So much has changed, yet so much remains the same.  I have been reading through the various trade pubs (on their way to the trash can) to see what others thought was significant about 2008 (and what wasn’t).  I won’t go there in this column except to say the following.

The most important things, IMHO, that appeared in 2008 from a storage infrastructure standpoint were the following:

1.  XIOTECH Intelligent Storage Element (ISE) — If these guys play it right (and I am doing my level best to help them do so), ISE is an extraordinarily important development that could change a lot about how we build storage today.  ISE, you see, is a “no frills” Lego building block from which storage infrastructure can be built intelligently and in a manner that meets business needs.  Hardware is hardware, but this little guy enables you to add the features and functions you want, instead of buying a flock of features you don’t use just because that is how the vendor is packaging them for sale.  A lot of my clients are excited about ISE and even those who are locked into a three-letter vendor are looking to phase out the big iron arrays for these guys going forward — a phase-in strategy because rip-and-replace is untenable.  It makes sense to me and provides an essential building block for creating a real SAN.

2.  XIOTECH (again) Web Services based management.  The implementation of a management platform based on Web Services standards from W3C is perhaps even more important than Casey and Steve’s ISE-box itself.  Let’s do the math.  Applications are already requesting services (that means hardware resources and software functions) from the infrastructure using Web Services requestors.  Problem is, nobody is answering.  While SNIA dicks around with SMI-S and XAM, the truth is that the real solution to common infrastructure management (and perhaps intelligent data management too) is staring them right in the face:  Web Services.  Through this standards-based approach, we could collect copious information about hardware and software services in a network — much more accurately and in a more timely fashion than SNMP traps can do it, and at least on par or more efficiently than accessing this info via a vendor API.  And enabling gear and software to speak Web Services and support Java/XML formats for reporting is a heck of a lot easier than writing custom scripts to get at this info or using a difficult to code and implement SMI provider.  That SNIA ignored an existing framework with so much potential — one that works already with Microsoft, Oracle, Linux and perhaps even the hypervisor crowd – confirms my view that they are yesterday’s news.  Bottom line:  I think Web Services-based management is a game changer.  I strongly recommend that anyone who wants to plug their products into a common management scheme consider enabling their hardware/software for Web Services dialog.  Xiotech can show you how.

3.  Server virtualization has done us all a service.  Yes, I know I have ranted here against the hype, but the truth is that the pain created by server virtualization (especially VMware) has forced many folks to take a systemic view of their infrastructure, starting at the application level.  This is far superior to building storage infrastructure without careful consideration of what applications and their data actually need.  The problems with management, with connections to so-called SANs, and the revelations of how much waste already exists in the storage we own are kicking a lot of stovepipe array makers in the buttocks.  This probably wasn’t the goal of the virtual server software guys, but it has done us all a favor.  We needed to get our minds right and the frantic embrace of virtual servers is teaching most of us some hard lessons about the crap that we allowed vendors to sell us over the past few years.

4.  The more I learn about their next gen products, the more I believe that CA is finding its stride again.  Mainframe 2.0 is a smart initiative.  It’s not just about putting a user friendly face on the mainframe OS so that the Java/XML trained IT generation can get a clue, it is about making the mainframe a centerpiece of an efficient and economically managed infrastructure again.  I also like what is happening with ARCserve, a product I abandoned some time back in favor of a competitor.  I am back on it now.  I like how CA has added functionality to the product, including a software VTL and software deduplication engine — not to mention some of the key functionality of their ill-timed BrightStor SRM suite.  (I say ill-timed because no one wanted to buy SRM when money was plentiful and gear was cheap.  Today, that has changed and ARCserve is worth a close look by shops large and small.)  

5.  I have warmed up to Crossroads Systems of late, particularly for their Read Verify Appliance and its reporting capabilities.  This is a must-have for anyone who wants to make tape operations efficient again in their shop and to cope intelligently with the data burgeon that shows little sign of coming under intelligent management anytime soon. 

