StorageRap

Non-competes ought to be illegal everywhere - not just California

David Donatelli's defection from EMC to HP has opened up interesting discussions about the nature of non compete (NC) agreements.  Steve Duplessie wrote a piece this AM opining over how these things ought to work.

Tom Petrocelli remarked in Twitter this morning that the issue was that employers don't guarantee lifetime employment & advancement. Tom's point is right on the money.  The days of employer/employer loyalty are mostly gone - especially in the light of the recession which has put lots of people on the street without a lot of warning. NCs are a relic from the past that we ought to abolish. 

A world without NCs shifts the potential for being abused from the employee to the employer.  In a world where employers can fire people at will, employees should be able to work where they want. There needs to be laws with teeth to prevent employers from being harmed by having trade secrets stolen and used against them. These are already in confidentiality clauses in employee agreements. 

FWIW, Steve, OJT typically would not qualify as a trade secret.

Symantec Managed Backup Services could be the best thing you do this year

I'm impressed with Symantec's vision and execution plans for their Managed Backup Services.

Here are some highlights from the description on their web page:

Symantec Managed Backup Services provide comprehensive 24x7 management of your backup and recovery operations under strict SLAs allowing you to focus on your core business priorities while retaining ownership of your backup technology. Meet internal and regulatory requirements at manageable costs by uniting Symantec’s award-winning managed services and leading data protection technologies.

Day-to-day operations are supervised by your Service Delivery Manager who also provides a centralized and transparent view of your operations through daily and monthly reports summarizing SLAs, storage capacity, and key issues identified during the period.

For customers, it shifts the responsibility from backup execution to audit and recovery testing/execution. Think about it - if you don't spend time managing the details of backup anymore, you can invest those resources into making sure backup is working correctly - something that is often overlooked until a disaster occurs. Not only that, but customers can invest more time on recovery testing and planning. 

Hurd picks Donatelli to rebuild HP's data center business

By all accounts David Donatelli was very well liked and respected at EMC, so it was a surprise when it was announced earlier today that he was leaving EMC for HP to become the EVP of HP's Enterprise Servers, Storage and Networking business. Of course when you have ambition, as Donatelli obviously does, it's all about more taking on more responsibilities and making more money.

Its significant that Hurd went outside HP for this choice.  I'm sure that has ruffled a few feathers at HP, but sometimes the best way to rebuild an organization is to bring in an external exec.  It shows how serious Hurd is about making HP a strong player in the future of the data center business.  The fact that he hired a storage executive is an indication of the strategic role storage will have in HP's data center business. Most server companies underestimate how difficult the storage business is and many have put server or operating system people in charge of storage - usually with dismal results (yes - I'm thinking about Sun especially).  Hurd did not make THAT mistake and I guess that's partly why I think so highly of him - he either knows these things or he has terrific instincts.

Donatelli probably has the skills to do the job.  In his tenure at EMC, he has seen many internal and external challenges and there's no question he has a deep understanding of how the technology business works.  As the person running EMC's storage business, he's been exposed to every technology and business concept in the data center industry.  Of course, as the guy who will run storage at HP, he will certainly have a few insights into how to compete most effectively with his old employer.

While I think this deal is mostly about Hurd's desire to build his team at HP, it does leave a few questions about what Donatelli is leaving behind at EMC.  His storage business unit at EMC is having difficulties selling its expensive premium products and services during the ongoing worldwide recession. Their recently announced storage product, the V-Max array, continues EMC's trend to develop and sell high-priced products.   

By contrast, 3PARs most recently announced product - the F Class array - reflects the current economic reality much more closely by being a mid range array with excellent performance and scalability and having a much lower entry price than V-Max.

Social spam, Facebook, twitter security and the separation of work and private lives

I signed up for Blip.fm yesterday - Blip.fm is an online social music site where everybody is a DJ creating communitized song lists.  Pretty interesting to me because I'm always interested in hearing new stuff.

During setup, I happily turned on a feed to twitter, which in turn is fed into Facebook. To make a long story short I unintentionally spammed both my FB friends and my twitter followers with insipid song listings late last night.  My sincere apologies to everybody that got this stream shoved in their queues.

I suppose there have already been cases of social infinite loops (or something like them). 

But that's not what alarms me. That's reserved for the ability to reverse the feed from FB to twitter. Anybody who is a parent needs to understand what this means. In FB, you have some control over who gets to see you or your child's personal information.  I can't remember what the default behavior is, but I think its to keep private information private.

Twitter on the other hand really only works if everything is public so anyone can see it.  That's how you build the number of followers you have.  I suppose you can do that privately too, but the numbers don't seem to support strong privacy for twitter users. 

