the storage anarchist

0.021 the case against standardized (performance) testing

Fellow blogger Tony Pearson has just completed a week-long series on the values and merits of standardized storage performance benchmarking, in a not-so-subtle attempt to justify his recent assertion that a SPC-2 win for the SVC has awe-inspiring relevance to customers. And he's done so in an eloquent, perhaps even masterful manner, deftly leveraging the subtleties and nuances of the English language (who knew?) to make his case.

But if you ask me, he's failed miserably. Unless his readers get lost in the misdirection and fail to realize that his metaphors are totally unrelated to the world of storage performance. In fact, his tutorial underscores the problems associated with standardized testing.

Elsewhere in the blogosphere, I have offered my own personal perspective on standardized benchmarking, which boils down to this:

• Standardized benchmarking oversimplifies the complex interactions that make up a real-world environment --the requirement for "controlled and repeatable" forces standardized benchmarks to exclude the chaos of random, but normally occurring, events and overheads, often masking or even intentionally subverting key differentiating capabilities of the test targets
   
• The inherent quest to be best in standardized benchmarks inevitably drives participants in to optimize their test targets for the test
   
• There is very little documented correlation between standardized testing results and the intended real-world application of the test target, and most people don't understand what the tests actually measure
   
• The inbred survival instincts of humans leads us to subconsciously establish relationships and hierarchies between similar objects, and in the absence of in-depth situational/contextual understanding, we will assign "better" based solely on whatever limited data points are available to us

I know - heady assertions, and my opinions all. But note that I harbor these opinions for ANY standardized test, be it the SPC, TPC, MPG, EER, SAT or every state's equivalent of MCAS. And my reasoning is simple:

Standardized testing homogenizes comparisons to a meaningless baseline that masks the unique strengths of the test targets, be they cars, servers, storage arrays or high school students. Unless you fully understand the test itself and the relevant requirements of your own application of the test target, you can draw no real conclusions on how standardized test results apply to your expected results.

So when Tony tries to convince readers that the SPC is like MPG, well...you know me, I gotta take exception.

0.020: do corporate blogs = marketing collateral?

Seems my investigative blogging was picked up by a couple of tech journalists this week, and suddenly I have a broader readership. Props to both Chris Mellor and Beth Pariseau for the traffic, if not necessarily for their perspectives .

I know that many of you won't believe this, but setting the record straight wasn't the primary objective of my articles on blogketing. My intent really was (and still is) to spotlight the notion of Corporate Blogging as a marketing tool, and whether or not it should be held up to the same credibility and liability standards as any other form of marketing or advertising. Over the past week, I've gotten feedback on both sides of that coin, both directly and even in a couple of other blogs.

My position is pretty clear - I think Corporate Blogs (the ones that show up on a company's web site under the company's logo) are just as much marketing collateral as everything else on those web sites, and thus are to be held to the same level of accuracy and professionalism. This despite any disclaimers that may appear on the blog - if the company is paying to promote the blog, they are by definition endorsing the views of the blogger.

The alternate position is best summed up by this bit of (edited) feedback that I received this week: "Everyone in the blogosphere knows, or at least should know, that a blog is just the un-edited voice of a single person, and many posts are made without spell-checking, fact-checking or grammar-checking. [...] Blog posts are not technology publications, magazine articles, press releases, or other collateral that follow a more rigorous editing process."

What do you think?

Opinion Polls & Market Research

<Direct link to this poll on Vizu>

Feel free to comment, either here on on the poll itself.

0.019: dmx-4 and oh so much more

As you probably already have seen, EMC had a pretty major platforms update announcement on Monday, with updates to virtually every storage platform product we offer.

Given the size of the company and the scope of our product portfolio, gone are the days when we have the luxury of launching only on a single product at a time -- there just aren't enough weeks in the year (and it does take weeks, with all the pre-briefings, scheduling, invitations, etc.). So we pretty much have to do these so-called "roll-up" announcements, and this one was pretty significant.

In fact, there were so many, many things announced across Symmetrix, CLARiiON, Celerra and Centera that it's near impossible to summarize them all in one place. For the next several weeks, if you want to learn about specific updates, I invite you to visit www.EMC.com directly. You can select the key product line areas from the rotating landing page banner, or you can follow the link to the Executive Summary presented by Barbara Robidoux, the Storage Platforms Marketing VP (but be forewarned, she has a LOT to summarize!).

I'll throw in a special recognition of EMC's marketing folks who created this launch - they've done a bang-up job of announcing a boatload of stuff without the overwhelming use of superlatives and hyperbole. In fact, it's obvious that there was a focused effort to communicate this announcement in terms of realizable customer benefits, instead of mind-numbing speeds-and-feeds. It certainly makes everybody's job easier when we don't have to answer questions like "so what?"

But if you really want to know the inside scoop about the launch, you've come to the right place. Well, so far as the Symmetrix side of the launch is concerned that is. My pal Storagezilla has adeptly covered the CLARiiON, Celerra, Centera, and RainFinity announcements over at his blog.

So, want to know more about DMX-4? Read on, Gunga Din!

0.018: no more bad things after 2011

Good news for those of us who have been following the wide-ranging discussions on the risks and perils of thin provisioning over the past month or two: it appears that all the "Bad Things" we've been discussing could be avoided altogether if we all simply unite and elect John Edwards as President of the USA next year.

