Interviews
Hot Aisle Interviews with Industry Figures
Why do many small businesses spend more money on coffee and tea than on their information technology systems? Working with Dell Computers, I recently moderated an expert Think Tank in Amsterdam covering how small and medium businesses invest in technology for growth. This was an incredibly insightful discussion from owners and managers in all types [...]
I interviewed Ron Bianchini CEO of Avere Systems about their new third generation FXT appliance. (Ron was the CEO of Spinnaker Networks acquired by NetApp in November 2003 for $300M). We started the conversation by looking at the key values of Spinnaker, it’s ability to scale and cluster NAS filers, a technology long since incorporated [...]
Globally the annual mid-market (companies with fewer than 1000 staff) spend for IT hardware, software and services exceeds $250B acording to Andy Monshaw, IBM’s General Manager for Mid-Market. Andy lives and breathes mid-market, he personally leads as many as 15 end user and IBM partner round tables a month, spending his time listening to customer problems and getting intimately [...]
Cloudera struck lucky in getting a $5M A-round away just before the markets shut down in response to the collapse of the global financial system. Backed by Accel Partners and more recently Greylock Partners they are making a bet that Hadoop with a smart scale out approach to managing large amounts of data is a [...]
Recently I spoke to David Emery a friend and colleague from my time at Coopers & Lybrand. He is now working on a major social media initiative for a global mobile telco. I was interested in David’s perspective as he has been working on a set of solutions to process log files at enormous scale. [...]
Today I had a really interesting conversation with my friend and colleague Richard Davis, CEO of Elastichosts a small (but perfectly formed) Cloud Computing company. Richard and I first met when he was a Business Technology consultant at McKinsey & Co and I was his client at BT. We worked together on a major project [...]
Greenwash or Greenbacks? – an eWEEK Europe Webinar What is the real motivation behind the Green Data Centre movement? Saving the planet… or saving money? …or keeping one step ahead of possible regulations, and saving yourself from a world of legal trouble? Readers of the Hot Aisle will already know that moves to more efficient [...]
I recently chaired a very interesting panel debate and discussion Hosted By BLADE Network Technologies in London. The panel was made up of: Harkeeret (Harqs) Singh, Global Head Data Centre Energy Optimisation, Thomson Reuters Finlay MacLeod, VP IT Infrastructure, EMEA, First Data Corp Charles Ferland, VP of EMEA, BLADE Network Technologies Brian Peterson, VP International [...]
Google Docs now has a batch export facility for their documents created by the Data Liberation Front, a Google team setup to help customers leave. “Imagine you want to move out of your apartment. When you ask your landlord about the terms of your previous lease, he says that you are free to leave at [...]
I visited IP Expo at Earls Court today and had a look around and concluded that everyone is on message about the cloud. If vendor push gets a technology going then cloud is moving at the speed of light. I mostly went to interview VirtualGeek, Chad Sakac VP, VMware Technology Alliance at EMC who was [...]
I recently had a conversation with Mark Anzani, IBM’s CTO for System z, the mainframe platform. Regular readers will know that cooling technology is a favourite subject here on the hot aisle and I was keen to get an answer to how IBM plan to cool their next range of machines, the z11 series. IBM [...]
I met up with my old friend Martin Williams yesterday; he is CEO of a startup company called ATOV. Apparently AtoV means Anarchy to Visualisation, which is exactly what they do. Some firms have limited instrumentation to monitor their IT systems, some firms even have a Command Centre or Bridge Operations to react to outages [...]
Some time ago I wrote an article called How do I know if my Data Center is about to fall over. This has proved to be very popular because it talks about risk, the risk that our investments in highly resilient data centers can be worth nothing if we fail to operate them properly. By [...]
I met with Phillip Petersen of Adinfa at a Green Data Center (what an oxymoron) event recently and he briefed me on the progress he had been making with his product – InSite that does real time power monitoring for Data Centers. He told me that they had really started to get some traction, real life big [...]
Last year I spoke to Ron Croce COO of Validus DC Systems about their unique approach to Data Center power provision. He and I both share strong backgrounds in power engineering and the certain knowledge that the way that data centers are powered today is fundamentally flawed. Today’s data centers take power from the grid [...]
The Hot Aisle is delighted to serve up another exclusive interview with a senior industry figure, 3PAR’s Senior Director of Strategy Geoff Hough. In this interview, Geoff answers some searching questions about 3PAR’s product capability and environmentalism and its intersection with self-interest – reduced running costs. The Hot Aisle: Can you explain 3PAR’s strategy around [...]
I recently met with Mark Shirman, CEO and Founder of Glasshouse Technologies and had the opportunity to get another exclusive Hot Aisle interview. Mark is uniquely placed to comment on the recent changes in the Data Center and Storage markets with particular emphasis on Green issues. For many years Glasshouse has been the leading independent [...]
I met up with the Mike Klayko the CEO of Brocade last week in the restaurant of the St Regis Hotel in New York (famous for creating the best burgers, bar none, in the city) for an exclusive Hot Aisle interview. Mr Klayko is an industry veteran with decades of experience starting at IBM, [...]
I met up with Andy Monshaw, General Manager of IBM’s Storage Division last week for an exclusive Hot Aisle interview and found him in ebullient mood. Andy has been running Storage for IBM since January 2005 and is an industry veteran. Andy had prepared a huge list of new products and initiatives he wanted [...]
The London Financial Times published an interesting article about data center cooling. Written by fellow blgger Dan Ilet of Greenbang.com it focuses on the strain being put on data centers by increased numbers and power demand of servers and the rapid increase in the cost of electricity. Its often amusing what journalists pick up in [...]
Met up with a really nice chap for a Starbucks today, Dan Ilett who is a journalist (for the Financial Times) and a friend of Ewan MacLeod who runs SMS Text News. Dan runs a great blog called Greenbang. Greenbang is all about green issues, not just green IT issues. Dan wanted to get [...]
Interview with Haroon Malik – DCS Magazine Malik – Do you think that, as yet, many businesses have a sufficient understanding of the importance of the human aspect of IT within the data centre? ie writing policies, managing infrastructure, making mistakes etc… O’Donnell – It may be a bit unkind to some of my [...]