6.  I also like Virtual Instruments — a lot.  From where I’m standing, these former Finisar-ites are doing what the mother company never could:  they are telling the truth about the inefficiencies of FC SANs.  To some extent it grates on me that they need to soft peddle some of the issues that they are uncovering with their management kit.  It wouldn’t make them very popular with the big iron and switch makers if they normalized their data and told the truth about what an abyssmal failure FC fabrics have become, as evidenced by extremely poor allocation and utilization efficiency metrics collected FROM THE SOURCE.  Instead, they have chosen (smartly) to take the high road and to message that they are merely a companion product for the big iron SAN that will help you get more value from your investment.  True enough.  But it stops short of telling the real story about port inefficiency, poor gear performance, the performance hit caused by a lot of the value add stuff that vendors are adding and we are buying even though it doesn’t really contribute much value.  Whether you want to see how bad your SAN sucks, or are seeking to collect fact based info you can use in your next vendor negotiation, VI is the stuff.

7.  We need a damned ecosystem of vendors that plug and play with a Web Services management bus.  (We could also use the bus itself.)  2009 will see some heavy development effort in this space beginning with a C-4 Summit that we’ve been developing over the past year, a C-4 Community, and a C-4 Microfactory where vendors can list their wares once certified for interoperability with a Web Services-based reference architecture model.  In short, I’m out to boil the ocean again and everyone’s invited.  Such an inclusive and standards-based architecture would deliver more value at a lower cost than stovepipe arrays.  Vendors of those products need to go the way of GM, Ford and Chrysler this year (whether chastised or chapter 11′ed) for selling their black 4-wheel drive SUVs in South Florida (where the highest mountain is 30 feet above sea level) instead of sensible and greener vehicles we can afford to buy and drive.  Don’t get me wrong, I like muscle cars as much as the next guy, but I just need clean, reliable and affordable transportation that gets me from point A to point B.  I don’t measure my worth by the box of tin, aluminum and plastic that sits in my driveway anymore than I measure a company’s “enterprise class” infrastructure by how many DMX arrays they have deployed.  Generally speaking, I think less of the guy driving the H2 Humvee (the Chevy Tahoe is the exact same vehicle with a different body style and a $40K lower sticker price) when he pulls up beside me in traffic.  I think he’s probably got some issues.  And frankly, I have generally the same view of the CIO who gushes over how much big iron stovepipe arrays he has deployed on his raised floor.  Everyone is selling a box of hard disks at the end of the day.  Show me the guy who knows how to manage heterogeneity and can measure service level growth without labor cost increases.  He or she gets my respect.

8.  Every big vendor seems ready to announce thin provisioning on their array this year.  I guess 3PAR and Compellent scared the crap out of them by taking some of their customers’ money.  I have a generally negative view of TP on the array.  If you have to do it, do it right.  Virtualize storage using DataCore Software.  They invented storage thin provisioning and are doing it at the network layer instead of down on the box.  Their great financial success in 2008 is testimony to the wit, wisdom and tenacity of George, Ziya and Bettye (and their krewe) who told the trade press and VC guys to go chase themselves when everyone saw the big iron guys as the big winners of the storage virtualization wars.  Their story is becoming a legend as their success, like Xiotech’s continues to climb.  I have yet to find an unhappy customer using their stuff.

9.  Related to Number 8, I just saw an email from a trade press pub that quoted a fellow who said loyalty is more important than satisfaction from EMC’s standpoint.  It has been a focus on cultivating loyalty rather than measuring customer satisfaction that has made Hopkinton successful at its game.  How is loyalty cultivated if not by satisfying consumer needs?  This sounds like the BS that has helped tank US financial houses, automotive manufacturers, and so many other industries.  Seimens, over in Europe, cultivated loyalty by paying off governments and customers with a huge slush fund according to an article in the Economist last week.  Now they are on the hook for nearly a billion in fines and taxes.  There is a point where loyalty (purchased via bribes or other incentives) goes head to head with reality.  I hope that 2009 sees the tide begin to turn.  I will keep calling the vendors on the BS in the coming year.

It's all about loyalty. No. Satisfaction!

10.  It is with some dismay that I must report that TechTarget is scaling back my speaking gigs this year.  Events need sponsors and sponsors are on hard times, like most of us.  I will do what I can to keep my outreach to you going, both here and in video blogs that we will shortly be doing with StorageTV.  I also want everyone to monitor the C-4 Community when I have it up and running.  We need consumers to tell us what’s wrong and what’s right with their infrastructure and even stovepipe vendors are invited to participate to give us their version of the financial and technical attributes of doing things via a one-stop-shop.  Maybe with a lot of participation from consumers, vendors and integrators, we can begin right-sizing infrastructure, making it manageable, and moving data intelligently across it.

Goodbye 2008.  Welcome 2009:  the year that will test all of our mettle.

