Storage Nation

The twitterverse is busy again today with discussions surrounding EMC's us of spambots to generate views of videos they are trying to make viral.  If you are interested in seeing what is being said, check out these people's tweets and you'll be off on a trip down a dark hole.  @ johnful ,    @ dvellante ,    @ sfoskett ,    @ valb00 ,    @ furrier Here are a couple cartoons I made about it last week from my new cartoon, Ineption : Netapp's Val Bercovici suggest this viral spamming as the end of innocence in social media, but innocence exited the social media stage long ago.  I'm much more concerned about how large companies like EMC can use social media to suggest product and customer relationships that stretch the truth well beyond the impressions that a reader might take away from reading suggestive blog posts from respected corporate voices. As "unofficial company statements" that are more influential than press releases, social media pieces can distort things in a way that more-accountable corporate marketing are not allowed to. Last week, Chad Sakac and Chuck Hollis published blog posts that pointed to an EMC white paper about details of a VMAX implementation at Terremark, an excellent 3PAR customer.  Readers of these posts would probably think that VMAX was being used as the storage behind Terremark's multi-tenant,  Enterprise Cloud service offering.  That would be stretching things more than just a little bit.  I commented on both blogs and the responses to my comments were interesting.  I guess I feel a little kinder towards Chad as a result.  It is possible that somewhere in the world, a VMAX is being used by Terremark.  One would expect Terremark to be looking at various storage platforms as a matter of course, it only makes sense for them. After all, VMware made a significant investment in Terremark last year and we all know who owns VMware.

A short while ago, Microsoft announced their plans to create a stack platform appliance for Azure .  This was done, presumably, to deal with the competitive threat from VMware , which is part of the V-Block-centered Acadia business venture.  Sorry Microsoft, but IMHO, this is a clear signal that the cloud stack has been catapulted to the stratosphere of hype.  There are a couple assumptions about clouds in a can that show the ready-fire-aim nature of these types of solutions. The first is that clouds in a can will provide an on-ramp for private cloud infrastructures to to use public cloud infrastructures in the future.  Oh yes, and how exactly will that work?  Vaporware drawn on white boards with clouds in the middle?  The allure of an easier future through stacks rivals any of the malarkey that our industry has ever produced. The second assumption is that customers will save money with stacks and appliances.

This is part of a series of posts with video recorded at the HP Blades Day in Houston, February 2010. Previous posts: HP Blades Day – Lab Session: Clip 1 HP Blades Day – Lab Session: Clip 2 HP Blades Day – Lab Session: Clip 3 In this final post from the Lab Session, James Singer discusses more about airflow and the chassis design.  The video doesn’t always follow the subject (due to my quality videoing techniques; in fact I was trying to pay attention), however the soundtrack is accurate

Chuck Hollis wrote a blog post earlier this week,titled "Once Upon a Time" .   I thought it was an excellent post, telling about the transition EMC made a decade ago starting when Joe Tucci replaced Mike Ruettgers.  FWIW, I think the diversification that Tucci accomplished at EMC has made all the difference there – especially the acquisition of VMware.  You might call it lucky (as I tend to do), but the fact was they were looking to diversify their business took them on a journey that has buoyed their company far beyond the capabilities that their storage products by themselves would have supported. At the end, he asks the question if history was bound to repeat itself again – which appeared to be a nudge towards some of the other companies in the industry.  I didn't think this was such an affront – Chuck has been known to tweak competitors from time to time, but for the last 6 months or so, he's restrained himself from doing so.   So I was surprised this morning when I saw some tweets that had me look at the post again.  And sure enough there was a blow up there involving a cadre of Netapp people that over-reacted to Chuck's post.   One of the consequences of this over reaction was that a benign blog post about EMC history became a referendum on Netapp's Secure Multi-Tenancy (SMT).  It wasn't what Chuck was driving at in his original post, but the comments from Netapp folks steered the discussion that direction. Chuck's main argument is that SMT isn't very secure if your service provider can gain access to a tenant's data. I'd add to that and say, it's not very secure if your service provider can delete volumes and destroy data too.  Inadvertent destruction of data by administrators is a larger threat than somebody pulling "an inside job".   But it doesn't just effect service provider scenarios.

OK,  Monday's post lacked the punch that people have come to expect from me where EMC announcements are concerned.  Thanks to my readers who were disappointed and told me so. This post is for you.    VPLEX (announced Monday with all the hype that EMC could muster) is the result of EMC trying to become something more than a storage company.

Technology integration makes computing products much easier to use and significantly drives down the cost and effort of owning it. For instance, technologies such as WiFi that were recently beyond the grasp of most people are now inexpensively integrated into PCs and usable by almost anyone. The trick with integration is understanding what variables should be exposed – or as my friend Rick Vanover likes to sa y – how many knobs there are to turn.  End user and infrastructure provider requirements differ considerably when it comes to knobs. For instance, Apple computers are great end user machines because they lack knobs, but are not always loved by technology professionals for the same reason

I case you didn’t know, I’ve been on holiday since the beginning of April.  I was expecting (after two weeks of rest and relaxation) to be heading off to a new and potentially challenging piece of work.  Unfortunately that work is no longer there.  Not only is the work not there but neither am I – I’m still in the US with my family and can’t travel due to the restrictions in place on aircraft after the volcano eruption in Iceland. In the space of less than a week, I’ve had to put contingency plans into place for both work and pleasure.  We’re lucky; we hadn’t left to go to the airport and so have managed to stay in our accommodation in San Diego.  A two week holiday will simply turn into three; school will have to wait for my wife and children. As for work, I already have some contingency plans in place and things will work out.  But who could have thought such as “simple” natural phenomena could have ramifications for the whole world? The People Problem For the UK and most of Europe the last two weeks have been Easter holiday time (I believe this overlapped the US Easter holiday too).  Quite rightly people have been enjoying time away, but now without the ability to get back home and the fact that more people are away than usual, the lack of key personnel will be causing problems.  None of these are insurmountable if: Key staff can be contacted while away – not disturbed, mind you but contacted in an emergency.  Even with tools as simple as a Blackberry or iPhone, decisions can be made and confirmed via phone, SMS or email

Greg Knieriemen and I covered SNW as the Storage Monkeys/Infosmack team yesterday and will be repeating the act again today.  There is a huge amount of stuff going on here and we are trying to give people a feeling for what the news is and how the event is going down. Videos are going up to the Infosmack Channel on YouTube.

Here's a ComputerWorld produced video from last year that is an interview with Hala Al-Adwan, VP of Data, and Richard Buckingham, VP of Technical Operations at MySPace.  In it they talk about the scaling challenges they have and how 3PAR helps them produce their massive site every day.

A couple weeks ago EMC's Pat Gelsinger outlined a vision for long-distance federated storage, which Chuck Hollis wrote about on his blog .   It received a fair amount of attention in the storage community as a bold step by EMC to set a development course with far reaching potential.  StorageBod's take on it was to call it a moon shot , referring to NASA's enormous decade-long project in the 60's to put a man on the moon. I remember being a kid during those years, thinking that anything would be possible in our lifetimes through the combination of imagination, hard work and glorious destiny.  We were encouraged by things like scuttling our yearly ice fishing expedition and taking a winter vacation to Disneyland instead. One of the great all time memes is pursuing the dream