Now that it’s Groundhog Day, I decided to look back at 2008 before it’s too late.
The picture above is from a collection of the best astronomy pictures of 2008. It is the star nebula W5, alias the St. Valentine nebula. What perspective does it give us about the importance of our opinions on events of 2008 and how they fit in shaping the heavens?
Won't stop us from having them though.
Also, for perspective, 2008 was designated as:
Lots of trade articles appeared in December and early January to assess significant 2008 IT highlights. Of course everyone is entitled to their opinion. Here are a few of my own, followed by those of several others.
Too many Kermit references.
Too many things / ideas / programs that use the word green in their attempt at legitimacy.
Hype for green peaked last January. By Q4 all the interest in green was of the cash-money type.
No crystal ball needed to expect that financial issues will continue to be out front through 2009.
My view is that it will be manifest in a quest for efficiency.
A few EMC ‘08 highlights included January’s Symmetrix introduction of the first Flash disk on Enterprise systems. At a 30x improvement in instructions per second (IOPS), that’s a big performance and efficiency improvement.
Later in the year Flash was included on the new advanced Clarion system that combined Flash, spin-down, virtual provisioning, adaptive cooling, SATA drives.
EMC also introduced new efficiency assessment services.
EMC Atmos was launched to operate as a separate entity. It features multi-petabyte offering for information storage and distribution that enables companies to build cloud storage. Providing massive scalability with automated data placement it is a whole new look at efficiency for content and information services delivery.
Not to neglect the needs of individuals, EMC also created Decho
(for Your Digital Echo), from the assets of two acquisitions: Mozy and PI Corporation. Efficiency here comes in the form of care, protection and flexible access to your individual digital archives
Altogether, in step with our customers, EMC devoted much more resource in 2008 to sustainable IT and we have seen it paying off for our customers.
More to come in 2009
eWeek: SLIDESHOW: “Green IT and Green Computing Slideshow: Top 8 Green IT Highlights of 2008”
December 16, 2008
Looking back over some of the news highlights in the green IT sector, companies such as Hewlett-Packard, Cisco Systems, Sun Microsystems and a number of others really took the lead in efforts to update data centers and save electrical resources. Many analysts and industry observers expect this green IT momentum to increase throughout 2009. Here are the top eight green IT highlights of the year, as reported by eWEEK.
InfoWorld: “Green-tech Trends From 2008”
December 22, 2008
By Ted Samson
Like 2007, 2008 proved an eventful year for the world of green technology. The reasons green tech has had such staying power are pretty clear: energy prices continue to soar, organizations continue to struggle with insufficient power and space in their datacenters, and concern over the state of the environment continues to grow. With 2008 nearly at an end, InfoWorld looks back at some of the trends in green tech, ones that will most certainly spill over in 2009.
GreenerComputing.com: “Fifteen Simple Ways to Green Your Data Center on the Cheap”
December 23, 2008
By John Pappas and Ron Wilson
There's been a lot of talk lately about green data centers, and with good reason. As businesses move away from paper records and in-person transactions and more towards computer-based transactions and digital information storage, the amount of energy that data centers use is growing -- and fast. According to the EPA, data center energy use doubled between 2000 and 2006, and many are worried this figure may double again in just a few years. With energy prices on the rise, smart IT and facility managers and even top executives are taking a look at ways to build and maintain not only effective, but efficient data centers.
December 29, 2008
EMC acquired SMB/SOHO storage hardware manufacturer Iomega in April, put it together with the Mozy online storage technology it acquired in late 2007 and its Retrospect SMB backup software and unveiled itself as a complete channel-friendly small business storage vendor. EMC has completed its transformation into one of the most channel-friendly vendors of storage, or of pretty much any technology. Solution providers voted EMC the most channel-friendly vendor in both the storage hardware and the storage software categories in the VARBusiness Annual Report Card survey in 2008. And they did so by a wider margin over its competitors than for any other vendor in any other category.
InfoWorld: “A Year in the Clouds”
December 23, 2008
By Eric Knorr
If there was one big trend in 2008 it was cloud computing. As with all new IT trends, levels of adoption were low. The most interesting thing about cloud computing is the argument over its definition continuing to rage, even as customers are paying for it and adopting it.
December 23, 2008
By Robin Harris
The world of data storage is changing faster than it has since the mid-90’s saw the rise of storage arrays and storage networks. ZDNet offers its take on the top storage products, both consumer and enterprise, of 2008, including EMC’s Atmos cloud storage.
December 31, 2008
2008 will go down in history as a year of extraordinary financial upheaval, but for storage users, it was also a year of major technological change, as technologies such as solid state drives (SSDs), data de-duplication and pNFS entered the mainstream, while the economic backdrop had users clamoring for any technology that could help them make better use of their storage environments. EMC is featured in three of the top 10 stories, including: Should EMC Buy Sun?, EMC Kicks NetApp's NAS: EMC is giving NetApp fits in its own market andApple Could Learn A Lot From EMC.
IDG News Service: “Three Deals Symbolized Storage Trends in 2008”
December 20, 2008
By Stephen Lawson
The storage story of 2008 was growth: An accelerating explosion of information, much of it in the form of video, led IT administrators to try to make better use of their capacity and staff. Overall demand for storage capacity is growing by about 60 percent per year, according to IDC. Another research company, Enterprise Strategy Group, pegs the annual growth rate of data between 30 percent and 60 percent. In addition to the trend toward disconnecting logical from physical resources, there were a handful of acquisitions this year that signaled other trends in storage world. In late February, enterprise storage giant EMC bought Pi, a provider of software and online services for consumers to keep track of personal information stored locally or online. The deal, which followed the company's 2007 buyout of online backup provider Mozy, was one sign of growing interest in cloud storage.
December 26, 2008
By Priya Ganapati
The economy may be tanking, but innovation is alive and well. The world's corporate and academic R&D labs were busy laying the foundations of some amazing future technologies in 2008. Wired offers a countdown of what rocked our world in 2008 — and what will change yours in 2009 and beyond, including flash memory – where EMC is among players championing flash drives for larger business users.
December 23, 2008
By Dave Raffo
SearchStorage.com outlines the 10 biggest storage deals of the year. IBM Corp. and NetApp set the tone for a busy first half of 2008 for storage acquisitions when IBM acquired XIV and NetApp bought Onaro Inc. in the first three days of the year. By the end of April 2008, EMC Corp. checked in with acquisitions of Iomega Corp. and Pi Corp., IBM added Diligent Technologies Corp. and FilesX Inc., Cisco Systems Inc. bought Nuova Systems Inc., and Blue Coat Systems Inc. picked up WAN optimization rival Packeteer Inc.
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