In case you had not heard, Cisco has announced they are getting into the server business. According to the New York Times, Cisco will release a server product within the next few months. (Some blogs are reporting as early as March). The new servers will be designed 100% for use as hosts to VMware’s ESX Server. From a technology perspective I find this exciting and believe this will drive innovation from IBM, HP and Dell. I do have one area of concern though… At VMWorld 2007, John Chambers made a fantastic keynote presentation of Cisco’s new concept called Datacenter 3.0. I found the presentation to paint a very exciting picture of where virtualization was taking the IT world. With virtualized Servers, Storage and Networks, the computing “Cloud” is a reality. I am a little...

STEELERS 27, CARDINALS 23   What's with the conspiracy theorists out there?  Slow news day on the world wide front? Sick of writing about the greedy financial services industry?  Something is amiss, because now the talk of the day is how the NFL and the refs conspired to make sure Pittsburgh won the Super Bowl! Are you kidding me?  Did you watch the same game?  The Steelers were the better team before the game, during the game, and after the game. The Cardinals deserve tons of credit for never giving up and making it close at the end. But, the Steelers took care of the game for over three quarters. They increased their lead after every quarter and mounted a game winning drive to win the game. Oh, the refs did call holding on the Steelers on their last drive so it was 1st an...

I just spent the week assisting with the install of IBM's GPFS and Cluster NFS (CNFS) on RedHat 5.2 Linux. We created a 30TB filesystem to store large digital media using GPFS running on multiple x3850 and x3650 servers. This allowed multiple GPFS clients to simultaneously share the filesystem. CNFS was configured to support server the digital media over standard NFS to the multiple DCP-2000 Digital Cinema Servers with high availability and security. Quick and easy failover. Low costs Intel Servers, RedHat, and SATA disks combined to create a high performance and highly scalable filesystem (up to 2PB). Let me know if anyone is looking to create large shared filesystems that can support direct SAN Block level access, NFS, or CIFS.