J Metz

Lately I’ve been giving a lot of presentations about storage basics. I actually really enjoy it, because it makes me rethink some of the things that I took for granted, and it helps me understand some of the gaps in my own knowledge when questions arise. When you think of how we do certain thi…

Note: This blog was simultaneously published on the SNIA blog. When I first started in storage technology (it doesn’t seem like that long ago, really!) the topic seemed like it was becoming rather stagnant. The only thing that seemed to be happening was that disks were getting bigger (more space) an…

One of the main themes I’ve been running into a lot lately is the sense of scale. For a while the term actually lost much of its meaning because it has been used to describe any number of systems that happen to be large. Scale-up. Scale-out. At scale. See what I mean? The term is predominantly used…

When last we left our hero, he (that is, me, or I) was getting a crash course in Nexus programmability and trying to understand what all of this stuff meant. I had plied Jim* with beer in order to get him to explain to me – using the available napkins in the bar – what the technology was, what it me…

It may sound strange to hear me say it, but when I wrote the previous blog post about Dynamic FCoE I thought that it may get a little blip of attention and then filed away as a “oh, that is cool” little factoid about Cisco’s storage portfolio. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been so nonchalant, but I confe…

I know that I take a different approach to learning new things than most people. At least, I know my approach is different than the way people present them. The good news is that when I get something, I really get it. However, when looking at the juggernaut that is “Software-Defined X,” or even “pro…

It’s been a very busy few weeks. The Data Storage Innovations (DSI) conference, the Ethernet Summit conference, EMCWorld, and next week at CiscoLive, I’ve been starting to talk about a new concept in Data Center storage networks called Dynamic FCoE. Understandably, there have been a lot…

This week has been the semi-annual OpenStack Summit in Atlanta, GA. In a rare occurrence I’ve been able to be here as an attendee, which has given me wide insight into a world of Open Source development I rarely get to see outside of some interpersonal conversations with DevOps people. (If you…

As I start to explore more and more information about Software-Defined Networking and Programmability in the Nexus portfolio, I’ve been fortunate that there have been a lot of people helping me learn along the way.  I thought I’d share some of these as it gave me a bit more insight into some of the…