December isn’t the best time to visit Minnesota[1], but I’ll give the geography this kudo: it’s flat. And for some reason they make a good buffalo wing out there, even though it’s across the lakes from Buffalo, NY. Many miles away. I was out there last week with [[UnnamedCustomerWhoWillNotBeNamed]], supporting some Lab work to help [...]

Giving away a $50 Amazon gift card for answering a trivia question that could have been easily Googled was nearly impossible – though it did eventually happen (to a colleague, who writes here as well), even if it took weeks longer than expected. But I’m not letting that deter me… in fact, I’m going to try [...]

Greetings, Constant Reader. A short update on the Datalink Labs[1] equipment injections and build activities over the next month (to hopefully brighten your day): New gear on the floor: – EMC VNXe and Isilon X200 in Atlanta Ramping up and builds: – Refreshed Datalink V-Scape™ in Santa Clara and Chicago Other fourth quarter builds: – [...]

(quick aside before we start) Thanks to my post I’m sure, Iceland is getting that data center. Thanks, Lambert. I’m not sure who the “little people” are that Engadget is referring to: I didn’t see any Icelandic natives under 5’10″ in my admittedly brief stay there. Perhaps they all live in the moon surface-like island [...]

Back to “serious business” after my belated April Fool’s Day flight of fancy. “Depends” is a word with multiple relevant meanings in IT. Thanks for opening that can of worms, Juan. As technology architects designing systems, we all live and die based on the ability to correctly identify, qualify and quantify need, and then build [...]

We come from the land of the ice and snow, From the midnight sun where the hot springs flow. The hammer of the gods will drive our ships to new lands, To fight the horde, singing and crying: Valhalla, I am coming! — Led Zeppelin I just returned from five days in Reykjavík, Iceland, which [...]

Thanks to the relentless teamwork of our engineering, product, marketing and practice groups, Datalink labs feature examples of two distinct virtual data center (VDC) unified reference architectures. We think that makes us a more selective lab-enabled company than one that has no VDCs/private clouds in their labs.[1] Kent writes over here about the nature and [...]

Last week, I sat in on the kickoff of an exciting new Datalink labs project at our headquarters in Chanhassen, MN: a team of NetApp ninjas working with our guys to build a four-node ONTAP 8.1 beta V-series cluster running a combination of NetApp and non-NetApp disk storage under the covers. If you’ve been away [...]

Welcome back! Time to share a few key numbers related to our demo/training/interop labs. In no particular order: 4 – The number of lab sites (or “nodes”) we have in our logically meshed lab grid. We have sites at our Minneapolis (Datalink Headquarters and Executive Briefing Center), Atlanta, Chicago, and Santa Clara offices. About 500 [...]

Howdy, Constant Reader. I’ll make brief mention of a few recent Datalink Labs goings-on, and remind you to leverage the labs to let Datalink show you how IT happens; we don’t bite (unless asked). Accompanying Spindler’s riff on dedupe comparison, we ran a recent lab bake-off (a.k.a. ThunderDome) for a customer wanting to see the Symantec 5200 [...]