Once in a while, I get someone who challenges me to really think outside the box, and speculate what things might look like farther out beyond the typical 12-24 month horizon. When that gauntlet goes down, there's always an awkward moment in the room: the sales rep squirms a bit as we're clearly going off the script, the questioner's co-workers look slightly embarrassed, maybe I'll choke, and so on. Why? Almost none of the IT vendors (including EMC) have formal external views that go out that far -- and that's exactly why it's a good question. It's not a good idea to respond by simply waving your hands and extrapolating on well-known known trends. To do a good job, you have to identify the less-obvious trends outside the topic at hand, talk about how they'll interact in novel ways, and look beyond just the technology itself. You also have to be comfortable improvising :) I don't think anyone expects you to be even partially correct. It's a thinking exercise, nothing more. And, while 2018 might seem a long ways away, the future comes at you fast. To be clear, these are my personal views, and may or may not be... Continue reading

That boring stuff -- storage -- is where we keep all of the interesting information we care to own. The size and growth of the storage market can often be a rough proxy for economic macro-trends such as aggregate capital investment, shifts to digital business models, and more. More reasons to keep information around == more demand for storage technologies. A recent IDC report claims that enterprise storage revenue growth will be notably more muted than in past years -- now forecast to track to a respectable (but modest) revenue growth rate of 4.1% through 2017. The report points at the adoption of familiar storage efficiency technologies -- compression, dedupe, thin provisioning, etc. -- as the primary culprit of reduced expenditures by IT organizations around the globe. While there's no denying that many of these technologies are becoming widely adopted, I think there's more to the story. And I'm guessing that when 2017 rolls around, the picture may turn out differently than IDC is forecasting. Why Does This Matter? Growing markets for technologies tend to attract investment: new innovation, new competitors, etc. That ultimately ends up being good for everyone who depends on said technology. As a positive case, consider... Continue reading

Given that Google's Reader is disappearing at the end of the month, and Google's Feedburner is not far behind, I thought the time was right to switch over to a new feed service -- FeedBlitz. Already, I like it a lot better. I don't want to lose you in the process. If you're a regular reader (and would like to continue being one!) your options are: #1 -- Do nothing Feedburner should continue to work, although I'm doubtful for how long. Why not take a moment to switch over? #2 -- Switch to my new feed Simply paste this string into the reader of choice: http://feeds.feedblitz.com/chucks_blog #3 -- Consider subscribing via email if you'd like Simply use the box on the right rail. That's about it -- please let me know directly if you see any issues. And thanks for reading! Continue reading

Conventional wisdom is that the familiar desktop/laptop market is getting seriously eroded by the popularity of tablets: first the iPad, and now a bevy of Android and Windows devices. Mine isn't getting used as much as it used to -- and for some very good reasons. I also am noticing the same thing with the people around me: family, friends, co-workers. While tablet form-factor computing is now an indelible part of the landscape, have we lost some of our enthusiasm over the last few years? Tales Of An Early Adopter I was completely smitten the first time I picked up an iPad. I bought one for myself. And then -- over time -- for my family members -- wife, kids, my mother, etc. I thought -- wow, this is a big deal. It was a completely novel experience, unlike any sort of end-user computing I had been exposed to. I took my iPad with me everywhere. I got a bunch of accessories. I spent a fair amount of time trying out different applications: productivity, games, etc. And then -- something changed. It mostly stays in my travel bag these days, and doesn't get that much use. I still think it's... Continue reading

