Storage Nation

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

For tomorrow’s webcast at Redmond Magazine: Hope some  of you can join us.  Link.

As part of my role here at EMC, I get to talk to all sorts of interesting consumers of IT: enterprises, partners — and, more recently, the more nascent category of "IT service providers". I think of service providers as a new channel for the IT industry.  Yes, we've seen outsourcers and hosters and all manner of people who will offer to run various aspects of IT on your behalf, but enough has changed recently that the whole discussion is somewhat fresh again. Given that I spend a lot of time with enterprises and more traditional partners as well, I have a pretty good sense of what people might want, and why they might want it.

We've now moved beyond the vision and enabling technology discussion with private clouds.  We're seeing more and more IT organizations start to put adoption strategies in place. And, with large numbers usually comes inherent patterns . In this post, I'd like to talk about the three primary adoption models we're seeing, and some of the context that leads to their choices

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.

I was at a customer dinner event last night, and predictably I got asked what I thought about yesterday's NetApp announcement by several EMC people.

Just was getting some thoughts out about using GPGPUs (nVidia’s Tesla and Fermi products, ATI’s FireStream ) for handling some of the menial cloud-based operations ( metadata calc, metadata location servicing, offload, etc.) that we have as part of any type of cloud file system . So, what are your thoughts?  The capacity to further collapse x86 commodity platforms by utilizing the extreme amount of processing capability present within these GPGPUs and coupling optimized OpenCL or CUDA routines into the standard CFS processing stack. Just something to think about.

The decade may have ticked over, but the C-4 issues persist:  cost-containment, compliance, continuity and carbon footprint reduction continue to be Front and Back Office priorities in every shop I visit.  So, our efforts at the C-4 Project continue into the new decade.  And we are pleased that a second wave of sponsors have signed up

Okay, so I was tricked by an email into clicking on a link to a video report about Microsoft and HP joining forces to create stovepipes for running Microsoft software on HP hardware.  See the video for yourself here. The idea, supposedly driven by cloud computing and NOT by Oracle’s acquistion of Sun/STK (IDC goes to

Over the last few weeks, I've been doing an informal survey of IT organizations aggressively pursuing virtualization, as part of some other work I'm doing. I wanted to share with you the common themes that I'm finding over and over again — you either know these things already, or — perhaps — might find them interesting in your particular situation. Background We wanted to know how people are overcoming specific challenges.  We went to EMC's "Studio E" group who manages references for us, and asked them to send out a short survey.  BTW, if you're an EMC customer, and haven't joined Studio E , you might want to consider it … Lots of responses.  I winnowed out about a dozen I found interesting for one reason or another, and got them on the phone for about 30 minutes each just so I could get a bit more color.