So many things to blog about and so many things that I can't blog about; EMC Customer Councils are always fun, informative and actually quite hard work. By the time you finish, you feel like EMC has attempted to squeeze you for all your opinions and ideas. If any vendor reading this doesn't have such an event, you should!! You'll learn alot and as EMC will testify, it's not always what you want to hear. At times you feel quite sorry for the product managers as they look quite crestfallen at the end of a session having had their product and future plans thoroughly trashed but they generally take it in good spirit.
One thing I think EMC are really beginning to take home is that they no-longer 'own' the storage landscape; they may still be the 'big dog' but the 'smaller dogs' are giving them a run for their money. There appears to be a lot more humility and acceptance that there are things wrong with some of their products. I had a good chat with Barry 'TSA' Burke; he's quite a reasonable fellow in person, yes he's got strong opinions, cut him and he'll bleed EMC but equally he gives credit where credit is due.
Also, it was interesting to talk about the impact of the current economic situation; firstly, the rate of data growth and hence demands on storage is not slowing. But we are being asked to do more with less; in some cases, a lot less. This does not necessarily means that we are fleeing our traditional partners and I think the news from Pillar and other smaller vendors will show this but we will buy less Tier-1, demand that products actually provide value and do more things in house. There will be a 'make and mend' mentality for the time being. There are tools which will assist us in this, dedupe is going to go a storm. For example, I had a comment from one fellow storagebod that A-SIS just works; they were planning to go ahead and test it, only to be told sheepishly by a storage admin that it was already turned on and no-one had noticed any performance issues.
SSDs will continue to fall in price rapidly but we need automated storage tiering to really get value from them.
And there's more but after three days pretty much solidly talking about storage, I think I'll go and kill something.
