My Storage for Virtual Environments seminar is really packed with content!

Next Thursday will be the first time I present my new-for-2011 Storage for Virtual Environments seminar. I’ve worked hard on the content, and appreciate all the input I’ve had from my readers and industry contacts since I first asked for help here on my blog.

The Virtual Opportunity

So what am I going to cover in this seminar? I hit on an interesting twist while working on the content: Virtual environments pose a challenge but also create an opportunity for storage people. Virtual environments are very demanding of storage features and performance, but we have the necessary tools in our arsenal. We just have to use them!

Server virtualization is the first step to a new IT paradigm

The first of three seminar hours is spent talking about the “big picture” issues for server virtualization. We talk about the trend for IT to move in a new direction, and how server virtualization is just the first step. It’s a bridge to the past, enabling legacy applications and operating systems to me used in a more-dynamic and flexible fashion. But the real change comes next, as virtualization and containerization hits the applications and they move away from legacy infrastructure.

This InformationWeek Analytics survey shows a slowdown in the trend towards virtual servers (from their 2010 Virtualization Management Survey)

Bur the reality check for server virtualization is starting to hit us. Look at the chart above, from an InformationWeek Analytics study on Virtualization Management. Server virtualization pros are scaling back their projections for virtualization penetration this year. Although most still believe many servers will be virtualized before the end of the year, it’s not the clear majority who thought that in 2009.

The VIrtualgeek survey demonstrates VMware's amazing market share

Another great source of information is the virtualization survey conducted by Chad Sakac. Although any web poll is not as scientific as a professional survey, it does reveal some interesting facts. One stand-out fact is the overwhelming: VMware ESX really dominate market for server virtualization. Although Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix XenServer do have users, VMware controls more than half of the market.

Next, I talk about some of the realities of server virtualization:  I contrast the simple virtual hardware environment that the guest believes it is running on with the complicated reality of the modern virtual data center. I also talk little bit about the cloud, and what this future IT infrastructure will look like.

Transitioning to Storage

Storage and network I/O have a massive impact on virtual machine performance

But this is all a prelude to the meat of the seminar content: The impact that these virtual environments will have on storage infrastructure. As one of the three pillars of server performance, storage I/O is critical. But we must also consider the integration opportunities for advanced storage technologies.

This leads me to the roadmap for the rest of the seminar. Storage folks hold the keys to the future, but they must unlock the doors. It’s time to start thinking about storage in a new way:

1. Storage presentation must adapt to the demands of the hypervisor
2. Converged I/O technologies (“Everything over Ethernet”) bring exciting new opportunities
3. Storage virtualization technology (volume management, thin provisioning, automated tearing, and so on) finally have a use in virtualized environments
4. New storage architectures, including solid-state disks, are also required

This is the real thrust of my presentation. Storage folks need to change both their assumptions and architectures to respond to the challenges of this new virtual environment.

Join In!

Want to get involved? Here’s what you can do:

1. If you’re not already, subscribe to my rss feed – I’ll use the “Virtual Storage” category for this topic
2. Check back over the next month or so as I post slides, commentary, and data regarding storage for virtualization environments
3. Consider joining me at the seminars – I have 9 dates, and I’m sure most readers would qualify to attend free of charge!
   1. Thurs. Mar. 10 – Philadelphia, PA
   2. Thurs. Jun. 16 – Phoenix, AZ
   3. Tue. Jun. 28 – London, UK
   4. Tue. Jul. 19 – Toronto, ON
   5. Thurs. Jul. 21 – Cleveland, OH
   6. Tue. Aug. 9 – Denver, CO
   7. Tue. Oct. 18 – Dallas, TX
   8. Thurs. Oct. 20 – St. Louis, MO
4. As the year progresses, I’ll be asking for clarification and posting updates to the material

I look forward to hearing from you, meeting you at the seminars, and putting some great content together!