John Edwards Vows to End All Bad Things (on The Onion)

Note that John doesn't specifically list "runaway demand for unavailable storage" or "double drive failure in a RAID 5 thin storage pool" as Bad Things to be eradicated, but maybe we could get a petition together to include these under either the "soil erosion" or the "not having enough spending money" categories. Worst case, we would probably be at least partially covered from the most damaging risks by the elimination of "procrastination," although that's not necessarily the root of all Bad Things related to thin provisioning.

I expect Edwards campaign contributions from 3par, DataCore, Equallogic, NetApp and Hitachi to start pouring in overnight (EMC is not included owing to its strong Republican party ties).

I sincerely apologize to my readers, I just couldn't resist. I'll have an update on the DMX-4 announcement by week's end, I promise.

0.017: can you take back your blogketing?

I noticed this morning that Hu Yoshida has updated his "Take Back Your Storage" blog entry.

July 9th version (thanks, Google!):

[ . . . ] Up to now, thin provisioning has only been available from some modular storage or filer vendors, now it is available from Hitachi in their Dynamic Provisioning service on the enterprise class USP V. This same feature is available on the HP XP 24000 and the SUN ST9990 V. Hitachi also makes thin provisioning available on their HNAS high performance NAS system. [ . . . ]

July 14th version:

[ . . . ] Up to now, thin provisioning has only been available from some modular storage or filer vendors, now it is available from Hitachi in their Dynamic Provisioning service on the enterprise class USP V. This same feature is available on the HP XP 24000 and the SUN ST9990 V. Currently Dynamic provisioning is only available for internal storage, but will soon be available for external storage that is virtualized within the USP V. Hitachi also makes thin provisioning available on their HNAS high performance NAS system. [ . . . ]

Was it something I said? 

0.016: storage blognostications

From time to time, several of us engineers will get together for an hour or two of non-linear thinking, just for the heck of it. In the office, we call these Innovation Events - the sort of brainstorming sessions I'm sure you've all participated in. But we also hold special outside the office sessions, where our focus areas tend not to be on customer problems, new technologies or The Next Big Thing.

And yes - there is usually alcohol involved in off-site these mental calisthenics events. It is indeed very convenient that we have a tavern virtually in the middle of our South Street campus in Hopkinton so that we can stop off for a quick, ah ... brainstorming session on our way home. And in fact, the establishment is owned and operated by EMC'ers no less - a pretty smart bunch, those O'Tooles.

Anyhoo, after the third beer or so, what does the conversation inevitably turn towards (after all the Red Sox gossip has been exhausted, that is)? Simple -- it's EMC's competition -- and what people think they're going to do next.

And the more beer, the better the prognostications .

Try these on for size ...

0.015: blogketing and revenue recognition

A reader of yesterday's blogketing post pointed out that US Federal accounting rules (FASB?) do not allow for revenue to be recognized until the product has actually been delivered as announced and described in supporting collateral (press releases, spec sheets, etc.).

Now I'm not an accountant, so I'm not saying this is gospel. But it seems to make sense. If I understand the deferral rules, the deal is something like this:

If the product itself is 100% independent from anything else (e.g., Microsoft Office for Windows, etc.), then revenues for the product itself must be deferred until the product delivers all of the publicly announced and marketed capabilities. However, if the product is part of a larger system, the entire revenue for both the product and the larger system cannot be recognized until the entire system does everything that it has been announced, promoted or sold to do (i.e., you can't sell a car without tires). I've been told that this clause was added at some point because it would be obviously impossible to police every transaction to determine whether the system was purchased for a specific feature or not, so the rule just says something like "if any feature isn't delivered, the revenue recognition for the entire system must be deferred until all the features are generally available and/or delivered."

0.014: beware of blogketing

Hu Yoshida has done another bang-up job of explaining the utilization challenge bearing down on customer budgets in his latest 2-part bloguturial (my contraction of "blogger's tutorial"). In the first part, he does a great job of outlining the problem, and in part 2, he credibly describes a vision for a solution. In fact, if you removed all the references to Hitachi products, those two blog entries should probably be mandatory reading for every storage architect in both mid-tier and enterprise IT shops (and probably their suppliers as well).

It could have been that good - if only Hu had separated fact from vision.

Written in the style of a print-media advertorial (a contraction of "editorial advertising," where ad space is purchased to run an editorial-like assessment of a product or service), the blogutorial is emerging as a new, and so-far unchecked marketing tool. Importantly, truth-in-advertising laws require published advertorials to be plainly marked as "paid advertisements" (usually in tiny font in the header where you might not notice it). Apparently this isn't so for blogketing ("blog marketing")- even when done by official corporate spokespersons in the public forum of the Internet. Apparently the blog-world is unfettered by truth-in-advertising rules.

This concerns me, because it allows bloggers to act like the snake-oil vendors of the past, getting away unchecked with unsubstantiated claims and misleading inferences of undeliverable capabilities.

Hu's blogutorial is a prime case in point. The way he litters the product references throughout the two articles would lead the uninformed reader to believe that Hitachi's newly-announced (and yet to ship) Dynamic Provisioning solves all the problems Hu describes. And in fact, this is clearly his intent - the two blogs are nothing more than thinly veiled marketing collateral written by an authoritative industry expert and delivered in the latest marketing medium, the Corporate Blog.

But the complete lack of any disclaimers begs for someone to call "foul."

Enter the storage anarchist...