I made this steering wheel cam after watching Leo address the company today in a world wide broadcast to all employees. I was glad to see him speak intelligently about the enterprise storage, server and networking business and I was very interested to hear him speak about the intersection of our end of the business with the personal products and imaging/printing parts of the business. He showed a lot of class, humor and aggressiveness and I think I'm going to like his leadership style.
The whole idea of a storage company making a video that reaches "viral status" is very interesting to me since I like making videos and I work for a storage company. There are several problems with making a viral storage video including the relative size of the storage community, which is not large enough to generate large numbers of viewers and then there is the matter that competitors tend to not promote each others work very much, which creates a dampening effect on the whole word of mouth thing that I have associated with viral media.
So, I get the idea of trying to promote a video, because you need a big lift beyond the industry to do it and you need to take advantage of the dynamics of the online video world.
If you follow this link and read it, you'll get an idea of how corporation can make viral videos. But not all viral videos are corporate - there are some that make it on creativity, execution and timing. Although its against very steep odds, a non-corporate video video can succeed if its interesting and compelling enough for people to want to share it with others. Being outrageous helps a lot. The question remains - if most viral videos result from corporate marketing programs, what does that say about the definition of viral - is it only the most numbers of viewers, or is it something else?
As far as I can tell, the most "viral" video produced in the storage industry was probably the Hitler social media video, which quietly made the rounds last summer and now has over 18,000 views. To me, this seems like the right amount of views to qualify for virality in the storage industry. I'm fairly certain that no company was promoting it with a marketing campaign - although there were many industry employees that passed the link through email. As far as I know, the producer of the video is a mystery (at least to me) and I don't think it was done to achieve any business goal.
I've made a few videos that had nothing to do with storage that were simply attempts at being funny. They were fairly well received, but were not promoted by marketing and have not generated nearly the same number of views as the "corporate viral" videos or the Hitler video have. Admittedly, I get a little jealous when I see somebody else's corporate production reaching getting a lot of hits, but I know what to expect without a campaign.
But it's also giving me the opportunity to re-post what I think was my best and funniest video - a video cartoon that I made the day that Oracle announced that it was going to acquire Sun. One question, - neglecting the numbers and the promotion necessary to generate "viral status", does this video have viral qualities? Why or why not?
Latency-sensitive applications are the best candidates for storage tiering to SSDs with 3PAR's AO (Adaptive Optimization.Typically, these are:
High performance transaction processing, like securities trading, or
Single threaded applications that are idle while storage I/Os complete
People ask about Microsoft Exchange and I tell them it benefits a great deal from big, wide striping, but not much from tiering because Exchange performance is mostly a matter of providing adequate throughput.
An app that people run daily but is seldom associated with transaction processing is backup. This SWCSA video discusses backup as well as the prevailing shift to dashcams and the implications for SWCSA branding.
iKnerd (Greg Knieriemen) broke the story yesterday about Oracle/Sun breaking off their relationship with HDS. That got everybody twittering - with the majority of tweets from the storage universe suggesting Oracle had greedy motives. How unfair! So, the video below attempts to restore balance to the universe and brings Netapp, HP, cloud computing, 3PAR and Larry's toys into the discussion.
If you are a Sun storage customer and think its time to change, you should check out 3PAR. We have a lot of ex-Sun server engineers who designed our storage cluster. I'm sure you'll appreciate the architecture of our InServ arrays, as well as our 50% capacity reduction guarantee.
(Hey, Claus Mikkelson at HDS. I've had a comment in on your blog for a couple days and it hasn't been posted yet. I know things can slip through the cracks sometimes, so I thought I'd bring it to your attention.)
Videos are smaller, formatted for 320x 240 small screens
Videos do not stream, they download completely and then play - so it takes longer to start playing
The content does not mirror that on StorageRap
Content on iTunes lags that on Podbean by a day or so
The video images in the podcast player are different than those on 3PARTV and this blog
If there is something on this blog that you want in a podcast version, contact me on Twitter (3ParFarley) or through a blog comment and I'll make a podcast for you.
Storagebod posted recently about the foibles of EMC not certifying Netapp's V Series Filer heads with their storage. That certainly is not a decision made in the best interest of EMC's customers, no matter how they might try to spin it. FWIW, 3PAR is a Netapp V Series partner and we're happy to help customers get a best of breed SAN+NAS solution installed.
Anyway, it occurred to me how much less bickering there would be between Netapp and EMC if EMC would only certify the V Series....
There's nothing quite like repetitive tasks to make the mind go numb and when you are seeing cross-eyed, it's easy to make mistakes. Welcome to the world of laundry and storage provisioning.
3PAR has a new tool, called Autonomic Groups to help with repetitive provisioning tasks.
OK, the talent show of the decade is on! The League of Suspicious Avatars (LOSA) has been working behind the scenes to bring you the very best of the storage blogosphere, complete with an astounding panel of judges. Remember to submit your comments about who you think shows the most talent!
Somebody asked me on Twitter the other day if our arrays allowed a pair of host HBAs to concurrently access a single LUN though two different controllers - telling me a competitor was saying we couldn't. Well, that was pretty whacked because our clustered architecture is designed specifically for that purpose. What they probably meant to say was that their own product couldn't do it. Anyway, it got the juices flowing for a new SWCSA vid!
If you are wondering how to get the most out of VMware's v-Sphere multipathing options, you need to make sure your storage array allows you to access individual LUNs through multiple controllers at the same time.
Why would you limit yourself to one controller per LUN, like Clariion, Netapp and HDS among others when you can balance the load dynamically across multiple HBAs and controllers with 3PAR InServ arrays with mesh-active controllers. To be clear, this industry-leading clustered storage capability is designed into all our arrays, from our mid-range F Class arrays to our enterprise T Class arrays.
