Kudos to IBM! For the first time since I can remember, they have come out, loud and proud about storage technology and capabilities that truly do trump anyone else in the industry. And they didn’t just brag about the fact they have better technology. They made it abundantly clear that this announcement is about providing significant customer value. IBM has made a very bold statement about their all flash systems and what they will… Read more »

Say the word “infrastructure” at Strata conference and you hear people start talking mostly about software. One of the biggest lessons I learned at the conference was that no one really cares about the hardware that “big data” sits on. Now, I am probably the biggest proponent of the fact that “spinning rust” doesn’t make a company money; it is the software that can extract the value out of the data that provides insights… Read more »

As a part of being a storage evangelist, I spend a lot of time educating sales as well as customers on the merits of our capabilities and technologies. Every since IBM acquired TMS I have been hearing from our sales reps that it can be difficult to compete as others in the industry have capabilities in their flash solutions such as data deduplication.

I spend quite a bit of time educating folks that deduplication… Read more »

So the storage sector starts off with a bang when it comes to M&A, driving more consolidation in the market with Imation acquiring disk storage vendor Nexsan. Isn’t Nexsan the ATABeast storage company? How does one market a supposed enterprise class storage system ATABeast? I have to say, it was creative. I do give Imation a lot of credit for this move. It seems like they got a bargain. They picked up the company for… Read more »

Last week I presented at an event for Storage Magazine in the famous London Tower Bridge (shown here) It was a fabulous venue. Dave Tyler, Editor of Storage Magazine for the UK gave a presentation that talked about the "buzzword bingo" vendors play with clients when trying to sell them storage arrays. His main point was customers should not be "baffled by the bull$h!%" (and yes, he did say bull$h!%).

It got me to thinking… Read more »