the storage anarchist

3.020: reality check - vsp vaai support

I've seen lots of bluster lately from the Hitachi PR machine about VSP being the first virtualization platform to support VMware's vStorage API for Array Integration (VAAI).

When you're next to last delivering something, I guess you gotta try something (I note that IBM has yet to deliver VAAI on either DS8K or on XIV – not surprising, since both seem to be on life support, if for different reasons).

Hitachi have spared no blather in their messaging. If you were to believe their PR proclamations, you would expect to gain all the benefits of VAAI without waiting for your existing storage platform to be upgraded with VAAI support. Just tuck it behind a spanking new VSP and forget all your troubles, they seem to say.

Reality Check time.

As Stephen Foskett essentially explains in his post VMware VAAI Storage Array Support in Plain English, VAAI was developed by VMware in cooperation of industry storage suppliers to address TWO issues:

1. Copy and Erase operations place a huge load on the servers, network and storage arrays
2. The SCSI reservation locking mechanism does not scale efficiently for large LUNs nor for large number of hosts sharing the same LUN(s)

What the Hitachi PR machine fails to mention is that moving the Bulk Zero and Bulk Copy workloads off of the server CPU is not the only benefit of a good VAAI implementation. In fact, with Done Right implementations like VMAX, moving these operations into the array allows the array to optimize the operations to further reduce the overhead and impact.
 

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

2.046: virtualizing hitachi math

I cannot resist. Forth-with a demonstrative specimen of fact-based FUD, from yours truly:

Earlier this week, Beth Pariseau posted an interview she had with Hu Yoshida (see Hitachi Data Systems' Yoshida talks Sun/Oracle, USP refresh and storage virtualization). Beth's last question in this interview provides some almost shocking insight into the actual number of deployments of Hitachi's virtualization capabilities on the USP-V:

SearchStorage.com: Do you have any numbers or percentages about customers virtualizing external storage?

Yoshida: Fifty percent of our controllers are virtualization enabled, and of those enabled, about 25% virtualize third-party storage.

Simple math thus says that roughly 12.5% of USP-V and –VM controllers are actually virtualizing 3rd party storage (25% of 50% = 12.5%).

(By the way, if we took Hu literally, we could assume that the 50% that are NOT "virtualization enabled" are in fact AMS' and the rest are USP-V's, thus making the percentage of USP-V and VMs that front 3rd party storage a mere 6.25%.)

Given all the blog posts that Hu has written for the past several years, extolling the virtues of virtualization, that number seems really, really small.

But, it must be true, for the very next day, HDS announced (and Hu blogs on) a new HDS Professional Services offering to "speed storage virtualization implementations." The basic premise of this offering? HDS is apparently finding that in a significant portion of their customer base (using Hu's words):

…the virtualization technologies become shelf ware…

So in effect, HDS (and Hu) now admit that the numbers they've been quoting for years that 50% of USP-Vs and VMs were actually using virtualization were bogus. Clear admission of the fact that they too have been avid practitioners of Making Stuff Up (MSU).

As PFC Gomer Pyle used to say: Surprise, surprise, surprise!

Also in this post, Hu also provides us with another example of Hitachi Math by using the results of a validated survey of USP-V customers to make claims that "86% of USP V and VM customers have increased their performance" as compared to "their prior environment."

NFW! 86% of people who bought YOUR NEW STUFF found that it ran faster than their OLD STUFF?

hold on now…wait just a minute!

Did that survey actually find that 14% of HDS' NEW STUFF customers say it actually ran SLOWER than their OLD STUFF?

OMG!

You just can't make this stuff up!

(Please do not try this at home – I am a trained professional!)

technorati tags: Hitachi Math,HDS,Hu Yoshida,UVM,customer adoption,shelfware,shelf ware,USP-V,USP-VM

2.041: pack light!

OK, I don't usually do this, but what the heck…someone sent me this today, and I couldn't resist:

Coming from me, this is inarguably FUD, irrespective of whether there is any relationship to the actual truth.

But you gotta admit it is kinda funny .

technorati tags: NetApp,NTAP,High Overhead,Low Performance,Zero Scalability

2.014: vendor/client relationships in everyday life

Another hilarious YouTube video found its way to my desk. This one presents three real-world vendor/client scenarios and how they might look if they were handled the way that some many all a lot of purchasers try to negotiate big-ticket deals.
 

Go ahead – laugh. It's ok…no matter which side of the deal you are on.

Of course, these gambits are anything but new. Heck, they've been around since even before J. Wellington Wimpy!

I'll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today!

technorati tags: sales,negotiations,purchasing,enterprise IT,government contracts,construction

2.012: how to mind the future of a mission-critical world

A couple of weeks ago, in the midst of Hitachi's recent green eggs and HHAM announcement, HDS bloggers Claus Mikkelsen and Michael Hay teamed up to assert that I have nothing better to do with my time than to comment on their blogs. Michael even went so far as to comment:

Claus I agree with your approach here, and I do wonder if our Boy Wonder, Barry, is a full time blogger for EMC without anything else to do.

