Storage Nation

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

The news is here ,  and    here ,     and here . 3PAR announced its storage tiering technology today with the introduction of our Adaptive Optimization (AO) software and with support for flash SSDs.  There's probably going to be a lot of discussion about storage tiering and AO in the weeks to come, so stay tuned.

Yes, I know — all of this talk about private clouds can seem very futuristic to some. In essence, though, we're talking about nothing more than the industrialization of IT infrastructure.  If you're inside the IT business, it all can seem so complex.  But if you're outside of IT, you might wonder "what's the big deal?"

Lots of back and forth with various folks internally on this in the last couple of days, and thought I would just put it out there: Despite the obvious simplicity that would come from directly connecting a UCS to an iSCSI, NFS, FC or FCoE target, this is currently (as of this posting on March 3rd, 2010) not possible with just a UCS chassis and UCS 6100 series fabric interconnect. I’ve had a couple people ask me “why” – after all, they’re just standard SFP+ connectors – you should be able to “plug Tab A into Slot B”. This is not new info (Scott and Rick have hit on this), but since I got asked so much (twice last week at different customers in a New York City tour), I thought I would summarize it here, as our readerships are not the same

I was talking with my InfoSmack co-conspirator, Greg Knieriemen ( iknerd.com )  last week about virtual junk and how the word "virtualization" was so incredibly unwieldy. It was killing my lazy mouth to have to do so much work for such a well-understood term/topic. (BONUS QUESTION: is "virtualization" a noun, verb, or WHAT?

 iKnerd (Greg Knieriemen) broke the story yesterday about Oracle/Sun breaking off their relationship with HDS .  That got everybody twittering -  with the majority of tweets from the storage universe suggesting Oracle had greedy motives. How unfair!  So, the video below attempts to restore balance to the universe and brings Netapp, HP, cloud computing, 3PAR and Larry's toys into the discussion. If you are a Sun storage customer and think its time to change, you should check out 3PAR.

The Cisco guys do a killer job on these tight, concise TechWise TV episodes… The one this Thursday is on Vblocks.  Hari is the main man in the VCE solutions squad in Santa Clara, and Vblock builder – a great resource to listen to, talk to and get to know. You can register here: http://www.cisco.com/en/US/solutions/ns340/ns339/ns638/ns914/html_TWTV/twtv_episode_62.html?sid=188290_26