Four times a year, IDC releases their market share analysis for the storage market.  Even though most vendors don't talk much about it, just about every vendor subscribes to their service.  Much time is spent in conference rooms debating and discussing the numbers and their implicati...

People who read this blog must sometimes think I come up with all these ideas all by my lonesome self. I do my fair share, but I'm also heavily influenced from others here at EMC. Today, I'm going to channel another VMware uber-geek at EMC, Chad Sakac, and explore the simpl...

Today, EMC announced several major enhancements for the Celerra platform.  Taken individually, they're interesting. But taken together, I think this announcement shows just how far NAS technology has evolved in the past few years.  If you haven't been paying attention to what the...

Much has been made online of Cisco's rumored plans to enter new data center markets. It's easy to dismiss all of this as just one large enterprise IT vendor poaching on another's turf. But, to many of us, there's much more here than initially meets the eye ... The Facts Now, I can...

The recent thoughts about how "private clouds" might be the emergent model for enterprise IT has sparked some strong philosophical debate in the cloud-o-sphere. On one side, the purists.  On the other side, the pragmatists. Where you stand probably has much to do with where you sit, ...

Sorry to be late on this post, but I thought it worth some commentary as to why this particular standard should be tracked by IT infrastructure professionals everywhere. Now, I always tell people to put aside their "standard skepticism" when discussing industry standards, and I always have...

Another day, another great customer conversation. This week's extremely cool meeting was all about sketching out a storage architecture at considerable enterprise scale.  And we came up with a simple way of thinking about the problem that turned out to be very useful. The Problem This part...

2009 has started with earnest, and -- by now -- I've had enough of a chance to visit with customers and prospects to get a sense of what people are thinking about. Efficiency.  It's always been a popular topic in IT infrastructure.  Now it's entirely dominating the discussion...

I get asked all sorts of interesting questions, some of which sound easy to answer, but turn out to be a bit more difficult to do so once you dig into them. As an example, I was asked to provide a quick, not-too-technical answer to the key differences between grid, scale-out, clustered and scale-up ...

Welcome back everyone -- to 2009.  It doesn't promise to be an easy year, does it?  If I had to pick one key theme to focus on, it'd be "accelerated change" -- things are going to start happening much faster than before.  Tough economic conditions have a way of do...