Around the water cooler

EMC seeks bone marrow donor for employee

What’s the one thing that could make EMC and NetApp not only get along, but work closely together toward a common goal? Trying to save a life.

Those two companies along with Cisco and Salesforce.com will all hold bone marrow registration drives in the coming days to try to find a match to EMC employee Nick Glasgow, who is suffering from leukemia and needs a transplant. The 28-year old has Asian and Caucasian ancestry, and so the companies are especially seeking people of similar backgrounds to be tested for a match.

Nick’s heritage poses an obstacle to finding a suitable donor at this time, according to an EMC media advisory:
 

What is needed to save Nick’s life is a bone marrow donor who is a match - a monumental task given his donor has to be part Caucasian and part Asian, and the donor pool for people of mixed heritages is only 2.4% of the national database of registered donors (Compared to nearly an EIGHTY% chance if Nick was Caucasian!). Given this, his doctors indicated that there was probably a 0% chance of finding a donor from the current donor list.

EMC and Be The Match Foundation are hosting multiple donor drives across the greater Boston area, starting today:

Friday, May 29 12:30 pm - 2:30 pm - Franklin:50 Constitution Blvd, Franklin, MA (Johnson Conference Room, 3rd Floor)

Potential donors can also register online at at www.marrow.org or www.aadp.org.

Latest addition to the storage swag collection

A while back I did a riveting post for this blog covering my collection of storage s.w.a.g. (stuff we all get) picked up in my travels through the storage industry. I thought I’d follow up with a notice about the latest showpiece in my collection:

It’s a T-shirt, from EMC/Mozy. Occupying a place of honor (and a place of not-fitting) in my work area at the office, it doubles as a conversation piece and warning to intruders.

What if the cloud is really a brain?

The idea that the human race has a global brain or a composite consciousness isn’t a new one. It’s at least as old as the Transcendentalist movements of the 1800’s, and the rise of computer technology has long sparked imagination about the possibilities for such universal connection made literal. The frequent recurrence of the idea among varying groups and individuals might even be considered evidence that such a superconsciousness exists. Creepy.

One of the most recent variations of this idea is currently making its way around the Internet, in the form of an essay by Kevin Kelly titled “Evidence of a Global Superorganism.” In it, Kelly draws on those concepts of collective consciousness, and postulates that the Internet/cloud is in itself a distributed, virtual, collective consciousness.

But more importantly, Kelly argues, the particular consciousness “emerging from the cloak of wires, radio waves, and electronic nodes wrapping the surface of our planet,” isn’t actually our own.

This megasupercomputer is the Cloud of all clouds, the largest possible inclusion of communicating chips. It is a vast machine of extraordinary dimensions. It is comprised of quadrillion chips, and consumes 5% of the planet’s electricity. It is not owned by any one corporation or nation (yet), nor is it really governed by humans at all. Several corporations run the larger sub clouds, and one of them, Google, dominates the user interface to the One Machine at the moment.

None of this is controversial. Seen from an abstract level there surely must be a very large collective virtual machine. But that is not what most people think of when they hear the term a “global superorganism.” That phrase suggests the sustained integrity of a living organism, or a defensible and defended boundary, or maybe a sense of self, or even conscious intelligence.

…It starts out forming a plain superorganism, than becomes autonomous, then smart, then conscious. The phases are soft, feathered, and blurred. My hunch is that the One Machine has advanced through levels I and II in the past decades and is presently entering level III.

This idea is familiar, and maybe a little bit frightening if you’ve read a lot of science fiction or seen The Matrix. Although a recent online survey found that people are less afraid of intelligent machines than “how humans might use the technology.”

For all who have ever wanted to throw things at a vendor…

Witness the carnage at VMWorld of a booth giveaway gone bad…(VMblog)

IBM’s got some ’splainin to do in storage

IBM. What to make of them these days when it comes to storage?

It’s a question I’ve heard asked a lot this week in my conversations with industry watchers and in my blog reading. Much of it came in the wake of the leak (again) on IBM’s European website of information about an upcoming product announcement.

