Storagezilla

The High Bandwidth Option.

PowerPoint has been taunting me for the past few hours with it's blinking cursor and empty slides. What I'm going to say unspooled into bullet points on scratch paper quite quickly, putting all the shiny happy digital presentation touches around it is the laborious part.

In between slowly chiselling my message onto stone tablets (I'll tell the internal attendees there was a pillar of fire involved) I messed around with a High Bandwidth VNX. Aimed at Business Intelligence, Rich Media, Data Warehousing the system bandwidth is anywhere up to 50% greater than a standard VNX 5500 through the addition of extra SAS busses on an UltraFlex module.

It's a pretty cost effective way to increase the IOPS of a VNX 5500 to meet a workload which might not require a more powerful VNX 5700 or VNX 7500.

Joe goes to OpenWorld

Cloud + Big Data = Massive Change + Massive Opportunity

The journey to cloud computing (private clouds, public clouds, and ultimately, hybrid clouds) is transforming IT infrastructure, applications, and end-user device layers, ushering in a wave of disruptive change unlike anything the industry has experienced before. Capitalizing on the new tools and techniques, organizations that discover how to extract value from big data will drive innovation, lead the market, and do things that competitors didn't know were possible. Now is the time to accelerate the journey to your cloud, unlock the potential of your big data, and think differently about your applications and your career in IT.

via www.oracle.com

I think, but can't be sure, that the last time Joe keynoted Oracle OpenWorld was in 2004.

I wouldn't bet against some announcements.

How soon until Whitman folds?

The HP board did exactly what I and many other people in tech told them not to do and hired Meg Whitman as CEO. For everyone who competes against HP this is a good thing.

Putting aside the fact she bailed on eBay the moment it started facing real competitive pressure lets look at her last gig as Gubernatorial candidate for California.

To the numbers!

Whitman’s opponent was Democrat Jerry Brown. A political insider and part of the Democratic machine to her “born to the purple” (Roman reference) Silicon Valley success story.

Over the course of the campaign Whitman spent $11.7M on political consultants. Brown spent $167K. Whitman spent $10.5M on campaign materials. Brown spent $2.5M. Whitman paid $5.9M in campaign staff salaries. Brown paid $157K. Whitman spent $2.3M (That’s Million) on office expenses. Brown spent $132K.

All in when the election was over their total expenditure came to:

Brown (Deemed to be elected): $24.8M. Whitman: $160M ($141M out of her own pocket)

Meg Whitman spent six times as much as her opponent, netting out at $50 per vote received, and she was demolished by Brown on election day.

When under pressure and asked to perform she has come up short, regardless of the substantial assets available to her, twice in a row.

Leo hits the door with his face on the way out

Leo Apotheker has really done a number on HP over the past 11 months.

Lets follow the money!

-$10B in market value has been wiped out since he announced his plans for the latest re-org. The stock has lost 40% of it’s value from the day his hiring was first announced.

-Autonomy, a deal I could see the point of when it was announced and I liked that HP was getting gouged on the price, is now costing HP close to $12B all in. Before today 42% of Autonomy stock has been tendered by shareholders meaning the deal is slowly creeping towards completion.

-Shutting down the former Palm/WebOS business has cost HP $1B in restructuring charges.

So in 11 months Leo’s presence has cost HP shareholders close to $23B in cash and market cap.

Leo’s out, his card was marked when he lowered guidance for the third time. While at SAP he led the company to it’s first loss in it’s history. SAP got rid of him after ten months, he lasted one more at HP due to playing “Where’s Leo?” early on with Larry Ellison’s process servers during the Oracle Vs SAP case early in the year.

Now that Leo joins the disgraced former HP CEOs club what matters is what HP does next.

They don’t have time to play another game of CEO Idol as Wall Street is looking for forward movement and a plan, the rumours say they’ll hire Meg Whitman. Whitman who’s been at a loose end since she blew $144M of her own money losing the election (Like HP really needs another big spender) to be Governor of California, all while picking an ugly fight with the Nurses Union and it’s members, is the wrong choice for this job.

Does she understand the business of selling hardware, software and services? There’s nothing in her professional background which would lead one to suspect she does. Does she have time to learn? No, Leo took all the honeymoon time.

Will she get the job? Possibly. Unless she refuses it. She was smart enough to hit the eject button on eBay just before growth stalled and even though she massively overpaid for Skype (There’s that big spender thing again) Wall Street does like her.

Regardless, by the end of this week Leo will be out and someone, a place holder or otherwise will probably have said they’ve changed their mind on spinning off the PC Business.

Autonomy though is a knottier problem. By offering a breakup fee of only $116M HP signalled to the market that come hell or high water this deal was going through. To put that in order of magnitude Google’s breakup fee with Motorola on a $12.5B acquisition is $2.5B. With a 42% holding if they attempt to unwind the deal that they could find themselves sued for Billions by Autonomy and it’s shareholders. And they still won’t own Autonomy.

That and the fact the Board already signed off on the deal the first time around means whoever they put in place will be charged with getting the deal done.  Fast.

What security company will EMC buy next?

I don't have a clue. But I have an idea who they *won't* buy.

RSA Chief Security Officer Eddie Schwartz probably knows who EMC will buy and Joe most certainly does since he's said he's been looking at that segment closely, factor in a few Billion in unspent 2011 acquisition funds and with the clock ticking down on this year any purchase could happen soon.

So who *won't* EMC buy? I'd say anyone using a signature based technology approach. Those no longer work as attackers move faster than signature updates and patches can be created and deployed. Instead I'm thinking attack disruption technology could be an area of interest.

You assume that they'll get in somehow, detect them when they do with NetWitness or the like and then make the environment as hostile to them as possible as to disrupt their ability to achieve their objectives. This giving you time to throw them back out.

Speculative on my part, but I think attack disruption is the missing piece of the puzzle.

What's new with EMC's investment arm, EMC Ventures?

Back in Febuary EMC quietly started EMC Ventures, it's investment arm focused at looking beyond the traditional storage market for investment opportunities. It's first engagement was as an unnamed Fortune 500 investor in Aria Systems, a billing and subscription management service used not only by EMC itself but also by Mozy, VMware and companies such as Disney and Roku.

Very quietly, something which appears to be the hallmark of the Ventures team, they also committed to contributing towards the funding for the first ever Node Summit. An event, currently without a website but running on the 24th and 25th of January, focused on Node.js

I wouldn't have to be a betting man to figure out what direction they're looking in for future investment opportunities.

But none the less EMC isn't new to investing at the venture or strategic level, over the years if memory serves the company has made anywhere between 70 to 100 quiet investments in storage industry startups and has a double digit number of investments active in the industry today I'm told. At the strategic level there are a couple of whale sized investments but those are rarely discussed. And yet I know they exist.

So, for intents and purposes EMC is in the venture capital business. You'll hear about some investments, hear rumours about others and hear nothing at all about most.

Is EMC now in the Server business?

If you wanted to be "sensitive" (I don't cry during movies and as such don't do sensitive) in how you stated it you'd say 'EMC is now in the Compute business'. Or it will be when we ship the feature.

EMC has been demoing moving Virtual Machines from other peoples servers to running directly on the storage array. Twice on stage, a lot more than that behind closed doors. Isilon are showing demos of it running in public, the VMAX team have started talking about it in public and there are other shoes to drop.

Just assume that in the future, when it's easier to move the Compute instead of the Data, you'll be able to move the Compute directly onto the EMC Array.

Is that being in the Server business? Maybe. But it's more like being in the Systems business.