I don’t like to show favouritism, but IBM do make some incredible kit. I know it isn’t cool to get excited about servers, but I had the privilege of seeing a new M2 version of the excellent x3850.
Unfortunately, I didn’t have my camera with me, but some of the design enhancements were incredible.
Sun have just announced a potentially market conquering piece of kit called the Sun Fire X4450 server.
This puppy is a 2U server that support 4 x Quad Core Intel Xeon CPUs with a colossal 128GB of RAM via its 32 Dimm Slots.
VMware have just released an updated SAN HCL and it now offers full support for the N3000 series of IBM iSCSI based storage subsystems.
http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vi3_san_guide.pdf
This is definitely becoming a viable alternative to IBM’s FC range of storage subsystems.
I heard a lot of talk about using NFS at VMworld, but dismissed it out of hand. This was until I saw a demonstration on the NetApp stand, for which I found a blog entry, going over the theory:
http://storagefoo.blogspot.com/2007/09/vmware-over-nfs.html
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