My customer interactions seem to come in thematic waves.  The current wave of customer initiatives I have been working on seem to all revolve around IT transformation.  In the case of four separate clients over the past few weeks, I have encountered the following situation: IT Centralization, or a move to a shared service model for internal or external consumers Challenges with optimization of data center processes to support this new scale Challenges with reporting, chargeback, and consumption forecasting to be able to run these new models Competition with shadow IT or a resistance to change In each case, the challenges and desires were consistent, even though the customers were in different industries and at different phases in the maturity of their projects. What each organization is dealing with is a ...

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At this point, all of the major external storage subsystem manufacturers have announced price increases in response to the devastating Thailand floods, and the subsequent impact on hard drive manufacturing.  At the same time, many companies in the consumer electronics space have warned about revenue targets in the wake of component shortages, including Intel in December. To date, however, I haven't seen any reporting of hard drive shortages affecting the enterprise disk market, but I am now seeing that first hand.  I am currently involved in at least four customer projects, across multiple manufacturers, where drive lead times are stretching out until March.  These are for orders that are either currently being processed, or that were placed in December. In order to make sure you aren't severely ...

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I haven't been posting with much regularity lately, but it's not for lack of trying. We've been so busy lately with performing demonstrations and putting some finishing touches on components with the lab. From a hardware perspective, we added a NetApp 6080 HA pair complete with Flash Cache and Unified Adaptors, which we're using to host both native NetApp storage and also virtualize additional storage behind it. Over the next few weeks I will be adding much of the ancillary management products in the OnCommand family that will extend the functionality of the NetApp to areas including application integration, backup and recovery, and disaster recovery. As you might have gathered from the subject line on this post, I'm also headed off to VMworld next week. Certainly I ...

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Today EMC announced it's newest storage platform, a variant on it's oldest brand.  The VMAXe, an entry level member of the Symmetrix product family.  This will be a brief overview of the product, and a market perspective on its relevance. What is it? The VMAXe is an entry level Symmetrix product that will be generally available this quarter.  The product features a de-featured version of the Symmetrix Enginuity operating system, something that will allow it to provide enterprise availability without the added complexity and cost.  Notably removed from the platform are support for Mainframe, IBM I, and traditionally provisioned volumes (hypers/metas with no pools).  There is also less variability in the configuration of the devices, as it allows only 4 VMAXe engines (versus the 8 on the ...

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Over the last 2 months, I have chronicled the journey of one of my healthcare customers' deployment of a "High Availability Design for Healthcare". Cancer Treatment Centers of America built and deployed their new data center based on the design previously discussed, and has been running production workload on this high availability design for over a month. Things have gone great - and they are only going to get better. Today at EMC World 2011 in Las Vegas, EMC announced a number of product enhancements to the VPLEX product family. The most widely discussed announcement is the go-live of the VPLEX GEO release to allow active/active datacenter solutions at asynchronous distances. Two additional (and less heralded) features added to the VPLEX family for VPLEX Metro have also become ...

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Among the flurry of announcements coming out of EMC World was Project Lightning, a new server card that can front end array data into the compute cluster, integrated with EMC Storage Array tiering technologies.  Buried in that announcement was the new support of all flash drive based VNX and VMAX arrays.  This announcement explicitly shows EMC's belief that there is a market for flash only array customers (I know of a few that exist already), and also implicitly says a few things about the storage industry in general  Here are a few quick thoughts from the conference floor: Joe Tucci was right when he said in 2008 that Enterprise Flash Drives and storage arrays tuned for them will fundamentally change the game in the storage arena. The ...

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Joe Tucci just wrapped his keynote at EMC World 2011 in Las Vegas.  There were no earth shattering announcements, the most surprising thing being EMC's embracing and support of Hadoop.  What I found more interesting thought was to compare this keynote with the ones I have seen going back to 2006.  What struck me is that Joe continued on themes he had started over five years ago, indicating that he has a pretty good feel on the pulse of the market.  Here are the dates that go with the concepts I saw today: Information universe - first in 2006, still going strong as part of the message, now called "Data Deluge" Fully Virtualized Data Centers - 2007, still here now merged with the following topic Private Cloud - ...

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Since I joined Ahead about 2 months ago, I find myself introducing my new company fairly often.  Whether it's to friends, family, new business contacts, or customers who I have known for years, most conversations at some point come back to who the company is, and why I chose to join up.  So it was very interesting to me yesterday when I was sitting with a new client, who had met with Ahead a few times already, to hear their take on our organization, and the value we provide.  I felt his description was actually better than anything I've used, so I wanted to share it.  I've tried to capture it as closely as possible below: "...it's really a unique service you provide to customers like ...

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