Now that the bidding war between Dell and HP for 3PAR has subsided with HP emerging the victor, the question becomes, “Which storage company is on Dell’s 2010 Christmas shopping list?” While there are still a good number of storage companies available, when one takes a hard look at which companies are the best fit for Dell, the list gets pretty short pretty quickly.
A few months ago DCIG released its first ever Buyer’s Guide – the Midrange Array Buyer’s Guide – to gauge the interest of such a guide among users and vendors alike. Needless to say, DCIG has been overwhelmed with the positive response and has received numerous requests to produce more like that one. But due to the amount of research and expertise required to produce these guides in an authoritative fashion in other segments of the storage market, DCIG elected to reach out to other analysts in the industry who have the needed experience to do this task.
It has been rumored that EMC’s CEO Joe Tucci has said that EMC’s biggest threat comes not from Dell, HDS, HP or IBM but NetApp. It is for that reason that EMC has been looking over its shoulder for some time to see what NetApp is up to in an attempt to stay one step ahead of it from a technology perspective. But after attending NetApp’s annual Analyst Days last week, it is time for EMC to stop looking over its shoulder and start looking up because EMC now finds itself in the shadow of NetApp’s cloud.
Sometimes when you find a good thing you have to roll with it and that is exactly what DCIG plans to do with its new line of Buyer’s Guide products. Last month DCIG announced the availability of its first ever Buyer’s Guide of any kind for either storage or ESI products. Since then its reception among storage providers and end-users alike has so surpassed our expectations that DCIG has decided to expand the scope of these offerings. It is for that reason DCIG is today pleased to announce that it is beginning research and plans to bring to market by the end of 2010 four more DCIG Buyer’s Guides.
Today DCIG is pleased to announce that through a special licensing agreement with Nexsan Technologies, the 2010 DCIG Midrange Array Buyer’s Guide is now available for a free download on Nexsan’s website for a limited time. This is a full copy of the 105 page Buyer’s Guide exactly as it was originally published by DCIG with no additions, deletions or edits.
Today’s blog entry comes out of some recent conversations that I have had with end users in the small and midsized business (SMB) space. Some common themes about how these individuals want to scale their storage solution are beginning to emerge and they strike a different tone than what individuals in the small, midsized and large enterprise space have to say. In short, they want to control their storage growth at a much more granular level and they do not want to be penalized for having that level of control.
In a couple of weeks, DCIG is going to release its first Midrange Array Buyer’s Guide that will include information and analysis on over 70 midrange arrays from 20 different storage providers. However it is important to note that this is a “Buyer’s Guide” and is not intended to do all of your thinking and decision making for you.
Back in early February I wrote a blog that announced that I was going to resume writing technology reports similar to what I used to write for Storage magazine a few years ago. After some deliberation, I decided to focus the first one on midrange arrays. Since then questionnaires have been mailed out to storage providers, completed by them and their responses tabulated, weighted and scored. This means that DCIG is getting close to announcing how all of the different midrange array models from the various providers were scored and ranked.
Going into the Omaha VMUG meeting, I was expecting to find maybe 40 – 60 users in attendance. However upon my arrival I found a steady stream of cars pulling into the parking lot, over 200 users registered to attend and I counted more than 150 people physically present at the event. So anyone who still doubts the impact virtualization is having on organizations need question no more.
This is one of my favorite blogs of the year to write. Even though this is only the second time since DCIG launched its blogging site two years ago that I have had the opportunity to write a blog in this format, I have been looking forward to looking back all year. In case you have not yet figured it out, today I take a look back at the top 10 most read blogs in 2009 on the DCIG site. However this year I am doing a two part series with today’s blog examining the 10 most read blogs in 2009 that were written in 2009.
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