 ”This now makes two ‘new platform’ storage announcements from IBM where they simply post a Web page regarding a completely new storage product on their European site and call it a day,” wrote Chuck Hollis in a blog post that got the word out about the leak. “Has IBM decided to focus its marketing efforts elsewhere, and decided not to bring much attention to their … storage business?”

The “announcement” of the XIV clustered block storage array in similar fashion earlier this month prompted similar head-scratching, and, more worrying if I’m IBM, analysts have begun to sit down and dig through the XIV specs they’ve released to the market without a single PR person or marketeer accompanying it with a message.

“Where’s the beef”? is the phrase I’ve heard used at the end of the analysts’ analyzing. Robin Harris’s StorageMojo blog post is a pretty good representation of the questions I’m also hearing from others in the wider market.

“I hope there is a cohesive strategy behind the XIV product. But so far I’m not able to even guess what it might be,” Harris concluded. “Maybe the decades of warfare between geeks and suits has so totally paralyzed the product marketing function that even the normal IBM facade can’t cover the cracks. It must be something.”

I’m no PR expert, but I have to believe this is what you have PR and marketing for - to at least try to counteract speculation like this. I’ve heard differing opinions on the reasons for the leaks this week–some close to Hollis’s, and others who say IBM has always done this kind of pre-release Web posting (other companies, like Hewlett-Packard, have been known to do it, too) . The problem is, there are many more people nowadays scouring the Web for every morsel of information they can dig up. And IBM’s competitors can quickly criticize those products via blogs, putting spin on IBM’s products before IBM does.

Perhaps the most perplexing part is that IBM is just letting rivals take their shots. As far as I can tell, they haven’t responded at all to the criticisms levied by competitors and analysts. And I can’t figure out why that would be. The cat’s out of the bag. The specs are out there. Pretending it hasn’t been announced yet and declining comment isn’t going to change that.

This isn’t the first wondering I’ve done this year about IBM. I’ve also wondered what the deal is with their DS6000 array (about which I’ve been assured it’s still in existence, but not much more information is forthcoming). I’ve wondered what the deal is with thin provisioning for the DS8000. My news director, Dave Raffo, asked them what the deal is with MAID, dedupe and thin provisioning at this year’s SNW, and got a lot of fairly vague answers.

In fairness, IBM has since acquired Diligent Technologies, finally adding dedupe to their backup hardware product line. But in the dedupe wars (which you can bet are still raging), IBM has been relatively silent.

Instead, yesterday, they sent out a press release saying they’ve developed and tested SSDs at 1 million IOPS. The press release is chock-full of verbiage about how much more technical and expert IBM researchers are and what a wealth of knowledge IBM brings to the SSD table, none of which I doubt.

But the thing is, that’s it. They’ve tested these things as part of Project Quicksilver. IBM labs are the studliest and most advanced in the world. The end, except for an intriguing but vague passage about some future products –

IBM Research has developed breakthrough data center provisioning technology that automatically understands and balances the utilization of diverse storage components in the information infrastructure, including solid-state storage. Additionally, to get the most value from high performance system resources in storage, IBM Research patented key technologies that help maintain required quality-of-service for higher priority applications.

I asked an IBM spokesperson when we’ll see product come out based on what was tested for this press release, and got the following response. “To clarify, there is no timeline/commercialization plan to discuss at this time and we’re not announcing a specific product.” As for the management software (I’m assuming), “we’re not going into specifics at this point.”

To be fair, I’ve heard some criticism recently of other vendors coming out with product pre-announcements months before product availability. But everyone in the industry has by now either launched or announced they will launch solid-state support. IBM, with its server business and experience developing memory technology, ought to be ahead of this pack. Instead, despite the fact that it’s clear they wouldn’t be testing such a thing if there were no potential revenue stream attached, they aren’t saying much else about it.

Maybe the folks running IBM storage think they don’t have to say anything. They’re still an established behemoth with a large, loyal customer base. The phrase “no one ever got fired for buying from IBM” is still thrown around, and IBM officials have argued that customers are willing to wait to get whatever technology is fashionable until they can get it in vetted form from IBM. Given its ginormous customer base, IBM says, its testing and QA processes are much more involved than other vendors, and hence, it takes longer for new technologies to hit the streets from IBM - but customers are willing to wait for the extra assurance.

