Flash – King of the Impossible

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I am a little kid at heart and mind so whenever someone says “Flash” I immediately play Queen in my head and visions of Flash Gordon pop to mind. The truth is the song isn’t that far off of how Flash storage helps with datacenter I/O loads it really is doer of the impossible. EMC recently announced XtremIO which is our foray into the all flash array. It opened up to some criticism from the competitive market which is of course expected as EMC is somewhat late to the game in all flash storage, but that doesn’t mean that flash hasn’t been part of the EMC portfolio.

In fact XtremSF which is EMC’s server based flash solution (SF stands for server flash) has been around for some time. VNX has had Flash drive integration for caching (Fast Cache) for even longer. So really to say EMC just started caring about Flash because of market pressure isn’t a reality. The thing is that EMC didn’t want to jump into the All Flash Array (AFA) market without thinking about how Flash storage works.

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What’s in a name?

/ / @Mike_Colson, EMC, Federation, Pivotal, VMware, vSpecialist / Leave a Reply

Let’s start off with a disclaimer: this blog is mine, opinions are my own. I work for EMC but these views and words are all mine. This isn’t the corporate line being towed.

Others have written about the Federation and how it works, they have touched on the co-opetition that exists between the companies.
So why do I feel compelled to write on it?

Well in part because I really don’t know how to keep my mouth shut. Also because just perhaps I have a slightly different view being new to this perspective. So without further ado:

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Learning Python Part: 1

/ / @Mike_Colson, APIs, Learning Python, vSpecialist / Leave a Reply

I decided it was time to learn a programming language that I could use for virtual environment management and orchestration. There are several that would have worked, PowerShell, Bash, Ruby, but I chose python. I prefer Object based programming and the vast library that the python community has built. There are already builds such as pysphere and pyVim that make the time to functional much shorter.

I am still studying and learning in no way do I understand everything about python. I started using CodeAcademy.com  to get some of the basics. One of my colleagues turned me onto Learn Python the Hard Way so I built some different projects. Easy stuff like Text based games or query calls. The same colleague then turned me onto writing a widget that called a web based API and returned a search function. The API to call was twitter, I initially did a google search and looked at some code snippets.

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