What this means is that somewhat soon there could lots of kids on FB sending what would normally be private information in FB to twitter where they are out in the clear for anybody to see. As far as I know, the only place you'll be able to check this status is by going into your child's FB account and winnowing the information about the FB/twitter application. If you are a geek, that's not so bad - its a pain in the rear - but if you are not a geek, you might have difficulty doing this. Prepare to become much more familiar with FB in order to be a responsible parent.

Kids FBing about where and when they will be someplace and who they will be with could be very interesting to creeps. If you've ever had a child stalked online you know how much THAT sucks.  Of course creeps don't always discriminate between kids and adults - so you need to be aware of your own information leaks too.  All of a sudden it could get a lot scarier than what its been and so it makes sense to watch what's going on here very closely.  Its not like we don't already have enough to do.

New social networking sites that tie into FB and twitter are also leakage points - as I discovered last night. There is no question I should have known better because I'm a technology person- but I screwed up.  It proved to me how easy it is to have information show up where you didn't really want it. 

Its a Pandora's box thing.  There's no stopping it and its going to create challenges and work for everybody, even those that don't use social networking technologies. If you are alive, you will need to understand how social networking technology works, just like you will need to know how crosswalks and airport security works.  I never would have thought THAT until recently.

I've never liked the idea of having multiple twitter and FB accounts, but I might need to consider it in order to create further separation between work and personal life.  There are lots of problems with doing that, not the least which is curtailing the amount of personal information that gets put into work-based social network accounts. That would significantly reduce the effectiveness of the media and I'm not sure how possible it is to do it anyway - being a social animal. 

3PAR not getting flash? Maybe it's EMC's customers who aren't getting it

A few weeks ago Storagezilla smacked 3PAR with his "3PAR still don't get flash" blog entry. 

Hmm,  seems to me EMC's customers are the ones who are not getting EMC's flash EFD (expensive freaking doohickeys) - or nearly enough of it by the looks of their earnings announcement last week.

The discussion of flash in their earnings call was limited to statements about how customers were interested in technologies like flash.  This differs a lot from saying things like sales of flash drives had exceeded certain levels or expectations or that the adoption of flash had been one of the leading factors of growth in certain markets or product classes.

I'm not saying that EMC is wrong about flash, but their timing was pretty bad. There's nothing like bringing out a new premium-priced technology when the world is on the verge on an economic meltdown. Sometimes you just have bad luck and sometimes you make the wrong assumptions.  Whatever the reasons, Symmetrix revenues, where one would expect to see the largest impact from SSD sales, were down 25%.

Customers want to know how to get satisfactory response time at the best price. If you are talking about transaction and mixed workload performance, wide striping is still a much more cost-efficient technology to achieve response time goals.  Maybe EMC doesn't care about cost effective IOPS anymore, but customers definitely do.

An excellent article on using Oracle with thin provisioning

vSphere has been getting a lot of attention this week for its inclusion of thin provisioning. It was a great validation that this important technology has made it into the maintream.  Of course, mileage with different thin provisioning implementations does indeed vary and we are always happy to show customers what makes 3PAR's so good. 

James Koopman at DCIG wrote an excellent short piece on preparing an existing Oracle database for running on thinly provisioned storage.

Here's a taste:

Recognize that the SHRINK command only compresses database objects and does not compress within table spaces or data files. As such, it may be beneficial, depending on how table spaces are being managed within Oracle, to look at the ALTER TABLESPACE...COALESCE and ALTER DATABASE DATAFILE...RESIZE commands for table spaces and data files respectively to eliminate all free space within Oracle data files before a migration.

Readers interested in understanding the performance of Oracle databases on highly utilized storage might want to read this white paper from Oracle's site.  Wide striping and thin provisioning together can be combined to get excellent performance and capacity results. In fact, when used with hardware assisted RAID 5, customers can get even better leverage of their capacity at a fairly small performance penalty, as the graphic below shows.  (from the Oracle/3PAR white paper)

Using RAID 5 (5+1) generates 85% of the performance of using RAID 10, but with a 20% capacity overhead - as opposed to a 100% overhead.  As you can see, there are a lot of ways to use 3PAR storage with Oracle databases to meet an organization's cost and performance objectives.

Note to Dell, give more people exposure

I don't know about anybody else, but I was disappointed with Michael Dell's participation at VMware's vSphere's product launch.  Michael is a smart guy and immensely likable, but variety is a really good thing.  So is showing more technical prowess.

