A Better Way to Dedupe Data: Dedupe Everywhere

You might also want to read When Marketing Becomes Pointless and The Epidemiology of Viral Videos

Stephen’s Stance

If you’ve been following the IT industry and my blog for a while, you probably recall the Mini Cooper stunts EMC pulled earlier in 2011: They packed a bunch of contortionists into a Mini at their New York event, while simultaneously parking a bunch of logo covered cars in front of NetApp headquarters. This was intended to demonstrate something about storage, but the exact point escaped me. In the end, the whole thing seems mean-spirited and pointless.

The Symantec video included here is an entirely different animal. It’s exactly the sort of thing I approve of: A lighthearted look at a serious technical topic with only a gentle poke at the “opposition”. And I bet producing this video was a lot less expensive than hiring an acrobat school! Let’s hear it for social media!

Disclaimer: Symantec is a frequent presenter at Tech Field Day and I have worked with them often on other projects. But this post is my own idea and I’m getting no compensation related to this video. I just liked it and wanted to spread the word!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2011. | How Many Social Media Marketing Campaigns Fit Into a Mini Cooper?
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.

• My writing
  • First up, a battery charger? La Crosse BC-700 Review: A Battery Charger That Does Not Suck
  • I urge you to See W. Curtis Preston’s Backup Central Live!
  • I was looking for The Best Network Card For VMware ESX Home Lab Machines
  • From my Network Computing blog: Unified Storage: What Is It Good For?
  • I was amazed to see the result of my HP Photosmart printer series: The Power of Negative Publicity
• Other great links
  • Chris Evans wrote a solid piece for Datamation: Virtualization and Storage: Overview, Vendor Solutions
  • Matt Simmons talks about dealing with storage: I’m here to shard data and chew bubblegum…
  • Alex Popescu’s 5 Approaches to Scalable Storage Solutions led to Jeff Darcy’s Introduction to Distributed Filesystems
  • Xangati talks Field Day: Running Comprehensive and Deep at Tech Field Day #5
  • And then there’s Wireless Field Day, courtesy of Andrew von Nagy: Shamrockin’ the Wireless Industry
  • Greg Ferro continues spreading the word on FCoTR: Presenting Silvano Gai With FCoTR Button
  • Howard Marks takes up the topic of specialized hard disk drives: Yes, Virginia, RAID Drives Are Different
  • Howard was spurred by Simon Gallagher, among others: Home Labbers beware of using Western Digital SATA HDDs with a RAID Controller
  • The continuing saga of Google Chrome and H.264 takes a weird turn: Microsoft adds H.264 support to Google Chrome
  • Simon Long fights the good fight, presenting solid technical info: VMware View Desktops: IDE or SCSI? BusLogic, LSI Logic or PVSCSI?
  • A key topic in storage is the balance between performance and capacity, as noted by Xiotech: Performance and Capacity Tradeoffs and the Rise of a New Class of Storage
  • An amusing infographic: The United States of Shame (CHART)
  • Kevin Houston takes on Cisco UCS: What Cisco Has to Do to Win the Blade Server Market
  • Finally, Jeremy Gaddis is back with Bypassing the Internet Kill Switch

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, February 4, 2011
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage, Personal, Terabyte home, 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.

EMC’s $3 Billion Announcement

The events of January 18, 2011 marked a new boldness for EMC marketing. The storage giant is not known as a clever marketing machine, but change is in the air. New Chief Marketing Officer Jeremy Burton was lauded by many today for the bolder strategy, and the company’s management, board, and stockholders must be pleased by his performance.

EMC CEO Joe Tucci kicks off the

EMC’s share price has slumped for almost a decade, yet has risen steadily over the past year. Although lagging behind rival NetApp in terms of growth, EMC shares jumped dramatically over the last three days. As the details of today’s announcement leaked, the stock rose $1.50, or about 5%. With 2.1 billion shares outstanding, this gain represents $3 billion of market capitalization.

While EMC’s engineering team delivered a compelling new unified storage platform as well as solid upgrades across the line, EMC’s marketing deserves much of the credit for the sudden rise in valuation. Opinions regarding the product announcements were positive but not overwhelmingly so. But the “record breaking” theme of the event generated buzz from unlikely corners and drew applause from the audience.

