Storage Nation

Last night, IDC released their storage market share analysis for what happened in Q2.  Some things remained the same, other parts seem to be changing. And if you watch this market as closely as I do, it's worth reviewing some of the more interesting bits. What You Need To Know For many years, IDC has published the most authoritative numbers on storage hardware and software sales.  While no methodology is perfect, I've come to view IDC's numbers as absolutely essential to anyone in the storage business. EMC doesn't give IDC access to any privileged information, they have to figure things out from published reports.  Generally speaking, IDC's estimates of EMC's business are usually within a few points (plus or minus) of our own.

As I sit back and contemplate the last few weeks, I keep coming to the same conclusion.  The market has clearly expressed its strong interest in all things cloud-like, and just about every technology vendor on the planet — large and small — is frantically repositioning themselves just as quickly as possible. Whatever "tipping point" we all were waiting for, it's clearly happened.  Game on. And I think this rapid shift has caught many in the IT industry by surprise: technology vendors, system integrators, consultants — few people are really interested in IT as usual.  Everyone wants to talk about the cloud.

There are three new white papers available on the site that may be of interest.  They are: Create a Smarter Storage Strategy http://thestoragearchitect.tradepub.com/free/w_fnet24 Availability and the Cloud http://thestoragearchitect.tradepub.com/free/w_fnet22/ The Economic Impact of File Virtualization: Reducing Costs and Improving Efficiency for File-Based Storage http://thestoragearchitect.tradepub.com/free/w_fnet09/ As usual I welcome any feedback as to whether this part of the site is useful. Disclaimer:  For each subscription I receive a payment which goes to fund the running of this site and www.thevirtualisationarchitect.com.  This includes covering the costs of trial subscriptions to cloud services.

In my discussions with customers, I often ask the "V" question: how are you doing with virtualization? Occasionally I get an interesting response: they're entrenched IBM customer, and they point to the use of virtualization on their mainframe, and perhaps their big AIX boxen, and say they're largely virtualized.  Asked and answered. I need to ask them a better question: how are you doing with pooling of resources? The Bigger The Better Any time you pool resources, you're angling for a better outcome.  Lower cost-to-serve through scale efficiencies.  The ability to load-level across multiple, shifting demands.  Being able to react quickly to new and unforseen demands.  Efficient processes that manage resources in the aggregate, rather than individually

Every so often, a well-understood category in IT becomes completely up-for-grabs in terms of answering the question: what's next?  Clearly, how we think about enterprise desktops and delivering end-user computing is now very much in play. The many announcements coming from VMworld only underscores this point

I know, there's a LOT to read and digest coming out of VMworld these days. As an occasionally proliferate blogger myself, I have to hand it to Chad — he's turned loose a veritable supernova of meaty and significant technology-oriented posts in the last few days.  I'm impressed, and I don't impress easily.  I know how much work is behind each and every one of these posts. If you have a moment, please check these out: vCloud Director and UIM VPLEX, Long Distance VM Teleportation, and a great offer ..

With VMworld in San Francisco this week, it's only fitting that Michael Haag is on the Hotspot discussing 3PAR's support for server virtualization . If you are at VMworld this year, please stop by our booth, #313, to see what all the commotion is about and why 3PAR storage is so popular for cloud computing .

Lots of activity at VMworld this week, plus the predictable flurry of vendor announcements.

The ongoing battle for 3Par by HP & Dell tells us much more about the state of the IT Industry than just the desires of two companies to acquire some interesting storage tech.  It signals an acceptance that storage is a key feature in the future direction of the IT industry – more important than networking and almost as important as the virtualisation platform itself. This may seem like a bold statement to make, however we need to look forward to where the industry is headed.  First of all, vendors want us to buy their unified hardware stacks; it represents that move back to a consolidated architecture that kept one vendor dominant in the mainframe days – IBM.  “No-one gets fired for buying IBM” the saying goes (or used to go), demonstrating how IBM was seen as the data centre supplier for all things computing in the 70’s and 80’s.  Of course we know that politics within organisations and the cost of IBM hardware eventually broke the monopoly, but the status quo worked well for many companies for many years.

So – today RSA, the security division of EMC announced a very cool capability – a simple VMware security dashboard that integrates with vCenter, ESX/ESXi, with vCenter, RSA Data Loss Prevention suite, VMware’s vShield family (more on that soon), VMware vCloud Director, VMware vCenter Configuration Manager, EMC Ionix portfolsio, and HyTrust appliancevShield family of products (along with other partners).  It brings everything up to a high level dashboard which continuously assess state – and helps remediate (aka “fix”) problems.   It’s a solution for Cloud Security and Compliance. We also showed the next step of the evolution of “Project Roswell” – an ongoing effort between VMware/RSA/Intel to bring an unbelievable set of compliance capabilities to public clouds, enforced in a hardware root of trust. There will also be an RSA Securebook on Cloud Security published in October that covers these topics for people who are in the security business… Ok a bit of background… So – I asked in the open “VirtualGeek 2010 Survey” (full results here ) 2 basic questions.   “Is security an issue for you”.  Of the 121 respondents to that question – it turns out it is (to varying degress) to 71% of the people. Then I asked people to be a bit more specific about degree of “security pain”.