I know, I flout one of the "conventional wisdom" rules of blogging: link to other people's stuff as much as possible. I have no excuse, other than perhaps I'm lazy.
Over the last few days, though, I've seen some excellent postings from the people I follow. I don't know whether it's the season, or people just getting more proficient -- but I'm really starting to enjoy some of these posts.
See how many of these you've seen.
Dear Father Christmas
Perhaps the most poignant series of posts came from Storagebod, who wrote a series of letters to different vendors. There's six in the series, starting here. He tells all of us vendors what we need to hear, and does it in a gentle and funny manner. I think Martin has emerged as one of the most insightful and reasonable voices in the storage blogging world, and we all follow him closely here at EMC.
I also like the fact that he provides feedback on various vendor blogging styles -- something that needs to be said, but far better coming from him than from one of us!
Grumpy Storage
@Ianhf is definitely worth following on Twitter, and his blog is pretty good as well. His "Show Me The Money!" post is a classic -- in that one short post, I saw the vast majority of bad behavior that we vendors are prone to exhibit.
Mandatory reading for anyone selling IT products to large enterprises!
Chad Does VMware View
Where do I start singing the praises of @sakacc? Way back when, I strongly encouraged him to invest the time to start blogging, and I think we're all glad that he did just that. If you're in the VMware world, Virtual Geek is fast becoming mandatory reading.
His latest, and most interesting post, has to do with real-world I/O considerations associated with desktop virtualization. One of the reasons I like this post so much is that it vindicates me a bit -- for years, I've been harping on the fact that delivering a crappier user experiences wasn't the goal of desktop virtualization, and having enough I/O on hand is a key element of that better user experience.
Need proof? Watch your disk drive light go blinky-blink when you're booting and working. That's disk I/O, friends. Recently, I got one of the new MacBook Airs that run on a 128GB flash drive. It is the first personal computing device I've ever used that's faster than I am -- which is all I want. As a result, I will never buy another personal computing device that doesn't have at least one flash drive in it. It's that good. And it works for both reads *and* writes :-)
Dedupe is all well and good, but not at the expense of having people curse and swear at what you've delivered, hence our interest in FAST.
StorageAnarchist Does An "Oh By The Way" Symmetrix Announcement
You gotta love Barry. Let's just say that before I get into a heated discussion with him, I have to make sure I have my facts right, because he certainly will!
This post speaks to the latest batch of feature enhancements to the V-Max -- in addition to FAST.
What amazed me was the substance of the new feature content: 8Gb, zero-block reclaim, new replication features, etc. etc. For those of you who follow this stuff closely, you probably came away with the same impression. Just a few years ago, this would have been a Major Industry Announcement with all the appropriate fanfare and hoopla.
These days, it gets tucked into a quick press release with just the facts, and all available immediately. My, how fast things are moving in our industry.
The Backup Blog Does Avamar 5.0 and vSphere
I believe Scott Waterhouse is one of the gems in our blogging world. He patiently and politely digs into backup strategies and technology with a healthy dose of pragmatism, even if he does work for EMC!
This post is an excellent example of high-value content I appreciate on a regular basis.
The Wide World Of Blogging
Sure, there are lots of bloggers who strive to be entertaining, and we all like to be entertained. Others try to use blogging as an extension of their vendor PR machine with varying degrees of success.
If you're a technology user, I'd encourage you to do what Martin, Ian and other are doing -- sharing their voices and their thoughts with all of us in a way that we can't ignore. We vendors appreciate what you all are doing.
And if you're a vendor, perhaps you share our aspirational goal of providing content that tries to help all of us -- vendors, customers and independents -- do a better job at what we do.
Thanks Chuck,
I like the links to relevant blogs...
Have a great holiday.
Posted by: Bob D | December 17, 2009 at 02:43 PM