It wasn't clear how packing 26 women in a Mini Cooper related to the product launches

NetApp Decries “Childish” Moves

EMC's Jeremy Burton tweeted this photo of the Minis at NetApp HQ

EMC’s marketing push also included pointed taunts at one key enterprise storage rival, NetApp. Tuesday morning saw a fleet of Mini Cooper cars wrapped in EMC branding parked outside NetApp’s Sunnyvale headquarters, and EMC slogans appeared on the pavement outside at least two offices.

This guerilla marketing tactic was lauded by the EMCers I talked to in New York. They chuckled at the audacious “branding” of NetApp’s offices, passing around photos of the cars on Twitter and internal sites.

NetApp PR director, Roger Villareal, voiced the annoyance expressed by some within that company at the pointed statement made by EMC’s moves. “EMC defaced NetApp HQ sidewalks,” tweeted Villareal, while others speculated about the nature of the marking campaign.

A NetApp contact provided this photo of the sidewalk logo

EMC insiders tell me they used a stencil and power washer to avoid “vandalizing” the NetApp property in a more-permanent manner, but the folks at NetApp were not so sure. One suggested it was “acid etched” and thus a permanent defacement of the property.

Update: Chad Sakac of EMC has unambiguously stated that this was “power-washed with a stencil.” NetApp should be able to easily remove the lettering by pressure-washing the surrounding area.

The presence of branded EMC Mini Cooper cars at NetApp HQ also raised questions. EMC pulled a similar stunt in November of last year, sending in billboard trucks during a major NetApp announcement. The photo of the EMC Minis was first tweeted and uploaded to the YFrog account of none other than Jeremy Burton, suggesting his pride at the action.

Note that these stunts occurred far from EMC’s announcement and would likely only be visible to NetApp employees but for the power of the Internet. Even Twitter, puzzlingly propelled more by NetApp tweets than from EMC, didn’t increase their visibility much. These stunts appear to be designed for the internal consumption of EMC and NetApp employees.

Stephen’s Stance

Another view of the sidewalk lettering

Native Americans of the American plains demonstrated their courage through the “coup” of touching their opponents and escaping unharmed. EMC appears similarly to “count coup” by “tagging” NetApp’s buildings with their logo and message. But what’s the point?

Such stunts are hardly unusual in corporate PR, but uncommon in enterprise storage. It is unlikely that customer buying decisions would be impacted positively by actions like this. In fact, large enterprise customers might be turned off by behavior they view as childish.

The launch of the VNX series, which is obviously inspired by and aimed at NetApp, does mesh with these branding stunts in one way: They show that EMC considers NetApp their main market threat. This must be gratifying to the smaller Sunnyvale company, and should entice the storage teams at HP, Dell, IBM, Oracle, and HDS to step up their games.

You might also want to read Every Company Is Gunning For Someone Else and When Marketing Becomes Pointless

Generating buzz for new products is certainly beneficial to EMC, and Burton’s announcement paid off in a big way in terms of corporate valuation. But mean-spirited taunting, like Twitter fights, will backfire. EMC should focus its newfound marketing muscle on positive messaging, not provoking their smaller competitor.

EMC provided air, hotel, dinner, and some delicious chocolate

Disclaimer: EMC paid for my airfare and hotel accommodations to attend this event. They also took me out for an excellent Sushi dinner and snuck into my hotel room to leave some Lindt chocolates on my bed. EMC and NetApp have both also sponsored Tech Field Day, an event I organize.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2011. | EMC Taunts NetApp: Counting Coup or Poor Sportsmanship?
This post was categorized as Computer History, 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.

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.

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.

This is part of an ongoing series of longer articles I will be posting every Sunday.

This is not a political blog, and this will not be a political post. But there is something to be learned about marketing from the way that political campaigns market their candidates, and this is a lesson for all time.

Watching the polls on FiveThirtyEight, the push and pull between moonbats and wingnuts on Electicker, and the strongly opposed views expressed in the letters to the editor section of my local paper, I began to ask myself how two obviously different candidates could be so close in the polls. Are Americans really divided almost equally between these two men, their running mates, and their platforms? How can so many people want the old senator and the unqualified governor? How can so many want the pairing of un-American and crazy senators?

I began comparing them to Coke and Pepsi, McDonald’s and Burger King, and I realized I was right. These candidates are marketed with extreme precision to maximize their appeal to the widest set of American voters. I imagine that their intrinsic qualities could eliminate them from consideration for some and cement their appeal to others, but the bulk of the electorate is swinging on the messaging. And this simple fact explains why Obama/Biden is now leading against McCain/Palin.

