Is 3Par worth $2 billion?

After seeing all the news around 3Par I started to wonder whether they are really worth $2 billion considering I had never heard of them before.

The primary benefits I can see of 3Par are:

• simplification of storage management
• thin provisioning

From a pure financial point of view the deal doesn't make sense - their sales were just under $200 million in the last year and I am quite confident that you could build a similar set of products for less than $2 billion.

Conspicuous by it's absence in the bidding are IBM, HDS, Oracle, and EMC. They have either decided it is too expensive or already have something similar under development.

Continue reading at my new blog site here.

State of the cloud

I've just finished putting together an article on the state of the cloud. You can go over and read it here.

Shifting tech blogging to Next Generation IT

Hello everyone. Just a quick note to say that I've shifted my tech blogging to here. Non-tech stuff will stay here.

Using the Cloud for your business - case study from Symbian

I've given my talk over at Bright Talk now and you can find it here if you are interested.

Cornwall

A couple of weekends ago we took a couple of days off and took a four day weekend in Cornwall. We stayed at Tzitzikama B&B which was a lovely place in Rock. We got there by taking a car from City Car Club (it's saved us having to buy a car) and on the way we had our first meal at Little Chef which is a chain of "greasy spoons".

We spent a fair bit of time in Padstow, sometimes known as Padstein due to how much Rick Stein owns of the place. It was a short trip back and forth between Rock and Padstow on the ferry. Bizarrely no ferries run between 5:30 pm and 7 pm - perhaps it was to make sure the cab drivers could make a living? On one of the trips we had to scramble between rocks in the dark as the ferry couldn't make it into Padstow due to the tides.

During the weekend we were away the London Marathon was on, so we did our own version on the Camel Trail and did around 25 miles biking from Padstow to Wadebridge to Bodmin and back. Wadebridge was a lovely little town and we were there on a day where they had a continental market, so we had a range of food from German frankfurters to French biscuits. The Camel Estuary was very beautiful.

Of course we had to have dinner at Rick Stein's Seafood Restaurant. The attraction is the fresh seafood but Michelin star it wasn't. The seafood was very fresh, but lacked much flavour or flair. We also had a meal at Pescadou which was a little bit better,

The food we did enjoy the most was actually at Shipwrights pub in Padstow washed down by Admirals Ale which is currently our favourite ale, made by St Austell's brewery.

We went one morning to Truro which is a lovely town which used to be the capital of Cornwall. Great shops there and a lovely atmosphere. On the way back we went to Cornish Birds of Prey which provides a sanctuary for birds of prey. Great flying demonstrations and some very happy looking birds and animals.

All in all, it was an awesome little break and well recommended.

Cotswolds

Over Easter we went for a drive to the Cotswolds. Initially it was a very slow drive through Slough and Maidenhead as I had set the GPS to walk mode, instead of drive mode.

Once I corrected this it was a bit quicker. First stop was Cotswold Wildlife Park which wasn't too bad. A reasonable variety of animals, but some of them didn't seem too bad. Not sure it was worth £12 though.

We then went to Cheltenham which we left pretty quickly as seemed pretty boring.

Next stop was Bourton on the water which was very lovely. Very picturesque and lots of lovely little boutique shops. A stream runs through the area with beautiful bridges over the river. We stopped for a cream tea and then went to the Cotswold Motor Museum. The motor museum was definitely better than we expected and well worth a visit.

We then had a very short drive to Lower Slaughter which is a lovely old small village. Also called in at Chipping Campden which is a nice town and Burford which has quite a lot of houses with thatched roofs.

Tik Tok from Ke$ha done in Star Wars style