ORIGINALLY POSTED 24th September 2008

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I was a little out of my normal loop the last week or two. This week is full with customer and potential customer visits. Today we had an SVC stalwart customer visit, to not only provide some great feedback on how SVC has over the last 5 years helped them to reclaim their lives (storage admins can have a life in the evenings and weekends, outside work – because you can now do those things during the working day) but they also gave some details of how they have implemented their multi cluster data-centers to get the best that SVC can provide. Its always refreshing to meet some SVC evangelists that really understand not only storage, but virtual storage. Thanks guys, I know you will be reading this once you made the trip back home. Equally refreshing was the constructive feedback – how can we make it even better – what could be great features to add, some obvious features to add – that yes we’ve known some of them for a while, but it’s all about resource and priorities. But all comments, feedback and criticism are appreciated. With my performance hat on, the more feedback I can provide to bang my performance drum the better – hehe…

Meanwhile last week we held a series of events to help continue the celebrations of 50 years of IBM at the Hursley site, Hursley @ 50.

The opening day we had a visit from the UK Member of Parliament for Innovation of Universities who spent the morning talking with Distinguished Engineers, the Lab Director and visiting the podiums on show from the 10+ major products currently being developed and tested in the Hursley Labs…. every time you use a “hole in the wall” cash machine – think of Hursley and the software IBM developed to make it possible, yesterday and today.

The idea of the podiums was to not showcase what has happened over the last 50 years, but where we are heading today, and what up and coming technologies and advances the Lab is producing today… cue Quicksilver

The second day was an invite event for UK based CIO and CTO’s – even a few CEO’s turned up and over the day we all had a great time explaining what we are doing today and tomorrow and its always great to hear and get acknowledgment of the problems facing todays data centers and how what we are doing with SVC and the other Hursley software products can and are helping address these fundamental business issues.

The final day was for press and academics. I did get interviewed with the Lab Director discussing Quicksilver – but thankfully they ‘edited’ the piece to not include our conversation.

However the Hursley Museum is well worth a visit – unfortunately only open to IBMers or Guests, but for a quick fly through check out the Sky News technofile piece. Looking carefully you can just make myself and the SVC team out in the background (with a small Quicksilver demo rack) during John’s camera piece.

Finally, I see that not everything IBM recently announced was un-interesting to Chris Mellor, as he has an interview worth reading with Rick White of FusionIO discussing how SSD’s can be adapted to Enterprise Storage. He makes some conclusions which would seem to make sense, but I guess he missed the point that the form factor isn’t the issue we were making more of a statement about the “wrapper” (commodity scale out vs monolithic scale up) – and given the recent history of IBM vs EMC on emerging storage methodology/technology i.e. SVC vs Invista… I know who I’d back…