Before Google could even take to the stage to announce their new “Google Storage for Developers” cloud storage offering in their I/O conference keynote, Amazon hit back with a new low-cost “Reduced Redundancy Storage” option for S3. The titans are at war, and cloud storage is the new battle ground. But what was really announced? And should you care?

Defining Durability

Amazon begins their RRS rollout with an apt discussion of durability. To quote:

Let’s define durability (with respect to an object stored in S3) as the probability that the object will remain intact and accessible after a period of one year. 100% durability would mean that there’s no possible way for the object to be lost, 90% durability would mean that there’s a 1-in-10 chance, and so forth.

I like this turn of phrase, and encourage other storage vendors to consider it as well. It’s especially appropriate for a discussion of public cloud storage, since the traditional SLA (“availability”) relies on many systems between data and application. There are many failure scenarios that can result in a loss of availability without any risk of data loss, and Amazon is wise to make the distinction here.

Also see Amazon CTO Werner Vogels’ discussion of S3 durability

Amazon claims that “the durability of an object stored in Amazon S3 is 99.999999999%. If you store 10,000 objects with us, on average we may lose one of them every 10 million years or so. This storage is designed in such a way that we can sustain the concurrent loss of data in two separate storage facilities.” That’s eleven nines – a Very Large Number. RRS changes this: “Objects stored using RRS have a durability of 99.99%, or four 9’s. If you store 10,000 objects with us, on average we may lose one of them every year. RRS is designed to sustain the loss of data in a single facility.” Eleven nines remains the default for data written to S3, but an API call can set the REDUCED_REDUNDANCY flag on demand.

The idea is that some data can be regenerated or simply requires less “durability”. The value for the customer is reduced cost: RRS is 1/3 cheaper than regular S3 storage at $0.10 per GB per month to start, a substantial discount designed to counter Google’s forthcoming offering.

Stephen’s Stance

Amazon S3 RRS is a risky move, but the company handled the announcement exactly right. Rather than focusing on the reduction in cost, they turned the spotlight to the built-in reliability of their existing offering. Yet it’s a fact that not all data is equal, and much could be stored with less durability and at a lower price, and Amazon’s new option enables this. The company also made the right move by making reduced-reliability an opt-in option. RRS is a good move for Amazon, and I expect competitors (Google, Rackspace, etc) to follow.

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2010. | Amazon Redefines Durability with Reduced Reliability Storage (RRS)
Read more posts categorized as Cloud Computing, Storage

Making a list? Who's naughty and who's nice?

Who’s naughty and who’s nice? The average computer geek of the last decade would have placed Microsoft atop the naughty list. The average corporate IT manager’s nice list probably wouldn’t have included EMC and Oracle. Yet Google, Apple, Sun, HP and even IBM don’t have this frequent negativity directed towards them. What’s the difference between naughty and nice when it comes to IT companies? I’ve heard complaints of the greed and arrogance of these companies, though their boosters would point out that it’s easy to envy the success of others.

But things are changing. Microsoft has a bona fide hit on their hands, with Windows 7, Xbox, and Bing re-introducing the company to new customers that don’t harbor old grudges. Inside corporate IT, the halo cast by VMware seems to highlight the re-energized EMC in much the same way. With their competition taking dents in the ongoing battles, Microsoft and EMC just don’t look so bad anymore.

Microsoft: Hearts and Minds

The blooms in many Microsoft competitors’ rose gardens seem to be fading. With “do no evil” Google only finding lucre in the filthy advertising business and the naughtiness of “evil as we wanna be” Apple peaking, Microsoft’s Internet and consumer efforts are starting to seem downright approachable. That’s one way to change your image: Wait for your competitors to catch up and your customers will catch on. The geek parade still loves Google and Apple, but their ambitious drive and massive revenue are distasteful to many.

Every time I write about Apple products, at least one credible geek has to call me out for being a fanboy. The core of their arguments seem to combine scorn for friendly interfaces and pretty hardware, a distaste for Apple’s huge profit margins, and a belief that the faithful wear Apple-tinted glasses when looking at alternatives. I guess Apple users look like a bunch of sissies to the more manly geeks in the audience.

