Monday, December 7, 2009
Tiering, ILM, HSM and WGAF
In 2004, SNIA defined Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) as comprising the policies, processes, practices, and tools used to align the business value of information with the most appropriate and cost effective IT infrastructure (I would have added 'for its placement' but the ILMers at SNIA are wicked fussy about inferring that ILM has ANYTHING to do with storage. –Ed.) from the time information is conceived through its final disposition. Information is aligned with business processes through management policies and service levels associated with applications, metadata, information, and data.
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
The Character of Clouds: Ethics Matter More for Service Providers
Here's an important reminder for cloud service providers: character counts.
Ethics, Values, and Trust are table stakes – for anyone who wants to succeed in business long term – but especially for cloud service providers.
As a cloud customer, I am not simply buying/renting your hardware and software. I am grafting my company onto yours. We are intermingling our corporate DNA. I am loading my databases on your disk drives. I am modifying my internal processes to map to your services.
Saturday, September 26, 2009
Rule 1: OSG is always right
Rule #2 - if you think right is wrong, you're not paying attention.
Regardless of who pays for it, healthcare is a set of goods and services that must be delivered by others to you.
Like if or not, there is not enough 'healthcare' to go around. Everyone cannot and will not get all the 'healthcare' they need or want.
This is just a reality, not a political statement.
When you let the government pay - the government has to decide who will get how much. Since government represent everyone equally, government payment systems requires 'fairness'. This means the government has to decide who gets treatment and who doesn't.
Some form of the following:
Life expectancy (age) X quality of life (defined how exactly??) X effectiveness of treatment / Cost of treatment
is used to determine whether you (or your kids or your parents) get the treatment.
Regardless of who pays for it, healthcare is a set of goods and services that must be delivered by others to you.
Like if or not, there is not enough 'healthcare' to go around. Everyone cannot and will not get all the 'healthcare' they need or want.
This is just a reality, not a political statement.
When you let the government pay - the government has to decide who will get how much. Since government represent everyone equally, government payment systems requires 'fairness'. This means the government has to decide who gets treatment and who doesn't.
Some form of the following:
Life expectancy (age) X quality of life (defined how exactly??) X effectiveness of treatment / Cost of treatment
is used to determine whether you (or your kids or your parents) get the treatment.
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Save a Socialist, Ride a Cowboy
I rejected your comment because I found it insulting, and it's my blog, so tough noogies. But, here's my attempt to respond objectively.
Your 'right' cannot ever be granted by taking property away from others. Rights are just that, rights - you have the right to life (I can't kill you), liberty (I can't enslave you), the pursuit of happiness (whatever that means). You don't - in western society anyway - have the right to take my stuff.
You don't have a right to eat my food. You have a right to earn your own darn food.
The blanket statement - "in western society, health care is a right not a good" is intellectually dishonest.
Your 'right' cannot ever be granted by taking property away from others. Rights are just that, rights - you have the right to life (I can't kill you), liberty (I can't enslave you), the pursuit of happiness (whatever that means). You don't - in western society anyway - have the right to take my stuff.
You don't have a right to eat my food. You have a right to earn your own darn food.
The blanket statement - "in western society, health care is a right not a good" is intellectually dishonest.
Blind Faith, Dashed Hope, and Unequal Justic
Been thinking about justice lately.
Left sees injustice in the fact that some people are wealthy and others are not.
Right sees injustice in the government taking away their property and giving it to others.
Healthcare Reformers see injustice in wealth determining access to medical services.
Kanye West sees injustice in Taylor Swift winning an award instead of Beyonce.
When we sense the order of things is out of whack, we get a visceral mental reaction. We hate injustice! We are even willing to fight wars to right injustices if they are menacing enough.
But what is injustice, exactly? And why do we so violently disagree on what is just or isn’t?
Left sees injustice in the fact that some people are wealthy and others are not.
Right sees injustice in the government taking away their property and giving it to others.
Healthcare Reformers see injustice in wealth determining access to medical services.
Kanye West sees injustice in Taylor Swift winning an award instead of Beyonce.
When we sense the order of things is out of whack, we get a visceral mental reaction. We hate injustice! We are even willing to fight wars to right injustices if they are menacing enough.
But what is injustice, exactly? And why do we so violently disagree on what is just or isn’t?
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Ah…whippersnapper…
like you, I have attended many trade shows. More than you, perhaps? We are no longer taught to respect the wisdom of our elders in this culture. However, perspective is very hard to acquire.
Sure, some things have changed since I wrote the rules on technical trade show strategy in 2007. Ironically, I wrote that at the urging of the sponsors of your upcoming all-natural show who were flumuxed about how my little startups always got so much attention while other huge sponsors went lacking.
Sure, some things have changed since I wrote the rules on technical trade show strategy in 2007. Ironically, I wrote that at the urging of the sponsors of your upcoming all-natural show who were flumuxed about how my little startups always got so much attention while other huge sponsors went lacking.
Sunday, June 21, 2009
Stephen's Graduation Party Speech
Everything's Changing - Nothing Much Has Changed
Putting together a video compilation for Stephen's graduation party was a bitter sweet experience. It was fun to find so many old video tapes of Stephen as a baby, but sad to realize that 20 years has passed so fast.
Stephen was born without incident - the obstetrician’s first words were “I’ve delivered lots of babies, and let me tell you, that is one good-looking kid” – nothing much has changed much there.