If you're involved with virtualization or any form of IT infrastructure, you're probably paying attention to SDDC (software-defined data center) concepts, as well you should. It's a powerful set of ideas: by abstracting intelligence into software, the IT world becomes a better place: more agile, more controllable, and more efficient. Infrastructure behavior will be ideally driven by the application workload at hand, and not pre-ordained. As the three core infrastructure categories pass through the SDDC wormhole, they are inevitably altered. For example, how we thought about servers five years ago in the physical world is nothing like we think about them today: servers are now abstracted, dynamic, resizable, and relocatable virtual entities -- all thanks to virtualization. Now both networking and storage are approaching the same event horizon as server and compute did years before. And both will look very different before long. This inevitability is not lost on industry storage vendors, either. To date, we've heard much about software-defined storage from EMC, NetApp and HP. We will eventually hear from HDS and IBM, and maybe even Dell. And, of course, no shortage of small, nimble startups that smell an opportunity. Where are the flags being planted? Is there any... Continue reading

IT refashions itself as the internal service provider of choice: creating services that business people want to consume. But -- once this model gets past the garden variety stuff: better end-user computing, enterprise apps, collaboration, etc. -- what are the killer new services that the business crowd is thirsty for -- and willing to pay for? It's data -- and lots of it. Gathered from as many sources as possible, analyzed in a variety of ways, and consumed and shared as efficiently as possible. Big data analytics. Internally here at EMC, we've dubbed our platform BAaaS -- business analytics as a service. From humble beginnings, we're now about a year into the effort. I've already shared what we're starting to learn from a business perspective: transforming your business to run on predictive analytics is certainly a journey, and in many regards we've only just begun. But there's a parallel story from the EMC IT side who's racing like crazy to keep up with the new cadre of data junkies we're earnestly creating. EMC IT BAaaS -- The Mission The internal summit was organized and led by our EMC IT "dream team": Narayanan (KK) Krishnakumar (VP and Chief Architect EMC IT),... Continue reading

Through the lens of history, every technological innovation has been a two-edged sword. Fire cooks -- and burns. Oil powers our economy, and fills the air with carbon. Nuclear power can deliver unlimited clean energy, or can be fashioned into terrifying weapons. These new technologies don't exactly come with convenient instruction guides -- we have to collectively learn how to extract the benefits without creating more harm than good. Many of us are now looking at big data in the recent light of what these tools might mean in the hands of large, powerful governments: boon or bane? Or is this yet another example where we as a society haven't figured out what we're comfortable with, and what we're not? It Isn't Just Entertainment Anymore The all-knowing, all-powerful government computer system has long been a staple of action films. Fragments of evidence immediately become rich, nuanced dossiers that conveniently accelerate the plot. Mostly, this capability is presented as being used for the greater good; but there are a few storylines that assume otherwise. Personally, I've always believed that assembling gigantic, cross-referenced real-time databases with every phone call, every email, every sensor trace, etc. -- well, it makes a nice story,... Continue reading

It hasn't taken long for Hadoop to be added to the long list of workloads that IT groups are now potentially responsible for. While not as ubiquitous as, say, Microsoft Exchange, you can start to see the occasional new Hadoop cluster pop up here and there. When you go looking for industry events that discuss the required infrastructure -- design and operations -- there's not a lot to choose from quite yet. But I did see that there was a clearly identified "infrastructure" track at the upcoming Hadoop Summit in San Jose, June 26-27th. If you're going, I and my VMware colleagues would very much like to meet with you. We'll be conducting a series of strategy feedback sessions around extending virtualization to meet the needs of tomorrow's big data analytics environments. And if you have an opinion on these topics, why not share it? You just might help create some really great products down the road ... How We Got Here VMware has been busy extending its technology to bring the benefits of virtualization to popular Hadoop distros via Project Serengeti. But now the VMware team faces some interesting directional choices, and is looking for feedback. We ran a... Continue reading

