Storagezilla

Being Proven

I decided to split this topic into two entries as it was getting a bit long. You can find part one in "Have you been Proven?"

While I've attempted to avoid exams it's not like I haven't had to take them. I took the Solaris Admin course years ago and did the RHCE. There was a difference in the design philosophy of both methods, Sun trying to teach you a lot of theory with RedHat focused more an a MSCE style certification complete with failures you had to root cause and fix during the exam.

Honestly I used a lot more of the Sun stuff, and still do, than what I learned on the Red Hat Certified Engineer track. The RHCE test is more interesting and I get that RedHat are trying to bootstrap a minimum level of Red Hat Enterprise Linux competence but to me it failed the five year rule as after the first time you see them none of their challenges would be in anyway challenging later on down the line.

I get that they were teaching the troubleshooting mind set and I'll admit it's a successful way of doing it but it's no replacement for hands on experience.

The Solaris courses were less hands on and the material a bit dusty (It would have been Solaris 2.6 as well) but I found the concepts stayed with me. I recall being impressed with the HP-UX training I took with HP, the instructor was great and I wish I remembered his name, but I've never been impressed with HP-UX. I never took AIX training and perhaps that explains why it was my least favourite to deal with.

Getting back to the EMC material I found it pretty well written, it is very EMC specific so it can feel like you're getting a tour of all the products but I'll admit to a few moments where I had a "That's interesting I'll have to look into that further" around products which were not my speciality.

Technical vignettes like that can turn out to be priceless when you have a head scratcher of a problem as they point you in the direction of a set of technologies to look at.

At the very beginning the EMC Proven materials do drill the industry wide fundamentals into and establish a common lexicon for you to use even if they use EMC specific technology to make the point. It gets deeper into product specifics the higher up the track you travel and by the end you can see where someone could write some very exam evil questions.

On the point of questions overall I found the exams to be fair. If you know the material that'll be reflected in if you pass or fail and I never felt the questions were trying to make an idiot out of me.

If I had a drawback it was when I looked at a question and had an answer I'd use in real life but which was not have been covered by the material and therefore isn't an option. It's a correct answer but not the answer in the material you were supposed to have studied. So a few times I found myself sitting in the tests trying to mentally wind back to what the accepted answer could be.

This caught me out more than once and it's my own fault. An example of being confident to the point of arrogance.

I passed the exams and can now put EMC Proven logos all over the business cards which I don't have, my boss is happy and I'll get paid.

There's not much more you can ask for really, but I do fear that now someone has cracked that by putting money on a string over my head and not giving it to me until I pass an exam it'll might mean I'll end up doing more of them in the future.

Doh!

But before that I might register and see what's going on in the Proven Professional Community.

I passed the tests so why not?

Have you been Proven?

For well over a decade I've avoided taking any kind of EMC Proven exam. This is even though I get the training and Exam for free.

Right now I could pick a product or a speciality, take the training and do the exam and it'll cost me nothing but my free time.

But I don't because I hate taking tests.

Taking tests just freaks me out and I've used every excuse in the book to avoid taking tests. This is a throw back from school where having a good memory appeared to outweigh any need to understand the material.

I'm a big subscriber of learning by doing. In life there's a lot of things you can read about but until you do it for yourself you haven't learned anything.

I've always been of the same view when it comes to what we do. When I was a UNIX/Linux admin the beard & sandals folks told me it took five years to grow a real UNIX administrator. I didn't understand that until five years later when I'd seen nearly every horror you can get when running a 24x7 operation. After five years I could prevent or solve more than my share of them and knew where/who to go for to figure out the rest.

You can apply the five year rule to any complex job functions in IT. Be it storage management, backup and recovery, archiving, database administration and on and on and on.

And aside as difficult as technical types can be there has to be an acceptable level of communication. Technical folks don't dig ditches for a living but I'm of the belief that some of them only have so much energy to deal with other people and the nastyness begins when they feel over extended.

That being said a technical genius you can't communicate effectively with is useless to you and probably in the wrong job. They're making you miserable but you in turn are making them miserable. It's just a bad situation.

