Everyone and their mother has been writing about this, but yes, Cisco is entering the server business. Details are still skimpy, but it looks like it’s a blade server, it’s got VMWare baked in, and the word “virtualization” gets thrown around every three sentences or so. I’ve been talking to some people who don’t understand why Cisco is bothering to do this, but it’s really kind of sensible, in my opinion. Here’s why: Read the rest of this entry »
Chuck Hollis, one of EMC’s senior execs and frequent blogger, has posted some odds and ends, but the one item that got my dander up was a little blurb on Exadata, Oracle’s storage server appliance. To quote Chuck:
“Oracle’s DW behemoth was announced with great fanfare last September. My pointed skepticsm even resulted in a minor war of words with some of the high priests of Oracle’s DW community.
Well, here we are in January, and it looks like the whole thing is losing momentum – as predicted. Sure, throwing a ton of hardware at the problem can make Oracle run much faster, but there are more elegant ways to get the same results — which customers are starting to realize.”
I find it odd that Chuck is even bothering to discuss Exadata on his blog. After all, the next stage of data warehouse storage was decided long ago, and it is not traditional SAN storage. Companies like Netezza, Datallegro (now Microsoft), Greenplum, and many others have all figured out that putting the storage as close to the end processing as possible is the cheapest, fastest way to run data warehouses, and they succeeded in getting some big customer wins against the traditional database vendors. Oracle simply had to compete, and that’s where the Exadata comes in.
Exadata is just Oracle’s way of offering a competitive offering to the existing data warehouse appliance vendors. While it potentially could be used in OLTP environments, Oracle isn’t heavily selling it into those environments. I certainly can’t speak to how successful it’s been from a revenue perspective, but one thing that’s going to limit adoptions currently is the fact that Exadata requires 11g. Oracle DBAs are notoriously slow to adopt new versions of Oracle, and most organizations I see are just now starting to evaluate 11g for production readiness.
Let’s see where Exadata is once 11g is the standard, and then we’ll talk. Of course, Oracle has long since been gunning for the end of “big box” storage vendors – the release of Oracle’s ASM storage management technology was the first salvo in Oracle’s strategy of commoditizing storage, as part of their attempts to commoditize everything but the database. After all, it gets a lot easier for Oracle to justify their software price points if the customer is buying cheap disk instead of expensive disk.
Chris Evans, the storage architect, just published a post about storage migrations. He talks about how the increasing storage capacity of arrays means that when you have to replace them, the process is ever-so-much more painful. I completely agree, but I think there’s a few points to consider when looking at this process. Read the rest of this entry »
Hu Yoshida, the CTO at Hitachi Data Systems, has a blog post up outlining his IT predictions for 2009. Some of them are fairly uncontroversial (midrange storage will continue to get more high-end features, people will spend less money buying new storage, more money on managing it more efficiently, etc.), but there’s one I find interesting:
“The hype around cloud storage will diminish. Attention will shift to practical solutions available through SaaS. While some vendors will continue to take advantage of cloud storage buzz, the industry will come to the realization that cloud is really about the network and not storage. The requirements for storage continue to be scalability, multitenancy, and security whether in the cloud or in the data center. Cloud or SaaS providers like SalesForce.com will offload some of the workload from the data center but the majority of the data will be stored and managed in the data center through 2009.”
Michael Arrington, over at TechCrunch, has gotten ahold of some of the contents of a private Google Group that Google HR set up to get some feedback on why people left the company. Reading through the thread, it all seems like your typical gripes that ex-employees have about why they left the company, with some exceptions.
Well, hello, and welcome to a new blog. If you’re seeing this post, it means I haven’t gotten far enough along in writing content to have this scroll off the main page. Sorry about that.
My name is Matthew Zito – I work in technology, and you can find more information about me in the About page. I started this blog to talk about technology events, developments, etc., but I suspect we’ll wander a little far afield of that. Please feel free to subscribe to the RSS feed, and don’t hesitate to drop me a line – matt@crackpotideas.com