I would have preferred hearing from somebody who could speak with more details about new vSphere functionality, manageability and performance and how Dell products are going to reflect those changes. It just came across as a live advertisement for Dell, as opposed to exploring vSphere and exposing it's goodies.  Too much Dell, not enough vSphere. 

Re-blog - @Virtual Geek on vSphere's launch

I think Chad spoke for a lot of people in his post on the vSphere launch.

Crazy Larry strikes again

Larry Ellison is one of the most shrewd technology guys around.  Even though IBM may have given him the idea, there is no question that today's announcement that Oracle will acquire Sun took almost everybody by surprise.  Its making huge waves throughout the industry because of the combined partnerships and competitive relationships that the two companies have and it obliterates the weakening distinction between software and hardware companies.  I'm sure it will have interesting implications for the storage industry but if Oracle expects to make money with Sun's storage business they will probably have to change Suns open source storage business model.

Anyway, here is my cartoon video about how all this came to be:

 

A great sounding chord, but no opus

Tom Petrocelli summarized what a lot of people are thinking about EMC's V-Max announcement in his blog today. 

(FWIW, I will be unavailable most of the day today)

How do you know when you are in "The Symm Zone"?

I have to give EMC credit, they really know how to make a big splash, as they did yesterday with their V-max (Tigon) announcement.  Stephen Foskett has a good list of blogs discussing it.

There are many more questions about V-max than answers, especially those surrounding performance - as there always is with EMC - and the nature of the interconnect they are using to tie their distributed controllers (what they are calling engines) together.  This sort of thing is always much easier said than done and we know because 3PAR has been doing it for 8 years now. Our mesh active architecture is very solid and very fast.

New competitive products always get the limelight when they are introduced but over time they help shine the light on other outstanding products, such as 3PAR's InServ arrays.  

What's a tigon anyway?

With EMC's announcement tomorrow of their DMX follow-on,code named "Tigon,"  there will likely be some questions about what the heck a tigon is.  It's a  cross between a male tiger and a female lion - not to be confused with a liger, which has the gender roles reversed.

If you like genetic abnormalities, tigons and ligers are pretty blasted interesting.  Ligers tend to be very large, while tigons tend to be much smaller and also have somewhat stunted lifespans.  An interesting hypothesis based on physiology is linked here.

The photograph that is above left shows a tigon. Its markings are distinctly different from the tiger and lion shown in the photograph on the lower right, which shows the tigon manufacturing process - something that there is not much evidence of in the wild.  Who'd a thunk THAT would be on the Internet?

One of the challenges tigons face is their sound. Apparently the lion mother and tigon cubs become confused by the uncharacteristic noises they each make. Then there is the problem that lions are social animals and tigers are solitary.  Biologists believe this is probably very confusing.  Imagine roaring your head off and having your progeny just walk away like they don't even hear!

Following Haldane's Rule, hybrid mammals are usually sterile, but not always. In the case of large cats, female ligers have been known to reproduce.

The most familiar hybrid, the mule (offspring of a male donkey and female horse) is also sterile but clever researchers from the University of Idaho and Utah State University have found a way to reproduce mules with cloning technology.  Somehow I doubt the animals involved with this procedure had the same level of satisfaction as the large cats.

I have to give EMC credit with this one. Maybe it will start a new trend in code naming technology projects after biological science, like a new dedupe technology code named heterogametic sex. 

EMC insider interview is a fake

We received this video from an anonymous source and have determined it to be a forgery.  There is a very high probability that the person who is portrayed as an EMC insider is not an actual current employee of EMC.

Link to the video on youtube.

SNW Barometer (or was the bar-o-meter) report

Who ruled at SNW this week?  3PAR!  That's who. The F Class launch was our main event, but it was a lot more than that - it was stepping up in the industry. Lots of people have commented on the whole F Class theme and wondered what came first - the product name or the marketing theme.  I can assure you it was the product name.  The F class follows the E class.

Data Domain had a good week too - even if they don't know what rap is. Some of the other companies in the industry have other priorities these days.  For instance even Howie Goldstein had a bigger booth than EMC. 

The only EqualLogic folks that were there were ex-Dell Equallogic folks, like Jason and Fadi - and they always were players!  But I missed seeing the rest of the EQ show regulars (D-man are you feeling me?).  I got some serious hang out time with the 3PAR SEs, AE's and HQ peeps that were there and they are so freaking geeked!  It was great.  There is nothing like hanging with deep geeks throwin' down serious T-smack.  Such delicious food for the blog!

3PAR F Class, the toast of SNW

I guess this would be an action shot from the Headwaters Lounge at Rosens in Orlando during SNW 2009 where we announced the F Class.  There's nothing like sharing a little camaraderie after a successful announcement.

To The F Class!