Techvalidate: An Innovative Twist on Marketing Services
Posted by David Vellante in Wikibon on January 30th, 2010
A New Way to Automate Marketing Content Creation
I first met Brad O’Neill in 2007. I was told I should meet with him because he was one of the brightest people around. We had a number of mutual contacts from Brad’s days at Storage Networks, Inc. and as an analyst at the Teneja group and because I was just getting Wikibon off the ground I expected it would be a useful meeting.
The Future of Social Media
Posted by David Vellante in Wikibon on January 29th, 2010

What's in Store for Social Media?
I was at the BDEvent in Palo Alto this week. For those who don’t know, the BDEvent was founded by Vanessa and Greg Duplessie as a no BS forum for doing deals. Really. No users. No booths. No demo dollies. No BS. Actually there was plenty of BSing but of a different kind. At any rate, the way it works is companies address the audience in brief 15 minute segments and it’s all about who you are, what your company does, why its different and what kind of deals you want to make. Interested? Let’s talk. Not interested? That’s fine too.
New England VMware Users Group
Posted by David Vellante in Wikibon on January 27th, 2010

500 VMware Zealots Hit The Razor
Last week at Gillette Stadium in Foxboro, MA, Mike Versace and I hit the New England VMUG “Winter Warmer.” It was an excellent use of time with more than 500 practitioners (aka VMware zealots) at the show.
Some interesting themes I saw were:
*Consolidation ratios (physical to virtual) for the clients we spoke with were all over the map, but more often than not, relatively conservative at 5:1, 4:1 and often 3:1 or sometimes even less.
Optimize without Compromise – Here Comes Storwize
Posted by David Vellante in Wikibon on January 22nd, 2010

"You must admit there is a fit..."
Storwize CEO, Ed Walsh stopped by the Wikibon offices the other day with his new VP of technology strategy Steve Kenniston packing a new pitch. Wikibon got an early look and we were definitely impressed. I first learned about Storwize in late 2008 and then mid last year we had Burzin Engineer of Shopzilla on a Peer Incite along with several other practitioners, speaking about in-line data compression for primary storage.
Changing the Security Model for Virtualized Cloud Systems
Posted by David Floyer in Wikibon on January 21st, 2010

Physical->Logical Shockers
A key value proposition of both internal and external clouds is reduction in cost from shared resources. Virtualized processors, virtualized storage, virtualized CNAs (Converged Network Adapters) and Virtualized IO are all running virtual machines on commodity hardware.
However, security has its foundations on protecting real objects. An IP address is linked to a real piece of hardware, storage ports have been masked or separated, and processors dedicated to specific sensitive workloads. Security products are often linked to specific hardware, as in encryption of data at rest, encryption of network traffic, and encryption of tapes. If the links between these technologies is physical (e.g., no connection between server and storage) or a well understood logical separation (e.g., LUN masking) then the security gurus can be persuaded that security is auditable. When all the components of the system are shared, the security experts that I have talked to throw up their hands in horror.
What’s Really Behind Facebook’s New Privacy Policy
Posted by David Vellante in Wikibon on January 12th, 2010

Zuckerberg: People are Happy to Share
Quick question. What is Facebook? 1) a Web community or 2) a Silicon Valley company aspiring to go public?
Last month, Facebook ‘fixed’ its privacy settings; or so we thought. At the time we said: “it’s about time.” Since the announcement, Facebook has been criticized by privacy advocates and it seems the world at large is not taking too kindly to the revision.
Storage Spending in 2010 to grow by +4.6% vs. 2009’s -10.7%.

Predicting Storage Growth
Ralph Finos Consulting has updated its 2010 storage spending growth rate estimate which has been accelerated by +2.5% since last quarter. Growth is being fueled in part by the relative weakness of the US$ compared to the 1st 3Qs of 2009, but there’s some real growth happening as well.
The Q409 growth rates will still be -5% YoY collectively, but this represents a +5% improvement over the Q3 YoY comparison.
The net effect is that storage spending levels will improve in 2010, but will only return to 2008 levels in 2011. or 2012.
Xiotech CEO Sends 2010 Signals
Posted by David Vellante in Wikibon on January 8th, 2010

-..- .. --- - . -.-. ....
I received an email blast yesterday from Alan Atkinson, the new CEO of Xiotech. It was a teaser to keep the company on people’s radar screens. I wrote about Xiotech back in November after I met with Alan. As I said at the time, Atkinson would both shake up Xiotech and get more marketing value out of its big name people assets. He’s doing just that.
EMC Acquires Archer, Integration Next

EMC Acquires Archer
The latest acquisition of Archer Technologies fills a gap in EMCs solution ecosystem with a best-in-class GRC software platform. With the Archer acquisition, and the development of an integration layer across EMC products, EMC creates the opportunity to speak more definitively about its capability to provide GRC solutions for core IT assets and operations and across the enterprise. The acquisition also provides a competitive play for EMC against other infrastructure technology providers including Oracle, with its GRC Manager, Microsoft with GRC Solution Accelerators and Sharepoint, CA, with its own GRC Manager, and others interested in their piece of the still-developing GRC marketplace.
Why Microsoft’s Head is up its DAS
Posted by David Vellante in Wikibon on December 31st, 2009
I’ve been doing a bunch of research on cloud-based email lately. It started when I was speaking with a number of Wikibon members about what they’re doing with Exchange and whether Exchange 2010 is changing the way they think about deploying storage. The Exchange team in Redmond has been pushing DAS harder than I’ve ever seen. Microsoft is telling customers that it has dramatically reduced the IO load from Exchange 2003, which is true.Microsoft is now pulling out all the stops. It’s telling clients that I spoke with to think about maintenance expiring on Exchange 2003 (I think you can still buy an extended service plan through 2014 if you give up your third child) and that SAN is not a recommended configuration for 2010. Microsoft is telling customers to worry about complexity and SAN can be a single point of failure. The logic put forth is that if I lose a DAS device I only lose part of my storage whereas if my SAN goes out…all my data is inaccessible. Interesting logic I thought.




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