The pattern is familiar: take any critical business question, and use big data analytics to come up with better predictive models. The effect seems near-universal across a dizzying array of disciplines: marketing, customer service, finance, manufacturing -- and even IT. What amazes me is that more IT groups aren't hiving off a small pool of resources to start to learn to apply big data analytics to *their* important business questions: not only for their own benefit, but to gain the domain expertise that the business will inevitable be asking for. It's not expensive. It's not particularly difficult. The handful of people I meet who are actually doing some of this are finding the glimmerings of great potential, and appear to be having great fun in the process. And there is obviously no shortage of interesting questions that need to be answered in the IT world ... Life In IT Ain't Perfect Certainly life in the IT world would be great if (a) requirements were well-understood and never ever changed, and (b) things worked predictably. Pay raises for everyone would be nice, too ... but none of that is likely to happen soon. In the meantime, we're faced with the need... Continue reading

I get a lot of questions on "how do you do this blogging thing?". I guess it must appear to be pretty difficult. Really, it's not all that hard when you break it down into pieces. There's the creative side of blogging which I will make no attempt to explain. For example, outside of work, I'm a musician -- but I could never teach someone how to do it like I do it. I know, I've tried and failed utterly at this. The mechanics, however, can easily be shared. And it's really not all that exotic ... nor time-consuming. The Life Of A Corporate Blogger Blogging does not appear in my job description, nor is my compensation in any way directly tied to my blogging activities. I choose to blog. Maybe you should too. I do not have an editorial staff. Every word that appears here came from my own keyboard. There is no formal approval process for anything I write. I've been doing it a while with some modicum of success: over a thousand posts, and over two million lifetime page views. It's probably the best thing I've ever done for myself, career-wise. Sourcing Material I'm always on the... Continue reading

Gardens are wonderful things. Building one can be an inordinate amount of work up front: finding space, prepping the soil, etc. You plant your seeds, and they hopefully sprout. You obsessively tend for weeds, pests and the occasional wandering child. And then it's payoff time -- a cornucopia of wonderful fruits and vegetables. Yesterday I spent most of the day sitting in on EMC IT's first-ever big data user summit -- 60 people from across the business, all learning and sharing from each other. I couldn't help but think -- what a wonderful garden we're growing these days: there's plenty at hand to harvest, with an even bigger bounty on the horizon. There are certainly organizations far more proficient than EMC's current internal efforts around big data analytics. But most that I encounter look longingly at what we and others have done, and desperately want to get their organizations moving in the same direction. To the extent that we can share our learning, methodologies and experiences -- perhaps we can help others who haven't started their journey yet. To Begin With Historically, EMC has not been the most analytically proficient company when it comes to our internal operations. Sure, we... Continue reading

An increasing number of IT groups are finding themselves adding one or more Hadoop clusters to the mix. Project Serengeti virtualizes Hadoop clusters, making them easier to deploy and easier to manage. It's one thing for a vendor to claim that, and it's another thing entirely to find a customer that agrees with you. This blog post comes to you courtesy of Sasha Kipervarg, the Director of SaaS Operations at Identified -- a targeted analytics-based SaaS offering for recruiting professionals. I was curious about how people actually use Serengeti with VMware, and Sasha was kind enough to be interviewed. I found a lot that was interesting here -- maybe you will as well? The Business Of Talent Recruitment Identified has a neat business model: use powerful algorithms that uses social feed data to help zero in on hard-to-find talent. Their first product -- Identified Recruit -- helps recruiters target scarce healthcare professionals such as registered nurses -- and has meet with good success. From my perspective, there's obvious room to expand in other dimensions: tech professionals as well as other hard-to-find talent. Their "secret sauce" isn't in the data itself -- it lies in their ability to extract signal from... Continue reading

Kids grow up, if you're lucky they eventually get a job and settle down, looking very much like their parents did at a similar age. By the way, they dislike it when you point this out. Industries grow up too: they go through exciting periods of rapid growth and innovation, but eventually settle down and start looking like other industries in many regards. IT is certainly an industry that has gone through exciting growth and transformation over the last few decades. But is IT growing up and settling down? And -- if so -- is this just a temporary plateau before the next exciting period? Given that most of my readers have invested their entire careers in IT, it's a relevant topic. What Brought This On It's not hard to figure out that I'm not exactly a young turk anymore. My first paying IT job was 40 years ago when I was a mere 13 years old -- during the summer, I got paid to write simple BASIC routines on a teletype punch using a 300 baud modem. It was better than a paper route or mowing lawns. As such, I've had a ringside seat on how many aspects of... Continue reading

