Storage Nation

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

Two bits of news, oddly correlated. First, there's EMC's recent SPEC benchmark posting, where a single Intel-based Celerra data mover absolutely *smokes* every other NAS device out there.

When I speak in front of audiences, I usually try and push the boundaries a bit by being intentionally controversial. Today was no exception.  I spoke at a partner event (GreenPages) in front of about 100 people about the journey to the private cloud.  Some of my comments even made it to CRN in real-time — scary thought.

Today is the day that VMware announces the availability of 4.1, and a key set of storage integration APIs (VAAI) that provide all sorts of cool speed-ups between server and storage.  EMC's announcement of day-one support is here . Chad Sakac (our legendary Virtual Geek ) does a great job of explaining what they are, how to use them, and what they can do for you.  If your passion is hands-on tech, please head on over there. However, if you're more like me, and are always curious about what things might mean in a broader sense, this post might be more to your liking …

As the IT industry rapidly transitions and matures, all sorts of traditional topics are now up for a fresh round of discussion. One of these topics that I'm getting frequently dragged into is storage management — what will it look like going forward?

Lots of cloud chatter this week.  A couple of good industry events.  An interesting new startup offering a cloud operating system for private clouds.  Even the ever-outspoken Werner dissing private clouds as "false clouds". A lively debate, to be sure! Time for me to offer up another attempted level-set in this discussion.  It's easy to become lost in the details, and more difficult to see what's really happening here — or, at least, what I think is happening. Disruption Is In The Air Clouds disrupt three aspects of technology: how it's built, how it's operated and how it's consumed.  Other than that, it's business as usual There's excitement in the air, but also certain degree of fear.  The deck chairs are starting to get re-arranged in the IT vendor world.  Hot winds of change are blowing through enterprise IT organizations.  And vast piles of capital are flowing into the new intermediaries — the service providers. As all of this happens, I'd encourage everyone to remember the golden rule.

I wrote previously about my current challenges involved with unlearning just about everything I've ever learned about storage. One fun exercise is to take terms and concepts we've been using for many years, and look at how their definition has evolved to a point that they're somewhat unrecognizable as compared to  where they started. And today, I'm going to have some fun with LUNs … LUN — The Fundamental Unit Of Storage Allocation If you'd like a clinical treatment, I'd refer you to the Wikipedia entry here .

In a recent interview with Dave Vellante of Wikibon fame, I offered up the view that — given the rapid rate of change in storage technology — I've had to revisit just about each and every fundamental assumption I've ever had about storage. An excellent example of this "unlearning storage" was buried in an Atmos announcement from EMC World.  In particular, Atmos storage now runs nicely in a VM.  Not just for eval, for production

A while back, it was part of my job to understand all the different social platforms as part of an effort to make EMC proficient at social media. If it was out there, I investigated it.  Blogs.  Forums.  Second Life.  Twitter.  Yammer.  Ning.  You name it, I checked it out. Some of these platforms made sense to me, others didn't.  Some I embraced (e.g communities, blogging, Twitter), others I largely stayed away from. And Facebook was one of those that simply raised hairs on the back of my neck.

If there's one topic that's been discussed to death in the storage industry, it's RAID — a redundant array of independent disks. No, this post isn't really about this version of RAID or that version of RAID, it's just a suggestion that — before too long — we might use this acronym to refer to a very different (yet intriguingly related) concept. To Begin With If all this storage stuff is new to you, don't fret.  The idea is simple — use multiple disk drives that can appear as one: bigger, faster and more reliable.  In the storage world, the advent of RAID fundamentally changed the industry in a substantial manner. Interesting note: if you'd like to see an interview from the DG engineers who built the first commercial RAID array (the CLARiiON), check this out.  All of them are still at EMC During the video, the thought comes out that the advance was driven by two things: growth in the power of CPUs, and new IP — in this case, the foundational Berkeley paper on RAID concepts