Current events at Datalink Labs

By Datalink
6/27/2011

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).
  1. 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 dedupe appliance versus the Quantum DXi 6000 and the Data Domain 600. That Symantec unit also helped host a recent internal support-focused 5200 appliance training.
  2. Solutions architect and lab advocate Brian Blake just published several NetBackup 7.0.1 and 7.1 “pods” (clone-able environments) for our folks to kick tires / light fires / learn / demo from. The pods include the NetBackup Media Server Deduplication Option, OpsCenter, and integration with vStorage API, and extend Brian’s proven record of being-in-it-to-win-it-ness.
  3. Rumors indicating that the Minneapolis Lab node melted into the floor due to that region’s recent 90-something degree temperatures are somewhat exaggerated. With that said, it might be time to consider tent computing in Datalink Labs.
Of course, all this happened along with a healthy smattering of the standard day-to-day test / learning / demo missions:
  • NetApp FAS and V-Series (in front of AMS and EMC CX, in recent events)
  • VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager
  • NetApp + F5 ARX customer environment test
  • Monitoring tool evaluation inside our Minneapolis-resident FlexPod environment
I could go on. In fact, people usually tell me that I do, so let’s stop here and be careful out there. Regards, Rick