Friday, May 29, 2009
Payback is a Perk
Vibhoosh Gupta, one of my Babson students from last year, stopped by the booth at Interop.
He's with Motorola.
Last year, he was an engineer - with good ideas and good busines sense. He always seemed somewhat frustrated to me, and I was happy to hear he wanted to move into marketing.
He stopped by last week to tell me that he had indeed moved to a Market Development role - he had come up with a great idea - taking fiber directly into commercial buildings and distributing it to the desktop in place of ethernet cabling. Benefit is pretty straightforward - no power required for switches, no switch closets, hi-performance, and total security (no EMI emission to tap). Vibhoosh ran with the idea, put a business plan together, got it approved and launched it at Interop.
He was nice enough to say that he was able to use his learnings from my class in doing so.
It meant a lot to me that I was able to help someone along the way - you never really know, do you? The reason I teach is to give something back - pay forward in reverse, I guess - and in the case of Vibhoosh, it seems to have worked. Made my day.
Boy, I hope he's successful with the idea, and if not, I sure hope he took good notes during the "starting from scratch is hard" class about getting up, dusting off, and starting over again...after you fail...once, twice, or a dozen times...
He's with Motorola.
Last year, he was an engineer - with good ideas and good busines sense. He always seemed somewhat frustrated to me, and I was happy to hear he wanted to move into marketing.
He stopped by last week to tell me that he had indeed moved to a Market Development role - he had come up with a great idea - taking fiber directly into commercial buildings and distributing it to the desktop in place of ethernet cabling. Benefit is pretty straightforward - no power required for switches, no switch closets, hi-performance, and total security (no EMI emission to tap). Vibhoosh ran with the idea, put a business plan together, got it approved and launched it at Interop.
He was nice enough to say that he was able to use his learnings from my class in doing so.
It meant a lot to me that I was able to help someone along the way - you never really know, do you? The reason I teach is to give something back - pay forward in reverse, I guess - and in the case of Vibhoosh, it seems to have worked. Made my day.
Boy, I hope he's successful with the idea, and if not, I sure hope he took good notes during the "starting from scratch is hard" class about getting up, dusting off, and starting over again...after you fail...once, twice, or a dozen times...
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
TechValidate
Brad O'Neill showed me his idea for TechValidate in the lobby of the New York Hilton at SNW a couple of years ago.
I loved it then, and I love it a lot more now. StumbleUpon was a pipsqueak of an idea compared to TechValidate.
As long as I have been doing this - marketing black boxes to IT geeks, that is - it's been near impossible to get and keep customer references.
This dearth of referencable customers leads to half a dozen thorny problems.
- Editors won't let reporters/writers do stories without customer quotes. Even if you have the best mousetrap since cheese, you can't get anyone to write a story about it.
- Frustrated writers/reporters can't publish even their most interesting stories.
- Prospects won't buy unless they can speak to a customer.
- Salesreps drive marketing crazy asking for references.
- Customers who do make themselves available quickly get besieged and 'burn out'
- Salesreps lucky enough to have customers willing to take calls, horde them like squirrels horde nuts, and won't let other reps (or marketing and PR people) get to them for fear of 'burning them out'
This friction in getting, keeping, and managing customer references creates scarcity and high cost. Industry analysts fill the void - for a price - acting as a proxy for real customers, offering quotes to press releases and reporters, opinion (expert or not) on the value of the product to customers, etc.
Along comes Golden-Hand O'Neill - OK, arguably with a bit of a chip on his shoulder for industry analysts perhaps - and innovates a tool that blows up the whole mess.
Talk about disruptive...
TechValidate lets customers offer their honest opinions directly and anonymously, but verifiably.
Writers and editors can now write stories with validated quotes, without the hassle of getting permission.
Prospects can get validated experiences from real customers to increase their comfort levels.
Salesreps can confidently make claims of value based on validated customer response.
Marketing people can stop fighting alligators and get back to draining the swamp.
Just once, please, can't I have a brilliant idea like this that will make me $10 or $20 million...?
Just once?
I loved it then, and I love it a lot more now. StumbleUpon was a pipsqueak of an idea compared to TechValidate.
As long as I have been doing this - marketing black boxes to IT geeks, that is - it's been near impossible to get and keep customer references.
This dearth of referencable customers leads to half a dozen thorny problems.
- Editors won't let reporters/writers do stories without customer quotes. Even if you have the best mousetrap since cheese, you can't get anyone to write a story about it.
- Frustrated writers/reporters can't publish even their most interesting stories.
- Prospects won't buy unless they can speak to a customer.
- Salesreps drive marketing crazy asking for references.
- Customers who do make themselves available quickly get besieged and 'burn out'
- Salesreps lucky enough to have customers willing to take calls, horde them like squirrels horde nuts, and won't let other reps (or marketing and PR people) get to them for fear of 'burning them out'
This friction in getting, keeping, and managing customer references creates scarcity and high cost. Industry analysts fill the void - for a price - acting as a proxy for real customers, offering quotes to press releases and reporters, opinion (expert or not) on the value of the product to customers, etc.
Along comes Golden-Hand O'Neill - OK, arguably with a bit of a chip on his shoulder for industry analysts perhaps - and innovates a tool that blows up the whole mess.
Talk about disruptive...
TechValidate lets customers offer their honest opinions directly and anonymously, but verifiably.
Writers and editors can now write stories with validated quotes, without the hassle of getting permission.
