Chuck's Blog

SAP and EMC?

Saw this little gem come across the wire today, speculating on a tie-up between SAP and EMC on "web hosting services".

And, while it's very true that EMC brings a lot of value to an SAP environment, I'm not going to comment on the specifics of this article -- sorry, folks, that's beyond my pay grade ;-)

But the author did a great job tying together a number of concepts and trends into an interesting story, and I thought it'd be worthwhile to spend a bit of time and share some of the behind-the-scenes thinking here.

Information Infrastructure for DW and BI

Well, it turns out we're finding ourselves in more and more conversations with customers about what they're doing with data warehousing and business intelligence.

From wherever it started, they're now coming to the realization that this is now an important part of their landscape. 

Whether there are a few warehouses that became business critical, or the darn things are proliferating everywhere, we're now getting asked to help out on a more frequent basis.

So I thought I'd use this post to share what we're seeing, and what we're doing to help.

Building A Really, Really Fast NAS Platform

One of the things I enjoy doing on this blog is taking some not-widely-known part of EMC's portfolio, and explaining a bit on how it came to be, but more importantly, to highlight how we combine and integrate our portfolio to come up with some interesting approaches to customer problems.

EMC does so much that sometimes very compelling offerings simply get lost in the noise.

Today's behind-the-scenes journey is about MPFS.  The acronym stands for Multi Path File System. 

Probably named by an engineer ;-)

Think of it as really, really fast NAS.  Now, I'm not going to argue that it's the fastest, or the best, or that the other guys aren't so good, etc. because that's not the point here. 

But many of us think MPFS is a pretty cool story, and a pretty cool product.

Corporate Social Media -- Lessons Learned

If you're a regular reader of this blog (or an EMC employee) you probably know I'm running a corporate social media initiative at EMC, among other things to keep myself out of trouble.

Over a year ago, I became dazzled by the transformational potential of social media as a business tool. I was lost, as many people are, in a babble of buzzwords, trying to figure out what to do.

Thankfully, I regained my composure, figured out a reasonable plan, and started hammering away.  Not only are we making delightful progress, but we've learned some lessons that aren't really talked about in the usual stuff you read.

I'm writing a more detailed blog on our journey, since I know that others will follow at some point, and -- like an explorer probing somewhat new territory -- I think my notes will be useful.