I didn’t know the man personally, but I work every day in the shadow of his legacy.
As do most of you: Dick literally founded our industry.
I learned of Dick’s passing after having sat tearfully through several hours of poignant memorial for Senator Ted Kennedy on the television. Even though their politics surely have the two latest patrons of heaven's Irish pub seated at opposite ends of the bar, rest assured they’ve hoisted a pint in honor of each other’s contributions to the world they have left in our care.
To the both of them, a traditional Irish toast:
May your glass be ever full. May the roof over your head be always strong. And may you be in heaven half an hour before the devil knows you're dead.
Today's perspective announces the first episode in a documentary series that will follow EMC's IT organization on their journey to implementing the Virtual Data Center of the Future.
Drinking our own champagne.
This introductory episode outlines the quest for the VDCotF, and it stars none other than Symmetrix V-Max (and some guy from IT who seems intent in blocking our view).
In his book "How to Castrate a Bull: Unexpected Lessons on Risk, Growth, and Success in Business," Dave Hitz uses his real-life experience of castrating bulls as a metaphor for the courage required to take big risks in business. If you haven't yet read it, I encourage you to do so (although I wish Dave would release it as an audiobook, hint hint).
A couple of weeks ago I ran across this TED video where Mike Rowe of the Dirty Jobs show on The Discovery Channel relates a story about his unexpected experience working as a sheep farmer. If you're a fan of the show, you know that most of the Dirty Jobs that Mike undertakes also require a healthy dose of courage – Mike's day job is essentially to live Dave's metaphor day in and day out.
But this video caught my attention because where Dave focused on the challenge of the task, Mike's focus is on his learnings from completing it.
The entire segment is about 20 minutes long, but you'll get most of the point by about the half-way point.
WARNING: while this video doesn't include actual on-the-job footage, it is quite graphic. If you are at all squeamish about animal husbandry, I recommend that you just skip it.
Last week, Chris Mellor reported on revenue growth of Compellent in his "sparkling less brightly" post. At the end of that post, Chris included the following chart comparing Compellent's growth with that of perceived peers 3PAR, EqualLogic and Data Domain (chart used here with Chris' permission):
Although Compellent's slow-and-steady growth isn't all that surprising, I for one was somewhat taken aback by the relatively poor performance of 3PAR. Especially given all the bluster and bravado that routinely comes our way from both David Scott (3PAR's president) and Marc Farley (3PAR's resident cheerleader cum rapper cum blogger) – listening to them in blissful ignorance of the facts would have you believe they're a lot bigger and more relevant than they really are. In fact, it strikes me that there's a disproportionate amount of noise coming from a storage company that still hasn't found its way onto the exponential growth curve after more than 10 years in business.
Add in the news that COPAN is struggling for relevance and ONSTor has been bought for pennies on the dollar, and the emerging estimates that Pillar Data is operating somewhere around the $44M annual revenue mark, and you get a pretty clear picture of chaos down at this end of the market.
I am unabashedly an employee of EMC, but the opinions expressed here are entirely my own. I am a blogger who works at EMC, not an EMC blogger. This is my blog, and not EMC's. Content published here is not read or approved in advance by EMC and does not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of EMC.
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