Getting back to test taking, nothing gets you to sit down and prepare for a test like your boss attaching it to your bonus. Which is exactly what mine did or she knew I'd have just set fire something to cause a distraction and then changed the subject.

So knowing that I need a deadline with some level of jeopardy involved I booked the closest exam time I could and then started studying for it. I think I booked it on a Friday evening for Wednesday morning and just started going through the material.

It's not something I advise if you're coming to this new.

You can find part two of this in "Being Proven"

Expanding the EMC/Quantum relationship

Earlier this morning Quantum and EMC announced an extension of it's successful de-duplication OEM agreement by making available a $100M line of credit which Quantum will use to refinance it's convertible debt.

Quantum's last quarter was one of it's strongest in years, their disk systems revenue alone growing by over 100%, but industry watchers know about it's perilous debt structure and how that was hampering the growth of a key player in the data de-duplication market.

A check of recent filings shows that Quantum is required to re-finance $135M of convertible debt in February 2010 but the financial meltdown has created a credit vacuum which EMC (With over $9B in cash and investments) can and has stepped in to fill.

Quantum also has senior debt to the tune of over $200M, but that's not the issue. The issue is the convertible debt and the ability to re-finance it in 2010 in a credit constrained market.

Looking at the growth in the de-duplication market, the fact that EMC is the revenue leader in that category and noting Quantum's growing business EMC has decided to make a line of credit available to Quantum to remove the pending debt liability allowing Quantum to focus on it's strong fundamentals.

Checking my stock ticker I notice the market see the same thing as of time of writing Quantum's share price has surged 92% on the opening bell and is still climbing.

It should be noted that this is not an acquisition in sum or in part, it's an example of EMC leveraging it's balance sheet to grow it's balance sheet in the near future. It does represent an extension of the existing EMC/Quantum OEM relationship.

With data deduplication being a growth market, EMC being the revenue leader in that market and Quantum being an important OEM partner there's a win here for both company's and a bigger win for it's mutual customers.

Retrospect 8 ships

Something I never thought I'd see in my lifetime but Retrospect 8 for Macintosh has shipped.

If like me you have a ton of data across a number of computers which could take weeks and weeks to upload into the cloud via my awful ADSL connection Retrospect backup to an external hard drive could be the cure for what ails you.

But for that stuff you just can't lose if the house burns down (God forbid) there's always Mozy. Or at least that's what my belt and braces backup strategy is anyway.

Retro does my local backup, Mozy does the offsite.

You are going to die.

Being a gamer (Finally gotten around to playing Mass Effect on PC) I read gamer sites so we'll take a short diversion from playing the grand information game we usually play here and talk about the fact that you are going to die.

Yes those threads will tie together but like cooking dinner I don't worry about the presentation while I'm cooking the meal.

Unlike games where health can regenerate or if you have a game designer stuck in the 80's you have the concept of lives, which in reality were nothing more than a design mechanic used to keep you pumping coins into arcade games, faith included there's a good chance you won't be back around to tell those you leave behind where everything is after you shuffle off.

Which is why we have wills and that one place in the house where we might keep all the important paperwork. But now we have online existence which stretch beyond the printed page kept in a folder in your house. 

In a time where even your work voicemail requires a five or more digit code and everything online appearing to require a 10 character mixed case password with at least three digits in the mix thereby making it unguessable and before you can even begin to absorb it it's time to change it because security types are sadists and do these things just to hurt you.

So reading this article on Yahoo! Tech about digital Deadman Switch services and how gamers and non-gamers alike are using them it got me thinking, another part of your estate planning now has to be digital. You're going to have to write down your passwords somewhere and ensure they're easily recoverable by people who may or may not be as tech savvy as you.

Your email login(s) probably should be included in case of a need to reset a password. Of course if there are security questions involved in the recovery that can make things even more complex and if there happens to be anything in your email you'd rather not have someone else read, well you'll be dead so don't sweat it too much.

