Disclaimer: My company was a Sun Microsystems partner (that later became part of Oracle) but now I no longer have a business relationships with this company anymore. Before the end of the year I had a lunch with a couple of friends: one Oracle’s employee and one partner of the same company. We weren’t there to talk about the most hated software company (and perhaps the wealthiest one) of the market but, eventually we opened up and shared each other some anecdotes. All the IT vendors have their fanboys and detractors, but I think that Oracle (not its products) is the one that could hold the...

Some days ago Isilon (now an EMC company) announced a new feature, in addition to existing options, for their storage solutions: HDFS support. This is a great move that I like very much but with a little reservation. Storage vendors are working hard to take a step forward by bringing data closer to the computational power. In this moment EMC is leading the pack (the other announcement they made last week is project lightning: a flash cache on servers tightly integrated with their storage), but it’s clear that it is only a matter of time: I’m sure that other primary vendors will release...

After a mighty struggle with my new video editing setup here’s the first video coming from the first Dell Storage Forum Europe held in London, UK last month. I recorded several videos during the event interviewing execs from Dell but the audio quality was seriously lacking, I tried to lower down the noise as much as I could in this one and I’m working on the other two. This video is a brief chat with Jonathan Seckler, Product Marketing of Dell Networking, about Force 10, the newest acquisition in the Dell family. We briefly cover new technologies such as VXLAN and NVGRE, FCoE and Layer 4-7...

So, after months of rumors and driven anticipations, EMC’s project lightning has seen the light! I was very thrilled about this announcement but it’s not so exciting as I was expecting, probably we need to wait for the next version to see more. New paradigms ahead The next generation scaled out infrastructures are looking at new methods to store data closer to the CPU: no more in vertical silos but dispersed in the cluster and near to the CPU power. At the same time, many storage vendors are working very hard on the opposite side trying to bring CPUs closer to data. The final goal is the...

During HP Discover I had the chance to sit down with some great HP folks, one of these “coffee talks” revolved around a new storage industry-wide effort called SCSI Express. I recorded a pretty long video (30+ mins) using my camera that unfortunately was thought to be lost in a hard drive crash that I suffered the week after I got back from Vienna, but, fortunately enough, I was recently able to recover it almost entirely using a data recovery product. I know that it’s been a long time since HP held Discover in Europe but I thought that the video would be very interesting regardless,...