the storage anarchist

3.013: of public and private clouds - in 98 seconds

Forbes has posted an interview with EMC's Pat Gelsinger where he is asked to explain the relationship of Public and Private clouds. It's short and simple, and you can see it here.

If you can, please try not to notice all the non-EMC advertising and product placements that have gotten wrapped around (and inside) the interview.

Perhaps just a bit more "balanced reporting" than necessary, if you ask me.

 

technorati tags: EMC,VMware,Journey to the Private Cloud,private cloud,public cloud,Pat Gelsinger,Forbes

3.012: vplex geo preview at vmworld

Last year at VMworld, Chad Sakac previewed active/active application teleportation over synchronous distances using an at-that-time preview version of what we now know as VPLEX.

This year, Chad’s done it again – he’s sneaked an early look at how VPLEX Geo will enable active/active data access over asynchronous distances. He’s snagged an early (very early) code drop from the VPLEX development team and staged a demo that should at least start to silence the doubting Thomases among us.

Sure, it’s not live (nor is it Memorex ;-). Indeed VPLEX Geo isn’t even scheduled to ship until 1H’2011, and as Chad notes there is lots of integration work yet to be completed between the VMware and VPLEX development teams. But it is still an important demonstration of the potential VPLEX has to change the way we deploy our IT applications and infrastructure in the future.

So, without further ado, I invite you over to Chad’s Virtual Geek blog to see and learn about this preview for yourself: At VMworld? Try VPLEX. Like it? Take one home :-)

Oh, yeah – I almost forgot. VMworld attendees are being offered a special 90-Day Trial of VPLEX – just stop by the EMC Booth for more information!

 

technorati tags: VMworld, VPLEX, VPLEX Geo, active/active, asynchronous, VMotion, EMC, VMware

3.011: hot air reclamation

As I said in a prior post, sometimes we in the storage industry misbehave.

And other times, we spew fish stories – the kind that would make Pinocchio’s nose grow a couple of feet instantly.

The latest fish tale to be exaggerated beyond all sense of reality is the Unused Space Reclamation geyser, and to hear it told is to be convinced that the world of underutilized storage hath been all but eliminated at long last by the ingenuity and design of a unique new magic trick that allows host software to tell storage systems they are no longer in need of certain blocks within a LUN.

Now, don’t get me wrong – this feature is extremely valuable and it will undoubtedly help us all to improve storage utilization and efficiency. But I’ve seen practically every vendor who is shipping support for this feature today practically claiming to have invented it, that it’s a key differentiating feature for their platforms, and that THEY are the ones driving the hypervisor, host operating system, file system, database and volume manager vendors to implement this new feature.

Reality Check Time

Folks, the fact is that the T10 SBC-3 committee has stabilized the RFCs for the two (yes 2) new SCSI commands that underpin all this hoopla. With stable RFCs, vendors are now able to implement one or both of these new operations without concern that the API is going to change (again). And these standards have been under development for over a year, with representation and comment from practically every vendor in the list I scribed above – as with most standards, it has been a communal effort.

Somehow, the early adopters see no need to explain these facts to their audiences, allowing encouraging them instead to think that each vendor alone has mastered alchemy to turn deleted files into reusable space.

Alchemy, indeed…

3.010: storage savvy: blogging with cred

Just a quick note to give a shout-out to a relatively new EMC employee blogger, Richard Anderson. His personal, not-reviewed-or-approved-by-EMC blog is at storagesavvy.com.

Richard joined EMC earlier this year, coming from Nintendo where he managed both EMC and NetApp kit. His experience provides the credibility to support a rather broad swath of topics, and he has been providing practical comparisons of EMC and NTAP products long well before joining EMC.

As interesting as those comparisons are (and surely they will be fodder for more competitive battles royale), I found his two recent posts on VPLEX (here and there) provided some very grounded perspectives. I’m hopeful that he might soon undertake a comparative review of VPLEX Metro and it’s fault-tolerant Active/Active presentation of LUNs.

If you haven’t read Richards’s material, there is a lot of content. I found it laced with grounded perspective from a hands-on technical perspective – very refreshing, if I do say so myself.

Welcome to the party, Richard – looks like you’ll fit right in…

3.009: whither the ds8700, or hath it withered already?

My followers know that I've been predicting the demise IBM's enterprise storage platforms (both DS6000 and DS8000 series) for several years now. And though I've been chastised for competitor bashing, I remain convinced that IBM will soon withdraw the DS8000 from marketing once and for all, just as they have the DS6000.

The product just isn't competitive in today's world, even with the unfair advantage IBM enjoys with its tight linkage to it mainframes and servers.

Supporting evidence for the impending demise comes from many directions and sources. Just this week I heard about a competitive deal Down Under where IBM withdrew the DS8700 from a competitive bid in the middle of the selection process. Pressed for an explanation, the new VMAX customer was told that the DS8700 would be EOL by year-end 2010, and IBM didn't want to propose a dead-end product.

How considerate of them!

Now, indeed, this is hearsay, and I can't promote any evidence as to the accuracy of this report. But it is another piece that seems to fit the emerging picture that IBM is winding down the DS8700 as we speak. IDC StorageTracker data shows a rather protracted decline in market share for the DS8000, one that began with the introduction of the Symmetrix VMAX back in April 2009.

In fact, if you compare the IDC StorageTracker data for EMC Symmetrix, IBM DS8K and Hitachi USP-V/VM for the 4 quarters beginning Q2'09, you'll see that VMAX share of the "high end array" pie has grown significantly, while both IBM and Hitachi have lost share dramatically.

