I thought I was done blogging about VMware Partner Exchange 2010, but, twist my arm, there seems to be enough public knowledge about an upcoming feature of vSphere that I thought I would briefly... This is a summary only. Visit http://vmetc.com for full content.

I’ve been asked by a few customers about the location of the VMware ESX\ESXi LUN masking feature and how the LUN masking is done at the VMware ESX\ESXi level in version 4.
In VMware ESX 3.0/3.5 the settings for LUN masking were available in the UI via the Advance Software settings under Disk -> Disk.MaskLUNs as shown in screenshot below.

VMware ESX\ESXi 3.x Disk.MaxLUNs Settings

For all the cloud computing hype, few business customers are actually storing data on Web-based platforms.

  I found this very clever feature in the StarWind vSAN product that allows you to allocate a chunk of physical memory on a host (i.e real RAM) and present it out as an iSCSI target – imagine the possibilities for running virtual machines from that? watch this space \ Posted in Starwind

EMC spent $2.1 billion on data deduplication market leader Data Domain, but other companies weren't so successful with their acquisition plans in the storage industry in 2009.

Retrospect 7.7 for Windows features integration with VMware Consolidated Backup, energy conservation, and a 64-bit engine.

Hewlett-Packard hopes to do the same thing with storage that it did with servers, leveraging years of system-building experience and economies of scale, by blurring the distinction between servers and storage. The company envisions platforms based on industry-standard hardware with software that can change the characteristics of each component as an enterprise's needs change, executives said at a press briefing on Friday.

By Ken Oestreich (Egenera)

Last week I attended Gartner's annual Data Center Conference in Las Vegas. Four days packed with presentations and networking (of the social kind). Lots of talk about cloud computing, IT operations, virtualization and more.

EMC announced delivery of its fully automated storage tiering (FAST) technology across its Symmetrix, Clariion and Celerra line of storage arrays. The technology will allow data volumes to be dynamically moved between tiers of storage, depending on business performance requirements.

A month since its introduction, the joint datacenter venture between Cisco and EMC is percolating with activity before it starts business in the first quarter.