A Note on Copyright

As promised, the seminar slides will be released using the Creative Commons license, specifically CC-BY-NC-SA 3.0. This means that anyone out there can get a copy, remix them, or reuse them as long as they attribute me, share their work with the world under the same license, and don’t try to make money off of it. As producers of this seminar series, TechTarget will have a special license allowing them to use the content.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2011. | Introducing Storage for Virtual Environments (From My Seminar)
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage, Everything, Personal, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

• My writing
  • Is NFS A Viable Protocol For Converged Networking?
  • EMC Taunts NetApp: Counting Coup or Poor Sportsmanship?
  • When Marketing Becomes Pointless
  • NetEx Joins the Roster of Tech Field Day Presenters
• Other great stuff
  • Bob Plankers takes his turn at bat for FCoTR with a Fibre Channel over Token Ring Presentation @ WI VMUG
  • This old post by Scott Drummonds about VMDirectPath is worth revisiting!
  • I couldn’t have said it any better, Louis: The Best Thing Apple Does Is Ignore Everyone Else
  • Chad Sakac and the gang were great hosts last week. Here’s more about their cool new tiny array: VNXe = incredible things.. in tiny, transformer-like packages!
  • Jon Langemak’s post on SAN Terminology is worth reading for newbies to the storage scene
  • Finally, Further clarification from Google about h.264

Subscribe to my Google Reader feed or follow me on Twitter to see these in real-time.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2011. | Back From the Pile: Interesting Links, January 21, 2011
This post was categorized as Apple, Enterprise storage, Everything, Personal. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

Do we really need parallel NFS?

Did some pNFS proponent slip a love potion into the coffee at EMC? Suddenly it’s pNFS time at the company known for its reluctance to embrace file sharing and filesystems in general. The purple prose is flying, with Chad Sakac declaring himself “a big fan of the application of NFS” and Chuck Hollis extolling the “inherent simplicity and ease-of-management of NFS.” The NetApp guys must be amused by the bear hug from Hopkinton, but many are seeing deja-vu all over again.

Chad’s Icky Bits

(Apologies for that heading, but those are Chad’s words, not mine)

Chad Sakac’s red rose for pNFS included a few thorns aimed at good old NFSv3. He calls these the “icky bits” and spills some ink over them:

1. “NFS Server failure behavior,” says Chad, leads to issues as serious as “a guest OS crash” and administrators “resorting to unnatural acts” to compensate. He talks about EMC’s DART OS being optimized to fail over in under a minute to avoid application issues and the difficulty in actually accomplishing this feat.
2. Chad also points out that “NFS client limitations” can lead to “unexpected bottlenecks.” Load balancing large workloads across multiple gigabit Ethernet NICs means hand-tuning, since NFS pins traffic to a single MAC address.

Certainly these limitations were known to many in the storage industry, but haven’t they also been addressed repeatedly? NetApp, EMC, and BlueArc do indeed suggest adjusting NFS heartbeat values to allow time for the cluster to recover, but this seems more a limitation of their clustered server architecture than of NFS itself. Scale-out NFS servers from Isilon and HP don’t seem to require these “unnatural acts.”

As for client limitations, manually balancing client loads is a reality in many large storage architectures, not just NFS. Perhaps the fact that NFS can handle so many more I/O requests in a given timeslice makes this more of an issue, but it tends to be transient.

Chad has repeatedly expressed his love for NFS, especially as a datastore for VMware. Clearly, he intended to point out these “icky bits” to highlight the possibilities for pNFS. But the method used (calling them “icky” for one) resembles mud slinging.

Chuck Wants pNFS

(Chuck’s titles also lend themselves to mis-reading)

Chuck Hollis is more careful in his wording, extolling the virtues of pNFS without calling anything “icky”. Indeed, there’s just one NetApp dig: He says their “emulated containers of LUNs” are “hardly optimized”, which is a welcome change of tone from previous debates.

But the underlying message is the same: pNFS is new and wonderful, encouraging proliferation of hand-holding, flower distribution, and rainbows. Again I ask, is this really true? Is pNFS ready for this kind of adulation when, as Chuck points out, “it’s going to take a while before the rest of the portfolio, industry and ecosystem catches up.  Maybe a year or so.”

Seriously? A year until pNFS is ready for mass enterprise adoption? Admittedly, EMC has been working on pNFS (as MPFS) for a long time, but predictions of “just another year” for a major protocol transition set off warning bells. This is doubly true when most clients (including VMware) don’t yet offer even basic support.

