Not all bloggers are equally vendor-focused - it's a spectrum

The Vendor Blogging Spectrum

Although most folks know they should take official company comments with a grain of salt, social media muddies the waters. Consider a spectrum of vendor blogs, ranked here from most- to least-forthright:

1. It’s easy to tell that a blog hosted at “companyxyz.com” is at least a semi-official statement from that company. For examples, see NetApp or HP’s lists of blogs. At the very least, the content of corporate-domain blogs will focus on the positives of the company. This is my preferred venue for business-related blog posts.
2. There are also independent-seeming official blogs from many companies. Sussing out the corporate can be fairly easy (as in OnlineStorageOptimization) or somewhat more difficult (see CloudStorageStrategy) but a reasonably persistent person can see that these are corporate communications vehicles. Also, see Quest Software’s SQLServerPedia for an excellent example of a community service site!
3. Companies like EMC encourage employees to create independent blogs outside the corporate domain, but most blogs include an “About” page listing their corporate affiliation. Again, one expects the corporate glow to radiate from these blogs and they rarely include anything but corporate-oriented content. It you’re blogging about your company on your personal blog, you must make sure it’s obvious where you work!
4. Next are the personal blogs of employees, which may or may not include business content. Many expect that these will disclose employment affiliation but some do not. I have often had to turn to Google or LinkedIn to discover who is and is not an employee of one company or another. This is fine as long as business content isn’t included, but disclosure is a must when there is crossover.
5. There are also paid placement blogs that serve as PR vehicles outside the corporate domain. Above-board examples like DCIG do an excellent job of providing solid content along with sponsor-oriented paragraphs, but it can be much harder to discover the paid connections in others. Some analysts even speak and write on behalf of their clients with no disclosure whatsoever!

And these are only direct connections. Is a reseller any more independent than a vendor? How about a consultant who gets paid to install and configure the product? Or an analyst who gets paid for strategic advice? Or a reporter taken on a junket? Perhaps the FTC disclosure rules weren’t so crazy after all…

Does Industry Matter?

Surprisingly, the tolerance of readers to vendor bloggers varies greatly by industry. What would be acceptable in one segment would be odious in another.

Base IT infrastructure components (storage, servers, switches) are an incredibly competitive market, so competition from bloggers tends to be equally fierce. The same is true of emerging technologies like cloud computing. Head-to-head competition is going to attract both overt blog battles and covert mindshare wars, so these industries tend to be much more concerned about who is and who is not “a vendor”. Marc Farley’s move from Dell/EqualLogic to 3PAR, for example, was the topic of heated debate due in part to the intense competition between these vendors. Tony Asaro’s blogging and career moves have caused similar debate for much the same reason.

In contrast, virtualization platforms, database software, applications, and development environments are more about making effective use of a singular product. Without the foundation of competition, much less attention is paid to where a blogger works. This is why the hiring of many top VMware bloggers by VMware and EMC hasn’t caused much concern. Who cares if you work for VMware when the relative merits of the platform is not a subject of debate? Folks like Scott Lowe, Ed Saipetch, and Rick Scherer are known for their quality technical contributions, so it’s unlikely that their moves into “the mothership” will change anything. But I know they’ll be watched much more closely from now on…

Case in point: See the recent “best blogs” polls at vSphere-Land and Storage Monkeys: The VMware blogger list includes (by my count) 11 vendor bloggers out of 25. In contrast, the Storage Monkeys site chose to have two separate lists, one for vendors and another for independents. It is interesting that the VMware community thinks nothing of combining “vendors” and “independents”, while the storage community wouldn’t have it.

Another cause of “vendor blogger” FUD is the orientation of the bloggers. Folks who are focused on message tend to be more criticized than those focused on technology. This is not always the case, however. If one became widely known as a proponent of a specific product or technological approach (say, NAS for VMware storage), it would be very difficult for them to make a move to a vendor with an entirely different approach (like a Fibre Channel or iSCSI player).

Expose Yourself!

