This time Inside the Data Cortex; Mark hates Vegas and no one sees sunlight as days pass in minutes during Dell EMC World. While getting ready for another day of customer meetings Stephen and Mark discuss: The types of customer conversations happening this year. Michael Dell’s shot over the bow of the public cloud. When analytics are a big thing and when they are not. New integrated data protection appliances, RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines, ProtectPoint adoption and Cloud Disaster Recover. Then everything goes right to hell in the book discussion. All this (and not much more) Inside The Data Cortex.  

Inside The Data Cortex

The Dell EMC World Cortex

Travelling through the Information Technology industry at warp speed this week Inside the Data Cortex Stephen and Mark go all over the universe. Inane SNL conversation and whatever happened to Will Ferrell? Melissa McCarthy's return on investment. Does development team size affect the making of a hit product? Why you shouldn't build big at the beginning. All leadership is communication. Who do you trust? Can trust be designed out of product development? All day and all night it's Enterprise Copy Data Management. The most important thing to know about Enterprise Copy Data Management. In books, who is wasting our reading time this month?  

The Who Do You Trust Cortex

Escapingthe deadly radiation of the tech industry pulsar this time Inside The Data Cortex. ·      This year has been “The Year of allFlash” and Mark didn’t notice. ·      Weeks after day one Stephen and Markdiscuss day one. It was kind of like day zero and not much different than daytwo. But day two had the world’s largest donut at Dell EMC World. ·      Weight gain and not much weight lossat tradeshows. ·      Stephen on the Goldilocks approachto embracing the public cloud and the tyranny of selection bias. ·      Do Google consider themselves anenterprise supplier? ·      This time of year there’s nosunshine anywhere outside of California. Says man living in California. ·      Software Defined Storage is kind ofinteresting. Says customer who thinks the installation packages will doeverything. ·      Scale out is still a hard problem. ·      Mark has looked at home grownstorage solutions and sees a lot of ugly babies. (Sorry! He’s not sorry.) ·      The Botnet of Things is real and yourdishwasher is hitting someone with a denial of service attack right now. ·      This episode in reading things.Alcatraz Verses the Evil Librarians, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life,Steinbeck’s The Winter of our Discontent, Ken Clarke’s Kind of Blue and StalinParadoxes of Power No one likes to give up power. Go before you are pushed. Because it will be people like us doing the pushing. Stephen Manley @makitadremel Mark Twomey @Storagezilla 

The Hashtag Cortex

Hurtling through the IT multiverse on leading edge of a ray of light, this week Inside The Data Cortex: -Mark wants to replace everyone with a robot including The Rock. -Stephen rejects this and believes The Rock is the biggest movie star in the world. Both worry about Nick Nolte and Ricky Martin?!?  -Mark’s hero? Attila The Hun. Then he kills the vibe by deciding this week we’re talking about APIs. It is so disappointing. -Ransomware, Isolated Recovery Services, APIs for Services Providers, level based targeting, the stuff which will never be standardised, test automation and doubling your salary to slum it. -This time in books, Stephen wades further into the creation of the United States in Revolutionary Summer while in “The Great Crash, 1929” Mark discovers we are not stupid, just human. A Neal Stephenson recommendation, Asimov did it before you and in “The Price of Prosperity” the Emperor Augustus puts a tax on the childless.

The Robot Rock Cortex

This time, Inside The Data Cortex. Paris is burning but it takes us to less than five minutes to begin arguing about Disney movies. EMC holds an all flash event and asks Stephen to speak. He opens by telling them Flash doesn’t matter anymore. Media changes do not kill companies who know how to deal with media changes. Mark thinks the most dangerous competitors are the large companies doing business in different ways. Mark laments to the EMC product family slide when it comes to Management & Orchestration. Stephen believes that every year in the latter half of this decade is the EMC year of M&O. Customers say that if EMC didn’t have ViPR it would have to go and create something like ViPR. Enterprise Copy Data Management, the protection orchestration layer. Stephen has an increasing interest in standards since SMI-S is now looking weather beaten. Case sensitivity worked for Stephen when he added so many options to the NDMP dump command that he had to move to capital letters. Archiving changes, but stubbing files always sucks. Terrible 80s TV shows. Where are the members of The Cosby Show now? Moby Dick has fallen. Listener recommendation Wool starts well but finishes poorly. Mark is reading about why Ireland should leave the Euro. The Big Short, highly recommended for long haul flight viewing. Star Trek, Hugh Jackman is now Old Man Wolverine, 16 Super Hero movies a year and the worst movie Mark paid to see in 2016.