In the 70's, the view that man was inducing Global Cooling prevailed. Of course this came from climatologists rather than hairdressers and insurance salesmen. We all acknowledge that sometimes science comes to flawed conclusions. The beauty of the scientific process is that it welcomes and requires us to question theories or propose different hypotheses to explain observations. Since measurements are imperfect and we don’t always know what to measure, we arrive at incorrect conclusions that need to be corrected by challenging them.

Global Cooling is now rejected by many in favor of Global Warming. Why? Because the science was wrong? Perhaps. Are we using science to draw the conclusion that Global Warming is indeed, the case? Many governments, Nobel-like committees, press organizations, and people presume so. Might the same process that led to the Global Cooling conclusion now conclude there is Global Warming and be wrong? Of course it might.

My issue with what is now more strategically being referred to as “climate change” (much less risky), is that instead of allowing the debate, proponents of the hypothesis refer to it as a fact. People refer to the “Union of Concerned Scientists” as if this is a religion and we need to “group up” as if the number of people that believe the world is flat has anything to do with the validity of the thesis. Figuring out the impact of mankind on our ecosphere doesn’t require a majority. It doesn’t matter if your brother-in-law believes it’s true. Besides, he invested with Madoff, along with $50B worth of people who thought that was a great idea.

Science is never “done.” The debate is not over; that’s foolish.  Proper debate and test of the hypothesis will continue, as it should. No matter which side you’re on, it serves nobody to make the other side politically incorrect.  The “Wisdom of the Crowd” is debatable, sometimes, it might be closer to “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds”.

What does this have to do with the storage industry?  Well, most of the people in the IT business know EMC but most do not know Pillar. The number of IT professionals that know EMC storage technology is not indicative of the wisdom of the choice today. Just like climate change, opinions and interpretation of the facts change over time. Safety in numbers could just be comfort. Personally, I prefer drawing my own conclusions based on analysis not on what a politician, consultant, or my Uncle Al thinks “everyone knows.”  

In Beth Pariseau’s recent TechTarget article “Storage Soup,” the Axiom was compared against the EMC Symmetrix and the Clariion. I think the article was pretty fair and balanced, and I appreciate that.  First, thanks for putting us up against two machines from a $14B company with #1 market share in both high-end and midrange machines and pointing out that the Axiom does compare, and in some cases blurs the lines between high-end and midrange. And it compares favorably.

The article says that while Pillar may have a good machine that compares favorably, EMC is the safer choice.  Mark Peters of ESG provides the analogy of two cars from Mercedes and Hyundai. While the Hyundai may be as good, whom do you trust?

Really? What if we reframe the question using Toyota and Hyundai? Wouldn’t this also be fair and perhaps a better analogy based on market share and size? Do we trust Toyota today as much as we did yesterday? Has EMC a spotless record with no issues? No data loss? No sticky gas pedal or faulty brakes? No horrific sales hi-jinks? If one casts aspersions against Pillar for risk due to its size, one should also consider the risk of buying from EMC due to, say, arrogance, stale technology, and platform proliferation leading to much higher total cost of solution. Incidentally, 8 gig FC touted in the article as a Sym advantage usually makes little performance difference. Most of us know better, including Mark at ESG. He also knows the switched back-end and multiple engines of the Sym and Axiom are far better than the older style Clariion, regardless of transport speed.

My IBM brethren used to cite risk against EMC, but it didn’t stop EMC from cleaning their clock with better technology. I put my faith in the same people that ultimately won the battle for EMC over IBM: IT professionals that realize a Mercedes like the S500 I drive isn’t always the best value, choice, technology, or necessarily risk-free. My daughter drives a Honda, and just for the record, the Toyota I drove for 10 years was the best car my family ever owned. And I wasn’t on a first-name basis with my car mechanic, nor the finance team at the car dealership.

 

As an engineer, it annoys me to lose a deal against inferior technology. And I’m not talking about my opinion of Axiom’s superiority, by the way, but the customer’s assessment. There are valid reasons for losing that don’t bother me much, and then there are the ones that are pretty difficult to swallow.