Stephen’s Stance

One wonders if airing this dirty laundry is an attempt to highlight EMC’s pNFS work or to discredit plain old NFS as a datacenter protocol. As I wrote about in Our New Thing Is Awesome (‘Cause Our Old Thing Sucked), the “parade of progress” sometimes degenerates into “out with the old,” and this is perilous for purveyors of durable goods like storage systems.

I am also very concerned with the proliferation of “layout types” within pNFS. It seems that every vendor has a hand in the protocol, and each is adding their own technology to the mix. We started with files and now have both objects and blocks. Will these be widely supported? Do we really need them? Or will pNFS start looking like Bluetooth: Bloated, incompletely-implemented, and ignored except for special use cases.

But my motivation behind this post is simpler than that. I would like to pose a question: Is NFS (v3) really that “icky”? Do we really need pNFS? Or have these problems been solved previously?

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2010. | Is NFS v3 Really That Bad?
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage, Gestalt IT, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

Are you a vendor blogger or an independent? Can you straddle the line and be both?

Why Do Vendor Bloggers Matter?

I suppose it’s best to get some definitions out of the way at the outset. Blogging and social media is a diverse and ill-defined region of the Internet, a world which itself in its infancy. What I write here is focused on my particular corner of the online world: Enterprise IT infrastructure, and enterprise storage in particular. I am sure that other areas, both inside and outside of IT infrastructure, have different norms and values.

In fact, this particular focus on who is a vendor and who is not will seem peculiar to many. Some areas are dominated by insiders blogging for their employer, other companies are entirely absent from the blogging sphere (Exhibit A: Apple), and still others don’t make much of a fuss over who someone works for. Yet concern about payola and bias runs deep even in the most liberal circles.

Can You Trust It?

It boils down to a simple question: How much can you trust what you read? Blogging and other social media activities (Twitter, conferences, forums, etc) have come to dominate discourse and drive search engine ranking. An outspoken social media maven can drive mind-space and thought leadership using these tools. Yet the democratic Internet is open to any and all.

This kind of influence can be very subtle. A connected employee can be expected to be part of the larger conversation about a product, service, or technology. Once also expects them to influence this discussion, and this will always be biased based on their experience and background within the company. Where outside critics see a profit-motivated monolith, an employee sees an all-too-human company trying its best to succeed. And since that success feeds their children, it’s hard to expect them to be too critical.

Certainly some content is inherently trustworthy, especially in technical areas like IT. I love Chad Sakac’s posts on EMC/VMware integration, for example. I also look forward to reading what the VMware and Microsoft employee bloggers write, since they’re so detailed and factual. And finding this kind of content of a personal blog, even without disclosure, wouldn’t raise my hackles. But even the most technical blogs sometimes get into “mine is better than yours” arguments between vendors.

The world of strategy and opinion is much less black and white. Consider just about anything on Chuck Hollis’ blog. He writes at EMC.com and his content is always on point for that company. But many others (from many companies) write similarly corporate-focused pieces with much less disclosure. This is an old PR trick, and the Internet makes it easier than ever both to get published and to disguise affiliation.

But even with the best of intentions, we are all biased in one way or another. Our experience, our employer, our friends, and indeed the entire world we live in influence our experience. It is not a simple thing to be independent of this, and we should expect everyone to be impacted to one extent or another. The trick is to detect overt bias and manipulation.

Throwing Stones

I’m not trying to throw stones here. In fact, I write a vendor blog myself for my employer, Nirvanix. I am very used to wearing multiple hats, and I pride myself on my ability to step into and out of the corporate shadow. But it’s a very difficult game to play, and I’ve failed on occasion.

Rather, I’m hoping that this series of articles will spark some discussion on the whole concept of vendor blogs. I’ll be posting about the spectrum of options that corporate bloggers have, non-blogging soapboxes they use, and best practices to keep everything straight.

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

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2010. | Vendor Bloggers 1: Why Does It Matter?
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage, Personal, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

Driving Massive I/O

Chuck Hollis treated us to a discussion of vSphere as an I/O Engine on his blog this morning with some background on multipath IO (MPIO for short), but I’m not sure he did the topic justice. In my opinion, server virtualization is the greatest I/O driver ever brought into the data center, and it messes with all of our preconceived notions about I/O at the same time.

