Posts by: ekaplan
H108: Lab Launch – Experience a True Hybrid Cloud
This Wednesday will be a big day at Ahead as we launch our second-generation lab. Those who have been reading our blog probably know we have been architecting and building this for the last two quarters.
I’m often asked why we spent the time and money on such a state-of-the-art facility when so many of our partners and clients have their own labs. Well, Ahead's goal is to help our clients plan, design, and deliver complex solutions within the data center. We can only do this by getting hands-on with the technology to educate our clients and ourselves. In addition, the lab lets us demonstrate the integration between different layers of the data center stack. Too often the aforementioned labs look at one piece of ...
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Why Isilon
It’s not uncommon to walk into a client and be asked, “Why did EMC buy Isilon?” It seems like a pretty simple question on the surface, but the reality is there are a lot of marketplace, financial and competitive dynamics in play when answering thisquestion.
The bottom line is EMC is a publicly traded company that must maintain a strong growth story in order to meet the demands of shareholders. Growth can occur via organic methods or through the power of acquisition.
Organic methods require EMC product teams to build newproducts and features internally. The most common form of organic growth takes place via “treadmill” or “turning of the crank” innovation efforts. Polish a feature, add a knob or dial somewhere, improve performance, reliability or availability. The ...
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Ahead recognized by CRN: #142 on VAR500 & Top Cloud Practice Award. Our thoughts…
This week was a proud moment for the team at Ahead. We heard from CRN magazine that we jumped from #435 in the 2010 VAR500 to #142 in 2011 and received the 'Top Cloud Practice' award. Fueling this jump was the fact that we grew by nearly $100M in revenue last year – a strong testament to the value we are adding to our clients. While the quantitative aspects of this award are important, its what the numbers can’t articulate that we are extremely proud of:
Our Clients – We wouldn’t be where we are today without the relationships we have with our clients. In four short years we’ve added clients in the financial, legal, education, healthcare, manufacturing and insurance vertical (to name a few) ...
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VMware – Where will Maritz take us?
Paul Maritz is a man with a career that most would envy. He’s had stints at Intel (5 years), Microsoft (14 years), and now VMware (3 years and counting). At the end of the day few will argue that Paul has had a significant impact on the overall IT industry. While at Intel he worked on key tools for developers focused on the x86 platform; at Microsoft he was the number-three man leading the Windows NT, Windows 95, and Internet Explorer development efforts (along with a bunch of other stuff). Now he is steering the ship at VMware—a company trying to redefine how applications are built, servers are deployed, and the desktop is composed and managed.
If you’ve seen Maritz speak at a recent conference, he ...
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SpotCloud – An opaque marketplace for Cloud Computing
I've been reading a lot about SpotCloud over the last week. They finally exited their beta cycle and are open for business. For those unfamiliar with SpotCloud it provides:
A Buy-Side and Sell-Side marketplace for spare cloud computing resources
The marketplace is opaque - meaning you don't know who you are buying compute resources from. This is to prevent price erosion for those paying full retail at the same providers. Think of this as Priceline for IaaS.
Sellers can create HW profiles, add location information and let buyers know how long the resources may be available.
Buyers can then search for resources based on their requirements, cost and location.
They have a set of VM's that are available for download.
SpotCloud is ...
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24-hours in NYC – Recapping EMC’s Mega-Launch
I’m currently flying back from NYC and reflecting on spending the last 24 hours with EMC for their “Breaking Records” event. For someone who spent almost 10 years at EMC this event felt different. As Pat Gelsinger and Joe Tucci unveiled the new VNX and VNXe midrange line, upgraded Symmetrix microcode, and a new set of Data Domain offerings it was also evident they were unveiling a new marketing and product launch strategy for the company.
Marketing as a whole was never strategic for EMC. Engineers delivered product, Sales was educated, and in turn much of the core EMC messaging was developed at the field level. EMC was basically reliant on their reps for street-level execution and delivery of their core messages.
Now over the years things ...
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