Did anyone else catch the fact that on September 27th, 2006 a press release entitled “EMC and Intec and Sensage Technology to Identify Terrorist Activity in Call Detail Records”.  What is interesting about this announcement is on September 18th, 2006 the acquisition of Network Intelligence by EMC hit the wire. Network Intelligence and Sensage are competitors, did the Sensage press release sneak in under the radar?  One has to assume the the Sensgte relationship is uncertain at best.  I guess we will have to wait and see.

-RJB

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

I have been inactive for a couple of days, this is because I am working on a new string of blogs focused on demos and how-to topics. I will be demoing software and walking through a few other topics in a hands-on blog series. The setup work is taking me a little time but my goal is to publish one demo or how-to per week. The first demo will focus on facilitating a full system recovery using Legato Networker. This is an issue I am working on for a customer right now and thought others may be interested.

-RJB

Now that the Evolution of Disaster Recovery roadshow is over, it?s time to start releasing the podcast. Because each seminar was just over 3 hours, we are releasing it in 4 parts.

This week, we have part 3.

Part 1 – The state of data proctection. This includes a discussion around, backups, backup to disk, virtual tape libraries, CDP, archiving, and more.

Part 2 – Edge to core data consolidation. Here we talk about using Cisco WAAS products to consolidate our data in a centralized location. This simplifies the management of our infrastructure, and makes preparing for DR much easier.

Part 3 – Leveraging Server Virtualization for Business Restart. Now that we understand how to protect out data, and have it in a centralized location we need to figure out how to make this data usable. Virtualization enables us to do this.

Part 4 – This section is a blending questions from each of the 9 cities we presented in.

A copy of the presentation can be found here if you?d like to follow along.

Happy to see Andy Bechtolsheim back at SUN returning them to the innovator they once were. I have to say Thumper looks pretty impressive!? Check it out here.

-RJB

It appears that there has been some activity around my original SMP clusters and virtualization post. I just noticed that there was a link back from jtroyer on the VMTN. I thought that I should make everyone aware of a follow-up post that further elaborates on the topic.

-RJB

So tonight I logged onto http://jimcarroll.com, for those of you who don’t know who Jim Carroll is, he is a highly regarded futurist. I was amazed by the relevancy of this particular blog post to some of my previous posts. Overall the post was insightful, thought provoking and I enjoyed it so much that I felt compelled to share it.

-RJB

So this week I am on vacation. I sitting on my deck (actually kind of cold outside, I am glad I had the pool closed yesterday) having a cup of coffee and replying to some Emails and reading through the stack of magazines that have been sitting in my office with sticky notes attached that say “Looks interesting”. With the massive amount of magazines I receive this is how I identify the stories I want to read and set them aside for a reading binge like vacation time.

This morning I read Business Week (Sept 18th issue) mostly because I was interested in two articles the first was about offshoring legal services to the Philippines and India and the second was about the boardroom leaks at HP when I stumbled across an article entitled the Best Places to Launch a Career. The article gives some ideas on how to recruit and retain young talent, specifically the Millennial generation:

• Don’t fudge the sales pitch
  • Makes sense, the world is a different place. Applicants spend significant time interacting in social networks like MySpace where they can ping a virtual network of peers for information. The information gleamed from social networks far outweighs a balance sheet or corporate propaganda.
• Let them have a life
  • Work hard and play hard (one of my personal favorites), Millennials expect this balance.
• No time clocks, please
  • Measure quality not quantity. Again this makes perfect sense.
• Give them responsibility
  • This refers back to my post on “The (Code) Linux”. Hillarie management makes this a difficult prophecy. Developing a web of trust allows ownership at the furthest edge of corporate infrastructure.
• Feedback, and more feedback
  • Managers should assume the role of mentor not task master.
• Giving back matters
  • Encourage altruistic behavior

This was an excellent article. Always interesting to see what companies are doing to attract talent and spur achievement and personal enrichment within corporate culture.

This my first post in a multi-part series entitled “Vacation Reading”. Look for Part 2 sometime later today or tomorrow.

-RJB

Now that the Evolution of Disaster Recovery roadshow is over, it?s time to start releasing the podcast. Because each seminar was just over 3 hours, we are releasing it in 4 parts.

Part 1 – The state of data protection. This includes a discussion around, backups, backup to disk, virtual tape libraries, CDP, archiving, and more.

Part 2 – Edge to core data consolidation. Here we talk about using Cisco WAAS products to consolidate our data in a centralized location. This simplifies the management of our infrastructure, and makes preparing for DR much easier.

Part 3 – Leveraging Server Virtualization for Business Restart. Now that we understand how to protect out data, and have it in a centralized location we need to figure out how to make this data usable. Virtualization enables us to do this.

Part 4 – This section is a blending questions from each of the 9 cities we presented in.

A copy of the presentation can be found here if you?d like to follow along.

-RJB

I spent last night and this morning at parents in Pennsylvania with my wife and daughter, we had a very nice time, thanks for asking. We live two hours away and my parents don’t see as much of their granddaughter as they might like but as you can imagine the time just gets away from you on the weekends. Anyway this morning my daughter awoke around 6AM and my wife snapped up from bed and spent 6-9AM with her at which time she usually goes down for a nap, but due to the strange surroundings this was not the case today. I had to take here for a walk, as usual she passed out about 15 minutes into it. I returned to my parents garage parked the stiller, open a folding chair and broke out my laptop an proceeded to watch “Revolution OS” (for the umteenth time).

While watching it dawned on me that while many people have heard of GNU and the copyleft license, many of them may not know the origin of GNU so I though I would publish the link to Richard Stallman’s GNU manifesto.

Wow, that was a long winded message for a link to the GNU manifesto.

-RJB