Storagezilla

When not to hit ctrl-c

It's that time of year where even the media take some time off and all of a sudden every item in your RSS Reader is a list of some sort. With that in mind just a quick pointer to Enterprise Storage Forum's Top Ten Storage Stories of 2008.

I found the first two articles written by Henry Newman to be interesting. He does raise a good point about fsck performance on Linux. I've seen people interrupt post crash fsck operations on multi-TB ext3 file systems because "it'll take too long".

Why yes allowing the system to clean itself up does indeed take more time than running with who knows what amount of garbage data on a dirty file system.

Oh and while we're on the topic InternetNews asks if pNFS will kill off high performance file systems. I'll have to go ask one of our file system brainiacs what they think about that though I'm thinking there will always be corner cases where what is an "industry standard" (Lowest common denominator) won't do the job.

I have years of industry history to support that idea. It's like saying the sun will rise tomorrow morning. It might not happen but there's a fabulous chance that it will.

Be seeing you.

It's been a heck of a year, easily seen by eWeek's run down of their top 10 storage related stories of 2008.

Having taken one day off this year to go to a funeral tomorrow I'm off to ride roller coasters until I puke and then pretend I don't enjoy Christmas while I secretly do.

Tomorrow I get on a plane with a Nintendo DS and a copy of The World Ends With You (Not sure how long a JRPG will hold my attention. We'll see), my iPod Touch which is subbing for my busted iPod Classic, and a book or two from my unread pile.

No RSA Token. No email. No Powerlink. No phone calls. No meetings. No RSS Reader. No Twitter. No Facebook. No Internet.

Just me.

At this stage 2008 is all over but for the shouting, with everyone trying to close business in the final moments I don't see any surprises popping up this late in the quarter.

There's always the chance we could have an unexpected visit from Pac-Man as we did on the 26th last year but we haven't seen him in a while so one thinks he might be on holiday from the tough economy.

And on that note, be seeing you.

HAIL. The High Availability and Integrity Layer for Cloud Storage

Ah Twitter. Like a walk on the beach it's amazing to what washes ashore.

For example tonight the Tweeps were talking about RAID for Clouds, amongst other things but I'm not getting into any of those just yet. RAID for Clouds. Great idea someone should look into it immediately.

Oh wait, RSA Labs already have.

You find endless uses for RSA's teams of cryptographers as a lot of problems can benefit from their skills. Since there's so much new frontier out there I like to think they're going to be busy for a very long time to come.

RecoverPoint: The Juggernaut.

Over a weekend of electrical storms which at one stage left the two of us in the dark and at least one of us without connectivity back into EMC at any one time I and one of our Microsoft brains worked on an early version of RecoverPoint to get it to do something (Which back then was) brand spanking new with MS: Exchange.

It was so new the code only existed as pre-GA code which was going through QA and there wasn't any real documentation. Now timings in sales engagements can be weird, let me explain.

"We'll support feature Z in the next release. That's scheduled for late next quarter"

"Great. We wouldn't be deploying until well after that anyway. I'm interested in this but I couldn't sign off on anything until I've see that feature work, and we'd like to get this done now while we have the money.."

And before you know it you have a sales person asking you to build a time machine so you can take them to the future to show their customer something due late next quarter, because the customer is interested in buying in the middle of this quarter. 

I hammered on the inbox of the group's VP, rattled staff in two of his software divisions and took conf calls at all hours from people on the east and west coasts of the US as well as in Israel to get information which was only in the process of being committed to paper.

From Thursday on it was non-stop work as we had a SAN, some switches, some distance simulators, some servers and some RecoverPoint appliances. Nothing connected to any of them and not a piece of software installed anywhere besides on the array controllers.

The Monday morning after the stormy weekend before when the customer was due to arrive to see this Proof of Concept work it was golden. Our Microsoft brain went in and away they went into Exchange land. The POC ended and I find out that everything went off without a hitch. "Brilliant.." I thought to myself "..all we need is the sales person to close and it was time well spent."

That didn't happen.

I found out two weeks later that we lost the deal to NetApp sight unseen because they gave ReplicatorX (or whatever they were calling the Topio stuff at the time) away for free. It was a wall to wall NetApp account and RecoverPoint would have opened the door for EMC, free was a price the customer couldn't argue with and neither could EMC Sales. No contest.

I was incandescent.

It's bad enough that my voice expands to fill the available space as it is but when I'm that angry I can be heard on the floors above and below where I'm standing. It's like Wagner but with Irish accents and a lot of swearing.

We had the better product, it had the application level integration Topio didn't (And never would) but the competitor denied us the deal on that occasion.

Bravo!

I don't do free, that was never an option as I'm in the business of getting paid. Instead I made sure that situation never happened again if I was involved. 

The moment Topio came up in conversation by the time I was done the NetApp team were re-positioning SnapMirror. They'd start talking about one, I get in a room with the customer for 45 minutes, then they'd start talking about the other.

Well, I have that POC customer's name written down somewhere and now that Replicator/SnapMirror for whatchamaface is dead if they're not already a RecoverPoint customer I'm going to have to make that happen.

This isn't over, it's just attempt number two. Wait until they see what we can do with SQL Server stretch clusters via RecoverPoint/Cluster Enabler.

Which markets are prime for disruption in 09?

A question and answer which occurred to me from reading TSA's latest post.

Factoring in what I know about product launches and roadmaps the answer of course is all of them.

Every established or emerging revenue stream is prime for disruption in 2009 and to quote from Zilla's Big Book Of Business it's the view of EMC to "do unto others before it's done unto us."

As corrosive as recessions and the actions company's take during recessions to put the brakes on OpEx are the way I see it fear works both ways. Employees fear that they'll lose their jobs, some do and that is awful and regrettable, but likewise the Olympians fear they'll lose the company.

Nothing motives people to start making moves, moves they previously wouldn't want to make or might consider risky in a good economy, like adrenalin and fear.

When the happy steady state the company might have achieved during the good times goes out the window you can either sit around and cry about it or you can make life absolute hell for your competitors.

Make them cry.

StorTOC: The Storage Technology Online Community

SNIA announcement in my inbox about StorTOC, the Storage Technology Online Community. Getting end users together is always a good idea, even if you're a vendor and the end users are only interested in giving you a good kicking, so I bounced over to take a look.

I like the idea of StorTOC but it's a subscription service the price of which I can't find on the front page, and they have a FAQ I can't read until someone approves my registration. I've feed back both of those points to various powers but the launch day for anything is always chaotic so it'll work itself out eventually.

We'll see if StorTOC is something I'd regularly visit but one does think that new members should get a month free regardless of when they register as according to the Terms of Service it goes subscription in December.

--Updated--

I've just been told that the public facing stuff is free (Of course) but inside the portal where the end user only discussions are and so on is $100 per person, per year.

Of course I'd be most interested in the end user discussions but have been informed that I'll be shot on sight.

Wisdom of the week

We sometimes forget..

“As former managing editor of Fortune Marshall Loeb used to say, “It’s a long career and a small community.”

When you think about our community it's microscopic.

Career choices.

Time to ask people questions. Blogged responses most appreciated.

Dave Spencer, I'm reliably informed you were a very talented coder and then opted to go the management route, which as we all know requires the use of a different skill set usually to the detriment of techie ability.  

As someone without any people management ambitions at this stage in my career what were the factors for you in making that decision?