September

Looking out of the window,  (well, not my window!) seems like summer has come to an unexpected and early end here in Zurich. So the warm evenings are over, school is on again, traffic is heavy and it's back to business as usual for everybody...

Here's a couple news that drew my attention during the past couple weeks:

There's rumblings at Brocade: Their SVP WW Sales Ian Whiting left in June as it seems and CEO Mike Klayko announced his planned departure as well. Plus there seems to be reorganizations going on inside the company on all levels. Hard to say what's next for Brocade. For the time being, they still have a very solid lead in the legacy Fibre Channel market and recently seem to have a renewed focus on that part of their business (after being distracted too long with their Foundry-based Ethernet portfolio)!

IBM announced their plans to make it's next acquisition in Storage: Texas Memory Systems (TMS) is based in Houston, TX (as the name implies!) and has been in the solid-state storage market long before the industry invented flash memory! The acquisition is expected to close in the fourth quarter 2012, see details here.

Amazon made some waves with frozen water this month: Glacier is the (code?) name for their most recent cloud offering: This is a new type of storage cloud - aimed at the archive market and not inteded to provide split-second response times and data retrieval! Amazon claims to be able to offer this service at 10$ per TB per month. The jury is still out if they use tape in the backend or not...

And lastly some learning topics: SMB 3.0 (aka SMB 2.2) is being finalized and will be part of Windows 8 and Microsoft Server 2012. Looks like this protocol has the potential to definitely tilt the preferred Windows attach method from block to file!
And -together with Windows OS based services like "Storage Spaces"- make some HW based technology (like RAID) obsolete along the way! So watch out for this!