Storagebod's Blog

An Observation and a thought...

Whilst catching up on the various blogs this week; especially in the aftermath of EMC's FAST announcement, something began to get to me. The number of competitor blogs who were obsessed with commenting on EMC's announcement even to the extent that they barely mention their own products.

I've now developed a rule:- as the number of times that a competitor's product is mentioned increases, the useful information contained in the article decreases in proportion. And if you rant on about a competitor's product and then get to the last paragraph and say something along the lines but I really don't understand the competitor's product...you have just made yourself look like a prize pillock!

So in future, it may actually be of more value to not comment on a competitor's announcement/product; instead of spending all that energy/creativity on that...perhaps write something positive or interesting about your own product. 

And can we please have #twitpiss truce!? For next three weeks, if you can't think of anything nice to say....say nothing!

Waves of Cool

You see a fair bit of discussion around Google Wave, some people thinking it'll be Google's first big failure and others very postive about it. Now I think it could be Google's first really big high profile failure for the simple reason although it has lots of potential, it has no real obvious killer application at present. And it's hard to see the value of it immediately.

Actually looking at Google Wave, this is one of the first times that Google have actually tried to invent something and get a new concept across; well, certainly one which is new to a lot of people (I worked on similar products for a small start-up many moons ago). Google are very good at taking existing ideas and making them better, these ideas though are nearly always pretty much fully accepted already tho'. Google do not invent, they improve.

There were search engines before Google; Google just did it better.

There was online advertising before Google, Google just does it better and knows how to monetise it better.

There was webmail before Gmail, Google just does it very well.

There's nothing wrong with this approach, arguably some countries have pretty much made this their whole industry. But to truly innovate, now that's hard and all the PhD's in the world are not necessarily going to generate the creative spark needed. 

This is equally true across the whole of the technical landscape and it might not matter whether you invented a concept, you just have to do it better. So whether EMC is more innovative than NetApp or whether IBM have more patents than HDS; it does not really matter from a customer's point of view. I just want products which do want I want them to do at a price which I want to pay. 

I see lots of cool products from lots of cool companies but cool is not a feature that I am willing to pay for in professional life (personally, I'll buy cool stuff all the time but I'm not going to bet my career on cool).

p.s Happy Turkey Day to my colonial readers! Remember to buy lots of cool stuff on Black Friday!

p.p.s I do have some spare invites for Google Wave if you want to give it a go.

Happy Blog Day

This blog is now a year old; who'd have thought it!!

It seems to have become part of the fabric of the many storage bloggers and it's certainly become part of the fabric of my life. I started the blog as a counter to many of the vendor blogs I see out there; trashing each other products but often not in a useful way.

I wanted to represent the customer's view; especially the larger customers, those with multiple arrays and multiple petabytes of data; those who have to struggle with management tools which didn't (and still don't) scale; those who have to deal with application architects who have no idea about what their applications do; those who don't have time to tune each individual LUN etc. 

I hope I have done so; I certainly feel that I've had some success and I know that some vendors are taking notice. I wish I was a 'Force for Change' but I think I probably more a 'Little Nudge for Change' but that is all good!

I like to thank my many readers and commentors; I like to thank all those who have linked to my blog either in posts or part of your blog-rolls. It's really quite odd when people in the industry who I have admired and read for years start linking and quoting me but hey, it's very cool.

I'd also like to thank Stephen Foskett for asking me to be part of the Gestalt IT team; that was a great honour and I look forward to collaborating on more posts with you guys!

Obviously I intend to carry on with the blog; calling FUD when I see it, hopefully talking about some of the cool stuff I'm currently involved in and generally supporting the customer point of view. And I keep meaning to do some more personal stuff; perhaps some book reviews and more about my home data centre.

And if you are ever in London; give us a shout, I'm always happy to have a beer...

Post Your Favourite FUD!!

Okay, let's get all the FUD out of our systems! What piece of FUD are you either

• Most proud of! What scurrilous piece of FUD have you manufactured to smear another vendor?
• Most amused by? What patently stupid thing has a vendor said to smear another vendor?
• Most shocked by?
• What piece of FUD actually turned out to be true?

This doesn't have to be storage specific but obviously I would prefer it to be so!

