In the mean time, I must say how completely impressed I am by Chuck Hollis’ blog postings.  Employing guys like him is one of the reasons why EMC continues to dominate the storage market even as challenger after challenger takes them on.  Sure, they’re not always right.  And sure, Chuck’s as guilty of anyone of a little blogketing.  But who isn’t?

Anyway, let’s take these two recent posts:

“As we look at our portfolio of services going forward, where are we going to need help getting good?  And who can help us get good without keeping us dependent?

And, finally, who are you going to trust to do this for you?”

So asked Chuck yesterday in his piece about outsourcing and services.  The emphasis is his, and I left it because I think it’s very relevant.  As I’ve often said, people hire consultants for two reasons: Either they lack time and focus or they lack experience and knowledge.  It makes sense to hire a consultant from EMC (or HDS or HP or whoever made it) to help you through the thickets and learn to really utilize a piece of equipment.  Anyone can use a piece of hardware, but utilizing it (putting it to a practical purpose) takes knowledge, and an insider or expert is best.

Now for Chuck’s piece from today on information governance:

“Bottom line: these questions of “how do we manage information at a corporate level?” are all over the place  if you look around, and more are coming every day.

And, rather than try and address them individually in an ad-hoc manner — with limited participation, measurement and evolution, the idea is to create a role of information governance function within the organization.”

This is the kind of work I do every day at Contoural.  It’s difficult – but that’s why we get hired.  Once again, companies lack the knowledge and focus to set up good data management policies.  But of course, Chuck’s right that the primary effort and input comes from inside – I’m a coach, not a player when it comes to governance work.

We in IT like to try to pretend we know everything because we would never want the rest of the business to see the emperors clothes as it were.  Everyone comes to us as the end-all knowledge guys, and we hate to disappoint them.  But maybe it’s time we admitted that we don’t always have all the answers and that we could use some help.

So there we are – admitting that we don’t know the answer and that we need help.  It’s hard for IT to do it, and harder for consultants.  But we’re all people, and if we’re brave enough to admit our limitations we usually find out that the rest of the world respects that.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2007. | Chuck Hollis Gets It!
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

Let me give you some background, gentle reader…  I’ve never worked for a “product company” in the storage industry, I’m a services guy.  And services are all about selling people – their skills and their time.  So rather than promoting a new box or piece of software, we in the services business promote ourselves, which I personally feel is the most honest thing to promote!  After all, we each have different skills – all we services companies can do is try to distill a similar set of skills to offer and hope that people are interested.

And, frankly, we all engage in self-promotion every time we blog (as a verb).  Blogging is all about rising above the crowd and saying “my opinion is important.”  Unlike traditional media, however, it is democratic:  Anyone can blog, anyone can try to be important, and the world will judge just how important they are.

Perhaps this is why people find corporate marketing blogs (aka blogketing) to be so insidious.  They are, seemingly, not the acts of individual initiative but of organizational co-option and perhaps even surreptition.  We feel that they are somehow less honest, since the person writing the words may be checking his true feelings at the door.

But perhaps not.  I agree with Jon’s assertion that corporate blogs give us a little insight, even if it is packed in salt grains.  And they certainly give us democratic communication – just like anyone can blog, anyone can comment, and blog writers (even the most corporate) tend to read their thoughts.  Plus, as Beth Pariseau noted, the back and forth can be both enlightening and enjoyable to watch!

Blogket away, I say.  Self-promote, too.  It’s a post-modern world: I’ll figure out what your angle is…

If you enjoyed reading this, you’ll probably also like my Foskett Services blog!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2007. | Blogketing Ourselves
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage, Personal. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

I’ve been in the trenches on storage content (aka data) for a long time. I, too, have often reverted to the old “gigs of MP3s and porn” argument from time to time. But I’ve done enough filesystem assessments at real companies to realize that that’s not really the norm. In fact, I’ve rarely found much porn, music, video, or jokes on full-up corporate file servers. And I’ve analyzed enough storage environments to know that, while file servers are big, they’re not normally the majority user of storage in large data centers.

On the contrary, most enterprise storage is taken up by business applications, though not necessarily critical data. Email, backup, and certainly user file servers are big space users. But give me a few Oracle instances, source code repositories, or image processing servers, and watch those applications shrink in significance.

No matter what the application, though, the real issue with storage growth (and ILM) is the (in)ability of IT managers to do anything about it. Let’s say we had permission to delete really inappropriate data, which is not a sure thing. Would we IT folks even be able to recognize it? How would we locate it? Can we even view user files without violating user trust, company privacy policies, or even laws? Many countries (yes, not all data is in the USA), regulate access to data even inside a company.

