Two of my friends have written books that are very relevant to what I do for work, so I thought I’d share a bit about them.

 Vaughn Stewart of Netapp (yes, competitors can be friends!) co-authored a book with Michael Slisinger titled Virtualization Changes Everything: Storage Strategies for VMware vSphere & Cloud Computing.  Chapter 1 is called Storage Matters. It promises that the book will cover “the effects cloud computing has had on storage platforms and technologies”. Looking forward to digging into this book, since that also has a direct impact on backup and recovery technologies (where I’m spending my work time these days).

Alistair Croll of Solve for Interesting (and a kazillion other cool startups and ventures) wrote Lean Analytics: Use Data to Build a Better Startup Faster. You may be wondering…why would I care about analyitics for startups, we all know the startup I tried didn’t work for me. Well the book is for people like me too; people who like to find ways to change the status quo inside big organizations. This book is for the other part of what I do at work, so reading both at the same time should be fun.

I’ll do a book review of each once I’ve finished reading, and I’m sure the concepts will find their way into my tweets and blog posts and offline conversations. Just want to note that Vaughn and Alistair both gave me a copy of their book, but no one asked me to do any writing or reviews – probably cuz they know how honest I tend to be. 😉