EMC and VMWare’s coming together with Cisco is an exercise in Utility. If we take Nick Carr’s analogy of comparing utility computing with the power-generation industry, what the VCE alliance could be said to be is an attempt to define a de-facto standard for the ‘compute unit’. An attempt even to define what voltage the cloud should run at.

One of the fore-runners of information storage and retrieval has after a long running saga of various failures including security breaches, data theft, data theft, mis-indexing and general mal-administration including corruption and incompetence has finally closed it doors today in dramatic fashion which has resulted in the loss of a great proportion of the world’s knowledge. Fortunately there were some distributed back-ups but sadly some data has been lost forever.

Steve Duplessie posts on Cloud Economics and especially the economics of Cloud Storage, 20 TBs of storage from Amazon’s S3 cloud will cost you $36,000 a year and that doesn’t necessarily compare especially well with purchasing your own array.

Once you’ve deployed a technology, how do you get out of it? Do you get out of it? And what impact does virtualisation have on this.

All providers of infrastructure need to understand the importance of requirements; nothing will destroy the credibility of Cloud Architectures quicker than the inappropriate and unplanned deployment of applications into the Cloud.

NetApp’s unified storage platform is a compelling vision for a customer; one platform to support pretty much all your storage needs. It is a powerful sell, it is still pretty much a USP for them; everyone else has to fake it by glomming together storage products and pretending.

Every now and then, I like to annoy people and point out that much that we are talking about as the future in Open Systems has been done before. And today is one of those days!

Too often we are backing up when we should be archiving. We generate so much content which is pretty much Write Once Read Never but it sits there just in case; getting backed-up time and time again whereas it should just go straight into the archive or certainly get moved after a number of days into the archive. Not only will it help with your back-ups, it will save you money.

Much of what we do in Storage Management can be considered living on a prayer; this is not just a result of the parlous state of the storage management tools that we use but also due to the complex interactions which can happen within shared infrastructure.

Hu Yoshida talks about an all too familiar case where storage decisions are made locally by the Business Units and the procurement strategy does not take account of the long-term health of the group; ongoing OpEx costs are not born by individual business units and become the problem of the IT department. The concept and value of shared infrastructure was not really understood by the Business.