After that slap-in-the-face, both Claus and Michael have has chosen to censor my comments on their respective blogs his blog, and it appears that Christophe Bertrand will no longer publish my comments either. [UPDATE 21 June 2009: Although he obviously agreed with Claus’ decision to censor me, Michael now says he hasn’t received any of my comments on his blog- I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt – for now.]

Was it something I said? 

Fortunately, the storage anarchist does have a day job.

In fact, the latest issue of the EMC.now magazine includes an article about how the Symmetrix Product Group stays closely connected with the requirements and future vision of its customers and prospects, and provides some insight about what I really do here at EMC. If you're interested, the article is How to mind the future of a mission-critical world and it can be found on page 18 of the on-line version or on page 10 of the PDF version of the EMC.now magazine.

In fact, this close customer interaction that the Symmetrix management team maintains is the real reason why the words "from a unique perspective" is included in my blog's masthead. I get to see the future of storage technology through the eyes of customers dealing with the here and now.

Customer insight is also why I can ask EMC's competitors the tough questions so quickly and precisely whenever they make an announcement – I actually DO live and breathe customer requirements for storage, and it really IS part of my job to understand if, when and how competitors are addressing the customer requirements I learn about daily. So as irritating as my questions are, I know that the competitors are getting these same questions from their prospects. And their bloggers have come to know that  that I won't hesitate to call them out on a BS answer – especially when they make stuff up or misrepresent the facts.

And if that makes me persona non grata, so be it. Anarchy cannot be censored!

By the way, there are lots of other interesting articles in this issue of EMC.now. Whether you are an EMC customer, partner, prospect or competitor, I encourage you to give it a thorough read. And if you'd like to discuss any of the content, feel free to post your thoughts and questions here.

I promise you won't be censored, even if I might not be able to answer all of your questions.

 

This is another post from the storage anarchist.

technorati tags: EMC,strategic planning,Symmetrix,V-Max,EMC.now,voice of the customer,TCE,mission-critical,storage strategy,HDS censorship

2.009: claus censors the anarchist's ham inquiries

By his own admission, Claus Mikkelsen over at HDS has censored a list of questions that I had the AUDACITY to post on his HAM blog posts.

Seems Claus (and HDS) don't want to answer any tough questions about HAM.

What are they hiding?

 

2.003: sgt. friday and the ibm flash competency debate

It appears that both Tony Pearson and Barry Whyte are wont to try to diffuse the debate I started in my ibm really really doesn't get flash post with yet more innuendo, misinformation and unsubstantiated fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD).

Which is all they can do, I guess, unless they are going to publicly explain in concrete terms why IBM is unable (or unwilling) to support the larger-capacity STEC ZeusIOPS drives in the DS8K that EMC has been shipping for Symmetrix since February 2009.

In the interest of those who really don't want to sift through the cruft to get to the reality behind the discussion, I outline for you here the simple facts of the debate:

1. EMC is shipping today the two largest-capacity enterprise-class flash drives available in the market – the STEC ZeusIOPS 4Gb/s Fibre Channel SLC-based drives in 200GB and 400GB capacities.
2. EMC refers to these drives as "Enterprise Flash Drives" (EFD) in recognition of their specific designs to support the availability and data integrity requirements of enterprise storage, and as opposed to the more common drives targeted at the server or laptop markets.
3. IBM reports to be shipping today the STEC ZeusIOPS 4Gb/s Fibre Channel SLC-based drives in 73GB and 146GB capacities only.
4. IBM calls its flash drives simply Solid State Drives (SSDs).
5. EMC's 200GB EFD and IBM's 146GB SSD are the same physical STEC ZeusIOPS drive, with 256GB of internal SLC NAND flash – the only difference between the two is that the EMC version provides more usable capacity from the same amount of flash.
6. EMC alone ships STEC's newest and largest ZeusIOPS 4GB/s FC drive with 512GB of SLC NAND, formatted for 400GB usable capacity.
7. EMC's 400GB EFD further reduces customer cost per usable GB, enabling customers to get more than twice the usable capacity from the same number of drives as IBM's largest SSD, or to use fewer 400GB EFDs to meet their capacity targets and thereby enjoy not only lower acquisition costs vs. the IBM DS8K, but reduced power, cooling and space requirements as well.
8. EMC asserts that the 200GB and 400GB formatting does not significantly reduce the practical life of either drive in any workload when used in EMC arrays, including pathological/artificial write-intensive workloads.
9. EMC stands behind this assertion with the same replacement and service warranty as is offered for both Fibre Channel and SATA-based hard disk drives in EMC storage arrays.
10. IBM has not yet explained publicly why it can not (or will not) offer similar capacities and the corollary cost savings on the DS8K.

Just the facts , ma'am.

This post is from the storage anarchist.

technorati tags: EMC,enterprise flash drive,EFD,SSD,solid state storage,STEC,ZeusIOPS,Symmetrix,DMX-4,V-Max,Tony Pearson,Barry Whyte,IBM,DS8000

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

1.042: modular storage - what's in a name?

OK. I did the last one. Now it's your turn.

What is the definition of modular storage?

It sure seems that I really got under the skins of the Dancing Giraffes over at NetApp with my "Flash Dance" expose of how slowly the competitors are embracing the value of flash technology.