 

One of the understandable reasons is when the customer decides that although they want to get to a new platform, adding 10 TB to an existing “clunker” is just too affordable to pass up in the current economy.  Plus, while the term clunker is certainly a pejorative, sometimes that clunker is “good enough.” I like the word clunker. It’s fun to say. Of course continuing to invest in old technology isn’t great, but sometimes it is all people can afford.

 

Among the harder reasons to accept are the continual efforts from an EMC to prevent emerging companies like Pillar from getting a beachhead. Sure, I understand their objectives and tactics. Putting Pillar alongside a Clariion is a real loser for EMC, or for HP EVA for that matter. Tactics include giving customers their equipment for “free.”  IBM is surely doing this with the XIV in MMIX and will continue this year (MMX to clear things up).

 

Expediency often mandates taking the “free” alternative, and I don’t blame people for taking this option. It is tough to turn down. But we all know that “free” is not free. There will be a continual drain that makes amends for the free equipment in the remaining business transactions with the vendor.

 

If a company is willing to give you “free” stuff, to the tune of millions of dollars in a single deal, they must have valid reasons for doing so. In other words this behavior is probably not just a testosterone-fueled aberration. Cooler heads in management will prevail, so when it happens, it is because the vendor doesn’t want you to pick up on the value proposition that makes them look pretty sad.

 

I’m not complaining by the way. We win more than our fair share deals against EMC, HP, NetApps, and HDS. When we do, it is nearly always for our basic array technology. I will also admit that occasionally we win because the prospect has had it with their incumbent supplier. Whether mistreatment, or no treatment at all, both give Pillar and other emerging companies many opportunities. At Pillar we attempt to treat everyone like they are a VIP, because we like doing it, and let’s face it, we have to. That is not to say that we haven’t goofed a few accounts up for some reason or another. I’m sure everyone has inadvertently done that. We actually had a sales guy threaten a prospect! Turns out that the guy previously worked for EMC, and he thought a “little muscle” was required to coerce a deal along.  Of course the guy no longer works at Pillar, or at the next two companies he joined in the subsequent year of his “career”; either go back to EMC or become a thug, pal.

 

I wonder if the EMC gang ever thought of the tagline “EMC: Because you have to.”? I guess that’s a bit over the top, but it made me laugh. J  Recently, we know of a case where a “deal that couldn’t be refused” was turned down. Upon refusal, EMC escalated up through the chain of management in the company, all the way to the CFO.  After all, if “free” doesn’t appeal to your CFO, who would it appeal to?  You have to admit, it takes balls as a vendor to turn in the prospect to higher ups; just makin’ friends and building bridges. “Clearly, your team is ignorant of business considerations, but you wouldn’t be where you are if you were such an ignoramus. That’s why they pay us the big bucks … so we can give stuff away for free.”  Jeesh.

 

All of us prefer to win on merits rather than because “we aren’t the other guy.” I am sure the gang at EMC, or HP, prefers to win on their merits, but that will be tougher with the technology they’re peddling.  I suppose sometimes they will be happy winning lots of deals because their competitors are the other guy – different than they are used to. Eventually, if people wait long enough and spend enough money, EMC will stop ripping out Vmax’s and replacing them with Sym IV’s when they figure out how to better copy the Axiom. But, then we’ll have moved on to selling “Sym 6 technology” while EMC is still peddling the Sym 5. I mean VI and V, what’s up with the Roman numerals anyway? Maybe we should have announced the Axiom DC Series II instead of the Axiom 600 Series 2? 

 

Take a look at our value proposition, and consider upgrading your solutions to the Axiom. I offer two thoughts on why you should do so: 1) For many enterprise businesses, our value proposition is far better than legacy vendors and worth a strong look; and 2) if you take a look at the Axiom, the worst thing that can happen is that the likes of EMC will offer you something for “free”, and although it isn’t really free over time, it may temporarily help your budget. How’s that for candor?

