Chuck's Blog

A Minor Milestone

I'm on vacation this week -- no blogging, no twitter, etc. -- but I did manage to get around to checking my blog for any interesting comments.

And I happened to notice this.

VCE, Private Clouds And The Agenda For Change

As some of you know, I'm over in Rome for a few days of meetings, to be followed by a week of overdue vacation time.

Much has been said about EMC and VMware's recent strong quarters, including this unique perspective from Storagezilla, but I wanted to share one big thought that stood out above all else.

Speed Bumps Along The Way To The Private Cloud

Many of the IT organizations I speak with have started their journey to a private cloud model.

Every road has its speed bumps: knowing what they are likely to be helps a great deal.

I thought it'd be useful to simply share my perspectives of likely issues, concerns and challenges that tend to show up in each phase of the journey.

Predictably, we've got lots of data points for the first phase, somewhat fewer for the second phase, and only a handful of observations for the third phase.

Private Clouds And Dealing With Legacy

The good news -- there's general consensus from the enterprise IT organization I speak with that -- yes, they'd like to pursue a private cloud model.

The challenging part -- as they look around their data centers, all they can see is the legacy of past decisions: incompatible architectures, stove-pipe stacks and the rest.  It's like an archeology project: you can see the layers of different waves that have come through the IT organization.

How can you move forward when all you can see is history?

The Contrast Is Stunning

I think people know by now that I get to meet lots of customers and partners in the course of my work.  Actually, I really don't consider it "work", it's really a lot of fun.

And they even pay me :-)

Sometimes, though, you get this great juxtaposition: you get to see how different IT organizations approach the same fundamental challenge in entirely different ways.

And the contrast can be stunning ...

Whitepaper: Private Cloud Practitioner's Guide

If you've been following this blog for a while, you know I've been describing how EMC's IT organization is progressing in re-envisioning our IT capabilities based on a private cloud model.

You've seen bits and pieces here on this blog, as well as EMC IT's own web site.

Today, I received a nice white paper entitled "EMC IT's Journey To The Private Cloud: A Practitioner's Guide".  While not as complete as many of us would like, it does serve as a nice contextual overview of of our journey: the rationale, the phases and the results to date.

Hope you find it interesting!

The Impact Of VMware Storage Integration

Today is the day that VMware announces the availability of 4.1, and a key set of storage integration APIs (VAAI) that provide all sorts of cool speed-ups between server and storage.  EMC's announcement of day-one support is here.

Chad Sakac (our legendary Virtual Geek) does a great job of explaining what they are, how to use them, and what they can do for you.  If your passion is hands-on tech, please head on over there.

However, if you're more like me, and are always curious about what things might mean in a broader sense, this post might be more to your liking ...

How Will You Manage Storage?

As the IT industry rapidly transitions and matures, all sorts of traditional topics are now up for a fresh round of discussion.

One of these topics that I'm getting frequently dragged into is storage management -- what will it look like going forward?

What makes this harder is that the decisions you make on how you will manage storage will be a direct reflection of how you decide to manage IT overall.

And it's not as simple a discussion as many would like, as we'll see in a moment ...

Storage Is Software

The title of this post is a variant on the intriguing "infrastructure is code" meme from the #devops community. I think it's a useful idea to remind ourselves of -- especially as technology transitions.

Even though some of you reading this might thing the statement is blindingly obvious, it's clear that the vast majority of people think of boxes with blinking lights when you say the word "storage".

And I think this is going to be up for change sooner than later.

An Offer You Can't Refuse

From aspirational to pragmatic:

EMC Unified Storage Is 20% More Efficient.  Guaranteed.

That's the tag line for the storage efficiency campaign we've recently launched in this hotly contested part of the market.

And, from all indications, it appears that it's working quite well ...