Chuck's Blog

The Power Of Pooling

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 an 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?

Where Does The Enterprise Desktop Go From Here?

Every so often, a well-understood category in IT becomes completely up-for-grabs in terms of answering the question: what's next? 

Clearly, how we think about enterprise desktops and delivering end-user computing is now very much in play. The many announcements coming from VMworld only underscores this point.

What's an enterprise IT planner to do?

Chad Is On A Tear ...

I know, there's a LOT to read and digest coming out of VMworld these days.

As an occasionally proliferate blogger myself, I have to hand it to Chad -- he's turned loose a veritable supernova of meaty and significant technology-oriented posts in the last few days.  I'm impressed, and I don't impress easily.  I know how much work is behind each and every one of these posts.

If you have a moment, please check these out:

vCloud Director and UIM

VPLEX, Long Distance VM Teleportation, and a great offer ...

Mega Caches, Automatied Tiering, or Both?

DRS -- For Storage

EMC Storage for VMware View 4.5 @ $38/client -- and scales to thousands!

RSA, VMware and Intel -- Securing Private/Public Clouds

And, of course, the video from the team that makes much of this magic happen ...

Good Reading!

Securing The Foundations Of The Private Cloud

Lots of activity at VMworld this week, plus the predictable flurry of vendor announcements.

Most people would agree that virtualization is *the* key enabling technology for most cloud models.  Make virutalization (e.g. VMware and associated infrastructure) provably secure and compliant, and you've gone a long way to securing the the clouds built on virtualization.

That's what RSA has announced -- an end-to-end GRC (governance, risk and compliance) solution that takes security in the virtual world to entirely new levels.

And if you see yourself living in a fully virtualized world, it's probably worth just a moment of your time ...

Meet The Prince of Dataness

Just wanted to share the most recent (and the funniest!) EMC 20% Guarantee video, this one starring Oggie -- The Prince of Dataness.

Charting The Intel Effect

Two bits of news, oddly correlated.

First, there's EMC's recent SPEC benchmark posting, where a single Intel-based Celerra data mover absolutely *smokes* every other NAS device out there.

Second, there's Timothy Prickett Morgan's take on the IDC server numbers, where -- once again -- the market bought more Intel-compatible servers and fewer of the other kind.

I think I've seen this movie before, and I know how it ends :-)

The Real Story At Pfizer

A while back, I wrote a rather skeptical post reacting to a press article about Pfizer's use of Amazon.
 
There are some lessons to be learned from this experience:
 
#1 -- Don't always believe what you read online from an industry reporter, and
 
#2 -- Before being critical, do your homework.
 
I made both mistakes.  But, wonderfully, I recently had a chance to talk to the principal behind the story -- Mike Miller -- and found the reality to be far more fascinating.

Mid-Tier Storage: Charting The Changes

Occasionally, people find a way to make something familiar so much faster and better that you've got to do some mental re-calibration. 

My favorite example is this crew, who've found a way to conveniently insert a military jet engine into what looks like an ordinary school bus.  The result really isn't a school bus anymore -- it's something quite different to behold.

Similar thoughts went through my head as I contemplated this morning's news from EMC: a passel of performance, efficiency and management enhancements for the CLARiiON and Celerra midrange storage platforms.

Having worked with both for so long, I'm finding myself having to re-calibrate my expectations.

Managing Your Skills Portfolio

I was fortunate enough to be invited to speak on a panel here at the "Everything Channel" event in Dallas.

Ostensibly, we were supposed to be talking about 2011 storage opportunities for resellers and solution providers.  But, somehow, we got into a number of far more interesting areas, including the strategic importance of the above topic.

We ran out of time, but the thought keeps rattling around in my head ...

Now HP Gets Into The Act For 3PAR

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.

Storage Opportunities For Channel Partners

I've been invited down to the xChange gathering next Monday to speak on a panel with some of my industry compatriots on the above topic.

Although I can improvise as well as the next guy (and sound pretty good in the process!), I really enjoy open-ended topics like this that make me step back and reflect a bit.  As a result, I came up with way more material than I could ever fit into a 90 second panel soundbite.

