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?

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.   

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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.