Earlier this week I noticed the formation of a new social media community sprouting up on our internal EMC ONE platform.  The community is called "RTP2 - EMC Data Center Migration". The formation of this community is in direct response to the recent announcement of 400 new North Carolina jobs and a recently purchased EMC data center facility in Research Triangle Park.

Here's the deal: many of the IT applications currently running internally at EMC are in Westboro, MA. Most (if not all) of these applications and services will be moving to the RTP facility. The community performing this task has the goal of helping "to communicate the plan, vision and strategy [of the move] to EMC Users".

It's going to be a major effort. I'll be subscribing to this community so that I can receive notifications whenever they post anything new. I would imagine that many of the IT systems have been running in Westboro for years and are not fully leveraging the latest in virtualization technologies.

I'm particularly looking forward to hearing about the technology choices being made for the new data center configuration. One would assume it would be vBlock-based and managed by IONIX. It's unclear whether or not VMs will seamlessly VMotion down to the new environment. I'm also not sure if heterogeneous equipment will be moved down there as well.

As far as the internal community, strike up another win for social media. Upon joining this community people can get an inside look at the schedules, tasks, technologies, and applications that are part of the move, published by people that are actually DOING the move.

Stay tuned. It will be interesting to write about the data center move while many of EMC's customers are trying to do the same.

Steve

http://stevetodd.typepad.com

Twitter: @SteveTodd

EMC Intrapreneur

Earlier this month Iomega announced and started shipping the ScreenPlay Director in Europe. I had previously bought the ScreenPlay HD for my parents and the ScreenPlay Pro for myself. As the Director is to the Pro, the ScreenPlay Plus is to the HD. A device for every price point, capacity and need.

The Director has a similar form factor to the ScreenPlay Pro but the dimensions are slightly different to accommodate a roomy 2TB Drive, also, the reflective buttons have taken on a more matte effect while the blue LED on the front of the panel has been replaced with a not as eye catching white version. It's all about making the Piano Black device more subtle looking when it's under your TV.

This isn't a bad thing. 

While the Pro's light was subdued the blue LED on the ScreenPlay HD blares at you somewhat and while others don't find it irritating I used to find my eye drawn to it a bit too often when I should have been watching the screen.

I never had that issue with the Pro.

The credit card style form factor for the remote control of previous ScreenPlays has been replaced with a proper sized IR remote, which means there's no more fat fingering the wrong button at the wrong time for me. One of the features which hasn't made the cut from the Pro was the ability to record directly into the ScreenPlay via composite ports in the back of the unit.

In all honesty this was of limited use and I'd have preferred it offer S-Video input support but I did manage to capture some home movies from VHS tape and it automatically saved them as MPEG-2 files. For any of you thinking you can convert your VHS movie collection this way I'm afraid you're out of luck as the Pro was capable of detecting VHS copy protection schemes and stopping the capture process. While I can understand the desire to put those classics you just can't buy into a digital format the film industry has driven DVD prices down to insane levels meaning you can find many mainstream titles for a pittance or even less if you go to the discount outlets.   

The Director takes longer to boot than the Pro, a lot longer, but the upside is that there's now a fully featured operating system doing all the heavy lifting. The user interface scaling to 1080i resolution, it appearing on my MacBook Pro as a NAS device when it was attached to the home network and with various online video options, the ability to locate and communicate with any active media servers on the network and with BitTorrent functionality included.

Video playback is gorgeous. Indeed it's better than gorgeous and great to watch even when watching standard definition content. High Definition content, right up to 1080p, is as good as I've seen on more expensive devices, playback obviously benefiting from the latest codec support and the more powerful system on chip hardware running inside the case. 

This matters as some of those more expensive devices offer a fraction of the storage and have enough fans in them that it can sound like you're standing on an airport runway when the unit gets hot. There are things which can ruin the home entertainment experience and unless you're willing to crank the volume because you have no neighbors fan noise is one of them. 

