Chuck's Blog

Odds And Ends

Well, my travel calendar is definitely getting a bit lighter this time of the year -- that's a good thing.

Had a few moments to dig back through all the stuff I missed, and put together a post or two on some of the flotsam I found interesting.

Warning: this might be a time-waster of a post -- you've been warned!

Testing? Bring The Right Tools ...

Over the weekend, a few internal notes were being circulated about testing storage array performance.  There's an interesting pattern that we're seeing with these evaluations, and we'd like to offer a few suggestions to save you time and frustration.

This storage performance testing discussion is very different from the ever-popular storage benchmarking (or benchmarketing!) debates -- it's about you investing your time to run some tailored tests to figure out what works well in your environment.

Not everyone has the time or the inclination to invest multiple days doing a suite of performance tests against multiple storage arrays.  Certain vendors, though, are forcing the issue by dropping off their newest boxen for evaluation.

My take?  If you're going to do this sort of thing, invest the time to do it right.

I'd invite others from the storage community to offer up their testing suggestions as well ... it's a topic that probably deserves a bit more attention.

Information Governance Webcast

Wanted to share with you a link to a recent webcast with myself and Christopher Blotto (one of our consultants) on recent trends in information governance.

Yes, there are a few slides to set the stage, but the best part is when Chris and I discuss what customers are actually doing, and we answer some great questions from the audience.

It's about 30 minutes long.  Audio quality isn't as good as I'd like, but there you have it.

Have a great weekend, everyone!

Do You Really Need A SAN?

A great debate is shaping up in our industry -- one that everyone should take note of.

I saw with much interest Forrester's recent white paper "Do You Really Need A SAN Anymore?", with Andrew Reichman as the lead author.  It attempts to make a case that SANs (really shared storage) is dead concept, and needs to be replaced with something better.

To the casual reader, it appears well written and well reasoned.  To people hip-deep in this stuff (like me) I think it's dangerously wrong.  And I have a sneaking suspicion that we'll see copies of this being dropped off on desktops around the world before long.

I'll leave it up to you as to whether or not it's worth the $279 or not.

My suggestion? 

Bookmark this longish post -- because, at some point in the future, you may find yourself defending your storage strategy to someone who's read this paper.

EMC's New DW/BI Competency Center

Today's announcement is especially gratifying, as one of my team leaders (Bill Bonin) has been working on it diligently for quite a while. 

It's finally here.

EMC today announced that its new Competency Center for data warehouse, business intelligence and analytics applications is open for business.

Working with almost all the leading software vendors, we've assembled an impressive capability of technical talent in one place for the benefit of our customers and partners.

Dell, EMC and the New NX4

Ours is an industry of partnerships, alliances and other combinations between various players. 

Some work out well, some don't -- but there seems to be a grudging consensus that the Dell/EMC relationship has done a good job of re-shaping the dynamics of not only both companies, but the industry itself.

Hopefully, you've seen some of the press material on our re-upping of the overall relationship.

But, as always, there's only so much you can get from a press release, right?

Towards Thoughtful IT

Greetings from Melbourne, Australia!

We've all enjoyed the pleasure of stumbling upon a great blog that we hadn't known about before.  Last week, I happened to stumble upon Cap Gemini's CTO blog, which I found excellent in several regards.

One posting in particular made me stop and think .. it was about "slow IT", part of the overall "slow movement".  I would offer that the word "slow" is a bit of a misnomer -- perhaps "thoughtful" is more appropriate.

And the prediction is that -- given the economic picture in 2009 -- we'll probably see a lot more time being spent on thoughtful IT.