I have been trying to keep a civil tongue in my head as these last hours of 2008 wind to a close.  It has been a difficult task as so many vendors seem to be up to their old tricks to contextualize stovepipe products as one-size-fits-all solutions for what ails storage.  Alas, I must blog again before the New Year in response to the piece I just read in InfoStor (probably published on their web site as well).

Here are my thoughts in words and pictures.

The scene opens in NYC as a financial house IT maven thinks about jumping from his window to the street below (played here by a young Richard Basehart).

“My data burgeon is…well…burgeoning.  I am told that I can only buy from EMC based on a deal they’ve made with the bean counters in the front office.  I told them that we don’t need another stovepipe array.  We can’t afford it, we can’t manage it together with the other gear in our overgrown SAN, and we probably wouldn’t need it if we just sorted out the junk drawer instead of saving everything.  They are talking “clouds” now with their new “Atmos” platform.  They say we can implement policy-managed storage clouds that use an object oriented method for writing data to commodity hardware (so long as the hardware is their’s, I suspect).  It sounds a lot like Centera writ large.  I wonder if I should jump now and save myself the trouble later…”

As he contemplates his fate, the EMC sales rep pokes his head out to see what is making the pidgeons so noisy. 

“Son, what is your problem?  You needn’t fear change.  Cloud computing is all the rage and we are just providing the cloud storage solution that customers want us to provide.  Selling the customer what we…er, they…want is what EMC is all about.”

“But how do I know that Atmos isn’t just more crappy-doo, like WideSky or any of the other panaceas you guy’s promised and never delivered?  How do I know that you aren’t just locking me into a proprietary object-based system from which I can never extract the company data…you know, like Centera?”

“Well now, I can only say that the trick to coping with change is to make a leap of faith.  Only, fall up, instead of down.”

“Fall up?”

“Sure.  Innovators fall up.  Out of the box thinkers fall up.  If this thing is successful, EMC stock value will fall up.”

“Whaddayah think, Sean.  Is that silver tongued devil from Hopkinton trying to talk the guy off the ledge…or down from it?”

“Depends on whether the guy is standing in the way of a sale, Ryan.  I’ve seen it happen before.  If this laddie is raising uncertainty or doubt that could interfere with getting management on board with the contract, the EMC guys will do whatever it takes to remove him from their cloudy sky.”

IT guy: “But doesn’t falling up deny a fundamental law of gravity?”

EMC guy, “Depends on who you ask.  There are no authorities anymore.  Just Wikkis.  Besides, our cloud storage alters physical reality.  Combined with our next-gen hardware…”

“But you guys are saying any hardware will work with Atmos…”

“Let me finish.  If you do Atmos with EMC gear, you change the nature of the universe.  You can apply policies to data so that ‘premium’ data gets replicated and protected while non-premium goes to your cheapest spinning rust…or, Gad forbid, to tape.  That means that you can stand on our cloud without falling through to the ground.”

“But how do I know what data is ‘premium’ and what isn’t?”

“Clearly, all of the data you produce after deploying Atmos will be premium data.”

“That doesn’t make sense?”

“There you go, overthinking everything.  Just have some faith.  Remember, we’re EMC.  That’s like GOD in the storage world.”

“Wow, that guy is good.  He almost has me convinced that Atmos will change the law of gravity.”

“Not me, Paddy.  I’ve heard EMC make this kind of case before.  ‘Trust us, we’re EMC.’  The only thing I know for sure is that if that boy makes the leap, he won’t have time to measure how far he has traveled before he gets to where he’s going.”

“I still have a lot of concerns about this cloud storage thing.  Shouldn’t the application layer define what services are to be applied to data, and not the storage layer?  I mean, why did you guys pay all that money for VMware?  By the way, we followed your advice on VMware and deployed it to contain server sprawl and to improve capacity optimization efficiency.  Today, we are the laughing stock of Wall Street because of our virtual server sprawl and the unmanageable allocation of SAN storage to our virtual server environment.  I trusted you on that one and almost got fired.”

“Son, nobody gets fired for buying EMC.”

“Yet…”

So, the world awaits the decision of the IT guy.  Will he take EMC’s advice on cloud storage and “fall up”?  Or will he be victimized by his own common sense?

THE END, FOR NOW.

According to the news today, we are officially in a recession.  Apparently, to meet the test, you must have at least two quarters of continuous non-growth.  From where I’m sitting, we’ve been in a recession for over a year.

