Calsoft Blog

VMware vSphere® Storage APIs – Array Integration (VAAI), also known as hardware acceleration or hardware offload APIs, are a set of APIs enabling interaction between VMware vSphere ESXi™ hosts and storage devices. The APIs in VAAI are supported by a block or NAS array (e.g. storage system) and can offload different functions from the vSphere hypervisor and virtual machine (VM). VAAI has been established to handle issues industry faces while trying to expand Virtual Machines mainly during sizing storage, rapid VM provisioning and maintaining application performance. It has the ability offload specific storage operations to compliant storage hardware, which results in less CPU, memory and storage fabric bandwidth consumption. In other words, VAAI removes blocks, and offloads tasks that are “expensive” and place a heavy load on ESX resources to storage arrays. This enables improved performance, scale and efficiency to a very large extend VAAI can be used in the following functions...

The Turing Award given by the Association for Computing Machinery has been called “The Nobel Prize of Computing”. The stipulation says the award should be given to an individual who has made technical “contributions of a lasting nature of major technical importance to the computer field.” The latest in a long line of worthy recipients is Michael Stonebraker, a man I am proud to call a mentor and a trusted advisor. Michael’s career pretty much exemplifies what the Turing Award stands for. An alumnus of Princeton and the University of Michigan he has had an illustrious teaching career at University of California, Berkeley and now at MIT. Before the Turin, he had already won some of the most prestigious computing related awards out there – the IEEE John Von Neumann Medal and the first SIGMOD Edgar F Codd Innovations Award for example. These awards all recognise the pioneering role he has played in the world’s understanding of databases, especially relational databases. Michael...