 

So I just went to see Avatar – in 3D of course. Wow. It was an amazing movie to say the least. The opening took me off guard a bit. It was fine – but nothing like what I had come to expect from the buzz surrounding this movie.  But then the technology kicked in and I was astounded.

Several thoughts occurred to me during the movie. First, of course, was an understanding why the movie drew $2B in box office in just 6 weeks. As much as I hate things that are popular becoming more popular because, well, they’re popular, this movie warrants the popularity in my opinion. Score 4 points for using the word popular 4 times in one sentence!

By the way, the appeal here is not the plot. I won’t give it away for the 9 people on the planet who haven’t seen it yet, but you will have the whole thing nailed after the first 20 minutes. Although predictable, the story is a great depiction of the Gaia hypothesis (or theory if you prefer) – that our planet is a completely connected living entity. I wholly embrace this and always have. But I digress.

The second thing I thought about was the moon. Huh? Well, it so happened that we had a gorgeous full moon out and while appreciating it this weekend, I couldn’t help but think about landing on the moon, NASA, and all that. During the movie, the thought occurred to me that far more processing power went into this 3 hour movie than a 10 year journey to the moon. Damn.

Not to be morbid, I also thought how lucky I was to get to see this in my lifetime. In other words, glad I didn’t miss this.  I think technically, the depth of the 3D computer rendering was a milestone in movie making, if not human events. Oh I suppose some people might think milestone is a bit of exaggeration – after all there have been a few spectacular movies made already that peg the processing horsepower meters. The thing is, this was especially creative and had content in it not done solely for the sake of special effects, but it blew my mind at the capability to bring to life an imagined reality far removed from our own. After a while, the movie seems real, rather than a movie. It’s kind of like watching a foreign flick with subtitles. If it is a good one, you forget about the damn subtitles and you start thinking you can hear the voices in your own language.  Is it just me?

Part of the story offended a few critics and pundits: a repeat of the big bad corporation ruining our environment out of greed. Oh for God’s sake. There have been and are plenty of real life examples of this. This is not a stretch. I am a raging capitalist for sure (just look at the books I love and recommend – Ayn Rand for crying out loud).  But just because a movie suggests this scenario doesn’t mean it is a subversive tool of the eco-fascist global warming nut-balls who have 17,000 square foot homes, use 2 megawatt hours of electrical energy annually, fly a private jet, and buy back their own carbon credits in their quest to double the $100M winnings they have made, does it?  Well if it is, I ain’t buying that story; I prefer to believe that we are capable as a species of not destroying everything we touch. Mostly.

There isn’t that much to say about the storage required to hold all the content, versions, texture files, etc. that has any wow factor. "Weta Digital in New Zealand did this, and they built an impressive render farm for this project consisting of 35,000 processor cores, 3 PB of disk storage, and 104 TB of RAM. NetApp's involvement with this movie is an honor for them for sure. Congratulations to the gang over there."

I love technology. The power this movie has to drop you into an alternate reality is a bit scary. I highly recommend seeing it in 3D and at a great theater, even IMAX if you can. Have fun.

Note: I did not include a link to a Trailer of the film – I would recommend you see the movie without viewing the trailer if you can.

When I was quite a bit younger some really great folks at IBM gave me the opportunity to help start a Hard Disk Drive OEM business.  I was part of the Storage division in San Jose California. At the time we built proprietary, non-standard products with all custom mechanical and electrical parts.

The writing was on the wall, the future lay in using high volume, and hence lower cost parts. Not only did this amortize engineering costs (NRE), but tooling and test process costs could be amortized over a much larger volume as well. The idea was – use custom parts only where they provided a distinct competitive advantage. Then, build designs that could be sold into many products, not just one.

IBM wasn’t alone in this, the rest of the world was trying to gain leverage by producing standardized components as well. Seagate was building an empire out of providing 5.25” standard form factor drives to everyone, including the IBM PC (AT back then).  But IBM had invented the disk drive, and its leadership was furious about ceding the high volume low cost drives to the likes of Seagate, and Conner Peripherals. Besides, it was clear that before long, the mechanical advantages of smaller form factors and advancing technologies would obsolete the “big drives” that were sold two or four spindles to the refrigerator sized box.

