Every Storage Networking World conference tends to serve as a gauge on the mood of the market and provides indications of trends and directions in the storage industry, and last week's in Orlando, to me at least, reflected a storage market that is transitioning to a mature phase, where new developments are likely to be more incremental -- evolutionary rather than revolutionary.

Storage virtualization, in all of its forms, continues to be a growing force, and almost every vendor is striving to capitalize on the server virtualization phenomenon. The focus, has shifted to more of a solution approach with an emphasis on solving the real needs, like addressing the imbalance between storage and server provisioning time, improving availability, and providing integrated disaster recovery solutions. Deduplication technologies also continue to evolve with the established players continuing to provide enhancements primarily by leveraging underlying component advances, while others who had promised such functionality are finally taking steps to make it a reality.

Not surprisingly, "green" offerings were everywhere to be found. However, as with terms like "virtualization" and "ILM" before it, "green" is subject to a rather liberal interpretation, including referring to anything that in any way, shape, or form could be linked to reducing numbers of disks, e.g. data compression is therefore a "green" technology. Improving efficiency and saving money are worthy goals in themselves and don't need to be cloaked within a self-congratulatory "greenness" message. Let's reserve the term for true impactful environmental efforts.

As always, there were press releases and announcements. Perhaps the most far-ranging announcements of the week related to the latest developments in Fibre Channel over Ethernet. Led by Cisco, a host of vendors announced strong support for the protocol as part of a unified data center networking initiative. This has already sparked strong reaction in both the iSCSI and Infiniband camps, and the debate over unified network connectivity will rage on.

One announcement that, to me, exemplified the evolutionary nature of the conference came from Xiotech. Who would have thought that the big innovation breakthrough for the show would be an enhancement to the long-established dual-controller storage subsystem? Nonetheless, their innovative Intelligent Storage Element, with its nearly vibration-free design and clever firmware for problem diagnosis and self-repair, shows that sometimes evolution is as good as revolution.

Of course, some of the more interesting developments at SNW often happen outside of the sessions and exhibits. Briefings on unannounced upcoming products promise more products and technologies in development that promise to provide more far-reaching solutions with a focus on areas like strategic power and cooling planning and management, enhanced automation, and others.

The reality of the times is that organizations are becoming more budget conscious and demanding that every dollar spent return substantially more in value. The best of the conference -- both in sessions and product offerings largely reflected this.

Jim Damoulakis is chief technology officer of GlassHouse Technologies Inc., a leading provider of independent storage services. He can be reached at jimd@glasshouse.com.

In line with its strategy to focus on a few parts of enterprise software and work with partners on other software and services, Novell announced Wednesday a Suse Appliance Program for ISVs (independent software vendors).

The program will enable ISVs to create appliances combining their applications with Suse Linux Enterprise in an integrated package.

Novell also announced the beta release of Suse Linux Enterprise JeOS, a minimized version of the Suse Linux Enterprise platform that ISVs can use for creating appliances.

Repositioned as an infrastructure software company, Novell is focusing on a few areas, such as offering the Linux operating system from the desktop to the datacenter, and software for desktop management, logical identity management, server consolidation, virtualization, and optimization, said Ronald Hovsepian, president and CEO. Products from PlateSpin, a company acquired by Novell earlier this year, allow the movement of workloads between physical and virtual environments regardless of platform or operating system, he added.

In other areas of enterprise software such as the database, middleware and application servers, Novell will be agnostic and plans to work with various ISVs, service providers, and systems integrators to integrate its products with third-party software for customers, Hovsepian said. The company expects to generate more than $2 billion in services business for its partners this year as it implements its plan, he added.

The company is not positioning itself as an open-source company, but rather as one that offers interoperability among software that may be open or proprietary, Hovsepian said. "We think that the market will operate and stay in this 'mixed-source' model for a long time to come," he added.

Novell also announced Wednesday that it will officially participate in the LimeJeOS project, which is an existing community-led project building a minimized version of the openSuse Linux distribution. Novell will release several new components of the Suse Appliance Program, including an automated tool to build appliances, it added.

