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OK, so I'm cynical, but am I to believe that this is mere coincidence? Netapp sues Sun for patent infringement over Sun's ZFS file system. Sun sort of denies that it infringed, tries to change the subject, and attempts to incite a civil war between Texas and California. A week later Sun buys a file system company.
Once again, let me stress that I am no lawyer - but like many (not all) lawyers, I do have several humanesque traits - such as common sense (and at least two nice suits). If nothing else, does not the timing of this make you scratch your head?
The move is pretty good as a hedge in case a judge slams Sun with an injunction and won't let them ship ZFS - especially since I figure a big revenue hit for a quarter or so makes them technically insolvent - so if that happens they will need to be able to ship something. Lustre has long been an accepted, well utilized file system within that bastion of capitalism and business computing - the scientific community. I don't think it runs unless the admin either wears a white lab coat, or sandals in the basement of an academic lab. I have no idea how easy or hard it would be to drop Lustre in to replace ZFS, I can only surmise that there weren't many other options at hand, though I'm sure they could also have used Redhat or Suse's file systems.
Regardless, it sure doesn't instill rip roaring confidence in their defense of the Netapp case. Sun does have a habit of doing things like this with no regard for what others might think, or even without how it might possibly affect their legal stance, so it's hard to say. I mean, it's not like they just OEM'ed Microsoft Windows server or anything...........Ooops. I'm starting to feel like either I'm in the twilight zone, or the industry is just screwing with me. Either way, cut it out.
First, Jonathan Schwartz, long time blogger and person not afraid to say seemingly loony things at any given moment (which I like, fyi) tossed out this one in response to the lawsuit. The JS blog fans seem to like it. I like the fact that he intentionally spells "Netapps" instead of Netapp (and do NOT try to make me believe it was a simple error - I learned such moves from Dick Egan et al in the day, masters of this game). I don't buy any of his argument, but his fans clearly do. Some compare Netapp to the evil EMC directly. That ought to ruffle some feathers.
Not to be out-blogged, Dave Hitz countered thusly with this. This is a particularly excellent blog if for no other reason than Dave made up a word - Litigoperation. I'm always looking for a new word. (My son was very bummed to find out Ginormous was made and official word, so he went on to create "togus" for totally bogus - he seems quite pleased with it thus far).
JS says Netapp never did something, Dave pops up an email that seems to prove that false, and off we go. Dave does get the best line of the match in with "For me, one of the most important rules of open source is that you give away things that belong to you." That's just stellar.
Question: is the stuff going on in public domain like this admissible as part of the proceedings? In which case, would you not want to make sure you were accurate in your statements? Just wondering. Any lawyers out there??????
Finally, why is it that west coast law suits always remind me of 7th grade girl fights? No offense, of course. I got my arse kicked by a 7th grade girl.......
Greg Reyes, former CEO of Brocade, was convicted of 10 counts of fraud involving backdating stock options. The practice, in case you are unaware, is when executives knowingly issue stock options in arrears, when a stock price was lower, to create instant value and wealth.
The practice, unfortunately, was widespread and far reaching. Reyes is appealing, and continues to tout his innocence. The Justice Department clearly went after him with all it's weapons, as an example and poster child for how this corporate badness just won't be tolerated.
In everything I've read, Reyes didn't really profit personally from the act - he was already loaded.
So, this chapter continues, but it does hopefully show the next generation that they will either have to resign themselves to doing things the right way, or find new ways to cheat. I like Greg personally. He is a tall, rich, charismatic person who embodied the "go go days" of the storage market. He came from money, made his own on top, and now is facing 20 years in jail.
Which gets me to the Red Sox. You skate through some times, when everything is smooth sailing and you can do no wrong. Brocade and Greg did that thru the gold rush. The Sox were up 12.5 games a month ago - and goofy fans said "it's all over!" Party on. The problem is, if it's too good to last - it won't. Now the stinkin Yankees are 5 games out, and I'm losing sleep.
You can't skate in this world - you gotta put in the effort even when you are winning. How many companies lost the magic they had because they got cocky or arrogant and figured it would never end? We act like it becomes our "right" to succeed.
Here's 43 years of chemically depleted knowledge for you: Don't cheat. Don't lie. Never, ever think that anyone owes you your rightful place in life - you gotta earn it every day. The worst is when you truly believe that you know better, or are above the law, or that since you are smarter and better looking, that little things like rules and morals don't apply to you. Those are the people to stay away from. Those are the companies to run from.
The Sox better start playing the game the old fashioned way again, and get their heads out of the clouds, because I can't take another riches to rags NY ending.
Life is weird, thankfully.
Months ago I shot my mouth off to IBM storage mucky muck Andy Monshaw about something or another, and the outcome was that we would go break bread, drink drink, and solve all problems. If that didn't work, we'd do the former and I'd listen to him bash EMC. Andy has an almost worrisome, deep-rooted hatred of the Hopkinton folks, and it's good fun to get him spun up on something they did or didn't do. Or might do. Or might think about doing.
So after endless schedule massaging by poor people on both our ends, a date was set for last Thursday in Manhattan. Wouldn't you know that day was also going to end up to be Game 2 of the Franklin Little League National League playoffs - and the Dodgers, of which my 12-year old Jason is a proud member of, were up 1 Game to nill. I was bumming that I was going to miss the game, but a date is a date. Plus, we were up one already.
I arrived via train (which is a far more civilized way to get to NY until one can rake in enough dough to fly private) right on time, and headed off to 590 Madison ave, where I was shuffled off to the 17th floor of some ridiculously expensive real estate. Upon exiting the elevator, I was greeted by a lovely receptionist who sat seemingly alone amongst pieces of art that probably were individually worth more than my entire collective being. There were no people anywhere. Quite a lovely spot, however.
Andy appeared out of some hidden wall somewhere and we got down to business. I won't tell you what was discussed, but suffice it to say that the conversation turned lively and interesting - not adjectives typically used when describing anything IBM. We were joined by Mary Coucher, VP of Biz Dev for Andy's group - a downright smart, passionate, and non-standard cookie cutter IBM'er. I thoroughly enjoyed myself.
Prior to dinner we stopped at some roof top hangout where one of Andy's "comms" people was having a going away party. I don't know what a "comms" person is, but there were lots of them. While Andy was kibitzing over a Jameson or two, Mary and I worked on solving world peace. We got onto the subject of next generation storage applications like video surveillance and the home media market, which got us to what each of us watches on TV (recorded, of course). She has Desperate Housewives, Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Soprano's, and 24. As she is saying this my phone rings, but I don't answer it. A few minutes later I take it out, and on the screen is John Slattery's number. Slats is my college roommates bro, who I happened to call the day before as he lives in NY to see if he could hook up for a beer. He is also "Dennis" on Desperate Housewives and has been making out with Eva Longoria for the last few months. I was curious to research just how hard work that was. Plus, he's married to George Clooney's X, and that alone is worthy of discussion. I've known him forever, and even though he's been in a million things, no one really knew him that much until this gig. Now he's a regular in People and my 15 year old daughter is trying to hook me up with her.
My phone rang again, and this time it was my wife. Mary was chatting with someone and Andy continued to kibitz with his whiskey, so I answered. She proceeds to tell me how Jason just hit his first home run - a monster 3-run shot to spark a slow rally to tie the game and send it to extra innings. I was psyched, and completely horrified that I missed it. They ended up losing in the 7th or 8th, but Jason didn't care. He spent 10 minutes describing the whole thing - clearly out of his mind happy. Made me feel like crap.
Anyway, I was knee deep in IBM sport drinking by then, and still had dinner to attend, so I left well enough alone. We all went off to some Mexican place (that was out of this world, but of course I can't remember the name of it nor where it was) and argued everything from CMOS to Salsa. It was entirely refreshing to engage in debate with very smart IBM folks who weren't just pushing their tired old "we're IBM so we are right" rhetoric. Andy, Mary, and Carl (Andy's "ops" guy, whatever that means) were definitely willing to listen - and not automatically assume they were blessed with divine correctness. I've had IBM executive discussions that have been wildly irrational - the kind that end up sounding like a business version of the Black Knight scene in The Holy Grail. This, thankfully, was not one of them. Perhaps there is hope for the mighty Blue Knight after all. The way they were talking, I can't wait to see what they come up with, as they were downright giddy with how "un-IBM" some of their impending moves were going to seem.
