the storage anarchist

1.000: happy anniversary, baby!

Today marks the 1-year anniversary of this blog.

My my, where did the time go?

I guess I was a bit optimistic with my chosen numbering scheme, as I allotted 3 digits for the post number, but I managed to craft only 78 posts. Not sure if that's good or bad - surely there are several readers who would have preferred that I'd done a few less posts (or a few less posts about their products, perhaps ).

All in all, I think not a bad start.

Oh sure, I've left a few loose ends, and I've opened the door on a few topics that I never quite got into. Hopefully it has still been been interesting to you, and maybe you even had a good chuckle every once in a while. To be sure, your comments, criticisms and feedback has been much appreciated, and I hope that I can expand the conversations in the coming year.

In fact, I'd really like to hear from you about what topics you'd like me to explore. And I mean that, whether you are a customer, prospect, competitor, work colleague, industry analyst, peer, friend, journalist, or someone who just happens to find my blog interesting - I wanna know what you wanna know...

So please, write a comment to this post with your questions and/or topic proposals, and I'll see about working them into my agenda, and maybe I'll hit more than 100 posts in my second year.

Many thanks to all of you! You've made the first year of storage anarchy better than I could have imagined!

ttfn!

0.078: lions and tigers and bears!

Driving in to work today, I heard a news report about the Hollywood Grizzly Bear that killed his trainer yesterday.

When I got to the office, I listened to Joe field questions during EMC's earnings call (19 consecutive quarters of double-digit year-over-year revenue growth). Several of the participating financial analysts inquired about the potential impact that the newly-delivered virtual provisioning for Symmetrix might have on future capacity demands. From the tone of the questions, you could easily imagine a pride of lions circling their prey.

And sure enough, by noon Beth Pariseau had her coverage posted on SearchStorage, under the headline EMC's Tucci: Thin provisioning mandatory but overrated.

Shortly after the earnings call, a colleague forwarded me the link to a Byte and Switch article by Mary Jander entitled Your Storage Arrays May Be Dangerous. In this article, Mary decries that people need to "rethink the environmental impact of storage gear," because the EPA has reported that electricity use for storage is growing faster than the energy used for the data center overall. Not surprisingly, the EPA called for "storage virtualization, data deduplication, storage tiering, and movement of archival data to storage devices that can be powered down when not in use" as strategies for avoiding environmental damage if not disaster.

Oh my!

In fulfilling my promise to get back to blogging about technology, I thought I'd invest today's post to provide a slightly less sensationalist perspective on thin provisioning, storage capacity and energy efficiency.

And all I have to say about the bear is: remember, these are wild animals, and they're driven by instinct and not logic or trust.

Any resemblance between wild animals and industry experts is purely coincidental!

 

0.077: ...priceless!

It's Friday, I'm back from a three-day trip out to EMC's Santa Clara Executive Briefing Center, the New England weather is the best its been all year, and somehow I just don't feel about blogging enterprise storage technology today.

So I won't.

I have taken a fair bit of ribbing this week about my apparent taste in music (many of you missed the fine print at the bottom of my last post). Sadly, the experiment failed - I have roughly the same number of subscribers this week as I had before enlisting the Britney factor. This week's musical reference will probably just dig me in deeper, but I'm wondering if maybe I picked an artist on the wrong side of their career slopes.

But you have to admit, when a major pop star names her "emancipation" album after your company, that's pretty special. Add in her TV & radio promo tour and the inevitable concert series, and that adds up to a boatload of global goodwill and brand awareness.

And while I most definitely am not a fan-o-Britney, I will admit to appreciating (and enjoying) most of Mariah's music.

The E=MC² album is perhaps a bit more "produced" than I prefer, but undoubtedly it will give her at least a couple more #1 singles - enough probably to put her atop the Billboard charts for all time total chart-topping hits. In fact, "Touch My Body" has already topped Billboard, pushing her past Elvis (who had 17 BB #1 hits). Two more and she'll tie The Beatles with 20.

