Post #SNW – Blogger Q and A with @esignoretti: Da vicino e personale con Enrico Signoretti di Juku.it

by @Rose_at_O

After a number of great meetings around the globe with the lovely Italian storage and virtualization blogger, Enrico from Juku.it, we’ve finally managed to bag an interview with him. Molte grazie Enrico!

Q.  Tell us a bit about yourself:

I run a small consultancy firm in Italy (Cinetica) focused in storage and virtualization. I began with Assembler and Unix in the 80’s but I always looked for new ideas and technologies on the market.

Q. Tell us a little bit about your blog and its interest in data storage.

Juku.it was born in the late 2010 and it is the sum of our (me and Fabio Rapposelli – the co-author ) former experiences in the blogosphere. The payoff is “think global, act local” and is maintained in two languages (English and Italian). The principal objective is having a worldwide observatory on storage, cloud and virtualization worlds while converting and reporting messages back into the field!

Q. What’s hot in storage this year?

SSD and dedupe are the most important topics now, but technology stacks are gaining a lot of traction.

Q. How many storage events do you attend each year?

I try to attend as many events as possible but, unfortunately, I still have a tight schedule due to my consulting engagements.

Q. Which one are you most looking forward to?

SNW Europe is on top of my list.

Q. What types of stories or companies are likely to attract your attention this year?

Tintri and Scality are the two of the most interesting startups but the storage market is full of interesting new ideas and products. The market is sparkling and many stories are coming, sometimes even from the big guys!

Q. How many interviews do you do per week?

It depends, sometimes up to three or four per week but usually no more than one or two.

Q. What’s the best way to pitch a story to you?

The best way to reach me is via email or twitter (@esignoretti) , after touching base I prefer to develop my interviews via phone or, better, face to face. I like to test the technology in the field or with customers and the best way to do so is to speak with them or to receive a demo kit for 15/30 days: my company has a well organized lab to perform all kind of benchmarks and “proof of concepts”. We only write about products and technologies we think are interesting or we tried first-hand for our job.

Q. Who is worth listening to (about storage)?

There are many interesting voices, one of the best in my opinion is Steve Duplessie from ESG but I could name other few, sometimes discordant voices, like Jon Toigo (DrunkenData), Robin Harris (aka StorageMojo), W.C. Preston (backupCentral), Chris Evans (the storage architect) and Martin Glassborow (StorageBod).

I follow vendors blogs too but, in general, only when they write about technology and not about alleged competitor flaws.

Q. What’s your favourite blog?

Probably StorageBod’s blog, because of his way to see the storage world from a smart customer perspective.

Q. What is your favourite piece of technology?

No doubts, my iPad is the winner. I use it all day for work and entertainment while traveling: great user experience, great battery life, and great apps. Sometimes it is the best way to enjoy cloud based applications.

Q. What do you think is the most important development in storage to date?

Many vendors are working to lower the data footprint (thin provisioning, dedupe, compression, etc.), raise the performance bar (SSDs as cache or first tier, wide striping), automate the management (i.e. automated tiered storage), better integrate their solution with the upper layers (especially with VMware) and ways to scale better (up or out).

Q. What is the best piece of advice for companies pitching stories?

We are not interested in pure marketing stories, that’s all. We want to understand, try and test the technology and, sometimes speak to end users to better understand how they use these solutions to solve their real life problems.

Q. What was the best press trip you’ve ever been on? Worst? Why?

Last HDS bloggers Day was perfect. Great overall organization, outstanding hotel (in front of Windsor Castle), very good content. I can’t say the same thing about many Italian trips, the fact that we are located in Italy (and Italy is considered a small country) means we are theoretically near the event location but in reality we still need to travel by car for many hours to reach the event.

Q. What’s your favourite restaurant?

I have a very long list of favourite restaurants but I like to add new venues during my trips. I have only one rule, never eat Italian food outside Italy and always try the local cuisine.

Q. Are you a social media lover? Which ones are you on? FB? LinkedIn? Twitter?

Social networks are perfect to maintain relationships all around the world, it’s my favourite way to interact with vendors and bloggers. After a long period of tests I can state without any doubt that the best one is twitter: it’s the perfect mix of professional talk with some added fun. To manage pure professional, very serious, social connections I use LinkedIn while Facebook is on the opposite side and I use it only few times.

Q. Tell us something no one knows about you.

Apart from storage and IT in general I’m a sea lover. I’m a sailor and I built my own boat, a 41″ sailing yacht with my hands ( you can find all the pics here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tanimodi/ ), I like to sail the Croatian side of the Adriatic sea with my family. I’m sad to add that I like to fish from my boat too, but I’m very unsuccessful in this sport.

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