Storage Nation

Here is a list of links to posts that I thought were interesting regarding the announcement today of Dell's intentions to acquire 3PAR. Chuck Hollis, blogger from EMC Stephen Foskett, Leader of independent storage bloggers consortium Steve Duplessie, Founder of Enterprise Strategy Group Greg Schulz, Storage author and independent analyst David Floyer analyst from Wikibon Gary Orenstein, blogger for GigaOm Joseph Kovar, writer for CRN Dave Raffo, writer for SearchStorage.com Lucas Mearian, writer for Computerworld Robin Wauters, writer for TechCruchIT W David Gardner, writer for InformationWeek Rex Crum writer for MarketWatch Taylor Buley, blogger for Forbes Susan J

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.

  There was a lot written last week surrounding VMware's release of vSphere 4.1 . Netapp appeared to have a lot to say, but it was confusing to figure out what they were really talking about.  I think I've got it now. It's unusual for a company to be invited as a centerpiece of high-visibility festivities and then mysteriously decide not to follow through

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.

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

(Federation Square, Melbourne) There have been some excellent discussions recently in the storage blogosphere and on Twitter about the concept of Storage Federation among a number of storage people; known by their Twitter IDs as @stuiesav , @storageanarchy , @rootwyrm , @davegraham , @bwhyte , @ianhf , @esignoretti , me ( @3parfarley ) and others – as the interest continues to increase.  There are two aspects of the discussion that I think are fascinating: first is the role of social media as the means to include customers, vendors and others in an open discussion that typically is conducted privately by a vendor preparing to release a new product or feature, second is the challenge of defining a storage capability with sufficient focus and vendor independence so that is is meaningful. There has been some amount of skepticism about this effort, suggesting that we are predetermined to end up with ambiguous terms that can be interpreted (spun) by anybody (any vendor) to mean anything (our product does it).

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

Fremont CA:  3PAR, the leading Steering Wheel Camera Society of America (SWCSA) producer of Steering Wheel Camera Technology and Smart Car chase scene videos has come to an agreement with Storwize , a Steering Wheel Camera Society of America member company from Marlborough, MA for Storwize to acquire the assets of the Steering Wheel Society of America. Marc Farley, founder of the SWCSA, said: "It kind of sucks to have the SWCSA ripped out from under my complete creative control," before blowing his nose and continuing "now I don't even know where to drive." Steve Kenniston, Director of Driving at Storwize was only available to speak from his mobile phone from within Storwize's state of the art Studio on Wheels was quoted as saying: "mmmbblgurg,  tan you he..  sshhhtdf… can you here me?" And then dropped this bombshell: "Were trying to pass legislation here is Massachusetts requiring everybody to make at least one SWCSA video per month." Here is his latest video:

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

In a self-described FUD piece today StorageBod wonders about Netapp's future.