the storage anarchist

1.052: over-hyping wide striping

When the capabilities you use to differentiate your product in the market are no longer unique, marketing tends to morph into hype.

That appears to be what’s happening to 3PAR.

Once the paragon of Thin Provisioning and Tiny Chunklets, today they struggle for relevance in a market where virtually every storage platform offers thin provisioning as just one among a long list of features.

What’s worse is that 3PAR, like XIV, is saddled with an architecture that makes it difficult (although surely not impossible) to integrate support for Enterprise Flash Drives. In fact, along with NTAP and XIV, 3PAR remains one of the few companies that have not yet figured out how to deliver the performance benefits of flash storage technology to their customers.

Marc Farley, who I respect immensely (and not just for his rappin’), stepped out this week in his blog to assert that while 3PAR is working on flash, they are “in no rush to be a me too player.”

(Out of respect, I’ll pass over that obvious softball.)

But I did find his suggestion that Wide Striping was 3PAR’s answer to EFDs rather funny. Almost as hilarious as IBM’s assertion that had me rotflmao! last year – the one where they said that their customers didn’t need flash drives, they needed TAPE!

Even more, um, dare I say ridiculous, was Marc’s assertion that EMC was using EFDs to avoid the efforts of re-architecting their products to deliver wide striping.

No offense intended, Marc, but you know I’m not one to let anyone get away with such misleading hype and outright false FUD.

Allow me to set the record straight…

1.051: skate to where the puck is going

I'm not an ice hockey fan, but I do know that skating to the puck is usually ineffective (and often embarrassing). As the great Wayne Gretzky explained, the winning strategy is to "Skate where the puck is going!"

Skating to where the puck is going is also a good business strategy.

As I've discussed over the past couple of weeks, when it comes to Enterprise Flash Drives and the storage array industry, EMC's competition is still chasing the puck.

Oh, sure, there are lots of visions of future capabilities being cast about by the competition. Promises of flash-as-cache, tighter application integration (often via proprietary lock-ins rather than open standards) and more efficient approaches to tiering – everyone seems hell-bent to publicly declare grand promises for tomorrow even as they belatedly (and begrudgingly) add support for 73GB and 146GB EFDs to their product lines today.

Well, guess what – they've missed the puck. Again.

With today's announcement of 200GB and 400GB Enterprise Flash Drives for the Symmetrix DMX4, EMC has once again netted a breakaway score (that's hockey talk). Through even tighter integration with the array hardware and software, these new 4Gb/s Fibre Channel EFDs are far more cost-effective on a $/GB basis than the significantly smaller drives that EMC's competitors are just now getting into the market.

And the fun thing is, I don't think anyone saw this coming this time, either!
 

1.050: e for efficiency

It started out innocently, with the introduction of the CLARiiON CX4:

Chronicles of Innovation: Energy Efficiency

Then you might say things got a little whacky.

Extreme Efficiency: Project Outdoor Office

Then folks got back to the very real ways EMC can help you save money – today...

1.049: would a "sixth sense" make us more rational?

Apologies for the off-topic diversion, but I can’t resist making a mashup of two topics I found this morning on TED.com.

If you don’t already know, TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader. Their annual conferences have been the platform for the initial introductions of some incredible inventions and ideas, and they have made hundreds of videos of earth-moving TEDtalks available to the public (their 400th TEDtalk was released today this week – you can get them ALL on your iPod here – apologies in advance, Martin).

If you don’t follow TED, you should. You’ll be amazed by the scope of the topics they present. (subscribe to their blog, podcast and vidcasts here).

The first subject to catch my eye was a teaser on TEDblog for Daniel Ariely’s talk this coming Monday night (16 March 2009) on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Daniel is the author of Predictably Irrational, my current audio book diversion (see more of my recommended audio book diversions here).

