Chuck's Blog

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?

Verticalization Vs. Virtualization

So many great thoughts and ideas came out of EMC World last week, I'm still gathering and processing them.

One of the bigger thoughts shared that took a while for me to fully process is a simple two-slide sequence that greatly clarified -- at least for me -- what was going on in the IT industry at a macro scale.

And it came out crystal clear in Joe Tucci's keynote ..

SAP and VCE

The news coming out of SAPPHIRE this morning is fairly compelling to many of us.

SAP is publicly endorsing the private cloud model, the VCE coalition and the Vblock infrastructure package.  They've highlighted the work that the VCE coalition (together with Accenture) has done to validate and benchmark a real-world SAP environment from Levi Strauss.

This announcement is in addition to the recent EMC Information Intelligence Group's tie-up in the content management and workflow space, covered here and here -- a big piece of news in its own right.

And, predictably, there are a lot of interesting angles to the SAP and VCE story -- some obvious, some a bit more subtle ..

EMC World 2010 -- A Retrospective

Now that EMC World 2010 is comfortably in our collective rear view mirror, I thought I'd take a moment to reflect on a few interesting themes that came out of this event. 

In many ways, EMC World is becoming more of an industry event, and less of an EMC-specific event, so what happens here affects just about all of us, and not just those affiliated with EMC.

Redefining RAID

If there's one topic that's been discussed to death in the storage industry, it's RAID -- a redundant array of independent disks.

No, this post isn't really about this version of RAID or that version of RAID, it's just a suggestion that -- before too long -- we might use this acronym to refer to a very different (yet intriguingly related) concept.

The Real Rock Stars of EMC World: EMC IT

There's a veritable river of information, perspectives and opinions coming out of EMC World this week.  Not to mention about a bazillion tweets on the #EMCworld hashtag.

While all the keynotes were excellent, the one that I thought really stood out came from the EMC IT organization.  Sanjay Mirchandani and his team did an excellent job of bridging the gap between theory and practice while adding a healthy dose of pragmatism to the whole private cloud discussion.

Their team also did yeoman's duty manning a booth on the floor and meeting with literally dozens and dozens of customers during the show. 

They weren't really there to sell anything, just to share their experiences openly and honestly as one IT team to another.

In this post, I wanted to share the presentation along with my own personal commentary.  If you'd like to see the presentation as a video (complete with a few very cool demos), check this out.  There's also a download link for the complete set of slides I'm using here.

Building The Atmos Storage Ecosystem

This press release triggered the observation that introducing fundamentally new technology into the marketplace is much more difficult that simply providing an improved version of what already exists.

And, if you look at the story of Atmos, it's a great illustration of this principle.

It's been in the market for a while now.  I still think there are a lot of people who don't understand how it's different than what came before it, or why that might be an interesting discussion. 

However, from my perspective, it's been a big success in terms of what it set out to achieve -- creating an entirely new category of storage platform.

Mid-tier Storage Accelerates

The bread-and-butter of the storage industry is mid-tier storage -- pragmatic dual-controller designs that do it all for a big piece of the IT landscape.  It goes by many names: mid-tier, modular, unified, etc.  Dual-controller designs provide a nice balance between performance, capacity and availability for so many storage requirements.

Whether it's a modest IT shop, a modest project in a larger shop, or a whole fleet of them in a really big shop – these dual-controller storage designs continue to be a staple of the industry.

It's also a hotly contested portion of the market -- just about everyone has offerings in this space: EMC, NetApp, HDS, HP, IBM, etc. etc.  In a notoriously competitive segment, this is where it can get most competitive.  Fights break out over minor things like the definition of "unified", for example.
 
While this week's VPLEX announcement from EMC World is most definitely cool, it did tend to overshadow a rather compelling chunk of new mid-tier capabilities for  EMC's CLARiiON and Celerra lines.
 
At any other storage vendor, these announcements would officially qualify as Big Stuff.  However, at EMC, they tend to get overshadowed by Bigger Stuff.  I consider that a high-class problem to have :-)
 
See what you think ...

Live From EMC World!

Had an interesting experience today where I was interviewed and videostreamed from the show floor.  David Vellante has teamed up with John Furrier, and they brought in some cool, portable studio tech that I hadn't seen before.

You can see the results below as David interviews me on social media, EMC's strategy, storage, the mood in IT, private clouds, and -- yes -- social media again.

Watch live video from The Cube LIVE from EMC World 2010 on Justin.tv

Helping To Chart The Course Of Private Clouds

Some of the more fascinating news to come out of EMC World today is the formation of an industry-wide Technology Advisory Board to help guide EMC and our partners forward as the industry transitions to a private cloud model.

Some vendors use market muscle to accelerate these transitions.  Others depend heavily on industry standards efforts to do so.  But both approaches often lack an open forum where issues and tradeoffs can be debated at an appropriate level.

Ideally, you'd ask heavy hitters from across the industry to join in, evaluate the options and make specific recommendations back to the vendor community.  And that's what I think we've got here.