So I leave the joint and am about to jump into a cab when Carl, the Haitian French speaking Andy Ops guy tells me that I just need to walk up a block or two and over a block or two and I'll be back at my hotel, The NY Palace. 43 miles of poor shoe walking shin-splint inducing hard labor later I found the hotel. It was still early, and I wanted a nightcap. The Palace is a beautiful hotel, but one that tends to frequented by 80 year olds with zillions of dollars who must head off to bed by 10 because the 6 seat bar from the Shining tucked into the corner was all closed up. Figuring that this is NY I just popped out to find a watering hole with a bit more zip to it. I rounded the corner and ran into the W on Lexington - which is a modern joint that caters to 20 year olds with zillions of dollars. Upon entering the Whiskey Bar, I realized that I was too old, too ugly, and too lazy to fight my way to a glass of wine. I gave up and went back to the Palace. When I got there, I asked the doorman why the Shining shut down at 9pm? I half expected him to call me Mr. Torrance. He told me that the real bar - Gilt - was on the second floor, and that was open and ready for me. I found it, and it was perfect. Neuvo, Ian Schragerish joint without a big crowd, and with the best per glass wine list I've ever seen. With the exception of the art deco purple chunk of art that made one end of the bar look like you were inside a golf ball, the place was great. I drank my $35 glass of a nice Barolo and headed off to bed.
I headed out early to catch the 8am express to Boston. As I'm walking through Penn Station I notice this guy leaning against the stand where the cops and soldiers are always hanging out - right outside the Acela express club. It was Jeff Garlin - who is Larry David's manager in Curb Your Enthusiasm. In an amazed state (this was number two on the list of discussed TV shows the previous evening), I say "Hi Jeff, I love the show", because A: I do - it's one of the funniest shows ever put on TV, and B: because you say that even if it weren't true, because that's just what you do. An hour later I'm in the cafe car on the train (and I don't care what anyone says, that train food, nuked in a plastic bag, is fantastic) talking to my wife on my cell about seeing Jeff, and doesn't he walk right in and stand in line 12 inches in front of me. Not being shy, I say "hey Jeff, say hi to my wife" and make him take my phone. My wife has no idea what I've done, happily continuing her tale of how the dog ate the curtains or something. He patiently listens to this, until he gets a chance to say hi and introduce himself. My wife loves the show as much as I do, so it all worked out. He couldn't have been a nicer guy. He also lost about 50 pounds and had wiffle instead of his big curly hair. I almost gave him a show idea based on my real life battles with the recycling people, but figured I had worn out his hospitality.
Friday night the Dodgers (our squad) won the first series. Every person there felt compelled to tell me what a great hit my son had. Too bad you weren't there..... Sunday we played game 1 of the NLCS. Trailing 5-4 in the bottom of the 6th (we only play 6 innings, so it's really the bottom of the 9th), our superstar Kyle draws a walk. Our #3 hitter, Frenchie (a 2 handicap - which is supremely annoying), smacks a double and brings Kyle home to tie the game. Our cleanup hitter strikes out. Now it's Jason's turn. My son, god bless him, inherited all of my genes, the poor bastard. He is smart and funny, but short and stumpy. He makes me look tall. He is slightly faster than a large office building. He is good looking though. Anyhow, Jason rips at the first pitch for a strike. He looks at strike 2. He fouls off the next pitch. Even in Little League, you don't want to throw a strike when its 0-2, and this guy just got away with one. He grooves the next pitch, and Jason belts it over the fence for a walk-off home run and team victory. As he goes by me at first, he says "happy fathers day. I didn't get you anything else".
How cool is that?
It had to happen sooner or later, but Brocade? I would have lost the farm on that bet. In retrospect I'm not sure why I was so surprised - the logic is sort of obvious - but I just never saw it coming.
I think that I, like most, stopped thinking about it. Emulex and Q-Logic have shared a spectacular 50-50 share of a flat HBA market - each at about 70% gross margins, for a long, long time. Both companies have printed cash by fighting over a point of market share here and there - but neither dumb enough to screw up a perfectly good thing by bombing price. They both knew their component portion of the OEM sale was so insignificant, as long as they were good citizens they could ride along under the radar.
I can paint a picture where Brocade steals a big chunk of share - first by forcing price cuts (which the others will very begrudgingly have to match), then by leveraging the fact that they are higher in the value chain since they own a lot of the switch footprint. In theory, they could give away the HBA's and make it up in switch margin, thus destroying a perfectly nice little market. I doubt they would do that, they have a chance to be able to change the game by adding intelligence at multiple points - the way Emulex would also like too - but having the switch as a core engine gives Brocade a leg up.
I can also paint a picture where not much changes except for Emulex and Q's stock prices. Q has a broader business base on the component side, and Emulex hedges with its InSpeed stuff, but HBA's and the fat, juicy margins that came with them have been both their bread and butter plays. One can't help but think this will cause some concern.
You have to hand it to them, they don't back down from giants like Cisco, have withstood a huge distraction with a stock option fiasco, surprised everyone by acquiring their then biggest competitor, and now are going to try to screw up a long established market. It would not surprise me to see CEO Mike Klayko wearing a Curt Schilling like "Why Not Us?" tee-shirt while mowing the lawn.
First power became an IT hot button - and now HBA's? What's next - super model backup services?
Does anyone else smile when they think about about TSA losing it's employee's private data? It only included name, date of birth, social security number, payroll information, bank account, and routing numbers - which is a super added bonus and really makes stealing those identities a breeze. I guess I shouldn't be happy about it, even though I swear those folks go out of their way to make sure my airport security experience is as painful, unorganized, and annoying as possible. A public cavity probe in the middle of the Mall of America would have been more appropriate. The fact that our own government is stupid enough to allow non-encrypted data of such magnitude to even exist, let alone float around willy nilly, is astounding. So much for hoping for legislation to make people use common sense.
Iron Mountain quietly bought the assets of startup Avalere, who had some pretty big and interesting plans in the area of data categorization and classification. Those ideas turned out to be much bigger than their funding source, however.
Don't be surprised to see all the big guys enter the service provider market, either directly or indirectly, within the next year. From Microsoft to EMC, it will happen.
Maybe the coolest gizmo I've ever seen in storage is the new Drobo box from Data Robotics. I am not supposed to talk about it yet, but if it lives up to what I've seen in the first 24 hours, there will be a lot to tell.
I'm tired. Tuesday of this week I acted half my age and went with some pals to see Elvis Costello at a small venue in Boston. I love Elvis, and he was great as usual. I drank a bit, and got home a bit late, only to face the awful truth of 6:30AM, at which point I had to go back to Boston to catch a flight to Chicago to give a pitch at Storage Decisions (which again was stocked to the gills with storage folks). It will be interesting to hear the feedback, as I have limited recollection of even being on stage. I had to sprint out of there to catch my return flight, which in Chicago means you sit in traffic for an hour or so. I made the plane by 9 minutes. Good for me? Au contraire. After about 8 years of being either Platinum or Executive Platinum on American (which gives you the right to pay more money to upgrade your seat to a barely tolerable state), I didn't fly enough last year. You would think I had personally offended the CEO's wife by how fast they downgraded me to "slug" status. I still have dozens of "upgrades", which I paid for, that I apparently no longer have the right to use. Better yet, the plane was mobbed, and a very nice 400 plus pound woman occupied the seat next to me, and most of mine - but we left on time. Then we promptly sat on the tarmac for 3 hours. I got home at 2AM, only to arise at 6:30 again - this time because my 3-year old daughter decided that's was a good time to tell me that her brother called her a name. I haven't recovered.
I've been playing with Media Center in Vista for about 5 months - and am waiting on AMD to ship the cable cards they have been promising for a year or so to build my mongo centralized home media center. I may end up spending 20 grand to save one hundred bucks a month from the cable company, but I will figure this out. Between AMD and Microsoft, it can be an infuriating experience. Once I master it I'll either publish a best practice - or I'll fund a company to make this stuff actually work. I can't be the only idiot who wants to control my own home content distribution system. Joost is going to be way cool, fyi.
Cheers
If you really want to get folks to get all nuts about something, involve politics - or not even - all you have to do is mention political figures and kazaam! The whole world goes nuts.
