Last year, Dell went on a storage buying spree. Dell took in Exanet for clustered, multiplatform NAS, Ocarina Networks for extensible, cross platform data compression and deduplication, capped-off with an announced agreement to acquire Compellent's virtualized storage arrays and Fluid Data technology, which closed last month. All tallied, I estimate Dell spent nearly $1 billion last year to flesh-out its storage portfolio, which also includes its EqualLogic virtualized storage arrays and PowerVault systems.

Dell storage executives now believe they have the goods to compete head-on with the major storage players (including EMC) in the following market segments:

Virtualized disk … Read more

IBM's Watson debuted for a national prime time TV audience last night on CBS' Jeopardy. Well, to be accurate, his avatar glowed behind his center-stage podium. He did however have a real button to push when he was ready to tee up a Jeopardy-formatted question-as-answer. The button was activated by a specially designed application running within his offstage IBM POWER7 server cluster, complete with IBM Scale-Out NAS (SONAS) storage.

From my perspective Watson was truly amazing during the first 15 minutes of the show, giving responses and choosing the next question category with blinding speed. Human contestants Brad Rutter … Read more

What's in a Vblock? It's a cloudy mix onto which a very experienced CEO is shedding more light.

Michael Capellas, the former chief executive of Compaq, MCI, and First Data, and current CEO of Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) Coalition, updated industry analysts with VCE progress as of early December 2010, slightly more than a year after Cisco Systems and EMC announced the VCE joint venture, which integrates servers and networking gear from Cisco, storage and management software from EMC, and the VSphere virtual operating system of VMware into Vblocks.

While the VCE Coalition is a privately held entity … Read more

Earlier this year, EMC surprised the storage community with its acquisition of Greenplum, a small producer of sophisticated software that can be used to both scale-out and accelerate data warehousing and business analytics applications. Its core technology is based on a convergence of Google's MapReduce process, and SQL. The result is a business analytics engine that is now being used to process very large data sets from a variety of online and traditional database sources. EMC created a new Data Computing Division around Greenplum and has recently released a Data Computing Appliance to compete with a number of accelerated … Read more

For years, storage vendors have been offering two types of disk storage: block and file. Block-based storage is commonly associated with SANs (storage area networks) while-file based storage is commonly referred to a NAS (network attached storage) and attached to Ethernet networks.

Lately, the vendors of either flavor have developed an interest in selling storage arrays that swing both ways--a storage system that provides both block and file access simultaneously. The moniker for these converged SAN/NAS systems is "unified storage."

With unified storage arrays, block access is accomplished through use of an interface to the array such … Read more

In a surprise move, IBM is acquiring a business analytics vendor named Netezza.

I say "surprise" first because few in my line of work saw this one coming (IBM already has products in this space. Why buy another?), and second because IBM is paying $1.7 billion for a company that earned $4.2 million during its latest fiscal year on revenue of $190.6 million. That's a long way away from $1.7 billion. And, need I say this again? IBM already has a whole portfolio of Smarter Planet business analytics products and services.

However, Netezza … Read more

It has been a long time coming, but virtualized storage is now a "must have" technology.

Dell has announced its intent to acquire next-gen storage vendor 3Par for $1.15 billion, excluding 3Par's cash and other considerations. With this acquisition, Dell continues to morph its business model to be more inclusive of computing systems and services aimed at the enterprise data center customer. With the addition of 3Par's InServ "utility" storage line, Dell ads a midrange to high-end array to its own and growing storage portfolio. 3Par's InServ FC SAN storage, popular lately … Read more

Last year, storage vendors were all about cloud. They saw major-league opportunities in the private, public, hybrid, and federated versions. No cloud was too big or too small. In fact, because clouds were "infinitely scalable," there was no limit to the number of yotta bytes they could sell.

Storage users and data center storage administrators in particular were decidedly more sanguine. You say cloud is a new services delivery model? Hey storage vendors, where have you been lately? We've been all about services delivery for some time now. Tell us something about cloud we don't know. … Read more

EMC has announced it will acquire Greenplum, a data warehousing and business analytics software firm for an undisclosed sum. EMC will use this acquisition to form the basis of a new Data Computing Products Division led by Bill Cook, CEO of Greenplum, who will report to Pat Gelsinger, COO of EMC's Information Infrastructure Products. To put that statement into perspective, Backup and Recovery Solutions (where Data Domain and other related acquisitions now live) is also a separate EMC division reporting to Gelsinger. BRS is a big division with a lot of products. Therefore, I think one can safely bet … Read more