A couple weeks ago EMC's Pat Gelsinger outlined a vision for long-distance federated storage, which Chuck Hollis wrote about on his blog.
It received a fair amount of attention in the storage community as a bold step by EMC to set a development course with far reaching potential. StorageBod's take on it was to call it a moon shot, referring to NASA's enormous decade-long project in the 60's to put a man on the moon.
I remember being a kid during those years, thinking that anything would be possible in our lifetimes through the combination of imagination, hard work and glorious destiny. We were encouraged by things like scuttling our yearly ice fishing expedition and taking a winter vacation to Disneyland instead.
One of the great all time memes is pursuing the dream. "If you dare to dream", the voices say, "you will be richly rewarded." Not many details are given about the compensation part of the promise, but to a child growing up in the frozen north, you imagine things like living in California, near Disneyland with a lifetime membership.
Silicon Valley and Route 128 replaced Disneyland as the places where dreams were made for tech whiz kids. The reward part became more obvious, but so did the reality of how much dreams can cost and that acronyms like ROI, tend to stop them. Start up companies fail for a lot of reasons, but eventually it's a matter of their dream losing a showdown with an ROI inquisition.
But dreams don't necessarily always die. In today's world the technology dream is encapsulated in intellectual property (IP) and purchased by another company. Like a biological organism that can lie dormant for many years, the IP of the failed company can be revived at any time by applying development resources. The inevitable scrutiny for ROI may be suspended while the dream is being re-created, but eventually it has to face it's tormentors again.
Geslinger's federated storage dream at EMC is such a project. It started as the dream of a little startup in Edmonton called Yotta Yotta. I remember the company and the passion the team had. It was a big dream that eventually could not stand up to ROI examination.
Now Pat Gelsinger, a relatively new exec at EMC appears to have bet his career on an acquired dream. It's not clear how all this came to pass, but it does not appear to have complete support within the company. For starters, it certainly competes for mind share with Atmos - another storage dream with similar characteristics, but different underlying technology. Perhaps these two initiatives will be combined, but they don't look all that compatible at first glance. The absence of Atmos in Gelsinger's vision suggests that Atmos is not living up to its hype.
The bigger issue would appear to be Gelsinger's focus on hardware and protocols, as opposed to higher level software. EMC has been moving to become much more of a software company under Joe Tucci's leadership. Gelsinger's federation dream looks like a hardware and firmware play.
EMC World this year will be very interesting as the company tries to figure out how to spin all of the varying visions they are projecting. Most of the attendees will be customers and fans of EMC, but I'm betting that there will be more confusion and questions about what the company's direction really is. Do their multiple visions make sense together? Are they visions that have an understandable, attainable ROI? Or do clash with each other and leave people wondering how much they will cost and how long will they take to be finished - if ever.
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