When your only tool is a hammer…...

…everything looks like a nail. Surely everyone has heard this saying, as a way of suggesting that one’s sphere of knowledge is perhaps limited. Indulge me for a moment in an example from my own past. It was the early nineties and I was working on my truck, a 1982 Datsun 4×4 pickup. Datsun 720 Pickip (not mine – but si [...]

Dave’s Pet Peeves

This post could also be named “Why market share doesn’t matter”, “Why I don’t care what now-standard ideas you invented”, or “What have you done for me lately?” In my career, like most of you, I have sat through too many product presentations, marketing pitches, and technical demos to count. I [...]

Moving on…

And so today begins the next chapter of my processional career. For the last five years, I have held various roles within Firefly Communications, the premier datacenter education partner within the Cisco ecosystem. I started out as a storage instructor and consulting, teaching primarily Cisco MDS courses, before moving into a little known ( [...]

Another “Why doesn’t Cisc...

On Twitter, @timmylevad said he’d like to see another “Why doesn’t Cisco?” post like I did . So this is a request for your ideas on what you’d like to see in such a post. I’ll try to answer as many as I can. Please add your suggestions as a comment to this post.

Request for help! NetApp gurus, plea...

Haven’t used my blog for this purpose before, but figured it couldn’t hurt to give it a shot! I’m not going to have an opportunity to test this until next week, so I’m hoping to get some feedback about whether or not I’m attempting the impossible. I’m trying to see if I can multiple sub-interfaces on a Ne [...]

Firefly Communications named Cisco 20...

While this is my personal blog, I make no secret of who I work for. I’ve thus far refrained from posting anything remotely sales-y or promoting my company, but I’m very proud of this group accomplishment and wanted to share. Every year at Cisco’s partner conference, Cisco awards a small number of partners (out of the alm [...]

FCoE vs. iSCSI vs. NFS

The following was just a short note I wrote in an internal discussion about FCoE vs. iSCSI vs. NFS – and spurred by Tony Bourke’s discussion about methods for implementing FCoE. This wasn’t intended to be a detailed analysis, just a couple of random musings. Comments as always are welcome. —– While NFS and iSCS [...]

Why do I need an active uplink to use...

Reader Peter sent the following question as a comment to my Direct Attach Appliance Ports post. When I connected my NAS to use the appliance port, in order for the vnic of the blade server to communicate with the NAS, i found that there should be a connected uplink port in the 6100 even though I created a private VLAN for the appliance po [...]

Update on the 8Gb FC vs. 10Gb FCoE Di...

By far, the most popular post on this blog has been my discussion on the various protocol efficiencies between native 8 Gb/s Fibre Channel and 10 Gb/s Ethernet using Fibre Channel over Ethernet encapsulation. I wrote the original post as much as an exercise in the logic as it was an attempt to educate. I find that if I can’t explain [...]

UCSM 1.4 : Maintenance Policies and S...

Strange as it may seem with all of the great new features in UCSM 1.4, this is one of my favorites. To understand the impact, first look at the way disruptive changes were handled prior to this release. When changing a configuration setting on a service profile, updating service profile template, or many policies, if the change would cause [...]