Was EMC World 2010

“Private cloud” wasn’t just the message of EMC World 2010, it was the slogan. The phrase was everywhere, from the airport to the taxis to the cycle rickshaws to the convention center walls. But end users seemed as confused as ever when talking to me, and EMC’s own show video proves the point: EMC’s customers are using virtualization and public cloud talking points, not the private cloud concepts EMC is pitching!

What is your cloud-computing strategy?

The first video asks for cloud strategy on Day 1 of the show.

1. “Putting together a solution for existing customers … to provide them the opportunity to leverage all of the capacity on demand … for emergency projects … as well as the cost savings” – Ok, so this guy is presumably a service provider of some sort. And his cloud strategy is to offer existing capacity to existing customers in emergencies. I’m not all that excited by this prospect, but I’m sure they’ll appreciate “the cost savings.”
2. “It’s still in development and it’s being defined by each of the different areas” – So he’s not really clear on that cloud thing, though he does get that storage, compute, and VM are different. I feel for you, brother, and hope you get answers at the show!
3. “We are in stage 2 of cloud evolution where we are trying to virtualize the core and mission critical applications” – Sounds like his company is trying to get server virtualization done first before working too hard on cloud. That’s probably a good IT strategy, but not really a cloud computing strategy.
4. “We’re talking about virtualization at my company” – This admitted “behind the curve” guy is also not too worried about cloud right now.
5. “We are talking about sharing data, talking about legal things like privacy; we have to put it somewhere and the private cloud is for collaboration.” – I talked to this guy at the show and he’s super-smart. He understands the cloud concept, is working toward it, and is doing the right things to get there. But he didn’t really mention this in the video.

There aren’t a lot of strategies mentioned here. And it doesn’t seem like their strategies match up with EMC’s private cloud vision going into the show. Let’s see how that changes over the three days of the event.

What are the business opportunities that the cloud will create?

Day 2 attendees would have been relentlessly pounded by EMC’s private cloud messaging. So what are they saying now?

1. “It allows us to virtualize and spread our services to different locations that we wouldn’t be able to provide the services to before.” – He starts with a private cloud pitch (equating cloud with virtualization) but then shifts to a location independence that’s not easily attainable with private cloud. If you can’t provide services to a location now, how does private cloud fix this? I can see accessing a public service over the Internet fixing this, but EMC’s big-iron infrastructure-centric vision of private cloud ain’t gonna help.
2. “What we’ve done is moved about 95% virtualized, so we’ve moved a lot of our applications, mission-critical applications, into the virtualized world, so our cloud is going good.” – Great for you! Seriously, this guy has a virtualization dream and he’s totally satisfied with that as his cloud. Sounds like EMC has very little selling to do here and he’s not all that interested in any new cloud vision.
3. “We have a private cloud. It’s great. It’s flexible. The business … needs to turn on a dime … so cloud computing is the way to go for us.” – Ok, so here again we have a company that already has a private cloud (presumably this is his synonym for server virtualization) and loves it. This is great, but it’s again hard to see what his cloud is and if it’s aligned with EMC’s vision.
4. “Different companies will be able to share data among each other a lot faster and quicker, instead of flying it to each other; it saves time and money.” – This guy is talking about public cloud, clearly. I haven’t heard data sharing and interchange used as a selling point for private cloud. To the contrary, data security is the primary FUD of private cloud proponents.
5. “We know we have components we need today but looking at the whole cloud it’s constantly changing so the industry will have to respond to the different niche markets within those clouds.” – These are not the words of someone who is sold on private cloud. He sounds like a skeptic, or perhaps a realist, who is sick of hearing half-baked cloud schemes and is politely asking for more business-aligned solutions. Amen, brother, I’m with you!

The gist from these folks, and those I talked to, is that cloud is just a new word for virtualization and “we’ve got that.” Have we moved on from the cloud meme yet? Or is this a sign of massive misunderstanding about what cloud really is and can be? Simply put, the EMC World attendees don’t see cloud as something they have to go out and buy right now. That’s probably not the message EMC wanted to send…

What did you learn?

Although the “what did you learn” video is much more on-message, it’s not clear that customers came out of EMC World with any actionable knowledge about private cloud. One attendee says, “cloud is not just vaporware anymore,” while another agrees, “we need to consolidate and think in terms of the cloud.” Yet most are still enthusing about storage features (“new Symmetrix features” and “VPLEX”) rather than the wholesale change to IT that the cloud represents. As the last guy says, “think about the future.” EMC itself ought to heed this advice!