If only she'd released the album a couple of weeks earlier - I could have had some REAL fun with it on Lirpa Sloof Day!

 

0.076: oops!... i(bm) did it again!

I know that many of you are getting tired of me pointing out the frequent faux-pas made by competitor's executives. To you, I apologize in advance for today's post, and I'll understand completely if you skip this entry or unsubscribe from my feed in protest.

Especially those of you from IBM, on both sides of the pond. I seem to get more hits from the ibm.com domain on these articles than from anywhere else!

I am sincerely trying to stop, honest I am. But just I can't. At least not until these guys stop feeding me material.
 

Before I continue, though...a note about today's theme.

About a year ago, when I was first thinking of starting up this blog, Chuck Hollis told me one of his super-secret tricks for attracting hits to his blog. He said he would include "Britney Spears" as one of the keywords for every one of his posts, and that he'd get a sizable percentage of hits from search engines like Google and Yahoo! as a result. Not that I need the hits, but the song title fits my topic, so I figured I might try it to see what happens.

So, if you're a Britney fan who accidentally got lured here by this little ploy, my apologies to you as well. This probably isn't what you were looking for.

But if you're both a storage geek and a Britney fan - Welcome! You'll probably recognize the subtitles below...

 

0.075: iomega joins emc storage division

There should little surprise in today's after-market-close announcement that EMC has reached a definitive agreement to acquire Iomega Corporation (IOM). From the moment of the initial (SEC-mandated) disclosure of EMC's unsolicited offer last month, most people probably assumed it was only a matter of time (and price).

Still, several questioned the logic of such a deal over the past several weeks.

Even with the expanded product portfolio, spanning storage, content management, security, virtualization, SaaS and personal information management, EMC hard-good sales is still firmly rooted in addressing the information storage needs of enterprises, large and small, primarily through direct sales and value-added resellers.

And it doesn't take much of a visit to the Iomega web site to understand that they couldn't possibly be more different than EMC - they serve primarily the home and small business consumer markets, primarily through distribution and retail routes to market.

The two could not be further apart.

Which is precisely why this makes sense...
 

0.074: emc world 2008

EMC World 2008 is just about a month and a half away, and the preparation  activity around the office is really picking up. Presentation content is being reviewed and critiqued, the kinks are getting worked out of the hands-on workshops and show-floor challenges, the chatchkies and prizes are starting to come in, and everyone's travel arrangements are being buttoned up.

And now that Q1 is complete (and 5773 is shipping), the excitement will really start building, hopefully to crescendo May 19-22 in Las Vegas.

A couple of weeks ago, I recorded a "teaser" for my session on Flash Drive performance and best practices. Mostly, the teaser is just the marketing side of the story. In my session I'll actually be diving into details on the performance customers can expect to attain for different workloads, as well as discussing the various tools that can be used to identify applications (or parts of applications) that could benefit most from sub-millisecond response times that Enterprise Flash Drives deliver on Symmetrix.

(Check out the video after the page break)

0.073: 5773 > c

In case you've been wondering, the previously announced Q1'08 Symmetrix enhancements, including Enginuity 5773, the 73GB and 146GB enterprise flash drives, the 1 TB SATA-II drive and the new GigE I/O director all shipped on schedule last week. As usual, there's quite a bit to talk about, because in addition to what has been announced already, there are several additional features in this code release that revenue recognition rules prohibited EMC from disclosing until everyone was confident that they would actually make the GA release in Q1.

But discussion of perhaps the most significant new feature in 5773 was held back for another reason: to get all the patent applications filed before it was disclosed. This one new feature could well prove to be the foundation of a whole new era in remote replication - potentially changing the nature of distance replication more than flash drives will change the storage media end of the equation.

But it'll take a little explaining (hint: it has something to do with the title of this post), so before I get into the details, a little background...