Prospects can get validated experiences from real customers to increase their comfort levels.
Salesreps can confidently make claims of value based on validated customer response.
Marketing people can stop fighting alligators and get back to draining the swamp.
Just once, please, can't I have a brilliant idea like this that will make me $10 or $20 million...?
Just once?
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Wow
Dave Donatelli leaving EMC. Wow.
DD at HP. Maybe. Probably Not. Wow.
Huge loss either way.
On Meyers/Briggs tests I'm always an INTP - which makes me a pretty good strategist - analytical, perceptive. I can usually sense industry moves BEFORE they happen.
But holy-batman-in-blue-tights-and-red-cape-with-a-big-S-on-the-chest...I sure didn't see this one coming.
Dave and I go back a ways - 1993-4 I think. He was pushing EMC to go multi-vendor when I was pushing DEC Multi-Vendor StorageWorks. We were both anti-authority change agents and competitors of sort. He was fighting against EMC's success in AS400 and IBM mainframe storage. I was fighting against the failure of DEC.
I interviewed with him once for a job at EMC. But, during the meeting, he told me about taking an MBA program in Chicago while living in Boston. That introduction to the Kellogg North America program changed my life. I followed Dave to Kellogg, but not to EMC, the year after he started, and one of the proudest moments of my life still is graduating at the top of the class while my father was still alive to see it.
The comparisons sort of end there though - Dave stayed at EMC. I quit Compaq to chase the startup dream. Last year, Dave made five and a half million dollars...let's just say, I didn't.
Despite his reputation as a very tough cookie in a box of tough cookies, Dave deserves a spot in the Storage Sanity Hall of Fame. There probably hasn't been a more influential hand behind the scenes in the storage industry for 15 years.
And, honestly, even though I did graduate at the top of the class, he was always smarter than me...we will all be better off as an industry if the courts let him work somewhere.
DD at HP. Maybe. Probably Not. Wow.
Huge loss either way.
On Meyers/Briggs tests I'm always an INTP - which makes me a pretty good strategist - analytical, perceptive. I can usually sense industry moves BEFORE they happen.
But holy-batman-in-blue-tights-and-red-cape-with-a-big-S-on-the-chest...I sure didn't see this one coming.
Dave and I go back a ways - 1993-4 I think. He was pushing EMC to go multi-vendor when I was pushing DEC Multi-Vendor StorageWorks. We were both anti-authority change agents and competitors of sort. He was fighting against EMC's success in AS400 and IBM mainframe storage. I was fighting against the failure of DEC.
I interviewed with him once for a job at EMC. But, during the meeting, he told me about taking an MBA program in Chicago while living in Boston. That introduction to the Kellogg North America program changed my life. I followed Dave to Kellogg, but not to EMC, the year after he started, and one of the proudest moments of my life still is graduating at the top of the class while my father was still alive to see it.
The comparisons sort of end there though - Dave stayed at EMC. I quit Compaq to chase the startup dream. Last year, Dave made five and a half million dollars...let's just say, I didn't.
Despite his reputation as a very tough cookie in a box of tough cookies, Dave deserves a spot in the Storage Sanity Hall of Fame. There probably hasn't been a more influential hand behind the scenes in the storage industry for 15 years.
And, honestly, even though I did graduate at the top of the class, he was always smarter than me...we will all be better off as an industry if the courts let him work somewhere.
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Something we all beleive in...
Today, Illinois' new governor, Pat Quinn, proposed a 50 percent increase in the income tax rate stating that it was based on "...something we all believe in -- ability to pay..."
Mr. Quinn - we don't all beleive in Marxism.
Karl Marx's famous - "From each according to their ability, to each according to their need" - is the central communist idea - that the most productive should be forced to pay for what other's receive from the state for free - only because the most productive, as a result of their productivity, have the means to pay.
This socialist philosophy - which so scares MOST of us to our bones - is based on the twisted and debased principle that the people exist to serve the state.
Of, by, and for, Mr. Quinn. Of, by, and for.
This democracy exists to serve its citizens, not the other way around. The government exists to provide benefits and protections to the VAST MAJORITY of its citizens. It exists because we will it to exist, not because it forces itself upon us.
We all agree that government has worth. We respectfully can disagree about how much it should do, and how much it should cost.
But when we start losing sight of the role of government we risk losing the country itself. Here it is again, just in case Mr. Quinn, or any of the rest of our leaders need a refresher.
"...We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed..."
It is simply amazing that the last 6 months have so changed us, that we now numbly accept, in the tenor of public discourse, the very concepts and ideas that generations of Americans gave their lives to protect us against.
Mr. Quinn - we don't all beleive in Marxism.
Karl Marx's famous - "From each according to their ability, to each according to their need" - is the central communist idea - that the most productive should be forced to pay for what other's receive from the state for free - only because the most productive, as a result of their productivity, have the means to pay.
This socialist philosophy - which so scares MOST of us to our bones - is based on the twisted and debased principle that the people exist to serve the state.
Of, by, and for, Mr. Quinn. Of, by, and for.
This democracy exists to serve its citizens, not the other way around. The government exists to provide benefits and protections to the VAST MAJORITY of its citizens. It exists because we will it to exist, not because it forces itself upon us.
We all agree that government has worth. We respectfully can disagree about how much it should do, and how much it should cost.