What did I learn from these videos? That customers aren’t getting the message but are pretty good at learning the words. Most IT practitioners still don’t see the coming business/IT schism and don’t grasp that cloud is much bigger than virtualization. But they’re trying hard to figure it out. I hope they look farther than the singular vision they got from EMC World.

I’m not trying to lampoon EMC or these show attendees. Far from it! This stuff is hard to grasp, and many companies are sending conflicting messages (if not outright FUD). I’m trying to stay on top of the messaging and I find it difficult. Imagine how hard it is for your average business person!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2010. | Could EMC World Attendees Have Missed The Private Cloud Message?
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.

Everyone is a vendor - what are you selling?

We’re All Selling Something

I’ve always been a vendor blogger, and so have you. It took me a long time to come to terms with this, but nearly everybody is a vendor of one sort or another: Regardless of whether you deliver results to your employer, sell your own services, or push a product, we’re all selling something.

I’ve been delivering enterprise IT consulting for a living for almost 15 years now. It’s easy to pretend that human services like consulting are somehow more pure than the “box pushers”, but this is simply not the case. Even internal end-user employees are trying to keep themselves employed, and the most effective way to do this is to promote their company and themselves.

It’s not a black and white scale. If we are all selling ourselves and our employers,then we are all vendors to greater or lesser extents. We all have our axes to grind, our prejudices to expose, and only our experience to draw on. So no one is perfectly credible and no one is perfectly tainted.

I’ve long labored to maintain my credibility and independence, even as I have moved from an IT outsourcer (Sprint Paranet) to a storage service provider (StorageNetworks) to strategic consulting companies (GlassHouse Technologies and Contoural) to a cloud storage provider (Nirvanix). I’ve always remained separate from any product focus, but I’ve always been part of the sales and delivery process for consulting services.

Get Out Of Jail Free?

The fact that it’s all shades of gray does not mean, however, that we are free to twist the facts with impunity or that we should object when others pass judgement on our motivations. Quite the opposite: If we are all vendors, we all had better be careful what our actions say about us!

This is the most important lesson I have learned about blogging: Credibility is our currency, and no one has yet offered me enough reward to sacrifice mine. Can I be bought? Well, in the words of Jayne Cobb, “that’ll be an interesting day!”

Because I recognize the importance of credibility, I try to keep a level head and maintain a respectable persona. This means avoiding personality-driven battles and engaging in accptable business practices I would be proud for the world to know. This isn’t always easy: As your personal profile rises, there will be outside pressure (or inside temptation) to leverage it. Our shared challenge is to keep level heads.

The Messenger Matters

One inescapable fact remains: Employees of companies known for FUD are held to a higher standard of scrutiny. No matter how personally responsible and credible you are, if you work for a marketing-driven product vendor, you will be under the microscope.

Comments that would be considered innocuous or even respectably aloof from an “independent” might seem like mud slinging from a vendor employee. Imagine reading blog posts or tweets from an end user criticizing the products of Microsoft and IBM. If the exact same statements were made by employees of EMC or HP, wouldn’t they be seen in a different light? The message is the same, but the messenger matters.

I have personally experienced the doors that close when moving from a consulting company to a managed service provider. Certain publications and event organizers have strict rules denying “vendors” the right to participate; others have no such restrictions. I was sad to say goodbye to TechTarget after 5 years, but I respect their rules. Happily, as their door closed, others opened and I was able to write and present more last year than any year previous!

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

My Approach

My new role at Nirvanix explicitly allowed me to continue my personal social media presence, including organizing Gestalt IT and Tech Field Day. Management saw that my reputation was a benefit to the company and trusted I would remain objective and keep my work and non-work roles separated.

I’ve endeavored to do just that, launching a new blog, Enterprise Storage Strategies, specifically for cloud storage strategy and restricted crossover between the two domains. In the interest of objectivity, I’ve also “recused” myself from discussions of cloud storage on the Gestalt IT web site and at Tech Field Day.

I don’t want to say that this is the correct approach for everyone, but it’s worked well for me. What do you think? How can vendor bloggers remain credible in the increasingly social world?

Hot dog cart image by rollingrck

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2010. | What I’ve Learned From Vendor Blogging
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.

HP invited bloggers to Colorado to show off their storage offerings at Tech Day 2009

Well that was interesting! I spent Monday and Tuesday with a dozen bloggers in Colorado Springs learning about HP’s key StorageWorks products from the executives and engineers of that storied company. Throughout the event, we listened, asked tough questions, and tweeted incessantly. HP Tech Day generated an avalanche of publicity for the company, including press articles and cries of FUD and misdirection.

