Storagezilla

Tucci storms Japan!

It's with humour we read that the boss put a baseball through an LED screen while in Japan.

Highlight of the trip, hands down, was EMC CEO Joe Tucci having a catch with Hideki Okajima at a fancy reception at the Sox' New Otani Hotel headquarters Monday. While 2007 World Series clips were shown on a Green Monster-sized LED screen, assorted clients and dignitaries - most of them Japanese - feasted on sushi and fine wines. After a few speeches and interviews with Mike Lowell, Dustin Pedroia, Kevin Youkilis, and Terry Francona, a couple of fielding mitts were produced and Tucci lined up to play catch with the Sox' second-most-famous Japanese hurler. Standing in front of the giant screen, Okajima softly tossed to Tucci, who was about 20 feet away. Tucci made the catch, and before you could say, "Nuke LaLoosh," gunned a wild heater that sailed far high and wide of a sprawling Okajima and punctured the precious LED screen. I will never look at the EMC logo (which was on the Sox uniforms for the Japan games) without thinking of this.

Hey Event Marketing, I vote we ditch Billy Crystal and watch Joe play games on a Nintendo Wii instead.

 

We'll need a lot of LCD TVs so lets start stocking up early. ;)

(And if I get fired it'll be because of this post.)

**Updated**

Polly "I really should have a blog" Pearson left a comment telling us that Joe got that pitching arm from a desire to go pro. Which would explain how he'd get the power behind it while I'd have thrown the ball only to watch it bounce and roll after five feet.

If it doesn't involve a video game controller I don't see it as a real sport!

Would DELL/Data Domain be a good fit?

This is purely theoretical but having read Marc Farley's latest blog entry one sees a couple of obvious parallels between Data Domain and EQL.

So, what do we think. Would Data Domain be a good fit for DELL? The big thing about Data Domain from an acquisition stand point is that I see them as being grossly over priced.

Though that's never stopped DELL before...

NetApp slogan not new either

NetApp's new slogan: Go further, faster.

Halliburton's current slogan: Go further, faster.

Hey Hitz, I promise you I'd rip off other peoples marketing waaaaaaayyyy cheaper than whoever you have doing it for you now. What with the recession and all it might be in your shareholders best interests to call me.

Here's where I think we could revamp the new/old NetApp logo to steal from someone who's good at marketing.

Can you see it? Can you see it Dave?

Don't delay I'm awake at least 20 hours a day. Call me! :)

Digital Darwinism

(Or when software products dry up and blow away.)

We had the funeral for Revivio earlier and Mendocino had it's gone out of business sale just last week. So from the big three of CDP products only RecoverPoint has thrived and has even done so well as to have it's I/O splitter technology integrated into FLARE.

I never got a chance to work with Revivio TimeSpring though I did present a heavily modified version of Mendocino at EMC World to a couple of hundred attendees only to be told we'd bought Kashya a few weeks later.

To be honest that was a good thing. The common thread running through the questions I fielded at EMC World all involved DR replication, something neither Mendocino or Revivio offered but Kashya did.

When we were looking at the pre-launch ramp Kashya was declared the most formidable competitor in the market so I'm glad EMC bought it before someone else did.

A couple of major versions later and here we are with version 3.0. Here's the new GUI for those of you who might have previously seen the 2.x versions.

You can see both local (CDP) and remote (CRR) replication of the same LUNs going on at the same time.

This post also serves the dual purpose of seeing how the monolith reacts to bloggers posting product screen shots. Since this is all freeform traditionally I try things out first and the rest of us count how much buckshot I remove from my backside afterwards. A low pellet count means we're good to go.

Ready.

Aim.

Fire!

Both the Sox and EMC make it to Japan

It was a bit of a nail biter for the folks in South Street when the Sox went on strike but that worked itself out and now everyone has made it to Japan.

EMC's Kevin Kempskie is hanging with the fans and updating us via YouTube.

Why didn't EMC buy Diligent?

Nigel left an interesting comment on the last post wondering why EMC didn't buy Diligent and the response turned into a post so here it is.

Having good technology isn't good enough you need to be good at business so lets guess at some numbers before talking tech turkey.

The last time I checked, which was back in 2002 admittedly, EMC owned somewhere around 24 or 25% of Diligent. Now, people say that Diligent has received $47M+ in VC funding and IBM are going to flip them for about $200M.

Assuming EMC hasn't decreased it's position in Diligent (Big assumption), looking at Diligent's market position and from a back of an envelop (The one the phone bill came in) revenue calculation performed while drinking a hot whisky it looks to me like EMC could make nearly as much if not more from this transaction pre-tax than Diligent made as a company in it's entire existence.

Those numbers while entirely speculative tell me that EMC might have blessed the deal before they finished reading IBM's proposal. Free money is free money after all.

Now lets talk tech.

Diligent fought the wrong war from the very start. They went after the Enterprise space which has been the slowest market segment to embrace de-duplication due to the volume of backup data involved and frequency of restore requests.

While Diligent were ranting about mathematical aberrations like hash collisions (Which is just technical Snake Oil when you understand the maths behind it but now everyone has to say they're collision resistant as a competitive spin point.) Data Domain grew like crazy in the Commercial market.