First there was their uninformed challenge to the term Enterprise Flash Drives. Not surprisingly, everyone else (except NetApp) seems now to understand that indeed there is a sufficient differentiation among solid-state storage devices to justify the "enterprise" classification, just as we also distinguish enterprise disk drives.

The second salvo from NetApp comes in the form of a brandy-new blog, authored by a pool of NetApp engineers, although it seems Mike Riley has taken the lead role, authoring the first 3 posts. In the latest post, Mike seizes the opportunity to a) cast me as an angry villain, b) offer me a hug, and c) assert that the last economic downturn fostered the era of "modular storage" and the end of monolithic storage's world domination.

Hence my question: what the heck is "modular storage" (as you can see from that link, even Wikipedia doesn't seem to know).

Mike continues with an outlandish assertion that "Hardware offers zero differentiation".

I guess I can agree with Mike in the sense that we all can use the same parts to make our products. But there does seem to be rather significant differentiation based on what components we actually do choose to use.

For example, the fact that Symmetrix DMX4 natively supports EFDs today, while NetApp still doesn't support flash drives of any sort with their mainstream storage arrays is pretty highly differentiated.

EMC is delivering the value, while NetApp is bringing forth more people rappers dancers.

And seriously, I am interested in hearing how you'd characterize or define "modular storage" these days…does the term even have meaning any more?

Oh, and thanks for the hug, Mike. You'll never know how much I needed it this week!

technorati tags: modular storage,flash drives,EFDs,enterprise flash drives,EMC,Symmetrix,DMX4,NetApp

1.038: val - exposed

A blogger's credibility is all that stands between valuable insight and total irrelevance.

Credibility is built upon the integrity of truth and humility: the basis of arguments and opinions on facts, and the ability to admit when your facts or your conclusions are wrong. Over the past couple of years I've had the opportunity to help several Fellow Bloggers realize that their arguments were based on mistaken understandings, misleading information and even urban legends. I've also had the opportunity to have my own misunderstandings and misrepresentations called out by my readers and peers. My own credibility is fundamentally important to my core being, and so I hope I can get away with saying that I've done a pretty good job of admitting (and correcting) my mistakes, just as many of my fellow bloggers have had the fortitude and integrity to admit and correct theirs.

But I'm clearly not having total success in my on-going efforts to keep us all honest, as Chris Mellor explains in his careful and patient analysis of a tangle started last week by Fellow Blogger Val Bercovici over at NetApp.

Go ahead, take the time to read Chris' article – it's the sort of thing you wouldn't want to hear from me first.

1.027: unprotected: no thanks, michael...

What's up with this? Protected: No Thanks Chuck...

UPDATED Oct. 17, 2008: Access to the referenced post was originally blocked.  Michael reports it was just a glitch - there's no conspiracy here (even though it's not the first time it's happened). Bummer...that sorta spoils the fun now, doesn't it?

I think I'll leave this post up anyway, even though it won't make as much sense now that we all can read what he had to say...but now that I've read the post, I have to wonder if there's any Hitachi technology in Michael's blogging software?

Honestly, I was just discussing yesterday how SURPRISING it was to have Hu Yoshida actually respond to Chuck's post on the new AMS2000. I was so surprised, in fact, that my first reaction was that Hu had a ghost writer. Or perhaps someone had been coaching the Hitachi bloggers on the values of actually engaging out here in the blogosphere.

Turns out nothing has changed with Hu's blog - he still doesn't approve comments in a timely manner, nor does he ever actually engage in communications with other bloggers. Michael's comment on my blog this morning is the first I've ever seen from a Hitachi blogger - on ANY non-Hitachi blog.

Apparently Michael wanted to respond to Chuck also, just not necessarily to everyone (including Chuck - I asked, Mike didn't email Chuck the password).

Makes you wonder, doesn't it. Does Michael have something to say that only Hitachi lovers would understand? Or is his post riddled with harassment and abuse? Or maybe he realizes what he wrote really isn't all that important to anyone (use the DELETE key next time, Mikey).

And how did he distribute the password to those he DID want to read his super-special post?

By email, maybe? How Web 1.0.

Things just aren't the same over there at HDS since Jeremiah left.

Thankfully, Jeremiah is actively helping a lot of other corporates and bloggers to become more effective in this Web 2.x world we are transitioning through.

Web 3.0, here we come!

Oh. And Michael - some free advice: You might want to try engaging your readers instead of blocking them out...

 

P.S. - I've been rather swamped lately, so please accept my apologies for the lack of posts. Lots of things to talk about, just none that I can dash off as quickly as this one. I'll be back on a regular schedule soon, I promise!

1.009: fun with numbers (and charts)

One thing I've grown to depend upon over my past 13 months of blogging is that Fellow Blogger Tony Pearson will try and refute, twist and manipulate anything I say that could be construed as a challenge to IBM and/or its products. Guaranteed action/reaction.

It took him a couple of weeks to get around to responding to my post on GDDR vs. GDPS, but he didn't let me down.

