Fans of High End Storage

Well I haven’t been feeling well the last two days :( So I have been slow on email and posts. I read Chuck’s latest post and thought it was a great way to help introduce…. A Storage related facebook group… Fans of High End Storage! Now a lot of you may be thinking, “Facebook is for college kids”… Chuck, StorageAnarchist, StorageZilla, and everyone else, why don’t you come on over and try it out. I’ve found a lot of my partners there, along with good friends, colleagues, neighbors, and customers! The Fans of High End Storage group is a place to talk about things relevant to high end storage, heated discussions are ok, but of course slander and being mean is NOT ok. It’s not just for EMC’ers…. any fan of high end storage (whether you run it, build it, sell it, blog about it, or do anything else with it), even the suddenly missing HDS blogger, David Merrill is welcome to join us!!

Check it out, you’ll have to login, but trust me it’s worth it :)

EMC will offer hosted storage

I am trying to catch up on the hodgepodge of press from EMC World…since there wasn’t a lot of blog coverage or live simulcasts :(

One thing I came across was the re-affirmation of the hosted storage solutions that EMC will offer through it’s partners. I mentioned hosted storagebefore and have wondered how EMC will play with the SaaS offerings that will be coming in the next few years. This isn’t a new approach or idea, but it is interesting how this approach will interact with Microsoft…or will lack integration with Microsoft. If you look at the acquisitions and read what the execs over there are telling us, Microsoft is looking to make a major play in the SaaS space…along with a minor on premise offering. So if Microsoft is going to move into the SaaS space and begin moving their apps out of your datacenters (including SaaS Storage)….where will you store your data? In some local facility where you are still paying to lease/purchase high end storage? Some storage cloud? Or on the SaaS providers’ high end storage? If you look at where the wins are today for combining hosted services like email and storage clouds….there are both success stories and failure stories.

The question that always comes up though is…. will customers outsource their apps and data to a third party? First, keep in mind we are not talking about just Small and Medium outsourcing here….we are talking about enterprise class services housed in another facility using high end storage. The expanse of customers who outsource their apps won’t want to keep their storage….and the customers who want to keep their storage won’t want to outsource their apps….So where is the line drawn? At what point is it more valuable to outsource both storage & apps and at what point is it more valuable to keep them in house? Clearly everyone thinks there is a line. Microsoft seems to be moving in the line, leaving a small number of in-house companies. EMC hasn’t really made clear where they think the line is though. Current directions and product offerings indicate they think the line leaves a larger number of in-house companies. I think it’s somewhere in the middle with some companies doing a little of both (for example, outsource spam filtering or mobile connectivity and keep the email servers in house). Even the basic email outsourcing can be difficult though. I have talked about Microsoft’s Hosted Messaging a bit, Keith McCall talks about the trade offs as well.

We’ve got a few years to see the result but it will be an interesting ride until we get there.

Are you on the List?

Thanks for pointing this out Matt!

Are you on The List?

Excerpt from the list:

Apr. 24, 2007

Baltimore County Dept. of Health (Baltimore, MD)

A laptop containing personal information including names, date of birth, Social Security numbers, telephone numbers and emergency contact information of patients who were seen at the clinic between Jan. 1, 2004 and April 12 was stolen.

6,000

Somewhere between onsite storage and Amazon’s S3

Karen over at eWeek has the the story about EMC & Unisys partnering up to offer hosted storage services for customers. This is an interesting strategy change that is barely explored by Karen. With the rise of Amazon’s S3 which allows storage at $0.15GB, more customers and startups have questioned their onsite storage solutions and moved to alternative methods of data storage. One thing that is missing in the cloud solution is the integrated data management that comes with an onsite storage solution. For those customers who need a little bit of management and a lot cheaper storage, they have still been stuck purchasing substandard storage or good storage with no one to manage it…..

……Enter hosted storage by EMC|Unisys…..now customers can get both integrated storage management from the start and a completely hands off approach to the whole thing….or the integrated storage with a little bit of hands on. This is a great concept, although it is odd that EMC isn’t hosting it themselves and I don’t see any pricing anywhere. It will be interesting if the pricing is aggressive enough to draw the web 2.0 crowd to use the EMC|Unisys offering vs. Amazon’s S3 offering. There are pros and cons to both storage outsourcing models and there is enough data in the world to support both of these offerings (and probably a couple more)….

Blue Monster: Beyond Microsoft

I think what Barry is trying to say is that EMC has a platform….and…..It Scales!!! It’s called a DMX!

I think Hugh’s Blue Monster campaign with Microsoft has a good shot at being extended to other tech companies….Hugh, you might want to think about it :)