To busy to blog?

That's not necessarily a bad thing, it's kind of like being to busy to catch a cold, it's the good kind of busy, which is way better than the alternative. I've had lots of customer meetings the last few weeks, some are interested in storage solutions, everything from some additional storage (Sun StorageTek 3510 FC) to a solution to replace an optical WORM archiving system (SUN StorageTek 5320 NAS). I've also been busy doing some Total Cost of Ownership studies, these are time consuming, but they're interesting to perform and the benefits can be huge when comparing the costs of older hardware, power consumption and performance and factoring in virtualization, whether it's Solaris Containers or vmware.

On the biking front, my schedule and the shorter days have kept me from riding as much as I would like, but I have been using my trainer (Cyclops fluid2) and some video (that I shot with my miniDV camera mounted on the bike this past summer) as as motivation.

Solaris Virtualization and consolidation

Here's an interesting website that goes into some of the specifics of moving a Solaris 10 zone/container from one hardware platform to another. One area that it didn't mention, but which some customers are already using, is to locate the '/zones' filesystem on a SAN. By doing this, the container becomes highly portable to any platform within the companies infrastructure, that is attached to the SAN. By having the zones on the SAN you don't need to deal with the archiving steps, just detach the container from one platform and attach it to another (oversimplified, but that's the basics).

I'm currently in the middle a design for a Highly Utilized Data Center. I'm not quite sure what to call it, but that name describes the idea behind it. Sometimes when I'm putting a presentation together I feel like I'm scripting a episode of Star Trek with all the technobabble (e.g., business speak) But, to get back on topic, with various forms of virtualization (e.g., vmware and Solaris containers) the trend is to do more with fewer (notice I didn't say less). The idea is of course to have a platform (for the hardware piece I'll use the term platform) that can support many systems and/or services. For the X64 based platform the possibilities range from; vmware to support multiple OSs on a single platform, to Solaris 10 x86 by using zones/containers.

Weekend Rides:
This past weekend marked the start of some near seasonal temperatures (Indian Summer), so I took advantage of it and got out on my bike on both Sat. and Sun., managing about 62 miles total.