Downloads for fall 2008 San Francisco Storage Decisions now available

November 29, 2008 – 12:00 pm
The TechTarget Storage Media Group has posted on Bitpipe the session presentations from the recent fall (November 17-19th) 2008 San Francisco Storage Decisions event. If you have never been to a Storage Decisions event, it’s a great venue for meeting with IT and storage professionals as well as vendors who also show up to demonstrate their wares and also meet with the attendees. Make no mistake about it, Storage Decisions is not a vendor to vendor meet and industry network event like SNW or a vendor sponsored user group like VMworld or EMCworld, rather, its focused on the IT and storage professional and encourages speakers to be frank and candid in their discussions of technologies, techniques and even of vendors and their solutions. In addition to doing a keynote session Wednesday evening November 19th on “Hot Storage Topics for Channel Professionals” at the Storage Strategies for Channel Professionals Dinner event, I ...

Posted in Data archiving and preservation, Data footprint and proliferation reduction, Data protection, Data security, Education, Green, IT Industry Activity, IT Infrastructure Topics, Infrastructure Resource Management, Performance and Capacity, Power and Cooling, Storage Architecture and Access, Storage and Storage Management Tools, Travel | No Comments »

The new Green (Gaining Realistic Economic Efficiency’s Now)

November 23, 2008 – 5:50 pm
With the IT and storage industry shying away from green hype, green washing and other green noise, there is also a growing realization that the new green is about effectively boosting efficiency to improve productivity and profitability or to sustain business and IT growth during tough economic times. This past week while doing some presentations (I’ll post a link soon to the downloads) at the 2008 San Francisco installment of Storage Decisions event focused on storage professionals, as well as a keynote talk at the value added reseller (VAR) channel professional focused storage strategies event, a common theme was boosting productivity, improving on efficiency, stretching budgets and enabling existing personal and resources to do more with the same or less. During these and other presentations, keynotes, sessions and seminars both here in the U.S. as well as in Europe recently, these common themes of booting efficiency as well as the closing of ...

Posted in Green, IT Industry Activity, IT Infrastructure Topics, Performance and Capacity, Power and Cooling, Storage and Storage Management Tools | No Comments »

Dutch StorageExpo Recap

November 14, 2008 – 3:31 pm
Earlier this week I had the pleasure of presenting a keynote talk ("Storage Industry Trends and Perspectives: Beyond Hype and Green Washing") at the Dutch StorageExpo (produced by VNU Exhibitions Europe) event in Utrecht the Netherlands which was co-located in the ultra large Jaarbeurs congress center (e.g. convention center) along with concurrent shows for Linux, Security and networking making for a huge show and exhibition, almost a mini scaled down version of cebit or VMworld or EMCworld like event. Congratulations and many thanks to Marloes van den Berg of VNU Exhibitions and her team who put together a fantastic and well attended event, not to mention their warm and gracious Dutch hospitality. European shows and events are different than those in the U.S. in that at European events, the focus is more on meeting, building and maintaining relationships and less on "Uui Gui" demos or marketing sales pitches involving complex demos and ...

Posted in Green, IT Industry Activity, IT Infrastructure Topics, Power and Cooling, Travel, fun | No Comments »

Time In and Around Clouds

November 13, 2008 – 8:31 pm
This past week I spent some time in, around and above the clouds literally and figutively. I was in the Netherlands the past few days doing a seminar with Brouwer Storage as well as key note presentation on Wednesday at the Dutch StorageExpo in Utrecht (a fabulous event with lots of buzz and activity, nice job Marloes!) before flying home today from my favorite airport (Amsterdam Schiphol). (Following photo's were taken this past summer on an early morning flight from my phone camera) Getting ready to land on a morning flight going through some clouds More morning clouds Low visibility as you can barely see the wingtip In addition to flying above the clouds over the Atlantic (not the above photos), the fall clouds at home where it was snowing when I left and then raining when I returned, with wind and clouds (some occasional sun) while in Holland, and then the industry buzz around ...

Posted in Education, IT Industry Activity, Storage Architecture and Access, Travel, fun | No Comments »

SSD activity continues to go virtually round and round

November 8, 2008 – 12:03 pm
Solid State Disk (SSD) (both FLASH and RAM based) activities and discussions continue to go round and round (pun intended) with announcements (here, here, here, here, here, here and here among others) of various improvements and evolution for technologies focused from the consumer to the small office home office (SOHO) to small medium business (SMB) to enterprise with technologies from vendors including Intel, Sandisk, Seagate and many others. Recent innovations are looking to address write performance issues or challenges associated with FLASH based SSD, which while better than magnetic hard disk drives (HDD), are slower than their RAM based counterparts. Other activity includes extending the useful life or duration of how many times a FLASH based device can be rewritten or modified before problems arise or performance degrades. Yet another activity is Sandisk introducing "virtual RPM" (vRPM) metrics to provide consumers an indication of relative revolutions per minute (RPM) of a ...

