Why do we care about thin provisioning? Because storage is not getting cheaper. If you went to buy a disk ten years ago, you’re going to spend about the same as would today, but you’re going to get a lot more capacity – a lot more capacity! The fact that we have terrible utilization of enterprise resources is really not helping us, and it’s not getting any better. It hasn’t improved because they are “doing storage” the same way.
NetEx was my first surprise when scheduling presenters for Tech Field Day 5. Their technology does indeed accelerate data transfer over a network, but it’s much more useful than I expected. NetEx is a data movement accelerator and makes what others do better.
The surest sign of success for the Tech Field Day event series is the return of past presenters and delegates. We are pleased to announce our first three-time Tech Field Day presenter: Data Robotics will make a third presentation as part of Tech Field Day 5!
Gestalt IT is pleased to announce our next Tech Field Day event. The Field Day delegates will convene in and around San Jose, CA on February 9 and 10, 2011. There, they will engage some of the most innovative and interesting IT infrastructure companies, with leading enterprise software provider, Symantec, headlining.
One of the amusing aspects of being self-employed is watching all the giants battle it out. Every company is gunning for someone, but the amazing thing is that they rarely have each other in their sights: NetApp is gunning for EMC who’s more focused on HP who wants to knock off Oracle who’s fixated on IBM. It sounds very “high school romance” but this is deadly-serious business.
Remember what it was like to drive without a GPS? Sure, it’s possible, but a good GPS takes it to a whole new level. Need gas? A Denny’s Grand Slam? A detour around traffic? You’ve got it! And when the kids start asking “how much longer” you have a precise answer! Old-school server metrics are like the gauges in your car: They show what’s happening now and can be useful to the driver, but a lot of questions are left un-answered. This is where application performance monitoring comes in: Rather than just checking server stats, APM gives credible, actionable, and user-focused answers about the state of your systems.
The news came out this morning that Dell is in exclusive talks to acquire network storage specialist Compellent for just under $900 million. I will leave it to the real reporters to track the ups and downs of the story; what piques my interest is the value Dell gets from Compellent’s technology and the challenge it poses to the data storage industry.
I’ve never been a fan of thin provisioning as a storage management tool. Don’t get me wrong, I love having thin provisioning in my toolkit to overcome the limitations of conventional filesystems. Thin provisioning just gets under my skin when folks try to use it to solve business problems like long deployment time and slow purchasing cycles. If you attended any of the thin provisioning sessions I’ve presented at Storage Decisions, Interop, E-Storm, or elsewhere then you’ve heard my wistful dreaming of real automatic provisioning without the hackery of thin provisioning systems. But perhaps I didn’t mention that actual automatic provisioning actually exists today! It’s one of the many things I love about API-driven cloud storage!
Xsigo sponsored our “Get Away to VMworld” contest, and a number of us decided to attend the announcement there of their latest Ethernet-based virtual I/O device. After the event, we circled the chairs and spoke with Camden Ford, the same Xsigo engineer that wowed the Tech Field Day 1 and Net Field Day crowds, about the new product.
After fighting yet more networking gremlins, Tech Field Day resumed at The Hoffman Agency wit a presentation by SolarWinds. We had come to expect quite a lot from this company after their fine presentation at Net Field Day in September, and the delegates were not disappointed. SolarWinds discussed their various management products, as well as their approach to high availability and database design.
