Chuck's Blog

Overcoming Distance

Over the last few centuries, much of mankind's ingenuity has been focused on eliminating the inconvenience of distance. 

From sailing ships to modern air transportation; from hand-carried letters to global telepresence -- we spend a lot of time and money to overcome distance in the physical world.

And, in the next few years, there's going to be an intense focus in IT in doing exacly the same thing.

EMC Acquires Kazeon

[Update: I was informed that the title of this post should have been "EMC To Acquire Kazeon" since the deal's not closed yet.  My bad.]

My my, another busy week.  No shortage of blog topics in my world!

I thought this latest acquisition was worth commenting on, less in terms of the product and what it does, and more in terms of exposing underlying strategic thinking here at EMC.

The press release, as well as Dave Raffo's blog post, cover most of the basics.  We'd been working closely with Kazeon for a while as part of our CMA business (think Documentum, SourceOne, et. al.), and today's announcement can easily be seen as simply another step in a logical progression.

I think that most industry watchers are starting to appreciate that M+A at EMC is a highly-tuned machine with formidable strategy, pipeline and process.  Just recently, we've acquired DataDomain, FastScale and now Kazeon.  All important acquisitions, all relating to different portions of EMC's business. 

But how do these themes relate strategically?

Good question.

Of Objects And Files

I was pleasantly surprised by the vigorous debate kicked off by one of my recent posts "The Future Doesn't Have A File System". 

Although most of the vigorous rhetoric came from an individual with a clear vested interest (Alex McDonald who is the competitive blogger over at NetApp), he did bring forth some themes that I'm sure are more widely shared.  And, just as vigorously, Paul Carpentier of FilePool (Centera) fame argued the other side of the equation.

I'd like to use this post to step back a bit and lay a bit of groundwork as to why this is such an interesting topic to so many of us looking at architecture.

The Future Doesn't Have A File System

... at least, not that tree-oriented, heirarchical model we've all gotten so accustomed to.

Sure, there'll be mechanisms for managing information objects, but calling them "file systems" can really hold back our thinking in some subtle yet powerful ways.

Why I Really Like VMware's SpringSource Acquisition

Sorry I wasn't able to weigh in when this happened last week. 

The good news: the more I think about it, the more I find this particular acquisition absolutely fascinating.

The usual disclaimer: I'm offering my own opinions, and not speaking officially on behalf of VMware, EMC, SpringSource or any other company for that matter.

But, despite the disclaimer, many of us think this is pretty darn cool.

I Want My Personal Cloud

Storagezilla got this one going, and it's a thought that's worth exploring.

So much of the cloud discussion is pointed at businesses -- what about us as individuals?

And -- yes -- there's a potential type of cloud that I think we'll all want.

A personal information cloud.

Storage Made Simple?

Ever have to explain this storage stuff to someone who doesn't really have a background in it?

I find myself speaking to all sorts of people these days, including more and more that are relatively new to all of this.   One example is at press events -- there are people who follow these topics closely, and those that are relative newcomers.

The first few times I tried to explain the wide world of storage to an outsider, I'm afraid I made a terrible mess of everything, and ended up leaving people more confused as a result!

As a result, I've been searching for a quick way to explain to people why storage is such an interesting topic to so many people.  I've sketched out some of the key ideas below.

Let me know how I did?

EMC Takes Atmos Storage OnLine

Perhaps the first big announcement to come out of EMC World is the twin combination of the new Atmos OnLine service, as well as AT&T's new Synaptic Storage as a Service based on Atmos.

While the new services and capabilities are interesting in their own right, I think they're emblematic of certain trends we'll inevitably see more of in the future.

And that's worth discussing ...

Securing The Private Cloud

So much to write about, so little time. 

I guess I'm going to have to think carefully about the topics I write about going forward -- I could easily spend every day doing nothing but blog posts on interesting topics.  Sure, that'd be fun, but my day job would seriously suffer.

A few interesting announcements last week that we can correlate:

• VMware's vSphere announcement -- all about the private cloud
• The Jericho Forum issued their best practices around secure cloud computing
• VMware and RSA made an interesting announcement as part of last week's RSA Conference

Put it all together?

It's all about securing the private cloud ...

Thoughts On "The State Of The CIO"

Rather than blather on incessantly about my company and products (again!), I thought I'd share with you some commentary around some great work by a few EMC people to summarize the 'state of the state' when it comes to CIOs.

Most of this material came from a recent CIO Magazine survey, but the EMC team added a few more data points that amplified the general story.  Thanks, guys!

I get to meet more than my fair share of thes individuals, and I found the research intensely interesting.  Maybe you will too.

Keep in mind, this isn't strictly about the person who is the CIO -- it says a lot about how thinking is evolving in enterprise IT in general.

Although many sources were used to create this composite picture, you'll see some very consistent themes throughout.