Image by Joe Penniston via Flickr

     Have to give a short shout out to Disney for the recent launch of DisneyDigitalBooks.com  Disney Publishing released an online version of more than 500 books available as a service online.  Each membership looks like it supports up to three children.  The best quote came out of the New York Times business section by someone I know very well.

“For parents, this isn’t going to replace snuggle time with a storybook,” said Yves Saada, vice president of digital media. “We think you can have different reading formats co-existing together.”

     I like the idea of multiple learning platforms, and I was a big fan the the Disney books growing up, so I’m looking forward to seeing this site gain major traction.  Check it out, they have a limited evaluation, and the annual subscription is at a great price point.  For the full NYT article look here.

Image by wynner3 via Flickr

About a week ago I tweeted that I had been invited to a storage vendor’s event, was invited as a potential customer by two different parties.  Funny thing about email lists, people get invited that you wouldn’t expect to attend.  I took off my storage hat, put on my analyst hat and promised a few old friends that I would behave.  I’ve competed against Compellent in the past (sometimes very aggressively!).  I’ve also said some nice things about the technology as well.

Compellent

Strong storage player, public company surviving in a harsh IT economy, and locally here in Colorado working with some great internal talent and one of my favorite partners.  Basic premise of the storage technology is controller based disk array (controllers are commodity based architecture which I’ve mentioned before) with a plethora of storage software services.  The special part that they bring to the table is at the storage service level, Data Progression™, Fast Track, replication, etc.  They have a very compelling story, proven scalability and a growing revenue and customer base.  The recent introduction of SSD support brings what most like to consider as a Tier0 storage layer, and although they have SATA, I would really like to see a strong archival tier in the near future.

Lewan and Associates

Lewan, is one of my favorite local integrators.  They did a very nice presentation about how they have several lines of business, specifically broken into two main lines of business, the traditional printer/copier side, and the IT Solutions side.  Lewan was relatively recently acquired by Xerox, but remains a very independent subsidiary.  What I liked the most about Lewan’s presentation was that they get the whole IT picture, and to date have had some of the key technology partners to create best-of-breed solutions for customers in the Rocky Mountain region.  The quick elevator pitch from Lewan?  D.N.A. – Data Center, Network, and Application Delivery.  They cover it all, and do it not only from a pure product basis, but from a consultative model that keeps the customers coming back!

Latisys

Latisys was another sponsor of this event, and they have some great solutions to the remote data center/hosting/co-location problem.  The purpose of the presentation on this day was to talk about Compellent’s place within Latisys, specifically to offer a target for secure remote replication.  This is something that any customer should look at that is currently running a Compellent SAN, because it reduces the complexity and I would assume costs associated in owning your own remote installation of Compellent gear, while giving you a place to recover too.  The better play they are offering however, is the ability to bring up your VMware based environment in a disaster, which is something that is very powerful for business continuance.

The SAN Technologist

I felt like a spy, I got funny looks, got directly asked if I had any questions, but I behaved and while I made no promises, I learned, I liked the things I saw, and I could without loosing sleep write something that is meaningful about these companies.  It isn’t everyday that you get a chance to see old friends, not try to destroy them, and leave with friendship renewed.  Quick shout out to my lovely mother who will greatly enjoy the Wizard of Oz reference, although not Judy’s greatest role, it is a good one. 

Image by www.ericcastro.biz via Flickr

I while ago I poked fun at the NetApp 50% Guarantee.  The idea that most of the savings come from taking a RAID10 environment and switching it to NetApp’s RAID-DP (btw, they only guarantee 35% if you are using your own storage behind a v-filer platform), is something I’ve touched upon in the past.  Now they have released a $1M’s worth of, at list, hardware if they can prove the reduction vs. a non-NetApp customer’s current environment.  What you win:

4. Prize

a) The prize ("Prize") to be awarded is comprised of the following NetApp products, and will be based on NetApp’s published US price List: storage hardware valued at $850,000, Professional Services Deployment, valued at $100K, and Software, valued at $50K.

b) The Prize will be subject to the Winner’s agreement to be bound by NetApp’s standard commercial terms. No purchase will be necessary to utilize the Prize; provided, however, after the applicable warranty period has elapsed for the hardware, software and service elements of the Prize, additional charges may apply to any requests for repair and maintenance.

c) To become the winner, the selected corporation must agree, if needed, to allow its representatives to be filmed by a NetApp representative and the winner’s representatives must execute a release and consent form that authorizes NetApp to use the video in NetApp Marketing material and activities. The winner must also agree to have a third party, nominated by NetApp, to evaluate the winner’s virtualization environment, both prior and after the commencement of NetApp’s implementation services to confirm the agreed upon virtualization metrics. Winner shall also agree to adhere to NetApp’s recommended best practices and requirements, including having NetApp’s professional services personnel on site to conduct a virtualization requirements analysis.

d) The Prize is not transferable. No Prize substitution is allowed except at the discretion of NetApp Inc. If the Prize cannot be awarded due to circumstances beyond NetApp Inc.’s control, a substitute prize of equal or greater retail value will be awarded.