The user interface is a significant improvement over what has come before it with some entrances and exits of various display elements gliding on to the screen but there are a few user interface elements I would have touched up slightly. Internet update capability is in the device so new code when available can be downloaded and applied with a few clicks of the remote control or sideloaded via your computer so I'd expect the system software to evolve as time goes on.

The biggest issue I had came with ordering the WiFi USB attachment from the online store. Though it's written on the site clear as day I did make the mistake of ordering the 802.11B/G adapter, which works with the Pro but doesn't work with the Director. The 802.11N adapter is supported by the Director (Larger file sizes require bigger transmission pipes) but though it is advertised in the materials and in an insert which comes in the box it wasn't available for purchase when I went looking for it. Th B/G adapter works fine with the Pro but does not work with the Director. 

I'm guessing when the Director is available in the US the WiFi Adapter will be made available too. Still, while entirely my fault it's something others should check before they hit the Purchase button.

Since I buy my devices at the retail store like everyone else, to say Iomega is growing would be a drastic understatement on my part. I first noticed they were moving significant amounts of product at my local consumer electronics store when the store appeared to be selling and replenishing stock at a rapid rate. 

From my own investigations it appears that Iomega have gone from the eight position to the third in the externally attached consumer storage market while Joe Tucci mentioned the division had significant double digit growth (Significant means something different to Joe than to you or I. He's not easily impressed.) in Q3 and that was before the insanity of the Christmas shopping season kicked off.

Overall it's a hot product and I'd have liked if there was support for an international version of Sonic Wall's Roxio CinemaNow, something which will be present in the American edition of the device, but since it isn't present you do get YouTube. Amongst all the tweener dreck of Miley Cyrus and Twlight which appears to be rated highly by the GooTubers you come across some unusual things you didn't find the last time you were there on your computer.

Basically, remember to:

• Tie this to business needs
• Show how it enables informal learning
• Explain it will still require resources to supportT

Actually, lots of what I do and consume at work is 100% distance.

I found a video of some of Rummler’s lectures at Motorola, and I am finding myself very annoyed that I never got to meet him. That he isn’t around for #lrnchat.

I know this is quite selfish, but I would have loved to have had the opportunity to talk to him.

If you have any suggestions for what my partner and I need to include in our report about Rummler, let me know. Maybe I’ll set up a wiki to collect more info.

Here’s the link to the videos I am watching. Rummler seems so straight-forward and real.

One of the most important things about the book is the context in which it was released:

• The financial crisis had reached dangerous levels towards the end of 2008.
• Bill's book is about "leading in crisis", and was published in 2009.
• Bill served on the board of Goldman-Sachs during the crisis.
• The book contains numerous examples of leadership behavior (both good and bad), some of which occurred during the current financial crisis.

The book suggests a list of seven leadership qualities that can be applied to any type of crisis. Bill sprinkles a variety of examples throughout the book.

I was mainly drawn to the book by Bill's position on the board of Goldman Sachs. In this sense he had a front row seat to the crisis. How often does someone in his position also have the writing skills to communicate what went wrong on such a massive scale? I was hoping that the book would contain the same frankness and openness that Bill uses on both his own blog and as a NY Times blogger (in which his transparency leads to some lively debate).

I was not disappointed in this regard.  Bill pointed at several different banks that went under during the financial crisis and called out examples of poor leadership.  During the pages of the book he did not pull any punches; this was the type of frankness I was hoping for.

Overall Thoughts on the Book

At just over 100 pages, the book is a quick read. The seven different leadership qualities that Bill covers seem to me to be common sense: don't take the world upon your shoulders, get ready for the long haul, dig deep for the root cause, etc. (For a quick summary of each category, I refer the reader to Jessica Lipnack's book review here).

I don't believe that Bill's seven tenets of crisis leadership are revelatory. From that point of view, I don't believe that I learned significantly new techniques for leading during a crisis.