And true to form, our resident Mr. Pennybags-lookalike spares no opportunity to misrepresent the facts in IBM's favor. Sure, you can run compile your own open-source version of Linux to run on IBM mainframe hardware as he says, but I sincerely doubt anyone would ever do that. That's awfully expensive hardware to be running generic home-brewed Linux on...

But fact is that you can't get IBM mainframe hardware from anywhere else but IBM, nor can you license the software necessary to run your z/OS-, z/VM-, z/VSE-, or z/TPF-based applications from anyone but IBM. And while GDPS might indeed support third party storage, the pre-requisite is that the storage vendor have licensed and implemented bug-compatible equivalents of PPRC and FlashCopy.

Hardly an "open system."

No, a real "open" version of GDPS would natively support TimeFinder and SRDF instead of the feature-limited IBM wanna-bee alternatives.

And though indeed EMC's GDDR supports only a subset of the capabilities of IBM's GDPS, that subset is pretty much 100% of what the vast majority IBM's GDPS customers are deploying - two site automated disaster restart for their geographically dispersed IBM z/OS-based Parallel Sysplexes running on IBM Series "z" hardware.

Yet GDDR costs SIGNIFICANTLY less to implement and maintain than IBM's GDPS for this same functionality. Does the same thing that most people need, for less. Plain, and simple...

To that fact, TonyP would have you believe that EMC is offering GDDR below cost - but you'll have to trust me on this one, nothing could be further from the truth.

No, the simple reality is that IBM has long been taking advantage of it's position as the sole-source provider to charge a massive premium for its mainframe products (hardware, software AND services). I'll go so far as to say that EMC's and IBM's costs to deploy their respective disaster restart solutions are probably very close to identical - IBM just charges more. A LOT more.

Which is why TonyP is throwing up all the FUD he can muster: he hopes to diffuse the very real threat to the exorbitant profits that GDPS has been delivering to IBM's bottom line.

Go figure....

 

1.001: this is like déjà vu all over again

Is it just me, or have IBM's storage execs suddenly started sounding like their mainframe execs used to a few decades ago?

Seems that every day someone else over there at Big Blue wants to go on record insisting that the best IT solution is one that is supplied by a single vendor - end-to-end integration, replace the "stickiness" of unique solutions with the "stickiness" of IBM software. And all that.

In Andy Monshaw's interview with eWeek.com, he makes it pretty clear that he believes that the best IT solution comes from a single vendor, with end-to-end integration. As in: buy your servers, your storage, your networking, your applications and your services all from IBM. Don't worry about vendor lock-in, because you'll be able to put IBM SVC kit in front of your old third party gear and do things the Blue Way with little or no hassle.

Oh, and really fast flash-based storage simply isn't good enough (go figure, since they don't have that in their portfolio). No, apparently (according to Andy) you're going to need to integrate flash into every aspect of your compute platform before you can gain any measurable value.

Bullship, I say to that: Bullship!

Andy goes on to say he no longer needs to "sweep the floor" - that an unintended benefit of the SVC is that customers no longer have to be locked into their storage platforms (as if they ever where - really).

But don't be fooled - despite the eloquent words, make no mistake: in Andy's vision, you'll still be handcuffed. He'll just paint whatever you have on the floor IBM Blue with his SVC spray paint.

It's what's best for the customer, he asserts.

In Andy's world, apparantely, there's nothing wrong with vendor lock-in, so long as you're wrapped from head to toe in IBM Blue.

Go figure! 

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!

 

0.072: wanna get away?

For those that haven't seen it, Southwest Airlines has been running an ad campaign called "wanna get away?" for the last year or so, depicting many of life's embarrassing moments when you just wish you could disappear. They even ran a "wanna get away?" contest for the best user-submitted  video over the past several months.

Unfortunately, Joe Tucci's entry missed the cut-off date:

 

This is in fact the actual video of the auspicious event chronicled by Dan Shaughnessy in yesterday's Boston Globe. You can see the rest of the videos from the EMC/Red Sox visit to Japan here.

UPDATE 03/31/2008: Joe "Fastball" Tucci was back in the office today, and one employee stopped to rib him in the cafeteria about his wild pitch. In true form for an ex-catcher, Joe grinned and replied "Yeah, but he should have caught it!".

Oh well, it probably would have been disqualified for being too similar to the original:

For those of us of in New England who have been living through the incessant repetition of Southwest's ad campaign throughout the entire Red Sox and Celtics seasons (in HD with Surround Sound, no less), the word that the contest is over is hopeful news that we'll soon see something different for the coming baseball season. 

Unfortunately, this year's Mohegan Sun commercial will probably have a rather detrimental effect on NESN's Red Sox viewership - especially since they tend to run the same commercial dozens of times each game.

Now THAT'S gonna make me wanna get away, for sure!

 

technorati tags: Joe Tucci,Joe & Oki,Joe Tucci Video,Wanna Get Away?,Joe's baseball gaff,Red Sox Japan,EMC,EMC Japan,Southwest

0.071: changes in latitudes, changes in attitudes

I took off for a week-long sojourn to the Conch Republic [history] last week, where I celebrated the half-century mark of my life with friends and family on St. Patrick's Day .