If there's one issue the Mac community has long felt divided on, it's cloning. I'm not talking about the ethics of creating baby sheep, or the questionable efficiency of the Republic's clone army, but something far more important -- running the Mac OS on hardware not manufactured by Apple. Over the years, a number of pundits and others have clamored for Apple to license its operating system to other hardware manufacturers, stating indefatigably that this would lead Apple to riches and glory.

Clones used to be the enemy. Back in the 1980s, the term was more or less synonymous with IBM PCs: machines that ran DOS and were the cheap efficient workhorses to the expensive luxury Macs. Then, for the briefest of instants in the '90s, clones became Apple's allies. CEO Michael Spindler licensed the Mac OS to a handful different manufacturers: Umax, Power Computing, Motorola, DayStar, APS, and Radius. The result? Machines that were theoretically just as capable as Macs, but cheaper than what Apple was producing. Whether or not that was always the case is a matter that's open for debate. At least one friend of mine had a Mac clone in the '90s that was a support nightmare.

Of course, the era of Mac clones didn't last long. When Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, one of the first things he did was kill off the clone program. That was good: The Mac clones were an attempt to turn back the clock and beat Apple's opponent (at that time, Microsoft) at its own game, but it was too little too late and predicated on the common fallacy that in order for Apple to win, Microsoft had to lose.

Today, circumstances have changed quite a bit. With Apple using processors from Intel, and with Macs able to run Windows, very little separates the Mac from its PC counterpart. Initiatives like the OSx86 Project aim to remove those last barriers by making it possible to run OS X on any hardware you like -- and, for the most part, they've been successful. But such a procedure still requires you to do some fiddling with the software, and there is of course still the lingering question of legality -- OS X's End User License Agreement (EULA) prohibits installing OS X on non-Apple hardware. Put simply, it's probably not something you're going to recommend to your mom.

That, apparently, hasn't stopped Florida-based Psystar from shipping Mac clones bundled with Leopard --and, furthermore, giving you the option to buy that hardware with the OS pre-installed. A Psystar representative talking to Information Week claimed that the company wasn't doing anything wrong and accused Apple of violating monopoly laws, using tired analogies both poor (what if Microsoft only let Dell sell computers running Windows?) and ridiculous (what if Honda only let cars drive on approved Honda roads?).

When you think about it, the term "clone" itself is kind of a misnomer. After all, the point of clones are not that they're exact copies of Macs, but rather, cheap imitations. It's kind of like buying a fake Rolex on the streets of New York City -- though, let's face it, nobody is going to mistake a Psytar OpenPro for a Mac Pro, except maybe after a few drinks.

Just software doesn't a Mac make. Apple's always been about the whole widget. Complaining that other hardware can't run the Mac OS is kind of like complaining that you can't play Wii games on your PlayStation 3. It's the combination of hardware and software that make the device what it is -- or, as the old saying goes, a Mac is more than just the sum of its parts.

The truth is that most of us buy Macs not just for their superior software, but for the whole package. It's impossible to understate the importance of hardware design to Apple's success. Psytar's not about to ship anything that's even close to as pretty, thin, or lightweight as a MacBook Air, for example. There's something profoundly other about Macs -- for many of us, they're objects of craftsmanship rather than just tools. You don't need to do anything other than go into an Apple Store and see how people behave around them to get that. Then, just for contrast's sake, take a stroll down to Best Buy, and see how people treat the computers there.

That said, if there's a cheaper option, there will always be people who gravitate toward it. Given Apple's extremely litigious nature, I doubt that Psystar will be around long enough for us to find out how many takers they'd have. My guess is that there is definitely a niche market for what they're offering; let's call them the Wozniaks of the world. But for most, the barriers to entry (such as "not non-safe updates") will likely prove too high. After all, if there's one thing that most Mac users have in common, it's the fact that we want something better -- and that we're willing to pay for it.

For the third straight month, the number of people clicking on Google ads didn't grow quite as quickly as it has in the past. At least, that's the word from market research outfit comScore.…

Novell's Suse Linux at the desktop is unlikely to be popular with consumers in the next three to five years, according to Novell President and CEO Ronald Hovsepian.

The consumer market is taking longer to develop, he said Wednesday. "The market for the desktop for the next three to five years is mainly enterprise-related," he said.