Yes, to the attentive observer, it is pretty clear that the DS8K is on its deathbed – at least as we know it today.

3.008: shame on all of us

Sometimes we in the storage industry misbehave.

Sometimes Badly.

The most recent example surrounds the reports early this week about how a bank was unable to service its ATM customers as a result of a vendors' process mistake. Apparently an operator used an out-of-date procedure to execute a routine service operation during a planned outage and the result was an protracted unplanned outage. To their credit, the vendor publicly owned up to the mistake and is certainly taking steps to avoid similar occurrences in the future.

All fine and good, if we could have just left it there.

But no, it seems this is not to be the case. Sales reps from the vendor-at-fault's competitors are gleefully emailing these reports to every customer and prospect, in hopes of creating sufficient Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) about the competitor in the minds of these potential sources of revenue. I personally have had over a dozen emails in my inbox linking to the reports.

I find this deplorable, childish behavior.

And yes, that is directed at folks from my own company as well as those from competitors.

3.007: corporate espionage and other covert affairs

Call it Karma, Destiny, or Fate, but two topics crossed my desk today with  almost uncanny congruence. And when I noticed my next post number for this year was 007, I knew I had to post this.

The first unexpected topic was a link from EMC's Daily News, a daily email distributed by our PR department highlighting news articles relevant to EMC's global businesses. The first entry of today's list was this FOX Business News television interview with Beau Dietl, the world-renowned expert on corporate espionage. In it Beau discusses the "threat from within" and how EMC's RSA Security division is helping corporations protect their most important information assets.

If you have 7 minutes of your life to spare, you might find this interesting…

The second unexpected component of this information eclipse follows the break…

3.006: You are more influential than you think

Here's an interesting social media experiment.

With nothing more than that as a tease, I ask that you click this link: http://fcinf.com/v/cbxd.

(the link is safe, I assure you)

 

technorati tags: social media,influence,experiment

3.005: transparency as a competitive advantage

Several years ago, Symmetrix customers let us Symmetrix developers know that they wanted more transparency from us about code bugs issues. They wanted to know if anyone else had seen problems like they were seeing, and (more importantly) what the solution was. They wanted to know the extent of our testing, and (more importantly) they wanted to know whether their environments fit inside the standard test/regression scope that a release went through before GA. They wanted a way to identify things in their environments that weren't in step with the EMC Support Matrix. They wanted to know the bugs issues we fixed in each release, even if it had nothing to do with their environment. And they wanted us to protect them from issues that we knew about, even if THEY weren't aware of the issue.

And they made it quite clear they weren't going to take "no, sorry" for an answer.

And so began the virtuous cycle of transparency. For most of the last decade we have had teams focus on providing the tools and information that customers were demanding. Driven by customer feedback, we have expanded this transparency far beyond the original "baby-steps" into what today is at least a differentiator, if not a huge competitive advantage.

Just some of the things we've done:

• We changed the EMC eLab Support Matrix from a printout of hundreds of pages into an on-line database that supports ad-hoc and template inquiries;
• We provided customers the means to create templates of their environments that could automatically be used to validate against the on-line support matrix;
• We tied our test matrix into these systems so customers could see the scope of configuration testing that was applied to each release prior to GA;
• We provided customers with on-line access to all customer-reported issues, and empowered them to track progress, work-arounds and solutions to the problems as they were identified and implemented;
• We provided them with an automated interface into the issues database that can block scripts and management interfaces (GUI, SMI-S, etc.) from performing operations that are known to invoke potential issues – in real time, as they are discovered;
• And we document every potential DU/DL issue we fix in New Releases, Service Releases and Maintenance Releases – even if the issue has never been seen by a customer.

This last one is perhaps to most transparent thing we've ever done; more importantly, customers tell us that they really like what we've done. And all of this transparency is a foundational component of our overall commitment to TCE – maximizing the Total Customer Experience of our installed base.

3.004: tell them why - an idea worth spreading

One of the more rewarding aspects of my job is the customer interaction it affords me to have with some of the largest IT organizations in the world. I am frequently called upon to brief customers in EMC's renowned Executive Briefing Centers, both here in Hopkinton MA as well as at our other EBCs in Santa Clara and Cork, Ireland (to name just two).

Thankfully, EMC has invested to deploy Cisco Telepresence at numerous EMC facilities, and recently we've linked our TP network with several partners (like Cisco and AT&T), affording the opportunity to speak with multiple customers around the globe on a single day, without even one second spent in an airplane.

I humbly admit that I'm pretty good at what I do, or perhaps even more humbly, allow me to politely note that customers and sales teams alike consistently rate my briefing sessions and presentations very highly in their visit and event assessments. I am often pleased to receive follow-up feedback from an account team that attributes a portion of their success to an EBC session with me, or to receive a note from a customer asking me if I could find time to share my perspectives with their management or peers.

And, as you might expect, I am often asked to explain how it is that I handle these briefings and presentations so well, and indeed that is a very difficult question to respond to. To be sure, simple experience plays a role, as does a deep understanding of the topics that I am called upon to discuss. But there are oodles of experienced subject matter experts who aren't good at this sort of thing (I'm sure we've all sat through more than one death-by-PowerPoint session, eyes glued to the clock in hopes that the session ends before the misery saps our very lifeblood away – so to speak). As a result, the true answer has eluded my conscious response for years.

Last week, while on vacation, I happened upon what I believe is the answer to the question; the answer not only to why my briefings stand out for my audiences, but perhaps indeed the secret behind all why inspirational, motivating and enjoyable presenters.

Notice, I said "Why" and not "How" my presentations are different, or "What" makes my sessions click.

The answer is in the "why…"