I am a huge fan of HP (Compaq), but they have nothing that comes close and I think they will spend at least two years catching up. It requires a strong networking core compentency which they don’t currently have. I predict they are going to attempt to buy either Foundry or Entarasys in the next year.

The biggest losers are Dell and Brocade. Dell spent a lot of money trying to catch HP and still lost the blade server battle. They won’t have the cash to fight this battle. Brocade bet the farm on their version of unified fabric (FCoE), then EMC and NetApp both went with Cisco (ratified as the standard last month). They were already steadily losing market share in the FC switch market now they are starting off with one foot in the grave on the unified fabric market. Look to see them either be bought by Foundry or Entarasys.

Last time I checked they were a bit less focused than EMC with those R&D dollars. I notice that your blog is not called “Printing Mojo”.

I certainly hope that the PhDs dying to publish go to a place where they can bask in intellectual elitism. Like Sun.

http://www.youtube.com/brocadevideo

Thanks,

Wilson Craig
Director, PR, AR, Social Media
Brocade

AMD and Intel both owe a nod to DEC though, for all the ex-Alpha engineers that fueled advances in Athlon and various Intel processor advances. (Intel would deny that I suspect.)

And we all benefit from DIX, whether we realize DEC was a key player in ethernet or not. DLT tape? The list goes on.

Dave, IBM, HP and Sun together spend a heck of a lot more on R&D than EMC does – and since they let their PhDs publish and don’t punish them with non-competes, they have a better shot at top talent. VMware has been hiring storage engineers like crazy for the last 3 years and they still haven’t fixed the problems. Maybe they will next week, but I’ll believe it when I see it.

RC, how much of Compaq’s success should be assigned to DEC? Just asking.

Robin

Seems like battle lines are forming around the virtualization space, with IBM possibly picking up VirtualBOX in the Sun acquisition.

Yep. And the stereo in my Porsche sucks.

Underestimating the ability of EMC and Cisco to put together end to end magic seems to be a favorite sport of folks who rally behind companies with R&D budgets the size of my mortgage. VMWare only recently learned that “storage” was not “the place where we keep our mops”.

Just like my stereo problem, that can easily be fixed.

Dave

From a Networking perspective, do you really think that a “low cost” Sun/HP/IBM Switch can compete with Linksys? Hard to go lower than Cisco at some level since they already own the bottom At the high end routing / DWDM space you have to deal with a whole host of players, some you’ve likely never heard of like Infinera. Google already makes their own ethernet switches, so I’m not really seeing a downside for Cisco networking wise.

Don’t you think that Cisco has EMC or NetApp (or both) as an acquisition target if the Three Stoogies (IBM, Sun, HP) actually get their act together? What would they do in response? Buy Brocade, Juniper & Citrix? LOL.

In any event, Cisco is targeting the low hanging fruit of windows consolidation with a fancy Cobalt like server in a can that plays nice with the data engineering teams while gracefully handling a number of oblique issues related to monitoring and security (VN-link/ nexus v1000) which will benefit VMware by removing some of the few remaining barriers to adoption related to compliance and security (extending IDS’s to the vm networking environment). This of course is a very unsexy but practical solution to existing business problems. Note that these aren’t “Storage” issues; which are really only relevant to any one but big web players.

~Max

The “cloud” does not necessarily mean public cloud infrastructure. In clouds, there exist at least these two axes:

Private cloud vs public cloud
Infrastructure style (e.g., EC2) versus computing service style (e.g., MapReduce)

Anyway, to me “cloud” is Virtualization 2.0. Amusingly, most everything in the cloud is currently vapor. For a really innovative way of looking at data centers, however, if you have not seen 3TERA AppLogic, you really need to take a look. I think that applications like theirs offer the long term vision of where this whole virtualization thing is going.

Joe.

I’m still mulling the whole ad thing. Could be happier – will continue pursuit.

Sub, VMFS can run a maximum of 32 ESX nodes. Running a group of shared-storage clones? Make that 8.

Cisco announces bong-sized clouds. Frat boys cheer!

Robin

~subbukl