Storagezilla

John Toner and the global cluster

EMC employee (and Microsoft MVP) John Toner runs a blog covering geographically dispersed clustering. Since he worked on developing EMC's SRDF/CE training and has been working on Windows Clustering technologies for coming up on a decade he has more than a few ideas about what works and what doesn't.

If posts with headings such as "Quorum Arbitration in a Geographically Dispersed Cluster" and "Geographically Dispersed Clustering with Clariion" float your boat I advise you to run not walk over to his blog.

Travelling without moving.

I leave my RSA token in the car thereby locking myself out of access to work email, though maybe that's not a bad thing but odds are a Blackberry will come sailing over the cubical wall and hit me in the head the moment I get back into the office, it takes hours to get to my hotel in London what with plane delays (My bag was out first. Which is stunning), train delays (The Heathrow Express running once an hour instead of numerous times per hour) and the general drudgery of commuting.

I book into the hotel room in Canary Wharf start unpacking and then glance out the window.

The fuzzy cameraphone photo doesn't do it justice but yes that is a Symmetrix staring back at me from the well lit room in the right corner.

There is no escape.

Free Beer and Amazon Web Services running at a loss

I'm on the not so high speed rail link from Dublin to Cork watching my 3G modem flap like a pair of unwashed oversized Y-Fronts hanging from a flag pole during a hurricane.

Yet another image you're free to take to the grave with you.

Onto new business.

Len Devanna is promising people free beer at EMC World. Well that's not what he's promising but you get the idea.

Unlike a lot of other events where the industry Legends In Their Own Living Rooms pretend they're too busy to hang out with you (Translation: They're out sucking up to the hand full of vendors who'll give them the time of day), that's not going to happen here. Here's a link to the sign up sheet. (The password is community) All you need to do is show up with a sense of humour, see who manages to get away from the mania involved in keeping EMC World running and we'll see where it goes from there.

Now for some old business.

I mentioned AWS doing $100M in revenue in 2007 and then did some digging. Since Amazon have moved well beyond the utilisation of excess capacity phase it looks like they're operating S3/EC2 at a substantial loss. Which explains why Google have taken so long to offer anything even remotely similar as currently without ad money there's no money.

With the economy being what it is one wonders for how much longer Amazon will continue to happily subsidize every user of their AWS offerings? Their capacity is as finite as everyone else's so eventually there will have to be another big infrastructure spend cycle where Amazon have to decide if they're going to go deeper into the hole or not.

It'll be interesting to see which way they jump.

piWorx first look

HP mightn't like me (The disdain is mutual) but someone in Paul Maritz's Cloud Infrastructure & Services Division does.

I'm just about to speak with a bunch customers so I'll swing back to this later today. It's still in Beta but it looks nearly ready for prime time from what I've looked at so far.

Huzzah!

(Don't bother checking the URL in the screenshot. I've everything locked down at the moment.)

Rain making clouds and the usual HP nonsense

Wired wrote a puff piece on Amazon Web Services, the story of which I've heard at every web get together from where I'm sitting now, around the world and back again. But what's interesting is that AWS's total revenue for 2007 was $100M.

Lets face it $100M in anyone's language is good money but when you consider that Amazon is the undisputed leader in that space that's a piddling amount of revenue and a clear sign that this market hasn't even started moving yet.

Oh and HP Upline continues the long tradition of screwing HP customers. I was digging through my pile of unread email and I found the following..

Dear HP Upline Service subscriber,

On Thursday, April 17th, HP suspended operation of the HP Upline Service.

We fully anticipate that suspension of the Upline Service will be temporary and short in duration, and will notify you when the Upline Service is operational again.

If you are not a resident of the United States, we regretfully must inform you that the initial launch of the HP Upline Service was intended for United States residents only. Unfortunately, our filtering tools did not adequately screen for subscribers residing outside of the United States.

That would include me then..

We thank you for your early adoption of the Upline Service, and look forward to being able to provide the HP Upline Service to you when we launch it in your country of residence. Since the HP Upline Service is presently offered for use within the United States only, we will be discontinuing your current subscription.

After we notify you that the Upline Service is operational
again, you will have a limited period of time to access and download files that you have uploaded onto the HP Upline Service servers. After that time period, you will no longer have access to your present HP Upline Service account. If you would like to be contacted by us when the HP Upline Service is made available in your country of residence, please send us an email at help@upline.com.

We apologize for any inconvenience.

And I apologise for trusting HP to deliver on anything. I now remember why I automatically reached for a printer/scanner/tea maker combo from a different vendor instead of from HP the last time I was shopping for one.

I can and do use Mozy today but EMC Fortress can't go global soon enough.

