the storage anarchist

2.031: manual or automatic?

My, but hasn't EMC's FAST announcement generated a lot of discussion this week?

I've been very busy out in the land of social media, answering questions on Twitter and clarifying things for a broad range of bloggers – most supportive, others well, not so much.

In the midst of a rather respectful tete-a-tete with Pete Gerr over on his HDS "Ars Indicium" (the art of information) blog, I suddenly had a revelation about what distinguishes Symmetrix vs. the USP-v (et al).

It's the different approaches we each take to addressing customer problems.

Now, to be sure, we actually sell to many of the exact same customers, often competing head-to-head for business. So you'd figure we're both seeing the same requirements from these customers. We each have our own well-established technology and storage platforms, and we both get our drives and components from pretty much the same place. I'll stop short of saying that our software does the same thing, though, because this is where it is that I suddenly realize we really differentiate.

But it's not what you think. No, it's not about Virtual Provisioning vs. Dynamic Provisioning or SRDF vs. TrueCopy.

I think it is really something more fundamental than that: Hitachi Ltd. builds tools that customers can use to solve problems, while EMC provides automation to solve those same problems.

We're automatic, they're manual.

Let me explain what I mean…

2.019: perspectives on bulls and sheep

In his book "How to Castrate a Bull: Unexpected Lessons on Risk, Growth, and Success in Business," Dave Hitz uses his real-life experience of castrating bulls as a metaphor for the courage required to take big risks in business. If you haven't yet read it, I encourage you to do so (although I wish Dave would release it as an audiobook, hint hint).

A couple of weeks ago I ran across this TED video where Mike Rowe of the Dirty Jobs show on The Discovery Channel relates a story about his unexpected experience working as a sheep farmer. If you're a fan of the show, you know that most of the Dirty Jobs that Mike undertakes also require a healthy dose of courage – Mike's day job is essentially to live Dave's metaphor day in and day out.

But this video caught my attention because where Dave focused on the challenge of the task, Mike's focus is on his learnings from completing it.

The entire segment is about 20 minutes long, but you'll get most of the point by about the half-way point.

WARNING: while this video doesn't include actual on-the-job footage, it is quite graphic. 
If you are at all squeamish about animal husbandry, I recommend that you just skip it.

Click here if you do not see the video above

DISCLAMER: I have never used a knife on live cattle or sheep

That said, and with all due respect to Dave, I think the shepherd's job requires just a teensy bit more intestinal fortitude. Don't you?.

For your convenience, here are links to the Wikipedia pages on Anagnorisis and Paripeteia
 

This is yet another thought-provoking perspective from the storage anarchist!
 

technorati tags: Dave Hicks,How to Castrate a Bull,Mike Rowe,Dirty Jobs,The Discovery Channel,castrate a lamb,anagnorisis,paripeteia,courage,fortitude,intrepidity,NTAP,NetApp,TED

2.018: perspectives on compellent, 3par and others

Last week, Chris Mellor reported on revenue growth of Compellent in his "sparkling less brightly" post. At the end of that post, Chris included the following chart comparing Compellent's growth with that of perceived peers 3PAR, EqualLogic and Data Domain (chart used here with Chris' permission):

Although Compellent's slow-and-steady growth isn't all that surprising, I for one was somewhat taken aback by the relatively poor performance of 3PAR. Especially given all the bluster and bravado that routinely comes our way from both David Scott (3PAR's president) and Marc Farley (3PAR's resident cheerleader cum rapper cum blogger) – listening to them in blissful ignorance of the facts would have you believe they're a lot bigger and more relevant than they really are. In fact, it strikes me that there's a disproportionate amount of noise coming from a storage company that still hasn't found its way onto the exponential growth curve after more than 10 years in business.

Add in the news that COPAN is struggling for relevance and ONSTor has been bought for pennies on the dollar, and the emerging estimates that Pillar Data is operating somewhere around the $44M annual revenue mark, and you get a pretty clear picture of chaos down at this end of the market.

read on for more perspectives…

2.017: perspectives on data domain

I’ve been collecting some personal perspectives about goings on in our industry over the past few weeks, and I thought I’d post a few of them in a series format.

So without further ado, here’s the first of several “perspectives”:

data domain

Other than a little tweedling (twitter needling) of a certain over-confident blogger over in NetApp-land, I have pretty much stayed out of this whole DDUP $ummer $aga.

But Steve Duplessie’s post today (EMC’s clever Data Domain integration effort) caught my attention, especially since I have enjoyed two personal interactions with the Data Domain folks in the past 6 days that I think are relevant.

