Managing an Information Technology department consists of two things, managing people and equipment. The best managers are those that provide guidance and knowledge that empowers their people to make decisions. There was a company who developed a tool in house specifically to manage their storage environment. They ran into an issue that many IT departments [...]

Each week VSI clients receive an email report summarizing the findings, trends, and potential issues that are worth noting within their storage environment. The following article discusses the major findings VSI was able to uncover within our clients environments for 2019. In 2019 we were able to provide business value to our clients including, but [...]

Part 1: Managing Conflict Three Big Reasons. According to the late expert Richard Hackman, only 25 percent of teams utilize effective processes such as coordination and communication, and nearly 60 to 70 percent fail to achieve their objectives in any given project or situation. The culprit? Team members consistently point to internal conflict. Three factors [...]

Your environment consists of 95% EMC or 95% PURE, so the vendor specific tools provided should be sufficient, right? We think not. Just because a tool reports on the basic data on an array – how much storage is available, in use, trends over time…. Does not mean they tell you everything. What you don’t [...]

When we set out to do a “hackathon” we had no idea what to expect. Let’s just say the participants in the hackathon were more impressive than we could have ever imagined. This past weekend, the final three teams presented their solution to our panel of judges. The difference between first and second place was [...]

Problem-solving in an Information Technology department can frequently look more like building a legal defense case than actually addressing issues to resolve problems. When a problem arises, storage is one of the first targets of blame. Storage is always guilty until proven innocent. Part of the problem is what IT has to go through to [...]