the storage anarchist

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?