There are ways to mitigate the impact of a vendor job move, of course. We’ll be talking about these in detail later in this series, but one easy way is to make sure there is a clear distinction between the person and the company. Here are some specific suggestions for your blog:

1. Create an “About Me” page, obviously linked from every page on your blog, that lists your full name and employer. I shouldn’t have to google you to discover who you are.
2. Create a separate work blog. Clearly spell out which “hat” you are wearing on each of these blogs, and keep from mixing work and personal content.
3. Don’t get into personal battles over work-related topics. Remain calm and professional and don’t make enemies. You never know when you’ll be playing for a different team!
4. Move work content up the stack. The closer you get to the top of the vendor blog spectrum, the less problems you’ll have. Some companies won’t allow a “company.com” blog, but maybe they would allow the creation of a special company-wide blogging site.

Your goal is to be open and honest about who you work for. Above all, remember: Your credibility is the currency of the new social economy!

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

Prism image: GFDL by Peo

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2010. | The Spectrum of Vendor Blogs
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.

Apple

• MacBook Users: Turn off This Bluetooth Default Setting Now – Now I know what turned on my MacBook Pro in the bag: My BlueTooth mouse!

Enterprise Computing

• Windows Storage Server-Based Systems Step Into 2008 – My Gestalt IT coverage of the features of WSS08.
• EMC Symmetrix V-Max: When Does It Get FAST and Virtual? – Another Gestalt IT piece, pointing out that the V-Max isn’t going to be fully realized for a very long time
• Microsoft Unveils Final Windows Storage Server – Paul Shread runs with the “Windows Storage Server 2008″ theme, quoting yours truly extensively.
• What is a best practice and Are Best Practices Just Shared Opinions? – W. Curtis Preston and I pickup an old conversation about the definition of “best practice”.
• Infosmack Episode 2 – EMC, David Donatelli and Non-Compete Agreements – Tony Asaro and I join Marc Farley and Greg Knieriemen on the Storage Monkeys podcast!
• The US Federal Government defines Cloud Computing - Ruven Cohen covers the US Federal Government’s cloud computing meetings and gives us a sneak peek at the new definition of cloud computing from the world’s number one IT user.
• Support and Q&A for Solid-State Drives – Lots of great info on how Windows 7 (and probably Server 2008 R2) deals with solid state drives.
• VMware Slaps Enterprise and Cisco In Face, Opens Door For Competitors – More on the VMware vSphere 4 licensing changes, and what it might mean.

Misc

• Non-competes are evil – Robin Harris lays it out. I happen to agree.
• Five Technologies Our Kids Won’t Even Recognize – Wired’s Gadget Lab makes us all feel old!
• Chrysler HQ Designed To Convert Into Shopping Mall - Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me says it’s true, so I believe it!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2009. | Back From the Pile: Interesting Content From the Week of May 9, 2009
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.

Enterprise IT

• Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle Your Reliance On Backup Tapes – What’s wrong with backup tapes? They’re inaccessible, making them unsuitable for most applications. My latest post for my Enterprise Storage Strategies blog.
• Is Licensing Turning vSphere Into Vista? – A group post for Gestalt IT suggesting that VMware’s tiered licensing strategy for the vSphere 4 family might cause anguish for customers
• Infosmack Episode 2 – EMC, David Donatelli and Non-Compete Agreements – I joined the StorageMonkeys Infosmack podcast to discuss EMC, Dave Donatelli, and con-compete agreements with Greg Knieriemen, Marc Farley of 3Par and StorageRap, and Tony Asaro of the INI Group
• IT utilities, the biggest game in town – Chris Mellor of The Register suggests that the biggest IT vendors are positioning to lock up the IT market.
• The Non-Compete Clause Debate….. - Steve Duplessie muses on the pros and cons of non-compete agreements and what they mean for the IT industry
• Who’s the pot & who’s the kettle? - W. Curtis Preston reacts to the skirmishes between Tony Asaro and the EMC bloggers
• The Only VMware-certified NAS in its Category: Why the Iomega StorCenter ix4-200r Will Resonate with Small Businesses - Jerome Wendt expands on the Iomega StorCenter Pro ix4-200r
• Don’t focus too much on costs, cloud computing is about business agility - CapGemini reminds us that cloud computing isn’t just about reducing costs
• What we talk about when we talk about cloud computing - The Google Enterprise blog lays down some of the hard facts about building a cloud on your own
• Review: Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System - Chris Evans provides one of the best reviews yet of Sun’s Amber Road open source-based storage systems
• Brocade Pokes Cisco in the Eye, Switches for IBM - A great headline and solid reporting by Om Malik on one of the first reactions to Cisco UCS
• TheInfoPro: Analysis or Marketing? - StorageMonkeys continues their probing of the storage analyst community
• A “Tweeterview” with Stephen Foskett, Nirvanix Consulting Director - Sunshine interviews me about Nirvanix, storage, and my new role