Demicans and Republicrats?

Sometimes, during election time, the candidates speeches can seem to be eerily similar. This was especially the case at the debates, where both Obama and McCain hit the same notes, made the same points, and seemed to be delivering the same messages: Change, fairness, helping the economy, foreign policy strength, and energy independence.

A reasonable person could easily have seen their own beliefs reflected in either candidate. And as in every election, roughly half of all Americans seem to be rooting for one candidate, and half for the other. Are we really divided, red versus blue, or is there something else at work here?

Now let us consider the stump speeches, conventions, and deeper conversations that each candidate has had. Although they pander to their listeners, as was made plain recently, with Obama praising both the Tampa Bay Rays and Philadelphia Phillies, and Palin rooting for these two as well as the Boston Red Sox, they also try to draw out distinctions.

These candidates are very much not the same. Their views differ greatly on major issues of the day, from tax structures to international relations to energy. A thoughtful listener hears a message of trickle-down economics versus lower- and middle-class support, of hawkishness versus engagement, and of increased supply versus alternatives and conservation from McCain and Obama, respectively. Nowhere is the difference more apparent than in the health plans of the two candidates: One is decidedly free-market while the other is government-driven.

Marketing takeaway: Sometimes, two products with distinct and meaningful differences can be so cleverly positioned that some rational people can’t tell them apart!

Going Negative

Ohio residents are deluged with anti-Obama mailings like these from the state Republican Committee

But these issues don’t get as much coverage as hot buttons like abortion, gay rights, and civil liberties. And nothing wins like pointing out the negatives of the other guy.

Carefully-selected name-calling seems to be the tactic of choice: Palin and McCain are careful to not exactly call Obama a communist, a terrorist, or a non-American, but their speeches seem to leave their listeners with these impressions. Similarly, Obama and Biden have been using words like “erratic” to draw a conclusion from the listener that McCain is senile, and thus too old to be president, or even downright crazy.

The Obama side has been carefully tiptoeing around questioning McCain’s age, just as the McCain side has been with the fact that Obama is black. Neither wants to come out and say these things for fear of alienating voters, but both wants to plant the seed in the listener’s mind. This is especially true when the other guy or his fans slip up, like Murtha’s “racist area” comment or the shouts of Republican rally attendees.

Marketing takeaway: Negative positioning of a competing product can take many forms, from blatant attacks to subtle “meme implants”, but the overt messaging of true believers can be much more damaging!

Feedback Loop

The exhaustive coverage of polling at Pollster, RealClearPolitics, and especially FiveThirtyEight really boggles the mind. I’m something of a math nut, so Nate Silver’s explanations of the intricacies of political polling has been a blast to watch unfold. The mechanics of polling vary somewhat and are prone to error, but the combination of these different polls becomes a powerful predictor of the future. And I’m not the only one watching!

Each campaign has its own poll watchers and spin masters, and these are constantly reacting to up-to-the-minute feedback from the voters. Not only are they dissecting the 40 or so polls that we see, they are commissioning their own polls to figure out how one issue or another can be positioned to maximize their appeal. It’s a tug of war between two slick machines.  American national politics is like the Segway two-wheeled scooter – constantly taking input from the tilt sensors to keep it perfectly balanced.

Marketing takeaway: When powerful opposing forces have the same data, it’s easy to play to a draw!

Winning

Obama's mailings don't even mention John McCain - they're all about energizing voters to turn out at the polls

One would think that these well-funded and informed campaigns would always reach a stalemate, and indeed national polls routinely show a near-even split between Obama and McCain, just as they do nearly every year. Yet, most elections are called fairly decisively, and this year is tilting strongly towards Obama.

How can this be? Simply put, it is not public opinion that declares a winner. No amount of positioning can force a consumer to buy a car he can’t afford – he has to decide to go out there and buy it. Analysis of past elections shows that elections are normally decided based on the enthusiasm behind a candidate rather than the general opinion of the electorate. Democrats weren’t all that enthusiastic about Kerry, Gore, Dukakis, Mondale, and the rest, just as Republicans weren’t too enthusiastic about George H. W. Bush and Bob Dole.

And yes, Republicans really aren’t all that energized by John McCain, either. Sure, they’d like him to win. And yes, they don’t want the un-American socialist in office. But if it wasn’t for Palin, they wouldn’t even be bothering with the man many Republicans have long regarded with scorn as a traitor and outsider to their party.

