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...

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...

By now, more than a few people have been exposed to -- or commented -- on the growing discussion around private clouds in large enterprises. I can't claim there's widespread agreement -- yet -- but I see people starting to orbit the core ideas in a very celestial manner. With a private cloud...

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...

Over the last few weeks, I've been fortunate enough to spend some serious time digging into the current state of affairs regarding GRC -- the emerging topic of governance, risk and compliance. Sure, the topic is hazy, poorly defined and all over the map.  That's probably one of the rea...

A great debate is shaping up in our industry -- one that everyone should take note of. I saw with much interest Forrester's recent white paper "Do You Really Need A SAN Anymore?", with Andrew Reichman as the lead author.  It attempts to make a case that SANs (really shared storag...

Today's announcement is especially gratifying, as one of my team leaders (Bill Bonin) has been working on it diligently for quite a while.  It's finally here. EMC today announced that its new Competency Center for data warehouse, business intelligence and analytics applications is open...