Storage Nation

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.

Another announcement from EMC (and, indirectly, VMware) that deserves some elaboration.

The blogosphere can be a crowded, noisy place — especially when it comes to storage-related topics.  Sometimes I think people say outrageous things intentionally.  I suppose if your goal is to draw attention to yourself, the tactic might make sense. But if your goal is to help others, saying outrageous things just adds to the noise and confusion — especially around a relatively important topics such as backup — and really doesn't help anyone

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.

I've been trying to lay low on the whole private cloud things for a while — really I have. But then I stumbled across a blog post that brought some key points into focus for me, and did a lot to reinforce some of my fundamental beliefs. Not that I need any more reinforcement, mind you … A Cloudy Headache Before we get started, you should go read this post from Alan Williamson.  Alan brings three interesting perspectives to this discussion

Sometimes numbers have a symbolic value beyond any real meaning they contain. Like when your odometer rolls over to a hundred thousand miles.

For the last few weeks, I've divided my blogging time between this site and a new one I've been helping with: privatecloud.com Thought I'd give you  quick view into some of my more recent posting over there — if you're interested! " A Real Private Cloud " — I interview Matt Coviello of EMC who has successfully built and operated a private cloud for internal use. " The Economist Debates Clouds " — an interesting discussion from outside the industry, but useful insight into alternative perspectives. " The Industrialization of IT " — fresh from a Goldman Sachs investor conference, I share my thoughts about the major themes and trends.

Well, there certainly are many who think so. On the vendor side, I'd put 3Par, IBM, NetApp and doubtless a few others I forgot to mention

I think we're getting ready to take the next step in the discussion around private clouds — from an initial set of generic concepts, to a more precise articulation of an underlying architecture. At a surface level, private clouds are basically fully virtualized environments that allow IT organization to use a dynamic combination of internal and external resources