Storage Nation

The title of this post is a variant on the intriguing " infrastructure is code " meme from the #devops community. I think it's a useful idea to remind ourselves of — especially as technology transitions. Even though some of you reading this might thing the statement is blindingly obvious, it's clear that the vast majority of people think of boxes with blinking lights when you say the word "storage"

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 .

It's Friday, it's been a good week, but I still have one more blog post left in me. The reason I've chosen to spend some time exploring the latest IDC results is simple: in a very competitive part of the IT game, IDC is the de-facto scorekeeper.  I used to offer up blog commentary every quarter, but stopped doing it since nothing interesting was happening. Not the case this time around. Things appear to be changing in the storage biz ..

One of the thoughts being promoted by one of our competitors last week was "snaps are all you need for data protection".  Some folks at EMC asked me to comment, so I thought I'd share here. Let me know what you think? Yes, But … Here's where I would agree with the thought

"Nothing good is easy ; nothing easy is good". I don't remember who said that originally, but that thought has always stuck in my head. And as I work with more organizations who have started down a private cloud road (or something very similar), I'm beginning to see repeatable patterns emerge

Two weeks ago, I posted " My Friday Rant " — nothing more than getting a few industry observations off of my chest without provoking the usual competitive response.

Over the several years that I've been blogging, I have learned many times that most people don't appreciate a rant — especially when it comes to one vendor criticizing another. Now, given the extremely competitive nature of our industry, and the fact that I obviously work for a vendor, this makes for a problem — how best to share my somewhat pointed comments about what others are doing?  And not annoy everyone in the process? I see what everyone does, and — given my obvious biases — I still think I have a worthwhile perspective that might be interesting to some — what to do about it