Storage Nation

By the time this is posted, I will be in a hospital having a fairly routine cardiac chatheterization procedure done to determine the level of blockage in my coronary arteries.  Cardiologists do a ton of these every year, saving people from inactive lives and open heart surgery.  Unbelievable technology, but I'll get back to that later.  No Chest Pain Symptoms! The main reason for this post is to help people understand that symptoms for heart trouble don't have to include chest pains.  I have had a little tightness of breath while exercising over the last year and I've noticed a drop in my cardio output, but I figured that's just what comes with aging.  I've been bike riding, skiing and hiking/walking, but my pace has been slower and hill climbs on the bike have been harder.

Greg Knieriemen and I covered SNW as the Storage Monkeys/Infosmack team yesterday and will be repeating the act again today.  There is a huge amount of stuff going on here and we are trying to give people a feeling for what the news is and how the event is going down. Videos are going up to the Infosmack Channel on YouTube.

Fremont CA:  3PAR, the leading Steering Wheel Camera Society of America (SWCSA) producer of Steering Wheel Camera Technology and Smart Car chase scene videos has come to an agreement with Storwize , a Steering Wheel Camera Society of America member company from Marlborough, MA for Storwize to acquire the assets of the Steering Wheel Society of America. Marc Farley, founder of the SWCSA, said: "It kind of sucks to have the SWCSA ripped out from under my complete creative control," before blowing his nose and continuing "now I don't even know where to drive." Steve Kenniston, Director of Driving at Storwize was only available to speak from his mobile phone from within Storwize's state of the art Studio on Wheels was quoted as saying: "mmmbblgurg,  tan you he..  sshhhtdf… can you here me?" And then dropped this bombshell: "Were trying to pass legislation here is Massachusetts requiring everybody to make at least one SWCSA video per month." Here is his latest video:

Our expectations for how laws are made might need to be reset.  The old adage, "you don't want to see it" doesn't really work any more in an increasing connected world.  This one was hard to avoid. FWIW, I think the democratic strategy of mostly ignoring the republicans was the best one because the republicans are apparently only interested in derailing any outcomes while the democratically controlled congress is in power.  And this is how things are going to be as long as we agree to be elect representatives of the same two, entrenched parties.  Not a great scenario for government productivity.  No wonder there is so much cynicism surrounding politics. In the aftermath of this, the republicans are going forward with a "vote the bums out" crusade. The democrats, on the other hand, will try to portray the republicans as log-jammers, a position that is much less appealing than the bum's rush approach

It's easy to get caught up in the excitement of new concepts in this business and it's one of the things us marketing people like the most.  We also like love competition, (oh really!), which means there is  pressure to be omniscient – or at least to appear to be. Whether it's bluster or public brainstorming, we've all listened to somebody who appeared to be very confident in what they were saying, only to find out later that they were pretty much clueless. Sometimes the industry plays a giant game of telephone, where there is a massive exchange of misspoken, misinterpreted and misaligned thought experiments.  One of the symptoms of mass-confusion is an abundance of definitions as people struggle to understand new terminology.  Defining a legitimate new concept makes it easier to think about and puts it in a frame of reference where it can be scrubbed for financial and technical viability.  Rarely, things like Twitter defy financial gravity, but most other half-baked technology concepts acquire a fish-belly patina under the harsh  light of a CFO's or CEO's scrutiny. "Tell me again why you think we need this new capital black hole and when you figure it's going to recoup half the ROI – and why we are paying you to waste your time on it?" Larry Ellison has proven himself over many years to have an excellent perspective on technology trends and he wonders what cloud computing is.

A couple posts ago , discussing Netapp CEO, Tom Georgens' now famous quote on tiering , I wrote: To be fair, Georgens DID get support from the contrarian Drunken Data.  This was the only reference to Jon Toigo and his blog. Apparently this thoughtless insult set Jon off because a week later he wrote a whole lot of overkill  in response.  Considering the effort he made, it doesn't seem fair to just ignore it all.    1.  I listen to customers, so do Chuck Hollis, Barry Burke, Mark Twomey, Val Bercovici, Alex McDonald, and most of the vendor bloggers.

. There are many things Larry Ellison can do .  If he wanted to run for public office, he certainly wouldn't have to worry about campaign funding.  I mean, if he can buy a bad NBA basketball team , he can certainly afford a series of popularity ads showing his over flowing empathy. But if he still wants to be the CEO of the largest software company in the world – it's not clear that getting into the hardware business will help him do it

NetApp launched a collection of cloud initiatives today, but I want to step back and ask what cloud means to CIOs. Every CIO I meet seems to want a “cloud strategy,” but the words mean different things to different CIOs