I am not going to go economics on everyone.  This isn’t the place for it.  What I do care about are the increasing demands for automation and the decreasing staff to support it that are the bane of existance in an increasing number of IT shops.  More automation, especially of managerial and administrative tasks, is key to doing more work with fewer resources.  That’s why management, which we have been crowing about here for three years, is suddenly sexy. 

We need to drive complexity out of infrastructure so that it can be managed more effectively.  That goes every bit as much for storage infrastructure as it does for server and network infrastructure.  Maybe moreso, since storage vendors have not allowed their wares to succumb to commoditization and still insist that a disk drive in an EMC frame is somehow better than the same disk drive in Joe’s JBODs.  Truth be told, however appealing the one-stop-shop storage array with all of its on-board, value-add, software gizmos may seem, it is ultimately a stovepipe and difficult or impossible to manage in conjunction with lots of other island stovepipes.  You do not reduce labor requirements by purchasing an all-in-one array unless you are a very small shop and have very little data.  The more your data grows, the more stovepipes you deploy to host it, the more you will feel the labor pinch caused by the inability to manage the infrastructure. 

It drives me crazy that hardly anyone gets this point while times are good and money is flowing.  Only when the “R” word begins to be used in common parlance do we seem to get a clue about the need for purpose-built infrastructure and solid infrastructure management.

And that’s just tech infrastructure.  Truth be told, I’m not sure we all get the point about the need for data management — which is at the root of IT expense overall.  Apparently, we will need a different jolt to the system than what we get from recessionary pressure.  Getting real about our drunken and unmanaged data will probably require another treatment modality, something with a more regulatory feel to it.

The cure for recession?

A couple of weeks ago, I was at Storage Decisions San Francisco, then CA World in Las Vegas.  I was surprised by how people are really starting to get a clue.  My C-4 presentation was very well received in SF and I was delighted to see John Blackman again, this time architecting storage for Safeway.  John is right on the money with his view that optical holds tremendous promise for archiving lots of data and deferring magnetic spindle growth at the supermarket chain.  He challenged his staff to come up with a more cost effective and reliable storage solution for older, keep it just in case, data, since so many had succumbed to marketing bullshit like EMC’s “shatter the platter” campaign intended to bring about the demise of optical.  Neither the disk mavens or the tape mavens could do it.  The metrics just aren’t there.  The only media more reliable, durable and cost-effective for long term archive is either papyrus or rock.

Sony’s guy in attendance was grinning from ear to ear and ready to support John with anything and everything in his Blu-Ray arsenal.  Moreover, with HD DVD gone and UDO rapidly fading into optical’s rearview mirror (with Plasmon gone), Sony is ready to take a lot of Blu-Ray archive technology commercial.  One place I hope they will look on the way is SENCOR in Minnesota.  I really like what these guys are doing with Blu-Ray based archive for healthcare data.  QStar, FileTek, ClearView ECM, and maybe KOM Networks are also looking like potential partners in a resurgent optical archive play.

If my read of HIPAA is correct, healthcare providers might be able to get off the hook to store patient data forever by burning the data onto Blu-Ray disc and giving it to their patient.  Comments are welcome on this approach, which is one specialty of SENCOR.

I also want to extend a formal invitation to the archive software and system folks, whether disk, disc or tape centric to come look at ArchiveMgt.org.  Some interest is being expressed by the optical players to re-form in this community given the dearth of ombudsmanship they have received from their pricey membership in OSTA.  We would be delighted to have you here.

At CA World, I was delighted to renew my acquaintance with the mainframe guys, the information governance folks, and with Eric and the gang from the data protection group.  Cool stuff there:  first, adding GUIs to mainframes to make the technology more accessible to non-mainframe trained technicians — what CA calls Mainframe 2.0.  The strategy has a lot of merit.  Really exciting to me, given my DR orientation, is the next generation of ARCserve.  The product seemed to be increasingly in the shadow of XOsoft, but what I saw at the conference was great. 

The new ARCserve delivers a software virtual tape system and deduplication engine.  (To be honest, I seriously doubt that dedupe is a product.  It is at best a feature, and just maybe, a feature best delivered as a network based service.  More on this in another post, I guess.)  The other thing about ARCserve that blew my socks off was the embedding that CA has made of functionality that was once part of their BrightStor SRM package.  For the longest time, you couldn’t sell a standalone SRM package to save your life.  CA is on the right path by placing certain key SRM utilities directly in the backup software, which must deal with hardware infrastructure anyway.  It might just be the best way to get SRM implemented in some companies — by not telling anyone that you are doing it!