But when we start losing sight of the role of government we risk losing the country itself. Here it is again, just in case Mr. Quinn, or any of the rest of our leaders need a refresher.
"...We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed..."
It is simply amazing that the last 6 months have so changed us, that we now numbly accept, in the tenor of public discourse, the very concepts and ideas that generations of Americans gave their lives to protect us against.
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
I just got ripped off...
Google finally got me...
I overran the free storage limit on my google account, and they made me pay $20 for another 10GB for a year. What a rip!
I could have bought a TB network drive from Dell for $179.
Let's see ... that's 1,099,511,627,776 bytes at $179 (call it $200 with tax and shipping) or $0.00000000018 per byte.
Take 6 or 8 zeros off and I'm still getting a whopping, I coulda had a V8, headache.
My first 1 TB storage system was the Digital StorageWorks Enterprise Storage Array we introduced in 1993/4. It came in 3 fully loaded 19" racks and cost over a million dollars.
Doh....
I overran the free storage limit on my google account, and they made me pay $20 for another 10GB for a year. What a rip!
I could have bought a TB network drive from Dell for $179.
Let's see ... that's 1,099,511,627,776 bytes at $179 (call it $200 with tax and shipping) or $0.00000000018 per byte.
Take 6 or 8 zeros off and I'm still getting a whopping, I coulda had a V8, headache.
My first 1 TB storage system was the Digital StorageWorks Enterprise Storage Array we introduced in 1993/4. It came in 3 fully loaded 19" racks and cost over a million dollars.
Doh....
Friday, March 6, 2009
A virtual world of virtualness
I wrote this a while ago, but returning from Nice last week, it still strikes me as somewhat prescient - if I do say so myself.
Kirby's Sub-theorem #2 - Virtualization eventually surrounds and commoditizes every IT resource
Ultimately, IT infrastructure will be made up of groups of commoditized resources – processor power, network bandwidth, storage capacity, etc. – connected through ‘buffering zones’ which are at their core virtualizers.
These connecting layers between resource pools will also provide the control points for infrastructure management. These connecting layers will be a loosely coupled network of policy enforcement engines – both providing the decoupling (virtualization) of the resources and enabling management policies to be injected, enforced, and visualized.
As data moves between servers and storage, policies will control access and placement. As traffic is moved from applications to end-users, policies will control security, quality of service, and even provisioning of additional resources.
IT operations will be provided a single unified view of the infrastructure and policies, enabling near-instant IT response to changes in the business environment.
It will be interesting to see how the virtualizers are eventually virtualized.
Kirby's Sub-theorem #2 - Virtualization eventually surrounds and commoditizes every IT resource
Ultimately, IT infrastructure will be made up of groups of commoditized resources – processor power, network bandwidth, storage capacity, etc. – connected through ‘buffering zones’ which are at their core virtualizers.
These connecting layers between resource pools will also provide the control points for infrastructure management. These connecting layers will be a loosely coupled network of policy enforcement engines – both providing the decoupling (virtualization) of the resources and enabling management policies to be injected, enforced, and visualized.
As data moves between servers and storage, policies will control access and placement. As traffic is moved from applications to end-users, policies will control security, quality of service, and even provisioning of additional resources.
IT operations will be provided a single unified view of the infrastructure and policies, enabling near-instant IT response to changes in the business environment.
It will be interesting to see how the virtualizers are eventually virtualized.
Forget Iceland - OSG is off to Galt's Gulch
Ok, so I was right and the loonies were wrong. $750B didn't do diddly. The S&P is one-half of its high 18 months ago, and headed further down today. Unemployment at 8.1% is the highest in decades, but the new treasury secretary can't find anyone who wants a job working for him.
Congress is drunk-dipping our collective ATM cards, the president is partying hardy at the white house every night, the US is on its way a People State, and Atlas is damn close to shrugging.
For goodness sake, what are we doing? 8570 earmarks-do you think that's ok? Do you seriously think that increasing taxes on people who create value, and then spending it on pork barrel projects, unemployment benefits, and welfare, will lower the deficit and increase employment?
Do you honestly think nationalizing banks will make people invest in them?
Do you think taking away the fear of failure and the benefit of success will motivate acheivers?
When has that assinine theory ever worked?
…”the federal government is the only entity left with the resources to jolt our economy back into life. It is only government that can break the vicious cycle where lost jobs lead to people spending less money…” Obama press conference, Feb 2009.
Good heavens, do you honestly believe that?
Have we forgotten the lessons of the last century, that coerced self-sacrifice causes a society to self-destruct?
Where are the men of the mind? Has Galt spirited them all away?
Hey John, don't forget me...I'm packed and ready for the call.
Congress is drunk-dipping our collective ATM cards, the president is partying hardy at the white house every night, the US is on its way a People State, and Atlas is damn close to shrugging.
For goodness sake, what are we doing? 8570 earmarks-do you think that's ok? Do you seriously think that increasing taxes on people who create value, and then spending it on pork barrel projects, unemployment benefits, and welfare, will lower the deficit and increase employment?
Do you honestly think nationalizing banks will make people invest in them?
Do you think taking away the fear of failure and the benefit of success will motivate acheivers?
When has that assinine theory ever worked?
…”the federal government is the only entity left with the resources to jolt our economy back into life. It is only government that can break the vicious cycle where lost jobs lead to people spending less money…” Obama press conference, Feb 2009.
Good heavens, do you honestly believe that?
