Tuesday, October 2, 2012

October

Q3 is here and that's probably a good time to look back on how our industry did thru Q2 this year.
Here's the IDC numbers as commented by Computerworld and The Register: "Spending on all disk storage rose to nearly US$8.1 billion in the quarter, led by double-digit growth in emerging countries, IDC said. Enterprises also bought more bytes of data capacity, with shipments rising 24.8 percent from a year earlier to 6,667 petabytes"
So let's wait a couple weeks for these guys to add up the Q3 numbers for us!

On the networking side, I noticed a steady increase of articles and discussions about VXLAN so took the time to dig a bit into this. The one piece which probably provides the best introduction and overview about this networking overlay standard can be found here.
And while we are on the hype-side of the industry: immediately after we get used to SDN (software defined networking), the SDD (software defined datacenter) is upon us! I have yet to sort this out, seems to be a re-packaging of some sort of cloud: "The software-defined data center is a way for IT shops to reap the agility benefits of cloud computing while maintaining legacy applications."

Remaining on the topic of networking: If you are old enough to remember the SAN craze of the late nineties and early 2000, there was one company which stood out: Brocade! And one CEO who made a couple of millions and  headlines during these years as well: Greg Reyes. Well, a lot happened since then and you can now read his story in that book released just recently!

And finally: IBM just completed the acquisition of Texas Memory Systems (TMS) yesterday and their stock price is at an all-time-high on that same date... but if you think that Wall Street suddenly appreciates solid state storage, you're probably wrong!
By the way: IBM is already actively working on the next generation of "solid-state memory" as this press release from June indicates!