In fact, it’s become something of a badge of pride to stick by Microsoft, even as the UNIX weenies and Apple-heads wander off. They ask “who’s got the most market share in desktops and servers?” Windows Vista’s appetite for hardware and unstable nature might have challenged them, but the quick, slick, solid Windows 7 has reaffirmed their faith. And they know that those who throw stones at Windows Server are living in the past: Ridiculous naming aside, Windows Server 2008 R2 is every bit as great in the data center as Windows 7 is on the desktop.

But there’s more to Microsoft than Windows. Even ardent Microsoft haters have to admit Bing is solid, functional, and even clever. Indeed, Microsoft has taken the search battle right to Google and is working hard to innovate past their rival. Xbox has a solid beachhead in the gaming world, challenging successful and innovative products from Nintendo and Sony. Azure puts a developer-friendly face on the nascent cloud computing market and is anything but a “me-too” to Amazon EC2 and VMware. Barring any major product or PR disasters, Microsoft is well on the way to renovating their sagging corporate image.

EMC: Keeping It Real

EMC is leaving the little storage market behind and doesn't look as big and scary in the larger IT world

What Microsoft is to average computer users, EMC is to enterprise data storage folks. No one denies that they make great products, and have dominated the market for two decades. Although they don’t have the massive share Microsoft has in the desktop OS market, no one comes close to EMC in enterprise storage. They spent the last decade steadily growing to control 25% of the market leaving a wealth of competitors fighting it out far below.

Through all this growth, however, EMC has never been loved by their customers. I’ve known literally dozens of IT shops who refused to buy from EMC, even though the sleazy sales tactics that turned them off (and indeed the sales reps themselves) are reportedly long gone from the company. Like Microsoft, EMC hasn’t softened its approach as much as their competitors have hardened theirs. With the market getting tougher, the tough guy doesn’t look so bad anymore.

I hear that things have improved inside the company, too. All giant corporations have their share of intrigue, politics, and dead weight, and EMC is certainly no exception. But the reports I hear from insiders are positive, and improving all the time. EMC is making some smart moves, giving acquisitions the independence to thrive and building revenue outside their enterprise storage base. Hiring great folks like Scott Lowe, Christopher Kusek, and Ed Saipetch doesn’t hurt, either.

Customers seem to be sensing a change, too. It’s hard to hate VMware, RSA, Legato, and the rest of EMC all at once, though some have grudges against two or three. EMC is successfully diversifying into other areas of information technology. Like Microsoft, EMC’s new customers never learned the old stereotypes. Now that they’re swimming in a much larger pond, EMC looks neither as big or as bad as it once did.

You Will Decide

Are EMC and Microsoft really turning the corner? We will all know in a few years. If the geeks of tomorrow no longer resent their success and hold past mistakes against them, both companies could enter a renaissance not only of credibility but of business success.

Santa Claus image: Public domain from Project Gutenberg

Gorilla image: public domain from Pearson Scott Foresman

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2010. |
Are Microsoft and EMC beginning a renaissance of geek respect?


This post was categorized as Apple, Computer history, Enterprise storage, Gestalt IT, Personal, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you’d like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2010. | Are Microsoft and EMC beginning a renaissance of geek respect?
Read more posts categorized as Server Virtualization, Storage

In order for FAST to work, it needs to gather and react to a lot of information from the array itself. In fact for FAST to be truly useful, it needs to gather, react and store alot of information about what is going on the array.

Take a typical corporate accounting application; most of the time it can be pretty quiet and non-performance intensive but at certain times of the year, it will be a very intensive workload. During these times, you might want it all to be on the fastest, most performant tier; now FAST will react to a sudden increase in workload and move the application when it sees the demand increase but will FAST be able to move this quickly enough? So perhaps, we need to give the array some hints as to when to prime the load?

These sort of peaks are very predictable and we know when they will happen but not all peaks are quite as predictable; or at least we don’t think they are. FAST will be gathering stats all the time and by analysing this data; it might be able to do the predictive analysis a lot quicker and spot things that we can’t or at least don’t have the time for. It may pick up on relationships between applications, application X runs hot at a certain time which causes application Y to become busy at some period later; for example, certain types of activity may cause a reporting job to be run at a later date.

You see from our storage infrastructure, we can start to gather a lot of information about our whole estate. But EMC could go further, they have things like nLayers and Smarts to leverage; they could start to pull information from VMware and do a whole lot of analysis on this. NetApp have SanScreen; HP have a zillion tools as do IBM.