So yeah, you're going to die but don't forget to leave the passwords to any critical services somewhere. And this brings us back to gaming. While shopping around this weekend for something else to play never was it more evident to me that the two things keeping PC gaming going are Valve's STEAM service and World of Warcraft.

And if we look at that abysmal situation I think we find it's all your fault as you never bought Psychonauts when you should have.

IBM Black Hole To Swallow Sun

IBM, the biggest monopoly holder in the technology business, half of who's revenue comes straight from their competition free Mainframe business, is interested in buying Sun Microsystems.

A company who's mantra since the dot com crash has been about disrupting the status quo of company's such as IBM. Insert culture car crash here.

Before I begin I have my suspicions about the timing of the WSJ leak. Those usually happen when the acquisition target is looking to fan the flames of a bidding war when another less interested party has come sniffing around.

I already think it's overpriced at the reported $6.5B and I'd guess that price will be higher by the time they close.

The question is what would Sun bring to IBM's table?

The key assets I'd see for IBM in a Sun acquisition are:

-The largest piece of the shrinking tape pie.

This would turn the tape market into a two player game. Quantum on one side IBM/STK on the other. Tape is incredibly important to IBM, even used as primary storage by it's Mainframe customers, but as a technology while it has a present tape does not have a future.

It won't die as a technology until five seconds after the Mainframe does but it's an innovation dead end.

-Control of Java.

Something which does a couple of hundred million in revenue annually. For all their talk about opening Java we'll see how that shoe fits when it's an IBM asset.

-A hammer lock on the server business.

Combined IBM/Sun server share exceeds 40% and Sun's server business is their fastest growing and probably most interesting division.

-Control of MySQL

The Oracle/DB2 war still rages so MySQL could be an interesting IBM attack point in that fight to that fight.

-The switch family

Cisco has parked their tanks on the server makers lawn. Sun have been making rumblings about going after the high margin switch business with commodity components. HP has ProCurve, IBM has...?

Post Sun acquisition they'd have the upcoming Constellation family of switches.

-It's all about EDS

HP's aquisition of EDS puts IBM on the back foot. A reversal here would be to go around EDS entirely, one way of doing that is to leverage the fact that many large EDS run shops are Sun customers. Buy Sun, put yourself into that relationship with the customer and HP have a hard time locking you out. 

The key liabilities I'd see in such an acquisition are:

-Solaris

IBM's cash rich pSeries division is an AIX stronghold with IBM's numerous attempts to kill AIX and replace it with Linux having all failed. With Linux being pushed hard on xSeries hardware, on the Mainframe and even on pSeries where does Solaris settle?

The answer is that it doesn't.

This would be Tru64 meets HP-UX all over again with noises made about integration but eventually the acquired UNIX going away. There will be massive uproar for the fanatical Solaris admin base (Of which I was a member) and as a sop to them eventually some crusty code would probably be thrown over the wall without Sun's community source strings.

-Sun Storage

Sun's server division had ambitions to chase the storage Dollar. Would an injection of Sun DNA into IBM awaken the same imperative in IBM's xSeries division? If it did that would be bad news for IBM storage partners.

On the other hand we can see the NetApp/Sun suit settling within moments of the ink drying. I don't see IBM copping to any liability or paying NetApp any money. They might even have a patent cross licensing agreement in place.

That doesn't change the fact the Sun guys will still despise NetApp with the burning fury of a thousand stars.

I also don't worry about ZFS going away, maybe the AIX team might want it maybe they'd see it as too much effort to decouple it from Solaris but regardless it was always going to be worm food in the face of btrfs. Sun legal could never get to a place where widespread adoption was going to be easy.

Sun's storage division for all the hype is a blip in overall Sun revenues but it wouldn't be if IBM decided they now had the technology to do it better than anyone they were rebranding gear from.

As for SPARC, hand it over to Fujitsu. They built faster SPARC processors with better yields than Sun ever did and with POWER in their pocket I can't see IBM being interested in anything besides the SPARC IP.

Sun have a lot of talented people and EMC is hiring. If the whole IBM thing doesn't work out, come and see us.

