Storagezilla

Steve Jobs about to screw Martin Varsavsky

The Steve summons Varsavsky to his palatial office in the engineering building at Infinite Loop where he grills him for a few hours and then turfs him out on the footpath.

Martin has the same star struck reaction all those who nab Steve's attention for a few minutes do (Except for Bill Gates who finds him fascinating in the car crash sense of the word, Steve Ballmer who thinks he's a sociopath with delusions of grandeur and Larry Ellison who doesn't listen to anyone unless they're named Larry Ellison anyway), he walks away an inch or two taller and thinks he's had a great meeting.

Steve's looking to mass market mobile voice over IP and do to the carriers what he did to the music companies. What value do they add to the iPhone besides provide dial tone? Steve Jobs doesn't meet with people unless he wants something. He's not interested in finding out about your business and how it's doing unless he plans on taking it away from you.

Martin. Run and hide.

And I actually do have a Fonera in a desk drawer somewhere. It might be time to dust it off and hook it up.

Now, what do we think of the OQO e2?

EMC buys Voyence

Infrastructure Lifecycle Management anyone?

This is a good time to swing back and look at where EMC is with acquisitions. It's been over a year since RSA was taken off the market (Yes a year) and that signaled the end of EMC's Billion Dollar Buys. Back then we were told we now had all the big pieces we needed to execute EMC's strategy so the name of the game was integration.

So what's been going on? Well there's been over 100 integration projects running over the past 12 months and who knows how many more under review. I haven't seen a single road map since Q3 06 which doesn't have acquisition technology or product integration on it somewhere. It could be anything from new features leveraging acquired technology to integrating entire products.

EMC is already shipping some of the results of those integration projects now but there's a lot more on the way.

Yeah picking up companies like Tablus, Mozy and Voyence is cool and all but I'd like to point out to those up on Mount Olympus reading this that it *has* been over a year now since EMC bought something big.-Hint Hint-

(I can't help it I need the "learning about an entirely new company" adrenalin rush. It's like Crack to a Techie!)

--Updated--

"My philosophy is that I want to stay focused on what I call these eight spheres of technology, so acquisitions that we do would basically make some of these spheres stronger rather than put another sphere on the board," he said. The eight areas he referred to are: intelligent information management, enterprise content management, virtualization, resource management, storage, availability, security, and archiving.

"That being said, eventually we will add a new sphere but that's not my immediate attention," Tucci said

WooHoo! :-D

New Blogger: The Doctor is in

NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!

My friends, something truly awful has happened. One of the big brains EMC keeps locked away (For the good of all humanity you understand) has escaped from one of ivory towers of the CTO's office and is now running amuck.

If anyone see's particle physicist, CTO and EMC Distinguished Engineer Dr. Subramanian Kartik running around the place do not approach.

Not only does he know more than you but he'll happily explain what you don't know to an insane level of detail using graphs, charts, diagrams, equations and "facts" if you stand still long enough.

Consider him armed with a calculator and dangerous.

(Especially if you are one of the SPC sock puppets.)

Web 2.0 Expo Berlin

Q4 is convention quarter. Or it is for me anyway. Just like buses nothing happens for 3/4 of the year and then they all come at once. Or something.

This year I'm not going to Les Web in Paris since last year it was nothing more than a political rally for Sarkozy pre French election but I am going to the Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin. The nice people at CMP Technology via Conor O'Neil provided me with two expo passes. Drop me a line if you want the other one.

My best laid N95 GPS plans fell foul of not having packet data access while I was in Boston and without network based Assisted GPS the N95 might as well just be a phone. (Which it is.)

Things came to a head after I jumped off the subway and found myself standing in the street looking for Comicopia. There I was with no idea where I was or where I should be going while trying in vain to get a satellite lock when after a few minutes I looked directly to my right.

I took that photo with the phone from exactly where I was standing. If the staff were looking out the window they probably thought I was a weirdo, but since I spent a ton of money in there I'm certain I was quickly reclassified as just being eccentric.

This time I'm buying a stand alone GPS unit and will stomp around Berlin using that. Yeah yeah, sure sure I know a Lonely Planet guide would be a lot cheaper and about as accurate but god damn it I'm not giving up on the technology until it all works perfectly. Then I'll endlessly lament about how it was better in the old days when you had to figure things out to get places becuase that's what all good tech people do.

The moment a problem is solved it's no longer interesting. That's why when some one tells me they're not sure something is going to work or that "it might be risky" I'm up for it.