I wrote this article in CW about the lost emails of White House staffers a few days ago - and if you haven't read it, please do and make sure I'm not the crazy one here. The article is about lost data, not politics - but judging by the comments posted on-line, and the hundred plus emails I've received (on every conceivable side of this non-issue) have taught me that I have found a way to stir the pot! I love a good controversy, but this one has taken on a life of its own, and it's not a rational one.
Some folks got a tad personal, assuming that I must be a crazed liberal Democrat as I mocked the administration around the whole notion of "losing" emails. I am a (albeit disillusioned) Republican - I even voted for Mr. Bush (twice). Calling me an idiot is fine, but please, get your assumptions in line! My vote has nothing to do with the fact that the White House "lost" data. Oh yeah, threatening to cancel your subscription is a nice touch, but for a free publication? What's next, a self-imposed twenty minute sit-in?
So, if you are able to read the 1200 or so words without automatically moving to any extreme position, you should find that the article is an accurate representation of the real issues - privacy and data retention. I don't care if it was Bush, Clinton, or my aunt Louise who was losing the data, I would have written the same piece. Data retention, protection and privacy issues transcend politics and yes, even religion - at least in my book. I'd rather listen to Paris Hilton discuss 18th century literary influences than engage in a political or religious debate via the media.
So, the deal is I promise to only call a spade a spade - and only in areas that I belong in. I don't, and won't, start non-IT related arguements just for sport - there's plenty of places you can do that without my help. For those who are lathered up on this one, re-read it as if you were not looking for a spot on Crossfire.
Now to really make you lose your mind - I worked at TJX one summer during college, and yes, I inhaled.
On a positive note, it appears activism is not dead. Why can't we put some of that mental energy to use getting our tech issues resolved? I really have to believe that if you used the same level of zeal on your backup vendor, the stuff would actually work by now.
Finally, one last thought for all of you regardless of political affiliation - if you went to your boss and told them you couldn't find data deemed critical, what would happen? Would a political action committe come to your rescue? I'm guessing no because in the business world, when things matter, politics and religion are secondary to economics - and that data will cost somebody a lot.
Remind me never to complain about being in Orlando again. The weather has been stellar, and back in Boston it is 35 degrees and raining a foot an hour. Glad I'm not a marathon runner also (I'm not, though that may surprise you), as they discussed canceling the event for the first time ever. They elected to go forward, which is ridiculous, but should make for entertaining video on the news. Why I continue to reside in the great Northeast is becoming a better question all the time. Arizona seems nice.
Orlando must the U.S. leader in cheesy gift shops, surpassing Vegas in my humble opinion. Middle America is frightening. It is hard to imagine ourselves as the tech whizzes and global super power extraordinaire when in line at a drug store behind four non-related (seemingly) people with full-on mullets, and supremely bad facial hair - and those were the ladies.
I've already begun to receive the usual bulk batch of press releases since SNW starts today. Emulex announced an independent company validated their performance is superior to Q-logic in a VMware environment. The only problem is I've never heard of the company (Demartek) and the full report link doesn't work, not that I'm insinuating anything. So yes, of course I am biased in such things, I don't think anything worth proving should be done by anyone other than ESG Labs, so take it with a grain of salt. Having said that, testing aside, the play is brilliant. Why wouldn't you attach yourself to VMware in any way you could? I'm surprised that more folks haven't figured that out - creating parallel branding to VMware is a very, very smart thing to do right now. It will be interesting to see how many of the vendors at SNW have overt VMware programs under way.
In this morning's USA Today, the front page banner is "25 Stocks You Should Have Bought". People pay for this? Why not pay the hotel staff to sneak into my room and hit me in the head with a hammer instead?
Speaking of VMware, the story they tell is one of the best you'll hear. I'm having trouble figuring out how Microsoft or Xen, etc. will be able to catch up. This game may be over before it starts and others will have to figure out how to play above (or below) that line. Second, EMC really has to be commended for leaving VMware alone - though now I think they have no choice. I'm amazed at how separated they really are - you would think that there would be much tighter integration with the EMC product set, but if anything, it's the opposite so far. EMC might be being a bit too nice in all of this - words I never thought I'd say.
Cisco made multiple announcements yesterday about their investments into the SMB space ( SMBs Move Center Stage--Become New Growth Engine of the IT Industry and a release, Cisco Raises SMB Commitment To A New Level) - really talking about initiatives and investments Cisco is bringing to market to this explosive area of the world.
They also announced the completion of the their acquisition of Neopath - an IP based, file virtualization platform who is geared right at that same SMB space. While details were not disclosed, the dollars were small - presumably sub-$50 million (I do enjoy saying things like that - putting the descriptor "small" in front of $50 million dollars, though I probably don't have $50 in my pocket or bank account), the principal appeared sound: put value into the IP network that Cisco owns, take value out of point products and manual labor that they don't. I had no issue with the deal, and thought it very cheap and very smart.
With Cisco, or anyone really, the issue is "if" they can make a ton of hay with a technology or a product acquisition, it's "will" they - or more importantly, will it get enough attention to ever live up to its opportunity. Sometimes its yes, sometimes its no.
This is a new one. This morning I open up my email to find this story from Beth Pariseau that blew me away - "Cisco's Move To Kill Neopath Shocks Users, Analysts...."
Cisco issued an EOS (end of sale) announcement that effectively kills all products and services that it just bought.
Now in no way do I consider myself as smart as the folks pulling the strings over in Ciscoville, so what am I missing here? Isn't some shareholder going to wonder why the company just gave some people $50 million or so and then told them to pack their bags and head on home - and oh yeah, take your crummy stuff with you? Maybe there is some very sane, rational explanation for this, but if so, don't you think they might have told someone what that was?
Things like this make me re-evaluate my position on Cisco eventually ruling the universe. Thank god I can still put my monopolistic hopes and dreams on Microsoft.
Some follow up in CW on the VMware IPO and other boring finance things.
Genius.
Here's my take in CW.
The biggest little state in the Union, Rhode Island, is about to enter the TJX fray with an investigation regarding proper disclosure - a criminal action is possible (and proper, if you ask me). Things aren't getting better. I think big Ben's quasi-apologetic mostly ridiculous public letter irritated more folks than just me. I'm also hearing that the hacks go back as far as March of 06, and it's possible that TJX knew or suspected problems earlier than December, as first reported.
TJX uses every big IT vendor there is, and those guys have security practices. I've already heard from one big one (anonymously) that they have been pitching security measures as well as encryption to the company for over a year - and I believe the company has several proposals on the subject on file. That means there are others out there as well, and I'd love to know about them. I'm dying to find out the real cost and effort it would have entailed to prevent this from happening.
On Pillar, who I mentioned in a recent blog as having a bit of an "eccentric" (nice sounding word for raving lunatic) CEO, Mike Workman. Apparently Mike was OK with my portrayal as he sent me two bottles of his homemade wine - Weeners Leap (Syrah and a Cab). Mike's dog is Clams, a weiner dog, who has become the company mascot (and who picture you can apparently see as take off from San Jose Airport as it sits on a huge billboard on Pillars building I'm told). Anyway, both bottles are superb, and wine is something I don't take lightly. Really stellar. And gone already......
My latest in CW. I think it's possible that this particular event might finally get some folks to wake up. Plus, I now think they may have broken the law and we haven't heard the last of this.
Sorry for the delay, but I've been woefully behind. It seems I never catch up anymore. Anyhow, I made it worse for myself by deciding to get on a plane and head out to Silicon Valley last week, which I have been able to successfully avoid doing for over a year.
First, the trip started poorly. Sunday evening I was forced to watch Peyton Manning finally beat the Pats in a game that mattered. I like Peyton, so it isn't about that, but to watch him come back on us in such a way, and to see that Mr. Brady is human every now and then was a mongo bummer. Even worse, I had a house lined up in Miami for the Super Bowl - and if you have ever attended said event, housing is the hardest thing to find. So I limped off to bed at 10:30pm with a buzz and a belly full of really bad (for you) food.
My alarm went of 8 minutes later (4AM) so I could make my 6:30 AM United to SFO flight. There are no longer any flights between Boston and San Jose, two of the major business capitals of the country. I hate airlines, and truly wish the bad would die. Who would want to go to San Jose? Only anyone who sells too or buys from one of the 18 zillion tech companies along the 101. Was there ever an empty flight to San Jose? Maybe American felt the planes were getting too heavy. Fortunately, I was in first class - which is a nice way of saying I was in a slightly bigger, really cruddy uncomfortable seat with only one person to have to climb over to go to the bathroom vs. two. The good news is I was in row 1 so even my 14" legs had to be bent in half to sit. There had obviously been well over one billion other rear ends in my seat previously, as it was about as padded and comfy as my driveway. I don't have a rear end, per se. Big gut, no butt. I was in pain after 25 minutes. 5 hours later I was almost a cripple.
