At the end of July I visited with the CIO of the San Francisco Giants, Bill Schlough. When I walked into his office, I couldn’t help but notice a framed article written to him with the title: Dear SF Giants CIO: I’m Sorry. If you’d like an interesting take on the SF Giants / LA Dodgers rivalry, read the article. Winning the World Series has its benefits!
My visit was essentially a courtesy call to a corporate partner to see how their EMC gear was doing. Their IT staff was in the middle of migrating scattered home directories onto a consolidated VNX-class NAS box. The migration is part of a multi-pronged technology refresh that involves VMware virtualization on the server side, and DataDomain deduplication on the backup side (with the NAS box in the middle).
This type of configuration (VMware – VNX – DataDomain) is commonly used to break down IT silos, conserve power, reduce OPEX, etc. In fact, the same sort of combination of VMware and DataDomain was deployed three states north of California as well.
VMware and DataDomain are just two of EMC’s West Coast acquisitions that form a blended solution with the traditional East Coast-originated storage technologies.
A dual purpose for my visit was to meet my co-workers from many of these acquisitions and pose a simple question: how can we combine the original East Coast technologies with the West Coast secret sauce to partner with local universities on relevant new research directions? After a fair bit of discussion with my co-workers, I visited three local campuses to find out what was going on.
I wrote about my visit to UC Berkeley. It’s a Big Data research hub. They’ve thought a lot about the analytics side of the equation, and they’re also ready to more fully consider the storage side. Some of their experiments could benefit from a petabyte-scale database (isn’t GreenPlum on the West Coast?). Others could use a multi-PB file system (come to think of it, Isilon is out there too).
During my visit to UC Santa Cruz, I discovered that UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz could really use a petabyte scale block device (VMAX fits the bill here).
At Stanford I noticed that their database research could benefit from server flash technology.
In fact, all three could benefit from the one-stop shopping now available via West Coast EMCers. Whether it be RSA security or Iomega edge devices, it’s quite a menu of technology choices to play with.
I’m looking forward to more trips out West. From baseball in the Bay to Bay Area Universities, there’s a lot of gold to mine.
On a final note, any true baseball fan would align any West Coast trip with a visit to some local ballparks. Well…. I noticed that the five West Coast MLB teams were playing in six days, so I flew my son out and we hit them all (with the girls joining us in Anaheim).
Steve
Twitter: @SteveTodd
Director, EMC Innovation Network