FUDdy Waters

Every now and then I rail against vendor FUD; especially in the Blogosphere, nobody especially listens and although there is sometimes a temporary lull, everyone soon goes back to their bad ways. So I thought I'd give an end-user's point of view and why it is a bad thing.

FUD is rarely backed-up with any kind of evidence; if you are going to criticise another vendor, you need to provide empirical evidence.

FUD often is couched in the terms 'it doesn't work'! Well, this is often plainly stupid; I find it hard to believe that any large vendor would ship a product which does not work! It may not meet all of it's claims but a plain 'it doesn't work'; that's madness!

If you are going to FUD product, you need to provide details and evidence. You should do it in a public forum and you should allow your competitors to respond. I don't mind competitive analysis and positioning of your product in the best possible light but please be willing to back up your statements.

Without such details, I simply treat it with the disdain it deserves!! I encourage all end-users to ask for details when presented with FUD. Ask for facts and figures; full disclosure and preferably not under NDA! 

FUD is often based on old information; competitors very rarely have information on each other's latest and greatest, so you find yourself comparing to last year's model and often features that were missing are now present. Immediately this makes me doubt your presentation because it is wrong!

Assume that the people you are presenting to are better aware of your competitor's products than you are; they've probably had the NDA presentations and know the roadmaps. And never allow yourself to be drawn into an argument about whether a feature is or isn't present in a competitor's product; invariably, you are wrong!

FUD may be fun but it often damages you more than the intended target!

Welcome to the Blogosphere

Let me welcome two new bloggers to the blogosphere Spacrc  who starts with a nice history of Thin Provisioning. Myself and Spacrc actually started our IT careers at the same company (Lloyds TSB) and pretty much at the same time. We certainly worked on the same floor but were only probably vaguely aware of each other; he was 'Big Iron' and I was 'Open Systems'. But whilst I have spent most of my career apart from a brief sojurn into the world of pre-sales as an end-user; he has spent most of his career on the other side of the fence, most recently at EMC.

His insights into the storage industry will be interesting, even when he was an EMCer, he was always one of the good guys with no illusions as to both the weaknesses and the strengths of the EMC product set. Obviously he will have tread carefully as we all do with regards to NDAs but I am expecting good things of him!

And then, I must welcome Grumpy Storage aka @ianhf on Twitter; I've known Ian for a few years as a fellow member of the EMC Customer Council; Ian is a architect specialising in storage. Anyone who has followed Ian on Twitter or knows him in Real Life will know that grumpy is an apt description. But underneath that grumpy exterior beats the heart of a real grouch! Ian takes no prisoners, suffers fools poorly and is a welcome addition to the storage blogosphere, especially as a fellow end-user.

Ian believes passionately about the future of Cloud and I am especially looking forward to his insights and thoughts in that area!!

Both of them are UK-based and both like a beer on occasion; look out for announcements of #storagebeers on Twitter and the chance to meet up with them!

The Bazzas

So the Storage Vendors' Blog Poll has finished over at the Monkeys; I must admit the result was a bit of a surprise and I suspect that there has been a fair amount of ballot-box stuffing going on; I am not sure about hanging chads, more a case of vote early, vote often!

There were three blogs which I feel deserve special mention and I am going to award my own accolades! Firstly, the 'Barry Of Distinction' award i.e The BOD goes jointly to Barry Burke and Barry Whyte

Barry blogs with passion about his product believing strongly in the fact that his is the best product!

Barry believes that Barry's product is quite simply the wrong approach and technically flawed!

Barry believes that HDS lags his product and HDS generally can't do math!

Barry believes that Barry's product is simply all marketing and bluster!

Barry quite likes and respects Barry but would rather that Barry did not know it!

Barry is technically very knowledgeable but also has a wicked sense of humour!

So I am pleased to award the inaugural Barry of Distinction to Barry!

The blog which I was most amazed to see missing was that of Marc Farley! What can one say about Marc's Storagerap blog?

The SWCAA would simply be illegal in the UK but he's not in the UK and can get away with it!

The League of Suspcious Avatars? A mark of honour amongst fellow storage bloggers to appear in this! A true recognition of achievement!

And then there's Marc's raps! The music industry's loss is our gain (I think!!)

So I am please to award the inaugural Mark of Distinction to Marc!

Now, go and vote in the Monkey's non-vendor blog poll! I'd like it if you voted for me but there are many worthy bloggers mentioned, many of whom for this is not a paid endeavour and they deserve the recognition!!

