This is the fourth (here is the first, second and third) in a series of StorageIO industry trends and perspective audio blog and pod cast discussions from Storage Networking World (SNW) Fall 2012 in Santa Clara California.
Given how at conference conversations tend to occur in the hallways, lobbies and bar areas of venues, what better place to have candid conversations with people from throughout the industry, some you know, some you will get to know better.
This is the third (here is the first and the second) in a series of StorageIO industry trends and perspective audio blog and pod cast discussions from Storage Networking World (SNW) Fall 2012 in Santa Clara California.
Given how at conference conversations tend to occur in the hallways, lobbies and bar areas of venues, what better place to have candid conversations with people from throughout the industry, some you know, some you will get to know better.
In this episode, I’m joined by my co-host Bruce Rave aka Bruce Ravid of Ravid & Associates (twitter @brucerave) as we catch up and visit with David Chapa (@davidchapa) Chief Technology Evangelist (CTE) of Quantum Corporation (@quantumcorp) in the Santa Clara Hyatt (event venue) lobby bar area. Disclosure note, Quantum has in the past been a client of StorageIO.
This is the second (here is the firstSNW 2012 Waynes World) in a series of StorageIO industry trends and perspective audio blog and pod cast about Storage Networking World (SNW) Fall 2012 in Santa Clara California.
Given how at conference conversations tend to occur in the hallways, lobbies and bar areas of venues, what better place to have candid conversations with people from throughout the industry, some you know, some you will get to know better.
In this episode, I’m joined by my co-host Bruce Rave aka Bruce Ravid of Ravid & Associates as we catch up and visit with Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) of Starboard Storage Systems Karl Chen in the Santa Clara Hyatt (event venue) lobby bar area.
This is a StorageIO industry trends and perspective audio blog and pod cast about Storage Networking World (SNW) Fall 2012 in Santa Clara California.
Given how at conference conversations tend to occur in the hallways, lobbies and bar areas of venues, what better place to have candid conversations with people from throughout the industry, some you know, some you will get to know better.
In this episode, I’m joined by my co-host Bruce Rave aka Bruce Ravid of Ravid & Associates as we catch up and visit with SNIA Chairman Wayne Adams in the Santa Clara Hyatt (event venue) lobby bar area.
I often hear people say how small the storage and networking (or other adjacent technology) industries are, and how everybody knows everyone. That might be true in some circles or sub-communities where everybody knows each other, however the industry is larger than many realize. As you listen to these series of pod casts what you will hear is a recurring theme of people meeting others at events, including some who may have passed each other in hallways for years yet never have had a chance to meet, or put a name to a face.
In case you are not familiar, degrees of separation refer to how you are connected to other people.
When you know somebody directly then you are a first connection, and you are a second degree of separation from people that they are directly connected to. The theory goes that via a mix of the number of people you are directly connected to, as well as how well they are connected to others, that you are only so many degrees of connection separation from many (if not millions of people) and if you go out seven degrees, that could be billions.
If you are familiar with or use Linked In and are directly connected to somebody like myself, which is a first degree. For example in the following image, person A is a first or 1 degree connection to person B, person B is a direct or first degree connection to person C who in turn is a direct connection to person D. Person A is 2 degree from person C and three degree from person D.
The reason I bring this up is not to say or play games around who is connected to whom, or compare contacts or the number of them, rather to use the idea of degrees of separation in the context of where and how you get your information. For example, you may get your information, insight or experience directly from what you do. On the other hand, you may get information or knowledge directly from the source or person involved with it, which would be 1 degree of separation.
You could also get the information from somebody else such as a friend, coworker, blogger, analyst, consultant, media journalist, reporter, vendor, VAR or other person who got it directly from the source, which would be 2 degrees of separation. Another example would be you get your information from somebody who cites a report, study, survey or some research that came from another source that involved another party who collected and analyzed the data.
At each point, there is the potential for the information to be changed, adjusted, reinterpreted, misunderstood, or simply adapted to meet particularly needs. What if person A gets their information from person B who in turn got their information from source C, and that comes from person D who got it directly from person E? Assuming that the information was collected and passed along as is, person A should get what was given from person E to person D. However, along the way, various interpretations, more material and views can be applied resulting in a different message.
There is also another variation, which are your spheres of influence or circles of contacts. For example I get to talk with lots of IT pros around the world live in person, virtually and via different venues, those would be direct or no separation. When I hear from a vendor or PR or some pundit telling me what they heard direct, that’s 1 degree however if they heard it from their marketing who heard it from a sales rep or other source then it’s at least two.
Another example of degrees of separation is where you are in relation to technology timelines, evolution, revolution, industry adoption vs. customer deployment. For example, if you are a researcher or development engineer, you are further along on a technology evolution curve than others are. Somebody then takes the researchers work and productize it including making it manufacture able on a cost-effective basis. Along the lines there is also the different degrees of separation between the researcher, initial publicity of a technology breakthrough, general industry adoption and later customer deploy and subsequent success stories. For example, to a research something that they did many years along with those who follow at that point may view what is emerging for real customer deploy as old and yesterday’s news.
