Storage Nation

This morning's M+A news was equally as interesting as the news from a week ago: HP submitted a bid to top Dell's offer for 3PAR.  And, if 3PAR trading prices are any indication, there's investor confidence that the price will go higher still. When I wrote about Dell's bid last Monday , my central premise was "it's all about competing with HP, folks". Turns out I was closer to the truth than I thought.

I have been heads down building out a couple of websites.  In addition to adding a lot of new content to C4Project.org (fresh interviews with Fujifilm, CA, and Xiotech), I am re-doing IT-Sense.org and will shortly tackle my main homepage and the Data Management Institute site.  The objective is to freshen content and update code that has proven hacker-porous.  Stand

Over the past few months, I've been progressively migrating to what I call the "fat browser" model for my day-to-day computing tasks.  If it ain't running in a browser, I don't want to use it, or at least use less of it. My experience so far?  Pretty good in most areas, just a few legacy areas to sort through.  And I think that — one we move beyond virtualizing legacy desktops — more people will come to appreciate the fat browser model as their preferred client experience. What Is A Fat Browser? For me, it's best exemplified by something like an iPad, or a netbook, or perhaps a smartphone.  Your browser is your primary UI.  There's always good connectivity, whether it be wifi or 3G/4G.  There are a few local applets and local information stores on the device if needed — nothing important, though.

Despite my doubts about its usefulness, on my recent holiday in the US I purchased a shiny new iPad.  OK, over the last few week’s I’ve talked about how I couldn’t see the point of the platform, but two things conspired against me; (a) I love technology (although I stop short of calling myself a geek) and (b) reverse peer pressure from my family goading me about my inability to walk past technology without acquiring it, tipped me over the edge.

Today IDC and EMC released their annual study on the size, shape and structure of the "digital universe": the total amount of information we're collectively generating, storing and using. Titled " A Digital Universe Decade: Are You Ready? ", it goes beyond the usual really-big-numbe r type of forecasts to provoke serious discussion on a number of topics.   And if you're a big-picture type of person, you'll want to seriously contemplate some of these findings …

InfoSmack podcasters Greg Knieriemen and Yours Truly interview Greg Kleiman (Netapp), Eran Farajun (Asigra), Brad Rooke (JumpPoint) and Daniel MIlburn (Consonus) about the current status of Cloud storage, the impact CDMI will have and get their thoughts on how they think this industry will evolve over the next several years. Recorded at SNW 2010 in Orlando

Yesterday, after writing here, I jumped on Twitter to get some input from the peanut gallery.  Actually, it turned into a rather engaging exchange.  I started with a shout-out to the world that on-array storage tiering struck me as technology for lazy people.  I knew that would provoke someone.  Shortly after, I had an exchange with

This week, ESJ.com published a segment from the last of the original flock of vendors we interviewed on tape when we launched the C-4 Project last June.  Still timely — if not moreso — Jon Toor walked us through virtual I/O technology from Xsigo.  (I will add a pretty screen shot here from ESJ.com once Jeremy enables

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

So, Sepaton has a funny on YouTube about a tape ejecting from a PC drive and killing Don, the IT guy.  I guess that this is an example of how a company uses “new media.” Hmm. To go along with this video, the company just released the results of a survey of 400 IT folks in the