Storagezilla

Where do you work?

I was packing up to go home around 7:00pm tonight when I decided to snap a photo of my desk.

It's surprisingly neat for me. I set out to dejunk the place after I realised the cleaning staff thought it was abandoned due to the amount of tech garbage I had cluttering up the place and the fact I didn't have anything which made it look like a human used it. So I cleaned it over the course of two nights and put up some of my awards and stuff. 

When I came back in the next morning the cleaning crew had spit polished it to a shine.

I head out the back way so I cut through the manufacturing facility.

 

I'll admit I had to wait ten minutes to get a clear shot. You don't see the people with pallet trucks standing off to the left out of shot and behind me.

When it's raining outside, as it frequently is, you're grateful that it stretches on so far. The wall on the right hand side stops about half ways through opening into an area of equal distance where you're faced with rows of blinking DAEs being tested. All the lights drove the sensor in my cameraphone nutzoid so there's no photo of that.

And this is one of the last things I see before I go home.

At our 20 year Cork Campus celebration we got everyone to sign their name on the banner, mine's up there somewhere, and then we hung it up next to the canteen.

Well that's where I work, where do you work?

Going to EMC World? Drop by and say Hello!

I'll be the guy who's voice carries across the country.

Besides haunting Len Devanna's Bloggers Lounge (And making sure our Flip winners do make movies. I make it a personal goal to be in all of them) I think I'm scheduled to be at the Backup and Recovery - Challenges and Opportunities with EMC NetWorker and EMC Avamar sessions where, I plan on answering all the questions the product architects avoid.

Well perhaps not all, just some.

Then there will be endless laps of the show floor to take questions on different things as they pop up.

All of this is subject to the fact that the Irish Passport office don't refuse my passport renewal request on morality grounds or something.

I've been going to EMC World for many years now but I get the impression this will be one of the notable ones.

Lets see what happens.

Dave Donatelli moves on

Let me say this regardless of the circumstances, Dave Donatelli is an asset where ever he lands. I liked the guy the first time I saw him speak 13 years ago and I continue to like the guy now.

He will be missed, but the company will go on.

As for Frank Hauck, I've worked for Frank at various times over a number of years and the first time I met him he was jet lagged, had been up 24 hours (Which is fine by me since I do that on a regular basis) but he still asked all the awkward questions a good bosses bosses boss asks when you go to them with something.

It's never not interesting around an EMC campus.

The 5%

There's nothing like management saying we're rolling out a 5% pay cut across the board to interrupt every meeting and conversation going on inside the company.

Lets cut to the quick, no one is pleased to take a pay cut. Money, like clean air, is something people always want more of. I'm in the process of buying my first house so you should have been able to hear the groan from me where ever you were as I read the email.

However, given the choice of everyone taking a hit or shedding a couple of thousand more people I'd rather we keep those families and dependents in food, shoes and shelter.

But that's just my opinion.

We get five extra days holidays so that's five days earlier that HR will be mailing me with the annual warning they'll be sending me home if I don't book a holiday and go on it.

Well they used to mail me, now someone flustered just shows up and reminds me that the Big Blue Room isn't a waiting area and I should feel free to use it for a while.

Of course I won't have any money to go anywhere but that's a different issue... ;-)

As goes VMware, so goes our industry

Before EMC reports and therefore at the risk of putting my head into the Lion's mouth and flicking his testicles with a rolled up tea towel, a quick comment on VMware's results.

The great, the just okayish, the ones I could take or leave and the not so good all lined up to sing vSphere's praises on Tuesday and if you subscribe to the idea that $1 spent on VMware means $3 more dollars spent on storage then one can see how things tighten up all around when that Dollar isn't a Dollar, but instead 50 cents.

We'll know how people did last quarter as they report but storage vendors, hardware and software, were the last to feel the effect of tightening budgets. 

The question now is if they'll be the first or last out when the skies clear?

MS, HP and EMC scale Documentum further

Before I dig deeper into PowerPath/VE a word about Documentum.

Craig has a post up detailing the work that went into generating a 100,000 concurrent user Documentum 6.5 Benchmark.

