Storagezilla

Innovating out in the open

 

Corporations by their very design are not transparent.

They're opaque.

This usually comes from the top down where corporate leaders have to watch what they do and say in public for fear of damaging shareholder return by saying the wrong thing at the wrong time and such.

Some stuff you're not going to speak about can soon become a culture of a whole lot of things no one is willing to speak about.

"It's not the company way." "The Boss doesn't do that why should I?." A million and one other reasons for going into listen only mode. I think this happened to EMC some where along the line and the company became this big gap in the conversation where every thing said by everyone else was analyzed to death behind the castle walls but responses never came.

Over the past 18 months a bunch of us have been pushing not to make EMC transparent, that just won't work in a big company, but to make it translucent. With things you can see clearly, things which might not be so clear and things you can't see at all.

One of the internal payoffs of moving towards something like this that I've noticed is the fact that I can now read what EMC Research reads even though I'm not privy to the discussions they're having about what we've been reading. The research value being kept private but the education value made public. That's translucency in action right there.

Another example of translucency was the Innovation Showcase at EMC World, Steve has mentioned it since it was the debut of his new arrival but I though it might be interesting to have a look at some of the graphics used to explain the some of the projects on display.

What follows is just a subset of what was on display at the showcase in the same way that what was on display is just a subset of the larger research efforts being under taken by the company around the world. Hopefully the diversity will give you an idea of how many different things have been going on behind closed doors and make what was opaque (EMC does research!?!) become translucent.

Disclaimer: All graphics have been posted here with permission and what follows are research topics which have been pursued to the point where they are operational prototypes. These are not shipping products and should not be considered to be such. Now lets jump in.

-Application Aware Intelligent Storage

The common nonsense is that the functionality of the array controller can be commoditised to the point of non-existence. A return to the days of hopped up volume managers and lots of DAS. But is that what's really going to happen? The AAIS team think not. 

  

-Project Daoli: Trusted GRID Infrastructure

You can guess why EMC is interested in GRID Infrastructure what with Fortress rising in different places around the planet.

-Project Futon

When the company started kicking around ideas to remove the PC as the gate keeper for digital media that was right about the time I realized they were serious about getting into the consumer electronics market. LifeLine and Iomega just sealed the deal. 

-WARP

Your phone becomes the authentication point for a myriad of services you interact with every day. A Digital Key for your Digital Life.

-Centera with Data Lineage

Steve Todd has blogged in far more detail on this than I ever could since it's his baby but here are some graphics to go with his words.

There are more. Covering a lot of different topics. Everything from new hardware/software/services to design methodologies and new ways of interacting with customers but that's just too much to cover here.

This should give you an idea of what the thinking inside EMC is these days. Everything from developing AI for storage controllers to building consumer electronics devices to figuring out the answers to security questions both in your personal life and locked away in data centers connected across the globe.

And if I'd told you 18 months ago EMC would be showing you things it was working on at the prototype stage you probably wouldn't have beleived me.

But look what happens when you aim for the pragmatisim of translucency and not the perfection of transparency.

The Hutchins/Crump War

B&S entered the high drama zone today when they posted an opinion piece as a news item. I read George Crump's piece earlier today, wrote it off as pro Data Domain anti-everyone else item and just moved on.

It is what it is. No discussion of how many de-dup engines are required to match the aggregate throughput of an Enterprise class VTL or how much buying that number of boxes might cost in comparison to a few more disk trays. No mention of the restore speed numbers when you go down that route just "Hooray for always on can't turn it off even if you wanted to inline de-dup!"

I wouldn't have posted it as a news item but as an opinion piece it's perfectly valid. But I do disagree with the style of one size fits all "this isn't Burger King you get things my way or you get damn all" thinking around the topic of de-dup since this is a feature after all and not a product or a market.

So the question now is if forum poster Hutchins should out and engage in a bit of point counterpoint. That's Hutchins decision but I'm thinking that were the poster an out and about member of the stor-o-sphere that nom de plum would have shown up in more places already.

As for George, well a bit of high drama never hurt anyones page view numbers and served to push a few more ads in front of a few more eyeballs. His subsequent entries are going to be read by people who otherwise would have moved on to other fodder were it not for the audience participation aspect of the story. 

He'll be fine.

Even more Vroom Vroom!

I mentioned NetApp car day in the previous post (I didn't mention the wacky FreeBSD chewing gum, twine and spit they're using to hold OnTAP 8 together as that's a different discussion.), but quick as a shot the Symmetrix guys were on to me about their annual event held over the course of six to eight weeks every summer where they show off different vehicles each week.