Have we forgotten the lessons of the last century, that coerced self-sacrifice causes a society to self-destruct?
Where are the men of the mind? Has Galt spirited them all away?
Hey John, don't forget me...I'm packed and ready for the call.
Friday, February 27, 2009
Brickbats and Bright Shirts
First off, thanks to Chris Mellor for 'encouraging' me to get back to StorageSanity. It is nice to be missed. I heard that while I was away Yuck went about patting a bunch of storage bloggers on the back - I guess I don't even rate condesention...oh, well...shall endeavor to be more painful in the future.
A guy named James wanted to post a comment about my trade show suggestions - I rejected it because he's a marketing consultant of some sort who wanted to plug his website. But, it turns out I am an idiot. According to Jame, the only thing that matters in IT today is credibility. Wearing bright shirts doesn't get you cred. Better to be the quiet one in the corner, oozing cred. It seems we marketing fluffballs have lost sight of the truth - If you offer real value (and have lots of cred), the market will line up at your booth. In fact, all you really need is a fax number for the PO's to start pouring in. After all, that's all Google and Apple need to do, right.
You - tiny little, cred oozing, startup that you are - can't do better than copy both of them. So ignore my previous advice, please, and quietly ooze cred.
I just came back from VMworld this week. Guess what the VMware folks were wearing...screaming green and prison orange shirts...
A guy named James wanted to post a comment about my trade show suggestions - I rejected it because he's a marketing consultant of some sort who wanted to plug his website. But, it turns out I am an idiot. According to Jame, the only thing that matters in IT today is credibility. Wearing bright shirts doesn't get you cred. Better to be the quiet one in the corner, oozing cred. It seems we marketing fluffballs have lost sight of the truth - If you offer real value (and have lots of cred), the market will line up at your booth. In fact, all you really need is a fax number for the PO's to start pouring in. After all, that's all Google and Apple need to do, right.
You - tiny little, cred oozing, startup that you are - can't do better than copy both of them. So ignore my previous advice, please, and quietly ooze cred.
I just came back from VMworld this week. Guess what the VMware folks were wearing...screaming green and prison orange shirts...
Sunday, November 2, 2008
I am SO out of here....
Just came back from whirlwind tour of Europe – 6 cities in 7 days. The financial collapse happened while I was away so you can’t blame me. It was fascinating how many Europeans, learning I was American insisted that I tell them what was happening. Why were we doing this to them?
As I was sitting in a pub in London, eating a $15 cheeseburger and drinking and $5 diet coke, I saw a bus go by with an advertisement for 6.7% interest on a passbook saving account. At home, the same account pays something like 0.03%. So I wondered– ignoring currency exchange risk – why would anyone put money in a US bank? Another advertisement offered 200% returns on money invested in Dubai real estate.
And I got to thinking that perhaps the real problem is that Whackaminijob from Iran might be right. America might be coming to the end of its dominant power position in the world. We might be facing a British Empire type demise. After all, we import obscene amounts of petroleum both in the form of oil from the middle east and plastic from the far east – while exporting nothing much more than ethereal cash that we borrow from both and promises of future cash which we have no clue how we will get. It’s probably an oversimplification, but if you picture cash as fluid, it seems to me the tide is flowing in the wrong direction and the reservoir is getting low. At some point, (maybe now?), there won’t enough cash left in NY to keep the system operating. Printing $750B will help for a minute, but it will also instantly deflate the value of each dollar by 5% or more. Can anyone spell Argentina?
Here in the US, we used to have a fairly well rounded set of value-adding functions that combined to create wealth -- natural resources, hard work, innovation, technology and tools, pluck, etc – mixed with a pride and sense of fear in not accomplishing something. If you didn’t work and succeed your family went wanting. Now, it seems we’ve squandered that American wealth building machine. A sense of entitlement replaces fear of failure. Distrust of those who have succeeded in accumulating wealth, and a desire to punitively tax them back to a lowest common denominator status, replaces ambition to join them at the higher strata of society. American innovation seems sort of a hollow concept lately –incremental vs. transformational.
I guess I am just an old geezer now, cranky and unforgiving. I don’t feel sorry for people who didn’t finish school, don’t work hard, and don’t create their own wealth. I don’t feel that my lifestyle – which I studied hard for 22 years, and worked harder for another 30 to achieve – is the right of every American, hard-working or not. It's certainly not the right of the criminaliens.
My hard work has created jobs for dozens or perhaps hundreds of families. My teaching has helped hundreds more build careers and create value for themselves. I don’t feel the least damn bit guilty for what I have accomplished or acquired, and I don’t feel selfish for wanting to share it my family rather than having it stolen by the government and redistributed to strangers who have not created enough value to provide for themselves.
Frankly, I am shocked and dismayed that 52% of the American voting public seems to disagree with me. But time will tell. Socialism fails - human spirit is too strong to put up with it for long. The sad thing is that historically when socialism fails, it destroys the underlying country that allowed it to spawn. I, politically incorrectly, pray to my chosen judeo-christian God that we find a way to avoid that fate this time.
The one good thing resulting from the global economic meltdown is that waterfront property in Iceland is cheap now. If the socialists win on Tuesday, I just may head off to Reykjavik to wait it out in a cottage by the shore.
As I was sitting in a pub in London, eating a $15 cheeseburger and drinking and $5 diet coke, I saw a bus go by with an advertisement for 6.7% interest on a passbook saving account. At home, the same account pays something like 0.03%. So I wondered– ignoring currency exchange risk – why would anyone put money in a US bank? Another advertisement offered 200% returns on money invested in Dubai real estate.
