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 »

The Eve of the Facebook IPO

The Eve of the Facebook IPO

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 »

Defining Cloud

Defining Cloud

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 »

Defining Big Data

Defining Big Data

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 »