I find the book's main value is that of a yardstick. If I want to evaluate my own leadership skills during a crisis, the book is an excellent place to turn. If I want to evaluate a public official, or a corporate executive, and formulate a thoughtful opinion of their performance during a crisis, I would refer to this book.

One particular chapter resonated the most for me: Lesson #3 - Dig Deep for the Root Cause. The advice that Bill gives in this chapter had a strong synergy with my write-up of Bill's speech from the World Business Forum. Leaders need to spend at least some time in the trenches. Here are a couple of gems from the book:

• Morgan Stanley CEO Philip Purcell didn't spend enough time on the trading floor talking to the traders when his firm was going through a myriad of problems in 2004 (he should have)
• Maintain close contact with people throughout your organization, not just your direct reports.
• Visit customers when they are in crisis (Bill had one angry customer throw medical equipment at him)
• Wander through the corporate offices and labs and ask the employees what they think the company needs to do to improve.

Overall I enjoyed the unique point of view on the financial crisis, as well as the framework for evaluating leadership. It's a good reference book to keep handy during tough times.

Steve

http://stevetodd.typepad.com

Twitter: @SteveTodd

EMC Intrapreneur

Note: in addition to customer/partner focused questions, there's been a whole lot of snarky sniping from various competitors and others who may have a different agenda.  All part of the fun.  I'll try and cover their concerns later, but -- for now -- we'll focus on the people who pay the bills!

That's rather straightforward -- tell us about the use case you have in mind for a Vblock, and that starts the discussion. 

Maybe it's virtual desktops, or self-service computing, or business analytics, or app dev and test, or your SAP landscape, or maybe something else entirely.  Telling us "how big" (in terms of VMs) would be useful as well.

However, he does raise a couple of concerns about source deduplication that I would like to address. Now source deduplication for EMC means Avamar. Actually, for most everybody it means Avamar, because there really is no other credible source deduplication alternative today. There may be software deduplication solutions--but most of them tend to be target solutions in one way or the other. And not terribly technically or architecturally credible. (Yes, I am thinking of you, TSM.) With vanishingly small market share to boot.

So Avamar it is.

Preston mentions a few points about Avamar:

In regular backups while there may be some benefit to reducing the amount of data transmitted, what you’re often not told is that this reduction comes at a cost – that being increased processor and/or memory load on the clients. Source based deduplication naturally has to shift some of the processing load back across to the client – otherwise the data will be transmitted and thrown away.

This is true, but there is a very significant counter-point. That is: although source deduplication has a higher processing load on the client than traditional backup, it is for a much shorter period of time. More succinctly: your backups use more CPU, but don't take as long.

Experience, annecdotal reports, and testing we have done at EMC suggest that, on average, Avamar backups may consume 25-50% more CPU than a traditional backup. However, the duration of the backup may be 75% less with Avamar than with other backup products. (Even those, like TSM, which utilize a "progressive incremental" approach.) In some cases, Avamar may complete a backup 90% faster than traditional backup. Particularly in large, dense file systems and with filers you will see significant improvements in the time to complete a backup job.

Secondly, Preston writes that:

Onto the second proposed advantage of source based deduplication – faster WAN based backups. Undoubtedly, this is true, since we don’t have to ship anywhere near as much data across the network. However, consider that we backup in order to recover. You may be able to reduce the amount of data you send across the WAN to backup, but unless you plan very carefully you may put yourself into a situation where recoveries aren’t all that useful. That is – you need to be careful to avoid trickle based recoveries. This often means that it’s necessary to put a source based deduplication node in each WAN connected site, with those nodes replicating to a central location. What’s the problem with this? Well, none from a recovery perspective – but it can considerably blow out the cost. Again, informed decisions are very important to counter-balance source based deduplication hyperbole.

