Tech Notes

It was great to be at the Storage Networking World (SNW) show in Dallas last week. We saw more customers sending people from the operations and the architecture/planning groups. It’s important for operations and architecture/planning to work together on SAN infrastructure, so it was good to see this and to hear some of the attendee’s remark they were hired to bridge the gap between these groups.

In a panel of CIOs at medium to large companies, all agreed that staffing remains a huge issue.  No one is getting new headcount, yet the number of new technologies they have to work with continues to grow.  Some saw a solution in cross-training IT staff.  One CIO is creating “pods” where architects and planners work closely with operations.  Everyone agreed that even though the effect of training and cross-training staff often results in “poaching,” it was still worth it to have a better-trained staff.  At Virtual Instruments, we agree with this trend and see cross-domain expertise taking on a more of an important role. VirtualWisdom, for instance, is designed for use by everyone in the infrastructure, from the DBAs and server admins to the fabric and storage admins.

Stew Carless, Virtual Instruments Solutions Architect, held a well-attended session on, “Exploiting Storage Performance Metrics to Optimize Storage Management Processes.”  In the session, Stew talked about how using the right instrumentation can go a long way towards eliminating a lot of the guessing game that often accompanies provisioning decisions.

Over at the Hands-on-Lab, Andrew Benrey and I led the Virtual Instruments part of the “Storage Implications for Server Virtualization” session. We had a full house for most of the sessions and we were pleased that many of the lab attendees were familiar with Virtual Instruments before they participated in the lab.

In a real-time illustration of managing the unexpected: The big news at the show came from the U.S. weather service, when a series of tornados ripped through the Dallas area to the east and west of the hotel. The SNW staff and the hotel did an excellent job of gathering everyone on the expo floor and sharing updates on what was happening. After a two-hour interruption, the SNW staff did a great job of getting the conference back underway. The expo exhibitors enjoyed the two hours of a captive audience!

With a couple of exceptions, many of the big vendors weren’t at SNW, which we see as a positive trend.  People come to these events to learn about new things, and frankly, the newest things come from the newest, smallest vendors.  At SNW, the floor was full of smaller, newer vendors who may not have direct sales forces who can blanket continents, but whose fresh insights and new approaches provided valuable insights for the SAN community.  I didn’t hear one end user complain that their favorite big vendor wasn’t there.