Silicon Angle claims that Cisco is dumping HP as a partner and it makes sense. After all, HP and Cisco have been trading blows for the last two years and progressively escalating the war. Once the Acadia / VCE project was announced, it was clear where Cisco is planning to go.

Dell picked up clustered NAS pro Exanet, finally signing the dotted line after months of speculation. The US $12 million purchase follows reports that the company was going into receivership in December after failing to repay a US $10 million loan from Kreos Capital.

I wanted to address this whole “Don Joey” thing. See, I’m not at all like this in person. I’m more like a friendly grandfather. I guess my Italian heritage makes people take me wrong.

So we got this growth problem, but there’s also an opportunity, and that opportunity is in Round Rock. How can we swing it? Simple: We got a great asset to sell off.

EMC is a storage company, right? Not anymore! Under Joe Tucci, the disk giant from Hopkinton has been diversifying rapidly, with acquisitions like VMware, Documentum, RSA, and Smarts. But is the IT world ready for EMC’s next move?

As cloud computing becomes more mainstream, investors will start looking to get in on the act. With that in mind, a friend and I began discussing which public companies were getting into the cloud computing market and to what extent. I have put together the following list, and encourage comments, suggestions, and contributions.

In case you were wondering, Cisco isn’t playing games with the Unified Computing System. Their aim is to take on IBM, HP, and Dell and become a major player in the data center server market.

Windows Storage Server is one of the most interesting products from Redmond, a specialized version of Windows Server with integrated storage target capabilities, including iSCSI, NFS, SMB, and single-instance storage (file-level deduplication). Although Windows Server 2008, with its many storage feature updates, was released last year, the updated version of Windows Storage Server was still under construction until last month. But Windows Storage Server 2008 is available to manufacturers today.

The first storage performance horseman is spindles: If you don’t have enough disk units, performance will suffer. I have been laying out storage on enterprise arrays since the dark ages, and one of the first lessons I learned was allocating data to avoid hotspots. I remember spending hours back in the 1990’s hunched over custom Excel spreadsheets trying to get my storage layout just right, balancing the workload across every available disk.