Storage Nation

Mucho going on in View (and more generally VDI) land.   My first part I was posted here . If you’re interested in a quick catch-up, read on… View 4.5 beta The existence of this has been discussed by others ( here , and here ) – I will neither confirm nor deny.   What I can say is that the ongoing march of improved simplicity, scale, function in the hosted virtual desktop use case is well underway, and that every day, more and more customers are starting to embrace it.

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

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.

Yesterday, I posted on how clouds need to be better than the traditional physical environments they replace.  I made a long list of areas where that was either the case today, or would be relatively soon.

You say something often enough, it becomes a personal meme.  If enough people agree with you, and start saying the same thing, it might become an industry meme. In that spirit, let me share with you a meme that shows every sign of making that transition. Why?  Because I think people are ready to accept this particular thought as conventional wisdom. An Oversimplified History Of Cloud Thinking The first round of people talking about cloud were the technologists.  The message?

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.

As technologists, we all sort of know that traditional tape-oriented backup is rapidly being supplanted by newer forms of disk-based backup, usually in conjunction with data deduplication. But quantifiable data on the size and speed of this trend is notoriously hard to find. This latest result from TheInfoPro helps to frame just how quickly this trend is moving.

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.

At the end of 2008 when we introduced the Atmos storage platform , we realized we needed a new term to describe what was essentially a new category — COS — or cloud-optimized storage — storage platforms and services that are designed expressly for cloud applications. With today's announcement, the uniqueness of the category becomes more apparent.  We're now in a better position to make the case that — for some use cases — cloud-optimized storage solutions can be better than their traditional counterparts. What Was Announced If you're not familiar with Atmos, you're not alone.  It doesn't fit neatly into the SAN/NAS/DAS categories that we're all familiar with.  Competitors, in particular, don't really know what to make of it. Mutliple Atmos units work together to create a storage cloud.  All information is stored in objects with integrated rich metadata.  Storage policy (how many copies, protection method, physical location of data, spin down, compression, etc.) is expressed in terms of service level desired — gold, sliver, bronze, etc.  Atmos interprets the policy intentions and seamless orchestrates all the data logistics in the background.  A single management console monitors service delivery.  It takes a while to fully comprehend what Atmos really does, but — regardless of your vendor affiliations — there's no denying that Atmos is a unique solution to a unique problem — overcoming, and then ultimately exploiting — distance