The first was at EMC’s all-hands Quarterly Review last Thursday. The summer quarterly usually includes an outdoor cookout, and this year the weather was particularly nice. As I was standing chatting with some co-workers over by the ice cream trucks, out of nowhere Joe Tucci walked up to say hi and to introduce us to Frank Slootman. My first words where “Welcome to EMC, Frank,” to which he responded something like “Thanks, couldn’t be happier to be here.”

My guess is he had no reason to suspect that indeed I am an ex-smoker.
 

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

1.043: the fine art of strategy

If you stopped by to engage in the latest round of storage blogger smackup, I'm sorry to disappoint.

Today's post is about "strategy."

Or, more honestly, it is about the right-brained approach to strategic thinking. As opposed to the analytical left-brained approach to strategic analysis that Michael E. Porter codified in his definitive works, Competitive Strategy and Competitive Advantage.

Why?

Well, first, because a recent commenter here on my blog accused me of "hiding" the fact that my job is in fact Chief Strategy Officer for EMC's Symmetrix Product Group. That accusation came with stinging indictments that I was intentionally misleading my readers by posing as an "independent storage analyst" while deriding competitor products and praising EMC's.

Those of you who know that i am anything but objective
can stop laughing now, before you hurt yourself.

I realize that while most of my readership is well aware that I live, breathe and bleed Symmetrix, not everyone does. Some of my more recent audience may not have taken the time to go back and review my earlier posts which pretty clearly define the platform from whence I pontificate. If you are one of those, I encourage you to enter the way-back machine and review my very first post, where I introduced myself and my context. And if you're interested, you can find all of my prior posts organized by date and categories in the archives.

As to the reader who accused me of hiding my identity, I will note that he actually contacted me by way of my Linked-In profile, which is plainly included in the sidebar on the right. I also include links to my About page, my Facebook profile and several on-line communities where you can learn more about me with a few clicks than you could have ever known about any trade journalist or industry analyst 10 years ago.

I am not attempting to hide anything; it's all there, in plain daylight.

The second reason for this post is in response to the myriad of people who ask me how I came to be a "strategist" and how they too might prepare for such a position. It's a question that used to be hard for me to answer, but I recently have begun to understand myself what it takes.

And I'd like to share a little of what I've learned…and how I learned it…

1.033: the end of the world

I found this little flash dittie whilst searching for clip art for this article, and I just couldn't resist posting it (warning - strong language):
 

attribution unknown

If you've been reading the storage blogs over the past couple of weeks, you might be inclined to believe that the end of the world is near. Especially if your world has anything to do with EMC - it seems like everyone lately is gleefully predicting the impending demise of EMC.

Why is everybody always picking on EMC!
 

1.021: bass-ackwards marketing

A coworker sent me this link a while back with a suggestion that I might want to use it in my blog. At the time, I really had no idea what to do with it, but now I think I do.

First, the link. Go ahead - click it, then come back.

That's a prime example of bass-ackwards marketing, if you'll excuse the pun. I mean really, who'd ever market anything as a "Real P.O.S." - even if it actually IS a POS?

Over the last several weeks, we've been witness to what could just be the biggest bass-ackwards marketing move ever. Who would have thought that IBM would stealth launch the GA of exciting new products like the first IBM-branded XIV Storage System, the brand-new DS5000 Storage System and a whole suite of DS8000 enhancements? And then, amidst the ruckus that Chuck and I seem to have started filling the void created by IBM's marketing department, IBM puts on a full-court press push to promote a science experiment using NAND flash behind an unsupported configuration of SVC nodes - a configuration that they publicly admit won't be available to customers for at least 9-12 months. Complete with IBM blogger air cover from BarryW and from TonyP. Meanwhile both  remain deathly silent about everything else.

Promote the stuff you can't buy yet, and say nothing about the new stuff that you CAN buy.

Seems so...Alice-in-Wonderlandish, doesn't it?

Now, if I'm reading the tea-leaves (and TonyP's intentional hint) correctly, the press is supposed to take the Blue Pill and show up at the System and Storage Networking Technical Symposium on September 8-10 in Montpelier, France to get the scoop on all this, and more. And the press seems to have calmed down once they received their invitations (mine must have gotten lost in the mail).

Curiouser and curiouser, IBM's marketing team has even co-opted "Information Infrastructure" - a term near-synonymous with EMC - for the title of their Symposium, calling it the "New Enterprise Forum: Information Infrastructure."

Thanks for the plug!

