Great event this morning.
Went to a Compaq StorageWorks seminar and had the immense pleasure of listening to the almost legendary Chet Jacobs. Chet’s been working in the storage business, with Compaq and elsewhere for almost as long as I’ve been on the planet.
Chet’s like a cocktail of 100 proof pure grain alpha geek shot through with a triple dose of evangelist. He’s a sharp enough architect to be able to design mind-numbingly vast storage solutions for huge companies, yet he’s also one of the best presenters I have ever encountered (and I’ve heard a lot of ‘em). Entertaining, educational and engaging as heck. If you ever, ever get a chance to hear this guy speak, crawl across broken glass to get there. Trust me. The StorageWorks events are touring North America. If the show comes to your town, take 2 hours of your time to go hear Chet's pitch.
He spoke for around 40 minutes this morning on the subject of SANs – Storage Area Networks. Prior to Chet’s pitch, I would have told you that there could not possibly be anything even remotely interesting to say about SANs, but I’m telling you the guy was hilarious.
He’s also a great user of factoids – illustrating key points with lively anecdotes and a liberal sprinkling of bite-sized infonuggets. Here’s a sampling:
“In the next three years, more new data will be stored than all the data stored since computers were invented.”
“75% of IT infrastructure spending by 2003 will be dedicated to storage.”
“Information and networks are the two things in your business that gain value over time” That’s a deep one – I’m still thinking through the numerous ways in which this claim can be demonstrated to be true.
“Servers in the future will become almost like peripherals. If the data isn’t there, all the server technology in the world won’t matter. Users accessing storage – that’s all you need.”
And much more in similar vein…
One of Chet’s most amazing anecdotes was taken from his work with Celera, the company that shared the credit for cracking the human genome. He was brought in to consult with them on a storage solution that would support their wish to share the genome decoding models with scientists and research labs around the world. The result of their capacity planning showed that, to do what they wanted, they’d need to add 7 terabytes of storage a day. That’s like a million dollars spent on storage every single day.
One word: Yike!
Went to a Compaq StorageWorks seminar and had the immense pleasure of listening to the almost legendary Chet Jacobs. Chet’s been working in the storage business, with Compaq and elsewhere for almost as long as I’ve been on the planet.
Chet’s like a cocktail of 100 proof pure grain alpha geek shot through with a triple dose of evangelist. He’s a sharp enough architect to be able to design mind-numbingly vast storage solutions for huge companies, yet he’s also one of the best presenters I have ever encountered (and I’ve heard a lot of ‘em). Entertaining, educational and engaging as heck. If you ever, ever get a chance to hear this guy speak, crawl across broken glass to get there. Trust me. The StorageWorks events are touring North America. If the show comes to your town, take 2 hours of your time to go hear Chet's pitch.
He spoke for around 40 minutes this morning on the subject of SANs – Storage Area Networks. Prior to Chet’s pitch, I would have told you that there could not possibly be anything even remotely interesting to say about SANs, but I’m telling you the guy was hilarious.
He’s also a great user of factoids – illustrating key points with lively anecdotes and a liberal sprinkling of bite-sized infonuggets. Here’s a sampling:
“In the next three years, more new data will be stored than all the data stored since computers were invented.”
“75% of IT infrastructure spending by 2003 will be dedicated to storage.”
“Information and networks are the two things in your business that gain value over time” That’s a deep one – I’m still thinking through the numerous ways in which this claim can be demonstrated to be true.
“Servers in the future will become almost like peripherals. If the data isn’t there, all the server technology in the world won’t matter. Users accessing storage – that’s all you need.”
And much more in similar vein…
One of Chet’s most amazing anecdotes was taken from his work with Celera, the company that shared the credit for cracking the human genome. He was brought in to consult with them on a storage solution that would support their wish to share the genome decoding models with scientists and research labs around the world. The result of their capacity planning showed that, to do what they wanted, they’d need to add 7 terabytes of storage a day. That’s like a million dollars spent on storage every single day.
One word: Yike!
