Last night I received a message from Compellent about their new organization: the acquisition process was over without a glitch and now they will work as a single company (or at least this is what I can see from the field). never change a winning team First of all I’m glad to see Compellent’s team will be left untouched, especially the customer’s beloved support and the engineering team! I have got no visibility of what will happen to sales forces but I’m sure that Compellent people will easily find a fit in the Dell’s organization (CML hasn’t direct sales forces on...

Hitachi announced VAAI support for external virtualized storage on their high-end storage platform: VSP. VSP is one of the main contenders in the high-end storage arena, and one of its main strength is the ability to virtualize external storage, leveraging previous investments in tier 2 or tier 3 storage. VAAI is one of the most touted features in the VMware world, VAAI is the acronym for vStorage API for Array Integration and vendors raced to support it in their firmwares but HDS is the first vendor to deliver a storage virtualization platform with VAAI. Benefits are huge, from accelerating old...

Although in the last years we delivered some important VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure) projects I still think VDI will remain a niche market and likely be soon surpassed by new technologies and different approaches to the problem. Analysts (and vendors) forecasts actually differ from my point of view, many of them think 2011 will be the VDI year but I’m pretty sure it’s not a realistic expectation, here it is why: the problem Well, the problem is indeed a simple one: running PCs is a drama! Hardware and software maintainance, security and power consumption are just the first...

During these holidays I was going through some (very) old docs lying in my archive directory (there's stuff dating back 1996 in there) and one of the directories struck me immediately: "Wearable Computing". For those unfamiliar with this term, it's something that the industry tried to convince us we needed back in the late '90s, early '00s, where so-called visionaries envisioned that all the people of the future had to wear small personal computers (sometimes with glass-mounted HUD) to keep us, people of the future, always connected. Big names like MIT Media Lab and IBM...

This topic often comes in conversations, by customer’s coffee machine, but its implications are less often underrated. what happens to your data if you do not stop and think over what happens inside your storage, you may end up with a distorted view of your needs, and this might lead to regrettable effects: higher infrastructureexpenditures (TCA and TCO), performances not up to the needs/expectations, management difficulties, and last but not least, a bad reputation among users. I’d like to clarify what happens to data/information, from the moment they are created on. I’m...