Chuck's Blog

The Power Of Pooling

In my discussions with customers, I often ask the "V" question: how are you doing with virtualization?

Occasionally I get an interesting response: they're an entrenched IBM customer, and they point to the use of virtualization on their mainframe, and perhaps their big AIX boxen, and say they're largely virtualized.  Asked and answered.

I need to ask them a better question: how are you doing with pooling of resources?

Where Does The Enterprise Desktop Go From Here?

Every so often, a well-understood category in IT becomes completely up-for-grabs in terms of answering the question: what's next? 

Clearly, how we think about enterprise desktops and delivering end-user computing is now very much in play. The many announcements coming from VMworld only underscores this point.

What's an enterprise IT planner to do?

Chad Is On A Tear ...

I know, there's a LOT to read and digest coming out of VMworld these days.

As an occasionally proliferate blogger myself, I have to hand it to Chad -- he's turned loose a veritable supernova of meaty and significant technology-oriented posts in the last few days.  I'm impressed, and I don't impress easily.  I know how much work is behind each and every one of these posts.

If you have a moment, please check these out:

vCloud Director and UIM

VPLEX, Long Distance VM Teleportation, and a great offer ...

Mega Caches, Automatied Tiering, or Both?

DRS -- For Storage

EMC Storage for VMware View 4.5 @ $38/client -- and scales to thousands!

RSA, VMware and Intel -- Securing Private/Public Clouds

And, of course, the video from the team that makes much of this magic happen ...

Good Reading!

Charting The Intel Effect

Two bits of news, oddly correlated.

First, there's EMC's recent SPEC benchmark posting, where a single Intel-based Celerra data mover absolutely *smokes* every other NAS device out there.

Second, there's Timothy Prickett Morgan's take on the IDC server numbers, where -- once again -- the market bought more Intel-compatible servers and fewer of the other kind.

I think I've seen this movie before, and I know how it ends :-)

The Real Story At Pfizer

A while back, I wrote a rather skeptical post reacting to a press article about Pfizer's use of Amazon.
 
There are some lessons to be learned from this experience:
 
#1 -- Don't always believe what you read online from an industry reporter, and
 
#2 -- Before being critical, do your homework.
 
I made both mistakes.  But, wonderfully, I recently had a chance to talk to the principal behind the story -- Mike Miller -- and found the reality to be far more fascinating.

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 ...

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 ...

Cloud Is In The Eye Of The Beholder

Lots of cloud chatter this week.  A couple of good industry events.  An interesting new startup offering a cloud operating system for private clouds.  Even the ever-outspoken Werner dissing private clouds as "false clouds".

A lively debate, to be sure!

Time for me to offer up another attempted level-set in this discussion.  It's easy to become lost in the details, and more difficult to see what's really happening here -- or, at least, what I think is happening.

Another Take At Integrated Vs. Best-of-Breed

I was locked away in meetings most of this week, and didn't have a chance to participate in a flurry of posts and discussions on this important topic.

Scott Lowe got the latest wave going with his prognostications on a certain vendor, Marc Farley added a thoughtful post, and Chris Mellor joined in the fun, as well as Storagebod.

But the topic isn't done yet -- we'll be arguing this one for decades to come.

Working as I do for EMC, I'm free to sign up on either side of the debate: EMC offers best-of-breed products for consideration (insert long list here), or conversely EMC is part of an integrated stack (e.g. VCE and Vblocks for private cloud deployments).

So, I'm going to wade here with a decisive statement: both perspectives are right, but what changes over time is where the boundaries of the debate occur.