Chuck's Blog

Storage And Cloud

One of the more popular questions that gets directed at me by journalists and others these days is around the above topic.

I guess since EMC does storage -- and is very active in things cloud-like -- they expect us to have some nice sound bites.

Well, I have my pre-packaged answer that's suitable for the press, but -- if you have the time and the interest -- the deeper answer is much more engaging.

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.

Business Continuity -- Virtualization Changes Everything

I haven't looped back to this thought in quite a while, but felt motivated to do so by this recent press release announcing EMC's business continuity professional services for virtualized environments.

Once again, it's another example of virtualization changing everything, including how we think about protecting against the unthinkable.

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.

Why Do I Work For EMC?

It's funny how things happen.

Joe's open letter to Data Domain employees has spontaneously triggered a number of us to share why we like to work at EMC.

First Scott Waterhouse jumped in, and then 'Zilla, and Steve is pretty clear on his motivations, and Barry is pretty clear, and Polly -- so I guess it's my turn.

And, since I'm a different sort of person, my motivations are well -- rather different.

Private Clouds and Portable User Experiences

When talking about private clouds, there's just so many interesting angles to dig into -- it ties so many different themes in IT into a consistent story that I keep getting drawn in like a moth to a flame.

Fortunately, I'm not the only one -- all of the customers I talk to are starting to get the buzz as well.  At some future point, I'll share my reasons why I think this is the case, but -- for now -- I'd like to discuss the user experience part of this discussion.

This post was triggered by a VMware news item describing how health care professionals can use VMware View to create a "follow me" user experience across thin clients, laptops, desktops, tablets -- just about any reasonable user device.

IT gets to package up a user experience, push it to multiple devices, and manage it all centrally.

Talk about your win-win scenario!

Dear Data Domain

This morning, the twitterverse had multiple references to an open letter written by Joe Tucci (our CEO) to the employees of Data Domain.

I thought it was a nice, thoughtful touch -- consistent with how Joe tends to do things.  He thinks about people first, which is a great attribute for any CEO or leader.

For those of you who might be wondering, Joe is a "no BS" guy.  You can take him at his word. 

Personally, I'm hopeful that Data Domain ends up joining the EMC family.  It'd be a blast ...

Trying To Get The Point Across ...

For some years, EMC has been investing in EMC's Proven Solutions -- targeted at industrial-strength application deployments, EMC assembles and tests the daylights out of these combinations of products.

The customers who use them think they're absolutely great, and tell us no other vendor does this sort of qualification work.

But -- alas! -- we still haven't cracked the code on how best to effectively communicate just how much work goes into these Proven Solutions, and -- just as important -- why they're not just another "solution" that some marketing department dreamed up.

In our continual search for better ways to get the message across, the team came up with this most decidedly non-corporate video. 

Hopefully, this gets the message across a bit better  ... now, if I could just figure out what this thing is all about!

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 ...