Meet the EMC team at Cisco Live 2013!

EMC are proud to be Platinum sponsor at Cisco Live, London this year. The event runs from Jan 29-31 2013, at London’s ExCel Centre.

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Carl Douglas talks about 2E2′s parthership with EMC and also shares some thoughts around the London EMC Forum.

Andy Tait was kind enough to share some of his impressions of EMC Forum in London 2012.

Lady Backup started this series by highlighting a Webcast that provided 3 steps to backup transformation.  If you missed it, you can watch it on demand here.

But I  think that still might not be enough to convince you to take action.  Being a frugal lady myself, the second part to making backup transformation real is the financial benefits.  It’s possible to quantify both your operational costs savings as well as soft costs in management time (people time) associated with your current backup infrastructure. Continue Reading

The financial services sector continues to be headline news for all the wrong reasons. We’ve had the banking crisis, government bailouts, rate fixing allegations and huge outages of IT systems impacting customers, some of which have rumbled on for days or even weeks.

While all this has been going on the regulators have been encouraging the banks to increase their capital holdings, while also increasing their lending to try and stimulate the economy. The Governor of the Bank of England went so far as to suggest organisations increase their capital holdings by not paying dividends Continue Reading

This week I was invited to attend a multi-supplier strategy workshop with one of our clients.  The purpose of the workshop was to look at their future storage strategy and all the major industry vendors  were there to present. This style of workshop provides clients the ability to see consistencies and opinions from each supplier. When it was my turn to present , I decided to push things a bit and discuss how sourcing storage and technology would change in the next 5 years.  I started by suggesting that come 2017 the major vendors will not be selling hardware. This may seem a bit of a ridical theory, but by how much? If you follow my reasoning to come perhaps this statement Continue Reading

Lady Backup is not a fan of status quo. For one thing, I get bored easily. And there are always new ways to think about things. But at the pace of today’s business environment, coupled with economic turbulence and severe competition, it’s hard to see beyond the way things are done today.

Recognizing an opportunity for innovation and then having the fortitude to see it through into a real product – that takes a strong will and a tolerance for risk.

What has me thinking about innovation is a story in the Wall Street Journal “Gates’ Hand in Death of Microsoft’s Courier Tablet,” which is a summary of a story initially posted y CNET about Microsoft’s plans for the Courier tablet. You can read the full story here .

The gist of the story is that Microsoft had a tablet device project that it quietly dismantled Continue Reading

Lady Backup likes it hot and sunny. But what’s great for the human spirit isn’t so great for data centers.
I hadn’t really thought very much about this until a story I read recently in The Wall Street Journal about a trend of companies building data centers in cold climates to offset costs of cooling data centers. Google, for example, is using an old paper mill in Hamina, Finland for a new data center – it cost about €200 million to retrofit the mill as a data center. The average yearly temperature is 2 degrees Celsius (definitely not a climate for Lady Backup!) in Finland so it makes it attractive for a data center site. The other part of the attraction of this facility is the use of a seawater cooling system.

The data explosion – driven by commercial and consumer usage – is driving the need to rethink cooling of data centers. It’s logical to locate data centers in places where nature can help contribute to the cooling process. Google, for example, consumed 2.26 terawatt hours last year, which is more than the electricity consumed by 200,000 American homes, according to the Wall Street Journal. By locating a data center in Finland, Google is looking to lower its electricity consumption to keep its new data center cool.

There are two questions on my mind. Continue Reading

Hey partners, did you hear that EMC swept 3 categories in the CRN Annual Report Card?

Yep, EMC received a total of 12 awards. And we’re real proud of it too – click here to see the press release. For the 5th year running, EMC took the enterprise network storage and backup and recovery categories. And for the 1st time EMC was named the company of the year in the SMB NetWork Storage category, which is certainly a testament to the EMC VNXe storage appliance introduced in January.

Maybe you haven’t heard about the CRN Annual Report Card (ARC). CRN is a dedicated channel publication, looking after the interest of resellers, distributors and IT solution providers. The report card is intended to benchmark the relationship between technology vendors and channel partners.
There are several dimensions to the award – product innovation, support, quality of the partnership between the vendor and the channel. And there are several categories for various different types of IT solutions (storage, networking, virtualisation, peripherals etc.).

Partners and customers know EMC for our storage capabilities – this year taking the top award for both enterprise and SMB network storage categories in the CRN ARC. That is not to suggest that EMC is resting on its laurels, quite the opposite. There is a massive shift within the company led from our senior executives to become ever better in supporting our channel partners. So if you thought EMC was good, we are just going to keep getting better in our efforts to deliver the right products and programs to support our channel. EMC and our channel partners – we are like fish and chips – two great things that are better together.

But there’s more to EMC than a storage company. Continue Reading