Nothing Beats Meeting In Person

The Internet is responsible for the demise of many “meatspace” industries, from magazine publishing to CD sales, but there are some things it’ll never do: No matter how much time you spend interacting online, meeting in person is something else entirely. I’m not trying to advocate a return to the old world of tech conferences and user groups. Rather, I envision a new breed of connected events that reinforce online communities with real face-to-face communication.

EMC Mixes Avamar Into Iomega ix12-300r

While getting some hands-on time with Iomega’s new 12-drive storage array, I spotted an exciting but unannounced feature: The ix12-300r includes native Avamar backup client! It also includes two PCI Express slots, bringing up intriguing possibilities for future expansion.

EMC’s Tough Road to the Post-Infrastructure Future

EMC is the 800 lb gorilla of the enterprise storage industry, but the company has much bigger plans. Although CEO Joe Tucci kicked off his keynote by claiming “We are an infrastructure company and proud of it,” EMC’s ambitions must go way beyond IT infrastructure. Each acquisition and strategy announcement is an attempt by EMC adapt to a fundamentally-transformed enterprise IT world.

EMC VPLEX: New Device or Future Array?

In VPLEX, do we see the future of EMC storage? Or more accurately, do we see the future of Symmetrix? Is it the beginning of the end for Symmetrix and more importantly, Enginuity. The final break from the past?

STEC Spills the Beans on ZeusRAM SSD

STEC may not have been quite ready to reveal their next-generation ZeusRAM solid-state disk (SSD), but they are demonstrating it anyway at EMC World in Boston this week. The ZeusRAM is a fundamentally different animal from the existing ZeusIOPS drive in one critical way: Rather than using flash memory for primary data storage, the ZeusRAM uses DRAM. This improves reliability and longevity and ought to raise the bar on performance as well.

Bedtime Reading – EMC’s ISM Book

Whether your using iSCSI, FC SAN, NFS or even local storage, it’s crucial to make sure you have your storage set up correctly to get the best performance, reliability and availability for your data. Fortunately I was given a copy of EMC’s book; Information, Storage And Management.

Lessons From the Cloud Computing Conference and Expo Prague 2009

What is the cloud? What will become of it? I spent May 17 and 18 in Prague at the Sys-Con Cloud Computing Conference and Expo exploring these questions with some of the smartest cloud-focused folks in Europe. The consensus: The IT world is changing and remote managed services are a big part of it. Another discovery: [...]