It couldn't have been better - from the boat drinks by the pool and the strolls down Duval St. in the unseasonably warm (and humid) weather, to an afternoon listening to Michael McCloud and sucking down Land Shark lager at Schooner Wharf, to the tours of the homes of Hemingway, Truman, Audubon and more butterflies than you can possibly imagine, to watching some of the most picturesque sunsets I've ever seen from Mallory Square and Fort Taylor State Park. And then there were the dinners at Louie's Backyard, Blue Heaven (in the company of chickens), Salute' and El Siboney (twice!). Not to mention the night life! [link intentionally omitted ]

Yes, Key West is a great place to turn 50, even if you're NOT a pirate (did I mention that it was Spring Break?)

Amazingly, and even though I did bring my laptop, I was able to resist the temptation to respond to the storage news of the week. With all the R&R I was enjoying in Margaritaville, it was a struggle to keep my fingers off the keyboard (NOT!).

Something about the weather just made it all seem so...unimportant!

But trust me, the week's events didn't go by without notice...
 

0.064: meet bob and joe

You may have run across these two already, but Bob and Joe are two rising superstars in the world of storage administration, and there's a lot of things we all can learn from these guys.

You know, things like "A Mind Is A Terrible Thing to Waste" (ad slogan quoted respectfully in honor of Black History Month).

So grab some popcorn, set aside a few minutes on your weekly timecard for OTJ training and tune in to these soon-to-be-classic edutorials (and if you only watch one, I recommend it be the last one):

Bob and Joe: Fun With Tape
 

Bob and Joe: Energy Efficiency
 

Bob and Joe: Mainframe Show and Tell
 

Oh, and I am very sorry, but I cannot promise that there won't be more of these in the future.

 

technorati tags: viral video,viral marketing,EMC,Symmetrix,Mainframe,Mainframe Storage,Energy Efficiency,Green IT,Tape is Dead

0.061: swinging from the sidelines

He Hu Shall Not Be Named has returned from his vacation in Aloha-land to learn that EMC has announced something of which he knows nothing about. Predictably, he has wasted no time demonstrating his total lack of knowledge about enterprise flash drives in his latest blog post.

Makes me wonder what the "CTO of Hitachi Data Systems" really does, since he obviously isn't following emerging new storage technologies all that closely.

Nor did he even take the time to do any research before posting, choosing instead to throw wildly uninformed punches at the technology in an attempt to defend Hitachi being caught flat-footed.

Not surprisingly, HHSNBN even manages to drag virtualization into the discussion. Now, is it just me, or does it seems like he can't write a post without using the V-word? I'm beginning to think he must use a customized version of the Ergonomic Keyboard for Pirates that has been making the rounds of late (pictured at right). On his version, though, the "Avast" key types "Virtualization."

<Shift>VIRTUALIZATION<Space>RRRR<shift>!!!<Enter>

Swinging from the sidelines

Clearly lacking a relevant clue about the the technology (and unable to buy a vowel), HHSNBN alleges that anything NAND can do, DRAM can do better and faster. Which is true, I guess, if you include consuming your IT budget in that comparison. Because as expensive as SLC NAND flash is today, it's already an order of magnitude or two cheaper than high-performance DDR2 SDRAM. Must be that Hitachi Math thing again.

So I'll just tack that one on the bulletin board right alongside "Intermixing, slower, less reliable SATA or FATA disks in tier 1 storage systems will impact that system’s performance and availability", which was HHSNBN's excuse for not supporting SATA in the USP. Right up until Hitachi Japan added SATA support to the USP-V at the end of last year, that is.

Some words of advice seem appropriate here:

It is far better to remain silent and be thought a fool
than to speak out and remove all doubt.

(the debate rages over who actually said this first)

the truth about enterprise flash drives

For the record, the enterprise flash drives that EMC announced last week are not the same as the consumer flash drives that is going into Airbooks, laptops and IBM blade servers. And they won't silently lose data (they'd be pretty useless if they did) - like disk drives they remap suspected bad blocks before they cause a problem. They'll probably outlive the practical life of the storage array before they wear out - the nominal operating life of SLC NAND flash typically far exceeds the rated minimal 100,000 writes per cell, and when you add in wear leveling across nearly 2x extra capacity within the drive, they will outlive all but the pathological 100% write forever use case.

Yes, enterprise flash drives use SDRAM buffers to accelerate writes, with both internal and Symmetrix-supplied backup power to protect that memory against unexpected loss of power, be it momentary or an extended outage. They are shielded from electrical and mechanical interference in a disk-drive form factor. And they do indeed provide extensive status reporting (basically the Fibre Channel & SCSI equivalent of S.M.A.R.T.), affording the array the ability to be proactive in protecting customer data.

And you don't have to take my word on that.

Thankfully, the folks over at Wikibon have taken a much more thoughtful approach at evaluating last week's Symmetrix announcements. After what was obviously a lot of actual research, they today presented a comprehensive review of enterprise-class flash drives, the customer benefits they can deliver and the practical implications that they will likely have on the entire storage industry over the coming years. I encourage you to read and comment on their review.

