Symantec have been looking at why customers are not going “the last mile” with virtualisation. Why are customers not deploying their Tier 1 applications on their virtual platforms? Symantec’s view on this was that customers still have issues with application level failure within guest VM’s. This product has been designed to fill that void and at present is a product with no real competitors.

Today is the (a?) day of reckoning in the 3Par saga, with Dell widely expected to make a counter-offer higher than HP’s bid. But this mega deal, like the Data Domain war before it, sends a strong signal to the enterprise IT world: It’s open season on data storage companies! But the rising superpowers are also likely looking at networking as an area of expansion. The game is afoot!

The ongoing battle for 3Par by HP & Dell tells us much more about the state of the IT Industry than just the desires of two companies to acquire some interesting storage tech. It signals an acceptance that storage is a key feature in the future direction of the IT industry – more important than networking and almost as important as the virtualisation platform itself.

After years spent focusing on personal technology, businesses are increasingly turning back to the enterprise. The corporate IT market is much more dynamic and competitive, with a few very large “superpower” companies discovering their power to drive purchasing decisions. If a supplier can create an integrated “stack” of hardware and software, they can push product purchases that might otherwise be overlooked or postponed. This is the main reason that enterprise IT acquisitions work so well: Where a small company must fight to sell their product, a large one can hitch it to a much more strategic sale and have it pulled along.

This week’s Tech Field Day roundtable discussion is an audio chat on the subject of Symantec’s VMworld-related announcements. This discussion occurred prior to the official announcement of these three products and was part of our joint effort to support VMworld, including Symantec’s sponsorship of our “Get Away to VMworld” contest.

Dell has offered to buy 3PAR for about $1.1 billion. So, a number of my customers have called and emailed me asking what this all means? They want to know how I view the addition of 3PAR to Dell’s storage portfolio? What does this mean for the storage industry, and should they seriously start/stop looking at 3PAR? What about all this discussion about monolithic vs. modular storage? Is 3PAR really Tier-1 storage?

When we announced our “Get Away to VMworld” contest, we knew it would be popular. But we had no idea that it would spark interest from so many people! We are overwhelmed by the response, with more than 70 entries, and by the support from our friends at Symantec, Xsigo, Zetta, and Veeam. It has been so successful, many are asking us to do it again for future shows, and not just VMworld!

I’ve twice posted now on Data ONTAP 8.0 shortcomings and this evening I did a little more research with the IBM version of Netapp’s hardware, the N-Series products. Fortunately, IBM are slightly more generous and informative in their documentation than Netapp and this document (freely available online) provides more background information on the “DOT8″ transition process. So, I’ve tried to produce a more in-depth objective view of the steps to move to “DOT8″. Firstly the following diagram provides a clue as to how Data ONTAP has migrated to the current release.