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This Week’s Blog:

SRM Tools – an Extreme Cash Cow?
I have personally seen raised frustrations around SRM tools from end-users ever since the “Single-Pane-of-Glass” glory days – pitched by every storage vendor under the sun…

Storage News:

VMware makes world takeover bid
VMware Infrastructure 4 will now be called “vSphere.” VMware CEO Paul Maritz at VMworld related vSphere to a “giant software mainframe” with management at the service level. This is exciting, in my StorageTek days I helped open-source StorageTek’s first an only open source initiative – OpenTMS. The thought was to embed data management services in the OS-layer, similar to Mainframe’s DFSMS offerings. At Sun, I became an Open Storage advocate with the agenda of seeing DFSMS-like functionality embedded in OpenSolaris. But with Mr. Maritz’s latest keynote, I now see that VMware “gets it” and may just have the technology, resource, and momentum to actually pull it off…

Chuck’s Blog: It’s Happening Again
Chuck sees a new trend happening that looks like an old one – the Golden Age of UNIX was in the mid-1980’s. Will the new Golden Age of the 2000’s be VMware???

Will the SAN Market become a Feature?
A bright engineer at StorageTek used to say, “Never put a product where a feature should be.” He was talking about tape encryption, when we put an encryption chip right next to the compression chip on the STK T10000. This was a better approach than a separate appliance. My friend, Mr. John McArthur, asks a similar question. And it looks like StorMagic is trying to turn a SAN into a feature…

Products of the Year 2008
And the winners are….VMware Site Recovery Manager takes Gold for Backup & DR software; Data Domain DD690 wins Gold for Backup hardware; BlueArc Titan 3200 takes Gold for Disk systems; Riverbed Optimization System (RiOS) takes Gold for Networking; and VMware VMotion brings home Gold for Storage management tools.

EMC beefs up Celerra NAS
The Celerra NS-120, NS-480, and NS-960 models pull in hashing codes from Avamar for file-level dedupe, but no block-level dedupe yet. Additionally, code from the Kashya file-system crawler was pulled into Celerra to locate inactive files for dedup and compression. On the hardware side, larger disk systems were added from Clariion CX4 (NS-960 has up to 960 drives & 8 blades) – and the new NS series will support Flash drives. Also see Chuck’s blog, NAS Evolved.

HP Joins Solaris Community (Live Free or Die)
Sun just inked a deal with HP’s ProLiant server business. Now you can get Solaris on HP, IBM, and Dell servers. Good for Sun’s Solaris business (and a testament to Solaris’ strength as an OS). Good for customers. Good for HP because they can now access customers that won’t move off of Solaris. But I suspect difficult for Sun’s server business – if you want Solaris, but are happy with your HP hardware, no need to change. On the other hand, if you are not happy with your HP hardware and like Solaris, you may look at Sun’s now.

Latest Sun/NetApp clash: SPEC SFS
Yet another benchmark debate. I managed the Sun Storage benchmark team for a short stint, and in that time I learned a lot about benchmarks, SPEC, and SPC. Without a lengthy post, I can make two general observations: 1. There is a LOT of science that goes behind these benchmarks and a lot off good people that try to make them fair. 2. If a vendor’s product performs well, then there is little complaint. But if it does not, that vendor will always discredit the benchmark and/or try to change the “criteria” so that vendor’s product performs better.

Iron Mountain opens file archiving service
Iron Mountain Digital rolled out a new cloud storage offering this week with a service called Virtual File Store (VFS).