‘Tis the season for holly hocks, eggnog, and pundits predicting industry trends for the coming year. Apparently, in the storage blogo-tweet-osphere, getting in the holiday spirit means poking fun at one another.
One of the most notable entries is a series of “Letters to Father Christmas” penned by none other than one of our favorite bloggers, Storagebod (Martin Glassborow). They are broken into seven — count ‘em! — installments (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, The Last One). Storagebod really kept Santa busy this year.
The letters contain such gems as this jab at storage giant EMC, which he has dubbed “Elven Magic Company”: “there was that V-MAX announcement; boy did that go down well with all of the other Father Christmases. Still, it was great to see you get down with the Intel Gnomes; still a pity that the FAST magic wasn’t ready to go quite yet…”
And this for another company he calls Hippie Pixies (try to guess…) “I think you need a tete-a-tete with your Hitachi partners; they’ve been sleeping on the job! They either come up with a refreshed array or you’re going to have to go acquisitive to get yourself a top of the line Tier 1 array.”
And lest you think that the Elven Magic folk are balking, he got props from the big elf himself, Chuck Hollis. He writes: “He tells all of us vendors what we need to hear, and does it in a gentle and funny manner. I think Martin has emerged as one of the most insightful and reasonable voices in the storage blogging world, and we all follow him closely here at EMC.”
Martin G. also sends us and our fellows a little gifty: “A special shout out to the smaller vendor bloggers; what you do is very important, more so than the bloggers of the big guys…Most of you do it very well and with a keen sense of humour! Keep it up and keep me smiling.” We’re working on it, Martin, we really are.
But wait, Mr. Bod isn’t the only one getting nipped by Jack frost. Over at his StorageIO blog, Greg Schulz has penned a post for the season: Behind the Scenes, SANta Claus Global Cloud Story. In it, we learn that “The heart or brains of the SANta operation is his global system operations center (SOC) or network operation center (NOC) that rivals those seen at NASA among others with multiple data feeds. The SOC is a 24×365 operations function that covers all aspects from transportation, logistics, distribution, assembly or packaging, financials back office, CRM, IT and communications among other functions…” Wow. For those of us who thought it was just elves turning wooden cranks to pop out Tonkas, this gives us a whole new view of the ops at the North Pole.
And speaking of cranking out wondrous things, Beth Pariseau over at SearchStorage has put together two seasonal posts that provide for highly entertaining reading. What’s great about this is that those of us in the tweetsphere saw her doing at least some of the research in real-time by asking for feedback through Twitter. Here they are:
First, on SearchStorage – What to buy a geek for the holidays
The best quote in this has to be the following from Taneja Group analyst Jeff Boles, “I’ve rejected the Kindle concept. Have you seen the book prices? It’s an entirely disadvantaged arrangement for what is ultimately a compromised experience in the first place. Wait until NEC makes a levitating robot dog that follows you around and holds the Kindle up for you while you do other things…” Quips Pariseau, “We’ll be sure to include this on our “What to Buy a Geek in 2050″ list.” Well, fine but I’m still putting that robot dog on my wish list…
Then this, on Storage Soup: The storage industry’s holiday wish list
In it, is the “wish list” of Wikibon’s Dave Vellante:
- secure cloud
- A dumpster to haul all my backup tapes that I’ve converted to disk-based backup.
- A primary storage device that optimizes capacity without sacrificing performance. (Dave, we may just have a surprise for you under the tree over here at Ocarina….)
- A virtualization performance guru … make it 5 gurus …
Finally, here’s a video showing John Troyer, Community Manager at VMware (and my costar in the Gestalt IT Tech Field Day overview video). In it, we see him open a veritable bonanza of presents from the VMware community. The normally unflappable Troyer cannot help but be blown away by the outpouring of love and truly enviable gifts he received. Those who know John are aware that this is all entirely appropriate to the level of positive energy he brings to that circle of techies. All the way over here at Online Storage Optimization we can feel the glow.
And with that, we wish you all a Merry Merry Christmas, and to all a good night!