Here is the truth: HP and Ivy did a darn fine job of putting together a set of sessions to tell us what they have. They presented folks who really knew their stuff, warts and all. They invited a variety of independent voices and let us ask and say anything we wanted with no expectations, let alone an NDA. This was a stellar event, and every other IT company should be asking why they didn’t do it first.

Won’t Be Fooled

But what was HP Tech Day really all about? Did they brainwash us into thinking the EVA was exciting? Did HP hoodwink and misdirect us from noticing the gaps and overlaps in their product line? Were we dazzled enough to no longer question their storage strategy? Of course not! Robin Harris has seen it all before. Rich Brambley can dissect a presentation with the best of them. Nigel Poulton questions everything he sees. This was not a love-fest, and there were some seriously uncomfortable moments for the HP crew.

We were all savvy enough to know what the score was: HP (and especially their StorageWorks product line) has never received much press or blogger attention. They invited us in to spread the word about their products and get blog exposure. And it worked! The storage Twitter-sphere was dominated with #HPTechDay postings for days, and attendees did indeed blog about the stuff they saw. It was a success from HP’s perspective, and now that we know more about their products we will likely cover them in the future.

I personally never blogged much about HP products. I compared them to Ford, called one product an all-time cool flop, and covered their acquisition of LeftHand and Ibrix, but that’s about it. I didn’t even notice that they had started selling LSI’s StoreAge-based virtualization platform, and didn’t know enough about their other product releases over the last two years to mention them. If it hadn’t been for Calvin Zito and the HP Tech Day, I probably wouldn’t mention them in the future, either. They just weren’t on my radar.

We Were Educated

This has changed as a result of Tech Day. I now know that EVA is still pretty much what I thought it was but that it is fairly simple to configure. I now know that HP has two lines of deduplication appliances, and that one is homegrown. I now know that HP develops and sells a FC SAN virtualization platform based on the LSI/StoreAge product. This was great product exposure for HP: Even though I still don’t think I’ll focus on these offerings, at least I now know that they exist.

We also saw some more interesting content: HP plans to leverage their excellent ProLiant server and blade technology to underpin a line of commodity-based storage and consolidated virtualization offerings. This is exciting stuff, and builds on HP’s base and their recent acquisitions. The most interesting concept I saw was a combination of a blade chassis and ultra-dense storage system with VMware ESX, LeftHand, Ibrix, and HP’s management software. They definitely plan to challenge Cisco/EMC and IBM in this market.

But the best part of the event was the people of HP. The company was smart enough to bring in the techies rather than executive marketing droids. They gave us straight and honest answers about their product capabilities and their place within the company, sometimes to the chagrin of others in the room. We saw conflicting definitions, product line overlaps, internal competition, and got a feel for the realities of this massive company. Every company is like this, but most would never admit what we already know. By not showering us with slick FUD, HP won our respect in a way that I would not have thought possible.

Colorado Take-Away

The event was great. Every other IT company should wise up and do the same. But I bet they won’t have the nerve to do it as openly, and I expect HP will be more careful next time too. As for HP’s products, let me lay out my honest opinion:

1. LeftHand was a bargain. HP could replace their entire sub-XP block storage product line with LeftHand variants based on commodity Intel hardware. I think they should.
2. Ibrix is too new to judge, but will likely take a seat next to LeftHand in a unified commodity-based scale-out SAN/NAS platform.
3. I hope HP hasn’t lost focus on their excellent Hitachi-based XP line, since it’s the only challenger they have to EMC Symmetrix at the high end of the market.
4. HP’s excellent server and blade hardware should be leveraged throughout the company and oddball hardware should be curtailed.
5. HP has an interesting lineup of Windows Storage Server and Windows Home Server hardware aimed at the low-end SOHO and SMB market. I’m not a Windows hater, but wouldn’t it be cool to have a super-low-end LeftHand variant there too?
6. I wonder if HP’s home-grown in-line deduplication (the D2D line) could replace the Sepaton-sourced post-process VLS line or vice-versa if an acquisition of that company happens.
7. I don’t “get” SVSP, the LSI/StoreAge SAN virtualization platform. It’s nice and it seems to work, but why introduce a FC SAN virtualization platform at this point? Maybe it sells when integrated with EVA, but not as a standalone product.
8. Where are all the storage arrays that use 2.5″ disk drives that HP talked about over the last few years? And where are the flash solid state drives?
9. They were like deer in the headlights with no story when I asked about sub-LUN automated tiered storage since even full-LUN automation has not yet been released. Might EMC get there first?
10. As for the absence of DCB and FCoE, HP seems to think that Virtual Connect and Flex-10 are good enough for now. HP will OEM a CNA soon and might possibly consider the Cisco Nexus 4000. Maybe. They had better have a more-convincing story when this stuff takes off next year!
11. Most importantly, where is the cloud strategy? I applaud HP for not overusing the current buzzword, but it almost seems like they are avoiding the topic entirely.