So you get all this good stuff!  This is really a great marketing idea.  Get a bunch of non-customers to tell you exactly what they are running (lead generation), pick a customer and make a case study of it (great P.R.), and finally, still get them, after all is said an done, to pick up support costs after warranties are expired and upgrades for other features they will want to use.  This is a win-win though, take a company that has legacy hardware that was looking to refresh, quick easy way to get into a NetApp solution.

Image by tschaut via Flickr

     In my career I have worked for a Fortune 50 company, companies with less then 50 employees, private companies that have closed their doors, private companies that have been acquired, and the holy grail of private companies that went public.  What eludes me is how private companies, who are built on sweat equity, go from passionate intimate environments to painful work places. 

     I’m thinking maybe it is my fault, maybe I’m just not cut from the “corporate” cloth.  I’m willing to dive into this first.  About me, I’m what I would consider to be a young professional.  I have a formal education, I have over a decade of industry experience, however, a good portion of that experience has been working with every type of customer across the globe on the sales side, the implementation side, and the consulting services side.  Maybe it is my east coast attitude, being raised in NY, watching people sellout their mother to get a deal closed, taxis literally running each other off the road to get to the next red/green light faster, the march of ants that occurs during rush hour in NYC.  I’ve always taken that as a cherished attitude, and used to have a great sign in my office: “I wanted it done yesterday!”  In NYC this was just typical average passion and energy. 

     Maybe it isn’t about me.  Small companies, especially private companies have the ability to so agile, literally turning on a dime.  While this bring a tremendous amount of instability, it also allows stuff to get done.  Large corporations, while generally stable, get so bogged down with process and procedure that hiring, firing, developing, fixing, and just quickly accomplishing anything becomes almost impossible.  Many things are sacrificed for stability of the all might stickholder, oops, Freudian slip, I meant stockholder.  Sometimes being public is a curse.

     So, I’ve seen it go both ways, I’ve seen very passionate people working for some of the largest companies in the world, I’ve seen deadheads (not Jerry G. fans, but “deadhead” def. #6) working at start-ups, and of course the reverse of both exists in the largest version of the bell curve.  For me, I like being “David”.  So I’ll throw my world wide pants on, help another fledgling company spread its wings, and like all start-ups, if we fly too close to the sun too soon we risk failure, timing is everything.

The Road Not Taken – Robert Frost

TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;
        

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that, the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,
 

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I marked the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way

I doubted if I should ever come back.
 

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.
 

     A well known poem, memorized by myself and my entire 3rd grade English class years ago.  The regularly missed point is that there really was no better choice, no better road, they were equal for different reasons, and only in blind hindsight can someone say one would have been better then the other. 

     Recently I was asked to talk about the reasons a storage start-up would chose to built a custom hardware platform vs. leverage a commodity server platform.  In reality, they both have merits, both, in early consideration, pretty equal. 

Servers as a Platform

     The commodity server platform as an appliance has always been an interesting one.  The benefits for a start-up are many.  Firstly, you get to leverage current technologies easily, toss in a new network card and you’ve got IB or 10GigE.  Secondly, open source Linux gives an instant development baseline, leverage the work others have done before you.  Lastly, your time can be spent on software development and features as a priority.  The complicated part is not getting the solution to work, but to get the most out of a platform not designed for IO, but for general computing.  The mix of software development between user space and kernel space, staying on top of security within a very open OS architecture, and overcoming the inherent single points of failure in today’s common server platforms, all become pain points very quickly.  However, for a cash poor start-up, the initial minimal costs and rapid development typically make up for choosing this road, especially if the exit strategy is change of ownership.  In recent years upstarts like Compellent (OEM’d SuperMicro Servers), LeftHand Networks(Dell, HP and a few other servers, although most recently ONLY HP Servers), Exanet (IBM, Dell, and a few other server vendors), DataCore (pretty much any server), and several others, chose the commodity server route and have had mixed success.

Hardware as a Platform

     The custom hardware road is much more complicated from the get go, but the effort up front can pay out big in the long run.  The upfront pain with custom hardware is running two engineering teams, one for the hardware side and another for the software.  The benefit of custom hardware is that chipsets, real-time operating systems, and form factors allow for HA hardware architectures, system built for performance and reliability, and ownership of every detail of the solution.  However, the effort to support hardware, roll with technology updates, and costs for manufacturing can burden even the most experienced engineering teams.  In mainstream storage the custom hardware route has been the standard of the likes of IBM, HP, EMC, HDS, and SUN STK, who cumulatively own the storage market. 

How to choose?

     In the end, how the technology was implemented is far less important then the impact of the architecture decisions to support the vendors choice.  The things I always pay attention to is the data path, what happens to the data path in normal state, degraded state, and a failed state.  The next area I will tend to look at is how has a company really leveraged either technology, was custom hardware required, or it is not a differentiator.  In the end, there isn’t always a clear winner, and doing a technology bake-off is always a good idea if the vendors will allow for it.