Chuck's Blog

An Extended Interview With Sanjay Mirchandani

Found this *wonderful* series of posts today, capturing an extended and insightful interview with Sanjay Mirchandani, EMC's CIO.

The reason you might want to read these extended posts is simple: Sanjay and his IT leadership team are making the private cloud real at EMC.  Not in a demo sort of way.  As in running the backbone of our business.

Much of the learning and lessons along the way I've shared in previous posts, but -- if you're following the story (as quite a few people are, obviously), you'll want to check these out:

Part 1   Part 2    Part 3    Part 4    Part 5

Hybridizing The Private Cloud

In botany and genetics, the benefits of hybridization are well understood.  By combining the desirable genetic strains of two organisms, we end up with a variant that is better than either of its predecessors.

When we consider the two major genetic strains of clouds (public and private), what new benefits can we expect when we hybridize the two?  

And -- more importantly -- what sort of IT alchemy will be required to do so?

Transitions Aren't Easy

Here comes cloud.

It's IT that's built differently, operated differently, and consumed differently.  

If you control it, it's a private cloud.

The good news?  

It's a significantly better way to deliver IT services.  Not a little better, a whole lot better.  Enough evidence is there if you want it.

So much better that -- if you spend significant money on IT -- you're almost forced to pay attention.

The hard part?    It uses different technology.  It uses different processes.  And it's based on an entirely different relationship with the business.

For the most part, it's not entirely compatible with what you're probably doing today.

Facing these inconvenient truths is turning out to be illuminating -- for just about everyone in the IT value chain.  And dancing around the obvious -- or trying to dress things up so they look more familiar -- isn't really helping anyone.

Journey To The Private Cloud: Where Are You?

Over the weekend, someone sent me a link to a very clever EMC web tool that helps people figure out -- not only where they are in their private cloud journey -- but what's the next step?

The discussion, framework and recommendations basically mirror what I've seen in literally hundreds of customer discussions.

Yes, I know it's a marketing thing.  

But I'd argue it's a marketing thing that might be useful to many.

See what you think ...

The Journey To The Private Cloud Starts Now

Creating A Pool Of Paths

So much of what we're doing around large-scale virtualization, private cloud, etc. revolves around the pooling of infrastructure so it can be used in a dynamic and intelligent fashion.

VMware intelligently pools server resources.  Storage products like VMAX and VPLEX and FAST illustrate intelligent storage pooling concepts.

But how do we create a "pool of paths" between servers and storage?  Especially when we're talking demanding block protocols?

Big Data And The Ever-Expanding EMC Petabyte Club

The term "big data" is starting to be used for newer applications that harness enormous quantities of information to do new things we couldn't consider in the past.

Whether it's the new world of analytics, enormous data and content repositories, or something else -- there's growing interest in this new realm.  Massive compute + massive storage = brave new world. 

Witness EMC's recent investments in Atmos, Greenplum, and -- most recently -- our proposed acquisition of Isilon.

But, in my mind, this is much too limiting a view.

I'd argue that perhaps we should extend our thinking even further --  and not only use the term "big data" to apply to these new and intriguing use cases, but also to refer to enormous information portfolios being created by more traditional applications: databases, files, etc.

Either way, I believe the conversation changes significantly when we start discussing petabytes vs. terabytes.  The sheer scale changes the problem, and your approach to mastering it.

EMC To Acquire Isilon

Well, today's news confirmed what was long discussed -- EMC's intent to acquire Isilon.  The full webcast, plus supporting materials, can be found here.

So, what's this all about?  And what might be different going forward?

Glad you asked ...

Why Backup Is Big

Within the storage-related disciplines, the folks responsible for data protection -- backup, replication, recovery, etc. -- historically haven't gotten their fair share of the credit they deserve.

The perception that data protection was important, but certainly not glamorous.  Sort of like the folks who do tax audits -- important, but not glamorous.

A number of trends seemed to have reversed the pecking order.  All of the sudden, backup is hot.

A Quick Update From NetApp

As I was scanning the morning emails, I found a link to this gem, basically pre-announcing NetApp's announcement for tomorrow.  The biggest surprise was that there really wasn't much of a surprise -- just about everything they announced was already public knowledge.

However, working as I do for EMC, I'm somewhat obligated to offer up some sort of commentary when one of our storage competitors makes an announcement.

IT Evolved: The Story of CAA

About a week ago the call came in.  The IT leadership team at CAA had been reading my blog.  They thought they were doing some very cool stuff.  Would I be interested in learning more?

You bet!

Due to practical constraints in time and travel, I probably get to hear only a small fraction of the insanely great stories that are out there, waiting to be told.  And -- thankfully -- they reached out to me.  If you've ever wondered what a highly evolved IT organization might look like, you'll be interested in this. 

 And -- oh yes -- they're doing it all with Microsoft's Hyper-V.