Last October I wrote: "By late 2012, federated storage will be the architecture of choice for large new storage deployments. These capabilities will dramatically improve IT's ability to respond to business needs with minimal disruptions. IT organizations should plan to aggressively adopt federated storage as it becomes commercially available." Around that same timeframe, Nick Allen wrote a piece about Chad Sakac’s Long Distance Live vMotion demo at VMworld 2009 and asked : "So, has EMC solved the long-distance cache coherency and distributed lock management problem that has plagued the industry forever?" Today (3/11/2010), EMC’s President of Information Infrastructure, Pat Gelsinger unveiled a vision for federated storage

In case you haven’t heard, there’s a little gathering of geeks taking place in my home state, starting this week, called South by Southwest. Naturally I’ll be down there attempting to bring relevance from the chaos which generally is that event. I’ll be assisted by Michael Sean Wright, Robert Scoble, Leo Laporte and a cast of dozens. You’ll be able to find my primary coverage here at SiliconANGLE, but also showing up on the TWiT Network, The Inquisitr, Nicefishfilms, Rizzn.com, and elsewhere. In the mornings, I’ll be roaming the halls of the convention center hunting down interviews, and in the afternoons, Michael and I will be anchoring a few hours of live coverage from the Texas Coworking Studios, followed by Leo’s regula

The future of the mobile industry is pretty clear- it’s all about data. Data revenues have allowed U.S. carriers to keep subscriber ARPU’s relatively stable in the face of 30% declines in voice revenues over the past five years. Look no further than Verizon Wireless’ recent announcement to allow unlimited Skype-to-Skype voice calls over its 3G network to see the future revenue prospects of voice, now a commodity service. Data revenues, in contrast, are expected to continue their explosive growth, more than doubling by 2013 according to a recent Telecommunications Industry Association report. It’s no coincidence that over the same period smartphone sales are projected to account for more than 40% of all wireless devices sold domesti

[Editor’s Note: Pay attention here – chances are that if you do, you’ll be more interested in the iPhone as well. –mrh] It feels like it’s been more than two months since the iPad was announced. The masterful PR craze that preceded it was only matched by the public backlash. Now that the waters are quieter, I would like to ponder a little about our upcoming iLife. Do we really need a tablet? Tablets are nothing new. Back in 2004, when I was still studying, I was the proud owner of a convertible Acer Tablet PC. I took notes, read comics, ebooks and watched series during class(muted and with subtitles of course!). In 2006, Intel introduced the Viiv, which was another attempt at introducing the tablets to the mainstream consume

A friend of Art and I, Dr. Melissa Clothier, put a post up on her blog today talking about an interesting trend in society fueled in part by social media and our ever splintering layers of technology: Rent-a-friends: This Rent-A-Friend concept is intriguing. So rather than fussing with some person with a boring, involved life-story, call up Joe and go to the movie. You hang out, talk about the movie, have some temporary company and then, boom, done. No sordid break-up stories. No diatribes against back waxing and Representative Massa. No queries into your grandma’s health. No enduring pictures of the kids, or worse, vacation. From the original post at the Las Vegas Sun: We’re lonely. One in four people said they had no close friends

Heavy Rain is a pivotal game. On its face, because it appears to be exactly the type of game we’ve been asking for: an emotional, character and story driven piece. In many ways, this is the flagship that shows what games could be. It is a major undertaking for Sony, who backed French developer Quantic Dream during the 4 years of development, calling it their “most important release.” Heavy Rain is the studio’s third game. Both previous games, The Nomad Soul and Fahrenheit, have been praised for their efforts in movie-like presentation and immersion, but were criticized for their lack of “game” aspects. According to the game’s Director, David Cage, the game is "a very dark film noir thriller with mature themes.” It te

As reported on Friday I was reporting a huge announcement from Cisco that was dubbed "The Internet will change forever" hype. If you want to track the live blogging of the announcement go here from Scott Raynovich. It was the general opinion of all journalists that this made Cisco look bad for overhyping this announcement.  TelecomTV was very critical of this overhype. I reported five major elements that Cisco was going to announce an end-to-end network play which would either will be announced individually or collectively as one big “grand” vision. Here is what I heard and posted last Friday Here is what appears to be breaking next week: 1) An “AppleTV” style cable set top or edge consumer box based on their Scientific

Are you working on a new community with big time bells and whistles that caters to a niche that you just know has been waiting for a place to call home? If so, I encourage you to push ahead full steam. But, let me caution you first. Your new community, no matter how great will not change habits. What I mean by this is you will not be able to stop potential members from posting on Facebook or twitter or their favorite Ning community.  If you are assuming that your new community will become the new gathering place for those belonging to the niche, I think you will be disappointed. Can you make it a great destination with robust content and interesting discussions? Absolutely. I know from experience what that kind of commitment can do

I have been using Pandora's online stream music service off and on for several years. What got me more interested lately was it being one of the many services on my Roku video streaming box, which my wife and I use mostly for watching movies from Netflix's "watch instantly" queue. As I investigated the service more, I came to understand exactly the challenge of what it takes to be truly multi-platform in the current era. It isn't just about having both Web and mobile phone versions of your service, but how you have to go deep into a lot of different devices to appeal to your customers. The cool thing about Pandora isn't that you can create your own custom radio station that will try to find music based on a particular artist or

Update: Cisco Announces upgrade but no set top box and no telepresence. Three out of five of this report announced by Cisco. Reactions were not that favorable. Update (March 8 2010): Cisco's Future Is Already Here -- Looks like Verizon, Juniper Networks, NEC, and Finistar are demonstrating trials on the eve of Cisco's big announcement reported by FierceTelcom, Information Week, and released by Verizon today. The announcement came as Cisco was preparing a major announcement for Tuesday, believed to be its entry in the 100G race. Google has already said it plans to test 100G networks in selected regions. You can take the 100G piece out of the Cisco equation and the notion that Verizon will be standing with Cisco at their podium.