Storage Nation

Lots to talk about as a follow-on from today's discussion around virtual storage, global federation and the underlying distributed cache coherence technology that makes all this wonderful juju possible. Most of the focus was on the specific capabilities around global storage federation, and the underlying distributed cache coherence technology that makes all of this useful and interesting

ESJ.com is running another of our C-4 Project video segments, this time with CEO and Chairman of FalconStor, ReiJane Huai.  Check it out. Mr. Huai reflected on his role in bringing tape backup to the distributed world, then offered commentary on several topics of interest including the formation of mini-me mainframes (“if you are going to

For those of us in the IT business, we occasionally encounter a fundamental new enabling technology that forces us to reconsider some of our long-held notions around the way things work. I'd put server and desktop virtualization into that category, as well as the ubiquitous web.  If you're a storage person, flash has that potential as well.  If backup is your thing, the combination of dedupe and low-cost disks has changed how you think about things. In this post, I'd like to start to introduce a technology concept that — yes — has the potential to change a great deal of how we think about IT at scale.  And, yes, this is going to be a long post … Context Today, Pat Gelsinger did an important event with industry analysts.  You can see his materials and webcast here .  In addition, I wanted to offer up my views on this topic as well.  I'll be using his slide deck as a reference point

The tickler I received in email this AM filled me with interest in what Mr. Foskett, lately of Nirvanix, was going to write about this question in his multi-part blog.  My fingers tingled with expectation as I keyed in the URL for his postings

Over the last week there have been a few stories catching my eye.  Here’s a brief paragraph on them. SGI Acquires COPAN Systems In fact to be more precise, SGI have acquired some of the assets of COPAN and left the liabilities behind for a mere $2 million in cash ( press release ).  The demise of COPAN raises two potential questions; is spin-down a dead technology or were COPAN in a market that wasn’t able to understand their technology

No, this is not another shameless pitch to attend yet-another-vendor show.

Hitachi Data Systems has been very successful selling the benefits of Storage Virtualization and Dynamic Provisioning.

Here’s my roundup of all the posts, pictures, video and comments from the HP Blades Tech Day Tweets The official hashtag for the event was #hpbladesday with hundreds of tweets being generated from the start of the Tech Day until now. Bloggers’ Posts By name order, here are the relevant posts from each blogger

Day 2 of HP Blades Day took place in a new location – the Customer Experience Centre.  This was due to issues with Wifi on day 1, now resolved in our new location.  Order of the day was: Review of the previous day’s presentations with a quick question & answer session Presentation on Client Virtualisation Factory tour Client Virtualisation Joseph George presented to the bloggers on client (aka desktop) virtualisation.  Whilst HP seem to have a story in this area, I’m skeptical about the whole process of virtualising desktops at this stage, other than in certain use cases.  I can see benefits for the following: High availability environments such as financial traders, where loss of a desktop translates to financial loss. Large scale desktop deployments where functionality is generic.  A good example of this is call centres; desks only require access to limited features (so don’t need high powered devices) and physical desktops may be used by multiple users. Environments not suitable for desktop virtualisation will include mobile users and anyone running bespoke hardware or software with hardware dependencies

If you've been following the storage banter over the last few weeks, this issue has been hotly debated back and forth. Rather than weigh in on one side or another, I thought I'd take a few moments to share the basic concepts, and to shine a light as to why different vendors are lining up on one side or another of the discussion. Now, since this is a simple treatment, I'm sure that others will want to either extend or amend some of my comments here.  And, yes, this is an over-simplified treatment — that's the point. Please feel free to do so.