Chuck's Blog

VMware's SRM Changes The Game For Remote Recovery

OK, it's no secret, I'm a *huge* VMware fan.  They've been able to take their underlying strength in hypervisors, and move into all sorts of useful adjacent areas: desktop, software development, systems management and so on.

For quite a while, I've been tracking SRM -- Site Recovery Manager -- as another one of these VMware-based "game changers". 

And, today, it's been announced.

So why do I think this is such a big deal?

Common Criteria Isn't So Common

This post was triggered by yet another innocuous EMC press release, this one announcing that many of our platform products have been certified under the Common Criteria Information Technology Security Evaluation.

Don't know about the Common Criteria?  Wikipedia has a decent write-up on the basics, but only goes so far.

No, this is not just a federal government thing -- it's got wider applicability than you might think.

And, once again, the real story is what goes on behind the scenes ...

Data Loss Prevention -- New Thinking

I've had another "aha" moment -- actually, a whole series of them -- recently.

The first hint that something big was going on came as part of a flurry of announcements at RSA World, including this hidden gem around DLP.

It turns out that I only had a half-baked notion of what all the fuss might be about, until late last week.  I was privileged to spend some quality time with the RSA team who went through the concepts and demo'd the product.

When they were done, my head was spinning.  Not so much around the product capabilities (which were very cool, to be sure), mostly it was the new way they were approaching the problem that got me so excited.

I probably won't be able to fit in all into a reasonable-sized post, so consider this the first installment exploring a topic that I'm sure we'll all be interested in -- sooner or later.

Storage Encryption -- New Capabilities

Somewhere in the blizzard of EMC-related news this week, the pieces of an interesting story started to come together, e.g. some new thinking and capabilities around storage encryption. 

The story came out kind of piecemeal (see here and here), and I thought it'd be useful to re-assemble some of the pieces. 

Many of you are doing some form of storage or tape encryption today, or are thinking about doing it.

I think there's now a better way to do this sort of thing than there was before.

Information Governance -- An Update

Like many of you, I tend to be on the lookout for interesting trends in this industry.

No surprise, but trends come and go.  Some start out strong, but may lose steam or morph into another discussion entirely.

Others continue to gather steam until the concept becomes part of our overall fabric of thoughts and ideas.

And I think I owe you an update on "information governance". 

VDI -- The Red Hot Discussion

I've never seen anything like this in the industry.  VMware is going from strength to strength in a way that's hard for many of us to fully comprehend.

Just when you thought the server-oriented ESX party was raging, over the last 6-12 months the VDI discussion has become extremely interesting, especially to larger organizations who are seeing the potential to save money, deliver better user experiences, improve security and so on.

As a result, a number of vendors are being drawn into extremely interesting conversations around VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure), including EMC.

I thought I'd offer up a few thoughts on this, based on what I'm hearing from people.

The Future of IT (Professionals)

So, I'm occasionally having an interesting experience these days.

Very often, I'm asked to share EMC's views on what's broadly called "the future of IT".

And, in the act of doing so, we usually end up in a discussion around "the future of IT professionals".

I think this is a discussion we'll be having more often in the future.

Building The NextGen Management Brain

I fear I may have been neglectful in my blogging duties. 

I've fallen behind in a couple of areas, specifically regading a few recent developments in EMC's resource management strategy. 

Go ahead and blame me, but there's a lot to cover around EMC, and I still have my day job(s) to get done ...

So, with apologies out of the way, let's dig into a fascinating portion of EMC's portfolio -- resource management.

Have You Tamed Your Storage Beast?

One of the most frequent questions I get from EMC customers in our briefing center is "how are we doing?".

They're curious to know how well they're measuring up in managing their growing storage and information management environment as compared to other IT shops.

Now, any sort of rigorous, scientific answer is beyond my scope.  But what I can do is share with you some of the broad averages as I see it from my perspective.

And, yes, many of them think they've made real progress on taming their storage beasts.

The New (Mobile) Desktop

About two or three times a year, I have a "d'oh!" experience, one where something hits me so strongly that I wonder how I missed it.

Generally speaking, these are trends in the industry that I was only paying casual attention to, but -- suddenly -- I realized that something big was going on here, and it really mattered.

I had a "d'oh!" experience this week while travelling in Europe, visiting with a few telecommunication providers.

And I finally started to really, really grasp what this mobile thing was all about.

