Chuck's Blog

Ten IT Predictions For 2012

It's getting to be that time of year when many of us start thinking about 2012.  Planning season is well underway at EMC, as it is for many of our customers and partners. 

Maybe you're doing some of your own 2012 planning right now?

I thought I'd try and help out by offering up my own personal predictions for those of us in the IT industry: vendors, customers and partners alike. 

These pronouncements aren’t really meant to be definitive -- just hopefully provoke a bit of thought and discussion.  

You also might be interested in the predictions I made a year ago.

See what you think …

The Thorny Challenge Of Elasticity

Listen to people describe their idealized cloud, and sometimes you'll hear them say "infinitely elastic".

Most IT infrastructure people cringe when they hear that sort of talk, and justifiably so.  At some point, all infrastructure becomes physical no matter how abstracted or virtualized you make it.

Not only that, being able to meaningfully grow and shrink infrastructure resources dynamically in response to changing application demand is a very difficult problem -- especially for general purpose use cases.

The application environment has to be able to request and release resources.  The supporting infrastructure has to work in concert with the application stack, of course.

And then there's the head-hurting topic of policy definition and management: under what circumstances should appplication "A" get more resources, and application "B", "C" and "D" get less?  

How do you define what types of internal or external infrastructure are allowed candidates for supporting dynamic application expansion?  

And how do you communicate back to the business what real-time tradeoffs are being made, and showing them that everything is compliant?

I don't think anyone has complete answers for most use cases, but some interesting work in this area is starting to manifest itself.

In particular, the VCE crew is presenting their current progress on a solution dubbed "Application Lifecycle Manager", or ALP for short.  And it's an interesting discussion, to be sure.

Vblock FastPath/VDI -- Changing The Model

If you follow this blog, you know I'm an ardent and passionate fan of the Vblock concept.  I just can't help myself.

For me, it represents acceleration.  

At a tactical level, that means getting results faster.  

At an operational level, it's the ability to spend more time on the stuff that matters and less time on the stuff that doesn't.

And -- strategically -- it means accelerating IT's transition to an internal service provider.

If you've sat through the Vblock roadmap sessions, you'll notice that development is progressing nicely around two axes.  One important axis is "better Vblocks": faster, more efficient, more functionality, better security, better operational integration, and so forth.  I always am surprised at just how fast these folks are moving.

The other axis is becoming important as well: pointing the Vblock concept at well-established IT use cases, and creating sinlge-SKU "products" that bring the Vblock model (real product vs. reference architecture, speed of deployment, pre-integration, single support, etc.) to specific and popular use cases.

Such is the case with the new Vblock FastPath/VDI.  In a nutshell, it's a single product you can buy that does VDI -- at scale -- in a box.

Managing Block Storage At Scale: Introducing EMC ProSphere

Personally, I think the whole topic of storage management doesn't enough industry attention.  Far more ink seems to get spilled on more prosaic topics like debating storage network protocols.

By all rights, storage management ought to be a topic of vibrant discussion and debate.

There's so much is in play here:

• dramatically growing information volumes and associated storage farms
• new storage technologies, like flash and storage federation
• the growing predominance of virtualized workloads
• the rapid shift to IT-as-a-service models (e.g. "cloud")
• and, as ever, the need for efficiency, control and choice

I think we collectively spend too much time debating the technologies themselves, and perhaps far too little time discussing how people might use them effectively.

So it seems almost precognitive that today EMC is launching an entirely new storage management environment targeted at large scale environments with demanding block-oriented storage workloads.

Big Data, Big Numbers: New SPEC Results From EMC/Isilon

I always warn people -- be careful of what you ask for, you just might get it.

For years, various competitors have heckled EMC that we ought to be more active and participatory with regards to public storage benchmarks.

Today, our Isilon team has released some truly astounding SPEC numbers that should get you thinking about this whole scale-out performance thing in a new way.

There's a lot of juicy insights here -- in addition to the predictable bragging rights -- so let's dig in and see what we've got.

Why Measuring Simplicity Can Be Complex

Anyone who works in IT knows that product simplicity and usability is important today, and becoming even more important going forward.

We at EMC spend a lot of time on this topic.  And, when it comes to usability, there's always room for improvement.

But, unfortunately, there are no generally accepted standards for usability.  Sure, we can count mouse clicks for commonly performed tasks, but we all know there's far more to the story than that.  Worse yet, it all can devolve into a marketing shouting match, with very useful information for users of products to objectively evaluate.  Not a good thing.

As a result, we've now started to turn to third party firms to evaluate our products' usability.  Tell us the good, tell us the bad -- but, most importantly, tell us where we need to get better.

And, in the spirit of transparency, I'd like to share the methodology and the results with you.

I Respectfully Disagree

I enjoyed reading Chris Mellor's recent ramblings on "Converged Stacks Will Retard Storage Innovation".

He makes a plausible argument: the rapid shift to converged and integrated infrastructures (e.g. VCE Vblocks) will make it harder for the erstwhile small startup to play, and thus hamper an important source of innovation in the storage industry.

After thinking about it for a while, I've decided precisely the opposite is likely to be true -- and here's why.

When Is A Backup Really A Backup?

I must be getting old and crotchety.

I keep seeing various marketing spins around "local backups" and I sort of shake my head and wonder if the world is going mad, or maybe it's just me?

See if you agree with my line of reasoning.

Data Domain: Accelerating The Transition From Tape To Disk

As part of EMC's recent flurry of product announcements, EMC's BRS division (backup and recovery systems) is especially well represented: not only by bigger/better/faster versions of their existing successful products, but new offerings that open up interesting market segments.

As the IT industry progressively transitions to using disk for backup, recovery and archiving (and, correspondingly, moving away from tape), customers need solutionsEMC's BRS division is in an enviable position in terms of differentiated product features, leading market share and great customer enthusiasm.

Right now, I think this game belongs to EMC.

My Friday Rant -- Moving Beyond VDI?

It's Friday.  I'm back from an exceptionally long holiday.  Thanks, it's great to be back.

Today's rant was sparked by a great conversation on Quora: what is holding back business adoption of VDI?  Lots of useful perspectives -- all worth reading -- but I felt compelled to add some additional thoughts.

On one hand, enterprise adoption of desktop virtualization is probably more widespread than the poster might realize.  On the other hand, I would guess that the vast majority of work-related user experiences today are most decidedly un-virtualized.

Part of the problem, I believe, lies in the name: it can send people down a pathway that may or may not be what they're looking for.  

And, no, I don't have a better name.