I spend the bulk of my days talking to mid- and large-size enterprises about the virtues of data center virtualization. Migration paths often vary from company to company. Like anything that is transformational, barriers exist. Internal barriers fall into two groups: politics and culture, and new ways to think about IT. Virtualization also requires new [...]

As I continue to work with customers, the discussion around data center cloud strategies is definitely heating up. Many organizations are well on their way to creating a cloud / virtual data center strategy while many others are realizing an urgent need to define and execute a strategy. One thing I’ve noticed is that most organizations [...]

Giving away a $50 Amazon gift card for answering a trivia question that could have been easily Googled was nearly impossible – though it did eventually happen (to a colleague, who writes here as well), even if it took weeks longer than expected. But I’m not letting that deter me… in fact, I’m going to try [...]

Greetings, Constant Reader. A short update on the Datalink Labs[1] equipment injections and build activities over the next month (to hopefully brighten your day): New gear on the floor: – EMC VNXe and Isilon X200 in Atlanta Ramping up and builds: – Refreshed Datalink V-Scape™ in Santa Clara and Chicago Other fourth quarter builds: – [...]

We come from the land of the ice and snow, From the midnight sun where the hot springs flow. The hammer of the gods will drive our ships to new lands, To fight the horde, singing and crying: Valhalla, I am coming! — Led Zeppelin I just returned from five days in Reykjavík, Iceland, which [...]

Two weeks ago, I shared insights on how organizations are migrating toward private and public cloud services as a guest blogger on the NetApp Community. Today, I continue the discussion in The Road to FlexPod. When built right, internal private cloud infrastructures can meet business objectives. This is where unified architectures, like FlexPod and Datalink’s [...]

Thanks to the relentless teamwork of our engineering, product, marketing and practice groups, Datalink labs feature examples of two distinct virtual data center (VDC) unified reference architectures. We think that makes us a more selective lab-enabled company than one that has no VDCs/private clouds in their labs.[1] Kent writes over here about the nature and [...]

As you know, Datalink is a proud partner of NetApp. This partnership – and the ones with other leading technology vendors – enables us to gain insight into trends and solutions that help our customers accomplish their goals. Recently, I had the opportunity to share our expertise and guidance as a guest blogger on the [...]

News is full of budget and tax talk. Here in tropical Minnesota (Datalink Headquarters), we’re wrapping up a three-week-long government shutdown. The debate: Raise taxes or cut spending. Nationally, Congress is facing an August 2 deadline to address a similar issue: Avoiding a government debt default. Meanwhile in IT, we’ve been focused on maximizing business [...]

What if we had a curated VMware world? It’s no secret that VMware has been telling everyone that the future is ESXi. The service console (SC) is going away. And it’s happening soon. Really soon. There are a number of reasons that VMware is doing this, but the interesting thing is why it took them [...]