Storagezilla

Death Of A Tagline.

When I started with EMC we had one hardware platform, Symmetrix, four software products for that platform and the CEO was Michael C. Ruettgers.

Mike came from the defence industry, was the product manager for more than a few city destroying weapons, had an easy smile and a ruthlessness which put sales people on edge even when he was smiling at them.

It was described to me once as feeling “…like a Great White Shark swam up along side you, gave you a wink and then quietly swam off into the darkness to rip someone else to shreds.”

If you boasted within earshot of Mike that you were going to make the Sun rise in the West by the end of quarter, he’d be up before dawn every morning to see how you were doing and then kick your ass when the quarter ended for failing to meet your deliverable.

It was simple. You had an agreement which you failed to honour and there were consequences for that.

His interaction with Wall Street was humorous to watch and the last fifteen minutes of the quarterly financial call was dedicated to what competitors sucked, why they sucked and why they couldn’t run their business properly.

This was the age of EMC, ‘The Storage Architects’.

Mike’s tenure began to wind down, the call of duck hunting and the sirens song of returning to the defence industry (To this day he’s on the board at Raytheon) became stronger and stronger until one day we were petrified when Joe Tucci suddenly showed up as President of EMC.

Joe had “saved” Wang according to some former Wangers (A poor choice of word if you’re from Cork but I’m running with it) by selling the company on to Getronics.

‘Oh god’, we thought ‘he’s going to break us up and sell us on to someone like HP and we’ll all be out on the street’. Such is the thinking when you’re pushing boxes from one side of the manufacturing floor to the other and at the time we had nothing much to talk about besides that and how high the stock was climbing.

The stock, having split more times than any cell in your body, did exactly what you’d have expected it to do during the dot com crash. It hit the floor and went right through it. Indeed the only thing which slid faster than the stock price was EMC’s revenue and we posted a loss so extensive there was shock amongst the employee populace.

“It’s that Tucci guy’s fault.” was the scuttlebutt around the canteen tables at break time. “He doesn’t know how to run a company like EMC so maybe Mike will let him take the hit for the crash and then come back and save us.”

Naive of the realities of the business world as that reads now unlike Mike Joe wasn’t omnipresent to us. Mike fired off emails when he was happy but equally when he was unhappy. Joe’s emails came from an ominous sounding but much more formal Office Of The President And CEO but only when he had something to announce.

Where Mike would saunter on stage in his tan sports coat and easily meander through complex slides, which he did regularly, we thought Joe never did well when driving PowerPoint and sightings at the edge of the Empire were few and far between as when Joe travelled, which he did and still does a lot, it was to see customers.

In retrospect it was unfair to compare both styles of leadership as they were two different people but we couldn’t help it. When Joe’s just talking to a room full of people he’s dynamite. At an EMC only event at EMC World he was talking to a room full of us about his early days as a Mainframe Programmer and his first job as a Sales Engineer. That’s the guy we could have done seeing more of a decade ago.

With EMC laying broken on the floor the sentiment of those of us working in the engine room became rancorous. We were seeing a lot of the company legends being run out the door and that didn’t sit well. The fact these legends in their own living room were amongst the largest contributors to our collapse didn’t dawn on a lot of us until much later.

So, with a sense the company was doomed I walked into the public library and asked to see everything I could on Wang from 1990 to the present day. What I found amongst voluminous piles of bound business magazines and newspapers was a broken and bankrupt company which through tough cost cutting and little nostalgia for it’s past came back from bankruptcy to doing $3B+ in revenues in just a few years.

Indeed it was so successful a rebirth it was an attractive acquisition for Getronics.

And then the light came on.

We had the right guy in the CEO’s office at exactly the right time and unlike Wang we had money in the bank and were in a growth market. The company started rebuilding itself in a new image and pursued acquisitions in areas far outside of box building and right into entire new industries.

We’d never have one hardware platform and four software products ever again and if you didn’t get with the Clariion, Software and VMware program you’d be shown the door so fast you’d open it with your face.

This was the age of EMC, ‘Where Information Lives’.

And that age is over.

Joe is still the CEO and his contract runs to 2013 but his tenure has outlived the tagline he launched. Out with the tagline, in with the statement..

