Storage Nation

A few weeks back, I joined Sanjay Mirchandani (our CIO) and Tom Roloff (heads up EMC Consulting) on a neat simulcast that was beamed to multiple locations around North America. The content mostly focused on EMC IT's journey — results, challenges and lessons learned — but we spent a lot of time answering questions as well.  Despite our best efforts, there were many good questions that we just didn't have time to answer

In the second part of Pat’s keynote, I did a quick demonstration of future technologies from EMC and VMware to support IaaS use cases: “An Infrastructure Portal” = The next version of EMC Ionix Unified Infrastructure Manager 2.0 (aka UIM) – target Q3 “An End-user self-service portal” = future capabilities of VMware (“project Redwood”) The point is to show where we’re going (after all – half the fun of EMC world are big “unveil” announcements, the other half is seeing what we’re thinking – and then arguing about it The idea that’s important here is that long term, we think infrastructure HAS to become much simpler, and will be abstracted across the stack of server, network, and storage.   These abstractions of elements into “service offerings” needs to be simple.   Then, ultimately the infrastructure needs to be consumed in new self-service models by end users along with IT.

Empowering your own IT staff is a gift worth giving. Trust your own IT experts.  They have a stake in the future of the company.

Good economy or bad, information continues to grow at about 60% every year.  Storage media costs are dropping at approximately 30% per year.  If you stayed awake in math class, you'll realize that — unless you take some serious steps — you'll end up spending more on storage each and every year.

If you're like me, you love to see the continual cycles of disruption that percolate through our industry. You might wonder why a "disrupto-phile" like me would work for a large, successful behemoth of an IT company like EMC, it's easy.  It's pretty easy, actually. First, you don't get large and successful without paying attention to disruptive trends.  And, second, it's far more fun when you are the disruptor rather than the disruptee. Case in point: a rather innocuous announcement from our Iomega subsidiary, found here

So, it's happening more frequently now. We go into a large enterprise customer, or perhaps one of our partners, and do our private cloud presentation. We talk about fully virtualized environments, new operational models, and how VMware, Cisco and EMC are working together to accelerate this world. And then something very interesting happens with increasing frequency.

Those of us who speak on IT topics often find ourselves waxing poetic about the future of technology, or the future of the data center, or something similar.