I am left thinking that HP is like a boxed puzzle. All of the pieces are there, but they haven’t been put into place yet. Let’s hope Dave Donatelli and his crew can help them work it out when he takes his post as czar of servers, networking, and storage next year. For now, I’ve gained a lot of respect for the people of HP and a pile of knowledge about their storage products. And HP has gained my attention.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2009. | The Truth About HP’s Tech Day
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage, Everything, Gestalt IT, Personal, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

But cloud services are different. Seriously! Cloud services don’t need standards because:

1. Cloud services are still rapidly evolving – No one knows how they will look in a year, let alone a decade, and a premature standard will be worthless. Similarly, it’s not at all clear what use cases will eventually win out, and usage should drive interfaces, not the other way around.
2. Cloud services are many and varied – It’s incredibly hard to come up with a reasonably-complete standard programming API or management platform when each vendor’s offering is radically different. Standards must follow the 80/20 rule, but today’s cloud offerings are only about 20% similar.
3. (Real) cloud systems are open already – The whole point of the public cloud is to leverage existing open standards for access (IP/HTTP) and any worthwhile service already has a freely-usable REST-like API. Cloud services are engineered to be programmable and open, so the only lock-in is in how you use the cloud.

We can’t even agree on terminology at this point. Is data storage as a service DaaS (as SNIA says) or STaaS (as NetApp says)? How do you define public, private, and hybrid cloud? And what is cloud anyway? Cloud computing is not a war, it’s a fantastically exciting race to deliver value!

Open for Business

I’d like to return for a moment to that last point: The key element I’ve seen in most interesting cloudy products is programmability. Service providers publish API documents outlining the inputs, processing, and outputs for their systems and developers and end users create applications that leverage these. The best of these APIs use the concept of REST, delivering services through extremely simple and self-contained HTTP calls. This barely even rises to the level of software coding (and thus isn’t a true API) and is the hallmark of the cloud.

These systems are wide open: You can explore their interfaces, discovering new ways to use the them that were never intended. The same process accompanies all Internet systems, from RSS and Atom to Yahoo Finance. Just as one can rapidly migrate from Yahoo to Google by substituting a few URLs and parameters, so too can one move between cloud platforms.

Note that certain cloud systems lend themselves more to this kind of mobility. Once cannot move virtual machines from Amazon EC2 to Rackspace or Terremark because the underlying hypervisor technology is different. But even here companies like RightScale are stepping in to enable mobility.

When it comes to cloud storage services, the major players’ interfaces are open enough that migrating data in and out is simply a matter of performance: Read from this one, write to that one, and wait until the process is done. I am not a programmer and yet I was able to port an application from S3 to Nirvanix in just a few hours using only the respective API documentation. Interfaces like CloudLoop can also be leveraged to ease the movement of data.

Standards When?

Cloud services will eventually settle down and be standardized. I expect a workable cross-platform API for RESTful cloud storage within 24 months, for example. And one expects that the management of cloud compute instances will pass through a consistent and stable interface in that same timeframe. But these will develop as a natural part of the evolution of the systems themselves, not through some artificial “build it and they will come” standardization process.

There is nothing wrong with big companies sending their representatives to SNIA and DMTF meetings to talk about standardization. In fact, this is a great way to discuss ideas and begin to orient the industry. But the time for standards has not yet come, and users of cloud services have no need to wait for them. In fact, waiting for a standard will just prolong the maturation of cloud services, since real-world applications are the external pressure that forces evolutionary selection. Amazon would never have created their virtual private cloud (VPC) capability without customer input, and they will never perfect this capability if they rely only on pundits, bloggers, and product marketers.

Even when standards do appear, they will not eliminate per-solution APIs. Cloud service providers will continue to explore new concepts, and these will appear first in “proprietary” interfaces. Perhaps they will use entirely unique calls, or perhaps they will leverage reserved or unassigned sections of the standard, but innovation will continue. Witness the radical changes in HTML versions to date, the additions to CSS, and the wide world of browser plugins.

So we don’t need cloud standards yet. They will come, whether artificially pushed by committees or evolving through use, but only useful standards will survive. Isn’t that just how it should be?

Note: I am employed by Nirvanix, a cloud managed storage service provider, providing independent cloud strategy advice as Director of Consulting. Although this article was not created for my employer and is not intended to reflect their views, my perceptions are obviously colored by my daily work.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2009. | We Don’t Need Cloud Standards (Yet)
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.