Storage Nation

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

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

No, this is not another shameless pitch to attend yet-another-vendor show.

Separated at birth? There have been some interesting discussions lately about storage tiering   And just because 3PAR beat most everybody else to the punch this week with our AO announcement , I think it's important to keep things in perspective – storage tiering does not solve everybody's problems

If you've been following the storage banter over the last few weeks, this issue has been hotly debated back and forth. Rather than weigh in on one side or another, I thought I'd take a few moments to share the basic concepts, and to shine a light as to why different vendors are lining up on one side or another of the discussion. Now, since this is a simple treatment, I'm sure that others will want to either extend or amend some of my comments here.  And, yes, this is an over-simplified treatment — that's the point. Please feel free to do so.

I was talking with my InfoSmack co-conspirator, Greg Knieriemen ( iknerd.com )  last week about virtual junk and how the word "virtualization" was so incredibly unwieldy. It was killing my lazy mouth to have to do so much work for such a well-understood term/topic. (BONUS QUESTION: is "virtualization" a noun, verb, or WHAT?

The headlines reads: " VMware To Acquire Certain IT Management Products and Software Expertise from EMC Corporation ". People will perceive this story one of two ways, depending on their perspective. The first (and most common) perspective will be "so what?" The second (and less frequent) perspective will be "this might be a big deal …" And I'd like a chance to share why I think this is more of the latter, and less of the former.

OK, cool contest alert. The folks at the EMC Developer Network are sponsoring their first ever EMC Monster Mash with over $25K of prize money .  Hint: that's better than a free iPod The idea is simple: go over to the EDN site and create a creative mashup of two or more EMC products using the published interfaces, combining external services as you see fit, and submit your entry. Lots of EMC platforms to choose from, storage, security, management, content, etc.  And, of course, a big world of non-EMC external services as well … Why are we doing this?  First, we've got a big world of mashable capabilities across our portfolio, and we'd like people to get more familiar with them.  Second, we think that intermixing this stuff with popular online services would be pretty interesting, and demonstrate even more powerful functionality.  Finally, we thought it'd be pretty fun.

It's most definitely an uncomfortable topic for many of the IT organizations I meet with on a regular basis. More often than not, I find myself asking how IT governance is done in their organization? And I've begun to see a very strong correlation between good governance and good IT.

The UK-based charity, Comic Relief , is once again using 3PAR storage as part of its IT infrastructure for raising millions of Pounds during it's nationwide Sports Relief campaign the weekend of March 19-21.  StorageRap spoke with Comic Relief's Web Technology Manager, Charlotte Melen recently about the intangible benefits of working for Comic Relief and what technologies they use for their donations platform.   Besides 3PAR, other key vendors include HP, Cisco, VMware and Oracle along with payment services from Paypal and RBS.