The usual Monday on a storage conference. It’s quite obvious all vendors are poaching cloud storage, seems to be the next big thing but what I couldn’t find out is what cloud storage actually is. Seems all vendors have a different mindset and they try to align their product set to the very cloudy definition of cloud storage.Second big thing is converged networking. Well, you know my thoughts around that. Mixing two totally different cultures is doomed to fail but we’ll see in the long term. The third big thing is solid state disks. Not new and I’m wondering what the fuss is all about. Just another layer of blocks which happen to be very fast but only for specific purposes. When the pricing come down significantly and when vendors are able to sort out the back-end performance we’ll see more adoption is guess.

I have a great day though. Met some of the most notorious bloggers like Seve Foskett, Stu Miniman, Marc Farley, Calvin Zito and others. Marc took us out for lunch at a sushi restaurant down town San Jose together with calvin, enrico and fabio.

From left to right Calvin Zito, Marc Farley, Fabio Raposseli and Enrico Signoretti.

The day for me started of with a session on Storage Security by Gordon Arnold from IBM. It’s very clear that the biggest problem is, again, not the technical side but more the side of legislation and how to adapt the technology to that legislation. Some countries are very restrictive in data locality, recoverability, authenticity and other labels you can hook this up to. There are quite some challenges in this particular arena.

David Dale from NetApp went on with a session on solid state with some very nice comparisons on price per IO and capacity. As always these things don’t go well together so again if the pricing on SSD’s is fixed we’ll see some more adoption in the marketplace.

Dennis Martin from Demartek had a session in which he outlined the benefits and current landscape of FCoE. I think he and I both agreed that the organisational issue as well as the post-sales support issues might have big ramifications on adoption from FCoE in the market. Generally speaking the storage guys don’t like the networking guys and vice versa. It’s a different mindset.

After that it was time for The Woz. (and that’s not an acronym for The Wizard of Oz :-)) Steve Wozniack, co-founder of Apple and these days tied to Fusion-IO. What can you say from the man who more or less invented the PC as we know it. He had some good jokes and still drives people to think about technology and encourages students to discover the capabilities of it.

After lunch had a catchup on Virtual Instruments but had nothing new for me unfortunately. The day concluded with a small cocktail party and had some chats with people around. It is still a very small business and everyone knows everyone but its good to see so many news things coming although it still think a lot of it have to be formalised and standardised before customers should pick up any of it. It’s still a lot of buzz but no real meat that will actually fix stuff.

The Apple iPad equivalent of storage has yet to be found and I still don’t see any vendor able to solved the puzzle. Maybe the next couple of days will bring more. At least we have #storagebeers coming up. 🙂

See ya, tomorrow.

Cheers,
E