Storage Nation

As some of you know, I'm over in Rome for a few days of meetings, to be followed by a week of overdue vacation time. Much has been said about EMC and VMware's recent strong quarters, including this unique perspective from Storagezilla , but I wanted to share one big thought that stood out above all else. All About Earnings Calls Earning calls in our industry are mostly about economic results — how well did you do, how well do you expect to do, etc.  All of that is pretty standard fare.  You can listen to EMC's here , or get a transcript here .

The good news — there's general consensus from the enterprise IT organization I speak with that — yes, they'd like to pursue a private cloud model. The challenging part — as they look around their data centers, all they can see is the legacy of past decisions: incompatible architectures, stove-pipe stacks and the rest.  It's like an archeology project: you can see the layers of different waves that have come through the IT organization. How can you move forward when all you can see is history

Lots to talk about as a follow-on from today's discussion around virtual storage, global federation and the underlying distributed cache coherence technology that makes all this wonderful juju possible. Most of the focus was on the specific capabilities around global storage federation, and the underlying distributed cache coherence technology that makes all of this useful and interesting

See this chart? If you are a DD reader, you might want to get used to seeing it.  (I welcome feedback on what I have designed, by the way.)  I call it a sitrep, or situation report, showing some operational and managerial aspects of the typical enterprise IT shop.  I hope to do a series of

Many of think this could be the case.  It looks like a "perfect storm" cloud be shaping up in the industry to fundamentally change this piece of the IT landscape. The thought is timely, given VMware's recent VMware View 4 announcement.  Check out the details from VMware here , or see Chad's excellent writeup here . So, let's look at the enablers — and the inhibitors — and how they might play out in the very near future

So, I now have been in front of 6 different senior IT audiences since Tuesday's announcement. Note: this might give you a sense of how frequently I have the privilege of interacting with customers