Storage Nation

The ongoing battle for 3Par by HP & Dell tells us much more about the state of the IT Industry than just the desires of two companies to acquire some interesting storage tech.  It signals an acceptance that storage is a key feature in the future direction of the IT industry – more important than networking and almost as important as the virtualisation platform itself. This may seem like a bold statement to make, however we need to look forward to where the industry is headed.  First of all, vendors want us to buy their unified hardware stacks; it represents that move back to a consolidated architecture that kept one vendor dominant in the mainframe days – IBM.  “No-one gets fired for buying IBM” the saying goes (or used to go), demonstrating how IBM was seen as the data centre supplier for all things computing in the 70’s and 80’s.  Of course we know that politics within organisations and the cost of IBM hardware eventually broke the monopoly, but the status quo worked well for many companies for many years.

Each and every day, our customers and partners are heroically driving innovation and success through the use of virtualization as the foundational step to achieving the benefits of cloud computing. This is a chance for us to THANK and showcase EMC customers and partners as leaders at VMworld 2010. EMC Journey to the Private Cloud Awards winners will receive an honorary award from EMC and be recognized among their peers during an EMC Customer Appreciation event at VMworld 2010 in San Francisco, August 30 – September 2, 2010. Additionally, winners will receive complimentary passes to VMworld 2011.

A short while ago, Microsoft announced their plans to create a stack platform appliance for Azure .  This was done, presumably, to deal with the competitive threat from VMware , which is part of the V-Block-centered Acadia business venture.  Sorry Microsoft, but IMHO, this is a clear signal that the cloud stack has been catapulted to the stratosphere of hype.  There are a couple assumptions about clouds in a can that show the ready-fire-aim nature of these types of solutions. The first is that clouds in a can will provide an on-ramp for private cloud infrastructures to to use public cloud infrastructures in the future.  Oh yes, and how exactly will that work?  Vaporware drawn on white boards with clouds in the middle?  The allure of an easier future through stacks rivals any of the malarkey that our industry has ever produced. The second assumption is that customers will save money with stacks and appliances.

Lots of cloud chatter this week.  A couple of good industry events.  An interesting new startup offering a cloud operating system for private clouds.  Even the ever-outspoken Werner dissing private clouds as "false clouds". A lively debate, to be sure! Time for me to offer up another attempted level-set in this discussion.  It's easy to become lost in the details, and more difficult to see what's really happening here — or, at least, what I think is happening. Disruption Is In The Air Clouds disrupt three aspects of technology: how it's built, how it's operated and how it's consumed.  Other than that, it's business as usual There's excitement in the air, but also certain degree of fear.  The deck chairs are starting to get re-arranged in the IT vendor world.  Hot winds of change are blowing through enterprise IT organizations.  And vast piles of capital are flowing into the new intermediaries — the service providers. As all of this happens, I'd encourage everyone to remember the golden rule.

There's a veritable river of information, perspectives and opinions coming out of EMC World this week.  Not to mention about a bazillion tweets on the #EMCworld hashtag. While all the keynotes were excellent, the one that I thought really stood out came from the EMC IT organization.  Sanjay Mirchandani and his team did an excellent job of bridging the gap between theory and practice while adding a healthy dose of pragmatism to the whole private cloud discussion.

  A couple weeks ago, one of the major storage vendors had two major problems to resolve after one of their arrays suffered a firmware bug-induced failure at one of their cloud (email) service provider customers. They had to: Help the customer get back to normal service levels after they had become unacceptable. Confront a public relations problem after it was exposed by a leading storage publisher.

I am here to declare that I am first to coin the term “JBOGs” – Just a Bunch Of Gigabytes for Cloud-based Storage. This is the same vain as “JBOD” – Just a Bunch of Disks which is a known term to us storage folk.

Image via Wikipedia Just a quick note from the field (as it were).  If you’ve been blessed enough to get a Cisco C-series server, there’s a nifty new Cisco Integrated Management Controller (CIMC) release available as of today’s writing. Version 1.0(1e) was the shipping release as of January 2010. Version 1.0(2) is the latest point release available as of March 2010

Image via Wikipedia I love receiving suprise packages.  Way back in January, I got a briefing on a VERY cool server offering from Dell that was going to be part of their DCS (Dell Cloud Services) offering.  I, of course, requested one understanding it to be an almost perfect density compute node for my EMC Atmos Virtual Edition testing and design work.

Finally I’ve managed to post here the first of a number of video clips from the recent HP Blades Day.  Paul Perez discusses my question regarding the management of the range of (somewhat) disparate storage technologies HP have acquired over recent years.  I’m looking forward to discovering more about: The converged management framework and “on-ramp”.