I have no idea where this was held, the company has buildings I've never even set foot in and that rolling expanse of greenery spreads out in every direction until it either hits another EMC building or someone's house. It might be an east coast thing but EMC people like to have room to stretch. Though looking at that tree line I'd almost expect the monster from Lost to be creating havoc in the background. The company is filled with enough Reagan Conservatives to be considered it's own branch of the Republican National Committee so you can be sure nearly everyone in the photo is armed with a "Freedom Dispenser" so fear not.

That being said I knew all the free parking spots had to be somewhere and these photos prove it. Greater use of the shuttle bus system in the future methinks.

Being EMC even showing off your vehicle(s) is a competition with everything from the latest speedsters and hogs to labors of love which have been carefully maintained or restored put before the judges. When you get down to it everything worth anything created by a man was first dreamed up in a garage somewhere. Sure it's had different names over the course of human history but they all mean the same thing. Place where a man can get some peace and quiet while messing around with something the rest of the family consider pointless and expensive. Some of these dreamers had beards and smoked pipes, so we'll agree that the garage was the best place for them. (I'm going to get letters on that one.)

The Bikers I'm not going to start in on since some of them weigh three times what I do and tend to look like they rip people apart with their bare hands. When other biker gangs won't even travel the roads in the surrounding areas and the Stones want to know who they'd speak to about acting as security for their next concert you know that some people have misspent more than a few of their weekends.

Okay so I did start into the Bikers, but then picking insects who died from wounds sustained from a high velocity impact out of my teeth was never what I considered to be the fun of the open road. (The letters I'll get for that one will probably be written in blood. Maybe even mine.) 

 

I'll leave you with what I consider to be the winning entry from last year.

Yes they're small and getting the family, or the dog, or..well..anything into them might be a bit of a squeeze but with petrol prices being what they are these are the most economical automobiles on the road.

Even the F1 models are affordable.

Vroom Vroom!

Covering NetApp's corporate culture Blocks & Files say the following.

NetApp people are down-to-earth and plain speaking. Sunnyvale HQ is not full of people wearing $5,000 suits, with Rolex watches and Ferraris or Porsches in the car park. It could be but they don't spend their money that way.

Unless it's the day of the NetApp Employee Car Show and Beer Bash.

Yes that's Building 1 of NetApp's Sunnyvale campus in the background. Nice rides, and you can see more of them here.

What's in the EMC corporate car park? The hell if I know. Any time I've ever driven to South Street I end up abandoning the car in front of buildings since it's near impossible to get a parking spot later in the day.

It's usually a rental so if they tow it and it ends up being crushed into a cube EMC has to pay for it...

The Week After The Conference Before

As I was going through my Camcorder footage I came to the realisation that footage of my Helicopter ride to the Grand Canyon looked better than my EMC World footage. Funny that.

YouTube to the rescue!

Keynotes and the like are on the EMC Corp channel.

Anyhoo, there were things I liked about this EMC World, a couple of things I didn't and one or two things I found funny.

I didn't like the number of booth hours this year since I knew going into it that a lot of those hours were going to be dead hours. We opened early on the Tuesday and Wednesday to give Proven Professionals a dedicated hour. They didn't show up until sessions weren't running as just like everyone else they weren't willing to trade session time for Pavilion time.

I wouldn't have either.

The justification for the addition of what turned out to be dead hours was "we can't make attendees go to sessions" but since the foot traffic went through the roof when sessions weren't running it was clear that attendees were happy to go to sessions all on their own. The two busiest times being 30 minutes after lunch began, when a lot of attendees were fed and watered, up until sessions restarted and right after sessions had finished for the day. At those times you couldn't extend your arms in any direction from a demo pod without hitting more than half a dozen people in the process.

Maybe next year we should follow the Monday model every day but do so without the free booze. Open during lunch and then open again for two hours after sessions end.

What I liked about the show was the scale of what I saw. Entering the keynote area was a bit of a jaw dropper when I saw how many people were sitting in the audience on the first day.

I showed up late to Joe's keynote since I already knew what was going to be announced and I couldn't stay long anyway but I didn't expect to see so many people seated and it took a few seconds to take it all in.

I also liked the EMC Booth, it looked....solid. And unlike Prometheus chained to a rock for his sins it wasn't a bad place to spend 18 to 20 hours over three days.

What I found funny was the gnashing of teeth around HULK/MAUI. No one said there would be an announcement at EMC World people just assumed it would happen and then got annoyed when it didn't.

One wonders if those who saw the list of Executives available for Interview even noticed that no one from the Cloud Infrastructure division was on the list.

EMC World is no more their show than it is an RSA show. One wonders would the number of industry people interested in Cloudy stuff have outweighed the number of customers interested?

At EMC World I know it would have.

