Customer Forum

I meant to blog daily at the Customer Forum, but I was having too much fun and spent a few too many hours in the office.

Here are a few tidbits that stuck out in my mind.

De-dupe is still red hot in the marketplace. You could look at Data Domain's earnings and understand what I am talking about. The customers are excited about the technology and our approaches and there is a lot still going on in this space.

People are still hungry for the basics to be simpler and easier to use. We are working on that and were able to show some "sneak peeks". The enthusiasm was even better than I expected. I can't wait to start unveiling more of it in public.

It was clearer than ever that thin provisioning isn't just for disks it also for the people. The same person wears the hat of SAN administrator, backup architect, troubleshooter, deployment guru and titles too numerous to name. 

10 Gigabit Ethernet is coming fast. Since backup is the most I/O intensive application in the typical datacenter it will be interesting to see how it shapes up the mixture of Fibre Channel, FCOE and iSCSI.

More than anything, I was again reminded that our customer's passion for NetBackup and their creativity at solving business problems in their respective organizations is completely infectious.

It will take me all weekend to update my contacts on linkedin.com and facebook.com