Storage played party to a number of running themes this week. From Xbox getting a boost from a new data center in Iowa, to Dropbox trying to compete more with Box for the enterprise…this week in storage was a lot like the second act of Romeo and Juliet — you were hooked after Act One.
 

Here is a round-up of the storage news for the week of June 24th:

Xbox One Up-Time Gets Boost With Microsoft’s $700 Million Iowa Data Center

 
Project Mountain’ turned out to be Microsoft’s, and the company is plowing $700 million into a data center that will power Xbox One and Office 365. Microsoft’s investment will total a more accurate $677.6 million, and comes on the heels of Facebook’s announcement two months ago that it would invest $300 million in an Altoona data center. The Iowa data center points to Microsoft’s continued push to the cloud and supporting it in both gaming and work.
 

Fusion-io Makes Play for CIOs with ioTurbine, the First Unified Virtualization Software Solution

 
Fusion-io upgraded its ioTurbine software this week. In is the industry’s first unified virtualization software solution. The upgrade boasts features such as hypervisor caching, virtualization-aware caching in the guest VM, dynamic reallocation of cache memory during live migration of virtual machines in VMware vMotion, and unified management of caching across virtual and physical environments. Watch a clip below of Wikibon CTO & Co-Founder David Floyer provide analysis on the ioTurbine upgrade.
 

 

Dropbox Try’s to Match Box at the Enterprise With Centrify Partnership

 
Centrify Corporation and Dropbox partner to enable secure access for Dropbox for Business. Dropbox for Business teaming with Centrify means that users now have one less password to remember. Centrify specializes in single sign-on (SSO) and is an easy-to-deploy cloud service that offers the industry’s most comprehensive solution for SSO. The added level of security improves trust for Dropbox’s enterprise-level cloud document management and file-sharing application., Dropbox for Business.
 

IBM, Internet of Things + Big Data : Interview with Scott Hebner

 
IBM has made its bed with Big Data and the Internet of Things in it. IBM is making the planet, well, A Smarter Planet. In today’s Profile Series we hear from Scott Hebner, Vice President of Cloud and Smarter Infrastructure Marketing, IBM. Below is a recent interview with Scott, who gives us the inside scoop on his IBM’s vision of the second phase of the Internet of Things.
 

Marketing, Storage + Security: The Crossroads No One Saw Coming

 
Pick your buzz word: Big Data, Data Revolution, Internet of Things, Industrial Internet, etc. — more data is being collected and conceptualized about consumers and consumer habits more than ever. This means the CMO of tomorrow has to rely on more data-driven facts than thought-driven facts. There is a very interesting crossroad we’re coming to: marketing, storage and security are interconnected in many ways we didn’t think, and that juncture is fast approaching. There are so many different moving parts, there is no one clear answer. However, there are ongoing developments in the space that address aspects of the questions raised today, starting with the matter of data democratization.
 

Infographic : Cloud’s Growing Footprint in Storage

 
Storage is a linchpin in the development and adoption of cloud services. From IT-operations and performance, to objects stored — storage is a big part of the cloud. As the Internet of Things continues to add “things” to the cloud, storage will continue to play a vital role as the backbone of cloud services. The more we do, the more we want to remember or have access to it — and there is only one common thread in those paths, storage.
 

DOTS : Human-Readable Storage -Is It The Best Bet in 100+ Years?

 
Reading digital files requires three things: computer, OS and applications (Apps). But as this may not come as a surprise, all three will be different than we currently understand them to be in 100 years. Digital files are explicitly dependent on apps in order for us to read them. And the raw data we would need to translate in 100 years, is well, not perfect. Human-readable storage is storing documents, photos and video copies of data that are, as you guessed it, able to be read by humans. DOTS (Digital Optical Technology System), a human-readable technology, was originally developed by Kodak. Kodak then all but ignored the technology, and in 2011 Group 47 acquired all DOTS patents and tech documentation from Kodak.
 

IBM Makes Moves in Flash Storage, Cloud at Edge 2013

 
IBM announced some major steps in both flash and cloud services at the recent IBM Edge 2013 conference in Las Vegas. While IBM is not pioneering new approaches or technologies in flash, its announcements at Edge greatly expand the presence of flash in its product line. IBM has included flash in its PureSystems and other products for some time. Now it is setting a direction toward a line of all -flash storage products.
 

Takeaways

 
Here are your (3) takeaways for storage news this week:
(1) Consumer trends in technology are starting to “make their way to the enterprise” and we’re going to see a lot of consumerization of the enterprise over the next few years.
(2) The CMO of tomorrow is going to have to deal more in data-fact, than understood-fact. What this means is that the crossroads of marketing + storage + security means that marketing is not only going to be able to prove the ROI’s and CP_’s better, but its going to be embed into all of your organizations departments.
(3) Storage in the backbone of the cloud. Don’t forget it.