Storage Monkeys

Many of you guys out there have gathered a lot of digital information. This might be your private photo collections, home videos, scanned documents and your home administration. All sorts of data that sits somewhere on your computer(s) or NAS devices.

Most of you are are aware of the risk of having it all stored on a single hard disk in your personal computer, whether it be a laptop or whatever workstation you fancy.

Cleversafe is pleased to announce our 3rd place finish in the StorageMonkeys Top Storage Vendors Blogs for 2010. You may be confused based on the official results posted on StorageMonkeys that placed Cleversafe in 21st.

We are not calling for a revote, but perhaps a more equitable calculation is in order, you review the math…

The voting in the Top 10 Storage Vendor Blogs ended at midnight on Friday PST and we have our new Top 10 list. I want to thank everyone who participated. We had 606 unique votes submitted which was higher than the 462 that voted in the Non-Vendor Blog vote in July. I have received no complaints about the voting (well, except for some snarky comments from vendors that were apparently upset that they couldn't get around the security of the vote). While some will quickly point out that the largest vendors got the most votes, the largest vote for the top blog was only 205 - not an unsurmountable number for any reputable blog with a strong following regardless of the size of the vendor they represent.

Before I list the winners, let me state something that should be pretty obvious: These types of polls are not scientific - they are intended to promote the industry, to have some fun and maybe stir some banter between vendors. Of course, the traffic to the site was great too and I'm hoping we get more vendor participation on the different groups on the site. I hope everyone understands the spirit of these polls.

InfoSmack #27 had EMC's Chad Sakac as a guest.  In that podcast, around the 34 minute mark, Greg Knieriemen asked Chad a question about Dave Donatelli, EVP of Enterprise Servers and Networking, and that launched a 10 minute discussion about HP and what Chad described as a lack of integration between HP StorageWorks and VMware.  Those chararacterizations were completely inaccurate.  I had recorded a podcast on the subject and am including it here.  Here's a link to that podcast: http://h30431.www3.hp.com/?fr_story=21c533d473c810849fdd1f25e30461ad78636ece&rf=bm

 You can follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/HPstorageGuy 

I was recently asked to look into Cloud Storage options for our organization and if it might fit in the future for some archives etc.

I just came across (yet another) good article by Kevin Beaver called Tests for securing the internal windows network . Kevin is an independent security expert, so he can’t be blamed for being vendor biased. Interestingly enough, the 1st step out of 3 he lists is “Test for share, directory, and (if needed) file permissions”.

Some might be surprised by this, but almost whenever I do a remote audit of file servers or a NAS devices, I always seem to find data that’s Exposed. Now, I’m not talking about an environment that’s “just” overly permissive – we all know how things work in large organizations: as people change roles or departments, they somehow always retain their old access rights and assume the new ones needed for the new role. (Why this is taking place probably warrants it’s own post). I’m talking about sensitive data being exposed to the “everyone” group (think the ‘Finance’ folder holding your company’s most sensitive data), I’m talking about seeing the “Domainusers” group showing up in unexpected places, because it’s a nested group of a nested group in Active Directory etc… If I had hair on my head, they would stand up every time we do one of these remote audits!      

Good Day....

I am Channel Enterprise Solutions Specialist at Dell living in/covering MI.  I am responsible for enabling our Dell Channel Partners to sell our Dell Enterprise Solutions.

I carry an EqualLogic Array in my trunk and travel all over MI presenting at Dell/Partner Events, going onsite to our current and prospective customers delivering the message and value of EqualLogic and Dell Solutions and much more.

Check out my blog:
http://marcdell.blogspot.com/

Twitter: MarcDELL

Thank you very much for your time.
Marc

If you haven’t yet tuned into the weekly podcast known as Infosmack on community site Storage Monkeys, you’re missing out. Every Monday, hosts Greg Knieriemen and Marc Farley bring on guests to dish about the latest storage industry news–and they do so in a very entertaining and informative way. This week’s show was particularly enjoyable, as they moved on from the usual format and turned the mirror around, so to speak–discussing social media such as blogging and Twitter, and how well big companies like EMC, HDS, IBM and HP are doing on that front.

The guests this week were Louis Gray and Mark Twomey–two guys who have made a serious mark on the social media landscape. Louis, who blogs daily at LouisGray.com is a recognized social media expert whose reputation extends far beyond the storage and networking industries. He is the co-founder of social media consulting firm Paladin Advisors and was at BlueArc for many years. He now advises such diverse clients as Emulex, My6Sense, Brazen Careerist, and Simler on social media strategy. I interviewed Louis on video recently–check out Part 1 and Part 2 to get his views on the latest social media debates.

We tried a "Top Ten Storage Vendor Blogs" back in July with some questionable results based on how we set up security for the poll. When we tweaked the security for the Top Storage Blogs (Non-Vendor) the feedback was much more positive. So... we are giving this another try BUT... this time every voter needs to be a registered Storage Monkeys user.

If you would like to add a blogger to the nominee list to vote on, simply comment here with a link to their blog.