Hardware

If you’re thinking about buying your first storage area network, do yourself a favor and go to the Aston Martin dealership first.  Smell the leather – that is, if they’ll let you sit in one – and play with the switchgear to feel how nice and solid it feels.  Pretty nice, huh? Or maybe that’s…

Vendor hype aside, storage virtualization is really expensive technology that few shops really use.  Don’t get me wrong, I love the technology, but seriously, it’s expensive.  And that’s just the hardware/software – try hiring somebody with storage virtualization experience – hoo, boy.  But something is coming that’s changing the game, redefining what storage virtualization means.…

Storage virtualization is a really slick SAN technology that does for SANs what VMware did for servers: it abstracts away the underlying hardware to make management easier.  Multiple SANs can be swapped around back and forth behind the scenes without affecting any servers that store data on those SANs. It’s nowhere near common yet –…

Dell AX150i The iSCSI EMC AX150i is resold by Dell, and refurbished versions are available pretty inexpensively through the Dell Outlet. We just picked up our second AX150i with 12 500gb SATA drives for around $6,000 total, or about $1,000 per raw terabyte. It’s a great deal for lab or development storage, but there are…