We landed on time, and a car was nicely waiting to pick me up to bring me to my first meeting, with Data Domain. DD is an impressive group - they invented the whole Data De-Duplication gig and have ridden that wave brilliantly. Now everyone and their brother is trying to catch up, but these guys have some great stuff and a big, impressive list of customers. Best of all, their CEO Frank Slootman, is Dutch. Therefore, upon meeting him, I immediately had to steal the line from Austin Power's Dad and say "there are two things I cannot stand - intolerance, and the Dutch." Frank looked at me as if I were insane, as apparently he hadn't heard that one before. We worked it out. I chatted with a bunch of their smart folks theorizing about where other implementations of this technology could really affect change in the world, and found quite a few. What if you could get the performance attributes required by a high percentage of today's applications on a primary store that happened to get 40 to 1 compression rates? Imagine the economic advantages and the consolidation potential. What if everything were stuffed into one place? Seems it may be easier to find things if it were all in one place.
Which got me to thinking about the fact that this is really the first time in this industry in a long, long time where so many "emerging" players have become legitimate, going business concerns. Historically there have always been start ups trying to become the next big thing, but most focus around a new technology or building a better mousetrap, and less about a getting to market and solving a heretofore unsolved problem with that technology. It is very rare indeed that someone comes around with a new new thing and be able to reach financial critical mass. Normally those companies are acquired along the way, or die trying. Rarely do they affect the incumbents, either positively or negatively.
I look at the landscape now and see folks either at or rapidly approaching ciritcal mass ($100,000,000 for hardware, $25M for software) in revenues - in a market long dominated by just a few big guys. DD, Pillar, 3Par, Equallogic, Lefthand, Compellent, SANRAD, Copan, CommVault, Isilon, Riverbed, BlueArc, and a host of others, and I wonder why. It has to be because of two factors - the first is the market requirements have changed - i.e. the nature of the business itself has changed because this industry was developed on the fact that transactional data was where all the value was. Today, most of the data created is not transactional, it's fixed or persistent. It doesn't change. Even transactional oriented data can start as fixed - it may be an event for example, but eventually even if it is changing initially, it becomes fixed at some point. Treating all data the same at creation until we eventually nuke it is illogical. Therefore, the second element required for newbies to have real businesses is that the incumbents simply are not providing solutions with the attributes to address the new world order. No IT person wants to buy from a newbie, no matter how cool the stuff. There is too much risk, and lets face it, too much work to do to justify doing it. So if a risk averse, already overloaded IT dude is going to go to bat for a newbie company, it only makes sense that the newbie must be solving a problem the others don't. I find that interesting.
I went to dinner with Dave Hitz and Kris Newton of Netapp that evening, at one of the two meat joints in the Valley. Why are there no restaurants, nor hotels in Silicon Valley? It's the tech capital of the planet, there is TONS of money there, and yet there seem to be 3 hotels, a motel from 1948, 3 restaurants, and 12,000 Starbucks. Dave was kind enough to bring a bottle of his brother's wine - Chateau D'hitz (pronounced "ditz" of course). It was a fresh 2005 Meritage named Screaming Priest (I didn't ask), and it was darned tasty. Dave and I spent hours talking about the world of IT years from now (I can almost feel the boredom on my childrens faces). He is one of the best people on the planet to talk about ethereal IT concepts with. I was in town to speak to Dave and some others for a book I'm finally writing (it is one of six that I've been threatening for years). He's a fascinating guy and a superb human, inside of a complete weirdo genius (which I mean entirely complimentary, I could not have more respect, admiration, nor flagrant envy for the man). He is worthy of a book all on him, so maybe I'll make it seven.
I spent the next day with various mucky mucks I'm not telling you about. I did have a nice dinner that evening with Mike Klayko, Tom Buiocci, and Dan Crain of Brocade fame. They had just received their FTC approval a few hours previously for the McData acquisition, so all was well. I was a tad nervous that our government was going to make the wrong call on that one, which would have not only really irritated me as a tax payer, but would have been the cause of McData's death - the very thing they supposedly were trying to prevent. Without disclosing confidences, Brocade's integration efforts behind the scene are about the most thought out and complete as I've ever seen. The proof will be in the pudding, as they say, but from a planning and contingency perspective, they have their act together. Perhaps the most interesting part of the conversation, unfortunately, came about during some tangent on Cancer - of which I'm a survivor. Mike shared that his daughter (Christina) in-law is going through some tough stuff and dealing with a harsher dose of treatment than I went though - and mine sucked. Her link tells her story, which everyone should read - and donate twenty bucks to the cause. Puts the problems of IT into a different perspective.
Speaking of Pillar, I spoke at their sales meeting. I get asked to do this stuff a lot, which is flattering, but i refuse most, as I really do hate to travel. Since I was there, and I've been following the company since it wasn't a company, I said yes. (Really - my first trip to Israel in 2000 - I end up in my hotel after a brutal day of meetings, tired and semi-loaded, when on the way to the elevator a small man stood up and said "excuse me, Steve, may I speak with you a moment?" Too stunned to be terrified, I'm thinking oh oh, the Mossad. They aren't kidding when they tell you everybody knows everybody in that country. I never did find out how he knew I was coming, or when, or where I was staying, or how long he waited. He introduced himself as someone working with Digital Appliance, and asks if I'm familiar with them, which I am not. He explains how Mr. Larry Ellison had DA started to create the ultimate scaleable database machine - to support all the thin clients that were going to happen. That didn't work, but they stumbled upon a storage architecture that did. He wanted to know if there might be a business in what they had. I thought there was. Now I figure if this hits, Larry owes me a billion or two.)
Being a veteran of a million years and a million sales meetings, I thought I'd seen it all. Two things occurred that were very new to me. First, the evening before as I was heading into the Santa Clara Marriott (which is the interviewing capital of North America in case you were wondering), I heard a loud ruckus. It was Pillar. I popped my head in only to witness the most organized U.S. vs. Great Britain beer swilling contest I've ever encountered. There were two lines facing each other and one person on each team guzzled their beer to completion prior to turning it upside down and putting it on their head, and the next guy would go. It was quite exciting, and the Americans won, but I'm fairly confident cheating was involved. Tough to out drink a Brit, I've found.
The next day I went down to do my thing, and walked to the back of the room to first listen to CEO Mike Workman's speech, which is where I witnessed the second unique thing of the sales meeting. Mike was on stage wearing a WWII jacket and helmet, in front of the Pillar version of a giant flag. Mike was doing his Patton thing, which is fine, except Mike makes me look like Bill Walton - the man is seriously short. His speech was hilarious, albeit loaded with profanity. (Yes, I said that. I was no longer concerned with my content.) It says something when your leader can have some fun and do semi-insane things in an almost public setting. His act was funny - but his messages were deadly.
Pillar isn't ashamed of the fact that they have been put on this earth via Larry Ellison to single handedly alter the entire economic and operational landscape of storage within IT. Their mission is to build storage for the new world order - simple, scalable, Q of S, unified storage that is smarter than you are - and cheaper than lunch. Why you ask? My theory is that Larry doesn't like all the value that is placed on something as mundane as storage infrastructure. Larry wants the value to remain entirely at a higher place - namely the Database. If he can help move storage the way that IP networking evolved down an inevitable standardized commodity curve, he can grab more of the higher value dough. Larry has spent well over a hundred million bucks on this so far, and that's just what he found between the cushions of his couch. He can be patient. He isn't a VC who needs this exit to save his portfolio. He's got all the time in the world. That's a pretty good advantage, since I've always loved saying that all problems we face can be solved with enough time and money.
I don't mean to imply that the Pillar folks aren't trying to solve real problems with real engineering - they are - as are a lot of others. They have what looks like a brilliant story around their unification story, the data center efficiency improvements and their ability to optimize the cost per performance per measure of space. The difference is that they are pursuing this goal knowing that they have a seemingly endless pile of money to get it done. These guys will be around for a long time I think. This could very well end up being book number 8 - maybe with enough intrigue, suspense, and violence to be a movie!
