In the vane of uniting and connecting storage users, I have begun to set up storage forums here. The goals of these forums are: to connect users, separate the technology from the vendors, help new users get started, and allow experienced users to share tricks of the trade. You can’t have the technology without the vendors, so I have set up a vendor category with a forum for each vendor. If you don’t see your vendor listed, please drop me a comment or a post in the forum request forum and I will be happy to set it up. I will continue to structure the forums in the coming weeks. I did some research and found almost no forums on storage. The Byte and Switch forums are pretty much unusable. Other storage forums out there are peppered with advertisements from vendors which make it difficult to find the information you are looking for.

Notice to vendors: you will get slimed here. Posts will not be deleted just because you don’t like them. These are open forums. I would suggest that you develop an accurate, honest, and detailed response if you find something to take exception to. Post your response and let each individual user make their own decision.

posted: 11:26:28 PM  permalink  trackback ()  comments ()    

Over a year ago I met with some of the guys at Enterprise Storage Group (now Enterprise Strategy Group), Steve Duplessie and Tony Prigmore to be specific, to pitch a new idea of developing heterogeneous storage reference architectures. They didn’t bite and I don’t blame them. It was an incomplete idea at the time. Part of our discussion branched into how the storage marketplace is completely dominated by the vendors. Every analyst and consulting firm in the storage marketplace is beholden to the vendors for their revenues, including ESG. Vendors like EMC hold the fate of partners in their hands. They know it and like to use the power. Other storage vendors like HP and IBM use storage as a lever to open up other opportunities in accounts. HP and IBM are so large, however, they can’t centralize control over partners enough to exert brute force in the same manner as EMC. One of the world’s largest consulting firms, Accenture, entered into a multibillion dollar partnership with EMC a couple of years ago. Accenture now finds the EMC sales warlords attempting to pillage their accounts. So how is the power wrangled away from the vendors? By uniting the users. The vendors have kept the skills and knowledge in the marketplace proprietary. There are movements afoot via SNIA and market forces like the demand for iSCSI to wrest power away from the vendors. However, these endeavors will be incomplete and the marketplace will remain unbalanced until the users begin to talk, communicate, and collaborate.

posted: 9:50:17 PM  permalink  trackback ()  comments ()    

I've been having a lot of fun testing inline encryption devices at work. While quite cool technology, I wouldn't recommend deploying this technology in production just yet. I saw much as a 53% degradation in performance in some of me tests. However, using these devices to encrypt tape backups might be a good use of these devices today since tape is completely mobile. Who's to say some guy at Iron Mountain isn't grabbing tapes at random hoping to find something valuable?

posted: 7:02:52 PM  permalink  trackback ()  comments ()