On the other hand, for customers getting ready to deploy a new technology, product or service, some breaking research may be interesting to hear about, however it may be out several years at best from customer actual use. Also on that theme, the customer of a component can be a manufacturer that in turn test, qualifies and sells a finished solution to their customers. Thus, there are different degrees of separation between industry adoption (e.g. talking about and awareness) and customer deployment (actually buying and using on a mainstream basis) in the technology supply chain.
Yet another degree of separation is between you and your information or data. Some of that data is very close in your own memory (e.g. brain), perhaps others written on note pads (physical or digital) with a copy local or remote including at the cloud. Depending on how your data and information are backed up or protected, there can be added degrees of separation between you and your information.
Thus, there are different degrees of separation between you and your various forms of information.
Your ability to learn and share information, meet and interact with various people from across different sections of environments is bound by what you are willing to engage via various mediums including social media involvement.
If you are comfortable with where you are at, or what you know, then stay in your comfort zone, or sphere of influence, otherwise, take a chance, venture out, learn what you do not know, meet who you do not know, interact and see new things, or have some dejavu and share what you have seen or experienced before.
After all, knowledge not shared with others is useless if kept only to you. Of course, for NDA material, what is not generally known about, or understood is not discussed and let us leave sleeping dogs lay where they rest. ;)
How good or reliable is your information or G2 that you might be using for forming opinions or making informed decisions around?
There are at least two different meanings for IOPs, which for those not familiar with the information technology (IT) and data storage meaning is Input/output Operations Per second (e.g. data movement activity). Another meaning for IOP that is the international organization for a participatory society (iopsociety.org), and their fundraising activity found here.
I recently came across a piece (here and here) talking about RAID and IOPs that had some interesting points; however, some generalizations could use some more comments. One of the interesting comments and assertions is that RAID writes increase with the number of drives in the parity scheme. Granted the specific implementation and configuration could result in an it depends type response.
Here are some more perspectives to the piece (here and here) as the sites comments seem to be restricted.
Keep in mind that such as with RAID 5 (or 6) performance, your IO size will have a bearing on if you are doing those extra back-end IOs. For example if you are writing a 32KB item that is accomplished by a single front-end IO from an applications server, and your storage system, appliance, adapter, software implementing and performing the RAID (or erasure coding for that matter) has a chunk size of say 8KB (e.g. the amount of data written to each back-end drive). Then a 5 drive R5 (e.g. 4+1) would in fact have five back-end IOPS (32KB / 8KB = 4 + 1 (8KB Parity)).
Otoh of the front end IOP were only 16KB (using whole numbers for simplicity, otherwise round-up), in the case of a write, there would be three back-end writes with the R5 (e.g. 2 + 1). Keep in mind the controller/software managing the RAID would (or should) try to schedule back-end IO with cache, read-head, write-behind, write-back, other forms of optimization etc.
In the piece (here and here), a good point is the understanding and factoring in IOPS is important, as is also latency or response time in addition to bandwidth or throughput, along with availability, they are all inter-related.
Also very important is to keep in mind the size of the IOP, read and write, random, sequential etc.
RAID along with erasure coding is a balancing act between performance, availability, space capacity and economics aligned to different application needs.
RAID 0 (R0) actually has a big impact on performance, no penalty on writes; however, it has no availability protection benefit and in fact can be a single point of failure (e.g. loss of a HDD or SSD) impacts the entire R0 group. However, for static items, or items that are being journaled and protected on some other medium/RAID/protection scheme, R0 is used more than people realize for scratch/buffer/transient/read cache types of applications. Keep in mind that it is a balance of all performance and capacity with the exposure of no availability as opposed to other approaches. Thus, do not be scared of R0, however also do not get burned or hurt with it either, treat it with respect and can be effective for something’s.
Also mentioned in the piece was that SSD based servers will perform vastly better than SATA or SAS based ones. I am assuming that the authors meant to say better than SAS or SATA DAS based HDDs?
Keep in mind that unless you are using a PCIe nand flash SSD card as a target or cache or RAID card, most SSD drives today are either SAS or SATA (being the more common) along with moving from 3Gb SAS or SATA to 6Gb SAS & SATA.
Also while HDD and SSDs can do a given number of reads or writes per second, those will vary based on the size of the IO, read, write, random, sequential. However what can have the biggest impact and where I have seen too many people or environments get into a performance jam is when assuming that those IOP numbers per HDD or SSD are a given. For example assuming that 100-140, IOPs (regardless of size, type, etc.) can be achieved as a limiting factor is the type of interface and controller/adapter being used.