In this post, Dan offers 3 irrational lessons from the Bernie Madoff scandal. For those of you who haven’t read his book yet, Dan is a leading expert in behavioral economics, and his book explains a lot about how we work. For example, he discusses why we’ll drive 15 minutes out of our way to save $7.00 on a $25.00 pen, but won’t make that same diversion to save $7.00 on a $450.00 suit. The aforementioned Madoff essay highlights some of the overreactions he predicts we will make as a result of the disgusting Ponzie scheme, even if we weren’t personally caught in the trap.

But it was the second subject I found that inspired me to wonder if Dan’s observed human irrationality could be overcome…
 

1.048: news flash! information is still growing!!!!

From the Business Section of the March 11, 2009 Financial Times comes this earth-shattering dilemma:

Storage: The bytes build up –
but where can we put them?

Seems that Mark Vargo, IBM’s own Chief Strategy Officer, and Hu Yoshida, Hitachi Data System’s Chief Technology Officer both agree that digital information is still growing.

Shocking!

Oddly, it was almost 2 years ago to the day the Mark was quoted by the very same Financial Times on the very same topic, except back then, he seemed to have an answer:

Surely we can squeeze a bit more in somewhere

I don’t know which is sadder, the fact that the Financial Times reruns topics, or that IBM and HDS are taking ipso-facto credit for the EMC-sponsored IDC research on the Expanding Digital Universe that is behind the observations of these two. (That some of their quotes are lifted directly from the research papers is, well, no longer astonishing).

OK – I’ll make it unanimous: EMC’s Chief Strategy Officer for Symmetrix also asserts that indeed, we will collectively have more digital information to store tomorrow than we did yesterday.

Who knew?

 

There, that said, I’ll return to working on The Perfect Storage Array, per Martin’s specifications.

 

technorati tags: digital universe, digital information, EMC, IDC, research, Financial Times, information explosion, data growth, IBM, HDS

1.047: dancin' with the starz

No, I'm not talking about The Woz's performance last night with Karina Smirnoff (although "A Teletubby going mad" was indeed an accurate description).

Nope, this is yet another follow-up to my flash dance / splash dance observations of the wild and sometimes whacky world of solid state storage.

Somebody has been taking dance lessons.

Or at least, they're paying attention.

Now appearing on the main stage: HP!

Yup, unlike IBM who seem to be totally unable to figure out the steps to this Flash SSD tango, HP has delivered a fairly coherent white paper outlining their perspective of Flash technology, entitled Solid State Disks for HP StorageWorks Arrays Whitepaper.

A welcome contrast to IBM's gloom-and-doom SSD white paper (the one that they still haven't figured out needs correcting).

I'll hasten to add that HP's paper represents a totally NEW perspective for the company – it was just a few weeks ago that the only thing SSD on HP's solid state landing page was about laptop and server applications. And after spending most of last year telling everyone that the technology wasn't ready for the enterprise and that it was being overhyped (by moi?), their solid state landing page has been recently updated to reflect a far more optimistic and comprehensive outlook for the technology. This is a most welcomed change of tune, because it will take the support of all of us in the storage industry to drive down the cost and expand the applicable use cases for solid-state technologies.

Welcome to the party, gents. You can stop trying to dance now, I guess.

But I do hope the Tucson Boys in Blue are paying attention.

1.046: administrivia - more feeds

In addition to the Comments Feed for all comments posted here on my blog site, there are a few other RSS feeds my readers might also be interested in.

• tsa's shared items feed – a feed of the posts and articles that I share using Google Reader, updated whenever I find items that I think my readers might be interested in. The titles and links to these also appear in the sidebar (under Recommended Reads); this feed gives you the complete posts. There is also an HTML page for my shared items.
• tsa's global comments feed – a feed of (almost) all the comments I leave around the blog-o-sphere, as captured by BackType. If you want to see what I think about other blogger's perspectives, this might be of interest to you (sadly, does not include IBM's blogs, apparently their blog site can't be parsed by BackType). And if you prefer the HTML web page instead of the feed, visit http://www.backtype.com/thestorageanarchist.
• enterprise storage friendfeed – not specific to just my content, but this friendfeed room encapsulates the posts of most every storage-related blogger around. (I'm not bothering with my own friendfeed, since this "room" pretty much encapsulates everyone I'd gather).
• The Who's Who of Storage Blogosphere – yesterday's post by David Panchigar in his StorageNerve blog captures most all of the storage-related bloggers in one place (send David a Tweet if you're not included). And if you like getting connected via LinkedIn, David's latest post lists a plethora of Storage/ VMware/ Cloud Computing groups over on LinkedIn. Thanks for both of these, David!

