Nigel has left the building…
It is a sad, but happy day for me. Nigel, one of the first bloggers here on rupturedmonkey.com is moving on. And it’s about time! 
He has created his own blog over at http://blog.nigelpoulton.com. His posts over there will be deep dives into technology products that he is working with. We have copied all of his past posts here and imported them over there so if you want to read some of his older stuff you can do that.
So what is going to happen to this site? Nothing. We will keep going with our initial mission, to let anyone that wants to blog about storage have an avenue to do that without restriction. Being one of the first five people (I’d say second to only Drunkendata.com) to begin blogging about storage back in May 2005 I started this site with the goal to let other people have an avenue to give their thoughts and feelings about the storage vendors in their shops and what they were doing right or wrong. The secondary goal was to get others talking about storage period! Too many people were hoarding information and unwilling to share it because they thought they would be giving away valuable IP and end users suffered greatly in those days. I’d say we were successful in those goals. You now have at least one hundred blogs dedicated to talking about storage. Most primarily marketing focused, some not.
As for myself, I plan on posting a few articles here and there. I’ve begun focusing more on the entire data center infrastructure over the past few years, but especially in the last 18 months. I don’t deal with just storage anymore and I really like it that way. Storage is a commodity now (to me) and it was time to move on to the next big thing. Having a ten and nine year old doesn’t give me much time outside of work to write many articles either.
So, here is the casting call. If you have a passion for storage and would like a place to write about it that already has a lot of dedicated readership then send me an email and we’ll get an author account setup for you. snig [at] rupturedmonkey.com.
December 5th, 2009 at 6:14 pm
I would beg to differ about it being a commodity right now. Having a friend who works as a Business Development Manager for Cisco who has to come up with some interesting solutions and also knowing what large corporations are trying to implement with the data centre and "cloud computing" (or whatever its called tomorrow), storage is by far not just a commodity.
Getting the right storage to the right user (on the right "virtualised" plaform) with the right protocol in the most efficient and cost effective solution needs a good deal of planning and in some cases vision.
Some of the best (I mean seriously big) paying roles around are for storage (and data) architectural roles that also have to integrate with security and server virtualisation architectural solutions. Getting the right backup solution for PB’s of disk is even more difficult.
Perhaps data center infrastructure covers that eh?
December 6th, 2009 at 11:13 pm
Storage is but a small piece of the puzzle my friend. Storage is a commodity now. Software companies have made it that way, including EMC. Hardware is cool, but software is sexy. (c)
May 13th, 2010 at 10:20 pm
I just shut down my blog – too busy these days to make it a full-time thing.The only reason Software is sexy is because the former hardware manufacturers want the fat profit margins that come with software. (IE once it’s GA you can sell the same thing over and over again)That would be fine if they didn’t skimp on development to increase said fat profit margin.For example. EMC was king when all it did was hardware. EMC is losing market-share daily now that they spend more time pushing crappy software products (and "appliances" based on consumer grade PC hardware) over the products that made them what they are.I don’t care how much the EMC Sales dweebs want me to endorse it, RecoverPoint goes into an environment and I go out of it. It’s as simple as that.