Storage Nation

Sure, most every organization spends money on IT — that much is obvious. I want to know if your organization invests in IT much the same way an investor would think about it. Why?  Because I believe that the answer to that simple question will tell me much about what kind of IT organization you are, what you expect from vendors like EMC, and — ultimately — what kind of IT organization you'll eventually be. Spending vs.

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 .

It's Friday, it's been a good week, but I still have one more blog post left in me. The reason I've chosen to spend some time exploring the latest IDC results is simple: in a very competitive part of the IT game, IDC is the de-facto scorekeeper.  I used to offer up blog commentary every quarter, but stopped doing it since nothing interesting was happening. Not the case this time around. Things appear to be changing in the storage biz ..

Sometimes, so many pieces seem to line up, I feel obligated to make a call and declare "big changes are coming". Such is the case with a topic I've come to call business analytics.   Other people might call it decision support, data warehousing, data marts, or perhaps something else

Everyone watches keynotes with varying degrees of interest, but when Sanjay Mirchandani took the stage at EMC World, and started sharing how EMC IT's move to private cloud was creating entirely new hard-to-fill roles in his organization, I could sense that the audience might be paying a bit more attention than usual. And why not?  If you've made your career in IT, you know that it makes sense to invest in skills and roles ahead of market demand — if at all possible.

Over the past few months, I've been progressively migrating to what I call the "fat browser" model for my day-to-day computing tasks.  If it ain't running in a browser, I don't want to use it, or at least use less of it. My experience so far?  Pretty good in most areas, just a few legacy areas to sort through.  And I think that — one we move beyond virtualizing legacy desktops — more people will come to appreciate the fat browser model as their preferred client experience. What Is A Fat Browser? For me, it's best exemplified by something like an iPad, or a netbook, or perhaps a smartphone.  Your browser is your primary UI.  There's always good connectivity, whether it be wifi or 3G/4G.  There are a few local applets and local information stores on the device if needed — nothing important, though.

In a recent interview with Dave Vellante of Wikibon fame, I offered up the view that — given the rapid rate of change in storage technology — I've had to revisit just about each and every fundamental assumption I've ever had about storage. An excellent example of this "unlearning storage" was buried in an Atmos announcement from EMC World.  In particular, Atmos storage now runs nicely in a VM.  Not just for eval, for production

Like many of you, I'm staring in utter horror and disbelief at the ecological catastrophe unfolding in Gulf of Mexico. Indeed, the Deepwater Horizon will go down in history alongside the Exxon Valdez , Bhopal , Chernobyl and other examples of massive infrastructure failure destroying the environment on a mind-numbing scale. And, as I go through all the articles and analysis to date, I am struck by one simple fact: it appears they didn't have a plan for the inevitable.  And above all else, I consider that criminal. Bad Stuff Happens We live in an imperfect world where — despite our best efforts — things routinely fail.  So we do our best to imagine what can go wrong, and put in place either preventative or remediation mechanisms for when the inevitable happens.

Once upon a time — and a very long time ago — there was a very successful storage company.  It made a good product, sold it effectively to customers, and supported them well.  It made a lot of money, and was seen as successful. However, the seeds of its success ultimately proved to be its eventual undoing.

A while back, it was part of my job to understand all the different social platforms as part of an effort to make EMC proficient at social media. If it was out there, I investigated it.  Blogs.  Forums.  Second Life.  Twitter.  Yammer.  Ning.  You name it, I checked it out. Some of these platforms made sense to me, others didn't.  Some I embraced (e.g communities, blogging, Twitter), others I largely stayed away from. And Facebook was one of those that simply raised hairs on the back of my neck.