Maybe you already "get it", and I'm the slow one here. 

If that's the case, I apologize in advance.

Please, Not The "S" Word!

Ours is an industry that tends to overuse and abuse words more than most.

We use them too frequently, and too imprecisely to the point where they lose their ability to convey significant meaning.

And, on the list of maligned IT words, I hold a special place for the word "solution".

In our industry, it's applied to so many things, it has come to mean almost nothing.

I've come to call it the "S" word -- to let people know I consider it impolite and inappropriate to use in public unless you're willing to take the time to convey what you might mean by it.

RecoverPoint Redux

As you might know, I like to dig into parts of EMC's portfolio that I think are especially cool, and share with you what I really like about the different pieces.

Somewhere in all the activity last week, there was a major announcement around RecoverPoint, our next-gen replication platform.

Not only is RecoverPoint cool technology, but it's a cool story as well.

FCoE Gathers Steam

When I first started discussing this emerging storage networking standard, it brought out vigorous debate, not only from others in the industry, but also within EMC.

I've been quietly tracking FCoE, and -- not surprisingly -- it appears to be on its way to achieving critical mass.

And, it's not just me who's noticed the same thing.

EMC To Acquire Pi Corporation

In a world of corporate acquisitions in information technology, there are those that eventually matter, and those that are just part of the landscape.

Everyone is free to come to their own conclusions regarding this particular acquisition by EMC, but I for one see this as signaling yet another shift in the technology landscape – one whose impact probably won’t be blatantly obvious for some time.

Let me share with you why I think this isn’t your everyday acquisition …

Can You Trust Your Cloud?

The industry is all abuzz with conversations about things cloud-like these days.

Sure, EMC has added our views to the discussion in terms of technology, architecture, requirements, use cases, etc.

But there's a certain element that's going to be required for this stuff to really take off.

And that's trust.

SAP and EMC?

Saw this little gem come across the wire today, speculating on a tie-up between SAP and EMC on "web hosting services".

And, while it's very true that EMC brings a lot of value to an SAP environment, I'm not going to comment on the specifics of this article -- sorry, folks, that's beyond my pay grade ;-)

But the author did a great job tying together a number of concepts and trends into an interesting story, and I thought it'd be worthwhile to spend a bit of time and share some of the behind-the-scenes thinking here.

Information Infrastructure for DW and BI

Well, it turns out we're finding ourselves in more and more conversations with customers about what they're doing with data warehousing and business intelligence.

From wherever it started, they're now coming to the realization that this is now an important part of their landscape. 

Whether there are a few warehouses that became business critical, or the darn things are proliferating everywhere, we're now getting asked to help out on a more frequent basis.

So I thought I'd use this post to share what we're seeing, and what we're doing to help.

Information Infrastructure for SOA

I'm called on frequently to speak about a variety of topics, and -- recently -- there's been a renewed interest in infrastructure associated with SOA.

You probably know about SOA -- service-oriented architectures.  It's a (relatively) new way of thinking about how applications are designed, developed and deployed.  .

But, like anything else, anything big and hairy (like SOA) has serious infrastructure implications. 

And SOA -- at scale -- is no exception.

Seismic Shifts In Outsourcing Land

It wasn't too long ago that outsourcers were causing considerable consternation in both IT customers and vendors.

Mega-outsourcing was all the rage.  If you were a large IT organization, you took this trend very seriously, for all the right reasons.  And if you were an IT vendor like EMC, your world was very different if your customer got outsourced.

But I think that the outsourcing marketplace itself is going through some pretty massive changes.  And, as I spend more time with outsourcers, I realize that some are moving quickly towards the new reality, and other -- well -- others are moving a bit more slowly.

And, if you're an industry watcher like me, it's an interesting story for customers, vendors and outsourcers alike.

EMC Does SaaS -- Reading Between The Lines

A relatively big announcement from EMC today, not so much on what we're doing specifically, but how we see the IT marketplace is evolving in very important ways.

The press release looks innocuous enough, doesn't it?  EMC announcing an enterprise version of Mozy-based backup.  Sure, that makes sense, sort of.

But I think there's a much more interesting story here ...

Managed Availability Services

I thought I'd take a moment to circle back to an announcement from Dec 20th that EMC made around this topic, because I thought the story-behind-the-story would be interesting.