I took the red eye back, which might be the worst overall traveling experience one can do. The airport is closed, and there is no one around except the living dead of the IT industry trying to get home. It looks like a B-grade hung over horror movie. The only planes that ever arrive early are the red eyes back from the west coast - so if you were going to be able to sleep all cramped up and wildly uncomfortable, forget it, because you just landed. The good news is I didn't drive, I took a car service, so being early was of absolutely no value. The better news is it was approximately 2 degrees (Fahrenheit, which is roughly 1100 below zero Celsius) out, and I had nothing but a sport coat, which I clung too while tromping by the endless line of limo clones, none of which had my name misspelled.
I'm looking forward to not getting on a plane next week.
TJX had a little theft issue last week - and they aren't even sure how much was stolen. All they know is that potentially hundreds of thousands of customers credit card transactions have been stolen - over a very, very, long time potentially.
TJX owns Marshall's, TJ Maxx, Bob's, and some others. I love a bargain, so I shop at all of them. My card hath been defiled. Again. This marks the third time within 12 months that I've had to deal with someone enabling others to latch on to my credit card information. Marriott, The Boston Globe, and now TJX.
The Globe reports that our friends at TJX were a tad lax in adopting the security standard put forth by the PCI (Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council), which is made up of Visa, Mastercard, Amex, etc. According to the article only 31% of folks comply.
I don't know about you, but I find it ridiculous that this problem has not been fixed. I hope it costs TJX an outrageous fine along with huge loss of goodwill. It would have cost them diddly to put the right things in place to keep this from being an issue.
My pal Jonny Oltsik can shed the light on what's happening with the PCI and the entire world of security much better than I, but every time one of these boneheaded moron maneuvers happens I at least have the satisfaction of being able to say I told you so. For 3 years I've been telling anyone who would listen that it is inevitable that the only way to protect data is to encrypt it. You will never keep bad things from happening (though I'm not advocating that you shouldn't try), you can only mitigate the damage done when it occurs.
TJX doesn't even know how it happened. It could have been a nice inside job, as you can fit an awful lot of small transaction data on a USB key, let alone on your 60GB iPOD. I'd like to think it was outsiders, but Mr. O tells me that the overwhelming percentage of data thefts still occur from insiders.
As a CEO, or really any legitimate seasoned business executive, you already KNOW that no matter how great a person you are, how fairly you treat everyone, what a superb environment you create for your people, some of those people will never be happy. Humans are odd, they have wildly differing views of the same thing. A person who got paid $48,000 two years ago and was seemingly happy made $150,000 last year and then quit when you showed them a pay plan that only got them to $175,000 if they perform this year. We know in our own minds that we would be tossing rose petals at our feet for such treatment, but that's not how others think. So if you know that people are flawed and you know that your only reason for being is your customer - and yet you turn a blind eye in protecting the sacred information your customer entrusts you with and not only piss them off, but put their world into jeopardy. Getting out of identity theft dilemma's has not proven easy. It is a nightmare. You caused that nightmare. Worse for you is there is really nothing you sell that we can't find elsewhere.
I'm still waiting for the first intelligent retailer to market the fact that they truly protect their customer data. Wouldn't you love to see L.L. Bean or Land's End shouting at the top of their lungs that they "Guarantee To Keep All Consumer Data Encrypted And Secure" ? Wouldn't the marketing win alone make the cost of implementing such a solution minuscule? I'd buy something from them just because of that, I don't even care what it is.
So I am a believer in keeping the governments of the world out of my life as much as possible, but since the vendors I use simply refuse to practice safe business, it seems until our fine elected officials mandate the rules nothing will change. A simple law that says the CEO is personally responsible for any non-encrypted data being lost, potentially lost, or stolen and has a minimum jail term of 5 years ought to solve the issue in short order, I suspect. And don't cry about the cost, that's bull. Vista gives it away, and there are plenty of other alternatives if you don't want that one.
Come on people. This is stupid.
On an completely unrelated note, as a real fan I'm hoping the Bears beat the Saints, because after beating the Colts (yes, again) the Pats would face the Bears in the Superbowl. We've already kicked their butts this year AND it would be a tremendous redemption for the 1986 whooping they put on us. That loss, to the likes of the Fridge and Jim McMahon's was like getting a giant wedgie by the curly haired jock stud moron in 8th grade in front of all the cheerleaders. Thankfully, the jock is bald and works as a security guard at TJ Maxx now.
As a lover of all things underdog however, it is awfully hard not to be pulling for the Saints. I hope Chicago beats them so we don't have too. However in the highly unlikely case that the Pats lose to Indy (which statistically is an actual possibility, believe it or not), I'm all about the Saints. Good move Marty, that Brees kid is all done. Clown.
$185 million clams. That's a good Christmas present. I have been racking my small, semi-swollen brain (the ESG non-denominational holiday party was last night) trying to figure out why.
E-Vault was a private, profitable service business. That part I get. It isn't profitable enough or big enough by itself to have any meaningful financial impact on Seagate's business as it is, so they must have other interests. There isn't any real technology per se, so it isn't that.
The only thing I can figure is it is a possible hedge in the SMB and SOHO space, since they own the enterprise already. They face competition in the mid and low-end markets, so it would be interesting if they are thinking that controlling their fate by delivering storage as a service vs. needing OEM's to deliver it as a product. Little guys like me would rather not buy IT products - I would much rather buy a service and let someone else deal with the gear.
The more I think about it (which is while I type this), if that's what they are thinking, it's pretty darned smart. There are tons of brand new go to market issues that go along with this theory, but if nothing else they would eliminate the variable the OEM brings to bear in that space. They could, in theory, even OEM and certainly channel a service like this. They would control their own fate to a greater degree.
Gross margins would be much higher than on a midrange disk, which they would get anyway (assuming they aren't interesting in buying Western Digital drives for their data center), and there are tons of value added services the small market buyer needs. They have the money to market it and the brand to support it.
I've talked myself into it. If that's why they did it, then I like it. If I find out they did it because they got snowed or it was a technology play, I reserve the right to call it stupid later on.
I was chatting with fellow ESG'er and avid HDS proponent Tony Asaro about an unrelated matter - how HDS has really been one of the few to take advantage of the V word - they use it as a differentiator on their big Tagma USP gear and it's getting them deals. People aren't buying it just for the virtualization - but with all (perceived) things being equal, folks would rather have the next next thing than not. Makes sense.
Overall, HDS is doing great, except in one area. I can't figure out why they are letting their biggest block competitor, EMC, run unchallenged with their Centera all over the place? EMC is pulling a half a billion a year, directly, and lord knows how much more in services and other products, with Centera. It gives the EMC folks cool - strategic - initiatives that are very topical to discuss inside a big account - and not just "my array is better than their array". The EMC guy gets to elevate their game by talking compliance, risk mitigation, and higher data oriented constructs to non-storage traditionalists like the legal folks, the risk officer, etc. Those guys have way more credibility and access up the ranks, which directly equates to bigger buckets of money and higher strategic visibility.
I know it isn't a technology issue, they have had Archivas software, and lord knows they have plenty of hardware, so it has to be a focus and packaging issue. The fear is by the time they figure that out, EMC is on to the next big thing and HDS ends up chasing the wrong market.
It's not that IBM or HP are doing much better here, but at least they have products folks can buy. Let's get in the game people!
On a side note, the next big opportunity for object based storage is going to happen in application areas where there is enormous quantities of fixed content/persistent/non-changing data that rely on a traditional database to be able to query it. Those databases aren't made to be effective in finding a needle in a haystack, they are built for transactional speed. An app vendor who has to pay an Oracle license that's as big as the revenue they get from a customer would be pretty happy to get rid of that expense, and if you could tell a user they could mine 100X the data in one tenth the time, I'm pretty sure you'd find a whole new market psyched to give you money.
Or, how about a unified location for everything non-transactional? Logical or physical, if everything in your world was on one thing, thru one object based meta-data smart system, then finding things in a federated fashion doesn't seem like so much of a pipe dream.
If you haven't seen HBO's "Hacking Democracy" on-demand, you must. If you still don't think data security is a really big deal, this should finally push you over the edge.
If you work for Diebold, I'm sorry, but you gotta find another gig. What a batch of executive dirtbags.