Half way home

Foozer pointed out an article on Blocks & Files (Which should be noted has organically moved into the most frequently read column in my feed reader) where Data Domain are shown to be spinning their wheels in vain again. Scott takes this down but then he's been waging a one man war on this since before the announcement was even made.

My first thought was "This is what happens when you don't have any serious competition." Over the next 12 to 18 months Data Domain will either become a better company or they'll be decimated completely since they'll be facing a massive direct sales force which can sell it's own offering and take out Data Domain's.

And that's before you even talk about the channel. A lot of them were Data Domain only, they won't be now if they've currently offer any other EMC gear.

The thing here of course is a lack of understanding. The DL3D1500/DL3D3000 offer policy based de-dupe, Which means you can perform 3D (Data De-Duplication) immediately or defer the 3D until you think it's convenient. That might be when the backup has just completed or it could be who knows how many hours later. Why would you want to do something like that? You want to take the performance boost offered but not dedicating resources to crunching the data. Since Data Domain have one trick, always on de-dup, you don't get that option with their gear so they'll try muddy the waters and say policy based 3D is complex. I had never seen the Web based GUI to the new DL models and I picked up the policy stuff for 3D and replication in about 10 seconds. 

The bottom line is if you can use a radio button, check box and a drop down box you're qualified to use policy based 3D.

Data Domain aside the most cunning competitor in the 3D space continues to be NetApp. I do think the company is spreading itself too thin by trying to fight too many wars on too many fronts, they've seriously dropped the ball with Spinnaker and they screwed up Decru's partner model so badly that the product set might as well be known to be an STD (Lets say Crabs) carrier, but they have enough smart people willing to take enough risk in order to make things interesting.   

Moving on, yesterday (Today??) well Thursday in Vegas I had a meeting with our user experience designers. They like feedback, I'm critical of the design of everything and would make a rotten poker player as you can read it all from my face so it's a good match. What's interesting is that the ideas they've been generating have been ripped off by other parts of the company. It only took EMC 25 years to get the idea that if you make something easy to use and pleasant to the eye more people would be interested in using it.

Who knew! (I did)

Lunch was boxed and eaten on the floor along with a bunch of other attendees before the session rooms emptied out. I was on my way through Mandalay Place with a Minty Chocolate Chip ice cream cone for dessert before the doors opened and the starving hordes pillaged the food supplies. A taxi ride to the airport and 11 hours later here I am in Gatwick waiting for my connection to Cork.

Too tired for Indiana Jones tonight. I say that knowing I'll probably fall into bed when I get home sleep for four hours before getting up and sprinting out of the house to catch the late show.

Thank you and goodnight!

Helllooooooo nerds.

And thousands of people burst into laughter at Billy Crystal's greeting. Some of the material was so old it creaked, fart jokes, Clinton jokes, Clinton again jokes, Obama jokes and "isn't Bush a moron" jokes but there's something about Billy Crystal which just makes you like him regardless of what he was saying. 

His gag reel was an Oscar opening skit and it just confirmed that he should host the Oscar's until the day he dies.

What you can't see in the cameraphone photo is the arterial spray of Brocade DCX Man shirts. While the actor playing DCX man was packing something scary in his super tight lycra costume that obviously didn't keep people away from Brocade's booth and stash of free T-shirts. 

The T-Shirt wars are over and Brocade won. 

Well that's my section of EMC World done. Even as the construction crew were ripping the booths down I was still answering questions from stragglers who decided 10 minutes after the Pavilion closed was the ideal time to ask me to explain whatever they didn't ask when I was in the same spot for 20 hours over the past three days.

Nothing changes, it's the same every year. 

Ed Saipetch from Breathing Data introduced himself during the post lunch time lull and he Scott and I had a good conversation until I felt my legs about to give out so we hit the beanbags in the keynote area with refreshments and snacks. Loooonnnnggggg conversation and he was unvarnished in his opinion of some EMC products but it places I saw his point in places where the company screwed things up.

What I've learned from Ed is that dealing with EMC can sometimes be akin to translating those bizarre error messages the AS/400 throws up on it's front panel. Yes it means something it's just not transparent as to what exactly that is. We're more open than we were but not open enough. I'd agree with that. He also made the point that some bloggers who work at EMC come off as pretty hostile at times, my answer to that is those of us who do tend to have been built during the Ruettgers era and he bred stone cold killers. 

Yes there's a lot of fluffy bunny bloggers who believe in peace and love but most of them are still inside the firewall.

Number of sessions I managed to attend this year? Zero. The same as in previous years. At 1:00am after sprinting across three hotels to make it to New York New York to see Zumanity and then making the trip back at a more leisurely pace I'm thinking that working the booth at the show has become too exhausting. Even attempting to waltz with Celerra Girl (Elvis outfit exchanged for a baseball cap as it was obviously casual Wednesday) doesn't do it.