When it comes to OS X people never learn

I get a phone call at the ass crack of dawn this morning from a person I know who's frantic because they've upgraded to Leopard late last night and now their system won't boot without crashing.

No longer being a Mac user for the first time in a decade and not keeping up with Steveworld like I used to you'd think I'd be out of the loop but in this case I know what the problem is because it's always the same problem.

It's Haxies. Because it's always Haxies.

I don't care what the problem is if Haxies are installed it's Haxies which are causing the problem.

"You were running Haxies right?"

-pause-

"Uhhhh yeah.."

"And you didn't bother remove what's most certainly a badly written piece of code which hooks into XNU kernel through some unsupported interfaces which have probably changed or no longer exist in the new kernel version. Right?"

-silence-

'Uhhhh yeah.."

"Then I think you'd want to boot from CD and either delete them by hand or run an archive and install and have the system sweep everything to one side."

And then I find this tech note proving that it is Haxies. Because as I said it's always Haxies and the next time it happens it'll be Haxies again.

Stop installing that crap they're not worth the trouble.

Wizball

Eurogamer review Wizball and all of a sudden I'm ten it's 1987 and the race is on to shoot sprites and collect colour droplets.

Let us never forget when it came to the MOS Technology 6581 or 8580 Sound Interface Device, the sound generated by each being unqiue due to imperfections introduced during the fabrication process which ensured that no two chips were ever alike, Galway is still God.

Dell's Tablet PC

Tablet PCs are something I've argued with people about on three continents. Sure people are for them but very few of them were willing to buy them when push came to shove.

Over priced and drastically under powered I saw the Tablet as nothing more than a replacement for the clipboard. Indeed if you look at the verticals it was positioned into it was nothing more than a digital clipboard which turned into a useless slab of plastic and metal after the battery ran down. Tablet's all supposed to be about portability after all, and time spent plugged into a socket was time that you weren't on the move.

Then two weird things happened. Apple brought the iPhone to market with multi-touch technology as the primary user interface. It's not a stretch to see a MacBook Pro without a trackpad and mouse buttons in the near future. And then Dell the king of sell it cheap rack em high economics announced that they were getting into the market with the Latitude XT.

The XT is now very close to launch so Dell must believe there's a growth spurt coming in the slow moving Tablet market. I always said I'd reconsider my stance on the TabletPC when Dell get into the market.

Would I buy a Dell Tablet? Of course not. I'm too much of a snob for that. That doesn't mean that years from now when this tech becomes standard that one won't land on the desk in front of me.

Now the next question is how you want your interface. You can use the Tablet stylus or your multi-touch finger(s). For some reason that makes me think of if I'd prefer cursive writing with a pen or to use finger paints instead.

23:59:59

It's finally happened.

24 has ripped off all four Die Hard movies all at once.

Common Nonsense

The wisdom of the punditocracy before EMC reported was that the market was "soft" and EMC was having a tough time closing deals.

Cha-ching! That proves the pundits are out on the fringe while the rest of us are in the scrum.There's money out there alright you just have to be ready to fight for it.

What's interesting is how well the multi-protocol systems (NAS/iSCSI/FC) are doing. So if EMC made the NS series easy to set up and easy to use they'd sell like crazy to customers who previously might never have considered EMC? Who knew!

As for Joe's roadmap discussion well we'll leave talk of Virtual Provisioning, SMB systems, spin down and other such things for another day.

But Web 2.0 Storage we'll talk about right now.

When designing ultra high density storage systems you have to realize that the type of data access is significantly different from OLTP workloads. As such the architecture of the system will differ from traditional storage system design in the sense that..oh..wait that's the kettle boiling down stairs.

Looks like that's all the time we have tonight folks. Seeya! :)

Schwartz: All your toaster now belong to us

Jon Schwartz writes:

So later this week, we're going to use our defensive portfolio to respond to Network Appliance, filing a comprehensive reciprocal suit. As a part of this suit, we are requesting a permanent injunction to remove all of their filer products from the marketplace, and are examining the original NFS license - on which Network Appliance was started.

This lawsuit is the gift which keeps on giving. And I notice Schwartz is still referring to the company as "NetApps" even after speaking with Danny W.

As I write this NetApp PR are probably crafting Dave Hitz response. It'll be interesting to see what tone it takes now that Sun have wrapped themselves in the open source flag. 

And what about IBM? Don't they have some skin in this game what with being the largest NetApp OEM? One wonders what patents they could end up throwing into this fray to defend their re-branded NAS business.