Opinion
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 [...]
Continue ReadingMost 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 [...]
Continue ReadingIf 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 SATA are getting [...]
Continue ReadingMy 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 every [...]
Continue ReadingBoth 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 [...]
Continue ReadingAround 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 from [...]
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 piece [...]
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 it [...]
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 since [...]
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 [...]
Continue ReadingNGD 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 the [...]
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 data centres [...]
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 [...]
Continue ReadingI 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 hot [...]
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 in [...]
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 Paris Exhibition [of [...]
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 group [...]
My friend and colleague Steve Duplessie over at Steve’s IT Rants just recently wrote about Enterprise customers consolidating vendors. At ESG we have been conducting a Spending Intentions Survey for years and one of the recent outputs is that 34% of enterprise IT operations have a stated corporate objective to “reduce the number of vendors we [...]
Continue ReadingHave you been noticing how unimportant hardware has become? Having the biggest. fastest, most reliable piece of equipment in the data center doesn’t cut it anymore. A few weeks back I was talking to Dave Hitz, one of the founders of NetApp and author of How to Castrate a Bull. He explained the phenomena really [...]
Continue ReadingIn the end content drives adoption. I refer you to Apple’s iPhone platform and the game changing nature of the AppStore. For those of us old enough to remember, look at Betamax and VHS and Sony’s subsequent acquisition of much of Hollywood to make sure they didn’t loose a technology war again.
We are now in [...]
Yesterday I took a day off being on holiday at Martha’s Vineyard to drop in to Foxwoods, a casino complex on a native american reservation that is apparently the most successful such establishment in the USA. I didn’t go to gamble, (I don’t) I went to work, to sit on a panel with some end [...]
Continue ReadingSoftware 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 application [...]
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 [...]
Continue ReadingFujitsu just announced a new blade server system using a custom designed motherboard optimized for the form factor of the chassis so that they have been able to fit 18 blades with two CPUs each into a compact 10U package. This contrasts with the rather weak Cisco design that manages to fit all of 6 [...]
Continue ReadingI am old enough to remember the 1960’s when IBM Mainframes used de-ionized water delivered by micro-bore pipes to cool the CPUs. (In fact I remember a spillage during a mainframe move that resulted in every single auto spares shop in south east England being raided for deionized water).
In a recent statement IBM claim that direct [...]
