Martin Blignaut This is Me

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1. 1. TECTONIC: Storage heavyweights to build open management platform

   www.tectonic.co.za/view.php?id - [Cached]

   Published on: 4/5/2006   Last Visited: 4/5/2006

   Martin Blignaut, storage and systems automation specialist at IBM South Africa, says the objective of the community is to give customers more choices for deploying open standards-based storage infrastructure software. "The organisation plans to develop a common storage software management platform that will give customers greater flexibility in the way they manage their storage environments," he says.
   
   As part of the move to Aperi, IBM says it plans to donate part of its storage infrastructure management technology to the open source community. Other members of the group are also expected to donate portions of their software to the community.
   
   Blignaut says that by standardising on a common software infrastructure platform, customers will be able to choose from a greater range of storage management products.

2. 2. www.tectonic.co.za

   www.tectonic.co.za/view.php?ac - [Cached]

   Last Visited: 12/5/2007

   Martin Blignaut, storage and systems automation specialist at IBM South Africa, says the objective of the community is to give customers more choices for deploying open standards-based storage infrastructure software. "The organisation plans to develop a common storage software management platform that will give customers greater flexibility in the way they manage their storage environments," he says.
   
   As part of the move to Aperi, IBM says it plans to donate part of its storage infrastructure management technology to the open source community. Other members of the group are also expected to donate portions of their software to the community.
   
   Blignaut says that by standardising on a common software infrastructure platform, customers will be able to choose from a greater range of storage management products.

3. 3. Data storage: A changing environment - Computerworld

   itreports.computerworld.com/ne - [Cached]

   Published on: 8/11/2005   Last Visited: 4/14/2006

   Martin Blignaut, IBM Software Group's storage and systems automation manager, says that due to the growth in data volumes, the good thing about virtualization for storage is that it places all the disciplines of the mainframe environment into the open system environment for better management purposes.
   
   "An open system is extremely undisciplined in terms of storage. Bringing the mainframe disk into this environment means it can be carefully managed with policies on all information. This will assist organizations to understand what information is mission-critical, and should be stored on high-speed disk, and what information is of lesser importance, and should be stored on cheaper disk, or even archived to tape," he adds.
   
   Companies should, however, look at implementing virtualization technologies from a phased approach, says Blignaut, and should not try and do it all at once.
   
   "It is all about simplifying the environment, and taking away the complexities to make our lives easier. Consolidation is one way - whereby a lot of small devices are taken away, and consolidated into fewer big devices, or through virtualization, where you logically simplify whatever physical infrastructure you have installed. This gives customers the choice to use multiple vendor products and allow for more flexibility," he says.