Opinion
I just finished reading EMC company blogger, Chuck Hollis article about EMC VFCache, a server side flash storage technology that competes with the Fusion-io, ioDrive head on. Most interestingly, the product name is chosen carefully to ensure customers don’t get confused that VFCache might be designed to replace the normal disk based EMC storage array controller products. [...]
Around this time, I usually pull together a ten point list of predictions for the coming year. I am interested in the Data Center (around power, cooling, reliability and economics), IT Security (particularly Database and Mobile), Big Data and Storage (Particularly Solid State). So what’s different this year from prior years? Strengthening fundamental drivers are likely to [...]
Last night a few friends (IT Operations Geeks like me) and I had a great “Brains Trust” event at the OXO Tower in London. The topic was a continuation of the last Hot Aisle blog entry Why do we try to solve backup when restore is the problem? Apart from the food, view and wine [...]
Google has the most amazingly clear terms of service for their cloud products. The terms are take it or leave it, no promises, no commitments and no come-back. I love the statement that there is no warrant that the quality of services will meet your expectations. It’s a gem. Thanks to Harqs Singh for [...]
Worldwide, there has been a lot of focus in recent years on reducing the environmental impact of Data Centers. Green always comes at a cost, but once it is viewed as a long-term investment rather than as a quick return on investment (ROI), it can be a viable cost cutting option. Data center investments are [...]
I don’t normally plug press releases straight from vendors but today I received an email from Emily Wood at Google with a message that I agree 100% with. Cooling data centers is not just about refrigeration – there are lots of options – many of which we have written about here on The Hot Aisle [...]
I have spent the last 12 months working with some of the smartest and best funded marketing people on the planet, I have been working with the the really big, household name, IT Infrastructure vendors. I learned lots, lots about marketing, lots about honest analysis and lots about human nature. I learned that marketing isn’t [...]
The problem with computing is everyone wants to make it uniform – fit it into a neat box, categorise it as ‘all the same’, make it autonomic, self-managing and move on. In fact, IT is anything but uniform, so these simplistic approaches fall at the first hurdle. Smart CIOs understand applications need to be treated [...]
A while back I met Kathrin Winkler, Chief Sustainability Officer at EMC. She was delivering a briefing about EMC’s Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) activities to a group of industry analysts. Most CSR briefings are as dull as ditchwater and devoid of anything remotely innovative or challenging. CSR is for some just going through the motions [...]
Most people who read this won’t have a clue what a Hollerith punched card is. I only just caught the end of the era at University where I learned to program in FORTRAN coding one punched card at a time. Once the stack of cards was complete, I delivered it to the computer operator for [...]
If you have been following the storage business for a while, you will have noticed a few changes: Introduction of Flash Memory components as Solid State Disks Serial ATA (SATA) disks becoming popular and growing in capacity (2TB soon) There are lots of other disk technologies around like Fibre Channel and SAS but SSD and [...]
My old CIO at BT, Al-noor Ramji had a most delightful and endearing way of describing just how unimportant and disconnected IT Infrastructure is from reality by describing us as “The toilet cleaner’s toilet cleaners”. Like other successful CIOs Al-noor had the ability to cut through the noise and explain things as they are. In [...]
Both Seagate and Western Digital announced Q2 results last week perhaps signalling a return of confidence in the disk drive channel. Component manufacturers in the enterprise IT channel are an interesting bellwether of market confidence as orders need to be placed in advance of shipments of finished goods. There is a significant delay in revenue [...]
Around this time, analysts at ESG pull together a ten point list of predictions for the coming year. One of my areas of coverage and of expertise is in the Data Center around power, cooling, reliability and economics. So what’s different this year from prior years? Strengthening fundamental drivers will likely make 2010 materially different [...]
Today Microsoft and HP announced an expanded partnership in order to deliver fully integrated application to hardware stacks. It’s a brilliant move, absolutely stunningly smart and spot on for HP. I wrote about Oracle VM and the fully integrated stack that Larry Ellison has been promoting to his customers. Superficially it might seem like a [...]
My good friend and ESG colleague Terri McClure @esganalysttmac recently blogged about a thought leadership piece I had presented at an analyst call last week. She made a very good job of explaining it and so I thought that I would write a little more about it here: I call the concept the “Golden Triangle” and [...]
My friend and colleague Steve Duplessie at ESG just blogged about an interesting court case happening in the USA on The Bigger Truth. “An e-mail archiving company, ZL Technologies, Inc., has sued, been dismissed, and re-sued Gartner – basically claiming that ZL’s placement in Gartner’s “Magic Quadrant” has caused the company damage – namely, that [...]
Everyone I speak to in the industry agrees that IT components are getting harder to integrate. It’s not a new issue, this complexity, it’s just got harder and harder over the years to make sense of how everything should plug together. So when I speak to friends in the industry who are faced with delivering [...]
NGD and BT announced this week that BT has agreed to take 380 racks at NGD Europe, Next Generation Data Limited’s newly-launched 75,000 square metres facility near Newport in Gwent. Rollout began in August and will be ready for customer use by February 2010. This is one of the first large Data Center deals in [...]
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 have been contributing to Kiva ever since I noticed a tweet from Padmasree Warrior (@padmasree) Cisco’s CTO mentioning the micro-finance site. Getting a business loan in the western world is tough enough, it’s pretty impossible in the third world. So that’s where micro-finance can help. Kiva collects lots of $25.00 “investments” from lenders (don’t [...]
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 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 [...]
Telephone has Shortcomings – It was printed in a memo at Western Union in 1878 that “This ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us” Electric Light will Close as well – Oxford professor Erasmus Wilson predicted that “When the [...]
I just picked up a neat blog post by Martin Glassborow (@storagebod) discussing a double disk failure in a RAID 5 array which (apparently) caused lost data. RAID is Redundant Array of Independent Disks and the number refers to the type of protection offered. RAID 5 means that there is an extra disks in the [...]
