Storage Nation

Recovering a single system after a disaster can be difficult.  Recovering hundreds is a mess.  Recovering them in a consistent fashion, so that their data dependencies are all correct, is a huge task

Like many of you, I'm staring in utter horror and disbelief at the ecological catastrophe unfolding in Gulf of Mexico. Indeed, the Deepwater Horizon will go down in history alongside the Exxon Valdez , Bhopal , Chernobyl and other examples of massive infrastructure failure destroying the environment on a mind-numbing scale. And, as I go through all the articles and analysis to date, I am struck by one simple fact: it appears they didn't have a plan for the inevitable.  And above all else, I consider that criminal. Bad Stuff Happens We live in an imperfect world where — despite our best efforts — things routinely fail.  So we do our best to imagine what can go wrong, and put in place either preventative or remediation mechanisms for when the inevitable happens.

So many great thoughts and ideas came out of EMC World last week, I'm still gathering and processing them. One of the bigger thoughts shared that took a while for me to fully process is a simple two-slide sequence that greatly clarified — at least for me — what was going on in the IT industry at a macro scale. And it came out crystal clear in Joe Tucci's keynote .. What's Happening In The Industry Today ..

Classic IT usually thinks in classical terms like TCO — total cost of ownership — and ROI — return on investment.  And there's a few of my blogosphere friends that occasionally rant on this topic, so I felt I had to chime in So much is changing as we enter a period of rapid change in how IT infrastructure is built, operated and consumed — perhaps we might want to reconsider our definitions of these terms? And, in doing so, I think we can deliver a useful insight that might help people — or annoy them, as the case might be … The New TCO Ostensibly, TCO — total cost of ownership — is the "all in" costs for a certain product or capability: hardware, software, maintenance, environmentals, labor, depreciation, etc. Now, there's nothing wrong on figuring out what the "real" cost of something might be — since it's all too easy for an IT vendor to show low prices in one aspect that result in significant costs in others.  Caveat emptor

This is a series of posts covering the subject of Storage Management.  In this post, I’ll be discussing one of the four foundations, Service and what exactly that means. My Four Pillars of Storage Management are defined in this initial post

Had an interesting experience today where I was interviewed and videostreamed from the show floor.  David Vellante has teamed up with John Furrier, and they brought in some cool, portable studio tech that I hadn’t seen before. You can see the results below as David interviews me on social media, EMC’s strategy, storage, the mood in IT, private clouds, and — yes — social media again. Watch live video from The Cube LIVE from EMC World 2010 on Justin.tv

Some of the more fascinating news to come out of EMC World today is the formation of an industry-wide Technology Advisory Board to help guide EMC and our partners forward as the industry transitions to a private cloud model. Some vendors use market muscle to accelerate these transitions.  Others depend heavily on industry standards efforts to do so.  But both approaches often lack an open forum where issues and tradeoffs can be debated at an appropriate level. Ideally, you'd ask heavy hitters from across the industry to join in, evaluate the options and make specific recommendations back to the vendor community.  And that's what I think we've got here

Doing what I do for EMC, I always get asked certain questions along the lines of "do you think that technology X or technology Y will win?". That's a bit of a trick question, because no technology rarely "wins", but — that being said — there are pronounced shifts to preferred approaches in our industry.  The current shift towards x86 CPU architectures is a good example — sure, there are alternatives, but you're seeing a lot less use of them going forward. And that's just what's happening in storage networking …

This one is most definitely off-topic, but you might find it interesting. Last Sunday, I broke down and bought a non-3G iPad.  I just was too damn curious.  Walked into the Apple Store, played with it for 5 minutes, gave them my credit card, and walked out 15 minutes later.  Brought it home, set it up, downloaded some interesting stuff, and had a blast.  Big geek fun. I then went off to work for the week, and left it home.  And that's when things got interesting ..

Final week of prep before the Big Event.  My calendar is starting to look like a brick wall, so apologies in advance if you're going and we don't have a chance to say "hi!".  Any downtime I get I'll be going to the Bloggers' Lounge for a double espresso … So many announcements coming out during this week, and I'll be doing my best to cover the bigger themes right here, as will other bloggers.  I've created a category for this purpose ("EMC World 2010") so you can track things more easily.