Recent content by hutchingsp

It's a little political - I'm not responsible for it but I have enough of an interest (and likelihood of being expected to deal with any issues depending who's around) that it's important it's done correctly. I'm pretty sure VSTP would do what we need by handling loops at a VLAN level - just...

Things did move on a little since the original post - we now *think* that a hybrid model with a single physical link with SVI's for the routed links and L2 trunked where we need it would work using VSTP to handle blocking on a per VLAN basis. There wouldn't ever be L3 loops on the RVIs so it...

Fair point and apologies, I know enough to get by but not enough "official" terminology :) This is the best parallel I've found to the situation we have: http://packetlife.net/blog/2011/feb/9/hybrid-access-layer-design-revisited/ Right now we're literally flat network, no routing at all.

I'm reasonably sure that the "right" way to redesign our currently massive flat network is to look to do OSPF between core and distribution - nothing unusual there. I'm also reasonably sure that we will be doing L2 between distribution and access for our own VLANs such as data and voice - L3...

I'm not sure if that's entirely true, if I've understood the question - we had a stretch cluster HP StoreVirtual and I could absolutely switch off or "steamroller" half of it and the cluster IP and storage would fail over without any interruption.

I don't know if I wish I was on that scale or if I'm glad I'm not :) I suspect there's a fair bit of CYA in there - terminal failures with any vendor seem fairly rare but when it happens if I was in the spotlight I'm sure HDS or EMC buys a few points vs. explaining why I chose...

Not used it but keep in mind it only works with 3 hosts upwards (and 3 won't give you much resilience).

We have a couple of baby HDS arrays - cheap enough, pretty dumb, HDS reputation for being deathly reliable. We're an average SME but I take a simple view which is if the storage is having a bad day everything else is going to have a bad day so I don't take chances - frustrating sometimes as...

I must admit I don't really get the point - you're buying a solution just as when you buy an array from HDS/Netapp/Pure/EMC or whoever you don't generally query how the cost is split between the hardware and the OS. I get that software defined means you can split the tin from the software...

Maybe look at Maxta - haven't used it but looks "interesting".

That's always been the gig with Nutanix and Hyperconverged though - you're not paying for magic hardware the value (if you see it to be worth it) is in the software.

I completely misread your post and read "Nimble" as "Nutanix" :)

I dont follow - you need 3 nodes minimum with Nutanix?

Nice thing with Simplivity is they use a FPGA accelerator card for the dedupe so it's inline not post and apparently handles it at line speed.

Not really surprising. They might run on commodity hardware but I wouldn't think for a moment that you aren't going to have to buy their SKU if you want support etc. just as with any other enterprise storage product.