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

To celebrate the close of VMworld 2010, there will be a best 5 of 9 match to the death between @Beaker – Chris Hoff, aka hohoff from Cisco and his army of vSquirrels vs @sakacc – Chad Sakac, aka “Mr VMware at EMC” and his squad of vSpecialists. So – a little more detail?

It's Friday, it's been a good week, but I still have one more blog post left in me. The reason I've chosen to spend some time exploring the latest IDC results is simple: in a very competitive part of the IT game, IDC is the de-facto scorekeeper.  I used to offer up blog commentary every quarter, but stopped doing it since nothing interesting was happening. Not the case this time around. Things appear to be changing in the storage biz ..

Sometimes, so many pieces seem to line up, I feel obligated to make a call and declare "big changes are coming". Such is the case with a topic I've come to call business analytics.   Other people might call it decision support, data warehousing, data marts, or perhaps something else

Everyone watches keynotes with varying degrees of interest, but when Sanjay Mirchandani took the stage at EMC World, and started sharing how EMC IT's move to private cloud was creating entirely new hard-to-fill roles in his organization, I could sense that the audience might be paying a bit more attention than usual. And why not?  If you've made your career in IT, you know that it makes sense to invest in skills and roles ahead of market demand — if at all possible.

Today, I flew out to Orange County to do a "town hall" type meeting with the team from CoreLogic.  Much as I really enjoy this kind of interaction, time and travel constraints don't give me a lot of opportunity to do it as often as I'd like However, I'm really glad I made the trip this time — it was special on many levels. The Story of CoreLogic I was there at the personal invitation of Evan Jafa, the CIO of CoreLogic.   Sure, they're a great customer, but there's much more to it than that. If you ever get a chance to meet Evan you should — he's about as smart, personable and passionate as they come.    And, as CIO, he's signed up for a unique and fascinating mission — to transform a somewhat traditional IT function into a nimble and progressive external service provider.

Once upon a time — and a very long time ago — there was a very successful storage company.  It made a good product, sold it effectively to customers, and supported them well.  It made a lot of money, and was seen as successful. However, the seeds of its success ultimately proved to be its eventual undoing.

OK, you're probably wondering (a) what in the world could possibly motivate me to start a new blog in addition to this one, and (b) who would ever want to read more of my blather? Well, over the last few months I've been working intently with a group of people I'll call "IT as a service" service providers.  We've historically called them outsourcers, hosters, SaaS, managed services, etc.

Those of you with relatively good memories will remember last year’s announcement from Hitachi/HDS, which at the time promised more than it delivered.  In fact, the anagram posed by Claus Mikkelsen on his blog and used as part of the press release was “REGRADES OUR CLASSY TREATS” and should have translated to “STORAGE ARRAYS CLUSTERED”  my tongue-in-cheek alternative was “A DREARY STORAGE CLUSTER” (who could have imagined such a serendipidous alternative).  With EMC’s new release of VPLEX, it’s deja-vu all over again…. With the usual EMC fanfare, VPLEX has been heralded as “ a new storage platform “.

If you follow the storage blogosphere, you're probably aware of a story that Beth Pariseau covered about an email service provider who recently had a very bad day — and, to make matters even worse — they were using an EMC storage array. And then the "blame" commentary started — whose fault was it, the vendor or the service provider? Disclaimer: I know absolutely nothing about the details of the situation, other than what Beth shared.  And, for the purposes of this post, I'm speaking entirely as myself, and not an Official EMC Representative. My initial thought: playing the blame game is counterproductive, we're all at fault to some degree.  Which brings up the discussion — what do we collectively need to do to avoid this sort of thing happening in the future