Helping IT People Get That Business Mindset

If you're an IT professional, you're entirely justified in thinking it's all about the technology: what's out there, what's the best, how do you use it, etc.

There will always be a need for people who understand the enterprise IT domain, especially as roles and responsibilities shift dramatically in the next few years.

But most IT people are employed by businesses of one sort or another.  So it makes a certain sense that truly valuable IT people not only know their domain, but can tie it back to the business in meaningful ways.

My Take -- Dell To Acquire 3PAR

[One week after this post was written, HP has announced their competing bid for 3PAR.  Not entirely surprising, either.  Not clear who's going to end up the victor as of now]

Nothing like a little M&A action to spice up a Monday, no?

Today's news is rather straightforward -- Dell intends to purchase 3PAR.  Not entirely a surprise if you're a close industry-watcher like I am.

Some interesting commentary is starting to result (including this piece by Dave Vellante), so I thought I'd offer up some personal observations as well.

Reblog: Enterprise Business Restart

Recovering a single system after a disaster can be difficult.  Recovering hundreds is a mess.  Recovering them in a consistent fashion, so that their data dependencies are all correct, is a huge task.  And what if they run different operating systems?  There is an effective answer.

via applyit.typepad.com

Vince has made a strong start as an EMC blogger, and he's writing about topics near and dear to my heart: storage at enterprise scale.

If his first two posts are any indication of the future, he's worth a follow ...

A Bit Of Marketing In Your IT Group?

Some of my favorite customer time is when I spend 1x1 time with a CIO or other IT leader and just chat.

Despite what you may think, I don't use the opportunity to shamelessly pimp EMC's products and solutions. 

We usually get into all sorts of interesting discussions about the industry, how their companies are evolving, how their IT organizations are changing -- and, ultimately, how they can better engage with the businesses they serve.

And, more often than not, I starting to drop a suggestion in front of them -- have you ever thought of a bit of marketing in your IT group?

Private Clouds, VCE And The Channel

Sometimes I write the blog post, sometimes it gets written for me :-)

Wanted to offer you all a quick link to a drive-by interview I did with Steven Burke at CRN yesterday.  He threw some great questions at me -- hopefully my answers hold up.

You be the judge -- here.  I also got this unrelated pickup here at ZDnet.

Thanks, Steven -- hope we get a chance to do it again some time soon!

Pervasive Virtualization And Avoiding Accidental IT

No matter what you do, there's always a strong incentive to do what's expedient, as opposed to taking a more thoughtful approach.  For example, everyone has good intentions when putting their IT environments together, but it's so easy to get lost in the moment.

The distractions can be plentiful and tempting: feeling bound by legacy decisions, a vendor offering a too-good-to-be-true deal, perhaps a shiny technology bauble that distracts.

We're starting to have far more engagements with customers and partners around end-to-end fully virtualized environments, rather than just individual piece-parts.

And some of them are willing to share their results.

Of Mainframes And Clouds

When I speak in front of audiences, I usually try and push the boundaries a bit by being intentionally controversial.

Today was no exception.  I spoke at a partner event (GreenPages) in front of about 100 people about the journey to the private cloud.  Some of my comments even made it to CRN in real-time -- scary thought.

At one point, I asked if anyone in the room had done "hard time on mainframes".  And, as usual, a few hands went up. 

For these people, the current move to cloud architectures is going to give many of them a strange sense of deja-vu ...

A Minor Milestone

I'm on vacation this week -- no blogging, no twitter, etc. -- but I did manage to get around to checking my blog for any interesting comments.

And I happened to notice this.

VCE, Private Clouds And The Agenda For Change

As some of you know, I'm over in Rome for a few days of meetings, to be followed by a week of overdue vacation time.

Much has been said about EMC and VMware's recent strong quarters, including this unique perspective from Storagezilla, but I wanted to share one big thought that stood out above all else.

Speed Bumps Along The Way To The Private Cloud

Many of the IT organizations I speak with have started their journey to a private cloud model.

Every road has its speed bumps: knowing what they are likely to be helps a great deal.

I thought it'd be useful to simply share my perspectives of likely issues, concerns and challenges that tend to show up in each phase of the journey.