One of the more memorable sessions at this year's EMC World was when Paul Maritz took the stage right after Joe Tucci to walk through the rationale and motivations behind Pivotal. I'm sure more than a few people walked into the keynote session wondering what this Pivotal thing was all about. Not only did Paul do a masterful job explaining the concepts, he made the compelling case that a platform like Pivotal must exist. The entire video appears here; Paul starts at 32:00 or so. Very much worth watching in its entirety if you have the inclination. For everyone else, I thought I'd attempt to summarize some of the core ideas in an easy-to-digest form -- although Paul is a hard act to follow. To Begin With Pivotal is a new business entity within the EMC federation; formed from assets owned by EMC and VMware, and hits the ground running with ~1300 employees, several successful predecessor products in the marketplace and a long list of enthusiastic customers. Pivotal's mission is simple: to create a new kind of platform for a new kind of world -- the world of big data. Let's Begin With The Three Platforms ... You're starting to... Continue reading

If you're like me, you've been promoting the idea of server virtualization for many, many years. You're also probably familiar with the standard pushback: what about performance? I can clearly remember going through before-and-after charts over and over -- again and again -- for workload after workload: databases, Exchange, web servers, etc. You had to convince people one painful step at a time. Here comes a new workload that more IT organizations are stepping up to: Hadoop in all its forms. While most IT professionals can see the many, many benefits of virtualizing Hadoop environments, they frequently encounter stubborn resistance from people who "just know" doing so will unacceptably impact performance. Well, they're wrong. And there's hard data to prove it. Big Data At VMware While perhaps not as glamorous as other parts of the VMware portfolio, there's a focused team at VMware working hard to bring the core VMware value proposition to big data environments. They've already brought you HVE (Hadoop Virtualization Extensions) as well as Project Serengeti. Today, another accomplishment: both VMware and Cloudera announced that they've done extensive joint qualification and performance characterization. That's all well and good, but what is *really* interesting is the performance white... Continue reading

I think many IT professionals realize that many application performance issues eventually boil down to storage and physical I/O. That was true before server virtualization, and it's certainly true now. Storage array vendors do what they can. Operating system, hypervisor and database vendors do what they can as well. But between the two, there's the potential for a smart layer of storage software that does what others can't. As an example: way back when Solaris was popular, Veritas' VxVM and VxFS were almost ubiquitous. Both products offered an important value-added layer than neither the host OS nor the storage array did well. As a result, the Veritas products become almost a de-facto standard in an larger Sun environments. While I was exploring Virsto (recently acquired by VMware), I was struck by similarities to what Veritas did years ago. It's clearly a smarter storage abstraction layer than either the hypervisor or the array can provide on their own. The real question — now that Virsto is owned by VMware, will Virsto technology end up being a de-facto standard for many VMware environments? What Brought This About Like many of you, I try to follow what all the various storage startups are... Continue reading

I can't remember how many EMC Worlds I've been to over the years. These days, I don't pay much attention to the metrics: number of attendees, number of sessions, etc. I'm far more interested in the soft side -- the discussions, the concerns, what is getting people excited, etc. For me, it's not just a big technology event -- it's more of a tribal gathering. So, if EMC World is a tribal gathering -- how is the tribe doing? And I can safely report -- the tribe is quite strong. EMC World In A Nutshell From its early storage technology roots, EMC has blossomed into a very broad event smack dab at the convergence of so many IT disciplines. Most of the IT infrastructure topics (storage, servers, backup, network, virtualization, cloud, management, etc.) are well represented, but there are healthy doses of security, content management, and -- more recently -- big data analytics. Something for everyone ... At first blush, you'd think you were at an uber-geekfest -- until you start asking people what they do. Very often, the folks at EMC World have broad and surprisingly senior responsibilities within their organizations -- much more than one might expect. Over... Continue reading