[ If you're thinking of making the move to Linux, check out these Linux desktop apps ]

Novell is in the meantime focusing on technology enthusiasts and offering them free downloads of the openSuse distribution. "It is a community development strategy, so we get a lot of testing and inputs from the 2 million users of openSuse, which is feedback for our development," Hovsepian said.

The company is, however, seeing strong demand for its Linux desktops from enterprise users, according to Hovsepian. Automobile maker PSA Peugeot Citroën, for example, signed a multiyear contract last year for the deployment of up to 20,000 Linux desktops.

Hovsepian does not expect corporate customers in Western Europe and the U.S. to migrate all of their desktops to Linux, but only a part of them. PSA Peugeot Citroën had about 70,000 desktops, but migrated only 20,000 to Suse Linux. In India and the Asia-Pacific, where corporate customers are more open to using Linux on the desktop, the markets will grow more quickly, he added.

Even in India, Suse desktops are being picked up primarily by enterprises rather than consumers, said Sandeep Menon, Novells country head for India.

Hovsepian was in India to inaugurate the companys new engineering facility in Bangalore, its largest outside the U.S. The new facility has the capacity to accommodate 700 staff. Novell already has 600 employees in India, with 500 in Bangalore. The company also announced an investment of $100 million in the country over the next three years.

In stark contrast to Microsoft's recent battle, here and here, to get Open Office XML sanctioned as an international standard, Google has quietly pulled off a standardization coup for its XML-based KML geographic information language with barely a whisper of dissent.…

The U.S. government needs to increase funding for research about the health, safety, and environmental effects of nanotechnology because much of the impact is still unknown, some lawmakers said Wednesday.

Members of the U.S. House of Representatives Science and Technology Committee called for a huge increase in the budget for environmental, health, and safety (EHS) research in nanotechnology for 2009. President George Bush's 2009 budget increases the nanotech EHS budget by 30 percent, to $76.4 million, but committee Chairman Bart Gordon suggested EHS funding should be double that request.

Nanotech holds great potential, but there should be more research about the health and safety effects of the 600 nanotech products already on the market, said Gordon, a Tennessee Democrat. The U.S. needs to put more money into education and safety research so that the public doesn't reject nanotech in the same way that some people have rejected genetically altered food, he said.

"I want us to be able to create jobs in this country built around nanotechnology," he said during a committee hearing. "It concerns me that we're going to have a horror story with one out of 600 [products], and it could put a taint on the entire industry."

Bush's 2009 budget for the National Nanotechnology Initiative, which encompasses nanotech research at 13 government agencies, is $1.53 billion, up from $1.49 billion in fiscal year 2008. A proposal before the Science and Technology Committee would set aside 10 percent of that budget for EHS research, instead of the 5 percent in Bush's budget.

Most of the six witnesses at the committee hearing agreed that funding for EHS research needs to increase, but some questioned the need for it to be 10 percent of the total federal nanotech budget.

A significant amount of the federal nanotech budget goes into building maintenance and instrumentation, meaning an increase in the EHS research budget could cut into other nanotech research, said Floyd Kvamme, co-chairman of the president's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. "If you actually talk about dollars and cents going to researchers," Bush's EHS budget is close to 10 percent of funding, Kvamme said.

In addition, much nanotech research includes EHS research, and it's hard to separate EHS research for the purposes of meeting a 10 percent budget number, Kvamme said. "If you're working on a chemotherapy drug, are you working on EHS issues or are you working on cancer cures?" he said. "It's a tough question to answer."

But other witnesses said more EHS research is needed to help the public understand the benefits of nanotech as well as any potential risks. "Safe nanotechnology will not just happen," said Andrew Maynard, chief science adviser for the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

The U.S. government "desperately" needs to educate consumers about nanotech to avoid horror stories in the media, added Rep. Vernon Ehlers, a Michigan Republican. Nanotech "has such an enormous potential to change our lives in ways we can't imagine," he said. "Yet, I don't think we quite have a handle on how we're going to use it ... and what the dangers are."

In addition to health and safety research, more consumer education and teaching about nanotech in colleges and high schools is needed, added Joseph Krajcik, a professor of education at the University of Michigan. "Most of our children, most of our adult population doesn't even understand the scale we're talking about," he said. "I think we have a lot of work we have to do to educate our country so that we are informed citizens."