I have seen fast HDDs and SSDs deliver sub-par performance or not meeting expectations fast interfaces such as iSCSI/SAS/SATA/FC/FCoE/IBA or other interfaces due to bottlenecks in the adapter card, storage system / appliance / controller / software. In some cases you may see more effective IOPs or reads, writes or both, while on other implementations you may see lower than expected due to internal implementation bottlenecks or architectural designs. Hint, watch out for solutions where the vendor tries to blame poor performance on the access network (e.g. SAS, iSCSI, FC, etc.) particular if you know that those are not bottlenecks.
In terms of fund-raising, if you feel so compelled, send a gift, donation, sponsorship, project, buy some books, piece of work, assignment, research project, speaking, keynote, web cast, video or seminar event my way and just like professional fund-raisers, or IOPS vendors, StorageIO accept visa, Master Card, American express, Pay Pal, check and traditional POs.
As for this site and comments, outside of those caught in the spam trap, courteous perspectives and discussions are welcome.
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In the spirit of Halloween and zombies season, a couple of thoughts come to mind about vendor tricks and treats. This is an industry trends and perspectives post, part of an ongoing series looking at various technology and fun topics.
The first trick or treat game pertains to the blame game; you know either when something breaks, or at the other extreme, before you have even made a decision to buy something. The trick or treat game for decision-making goes something like this.
Vendor “A” says products succeed with their solution while failure results with a solution from “B” when doing “X”. Otoh, vendor “B” claims that “X” will fail when using a solution from vendor “A”. In fact, you can pick what you want to substitute for “X”, perhaps VDI, PCIe, Big Data, Little Data, Backup, Archive, Analytics, Private Cloud, Public Cloud, Hybrid Cloud, eDiscovery you name it.
This is not complicated math or big data problem requiring a high-performance computing (HPC) platform. A HPC Zetta-Flop processing ability using 512 bit addressing of 9.9 (e.g. 1 nine) PettaBytes of battery-backed DRAM and an IO capability of 9.99999 (e.g. 5 9’s) trillion 8 bit IOPS to do table pivots or runge kutta numerical analysis, map reduce, SAS or another modeling with optional iProduct or Android interface are not needed.
StorageIO images of touring Texas Advanced Computing (e.g. HPC) Center
Can you solve this equation? Hint it does not need a PhD or any other advanced degree. Another hint, if you have ever been at any side of the technology product and services decision-making table, regardless of the costume you wore, you should know the answer.
Of course the question of would “X” fail regardless of who or what “A” or “B” let alone a “C”, “D” or “F”? In other words, it is not the solution, technology, vendor or provider, rather the problem or perhaps even lack thereof that is the issue. Or is it a case where there is a solution from “A”, “B” or any others that is looking for a problem, and if it is the wrong problem, there can be a wrong solution thus failure?
Another trick or treat game is vendors public relations (PR) or analyst relations (AR) people to ask for one thing and delivery or ask another. For example, some vendor, service provider, their marketing AR and PR people or surrogates make contact wanting to tell of various success and failure story. Of course, this is usually their success and somebody else’s failure, or their victory over something or someone who sometimes can be interesting. Of course, there are also the treats to get you to listen to the above, such as tempt you with a project if you meet with their subject, which may be a trick of a disappearing treat (e.g. magic, poof it is gone after the discussion).
There are another AR and PR trick and treat where they offer on behalf of their representative organization or client to a perspective or exclusive insight on their competitor. Of course, the treat from their perspective is that they will generously expose all that is wrong with what a competitor is saying about their own (e.g. the competitors) product.
Let me get this straight, I am not supposed to believe what somebody says about his or her own product, however, supposed to believe what a competitor says is wrong with the competition’s product, and what is right with his or her own product.
Hmm, ok, so let me get this straight, a competitor say “A” wants to tell me what somebody say from “B” has told me is wrong and I should schedule a visit with a truth squad member from “A” to get the record set straight about “B”?
Does that mean then that I go to “B” for a rebuttal, as well as an update about “A” from “B”, assuming that what “A” has told me is also false about themselves, and perhaps about “B” or any other?
Too be fair, depending on your level of trust and confidence in either a vendor, their personal or surrogates, you might tend to believe more from them vs. others, or at least until you been tricked after given treats. There may be some that have been tricked, or they tried applying to many treats to present a story that behind the costume might be a bit scary.
Having been through enough of these, and I candidly believe that sometimes “A” or “B” or any other party actually do believe that they have more or better info about their competitor and that they can convince somebody about what their competitor is doing better than the competitor can. I also believe that there are people out there who will go to “A” or “B” and believe what they are told by based on their preference, bias or interests.
When I hear from vendors, VARs, solution or service providers and others, it’s interesting hearing point, counterpoint and so forth, however if time is limited, I’am more interested in hearing from such as “A” about them, what they are doing, where success, where challenges, where going and if applicable, under NDA go into more detail.