Good points all, and storage buyers are a conservative lot. But IBM spent $300 million on a product it hasn’t yet promoted except to cast it as the new crown jewel of Big Blue storage. Meanwhile, people in the marketplace are beginning to tear it apart before anyone sees a PowerPoint slide. People are beginning to wonder if it wasn’t really Moshe Yanai IBM was after, and that they had to buy his startups to get him. People are starting to speculate about what’s going on internally at IBM - about a battle between geeks and suits, or that IBM is ashamed of its storage products and therefore hiding them, competitors are having a field day, and IBM’s doing nothing to counteract any of it.

What is the deal?

Cisco executive found shot to death

Detroit police are investigating the Aug. 19 death of Cisco marketing executive Benjamin Goldman, 42, who was found fatally shot outside a strip club called the Penthouse on Detroit’s Eight Mile, according to reports. So far, no one is in custody.

According to San Jose Mercury News coverage of Goldman’s memorial service, he worked 16 years at Cisco in customer-facing marketing roles.

Event Horizon: CERN mega-collider coming to life

This was originally scheduled for May, but after some delays the CERN Large Hadron Collider, which some believe will create a black hole that will swallow the Earth (beginning with France), has been put through its paces on its first test runs. According to the latest reports, launch is now set for Sept. 10. As a great man once said, “hang on to your butts.”

Personally, though, I’m a little more concerned today with reports that an upgrade to the U.S. terrorism database is not going well. But perhaps we’ve gotten to the bottom of why so many random people are on the No-Fly List. Ain’t technology grand?

In case you need a bit of cheering up after those things, the Brocade boat is apparently still going strong. So that’s some good news.

Friday Storage and Technology Reading

My Google Reader isn’t quite as busy as Robert Scoble’s, but it gets a decent workout each week. Between that, the wires and all the different pitches I get - not to mention the interesting stories I come across that are more general IT than storage-specific - I usually end up with a backlog. Every so often, I’ll clear out that backlog with a link dump. Here’s one for this week:

NetApp’s Simple Steve on how to recover corrupted photos. [Simple Steve: Photo Recovery]

The Storage Anarchist, who already broke the arrival of IBM’s XIV array, keeps pounding away at IBM. [The Storage Anarchist: How much does a free XIV array really cost?]

In case you haven’t heard, former Dell/Equallogic evangelist Marc Farley has signed on with 3PAR. One of his first vids for the 3PAR blog features mad props for the above mentioned Storage Anarchist, with low-tech farm animals in the background. [StorageRap: Props to Anarchist for Blogging Coup]

Server virtualization tangent time: Chris Wolf breaks down Microsoft’s new Hyper-V licensing.

Back to storage (well, sort of). Another really enjoyable post from Steve Duplessie, with humorous anecdote about his “militaristic” attempts to recycle, how his town has thwarted them, and how it all ties in with green IT. [Steve's IT Rants: Hybrid IT]

Okay, back to storage: Curtis Preston offers his advice for home data protection. [Backup Central: Friends & Family Computer Recommendations]

While EMC’s Anarchist keeps IBM busy, another EMC’er picks on NetApp’s VTL. [The Backup Blog: NetApp's VTL is "Dangerous"]

Amazon adds more cloud storage, this time for its EC2 platform. [TechCrunchIT]

When I got to college, all I got was a POP email account and some spectacularly crappy dining hall food. Kids these days are getting iPhones and iPod Touches. Also, I just said “kids these days”, meaning I’m officially old. Thanks a lot, New York Times. [NYT Technology: Welcome, Freshmen. Have an iPod]

The San Jose Mercury News has an employee’s-eye look at the Agami shutdown. [Promising start-up abruptly shuts down]

Finally, if you only check out one item from this list, make it this one. A new blog called Where is Bob? Tales of an Absentee Manager, is one I recommend bookmarking for anyone who works in IT. It’s kind of like the IT blog equivalent of Office Space, and even involves storage-related hilarity(yes, you read that correctly):

I could see sweat forming on Marek’s forehead. I marveled at his self control, and wondered whether he was practicing zen meditation when he wasn’t hacking into the Pentagon.

