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.

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.

Nigel Poulton tweeted today:  " What are peoples thoughts on best practices for multiple pools on the likes of USP V and VMAX. Trade-off between perf vs resiliency etc…" Good question Nigel, one of the biggest problems customers have is being able to fully utilize all their resources. It's not just that the ROI for storage tends to be underwhelming, but more frustrating is the fact that their storage was provisioned in a way that makes resources inappropriate or unavailable for the pressing needs at hand. Pools are used two ways – to reserve storage capacity for certain functions such as snapshots or to create QoS levels for storage.  The difficulty lies that in the creation of pools for QoS, resources that are committed to pools are practically locked into them and cannot be easily redistributed to other pools to meet changing demands.  As storage systems age and are filled with data, the various pools are consumed unevenly

Here's a video that TechTarget produced for us with one of our customers, Priceline.com . Here are a few highlights from the video: Priceline.com was one of the first e-commerce players to adopt virtualization.  That may account for why the company's IT organization is known for for it's high availability and ability to adapt quickly to changes in the market.  Given the fact that their business has a broad value-based appeal, their IT organization works very hard to get the best rate of return for their capital expenditures. 3PAR storage allowed them to increase their storage capacity over 400% over the last four years while reducing the administrative load required to manage it all. Ron Rose, ex-CIO at Priceline (now on the Sr

  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.

Dave Vellante from Wikibon posted his summary of 3PAR's analyst call this week .  It's a good chance for people to get an unvarnished opinion how 3PAR is doing. One of the things that came up during the call was a discussion of Storage Federation . Here is what our CEO David Scott said were the three main points to understand about it: It’s different from virtualization. It allows separate peer, self-governing systems to act as a global whole (versus a hierarchical approach).

By the time this is posted, I will be in a hospital having a fairly routine cardiac chatheterization procedure done to determine the level of blockage in my coronary arteries.  Cardiologists do a ton of these every year, saving people from inactive lives and open heart surgery.  Unbelievable technology, but I'll get back to that later.  No Chest Pain Symptoms! The main reason for this post is to help people understand that symptoms for heart trouble don't have to include chest pains.  I have had a little tightness of breath while exercising over the last year and I've noticed a drop in my cardio output, but I figured that's just what comes with aging.  I've been bike riding, skiing and hiking/walking, but my pace has been slower and hill climbs on the bike have been harder.

(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.