Customer success stories are good, however again, if interested in what works, what kind of works, or what does not work, chances are when looking for G2 vs. GQ, a non-scripted customer conversation or perspective of the good, the bad and the ugly is preferred, even if under NDA. Again, if time is limited which it usually is, focus on what is being done with your solution, where it is going and if compelled send follow-up material that can of course include MUD and FUD about others if that is your preference.
Then there is when during a 30 minute briefing, the vendor or solution provider is still talking about trends, customer pain points, what competitors are doing at 21 minutes into the call with no sign of an announcement, update or news in site
Lets not forget about the trick where the vendor marketing or PR person reaches out and says that the CEO, CMO, CTO or some other CxO or Chief Jailable Officer (CJO) wants to talk with you. Part of the trick is when the CxO actually makes it to the briefing and is not ready, does not know why the call is occurring, or, thinks that a request for an audience has been made with them for an interview or something else.
A treat is when 3 to 4 minutes into a briefing, the vendor or solution provider has already framed up what and why they are doing something. This means getting to what they are announcing or planning on doing and getting into a conversation to discuss what they are doing and making good follow-up content and resources available.
Sometimes a treat is when a briefer goes on autopilot nailing their script for 29 of a 30 minute session then use the last-minute to ask if there are any questions. The reason autopilot briefings can be a treat is when they are going over what is in the slide deck, webex, or press release thus affording an opportunity to get caught up on other things while talk at you. Hmm, perhaps need to consider playing some tricks in reward for those kind of treats? ;)
Do not be scared, not everybody is out to trick you with treats, and not all treats have tricks attached to them. Be prepared, figure out who is playing tricks with treats, and who has treats without tricks.
Oh, and as a former IT customer, vendor and analyst, one of my favorites is contact information of my dogs to vendors who require registration on their websites for basic things such as data sheets. Another is supplying contact information of competing vendors sales reps to vendors who also require registration for basic data sheets or what should otherwise be generally available information as opposed to more premium treats. Of course there are many more fun tricks, however lets leave those alone for now.
Note: Zombie voting rules apply which means vote early, vote often, and of course vote for those who cannot include those that are dead (real or virtual).
Where To Learn More
View additiona related material via the following links.
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This is first of a two-part post (click here for second post) that is part of ongoing industry trends and perspective cloud conversations series that looks at Dell and their cloud strategy story. For background, some previous Dell posts are found here, here, here and here. Here is a link that has video of the live Dell Storage Customer Advisory (CAP) panel that Dell asked me to moderate back in June that touches on some related themes and topics. Btw, fwiw and for disclosure Dell AppAssure is a site advertiser on storageioblog.com ;).
If you consider object based storage to be part of or a component of private clouds or at least for medical, healthcare and related focus, then Dell is already there with their DX object storage solutions (Caringo based).
If you view clouds as being part of services provided including via hosting or similar, Dell is already there via their Perot systems acquisitions.
If you view cloud as being part of VDI, or VDI being part of cloud, Dell is there with their tools including various acquisitions and solution bundles.
On the other hand if you view clouds as reference architectures across VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix Xen among others, guess what, Dell is also there with their VIS.
Or, if you view private clouds as being a bundled solution (server, storage, hardware, software) such as EMC vBlock or NetApp FlexPod, then Dell vStart (not to be confused as being a service) is on the list with other infrastructure stack solutions.
How about being a technology supplier to what you may consider as being true cloud providers or enables including those who use OpenStack or other APIs and cloud tools, guess what, Dell is also there including at Rackspace (via public web info).
So the above all comes back to that Dell like many vendors who offer services, solutions and related items for data and information infrastructures have diverse offerings including servers, storage, networking, hardware, software and support. Dell like others similar to them has to find a balance between providing services that compete with their customers, as well as supplier such as to Rackspace. In this case Dell is no different from EMC who happened to move their Mozy backup service off to their VMware subsidiary and has managed to help define where VCE (and here) and ATMOS fit as products while being services capable. IBM has figured this out having a mix of old school services such as SmartCloud Services (or here), IBM Global Services and BCRS (business continuity recovery services), not to mention newer backup and storage cloud services, products and solutions they have acquired, or OEM or have reseller agreements with.
HP has expanded their traditional focused EDS as well as other HP services along with products being joined by their Amazon like Cloud Services including compute, storage and content distribution network (CDN) capabilities. NetApp is taking the partnering route along with Cisco staying focused for at least now on being a partner supplier. Oracle, well Oracle is Oracle and they have a mix of products and services. In fact some might say Oracle is late to the cloud game however they have been in the game since the late 90s when they came out with Oracle online, granted the cloud purist will call that application service provider (e.g. ASP) vs. today’s applications as a service (AaaS) models.
Some of the fall events include SNW (past SNW posts here, here, and here) in Santa Clara, as well as SNW Europe and Power the Cloud event (Frankfurt Deutschland aka Germany) October 30 and 31st where I will be doing some meetings and briefing, along with attending sessions and the expo activities.
