In VPLEX, do we see the future of EMC storage? Or more accurately, do we see the future of Symmetrix? Is it the beginning of the end for Symmetrix and more importantly, Enginuity. The final break from the past?

So we have VPLEX and despite some scratching of heads as to what it is; it is really quite simple, “storage access is further decoupled from storage physicality.” And this really is nothing especially new; decoupling the storage access from storage physicality has been going on for some time.

Stephen’s blog entry about NAS strikes so many chords with me that I find it hard to disagree with very much he writes in the entry but I am going to disagree with the central premise/question; you should not ignore NAS if you work in a Storage Team. You may hate it but you should not ignore it.

What is the point of an ‘IT Project’? Is it to deliver infrastructure? Is it to deliver applications? Or is it to deliver a service to the business? Actually, most ‘IT projects’ shouldn’t be called ‘IT projects’; perhaps they should…

Autonomic computing as coined by IBM in 2001 was arguably the frame-work for Cloud Computing today. And now 3Par have taken the term Autonomic and applied it to storage tiering.

BFI is an acronym which gets thrown around a bit and could stand for many things; Brute Force and Ignorance is one…but I’ve come up with a hopefully a new one which goes along with it, Big F**king Infrastructure. And this is my problem with Cloud at present; there seems to be a trend around at the moment that the point of Cloud is to build Big F**king Infrastructure.

There’s a lot of talk about Dynamic Data Centres, Dynamic Infrastructures; mostly in a cloudy context and mostly as some over-arching architectural vendor-focused vision. At times, I wonder if when a vendor talks about a ‘Dynamic Infrastructure’; if they actually mean, you can use as much of OUR infrastructure as you like? You can flex up and down on OUR infrastructure.

NetApp’s Filer is a single great product which you have built a business on but it is just a single product.

NetApp worry me as a company; despite their record revenues this quarter, they strike me as a company in trouble. And as an end-user who wants/needs a competive storage market, this is a little concerning.

Can Snaps and Replication ever replace traditional back-up applications? It’s an interesting thought and certainly one that we’ve considered in the past. We often find that the answer that you get very much varies from what the favourite technology is with generally the NetApp fans saying yes and the EMC fans saying no.