Predictably, we've got lots of data points for the first phase, somewhat fewer for the second phase, and only a handful of observations for the third phase.

Private Clouds And Dealing With Legacy

The good news -- there's general consensus from the enterprise IT organization I speak with that -- yes, they'd like to pursue a private cloud model.

The challenging part -- as they look around their data centers, all they can see is the legacy of past decisions: incompatible architectures, stove-pipe stacks and the rest.  It's like an archeology project: you can see the layers of different waves that have come through the IT organization.

How can you move forward when all you can see is history?

The Contrast Is Stunning

I think people know by now that I get to meet lots of customers and partners in the course of my work.  Actually, I really don't consider it "work", it's really a lot of fun.

And they even pay me :-)

Sometimes, though, you get this great juxtaposition: you get to see how different IT organizations approach the same fundamental challenge in entirely different ways.

And the contrast can be stunning ...

Whitepaper: Private Cloud Practitioner's Guide

If you've been following this blog for a while, you know I've been describing how EMC's IT organization is progressing in re-envisioning our IT capabilities based on a private cloud model.

You've seen bits and pieces here on this blog, as well as EMC IT's own web site.

Today, I received a nice white paper entitled "EMC IT's Journey To The Private Cloud: A Practitioner's Guide".  While not as complete as many of us would like, it does serve as a nice contextual overview of of our journey: the rationale, the phases and the results to date.

Hope you find it interesting!

The Impact Of VMware Storage Integration

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 ...

How Will You Manage Storage?

As the IT industry rapidly transitions and matures, all sorts of traditional topics are now up for a fresh round of discussion.

One of these topics that I'm getting frequently dragged into is storage management -- what will it look like going forward?

What makes this harder is that the decisions you make on how you will manage storage will be a direct reflection of how you decide to manage IT overall.

And it's not as simple a discussion as many would like, as we'll see in a moment ...

Storage Is Software

The title of this post is a variant on the intriguing "infrastructure is code" meme from the #devops community. I think it's a useful idea to remind ourselves of -- especially as technology transitions.

Even though some of you reading this might thing the statement is blindingly obvious, it's clear that the vast majority of people think of boxes with blinking lights when you say the word "storage".

And I think this is going to be up for change sooner than later.

An Offer You Can't Refuse

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 ...

EMC To Acquire Greenplum

Today, EMC announced its intention to acquire Greenplum -- a successful provider of data warehouse and business intelligence database software.

And there’s a lot to talk about as a result …

My Friday Rant -- Transparency

Four things happened this week that sort of bothered me, and it finally struck me that all four revolved around the concept of transparency.

Transparency is one of those things I didn't realize was truly important until later in my personal development.  Once I learned of its importance, though, life became better for me and those around me.

I can only hope that others aren't as slow as I was to catch on ...

The Challenge Of Opening Your Company

I was reading posts by Elias Khnaser and Nigel Poulton over breakfast this morning that were imploring one of EMC's historical competitors -- HDS -- to "open up" their company and start engaging more with the communities around them.

Both Elias and Nigel are absolutely correct -- and their suggestions very helpful -- but opening up your company is a lot harder than it looks.

Trust me on this.

Private Cloud: From "What" To "Why" ... To "How"

I've been living with the private cloud journey since well before my first public post at the beginning of 2009.

The appeal of the private cloud model has steadily grown in the last 18 months, and shows all signs of becoming the primary cloud adoption model for most typical enterprises.

And, over that time, I've seen my dialogue with customers and partners evolve from...

"what is a private cloud and how is it different from other proposed cloud models"

to ...

"why you should consider a private cloud model for your enterprise"

to the more recent

"... and here is how you start planning your journey to the private cloud".

It's a natural evolution of the discussion, if you think about it.  I thought it'd be a good opportunity to bring everybody up to date as to where the conversation appears to be at present, and where it's likely to head.

Another Step Towards Information Governance

Sorry for falling behind the pace here, but there was a recent EMC product announcement that I found worthy of a deeper discussion.

EMC's SourceOne group just announced their new File Intelligence product.  And, as organizations struggle to get their arms around unfettered information growth, we may just have a new and important tool in the arsenal.

You be the judge ...