Once you’ve got that information, you need to start turning that into something the business understands so that you can sit with the business and do what-if modelling, show conflicts and clashes where multiple services are demanding the same high-performance infrastructure at the same time. Perhaps the business owner needs to prioritise or purchase more infrastructure. Perhaps they need less, perhaps they can shift some stuff into the Public Cloud and just pull it back when they need too.

So FAST could be rather more than just a way optimising your storage infrastructure; if you data-mine this in the same way Google data-mine statistics, you can find out a lot of stuff which you didn’t realise and probably completely change the way you look at your infrastructure.

So when EMC talk about FAST being a foundational technology, they aren’t wrong…actually, like Virtual Provisioning, it is so important….it should be Free! Actually they could fund this by getting rid of half their account managers; FAST could literally sell itself.

© Martin for Gestalt IT, 2009. | Google for the Infrastructure
Read more posts categorized as Storage

I am spending a few weeks examining the truths and fictions that bind our industry together. Let’s start with one of my favorite old canards: That enterprise storage must be overpriced because bare disk drives are so cheap.

I have seen this straw man argument set up by so many throughout my career that it has become laughably predictable. Every time a new high or low point is set for enterprise storage cost, someone is there pointing out that a bunch of disk drives is vastly cheaper. Let’s call this the Dumb Disk Fallacy: Only a fool would claim that dumb disks are comparable to enterprise storage.

Are we supposed to be surprised that raw materials make up such a small percent of the cost of an integrated system? One can prepare a delicious meal at home using supermarket-bought ingredients for a quarter the cost of a restaurant outing. A single glass of wine at a bar often costs as much as a whole bottle at the store, yet the restaurant industry is holding on even through a recession.

Lack of expertise only one factor: Even one who can not whip up a soufflé can certainly boil some spaghetti, warm up some sauce, and pour a glass of Chianti! Convenience is another driver, since many lack the time required to shop and cook. But there are other benefits as well: Dining out is a social activity and restaurant meals allow us to sample unfamiliar cuisine. Clearly, there are many reasons for one to pay far more for a finished product than for the ingredients it contains.

The same is true of enterprise storage. Although they make up a significant proportion of the bulk of a given storage array, hard disk drives are often a small element in the overall cost. One does not price a salad by its lettuce or a lasagne by its pasta, after all. Modern enterprise storage systems are defined their capabilities, ranging from performance to reliability to flexibility. Indeed, core components like disk drives and processors have long since been commoditized, and many vendors are leveraging much larger-scale commodity subsystems these days. The day will soon come when major vendors will differentiate entire product lines based solely on the software they run.

Now, it is possible to build very cheap storage systems, and the price of these can even approach the raw disk cost. But finished storage systems will never be as cheap as just a bunch of disks (JBOD, for newbies), because of the following:

1. Disk arrays include lots of hardware components beyond disk drives – chassis, power supplies, controllers (complete with CPUs, RAM, etc), and cabling and connectors
2. Data must be protected using extra disk capacity for parity, mirrors, snapshots, and spares
3. Arrays include software to orchestrate the whole operation; even free software requires development, testing, and integration
4. Support and maintenance contracts are required for any production system
5. Supporting software is often a requirement, too, for configuration, operation, management, and integration with servers and applications
6. The companies selling the array deserve a bit of profit or they’ll go out of business and your support contract won’t be worth much
7. Don’t forget utilization: A half-empty disk costs twice as much as a full one, and it is awfully hard to make use of 100% of available capacity without a storage network of some kind

So how close to “dumb disk” can a production storage system get? Google’s is probably the closest: They use custom server boards, custom chassis, custom power supplies, custom racks, and low-end disk drives to keep hardware costs at a minimum; the entire thing is composed of commodity components, too; the array software is all written and supported in-house for very low overhead; the capacity is very highly utilized due to the inherent flexibility of the applications they support. So Google has attacked every one of these areas in an effort to drive out costs. But would it really be practical for folks other than Google to invent, construct, and run their own storage system?

