innovation Archives

December 13, 2012January 18, 2021

Hardware, Software, what about Valueware?

I am surprised nobody has figured out how to use the term valueware to describe their hardware, software or services solutions, particular around cloud, big data, little data, converged solution stacks or bundles, virtualization and related themes.

Cloud and virtualization building blocks transformed into Valueware

Note that I’m referring to IT hardware and not what you would usually find at a TrueValue hardware store (disclosure, I like to shop there for things to innovate with and address the non IT to do project list).

Instead of value add software or what might otherwise be called an operating system (OS), or middleware, glue, hypervisor, shims or agents, I wonder who will be first to use valueware? Or who will be the first to say they were the first to articulate the value of their industry unique and revolutionary solution using valueware?

For those not familiar, converged solution stack bundles combine server, storage and networking hardware along with management software and other tools in a prepackaged solution from the same or multiple vendors. Examples include Dell VIS (not to be confused with their reference architectures or fish in Dutch), VCE or EMC vBlocks, IBM Puresystems, NetApp FlexPods and Oracle Exaboxes among others.

Why is it that the IT or ICT (for my European friends) industries are not using valueware?

Is Valueware not being used because it has not been brought to their attention yet or part of anybody’s buzzword bingo list or read about in an industry trade rag (publication) or blog (other than here) or on twitter?

Is it because the term value in some marketers opinion or view their research focus groups associate with being cheap or low-cost? If that is the case, I wonder how many of those marketing focus groups actually include active IT or ICT professionals. If those research marketing focus groups contact practicing IT or ICT pros, then there would be a lower degree of separation to the information, vs. professional focus group or survey participants who may have a larger degree of separation from practioneers.

Depending on who uses valueware first and how used, if it becomes popular or trendy, rest assured there would be bandwagon racing to the train station to jump on board the marketing innovation train.

On the other hand, using valueware could be an innovative way to help articulate soft product value (read more about hard and soft product here). For those not familiar, hard product does not simply mean hardware, it includes many technologies (including hardware, software, networks, services) that combined with best practices and other things to create a soft product (solution experience).

Whatever the reason, I am assuming that valueware is not going to be used by creative marketers so let us have some fun with it instead.

Let me rephrase that, let us leave valueware alone, instead look at the esteemed company it is in or with (some are for fun, some are for real).

APIware (having some fun with those who see the world via APIs)
Cloudware (not to be confused with cloud washing)
Firmware (software tied to hardware, is it hardware or software? ;) )
Hardware (something software, virtualization and clouds run on)
Innovationware (not to be confused with a data protection company called Innovation)
Larryware (anything Uncle Larry wants it to be)

Marketware (related to marketecture)
Middleware (software to add value or glue other software together)
Netware (RIP Ray Noorda)
Peopleware (those who use or support IT and cloud services)
Santaware (come on, tis the season right)
Sleepware (disks and servers spin down to sleep using IPM techniques)
Slideware (software defined marketing presentations)
Software (something that runs on hardware)
Solutionware (could be a variation of implementation of soft product)
Stackware (something that can also be done with Tupperware)
Tupperware (something that can be used for food storage)
Valueware (valueware.us points to this page, unless somebody wants to buy or rent it ;) )
Vaporware (does vaporware actually exist?)

More variations can be added to the above list, for example substituting ware for wear. However, I will leave that up to your own creativity and innovation skills.

Let’s see if anybody starts to use Valueware as part of their marketware or value proposition slideware pitches, and if you do use it, let me know, be happy to give you a shout out.

Ok, nuff said.

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press, 2011), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press, 2009), and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier, 2004)

twitter @storageio

August 29, 2009March 7, 2022

Buzzword Bingo 1.0 – Are you ready for fall product announcemnts?

Ever play IT buzzword bingo or perhaps you have and not realized it?

Anyone can play, its easy and you don’t even need to know or understand the words or terms.

Its actually quite common and very easy, it goes like this, someone perhaps a vendor, var, media, analysts, pundit, blogger, twitter, customer/user, financier or whomever starts rattling of terms, phrases and acronyms in a discussion until some says or yells, “Bingo”, that is what I want or want to talk about or that applies to what Im interested in. Buzzword bingo can be multi-directional, it can be played by customers and vendors alike, it can be played via product announcements, articles, white papers, blog posts, videos, presentations or webcasts you name it.