And I got to thinking that perhaps the real problem is that Whackaminijob from Iran might be right. America might be coming to the end of its dominant power position in the world. We might be facing a British Empire type demise. After all, we import obscene amounts of petroleum both in the form of oil from the middle east and plastic from the far east – while exporting nothing much more than ethereal cash that we borrow from both and promises of future cash which we have no clue how we will get. It’s probably an oversimplification, but if you picture cash as fluid, it seems to me the tide is flowing in the wrong direction and the reservoir is getting low. At some point, (maybe now?), there won’t enough cash left in NY to keep the system operating. Printing $750B will help for a minute, but it will also instantly deflate the value of each dollar by 5% or more. Can anyone spell Argentina?
Here in the US, we used to have a fairly well rounded set of value-adding functions that combined to create wealth -- natural resources, hard work, innovation, technology and tools, pluck, etc – mixed with a pride and sense of fear in not accomplishing something. If you didn’t work and succeed your family went wanting. Now, it seems we’ve squandered that American wealth building machine. A sense of entitlement replaces fear of failure. Distrust of those who have succeeded in accumulating wealth, and a desire to punitively tax them back to a lowest common denominator status, replaces ambition to join them at the higher strata of society. American innovation seems sort of a hollow concept lately –incremental vs. transformational.
I guess I am just an old geezer now, cranky and unforgiving. I don’t feel sorry for people who didn’t finish school, don’t work hard, and don’t create their own wealth. I don’t feel that my lifestyle – which I studied hard for 22 years, and worked harder for another 30 to achieve – is the right of every American, hard-working or not. It's certainly not the right of the criminaliens.
My hard work has created jobs for dozens or perhaps hundreds of families. My teaching has helped hundreds more build careers and create value for themselves. I don’t feel the least damn bit guilty for what I have accomplished or acquired, and I don’t feel selfish for wanting to share it my family rather than having it stolen by the government and redistributed to strangers who have not created enough value to provide for themselves.
Frankly, I am shocked and dismayed that 52% of the American voting public seems to disagree with me. But time will tell. Socialism fails - human spirit is too strong to put up with it for long. The sad thing is that historically when socialism fails, it destroys the underlying country that allowed it to spawn. I, politically incorrectly, pray to my chosen judeo-christian God that we find a way to avoid that fate this time.
The one good thing resulting from the global economic meltdown is that waterfront property in Iceland is cheap now. If the socialists win on Tuesday, I just may head off to Reykjavik to wait it out in a cottage by the shore.
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
The importance of new school lunchboxes
Remember when you were a kid and one of the most important decisions affecting your life was what lunch box you were going to carry when school started in September? I’m talking about real lunch boxes here, the pressed steel ones with the plastic handles that held a thermos bottle for cold milk – or if you were on the geeky side like some of us, hot soup. The kind of lunch boxes that are so collectable today.
Remember you couldn’t possibly show up on opening day of school with last year’s model – heaven forbid. And, if you, or more probably your mother, chose the wrong pop star, band, or action hero lunch box the entire success of your school year could be put at risk. It was a momentous decision. The Beatles beat Herman’s Hermits, GI Joe blew away James Bond, Barbie must have out-blonded some other doll, but I have to admit, I didn’t pay attention to girls or their lunchboxes. Back then, to us girls were like Linux to the MSFT legion – weird, inexplicable, and coodie-ridden.
Funny how things don’t really change that much (well not the girl part, that changed pretty dramatically, I mean the lunch box thing). It’s Fall again, so for the storage industry, that means its school lunch box time again. The first day of school is now the first day of Storage Decisions, and every kid on the block has a new lunchbox.
I was so excited to see all those solid state disk lunch boxes – all with (I told you so two years ago) flash inside. Violin seems pretty cool – fast, dense, relatively cheap – and I love that they are co-opting the term, Tier Zero, which I (we) coined a few years ago. I have decided to farm myself out as an industry term coiner for hire. Let me know if you have a challenging concept that needs a catchy term – or better yet a three or four letter acronym. I am really good at creating techno-babble…but I egoistically digress…
Acceleration is another big lunch box theme this year – sorry I just don’t see how this is a product and not a feature. Overtime, all these specialty acceleration appliances converge into layers of value added services delivered on multi-service platforms. I wouldn’t have invested in this stuff myself, but perhaps there is a build and sell model that will work for a few of these startups. Like a Gary and Pacemakers lunchbox– I predict it will look dopey by Christmas vacation when they haven’t had another hit, but could be an awesome collectable by 2028. Ditto encryption – (Freddie and the Dreamers).
Thin provisioning is sort of the Rubberman/Fantastic Four lunchbox – stretches to fit. The problem I have with the idea of faking out the application and underprovisioning capacity is the holy hell to pay if something unexpected happens. I know, I know. Oh, Kirby, you are such a worrier – the statistical probability of the system melting down is negligible. It won’t happen, our algorithms are sound. Well maybe, but trying selling that logic this week at Lehman, AIG, ML, and Bear -- or the families on the London Eye when Rubbie lets the Sliver Surfer get the better of his temper for that matter. I like my bytes to be real bytes.
