Father Christmas Letters – part 1

Dear Father Christmas or can I call you Uncle Joe?,

My what a busy year you and the Elven Magical Company have had and I don't want to seem ungrateful but I thought I'd get my requests in early for 2010. Still before I do, lets look at some of your achievements over the past twelve months.

Firstly, there was that V-MAX announcement; boy did that go down well with all of the other Father Christmases. Still, it was great to see you get down with the Intel Gnomes; still a pity that the FAST magic wasn't ready to go quite yet. And it must of been a bit of a downer when that Elf with the name which sounds a bit like a turtle up and left for the Hippie Pixies! 

Of course then there was the little love-tug-of-war over the other Double D (get your mind out of the gutter…Mother Christmas is giving you a stern glare!). Bet you are glad you won that one, a triumph of jam today I reckon; although the jam tomorrow smells mighty fine right now.

And then you went and threw your lot in with another bunch of West Coast Hippies; are you sure that was a good idea? These West Coasters are a strange bunch; I reckon this bunch could turn out to be polyamorous, just make sure that you're their main or they'll be running of with another West Coast Chick. 

Then just in time for Christmas, you finally let some of that FAST magic out of the traps. Good for you, ignore those who think it's a little bit of damp squib…more cantrip than full blown spell! I think it's fairly cool anyway.

So, my what a busy year you've had and you've even managed to throw in some extra presents such as free Virtual Provisioning on the way.

Still next year I'd like…

FAST v2; it'd be cool if it was free but I can understand that even Father Christmas has some expenses to cover (still I'm sure that Storagezilla would work for free which would cut a little off the overheads! No? Well give it some thought and do you need to pay Chuck and Barry so much? And that Chad; well he's a Canuck, he should just think himself lucky to be working for such a fine American company).

But on the FAST v2 thing, I had this idea…wouldn't it be cool if customers could run it for a few months in a purely advisory mode for free? That way, they could gauge the savings they could make and it would be building up a nice profile of what their arrays are doing. And I have this idea for FAST v3, why can't we cluster V-MAXs together and use that RAPID-IO thing to move data between arrays but utilise the FAST engine to do it. Okay, sounds a bit like storage virtualisation but I'm sure you guys can come up with a spin which will stop You Know Hu from crowing too much!

And on the virtualisation front; why so coy about your virtual appliances? They would have made at least nice stocking fillers this year? But, perhaps next year?

What else, perhaps a really good integrated storage management tool (but not another configuration tool) would be good. But can we stay away from this Java stuff; it always causes my desktop to run like Rudolph after too much Christmas Pudding!

And Cloud…lets have a little less hot air and bit more precipitation please?

Anyway, have a Great Christmas and New Year

Best Regards,

Storagebod

p.s if you've got any spare SSDs that you don't need…