Chuck's Blog

Reconsidering the LUN

I wrote previously about my current challenges involved with unlearning just about everything I've ever learned about storage.

One fun exercise is to take terms and concepts we've been using for many years, and look at how their definition has evolved to a point that they're somewhat unrecognizable as compared to  where they started.

And today, I'm going to have some fun with LUNs ...

My Friday Rant -- Q1 IDC Results

It's Friday, it's been a good week, but I still have one more blog post left in me.

The reason I've chosen to spend some time exploring the latest IDC results is simple: in a very competitive part of the IT game, IDC is the de-facto scorekeeper.  I used to offer up blog commentary every quarter, but stopped doing it since nothing interesting was happening.

Not the case this time around. Things appear to be changing in the storage biz ...

The Coming Revolution In Business Analytics

Sometimes, so many pieces seem to line up, I feel obligated to make a call and declare "big changes are coming".

Such is the case with a topic I've come to call business analytics.  Other people might call it decision support, data warehousing, data marts, or perhaps something else.

At its highest level, it's using analytic results to make better business decisions. 

And I think it's a topic that many of us will be drawn into at one level or another -- if we're not already.

Careers In The Clouds

Everyone watches keynotes with varying degrees of interest, but when Sanjay Mirchandani took the stage at EMC World, and started sharing how EMC IT's move to private cloud was creating entirely new hard-to-fill roles in his organization, I could sense that the audience might be paying a bit more attention than usual.

And why not?  If you've made your career in IT, you know that it makes sense to invest in skills and roles ahead of market demand -- if at all possible.

So, how does that play out now?  And should you be thinking of making a career in the cloud?

Living In A Fat Browser World

Over the past few months, I've been progressively migrating to what I call the "fat browser" model for my day-to-day computing tasks.  If it ain't running in a browser, I don't want to use it, or at least use less of it.

My experience so far?  Pretty good in most areas, just a few legacy areas to sort through. 

And I think that -- one we move beyond virtualizing legacy desktops -- more people will come to appreciate the fat browser model as their preferred client experience.

Unlearning Storage

In a recent interview with Dave Vellante of Wikibon fame, I offered up the view that -- given the rapid rate of change in storage technology -- I've had to revisit just about each and every fundamental assumption I've ever had about storage.

An excellent example of this "unlearning storage" was buried in an Atmos announcement from EMC World.  In particular, Atmos storage now runs nicely in a VM.  Not just for eval, for production.

And there are some interesting implications as a result.