by Liem Nguyen, (former) Director of Communications and Social Media, Dell Storage — June 11, 2010
Five years is a long time in the storage industry. Five years ago, Compellent’s thin provisioning technology was a year old, and we introduced sub-LUN, block-level automated tiered storage to the world. Five years ago, Beth Pariseau, @PariseauTT, started covering the storage industry over at SearchStorage.com. That’s when Compellent first started working with her, offering our perspective on storage issues and connecting her with our customers across various industries, and we’ve enjoyed a great working relationship ever since. She was always willing to hear our point of view, and that means a lot to a growing company in this competitive market. Today Beth announced she’s moving on from the storage beat and will cover broader IT topics in the Data Center and Server Virtualization Group for TechTarget (the parent company to SearchStorage).
While I’m sure we’ll continue to share ideas on the role of storage virtualization in the data center, we’re going to miss regularly working with Beth. When I joined Compellent in 2007, I already knew of Beth’s reputation for balanced reporting, always digging at the story behind the story and never taking any vendor’s claims at face value. I first met Beth in person over dinner (Chinese) while at SNW Spring 2007 in San Diego. I found out that besides being a good reporter, she was a die-hard fan(atic) about all sports teams Boston, and we also compared notes about digital photography. She clearly knew more about ISO and F numbers than I did, and who was playing well or playing hurt. News briefings and phone calls since then have tended to include sideline discussions about the unimaginable life of Tom Brady or whether David Ortiz’s bat swing evoked fear or regret. Regrettably, I was supposed to take her to lunch last year but I broke my leg (playing touch football of all things) and had to take a raincheck.
Beth, the Compellent team wishes you all the best in your new role and thank you for sharing our passion for storage and sports. It’s been a fun and exciting journey for all of us as the market has changed so much over the past five years. We look forward to working with you on new stories, and also following you over @Cursed_to_First . Hopefully you and I will have that lunch soon.