Let me tell you something more horrific than the fact that last year my good friends at Marriott lost my personal data and two weeks later the Boston Globe not only lost my information, they printed it in hard copy and distributed it across the great state of Massachusetts apparently.
Democracy itself is being decimated, one hacked bit at a time.
Like many of you, I am smashed in the head with so many sensory inputs daily that I can’t possibly comprehend the magnitude of most events. I live in an ADD haze where the fact that thousands of people die every day in wars around the globe and mass genocide still occurs gets the same non-attention as the cute little puppy left homeless after a local fire, or who won the football game. I think about security and data and privacy and ethics as isolated elements, as singular events designed at the hands of some poor slob or evil doer with a small minded mission, like stealing my money. Then I stumbled upon an HBO documentary (On-Demand, which may be the greatest invention ever) called “Hacking Democracy”. It had an intriguing title, so play I did.
This may sound like some political rambling for a few minutes, but bear with me. It may also sound like a lot of hippy, tree hugging, spread the wealth, save the unborn gay whales for the lord rhetoric, but again, stay with me. I’m as capitalistic and conservative as a centrist can be. As a matter of fact, I’m a republican living in Massachusetts, which makes me the political equivalent of a Panda – odd, interesting to look at, the brunt of many debates, and not very threatening since we all know neither of us is going to aggressively attack anyone.
The basis of democracy is that everyone gets the right (and duty, in my opinion) to vote. One person, one vote. You don’t like how things are going; you have the right to cast your ballot and try to change it. Granted, most Americans complain and yet don’t vote, but they could if they wanted too. We can even vote for complete nitwits, as it is our right. Silly idealistic me has grown up believing this fundamental principal, and believing that all other things I hold dear about the democratic process and all its warts is based upon this one basic principal. It never dawned on me that of course someone would hijack the process.
Sure, we know that a person could make a “mistake” counting votes. We know that sometimes things get lost – but only at a small, local level, right? I mean please, if there are lots of votes to count, we use computers. Counting things are what computers do, isn’t it? Haven’t we been able to use a computer to tabulate basic math functions since, well, the invention of computers? Wasn’t’ the first computing machine an automated abacus? Of all the problems yet to solve with computers, counting isn’t one of them. We did that already.
Or so I thought. A vote counting computer is the gizmo you either vote directly on if it is a touch screen, or you have your ballot placed into and read, if it’s an optical character recognition type. Either way, all that baby has to do is add up how many checked box 1 and how many checked box 2. That’s it. My 12 year old could program it.
Because we like to believe in higher level constructs like truth and justice, we (sorry if I’m associated you with me, there is a chance I’m the only one who was dumb enough to live this way, but it makes me feel better to act as a class) sort of just assumed that A: the voting tabulators, a.k.a. dumbed down calculators (requiring approximately 4% of the functionality of a .69 cent device available in 99% of all electronic products everywhere in the world) could add, and B: the integrity of those machines – i.e. the security of those machines, would be iron clad. Sure, some could be compromised locally, but the checks and balances associated with such a simple process would have to be impossible to overcome, right?
Bam!! smashed in the mouth with reality. I’m not that smart, but here’s how I would have assumed such devices might operate:
The magic voting tabulator would have a hardened O.S. that was entirely self contained. It would not accept any field changes, ever. Since all it has to do is add, the program would have been locked down since about 1972. Of course there would be independent auditors who validate the machine code, create tests to run, and certify the integrity of the machines - who work for the people, by the people. Once the box is “enabled” i.e. ready to accept votes when the polls open, any physical activity would trigger a tampering fault, and the system would shut down. All the data that had been read thus far would have already been either pushed out to the next level tabulator (with no data being kept on the collection device itself) over a mega-encrypted proprietary link. There would be no bi-directional communication allowed – one way only – out.
I’m fairly confident I could start a company and deliver the above specified devices without leaving my home, and be able to make a tidy profit selling said devices for roughly $200 each. I’m also confident that if my 12 year old couldn’t program it, there’s some other neighborhood kid who can. I’d let the guys keep the nuke codes be the ones who are in charge of verifying the integrity of the system – or maybe even better – the guys who keep the Oscar winners a secret. Make it a federal crime with the penalty of death for tampering with the voting process. I’d vote for that.
Apparently I’ve been drinking the wrong Cool-Aid again. HBO uncovered the ugly truth behind the uglier process. Actually, a grandmother in Seattle did, and brought HBO along for the ride. The story is scarier than Hostile and all 3 Saw movies combined.
This nice Seattle lady, Bev Harris, wondered why her district went from the old fill in the oval ballots to touch screens. She didn’t like the answers, so she started snooping around on the internet. During her homework she stumbled upon an FTP site from voting machine market leader Diebold (I think their full legal name may be Die Boldly Lying To Your Face, Inc.). The FTP site contained all the source code for the voting machines. Up until that time, the world was told that source on such devices was double secret, uber-Russian security, CIA stuff. It was completely secure, impenetrable, and bullet proof. It was B.S.
She took the source to a few security guru’s, who were able to hack the code and make it do whatever they wanted in about 10 seconds. They could make it output any result they wanted, regardless of the input. The Diebold machines used a removable disk that kept the tabulated data. That disk and all the others were then physically removed and inserted into the aggregation machine, which added up all the sub-votes, declaring a winner. While the company bold face lied to everyone and anyone – insisting the system was impenetrable, Bev and one honest guy who ran a voting district in Florida and smelled a rat, proved that they could put a hacked executable on these disks and upload the hack no problem – and it only took one machine to screw an entire election.
The CEO of Diebold was the cheesiest, smarmiest liar I’ve ever seen. A used car salesmen’s bookie’s drug dealer has more ethical integrity. The company spokesman/stooge was a “marketing director”, which means there was no way any VP type was going to put their name on this Titanic debacle. The poor bastard reminded me of Tariq Aziz and Lee Anne McBride combined. (Tariq was Saddam’s spin master during the first Gulf War, and I loved how this guy could say things like “we are depleting the enemy of their critical armaments and are assured of victory within hours”, even though the entire world watched non-stop bombing from space while occasionally some guy in the desert threw a goat turd in the air. Lee Anne is Dick Cheney’s spin master – who told us about the unfortunate accident where Dick shot his pal in the head with a shotgun on a very dangerous quail hunting trip. She almost made me forget that these “hunting ranches” aren’t exactly the wild jungle – really it’s more like a rich guys back yard that has these birds with one wing duct taped behind it’s back, tethered to a 50 foot rope, tossed in the air by an employee who first yells “look over here guy’s, I think I hear one about to take off”. I’m pretty sure Dick doesn’t eat what he kills, but I digress.)
He, and the CEO, lied to everyone from Congress to me. They did so without any consideration of the facts that stared them in the face. They actually said that Mrs. Harris stole the source code. It was an awesome display of ethical de-volution combined with outright ineptitude. At least Bernie Ebbers and Ken Lay were smart dirt balls. These guys are buffoons.
So it was completely and absolutely proven that the Diebold voting machines had security flaws you could sail an ocean liner through. (For the record, there are two other companies that make this stuff, but I can’t remember their names, and they weren’t implicated as dirt bags in this documentary.) It was also exposed that they charge HUGE money for these easily hackable calculators. One district paid $20,000,000 for a bunch of the bad boxes – after being given irrefutable evidence that the machines have these security issues, the company flagrantly lied right to the committee making the decision, and the whole thing was captured on tape for all to see. Absurdity at its finest.
We are, after all, the country that elected Marion Barry back to office even after he was videotaped smoking crack with a hooker. Democracy in action. The program spent a lot of time showing how Republicans were benefiting by the scam, but the security issue affects all parties and peoples. They did do a nice job of showing how one district in Florida had their machines so wonderfully hacked that not only did Mr. Bush kick butt vs. Mr. Gore, but Mr. Gore actually received negative 16,000 votes. True story. In order to make sure the number of vote cast equaled the number of voters who voted, the security dudes created a sample executable that uploaded into the voting machine and for every vote it added 5 votes for Mr. Bush, and subtracted 4 votes for Mr. Gore, netting 1 vote. If 1000 people voted there would be a result of 1000 votes cast for Mr. Bush, zero for Mr. Gore.