UPDATE 4:45pm EDT Sept 3, 2008: Changed above link to search for the possessive complete string "EMC Information Infrastructure" - returns about 25,200 Google hits, while "IBM Information Infrastructure" returns merely 7,120-ish hits.

technorati tags: IBM, XIV, DS8000, DS5000, EMC Information Infrastructure, bass ackwards

0.044: not dead yet, I guess

I feel somewhat like the poor sot at the beginning of the classic Monty Python and the Holy Grail, having tossed my poor plague-ridden uncle into the death-cart -- only to have him whimper "I'm not dead, yet!"

Seems I may have prematurely declared the demise of the DS8000 in my prior blognostications. Oh, the DS6000 has clearly succumbed to a myriad of afflictions, but there's been a growing rumble that there will be an update to the DS8000 Turbo announced on Tuesday, October 23^rd. I'd been hearing about this from my inside-EMC channels for a while now, but today I received what I will conclude is external confirmation in the form of this week's Peer Incite review over at Wikibon.

An excerpt:

On Tuesday October 23^rd the Wikibon community will be reviewing an announcement from one of the world's leading storage suppliers.

The Wikibon community will explore implications for customers, especially emphasizing near term procurement actions. [name redacted], a well known and highly regarded analyst for the storage industry will be the lead analyst on the call.

Each week, Wikibon hosts Peer Incite, a free, unbiased research and advisory call on important storage topics. Please join other practitioners, technologists and consultants as we explore critical storage industry issues.

Now honestly, I don't know how critical this could be in real life, especially given that [name redacted] isn't necessarily all that "unbiased." But if you want to see what all the fuss is about, you'll have to register to participate over at WikiBon.

 

0.018: no more bad things after 2011

Good news for those of us who have been following the wide-ranging discussions on the risks and perils of thin provisioning over the past month or two: it appears that all the "Bad Things" we've been discussing could be avoided altogether if we all simply unite and elect John Edwards as President of the USA next year.

John Edwards Vows to End All Bad Things (on The Onion)

Note that John doesn't specifically list "runaway demand for unavailable storage" or "double drive failure in a RAID 5 thin storage pool" as Bad Things to be eradicated, but maybe we could get a petition together to include these under either the "soil erosion" or the "not having enough spending money" categories. Worst case, we would probably be at least partially covered from the most damaging risks by the elimination of "procrastination," although that's not necessarily the root of all Bad Things related to thin provisioning.

I expect Edwards campaign contributions from 3par, DataCore, Equallogic, NetApp and Hitachi to start pouring in overnight (EMC is not included owing to its strong Republican party ties).

I sincerely apologize to my readers, I just couldn't resist. I'll have an update on the DMX-4 announcement by week's end, I promise.

0.016: storage blognostications

From time to time, several of us engineers will get together for an hour or two of non-linear thinking, just for the heck of it. In the office, we call these Innovation Events - the sort of brainstorming sessions I'm sure you've all participated in. But we also hold special outside the office sessions, where our focus areas tend not to be on customer problems, new technologies or The Next Big Thing.

And yes - there is usually alcohol involved in off-site these mental calisthenics events. It is indeed very convenient that we have a tavern virtually in the middle of our South Street campus in Hopkinton so that we can stop off for a quick, ah ... brainstorming session on our way home. And in fact, the establishment is owned and operated by EMC'ers no less - a pretty smart bunch, those O'Tooles.

Anyhoo, after the third beer or so, what does the conversation inevitably turn towards (after all the Red Sox gossip has been exhausted, that is)? Simple -- it's EMC's competition -- and what people think they're going to do next.

And the more beer, the better the prognostications .

Try these on for size ...

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...

0.004: get ready for tagma-too!

Word's out - there's soon to be a new USP from our pals at Hitachi/HP/Sun. And I'm sure you didn't hear about it first from me.

It's about time.

Hitachi had been on a pretty set schedule of bringing new high-end platforms to market just about exactly every 24 months. And in fact, it seems many customers were specifically told in early 2006 to expect the next-gen "Tagma" in the September 2006 (ish) time frame, almost exactly 2 years after the original USP12000/9990v was announced.

That would make next week's (rumored expected) announcement just about 8 months late. Makes one wonder what when wrong - what happened in 2006 to cause such a delay? A delay so long that Hitachi's Wall Street Minions were out in force late last summer, admitting to anyone who'd listen that the company would likely suffer significant loss of market share through calendar Q4'06 and Q1'07.

Although the numbers aren't all in yet for Q1'07, the predicted loss of storage market share the last couple of quarters looks very likely to have been correct. In fact, estimates I've seen indicate that IBM's DS8000 surpassed Hitachi's USP+NSC sales in the high-end for the first time back in Q4'06.

After such a long wait, I'm pretty sure what the folks over at Hitachi are thinking right about now...

...Welcome to the machine!