Again, Preston is just right. However, there is an alternative with Avamar that can be employed to mitigate this concern: Avamar Virtual Edition. Briefly Avamar Virtual Edition (or AVE) is an Avamar server in a virtual machine. So rather than having to deploy an entire physical node in each WAN connected site, you can simply deploy an AVE. An AVE is typically more modest in size than a physical Avamar node, and hosts anywhere from a very small amount of storage up to 2 TB--normally the capacity is just that required for local recoveries at the remote site. Storage can reside on the same storage system that your ESX server holds its data--it does not need to be dedicated.

So again, the issue Preston raises is true, but there is a practical and easy way to mitigate the financial impact. In practice, both source and target deduplication solutions have small footprint products that are reasonably price and appropriate for placing at a small, remote site.

Finally, Preston says that:

Now let’s look at a couple of other factors of source based deduplication that aren’t always discussed:

1. Depending on the product you choose, you may get less OS and database support than you’re getting from your current backup product.
2. The backup processes and clients will change. Sometimes quite considerably, depending on whether your vendor supports integration of deduplication backup with your current backup environment, or whether you need to change the product entirely.

The current support matrix for Avamar can be found on PowerLink (for EMC customers and partners). Without listing it in its entirety here, suffice it to say that Avamar supports a full range of databases, applications, host OS types and versions. Although it may have been true several years ago that support was somewhat more constrained than a typical backup application, that tends to no longer be the case. With the exception of one or two idiosyncrasies in the support matrix, Avamar supports as wide a range of applications and data types as any other backup application.

As for the backup processes changing? Well yes! They do. Thankfully. I will be the first to admit that switching backup applications can be a non-trivial process. Not something that should be lightly undertaken, or that most people will do without a second thought. However, here is the other side of the coin: lots of current backup environments are broken. If not irretrievably so, then very seriously.

VMware backup. Filer backup. Remote backup. Backup of dense file systems. All of these are things which many traditional backup applications simply do a very poor job of. And if your backup application is broken, then changing it may be a very good thing. I would encourage you to weight the costs and the benefits of switching applications very judiciously. Don't just do it because somebody told you it would be a good idea. (Even if that somebody is me!)

But... be honest about the strengths and weakness of your current approach. If the way that NetBackup or TSM does something right now is just really messed up, if it takes way too long to finish a backup, if your failure rate is way too high, if you just can't backup that ESX server in any reasonable time frame, then maybe changing backup applications isn't such a bad idea.

Looking at the particular example from the previous post, the business case Tony Pearson used as an example showed that 81% of the savings were due to soft costs. This is really bad. In most business environments, such a business case would be rejected out of hand.

I thought it might be instructive to have a look at a better business case: a business case based almost entirely on hard cost (savings). Two of them actually. One for source deduplication, one for target deduplication. In both cases, they are real environments, with real costs, real savings, the proposals were made with the costs and savings exactly as described, and they were accepted by the customer and the projects were funded on that basis. I have only removed names and specifics to the extent necessary to anonymize the customer and any technical or business characteristics unique to that customer. And, as I wrote the TCO tool itself EMC uses for target deduplication, I am more than happy to answer any questions on the data, the assumptions that drive it, or the calculations and formulas that we used to determine the benefits and cost savings of the solution.

In this post, I am going to deal with target deduplication. The business case for a source deduplication solution will be the subject of a future post.

In the case of target deduplication, we were working with an organization that uses TSM. They had a tape infrastructure, with an off-site copy pool (also tape) for their backup and recovery infrastructure. This particular customer also had infrastructure at 3 sites (all more or less local to a single metro area). The customer wanted to refresh the infrastructure, but was unwilling and unable to throw out TSM entirely (due to some dependencies in the mainframe space).

A couple other relevant factors: the business in question employs 30,000 people, manages 140 TB of data, has annual revenues of nearly $500m (CAD), and has a fairly average mix of email, file and print, and database data with typical growth rates and an average number of servers given the amount of data.