So, I’m sorry about the political, do gooder rant, but I warned you. Security matters and we aren’t doing enough about it. It’s not about technology alone – it’s about policy and process. John Kerry knew that in New Mexico, overwhelmingly Democratic districts reporting overwhelmingly Democratic outcomes in the exit polling were reporting Republican victories. He knew – and he did nothing. Worse, by conceding the race under the auspice of saving the belief in the system, there was no legal way to launch an official inquiry. There were people ready to go.
As long as people are willing to tolerate security botches they will occur. As long as greed or power or lunacy is accepted as a reason for leaving a back to door open for the ethically challenged, they shall enter. As long as our system rewards dirt bags by allowing them to build junk and sell it for a ton, they will. Am I really to believe that IBM couldn’t build these things? I don’t even want to think about the ATM’s these guys make. Stealing my ID sucks, stealing Democracy violates every principal I thought I had.
Superbly brilliant, but I'm not going to tell you exactly why yet. I promise too when I have more time in the next day or so, but suffice it to say this couldn't have been a simple reaction to EMC/Kashya as several have suggested to me. I missed the call, but I see what this has meant in a few gigundo deals so far, and when I think about how IBM can come to the party now it makes me giddy.
If they did it for what I hope they did it for, then it is just genius. If they did it for other reasons, then they got lucky.
I'll explain shortly.
Observations of late:
Chris Calisi is toast at Overland. It was long overdue. Very nice guy, but never understood what the company is (low tech player to volume market) and always wanted to add IP, usually at a silly cost. The business has been slaughtered over the last year or so, with no end in sight so Chris had to go. The company is trading just above its cash value, which isn't good for those of you foreign to the world of high finance. I'm pretty sure I could buy them. Rick Belluzzo (Quantum/Adic) should go snap them up to help him shore up the low end. They ship a ton of Rios as iSCSI virtual tape targets and still have a fairly large low-end VAR channel.
EMC's CTO, Jeff Nick, turns out to be brilliant. You don't know him, because Mr. Tucci and co. have apparently not let him out of the basement. He was the On Demand CTO guy at IBM prior, and is a way forward thinker - which is probably the real reason he's been locked up! Selling stuff you have today is the mission, not talking about what the world will look like in 8 years. I bring it up because for the first time since I've known the mighty E, there is a guy there who really has long eyeballs and isn't focused on what to ship this quarter - and if they let him, he just might lend a whole lot of credibility to the end-game for those folks. I tried to argue with him for a while, but then realized I completely agreed with where things had to end up in IT (which may really mean he's an idiot). Don't expect to hear him at the next SNW, but feel good being an EMC customer knowing someone is spending time really looking out beyond their nose.
D-Link (yes, that D-Link) is shipping boat loads of iSTOR based iSCSI RAID boxes, and get this, into the SMB space. The stuff is cheap, fast as heck, and brain dead to operate. I like this stuff.
George Symons, arguably one of the nicest gentlemen in the history of the computer business, has left EMC (he was CTO of the Legato stuff) and become the CEO of SMB backup player, Yosemite - which just so happens to be 11 feet from his house. George is impossible not to like, so I'll be rooting for him.
I have misplaced my orthotics, and get foot cramps at bizarre times - like now. Got to go.
Here's the CW rant I did on the silly public DR thing that happened in PA. I had a decent amount of comments, and all but one agreed. This fellow didn't - here's what he said:
"Today I read the Opinion (below) on the discussion regarding the proposed Northeastern Pennsylvania’s real estate development project, as advertised to help address the Business Continuity (“BC”) requirements of Wall Street firms. I think the author’s opinion is emotional, not adequately supported by facts and way over the top in its condemnation. The opinion failed to recognize many important realities or acknowledge the greater good that such thinking and commitment, on the state, federal and private sector levels, to providing more and potentially better backup options brings to the business community and to the population at large. Our vulnerability and, thus, our need to secure adequate resiliency is not a family secret any longer. I feel that the options promoted by the group from PA have merit, despite the public fanfare brought on by the sizable financial commitments made by the government and private parties in this project. I strongly believe that Mr. Duplessie, who is a self-proclaimed analyst, failed to properly analyze the story or the situation, beyond the perceived need for secrecy. I was among many there as an attendee at the meeting on October 10, 2006. I arrived by car (not helicopter), met the many parties involved, asked questions and witnessed the media event afterward. Perhaps most importantly, my firm knows what it is looking at in these promotions. My colleagues and I analyze alternate sites options professionally for clients. We take into account many factors of the site options and the specifics of individual client requirements. We have seen nearly every solution promoted in the past twenty-five years. While it is prudent for individual companies to not advertise where and how they conduct business continuity, the available solutions are public knowledge.
For your consideration and the consideration of the readers who read the incomplete thoughts offered by Mr. Duplessie:
- There is no building to target - The buildings are proposed and not yet built, nor has ground been broken for any building.
- A level of privacy was maintained - The helicopters flew to the grounds of a hotel off-site where the meeting was held, not to the sites. No clients names were featured during the session and no client commitments were advertised.
- There are few secrets - Information on the location of commercial DR sites, once built and marketed, and also the location of private sites, is quickly common knowledge anyway, due to the necessity for the employees to know where it is and how to get there. The plans are communicated in advance throughout the organizations’ personnel on a broad scale and to all key vendors, the U.S. mail, FedEx, UPS and even the water cooler vendor. The family, friends and neighbors will all know and so will hundreds of local merchants. Let’s not kid ourselves about secrecy.
- Other options abound - The New York financial community has split operations and DR sites all over the NY area, the Northeast US, around the country and even around the world already.
- Who brought up Jersey City? - The author alludes to a common knowledge that there is a concentration of Wall Street BC and DR sites in Jersey City right now. If that were, and indeed still, true, by putting that ‘knowledge’ in the media Mr. Duplessie was doing essentially the same thing for which he condemns the promoters…giving out new ideas to terrorists – like they need them.
- More options = less concentration of risk - The proposed plan would dilute any alleged concentration in Jersey City or elsewhere.
- The real man in US Congress behind this is US Rep. Paul Kanjorski (PA), member of the Financial Services Committee in Congress, involved and knowledgeable of the issues and eloquent in his articulation. (The quote attributed to PA Rep John Siptroth is meaningless out of its context and is left open to interpretation. The more valuable points were made by Congressman Kanjorski.)
- The network radio and TV coverage of DR sites is not new; IBM, Sungard and many other entities have been in the national news before and while recovering companies from the outages of 9-11, Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the first WTC bomb in 1993 and the NE US power outage of 2003, to name a few · Terrorism is only a subset of the universe of bad circumstances planners address - The author’s presumption is that the sole or primary criteria for firms to seek DR or Business Continuity (BC) is widespread, intentional, successfully targeted destruction. This is one of many concerns.
- DR is the sizzle, Real Estate is the steak - The proposed project in PA is a commercial real estate development project that is really promoting the positive features of the region, with regional diversity of business operations, personnel, BC and IT-DR just some of the potential justifications. There are housing, retail and other intended regional enhancements planned that have little or nothing to do with DR. Eagle Rock Alliance and its management have no commercial interest in the proposed project or have a prior, current or planned relationship with the Penn Regional Business Center (PRBC) project, its sponsors or any of its potential competitors. We believe that the high profile of the project has raised awareness in Business Continuity as an important business initiative and at the same time served to expand the horizon of viable solution options that the business community can consider for their individual business resiliency needs.
Yours truly,
Gerry Nolan
President
Eagle Rock Alliance, Ltd.
I do like the "self-proclaimed analyst" remark, touche on that one my friend. However, the fact is after carefully reading your well crafted, albeit self-serving commentary, my position remains steadfast - It was dumb.
Had you read the article with half as much effort as you put into the reply, you would have noticed that I had no issue with the business aspect - only with the way it was publicly done. Flaunting "disaster recovery" in the face of non-stable, non-rational folks who have a history of doing bad things for bad reasons is just plain dumb. How you could take that criticism to mean terrorism was the only need for DR is beyond me. Standing around half-loaded dropping twenty dollar bills in the middle of a crack neighborhood while looking for the keys to my hummer doesn't mean I want to get robbed, nor does it imply everyone there wants to rob me - but giving them the idea isn't very smart. We all know there is money in a bank, but does that mean the bank should advertise that there will be a very large infusion of cash on Tuesday afternoon at 4pm and oh, by the way, our alarm has been giving us problems and our 86 year old security guard isn't feeling well? It's not what you say, it's how you say it.