More later.

Another 147 folks heard from.  Here is what a Sepaton-commissioned survey discovered:

Key survey findings included:

1. Despite current economic pressures, nearly seventy-five percent of enterprise respondents expect their data protection budget to either stay the same or increase in 2009. Enterprises consider the need to protect data assets and to keep pace with data center growth among their top priorities.
2. A key focus of spending in 2009 will be on cost containment technologies for data protection. Enterprises are investing in technologies that reduce total cost of ownership by providing higher levels of data protection, control data growth, and scale capacity and performance.
3. Fifty-two percent of users who rated their data protection as insufficient cited “lack of budget to keep pace with technology” as the cause. Enterprises see new data protection technologies such as data deduplication as essential for maintaining service levels and regulatory compliance.
4. Most enterprises are protecting extremely large and quickly growing volumes of data. Forty-eight percent of enterprise respondents have more than 200 TB of data to protect. Thirty percent of respondents have data stores that are growing at a compounded rate of more than thirty percent per year.
5. While a majority of respondents are using physical tape today, fewer than fifty percent expect to be using tape one year from now. A majority of respondents plan to increase their use of disk-based technologies — disk-to-disk, virtual tape library (VTL) appliances, or VTL gateways.
6. Data deduplication ranks highest as the technology planned for deployment in the enterprise data center. More than ninety percent of respondents are either currently using deduplication or want to use it. Of those who do not have deduplication, fifty-five percent are allocating budget towards this technology in 2009.
7. Server virtualization (VMware) is putting significant strain on data protection environments. Seventy-four percent of respondents reported that VMware virtual environments significantly increased their data storage and/or the complexity of their data protection environment.

I will be chatting with CTO Miki Sandorfi tomorrow and will let you know what light he sheds on these points.

Over at this blog,  ThinkingProblemManagement, we got a kudo.  We were awarded three pineapples, which I guess is a good thing.

Thanks, ThinkingProblemManagement.

This week and next on ESJ.com, as part of my continuing look at Storage 2008:  Features Promised and Postponed, I have dedicated substantial space to the topic of SSD.  Here are a few slides from a friend at Samsung that I wanted to publish here.  Hubbert Smith has done an admirable job of giving us some three dimensional metrics for SSD and disk that are still in development but hold much promise, IMHO.

Slide one looks at typical metrics used to assess disk and SSD today.

IOPS and GBs

Next chart looks at a key factor in cost of ownership:  power consumption.

IOPS and GB per watt

The next chart is illuminating.  It compares an 8.6TB enterprise disk solution using 15K drives (60 of them) and compares the acquisition and annual power costs to an all Flash SSD and a hybrid Flash SSD/SATA configuration using 1TB drives for 90 percent of capacity.  Pay close attention to the costs on the bottom of each option.

Comparison of configuration options

If I did this right, you should be able to click each image to see it in full size. 

Without stealing the thunder from my columns on ESJ.com, I think Hubbert is definitely onto something here.  We all knew that SSD was faster than anything else on the market.  Rarely have we looked at the technology from its power costs.  I would like to see the model extended to include tape and optical as well.  Plus we need to skew in the impact of chassis components, RAID, RAID-like protection for Flash SSD (which has certain memory wear properties that will require periodic replacement of components), and labor costs.

Still, it would be nice if all the vendors would give us baseline cost/IOPS, cost/GB, watts/IOPS, and watts/GB.

In case you hadn’t noticed, November went quiet for DD.  That’s not to say we weren’t busy.  Between travel, writing projects, consulting projects, C-4 Summit preparations, Thanksgiving holidays (Happy Belated Turkey Day, by the way), and an extensive Honey Do list following some 183 days on the road with only weekends at home, it has been busy.

Talk about your recessionary environment:  our phones are ringing off the hook here.

About a third of the calls are from companies seeking to reduce costs and automate more…especially in the realm of storage!  Apparently, our schtick here, as some call it, is finally resonating.

Another third are from folks seeking employment.  Sorry folks, we aren’t hiring.  I hate payroll.  Most folks who work in our endeavors are independent contractors (like me).  It is the only way to be master of your destiny and to avoid the dread of finding a pink slip in your pay envelope.  I left the world of corporate cubicles in the early 1990s and haven’t looked back.

