Going to push my luck and try skiing again this weekend.  Blizzard been happening up north of me for a week, lots of snow.  Nice knowing you.

Have you seen what Nasuni has done with its cloudbench utility?  Tells users exactly what levels of availability and performance they get out of their cloud storage provider on the back end.  This is exactly the kind of visibility and control that customers of the cloud are ultimately going to demand.  That, combined with the ability to allow users to control the movement of their stuff between cloud providers, are going to be mandatory attributes for “business” cloud usage long term.  Guys like Nasuni and TwinStrata are smart in considering these things up front.  Tells me there is hope yet.

I’m curious as to what GE’s play in the cloud is going to end up really being.  Lots of speculation, not a lot of details.  Big, bad consumer company however, that clearly can change the landscape if it decides to.

I was in Vegas at IBM’s Pulse event this week.  5000 PAYING end-users showed up from around the world.  When my session was polled on how many were new attendees, half the hands went up.  That tells me people are now spending money on travel and education again – something they definitely did not do last year – and therefore I view it as another positive sign.

IBM storage has been screwed up for a while – not on technology or products, but in how they do things.  While I can’t say it’s fixed yet, I’m encouraged.  The new new regime is headed by long time CTO super genius Brian Truskowski – who although he’s a vector head, has always also been a business person.  They have new (to the job, not to IBM) folk running the disk business and (gulp) even have someone that looks capable of taking on what I feel is IBM Storage’s biggest challenge – marketing and messaging.  IBM has had great technologies forever – but no one knows about them because they are scattered everywhere and are almost never in context.  IBM gets no cross leverage when XIV wins a deal or when TSM does.  Sales people and partners have no idea what to sell when because there is no rationalization between lines.  It’s complicated for sure, but it can be fixed, and when it is, IBM will get an instant boost in output.  Or, they can continue to ignore it and it will be more of the same.

I think we’ll start to see that primary storage data reduction is going to be an in vogue conversation by the end of this year.  It’s simply too stupid to keep dealing only with the result of too much data and not with the cause.

I was stunned by some data our squad came up with that shows situations where tape is really NOT the cheapest means of performing DR, contrary to all popular wisdom.  Yes, it’s a tease, but more will come.

You wanna know why the backup software market is still the best place in the world?  $4b+ spend annually, very mature, and yet it still represents a great place for startups and innovators.  Why?  Because every year we estimate that at least 10-15% of people will flush their current solution and seek another – that’s a lot of money to be grabbed.  Why?  Because data growth breaks all existing systems/processes sooner or later, or server virtualization efforts create new opportunities to re-do backup – and that gives a new player with a new way of doing things a new shot at fame.  Natural factors will accelerate this trend, by the way.

Steve O’Donnell has been teaching folks in industry how to talk to CIOs – or more accurately, translating the language of the CIO.  Fascinating stuff.  I stole a bunch of his theories for my presentation at Pulse.  By the way, kudos to IBM for letting me talk about this stuff and not talking at ALL about storage or boxes or servers or anything!  I hope the crowd enjoyed it – it was good stuff regardless of the presenter.  I think IBM made the preso available but if not, we’ll be happy to send it along if you’d like it.

I like the Viridity story.  It’s amazing how little insight we really have in our own data centers as to what boxes are sucking what power and cooling and what is really available.  They aim to help folk to find actual information out about this – which will save companies gazillions.

Ciao

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Tags: CIO, Data Reduction, IBM, Nasuni, TwinStrata, Viridity