So lets give it a try with a simple version to get started, oh, some of the acronyms have multiple meanings as well just to make the game more interesting, so remember, yell bingo when something resonates, ready? Ok, let’s go with 8 Gb Fibre Channel (8GFC), 10GbE, AVO, Agent-less, Authentication, Archiving, Backup, Backup Service Provider (BSP), BC/DR, Buffer, Bus, Benchmarking, Blade servers, Bulk Storage, CAS, Capacity Planning, Capacity per watt, CDP, Converged Enhanced Ethernet (CEE), CIFS, Cloud, cloud computing, cloud storage, cloud it, cloud confusion, clusters, Clustered Storage, CNA, Compliance, Compression, Converged Networks, Cores, Driver, Data Center Ethernet (DCE), DLP, Domain, D2D2D, Data management, Data migration, De-duplication, De-dupe debates, Dual Boot, DPM, eDiscovery, Energy Star, EPA, Environmental Health and Safety (EHS), Encryption, Event Correlation, eWaste, Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), FCBB, File management, FLASH or flash, Gateway, Green, Grid, Hash table, Index, HA, Hypervisor, hyperv, HAL, I/O Virtualization (IOV), Inband, Inline, ITIL, InfiniBand, Infrastructure Resource Management (IRM), IOPS per watt, IPM & MAID 2.0, iSCSI, LAN, Look aside buffer, MAN, Mhz, Multi-Protocol Storage, Managed Service Processors, Provider (MSP), MIBS, MLC, Meta, NAS, NFS, NPVID, OS, Over clocking, Optimization, Partitions, Para-virtualization, PCIe, Policy Management, POTS, POST, Post processing, PIROMA, Power Cooling Floor-space EHS (PCFE), PCI SIG IOV, Pin count, Pin out, Pun up, Performance, pNFS, Removable Hard Disk Drive (RHDD), RAID 6, RAM, Replication, RoHS, Replication, REST, SAN, SaaS, SRA, SRM, SAS, SATA, Security, SLC, Snapshots, SMIS, SNMP, SOAP, SRM, SSD, Stack, Tape, Threads, Thin Provision, Tier 0, Unstructured data, VCB, VM, Vmworld, Virtualization, virtual memory, Vmotion, VMware, vcpu, VTL, WAN, WAAS, WADS, WAFS, WADM, Web 2.0 or xaaS (replace x with whatever letter you like, kind of like xSP ;) ).

Any bingos yet? Ok, enough is enough, will leave it here for now, maybe a future post for Buzzword Bingo 2.0 will include more technical terms and acronyms or excerpts from industry trade group dictionaries such as SNIA or glossaries such as those from mine and other books .

With a plethora of upcoming announcements, rest assured, there will be plenty of opportunities to brush up on buzzword bingo so get ready, practice and enjoy your next game.

Check out the news and portfolio as well as interesting links page to learn more about related topics.

Ok, nuff said.

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

December 23, 2008December 4, 2019

Is There Still Innovation For IT and Storage?

Storage I/O trends

Is the IT industry and specifically, storage and networking segments currently lacking from innovation? The answer to that question exists in part due to what your definition or view of innovation is and how it is measured.

By some definitions, innovation is defined by how many startups exists as was the case in the late 90s and early 2000s when there was a large number of startup companies involving Fibre Channel, iSCSI, NAS, SRM, CDP, Backup, Compliance and Archiving among others.

Several bloggers have recently made posts about what is or what is not innovative as well as how previous innovate hype may have led to showing up on the not so hot or where are they now lists. Some examples can be found here, here, here, here, here, and here among others.

3Leaf, 4blox, Astaro, Attrato, Autovirt, Axxana, Candera, Caringo, Cassatt, Cleaversafe, Code42, Continuity, Cyberark, Digitalocular, Drobo, Fisec, FusionIO, Fusionio, Greenbytes, Iosafe, Monospehere, Moonwalk, Neptuney, Netrion, Nextio, Nirvanix, Numonyx, Ocarina, Open-e, Parrascale, Piviot3, Pliant, Racemi, ScaleMP, Seanodes, Stormagic, Storwize, Tarmin, Violin, Woven, XIV and Xsigo among others constantly show up in my inbox making announcements or preparing to launch, some have been around longer than others.

There are also several startups that are still either in stealth mode or preferring to keep a low profile for now. How does this compare to what we saw in the storage and networking industry during the late 90s and early 2000s, certainly not the same number or amount of money being spent on marketing startups, however there are still startup companies to fill the void left from M&A as well as to address new opportunities including in the converged storage, networking and server sectors as well as virtualization.

Look, here’s my point, vendors have been innovating and even more impotently, executing and delivering on prior hype and innovation with scalable and stable solutions. What of established companies such as Amazon and their S3 cloud solution are innovative or EMC with their cloud optimized storage aka Atmos are innovative? How about Sun with their open source based solutions are those innovate for the industry or for the vendor?

As for technologies and techniques, which are innovative or evolutionary, that depends, however some candidates include among others:

FLASH and RAM based SSD, both as component devices for installation into laptop, desktop and servers as well as into storage systems

Standalone SSD storage systems with Fibre Channel, SAS and SATA interfaces.

Innovations for FLASH include write performance optimization and wear leveling to boost endurance and reliability

Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and converged enhanced Ethernet (CEE) or Data Center Ethernet (DCE)

If you prefer Cisco version leveraging enhanced, premium loss-less and low latency Ethernet for converged networking.

PCI-SIG Single-Root (SR) and Multi-Root (MR) I/O virtualization.

Incremental enhancements including SAS shifting from 3GB to 6GB including switched SAS

40 GbE along with 100 GbE, 8 GbE Fibre Channel along with enhanced InfiniBand and enhanced NFS V4.x

Cloud based servers and solutions for internal (private) and public (services) use.

Clustered storage and clustered file systems including object based access

Cross technology domain and infrastructure resource management (IRM) tools to support virtual environments

What’s your take, is there still innovation taking place in storage and networking, or, is it all just hype and execution delivering on prior hype?

What is innovation and how to measure it?

What is the value prop of an innovate solution that makes it a viable solution?

Does innovation have to be adopted to be considered innovative?

Who is innovating and who is executing?

Ok, nuff said.

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

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