the storage anarchist

3.000: another year older

Another year bolder?

And so, we begin Year Four of the storage anarchist, and judging by recent events, it looks to be another very interesting year.

I've been crazy swamped as I gear up for the upcoming EMC World (and my daughter's wedding, plus a few other things), and haven't managed to get many posts out recently. Turns out this year is no different than the last several years, in fact: I'm spending a lot of time reading, writing, proofing, editing and approving miles of content that's going into this years event and it leaves me little time (or desire) to blog.

Still, the few words I've proffered in the blog and on Twitter seem not to have gone unnoticed.

We've had a few rounds of lively discussions on the meanings and customer value of the notion of Federation, leading up to Marc Farley's attempts to document definitions on behalf of the debaters. I enjoyed some lively chats with the Gestalt IT visitors about some things historical and some things-not-yet-public. And last Friday's little short story has claimed a lot of attention, with customers and competitors across our industry debating whether the vision is real, unique, or even desirable.

What fun!

2.048: a walk through the clouds

For what may be my final post of my 3rd year of blogging (April 27th is the anniversary of my first post -- not to worry, there will be a fourth year), I present a short story written by fellow EMC employee David Meiri. David has been a member of Symmetrix development for nearly over 12 years. For most of those years he has been a key innovator and developer on EMC's world-renowned SRDF (Symmetrix Remote Data Facility). I only just recently learned he can be an artful author in languages other than C and assembler.

So, forthwith, here's David's (mildly edited) short story:

A Walk through the Clouds

A short story describing how a private cloud may look for users, at all levels.

Sometime in the near future . . .

Susan’s day started out easy enough.

As the sole Application Administrator in the IT department of Blue Sky Bank, it was her responsibility to take care of any problems related to the many applications the bank ran. So far this morning there was only one issue: traders complained that the global trading application was not performing fast enough. While on the phone with their manager at headquarters, she took a quick look at the all-green dashboard on her monitor and said: “It looks like your storage demands are exceeding the 5,000 IO/sec you have requested, and as a result the average latency is above your SLA. If you want better performance, I can move your current trading activities to a higher tier and charge you an additional $10,000 a quarter. The next-level service package in the catalog will provide you with higher IO rate, reduced response time, higher availability and better data protection through more frequent snapshots that are retained for longer periods.” The manager on the other end of the line approved the change, Susan turned to her keyboard to adjust the policy, and within minutes the application’s performance started climbing up.

 

2.047: the gestalt are coming, the gestalt are coming!

As Bas Raayman discussed last week, the Gestalt IT Tech Field Day is coming to Boston this week. Yours truly is honored to be one of the presenters to meet with this group on Thursday afternoon. EMC's very own Virtual Geek will also be presenting, and hats off to Stuart Miniman for the behind-the-scenes work he's put into making this event happen.

In preparation for the discussions we will be having, I happened across a bunch of web sites that focus on this notion of gestalt. One site I found gave a particularly insightful description of the term, albeit from an artistic perspective:

• Gestalt- Theory that makes unity and variety possible.
• Gestalt means "form" or "whole" in German.
• Gestalt deals with visual perception and the relationship between the parts and the whole composition.

Indeed, I believe that these describe not only the objective of the Gestalt IT collective of bloggers, but also that of the vendor hosts. While I can't speak for the other vendors, I am personally looking forward to insightful discussions and feedback on the variety of topics planned for the EMC segment on Thursday afternoon. We will be exploring topics that may well change perceptions and perhaps even enable the composition of new use cases – hopefully we can do a little out-of-the-box collaboration while we're together.

Oh, and I'm sure we'll also have some fun at the Thursday evening event – especially for the baseball fans in the group!

Out of respect for the Gestalt IT bloggers, I won't disclose those topics prior to the meeting. But these discussions are specifically being held without the safety net of an NDA (hence the photo selection), so I'm sure you'll be hearing from the attendees both during and after the event. To be fair, you shouldn't expect any new product announcements or selling of futures (thanks, Enron), but rest assured that the discussions will be interesting, topical and evocative nonetheless.

Safe travels, everyone – we're really looking forward to this!

 

technorati tags: Gestalt IT Tech Field Day,EMC