Last year we decommissioned a physical Avamar grid in London because it was both out-of-support and the location was about to close down. The Avamar was however still being used for desktop/laptop (dt/lt) backups. A separate project was taking care of replacing those laptops, but in the meantime we needed to keep the Avamar backup service running.
We did a quick calculation on the required capacity and deployed 4 new Avamar virtual editions in our central VMware farm. After configuring them and connecting them to the Avamar Enterprise Manager dashboard, we were able to move the majority of clients over.
Now, almost a year later, many of those laptops have been replaced and are no longer backed up by these 4 new Avamars. Which clearly shows in the utilization, as you can see. Three out of four systems are <10% utilized. Since these Avamars claim a fair bit of resources from the VMware farm, I set out to consolidate the systems into the first virtual Avamar. Thus, reclaiming 75% of the resources.
I recently installed a new Data Domain DD6300. Part of the whole installation procedure is to run a DD OS upgrade to bring the system up to the target DD OS release. You can find the target releases over 
I’ve installed quite a few new Isilon clusters in 2019. All of them are generation 6 clusters (H400, H500, A200), using the very cool 4-nodes-in-a-chassis hardware. Commonality among all these systems is an 1GbE management port next to the two 10GbE ports. While Isilon uses in-band management, we typically use those UTP ports for management: SRS, HTTP, etc. We assign those interfaces to subnet0:pool0 and make it a static SmartConnect pool. This assigns one IP address to each interface; if you do it right, 
Roughly 6-7 years ago (around 2012), flash storage became affordable as a performance tier. At least, for the companies I was visiting. It was the typical “flash tier” story: buy 1-2% of flash capacity to speed everything up. All-flash storage systems were still far away into the future for them. They existed, and they were incredibly fast, but they also drove the €/GB price too far up, out of their reach.
It is a fact of IT life: hardware becomes faster and more powerful with every new generation on the market. That absolutely applies to CPUs. A few weeks ago at Intel’s Data Centric Innovation Day in San Francisco, Intel presented their new Intel Xeon scalable processors. These beasts now scale up to 56 cores per socket, with up to 8 sockets per system/motherboard. This incredible amount of compute power enables applications to “do things”, whether it’s analytics, machine learning, or running cloud applications.