Contrast this with the fire in the Obama supporters. They love him even more than the right loves Palin, and that’s really saying something! Most analysts expect a strong pro-Obama turnout on Tuesday and expect it will match the pro-Bush, pro-Clinton, and pro-Reagan partisan turnout. Although the margin will still be close due to habitual voters on both sides, this push for the candidate should be enough to ensure victory.

Marketing takeaway: Don’t mistake desire for a sale – your customers can’t just like what you’re selling or dislike what the other guy offers, they have to be willing to buy!

What We Can Learn

I think this election cycle has a lot to teach us, both as marketers and consumers. And in the end, both buyer and seller have to be wary of the tactics used to play the game.

1. Keep your eye on the ball!  Don’t assume that the intrinsic qualities of a product, service, or person will drive success. People tend to overlook the forest and concentrate on the trees, deciding based on small and even inconsequential features rather than large and rational factors.
2. Watch what others are saying for and against you! It’s hard to control word of mouth, and it’s much easier to plant a seed of doubt than prove virtue.
3. Butting heads results in a draw! In a game between two equal foes, no amount of effort will force victory.
4. Play for victory, not just success! As in sports, a good defense is a requirement, but you’ll never win without a risky drive to score.

More on this topic:

• Marketing lessons from the US election by Seth Godin
• Ten marketing lessons from the Barack Obama Presidential campaign by David Meerman Scott
• Election Day Marketing 2008 by The Rogue Marketer
• Marketing – Obama style is winning style by Results Revolution
• Simple by Timothy Coote

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2008. | What Elections Teach Us About Marketing
This post was categorized as Everything. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2007. | Evangelize!
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.

Google’s “enhanced” (read “expanded”) storage service amounts to very little. For $20 a year you can have 6 GB of extra space for GMail and Picasa Web Albums. Since the company had been upgrading everyone’s storage for free, this enhancement amounts to a real rollback of expected service enhancement. And it’s practically useless. I’ve been using GMail for years and am only using 280 MB of storage – I don’t need the 2.8 GB they currently offer me, let alone another 6 or more. And I’ve got my own online gallery, so I haven’t used Picasa Web Albums. The one area this might be useful for, Google Docs, isn’t currently covered. And this is nowhere near the “GDrive” rumors of last year! Wake me when it has an (official) drive mapping feature…

Microsoft’s SkyDrive was the other big announcement this week. It offers “drag and drop” uploads, but only from within Internet Explorer. Although the development team thought a real drive mapping in Windows would be a good idea (it’s buried in the comments), it’s not there yet. Although it’s arguably more useful than Google’s “service”, since it can be shared and can store arbitrary file types, SkyDrive still falls short of my needs.

Most other online storage services also fall short, offering special-purpose storage instead of allowing me to store whatever I want. Carbonite and Mozy (and others) are online backup; SmugMug (and Google’s Picasa and lots of other services) do photos. XDrive, the pioneer of online storage, still exists as a service of AOL. It requires a desktop client install, but does offer drive mapping. But XDrive has lots of customer complaints on the web, which makes me worry…

There are other options, too. Yahoo Briefcase offers a staggering 30 MB of space! AllMyData offers “unlimited” storage and backup for $5 per month. Box.net, iomega’s iStorage, MediaMax, and StrongSpace all seem limited to web or other weird interfaces. eSnips.com is kind of a community like MySpace for storage. Mofile seems pretty limited. Omnidrive seems best so far, but it’s still in beta and I worry about the company’s stability. Most web hosting companies also offer storage, often through the painfully slow WebDAV protocol, though Go Daddy’s Online File Folder seems interesting.

One service that really stands out to me as offering just the right mix of end-user focus, usability, and solid support is Apple’s oft-maligned .Mac service. Their iDisk is a mapped drive from any computer, and even though it’s primarily a service for Mac users, it does support Windows, including drive mapping.

So why can’t Google offer this kind of service? Why can’t Microsoft? Or Yahoo? Maybe because too many people would use them, gobbling up expensive capacity and bandwidth? Or maybe because mapped drives don’t have the ability to show ads?  Maybe people just don’t want to store their files online (sorry again, Hu)…

Or I guess I could just get a Mac…

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2007. | Online Storage? Hardly!
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage, Terabyte home. 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.