Microsoft supplied the testing facility the operating systems and SQL Server 2008, HP provided the Integrity SuperDome multiprocessor system and EMC provided Documentum 6.5 and the storage hardware.

Contrast that to Oracle who want to own all the pieces but who's Stellant Content Management System died yesterday resulting in Oracle putting a maintenance page up and asking people to call them with their questions.

PowerPath/VE

Joining the already shipping support for Hyper-V, hetrogenous path management comes to VMware vSphere with PowerPath/VE.

All the goodness of PowerPath for your virtualized data center.

Soracle

Charles, who at Microsoft fought IBM, Sun and Oracle all at the same time (And who I sometimes think is just waiting for Round 2) has his own take on the Soracle deal.

It's a bit different.

Timing - I need to go back and look at the sequence, but Oracle has been pretty good since their acquisition parade began at timing deals in such a way that they help their year-on-year comparisons.  Never forget Oracle is managed financially these days.  This might explain why they didn't pull the trigger on Sun earlier.

Ellison on buying Sun.

"I don't think Oracle should be in the hardware business, so I don't think you'll see us buying any hardware companies. But we have thought about it."

--Larry Ellison who when asked in 2003 if Oracle had considered buying Sun Microsystems instead of pursuing the hostile takeover of PeopleSoft continued on to say it would be a bad idea.

The bearded one is obviously for turning.

Throw in the fact that IBM appear to have thought that they were still negotiating with Sun and this looks like a smash and grab deal. Hell Sun didn't even get a leak out to the Wall Street Journal and that's in direct opposition to their entire corporate culture.

It was obviously a fast deal and that would explain why there appears to be a lack of integration details.

Sun is a huge company even if it's value is low, we know they like Java and want to build a hardware mainframe. Beyond that? We and perhaps they know nothing.

Oracle buys Sun, plays defense.

I said there would be a shocker deal this year and this is it. Oracle have announced they're buying Sun for $9.50 a share. An offer less than what IBM first put on the table but 15 cents hire than IBMs post due diligence offer and it looks like Oracle are willing to fight it out with the regulators to prove that also owning MySQL isn't an issue.

If you're a Sun stockholder the board appears to have done it's job. But I still expect briefs from Microsoft and IBM to land on desks at the European Commission by the end of the week.

So this puts MySQL, Solaris and Java in Oracle's pocket and puts Oracle in the server and storage hardware business. Interestingly they're playing down owning the hardware components and a large tape business. One assumes a quick death for the Oracle/HP Exadata storage system since HP is now firmly on Oracle's hit list as a Sun server competitor.

Everything which isn't Java, MySQL or Solaris is probably now dead. Expect maintenance costs to sky rocket as per previous Oracle acquisitions.

Since they now consider Solaris a crown jewel I wouldn't expect NetApp to catch any breaks in their ZFS case. Charles Phillips going so far as saying

Oracle can optimize the Oracle database for some of the unique, high-end features of Solaris.

You mean like DTrace and ZFS? Probably the only unique features of Solaris.

This is an interesting deal for a number of reasons, one of them being Oracle has long tried to commoditise the hardware business and now finds itself in it.

They'll be selling one trick appliances like Exadata (And I can't find a customer who hasn't turned their nose up at that), but they're now a hardware vendor none the less.

Interesting shout out about protecting customers SPARC investment in those materials. The thought of losing that SPARC maintenance stream must have been a more damaging blow than anyone would have thought.

It does make sense that this is a defensive move. The maintenance revenue for Oracle running on Solaris/SPARC must be huge and that falling into the hands of IBM must have been a waking nightmare.

Looks like SPARC will continue for a while to come.

The smacks of a $7B defensive move on Oracle's part. Yes they pick up Java and MySQL but keeping Solaris and SPARC means you're keeping the parts other companies would have quietly disposed of in the face of Linux and Intel based processors.

There are much cheaper ways of getting into the server and storage business than buying Sun and taking on all that baggage, there's also the fact that buying hardware companies is like drinking a ladle full of castor oil.

It might be required but it's such a brutal, cut throat, low margin business you know it's going to upset your regularity for a while.

And that's why people don't do it that often.

All in all fun, fun, fun!