Storage Nation

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

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

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.