Chuck's Blog

VMware Mania At EMC World

If you were at EMC World, you saw it everywhere you went.

VMware this, VMware that ... you'd think that maybe we had more than a passing interest.

Well -- yes!

Personal Information: Fashion Statement?

You know I've been sharing my thoughts on the growing importance of personal information, and our growing need to regain control over it.

I never thought personal information would end up being a fashion statement.

Me?  I'll take mine in cammo ...

Being An Informationist: eDiscovery

A big idea reprised: in tomorrow's IT world, there will be informationists and technologists. 

Informationists will understand the value of information; technologists will provide the supporting environment that informationists need. 

And -- quite likely -- the value will shift to informationists over time.

For me, nothing quite illustrates this thought quite as well as EMC's recent offerings around eDiscovery. 

Not only is it a compelling application in its own right today, but I see it as a harbinger of more interesting things to come.

EMC and DW/BI

Sorry, another acronym alert.  It's just that I get tired of typing "Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence", so I have conveniently shortened this to DW/BI.

No, I am not making up another buzzword ...

I thought I'd share with you yet-another behind-the-scenes peek into an interesting area EMC has been working on for a while, as well as some distinct customer perspectives I've gathered.

Forgive Me, I Just Can't Help Myself ...

This made me smile a bit ...

And, if you want to see how this trend is making certain people react, check out this gem ...

For those of you in the US, have a great extended weekend!

No, I Wasn't At EMC World

... but I really, really wished I had been.

Even though most everyone in our world was at World, someone had to cover a few important things that were going on elsewhere, and that task fell to me. 

Bottom line -- I wasn't able to go.

From what I can tell remotely, it's exceeded all expectations -- both EMC's and that of the attendees.  Now we have a higher bar for next year ;-)

Fortunately, though, there's been a ton of great coverage.  To see most of it (and there's a lot of it), try this blog search, or check out the YouTube feeds, the Twitter feeds, or whatever.

Personally, I found the best coverage from StorageZilla, Word Of Pie and ... of course .. The Storage Anarchist.

Everyone who went said two things: "it was great" and "I'm really tired". 

I really, really want to be there next year!

Does Frictionless IT Strike Fear In The Heart Of IT?

Recently, I've got into about a dozen very interesting discussions with some more advanced IT groups around the promises and pitfalls of what's likely to be called "frictionless IT".

And, in the process, we're stumbling into some rather thorny philisophical issues around what IT is really all about.

I'm not saying anyone has answers here, I'm just enjoying the debate.

And I'm guessing that this discussion will get more common -- and more heated -- in the coming years.

Off Topic -- A New Toy

OK, I succumbed to techno-lust this weekend.

Like many of you, the MacBook Air is just too slick to not notice.

And ever since it came out, I've been tormented with technology angst -- could it be my primary work machine?

After many weeks of research and anxiety, I finally broke down and bought one at the local Apple store last weekend.  My wife was egging me on a bit -- I think she thought it was pretty slick, too.

3D Redux

Well, the story of data deduplication in our little industry just expanded a bit, especially in the context of this week's announcement at EMC World.

By now, I think that most people are coming to a roughly similar set of beliefs around data deduplication, or 3D as it's now being abbreviated.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Great RecoverPoint/SRM Customer Testimonial

Sorry to be such a shameless promoter of EMC marketing material, but I really like this one.

It's a short video of one of our customer/partners -- Hosted Solutions -- talking about how they like RecoverPoint, and -- as a bonus -- a short discussion of how they're using VMware's SRM (Site Recovery Manager) to do complete automated failovers.  I was told they were one of our beta customers and did extended testing.

A longer technical discussion (10 min video chalk talk) can be found here.  Or, if you're really interested, see the full boat here.