The EMC / Dell merger: my tears and thoughts

Posted by on December 2, 2015 3 comments
Dell EMC

It’s been a few weeks now since Mr Dell, Silver Lake and MSD Partners announced they want to take over EMC and with that become the world’s largest privately held IT company. For me I relived the whole HP / Compaq merger and at that time Compaq was my favorite company. My whole world collapsed. What was going to happen to the world I lived in? It was going to disappear! But luckily it did not. The best pieces of Compaq at the time, their servers, were simply rebranded and sold as HP Proliants and the Alpha CPU “suddenly” appeared as the Itanium from Intel. And everybody was happy. Well, sort of. At least the server department kept on delivering what they were famous for.

And now this happened

I never realized Michael Dell was even in a position to actually raise that kind of money. But with help from Silver Lake and MSD Partners he succeeded to raise sixty five Billion US Dollars! Just imagine! Oh, wouldn’t I like to get my hands on a small portion of that!! But that’s a whole other story. Forget the money, forget the stock exchange market: what will this mean for both companies and the people working there? As some of you know, I’m involved with both the EMC education department as well as the customer facing piece of EMC Support and I want to share my thoughts on the future of my current “Compaq” equivalent, aka “EMC”.

Read more »

Why securing devices using your fingerprint is not safe

Posted by on December 1, 2015 No comments
fingerprint

Think about it: fingerprints are unique. Everybody has them and every one of them is unique, so it’s a secure way to prove your identity, right?

WRONG!

We all thought that passwords were easily hackable, if not by guessing, by brute force attacks. And we all know the “difficult” passwords: P@$$w0rd123 and 3AsyD03s1T. As if hackers are stupid! They’re not! Believe it or not, but these so called encrypted, but still “readable” passwords are easy to guess, just like your dog’s name and your mother’s birthday. I mean, a dog’s name is Bello, Spot, Rex, Fluffy or a dozen other names and as for birthdays: we only have to try every date since 1-1-1900, which is roughly only 115 x 365 = 42,000 dates which are there to try.

Read more »

Cisco Smart zoning – part II: examples

Posted by on November 5, 2015 4 comments

Smart zoning examples

In my smart zoning post from last February I already presented the way to get started with Cisco smart zoning. I initially planned to give a more detailed calculation on how much time you can save if you were using smart zoning compared to SIST zoning.

SAN fabric

I was talking to an EMC SAN instructor (Richard Butler) this week and after I did a little white-boarding and used my hands to picture how massive a traditional SIST zone environment would be, we agreed smart zoning is the way to go.

Read more »

Nominate your candidate(s) for the 2016 batch of EMC Elect!

Posted by on November 4, 2015 No comments

EMC Elect 2016 nominations are open

It’s that time of year again: the nominations for the community heroes that might become part of the EMC Elect group of next year.

EMC Elect Nominations for 2016

The nominations can be sent in by anybody who wants to honor their community hero. What’s considered a community hero? To be recognized as EMC Elect candidate you could think about how you represented EMC throughout 2015. Well, represented is not the right word, since you don’t really represent EMC, but if you write or talk about EMC on ECN, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, or you are a speaker in public accessible forums or events, or write blogs about EMC equipment or software, you certainly are a candidate to be nominated.

Can you nominate yourself?

Why not? It’s not about who nominates who, but who gets nominated! And it’s not a contest! Only 1 nomination will do just fine. It has no added value to nominate somebody more than once! In the end the judges will look at your curriculum anyway and what you did during this year, so it’s perfectly fine to mention this to EMC yourself! Go ahead, make a nomination, or two, or five. Get the word out and make sure we get as many nominations as possible. The judges will decide who gets in after the current month.

Nominations can be done from November 1, 2015 to November 30, 2015, so don’t wait too long and let’s all nominate!!!

The next big merger? Western Digital wants to buy SanDisk!

Posted by on October 21, 2015 No comments
WD SanDisk

According to rumors Western Digital would love to buy SanDisk for $19B. Multiple companies are interested in buying SanDisk, but it’s WD that seems to have the advantage. The deal will perhaps already take place during next week!

Micron also interested

Read more »