HDS, NetApp and EMC all agree on big data

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, says one saying.

Fools seldom differ, says another.

So what are we to make of the fact that EMC, NetApp and HDS have all picked up on the term “big data” to describe their activities?

HDS Michael Hay says “Big Data has not just magically appeared, nor is it something that will have its 15 minutes of fame and then disappear” and Chuck Hollis has ten questions to ask about big data. NetApp’s Exposed riffs a little, calling the concept “Big Storage”.

All three are, however, talking about the same thing, namely the fact that we all create a lot of data these days and things – phones, sensors, myriad other machines – make rather a lot too.

And all three seem to have pinched their nomenclature from this Giga Om conference, named “Big Data ”. EMCers have also told SearchStorage ANZ to expect some marketing noise around the theme (anything will be better than the breaking records broken record). Maybe they think that if they can take business cards digital, as EMC HR blogger Polly Pearson postulates, there’s a few sales in it?

Everyone’s excited about this because it means a chance to sell a lot of stuff, and that’s just what NetApp has been doing according to the Gartner storage market share data we’ve dissected of late.

NetApp is trying to make sure it can do that in part through its Engenio acquisition, which gets good press from Storagebod, StorageMojo and StorageIO but has AboutRestore scratching its head. NetApp also says it has some thinking to do: the acquisition and organic growth mean the company now has more than 10,000 employees and Dave Hitz says culture change is now inevitable.

But the company is also struggling, according to Zerowait, to get enough FAS 3200 out the door to meet demand. A little bird has also whispered to SearchStorage ANZ that all is not well in the land of the big blue staple, with a few large deployments running off the rails thanks in part to difficulties finding enough storage-savvy engineers on both client and vendor side. We also, for what it is worth, hear of V-Block installations being more than a little frustrating.

But back to the blogs, where Backblaze got our attention with a post titled “5 years of Twitter in 1/3 a Backblaze pod.” Your author would condemn the grammar had he not just left a word off a magazine cover (d’oh!) but will condemn the clickbait headline which at first had us thinking Twitter had moved away from Amazon S3 but turned out to be a wee piece of speculation. The company’s post about missing data from cancer researchers was at least more accurate.

While on the melancholy topic of cancer, SearchStorage ANZ Editor Simon Sharwood has been invited by CSC to ride in the Tour De Cure, a marathon cycling event that aims to raise funds to help those afflicted by the disease and also fund research towards a cure.

He’ll be doing 100kms (60 miles) on April 2^nd. Feel free to sponsor him here or learn about the event here. And keep an eye on his Twitter feed at @ssharwood – CSC has promised to hook him up to a GPS thingy so you can track him through automated tweets.

Once again, back to the blogs, in this case StorageNerve who was one of a few folks to get a gig at an HDS Bloggers Day. Technical Deep Dive looks at the future of enterprise drives and Hugh Yoshida touches on a similar subject with this post about how HDS fits into the Hitachi GST acquisition.

We’d be remiss not to mention the terrible events in Japan, which HDS bloggers cover off: seems that HDS top brass quickly let everyone know that all’s well in the company’s facilities. But as Hitachi group has more than 100,000 employees the company is braced for bad news. DRAMexchange.com says flash memory supply will be down by around 4% as a result of the disasters. IBM’s Tony Pearson has some Dealing With Distributed State” but it seems so elaborate it deserves a mention. Pillar Data asks “Is VDI just a throwback to dumb terminals?” If you deliver virtualised dumb terminals, then yes, we imagine. Myvirtualcloud also ponders VDI.

The prolific Preston de Guise looks at Staging vs. Cloning and Emulex continues to be aggressive in its own little corner of the industry, seemingly unaware that no-one else cares. Here’s a newly-thrown punch.