Instead of dreaming about building our own storage solution, let’s look at the spectrum of storage available to the modern enterprise IT shop:

1. Bare disk drives are widely available with a handful of companies producing just a few different models. The idiosyncracies of these are interesting to some, but a hard disk drive is useless alone
2. Direct-attached storage offerings range from single-drive USB-connected external disks to multi-drive racks, yet these too are useless without a server to drive them. These normally lack any sort of intelligence or advanced features and quite a bit of effort is required to ensure acceptable levels of performance or reliability. But so-called JBOD or DAS storage can be incredibly cheap to purchase.
3. True storage arrays range from the most basic home NAS boxes to the most advanced enterprise systems. All are purchased primarily for their features, with price tags merely differentiating between competitive offerings. For this reason, storage developers focus the vast majority of their engineering, sales, and marketing efforts on advanced capabilities rather than per-GB cost.
4. Storage as a service is a different realm entirely. Although advances in manageability and utilization and commoditization of hardware allow today’s cloud storage offerings to be offered at very attractive per-GB price points, low cost is merely a welcome side benefit. Engineering and support resources focus almost entirely on enhancing user experience, while hardware is small component of the cost of delivering enterprise-class storage as a managed service.

I’m not an apologist for overpriced enterprise storage, but I recognize that arrays are more than just a collection of disks. I look forward to the day when we finally dispense with the dumb disk fallacy and focus instead on the real value added by enterprise storage innovation. But the realist in me knows that this straw man will continue raising his head for some time to come. I am sure that developments like EMC’s unified CLARiiON and Symmetrix hardware platform, the spread of software appliances on commodity server hardware, and excellent free storage software like Nexenta and FreeNAS will only add fuel to the fire. Therefore I entreat you, dear reader: Do not succumb and pitch disk that is dumb!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2009. |
The Dumb Disk Fallacy


This post was categorized as Computer history, Enterprise storage, Gestalt IT, Terabyte home. Each of my categories has its own feed if you’d like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2009. | The Dumb Disk Fallacy
Read more posts categorized as Server Virtualization, Storage

Championing “open” and calling for standards has become the first stalling action by late-movers in technology spaces. They see opportunity passing by and try to hold back progress and FUD the market by yelling about proprietary solutions, vendor lock-in, and a lack of standards. Many well-intentioned IT folks follow along: After all, who doesn’t want openness, standardization, and interoperability?

But cloud services are different. Seriously! Cloud services don’t need standards because:

1. Cloud services are still rapidly evolving – No one knows how they will look in a year, let alone a decade, and a premature standard will be worthless. Similarly, it’s not at all clear what use cases will eventually win out, and usage should drive interfaces, not the other way around.
2. Cloud services are many and varied – It’s incredibly hard to come up with a reasonably-complete standard programming API or management platform when each vendor’s offering is radically different. Standards must follow the 80/20 rule, but today’s cloud offerings are only about 20% similar.
3. (Real) cloud systems are open already – The whole point of the public cloud is to leverage existing open standards for access (IP/HTTP) and any worthwhile service already has a freely-usable REST-like API. Cloud services are engineered to be programmable and open, so the only lock-in is in how you use the cloud.

We can’t even agree on terminology at this point. Is data storage as a service DaaS (as SNIA says) or STaaS (as NetApp says)? How do you define public, private, and hybrid cloud? And what is cloud anyway? Cloud computing is not a war, it’s a fantastically exciting race to deliver value!

Open for Business

I’d like to return for a moment to that last point: The key element I’ve seen in most interesting cloudy products is programmability. Service providers publish API documents outlining the inputs, processing, and outputs for their systems and developers and end users create applications that leverage these. The best of these APIs use the concept of REST, delivering services through extremely simple and self-contained HTTP calls. This barely even rises to the level of software coding (and thus isn’t a true API) and is the hallmark of the cloud.

These systems are wide open: You can explore their interfaces, discovering new ways to use the them that were never intended. The same process accompanies all Internet systems, from RSS and Atom to Yahoo Finance. Just as one can rapidly migrate from Yahoo to Google by substituting a few URLs and parameters, so too can one move between cloud platforms.

Note that certain cloud systems lend themselves more to this kind of mobility. Once cannot move virtual machines from Amazon EC2 to Rackspace or Terremark because the underlying hypervisor technology is different. But even here companies like RightScale are stepping in to enable mobility.

