Storage Nation

Yesterday, I posted on how clouds need to be better than the traditional physical environments they replace.  I made a long list of areas where that was either the case today, or would be relatively soon.

The headlines reads: " VMware To Acquire Certain IT Management Products and Software Expertise from EMC Corporation ". People will perceive this story one of two ways, depending on their perspective. The first (and most common) perspective will be "so what?" The second (and less frequent) perspective will be "this might be a big deal …" And I'd like a chance to share why I think this is more of the latter, and less of the former.

I read with empathy recent posts on Wikibon regarding the general perception that storage management tools could be a whole lot better. One excellent post spoke of managing storage performance .  Another speaks to large warehousing workloads meandering through the fabric, and the havoc that caused.  Good reading. It'd be easy enough to say, " yes, darn it, we need better tools! ".  And plenty of storage admins would agree with me wholeheartedly. My argument, however, is that tools in isolation can only get you so far.  At some point, the model needs to change.  And that's a more difficult proposition

I've been trying to lay low on the whole private cloud things for a while — really I have. But then I stumbled across a blog post that brought some key points into focus for me, and did a lot to reinforce some of my fundamental beliefs. Not that I need any more reinforcement, mind you … A Cloudy Headache Before we get started, you should go read this post from Alan Williamson.  Alan brings three interesting perspectives to this discussion

If you've made it this far, we've on an interesting journey together — exploring concepts around an internal "information utility" for our organizations. Yes, some pre-reading is required: an initial discussion here , concepts of efficiency here , building control models here , and — of course — how we might think about choice . In this post, we come full circle, and talk about how organizations might get from here to there. It's All About The Journey During 2009, I probably spoke with 200+ IT organizations around private cloud concepts.  Once they understood the concepts, they agreed — this was a fine destination to chart a course towards

You're midway through a series of posts exploring the concept of an idealized "information utility" for enterprises — something that can do a better job of handling the 97% of all corporate data that isn't mission critical.

You're midway through a sequence of posts describing the concept of building an "information utility" for the non-mission-critical information that's drowning every enterprise. I did my best to lay out an initial conceptual framework here .  Much of what I say here will make far more sense if you have the chance to read this first. In this post, I want to drill down on the enabling technologies and automated operational models that have the potential of dramatically transforming the efficiency of how we store, protect, manage and leverage our enterprise information

So many cool products, so little time. One of the most successful — and perhaps least widely known — products in EMC's sprawling portfolio is EMC Data Protection Advisor. Based on our acquisition of WysDM, we've continually enhanced and extended the product's capabilities where — today — most people are seriously surprised as to what it can do, and how well it does what it does.  Frankly speaking, I think it's under-marketed. And, if your job involves protecting lots of different forms of information with a wide variety of tools, you might be interested in this post

This just in. One of our premises is that — as we virtualize — certain disciplines can be made *far better* than they were in the physical world.  Security is a prime example. Nowhere does this play out as much as with virtual desktops.  In the security landscape, they're the endpoint that causes everyone to lose sleep

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.