Archive for July, 2009
Next week I am in Marthas Vineyard visiting with my friend, colleague and fellow blogger Steve Duplessie of Enterprise Strategy Group. For a few weeks Steve has been telling me about an Enterprise Windows Data Migration tool called AutoMove from AutoVirt. So I have been looking at the details it is pretty good. I have [...]
After my recent articles on XIV, I got invited out to lunch to meet with some of the UK XIV Sales team this afternoon. Lots of interesting stuff came out but I stumbled into a really strange story. One of my contacts claims that IBM have recruited an extra 400 salespeople (so far) to promote [...]
Microsoft just posted shocking year end results refelecting weakness in almost every area except for operating expenses where costs are also down by 10% reflecting strong fiscal management: -Revenue down 17% y/y -Revenue of $13.1 billion vs. street estimate $14.4 billion -Net income down 29% y/y -Operating expenses down 10% y/y -Weakness in the business [...]
Software licensing just hasn’t caught up with the realities of the modern IT Operation. Software vendors rightly need to monetize the customers valid use of their intellectual property, however it is in neither parties long term interests to increase operational costs by doing this. Many software licensing terms focus on an actual link between the [...]
I have just finished a call with Adam Hawley, Oracle’s Director of VM Product Management, the guy who owns the whole Oracle Virtualization story and technology. It got me thinking about the Hypervisor marketplace, the players, product strengths and weaknesses as well as ability to execute. My colleage and friend, Mark Bowker (the Virtualization Guru) [...]
I am doing some work on understanding the size of the market for Data Center Scale systems. Sytems like SGI (Rackable) Ice Cube, Verari’s FOREST, HP’s POD, Sun’s Container and AST-Global’s dual container solution. Talking around the market my sense is that although the unit value is quite high ($4-$6M per container) the volumes are [...]
This week CleanAnalysis – the research and analyst arm of my friend, Dan Ilet’s Greenbang (www.cleananalysis.com) – will be officially launched. CleanAnalysis be looking at all sorts of cleantech products and markets with an aim to telling the public and private sector about what will really have an impact on their sustainability, marketing and bottom [...]
Chris has picked up on the story on XIV and pubished a very good story in The Register – worth a read for sure.
I have spent most of the day taking calls and answering mails from Hot Aisle readers who have an opinion about XIV. One of the most interesting was from an IBM insider who tells me that he has a ton of great salespeople, customers who love the product when they buy it but no marketing support [...]
My recent article on IBM’s XIV product has created a real torrent of calls and mails from competitors, analysts and others in the industry saying I am completely barking mad and that IBM storage (particularly XIV) is a joke. It is true that IBM have been really bad at communicating their storage message and even [...]
I am used to writing online here at the hot aisle but yesterday, the 14th July 2009, I managed to deliver the lead story in a supplement on Efficient IT that was included in the Times, the UK’s leading newspaper. In the article, I discuss where efficient IT goes from here and point to a new “super-charged” approach. I advises CIOs to look [...]
As a further takeaway Anix stated that the configuration work of the XIV during the Proof of Concept was very simple, taking minutes to complete – “far quicker then using the existing EMC and IBM infrastructure ” Today I spoke to a UK based Infrastructure Consultancy Anix (now part of ACS) about an XIV storage [...]
Today my friend and colleague Peter Hopton gave me the neatest piece of software I have seen in a long time. Software that knows if you are sitting in front of your computer or not, and if you are not shuts down the display to save energy. As soon as you sit down again, the [...]
Perhaps it’s old news now but the EMC acquision of Data Domain is big news in the IT Industry (despite a week been a very long time in technology). I had lunch with Rena Fallstrom from NetApp today and asked her what the impact was on NetApps business in Europe. Given the huge customer acquisition [...]
Over the last few months I have been thinking about data centers, how we power and cool them and what we put in them. I’ve been looking at what the very largest consumers of IT infrastructure do with their data centers compared to industry norms. The first take away is that almost none of them conform [...]
