Difficult economic conditions lead to fiscal belt tightening, however, the ever-increasing demand for data continues; accelerating the requirement for hardware to manage the data.  Big data and its appetite for hardware become prominent line items which appear like ripe, low hanging fruit to many cost-cutters.  Buying low priced, ‘good enough’ or mediocre equipment starts to emerge as an opportunity to reduce a burgeoning budgetary item.  Price of the hardware however, is only one part of the total cost equation.

Low-cost gear costs less not just because of limited functionality; it is lower cost because a number of engineering short cuts are taken during manufacturing.  For example, using lower-tolerance components that have higher failure-rates or removing redundant components are common ways to reduce production cost.   These short-cuts, however, negatively impact overall reliability and increase the failure rate....

Red Hat & Symantec Join Forces to Accelerate Next Generation Clouds

Commercially supported enterprise Linux platforms have an incredibly bright future as core building blocks for next-generation, highly resilient data centers and agile private and hybrid clouds. Yet to fully optimize Linux to support the demands of increasingly business-critical workloads, organizations need to heed enterprise requirements around disaster recovery, high availability, and storage management. To facilitate such a demand, Symantec and Red Hat have partnered together. As a partnership “built on strengths,” Red Hat and Symantec provide the following solutions: Automated off-premise disaster recovery, cost-effective failover for Oracle databases, and improved storage performance for heterogeneous data centers. Further, customers achieve low-cost, flexibility and more robust performance. To learn more about this unique...

The standard administration of a VMware vSphere environment is typically performed using the vSphere client UI, but some of the advanced functionality and automation can only be done using custom scripts that use the remote command line interfaces.

The VxDMP command-line packages can be obtained from the installation media or downloaded from VxDMP UI as shown below

VxDMP for VMware follows this philosophy and provides the familiar and widely-used cross-platform administration command line interfaces for the VMware ESX environment as well. The VxDMP commands can be executed from any Linux or Windows host that has the VxDMP command line...

In large data centers, whenever the storage administrator requires to perform maintenance operations on a SAN infrastructure component, it’s difficult to identify all the entities in the data center are currently using it. Typically, the storage administrator needs to run various set of inquiries and provide list of transport identifiers (WWN mappings, iSCSI target IDs) that would be affected by the maintenance operation to the vSphere administrator who then, in turn, needs to search through the environment to identify the set of affected ESX hosts and the running virtual machines. This process is time consuming, tiring and error prone.  Additionally due to the dynamic nature of VMware, the configuration information can change very quickly; the location of a virtual machine may be different than it was mere minutes ago.

VxDMP helps ease this painful process by providing visibility into...