The press release is innocuous enough (as are most press releases).  Simply put: EMC is offering a complete set of business continuity services: in addition to the usual assessment / design / implementation stuff, we now can help you operationally run your business continuity environment.

So why do I think this is interesting? Like any glacier or volcano, the interesting stuff is underneath ...

The New (VMware) House

To many industry watchers and IT consumers, VMware looks like just another technology to add to the list of operating environments they have to support.  The mindset might be that there are some places where it'll work, some places it might not work so well -- really, it's just part of the landscape.

But the more I talk to some customers, they've changed their perspective.

It's not just part of the landscape, it's THE new landscape.

And it's interesting to watch how people's thinking shifts over time.

The Changing Face(s) of IT

If anything, I write about a lot of different topics.  Maybe not particularly well, but people tell me there's no shortage of breadth ;-)

Someone suggested that maybe I bump it up a level, and try to summarize and integrate some of the key trends that are making us all think really hard these days.  You know, tie together the big threads and create a short, comprehensive picture.

So, I'm going to give it a try -- let me know how I do?

A New Category of Information?

Not surprisingly, EMC is all about information infrastructure.

A lot of our thinking involves thinking about different categories of information, the unique requirements of that information, and how we can build infrastructure solutions to help people store, protect, optimize and leverage all of it.

In the past, we've made distinctions between, say, structured and unstructured information.  Changing vs. static information.  Managed vs. unmanaged.  And so on.

Our thinking is that by understanding differences, and you can come up with some pretty clever solutions -- simply by focusing on the information itself -- and what makes it different.

And, I'd like to offer, maybe it's time for a new category of information.

Storage Protocols and VMware

What'll it be with your VMware environment -- FC, iSCSI or NAS?

Now, given that hot debates rage on storage protocols across the industry, and -- of course -- within EMC, juxtaposing something like VMware on top of it raises another whole round of debates.

And, in the spirit of lively conversation, I thought I'd offer my view of how I'm seeing this play out in the industry and with EMC's customers.

Like all storage protocol discussions, I'm sure I'm going to get my fair share of commentary ...

More on Metadata

Just a quick follow-up to my post on The Metadata Conundrum ...

Just stumbled across this excellent video (again) that make a great case for re-thinking about how we organize information. 

Fun, thought-provoking and inspirational.

The Metadata Conundrum

It doesn't take too long at looking at the overall information management problem before you quickly realize that metadata (information about information) is one of the important keys to all of this.

With the right metadata, it's not hard to imagine a world where by simply looking at the metadata, you could figure out where to store it, how much protection it needs, retention, security.

Or, in terms of value-generation, what are the key attributes of this piece of information that might make it valuable to other parts of the business?  Easy to find and use?

And then you get into the gritty details of how, and why ...

I was first intrigued by this discussion when EMC started to work on ILM (information lifecycle management).  Metadata (or tags) could help a lot in the day-to-day management tasks associated with information. 

But it's not as a simple or straightforward as we all would have hoped.

Tomorrow's Thinfrastructure

Occasionally, I trip across a clever word to describe a relatively complex concept.

This one comes from Kartik, one of our field CTO types.

And I think it's a handy way to describe many aspects of tomorrow's IT infrastructure.

Securing The Next Platform

I don't know about you, but I'm doing an awfully large amount of work from my mobile device these days.

Yes, I know we call it a "phone".  But I don't make many voice calls with it.  Do you?

I do email.  And lately, I've gotten pretty addicted to the browser.

For me -- it's my next platform -- the one I want. 

But how to secure it?

Integration -- The New Killer App?

So, many of us have been asked the same question about a bazillion times ...

"So, EMC has acquired all this technology .. what are you doing to integrate it?"

And the answer is -- a lot -- but it comes out in ways that are not always obvious, but I would argue are certainly useful and attractive.

And today's example is a rather obscure product announcement that illustrates a broader theme.

EMC Moves Into The IMSP Market?

You probably saw the recent announcement regarding EMC's acquisition of Berkeley Data Systems, and their very popular offering, Mozy.

So what's going on here?

You could look at it tactically (which many people do), or strategically (a bit less common).

I'd like to offer a few thoughts from a strategic perspective.

Creating The Virtual Runbook

Discussions move fast in this industry, especially with customers.

Yes, server/desktop virtualization is cool.  We're in, they say.

Yes, we get that the supporting infrastructure may have to change -- servers, storage, backup, replication, management, security, etc.  We're evaluating that one.