Oh - it's aptly titled EMC Lands a Haymaker.

0.057: of blind men and an elephant

For some reason, IBM's brand marketing dude (and Fellow Blogger) Tony Pearson has taken it upon himself to single handedly justify and defend IBM's recently announced acquisition of XIV. (I don't know, maybe its his job, or something.)

In yesterday's salvo he attempts to clarify the alchemy of blob-based replication and recovery. But alas, his logic still doesn't hold up: there's nothing in Nextra that protects against data loss from the inevitable double drive failure, no matter how how hard he tries to mix in irrelevant "facts" to redirect the conversation.

But I'll have to admit he floored me with his "observation" (buried within the follow-up comments) that cosmic rays basically defeat any potential benefits of RAID6! I guess that explains why the DS8000 still doesn't support RAID6 or support drives larger than 500GB, since the DS8000's read memory isn't mirrored and there's no error detection/correction like the SNCDND logic that is utilized in all generations of Symmetrix DMX.

Go figure!

But what shocked me the most was Tony's assertion that SATA drives are cheap enough that the Web 2.0 world can in fact afford not only to mirror them, but also use that mirrored capacity at less than 50% full!

Now, I don't know about you, but in the world I'm living in, nothing could be further from the truth.

0.056: the emperor and his new clothes

Oh my. It seems I have ruffled the feathers of fellow blogger Tony Pearson.

Seems he can't understand why one little voice would dare disrupt the majestic unveiling of the emperor's new wardrobe, especially since it was crafted by none other than the master magician of storage himself, and now forms the cornerstone of IBM's newest invention - Web 2.0 Storage!

Move over, Al Gore! We need some room on that there podium!

My apologies Tony, sir, I mean not to offend, sir, but merely to point out that the emperor, well sir, the emperor...umm...you see sir, the clothes he's wearing, sir...well, umm...they aren't new, sir! Nor are they made of magical thread, sir. In fact, sir, yes indeed, sir...they look almost exactly like the clothes EMC made 6 years ago when they created the CAS market. Oddly similar, sir, as anyone who looks can plainly see!

But please, sir, I mean not to offend.

But apparently, sir, you did. The implications of the your response are repugnant and unprofessional.
 

0.040: where's the spc disclaimer?

There's been lots of feedback and response to my post earlier this week on Hitachi's USP-V SPC-1 results. Most of it has been very insightful, including additional observations by several people that I only scratched the surface on the inconsistencies between the various tested platforms, etc. From the responses, I am encouraged that many of you are actually taking the time to more thoroughly research and understand exactly what the SPC does, and does not, actually mean.

Importantly, the SPC benchmarks are not a test of whether a platform is "enterprise" or not. Nor is it appropriate to use the results as the basis claim superiority within any such category. In fact, the SPC tests are intentionally agnostic to the "class" of storage, even while they are intentionally cache-hostile benchmarks (noting that most "enterprise" arrays do typically have lots of cache and do derive performance benefits from large cache, which the SPC tests try to factor out of the results).

So since the SPC doesn't define a criteria or measurement of "enterprise" any such claims of "superiority within class" are merely  examples of Bad Blogketing, in the same category as Hitachi Math- unsubstantiated, unverifiable, and bearing no real relationship to reality.

In fact, the SPC disclaimer, taken directly from the specifications of the SPC-1 tests, says exactly this.
 

0.026: free speech, blogketing and mojo

Robin Harris has gotten around to reading some of my posts on blogketing (beware of blogketing and blogketing and revenue recognition) and my belief that it is the responsibility of corporate bloggers to comply with the same standards as for any other marketing collateral. Robin seems to have taken issue with my position, slinging the First Amendment back at me. In doing so, Robin has effectively twisted my position into one that bears little resemblance to what I said or meant.

And he has every right to do that, without question, and we all defend that right daily.

But the point I have tried to make is NOT that bloggers can't freely express their opinions in their blogs, whether they blog on a corporate-sponsor site or not. No, my point is that when you blog under the banner of your company's logo, your blog must then be held to a higher standard for factual representation of your company and its products (note the clear distinction between "opinion" and "product facts" here).

Apparently, most of you agree with me (so far, anyway).

I sat down this morning and wrote a response to Robin that was simply too long to post as a comment on his blog. So although I really don't intend for my own blog to erode into an ongoing debate on blog-etiquette, I did open this can of worms, so I guess I have no choice but to chew.

So my response to Robin becomes this morning's post...

0.025: heroes or hiro's?

News Flash! Mr. T has reportedly been seen walking the sidewalks of Wall St, under the watchful escort of Hitachi Data Systems’ PR agency.

Now why would Hitachi Data Systems be parading an aged, almost-forgotten actor-nee-comic book hero around the offices of prominent Wall St. financial analysts? I mean, it’s not like he’s any sort of expert on storage technology, or technology of any sort, for that matter. As I recall, Mr. T's character was the muscle of the A-Team, not the brains; he was they guy you sent in for a round of intimidation when logic, good looks or the uncontrolled psychotic couldn't do the trick.

