Chuck's Blog

Private Cloud Redux

It's been over a year since I wrote my first foundational post on private clouds, the first of many.

A year can be a long time in our industry, especially when discussing new concepts. 

Some ideas hold up and gain traction, others get swept away in the never-ending river of new ideas and concepts.

So, where are we -- as an industry -- with the whole private cloud discussion?

Managing Your IT Career In Turbulent Times

The industry is in transition -- most of us can feel it on one level or another.

And like any big industry transition, everyone is affected to some degree -- vendors, partners and consumers as well.

On more than one occasion, I've been asked an important question -- how do you manage your career in turbulent times like these?

I may not have the best answer, but I've lived through a few of these transitions before, and some of what is old has become new again.

A New Twist On Information Protection

Let's face it -- EMC is an industry leader in storage and related disciplines.

And, when you earn the status of "industry leader", all of your competitors paint a target on you, and try and make you the bad guy.

There's nothing wrong with this -- it's how the industry has always worked.

Periodically, competitive vendors will do some sort of marketing video showing our products being destroyed in some fashion -- crushed, burnt, exploded, drowned, etc.  Seems that sooner or later, every marketing department takes their turn on this theme.

Well, we've decided that our products are too valuable to be subject to this sort of continual desecration.

And, as a result, we've issued some new guidelines to our field personnel to prevent this sort of thing happening in the future...

Back To The Future

In most of my customer and partner engagements, I use the private cloud model as a starting point, and how EMC, along with our partners VMware and Cisco are investing in accelerating the transition to this model with VCE, vBlocks, Acadia and the like.

Very frequently, someone very senior will ask me "where is it all going?" or "what's the end-state?".

And that's where I start to have some fun.
 

Lighthouse Projects And Accelerating Change

I don't know if you're familiar with the term "lighthouse project".  I've used it for years to describe projects that are more about changing perceptions than the actual project itself.

And, as we accelerate towards an IT world of fully virtualized environments, private clouds and service providers, I'm finding I'm talking more and more about these types of projects.

DLP, Collaboration And The Cloud

Another fascinating example of convergence and synergy crossed my desk this morning. 

The news release is fairly straightforward: "RSA Helps Global Corporations Collaborate Securely With New Release Of RSA® Data Loss Prevention Suite". 

As press releases go, it's sort of ordinary-looking material -- what could possibly be exciting here?

And that's exactly what I wanted to share with you ...

Welcome, Jeremy!

I was pleased to see that we just announced our most recent senior hire: Jeremy Burton who will be EMC's new CMO -- chief marketing officer.

I'm reasonably sure that he's going to like it at EMC.  It looks like the right person in the right position at the right time.

Go Big Or Go Home

It's funny how memes circulate within a larger corporation, especially one as socially connected (internally and externally) as EMC.  If you work in these sorts of environments, they're an interesting reflection of the organizational psyche.

And "go big or go home" is certainly on the rise here in the halls of EMC.

Virtual Storage, Global Federation and Distributed Cache Coherence Follow-Up

Lots to talk about as a follow-on from today's discussion around virtual storage, global federation and the underlying distributed cache coherence technology that makes all this wonderful juju possible.

Most of the focus was on the specific capabilities around global storage federation, and the underlying distributed cache coherence technology that makes all of this useful and interesting.

After participating in Pat's event today, some useful questions and comments came up.  I thought it'd be interesting to share the thoughts.

This Changes Everything

For those of us in the IT business, we occasionally encounter a fundamental new enabling technology that forces us to reconsider some of our long-held notions around the way things work.

I'd put server and desktop virtualization into that category, as well as the ubiquitous web.  If you're a storage person, flash has that potential as well.  If backup is your thing, the combination of dedupe and low-cost disks has changed how you think about things.

In this post, I'd like to start to introduce a technology concept that -- yes -- has the potential to change a great deal of how we think about IT at scale. 

And, yes, this is going to be a long post ...