I'll be back later with more on this, today is a busy busy work day.

The Road to EMC World 2009

For the first time in seven or eight years I won't be at EMC World (Not my call, it's the economy) which means you'll be having fun without me.

And after a long day of numerous sessions, some of which are yet to be announced, -cough-, what fun to be had. This year's Wednesday night event is at the Universal Orlando Park, not the Islands of Adventure as in previous years.

While I always enjoyed the water rides at IOA the move to Universal opens up more options for those who's idea of a good time doesn't involve being drenched in so much water it looks like you've been swimming.

My personal picks for the must see attractions at Universal are Shrek 4D, The Simpsons Ride, Disaster Studios and the interactive Hollywood Rip, Ride and Rockit coaster.

The Maurer Söhne designed Rockit isn't open yet but it is targeted to come online in May. Will it be ready for the EMC World throngs? I hope so. It looks to me that the lift and the loading area are well along but the main loop hasn't been fully put in place yet.

The lift hill is probably going to be one of the largest in the world with a 50 meter vertical ascent while the ride itself is using an X-Car design with Maurer's multimedia X-Seat. The X-Seat puts two stereo speakers into the headrest allowing you to pick your own soundtrack during the ride and a built in video camera to record your horrified expressions over the duration of the ride. You should be able to pickup your own personal ride music video in the gift shop at the ride exit.

Shrek 4D is good fun but mind those creepy crawlies, they will make you squirm. They most certainly made me squirm and you'll know what I'm talking about when you experience it. In 4D.

As for the Simpsons my only advice there is that tall people should sit in the back seats, headroom allowing, or they'll obscure the view. Homer is of course the star.

There are a lot of other rides to choose from but I'll admit to having a special place in my heart for the trip to Disaster Studios and my visit with Master of Mayhem and undisputed king of Disaster movies Frank Kincaid.

(Any resemblance to Christopher Walken is purely coincidental)

The wave of the future (Replay)

Earlier today (At of time of writing) EMC held it's Strategic Forum for Institutional Investors. You'll only get a portion of what happened by reading other people's accounts, the archived webcast is now available for viewing.

To add my own commentary, up front Joe shoots down the idea of spinning off VMware.

Good.

That was only a good idea in the minds of EMC competitors. VMware is the growth company people want to own. What exactly would the super geniuses have sold it to buy? Magic beans? 

Since VMware is now established in it's market and has a very diverse ecosystem it's okay for EMC to focus on the opportunity around it. No one can say they haven't been given a fair shot by how the Virtual Infrastructure division has been structured and run.

You might compete against the Information Infrastructure division but it's easy and very desirable to partner with the Virtual Infrastructure division.

With the rise of Hyper-V (Who's Dollar those of us in "eye-squared" are also chasing and don't be stupid enough to think otherwise) if any vendor de-emphasises their VMware support for even a split second I swear to god those of us in Information Infrastructure will take that business and their customers from them.

We're already fighting them for the money spent around VMware and we'll take whatever other opportunities they provide through their negligence.

We think the Software Mainframe is the wave of the future and from the beach all of us are standing on you can see it coming to shore.

We're hiring.

The great expansion begins once more. Don't ask me how these things work but it appears a ton (literally) of new jobs are available at EMC right across the company.

-If you currently don't have a job give it a look.

-If you used to work at EMC and want to come back give it a look.

-If you're in the IT industry and have never worked for EMC give it a look.

If you have talent, dedication and a passion for what you do, we want to work with you.

We're more than storage boxes, software, information security, content management and cloud computing. I can walk into a large meeting of EMCers and find people discussing nearly every topic in technology and it's probably all work related.

Our ambition knows no bounds. How about yours?

Wheat Vs Chaff

Reformed analyst and current Security Evangelist at RSA Paul Stamp (It should be noted I objected to his choice of pun considering token's are the least interesting thing about RSA) has an interesting piece up about..well..analysts.

I suppose it does take one to know one after all.

Welcome to the conversation Paul. ;-)