The IBM AS400 group had the same idea: Build smaller drives with advanced IBM technology to sell to internal customers like the AS400 and IBM PC groups. While the AS400 came from the “custom” world, the IBM PC guys new that they needed best of breed cost in all their components, and the thought of being locked in to some over-transfer-priced HDD from another division was repugnant. The Rochester team made an “almost standard” product: Little things like non-standard mounting holes were rendering their drives incompatible for PCs inside or outside of IBM.

I was asked by “The Chairman” and a few San Jose execs to build an entrepreneurial program inside IBM – the goal of which was a) To build a standard form-factor and interface HDD, and b) Build one packed with enough technology like MR heads to allow even the high-end storage guys to incorporate it into a modular version of the product.  Unfortunately the IBM Rochester team was heading in a similar direction, so a political battle ensued in which after a squabble, I landed in Rochester, Minnesota. As my California friends said at the time “He really must have pissed someone off to be sent to Minnesota”. From Rochester (home of the Mayo clinic) I managed what I named Allicat – an enterprise class drive in reliability and performance that fit Industry standard electrical and mechanical specifications.  The “Alli” in Allicat came from the Alliance of San Jose and Rochester. At 2GB, 5400 RPM, SCSI and IPI-2 interfaces, the drive was the beginning of the OEM HDD storage team within IBM. We went from about $0 top-line revenue to about $4.6B in the next 11 years. 

Disk drives today are indeed labeled as a commodity. Lots of definitions of a commodity exist including simply something that is bought or sold. I maintain that when most of us think commodity, we think about a product that has minor differentiation against others that are adequate substitutes. Table salt for example: Nobody says “Please pass the Morton’s Table Salt”.  Instead, salt is salt, and rarely is anything but “Please pass the salt” heard at any table. Likewise, gold is gold, wheat is wheat, etc.  Differentiation of one commodity over another is usually at the fringes -- fringes which are desperately held on to by manufactures (But when it rains, this salt still pours!).

Moving up the food chain buyers of PCs and Servers that incorporate HDDs always make sure that their commodities include two or more sources. Same for muffin fans, chassis, cables and connectors.

What about storage arrays? Well the more complicated the system, and the smaller the volume requirements are for a system, the less easily it is commoditized. After all, the how many Golden Gate bridges are needed in the world and how standard is the interface between the bridge and the terra firma it sits on? So the truth is, while buyers try and push arrays toward the commodity spectrum, it is difficult to substitute one array for another at some level. Training, management, interoperability, application APIs are all different enough that one vendor is much easier than three, and disparate types of arrays at some level cost the buyer money by shear reason of their differences.

What are some of the consequences of commoditization in the storage business? Here are a few, I am sure that many of you can add to this list:

1. Disk will continue as a commodity.
2. SSD will become a commodity. Manufacturers will struggle valiantly but much like the HDD business, that large OEMs will drive toward standardization and multiple sources as volumes increase. One might argue that we are nearly there already, but firmware maturity is still disparate amongst manufacturers. 
3. The number of manufacturers of SSDs will grow for awhile, and eventually decline as margins force consolidation.
4. Flash memory used in SSDs will become a commodity. Today there are still some differences but there will be a convergence.
5. Plug-in Cache modules (PCIe based Flash Memory) will converge into a commodity. Right now many players are striving to differentiate themselves, but the pace will be fast and furious and largely decided by large volume OEM’s wins.
6. As SSDs reduce in price and increase in capacity, there will be larger and larger a substitution of SSDs for HDDs. 
7. A trend toward SSDs over HDDs will cause all storage arrays to be re-architected. Today’s arrays are not built properly for maximum utilization of the performance benefits of SSD. This will affect everybody in the business. Pillar’s advanced Axiom architecture is already under development. This will be fun.

Oh, and I like Minnesota, really. Sure it is cold, but that wasn’t the real problem. Rather, it was how long it was cold. And thank goodness for the commoditization of salt, because they use a heck of a lot of it.