When it comes to cloud storage services, the major players’ interfaces are open enough that migrating data in and out is simply a matter of performance: Read from this one, write to that one, and wait until the process is done. I am not a programmer and yet I was able to port an application from S3 to Nirvanix in just a few hours using only the respective API documentation. Interfaces like CloudLoop can also be leveraged to ease the movement of data.

Standards When?

Cloud services will eventually settle down and be standardized. I expect a workable cross-platform API for RESTful cloud storage within 24 months, for example. And one expects that the management of cloud compute instances will pass through a consistent and stable interface in that same timeframe. But these will develop as a natural part of the evolution of the systems themselves, not through some artificial “build it and they will come” standardization process.

There is nothing wrong with big companies sending their representatives to SNIA and DMTF meetings to talk about standardization. In fact, this is a great way to discuss ideas and begin to orient the industry. But the time for standards has not yet come, and users of cloud services have no need to wait for them. In fact, waiting for a standard will just prolong the maturation of cloud services, since real-world applications are the external pressure that forces evolutionary selection. Amazon would never have created their virtual private cloud (VPC) capability without customer input, and they will never perfect this capability if they rely only on pundits, bloggers, and product marketers.

Even when standards do appear, they will not eliminate per-solution APIs. Cloud service providers will continue to explore new concepts, and these will appear first in “proprietary” interfaces. Perhaps they will use entirely unique calls, or perhaps they will leverage reserved or unassigned sections of the standard, but innovation will continue. Witness the radical changes in HTML versions to date, the additions to CSS, and the wide world of browser plugins.

So we don’t need cloud standards yet. They will come, whether artificially pushed by committees or evolving through use, but only useful standards will survive. Isn’t that just how it should be?

Note: I am employed by Nirvanix, a cloud managed storage service provider, providing independent cloud strategy advice as Director of Consulting. Although this article was not created for my employer and is not intended to reflect their views, my perceptions are obviously colored by my daily work.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2009. |
We Don’t Need Cloud Standards (Yet)


This post was categorized as Computer history, Enterprise storage, Gestalt IT, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you’d like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2009. | We Don’t Need Cloud Standards (Yet)
Read more posts categorized as Cloud Computing, Featured, Server Virtualization, Storage

VDI has gained momentum. VMware, Citrix, and Microsoft all boast about the availability of an enterprise ready virtual desktop management solution. Storage technologies such as thin provisioning, deduplication, and rapid cloning are being perfected and optimized and will lower the total cost of ownership for VDI. 64 bit Hardware with virtualization assist technologies on host servers has enabled record setting ratios of supported users. It seems that OS licensing models formerly based on physical hardware are slowly morphing to support virtualized environments. But, in my opinion, there is still a major hurdle to the enterprise’s wide spread acceptance of VDI on a platform other than Windows.

Is enterprise business really ready to migrate the majority of their user applications and data to Linux, the web, or even the Cloud? For Chrome OS to challenge Microsoft for seats in the enterprise, this shift will have to happen, and it will have to be publicly reported as highly successfully and common. Are web based applications and software as a service (Saas) alternatives ready to handle main stream business services like email and office collaboration? More importantly, are enterprise IT departments ready to allow cloud providers to run, protect, and store their business critical applications and data? When that happens the OS on the desktop becomes less important. The browser will become the only application of importance.

Until then, Windows will continue to be the most popular desktop OS simply because it runs the most popular applications needed by business today. Therefore, the typical VDI solution in the immediate future will continue to consist of Windows VMs. Microsoft’s decision to strip down the bloat and replace Vista with Windows 7 was a wise move, and probably has ensured Microsoft’s position as the desktop market leader for many more years to come.

That’s why it more important to think about what will the users use to connect to those virtual desktops. Yes, VMware, and the competition, is developing their own desktop hypervisor OS. VMware calls their work in progress CVP (Client Virtualization Platform), but is VMware’s CVP (for example) really going to be able to run on all modern notebooks and desktops? To be specific, on the Lenovo T400 I am using to write this, will a VMware client hypervisor allow all of the volume buttons, wifi adapter controls, microphone, blue tooth, and other miscellaneous hardware features to work properly? What about all the other manufacturers of notebooks, netbooks, and desktops with their different models and hardware configurations too? This is where all the work put in to a modern Linux distribution appears to have the advantage. Otherwise, does the future client hypervisors requiring their own specialized hardware really sound appealing? Does expecting users to use today’s notebooks without the full functionality sound realistic?

