Storage Nation

The headlines reads: " VMware To Acquire Certain IT Management Products and Software Expertise from EMC Corporation ". People will perceive this story one of two ways, depending on their perspective. The first (and most common) perspective will be "so what?" The second (and less frequent) perspective will be "this might be a big deal …" And I'd like a chance to share why I think this is more of the latter, and less of the former.

We've all been hearing about it for a while, but I've just noticed that Cisco is getting more public in talking about their OTV (overlay transport virtualization) technology. I consider this one of the key "enabling technologies" for many cloud models, and private clouds in particular. And here's why ..

Chris Evans has some thoughtful commentary about the latest round of "storage guarantees" that are popping up in our industry. We at EMC are always asked if we're going to do something like that. The answer is "yes" and "no"

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.

All of the sudden, everyone at EMC was asking me about this topic.   Where the heck did this come from? Doing a bit of digging, I figured out why — one of our competitors has started promoting a solution in this space.  Lovely.   I dutifully found the source documents, and realized that there was a good deal more to this discussion than white papers and marketing videos I was able to find

It's a very fun time in IT, especially if you work in a larger enterprise or service provider. Whether you call it pervasive virtualization, private cloud, or whatever — the boundaries between traditional disciplines are being redrawn, and — as a result — many of the words and concepts we're so familiar with take on very different meanings. As IT professionals (whether customer, vendor or consultant), I would argue that we all need to be very congnizant of helping people migrate from traditional meanings to newer ones

As the industry starts to move to fully-virtualized models, and cloud-like environments, I'm encountering a specific debate around IT philosophy. The question revolves which is better for IT: purpose-built appliances, or pools of generic resources that are dynamically used?

My, that's a geeky title for a post, isn't it? Wanted to dash off a quick observation that might impact your thoughts around this topic.  At the very least, it's something to be aware of. Fasten your seatbelts … Dedupe Basics Data deduplication is useful stuff.  Much the way that compression shows up everywhere in the infrastructure stack, data deduplication can be thought of in the same way.

I knew trouble was afoot a while back, first when Oracle acquired Virtual Iron , and later when they announced their intent to acquire Sun. I told people at the time "Larry Ellison and Oracle are going to do everything in their power to lock out VMware".  People didn't really believe me.  Now it's pretty clear to all what the picture looks like. Which brings up the inevitable questions of "why?" and "what happens next?" So let me attempt a few answers ..

Sometimes you see things in this industry that make you shake your head and wonder. Such is the situation with Oracle's recent acquisition of Virtual Iron .  Put in the context of other recent activities, the picture is crystal clear: it appears that Oracle intends to use their market power with databases to force customers to consider their soon-to-be-announced virtualization stack. And, from a customer perspective, this will not be a good thing