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.
W. Curtis Preston
See W. Curtis Preston’s Backup Central Live!
Last week, after the Exec Event in Palo Alto, I joined my friend W. Curtis Preston for his first Backup Central Live! event. Curtis has spent years educating IT pros about data protection, this was the first week of a new series of self-produced events. And let me tell you, although I’ve seen him present dozens of times, Curtis was really in his element here. He held the packed room enthralled, and the vendor sponsors I talked to were very pleased about the event!
Will You Be At The ExecEvent?
The ExecEvent (formerly known as The BD Event) is coming up in two weeks, and I wanted to introduce it to my readers.
Overcoming The Limits Of Thin Provisioning With Automatic Provisioning!
I’ve never been a fan of thin provisioning as a storage management tool. Don’t get me wrong, I love having thin provisioning in my toolkit to overcome the limitations of conventional filesystems. Thin provisioning just gets under my skin when folks try to use it to solve business problems like long deployment time and slow purchasing cycles. If you attended any of the thin provisioning sessions I’ve presented at Storage Decisions, Interop, E-Storm, or elsewhere then you’ve heard my wistful dreaming of real automatic provisioning without the hackery of thin provisioning systems. But perhaps I didn’t mention that actual automatic provisioning actually exists today! It’s one of the many things I love about API-driven cloud storage!
Stephen Foskett’s 50% Free Capacity Guarantee!
Since all the cool companies are offering capacity guarantees these days, I thought I might as well throw my hat into the ring and offer one, too. Starting now, I guarantee any takers an easy plan to write 50% more production data to your existing storage environment. Even better, I’ll do it with no additional hardware or software to purchase and install and no complicated terms and conditions. You won’t even have to delete anything, but if you do I’ll guarantee double your data! And I’ll only charge 50% of the deferred storage hardware and software spend, and if I can’t do it you pay nothing. What have you got to lose?