SNW bigger, louder, faster.

Well, halfway through this season's SNW, I have to say there are more people, more vendors, and a ton more FUD.

I love the storage space, it's new, it's dynamic, it's still a little wooly... But if I hear one more "we're the only vendor to do X...", I think I'll just start laughing. There are just too many vendors to say that.

And I saw an analyst quote that said "The easiest storage to configure". Wow, that's just poor policy for an analyst. My immediate reaction was "hey! What about company Y that is not in your space??" I told the vendor I wanted their stuff in my lab to play with. There's an awful lot of easy-to-configure storage out there these days, so I want to see if it really is the easiest to configure. Needless to say, I'm skeptical.

Anyway, there's still good stuff going on out there, I talked to vendors with a lot of cool new things coming up. Hopefully I can get them into the lab and kick the tires, letting you know how they fare.

And next week, just for you, I will offer a sanitized list of "the biggest lies I heard at SNW". It's time for storage vendors to stop hyping and start actually delivering. What they're doing tomorrow isn't as big a deal to you, our readers, what is available today is.

So I'll remove vendor names, and filter my language, and offer you a list of outrageous lies :-). Watch this space...

Don.