Cloud Is In The Eye Of The Beholder

Lots of cloud chatter this week.  A couple of good industry events.  An interesting new startup offering a cloud operating system for private clouds.  Even the ever-outspoken Werner dissing private clouds as "false clouds".

A lively debate, to be sure!

Time for me to offer up another attempted level-set in this discussion.  It's easy to become lost in the details, and more difficult to see what's really happening here -- or, at least, what I think is happening.

Another Take At Integrated Vs. Best-of-Breed

I was locked away in meetings most of this week, and didn't have a chance to participate in a flurry of posts and discussions on this important topic.

Scott Lowe got the latest wave going with his prognostications on a certain vendor, Marc Farley added a thoughtful post, and Chris Mellor joined in the fun, as well as Storagebod.

But the topic isn't done yet -- we'll be arguing this one for decades to come.

Working as I do for EMC, I'm free to sign up on either side of the debate: EMC offers best-of-breed products for consideration (insert long list here), or conversely EMC is part of an integrated stack (e.g. VCE and Vblocks for private cloud deployments).

So, I'm going to wade here with a decisive statement: both perspectives are right, but what changes over time is where the boundaries of the debate occur.

From Presenting To Engaging

One of the thought bubbles that has been continually floating around the Twitter banter has been the importance of differentiating between simply presenting to an audience, as opposed to actually engaging with them.

More importantly, as we become progressively more online social creatures, simple presentation skills become almost quaint (remember shorthand?) and possessing a wide variety of engagement skills and behaviors becomes far more important.

Journey To The Private Cloud Simulcast

A few weeks ago, I was fortunate enough to be part of a high quality customer event: Journey To The Private Cloud.  We all were in a studio, beaming to multiple locations in North America in hi-def and surround sound.  If nothing else, the tech was pretty cool :-)

I thought it turned out very well, and wanted to share it.  After a few weeks, I finally got a DVD of the event, which I promptly ripped and posted here.

It basically has five parts:

• an obligatory introduction from our moderator
• a short piece with me presenting private cloud concepts and rationale
• a longer piece with Sanjay Mirchandani (EMC CIO) discussing how EMC's IT organization is moving to the private cloud
• a short piece from Tom Roloff (heads up EMC Consulting) on how best to organize for success
• a rather long Q+A session that was a lot of fun

There were so many questions we didn't get to them all, so I attempted answers in this post.

I hope you find the discussion useful!

(Sorry everyone, I tried to find a suitable video hosting service, but the file is too big to host on the usual services, so you'll have to download it if you want to watch it. 432 MB, .m4v format.  I'll try and fix this later)

Questions From "Journey To The Private Cloud" Simulcast

A few weeks back, I joined Sanjay Mirchandani (our CIO) and Tom Roloff (heads up EMC Consulting) on a neat simulcast that was beamed to multiple locations around North America.

The content mostly focused on EMC IT's journey -- results, challenges and lessons learned -- but we spent a lot of time answering questions as well.  Despite our best efforts, there were many good questions that we just didn't have time to answer.

So, in an effort to keep the discussion going, I'm going to devote this post to attempting to answer most of them.  If you watched the simulcast, perhaps one of the most entertaining parts was that we all had different perspectives on the issues -- so you'll see some of that here as well.

This "virtual dialog" also gives you a sense where many people are at with this whole discussion, which in itself is rather enlightening.

The Innovator Within

Success in business is essentially based on differentiation: doing something faster / better / cheaper than the other guys who are competing for the same business.

It shouldn't be hard to see that one of the core strategies for achieving differentiation should involve some form of innovation.

Sure, we can hold the concept of innovation at arms length, and say "yup, that's important all right", but how many of us believe it's our individual responsibility to continually innovate at work?

Perhaps not enough, I'd argue.

Does Your Organization Invest In IT?

Sure, most every organization spends money on IT -- that much is obvious.

I want to know if your organization invests in IT much the same way an investor would think about it.

Why?  Because I believe that the answer to that simple question will tell me much about what kind of IT organization you are, what you expect from vendors like EMC, and -- ultimately -- what kind of IT organization you'll eventually be.