EMC Corporation is a global leader in enabling businesses and service providers to transform their operations and deliver IT as a service. Fundamental to this transformation is cloud computing. Through innovative products and services, EMC accelerates the journey to cloud computing, helping IT departments to store, manage, protect and analyze their most valuable asset — information — in a more agile, trusted and cost-efficient way.

What it lacks in elegance it makes up for in accuracy. It’s pretty much what EMC does these days.

Will it survive as long as the taglines did?

I suppose that’s a question for the next CEO.

The Limits Of NetApp Newspeak

Now that NetApp have swarmed out of the anthill to defend the Newspeak we find ourselves through the looking glass and into the wonderful land of delusion. Lets take the common refrains and look at them rationally.

Assertion: Data ONTAP is a Unified OS and the single architecture for all workloads.

Response: Without even talking about how different the modes are in operation before you do a thing you have to choose from one of two modes at installation time and neither mode can replicate to systems running the other.

I’ll write that again, a system running ONTAP 8 7-Mode cannot replicate data to a system running ONTAP 8 Cluster-Mode and vice versa.

ONTAP isn’t a Unified OS, it’s a brand. They could call StorageGrid or Engenio ONTAP and it’ll be about as Unified as Cluster-Mode and 7-Mode. There is no unification here beyond the block diagram they’ll draw on your white board and that diagram is not connected to reality but to brand marketing.

Assertion: There’s nothing wrong with ONTAP for large datasets, Engenio is just cheaper to buy.

Response: Lets turn to the transcript.

MR THOMAS GEORGENS: There are workloads which have a set of requirements that lie outside the current and anticipated design centre of ONTAP

That quote is as clear as crystal. ONTAP doesn’t cut it for Big Data. ONTAP doesn’t cut it for big data so we had to buy what we derogatorily referred to “legacy” storage arrays with RAID 5, RAID 6, RAID 10, COFW Snapshots and Fibre Channel in order to serve those workloads.

And here we are right at the limits of NetApp Newspeak where only the corporate Lotus eaters will say nothing has really changed even after they’ve admitted to everyone but themselves that Purpose Built was not only the right approach but the necessary approach all along.

Deconstructing NetApp Newspeak

Alex from NetApp thinks I’ve given him free advertising.

Lets watch!

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Hi Mark, thanks for the free advertising. There are really three parts to any storage business; the hardware, and the software that runs on it. The third part I'll come to. Engenio takes NetApp places we haven't been before. Full motion video,

You mean ONTAP 8 Cluster Mode?

or managing huge data sets,

You mean ONTAP 8 Cluster Mode?

requires a highly scalable, very high performance and ultra-dense storage solutions; that's an area where we see a great deal of growth (as I know EMC does).

So you don’t mean ONTAP 8 Cluster Mode? But how is the E7900 ultra dense when it supports only 480 drives?

This to me is another example of the “Power of OR” not the “Power of AND” to borrow a short sighted piece of marketing. If you want huge datasets don’t do it on ONTAP do it on Engenio.

The shell game here is to love having a portfolio of storage products but not wanting to man up and admit you can’t do it all in one box and that ONTAP FC support can’t cut it with full motion video or huge data sets or so on or so on.

It represents a mixture of hardware and software for a set of issues that are much larger -- orders of magnitude larger -- than they were a few years ago, and that are no longer readily addressed by a unified storage solution.

So it was addressed before but it isn’t now? All of a sudden having an FC array is a requirement when before it didn’t matter?

This is a bit of a turn around for the people who claimed the future is IP storage, FC is dying and railed against “traditional” RAID arrays. RAID 5, RAID 10, RAID 6 and COFW snapshots. But now we’re told customer requirements have changed and highly scalable high performance ultra dense storage solutions are a requirement. These offerings of course are FC based and offer RAID 5, RAID 6, RAID 10 and COFW snapshots.

