I spent last week tying up loose ends before Tech Field Day 5 in San Jose. It’s going to be a great event, with presentations by Symantec, Drobo, Xangati, NetEx, InfoBlox, HP, and a new company making their US launch! In the mean time, I am working hard to wrap up the Small Enterprise Storage Array Buyers’ Guide for DCIG and continuing my regular work – spreading the word about state of the art IT! I’ve been researching VMware extensively, and building a home lab server, in preparation for my Storage for Virtual Servers seminar, too.
The Enterprise IT Acquisition Game
August 26, 2010 By 1 Comment
Today is the (a?) day of reckoning in the 3Par saga, with Dell widely expected to make a counter-offer higher than HP’s bid. But this mega deal, like the Data Domain war before it, sends a strong signal to the enterprise IT world: It’s open season on data storage companies! But the rising superpowers are also likely looking at networking as an area of expansion. The game is afoot!
Dell + EqualLogic, Exanet, Ocarina, 3Par = What?
August 16, 2010 By 2 Comments
The storage industry got a lot more competitive this morning, as Dell announced plans to buy 3Par. This is the latest round in a well-established race for the enterprise storage dollar, challenging superpower (and Dell partner) EMC in the high-end SAN space. What does this acquisition say about the industry as a whole? Where are we headed?
My 2009 IT Industry Predictions
December 24, 2009 By 3 Comments
Predictions are perilous: Get it right and you look like a mere trend-watcher; get it wrong and you look like a fool. So I’m doing something different this year: I’m going to make predictions for 2009 now that it’s over, and reflect on just how smart I am (not) to have made them.
If Storage Vendors Were Automakers…
August 7, 2009 By 8 Comments
Top Ten Coolest Enterprise Storage Flops
December 6, 2008 By 12 Comments
This is the second entry in my Top-Ten in Storage series. Not every innovative product can succeed in the market, and no matter how good some ideas seem, they can fail to make much of an impact. The truth is, people buy solutions, not technologies. This list includes products so cool, so ahead of their [...]
Is Flash A Disk Or A Cache?
October 22, 2008 By 2 Comments
There is a battle shaping up in the enterprise storage industry. On one side are those who see flash storage as an upgrade for the disk drive, and on the other are those who see it as a cache between the CPU and the drive. It’s a fundamental difference of opinion – flash chips can [...]
Wherefore Art Thou, Solid State Disks?
August 2, 2007 By 7 Comments
Sure, hybrid drives are going nowhere fast in enterprise storage. But what about solid state disk technology? It’s been “almost there” for decades – anyone remember EMC’s solid-state Orion Atom (or was it Adam) array? Now a handful of storage players are talking about SSD’s again, including some respectable names like LSI and Xiotech and [...]
Where is Linux in Storage?
July 20, 2007 By Leave a Comment
Marc Farley’s challenge of listing all the devices on our home networks got me thinking –I’ve got an awful lot of Linux devices, but all of them are infrastructure rather than interactive PCs. Of the 10 devices currently attached my home network, four are Linux based (two TiVos, a Linksys router, and Linksys NAS), three [...]
