the storage anarchist

3.010: storage savvy: blogging with cred

Just a quick note to give a shout-out to a relatively new EMC employee blogger, Richard Anderson. His personal, not-reviewed-or-approved-by-EMC blog is at storagesavvy.com.

Richard joined EMC earlier this year, coming from Nintendo where he managed both EMC and NetApp kit. His experience provides the credibility to support a rather broad swath of topics, and he has been providing practical comparisons of EMC and NTAP products long well before joining EMC.

As interesting as those comparisons are (and surely they will be fodder for more competitive battles royale), I found his two recent posts on VPLEX (here and there) provided some very grounded perspectives. I’m hopeful that he might soon undertake a comparative review of VPLEX Metro and it’s fault-tolerant Active/Active presentation of LUNs.

If you haven’t read Richards’s material, there is a lot of content. I found it laced with grounded perspective from a hands-on technical perspective – very refreshing, if I do say so myself.

Welcome to the party, Richard – looks like you’ll fit right in…

3.009: whither the ds8700, or hath it withered already?

My followers know that I've been predicting the demise IBM's enterprise storage platforms (both DS6000 and DS8000 series) for several years now. And though I've been chastised for competitor bashing, I remain convinced that IBM will soon withdraw the DS8000 from marketing once and for all, just as they have the DS6000.

The product just isn't competitive in today's world, even with the unfair advantage IBM enjoys with its tight linkage to it mainframes and servers.

Supporting evidence for the impending demise comes from many directions and sources. Just this week I heard about a competitive deal Down Under where IBM withdrew the DS8700 from a competitive bid in the middle of the selection process. Pressed for an explanation, the new VMAX customer was told that the DS8700 would be EOL by year-end 2010, and IBM didn't want to propose a dead-end product.

How considerate of them!

Now, indeed, this is hearsay, and I can't promote any evidence as to the accuracy of this report. But it is another piece that seems to fit the emerging picture that IBM is winding down the DS8700 as we speak. IDC StorageTracker data shows a rather protracted decline in market share for the DS8000, one that began with the introduction of the Symmetrix VMAX back in April 2009.

In fact, if you compare the IDC StorageTracker data for EMC Symmetrix, IBM DS8K and Hitachi USP-V/VM for the 4 quarters beginning Q2'09, you'll see that VMAX share of the "high end array" pie has grown significantly, while both IBM and Hitachi have lost share dramatically.

Yes, to the attentive observer, it is pretty clear that the DS8K is on its deathbed – at least as we know it today.

3.008: shame on all of us

Sometimes we in the storage industry misbehave.

Sometimes Badly.

The most recent example surrounds the reports early this week about how a bank was unable to service its ATM customers as a result of a vendors' process mistake. Apparently an operator used an out-of-date procedure to execute a routine service operation during a planned outage and the result was an protracted unplanned outage. To their credit, the vendor publicly owned up to the mistake and is certainly taking steps to avoid similar occurrences in the future.

All fine and good, if we could have just left it there.

But no, it seems this is not to be the case. Sales reps from the vendor-at-fault's competitors are gleefully emailing these reports to every customer and prospect, in hopes of creating sufficient Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) about the competitor in the minds of these potential sources of revenue. I personally have had over a dozen emails in my inbox linking to the reports.

I find this deplorable, childish behavior.

And yes, that is directed at folks from my own company as well as those from competitors.

3.007: corporate espionage and other covert affairs

Call it Karma, Destiny, or Fate, but two topics crossed my desk today with  almost uncanny congruence. And when I noticed my next post number for this year was 007, I knew I had to post this.

The first unexpected topic was a link from EMC's Daily News, a daily email distributed by our PR department highlighting news articles relevant to EMC's global businesses. The first entry of today's list was this FOX Business News television interview with Beau Dietl, the world-renowned expert on corporate espionage. In it Beau discusses the "threat from within" and how EMC's RSA Security division is helping corporations protect their most important information assets.

If you have 7 minutes of your life to spare, you might find this interesting…

The second unexpected component of this information eclipse follows the break…

3.006: You are more influential than you think

Here's an interesting social media experiment.

With nothing more than that as a tease, I ask that you click this link: http://fcinf.com/v/cbxd.

(the link is safe, I assure you)

 

technorati tags: social media,influence,experiment