Wikibon Blog

Data Center Madness

It’s been an interesting first quarter. Cisco and HP dumping on each other last month, 3PAR turns up the heat in automated storage tiering and then HP’s two-day analyst event in March, followed up by EMC’s grand vision for federated storage and then LSI’s analyst event in NYC. Next week is Iron Mountain in Boston where we’ll hear about the Mimosa acquisition. Then it’s SNW in April which will bring a ton of announcements. 

LSI in the Big Apple

Why does LSI exist? In 2007, Bill Zeitler, former head of IBM’s Systems and Technology business said something to me that summed it up perfectly: “Industry revenue is growing at 9% and R&D spending is growing at 12%– we can’t afford to fund everything.”Bill retired a couple of years ago and the numbers have obviously changed—but the pressure to focus R&D dollars hasn’t.

Wow - HP Finally Gets It

HP is finally getting its act together in storage. For years HP has talked about leveraging the systems and storage business but that vision has never materialized as a serious differentiator. Guess what? It’s finally happening; And there’s an added bonus, HP’s move to compete with Cisco makes it the only company on the planet that owns a robust server, storage and networking stack.

How did that happen? Here’s the simple formula:

• Hire someone (Donatelli) that understands the business and can execute

Exploting Distance as a Business Capability

Last October I wrote:

By late 2012, federated storage will be the architecture of choice for large new storage deployments. These capabilities will dramatically improve IT’s ability to respond to business needs with minimal disruptions. IT organizations should plan to aggressively adopt federated storage as it becomes commercially available.

Around that same timeframe, Nick Allen wrote a piece about Chad Sakac’s Long Distance Live vMotion demo at VMworld 2009 and asked :

So, has EMC solved the long-distance cache coherency and distributed lock management problem that has plagued the industry forever?

Security for virtualized infrastructure topped the category list of security innovation at this year’s RSA 2010 Innovation Sandbox competition.  Altor Networks, providing solutions for malware protection, VM segregation, and compliance for VIS took the number 1 award for best innovation, business value delivered, and management team in the “American Idol” – style contest.

The Top 10 playing in the Innovation Sandbox were:

RSA 2010 Security Innovation Sandbox

The audit profession, including the education, the frameworks used in practice, certifications and tools is further behind than security when it comes to the what’s needed for the safe transition from traditional data center technologies and virtual infrastructure.  However, the realization that audit requirements, technologies, and even AaaS, or Audit as a service, are fundamental to sustaining a level of trust in virtual computing is beginning to gather steam, support, and critical thinking.

Two important developments to keep track of:

A6, CloudAudit

Check

When Dave Donatelli left  EMC last April to run HP’s infrastructure business I wrote at the time that this was another move on the chessboard– “there’s more to this match than storage; and HP just moved a pawn on the board. The question is what can the Rook now see that it couldn’t before?”   

At the time I wrote that the data center business has become an oligopoly where Cisco, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft and Oracle are $100B players (revenue and or market cap) and any move they make has an impact that ripples through the industry. I’m putting VMware and EMC in that mix too given the momentum that VMware has.