On November 1st its off to Storage Expo Holland in Utrecht (here and here) where I will be presenting two sessions. One is on SSD industry trends and tips on deployment with a theme of not if, rather when, where, why and with what to use SSD. In addition I will be doing a general industry trends and perspective session on gaining confidence with clouds, virtualization, data and storage networking including object storage and backup (e.g. data protection modernization).
European travel tools and technologies
In addition to the above activities, following successful past events in Nijkerk Holland including the most recent May 2012 sessions, a new seminar has been announced focused on backup, restore, BC, DR and archiving hosted by Brouwer Consultancy on November 5th and 6th 2012. These workshop format seminars are very interactive providing independent perspectives on technology, tools, trends and what to do to address various challenges including more informed and effective IT decision-making.
In addition to the new seminar that you can learn more about here, two other sessions will also be offered in Holland. These include a backup, restore, BC, DR and archiving. The other session is a backup, restore, BC, DR and archiving covering storage and networking industry trends covering clouds, virtualization and other broad topics.
Examples of Dutch refreshments
Learn more about the dutch seminars including how to register here.
Watch for more events, seminars, live video, webinars and virtual trade shows by visiting the StorageIO events page.
Drop me a note if you would like to schedule or arrange for a meeting, webinar, seminar or other activity at an event near you. If you planning to be in or near Holland early November, and interested in scheduling a meeting or session, send me a note or contact Brouwer Consultancy (here) to make arrangements.
Time to get ready for these and other events, ok, nuff said.
My how time flies, seems like just yesterday (back in 2008) that I did a piece titled Politics and Storage, or, storage in an election year V2.008 and if you are not aware, it is 2012 and thus an election year in the U.S. as well as in many other parts of the world. Being an election year it’s not just about politicians, their supporters, pundits, surrogates, donors and voters, it’s also a technology decision-making and acquisition year (as are most years) for many environments.
Similar to politics, some technology decisions will be major while others will be minor or renewals so to speak. Major decisions will evolve around strategies, architectures, visions, implementation plans and technology selections including products, protocols, processes, people, vendors or suppliers and services for traditional, virtual and cloud data infrastructure environments.
Vendors, suppliers, service providers and their associated industry forums or alliances and trade groups are in various sales and marketing awareness campaigns. These various campaigns will decide who will be chosen by their customers or prospects for technology acquisitions ranging from hardware, software and services including servers, storage, IO and networking, desktops, power, cooling, facilities, management tools, virtualization and cloud products and services along with related items.
The politics of data infrastructures including servers, storage, networking, hardware, software and services spanning physical, cloud and virtual environments has similarities to other political races. These include many organizations in the form of inter departmental rivalry over budgets or funding, service levels, decision-making, turf wars and technology ownership not to mention the usual vendor vs. vendor, VAR vs. VAR, service provider vs. service provider or other match ups.
On the other hand, data and storage are also being used to support political campaigns in many ways across physical, virtual and cloud deployment scenarios.
Let us not forget about the conventions or what are more commonly known as shows, conferences, user group events in the IT world. For example EMCworld earlier this year, Dell Storage Forum, or the recent VMworld (or click here to view video from past VMworld party with INXS), Oracle Open World along with many vendor analyst, partner, press and media or blogger days.
Here are some 2012 politics of data infrastructure and storage campaign match-ups:
Speaking of networks vs. server and storage or software and convergence, how about Brocade vs. Cisco, Qlogic vs. Emulex, Broadcom vs. Mellanox, Juniper vs. HP and Dell (Force10) or Arista vs. others in the race for SAN LAN MAN WAN POTS and PANs.
Then there are the claims, counter claims, pundits, media, bloggers, trade groups or lobbyist, marketing alliance or pacs, paid for ads and posts, tweets and videos along with supporting metrics for traditional and social media.
Certainly, there are vendors vs. vendors relying on their campaign teams (sales, marketing, engineering, financing and external surrogates) similar to what you would find with a politician, of course scope, size and complexity would vary.
Surrogates include analyst, bloggers, consultants, business partners, community organizers, editors, VARs, influencers, press, public relations and publications among others. Some claim to be objective and free of vendor influence while leveraging simple to complex schemes for renumeration (e.g. getting paid) while others simply state what they are doing and with whom.
Likewise, some point fingers at others who are misbehaving while deflecting away from what they are actually doing. Hmm, sounds like the pundit or surrogate two-step (as opposed to the Potomac two step) and prompts the question of who is checking the fact checkers and making disclosures (disclosure: this piece is being sponsored by StorageIO ;) )?
What this all means?
Use your brain, use your eyes and ears, and use your nose all of which have dual paths to your senses.
In other words, if something sounds or looks too good to be true, it probably isn’t.
