Storage: Interviews

In March, Western Digital agreed to buy Hitachi Global Storage Technologies> (HGST), the disk drive subsidiary of Hitachi Ltd., in a stock and cash transaction valued at $US4.3 billion. HGST CEO Steve Milligan will join WD as president at the closing of the deal, expected in the fourth quarter.

EMC recently held its annual Inform conference in Sydney. Keynote speaker, EMC President for Australia and New Zealand, David Webster, sat down with Matthew Sainsbury to discuss the event, market issues and its vendor partnerships.

Brian Gallagher , president of EMC 's Symmetrix & Virtualization Product Group, sat down with Computerworld at EMC's annual user conference, EMC World, to talk about the company's new VPLEX synchronous data replication product . Gallagher explained what differentiates it from rival products and EMC's existing offerings, such as Symmetric Remote Data Facility [SRDF] replication technology and Invista storage virtualization software.

Pat Gelsinger made headlines in September 2009 when he left Intel to join EMC as president and COO of information infrastructure products, a group that includes the company's information storage and information security businesses. Now, Gelsinger -- who was Intel's first chief technology officer and led both the desktop products group and the digital enterprise group during his career at the chip maker -- is making waves again.

Plenty of kids grow up with dreams of taking to the skies as pilots, but EMC channel manager, Chris Moyle, was one of the few to make it a reality.

Earlier this year, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak accepted the position of chief scientist at start-up solid state drive company Fusion-io. It's the first time since 1972, when he worked in Hewlett-Packard Co's calculator division, that he's held a technologist's position for a company that wasn't his own.

Now that EMC has purchased deduplication technology leader Data Domain, its reseller agreements with the likes of FalconStor Software Inc. and Quantum Corp. for the same type of single-instancing technology could be in jeopardy. Quantum resells both its tape libraries and dedupe software through EMC, sales that amount to less than 10% of its revenue.

Westcon Group is confident its focus on core technologies such as collaboration, security, storage and networking will help it ride out the economic storm. General manager, Wendy O’Keeffe, caught up with ARN to discuss the state of the market and the distributor’s position in 2009.

What was your first job?

What's holding users back? Potential security risks and a loss of IT control topped the list of perceived barriers to SaaS adoption. With so much trepidation in the air, Computerworld decided to get the real scoop, so we interviewed six executives who have tackled SaaS projects.

Juniper Networks datacentre solutions director, Bobby Guhasarkar, spoke with ARN about where the datacentre is headed and the way market conditions affect strategy.

Dell has continued to move its storage product line and services upstream, adding more sophisticated software into its arrays, which have traditionally been targeted at small to midsize businesses. At the same time, the company says it will increase its offerings around cloud-based computing, both in on-site and off-site backup and disaster recovery.

What does your role at HDS entail?

In the past 18 months or so, EMC has been talking to partners about its Velocity Partner Program in an attempt to identify the parts that work and those that don’t. What have been the key findings?

Where do you see DataCore's position in the Australian virtualisation market?

What is SpectrumData focusing on this year?

Symantec chairman and CEO John Thompson last week delivered a keynote speech to thousands of security professionals at the RSA Conference 2008 in the US. Ellen Messmer caught up with Thompson at the RSA event, where he expanded on a range of topics including vendor alliances, Symantec's competition and the importance of data-loss prevention technology.

Rackspace provides datacentre facilities under a managed hosting scheme. It is building a new UK datacentre and has had a green aspect to its business for about a year and a half. How is that affecting its operations?

APC founder and CTO Neil Rasmussen was in London recently to talk about datacentres, power and efficiency - themes that have become headline news as they transmogrify into green issues. We took the opportunity to ask him - inter alia - whether the datacentre can ever be green.

Responsible for steering the course of EMC's security franchise, Art Coviello, executive vice president of EMC's RSA Security division, says the unit will eventually contribute US$2 billion to EMC's annual revenue. In a recent interview with Computerworld, Coviello talked about a balance between storage and security needs, why administrators focused only on "dumb storage" are a dying breed and why selling risk needs no justification.