The Value of Curiosity

One of the questions which often comes up in interviews is what is your greatest strength? It’s a lazy question and comes from the standard text. And everyone has their answer off pat, I ask it hoping to get an original answer and only rarely do I get answer which surprises me.

Anyway I have my answer down pat as well…I’m intensely curious,  I’ve never grown out of the why stage of my life but instead of bugging my parents, I bug myself and go and find out myself. 

Now if the interviewer gets the answer, I probably want to work for them and if the interviewer doesn’t; it’s probably never going to work out. I think curiosity is a much under-valued trait, wanting to know what’s on the other side of the hill is what drives us forward.  Hey it might kill cats but I'm not a cat

And that’s why I love things like Twitter and Blogs, it lets me find out lots of stuff; a lot of it useless but some of it profoundly useful. I get to talk to people who I wouldn’t normally have a chance to talk with. That’s why sometimes the various vendor blogs that seem to enjoy throwing mud as opposed to telling me about their product and what it can do for me really irritate me at times as they add very little to my learning.

We’re heading into a big year of product announcements, can I respectfully ask that the vendor bloggers do their best to talk about their products and what they can do? And not what the opposition can’t do? If I see a cool new feature, I can find out for myself if someone else also has it.

p.s the funniest answer to the question ‘What’s your greatest strength?’ I’ve heard of is a guy who worked for me who during a HR interview answered ‘Okay, I’ll give you a strength and then you’ll ask me what my greatest weakness is? I’ll give you a weakness which I cleverly twist into a strength. So my greatest strength is I don’t answer stupid questions!’. He’d already got the job at this point but he started off with ‘TROUBLE’ written on his file.

All Blogged Up

Since I've started this blog, I have been amazed to discover just how many storage blogs are out there. Now, I know most of you don't write them out of the goodness of your hearts but I do appreciate that many of them do write them in your own time.

Now a lot of them are full of marketing stuff but a lot of it is educational, interesting and often entertaining. They can get a bit confrontational at times but at least you are showing passion for the companies you work for and the products you sell. Actually some of you show far too much passion and I wonder about some of the induction regimes you go through!

And then, there are the mad independants. Of course, we all have our reasons for doing it; I suspect most of us like our own little soap-box to pontificate, I know I do. I also hope that we bring a little bit of balance to what are sometimes quite heated debates! We often have the real world experience of the products that you may be pushing or trashing, we know that things are very rarely black or white. There is no perfect storage product!

Can I ask one thing of the vendors please? I don't expect you to be experts on the opposition's product, certainly not how they might work but you should really be careful about features. Nothing looses credibility more in my eyes than when a vendor says that a competing product can't do x, y or z? And it can. Do your competitive analysis well and if you don't know for sure, ask someone. Ask me; if I know, I'll give the answer if I can (I'm pretty good on ESS/DS, SVC, DMX, Clariion and OnTap). I might even ask for you if you are too embarassed. Now I won't disclose NDA stuff, well not sober anyway ;-)

BTW, I'm trying to come up with some more analogies after the success of the 'WAFL is a Platypus' (that would make such a good t-shirt) and it's a pity that Accelerate was cancelled; I would have loved to Kostadis get up and do a talk about WAFL entitled 'WAFL is a Platypus'.

Five Pineapples

Thinking Problem Management blog has now awarded me Five Pineapples. I'm a bit concerned that I was boring about EMC NDAs, I don't consciously remember being boring about EMC NDAs. But I'm extremely sorry if I was!! I'll try to be equally boring about NetApp, 3PAR and IBM et al NDAs in future; I don't want to be seen to have any bias!!

Actually NDAs are incredibly tedious and especially being under multiple vendor NDAs, I find at times having to tread a very precarious line. Especially one vendor is going on about their unique feature which they are going to launch and you are sitting there thinking, 'Not as unique as you think!'

And then there is whole thing of knowing more about upcoming products than the 'poor' sales-guy in front of you.

But the worse type of NDA is when a problem is discovered which could have dramatic implications to the whole community of fellow Storagebods! And then you get NDAed and you can't tell anyone! Full disclosure should be allowed; we should be able to tell people that they could be sitting on a ticking time-bomb. Of course, the vendor who thinks that we don't unofficially do so....is seriously misguided.