As part of the EMC World festivities, EMC's Isilon group is announcing a few new features available today -- as well as previewing their next release, dubbed Waikiki. Even with my obvious EMC bias, I can make a strong argument that OneFS is now clearly in a class of its own: architecture, functionality, robustness, performance, efficiency, etc. You could teach an advanced course in file system design and use OneFS as a perfect example. The gap between OneFS and everything else shows every sign of widening over time. The Isilon team now uses a fast-cadence development model, and we should be expecting regular drops of tick-tock functionality on a 6 month cadence going forward. Join me for a quick recap of "what's new" in the OneFS world -- there's a lot to like. The Basics The name "OneFS" is aptly chosen -- it delivers a single, real-deal scale-out filesystem (up to 20PB and 144 nodes). It is not an aggregation of file systems, nor is it an adaptation of dusty legacy code. It auto-scales, auto-balances and auto-manages. And does so on largely commodity hardware. People who have only known the traditional world of NAS filers express more than a little... Continue reading

I'd like to think I have a pretty good capacity for approaching new technology concepts, internalizing them and explaining them effectively. Those capabilities were severely put to the test when I first approached EMC's new product announced at EMC World: ViPR. The effort paid off: I came away with a deeper understanding of some of the more powerful forces at work in our industry, as well as a breathtaking appreciation for what ViPR intends to achieve: both now and into the future. Rather than debate terminology and categories, the best approach with ViPR might be to relax, follow the discussion, and come to your own conclusions: what ViPR does, what it means to the IT industry, and -- most importantly -- how it might affect you in your world. Trust me, the journey will be rewarding ... Not A Simple Exercise New technologies often defy easy categorization. Past labels can do a poor job of describing a seriously new capability, e.g. Google Glass is much more than just a new way to use your smartphone. While I'm sure many familiar labels will be applied to ViPR, I'm going to avoid that for the time being. Yes -- you can find... Continue reading

Many of us have watched trends wash over the industry landscape. Some come and go quickly; others make more substantive changes. I've had the unfortunate privilege of observing many different waves hit, and I'd like to think I can learn a bit from each one. As we sit here in 2013, it was only four short years ago that the first vituperative cloud arguments started to erupt online: true clouds vs. fake clouds, clouderati, accusations of cloudwashing -- remember all that? From my perspective, the root cause was simple: collectively we were using a single term with multiple meanings -- and thus being perceived very differently depending on your viewpoint. History may not repeat itself, but it does rhyme: the same phenomenon was evident when the big data conversation erupted a few years back. Once again, a single term was being stretched and tortured to mean very different things to very different audiences. Frustration and cynicism is an inevitable by-product. I suppose the most recent phenomenon is software-defined anything. Those of us who are vendors and industry-watchers historically have matters much worse for everyone else. We focus on one shiny aspect or another of the discussion, and often don't take... Continue reading

No, not really -- but a surprising number of IT shops have moved beyond simple snapshots towards continuous data protection -- a DVR-like model that allows recovery to any point in time, and not just to potentially stale snapshot. Perhaps the best example of continuous data protection in today's marketplace is EMC's RecoverPoint. There's a lot to like in the product: extreme flexibility in defining protection modes, well-integrated with applications, operating systems and hypervisors alike, extremely efficient in its use of network and storage resources, and seriously storage agnostic on the back end. Customers have embraced the product enthusiastically -- there are now over 10,000 RecoverPoint units in production today, and more of our customers are coming on board every day. Don't get me wrong: snaps are handy things to have around, and they've saved more than one administrator's bacon over the years. But when you start studying the challenges associated with larger environments, better automation, efficiency, etc. -- you start looking for something with a bit more architectural meat on it. And that's where RecoverPoint shines. Today, EMC is announcing version 4.0 of RecoverPoint. This is no minor release; there's a slew of new capabilities that are worth reviewing.... Continue reading

