Think Differently, Live Better. (And Drive Fast Cars)......

In last month's Storage Magazine article I explained my theory of why we are so screwed up infrastructure-wise, or at least how we got to this point.  Now I'll give you the way out.  Then, I'll talk about cars.

Forget everything you know for a few minutes, or at least everything you think you know.  Accept my argument that most everything we’ve done in commercial IT has been done based on transactional requirements.  Open your mind.  Breathe through your eyes, Danny.

There are two distinct types of data – dynamic and persistent.  Dynamic is data that is in flux – this is where transactional data begins.  Persistent data is just that – fixed.  It doesn’t change.  It is what it is, and will never be anything else.

Just because data is dynamic doesn’t mean it starts and dies within an RDBMS.  Structured database data certainly starts as dynamic – but at some point it becomes a non-changing record.  It’s persistent.  You may have reasons to keep it inside a database forever (although I doubt they’re valid ones), but those records are still persistent – they are what they are. 

Rule #1:  Don’t confuse how something begins its life with how it will end.  Everything begins dynamic and ends persistent.  Stop delineating between structured, unstructured and semi-structured.  All types live dynamically for some period, whether it’s a Word document, a movie, a credit card transaction or an email.  It all ends up as fixed digital content.

Rule #2: The attributes and requirements for each type of data are vastly different – in most every sense.  Read/write performance, throughput, redundancy, protection, disaster recovery, etc., count more in the dynamic phase of data life – but we’ve extended all of those philosophies to data that stopped changing, which causes 90% of our operational issues.  Building data redundancies and protection schema’s to handle real money transactions is good business – backing up a non-changing data element a thousand times isn’t.  Keeping your bullet proof transaction system capable of handling all the dynamic money events thrown at it is good business. But adding processing power, capacity, network infrastructure, etc., to keep it churning away rather than removing the 90% of the data that isn’t dynamic or possibly even relevant that can interfere with the real transactional stuff isn’t.  Thinking you can’t make this happen is wrong.

Rule #3: The ratio of true dynamic data (and data being “treated” dynamically) to persistent data is about 1:10 – and that ratio will rapidly evolve to 1:100 and beyond.  Dynamic data just doesn’t stay dynamic for very long. 

Transactionally oriented systems are all about doing things fast.  Perform the transaction fast, store the data fast, load the data into other systems fast.  If it sits in a database, it’s easy to find – which is the point of the database.  If we could, we’d have everything inside a database, but they weren’t designed for that.  The persistent data world is all about finding things.  That means you need to know where to look.  Having stuff everywhere, inside and outside of the building, makes this task all but impossible.  The whole categorizing/classifying/indexing/search thing going on today is designed to add structure so we can find things.  It just seems to me that if we created two distinct “virtual” places to look for each distinct type of data, it would be a heck of a lot easier to find what we want in either.  If all our dynamic data sat in one place designed to handle things like that – no matter if it’s Word or big dough – and then was moved (based on business rules) into the persistent digital content store, we’d be able to architect this store entirely differently than the dynamic store. 

If the dynamic store is about speed and redundancy, then the persistent store is about infinite dynamic scale, the ability to find things easily and quickly, autonomous self-managing/self-healing infrastructure--and it should be really, really cheap to buy.  If the dynamic store requires knob-turning specialists, the persistent store requires the occasional dusting.  Stop trying to turn the dynamic store into the persistent one – and stop trying to make the persistent store dynamic.  If you think differently, you’ll act differently.  If you act differently, you’ll realize you can get back to making IT a competitive advantage.

And Now For Something Completely Different....

If I had stupid money, I'd buy a Mercedes SL65.  The car wouldn't get noticed at the shopping mall, but it is a 700HP rocket ship.  Silly, really.  It is the very same car my girlfriend, Lindsay, just smashed while being smashed, out in L.A. 

