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EMC To Acquire Greenplum

admin — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 20:18:21 +0000

Today, EMC announced its intention to acquire Greenplum — a successful provider of data warehouse and business intelligence database software. And there’s a lot to talk about as a result … What's This All About? In a nutshell: big data driving a new generation of data computing applications using a private cloud model. Let's take these one at a time.

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EMC To Acquire Greenplum

David Scott on cloud dynamics in the IT industry

admin — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 18:07:07 +0000

Forbes.com recently published a video interview with our CEO, David Scott on their Intelligent Technology channel. David who talks about the shift from privately run data centers to utility, public cloud computing services. Here are some of the key points from it.

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David Scott on cloud dynamics in the IT industry

Cisco sneaks into the corporate laptop/desktop market with CIUS

admin — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 16:10:48 +0000

I've been going slightly nuts since yesterday after Cisco announced the CIUS. It looks like the perfect tablet for the sorts of things I really want a personal screen device for – communicating with other people. This review by Erik Parker of InfoWorld is a pretty good read and it summarizes key advantages and disadvantages of CIUS. If it can make the technology of video conferencing transparent to end users, it will be a big deal. But the hidden story to this is that Cisco is also making a play to get into the corporate desktop/laptop business with the CIUS. The idea that companies could deploy these with VDI is definitely part of Cisco's grand plan for world domination . Whether or not the CIUS could replace laptop or desktop computers remains to be seen, but there are reasons to think they could eventually if the stars align. The arguments for VDI are strong, but there are still a lot of hurdles to overcome, such as back end storage performance to support boot storms . By the way, people looking at large VDI implementations might want to look at 3PAR's wide striping storage systems to get the sort of affordable IOPS needed to support large VDI environments. My previous post illustrates our design for massive throughput, which supports a huge number of IOPS without needing SSDs or requiring storage administrators to create special disk pools to isolate the VDI workload from other applications running in the same storage array.

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Cisco sneaks into the corporate laptop/desktop market with CIUS

Fast, faster and fastest

admin — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 17:29:32 +0000

I was hanging out in San Francisco airport yesterday on a flight delay and went into one of the magazine stores to check out the latest monthlies. A bunch of them had the same full page ad from Oracle comparing a Sun server hosted Oracle DB with apps to an anonymous IBM “server” hosted Oracle DB with apps

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Fast, faster and fastest

Customer Priceline talks about 3PAR storage

admin — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 17:37:45 +0000

Here's a video that TechTarget produced for us with one of our customers, Priceline.com . Here are a few highlights from the video: Priceline.com was one of the first e-commerce players to adopt virtualization. That may account for why the company's IT organization is known for for it's high availability and ability to adapt quickly to changes in the market. Given the fact that their business has a broad value-based appeal, their IT organization works very hard to get the best rate of return for their capital expenditures. 3PAR storage allowed them to increase their storage capacity over 400% over the last four years while reducing the administrative load required to manage it all. Ron Rose, ex-CIO at Priceline (now on the Sr

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Customer Priceline talks about 3PAR storage

Debating secure multi-tenancy

admin — Fri, 28 May 2010 19:31:32 +0000

Chuck Hollis wrote a blog post earlier this week,titled "Once Upon a Time" . I thought it was an excellent post, telling about the transition EMC made a decade ago starting when Joe Tucci replaced Mike Ruettgers. FWIW, I think the diversification that Tucci accomplished at EMC has made all the difference there – especially the acquisition of VMware. You might call it lucky (as I tend to do), but the fact was they were looking to diversify their business took them on a journey that has buoyed their company far beyond the capabilities that their storage products by themselves would have supported. At the end, he asks the question if history was bound to repeat itself again – which appeared to be a nudge towards some of the other companies in the industry. I didn't think this was such an affront – Chuck has been known to tweak competitors from time to time, but for the last 6 months or so, he's restrained himself from doing so. So I was surprised this morning when I saw some tweets that had me look at the post again. And sure enough there was a blow up there involving a cadre of Netapp people that over-reacted to Chuck's post. One of the consequences of this over reaction was that a benign blog post about EMC history became a referendum on Netapp's Secure Multi-Tenancy (SMT). It wasn't what Chuck was driving at in his original post, but the comments from Netapp folks steered the discussion that direction. Chuck's main argument is that SMT isn't very secure if your service provider can gain access to a tenant's data. I'd add to that and say, it's not very secure if your service provider can delete volumes and destroy data too. Inadvertent destruction of data by administrators is a larger threat than somebody pulling "an inside job". But it doesn't just effect service provider scenarios.

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Debating secure multi-tenancy

How would you build an iBlock?

admin — Thu, 27 May 2010 23:49:48 +0000

I just read an article about how the concept of infrastructure blocks is playing out on the SearchDataCenter site. The article presents several perspectives, but it's a bit confused. The concept is referred to as three different terms (pods, blocks and cells) and the comparison between a making your own and buying one are not clearly juxtaposed. Regardless, its a thought provoking article. But is does raise the point what should we call these things? I think a better generic word for them is iBlock, short for infrastructure block. I've been speaking to customers about this sort of thing lately and a number of them have expressed the opinion that rolling out their own iBlock would be a lot cheaper, more flexible and more scalable than anything they could buy from a vendor. I'm a big believer in the power of integration, but it's possible to get too far ahead of the curve. 3PAR customers have already been implementing iBlocks for several years using the 3CV design discussed in this ESG Labs report.

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How would you build an iBlock?

3PAR customer Ultraspeed goes international with DR services between London and Amsterdam

admin — Wed, 19 May 2010 15:43:14 +0000

London-based Ultraspeed has succeeded in the managed hosting business 13 years by being smart, opportunistic and service-oriented. A lot has changed during that time, especially customer expectations for uptime and how much customers rely on their hosting providers to respond quickly when needed. Web sites that are lucky enough to "go viral" can be a disaster if the hosting company's infrastructure is unable to adjust rapidly enough to meet demand. In March, Ultraspeed opened their second data center in Amsterdam implementing a modular infrastructure design including multi-tenant 3PAR storage, VMware, Extreme Networks switches and customized servers. The highlight of their Amsterdam site is the ability to offer bi-directional DR services between London and Amsterdam using 3PAR's Remote Copy software. Ultraspeed is a member of 3PAR's Cloud-Agile program . In this interview, conducted in February 2010, Jordon Gross, CEO of Ultraspeed and Michael Shanks, CTO joined us for coffee near their offices and talked about their company's history, it's technology, the challenges they face and how they expect things to shape up in the years to come.

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3PAR customer Ultraspeed goes international with DR services between London and Amsterdam

VPLEX undressed

admin — Wed, 12 May 2010 16:36:56 +0000

OK, Monday's post lacked the punch that people have come to expect from me where EMC announcements are concerned. Thanks to my readers who were disappointed and told me so. This post is for you. VPLEX (announced Monday with all the hype that EMC could muster) is the result of EMC trying to become something more than a storage company.

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VPLEX undressed

Your Virtual Machine Teleporter is ready Are you?

admin — Mon, 10 May 2010 14:52:55 +0000

Well, it’s here.