Enjoy, and Keep on storin'!

1.045: administrivia - comments feed and new tsa domains

For those of you who have been trying to follow the integrated site comments on my blog via the Comments Feed link in the sidebar, I have (finally) found and fixed the problem that had it showing only the first 50 comments from my first posts. It now properly distributes the most recent 100 (or so) comments.

I’ve also registered a few alternative domain redirectors for my blog (just for the heck of it). You can now use any of the following to reach this blog:

• thestorageanarchist.typepad.com
• thestorageanarchist.com
• tsa.blogdns.com
• tsa.blogdns.net
• tsa.blogdns.org
• tsa.blogsite.org
• tsa.is-a-anarchist.com (not really, but it was available)
• tsa.readmyblog.org

Enjoy!

1.044: ibm's amazing splash dance

Leave it to the folks over at Big Blue to throw cold water on the whole flash storage revolution.

On the same day that both IDC and Gartner confirmed that IBM is losing share in the external storage market while EMC is gaining, the following Tweet from "ibmstorage" floated across my TweetDeck:

IBM's approach to new storage technology
"Solid state disks for enterprise storage" http://tinyurl.com/acom2s (pdf)
ibmstorage , Fri 06 Mar 10:32 via web

The links gets you this white paper: Solid state disks for enterprise storage - IBM’s approach to new storage technology.

UPDATE: Just in case IBM moves or withdraws the referenced white paper, I have saved a copy of it here on my blog site.

With a title like that, I figured this paper would be the long-waited IBM response to my previous Flashdance post, even though it was probably at least in draft weeks before I started my post.

I wasn't to be disappointed.
 

1.043: the fine art of strategy

If you stopped by to engage in the latest round of storage blogger smackup, I'm sorry to disappoint.

Today's post is about "strategy."

Or, more honestly, it is about the right-brained approach to strategic thinking. As opposed to the analytical left-brained approach to strategic analysis that Michael E. Porter codified in his definitive works, Competitive Strategy and Competitive Advantage.

Why?

Well, first, because a recent commenter here on my blog accused me of "hiding" the fact that my job is in fact Chief Strategy Officer for EMC's Symmetrix Product Group. That accusation came with stinging indictments that I was intentionally misleading my readers by posing as an "independent storage analyst" while deriding competitor products and praising EMC's.

Those of you who know that i am anything but objective
can stop laughing now, before you hurt yourself.

I realize that while most of my readership is well aware that I live, breathe and bleed Symmetrix, not everyone does. Some of my more recent audience may not have taken the time to go back and review my earlier posts which pretty clearly define the platform from whence I pontificate. If you are one of those, I encourage you to enter the way-back machine and review my very first post, where I introduced myself and my context. And if you're interested, you can find all of my prior posts organized by date and categories in the archives.

As to the reader who accused me of hiding my identity, I will note that he actually contacted me by way of my Linked-In profile, which is plainly included in the sidebar on the right. I also include links to my About page, my Facebook profile and several on-line communities where you can learn more about me with a few clicks than you could have ever known about any trade journalist or industry analyst 10 years ago.

I am not attempting to hide anything; it's all there, in plain daylight.

The second reason for this post is in response to the myriad of people who ask me how I came to be a "strategist" and how they too might prepare for such a position. It's a question that used to be hard for me to answer, but I recently have begun to understand myself what it takes.

And I'd like to share a little of what I've learned…and how I learned it…