Outside of that is where NetApp's unified systems play; a set of hardware and software that meets the needs of 90% of the rest of the market that doesn't have these specific and novel requirements. Simple and effective, OnTap (and 8 is where our focus lies, not 7) has made even silo storage providers like EMC sit up and pay attention. The last piece in this business, and the most important, are customers. Every day of every week they're out there looking to make their businesses more effective and efficient. That means change. The requirements, the business issues, the opportunities aren't what they were 5 years ago; heck, they aren't what they were last year. Any company that stays in a rut with its solutions gets stiffed. Ask anyone from HP; their storage offerings are living proof that not innovating and not changing costs you dear. Even buying 3Par may not be enough to save them. OnTap is a brilliant piece of NetApp technology, that with the improvements in the shape of OnTap 8 that bring clustering, more efficiency, more _____ (you fill in the blanks here) will mean that we get more of the market because we're better at the unified, single platform storage that anyone else.

Yes ONTAP is so brilliant you spent your opening paragraph defining where it shouldn’t be used in this new world. But the crux here is that NetApp don’t offer a single Unified Platform.

Here are NetApp’s separate storage products.

1. ONTAP 8-7 Mode
2. ONTAP 8-Cluster Mode
3. StorageGrid
4. Engenio

Two different block storage products. Two different NAS products. One CAS also ran competitor.

Marketing Duckspeak might play well on slides but the inescapable fact is that two of those products only share an installer.

And now we've bought Engenio and upset you, and you’d like everyone else to feel equally upset too.

I’m not upset you’ve bought a fourth storage platform. I’m elated. It points out the hypocrisy when NetApp mounts it’s broken down old Nag to shout “Look at all the platforms the other guy has. We can solve all your problems with two of them. I mean three of them. Make that four of them.” It also points out the hypocrisy of slamming “traditional” RAID Arrays since you had to go buy one to meet the FC demands of “full motion video, managing huge data sets and anything else which requires a highly scalable, very high performance and ultra-dense storage solution.”

And like you pointed out, ONTAP can’t cut it with those as requirements have moved on.

You'd like us to stick to what you think is our knitting, so you can persuade the world that we're "doublespeaking" and that EMC, that truthful, faithful and spin-free EMC that only exists in your imagination, has better point solutions in every department. Oh, along with a "Just Like NetApp" stance on unified storage. It’s you that has the problem; EMC are in knots and you have your panties in a bunch because we refuse to stand still. Roll on change.

You’re not standing still or moving forwards, in your own long established terms you’re heading backwards.

Years of telling people ONTAP was all you needed now out the window and even ONTAP as a brand is fragmented. You have 7-Mode and Cluster-Mode. Both entirely different products which share a brand name which can be applied to anything. Like the term FlexPod.

NetApp has been evacuating from both orifices on their “Unified” product set for a long time now. Running around the place slamming diverse product portfolios and FC arrays as they keep adding products and buying FC arrays. But now people are noticing. And the Newspeak isn't working.

NetApp Newspeak

There’s nothing like watching NetApp employees talk themselves into knots when they explain how they have one platform for every problem, but don’t.

Lets list NetApp’s go to market offerings and add some context free of the Sunnyvale “The Law of Gravity is nonsense. No such law exists. If I think I float, and you think I float, then it happens.” Newspeak which leads them to make unfounded claims such as leadership in the external Flash storage market with 3PB shipped while at the same time EMC had shipped 10 PB.

Lets go..

-7G

ONTAP classic. The house that WAFL built. When they talk about 20 years old this is what they mean.

-7G with FlexCache

They sell this combo to boost 7G performance in HPC environments.

-Cluster Mode

Code I wrote in college has more installs than Cluster Mode. Lacking a true scale out file system it instead is a warmed over DFS with horrific per mount point scaling, an impoverished feature set and represents the state of the art from 11 years ago.

-StorageGrid

Healthcare focused also ran CAS competitor with a management point for every day of the week. I never once lost to StorageGrid when I sold against them and I eventually took out every StorageGrid install I came across.

-Engenio

FC arrays pitched as Shared DAS with various file systems (StorNext, Lustre, HDFS, etc) layered on top in order not to confuse the NetApp Salesforce into thinking they have another FC storage platform in the company. They dealt with having more than one NAS platform by doing their utmost to train their Salesforce to talk customers out of buying Cluster Mode and making specific details on it notably lacking in their public materials. I give it a month before someone asks for and gets Engenio inserted into the FlexPod PDF. And then the emails will go out from NetApp sales management saying that selling products with a margin of less than 60% is the fastest route to unemployment. Even if that product offers more consistent FC performance than what they can offer with 7G.