The final third are calls from vendors seeking to excite me about the latest deduplication, thin provisioning, “tiered storage.” or “ILM” play they are launching in their gear.  Unfortunately, this functionality is usually accompanied by a hefty price increase for the value add software.  If companies buy into the ROI proposals of these vendors, they might sell a few copies, but I wouldn’t be so sure.

Stand by for more posts in the coming days.  DrunkenData is alive and kicking and we have lots of opinions to offer.

Just emailed this to PT, which I happened to be perusing in my “library” (aka the rest room) today, in response to an article in their December issue.

Normally, I just find your publication mildly amusing, especially complaints about scantily clad women – how many people out there still view the human body as evil! However, seeing an interview with Kevin Mitnick in your December issue on page 19 compelled me to respond. Your name for him, “ethical hacker,” is wrong. He is neither ethical nor a true hacker.

Mitnick was on the same agenda as myself at a computer conference in Lisbon, Portugal about a year and a half back. To demonstrate the vulnerability of wireless networks to hackers, he opened his presentation by showing the screens of computers he had hacked the previous evening belonging to folks who were staying at the hotel. My screen showed up in his preso.

Interestingly, I was not using wireless connections at the hotel. So, the only way he could get into my system was to violate the hotel server and hard wire network security, which is patently illegal. So much for “ethical.”

As for hacking, most of Mitnick’s tricks and tools are widely known among the lowest ranks of the hacker community, the script kiddies. Real hackers regard Mitnick as a “hack” and not as a hacker, which means expert code breaker. His only claim to fame is 1) that he was caught, and 2) that he partied with the likes of Paris Hilton for a time.

That a teacher rewarded him with a high grade for stealing the teacher’s computing password makes me cringe, if in fact it actually happened. That may have set his feet on a path to success measured in terms of kudos from fellow security breakers. Now that he is ostracized by the hacker community, his ego needs to be fed by articles like this one. He probably hopes that Leonardo DiCaprio will play him in some future movie.

Why would you want to help perpetuate this kind of bent mentality?

Moreover, given the budgetary expense of data security in organizations today and the burden placed on overstressed information technology practitioners by daily breaches of their security systems, why would you devote ink to Mitnick? A better use of the space might be to look at the pressures on the IT practitioners who must stop the Mitnick’s of the world from breaching private customer data, stealing financial or medical identities, and costing every one of us time and money in our day to day lives.

Jon Toigo
Chairman, Data Management Institute

Can you imagine? A celebrity hacker.

According to Computerworld, NetApp has cancelled the user conference it was planning for February next.  Lots of speculation is provided as to why.  They only cite the economy.

I suspect it may have something to do with the Barenaked Ladies concert that they were planning to have at the event.  AP just reported that vocalist/guitarist for Barenaked Ladies, Steven Page, was arrested on cocaine possession in NY and may go to jail for 15 years, emerging just in time for the recovery of the economy and NetApp’s next user conference.

Maybe I should reconsider the C-4 Summit in Tampa first week of February.  Is it true that there is no worth in attending an event that won’t feature coked-out bare naked ladies?

I have been writing for ESJ in one incarnation or another (print and on-line) for over 14 years.  I often link to my storage column on the site here, just to annoy certain readers.  About a month ago, I was asked to draft a second series of columns for them covering data center issues, which I was delighted to do.  Thus far, two have posted.

The first is here.

This week’s is here.

The publisher has asked me to pick a name for the new column, but I’m drawing a blank.  (Too much to do and not a lot of time for free-form thinking…or maybe my age is catching up.)  Anyway, if you want, have a read of the columns and post any constructive commentary here.  If a reader comes up with a good name, I will buy you a beer the next time I’m in your town.

Speaking of which, next week (November 5) I jump to Irvine, CA for a TechTarget event.  Compellent is the sponsor of record, though I will be talking about C-4 issues (cost-containment, compliance, continuity and carbon footprint reduction).  The following week, I round out my DR seminars with TechTarget and CDW in Atlanta, GA (November 13).  The week after that, I finish my last Storage Decisions, in San Francisco, on 17th and 18th, then jet over to Las Vegas from the 18th to the 20th for CA World.

That, my friends, is the last of the travel I have booked (so far) through end of year.  I can focus on writing three new books that are already underway, planning the February C-4 Summit in Tampa, cranking out my columns and articles, finishing up some lab reviews, and penning a few white papers…and maybe enjoying some time with my long lost wife and family.