Last week Tuesday I began to reflect on the most read blog entries on DCIG’s site this past year in terms of the number of page views they received. In that blog entry I covered the blog entries that came in at numbers 8, 9 and 10 on DCIG’s site in 2010. Today I want to pick up by covering the blog entries that come in the middle – from #7 down to #4.
#7 – CommVault and Symantec Square Off in the Battle for Backup (link.) The impetus for this blog entry came from a comment posted by Josef Pfieffer, a Symantec NetBackup product manager who responded to a blog entry about the release of Simpana 9 in early October 2010.
One of Simpana 9’s new capabilities is a feature squarely targeted at Symantec NetBackup customers by giving them ability to migrate from NetBackup to Simpana. In his comment, Josef posed the question, “Why not upgrade to the latest release (NetBackup 7) and get more functionality rather than settle for less features and a big migration that may or may not work?“
Since the answer to that question could not easily be handled in the form of a comment, I elected to write an entire blog entry in response to it. It is now clear based upon the readership of this blog entry (over 50,000 page views) that a lot of readers had the same question that Josef had.
#6 – HP Shares Details about the Future of 3PAR within its StorageWorks Division (link). Blog entries about the acquisition of 3PAR drew a huge amount of attention in 2010 on DCIG’s website with every blog entry on the topic ending up in DCIG’s Top Ten most read blog entries. However what I always find interesting is that some of the most popular and well read blog entries on DCIG’s website are rarely “scandalous” or “snarky” but informative in nature.
That was the case with this one. The other two blog entries that I wrote about the acquisition of 3PAR in 2010 looked at why Dell and HP had an interest in 3PAR as well as the ramifications they faced of not having 3PAR in their portfolio. This blog entry provided readers some insight into how HP planned to fold 3PAR into its broader storage portfolio and was based upon a conversation that I had with HP’s new Director of StorageWorks Marketing, Craig Nunes, at the fall 2010 SNW show.
#5 – Cable Labeling as Part of Data Center Management – Part II. (link) This is an oldie but a goodie that was written by Tim Anderson almost 2-1/2 years in June 2008. On one hand, it is a bit perplexing in this age of deduplication, virtualization and cloud storage that something as basic as a blog entry on the topic of cable labeling continues to be one of the most-read on DCIG’s site. (This is the 3rd year in a row this blog entry has showed up in the Top 10 on DCIG’s site.)
Yet it is really quite logical when you think about it. If you are responsible for managing the infrastructure of your data center, where do you go to learn about it? Unless you are working for a world class data center or can afford the services of a large storage provider or reseller, you are stuck trying to figure out how to properly manage and label cables on your own. If that is the case, you are likely to go to the web and search Google looking for information and if you type in “cable label management,” this is one of the Top Ten responses on Google so it is no wonder people keep finding their way over to DCIG’s site to read this blog.
#4 – EMC is Looking Up and Finding Itself in the Shadow of NetApp’s Cloud. (link) This blog entry I wrote on a very, very long plane flight back from NetApp’s June 2010 Analyst Days event. I was supposed to catch an early morning flight out of San Jose, CA, but it was delayed until the afternoon. So I was put on an alternative flight that routed me through the Minneapolis airport.
Only when I arrived there, we were stuck on the tarmac for an hour and then, when we finally did pull into the terminal around 6 pm, the tornado warning sirens went off and all outbound flights were canceled for the evening so it was the next morning before I finally got a flight back to Omaha.
In any case all of that time in the plane and airline terminal gave me a lot of time to reflect on a number of analyst day events that I had attended during the spring of 2010 and think about the information that was presented. It was during the flight to Minneapolis that I sketched out the outline for this blog entry but it wasn’t until the following week on the Thursday before the July 4th holiday weekend that I had a chance to post it.
Little did I know the firestorm this would create as it evoked candid responses from EMC and NetApp alike and got a brief mention in an InfoSmack podcast the following week. The day this blog entry posted (July 1) went on to become the busiest visitor traffic day to date in the short history of DCIG. The blog entry didn’t do too badly either as it went on to generate over 70,000 page views YTD.
Look for the final blog entry in this series later this week as I reveal the top three most read blog entries on DCIG’s site in 2010. If you missed the first blog entry in this series recapping the Top Ten most read blog entries on DCIG’s site in 2010, you can link to it here.