Likewise if something smells funny or does not feel right to your senses or common sense, it probably is not or at least requires a closer look or analysis.
Be an informed decision maker balancing needs vs. wants to make effective selections regardless of if for a major or minor item, technology, trend, product, process, protocol or service. Informed decisions also mean looking at both current and evolving or future trends, challenges and needs which for data infrastructures including servers, storage, networking, IO fabrics, cloud and virtualization means factoring in changing data and information life cycles and access or usage patterns. After all, while there are tough economic times on a global basis, there is no such thing as a data or information recession.
Keep in mind and in the spirit of legendary Chicago style voting, when it comes to storage and data infrastructure topics, technologies and decisions, spend early, spend often and spend for those who cannot to keep the vendors and their ecosystem of partners happy.
Note that this post is neither supported, influenced, endorsed or paid for by any vendors, VARs, service providers, trade groups, political action committees or Picture Archive Communication system (e.g. PACs), both of which deal with and in big data along with industry consortiums, their partners, customers or surrogates and neither would they probably approve of it anyway’s.
With that being said, I am Greg Schulz of StorageIO and am not running for or from anything this year and I do endorse the above post ;).
While at VMworld 2012 in San Francisco and walking around the expo floor, something familiar was taking place.
Sure, there were the vendors trying to outdo themselves with give away, magicians and other techniques to draw you into their booths or show areas.
What I also saw and heard were plenty of sales and marketing pitches that seemed more focus on selling and closing a demo, vs. selling the company or product, let alone trying to show a reason for wanting to learn more about the company.
Granted, for some people a good demo is all that is needed to become comfortable with the company or products.
On the other hand, it is nice to have a quick conversation to set up a follow-up to learn more and dig deeper.
What I find interesting is how many organizations are more focused on trying to close on the demo than to spend a minute or two in a quick conversation that could go a lot further. This can be a challenge when somebody asks me about a company or product and my impressions of it. For example, if a vendor is to focused on selling and closing on the GUI demo, when asked I sometimes after to say that company xyz has a great demo, beyond that not much else to recommend at this time. Now if the goal of the company is to sell the demo, then that is what they should be closing on.
On the other hand, if the goal of the company is to sell and close on products, then the demo is just one of many means to the goal as opposed to a singular focus.
Is it just the booth or show crews who are under instructions from the marketing or event staffs who are supposed to be focused? Nope, sales and marketing types, engineers or technical types and even CEOs. In fact, at VMworld I meet a few CEOs or other CxOs who were focused on either closing on their demos, or simply using the demo as an excuse to handoff and be able to go talk to somebody else. Funny thing is that some of those same CxO types complain directly or via their surrogates when they do not get the coverage they wanted or expected for their product, service or company.
Having spent more years than I care to remember at shows and conference events, both as a customer attendee, as a vendor exhibitor, and as an analyst, consult, lets keep in focus the value of time at events. This means realizing that shows or conferences typically mean speed dating or very short windows of opportunities to interact, for both the exhibitors and attendees.
Thus, make the best use of available time. If you are the attendee, tell the exhibitor what you are interested in or need to learn more about. Likewise if you are the exhibitor, do some basic triage and quickly determine what the attendee is looking for, whom they need to talk to, or follow-up with.
This prompts the question(s) of do you make product and services decisions based off G2 (intelligence, information, insight, awareness) or GQ (looks, packaging appeal, style, trendy and hip, how it demos or shows)?
Are you buying a product, service or technology based on likability, popularity, cost, peer pressure, or something else?
Do you buy because of the demo or of its functionality?
Do you buy because of cost or price, or business benefit?
Do you buy because of a vendor, partner or sales person, or because of it?
Do you place more emphasis on looks, appearance or GQ factor including packaging, presentation, images and style?
Alternatively, do you place emphasis on G2 including insight, intelligence, knowledge, comfort and understanding of solution?
As with many things, my assumption that the answer to the above questions is it depends.
Common themes at the recent modernizing data protection and new realities of cloud and virtualization event series that I was involved with pertained to cloud concerns. Some organizations are already using clouds to some degree while others are taking a cautious approach. Some are all in, while others will take longer for various reasons. Likewise some are using a mix of public, private and hybrid to compliment their environments for collaboration, shared storage, compute, content distribution, backup, archive or BC and DR among other things. These environments range from SOHO or small SMB to ROBO to workgroup to enterprise, education and government of various size.
Often the conversations would evolve around gaining confidence with clouds as well as virtualization. In the case of clouds, given that some of the services as well as products, solutions or technologies are still young, there is still a learning and maturing curve. There are also other factors including the amount of hype and FUD around clouds has some people more skeptical or cautious to move forward. Granted there are also the true cynics which tend to be offset by the cloud crowd cheerleaders thus canceling each other out.
For the non cheerleaders and non cynics, hurdles to cloud adoption (in whole or in part, public, private or hybrid) tend to start with the letter C.
