Chuck's Blog

FAST And The Continuing Virtualization Of Storage - Part 1

Today's thematic post was triggered by EMC's announcement that FAST (fully automated storage tiering)  is now GA (generally available) on Symmetrix, CLARiiON and Celerra product lines.

Rather than get into the gritty details, I saw today's announcement as just another step in the journey of storage becoming a fully virtualized and dynamic resource, much in the way networks have been, and servers are fast becoming.

Changing Definitions By Redrawing The Lines

It's a very fun time in IT, especially if you work in a larger enterprise or service provider.

Whether you call it pervasive virtualization, private cloud, or whatever -- the boundaries between traditional disciplines are being redrawn, and -- as a result -- many of the words and concepts we're so familiar with take on very different meanings.

As IT professionals (whether customer, vendor or consultant), I would argue that we all need to be very congnizant of helping people migrate from traditional meanings to newer ones.

In this post, I wanted to share three personal examples of somewhat familiar concepts where I believe this is happening right now.

The Private Cloud / VCE Presentation

For most of this year, I've relied on a single deck to explain the concepts of a private cloud and describe the recently announced VCE Coalition.

This rather long post is basically a scripted version of the presentation -- although there are always a few things that usually get said that go above and beyond what's here.

Disclaimer: these are the slides and the story that I've personally been using recently.  I'm not entirely sure if it's 100% official or sanctioned or anything else like that. Hope you find this useful and entertaining!