
Google Cloud Platform : Good Times Ahead
The tech behemoths Amazon, Microsoft & Google are established players in one of the battes that will change the future of customers view and investments of computing. This is an area with a potential hundred billion dollars plus that can be secured for the vendors – a lucrative space that each one wants to corner […]

Cloud … You’re Doing it Wrong!
I’ve been doing “cloud” for about as long as it’s been a “thing”. It is safe to say that I’ve talked about every conceivable topic related to cloud and cloud computing. Unfortunately, I still run into a common problem, which is that the average enterprise looking to adopt cloud or build their own, is usually […]

Killing the Storage Unicorn: Purpose-Built ScaleIO Spanks Multi-Purpose Ceph on Performance
Collectively it’s clear that we’ve all had it with the cost of storage, particularly the cost to maintain and operate storage systems. The problem is that data requirements, both in terms of capacity and IOPS are exploding and growing exponentially, while the cost of storage operations and management is growing proportionally to those data needs. […]

A CoprHD Status Update
I wanted to provide you a big update on Project CoprHD and a mea culpa. As many of you know, EMC launched CoprHD during EMC World 2015 and made the code generally available on June 5th. Unfortunately, we are learning the hard way about proper follow through when open sourcing a project. As you probably […]

Intel, Rackspace, OpenStack, and a Cloud for All
I didn’t really get it, back in January 2014, when Intel, Amazon and others made a big noise about slapping the equivalent of an ‘Intel Inside’ sticker on your favourite cloud. Now they’re at it again, with the birth of a new ‘Cloud for All’ initiative, a nudge for OpenStack, and the promise that Intel and Rackspace […]

Amazon iterates, Google partners
Positive cloudy news from two of the big three, with Amazon Web Services (AWS) making some significant improvements to their DynamoDB service and Google signing on as a sponsor of the OpenStack cloud platform. AWS has got this incremental improvement thing down to a fine art, to the extent that too many competitors have stopped […]

Money for IaaS, money for streaming data
$83 million for Digital Ocean, with its bare-bones spin on cloud-based infrastructure… and $24 million for Confluent, the company behind Apache Kafka. Digital Ocean’s not an AWS-killer (and doesn’t think it is, either), and Kafka addresses a rather specific set of use cases around messaging between devices and/or application components… but both are solid pieces of […]

Project CoprHD’s Architecture
Unless you had your head in the sand, you probably saw my blog post talking about Project CoprHD (“copperhead”), EMC’s first open source product. Exciting times are ahead when one of the world’s largest enterprise vendors embraces open source in a big way. Does it get any bigger than picking your flagship software-defined storage (SDS) […]

Big telcos with cloudy pretensions
Two stories in the past week, to remind us that big telecoms incumbents have the customer relationships, the brand recognition, the data centres, the network and the ambition to offer cloud services. These are normally aimed at their existing customers, particularly big enterprises with existing co-lo relationships to these telcos. They’re also, normally, aimed at […]

EMC and Canonical expand OpenStack Partnership
As you saw at last week’s OpenStack Summit, EMC® is expanding its partnership with Canonical amongst others. I want to take a moment to talk specifically about our relationship with Canonical. We see it as a team up between the world’s #1 storage provider and the world’s #1 cloud Linux distribution. For the last two […]

Size Matters, sort of
The Amazon Web Services cloud sees ten times as much usage as the next fourteen competitors combined, according to a new report from industry research firm Gartner. At least according to Business Insider’s reporting of the latest Gartner Magic Quadrant for public cloud. And over at VentureBeat, HP’s public cloud is now too small to […]

Introducing CoprHD (“copperhead”), the Cornerstone of a Software-Defined Future
You’ve probably been wondering what I’ve been working on post-acquisition and yesterday you saw some of the fruits of my (and many others) labor in the CoprHD announcement. CoprHD, pronounced “copperhead” like the snake, is EMC’s first ever open source product. That EMC would announce open sourcing a product is probably as big a surprise […]

IT survival in a digital world
Traditional IT skills center on technology and infrastructure like servers, databases, and telecom systems. Although important, these skills are rapidly becoming insufficient to meet the expectations of digital business. To be clear, traditional IT and the CIO are not going away anytime soon. Businesses and the government run on datacenters and applications that require traditional […]

Qlik gets cloudy, puts DataMarket to work
Qlik gets cloudy, puts DataMarket to work: On-premise visual analytics provider, Qlik, has rolled out a cloud-enabled offering that “supports the creation of dashboards and storyboards, and offers seamless sharing and interactivity, allowing users to share Qlik Sense applications” As Maria Deutscher notes in her SiliconAngle piece, this is partly about playing catch-up to the […]

DigitalOcean does Germany
DigitalOcean does Germany: DigitalOcean is very much an outlier. It calls itself a cloud infrastructure provider but essentially it is a traditional hosting provider (although, I’ll have to admit, there is very little to differentiate between a hosting provider and a raw cloud infrastructure vendor). Whatever it does, it is doing it well. DigitalOcean […] […]