the storage anarchist

0.013: customers say the darnedest things

Well, it's the last week of the quarter, and things around work are much like they probably are at virtually every product company on the planet - everybody is on-call to do whatever it takes to close business and get the products shipped in order to recognize the revenue this quarter. Even many of us in engineering will be called in to help close deals - we even have a slogan for this practice: "Everyone Makes Closing Calls" (that's the EMC "squared" version).

Down the road in Franklin and Apex and over the pond in Cork, at this time of the quarter EMC stands for "Empty Manufacturing's Closets," the goal being that everything is in the trucks (or lorries) and well down the road by midnight Saturday, with the manufacturing floors as barren as Old Mother Hubbard's cupboards.

Given this quarterly ritual, and next week's impending US Independence holiday, I expect the blog traffic to be relatively lighter this week than others. So I thought I'd have a little fun between briefings and con-calls and explore a few of the odder things I've heard from customers and prospects over the years.

Regarding the title of today's entry, many of you probably remember the similarly-titled children's show hosted by Bill Cosby back in the 90's. Many of you will also remember that it was Art Linkletter who first ran the concept as a segment on his CBS radio show back in the 1940's and later on his TV show (from 1952 through 1970). Fewer of you will actually remember the name of that show: it was "Art Linkletter's House Party."

There - the genealogy is documented. Now I don't want to see any folderol out in blog-land about who actually invented the darnedest things nor who stole them from Art. Especially not from a certain inebriated mis-information peddler. OK?

0.012: a terabyte isn't enough for my home

Just read Hu Yoshida's brief blurb about how he thinks enterprise-class storage obviates the need for storage in the home.

NOT!

As I noted in my introductory post to this blog, I have multiple terabytes of storage in my home. Today. Let's see - a quick run-down:

HD TiVo Series 3	750GB
TiVo Series 2	600GB
TiVo Series 2	250GB
MP3 File Server	500GB
Laptop 1	500GB
Laptop 2	40GB
Desktop	360GB
Portable USB Drive	300GB

That's 3.3 TERABYTES of storage! And that's just what's spinning at my home on a regular basis. On top of that there's an old Linux PC I boot up from time to time (to upgrade hard drives in my TiVos), a 40GB Creative Nomad 3 portable MP3 player, my 8GB iPod Nano, and the 2+GB of CompactFlash drives for my Canon Digital SLR. And not to forget my "remote replicas" - the 300GB MP3 file server and 250GB TiVo Series 2 that live at the beach house I share with my cousins.

While this is some serious storage, I'm sure my list isn't the largest among my readership (I know one guy who has a whole SGI file server in his basement). So for anyone to suggest that enterprise-class storage on the other end of some magical unlimited-bandwidth data link is going to obviate the need for storage in the house?

I seriously think not.

Let me explain why...

0.011: strategies for world domination

Like many of you, I've been watching the recent discussions about who stole what from whom with more than a little bit of glee. Chris Mellor started it, Tony Pearson responded, Kirby piled on with innuendo of similar BigCo misbehavings in the past, and Storagezilla took the time to correct Tony's obvious misunderstanding of how Invista is packaged and delivered (as an integrated solution, Tony, not as a kit of bits). Oh, and then last Friday Kirby whined a bit more (guess BigCo's lawyers forgot to get a gag order, huh?).

Such fun.

In parallel, and seemingly unrelated to this, there have been a slew of assertions about who is really #1 in storage. Tony and IBM claimed world dominance in overall storage (if you include tape), HP claimed #1 in overall disk storage, Chris granted EMC #1 in external storage, and Kirby asserted that the real overall winner in disk storage was Seagate. Mark Lewis clarified the obvious and questioned IBM's motivations. And of course, the rest of the wanna-be's all chimed in with their own context-ridden slice of IDC's concoction of data-that-would-be-useful-if-only-it-were-verifiably-true. I must admit that NetApps' "fastest growing in multiple shrinking markets" announcement left me a bit confused, especially coming on the heels of their forecasted 6-7% downturn in revenues for calendar Q2. Given that calendar Q2 is historically stronger than Q1, I don't think these press release necessarily add up to a positive for NetApp shareholders.