The savings that we were able to demonstrate for target deduplication included (all figures in CAD):

• Media Savings - $5,012,103
• Tape and Library Savings - $2,435,671
• Administrative Costs - $690,285
• Offsite Tape Storage Costs - $283,177
• SAN Port Savings - $251,115
• Improved Tape Reliability - Revenue Impact - $147,890

These benefits can be grouped regarding business impact as:

• $8,672,352 in IT cost reductions
• $147,890 in business strategic advantage benefits (this is a soft cost, but ammounts to less than 2% of the net benefit of the business case)

On the other side of the coin, what were the cost associated with the project?

To implement the proposed project required a 5 year cumulative investment of $4,132,999 including:

• $1,542,000 in initial expenses
• $0 in capital expenditures
• $4,132,999 in operating expenditures (including the initial expense)

Comparing the costs and benefits of the proposed project using discounted cash flow analysis and factoring in a risk-adjusted discount rate of 9.5%, the proposed business case predicts:

• Risk Adjusted Return on Investment (RA ROI) of 87%
• Return on Investment (ROI) of 113%
• Net Present Value (NPV) savings of $2,954,800
• Internal Rate of Return (IRR) of 54%
• Payback period of 15.0 month(s)

In other words, with an EMC solution, relying almost entirely on hard costs, we were able to demonstrate a payback period of just 15 months, and an ROI of 113%, by augmenting TSM with target deduplication.

As a "C" level executive, this is the kind of cost savings that you simply can't ignore. It isn't funny money. It doesn't rely on voodoo math. It doesn't have anything to do with "soft" costs that are hard (impossible) to justify. It is real money, and real savings.

Is TSM an expensive backup solution relative to other backup applications? Yes. But those costs can be effectively mitigated.

With the latest release of NetWorker, EMC has introduced cloud backup as native functionality. Right out of the box, NetWorker users can clone backup data to a target in the cloud. EMC is hosting a Live Event that discusses the functionality in greater detail.

EMC NetWorker Fast Start and the new Cloud Backup option offer a secure and affordable alternative to the pain and expense of offsite tape vaulting. Attend this webcast and learn how you can:

• Reduce personnel expenses by automating offsite data protection
• Cut the hard costs associated with tape infrastructure and offsite storage facilities
• Choose a flexible “pay-as-you-go” model for offsite storage

You can register for the event here, or by going to http://info.emc.com/mk/get/DBM5396-1950_RAF_LP?reg_src=PA .

I read an announcement by the ACM last week that they have decided to scale back their investment in print-based services and focus instead on the long-term digital preservation of ACM content as part of a public cloud.

Public clouds that specifically target digital preservation have a different set of requirements than a public cloud like Amazon EC2, for example. The focus in a "preservation cloud" is longevity, and the administrators of said cloud must think like digital curators.

It's an interesting exercise to study the (a) system and (b) curator choices that ACM has chosen. The ACM has chosen to go with CLOCKSS and Portico, respectively. Both CLOCKSS and Portico are not-for-profit organizations.

CLOCKSS

LOCKSS stands for "Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe", and the 'C' stands for "controlled". The LOCKSS software framework was developed at Stanford University and is a peer-to-peer, de-centralized model.

The CLOCKSS initiative is run by "the world’s leading scholarly publishers and research libraries" with a goal of ensuring "the long-term survival of Web-based scholarly publications for the benefit of the greater global research community". CLOCKSS ingest boxes are located at Rice, Indiana, and Stanford university. As libraries and researchers submit content to these "ingest boxes", they are stored in normalized, maintainable format in triplicate across the sites. Once all of the ingest boxes have cross-audited the content, the artifacts are moved to "archive nodes" spread throughout the globe. These boxes continually audit themselves and verify the authenticity of the content, and create new versions when hardware fails (very similar to a RAIN architecture).

