Storage Nation

A little EMC/NetApp Fun to help cure cancer

admin — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 03:27:20 +0000

Folks – we spend so much time fighting, so much seriousness in things that in the end, while important aren’t as important of the lives of people, in particular the lives of children. A friend and colleague at NetApp let me know they were doing a drive for St. Baldricks – a campaign where people shave their heads to help raise funds for fighting cancer in children. So, in the spirit of competition driving positive things and staying above the fray, we made a little wager

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A little EMC/NetApp Fun to help cure cancer

Welcome, Jeremy!

admin — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 14:41:47 +0000

I was pleased to see that we just announced our most recent senior hire : Jeremy Burton who will be EMC's new CMO — chief marketing officer. I'm reasonably sure that he's going to like it at EMC. It looks like the right person in the right position at the right time. Marketing at EMC Historically, I've always seen EMC as built on three exceptional pillars: a great product organization, a great sales organization and a great customer support organization. Marketing, while always relevant, hasn't historically been one of the things that we could lay claim to being "best in class", simply because it typically hasn't been a top priority

Toigo is a Twit

admin — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 19:04:13 +0000

Okay, I knuckled under to pressure. First, Leigh Grace tried to sell me on Twittering (which led me to use it as a way to notify everyone about new posts here), then I got a call from Rose Ross over in the UK who relayed to me that folks were sending me messages — tweets

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Toigo is a Twit

Go Big Or Go Home

admin — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 17:55:23 +0000

It's funny how memes circulate within a larger corporation, especially one as socially connected (internally and externally) as EMC. If you work in these sorts of environments, they're an interesting reflection of the organizational psyche.

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Go Big Or Go Home

Storage Caching 102 – mixed workloads

admin — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 20:26:09 +0000

Chuck Hollis had an excellent post last week, discussing caching. About 10 years ago a small team that I was a part of looked at starting a company that would do something similar to what IBM's SVC does. The idea was to create a SAN front end controller with a lot of cache memory that would virtualize "downstream" storage and provide performance boosts through various techniques such as caching, striping, and multi-way mirroring. We gave up on the idea when it became apparent to us that the project was quite a bit larger than we initially thought and it was unclear when we would ever have sufficient resources to get a competitive product to market. I think we could have sold the idea to venture capital investors who were throwing money at storage startups, but we couldn't sell it to ourselves. For those of you that wonder why I tend to think SVC is an important product, that's why – I know some of the things IBM did to make it work and I admire their ability to bring it to market

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Storage Caching 102 – mixed workloads

Virtual Storage, Global Federation and Distributed Cache Coherence Follow-Up

admin — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 18:50:59 +0000

Lots to talk about as a follow-on from today's discussion around virtual storage, global federation and the underlying distributed cache coherence technology that makes all this wonderful juju possible. Most of the focus was on the specific capabilities around global storage federation, and the underlying distributed cache coherence technology that makes all of this useful and interesting

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Virtual Storage, Global Federation and Distributed Cache Coherence Follow-Up

FalconStor’s ReiJane Huai, SuperStar

admin — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 16:41:20 +0000

ESJ.com is running another of our C-4 Project video segments, this time with CEO and Chairman of FalconStor, ReiJane Huai. Check it out. Mr. Huai reflected on his role in bringing tape backup to the distributed world, then offered commentary on several topics of interest including the formation of mini-me mainframes (“if you are going to

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FalconStor’s ReiJane Huai, SuperStar

This Changes Everything

admin — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 16:39:39 +0000

For those of us in the IT business, we occasionally encounter a fundamental new enabling technology that forces us to reconsider some of our long-held notions around the way things work. I'd put server and desktop virtualization into that category, as well as the ubiquitous web. If you're a storage person, flash has that potential as well. If backup is your thing, the combination of dedupe and low-cost disks has changed how you think about things. In this post, I'd like to start to introduce a technology concept that — yes — has the potential to change a great deal of how we think about IT at scale. And, yes, this is going to be a long post … Context Today, Pat Gelsinger did an important event with industry analysts. You can see his materials and webcast here . In addition, I wanted to offer up my views on this topic as well. I'll be using his slide deck as a reference point

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This Changes Everything

Why Isn’t Storage Getting Cheaper?

admin — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 16:06:15 +0000

The tickler I received in email this AM filled me with interest in what Mr. Foskett, lately of Nirvanix, was going to write about this question in his multi-part blog. My fingers tingled with expectation as I keyed in the URL for his postings

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Why Isn’t Storage Getting Cheaper?

Enterprise Computing: COPAN, EMC/VMware & STEC

admin — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 09:00:39 +0000

Over the last week there have been a few stories catching my eye. Here’s a brief paragraph on them. SGI Acquires COPAN Systems In fact to be more precise, SGI have acquired some of the assets of COPAN and left the liabilities behind for a mere $2 million in cash ( press release ). The demise of COPAN raises two potential questions; is spin-down a dead technology or were COPAN in a market that wasn’t able to understand their technology

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Enterprise Computing: COPAN, EMC/VMware & STEC