What’s so special about server virtualization?

1. Hypervisors concentrate I/O, shifting loads that were formerly distributed to a large number of I/O channels into a far fewer channels. Picture 10 servers doing what they do. Now put all 10 in a single physical box. All of their storage access must now share a bus, a host adapter, a cable, and perhaps a LUN on the storage system. It’s the difference between lemonade and lemon juice!
2. Hypervisors randomize I/O, chunking everything up and mixing it together. Forget about the carefully-designed read-ahead algorithms and caching used in enterprise storage – VMware, Hyper-V and the rest throw those expectations out the window! Virtualization is a blender – it grinds up your lemons, skin, seeds, and all!
3. Hypervisors demand low I/O latency, forcing infrastructure to get quicker, not just faster. This is one reason that caching, solid state disks, and 10 GbE are going to be huge in virtual environments – all reduce latency by orders of magnitude! As any car guy will tell you, quick and fast are two very different things!

The upshot of all of this is that virtual servers are very very hard to satisfy when it comes to I/O. And the “back end” has always been a bit of a bottleneck for virtualization software. Now we have VMware claiming that vSphere 4 can push over 300,000 I/O operations per second (IOPS) without resorting to VMDirectPath and similar “cheater” measures. Of course not all IOPS are equal, and I doubt that that 300k number would hold up with a real-world workload, but it’s impressive nonetheless!

A Brief History of MPIO

Let’s turn back to multipath I/O. PowerPath/VE is just the latest in a long line of path managers, not all of which have been well-loved. Back in my HP-UX days I learned to make the most of PVlinks, the native path management on that operating system. It wasn’t always easy to get it to work well, but it sure was nice to have a path manager built into the operating system! Veritas also offered a multi-platform path manager, DMP, which worked with a variety of array types. Back in the day, both were limited to simple failover and lacked the “intelligence” to deal with the peculiarities of the weird storage arrays we learned to not hate.

Array-specific path managers from storage vendors were much more successful. CLARiiONs used ATF, Hitachi arrays used HDLM, IBM had SDD, and of course EMC had PowerPath. EMC introduced PowerPath in 1997, the software reportedly having been developed by Conley Corporation, which EMC acquired the next year and turned into its Cambridge (MA) development center. After acquiring Data General, EMC adapted PowerPath to support CLARiiON, pushing ATF off stage right. Then they kept right on developing the software, adding support for IBM, HDS, and HP arrays and data migration.

Meanwhile, Microsoft decided that HP and Veritas were on to something when they developed standard path management software, so they began working on a standard multi-path IO (MPIO) driver for Windows. But Microsoft learned a thing or two from the mediocre device support in those old solutions, so they decided to allow vendors to plug their own smarts into the standard Windows Server 2000/2003 MPIO framework. Microsoft provided basic failover capability and third parties, including EMC, wrote their own device-specific modules (DSMs). This MPIO support evolved and spread, standard on Microsoft’s iSCSI initiator and Hyper-V virtualization platform. PowerPath 5.2.1 for Windows already supported Hyper-V thanks to this.

PowerPath and VMware PSA

VMware also learned a thing or two from HP and Microsoft. Although basic path failover support has been included in ESX for years, vSphere 4 takes it to a new level with pluggable storage architecture (PSA). Every version of ESX 4 includes native multipathing (NMP), but Enterprise Plus licensees can use vendor-supplied plugins to enable more advanced path management. As I noted on Tuesday, there are two three different levels of path selection: Basic path-selection plugins (PSPs), more advanced storage array type plugins (SATPs), and complete multi-path plugins (MPPs).

This is what EMC has introduced: An MPP for vSphere 4 called PowerPath/VE. Like the DSM for Windows MPIO, PowerPath/VE for vSphere slots right into an existing MPIO framework and enables advanced path selection and load balancing without mucking with the internals of the hypervisor. PowerPath/VE has all sorts of smarts in it. It has eight different predictive load balancing policies, proactive disconnect, bus testing, and HBA monitoring.

