Storage Nation

We’re finally back on line after (hopefully) rectifying a hack that had all of my web sites being redirected to places like Realtor.com, White Pages.com, etc.  I guess these companies pay someone to get their visitor numbers up by stealing traffic from other peoples’ sites.  It is annoying and wrong.  My wife, whose blog is also

I was at a customer dinner event last night, and predictably I got asked what I thought about yesterday's NetApp announcement by several EMC people.

I just came across (yet another) good article by Kevin Beaver called Tests for securing the internal windows network .

My previous post about the long slog ahead for IT business prompted a communique from my friend and fellow blogger, Mike Linett, over at Zerowait.  We have been chatting back and forth via email over the past few days and I thought I would post the emails here so that others can chime in if

UPDATED Dec 1st @ 10:10am PST (minor updates/corrections – also posted the table in xls format based on demand) “What is the best way to backup my VMware environment?” Ah… There are some questions that are easy and short to ask, but are long to answer.   This is one of them.   But – the proliferation of various tools for VMware-oriented backup (including VMware’s own VMware Data Recovery as well as other 3rd party options) suggests that good vendor answers to that question have a lot of value to customers.

Happy thanksgiving to my American colleagues! after a bunch of “high level” of posts, glad to do a technical one again Glad to see vSphere 4 udpate 1 hit today – you can get more here .

Although myself and others here at Storage Monkeys have been railing about the need for transparency and honesty among bloggers, surprisingly few have adopted any ethical standards for disclosure of potential conflicts of interest. The lack of disclosure is bad for the storage industry, it’s bad for vendors,  it’s bad for the bloggers and it’s real bad for the commercial publications that refuse to develop any standard for disclosure.   One of the regular offenders of tRead More..

I have been actively involved in discussing clouds here on my blog, as well as various customer and industry forums for a little over a year. I've put forward some fairly definitive concepts (e.g. private cloud) as well as had plenty of time to discuss and occasionally defend my position.  It's added up to quite a few posts . I went back to one of the foundational posts I did way back in January , and was surprised as to how well the thinking has held up over time.

I think we're getting ready to take the next step in the discussion around private clouds — from an initial set of generic concepts, to a more precise articulation of an underlying architecture. At a surface level, private clouds are basically fully virtualized environments that allow IT organization to use a dynamic combination of internal and external resources

I really enjoy meeting customers.  However, not every customer interaction is sunshine and lollipops.  Sometimes, the interactions can be tense at the beginning, but result in an extremely productive discussion. I had one of those today, and — as I thought about it — I realized I'm starting to see this particular situation more often.  It's a harbinger of things to come. It Started Out Rough During a typical briefing, I'm usually asked to lead off the big technology strategy discussion.  It's usually 45 minutes of private cloud / VCE material, with plenty of time for discussion and debate