I will be wearing two hats at the show as usual:

1. I’ll be attending as press, representing this blog and Gestalt IT and learning about all of the new storage technology being launched. I’ve got some questions for quite a few companies, too, and look forward to covering their products here in the future.
2. I’ll also be introducing my new Nirvanix Consulting practice, and probably fielding lots of questions about what exactly that means.

I’ve got a full roster of meetings, both informal and scheduled, over the next three days. Along with many, many marketing reps, I’m looking forward to meeting tons of storage bloggers, some old friends and some for the first time: George Crump, Steve Duplessie, Carter George, Howard Marks, Beth Pariseau, Dave Simpson, Jerome Wendt, Hu Yoshida, IDC, ESG, and The Wikibonners, I hope I didn’t miss anyone, but I’m sure I did. Greg? Mark? Marc?

Traveler's unicorn: A 3 oz tube of toothpaste! Why did it take so long for a TSA-approved tube?

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2009. | Spring Storage Networking World 2009, Here I Come!
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.

Challenges for Enterprise IT

I’ve spent 15 years focused on the business of IT, with a special interest in data storage, since it makes up such a large part of modern information systems and budgets. The current crisis has forced many of us in enterprise IT to focus inward, tackling the tough challenges inside our data centers rather than adding on exciting new capabilities. The priority has shifted from features with a potential for cost avoidance to real current-year cost savings.

Even as budgets are tightening, we continue to pour good money after bad. This happens everywhere, buying too much of what we don’t want or need.

• As the high end marches ever-higher, we find that most applications require lower tiers of capability
• Data center managers are scrambling to control power and cooling costs
• At the same time, utilization of existing resources remains low, especially storage systems

But change is in the air. Enterprise IT is questioning their old assumptions.

• The monolith of IT infrastructure is finally becoming a pyramid, with a small amount of super high-end “tier-0″ capability and a widening reliance on lower tiers of bulk capacity
• Virtualization of servers and storage is having a real impact, enabling mobility of systems, applications, and data across tiers
• Enterprise IT is increasingly offloading non-essential services to outside partners who can deliver focus and economics

A New Challenge for Me

I have always tried to focus my efforts on making a difference in my little corner of the world, so the time has come for me to make a change professionally.

I am pleased to announce that I am joining Nirvanix, where I will be starting a new strategic consulting practice. We will focus on enabling enterprise customers to leverage modern data storage technology for infrastructure transformation. Nirvanix shares my vision of evolved IT infrastructure supported by tiers of applications, servers, and especially storage. Nirvanix moving forward and attacking the storage issues that face enterprise IT head-on!

I pride myself on giving honest and straightforward advice, and this will not change. Nirvanix Consulting will deliver independent and trustworthy advice, and this is exactly what enterprise IT organizations require and demand. Although Nirvanix provides managed offsite storage as a service to enterprise customers, this offering is not the correct answer for every application or business. In discussing this business concept with Nirvanx CEO, Jim Zierick, I stressed that I will certainly sometimes recommend competing solutions, and that the right move for some is reuse of existing assets. Zierick, who was formerly a partner at the respected consultancy, McKinsey, agrees with this independent approach. We must help each client to develop a strategy that is appropriate to their needs.

Although I have a new professional affiliation, my independence and commitment to the storage community will not change. I remain committed to open communication, and will maintain my Pack Rat blog, Gestalt IT, and my other public writing and speaking activities. Now let’s get down to work!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2009. | Changing Times Demand Focus
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.

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.

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.

These days, when another parent at the soccer game or church asks what I do for a living, I go through a little semantic dance.  I start with business consulting, move on to big companies and their computer systems, and finally mutter something about data storage.  If I told them I consulted in the field of enterprise storage, they’d probably think of big parking lots and a rental car agency.  It was different in Massachusetts, of course.  There, I could just say ” the stuff EMC does” and they would have a pretty good idea.

But EMC, and Massachusetts, is not the real world, bringing me to today’s topic: information, data, and storage.  We are storage people, and we work in the storage industry, but storage is not important to the world at large.  They think about information, first, and occasionally about data.  Mostly, our industry is a negative in the real world: “my computer died and I lost my data”, or “my credit card company lost a tape of personal data”.

Even in business, nobody cares about ILM, virtualization, thin provisioning, iSCSI, or any of the topics that we spend all our time focused on.  Data storage is a necessity to build cars, drill for oil, sell mortgages, and so on.  If they can do these things efficiently without so much IT infrastructure and investment, then they probably would.  In the meantime, they’ll keep the lights on the IT until something else better comes along.

What can we do?  Well, we had better start by making sure that we are as valuable to the business as we possibly can be, keeping in mind that data storage should never be a priority at a major company.  We need to keep more humility, realizing that the business cares about information, knows about data, and ignores storage, and this is really how it should be.  We need to make sure that we take care of the business data entrusted to us, and that we keep the storage infrastructure out of the way.

We can do this by focusing our efforts in two ways: make sure our data storage infrastructures are bulletproof, and help the business understand our data storage capabilities on their terms.  Storage technology, and storage managers, are getting pretty good at keeping things working.  So let’s stop putting so much attention on the latest and greatest storage devices, and start thinking about better ways to care for the data that has been entrusted to us.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2007. | Information, Data, and Storage
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.