EMC

With Cisco-EMC pairing, what’s up with VMware?

The HP vs. Cisco/EMC/VMware hype fight this week re-emphasized that Cisco and EMC (and its subsidiary VMware) are joined at the hip in their aggressive grab for data center share. 

Recurring rumors have Cisco giving up all pretense at some point (John Chambers: ” Ah heck, let’s just get this over with!”) and buying EMC outright. Continued »

HP to add storage to converged server/switch

Inquiring minds really want to know when HP will add storage to its converged hardware offering.

The answer appears to be as soon after Jan. 2, 2010 as possible. Continued »

EMC fights Donatelli departure tooth and nail

EMC isn’t taking the defection of David Donatelli to Hewlett Packard lying down. In fact it’s suing to put the kibosh on the move and a Masschusetts (homer!) judge has granted a preliminary injunction in the matter. A colleague here at TechTarget (thanks Jo) says EMC is one of the few companies that have successfully enforced notoriously hard-to-enforce noncompete agreements in the past so this could get juicy–perhaps as much so as the Microsoft-Google kerfuffle over Kai-Fu Lee.

Tom Brady knee injury inspires EMC campaign

On Sunday, Sept. 7, Patriots quarterback and reigning NFL MVP Tom Brady suffered a season-ending knee injury — dashing the dreams of fans across New England, giving championship hopes to other AFC teams and … inspiring a new EMC marketing campaign?

Yup, it’s true.

EMC today released the Iomaga eGo Patriots edition, a 250GB portable hard drive that’s branded with the Patriots logo and carries the tag line, “You never know when you’re going to need your backup.”

Oh, I get it, like how the Patriots have needed their backup quarterback this year. Good one, EMC. The other football puns in the press release are equally cringe-inducing, like “score a touchdown with backup you can trust” and “an all-pro guard that protects your data on every play.”

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Oracle takes on storage partners

Forrester Research’s Andrew Reichman has a good take on Larry Ellison’s latest competitive foray. During his Oracle OpenWorld Keynote, Ellison did, in fact, position the HP Oracle Database Machine (or Exadata) as an alternative to Teradata and Netezza. And that is true,  as far as it goes. And yet, as Reichman points out, Oracle’s other hardware and storage partners–some of whom were big OracleWorld sponsors, must be irked. Because this box is also taking aim at them.

Coopetition is a grand ol’ tradition in tech. Several years ago, while talking up his company’s desire to suck up more revenue from its own storage management, analytics and other offerings, Ellison warned applications, storage management and BI rivals that mined the Oracle’s installed base, to get out of his backyard.  Two of the companies he was shaking his fist at were Siebel Systems and BEA. And guess where they are now.

And so, with HP, Oracle is taking on Sun (which has its own data warehouse appliance work going on with Green Plum), NetApp and others even as those companies helped pay the Oracle OpenWorld bills.

NYT: Tucci fired Greene in front of her husband, offered her seat to him

Wow. Looks like all that speculation about bad blood between Joe Tucci and Diane Greene wasn’t just true — it was worse than people thought.

The New York Times today has an explosive story with the ugly details of July 7, when Tucci, the EMC CEO and VMware chairman, fired Greene, VMware’s CEO and co-founder.

Citing anonymous sources, the paper says that Tucci called Greene into a room, along with her husband, VMware co-founder and chief scientist Mendel Rosenblum. First, Tucci fired Greene — right there, in front of Rosenblum. Then, adding insult to injury, he turned to Rosenblum and offered him his wife’s seat on VMware’s board!

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Microsoft’s virtualization party

Microsoft wants customers and partners to know that it’s really, really REALLY ready to virtualize. So it’s hosting its “Get Virtual Now” event Monday.

It’s invited a few dozen of its best-friend vendors (if that’s not an oxymoron) to Bellevue for its big day.  Among the Platinum sponsors the usual suspects are well represented. Intel? Check. Dell? Hewlett-Packard? IBM? Hitachi Data Systems. Check, check, check and check. That makes sense. The server guys will claim their boxes are Hyper-V ready or Hyper-V capable or Hyper-V elite. Whatever the label is, it means little except in marketing terms.  (”Hey HP, what’s technologically different between this server today and your server last week? Nothing?” And so it goes.)

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Cisco will go acquisition hunting in FY ’09 — but not necessarily for EMC

Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers said Tuesday that regardless of “challenging macroeconomic times,” the company would make major acquisitions in the coming year — though he didn’t indicate that one of those purchases would be EMC.

Chambers made the comments during a fourth quarter earnings call. Continued »

Is Fibre Channel over Ethernet really ready for primetime?

Ask Cisco executives about Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) deployment in data center and storage networks and they’ll tell you it’s a no-brainer. The technology will be ready for volume deployment by next year or 2010, and the channel should gear up and start training now.

Ask Brocade, a major Fibre Channel switch rival, and they’ll tell you to hold your horses — the enterprise is not ready to re-jigger entire data centers and the technology won’t take off until 2012. In fact, Brocade spent its Technology Day at the end of June warning that it would take its time with FCoE, not even doing customer testing until 2009. Brocade also said it would continue developing straight Fibre Channel equipment since that would be the dominant protocol for enterprise storage until at least 2014 . Cisco was happy to quickly counter Brocade in the press. Continued »

VMware CEO Diane Greene suddenly replaced

VMware CEO Diane Greene — who is widely credited with driving server virtualization into the mainstream — was suddenly replaced by Microsoft veteran Paul Maritz. Maritz had most recently been running the cloud computing division at VMware parent company EMC.

The industry-shaking announcement came in a statement from the board of directors, but the company didn’t offer any details about why Greene is leaving. VMware chairman Joe Tucci thanked Greene for her contribution and wished her the best.

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