Interestingly enough, the solution is a "dark archive". The initial content is not accessible to the general public. The ingest and preservation within CLOCKSS is initially focussed on maintaining content for the long-term. When a "trigger event" occurs, however, content is made public by migrating it to the newest format and storing it on publicly available nodes at Stanford and the University of Edinburgh.

A description of how CLOCKSS works can be found here.

Portico

Portico can be thought of as a third-party partner that supplies the people and processes behind the CLOCKSS solution. The best way to explain the process they bring to the table can be found in one of their brochures:

The CLOCKSS and Portico solution relies heavily on migration of data formats as the years roll by. I've always wondered about the feasibility of such an approach. Can it scale to billions of documents? Does the system have to continually upgrade all documents to newer file formats as these new formats become available? One thing I picked up as I learned about their solution is that the format conversion occurs when the format goes from "dark" to "publicly available". In other words, there's no need to continually upgrade file formats.

The alternate approach to format conversion is something I've been researching here at EMC. As an entire class of documents is imported into an archive, can a Virtual Machine also be imported that is able to "read" all of these documents, both now and in the future? This would require some time of virtual machine "player" that has infinite playback capability (no easy task).

I hope to learn more about the server/storage implementation of CLOCKSS at locations around the world.

Steve

http://stevetodd.typepad.com

Twitter: @SteveTodd

EMC Intrapreneur

The thought is timely, given VMware's recent VMware View 4 announcement.  Check out the details from VMware here, or see Chad's excellent writeup here.

So, let's look at the enablers -- and the inhibitors -- and how they might play out in the very near future.

And many of us believe that desktop virtualization gives us a once-in-a-career opportunity to "harden" these environments in a way we never could do in the physical world. 

Not "good enough" security: world-class security that's adaptable, auditable and verifiable.

There might be some changes coming on some of those lines.
Today I officially enter a new role at EMC. I still work for the same team, doing Storage Resource Management for Ionix. But I’m stepping “sideways” into a Technical Lead role. The context of my day to day work will not change, but my focus is shifting more to the technical side, putting management of people to the side for now.

My journey from technical contributor to manager was a strange one, and my journey back to the other side of the fence was just as unusual. I won’t go into too many details but I will say this was something I’ve been debating for many long months, and when circumstances aligned and a clear need arose, I spoke with my management chain and we decided together the time was right to explore this path.

I am not walking away from management with any kind of finality. Who can say what will be happening in 3 years, never mind 30? But for now, my focus is going to shift, and you can expect I will be talking about some new topics here.

My focus on thriving in the 21st century workplace will not change, though, unless I find some topics which consistently move me as much as that topic does. But I’m sure the technical side of my life will bleed into here a bit. We’ll see how it goes. I hope you stick around and explore it with me.

Oh, and on a side note, if you’re a current ControlCenter customer and want to be sure your voice is heard in the next generation of EMC’s Storage Resource Management, make sure you’re part of the ControlCenter Online Community. I’d love to make advocating for your wishes part of my job description, and having your voices heard loud and clear makes that job much easier….

This post is from: Dave Talks Shop

I've worked with James and found him to be a good techy lacking all sense of self awareness.

Therefore he's a perfect canidate for blogging.

Post early and post often James. :-)

I think it’s time to spread the word about my colleague James Baldwin – an engineer in EMC’s Global Solutions Group – who I was able to see in “full tech mode” at the SharePoint Conference in Vegas. You see, most of us storage geeks have it – one sec we’re joking around, then we jump into tech jokes, and finally we’re in “full tech mode” – arguing about why Exchange is actually cheaper on a SAN (more on this later). Whether or not SharePoint SQL servers should be virtualized or kept physical. Or how native backup tools compare against third-party tools. Keeping SharePoint data secure, yet accessible in multiple locations… He’s really good at this full-tech mode stuff, which qualifies him as an expert, and his job gives him unprecedented access to HUGE SharePoint environments and to very smart engineers from EMC and Microsoft…

James now has a blog going, so please go give him a read if you wish to learn more about keeping your SharePoint farm in order; he’s calling it Sustainable SharePoint.

