November, 2011

SNW Europe: EMC’s project with no name

Talking to Mika Kotro, EMC Germany-based sales and partner development manager, at SNW Europe, I was told of an unusual-sounding project in development. The idea is this: to utilise spare processing power on EMC storage controllers to serve critical applications.

SNW Europe: SNIA’s ‘green’ storage initiative yields practical results

Three years ago, everyone (well, everyone in the world of storage marketing hype, that is) was talking about "green" storage. For a while, all sorts of products were framed in terms of their green-storage crendentials. Entire product categories built their pitch on that basis;...

SNW Europe: An Emulex formula for convergence, and v2.0 of its monitoring tool

I recently blogged about QLogic’s new converged 16 Gbps Fibre Channel and FCoE network adapter, while a reader helpfully pointed out Brocade had one of these too.

I observed...

SNW Europe: Avere’s ‘edge NAS’ product

Continuing the centripetal/centrifugal theme, an interesting example of a product I saw at SNW Europe that is quite happy to be good at one thing -- OK, maybe two things in a quite unusual combination -- is...

SNW Europe: Centripetal/centrifugal forces at work

It’s an axiom of capitalism that the customer should be free to choose what they buy. But it’s not always a right that’s freely given, and businesses prefer to lock you in if they can.

In the consumer IT world Microsoft was forced, for example,...