Super VMware guy Chad Sakac described PowerPath/VE as part of the launch. He notes that EMC is first out of the gate with a multipathing plugin for vSphere, but I suspect that just about every vendor will release similar functionality pretty quickly. In particular I expect support to come from NetApp and 3PAR, since they’re so interested in VMware support.

Licensing Questions

One thing really stuck out in the vSphere launch: PSA is only included in the top-of-the-line Enterprise Plus license. Presumably, this means that, in addition to paying for a PowerPath/VE license, users will have to spring for maximum ESX, too. This is a dumb move, if you ask me. Microsoft made MPIO successful by giving it away with every copy of Windows. They even included it in the free iSCSI initiator download. VMware, in contrast, seems to be actively limiting PSA’s usefulness to the top tier of users. If it was up to me, I would set the VMware MPIO free!

I’m working with EMC and VMware to determine the extent of the NMP/PSA/PowerPath licensing mess. I’ll update this post as I find out the answers!

1. Does every edition of ESX 4 include the basic VMware native multipathing (NMP)?
2. Can one use a vendor-supplied PSA plugin like PowerPath/VE without an enterprise plus license?
3. Does it matter (to licensing) if the plugin is a PSP or an SATP?
4. If “no” to 2 or 3, can PSA be added separately without the plus license if someone wants to use something like PowerPath/VE?

Update: I received a nice email from an EMC engineer correcting me about the plugin types. This kind of open communication is why the web is so great! It turns out that PowerPath/VE is a sort of super plugin called an MPP, not “just” an SATP or PSP. I’ve updated the section above!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2009. | PowerPath To The Virtual People
This post was categorized as Computer History, Enterprise storage, Gestalt IT, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

This news is so fresh you would leave footprints if you step in it, but here’s a collection of my favorite links and coverage so far. I’ll be updating this list throughout the next few days:

• Let’s start with independents:
  • My first post on the topic can be found over at Gestalt IT: EMC Symmetrix V-Max Is Neither Monolithic Nor Midrange
  • Chris Evans was first but promises more than Enterprise Computing: EMC Announced Next Generation V-Max Architecture
  • Storagebod supposes that there will be No DMX5
  • Duncan Epping is watching from a server virtualization perspective: EMC announced the Symmetrix V-Max!
  • Jerome Wendt: EMC Symmetrix V-Max – It’s About Time
• And the press:
  • Beth Pariseau is always smart, as her SearchStorage piece shows: EMC clusters Symmetrix high-end disk arrays
  • And Beth on StorageSoup: EMC launches Symmetrix V-Max, may add spin-down
  • Chris Mellor is dead on in his piece for The Register, Symmetrix and the death of monolithic arrays
  • Lucas Mearian of Computerworld focused his piece on the private cloud: EMC introduces x86-based Symmetrix array for cloud storage
  • Dave Raffo at StorageSoup: EMC V-Max: V stands for bigger
  • Paul Travis at Byte and Switch: EMC Clusters New Storage Systems for Virtual Data Centers
  • And Dave Simpson brings up the rear on his personal blog, but still no word from InfoStor: EMC V-Max: Locked (in) and loaded
• EMC’s bloggers are first out of the gate:
  • Barry Burke has typically prolific and detailed coverage: 
  • • 1.055: symmetrix v-max – a revolutionary evolution
    • 1.056: inside the virtual matrix architecture (my favorite)
    • 1.057: symmetrix v-max – scale up, scale out, scale away!
    • 1.058: v-max does what hi-star can’t?
    • 1.059: fully automated storage tiering (fast)
  • Chuck Hollis’ Symmetrix V-Max: Storage Architecture Redefined is a solid overview
  • Chad Sakac is always good, and his EMC’s VMware Storage Strategy – The 3rd Shoe Drops is a must-read on V-Max, though I’m still left wondering about EMC’s VMware strategy!
  • Mark Twomey’s there with three posts and counting:
    • V-Max: The Scale Out Symmetrix
    • VMax: Auto-provisioning Groups
    • V-Max: SRDF Evolves
  • Dick Sullivan promises You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet
  • Steve Todd:
    • V-Max Quality
    • Managing V-Max at Scale
  • Len Devanna comments on the Social Launch
• The opposition is moving fast, too!
  • Marc Farley preempted the announcement with a hilarious must-watch video, EMC insider interview is a fake, and an expose on What’s a tigon anyway?
  • Val Bercovici from NetApp observes that the world might have moved past the need for a Symmetrix, noting “Frames are so 90’s”
  • Hu Yoshida focuses on what the V-Max is not: A storage virtualization platform. Don’t Confuse Symmetrix V-Max with Storage Virtualization
  • Claus Mikkelsen of HDS was also predictably underwhelmed, asking why EMC introduced this roadmap now? EMC – Catching Up With the Past
  • Tony Asaro blogs for HDS about 10 Questions on V-Max