Assuming Google’s product will be most like a Linux distribution, it seems to me that Google’s best bet for mass adoption of the Chrome OS would be to make sure that enterprises can count on installing VMware’s View Client (and the competition’s VDI clients as well). The real corporate desktop will still have to be a Windows virtual machine that can be synced between the data center and the client OS and even used offline. Eventually, as cloud based application replacements emerge in the future, Google’s OS could become more of a direct competitor/replacement to Microsoft’s OS.

© Rich for Gestalt IT, 2009. | VMware Will Virtualize Google Chrome, But Will Chrome Run VMware For VDI?
Read more posts categorized as Desktop, Featured

Since no company (except perhaps Salesforce.com) derives 100% of its revenues from cloud computing at this point, none can be called true cloud computing companies. But we can attempt to determine to what extent each has jumped into the market.

One might also include 3PAR, Compellent, NetApp, Cisco, HP, Dell, and other vendors of hardware used by cloud service providers. Others that might be included include Red Hat, Novell, Unisys, and Symantec.

Please leave a comment below if you have any suggestions. I envision this becoming a living list (perhaps a Wiki) in the future.

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2009. | The Public Corporate Face of Cloud Computing
Read more posts categorized as Cloud Computing, Exclusive, Featured, Top Story

Sun is leveraging the assets they acquired from Q-layer earlier this year on top of OpenSolaris, MySQL, ZFS, and just about everything else in their arsenal to offer their own virtual data center (VDC) strategy. The Sun Cloud will be a private (inside the firewall) environment offering mobility of virtual machines. Q-layer had partnerships with both VMware and Microsoft and functioned with Windows, OpenSolaris, and Linux, suggesting that this will be quite a full-featured offering. Suddenly Sun’s free OpenSolaris offering on Amazon EC2 makes a lot more sense – it provides a gateway to take virtual computing business from the Bezos team!

One very nifty angle Sun is taking is enabling VirtualBox system images to be saved to (and presumably run in) their cloud. I wonder about monetization, since VirtualBox is more of a desktop virtualization system than VMware ESX and Microsoft Hyper-V, but the prospect of clicking “Upload to Cloud” is intriguing! OpenOffice will also allow cloud storage, a foil to Google Apps.

The Sun Cloud also includes a managed storage service. Sun apparently has three storage protocols: A proprietary Sun Cloud Storage API, WebDAV, and an object API likely leveraging Amazon’s AWS. The company claims that they are API-compatible with AWS, allowing applications written with Amazon in mind to be easily ported to their cloud storage service.

One key point to consider with all of this cloud talk, however, is how prepared each company is to support enterprise computing needs. Long-term viability depends on paying customers, and only the largest systems can attract enough end-user nickels and dimes to survive. Enterprise solutions are where the real money is, and questions remain about how prepared companies like Amazon, Google, and Rackspace are to support the needs of corporate users.

There are really three cloud markets: Shared clouds for small developers and enterprise customers and private cloud systems. Amazon was strong from the start with the little guys, Web 2.0 startups and end-user services like Jungle Disk, and Rackspace/Mosso and Google are challenging them in this space. Sun’s focus on AWS compatibility and VirtualBox suggests that they plan to play in this sandbox.

But the enterprise cloud is another matter entirely. Nirvanix stands strong in shared managed storage services, racking up win after win with big customers. EMC, VMware, Microsoft and others are positioning themselves as private alternatives in this space. Will Sun try to compete here, too? They are certainly talking about private clouds and the virtual data center, but there is a serious risk that they will lose focus trying to take on too many roles, and enterprise users won’t tolerate poor pre- and post-sales support! 

You might also want to read these other posts…

• EMC Atmos Versus VMware VDC-OS: Will The Real Cloud Strategy Please Stand Up?
• Top Ten Coolest Enterprise Storage Flops
• Granularity: The Hidden Challenge of Storage Management
• VMware Virtual Datacenter Operating System: Heavyweight or Hot Air?

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2009. | Sun Launches Their Own Cloud, But For Which Market?
Read more posts categorized as All, Cloud Computing, Featured, Server Virtualization, Storage