While it certainly is also true that it isn't all that hard to find out where the DR sites are for those who you wish to destroy, not every would-be terrorist is a rocket scientist. It is irrelevant if this were part of an intelligent well planned attack - but for a dope like the shoe bomber it just may have been a self-realization moment that called someone to action. We aren't dealing with terrorist Mensa candidates all the time - the bad guys are a pyramid scheme, lots of smarts up top, lots of disilusioned loners looking to join the cult down below.
Of course the options they were promoting have merit - DR is good - and necessary. Commercially pushing the cause was not a concern, it was the Wall St. angle that was dumb. Some things should be left unsaid. You lost me by saying I was only talking about terrorism as the requirement for DR, which is dumb on your part. If there has been a more vocal pundit on the needs for DR/BC in all companies large and small - in life or in print - I challenge you to find them.
Since you clearly didn't comprehend, or desire to comprehend, the simplicty of the message, I can only surmise that you sent this in the hope of being published and sounding smart, therefore enhancing your business opportunites, (or trying to get a favor out of Mr. Kanjorski). I don't blame you for that at all, but you seem so wildly off base that I'm afraid your rant may cause the opposite effect - I wonder how many folks who read this may interpret your pitch incorrectly, and assume that means you support enhancing the operating efficiency of terrorists? Yikes.
Anyhow, thanks for reading!
Read this is you are a SAN person, or might be. If the Brocade McData deal doesn't go forward, because either the FTC stops it (I don't think that will happen, but it sure looked like that a few days ago), or if rumors are true and the Brocade big shareholders vote against it - those shareholders are screwing themselves and we're going to end up with an entire IT world that will be at risk.
Here's the article, let me know your thoughts.
Wow - timing is everything. Without breaking any NDA's - Q-Logic will announce a legitimate quasi-director - a scalable, pluggable, stackable chassis product that looks like it should have a true play in the core space. It won't support the Mainframe, but in open systems shops the 1.6Tb stated real throughput and the ability to add not only ports but intelligence modules as you want, when you want - in typical super low cost Q-Logic fashion. As always, this market will require the OEM's to support the cause and offer this product to the customer - but with all that is going on, Q's timing is brilliant. This also makes my point more valid - now there really is no reason the Brocade McData deal shouldn't go forward, at least from the government's perspective. Product specifics are coming out at SNW on the 31st or 1st.
The only Data Layer player to go public in the last decade (ish) has been Xyratex. They got killed at the IPO, and it took a year or so to get back - and now the stock is doing well. The IPO market for technology players has been non-existent since 2001.
Today we have Riverbed, CommVault, Isilon, and DoubleTake in registration - waiting to go public. Yee Haw!!
Suffice it to say these four are being very closely observed - by panting venture capitalists, salivating entrepreneurs, begging investment banks, and most of all - by the big dogs of the business.
EMC, IBM, HP, Symantec, etc. have had a field day since the markets have shut down - they have paid 10 cents on the dollar to acquire companies and technologies because there was no other way out for many of the acquired. If the public market comes back - even marginally - for this space, the price of acquisition will go up, and it could be a lot.
The best situation for the civilized world (yes, including the Data Layer folks) is that the market allow exits, the companies who get public perform well in their businesses, and the public take a sensible view of the value of those companies - and hold them to a high standard.
That would be great. Unfortunately, I'm skeptical. Even after Enron and all the garbage of the last 50 years being exposed, even after you read every day how even "good" public companies are now in trouble for the way they expense options, even after all the negative exposure - greed still rules. Case in point - HP. The current fiasco at the board should be sending red flags and sell orders throughout Wall St., let alone the cops. Wall St.'s reaction? Zip. If the numbers are good, they don't care if your board is run by an axe murdering psycho or an incompetent fool.
I mean no disrespect to HP - current fiasco aside, they have joined the ranks of IBM, Apple, and EMC as the best turnaround stories in the history of the computer business. Mark Hurd is my favorite CEO I've never met. HP is back in every business, and kicking butt in most. I do mean disrespect to Wall St. I don't think they have learned a single thing, nor do I think they care. Yes, I grossly generalize, but overall, Gordon Gecko lives and breathes in Manhattan.
What's the Data Layer? Good question. It doesn't make sense to talk about the "storage" market anymore. What isn't storage or directly related to storage in IT infrastructure? I'm thinking about things in 3 major contexts - 1. the User/Application presentation layer (one end of the wire), 2. The Infrastructure Layer, and 3. The Information (the other end of the wire).
Inside the Infrastructure Layer resides 3 sub-components: A: The server/processor layer, B: the network layer (user facing and infrastructure facing) and C: the DATA layer.
The data layer includes things that prepare, manage, store, move, and protect data. That includes databases, file systems, storage devices, data management/protection, and all the other IIM subsets.
Why no "application" layer? Because what is an application? Applications execute at every point of the infrastructure - there is no layer. Applications are simply an execution engine which execute on whatever hardware they need to in order to fulfill their mission - which is to create or find the right data in the Data Layer and deliver it to the User/Application Interface - or vice versa. The SOA world made me re-think all of this. It was easy to put file systems and databases in the data layer, because after all, what they do is manage data so that it can be found later on.
Hitachi, parent of HDS (who I love - though they have their own marketing challenges from time to time), just announced an "enterprise" caliber 500GB SATA disk drive. Not content to simply attack the lower-end markets, they tacked on a 1 million hour MTBF (which means not only will the drive never break, it will be spinning post-Apocalypse) and a 5 year warranty.
Sounds great right? It sure does. Now, did the company use its marketing muscle to come up with a crafty high-end "enterprise" caliber name for the line? Something like DS500 (death star) or Infinity500 or DC500 (data center)??? Nope. It uses Deskstar. Yep. Deskstar. Why not Lunch box 500? or CameInTheCerealBox 500? I can see the ad campaign now, "Mr. VP of IT, if you have a desk, now you are a star". Ugh.
How many desks have critical enterprise data on them? Maybe the age of consolidation has gone so far as to shrink data centers down into furniture looking things. HP used to make an MPE machine that looked like a desk. I sat on it in the Boston, MA Putnam Investments data center once, having no idea it was not furniture. That might have been OK, except I was the EMC sales rep/installer that was going to plug a new memory board into that desk, which probably did not instill a very high degree of confidence in the customer. I'm pretty sure I left the board there for one of the guys techies and took him to a bar to wait it out.
I digress. My point is that if you wanna make people feel comfortable about applying your product or technology into their worlds, you should first try to understand what those requirements mean, and second, you might want to consider a naming convention that connotes confidence. Who would buy an Ab Blaster if it were called a "You'll never use it anyway, and end up putting it in the basement with clothes hanging from it that don't fit you anyway, you fat slob"?
Sun should probably start trying non-compete agreements. Rich, who ran the America's for Sun, is now at EMC and owns Clariion, Centerra, and Celerra - or everything but Symmetrix. That's got to hurt. I wish him well. I get the feeling he will find EMC a tad different culturally than the one he just left.
Here's ESG's take on EMC's org changes announced this morning:
CFO Tueber is now Vice Chair. Long time Tucci exec Dave Goulden is now CFO. Goulden is very different from Tueber, very persuasive and clearly smart (not that Tueber isn't smart, he clearly is), but Goulden is cut from a different cloth and it will be interesting to see how the street reacts to him. We believe it will be positive, and give EMC an opportunity to change thier Investor Relations strategy to get the stock moving, since the previous methods clearly did not work.
Dave Dewalt will take Goulden's job as EVP of Sales Operations, maintaining the role of President of their Content Management and Archive businesses - but no longer Legato. Legato (Mark Sorenson) and InVista (Doc Derrico) will now report to Dave Donatelli. Howard continues to own services, and resource management (smarts, control center run by Chris Gahagan).
The things to watch are Goulden's impact with Wall St., and the Dewalt impact since he now owns a lot of sales guys who have been there a long time and who wield a ton of power, such as Bill Scannell. The two have butted heads in the past, and everyone Scannell has butted heads with over the years is now gone. Somehow, he ends up on top every time.
Is this Joe's way of shaking things up and letting the cream rise to the top? Probably. The guy is too smart so this isn't window dressing, there is a purpose. Will it open up windows of opportunity for the competition? Probably not. The personnel dynamics are the things to watch, and those could have downstream impact in short order.
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