Cloud storage. Hmmm. I’m foggy on clouds, but didn’t we try this 10 years ago? Is this perhaps the Grateful Dead lunch box? What a long strange road…and all that? Or maybe the lunchbox with the big marijuana leaf on the cover? If our next new generation of storage marketing genii can finally convince enterprise customers to store their data on dirt cheap white box storage in questionably operated remote data centers – when we couldn’t convince them to store data on Symmetric systems in our professionally managed raised floors environments, then I will eat my SNIA founding member card, and my lunch.
Speaking of cafeterias–the food at Storage Decisions still reminds me of Lunch Lady Land.
Remember you couldn’t possibly show up on opening day of school with last year’s model – heaven forbid. And, if you, or more probably your mother, chose the wrong pop star, band, or action hero lunch box the entire success of your school year could be put at risk. It was a momentous decision. The Beatles beat Herman’s Hermits, GI Joe blew away James Bond, Barbie must have out-blonded some other doll, but I have to admit, I didn’t pay attention to girls or their lunchboxes. Back then, to us girls were like Linux to the MSFT legion – weird, inexplicable, and coodie-ridden.
Funny how things don’t really change that much (well not the girl part, that changed pretty dramatically, I mean the lunch box thing). It’s Fall again, so for the storage industry, that means its school lunch box time again. The first day of school is now the first day of Storage Decisions, and every kid on the block has a new lunchbox.
I was so excited to see all those solid state disk lunch boxes – all with (I told you so two years ago) flash inside. Violin seems pretty cool – fast, dense, relatively cheap – and I love that they are co-opting the term, Tier Zero, which I (we) coined a few years ago. I have decided to farm myself out as an industry term coiner for hire. Let me know if you have a challenging concept that needs a catchy term – or better yet a three or four letter acronym. I am really good at creating techno-babble…but I egoistically digress…
Acceleration is another big lunch box theme this year – sorry I just don’t see how this is a product and not a feature. Overtime, all these specialty acceleration appliances converge into layers of value added services delivered on multi-service platforms. I wouldn’t have invested in this stuff myself, but perhaps there is a build and sell model that will work for a few of these startups. Like a Gary and Pacemakers lunchbox– I predict it will look dopey by Christmas vacation when they haven’t had another hit, but could be an awesome collectable by 2028. Ditto encryption – (Freddie and the Dreamers).
Thin provisioning is sort of the Rubberman/Fantastic Four lunchbox – stretches to fit. The problem I have with the idea of faking out the application and underprovisioning capacity is the holy hell to pay if something unexpected happens. I know, I know. Oh, Kirby, you are such a worrier – the statistical probability of the system melting down is negligible. It won’t happen, our algorithms are sound. Well maybe, but trying selling that logic this week at Lehman, AIG, ML, and Bear -- or the families on the London Eye when Rubbie lets the Sliver Surfer get the better of his temper for that matter. I like my bytes to be real bytes.
Cloud storage. Hmmm. I’m foggy on clouds, but didn’t we try this 10 years ago? Is this perhaps the Grateful Dead lunch box? What a long strange road…and all that? Or maybe the lunchbox with the big marijuana leaf on the cover? If our next new generation of storage marketing genii can finally convince enterprise customers to store their data on dirt cheap white box storage in questionably operated remote data centers – when we couldn’t convince them to store data on Symmetric systems in our professionally managed raised floors environments, then I will eat my SNIA founding member card, and my lunch.
Speaking of cafeterias–the food at Storage Decisions still reminds me of Lunch Lady Land.
Saturday, July 12, 2008
Thoughts Aweigh...
Been on vacation. Finally got the boat sorted out and took it to Nantucket. Wow.
Finally found out where everyone disappears to after they take their storage company public...
Stopped along the way in MV and took David parasailing. Wow.
Been spending a lot of time thinking about virtualization - again. Still think Kirby's Law applies - now having given it some thought beyond just storage. But...here's the thing. Its not really the virtualizing itself that means anything. Virtualization is decoupling. Seperating logical access from physical location. a proxy. whoopdeedamndoo. It's the services you can inject into, or maybe more respectfully to Kirby's Law...under, the decoupling layer that matter. Services can be simple - provisioning, federation, migration of the virtualized resource for instance. Or they can be more complex and presumably higher value - directed access, security, cleansing, etc. And given enough horsepower, you might even host applications in the virtualization layer - CDP/Backup, Indexing, etc.
All of this presumes however that you respect Kirby's Law and virtualize resources from the layer above. Decoupling a resource from itself makes no sense, and injecting cross-resource services into an individual resource itself makes no sense either. What does that mean pracitically? It means you will eventually learn to decouple physical storage from servers and decouple physical servers from the network using seperate, purpose built virtualization/service delivery platforms. And it means that the services aimed at managing those physical resources will eventually come to reside in the service delivery platform not the underlying physical resource layer.
I'm right - but it may take a while for the physical resource layer guys to admit it. They will have to find another way to make money before they do.
Now, if I can only figure out how to beat them to it, I think there is 150 foot slip waiting for me at the Nantucket Boat Basin....
Finally found out where everyone disappears to after they take their storage company public...
Stopped along the way in MV and took David parasailing. Wow.
