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.
Dell + EqualLogic, Exanet, Ocarina, 3Par = What?
August 17, 2010 By Leave a Comment
The storage industry got a lot more competitive this morning, as Dell announced plans to buy 3Par. This is the latest round in a well-established race for the enterprise storage dollar, challenging superpower (and Dell partner) EMC in the high-end SAN space. What does this acquisition say about the industry as a whole? Where are we headed?
The Stack Wars Have Begun!
April 19, 2010 By 9 Comments
Just as public cloud computing is beginning to catch on, the enterprise data center world has been shaken up by the biggest IT product vendors. Rather than sit back and watch their wares commoditized, companies like Cisco, EMC, HP, and now HDS are stepping up to the plate with integrated “stacks” that include server, storage, networking, and management software. The next-layer players, VMware and Microsoft in particular, are joining hands, too, eager to support these stacks. To paraphrase the wise Jedi master, Yoda, “cloudy, the future is.” So, the stack wars have begun!
HP StorageWorks Tech Day: Day 1
March 31, 2010 By Leave a Comment
New HP P2000 and P4000 Storage Arrays
February 16, 2010 By Leave a Comment
Enterprise Computing: Is There Any Point Buying From EMC?
December 9, 2009 By 4 Comments
Yesterday, EMC announced Fully Automated Storage Tiering (FAST), their much hyped and much anticipated storage feature enabling the automated moving of data between tiers of storage on a policy basis. However the most notable missing feature in the EMC announcement was the lack of support for legacy DMX-3 and DMX-4 platforms. This to me sends [...]
HP Acquires Scale-Out NAS Maker, IBRIX
July 17, 2009 By 1 Comment
HP woke up the IT world this morning by announcing their acquisition of IBRIX, a maker of scale-out file servers. The purchase will presumably be integrated with HP’s existing clustered file system technology acquired with PolyServe in 2007. The move demonstrates HP’s commitment to continue to be a major player in the enterprise storage market.
HP’s RAID 6 (ADG – Advanced Data Guarding)
February 18, 2009 By Leave a Comment
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Storage Automation
February 9, 2009 By Leave a Comment
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.