Apple

• Achieving Email Bliss with IMAP, Gmail, and Apple Mail – A deep, long post on GMail, IMAP, Mac OS X Mail, and how to get all three to play nicely together.
• Monitor Your Mac Remotely With iStat for iPhone - I love iStat for Mac OS X and the iPhone and had been meaning to write a review. This AppleBlog post is just about what I might have written!

Life

• There Goes Chrysler – NPR’s awesome Planet Money blog reported the breaking news of Chrysler’s bankruptcy
• The Venture Capital Math Problem and The Venture Capital Math Problem (continued) – Fred Wilson points out that there can be no such thing as unlimited venture capital
• Is it time to cut the Ethernet access cable? – Has pervasive wireless Ethernet made wired ports unnecessary?
• Interview with Micah Baldwin, Father of FollowFriday – Micah calls me out as someone who is doing interesting things on Twitter!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2009. | Back From the Pile: Interesting Content From the Week of May 2, 2009
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.

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.

What was he getting at? Read the comments in Chuck’s post and you’ll understand his implication: Chuck suggests that NetApp “emulates” Fibre Channel in their FAS/OnTap devices on top of the WAFL “file system”, while EMC’s AX storage (behind the NX4) uses “real” Fibre Channel, so it’s better. He goes on to say that EMC is doing a brisk business replacing misfit NetApp FC arrays with real FC kit from EMC. But, as is so often the case, the truth is a little more complex than this: All enterprise storage arrays “emulate” Fibre Channel drives to one extent or another, and using the wrong tool for the job will always lead to trouble.

Is It Real Or Is It Virtual?

Let’s knock one thing out right away: Chuck is right, NetApp is emulating Fibre Channel drives with their FAS arrays. They really do lay out chunks of storage on something kind of like a file system with a bunch of logic mixed in and then pretend that this space is a plain-jane SCSI drive connected over Fibre Channel. And I’ll add to the “scandal” by pointing out that NetApp does exactly the same thing with their iSCSI drives!

Now let’s move on to an even more important point: All modern storage arrays emulate SCSI drives! That’s right, every enterprise storage array is lying, pretending to serve up basic drives but really slicing and dicing them in the background for their own nefarious purposes!

Who is responsible for this deceit? I place the blame on a few: Patterson, Gibson, and Katz started the game with their so-called RAID concept, which kicked things off by allowing a few drives to pretend to be a single one. Data General implemented this with cache in their oh-so-clever HADA, further separating us from The True Disk. But the worst was EMC, with their fully-virtualized Symmetrix array, where there was no definite relationship at all between the LUNs presented to servers and the disks that do all the real work. Some folks would even go so far as to praise this type of post-RAID virtualized storage as innovative!

