Storage Nation

As I sit back and contemplate the last few weeks, I keep coming to the same conclusion.  The market has clearly expressed its strong interest in all things cloud-like, and just about every technology vendor on the planet — large and small — is frantically repositioning themselves just as quickly as possible. Whatever "tipping point" we all were waiting for, it's clearly happened.  Game on. And I think this rapid shift has caught many in the IT industry by surprise: technology vendors, system integrators, consultants — few people are really interested in IT as usual.  Everyone wants to talk about the cloud.

Every so often, a well-understood category in IT becomes completely up-for-grabs in terms of answering the question: what's next?  Clearly, how we think about enterprise desktops and delivering end-user computing is now very much in play. The many announcements coming from VMworld only underscores this point

I know, there's a LOT to read and digest coming out of VMworld these days. As an occasionally proliferate blogger myself, I have to hand it to Chad — he's turned loose a veritable supernova of meaty and significant technology-oriented posts in the last few days.  I'm impressed, and I don't impress easily.  I know how much work is behind each and every one of these posts. If you have a moment, please check these out: vCloud Director and UIM VPLEX, Long Distance VM Teleportation, and a great offer ..

A while back, I wrote a rather skeptical post reacting to a press article about Pfizer's use of Amazon.   There are some lessons to be learned from this experience:   #1 — Don't always believe what you read online from an industry reporter, and   #2 — Before being critical, do your homework.   I made both mistakes.  But, wonderfully, I recently had a chance to talk to the principal behind the story — Mike Miller — and found the reality to be far more fascinating

I've been invited down to the xChange gathering next Monday to speak on a panel with some of my industry compatriots on the above topic. Although I can improvise as well as the next guy (and sound pretty good in the process!), I really enjoy open-ended topics like this that make me step back and reflect a bit.  As a result, I came up with way more material than I could ever fit into a 90 second panel soundbite.

Nothing like a little M&A action to spice up a Monday, no? Today's news is rather straightforward — Dell intends to purchase 3PAR.  Not entirely a surprise if you're a close industry-watcher like I am. Some interesting commentary is starting to result (including this piece by Dave Vellante), so I thought I'd offer up some personal observations as well.

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

Some of my favorite customer time is when I spend 1×1 time with a CIO or other IT leader and just chat.

Sometimes I write the blog post, sometimes it gets written for me Wanted to offer you all a quick link to a drive-by interview I did with Steven Burke at CRN yesterday.  He threw some great questions at me — hopefully my answers hold up. You be the judge — here .  I also got this unrelated pickup here at ZDnet

I'm on vacation this week — no blogging, no twitter, etc. — but I did manage to get around to checking my blog for any interesting comments.