the storage anarchist

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?

 

1.061: the voice of the customer

Listening to the voice of the customer is good advice for us all…(be sure to read the comments):

techmute.com: Response to Tony’s V-Max Questions

 

Thanks, Matt – There's clearly room for improvement on EMC's communications to some audiences, but I think you received almost 100% of the intended message.

In answer to Matt's lingering uncertainty in questions 9 & 10 at the end of his 1st comment response to TonyA:

9. Being purpose-built for the its current (and future) functionality, rest assured that the performance of Symmetrix V-Max wide-striping and SRDF are not restricted by the Virtual Matrix Architecture…in fact, most customers will realize improvements to both relative to DMX4.
10. Best practices for Symmetrix V-Max were made available simultaneously with General Availability of the system. Although not radically different from DMX4 for existing features, best practices for new capabilities were developed and validated with the assistance of Beta Sites and in-house CSE expertise.

technorati tags: EMC,Symmetrix V-Max,Virtual Matrix Architecture,blogger-for-hire,Tony Asaro

1.049: would a "sixth sense" make us more rational?

Apologies for the off-topic diversion, but I can’t resist making a mashup of two topics I found this morning on TED.com.

If you don’t already know, TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader. Their annual conferences have been the platform for the initial introductions of some incredible inventions and ideas, and they have made hundreds of videos of earth-moving TEDtalks available to the public (their 400th TEDtalk was released today this week – you can get them ALL on your iPod here – apologies in advance, Martin).

If you don’t follow TED, you should. You’ll be amazed by the scope of the topics they present. (subscribe to their blog, podcast and vidcasts here).

The first subject to catch my eye was a teaser on TEDblog for Daniel Ariely’s talk this coming Monday night (16 March 2009) on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Daniel is the author of Predictably Irrational, my current audio book diversion (see more of my recommended audio book diversions here).

In this post, Dan offers 3 irrational lessons from the Bernie Madoff scandal. For those of you who haven’t read his book yet, Dan is a leading expert in behavioral economics, and his book explains a lot about how we work. For example, he discusses why we’ll drive 15 minutes out of our way to save $7.00 on a $25.00 pen, but won’t make that same diversion to save $7.00 on a $450.00 suit. The aforementioned Madoff essay highlights some of the overreactions he predicts we will make as a result of the disgusting Ponzie scheme, even if we weren’t personally caught in the trap.

But it was the second subject I found that inspired me to wonder if Dan’s observed human irrationality could be overcome…
 

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…

1.025: flash wars and the great debate

No, I'm not talking about the on-again US presidential debates scheduled for tonight in at Ole Miss.

Nor the decades-long debate over whether Nikon or Canon make the best intelligent TTL flashes for their cameras. (I choose Canon).

I'm referring to the ongoing debate about where NAND Flash should be used - server, network or storage.

It seems that everywhere I turn I find proponents arguing about where the technology is "best utilized." And like the presidential debates, the positions tend to fall along party lines: server vendors and their suppliers insist you can't get everything NAND has to offer unless you install in right next to the server CPU, ideally with a native memory bus or I/O bus (e.g. PCI/x) interface; the external storage vendors and their supply chain insist that the disk drive form factor and interface is best; and of course the network storage appliance world insists that NAND belongs as a service in the middle.

And they're all correct.

That's right - while EMC and I are both proponents of using persistent solid state storage as a faster alternative to spinning rust, I personally believe that there is no reason the technology won't be applied at every layer - and probably in multiple places along the same I/O path!

In support of my postulate, look no further than all the rest of computing technology - CPU's, DDR SDRAM, spinning disks, PCI/x, protocols, interfaces, connectivity, etc...every single component - both hardware and software - is today applied in servers, and in networks, and in external storage. We put DDR SDRAM and/or processing power into external storage devices and connect servers to them using Fibre Channel, and we also build servers with terabytes of addressable local memory - both approaches can accelerate existing applications without requiring applications to be re-architected or redesigned.

Is there any reason to believe that NAND (or any solid state storage technology) should be applied any differently?

I think not.

So why the continuing debate?

 

1.000: happy anniversary, baby!

Today marks the 1-year anniversary of this blog.

My my, where did the time go?

I guess I was a bit optimistic with my chosen numbering scheme, as I allotted 3 digits for the post number, but I managed to craft only 78 posts. Not sure if that's good or bad - surely there are several readers who would have preferred that I'd done a few less posts (or a few less posts about their products, perhaps ).

All in all, I think not a bad start.

Oh sure, I've left a few loose ends, and I've opened the door on a few topics that I never quite got into. Hopefully it has still been been interesting to you, and maybe you even had a good chuckle every once in a while. To be sure, your comments, criticisms and feedback has been much appreciated, and I hope that I can expand the conversations in the coming year.

In fact, I'd really like to hear from you about what topics you'd like me to explore. And I mean that, whether you are a customer, prospect, competitor, work colleague, industry analyst, peer, friend, journalist, or someone who just happens to find my blog interesting - I wanna know what you wanna know...

So please, write a comment to this post with your questions and/or topic proposals, and I'll see about working them into my agenda, and maybe I'll hit more than 100 posts in my second year.

Many thanks to all of you! You've made the first year of storage anarchy better than I could have imagined!

ttfn!

0.048: a "new deal" storage benchmark

Dr. Kartik has picked up on the challenge to define a real-world benchmark for storage arrays. This will be an inherently complex undertaking, probably rivaling the hornet's nest that was FDR's New Deal, but I'd like to be the first to put my support behind the effort.

More important than my participation, however, is YOURS.

And where the SPC benchmarks (and the TPC benchmarks before them) were designed by a membership-only club that worked in the privacy of their meetings, I encourage THIS attempt at defining a benchmark to be conducted entirely in the public, using the open & unrestricted platform of wikis, blogs and discussion forums to engage as many people around the globe as possible.

dotConnector has opened up the conversion in his blog, and his call to action needs your input and perspectives.                           dotConnector wants YOU!

Let's ALL join in!

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.

 

0.027: inside tiered storage - part 1 (definitions)

There has been a lot of talk of late related to tiered storage, mostly surrounding the applicability of using SATA devices in enterprise-class storage arrays. After posting a few comments and follow-ups on fellow blogger sites, I thought perhaps I might invest in making a more in-depth look at the whole topic from an enterprise IT perspective.

The way I see it, this whole notion of tiered storage is pretty broad, so I've outlined my approach to the topic into a couple of related posts that I plan to deliver over the coming days/weeks. Roughly, I think I'll tackle the discussion like this:

part 1: definitions

In the first installment (this one), we'll explore the definition of "tiered storage" - I say "we" because I'd like to collect your feedback on the subject.
 

part 2: options

Next I'll explore the various approaches to implementing tiered storage, using different companies and their products as examples.
 

part 3: challenges

Then I'll discuss some of the challenges of implementing tiered storage, both related to each individual option and across the entire spectrum (I'll give a little preview: there isn't yet a good solution that solves everything for everyone).
 

part 4: predictions

Finally, I'll take a look at what I think will likely be coming down the pike to help improve the overall situation.

Now, I probably won't get through all this back-to-back, so expect me to intermix this series with other topics over the coming days or weeks.

One important caveat - this series is about Tiered Storage, and NOT Information Lifecycle Management (ILM). As SNIA has defined, ILM is about the entire operational ecostructure (people, process, practice, tools & technology) employed to effectively align the business value of information with the IT infrastructure throughout its' lifecycle. This series of posts will explore perhaps the most important of the infrastructure tools - tiered storage - that can be employed in support of ILM, and the various means this tool can be deployed.

So let's get started...

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...

0.020: 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?

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