Storage Nation

Quite suddenly, 3PAR is a very hot company.  To a lot of people, especially those who are unfamiliar with the storage industry, one of the obvious questions is "Who are these people and where did they come from?" The answer is that the company was formed by a group of server-cluster engineers from Sun and has been around for over a decade developing and selling large scale storage products designed for something that used to be called "utility computing" seven years ago, but today is just called "the cloud". We've been very successful with our cloud strategy and have 7 of the top 10 IAAS (infrastructure-as-a-service) customers as clients.  3PAR products work very hard in the background for a lot of household-name customers.

There is no question that I'm going to get a lot of ribbing from friends of mine in the business when they read about this. After all, I was at Convergenet prior to it's acquisition by Dell and then again years later at EqualLogic when it was acquired by Dell and – as some have teased me about the inevitability of another Dell acquisition – it now appears that Dell intends to acquire 3PAR too .

This is an older video I shot from late last year with Chakri Avala from Symantec and and Karl Swarz for 3PAR demoing how thin reclamation for Symantec Storage Foundation works.

The whole idea of a storage company making a video that reaches “viral status” is very interesting to me since I like making videos and I work for a storage company.  There are several problems with making a viral storage video including the relative size of the storage community, which is not large enough to generate large numbers of viewers and then there is the matter that competitors tend to not promote each others work very much, which creates a dampening effect on the whole word of mouth thing that I have associated with viral media. So, I get the idea of trying to promote a video, because you need a big lift beyond the industry to do it and you need to take advantage of the dynamics of the online video world. If you follow this link and read it ,  you’ll get an idea of how corporation can make viral videos. But not all viral videos are corporate – there are some that make it on creativity, execution and timing.  Although its against very steep odds, a non-corporate video video can succeed if its interesting and compelling enough for people to want to share it with others.  Being outrageous helps a lot.  The question remains – if most viral videos result from corporate marketing programs, what does that say about the definition of viral – is it only the most numbers of viewers, or is it something else?

Today, EMC announced its intention to acquire Greenplum — a successful provider of data warehouse and business intelligence database software. And there’s a lot to talk about as a result … What's This All About? In a nutshell: big data driving a new generation of data computing applications using a private cloud model.  Let's take these one at a time.

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.

I've been going slightly nuts since yesterday after Cisco announced the CIUS.  It looks like the perfect tablet for the sorts of things I really want a personal screen device for – communicating with other people.  This review by Erik Parker of InfoWorld is a pretty good read and it summarizes key advantages and disadvantages of CIUS.  If it can make the technology of video conferencing transparent to end users, it will be a big deal.  But the hidden story to this is that Cisco is also making a play to get into the corporate desktop/laptop business with the CIUS.  The idea that companies could deploy these with VDI is definitely part of Cisco's grand plan for world domination . Whether or not the CIUS could replace laptop or desktop computers remains to be seen, but there are reasons to think they could eventually if the stars align.  The arguments for VDI are strong, but there are still a lot of hurdles to overcome, such as back end storage performance to support boot storms . By the way, people looking at large VDI implementations might want to look at 3PAR's wide striping storage systems to get the sort of affordable IOPS needed to support large VDI environments. My previous post illustrates our design for massive throughput, which supports a huge number of IOPS without needing SSDs or requiring storage administrators to create special disk pools to isolate the VDI workload from other applications running in the same storage array.

I was hanging out in San Francisco airport yesterday on a flight delay and went into one of the magazine stores to check out the latest monthlies.  A bunch of them had the same full page ad from Oracle comparing a Sun server hosted Oracle DB with apps to an anonymous IBM “server” hosted Oracle DB with apps

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

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.