Okay flash storage vendors, enough is enough. Several of you have been trying desperately to convince people that flash is cheap enough to replace spinning disk by measuring it wrong. You keep trying to compare the price of deduped flash with raw spinning disk, and that’s just silly. What Even… Read More
I can’t run the numbers on Dell like I did previously, because Dell has, famously, gone private again. From a purely personal perspective, I think this was absolutely the right thing to do. Why? Because Wall Street sucks. The efficient market hypothesis is bollocks. People invest for all sort of… Read More
What a difference 18 months makes. I last reviewed Commvault for Tech Field Day 9 in June 2013 in a series of posts. My post-TFD9 review focused on their new-at-the-time Sympana 10 release, but prior to the event, I did some old-fashioned financial analysis, since they’re a public company and… Read More
During the recent HP Discover conference in Barcelona, I happened to sit in on a couple of excellent panel sessions. I recorded audio from them, which is usually just for my own note-taking reasons, but occasionally something really good happens and is worth sharing. Architecting the Future of HP IT… Read More
This week I’m headed over to HP Discover in Barcelona, Spain, thanks to the magnanimity of Calvin Zito. I’m looking forward to hearing from HP directly, because I don’t know as much about them as I once did. There’s so much going on in technology at the moment that it’s… Read More
Multiple tech companies are in the news lately because they’re splitting off parts of themselves. HP, Symantec, and eBay are all splitting off major sections, and there’s speculation about EMC splitting off VMware, and maybe Cisco doing something similar. There was also a conversation about the topic on this week’s… Read More
The centralised command-and-control method doesn’t work at scale. Many people have discovered this independently, from the Romans to the Chinese. It’s just not humanly- (or even computerly-) possible to track that many interdependent variables and make smart decisions. To manage a vast array of components, a central apparatus needs to… Read More
Sandisk are the other public company presenting at Storage Field. Their financial statements tell a very different story from those of EMC that we discussed previously. Check this out: That’s a pretty bumpy ride through the GFC. Here’s what it did for investors, in terms of Return on Equity: Ouch.… Read More
Rackspace have responded to the latest escalation of the price war between Google, Amazon, and Microsoft with exactly the right response. In an article at The Register, Rackspace very clearly state that they charge “premium prices for premium service” and explicitly differentiate themselves from “commodity providers of cloud infrastructure”. Rackspace… Read More
Welcome to the first instalment of my now-traditional pre-Tech Field Day event prep work! First up is EMC. I’ve picked EMC first for two reasons: firstly, they’re one of only two publicly listed companies we’ll be talking to as part of SFD5, and secondly, because they’re huge and have many… Read More
