Storage Nation

I was fortunate enough to be invited to speak on a panel here at the "Everything Channel" event in Dallas. Ostensibly, we were supposed to be talking about 2011 storage opportunities for resellers and solution providers.  But, somehow, we got into a number of far more interesting areas, including the strategic importance of the above topic. We ran out of time, but the thought keeps rattling around in my head … The Basic Premise As the IT industry goes through yet another dramatic consolidation and transition, newer skills will command a premium, and traditional skills less so.  Generating new skills requires non-trivial investment: either hiring, training or usually both.

This morning's M+A news was equally as interesting as the news from a week ago: HP submitted a bid to top Dell's offer for 3PAR.  And, if 3PAR trading prices are any indication, there's investor confidence that the price will go higher still. When I wrote about Dell's bid last Monday , my central premise was "it's all about competing with HP, folks". Turns out I was closer to the truth than I thought.

No matter what you do, there's always a strong incentive to do what's expedient, as opposed to taking a more thoughtful approach.  For example, everyone has good intentions when putting their IT environments together, but it's so easy to get lost in the moment. The distractions can be plentiful and tempting: feeling bound by legacy decisions, a vendor offering a too-good-to-be-true deal, perhaps a shiny technology bauble that distracts. We're starting to have far more engagements with customers and partners around end-to-end fully virtualized environments, rather than just individual piece-parts.

I think people know by now that I get to meet lots of customers and partners in the course of my work.  Actually, I really don't consider it "work", it's really a lot of fun. And they even pay me Sometimes, though, you get this great juxtaposition: you get to see how different IT organizations approach the same fundamental challenge in entirely different ways. And the contrast can be stunning ..

Four things happened this week that sort of bothered me, and it finally struck me that all four revolved around the concept of transparency. Transparency is one of those things I didn't realize was truly important until later in my personal development.  Once I learned of its importance, though, life became better for me and those around me. I can only hope that others aren't as slow as I was to catch on ..

We are regularly told that checking our own bodies for signs of change is a good thing.  Early diagnosis of disease gives more of a fighting chance of curing the problem.  So, in the IT world, where we assume all of our backups have been taken successfully, how often should we be checking the results and ensuring the backup will work on the fateful day we need to do a restore?  This question was posed by Federica Monsone on Twitter this week.  Here’s an attempt to provide an answer.

Sorry for falling behind the pace here, but there was a recent EMC product announcement that I found worthy of a deeper discussion. EMC's SourceOne group just announced their new File Intelligence product.  And, as organizations struggle to get their arms around unfettered information growth, we may just have a new and important tool in the arsenal

A few weeks back, I joined Sanjay Mirchandani (our CIO) and Tom Roloff (heads up EMC Consulting) on a neat simulcast that was beamed to multiple locations around North America. The content mostly focused on EMC IT's journey — results, challenges and lessons learned — but we spent a lot of time answering questions as well.  Despite our best efforts, there were many good questions that we just didn't have time to answer

Here's a video that TechTarget produced for us with one of our customers, Priceline.com . Here are a few highlights from the video: Priceline.com was one of the first e-commerce players to adopt virtualization.  That may account for why the company's IT organization is known for for it's high availability and ability to adapt quickly to changes in the market.  Given the fact that their business has a broad value-based appeal, their IT organization works very hard to get the best rate of return for their capital expenditures. 3PAR storage allowed them to increase their storage capacity over 400% over the last four years while reducing the administrative load required to manage it all. Ron Rose, ex-CIO at Priceline (now on the Sr

I wrote previously about my current challenges involved with unlearning just about everything I've ever learned about storage. One fun exercise is to take terms and concepts we've been using for many years, and look at how their definition has evolved to a point that they're somewhat unrecognizable as compared to  where they started. And today, I'm going to have some fun with LUNs … LUN — The Fundamental Unit Of Storage Allocation If you'd like a clinical treatment, I'd refer you to the Wikipedia entry here .