This is one of my favorite times of the year as I look back on some of the most popular blog entries on DCIG’s site in the past year based on the number of page views. What makes it so intriguing for me is that it is similar to looking at a big wrapped gift under the Christmas tree and not knowing exactly what is in it. Every year I am never completely sure until this week which blog entries which will make up the Top Ten on DCIG’s site as the most read. This year is no exception.
In the past I posted all of DCIG’s Top 10 most read blog entries in a single blog entry but this year I am going to spread it out over a series of three blog entries with the last one containing the top three blog entries of the year. Today I am just going to count down from #10 to #8 and I will post the top three most read blog entries on DCIG’s website on the last day of 2010. So here are number ten to number eight.
#10 – As 2011 Nears a Transformation in Backup Awaits. The idea for this blog entry came to me back in September of this year. I had just returned from VMworld so my head was still swimming for the number of new technologies that I had seen at the show. However I was also working on a number of case studies for clients of mine so I was actively talking to a number of end-users as to what they were doing about changing their backup infrastructure.
In speaking to them, they confirmed they are recognizing that how they do backup and then leverage the data in their backups needs to change. Further, it indicated they many are still awakening to the new possibilities of what having a near-real time copy of production data on disk creates and how it changes more than just backup but how they can now more effectively and economically perform tasks such as disaster recovery and internal testing – tasks that to a large part they only dreamed about doing in the past.
#9 – HP and Dell Interest in 3PAR Started 9 Months Ago; 3PAR Solves Storage Problems for HP on Multiple Fronts. This is another blog entry that came out of my time at VMworld 2010. While there, the final stages of the bidding war between HP and Dell for 3PAR were occurring. But what made this interesting is that since I was at VMworld in San Francisco, there were a few individuals there who were acquainted with some of the behind the scenes actions and were willing to speak off the record.
However having just completed my own research on the midrange array Buyer’s Guide, I saw a lot of upside on the storage side that 3PAR was going to offer HP. Specifically, 3PAR is very well tuned for virtualized environments, uses the same software across both its midrange and high end storage models and had a huge presence in the rapidly growing and coveted managed service cloud storage provider space. That combination of factors had to make 3PAR almost irrestible to both HP and Dell.
#8 – HP Versus Dell: The Loser will be Left on the Outside of the Cloud Storage Looking in. This blog entry was written a few weeks prior to HP winning the bidding war for 3PAR. It highlighted the very strong cloud storage story that 3PAR had and, with more enterprises looking to implement storage clouds in the next few years, neither HP nor Dell could really afford to lose out on an opportunity to acquire 3PAR. This in large part explains why 3PAR’s share price shot up from about $10/share to over $30/share when all was said and done.
Maybe the most interesting tidbit of information coming out of this episode was that the night before Dell announced its bid for 3PAR (3PAR is a blogging client of DCIG) was that a well known individual at Dell subscribed to DCIG’s twitter feed though I did not connect the dots until the next day.
Look for two more blog entries next week covering the remaining top ten blog entries of 2010 for DCIG.
Read what blog entries came in from #7 down to #4 on DCIG’s website in 2010 at this link.