Posted in IT Industry Activity, IT Infrastructure Topics, Performance and Capacity, Power and Cooling, Storage Architecture and Access, Storage and Storage Management Tools | No Comments »

Storage Virtualization – In-band vs. Out-of-band Debates to be resurrected?

November 8, 2008 – 11:23 am
HP recently announced announced their new SAN Virtualization Services Platform (SVSP) which is an appliance with software (oh, excuse me, I mean platform) for enabling various (e.g. replication, snapshots, pooling, consolidation, migration, etc) storage virtualization capabilities across different HP (e.g. MSA, EVA and in "theory" XP) or in "theory" as well, 3rd party (e.g. EMC, Dell, HDS, IBM, NetApp, Sun, etc) storage. Sure HP has had a similar capability via their XP series which HP OEMs from Hitachi Ltd. (who also supplies the similar/same product to HDS which HP competes with), however what’s different from the XP based solution and the SVSP is that one (SVSP) is via software running on an appliance and the other implemented via software/firmware on dedicated Hitachi based hardware (e.g. the XP). One requires an investment in the XP which for larger organizations may be practical ...

Posted in Green, IT Industry Activity, IT Infrastructure Topics, Infrastructure Resource Management, Performance and Capacity, Power and Cooling, Storage Architecture and Access, Storage and Storage Management Tools | No Comments »

EPA Draft 3 of Energy Star for Computer Server Specification

November 4, 2008 – 5:21 pm
Today is the 2008 USA general election today pitting democratic senator Barack Obama vs. republican senator John McCain as well as several other lesser known party candidates who have made comments about the environment and going green as well as the economy, all of which have an impact on IT spending not to mention green IT and green computing. Today is also the day that the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) sent out notification that Draft 3 of Energy Star for computer server specifications are available for comment (See here). Energy Star is not a new program for IT equipment having been around for some time on PCs and other commodity products as well as many consumer goods. The EPA has been working on several Energy Star programs pertaining to IT data centers in addition to the Server specification working with industry groups covering servers, storage, networking and facilities among others, ...

Posted in Green, IT Industry Activity, IT Infrastructure Topics, Power and Cooling | No Comments »

Did someone forget to tell Dell that Tape is dead?

November 2, 2008 – 12:30 pm
Did someone forget to send a memo to Dell that magnetic tape is dead, or, perhaps pre-occupied with other activities? Maybe no body at Dell read the "virtual" or "fictional" memo that tape is dead? Ok, enough with the cynicism and joking around, tape is not dead (See recent Computerworld and Dell story) and Dell is one of several vendors including IBM who still find time to talk about tape as part of a solution to different customer and environment needs. Sure, tape might be in or heading into its golden years or what can also be called the plateau of productivity (for customers) or profitability (for some vendors), tape does not get the marketing dollars and media coverage as its been around as a technology for a long time and their are cooler and niftier (techno term) things to discuss including disk based backup and data protection, CDP, VTLs, de-dupe ...

Posted in Data and Information Management, Data archiving and preservation, Data protection, Green, IT Industry Activity, IT Infrastructure Topics, Infrastructure Resource Management | No Comments »

Trick or Treat - Either way, Be Safe!

October 29, 2008 – 2:38 pm
Ok, so this Friday is Halloween, which means putting on costumes and pretending to be something or someone different, scary or nice, what ever you want to be. How ironoc, here we are also in the closing days of the U.S. 2008 election season as well as in the midle of the fall 2008 IT conference and show season which also means lots of announcements and new products and promosies. In the case of Halloween, there's the scary themes including "Zombies" (or here) as well as the fictional or fun theme topics, kind of like with IT, there are the "Zombie" technologies like tape, mainframes, disk drives, Fibre Channel and others that have been declared dead for sometime, yet, continue to be used and relied upon meaning customers buy them so vendors sell them and make money on them. The money in some cases is used to buy the costumes (e.g. marketing) ...

Posted in IT Industry Activity, fun | No Comments »

Vendors Who Dont’ Want to Be Virtualized?

October 24, 2008 – 5:18 am
This past week I did a couple of keynote and round table discussions in Plano (Dallas) at Jaspers and in Boston at Smith and Wollensky with a theme of BC/DR for Virtualized environments. In both locations, where we had great participate involvement and discussions, audience members discussed the various merits and their experiences with server virtualization, and one of the many common themes was vendors whose do not support their vertical applications in virtualized environments. Say it so Joe (or Jane), especially with so many vendors tripping over themselves to show how their software can be stuffed into a VM in order to jump on the VM bandwagon. How could it be so that some vendors don’t' want to be virtualized? It's true, there are some independent software vendors (ISV) whose vertical packages are commonly deployed in environments of all size who do not for various reasons want nor support their software ...

Posted in Education, IT Industry Activity, IT Infrastructure Topics, Travel | No Comments »