Storage Nation

I don't know if you're familiar with the term "lighthouse project".  I've used it for years to describe projects that are more about changing perceptions than the actual project itself. And, as we accelerate towards an IT world of fully virtualized environments, private clouds and service providers, I'm finding I'm talking more and more about these types of projects. What's The Goal Of A Lighthouse Project? So many projects we undertake are to solve a well defined problem and move on.  But what if the problem turns out to be changing widely held and deeply rooted perceptions

It's easy to get caught up in the excitement of new concepts in this business and it's one of the things us marketing people like the most.  We also like love competition, (oh really!), which means there is  pressure to be omniscient – or at least to appear to be. Whether it's bluster or public brainstorming, we've all listened to somebody who appeared to be very confident in what they were saying, only to find out later that they were pretty much clueless. Sometimes the industry plays a giant game of telephone, where there is a massive exchange of misspoken, misinterpreted and misaligned thought experiments.  One of the symptoms of mass-confusion is an abundance of definitions as people struggle to understand new terminology.  Defining a legitimate new concept makes it easier to think about and puts it in a frame of reference where it can be scrubbed for financial and technical viability.  Rarely, things like Twitter defy financial gravity, but most other half-baked technology concepts acquire a fish-belly patina under the harsh  light of a CFO's or CEO's scrutiny. "Tell me again why you think we need this new capital black hole and when you figure it's going to recoup half the ROI – and why we are paying you to waste your time on it?" Larry Ellison has proven himself over many years to have an excellent perspective on technology trends and he wonders what cloud computing is.

Latency-sensitive applications are the best candidates for storage tiering to SSDs with 3PAR's AO (Adaptive Optimization .Typically, these are: High performance transaction processing, like securities trading, or Single threaded applications that are idle while storage I/Os complete People ask about Microsoft Exchange and I tell them it benefits a great deal from big, wide striping, but not much from tiering because Exchange performance is mostly a matter of providing adequate throughput. An app that people run daily but is seldom associated with transaction processing is backup.  This SWCSA video discusses backup as well as the prevailing shift to dashcams and the implications for SWCSA branding.  

The news is here . It's gratifying to see our international business growing

Another fascinating example of convergence and synergy crossed my desk this morning.  The news release is fairly straightforward: " RSA Helps Global Corporations Collaborate Securely With New Release Of RSA® Data Loss Prevention Suite ".  As press releases go, it's sort of ordinary-looking material — what could possibly be exciting here? And that's exactly what I wanted to share with you ..

It's funny how memes circulate within a larger corporation, especially one as socially connected (internally and externally) as EMC.  If you work in these sorts of environments, they're an interesting reflection of the organizational psyche.

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.

Separated at birth? There have been some interesting discussions lately about storage tiering   And just because 3PAR beat most everybody else to the punch this week with our AO announcement , I think it's important to keep things in perspective – storage tiering does not solve everybody's problems