So there you have it, a quick list of NetApp’s four answers and one bolt on to any problem you put to them. Except when they’re flapping their gums about competitors  where upon they’ll pretend they have the first one but not the other four.

NetApp Newspeak makes people dumb. Point it out when you see it.

Flash To The Future With Pat Gelsinger

Pat Gelsinger is just off of stage and EMC is now a supplier and developer of Hadoop and PCI Express Flash Storage.

Lets get into it.

Lets follow up from Mega Launch, how was the Boston Marathon?

It was great until mile 19, then my right calf cramped up making the rest slow and arduous.

But you finished?

Yes I did. With a time of 4:31 and that’s all that matters!

EMC is now a contributor to and supplier of Hadoop. There are a lot of Hadoop vendors there. Where do you see EMC adding value and differentiating from the six or seven suppliers already in that space?

Well lets step back and see what’s in the portfolio. Greenplum is great for scale out structured analytics. Hadoop is clearly the lead environment for unstructured or semi structured analytics. so we’re going to embrace that into the Greenplum family.

We will compete head to head with other distributions, like those from Cloudera and IBM, while staying fully committed to the Apache open source model and working towards driving standards.

We will differentiate this under, beside and above. Under, with VMware integration and Hadoop Appliances. Beside, with Greenplum integration. Above management with VMware for self service and Greenplum Chorus for collaboration.

What do customers think about that?

It’s early but the reactions have been positive.

On Open Source. Historically EMC has not been a significant contributor to Open Source projects, VMware on the other hand through it’s integration of SpringSource is now a significant contributor to open source projects. Is EMC Hadoop the start of greater open source involvement on EMC’s part?

Yes. You’ll see us becoming increasingly active in specific Open Source projects like this and in other targeted areas.

Project Lightning. EMC is using server side Flash on a PCI Express Card to extend array cache directly to the server.

That’s correct. I heard from many customers that the ability to have server side Flash interact with their Arrays for persistent storage, high availability and shared storage data services is highly desired. Thus we’re giving the best of both worlds to our customers and bringing our world class sales and support positions to bear to create a unique position in that market.

On that market, there are already companies in server side Flash storage but they’re Direct Attached Storage focused. Is EMC wedded to an array extension strategy?

We’re not wedded to the idea of Lightning solely being offered as cache extension for our Arrays but it is something we’re going to address right out of the gate. Lightning will be a competitive PCIe DAS device for local storage or external storage caching but we’ll differentiate with array cache extension technologies such as FAST.

Finally, you’ve run the Boston Marathon, are at EMC World and are then off to the Great Wall Marathon. I’ve heard you say Time Management is one of the secrets to making that all work. For those of us whom are chronically tardy and have developed the last minute cram into a fine art, where does one start down the effective time management path?

Well as I described in my book “The Juggling Act”…

Cheapest plug ever.

Thanks. Buy one for all your family & friends.

As I described in my book “The Juggling Act” a personal mission statement is a great place to start this journey. Get specific about who you are and what you want to do with your life. Based on that, begin that journey with specific goals. Next, get some help along the way. Mentors and accountability partners who are willing to join with you on the journey and help you be accountable to your mission statement.

Of course a dose of discipline and a dash of time management practices is pretty helpful as well.

Virtual Pass? Virtual Lab? EMC World 2011

Less than a week away from EMC World 2011 and I’m doing everything I can to ignore the fact I have yet to even consider packing for the multi-hop trip.

Two notes on the show.

For people who can’t attend, and that’s a shame since the value in EMC World is in the face to face interactions, you can watch replays of the keynotes on Facebook if you like the EMC Corp page.

For attendees, this year the Solutions Centre and vSpecialist teams will be opening the doors on the vLab.

This 200 seat lab will give you access to a broad swath of the EMC Portfolio, from storage platforms and features, to security products and Big Data applications right way to backup & recovery. And it’s all running in the EMC Cloud in North Carolina.

Due to the volume of people at EMC World there will be a digital sign up station outside the lab where you’ll make your lab selection and from where you’ll be brought to your lab session.

Nothing to stop you from signing up for another one when you’re done with the first.

Be seeing you…