I must admit I’ve been remiss in posting this year.  We’ve been off to a busy start at Pillar with the announcement of our Series 2 Slammer and everything else that sits squarely on my shoulders as the CEO…mea culpa. 

More on the Axiom 600 Series 2 soon, but I saw this yesterday and I just have to write about it:  3PAR’s new Save 50% of Your Capacity Guarantee. I can’t help it. Perhaps thinking that the “thin” story has worn thin, 3PAR has a new guarantee that goes like this:  Assuming you have over-provisioned your LUNs by 2X, and you don’t own an array that will allow you to thin provision (just about everyone’s does), you can toss out your array at capacity of C  and buy a new one with a capacity of only C/2? And 3PAR guarantees that you will only have to buy C/2 to replace what you already own (C)?

Hello? Helloooo? I am sure there is more to this, there has to be. This seems goofy at best. I’d love to read the “terms” that they reference (but don’t disclose).

How about I offer my own guarantee: Don’t buy anything from anyone and save even more! After all, you if you fill up C/2, it’s not like you have more storage by buying C/2? I suppose that you have the virtue of not wasting anything. I like that.

Meanwhile, back at 3PAR’s guarantee, for equal capacity spindles, your performance will drop in half, guaranteed.  That sounds kinda crappy to me. Who needs a 50% performance drop after spending money to save space that you don’t apparently need?  And how do you increase performance with 3PAR?  Well, add more disks of course!  Seems to defeat the purpose of this guarantee doesn’t it? I mean, buy half as much, but double it to get your performance back to where it was before you started.  Earth to 3PAR Marketing, over. Come in 3PAR Marketing, are you near Uranus yet? Apparently so. Who came up with this one? I hope it wasn’t some guy eating a cinnamon roll behind the steering wheel of his car again when this idea popped up?

Oh, you need the space? For more applications and stuff? Well, then buy the same capacity you had, restore your performance (for equal spindle count), and provision the original capacity out at C/2 instead of C – this leaves C/2 of empty space no longer hogged up by the over-provisioners out there. Good. But if your new applications require more I/O than you originally had, well, you are SOL.

Wait a sec. If you’re going to migrate all your data to another system for this “technology refresh” and go through all the LUN resizing exercises, why not skip the 3PAR purchase and rearrange what you already own? After all, it is possible, and you wouldn’t have to fork over any bucks to do it.

I think this comes down to a foot in the door. It’s one-dimensional and focuses only on capacity and not performance. It’s a trick, not a treat. You can’t replace the performance of 100 spindles with 50 spindles.  It won’t work.  You also can’t buy the same 100 spindles (for performance reasons), use thin provisioning to get more space and then layer more applications on those drives.  Where do they get their performance?  You can’t cram 100lbs of stuff in a 50lbs sack.  3PAR needs to figure out a way to meet service level agreements for each LUN when they are all in contention (hint: QoS).  This will allow them to use Thin Provisioning, tap the recovered capacity and provide decent performance minimums.  As it stands, this guarantee is goofy, and in the hopes that people just listen to the story, 3PAR may end up making a quarter disappear behind their ear. Problem is, it is your quarter.

Here is the shocker: 3PAR’s stuff is most probably better than the old fashioned 15-20 year old array architectures, and I recommend it. This aspect of the “technology refresh” is worthwhile.

Now before you fall off your chair, I don’t recommend them over Pillar, but certainly I think the next-gen architectures are better than the stuff the legacy suppliers keep hawking.

My suggestion is that you bring them in for better reasons than a goofball 50% capacity savings guarantee. While you’re at it, bring in Pillar. We’re thin too, but we have a lot more technology than thinly striping on all disks….like QoS, distributed hardware RAID, unified NAS/SAN, single-license software model without capacity scaling taxes (like 3PAR has for example), a real guarantee of 80% utilization at expected performance levels, SSD, 2TB disks, and the choice to stripe on smaller number of spindles than “all”.

And it’s not even Halloween.