The Charles Fan Interview

"It's really a startup. Twice."

The startup in question was Rainfinity, and the person telling me this is Dr Charles Fan co-founder of Rainfinity now VP and General Manager of EMC's China R&D center.

It turns out that in Rainifity's seven years as a startup file virtualization was the second product the company worked on, the company originally started out with a successful HA solution for Firewalls & VPNs. When the market tanked in 2000/2001 the business soured and Rainfinity had to withdraw from the European & Asian markets, reduce headcount, and decide what it wanted to do with it's business. The choice was simple: Fold or work on a second product..against the clock.

Rapidly running out of cash (and time) the company focused on developing a storage related offering. Less than a year later they had a file virtualization product which they shipped on time and sold to customers in the same quarter it shipped. The core team stuck it out, the company got back on the growth path, and then EMC came calling.         

"EMC treated everyone at Rainfinity very fairly and very nicely." "They almost treated me too nicely.." he says with a smile. He then tells me that he's found his startup experience to be very rewarding with regard to what he learned along the way and how it ended, with Rainfinity technology finding it's way into the hands of a larger audience. There was a great feeling of satisfaction amongst the developers in seeing that happen.  

When we discuss the rapid growth of unstructured data and what part file virtualization has to play Charles makes the point that it works to address the current lack of management of unstructured data. "It's really a storage management methodology. A way of bringing order to chaos." He points to server virtualization being a similar methodology for bringing the chaos of rapidly growing data centers under control.

When I ask what people in the storage industry need to do better he's pretty clear that the mindset has to change. "Instead of looking at one box at a time people need to manage data more logically from the dataset perspective, and from the properties of those datasets. The fundamental benefit this will bring is that it will allow scale. It'll be Petabytes, then tens of Petabytes, then hundreds of Petabytes. Some people already have Petabytes. Petabytes are no longer a big deal!" His core message is that every increase in order of magnitude of scale requires new management frameworks. File virtualization is a required framework not only today but as we move from managing Petabytes to managing tens of Petabytes. After that we'll need a new set of management frameworks to deal with the next order of magnitude increase.

Since Charles was born & raised in China, spending half his life there and half in the US before returning to lead EMC's R&D efforts in the region I was curious to know what was different about doing business in Asia for a western company like EMC? "China has changed so much since when I was there. It's adopted so many business practices from the west. 90% of things are the same, and if they're not the same they try and make them the same. That's their goal. It makes it very easy for a multi-national company like EMC to enter the market, and EMC has been there for ten years. What opened my eyes is the amount of talent that's available. 1.3 billion people, 5 Million college graduates each year, and the college curriculums are getting closer and closer to those in Ireland and the US."

At that it becomes clear to me that China is currently undergoing the college education boom that Ireland went through in the 90's. This revolutionized my country both socially and economically and it'll do the same for China.

With EMC being in fast growth mode Charles is very aware that this currently untapped source of talent in Asia is vital to the company's future success. Ask any HR person and they'll tell you that the employment market is super competitive in the US and in parts of Europe. "We had 13,000 people applying for 80 positions last year" he tells me with a sense of awe. I'm not a HR person but I could probably guess that 162.5:1 isn't a common applicant ratio these days unless you're offering VMware or Google money.

When we discuss the poor reception a Chinese acquisition of Seagate received his views are pretty clear. "We live in a global economy, and when country's are talking to each other it's better than not talking to each other. When they're doing business with each other, it's better than not doing business with each other. Such transactions are going to emerge in the future, some will work out others won't, but when done properly it's good for everyone." This reminds me of something Colin Powell said during his closing keynote at the RSA Security Conference; countries who are busy trading don't have time for fighting.

And then we were done and he's off to an appointment which was actually scheduled. I having hijacked him for the past 15 minutes. 

What I found interesting about the China R&D center was how many projects they were working on which I knew about, but I didn't know that they were working on them. They've big brains in the areas of advanced information management, Internet scale architectures, file system design, IP storage, Linux development, and a host of other areas. Add to that the fact that they're also about to move into a massive new campus in Shanghai and it's an encouraging sign for their & EMC's future.

I'd like to thank Dr Fan for graciously agreeing to sit down and speak with me, especially since it was an unplanned session. I'd also like to thank him for letting me know that he reads my blog. It can be surreal when someone mentions they've read my blog as I never know what they're going to tell me they think about it but he was very encouraging of it. I also look forward to all of us, EMC employees & EMC customers alike, getting our hands on the work his team has been doing.

The stuff they're building in China R&D today is what we'll be using and talking about tomorrow.

I could talk about it today but then I'd have to find myself another job. ;)