Chuck's Blog

Winds Of Change

I really enjoy meeting customers.  However, not every customer interaction is sunshine and lollipops. 

Sometimes, the interactions can be tense at the beginning, but result in an extremely productive discussion.

I had one of those today, and -- as I thought about it -- I realized I'm starting to see this particular situation more often.  It's a harbinger of things to come.

Element Management vs. Service Orchestration

One continual theme that comes up around any strategic discussion of fully virtualized environments and private clouds is management.

"There aren't any tools!". 
"There are too many tools!". 
"The tools don't work the way I do!"

So what's going on here?

Getting Comfortable With Oversubscription

It's a key concept in getting any sort of shared resource efficiency.  We see it everywhere we look in our daily lives.

But as we talk about IT strategies, private cloud and fully virtualized environments, one of the biggest stumbling blocks I'm encountering is the idea of intentionally pushing oversubscription of IT infrastructure resources -- servers and storage.

And that's going to have to change, I think.

Barriers To Private Cloud Adoption

I've must have had the private cloud discussion well over a hundred times with customers.

Begin to fully virtualize your environment

Learn to manage it more like a cloud, and less like a data center from 1989.

Start to consider the strategic implications of the new choices you now have -- everything from dynamic federation of resources to a bring-your-own-laptop program.

Mostly, it's gone pretty well.  Far better, in fact, than any other discussion I've had with customers -- ever.

And I'm starting to see more and more consistency regarding the structural barriers to private cloud adoption by enterprise IT groups.

The Future Is Here

Those of us who speak on IT topics often find ourselves waxing poetic about the future of technology, or the future of the data center, or something similar.

We wave our hands, and talk about what could be.

What happens when the future is here?

Do we immediately acknowledge that entirely new things are possible and set off in new directions, or do we as human beings take a considerable period to adapt to our new circumstances?

For the last few months, I've been focused almost entirely on private cloud concepts, and the alliance of VMware, Cisco and EMC that has formed to accelerate the adoption of these fully virtualized IT environments that form the basis of private clouds.

I don't think anyone is really arguing that much with what I'm saying.  But changing our thinking and our actions is going to take a while, it seems ...

The Limitations Of (Storage) Models

Memes come and go in this industry. 

One popular one that's making the rounds is the Doeswijk Data Model, as described by my esteemed colleague and competitor Hu Yoshida over at HDS.

Now, I don't have problems with simple models to illustrate a concept or two, but every model (and analogy!) has its limitations.

In this case, I've now started to see a few people use this model as a basis for creating their overall storage strategy, and the results -- well -- haven't been pretty.

I do want to thank Hu for sharing the model.  And while I want to praise its strengths, I also want to highlight a few key intellectual flaws that can lead you astray if you're not careful.

Storage Made Simple?

Ever have to explain this storage stuff to someone who doesn't really have a background in it?

I find myself speaking to all sorts of people these days, including more and more that are relatively new to all of this.   One example is at press events -- there are people who follow these topics closely, and those that are relative newcomers.

The first few times I tried to explain the wide world of storage to an outsider, I'm afraid I made a terrible mess of everything, and ended up leaving people more confused as a result!

As a result, I've been searching for a quick way to explain to people why storage is such an interesting topic to so many people.  I've sketched out some of the key ideas below.

Let me know how I did?

EMC Takes Atmos Storage OnLine

Perhaps the first big announcement to come out of EMC World is the twin combination of the new Atmos OnLine service, as well as AT&T's new Synaptic Storage as a Service based on Atmos.

While the new services and capabilities are interesting in their own right, I think they're emblematic of certain trends we'll inevitably see more of in the future.

And that's worth discussing ...

Oracle Wins Virtual Iron, Customers Lose

Sometimes you see things in this industry that make you shake your head and wonder.

Such is the situation with Oracle's recent acquisition of Virtual Iron. 

Put in the context of other recent activities, the picture is crystal clear: it appears that Oracle intends to use their market power with databases to force customers to consider their soon-to-be-announced virtualization stack.

And, from a customer perspective, this will not be a good thing.

Accelerating TTV For VMware

Sorry to lay YAA (yet another acronym) on you -- this one stands for Time To Value. 

How quickly can a customer get to "good" and start seeing the benefits?

If you're in the IT vendor business, sooner or later you start taking this topic very seriously, not only for your own products, but also how they work with other parts of the ecosystem.

And since the potential customer value of fully virtualized solution is very great indeed, this is turning out to be a very popular topic.