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...

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...

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...

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 ...

Over the weekend, a few internal notes were being circulated about testing storage array performance.  There's an interesting pattern that we're seeing with these evaluations, and we'd like to offer a few suggestions to save you time and frustration. This storage performance testin...