(And trust me when I say each day is one step closer to that goal)

The Road To EMC World

So we're now less than a month away from EMC World 2008. The sessions are locked the book has/should be on it's way to the printers and it took nearly a month and required two VPs, a Finance Director and my Manager to get sign off on my attendance. (Let me tell you something about cost control..)

I'm going. Barry is going. Chuck is going. Steve is going. So if in the middle of next month it becomes all EMC World all the time you'll know why. I'm looking at the list of Executives going and wondering how the continuity of governance plan plays out should an asteroid hit the Mandalay Bay. It look very much like the war mongers inherit the company if the rest of us die all at once.

Sorry about that.

Of course the only reason I think about stuff like that is when Roger Ailes was running his consulting company he used to pose an interesting question and tape your response. On camera he'd ask what would you do first if the entire executive team was wiped out and you were the most senior officer in the company left alive?

For the overly ambitious this situation was a godsend, some seeing this as their coronation and automatic acceptance into the CEO club, but in reality it was a test of empathy as well as business savvy. Some of the answers he got from the would be masters of the universe were horrifying to say the least.

Anyhoo, getting back to EMC World I don't have a copy of the Book yet but the De-dup Birds of a Feather session looks interesting and has a bucket of CTO's attending. Barry is running sessions on FLASH and I fully expect some marketing person to try and flying tackle him (I wish them the best of luck with that) when he starts straying into "the world of the future" talk. Chuck will be hanging with customers. (He will but on another coast) Steve will at the Innovation Pavilion, hopefully with the Sport Coat and I'll be on the EMC booth wearing something which hopefully won't make me look like I'm going to ask if you'd like fries with that.

More than a year ago I squatted on twitter.com/emcworld. That doesn't appear to be even remotely close to coming online yet since it hasn't really been publicised but there it is for reference anyway. Some of us will be tweeting direct from the show so that's car crash blogging potential right there.

More updates to follow.

Shepherd One

I've FOX News on and they're covering the Pope's departure from the US.

Interesting article about travelling on Shepherd One. I always knew there wasn't a fleet run by the Vatican, though I'm sure Airbus would happily cut the Holy See a substantial discount for a long hauler, but I didn't know what it was like on the plane.

As for Benedict himself I read one of his books years ago before he became Pope. Smart guy.

The last Tape & Mainframe sales person on earth

I have come to believe that Kamandi is really the last IBM Tape & Mainframe sales person on earth.

Kamandi rows up river to pitch the new LTO 9845600 drive to the beast people.

In one of those wacky exchanges you can only appreciate with a small amount of hindsight this week Hu tried to push Diligent's (IBM's) VTL over the top even though Hitachi themselves didn't see it as strategic enough to invest any money in it the way they did with BlueArc...

Another surprise may be that tape libraries are such large consumers of power. Since tape is not spinning most of the time they should consume much less power than spinning disk - right? Apparently not if they are sitting in a robotic tape library with a lot of mechanical moving parts and tape drives that have to accelerate and decelerate at tremendous speeds. A Virtual Tape Library with de-duplication factor of 25:1 and large capacity disks may draw significantly less power than a robotic tape library for a given amount of capacity.

...while Tony P. tries to hold it's head under water the same week IBM spent anywhere in the range of $160M to $200M to add it to Moshe's toy box.

The analysts even considered a disk-based Virtual Tape Library (VTL). Focusing just on backups, at a 20:1 deduplication ratio, the VTL solution was still 5 times per expensive than the tape library. If you use the 25:1 ratio that Hu Yoshida mentions in his post above, that would still be 4 times more than a tape library.

If Diligent's VTL focus shifts you'll know it's a result of IBM's all tape all the time backup strategy. They're number one in the tape market. Not two or three. Number One. So like the Red Queen it's a case of "Off with it's head!" should anything look like it threatens the linear media cash cow.

And remember, IBM would prefer you not to buy the IBM de-duping VTL. Though they might want you to buy a de-dup license for the next version of TSM. But only if the data will eventually end up in a tape storage pool where you can reclaim and collocate it for hours on end.

But don't forget to buy enough tape drives so you can still carry out restores while TSM is doing that. Not that you'd have that worry were you using an EMC Disk Library..I mean Virtual Tape Library with TSM.

But it could be much worse.

You could be waiting for HDS to work on solving your backup challenges. No help there but you can be sure their parent will have a next generation version of their market leading "vibrating relaxation aid", the Hitachi Magic Wand, available to solve other challenges.

Buuuuzzzzzzzzzzzz!

IBM buys Diligent..

...EMC cashes fat cheque.

How much just for the planet?

It's interesting that Xiotech appears to have drafted Jon Toigo to fight their battles. I suppose no one can do red faced jowl waggling self-righteous indignation the way he can but what I find interesting is that amongst the outlandish, unsubstantiated and downright bizarre claims he hasn't once discussed price. 

No one has.

Funny that.

So, how much for the glory of god in this box Jon?