By the time Diligent managed to limbo down to that level Data Domain had a ton of commercial customers floated themselves on the stock exchange and was running around trying to redefine what Enterprise means so they could look like they were punching above their weight class.

Hey Slootman here's a hint: Enterprise does not mean restoring slower than tape. 

Anyhoo. Diligent in IBM's back pocket automatically puts it in front of vastly more eyeballs than HDS were willing or able to but the lesson here is that IBM's frantic deal making is going to continue until Moshe runs out of things to sell them.

Monshaw has a number of gaps to fill and IBM's wallet is bottomless. If he's willing to turn Moshe into the Five Hundred Million Dollar Man before the end of Q1 he's probably only a step away from hand washing his dirty underpants too.

IBM to buy Diligent

I left a comment on Tony P's blog right after the XIV announcement asking about Diligent. We agreed to toast it since there's only so much English you can get out a N95 keypad at 11:00pm without a spell checker.

Knowing Moshe it wasn't a stretch to guess that he would want all his toys in the same toybox and now the word is that IBM are looking to pick up Diligent and screw HDS in the process.

Interesting to note IBM's storage strategy going forward appears to be built on the scraps from EMC's table. Hey, I suppose it's one way to get some kind of strategy going beyond trying to sell hardware/software/services like they were cheap toilet roll and litres of drain cleaner. (IT Supermarket, right guys?)

ProtecTIER customers listen up. Your new lords and masters will be around to throw an SVC at you, regardless of if you need it or not, quite soon. There's also a game which comes free with every SVC cluster, it's called "what combination of peak workloads will cause us service level problems?" and as I've discovered recently it turns out you're never the only player.

Security In the Open Grid

I've blogged about EMC's experiments with Second Life before and while admittedly I now spend 100% of my virtual world/universe time fleeing carrier groups of annoyed players who I've sinned against in EVE Online, I found the closing session of the Life 2.0 show to be of note.

Thursday March 20th 2008

11:00 AM PDT - 12:00 PM PDT

SECURITY IN THE OPEN GRID

Mark Ferlatte, Security Architect, Linden Lab; Dr. Burt Kaliski, Director, EMC Innovation Network

The emergence of open, public metaverse grids presupposes the need for transactional security, identity protection, authentication, validation of trust, and the presumption that minimum necessary information will be passed in all forms of negotiation (e.g., if we need to know you're 21 to admit you to an adult segment of our grid, does that mean we need to see your credit-card or driver's license?). In this session, Mark Ferlatte (SL: XXXX), security expert at Linden Lab, will converse with Dr. Burt Kaliski, Director of the EMC Innovation Network -- a world-renowned expert in the logic and mathematics of encryption -- formerly Chief Scientist and Vice President of Research at RSA Laboratories.

Interesting session but a more interesting speaker. As well as being a wiz at mathematics and EMC's "Secretary of State" when it comes to dealing with the academic/research community Burt is probably one of the most accessible people in the CTO's Office that I've ever dealt with.

Case in point. I recently asked what EMC's research areas going forward were and to my surprise he told me. In detail. That's ten years of having to scrounge around for scraps of information and building up contacts in some very weird places wiped out just like that.

His session will be running in Second Life and streaming out to the Internet at ustream.tv

The ultimate file system until the next file system

If you're into this kind of stuff and have a moment (Which I do since it's Saint Patrick's Day) Ars Technica have a run down on the history of the file system covering everything from DecTape to ZFS.

It's so ubiquitous at this stage it's easy to forget how rocking a file system NTFS is.

NTFS was an all-out, balls-to-the-wall implementation of all the best ideas in file systems that Cutler's team could think of. It was a 64-bit file system with a maximum file and volume size of 2⁶⁴ (16 exabytes) that stored all file names in Unicode so that any language could be supported. Even the file date attributes were stretched to ridiculous limits: Renaissance time-travelers can happily set their file dates as early as 1601 AD, and dates as late as 60056 AD are supported as well, although if humanity is still using NTFS by that time, it will indicate something is seriously wrong with our civilization. It first was unveiled to the public with the very first release of Windows NT (called version 3.1 for perverse marketing reasons) that came out in 1993.

And to think, Microsoft are still only starting to exploit that functionality today.

Centera: Four generations later.

Centera, the product which created the CAS market from nothing and today has over 4500 customers with more than 210PB (Yes Petabytes) shipped making it the market leader by every metric, has received a major software upgrade today with the announcement of CentraStar 4.0

Shipping on all new Centeras and provided as a free upgrade for Centera customers on maintenance it doubles the number of objects which can be stored per disk to 25 Million giving you the mind boggling ability to store 3.2 Billion objects per frame.

Traffic segmentation has been enhanced as to allow customers to manage application and replication traffic to a more granular level while security features such as logging and auditing should make security professionals lives that bit easier.

Something else to note, deletion and reclamation operations have received a significant speed bump which will improve garbage collection operations when dealing with millions/tens of millions/billions of objects.

Go visit The Todd for his take on the new release.