My message has and continues to be that of do not be scared of clouds and virtualization, however be ready, informed and decide what your concerns are. By determining your concerns, you can then work on figuring out what to do about those.
Here is a list of common cloud concerns and comments that I hear: Cloud cheerleader hype Cloud critics and cynics FUD Confidence in cloud products or services Certainty in cloud data protection or security Cloud certifications and standards Compatibility and interoperability Classes and continuing education Confidentially, privacy and security Costs of cloud services or products Country where cloud data is stored
There are many other items that can be added to the list that start with the letter C, however there are also some that start with P. For example, People, Products, Process, Procedures, Practices, Paradigm, Public or Private and Protocols among others.
Its one thing to be scared of something and not know what or why you are scared. It’s another thing to know or figure out what or why you are scared or concerned and then be able to do something about it. For example learn what standards such as SNIA CDMI among others exist and how those could be of help along with other tools or best practices from others.
Thus don’t be scared of clouds or virtualization, however do your homework, decide your concerns and then find what can be done about those. If you need help, drop me a note.
As part of a recent 15 city event series sponsored by Quantum (that was a disclosure btw ;) ) titled Virtualization, Cloud and the New Realities for Data Protection that had a theme of strategies and technologies that will help you adapt to a changing IT environment I was asked to present a keynote at the events around Modernizing data protection for cloud, virtual and legacy environments (see earlier and related posts here and here).
Since late June (taking July and most of August off) and wrapping up last week, the event series has traveled to Boston, Chicago, Palo Alto, Houston, New York City, Cleveland, Raleigh, Atlanta, Washington DC, San Diego, Los Angeles, Mohegan Sun CT, St. Louis, Portland Oregon and King of Prussia (Philadelphia area).
The following are a series of posts via IT Knowledge Exchange (ITKE) that covered these events including commentary and perspectives from myself and others.
Data protection in the cloud, summary of the events Practical solutions for data protection challenges Big data’s new and old realities Can you afford to gamble on data protection Conversations in and around modernizing data protection Can you afford not to use cloud based data protection
In addition to the themes in the above links, here are some more images, thoughts and perspectives from while being out and about at these and other events.
While I was traveling saw this advertisement sign from Datalink (who is a Quantum partner that participated in some of the events) in a few different airports which is a variation of the Datadomain tape sucks attention getter. For those not familiar, that creature on the right is an oversized mosquito with the company logos on the lower left being Datalink, NetApp, Cisco and VMware.
When in Atlanta for one of the events at the Morton’s in the Sun trust plaza, the above sculpture was in the lobby. Its real title is the goddess of fertility, however I’m going to refer to it as the goddess of data fertility, after all, there is no such thing as a data or information recession.
Traveling while out and about is like a lot of things particular IT and data infrastructure related which is hurry up and wait. Not only does America Run on Dunkin, so to does StorageIO.
When out and about, sometimes instead of looking up, or around, take a moment and look down and see what is under your feet, then let your imagination go for a moment about what it means. Ok, nuff of that, drink your coffee and let’s get back to things shall we.
Just like virtualization and clouds, airplanes need physical engines to power them which have to be energy-efficient and effective. This means being very reliable, good performance, fuel-efficient (e.g. a 757 on a 1,500 mile trip if full can be in the neighborhood of 65 plus miles per gallon per passenger with a low latency (e.g. fast trip). In this case, a Pratt and Whitney PW2037 (could be a PW2040 as Delta has a few of them) on a Delta 757 is seen powering this flight as it climbs out of LAX on a Friday morning after one of the event series session the evening before in LA.
Not sure what to make out of this image, however it was taken while walking into the Mohegan Sun casino where we did one of the dinner events at the Michael Jordan restaraunt
Here is an image from one of the events in this series which is a restaurant in Cleveland where the vault is a dinning room. No that is not a banker, well perhaps a data protection banker, it is the one and only (@davidchapa) David Chapa aka the Chief Technology Evangelist (CTE) of Quantum, check out his blog here.
Nice view just before landing in Portland Oregon where that evenings topic was as you might have guessed, data protection modernization, clouds and virtualization. Don’t be scared, be ready, learn and find concerns to overcome them to have certainty with data protection in cloud, virtual and physical environments. Cloud, virtualization and data protection modernization is a shared responsibility requiring team work and cooperation between service or solution provider and the user or consumer. If the customer or consumer of a service is using the right tools, technologies, best practices and having had done their homework for applicable levels of services with SLAs and SLOs, then a service provider with good capabilities should be in harmony with each other. Of course having the right technologies and tools for the task at hand is also important. Moving your data to the cloud or a virtualized environment should not feel like a walk down a long hallway, that is assuming you have done your homework, that the service is safe and secure, well taken care of, there should be less of concerns. Now if that is a dark, dirty, dingy, dilapidated dungeon like hallway, then you just might be on the highway to hell vs. stairway to heaven or clouds ;).