So why has Hitachi hooked up with Mr. T: The "T" in I.T. again? Heck, being a Japanese company, you’d think Hitachi would spring for a hero that was a bit more contemporary.

Like maybe Hiro.

0.021 the case against standardized (performance) testing

Fellow blogger Tony Pearson has just completed a week-long series on the values and merits of standardized storage performance benchmarking, in a not-so-subtle attempt to justify his recent assertion that a SPC-2 win for the SVC has awe-inspiring relevance to customers. And he's done so in an eloquent, perhaps even masterful manner, deftly leveraging the subtleties and nuances of the English language (who knew?) to make his case.

But if you ask me, he's failed miserably. Unless his readers get lost in the misdirection and fail to realize that his metaphors are totally unrelated to the world of storage performance. In fact, his tutorial underscores the problems associated with standardized testing.

Elsewhere in the blogosphere, I have offered my own personal perspective on standardized benchmarking, which boils down to this:

• Standardized benchmarking oversimplifies the complex interactions that make up a real-world environment --the requirement for "controlled and repeatable" forces standardized benchmarks to exclude the chaos of random, but normally occurring, events and overheads, often masking or even intentionally subverting key differentiating capabilities of the test targets
   
• The inherent quest to be best in standardized benchmarks inevitably drives participants in to optimize their test targets for the test
   
• There is very little documented correlation between standardized testing results and the intended real-world application of the test target, and most people don't understand what the tests actually measure
   
• The inbred survival instincts of humans leads us to subconsciously establish relationships and hierarchies between similar objects, and in the absence of in-depth situational/contextual understanding, we will assign "better" based solely on whatever limited data points are available to us

I know - heady assertions, and my opinions all. But note that I harbor these opinions for ANY standardized test, be it the SPC, TPC, MPG, EER, SAT or every state's equivalent of MCAS. And my reasoning is simple:

Standardized testing homogenizes comparisons to a meaningless baseline that masks the unique strengths of the test targets, be they cars, servers, storage arrays or high school students. Unless you fully understand the test itself and the relevant requirements of your own application of the test target, you can draw no real conclusions on how standardized test results apply to your expected results.

So when Tony tries to convince readers that the SPC is like MPG, well...you know me, I gotta take exception.

0.020: do corporate blogs = marketing collateral?

Seems my investigative blogging was picked up by a couple of tech journalists this week, and suddenly I have a broader readership. Props to both Chris Mellor and Beth Pariseau for the traffic, if not necessarily for their perspectives .

I know that many of you won't believe this, but setting the record straight wasn't the primary objective of my articles on blogketing. My intent really was (and still is) to spotlight the notion of Corporate Blogging as a marketing tool, and whether or not it should be held up to the same credibility and liability standards as any other form of marketing or advertising. Over the past week, I've gotten feedback on both sides of that coin, both directly and even in a couple of other blogs.

My position is pretty clear - I think Corporate Blogs (the ones that show up on a company's web site under the company's logo) are just as much marketing collateral as everything else on those web sites, and thus are to be held to the same level of accuracy and professionalism. This despite any disclaimers that may appear on the blog - if the company is paying to promote the blog, they are by definition endorsing the views of the blogger.

The alternate position is best summed up by this bit of (edited) feedback that I received this week: "Everyone in the blogosphere knows, or at least should know, that a blog is just the un-edited voice of a single person, and many posts are made without spell-checking, fact-checking or grammar-checking. [...] Blog posts are not technology publications, magazine articles, press releases, or other collateral that follow a more rigorous editing process."

What do you think?

Opinion Polls & Market Research

<Direct link to this poll on Vizu>

Feel free to comment, either here on on the poll itself.

0.017: can you take back your blogketing?

I noticed this morning that Hu Yoshida has updated his "Take Back Your Storage" blog entry.

July 9th version (thanks, Google!):

[ . . . ] Up to now, thin provisioning has only been available from some modular storage or filer vendors, now it is available from Hitachi in their Dynamic Provisioning service on the enterprise class USP V. This same feature is available on the HP XP 24000 and the SUN ST9990 V. Hitachi also makes thin provisioning available on their HNAS high performance NAS system. [ . . . ]

July 14th version:

[ . . . ] Up to now, thin provisioning has only been available from some modular storage or filer vendors, now it is available from Hitachi in their Dynamic Provisioning service on the enterprise class USP V. This same feature is available on the HP XP 24000 and the SUN ST9990 V. Currently Dynamic provisioning is only available for internal storage, but will soon be available for external storage that is virtualized within the USP V. Hitachi also makes thin provisioning available on their HNAS high performance NAS system. [ . . . ]

Was it something I said? 

0.015: blogketing and revenue recognition

A reader of yesterday's blogketing post pointed out that US Federal accounting rules (FASB?) do not allow for revenue to be recognized until the product has actually been delivered as announced and described in supporting collateral (press releases, spec sheets, etc.).

