Wow, what a year! Some great partnerships are made public, “Cloud” is no longer a dust bowl term of ambiguity, and M&A continues. Not to mention on the home front, Varrow rocks the Casbah with a number of accolades. Its no doubt IT budgets in general were depressed but you would have barely noticed depending on the sector of IT you were in, namely storage and virtualization. So here are some notable moments in no particular order…

• vSphere 4 Released-The long awaited vSphere 4 was released to the wild back in April to much acclaim. VMware’s fourth generation enterprise server virtualization product has made cloud its target, touting there is no better way to get there than with ESX under the hood. Larger maximums, thin provisioning, Distributed Virtual Switches, robust storage API’s for third-party integration, and Fault Tolerance are among some of the new additions to this stellar accomplishment.  
• VCE Partnership publically established, birthing Acadia-Campaign to righteousness, all hail the ever knowing Virtual Computing Environment coalition. Why not? why not collaborate to bring referenced architectures to the people and a seamless support experience to boot. Of course I speak of vBlock’s and Acadia, more info here, Hot to the Touch: The #VCE Coalition. This really is a great way to sprint into 2010, more on this topic to come.
• Varrow Receives EMC Mid-Market partner of the year – Truly remarkable, just goes to show you “size ain’t sh#@”. Put any number of like minded, passionate individuals together and look out world. Just in case you don’t know, “..the partner of the of the year award recognizes valuable partners who have exceeded joint sales and business goals, achieved significant market penetration, an provided superior support throughout the year”, that’s nationwide BTW. Thanks EMC for your faith in us! And trust me, there is no brighter star to hitch your wagon to than the fine individuals at EMC, how can you not succeed!
• Varrow Makes FAST 50 in the Triad Business Journal – They just keep coming you know? The FAST 50 recognizes 50 of the fastest growing private businesses in the triad area. For those that missed it, here is the snapshot from the biz journal. Another huge accomplishment for us. With these acknowledgements come a lot of blood, sweat and tears. You can guarantee in 2010 we will hit #1 (we came in fifth btw)
• EMC buys DataDomain, bitch slaps NetApp in the process- Sometimes its just a matter of principle and frankly NetApp has an uncanny way of choking on acquisitions, so it was in Data Domain’s (and the shareholders) best interest to be acquired by EMC. Data Dedupe is all the rave, and although both companies at the time had competing products, building a portfolio of products for a particular technology has long been EMC’s approach. Looking for source based dedupe? They gotcha with Avamar. Scouting for target dedupe? In like flynn with DataDomain. Intent on dedup’ing your NFS and CIFS data? Say hello to the Celerra. Its clear (according to my data domain partner bulletin) that dedup is no longer a “feature”, its there in high-end and low-end arrays, primary, near-line and archived data. Its now a baked in, bona-fide, “it”? Come on, its a feature..how else do you subscribe it?
• EMC RecoverPoint-Your neighborhood replication engine – For those that don’t follow this blog regularly (u should : ), RecoverPoint is a heterogeneous block based replication solution. It works with the vast majority of arrays out there (not just EMC), its out-of-band appliance based, with dedup and compression to boot. CDP is the surrounding industry buzzword meaning Continuous Data Protection, the ability to capture every write to a LUN with transmission being async or sync. It truly is one of the marvels within the replication arena and assured to gain increased traction in 2010. Personally we have done a number of implementations across NC and VA, ALWAYS to 100% customer satisfaction. I have done a far amount of blogging on the subject to say the least, so if interested please visit here. With supporting products such as Axxana, and VBlock replication just around the bend this product has no where to go but up.
• The long awaited FAST is amongst us – ILM reincarnated + automation as I mention here, EMC FAST for Clariion in 60 Seconds or less, is the essence of this technology. This revival of storage tiering couldn't come at a better time. With data consumption growing at a staggering rate, the ability to automate data migration from one Tier to another, especially with the advancements in LP, Spin-down and even SSD technology, is a must. Although not really first to market, depending on who you talk to, it is as far as I know the first to support multi-platform (V-Max, Celerra, and Clariion).
• FCoE is impacting DC’s more that originally thought, or at least conversations – At a time where “Data Center” technologies are king, FCoE has become the enabler for network/storage convergence. Very much likened to iSCSI, FCoE forces a host of advancements to the forefront, namely Data Center Bridging (DCB, or CEE or DCE), which in short provides a lossless transport in support of LAN/SAN confluence. Cisco led the industry stampede to this transport and clearly is benefitting the most at this juncture. Sometimes being first to the party has its benefit..
• Twitter is the Social Media Titan 2009 is the year of Twitter. From would-be presidents to current presidents, to actors, to techies alike, Twitter and its infamous 140 character limit is very much mainstream. Relax your social media gag reflex and make the plunge if your not among us tweeples, although I would bet all of my followers <wink, wink> are indeed followers, right? Well, If you still don’t get it, check out the 5 phases of Twitter, shorthanded below or Twitter in Plain English.  In 190 characters <where is TweetShrink when I need it>, Twitter is all about entering and leaving streams of information, you can’t be in the know for all of it, but be patient the information you happen to get locked into is invaluable and free!
  • What the hell is this?
  • Oh cool. follow follow follow
  • Hey, I’m semi-popular
  • Stop spamming me
  • What did you say? I missed it.
• Cisco drops A-bomb on industry as a whole.. – I’ll admit, my knowledge of UCS (Cisco’s Unified Computing System) is still in “back swing” mode. But I have seen the ripple effect across the technology landscape. Designed from the ground up with the intent of underpinning current and future cloud initiatives, UCS is NOT your average blade system, that is clear. This is your next generation Data Center platform, providing compute, storage, networking and virtualization all within a SPoG united framework. In one massive swoop Cisco has reinvented itself, challenged its deep partner relationships, and shaken the industry to the core. Go Cisco!
• EMC cherry picks partner talent and then some – Lets see, @DuncanYB and @ClineK casualty’s of VMware’s siren, @CXI, @scott_lowe and @edsai all swept up by EMC. This is a serious amount of cerebral muscle coming aboard an already stacked international squad. And with the #VCE partnership coming on strong, the writing was on the wall in a non-doom and gloom, non-idiom sort of way (?). Needless to say an @sakacc army was forming it seems…not really sure what to think of it beyond positive ju-ju for the entire ecosystem.

Well there you have it my faithful followers, the second installment of Battle Ponderings (from weekly to yearly-man I sux) I have truly enjoyed the last year we have spent together, you made me stronger, the technology keeps my fuel packs lit, and well the rest <pause> will be blogged or tweeted about.. : 0 )

Happy Holidays Everyone! See you in the year of opportunity, lets shoot high!