There continues to be barriers to cloud adoption and deployment for data protection among other users.
Unlike the mountain ranges inland from the LA area coastline causing a barrier for the marine layer clouds rolling further inland, many IT related barriers can be overcome. The key to overcoming cloud concerns and barriers is identifying and understanding what they are so that resolutions, solutions, best practices, tools or work around’s can be developed or put into place.
Hmm, breakfast of champions and road warriors, Dunkin Donuts aka DD, not to be confused with DDUP the former ticker symbol of Datadomain.
In the spirit of not treating everything the same, have different technology or tools to meet various needs or requirements, it only makes sense that there are various hot beverage options including hot water for tea, regular and decaffeinated coffee. Hmm, tiered hot beverages?
On the lighter side, things including technology of all type will and do break, even with maintenance, so having a standby plan, or support service to call can come in handy. In this case the vehicle on the right did not hit the garage door that came off of its tracks due to wear and tear as I was preparing to leave for one of the data protection events. Note to self, consider going from bi-annual garage door preventive maintenance to annual service check-up.
While not part of or pertaining to data protection, clouds, virtualization, storage or data infrastructure topics, the above photo was taken while in a quiet section of an airport lounge waiting for a flight to one of the events. This falls in the class of a picture is worth a thousand words category as the sign just to the left of the sales person talking loudly on his cell phone about his big successful customer call says Quiet Zone with symbol of no cell phone conversations.
How do I know the guy was not talking about clouds, virtualization, data infrastructure or storage related topics? Simple, his conversation was so loud me and everybody else in the lounge could hear the details of the customer conversation as it was being relayed back to sales management.
Note to those involved in sales or customer related topics, be careful of your conversations in public and pseudo public places including airports, airport lounges, airplanes, trains, planes, hotel lobbies and other places, you never know who you will be broadcasting to.
Here is a link to a summary of the events along with common questions, thoughts and perspectives.
Thanks to everyone who participated in the events including attendees, as well as Quantum and their partners for sponsoring this event series, look forward to see you while out and about at some future event or venue.
Does software eliminate or move location of vendor lockin?
Does software eliminate or move location of vendor lockin?
I’m always interested when I hear or read a software vendor or their value added reseller (VAR) or business partner claim that their solution eliminates vendor lockin.
More often than not, I end up being amazed if not amused over the claims which usually should be rephrased as eliminating hardware vendor lock-in.
What is also amazing or amusing is that while some vendors make claims of eliminating (hardware) vendor lock-in, there is also some misdirection taking place. While some solutions may be architected to cut hardware vendor lock-in, how they are sold or packaged can force certain vendors technology into your solution. For example, the EMC Centera software in theory and architecture is hardware vendor independent, however it is sold as a solution (hardware and software), similar to how Dell sells the DX which uses software from Caringo and you guessed right, Dell hardware among many other similar scenarios from other vendors.
How about virtualization or other abstraction software tools along with cloud, object storage, clustered file systems and related tools.
Keep in mind the gold rule of management software and tools which includes virtualization, cloud stacks, clustered file systems among other similar tools. The golden rule is simply who ever controls the software and management controls the gold (e.g. your budget). In the case of a storage software tools such as virtualization, cloud or object storage, cluster or NAS system among others, while they can be correct depending on how packaged and sold of eliminating hardware vendor lock-in, the lock-in also moves.
The lock-in moves from the hardware to the software which even though a particular solution may be architected to use industry standard components, often to make it easy for acquisition, a vendor packages the solution with hardware. In other words, sure, the vendor unlocked you from one vendors hardware with their software only to lock you into theirs or somebody else’s.
Now granted, it may not be a hard lock (pun intended), rather a soft marketing and deployment packaging decision. However there are some solutions that give themselves or at least via their marketing on hardware independence only to force you into buying their tin wrapped software (e.g. an appliance) with their choice of disk drives, network components and other items.
So when a software or solution vendor claims to cut vendor lock-in, ask them if that is hardware vendor lock-in and if they are moving or shifting the point of vendor lock-in. Keep in mind that vendor lock-in does not have to be a bad thing if it provides you the customer with value. Also keep in mind that only you can prevent vendor lock-in which is like only you can prevent cloud data loss (actually its a shared responsibility ;) ).
Here is my point, so what if a vendor chooses to wrap their software with an appliance to make it easy for you to buy and deploy, however unless they are willing to work with you on what hardware that will be, perhaps they should think about going a bit easier on the vendor lock-in theme.
In the quest to race from hardware vendor lock-in, be aware with ears and eyes wide open to make sure that you are not fleeing from one point of lock-in to another. In other words, make sure that the cure to your vendor lock-in challenge is not going to be more painful than your current ailment.
What is your take on vendor lockin? Cast your vote and see results in the following polls.
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