Storage Nation

We talk about IT-as-a-service all the time — or at least, we should be! Whether we're large enterprises, or service providers who desire their business — you're providing a service, what does the service cost? It's turning out that this mental leap is proving difficult for many IT people.  For decades, they've been focused on the cost of the ingredients, rather than the price of the meal

As part of my role here at EMC, I get to talk to all sorts of interesting consumers of IT: enterprises, partners — and, more recently, the more nascent category of "IT service providers". I think of service providers as a new channel for the IT industry.  Yes, we've seen outsourcers and hosters and all manner of people who will offer to run various aspects of IT on your behalf, but enough has changed recently that the whole discussion is somewhat fresh again. Given that I spend a lot of time with enterprises and more traditional partners as well, I have a pretty good sense of what people might want, and why they might want it.

We've all been hearing about it for a while, but I've just noticed that Cisco is getting more public in talking about their OTV (overlay transport virtualization) technology. I consider this one of the key "enabling technologies" for many cloud models, and private clouds in particular. And here's why ..

"Nothing good is easy ; nothing easy is good". I don't remember who said that originally, but that thought has always stuck in my head. And as I work with more organizations who have started down a private cloud road (or something very similar), I'm beginning to see repeatable patterns emerge

This post is the third (and hopefully final) post in a series triggered by EMC's announcement of FAST going GA today. The first post described the primary impacts of the FAST technology, and noted similarities / synergies between the virtualization of servers and the continuing virtualization of storage

In my previous post , I attempted to present some of the basic impacts of FAST — fully automated storage tiering, and how they were reflective of a Big Theme I want call the continuing virtualization of storage. This theme plays out in two primary ways — one of which is storage's continuing alignment with fully virtualized servers and networks.  And the other is how — once we fully abstract logical from physical — many more things are possible in the storage domain than we might previously have assumed. This second post digs in deep on the second idea — what new things are now possible once we fully embrace "virtualized storage"?  And one of those "new things" is an entirely new take on storage tiering.

It's a very fun time in IT, especially if you work in a larger enterprise or service provider. Whether you call it pervasive virtualization, private cloud, or whatever — the boundaries between traditional disciplines are being redrawn, and — as a result — many of the words and concepts we're so familiar with take on very different meanings. As IT professionals (whether customer, vendor or consultant), I would argue that we all need to be very congnizant of helping people migrate from traditional meanings to newer ones

For most of this year, I've relied on a single deck to explain the concepts of a private cloud and describe the recently announced VCE Coalition. This rather long post is basically a scripted version of the presentation — although there are always a few things that usually get said that go above and beyond what's here. Disclaimer: these are the slides and the story that I've personally been using recently.  I'm not entirely sure if it's 100% official or sanctioned or anything else like that. Hope you find this useful and entertaining! Introducing The VCE Coalition My favorite Chinese curse is "may you live in interesting times".  Well, if you're involved in IT, those "interesting times" have started.  Many of us believe that IT infrastructure is ripe for a seminal change in how it's built, operated and paid for

Hitachi Data Systems announced a new portfolio of cloud technologies that delivers an integrated set of storage services across block, files and content storage to support cloud computing and enable organizations to implement cloud services at their own pace. From my perspective, we have been providing customers cloud enabling technologies since we introduced the virtualization capabilities of the USP. There are many SaaS providers and Network Computing companies like Telstra , Australia’s leading telecommunications and information services company, which is hosting and delivering their services through the cloud using Hitachi Data Systems storage virtualization services today

Most of the discussion in our industry focuses around technology and use cases.  That's as it should be. But occasionally a shift comes along that puts the focus squarely back on the people side of our business — the many hundreds of thousands of IT career professionals who design, implement and manage the enormous IT infrastructure that keeps our modern world spinning. Any cloud is fundamentally different than traditional IT approaches: it's built differently, operated differently, and consumed differently.  That's what makes it a cloud. Most of the industry discussion tends to fall around the endpoints — how it's built, and how it's consumed.