September

I'm back from vacation, business trips and other summer fun! A lot going on in the worldwide economy and politics these days, not so much on the storage front though.

Let me summarize some of the key news there from the past couple weeks:

Lots of hype still around FCoE, here's an excellent summary of where the industry is today. I've had quite a few discussions around this topic recently and my personal opinion is this: unless the (FCoE) industry manages to get to an accepted standard where clients will be able to connect FCoE native (storage) devices and FCoE switches without being forced to juggle dozens of interop matrices, FCoE will be going nowhere!

Take iSCSI as an example: iSCSI storage connects to any standard IP network and switch and clients don't have to first verify if device XYZ supports switch ABC.

Even more hyped is the "Big Data" theme: Read in this article why "there's really no such thing as big data"!

By the way: one of the books I took along to the beach this summer is "Innovators Dilemma", I can highly recommend it, it has lots of examples and details about the hard-disk industry; to make the case why big companies ("incumbents") usually fail to spot new market niches and disruptive technologies.

Talking about "big": While others talk about big data, IBM actually builds big data, read here!

And to close on a sad note: HP seems really lost these days, the article here in WSJ says it all.