This all followed by a couple of rounds of marketing 101 training between Chuck and Kirby. (Psst. Kirby - the colloquialism is "nursing at the corporate trough," even if it is occasionally pronounced "troth"!)

Pure entertainment.

But today's blog entry isn't about those shenanigans.

No, I thought I'd write about what's behind all these seemingly unconnected discussions - the motivations of the leading storage suppliers that drive us to compete to be king-of-the-hill. A look into the unspoken (but quite apparent) strategies being employed to get to the top. And my anarchist's view of what they/we are all missing.

Ready? Read on...

0.010: operating at exa-scale

You've seen the IDC/EMC report on the staggering rate of information growth the world faces. At something like 56% CAGR, we collectively today manage over 161 exabytes of data storage. If you have read the press release or the complete study, you'll have noted that the bulk of this growth is in data that resides outside of the typical IT data center - digital video, photography and audio. And unless you work within the industries that are building value on or around these new storage-hungry data types, you might harbor the impression that this growth is really somebody else's problem.

And you'd be wrong.

Many Individual IT organizations around the globe are dealing with the same levels of compounded growth in their storage requirements as is the entire global information economy cited in this report. And many of these IT departments are already dealing with 10's or even 100's of petabytes of on-line storage, not to mention perhaps a couple of exabytes of off-line or near-line capacity.

I've seen a few of these environments up close, and it literally boggles the mind. Off the top of my head, some of the larger ones include:

• the cellular communications company in Japan that services real-time "debit card" type transactions from millions of customers' cell phones and the cell phone company in China that has more customers than the United States has residents;
• multiple different global financial institutions that handle the billions of concurrent stock, currency and credit transactions that make up the global economy;
• the airline reservation and scheduling systems that keep pilots, planes and passengers moving in relatively organized chaos;
• the processed foods and consumer goods companies that constantly analyze point-of-sale and shelf-life information for its products in near-real-time so that it can maintain just-in-time manufacturing and delivery in response to geographical and seasonal  demand shifts;
• the DoD and national security organizations that um...well...ahem... do whatever it is they do with all that information that they've intercepted collected over the years (and it's a lot, or so I've been told d:^).

Bottom line - there are literally thousands of IT organizations operating at a scale that most of us can't even imagine.

And whether by vendor intent or sheer customer need, EMC supports the storage requirements of (dare I say it) the majority of these largest IT organizations in the world. Dealing with the evolving (and exploding) information demands of these customers has largely defined EMC's product and services portfolio, from the early days of Symmetrix through the latest server virtualization, data-dedup and information security additions. We've learned a lot by supporting these bleeding edge consumers of storage, including one very sobering reality.

And you know what that is?

Operating at exa-scale is extra-hard.

0.009.2: catch-22 part deux, redo

(OK, I blew it. In the original version of this entry, I somehow lost about a third of what I had written and edited. This is the entire entry, and I've deleted the original. Apologies to those who commented on the original version; feel free the chime in again. Thx - tsa)

In a recent blog entry, Hu Yoshida pronounces the benefits of thin provisioning with wide striping as if it were something new and innovative recently invented by Hitachi's corps of Japanese engineers.

Many of you (especially the OSG's) will recall that StorageTek Iceberg was the first practical implementation of thin provisioning, back in 1994. Although innovative and cutting edge (some would say daring), it never really caught traction, proving first-to-market isn't always an assurance of success. Garbage collection was its Achilles heel, although many believe the demise of Iceberg was more due to the fact that mainframes don't really need a lot of help to manage storage utilization effectively.

Since Iceberg, there have been more than a handful of companies who have tried to leverage thin provisioning into the magic sauce that cost-effectively improves utilization, simplifies allocation and reduces the demand for physical storage - all while maintaining predictably acceptable performance. But none of them have solved the Catch-22's of thin virtual provisioning that I discussed in my earlier blog entry.

Hitachi is the most recent (and exuberant) entrant in this long line of would-be storage alchemists, and frankly, there's nothing to indicate that they've done anything to differentiate their implementation from all the rest.

No, despite all the hype, this latest quest to deliver the virtual provisioning grail by the Hitachi Ltd. developers from the Land of the Rising Sun appears to do nothing to help customers break out of the virtual provisioning catch-22.