Storage Nation

For tomorrow’s webcast at Redmond Magazine: Hope some  of you can join us.  Link.

I was out of pocket last week supporting the EBC on the Road in Sweden. Kenneth Chang, who managers our Executive Briefing Centers in Sefton Park, UK and Santa Clara, California, recruits our executives to spend a week doing briefings for companies in locations outside of our EBCs so that we can get closer to our customers and prospects.  This has been helpful for many companies who have had to cut back on their travel expenses. Unlike other briefing centers that are staffed by dedicated presenters, our EBC briefings are done by product managers and executives who have direct responsibility for the products and solutions that they present

My fellow HDS bloggers Ken Wood and Michael Hay have been using the term Cartesian scaling to describe what I call Scale up and Scale out . Cartesian scaling is the ability to scale in two directions, up and out. I have resisted using this term since I thought it sounded too technical to describe what I thought was a simple concept. (The term Cartesian comes from the French philosopher Rene Descartes who wrote a paper Discourse on the Method , where he introduces a way to order objects on paper using two intersecting axes as a measuring guide

February 14 marks the start of the Chinese New Year, Year of the Tiger. This year it happens to fall on Valantine’s Day.  Here is a greeting, wishing you all the best for this New Year From the Folks at Hitachi Data Systems

The voting in the Top 10 Storage Vendor Blogs ended at midnight on Friday PST and we have our new Top 10 list. I want to thank everyone who participated. We had 606 unique votes submitted which was higher than the 462 that voted in the Non-Vendor Blog vote in July

I just came across (yet another) good article by Kevin Beaver called Tests for securing the internal windows network .

While Cloud computing is touted as a new way to mask the complexity of the IT infrastructure and provide IT services as “a pay as you grow” service, these concepts  were introduced over 10 years ago with the service providers of the late 1990’s. These concepts were so appealing that they helped to fuel the dot com boom,  but disappeared in the dot com crash of 2001/2002. What has changed to make us think that a shared services model like cloud computing and cloud storage will be successful this time around? Key to the success of cloud storage providers, as with the dot com storage services providers (SSP) of earlier days, will be the ability to leverage their resources and be more efficient in managing the growth of storage compared to their end users.

Happy NewYear and welcome to 2010! I wish you all a healthy and productive new year. While the economy seems to be getting better, budget planners are still very cautious and so we will continue to see a drive to consolidate to reduce cost and thin down the fat to be more agile. Therefore data center virtualization will be a top priority for 2010.  We have already seen the adoption of server virtualization platforms with more competitive offerings and faster more powerful processors and networks becoming mainstream. The next major step in data center consolidation will be in the consolidation of storage through thin provisioning.

My previous post about the long slog ahead for IT business prompted a communique from my friend and fellow blogger, Mike Linett, over at Zerowait.  We have been chatting back and forth via email over the past few days and I thought I would post the emails here so that others can chime in if

I would like to wish you all the best for the holidays. I will be taking some time off and will be back after New Years day.  Thanks to all of you who read this blog and special thanks to those who take the time to add your comments. Even if you don’t agree with me, I value and respect your perspective and will publish your comments.    I look forward to 2010 and future dialogue with you around the storage issues and thoughts of the day.