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

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

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

Curtis Chan called me Friday to nudge me to write something about ProStor, the guys who have made arrays out of removable laptop hard disks. They had sent me an external USB-connected unit and one hardened disk cartridge (about the size of a pack of cigarettes) just before Christmas and I promised to put it

One of the thoughts being promoted by one of our competitors last week was "snaps are all you need for data protection".  Some folks at EMC asked me to comment, so I thought I'd share here. Let me know what you think? Yes, But … Here's where I would agree with the thought

"Nothing good is easy ; nothing easy is good". I don't remember who said that originally, but that thought has always stuck in my head. And as I work with more organizations who have started down a private cloud road (or something very similar), I'm beginning to see repeatable patterns emerge

So many things are tantalizing mixes of unknown opportunity and unknown risks.  And, certainly, for many enterprise IT organizations, the topic of "cloud" certainly fits this description. You can't hide your head in the sand.  You can't plunge headfirst into it and ignore the obvious risks. In between these two extremes is the notion of governance: a policy-making function that attempts to assess opportunities and risks in a dynamically changing environment.  Several years ago when I was doing the corporate social media strategy thing, I found that a good governance model can accelerate change.

megan fox 2010 2 girls 1 cup 2010 Just as George McFly became a real man when he embraced his density, so shall we all. This week, two big announcements were made about technologies that will/promise to dramatically increase the storage capacities of magnetic media

Yes, I'm still talking with customers about private cloud models, day in and day out.  The funny part is that now they're asking me, rather than me bringing it up.  That's progress, I guess. Just to refresh your memory, in my simple world clouds have three major attributes: * they're built differently — dynamic pools of virtualized resources * they're operated differently — zero-touch or low-touch aggregated models * they're consumed differently — they're convenient to consume I seemed to have spent the first part of 2009 discussing the technology.  Fortunately, many people now generally accept that fully virtualized environments can be better than their physical counterparts in many situations. And, as I think about it, I spent a great deal of time during the second part of the year on operational models: the need for self-service, the importance of flexibility, how traditional roles and responsibilities change, and attacking the people / process / politics part of the problem

Was chatting with a customer about the impact of a recent EMC announcement where the CLARiiON now has a 4:1 advantage in capacity density: twice as much physical capacity (due to 2TB drives) as well as also doing so in half the space (due to double density packaging). Rather than incessantly brag about the achievement ( sooner or later, other vendors will eventually figure out how to do this ), I thought it was indicative of how our thinking around storage is starting to change — and fast. The Basics Let's start with contemplating storage arrays and drives just a few years back — say, 2007. You wanted decent capacity, but decent performance as well.  Sure, there were exotic faster drives, and large "data tub" drives based on ATA, but it took heavy lifting to get the right data on the right storage at the right time