Storage Nation

Today is the grand opening of a new cartoon strip, Ineption (Click the cartoon to see a larger image)

Forbes.com recently published a video interview with our CEO, David Scott on their Intelligent Technology channel.  David who talks about the shift from privately run data centers to utility, public cloud computing services.  Here are some of the key points from it.

Nate at Techopsguys has put together a comparison of SPC-1 benchmarks with six different bar charts showing the various characteristics of the configurations, performance and cost.   Here's an example of what's in is post.

  I just read an article about how the concept of infrastructure blocks is playing out on the SearchDataCenter site.  The article presents several perspectives, but it's a bit confused. The concept is referred to as three different terms (pods, blocks and cells) and the comparison between a making your own and buying one are not clearly juxtaposed.  Regardless, its a thought provoking article. But is does raise the point what should we call these things?  I think a better generic word for them is iBlock, short for infrastructure block.   I've been speaking to customers about this sort of thing lately and a number of them have expressed the opinion that rolling out their own iBlock would be a lot cheaper, more flexible and more scalable than anything they could buy from a vendor.  I'm a big believer in the power of integration, but it's possible to get too far ahead of the curve. 3PAR customers have already been implementing iBlocks for several years using the 3CV design discussed in this ESG Labs report.

Surprise, surprise.  After months after bad-mouthing their competitors for their capacity guarantee programs, EMC has done an about face and has announced their own, very restricted, guarantee program. EMC offers a 20% capacity guarantee, as opposed to 50% from 3PAR's Get Thin Guarantee program. (FWIW, other vendors have also made 50% guarantees)  I guess EMC must be concerned they won't really be able to do it. Also, 3PAR's capacity guarantee applies to EMC customers, but EMC's program does not apply to 3PAR customers.

What would my friends at EMC do without my parody of their announcement?  On the day a product is announced its pretty hard to make a serious analysis – that usually takes more time, but in the case of EMC, there are usually a couple things you can bank on. New levels of complexity to manage Eye popping professional services costs The second is an obvious consequence of the first.  Otherwise, I think Storage Federation is a very big deal for our industry and it's great that EMC is bringing attention to it.  People interested in reading more about this might want to check out Stuiesav's blog : and the article in The Register

(A quote from Dieter Rams – former Chief of Design at Braun) It's hard to think of a company that has had more success with it's product designs than Apple. When you look into how Apple did it, you find out about Jonathan Ive – Apple's lead industrial designer – and how his designs have followed the philosophy outlined by Dieter Rams , who was the lead designer for many years at Braun.  When you compare photos of their designs, it is obvious that Ive has a strong appreciation for Rams' work. What Ive and others have found compelling in Rams' work is nicely summarized in the design principles Rams used at Braun for many years. Good design is innovative Good design makes a product useful Good design is aesthetic Good design makes a product understandable Good design is unobtrusive Good design is honest Good design is long-lasting Good design is thorough down to the last detail Good design is environmentally friendly Good design is as little design as possible The design goals for consumer products differ considerably from those for industrial products.

InfoSmack podcasters Greg Knieriemen and Yours Truly interview Greg Kleiman (Netapp), Eran Farajun (Asigra), Brad Rooke (JumpPoint) and Daniel MIlburn (Consonus) about the current status of Cloud storage, the impact CDMI will have and get their thoughts on how they think this industry will evolve over the next several years. Recorded at SNW 2010 in Orlando

There were some problems with the links that were posted this week regarding Oracle's ASM Storage Reclamation Utility (ASRU) and 3PAR's Thin Persistence. ASRU is a stand alone utility that compacts data in a specified Oracle disk group and then frees up space that Oracle no longer needs. Here is a short white paper on it (PDF).

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.