I made myself a few promises when I jumped the fence from end user to peddler of storage goods. Among those was that if I ever had to compromise my integrity or ethics I’d go find something else to do. This means that I have to believe in what I’m selling and that the product…

Yesterday afternoon I happened to pop into Tweetdeck and saw a tweet from Jon Toigo – I’m interested in exploring the case for on-array tiering. Makes no sense to me. Sounds like tech for lazy people!… I engaged Jon in a quick tweet discussion (I’m the “inbound tweet”) until we both had to attend to…

Tommy posted a great analogy piece on his blog which explains storage in terms of hotel ownership and occupancy rates versus room cost.  Not to take anything away from Tommy, because it was a good example for non-technical audiences, but I want to point out that analogies like statistics in USA Today, can be used…

When I look back over my career in IT, I realize that I’ve been involved in sales long before I decided to join Compellent. Every strategic initiative I pushed for over the years has involved a great deal of salesmanship, evangelization and consensus building. Technologies that are common place today got there, in large part,…

Early in the last decade if you were making a storage purchasing decision you likely would have been frustrated with sales presentations, analyst reviews and industry news about storage virtualization to the point that you’d rather purchase ANY product that didn’t have this mysterious capability. Of course, the uncertainty continues today, although the hype has…

I’ll give NetApp CEO Tom Georgens credit for one thing, he knows how to stir the pot. There’s been lots of good and interesting debate over a feature offered by several storage suppliers since he made that comment. Notice I used the word “feature” – that’s an important distinction. Automated tiered storage (I’ll say ATS…