That’s the news that’s fit to print so far! Stick with this post and Gestalt IT’s continuing coverage of the V-Max!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2009. | Tracking EMC’s Symmetrix V-Max Launch
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

This got me thinking: The real distinction is between buyers and sellers of products and services. There is a spectrum on the sell side between being an independent and a company man, but we are all vendors. Our credibility comes from who we are, not where we work.

The Business of Consulting

Consulting is a simple and perilous business, and it is governed by a simple formula: Billing rate times billability is gross revenue, everything else is overhead. You keep what’s left over.

Only three elements matter to a consulting business, and all are variable

There are really only two reasons a customer hires a consultant:

1. They need specific skills or knowledge
2. They need focus or manpower

The consulting business rests on these simple elements, and we all try to make the best of them. But at the end of the day, a company that has to make its money selling services has to decide what it wants to be:

• Strategic and professional services (PS) organizations focus on maximizing rate by specializing in a special area of skill and take shorter-term engagements.
• Body shops or outsourcers focus on maximizing billability by providing low-rate manpower in long-term engagements.
• Subcontractors focus on reducing overhead by running lean and outsourcing services to non-employees (typically self-employed “1099″ consultants).

I’m using common jargon here, and most consulting businesses wouldn’t want to be classified into one of these buckets, but the business speaks for itself. For any given consulting shop, ask yourself one question: Which of the three factors in the equation is being maximized?

This simple math deeply affects the life of the consultant. Some decide to go it alone, happily risking a steady income for a higher rate as a 1099 subcontractor. Others choose to stick with the steady life of the outsourcer, accepting a lower pay but knowing where they’ll work each day. Personally, I always gravitated towards the strategic and PS roles because the focus on skills made me feel special.

Who Are You?

Let’s step back to that continuum of supply-siders for a moment. In my field of specialization, enterprise data storage, one can immediately identify some positions along the spectrum:

• PR people relentlessly and (sometimes) creatively push their clients. They are among the most vendor-focused folks out there because that’s their job!
• Marketing communications folks have to be creative to create a product-centric point of view, so you can expect solid vendor-angled messaging from them.
• Product marketing people tend to be much more technical and tend to truly believe in the virtues of their product, since they helped shape it.
• Subject-matter experts in the vendor and reseller community know the plusses and minuses of the products inside and out and love to get into deep technical discussions.
• Analysts present their opinions in a balanced way, but the topics they focus on are driven by the vendors they work with.
• Consultants vary in focus depending on the aims of their company, but tend to be more utilitarian, asking “what does this do for a customer?”

I have great affection for folks in every category on this list. Take Sunshine Mugrabi, for example, a PR pro who has taken that job to a whole new level of relevance with her work for Ocarina Networks. Or Marc Farley, who works somewhere in 3PAR marketing but still manages to crank out hilarious videos and thoughtful commentary. Or Chad Sakac, whose knowledge of VMware and storage makes him credible as much more than “an EMC guy”. And what about storage analyst extraordinaire, Steve Duplessie? This list could go on and on, so please accept my apologies, but I could not possibly include everyone I respect.

What’s the common denominator that makes someone credible? Simply that they rise above their positions to protect and project their personal reputations. Yes, they all work for vendors and they all deliver sales, but their work benefits the community well beyond that.

Credibility

The net is simply that we each build up or tear down our own credibility in life. Consultants, analysts, and pundits do not corner the market, and simply being in one of these fields does not make one especially independent or trustworthy. What matters is what we do with whatever soapbox we have. Do you trust me?

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2009. | Consulting Is A Perilous Business But Credibility Is What Matters
This post was categorized as Personal. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.