So it has been a busy couple of weeks. Tasks are piling up and just not enough time in the day to complete them all. Thus the blog has suffered…. I have a ton of things to talk about so I would expect some serious activity over the next week or two. For starters I noticed that Mark Lewis has finally jumped into the blogsphere as the last of the 3 big storage company bloggers. There now seems to be the beginnings of what could become a game of log pong between Dave Hitz of NetApp, Hu Yoshida of Hitachi and Mark Lewis of EMC. I love reading each of these blogs because they do provide unconventional insight into where each company is going and where the market makers will push the industry. EMC’s recent acquisition of Network Intelligence spurred a post by Mark Lewis on the strategy behind the question. The post was focused on the role of Network Intelligence as it relates to metadata and compliance. Mark talks about Network Intelligence’s role in the creation of metadata which can be used for forensics and potentially maintaining chain of custody. I think that the Network Intelligence acquisition clearly states EMC desire to extend the metadata schema beyond what the the in dusty defines it as today. As a market maker Mark Lewis and EMC have served their definition of metadata and Hu Yoshida of Hitachi has volleyed the serve with his definition . Will Dave Hitz through his hat into the ring? Referring back to a previous post of mine the security and storage market continu to converge at a rate that far surpasses the convergence of storage and networking (ethernet), things may change when we begin to see pervasive 10 gig ethernet deployments but I will save this discussion for another post. It is going to be interesting to watch the development of this trend. There is a real need to expand the definition of metadata to for the purposes of forensics, chain of custody, etc… I think we are on the right track.

-RJB