Storage Nation

In my discussions with customers, I often ask the "V" question: how are you doing with virtualization? Occasionally I get an interesting response: they're entrenched IBM customer, and they point to the use of virtualization on their mainframe, and perhaps their big AIX boxen, and say they're largely virtualized.  Asked and answered. I need to ask them a better question: how are you doing with pooling of resources? The Bigger The Better Any time you pool resources, you're angling for a better outcome.  Lower cost-to-serve through scale efficiencies.  The ability to load-level across multiple, shifting demands.  Being able to react quickly to new and unforseen demands.  Efficient processes that manage resources in the aggregate, rather than individually

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.

Today is the day that VMware announces the availability of 4.1, and a key set of storage integration APIs (VAAI) that provide all sorts of cool speed-ups between server and storage.  EMC's announcement of day-one support is here . Chad Sakac (our legendary Virtual Geek ) does a great job of explaining what they are, how to use them, and what they can do for you.  If your passion is hands-on tech, please head on over there. However, if you're more like me, and are always curious about what things might mean in a broader sense, this post might be more to your liking …

From aspirational to pragmatic: EMC Unified Storage Is 20% More Efficient.  Guaranteed. That's the tag line for the storage efficiency campaign we've recently launched in this hotly contested part of the market. And, from all indications, it appears that it's working quite well … The Background If you haven't been following this particular drama closely, maybe I should bring you up to date.

The bread – and-butter of the storage industry is mid-tier storage — pragmatic dual-controller designs that do it all for a big piece of the IT landscape.  It goes by many names: mid-tier, modular, unified, etc.  Dual-controller designs provide a nice balance between performance, capacity and availability for so many storage requirements. Whether it's a modest IT shop, a modest project in a larger shop, or a whole fleet of them in a really big shop – these dual-controller storage designs continue to be a staple of the industry. It's also a hotly contested portion of the market — just about everyone has offerings in this space: EMC, NetApp, HDS, HP, IBM, etc. etc.  In a notoriously competitive segment, this is where it can get most competitive.  Fights break out over minor things like the definition of "unified", for example.

Another announcement from EMC (and, indirectly, VMware) that deserves some elaboration.

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.