NetApp takes this “automated lying” to the extreme, forcing their innocent hardware to take honest, well-laid-out blocks of intelligent WAFL space and twist them into vast tracts of dumb pretend-disks. The nerve! Compellent, 3PAR, Dell/EqualLogic, and the rest are just as bad, scattering blocks of data willy-nilly across their disks in so-called “wide stripes“. But don’t let Chuck’s misdirection fool you: EMC is just as guilty with each of their different storage platforms, masquerading as disk drives or file servers and intelligently managing storage underneath! And don’t get me started on the twisted things VMware does to storage!

Modern? Feh! Let’s all hope Apple starts producing their no-feature Xserve RAID again!

Waiting On Angels

So every modern array emulates disks. What was Chuck’s point again? Oh yeah, that the AX Fibre Channel storage used by EMC’s NX4 is superior to the integrated Fibre Channel capability of the NetApp FAS2020! I’m sure he’s right for some use cases and wrong for others. FC on the FAS2020 is a perfect match for some, and the NX4/AX wins in a landslide in some circumstances.

The crux of the argument is the fact that NetApp does all sorts of stuff behind the scenes build and support an FC LUN that the EMC AX FC array doesn’t do. So, although it wouldn’t be fair to say that one was “emulated” and another was not, Chuck would be correct in saying that an FC LUN on an AX is more “real” than one on a NetApp FAS. But arguing over technicalities like this is all angels and pins and doesn’t matter in the real world!

What does matter? In block storage, latency is king. Generally speaking, more cogs and wheels leads to more latency. This is why storage arrays rely so much on large, intelligent caches and vendors are experimenting with all sorts of cool caching technology. But, ignoring cache, high-end arrays generally have worse latency than low-end ones because they have all sorts of translation and virtualization going on in the background. In any I/O situation, increased latency hurts throughput and the perception of performance. And there comes a point when block applications give up waiting and it’s “game over, man!”

I remember migrating from an old CLARiiON 3100 to a brand new Symmetrix 3930 and watching the Symmetrix choke on the incoming data stream. It just couldn’t write fast enough to handle full streaming reads from the (old-tech) CLARiiON. But once everything was migrated and running, the Symmetrix, with its massive (for the time) 16 GB of cache, widely-spaced data layout, and multiple internal channels, completely destroyed the CLARiiON in real-world performance. This pattern continues today, with devices like the DMX and USP offering much better real-world performance than benchmarks or theoretical techno-arguments would suggest.

So Which Is Better?

But Chuck and the rest were not talking about high-end stuff here. They are comparing the architecture of entry-level enterprise kit and drawing conclusions about which is best. I personally don’t care what the internals of the system look like. I care how well it works.

I have personally seen Microsoft Exchange running on low-end FC-connected NetApp FAS arrays, and it worked great. I also helped a customer migrate off of EMC AX that didn’t give them the performance they needed for their databases. In truth, lower-end gear is often over-sold and unable to deliver the performance, features, and reliability specified on data sheets and in vendor presentations.

That’s right, there’s more to this picture than raw performance. Consider manageability, for one. NetApp is offering a single-interface integrated system with all protocols (CIFS, NFS, iSCSI, and FC) available from one device. They also offer similar levels of integration for their (really nice) snapshot, replication, and deduplication technology. WAFL is busy doing a lot of great stuff, so I really wouldn’t be surprised if EMC’s less-integrated NX/AX offering beats them on performance at the same price point. Which is more important to you, integration, performance, or features? And I bet that, if you spent a bit more on a higher-end NetApp box, you could have it all.

On the flip side, EMC is offering a really compelling entry-enterprise combination at a nice price point. The latest NX should be on everyone’s NAS short list, and I’m sure the simple FC of the AX array would work well in a smallish Exchange, VMware, or SQL Server environment. It’s not as unified as NetApp’s offering management- or feature-wise, but it’s still pretty good.

Pick the right tool for the job, though. Neither the NX4 nor the FAS2020 is a good fit for a high-I/O application, and that’s a fact!

This post can also be found on Gestalt IT: Of Emulated Fibre Channel, Virtualization, And The Right Tool For The Job

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2008. | Of Emulated Fibre Channel, Virtualization, And The Right Tool For The Job
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.