I stumbled across this thing called "Supercar Life" (www.supercarlife.com) in one of the high end rich folk magazines I read and drool over.  It turned out (in a very legal, tax deductible way) that one of my biggest customers is a car freak, so as a purely business oriented gesture, I took him to this.  The owner, Joel, a guy with way too much dough on his hands, figured out that there are a lot of "men" who still act like they are 12 when it comes to cars.  So, for a piddly $5,000 you can fly to Pittsburgh where he rents an entire race track (Beaverun), and only lets 10 folks on it.  He has (2) of each - brand spanking new - Ferrari F430, Lambo Gallardo, Porsche 911 Turbo, Astin Martin DB9, and the SL65 (Joel had his $450,000 Porsche Carrera GT sitting out front, but didn't offer to let me drive it for some reason). There are about 6 or 8 real race car driver guys - not local car club pro's - real dudes that race really expensive cars really fast that teach you how to not destroy the very nice cars that you don't own.  Every few minutes, you swap cars.  By the end of the day, you have driven a million bucks worth of cars really, really fast.  It was awesome.  If you are thinking of buying one of these rocket ships, why not spend an entire day test driving them first, and learning how not to "Lindsay" your ride?  It was really first class - they put you up at the Marriott Resort and Coal Mine, feed you well, and were just terrific folks.  My customer may have had to have surgery to remove the smile from his face.  Now I just need to find some other car crazy customer who gives me piles of dough to justify my return trip.....

Bowling With Giants.......

This "Since You Asked" article is about the outrageous growth rates of digital content and other fun stuff.  At the end of it, I was speaking of libraries which reminded me of a recent shindig in Vegas that I attended with my lovely wife and a few other ESG'ers for a library fund raiser.  For some unknown reason (place sarcasm here), my noble and supremely patient editor, Lucas, elected not to include that part.

Therefore, I add it here.

Speaking of libraries, I had an interesting weekend recently.  I was invited (actually, my checkbook was invited, I was just baggage) to attend a charity fund raiser in the great city of Las Vegas, by ESG's own Taya Wyss - who is one of those people who hangs around with professional football players for some reason.  Taya's pal, a big giant person (literally - a lineman for the NY Giants) Grey Ruegemer has adopted a bunch of public libraries in Vegas (yes, they apparently do have actual libraries in Vegas - who knew?) and held a Bowling fund raiser at a way off the beaten path hotel  - The Suncoast.  Being one who loves Vegas in small doses and a huge football fan, I happily agreed to be a sponsor.  I paid for Tony Dorsett to bowl with the west coast ESG squad, but he didn’t show (don’t worry, I stole his gift bag).  Fellow gigantic human Marco Rivera – a 3 time pro-bowl guard -became our teammate.  I have significantly more in common with his lovely wife, who is roughly 210 pounds lighter than Marco, and just an awful bowler.  Bowling is hard.  Even without drinking, I had to really focus on not hurting myself or someone else.  My wife, of course, was brilliant at it.  She even looked like she knew what she was doing. I just tried not to fall down.

There were all sorts of giants hanging out bowling that weekend, lowering the average age of this particular hotels’ occupants to around 80.  I looked like a six year old standing next to these guys.  I had trouble holding a 12 lb. bowling ball which looked like a ping pong ball in their hands.  I did wear Joe Andruzzi’s super bowl rings, and almost couldn’t lift my arm up.  Joe, Grey, and Matt Chatham were all former Pats, all with rings, and all OK in my book. Nice people, those giants, though Joe A. did push me in the pool, and Marco did comment on the abundance of “fur” on my CFO’s torso.  I told them to watch it since my lawyer was bigger than theirs.  I don’t think I intimidated them.

FYI, they have actual penny slots at the Suncoast, which is apparently why their average slot player is approaching 115 years of age.  How you make money on a penny slot machine is beyond me, but what do I know?  I bet they have an exabyte of pennies - and cigarette butts. 

If you would like to bowl with giants next year, or be a good egg and send some dough to this cause, you can do so at www.ruegysreaders.com/

Catching Up.....

I forgot to post this article - my bad.  Here's a CW one on more Green IT.

This is a good blog by Rich Corley of Pirus fame, who started Akorri.

This is my latest in Storge Magazine - I particulary enjoy the X-Wife reference.

Darwinian forces are at work in the storage industry, and users stand to benefit the most.

