"Big Enough" Data

"Big Enough" Data

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 »

Deduplication for Flash / SSD & Tiering

Deduplication for Flash / SSD & Tiering

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 »

Storage Consolidation Keeps on Truckin'

Storage Consolidation Keeps on Truckin'

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 »

The Business End of Storage

The Business End of Storage

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 »