Reconsidering the LUN

I wrote previously about my current challenges involved with unlearning just about everything I've ever learned about storage.

One fun exercise is to take terms and concepts we've been using for many years, and look at how their definition has evolved to a point that they're somewhat unrecognizable as compared to  where they started.

And today, I'm going to have some fun with LUNs ...

My Friday Rant -- Q1 IDC Results

It's Friday, it's been a good week, but I still have one more blog post left in me.

The reason I've chosen to spend some time exploring the latest IDC results is simple: in a very competitive part of the IT game, IDC is the de-facto scorekeeper.  I used to offer up blog commentary every quarter, but stopped doing it since nothing interesting was happening.

Not the case this time around. Things appear to be changing in the storage biz ...

The Coming Revolution In Business Analytics

Sometimes, so many pieces seem to line up, I feel obligated to make a call and declare "big changes are coming".

Such is the case with a topic I've come to call business analytics.  Other people might call it decision support, data warehousing, data marts, or perhaps something else.

At its highest level, it's using analytic results to make better business decisions. 

And I think it's a topic that many of us will be drawn into at one level or another -- if we're not already.

Careers In The Clouds

Everyone watches keynotes with varying degrees of interest, but when Sanjay Mirchandani took the stage at EMC World, and started sharing how EMC IT's move to private cloud was creating entirely new hard-to-fill roles in his organization, I could sense that the audience might be paying a bit more attention than usual.

And why not?  If you've made your career in IT, you know that it makes sense to invest in skills and roles ahead of market demand -- if at all possible.

So, how does that play out now?  And should you be thinking of making a career in the cloud?

Living In A Fat Browser World

Over the past few months, I've been progressively migrating to what I call the "fat browser" model for my day-to-day computing tasks.  If it ain't running in a browser, I don't want to use it, or at least use less of it.

My experience so far?  Pretty good in most areas, just a few legacy areas to sort through. 

And I think that -- one we move beyond virtualizing legacy desktops -- more people will come to appreciate the fat browser model as their preferred client experience.

Unlearning Storage

In a recent interview with Dave Vellante of Wikibon fame, I offered up the view that -- given the rapid rate of change in storage technology -- I've had to revisit just about each and every fundamental assumption I've ever had about storage.

An excellent example of this "unlearning storage" was buried in an Atmos announcement from EMC World.  In particular, Atmos storage now runs nicely in a VM.  Not just for eval, for production.

And there are some interesting implications as a result.

Planning To Fail

Like many of you, I'm staring in utter horror and disbelief at the ecological catastrophe unfolding in Gulf of Mexico.

Indeed, the Deepwater Horizon will likely go down in history alongside the Exxon Valdez, Bhopal, Chernobyl and other examples of massive infrastructure failure destroying the environment on a mind-numbing scale.

And, as I go through all the articles and analysis to date, I am struck by one simple fact: it is likely that they didn't have a plan for the inevitable. 

And if the story comes out as I believe it will, I will consider that unforgivable -- simply because it was avoidable.

My Friday Rant -- Integration

Actually, this week it turns out people are ranting at me, rather than the other way around.

By all accounts, it was a great week: did a great broadcast thing on Tuesday, met with a great customer/partner on Wed, and had a similar experience on Thursday.

Along the way, I wrote a short post about my early days at EMC -- one of those intensely personal experiences I felt like sharing. 

The message was simple: don't rest on your laurels, because things change fast.

Some people saw it for what it was -- just me sharing my personal experiences and perspectives.  Others saw it as an attack on some of EMC's competitors.  Either way, it's a message that bears repeating.

But, somewhere in the ranting, a few points were made that deserve some exploration.

The Town Hall

Today, I flew out to Orange County to do a "town hall" type meeting with the team from CoreLogic. 

Much as I really enjoy this kind of interaction, time and travel constraints don't give me a lot of opportunity to do it as often as I'd like

However, I'm really glad I made the trip this time -- it was special on many levels.

Once Upon A Time

Once upon a time -- and a very long time ago -- there was a very successful storage company. 

It made a good product, sold it effectively to customers, and supported them well.  It made a lot of money, and was seen as successful.

However, the seeds of its success ultimately proved to be its eventual undoing.