Network automation is right up there with automated server provisioning, to accelerate the development and advancement of applications and services. A common example, might be: “There’s a problem in production and I need to clone my production environment to a bubble test environment for rapid testing and resolution.”

It happens all the time – for all the right reasons, one of our customers is interested in VDI until they see the price. Sticker-shock doesn’t begin to describe the experience one goes through, when looking into traditional VDI for the first time. Many organizations, large and small, understand the operational overhead (i.e. cost) of managing desktops, seeing VDI as a way to both streamline operations and deliver a consistent end-user experience.

There’s a new old buzzword surfacing in the storage space: “Erasure Coding”. Sounds pretty fancy! Believe it or not, most of you are using some form of erasure coding (EC) in your data centers today. The concept generally describes the math behind data availability and redundancy (think: RAID). What we are seeing now, is traditional RAID exposing significant limitations with both large, slow drives and super-fast SSDs. RAID also doesn’t generally describe data locality for availability purposes. Before we get into advanced erasure coding, let’s talk about what RAID-5 and RAID-6 really are.

There is a fairly serious bug, in vSphere 6.0, which can make backup data corrupt and prevent you from restoring data. This issue is specifically targeted at those (most) who use CBT (change block tracking) to take efficient image-based backups of their environment. If you need any assistance with applying or testing these patches and/or the integrity of your backups, please give your account representative a call. You can also contact us here. The VMware KB for this article is here: http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2136854

Desktop Environment Managers share several concerns about the challenges of managing a company’s desktop and laptop environment. Chiefly, they struggle with the maintenance of the separate images used to support both hardware and users. The quandary of simultaneously supporting operating systems during an upgrade is also a challenge.

At the heart of many of today’s high-value business applications are large repositories of business data stored on rotating magnetic disk. Although CPU performance is critical to the performance of many of these applications, I/O performance, or the ability to read and write data to and from the disk, is frequently even more critical. The more time an application spends waiting for data to be read from or written to disk, the more its performance will improve if I/O can happen with less delay.

There’s so much written and talked about, targeting “big IT”. It probably misses the mark, when it comes to the small and medium business (SMB) space. It’s likely that your server room doesn’t look like a massive datacenter as pictured on many IT brochures and magazine covers. You might only have a closet, with just a server or two and some communication equipment. Your IT budget might not be in the millions and you probably have to be smarter with investing the right amount, in the right technology, at the right time. In reality, it’s more challenging for you to make the right decisions to develop your business, foster creativity in your employees, and efficiently manage an IT infrastructure. That doesn’t mean IT is any less important or critical to your success.

At Kelser, I receive a fair number of inquiries related to VDI (Virtual-Desktop-Infrastructure). VDI is virtualizing the client (usually desktop) component of client-server computing. Using virtualization, your organization further abstracts users from the hardware layer and even OS layers. The use cases for VDI are just as unique as your organization itself.