But what about the most important part of IT -- the people and process?

When Cool Technologies Collide ...

... sometimes the result is an overdose of coolness.

Saw a promo go out for an upcoming EMC LIVE event about using Application Discovery Manager in VMware environments.

If VMware is my #1 favorite cool technology, then Smarts ADM is right behind it.  And an event showing how these two things work together has got to be one of the better tech webinars from EMC.

It's All About The Children!

One of the more blatant marketing appeals, to be sure.

But on a serious note, I've been unable to avoid thinking about what our rapid shift to an information society is doing to how we think about educating the next generation.

And I keep finding clear discontinuity between The Way We've Always Done Things and The Way Things Are Going To Have To Be

Smarts Gets Smarter (Again!)

You probably know by now I'm a big fan of Smarts -- not simply because it's another EMC product -- but because it embodies game-changing thinking.

A few obscure press releases slipped out in the last few days, but there's a wealth of thinking behind it, and I'd like to take a moment and share some of it with you.

IT's New Job

It's been a travelling week, hence no posts as I find it difficult to sit still and write when on the road.

What made this trip unique was that I had three separate customer interactions around the same topic: information governance. 

Each of them got to the same place, but through a different path.

There's either a trend here, or perhaps I've succeeded in deluding myself ...

Virtualizing Infrastructure

So, another press release from EMC that seem innocuous enough, but really doesn't get to the big ideas behind it.

And, unfortunately, it's going to look like I'm pandering again, because it's about EMC Avamar (which I write about all the time), and VMware (which everyone else is writing about now, in addition to me).

But, trust me, I think there's a really big idea here that you might find interesting ...

Little Things, Big Impact

So today, I'd like to share with you a little thing that'll probably have a big impact.

It's a fun game -- take something innocuous, and see if you can follow the impact trail.

Transformational Migrations

No, I didn't get lost somewhere in the IT buzzword dictionary.

I've started to use the phrase to capture some basic concepts around one of the most mundane (yet) important tasks in IT -- migrations.

And I'd like to offer some thought as to why we might be thinking of this differently in the near future, if not today.

Cool IT Guys

I get to meet with customers on a frequent basis.  And I like to share my thoughts and impressions of these experiences here on Ye Olde Blog.

Yesterday, I had the chance to meet with a group of real cool IT guys. 

They weren't talking about next-gen IT, they were doing it.

And it made me think.

Information Security Heats Up (Again, and Again ...)

Thought I was done with posts for today, but I came across this really interesting piece from Forrester Research: The State Of Data Security In North America.

Or, if you're busy today, the press release has a nice summary of the conclusions.

Yes, EMC (actually, RSA) sponsored it, but -- vendor biases aside -- I found it pretty interesting on a couple of levels ...

VMware Podcast

Nothing like a dazzling IPO to get people really interested in something -- like VMware.

I've been repeatedly asked to deliver the key thoughts (at least, from an EMC perspective) about what's happening here.

So we've created this little podcast -- just a few minutes long -- hope you find it useful!

For more that I've written on this subject, please look here.

The ROBO Conundrum

ROBO stands for Remote Office / Branch Office.  It's one of those secret-handshake industry terms we all fall into the trap of using without really understanding what we're talking about.

Why is this interesting?

First, people realize that the information outside the data center can be the most expensive / risky / unproductive information in the environment. 

And second, lots of vendors are piling in with solutions in this space, and it is becoming very noisy and confusing.

So, I thought it'd be worth a post or two to step back and offer a few thoughts on the topic.

EMC Acquires Tablus

Or, more accurately, RSA (a division of EMC) acquires Tablus.  You're welcome to read the press release here.

But what's really going on here?

ITIL for Storage

A bit of commentary has been floating around blogland about the increased need for trained, certified storage administrators.

I thought I'd use this post to share EMC's views on this problem, and what we've been trying to do about it.

More On Thin Clients

Had a customer surprise the heck out of me with an extremely interesting take on thin clients.

They weren't just talking about doing it -- they had it up and running.

And it was for reasons I hadn't expected ...

Information Governance

No, not IT governance.  Information governance.

OK, if you're a regular reader of this blog, you know my rant.

• information is becoming the most important business asset in the world.
• someone's going to have be the "CFO of information".
• and you're going to need new tools -- information infrastructure -- to do this.

At most companies, there's pretty good governance around something else that's important -- financials. 

What about information governance?