James has already had his work spotlighted by Chad “virtual geek” Sakac for showing how to save over 70% of your power bills by virtualizing Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. (link here)

Go check out James now, in full tech mode, over at his site!

http://sustainablesharepoint.wordpress.com

Tell him Power Windows sent ya! Or something.

The New Horsemen. On the rise of Cisco, EMC, VMware, Dell, and Oracle as platform players.

And

EMC/Cisco/VMware vBlock – an Economists Perspective.

One of the ideas I find most interesting is that Cisco/EMC converging on this area alone is going to the speed up the move to private cloud as everyone else repositions and tools up to work with or go to war against the alliance.

We’re expecting over a thousand customers and partners from all across the EMEA region, and the CMA team has worked really hard to give a rich, memorable experience.

The theme of the show is, “Inspired by the past, Primed for the future,” which is appropriate in so many ways. Take the location of Athens itself. Not too many places in the world so nicely blend the old and the new. Even more relevant to me, is thinking about how our solutions mirror this theme of building on past successes to give customers even more value and more innovation.

In my keynote at the conference, I will share with our guests why I’m so confident about the future. The CMA solutions for Information Governance, Information Access and a development platform for building case management applications, are all target areas of strength for us.

I look forward to meeting new friends and re-connecting with old colleagues who’ve followed the Documentum brand for years.

Mark…

Well the place had to get something I suppose.

Join us and you’ll see why Data Domain does for backup what the iPod did for digital music and why VMware and Avamar go together like strawberries and cream on a warm summer day.

See you there. :-)

Thought I'd share it with you, because I think we're going to see more of this going forward.

However, I did push back a bit. 

I said to make this really work well, we needed two things -- a clearly defined use case so that we didn't have to solve world hunger just to validate the approach, and an "expedited organizational interface" so we didn't get lost in the existing machinery and process.

I’m not going to say what just yet, lets call it Project Ice Climber for the time being, but we’d like to solicit some feedback from end users.

Here’s a quick survey on Next Gen Storage Management if you’re an EMC customer, EMC partner or an end user of storage arrays, (EMC or otherwise) your feedback is something we’d like. It’s pretty quick and you can be as detailed, or not, as you desire but the more you put into it the greater the chance you’ll move our thinking in your direction.

If you fill in your contact details on Question 12 we’ll be having a draw for a small prize. This is to do with ensuring the feedback is from the right audience more than anything else.

I’d appreciate your time and my thanks to anyone who contributes.

Unified management is an integral part to a Cloud based solution as it’s one of the ways you can slash OPEX and reduce if not entirely eliminate the ridiculous amounts of custom scripting people have to hammer out as they attempt to lash various products from various vendors together and operate at this scale.

What UIM provides is not only a dashboard across the entire Vblock domain but provides provisioning, configuration management, network control, storage connectivity and profile creation, profile deployment and profile management across all the compute blades involved.

But you don’t have to junk your existing Enterprise Management software to this. UIM plugs into the major enterprise management platforms going so far as to deliver things like change and compliance events up to whatever top level manager you might already have in place.

And when you press this button you deploy and start thousands of virtual machines.

Remember, as a company NetApp can't use the bathroom without declaring a successful transference to be an epic win, calling everyone they have on speed dial to tell them about it, taking out ads on the internet and then starting a urinal cake stunt marketing campaign.

It's their nature.

And then we come to New ONTAP. The New Coke of the storage world. Something which strikes most people as a waste of time and energy. A muted, if not timid introduction followed by a number to call if you wanted to get your hands on Cluster Mode as unlike vi it can't switch modes without paving over your data and they didn't want you downloading it on your own as you would hurt yourself.

They might as well just have dug out a bad jumper and had The Cos do the pitch.