Storage Nation

  I just read an article about how the concept of infrastructure blocks is playing out on the SearchDataCenter site.  The article presents several perspectives, but it's a bit confused. The concept is referred to as three different terms (pods, blocks and cells) and the comparison between a making your own and buying one are not clearly juxtaposed.  Regardless, its a thought provoking article. But is does raise the point what should we call these things?  I think a better generic word for them is iBlock, short for infrastructure block.   I've been speaking to customers about this sort of thing lately and a number of them have expressed the opinion that rolling out their own iBlock would be a lot cheaper, more flexible and more scalable than anything they could buy from a vendor.  I'm a big believer in the power of integration, but it's possible to get too far ahead of the curve. 3PAR customers have already been implementing iBlocks for several years using the 3CV design discussed in this ESG Labs report.

Surprise, surprise.  After months after bad-mouthing their competitors for their capacity guarantee programs, EMC has done an about face and has announced their own, very restricted, guarantee program. EMC offers a 20% capacity guarantee, as opposed to 50% from 3PAR's Get Thin Guarantee program. (FWIW, other vendors have also made 50% guarantees)  I guess EMC must be concerned they won't really be able to do it. Also, 3PAR's capacity guarantee applies to EMC customers, but EMC's program does not apply to 3PAR customers.

Ok – it’s VMworld season starting    Seems like just yesterday I was in Cannes   We’ve got a series of session proposals that have made it to the voting round – I’ve nominated my “Top 10”, but please peruse and if you are interested, please vote! Public voting will close on May 26th. For each track there is a direct link.  You need to have a VMworld login, but that’s cake (just register) Hybrid and Public Cloud: http://vmworld.com/community/conferences/2010/cfpvote/hapcloud Private Cloud-Management: http://vmworld.com/community/conferences/2010/cfpvote/pcmanagment Private Cloud-Business Continuity: http://vmworld.com/community/conferences/2010/cfpvote/pcbusiness Private Cloud-Security: http://vmworld.com/community/conferences/2010/cfpvote/pcsecurity Enterprise Applications: http://vmworld.com/community/conferences/2010/cfpvote/eapplications Desktop Virtualization: http://vmworld.com/community/conferences/2010/cfpvote/dvirtualization Technology and Architecture: http://vmworld.com/community/conferences/2010/cfpvote/tarchitecture Virtualization 101: http://vmworld.com/community/conferences/2010/cfpvote/v101 Read on for my “Top 30”, and an complete listing of submissions we’ve made.  Customers, EMCers, EMC partners – heck anyone interested – please check them out, people are working very hard behind the scenes to make it useful to all…  I’m enforcing a “no commericals” rule for the EMC sessions (worked to ensure that none of the ones that sound like commericals made it into my Top 30 – and that I know that the presenters will keep it real).

Here is a video demo prepared by Maneesh Jain, one of 3PAR's Solutions Architects, of 3PAR's Plug-in for VMware vCenter and 3PAR's VMware Site Recovery Manager.  The Recovery Manager demo shows not only how to recover a VM, but also individual files within a VM. Enjoy!

I am becoming a fan of the Active Archive Alliance.  I did a webcast with Molly Rector at Spectra Logic yesterday that will soon be available for replay for anyone who couldn’t make it. Will post a link once it is available. Plus, I started writing a story arc at ESJ.com – first part published yesterday, next

Another announcement from EMC (and, indirectly, VMware) that deserves some elaboration.

The blogosphere can be a crowded, noisy place — especially when it comes to storage-related topics.  Sometimes I think people say outrageous things intentionally.  I suppose if your goal is to draw attention to yourself, the tactic might make sense. But if your goal is to help others, saying outrageous things just adds to the noise and confusion — especially around a relatively important topics such as backup — and really doesn't help anyone

InfoSmack podcasters Greg Knieriemen and Yours Truly interview Greg Kleiman (Netapp), Eran Farajun (Asigra), Brad Rooke (JumpPoint) and Daniel MIlburn (Consonus) about the current status of Cloud storage, the impact CDMI will have and get their thoughts on how they think this industry will evolve over the next several years. Recorded at SNW 2010 in Orlando

Greg Knieriemen and I covered SNW as the Storage Monkeys/Infosmack team yesterday and will be repeating the act again today.  There is a huge amount of stuff going on here and we are trying to give people a feeling for what the news is and how the event is going down. Videos are going up to the Infosmack Channel on YouTube.

For those of us watching this corner of the industry, Data Domain appears to be the runaway favorite in the marketplace.  Take Data Domain's core competencies, place them in the context of the broader EMC, and you've got a market-winning formula that's hard to beat. You'd think that the temptation would be to simply rest on past successes, and offer up only small tactical enhancements to the product.  This apparently isn't the case — today we saw an interesting product announcement that signals continued innovation with the core infrastructure behind the Data Domain product.  You can read the press releases here and here , or go see Brian Biles' take on Data Domain's blog here .