Chuck's Blog

Reblog: Enterprise Business Restart

Recovering a single system after a disaster can be difficult.  Recovering hundreds is a mess.  Recovering them in a consistent fashion, so that their data dependencies are all correct, is a huge task.  And what if they run different operating systems?  There is an effective answer.

via applyit.typepad.com

Vince has made a strong start as an EMC blogger, and he's writing about topics near and dear to my heart: storage at enterprise scale.

If his first two posts are any indication of the future, he's worth a follow ...

A Bit Of Marketing In Your IT Group?

Some of my favorite customer time is when I spend 1x1 time with a CIO or other IT leader and just chat.

Despite what you may think, I don't use the opportunity to shamelessly pimp EMC's products and solutions. 

We usually get into all sorts of interesting discussions about the industry, how their companies are evolving, how their IT organizations are changing -- and, ultimately, how they can better engage with the businesses they serve.

And, more often than not, I starting to drop a suggestion in front of them -- have you ever thought of a bit of marketing in your IT group?

Private Clouds, VCE And The Channel

Sometimes I write the blog post, sometimes it gets written for me :-)

Wanted to offer you all a quick link to a drive-by interview I did with Steven Burke at CRN yesterday.  He threw some great questions at me -- hopefully my answers hold up.

You be the judge -- here.  I also got this unrelated pickup here at ZDnet.

Thanks, Steven -- hope we get a chance to do it again some time soon!

Pervasive Virtualization And Avoiding Accidental IT

No matter what you do, there's always a strong incentive to do what's expedient, as opposed to taking a more thoughtful approach.  For example, everyone has good intentions when putting their IT environments together, but it's so easy to get lost in the moment.

The distractions can be plentiful and tempting: feeling bound by legacy decisions, a vendor offering a too-good-to-be-true deal, perhaps a shiny technology bauble that distracts.

We're starting to have far more engagements with customers and partners around end-to-end fully virtualized environments, rather than just individual piece-parts.

And some of them are willing to share their results.

Of Mainframes And Clouds

When I speak in front of audiences, I usually try and push the boundaries a bit by being intentionally controversial.

Today was no exception.  I spoke at a partner event (GreenPages) in front of about 100 people about the journey to the private cloud.  Some of my comments even made it to CRN in real-time -- scary thought.

At one point, I asked if anyone in the room had done "hard time on mainframes".  And, as usual, a few hands went up. 

For these people, the current move to cloud architectures is going to give many of them a strange sense of deja-vu ...