Will Novell FILR make a difference in this area ?

Regards/JC

Sorry for the late reply. I have been traveling a lot and haven’t had much looking at the comments in my blog.

I have spoken to quite a lot of people in my travels, especially in India and Australia, and it appears that the take-up rate of FCoE isn’t exactly flying off the shelves. Many are still comfortable with the typical FC-SAN fabric and not investing in FCoE gear. Part of that is the FCoE cost, and another reason is many are still hoping for 10GBASE-T rather than fiber optics network.

Again, I cannot comment on the future of your network because I do not know the business and operational objectives. If there is a need to go green and save money in power, cooling and rackspace, then FCoE is the way to go. Unfortunately it is difficult to explain to management about these cost savings because you need a tool/utility/spreadsheet to calculate utility savings, PUE and other statistics in a tangible manner. Spreadsheet is probably the last resort because the data collection is likely manual and productivity of the IT folks drop.

On a technical front, if you have a large network and plan to have more VSANs, then VLAN limit of 4094 becomes a factor. VSAN must be part of a VLAN in the Cisco CEE network.

Hope that helps. All the best

/Chin-Fah

I apologize for taking such a long time to get to your comments. I have finally gone through the blog, and yes, I agree with you about looking at the rate of change.

It still does not change much of what I perceive the top leaders are, which are EMC, NetApp and HDS. All have positive growths in the past 3-4 quarters. EMC partly because it has become the behemoth that it already is; NetApp, as I have called it in the past – “The little engine that could” and HDS, who had 2 strong quarters until their recent restructure which has slowed some of their momentum.

But your input gave it a great different perspective, and that’s important because you gotta pick from all sources.

Thank you and have a great week ahead!

/Chin-Fah

Thanks for your update about Dell’s DX line.

IMHO, more and more data created are already unstructured. Coupled with the proliferation of mobile devices and BYODs into the corporate environment, traditional networked file systems can no longer address the key fundamental requirements of web-based, and mobile-based contents. Object storage is the way to go and regardless of Dell’s exit, object is inevitable.

It will be more relevant as unstructured content continues to invade the data space.

Thanks
/Chin-Fah

Thanks for your comments. I have always been in touch with TKOng, Novell’s country manager here in Malaysia, who is my good friend and ex-housemate. In fact, I just spoke to him last week.

But you guys are late, very, very late. I have seen opportunities come and go, come and go since I gotten some people interested in late 2011 and early 2012. But Novell Filr was nowhere to be seen throughout 2012 that the opportunities I have been breeing for TKOng have come and gone. I would like to see what Novell Filr has, compared to solutions from Symantec, TrendMicro, Promise Technology, EMC Syncplicity, OwnCloud, Tonido, Copiun/Good Technology. These are all the ones I have evaluated in 2012 and part of 2013 on behalf of the prospects who have engaged my services.

TKOng has informed that beta will be end of April. Let’s see what you guys have.

Thanks
/Chin-Fah

Filr is finishing its Technical Preview and will release end of April, 2013. Have you gotten a look at it yet? If not, contact me and I will get you into the program!

Thanks for your input.

I don’t want to deride my fellow storage professionals but if a basic technology such as thin provisioning is not well known, I can find 2 possible reasons:

1) The company he/she is working for does not encourage personal growth and therefore, the desire to learn is not there
2) He/She is in the wrong industry!

All the best to you!

/Chin-Fah