Storage Nation

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 .

So, here we are at day 2 of EMC world.  If day 1 was all about “big picture” innovations in entirely new areas (VPLEX, IaaS efforts), today it’s about continued execution on the fundamentals for EMC. To set the stage here a bit: At the high-end, VMAX and its next-generation capabilities and architecture is killing it.   Customers are voting with their pocketbooks, and the growth we saw in Q1 was fantastic – 28% year over year, and quarter over quarter growth that means we’re doing something right. VPLEX represents a new “category creator” – transactional storage models that can be federated locally and across distance. VCE and other transformative initiatives (see my post on IaaS here ) is accelerating like you wouldn’t believe (more on this later).   Cisco, VMware, and EMC literally can’t hire fast enough to staff against demand.   I was in QBRs this past week and in some meetings with Capellas, and ‘Zilla nails it in his post Contemplating Capellas .  Again, customers and partners are voting with their wallets.

Many of you guys out there have gathered a lot of digital information. This might be your private photo collections, home videos, scanned documents and your home administration. All sorts of data that sits somewhere on your computer(s) or NAS devices

One of the principle points of contention within the cloud storage space is what to do with metadata (literally: “data about data”).  There are several schools of thought regarding how metadata should be presented, protected and optimized but for the sake of this post, I’ll just tackle 2 of them.  These two thought processes are: (a) metadata appended directly to the objects that they represent and (b) metadata separated from the object and stored separately in a database or other type of referencable system object .

Sometimes you see things in this industry that make you shake your head and wonder. Such is the situation with Oracle's recent acquisition of Virtual Iron .  Put in the context of other recent activities, the picture is crystal clear: it appears that Oracle intends to use their market power with databases to force customers to consider their soon-to-be-announced virtualization stack. And, from a customer perspective, this will not be a good thing

I really haven't met anyone recently who thinks that virtualizing as much of their environment as possible isn't a good idea — at least in the abstract.