What do storage tiering, Jimi Hendrix, and cloud computing have in common? You might think all of them can be psychedelic, “offering you creative exuberance of the mind liberated from its ostensibly ordinary fetters.” Most practical IT people do not like these concepts at first because they are a different way of going about delivering IT infrastructure. The same can be said for Jimi Hendrix music for conservative folks, it is not until you have an open mind and think differently about the music that it strikes you as profound and brilliant.
Another thing that associates these three concepts is John Arrasjid, Principal Architect @ VMware. John was was recently on a Drobo webcast talking storage tiering in a vCloud architecture. John is one of many VMware experts that use Drobo storage in his labs, and is also a member The Elastic Sky Band @ VMware. If you attended VMworld 2011 in Las Vegas, you may remember the band setting a psychedelic mood with a rendition of Jimi Hendrix’s Little Wing filled with great sax and guitar solos.
In the webcast John spoke about ways to leverage cloud computing: it is all about service levels and tiered storage is part and parcel of cloud computing. My favorite quotes include “Heterogeneous is the norm, where they need performance and availability … we have EMC and Drobo among others,” and “If you do tiering on the back-end, you don’t have to worry about managing it, and customers want both VMware technologies and vendor technologies.” You can find the webcast, as well as more on the Drobo solution for vCloud, including a detailed how-to guide for SMBs in the VMware Solution Exchange.
Bonus material – The VMware Solution Exchange also has other great webcasts and how-to guides that Drobo developed with VMware experts to help SMBs have success in virtualization and data protection projects. Storage for VMware Essentials Plus, as well as storage for vSphere replication and VMware Site Recovery Manager are other solutions where Drobo fits wonderfully for smaller organizations.
John also mentioned in the webcast that IT managers from companies of all sizes are looking for ways to effectively use SSDs in their architecture. With our B1200i, we now have tiering within a system, which has impressed expert Scott Lowe. He writes in his Wikibon blog, “… user intervention isn’t required to try to figure out how to deploy these disks in a way that makes sense. Drobo just does it.”
Net = A psychedelic experience is characterized by the striking perception of aspects of your own mind that were previously unknown to you. Deep down you probably already understood that you could and should be using lower cost storage in your infrastructure, you just were not yet comfortable with it. Take my word or the word of other VMware experts already doing it, Drobo is great storage for the lower tiers of your vCloud architecture for which you do not need Tier 1. You don’t need chemical assistance to come to this understanding, though a slow Jimi Hendrix song such as Little Wing does not hurt to set the mood.
Talk live to Mario and other Drobo experts @ http://www.drobo.com/live or e-mail mario@drobo.com
Mario Blandini
Mario is VP of Technology Solutions @ Drobo. Responsible for technical marketing, the pre-sales technical team, product marketing contribution, and solution development with industry partners, he is the voice of Drobo webcasts / podcasts and the pitch man in most Drobo videos. Talk live to Mario and other Drobo experts @ http://www.drobo.com/live, or e-mail mario@drobo.com.
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