Now let’s move into grayer areas of “unnecessary” corporate data. Many storage administrators can’t even name the applications that take up all that space, let alone understand the intricacies of the data under management.  To make a timely (and tired) Harry Potter analogy, IT are the house-elves of the business – powerful but subservient, with little input into what happens above and around them.  I’ve talked to business people who don’t want IT to have any input, relegating them to order takers and laborers.

This is a dangerous slide, however.  Lots of people have the capability to take IT orders and keep the lights on,  a realization that leads to outsourcing.  IT pros must prove their worth to the business in order to remain relevant and irreplaceable!

ILM is one way to do that.  To get back to Chuck’s post, we need to take the reins and try to understand data better.  We need to pick certain applications that lend themselves to automated data classification and tiered storage and try to get them under control.  Email is a great candidate, and that’s why email archiving applications have taken off recently.  File servers are coming along, too, especially with file virtualization in the ascendancy.

I’m particularly excited about what a smart IT manager I know called the “second wave” of SRM tools.  Rather than just collecting stock metadata (age, name, owner, etc), the latest filesystem scanning tools look inside a file, trying to better classify them.  Let’s say 1/4 of your file server is made up of Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents.  What can you do about that unless you can identify which are critical and which are not?  Each business will have its own criteria, and you need a flexible tool to scan them all and report back to you before you can “ILM” them.  That’s what lots of software vendors are currently working on, and though we’re at an early stage still, the results are promising.

Sadly, though, we in IT may soon find that we just can’t delete anything.  Even totally banned content like porn could be critical to a legal case against an employee,  and it won’t be long before we are expected to keep everything that shows up on our servers for a very long time.  Most companies have policies for hardcopy document retention, and many are currenyly diving into the world of data policy as well.  The default policy may be “keep until we decide what to do with it”, and this could cause the current trend of storage growth to accelerate!

If we can’t delete data, we will be forced to sail the Titanic rather than sink it.  Small companies can benefit most from the falling price of storage, since the entire storage footprint for a little shop is often under a terabyte.  But larger organizations will find that they need to start tiering their storage, and quickly in order to keep prices under control.

And then there’s green storage.   Again, Mr. Toigo makes the very valid point that the problem is in the business, not in the hardware we use.  But if we can’t do anything about data growth for the time being, we had better start tackling the technical challenges we face.  I’ve talked to many IT folks who are very worried about data center space, as well as the terrifying trio of heat, power, and cooling.  For them, green technologies are no laughing matter!  If you can’t get any more power, you have to lower your per-GB requirement and quickly.

It’s easy to say “understand your data and delete some”, but hard for IT pros to  actually do it.  Until we can tackle the strategic issue of data growth, we’ll have to continue fighting the tactical problems of storage.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2007. | Sailing the Titanic (Why We Need ILM and Then Some!)
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

Let’s back up (metaphorically speaking)… I’ve been writing and speaking on the topic of enterprise storage for most of this decade, and I’ve learned a few things. First is that you always have to take the things that industry insiders say with a grain of salt. I’m really good friends with a lot of these guys, and am not trying to impugn their personal integrity. But when the existence of your paycheck, and thus your house, food, car, family, etc, hangs in the balance you tend not to shake the trees too hard.

Most people find an easy middle ground by simply easing off their invective on topics that will get them in trouble. Let’s say you worked for EMC and had your own blog. Would you go around saying that the DMX-4 announcment was unimpressive? Or if you worked for Hitachi, would you go out of your way to point out that thin provisioning isn’t widely available yet? No, you’d simply point out the parts of the announcements that you did approve of, and skip the rest.

The same happens in the analyst world. These guys are really good folks, but when the time comes to respond to a question about some newfangled technology which just happens to be from a client company, you’re going to figure out a way to phrase your answer positively. It’s cynical, and really not entirely truthful, to say they’re coin-operated. Really, they’re just non-stupid…

But folks outside the industry have to understand where their information is coming from. What’s the slant of the person talking to you? Are they trying to promote a product? A client? A service? Say what you want about Jon Toigo, but at least he’s just trying to promote himself…

Seriously, though, another thing I’ve learned is that all of these people wouldn’t exist without the end-user community. And they are the ones that really know what works and what doesn’t, a point I tried to make back in the August 2004 issue of Storage magazine… Oops, there I go, promoting myself!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2007. | Blogketing (re)Visited
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage, Personal. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.