Last month, I explained why the storage business works the way it does. This month, I’ll talk about who’s benefiting from the evolutionary changes that have occurred in this space.

Revolutionary events cause rifts in the atmosphere, creating holes of new opportunity. IBM caused the great computer rift—enabling machines to perform business tasks—and it propelled them to historic levels of greatness not seen since the industrial revolution. The firm’s success caused slower, evolutionary changes that enabled new holes of opportunity. Apple did it with iPod. Microsoft did it. But as IBM became more successful, the forces of evolution took hold and the problem shifted from “How do we get more leverage out of our high-priced math-whiz actuaries?” to “How will we keep all this electronic gadgetry up and running?” to “How do we do much more with way less?”. Enter EMC, a fledgling memory company that saw an opportunity with a cheaper, faster, better play—namely storage. This one has even more revolutionary attributes because not only did the mighty IBM have to have woefully inferior products, but the entire market had to alter the way it bought those products. Disk was just a peripheral. Nobody ever made independent disk decisions before; it would’ve been like buying a car and adding your own transmission.

With evolution, EMC is now part of the status quo in the market it effectively created 20 years ago. EMC, Hitachi Data Systems and IBM still rule the “core” transactional world, but that world has changed. Those changes have forced new economic and operational realities to the forefront. It isn’t okay to have infrastructure purpose-built for bullet-proof transaction processing all the way through forever. It’s too expensive and difficult to manage, grow, change, etc. We can’t validate the required expertise that we could on the transaction system because we can’t point to the dollar-per-transaction element that made it easy to justify. It’s hard to put value on an email, PowerPoint or two-year-old event log—until you need it to stay out of jail.

Trying to convince a small slice of the market to take the hard route and be a rebel, a whole bunch of folks may have started building better mousetraps. But they suddenly find themselves relevant not because their technology is cheaper, better and faster, but because the market dynamics evolved at the right time. 3PAR has been preaching “utility” computing and delivering quality of service favoring one I/O against another for a long time. It was cool to talk about, but now it’s sold hundreds of millions of dollars of gear because enabling IT to run as a legitimate sub-business with known deliverables is no longer just theory—it’s the difference between IT relevance and extinction. EqualLogic didn’t get 2,000 customers because people were dying to use iSCSI. It got them because it built systems that scale dynamically and because a system the size of Montana can be managed by someone as clueless as my ex-wife. Yosemite Technologies isn’t selling tons of backup software because it has continuous data protection; it’s winning because it took all that high-end stuff and completely hid it from the SMB guys who would rather chew tin foil than invest in something built for an enterprise. They know there are more companies with fewer than 100 folks than any other slice, and those folks care as much about their emails and accounting apps as the big banks.

Dozens of companies are building real businesses today because of luck, opportunity, and the inevitable fact that time will erode what was and expose what isn’t. Firms like CommVault, Double-Take Software, Isilon Systems and Riverbed Technology have found riches in them thar hills. But even more are lurking, ready to grab their place in history—and I couldn’t be happier.

The Color Of Money....

It's profitable to be eco-hip.  My CW latest.

IT is a Ford Pinto.....

I had a Pinto.  My aunt gave it to me my second sophomore year in college.  I was psyched, for about an hour.  It literally burned more oil than gas.  It was a free car that cost me a fortune to operate.  That was the intent behind this article, at least at some point.

It seems to me that until we apply some of the lessons we've learned in other technology areas to the baseline data infrastructure, we're screwed.  IT as a business?  Pahleeese.  As long as it takes Weeks or Days or even Hours to provision a storage infrastructure, how can we kid ourselves that we're in the service business?

Here it is.

Send Lawyers, Disks, And Money....

This years LegalTech show had 10,000 folks - most lawyers.  No, it's not the start of a joke, though it could be.  Record retention and e-discovery were the defensive areas, and litigation support the offensive push.  Sarbanes-Oxley might have been the wake up call to big mucky mucks, but dealing with the myriad of regulations around record retention and being able to find things when outsiders ask for them are real issues not going away any time soon.

Here's my point in CW.