Time for a break.

Day Two: In Review

First things first. I'm told that Dr Patricia Florissi ripped the roof off the building with her lecture this year

Patricia's slide decks are known to be works of art and near impossible to reuse without her. I don't have a copy of the book (I think I got one just one year out of who knows how many years I've worked EMC World) but her session is called Strategy and Directions for EMC Resource Management – Managing Virtualization and Compliance and I'm hoping it's repeated on Thursday. I have a few hours before I begin the long and draining commute back to the bog in Ireland.

Since the Pavilion was open for more than six hours straight today the stampede did not occur until lunchtime and it then eased off shortly after wards. A lot of people just entering the evaluation stage when it comes to data reduction technology, it might be the crowd that attends a show like this but very few people I spoke to had deployed data reduction technology and those of them now looking at it consider it a feature rather than a product or a specific market.

Instead of taking lunch I wandered the Pavilion floor. Knowing that the companies running their own booths had real customers to deal with I kept my questions to myself and tried to blend into the furniture. Something that's pretty hard to do when what you're wearing is designed to identify you as an EMC'r even if viewed from space. There's a meeting with EMC Select partners on the books at some stage this week so I'll be able to watch their pitches and get further details then. We're in a pretty vibrant market right now so there was lots to see.

On the topic of dressing up I'm not sure how they managed to do it but the Multi-Protocol Group managed to get someone into an Elvis themed Celerra costume. You don't see much of the cape in the photo but I assure it you it was there. Judging by the laughs and squeaks it was one of the women. God bless her for doing it.

After dealing with some stragglers I walked back to the hotel with Bill Petro  who introduced himself just as we were closing up. (For the record I'm in the DL3D pod in the back of the EMC booth. Left hand side as you enter the Pavilion) He's now convinced that I know everyone. Like Jerry Lewis walking the streets of New York in The King Of Comedy walking down the crowded corridors at EMC World I end up saying hello to someone every ten feet or they say hello to me. I'll admit I have a terrible memory when it comes to names which is why they get a "Hey Pal!" a wave and a big smile as I breeze past. Don't take it the wrong way, you just work with what information you have and improv the rest.

The night ended with the 9:30pm showing of KÀ at the MGM Grand. Amazing production values with a stunning hydrolic set but a weak story. The baton act by one of the female artists was done with such skill it was just beautiful while the two stand out action sequences would be the first verticle combat piece and their spin (Pun intended) on the Wheel of Death aerial stunt. 

I'd never seen the Wheel run live so it was already interesting before it got really interesting. The performer running the wheel was using a prop whip as a skipping rope while it was rotating. He missed a jump tangled his feet the rope went flying over the edge and he lost his balance and stride for a moment. There was a split second where I thought he was going over the edge but he recovered gracefully grabbed another rope from a cast member and finished the stunt.

It got the blood pumping for me, probably for him too.

ZillaMojo

I just met Robin Harris from Storagemojo while I was using the contents of the cake trays set out for customers as "lunch", yes I am that busy. We've had our run ins in the past but he strikes me as being a nice guy and I'm sure we'll disagree in the future.

He brought his video camera so he'll have a couple of interesting items posted over on storagemojo.com when they're ready to go.

And yes the game for this EMC World for some people is "Where's Maui?" but were I to answer that it would spoil the surprise. ;)

Day One: In review.

I mentioned the queue of people waiting to get into the Solutions Pavilion. I took this tonight with my camera phone just as we opened up for the welcome reception. People started queuing 30 minutes before the Pavilion opened. After my break, most of it spent on a beanbag with my eyes shut, I had to wade through them to get back to the EMC Booth. That photo doesn't give a good perspective of how deep the crowd was but it was a tricky set of moves for floor staff to get to the front of the crowd so they could go back to work.

In one of those booth duty things which sometimes happen one of the products I was covering was the Mainframe Disk Library. (DLm)  No problem. The hardware and software I had down. Speeds and feeds I had down. General Mainframe terminology? You must be kidding.

It's the difference between being from the streets and living on a street.

Luckily for me there was an EMC Mainframe person no more than ten feet away who was immediately drafted to handle such things. That's what happens when you stand still at such events for too long. I either assume you're dead or my new assistant.

And to close a rather awesome Nintendo Wii I'm not eligible to win. Judging by how busy the various Symm areas were it was clear that "symmetrix rocks."

Tomorrow we open up an hour earlier for some attendees and I think we're due a visit from the men in the white coats. 20 of the company's top pre-sales experts, male and female will be wandering around the show floor in lab coats answering questions  and probably giving prizes for good ones.

It should be..weird. ;)