Last week, in the midst of doing research on Flash/SSD I spent a good deal of time speaking to one of the foremost experts on the topic, David Floyer at Wikibon. We were discussing the fact that once Flash is cost effective enough (and we are almost there), and there is software robust enough to push the less important data to cheaper storage, as long as I can access that… Read more »

So yesterday I am flying back from Slovakia through London and I hear to girls behind me talking about Facebook. They are both discussing the fact that they would NEVER buy Facebook stock because they are both leaving Facebook, and of course it was just a “fad” and everyone else who joined is just going to get off as well so pretty soon (I believe the quote they used was “as fast as they became… Read more »

A decade or so ago, service providers made a valiant attempt trying to change the way IT managed there applications and their data. There were a few issues that played a significant role in the demise of service provides back then however. First, there was a distinct lack of understanding of the velocity at which IT can and does change. Quite often I see infrastructure sales people proposing solutions to customer problems that require more… Read more »

Tuesday night I attended an event – storagefest II 2012, which was hosted by Valhalla Partners. The event was a dinner with a group of storage experts from all vectors of the storage industry. There were customers of storage technologies, VCs with investments in storage, entrepreneurs (folks from storage startups), industry insiders (analysts) and folks from storage companies who have been acquired into large companies. The goal of the event also had… Read more »

Yesterday I was on a panel at SNW in Orlando Florida. The panel was hosted by Dave Vellente, Founder of Wikibon and always a great host for these kinds of things. On the panel was Larry Freeman of NetApp, Craig Nunes of HP (formally 3Par), Jarred Floyed CTO / Founder at Permabit and myself, IBM (formally Storwize).

Some interesting data came out of this panel. There were probably over 150 people in the audience. It… Read more »