Now I'm not an accountant, so I'm not saying this is gospel. But it seems to make sense. If I understand the deferral rules, the deal is something like this:

If the product itself is 100% independent from anything else (e.g., Microsoft Office for Windows, etc.), then revenues for the product itself must be deferred until the product delivers all of the publicly announced and marketed capabilities. However, if the product is part of a larger system, the entire revenue for both the product and the larger system cannot be recognized until the entire system does everything that it has been announced, promoted or sold to do (i.e., you can't sell a car without tires). I've been told that this clause was added at some point because it would be obviously impossible to police every transaction to determine whether the system was purchased for a specific feature or not, so the rule just says something like "if any feature isn't delivered, the revenue recognition for the entire system must be deferred until all the features are generally available and/or delivered."

0.014: beware of blogketing

Hu Yoshida has done another bang-up job of explaining the utilization challenge bearing down on customer budgets in his latest 2-part bloguturial (my contraction of "blogger's tutorial"). In the first part, he does a great job of outlining the problem, and in part 2, he credibly describes a vision for a solution. In fact, if you removed all the references to Hitachi products, those two blog entries should probably be mandatory reading for every storage architect in both mid-tier and enterprise IT shops (and probably their suppliers as well).

It could have been that good - if only Hu had separated fact from vision.

Written in the style of a print-media advertorial (a contraction of "editorial advertising," where ad space is purchased to run an editorial-like assessment of a product or service), the blogutorial is emerging as a new, and so-far unchecked marketing tool. Importantly, truth-in-advertising laws require published advertorials to be plainly marked as "paid advertisements" (usually in tiny font in the header where you might not notice it). Apparently this isn't so for blogketing ("blog marketing")- even when done by official corporate spokespersons in the public forum of the Internet. Apparently the blog-world is unfettered by truth-in-advertising rules.

This concerns me, because it allows bloggers to act like the snake-oil vendors of the past, getting away unchecked with unsubstantiated claims and misleading inferences of undeliverable capabilities.

Hu's blogutorial is a prime case in point. The way he litters the product references throughout the two articles would lead the uninformed reader to believe that Hitachi's newly-announced (and yet to ship) Dynamic Provisioning solves all the problems Hu describes. And in fact, this is clearly his intent - the two blogs are nothing more than thinly veiled marketing collateral written by an authoritative industry expert and delivered in the latest marketing medium, the Corporate Blog.

But the complete lack of any disclaimers begs for someone to call "foul."

Enter the storage anarchist...

0.011: strategies for world domination

Like many of you, I've been watching the recent discussions about who stole what from whom with more than a little bit of glee. Chris Mellor started it, Tony Pearson responded, Kirby piled on with innuendo of similar BigCo misbehavings in the past, and Storagezilla took the time to correct Tony's obvious misunderstanding of how Invista is packaged and delivered (as an integrated solution, Tony, not as a kit of bits). Oh, and then last Friday Kirby whined a bit more (guess BigCo's lawyers forgot to get a gag order, huh?).

Such fun.

In parallel, and seemingly unrelated to this, there have been a slew of assertions about who is really #1 in storage. Tony and IBM claimed world dominance in overall storage (if you include tape), HP claimed #1 in overall disk storage, Chris granted EMC #1 in external storage, and Kirby asserted that the real overall winner in disk storage was Seagate. Mark Lewis clarified the obvious and questioned IBM's motivations. And of course, the rest of the wanna-be's all chimed in with their own context-ridden slice of IDC's concoction of data-that-would-be-useful-if-only-it-were-verifiably-true. I must admit that NetApps' "fastest growing in multiple shrinking markets" announcement left me a bit confused, especially coming on the heels of their forecasted 6-7% downturn in revenues for calendar Q2. Given that calendar Q2 is historically stronger than Q1, I don't think these press release necessarily add up to a positive for NetApp shareholders.

This all followed by a couple of rounds of marketing 101 training between Chuck and Kirby. (Psst. Kirby - the colloquialism is "nursing at the corporate trough," even if it is occasionally pronounced "troth"!)

Pure entertainment.

But today's blog entry isn't about those shenanigans.

No, I thought I'd write about what's behind all these seemingly unconnected discussions - the motivations of the leading storage suppliers that drive us to compete to be king-of-the-hill. A look into the unspoken (but quite apparent) strategies being employed to get to the top. And my anarchist's view of what they/we are all missing.

Ready? Read on...

0.003: beware the blogger: urban folklore at work

The trouble with tribbles (er) blogging is that you just never know who (or what) to believe. Too bad there isn't an automated BS Detector that could tell you in advance when something simply isn't true.

Usually, these misrepresentations result in little measurable or lasting damage. But occasionally they take on a life of their own. Left unchecked, they get repeated so often and with such conviction that people actually start to believe them.

In many (hopefully most) cases, such untruths may be unintentional and accidental. These usually get caught early, and before they are unwittingly repeated far and wide. I'm sure that sooner or later we all get caught in a misunderstanding or even the context-changing typo here and there.

But all too often, these untruths have every appearance of being intentional. There are those who stop at nothing to make a point, and who have no qualms in adjusting the facts to support their position. And others will resort to the age-old marketing tactic of comparing their TODAY product to the competition's YESTERDAY product in their quest to establish the perception of radical superiority.

And some people are so durn good at twisting truths that their assertions become part of the urban folklore sometimes faster than facts and realities do.

Who ya gonna call?