It's Friday, the weather has turned stunningly gorgeous here in New England, and I don't have any well-organized thoughts to share with you this time. Instead, I thought I'd share some of the loose thoughts rambling around in my head, sort of like empty bottles in the trunk of a car: clanking and rattling at every turn. No big thoughts here, just idle commentary and observations. The Pivotal Announcement For many of us, the highlight of the week was the formal unveiling of Pivotal. The team has done an excellent job of honing and simplifying their message (a very difficult task), and has created a great website that's worth a moment if you're interested. Speaking of "interested", that seems to be an understatement. With just about every customer or partner interaction these days, they want me to set aside 5-10 minutes to talk about Pivotal: what is it, why was it created, what does it mean to me, and so on. I suppose with GE's highly visible investment, that's only going to continue. It's not hard to figure out what Pivotal is aimed at: a new platform for a relatively new class of application -- including the extended ecosystem that... Continue reading

Occasionally, we get very clear signs that significant change is in the air. When large sums of money unexpectedly change hands, people take notice that something interesting and perhaps unexpected is happening. This morning, GE announced that they were investing $105m to take a significant stake in Pivotal, the new initiative jointly owned by EMC and VMware. On one hand, we have GE: perhaps one of the best examples of an exceedingly well-run global corporation with a market cap of over $220B. On the other hand, we have Pivotal: a nascent analytics platform company formed from EMC and VMware assets, with an exceptional leader at the helm: Paul Maritz. Why would a well-resourced and exceptional global corporation take a significant stake in what might appear to be a technology startup venture? And what might this signal going forward? Context Matters I need to start with a disclaimer: I have no "inside knowledge" whatsoever in regards to this. Consider what follows only informed speculation on my part. That being said, let's dive in ... The first big idea in play is the "internet of things", or what GE calls the "machine internet". The first wave of the internet was driven by... Continue reading

Historically, I've done a *lot* of direct customer and partner interaction. I've always found that you can't fully appreciate what's really going on in the IT marketplace unless you spend a lot of time with the people that matter. Reading analyst reports (no matter how good) can only get you so far :) All this frequent interaction gives me the opportunity to spot subtle yet persistent shifts in the gestalt of enterprise IT. Good news: I've started to regularly encounter an entirely new class of post-transformational IT leadership team. They recognized the need for substantive change a while back. They knew what needs to be done, and took on the hard work involved. Their journey was not an easy one. But -- and here's the good part -- they're visibly moving ahead on a wide variety of initiatives, and clearly starting to reposition the IT function from a cost-center to a value generator. And we, as vendor/partners, are inevitably starting to adjust our engagement model around their new reality. The Three Classes Of IT Organizations ... According To Chuck Anytime I sit in front of an IT group for the first time, I spend the first few minutes trying to... Continue reading

This morning, HP took a bold step forward with formally unveiling their "Project Moonshot" -- a new class of servers targeted at (apparently) hyperscale web server farms. While I'm certainly a big fan of disruptive innovation (even from EMC competitors), I've come away with mixed emotions. HP has certainly picked an interesting target to aim at. And they have enough resources and influence in the larger ecosystem to drive a specific agenda. But I think it's going to take an awfully long time before the jury is in as to whether they've been successful or not. The Basics This morning, HP conducted a press event announcing their new "Project Moonshot" servers: a new design package with new processor choices. Strip away the fanfare and puzzling branding (e.g. "software-defined servers"?), and we see a big bet on several interesting industry trends: - server architectures designed for web-scale processing will be an important market (think Facebook and their ilk) - power, cooling and floor space (opex) become dominant concerns with this audience - newer, low-power SoC (server on a chip) processors can do a better job on powering web services per $$ and per watt Download the data sheet, and you'll see... Continue reading