Back in 2003 hardly anyone had heard of a small but rapidly growing technology company called VMware. But since that time VMware literally exploded to become the dominant player in enterprise server virtualization. Now the same forces that propelled VMware to the top of the server virtualization heap are at work again.
As part of his opening remarks during his keynote on Tuesday morning, Symantec’s CEO Enrique Salem shared a comment that was made to him by a Symantec user, “We are in the middle of a time of profound meaningful change.” Truer words were never spoken as enterprises of all sizes are facing a broad spectrum of technology changes that are unequaled in this modern era of computing.
Cloud. Cloud! Cloud!! That’s all I hear these days. Cloud computing. Cloud storage. Private Cloud. Private Storage Cloud. Public Cloud. Public storage cloud. Hybrid cloud. Hybrid storage cloud. Enterprise cloud. Consumer cloud. Cloud archive. Cloud backup. You name it, there is a cloud term to go with it. Further, no matter which vendor you talk to, everyone has a cloud solution even if the product looks just like it did five years ago before the cloud craze began. So it begs the question, what do these cloud terms mean???
The recent outage at Amazon Web Services coupled with the news that Iron Mountain is exiting some of its storage cloud lines of business has created quite a stir in the storage industry. But many of the conversations in which I have been involved have centered on how some users have been – consciously or unconsciously – applying enterprise expectations to the services that existing cloud storage providers offer. So the questions becomes, “Who is responsible for creating these unrealisticly high expectations – cloud service providers, users or some combination of both?”
The cloud was back in the forefront of the news this past week and it was not all good news. First there was the news early in the week that Iron Mountain was suspending some of its cloud storage offerings while just yesterday Amazon Web Services had its own set of troubles as a number of websites that it hosted were either offline or experiencing degraded performance. The net effect of this was other cloud providers in the business getting a bit shook up.
Acquisitions and mergers are becoming all the rage in the storage industry and this past week did not disappoint. On Monday storage reseller Promark announced it was going to merge with IceWEB and then, just two days later, NetApp announced its intentions to acquire Engenio, LSI Corp’s external storage unit.
As more organizations explore the possibility of moving data into the cloud, the first question they are bound to ask is, “How do we seamlessly move what we already have into the cloud?” No organizations are more concerned with this transparent data movement than service providers and enterprises that have a lot to gain but just as much to lose if problems arise.
Ever since Cisco, EMC, VMware and Intel announced the formation of VCE, The Virtual Computing Environment Company, on November 3, 2009, there has been a fair amount of debate as to how VCE will operate. Many of the questions focus on what benefits VCE will deliver to enterprises now and what enterprises should ultimately expect from VCE in the future. Having recently attended the EMC Analyst Days Event in New York on January 17th and 18th, it is much clearer as to what VCE is delivering today and how it is laying the foundation to help make enterprise private clouds “Great” in the very near future.
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.
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.
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