Storage Nation

Andy Kyte from Gartner was been sounding the alarm for data center modernization for a number of years. He warns that the data center is headed for a train wreck

A new survey by Intercall shows that 48 percent of americans who use technology in their everyday jobs say that they are now required to do more work with fewer resources due to the current economic climate.

Last week  the Register’s Chris Mellor covered EMC’s intention to propose  “unified storage/server systems  that span the globe and function as a single virtual resource pool, using YottaYotta technology” as announced by Pat Gelsinger, EMC’s president and COO of Information Infrastructure Products group. Those who were in the storage business during and after the dot com phase at the turn of the century, remember the dozens of startups that were trying to leverage the introduction of Storage Area Networking with storage virtualization appliances. EMC also entered the market with a storage virtualization appliance called Invista

My next column at Storage magazine in the Netherlands.

A while back we did a storage assessment for a non HDS customer and showed him that his storage utilization was actually around 30% which is typical in most accounts. While that was not surprising to the operations people this was a surprise to the financial people who could not understand why 70% of their storage capacity, in this case, several hundred TBs, was not being utilized. Management was embarrassed and immediately fingers were being pointed at the storage architect and storage administrators, who in turn pointed to the application users who were asking for way more storage than they appeared to need.

I was out of pocket last week supporting the EBC on the Road in Sweden. Kenneth Chang, who managers our Executive Briefing Centers in Sefton Park, UK and Santa Clara, California, recruits our executives to spend a week doing briefings for companies in locations outside of our EBCs so that we can get closer to our customers and prospects.  This has been helpful for many companies who have had to cut back on their travel expenses. Unlike other briefing centers that are staffed by dedicated presenters, our EBC briefings are done by product managers and executives who have direct responsibility for the products and solutions that they present

My column for the next issue of Storage magazine in the Netherlands for the Dutch impaired. ABOUT THAT DATA EXPLOSION BY JON TOIGO For the past couple of years, International Data Corporation has been publishing statistics and infographics about the “digital data explosion” that seem to pop up in just about every vendor presentation I see.  The back story on

My fellow HDS bloggers Ken Wood and Michael Hay have been using the term Cartesian scaling to describe what I call Scale up and Scale out . Cartesian scaling is the ability to scale in two directions, up and out. I have resisted using this term since I thought it sounded too technical to describe what I thought was a simple concept. (The term Cartesian comes from the French philosopher Rene Descartes who wrote a paper Discourse on the Method , where he introduces a way to order objects on paper using two intersecting axes as a measuring guide

February 14 marks the start of the Chinese New Year, Year of the Tiger. This year it happens to fall on Valantine’s Day.  Here is a greeting, wishing you all the best for this New Year From the Folks at Hitachi Data Systems

Happy NewYear and welcome to 2010! I wish you all a healthy and productive new year. While the economy seems to be getting better, budget planners are still very cautious and so we will continue to see a drive to consolidate to reduce cost and thin down the fat to be more agile. Therefore data center virtualization will be a top priority for 2010.  We have already seen the adoption of server virtualization platforms with more competitive offerings and faster more powerful processors and networks becoming mainstream. The next major step in data center consolidation will be in the consolidation of storage through thin provisioning.