“Bob.” He was speaking slowly, enunciating every syllable. “Do you know the meaning of words, back-up and eve-ry-thing?”
“What?” Bob was laughing, he was clearly in good spirits, and Marek’s accent often amused him.
“Backup. Everything.” Marek repeated even slower. I saw a few blood vessels rupture, and his left eye began to twitch violently. I knew that I had to intervene.
“Now look, Bob. What you are asking just doesn’t make sense,” I said. “You can’t have a backup of everything. You need a backup of a particular thing at a particular time.”
“I need a backup of all our servers for all time.” So, he knew that we had servers. I underestimated Bob. But he clearly didn’t understand the passage of time, so perhaps I still had an advantage.
“That’s impossible, Bob. Can’t be done.” It was one of those times when you begin regretting what you said before you even finish saying it.
“Can’t be done!” He didn’t say it like a question, and I knew what was coming. “You are one of those people who say NO all the time. No, we can’t write our own operating system! No, we can’t have a backup of everything! People hate that! You impede progress!”
“Ok, we’ll do it.” Marek gave me a classic crazy-girl-what-are-you-doing look. “Come back next Wednesday.”

[...]

When Bob returned to work on Thursday, he forgot about his outlandish backup request, and left us alone. Unfortunately, Bob forgot to mention that we were in violation of a university mandate to have redundant copies of our backups stored in an off-site location. He received the notice about our lack of compliance along with a detailed write-up of the policy. He compressed the forty page document into three incongruous words - backup of everything. So, when we learned about the violation, Marek and I had to postpone all our other projects and commitments, and scramble to make duplicates of critical backups to be sent off site along with other disaster recovery tools and documents. [Where is Bob? Welcome Party for Dave, Part I]

The power of the Web in dealing with vendors

This story isn’t specifically about storage vendors - it’s about airline carrier JetBlue - but I think it’s a great example of the power of the Internet and populist publishing when it comes to getting the news of your experience with a vendor across to other potential customers and etting that company to respond to you.

Bill Baker was trying to travel home on JetBlue when his flight was cancelled. He said he wasn’t so upset about the cancellation as the manner in which it was handled - no refunds, no sleeping accomodations, no agreements with other carriers to put passengers on other outbound flights.

Unfortunately, what JetBlue didn’t know about this particular passenger is that he works as a technology publicist in Connecticut, and his response was to do, I’m sure, the one thing that would have gotten the undivided attention of his own clients: tell everyone on the Internet about his bad experience.

As CNet’s Charles Cooper put it, “We’re long past the era when companies could cavalierly screw over their customers without risking public humiliation…see, there’s this thing called the Internet…”

Maybe this is true when it comes to consumer companies, but this has not been my experience at all when it comes to customers of enterprise products. You’d think that the comparitively large size of both products and price tags would make the enterprise a market even more rife with publicly-aired criticisms and calls to action, but you’d be wrong.

I find many enterprise customers fearful of speaking publicly, especially about their vendor. I understand there are big bucks and politics at stake in enterprise capital equipment purchases, but it saddens me when users act like they work for the company that sells them storage products rather than the other way around. Especially when users trade daily, arduous efforts to manage unmanageable products or problems for keeping the political peace. It would be great for the industry, I think, if more storage users started blogs like Baker’s.

Jerry! Jerry! Jerry! Jerry!

Oh, snap.

NetApp has struck back in the ongoing catfight with EMC - this time in the form of a T-shirt.

According to an announcement made this morning, NetApp’s V-Series gateways can now dedupe storage from HDS, HP, Fujitsu, and 3PAR, among others, but with this promotion, they’ve chosen to focus on you-know-who:

“EMC, We Got Your Back - Now You Can Dedupe EMC Storage with NetApp V-Series.”

Now I’m waiting for EMC to send me a “NETAPP SUCKS” coffee mug.