Been spending a lot of time thinking about virtualization - again. Still think Kirby's Law applies - now having given it some thought beyond just storage. But...here's the thing. Its not really the virtualizing itself that means anything. Virtualization is decoupling. Seperating logical access from physical location. a proxy. whoopdeedamndoo. It's the services you can inject into, or maybe more respectfully to Kirby's Law...under, the decoupling layer that matter. Services can be simple - provisioning, federation, migration of the virtualized resource for instance. Or they can be more complex and presumably higher value - directed access, security, cleansing, etc. And given enough horsepower, you might even host applications in the virtualization layer - CDP/Backup, Indexing, etc.
All of this presumes however that you respect Kirby's Law and virtualize resources from the layer above. Decoupling a resource from itself makes no sense, and injecting cross-resource services into an individual resource itself makes no sense either. What does that mean pracitically? It means you will eventually learn to decouple physical storage from servers and decouple physical servers from the network using seperate, purpose built virtualization/service delivery platforms. And it means that the services aimed at managing those physical resources will eventually come to reside in the service delivery platform not the underlying physical resource layer.
I'm right - but it may take a while for the physical resource layer guys to admit it. They will have to find another way to make money before they do.
Now, if I can only figure out how to beat them to it, I think there is 150 foot slip waiting for me at the Nantucket Boat Basin....
Sunday, May 25, 2008
Eulogy for Norman
My wife's grandfather died this week -at 94 bless his heart - and these words somehow found their way to my keyboard. I gave this eulogy today at his funeral, and enough perfect strangers came up afterward to tell me how it helped them, that I think maybe it will help you, too. If not, skip it and wait for more of my acerbic storage wit later...
Recollections on a Real Corker
My first introduction to Norman Appleyard’s larger than life persona occurred back in 1986. I was visiting my dear friend Jef Cole at his parent’s house on Cape Cod. Many of you may remember Larry and Barbara Cole from this church, and the Weston Golf Club.
Monday, May 5, 2008
Virtualize this…
Interop, Las Vegas – the mere whisper strikes either fear or joy into the hearts of every high tech marketer in America. People in this business don’t set their watches by it, they plan their calendars around it. Vacations, meetings, training events, and even weddings (!) sway in accommodation for this annual IT pilgrimage to the Mecca of all things bright and brazen.
As we’ve discussed, I hate trade shows. Trade shows are dead or dying. And as previously stipulated, I am never wrong…
Well…
Is it possible to be a little tiny bit wrong?
Visiting Mandalay Bay for a quick in and out last week brought me up short.
Here 25,000 people, mostly card-carrying, paid-up members of Geek Nation (my favorite buyer persona), herded around cattle fields full of vendor booths sniffing crop loads of black boxes with blue blinky lights. Old geeks, hairy geeks, bald geeks, creepy tattooed geeks, geeks in jeans, geeks in suits, geeks in patent leather(!) all sniffing and poking, pawing at the ground, mooing and ahhhing occasionally. A technomarketers sweaty palmed dream come true.
Major OSG kudos to vendors who subscribed to my Dozen Dirty Tricks for Trade Shows – the place was overrun with booth models, golf simulators, free tee-shirts, and blinky-lights as vendor after vendor strove to be REMARKABLE.
A tiny training company with a 10x10 booth, and a tiny marketing budget takes home the coveted First Annual Kirby Award for best-of-show promotional remarkability this year.
On the first day of the show, their promo models proudly wore skin tight tees emprinted with simply, “Virtualize This…” (or was it Virtualize These...? I was afraid to look.) on the front, which generated a solid buzz.
They outdid their own buzz factor, and every other exhibitor large and small, when the next day, the models arrived in bikinis, and lounged around on beach towels in the booth, (their giveaway theme was an island vacation).
But, I have to admit, when they broke out the Twister game, I retired my tradeshow number to the rafters, and packed it in.
Flourescent shirts have nothing…nothing at all on this.
Maybe my OSG heart was a few sizes too small?
Maybe tradeshows do have some value after all?
As we’ve discussed, I hate trade shows. Trade shows are dead or dying. And as previously stipulated, I am never wrong…
Well…
Is it possible to be a little tiny bit wrong?
Visiting Mandalay Bay for a quick in and out last week brought me up short.
Here 25,000 people, mostly card-carrying, paid-up members of Geek Nation (my favorite buyer persona), herded around cattle fields full of vendor booths sniffing crop loads of black boxes with blue blinky lights. Old geeks, hairy geeks, bald geeks, creepy tattooed geeks, geeks in jeans, geeks in suits, geeks in patent leather(!) all sniffing and poking, pawing at the ground, mooing and ahhhing occasionally. A technomarketers sweaty palmed dream come true.
Major OSG kudos to vendors who subscribed to my Dozen Dirty Tricks for Trade Shows – the place was overrun with booth models, golf simulators, free tee-shirts, and blinky-lights as vendor after vendor strove to be REMARKABLE.
A tiny training company with a 10x10 booth, and a tiny marketing budget takes home the coveted First Annual Kirby Award for best-of-show promotional remarkability this year.
On the first day of the show, their promo models proudly wore skin tight tees emprinted with simply, “Virtualize This…” (or was it Virtualize These...? I was afraid to look.) on the front, which generated a solid buzz.
They outdid their own buzz factor, and every other exhibitor large and small, when the next day, the models arrived in bikinis, and lounged around on beach towels in the booth, (their giveaway theme was an island vacation).
But, I have to admit, when they broke out the Twister game, I retired my tradeshow number to the rafters, and packed it in.
Flourescent shirts have nothing…nothing at all on this.
Maybe my OSG heart was a few sizes too small?
Maybe tradeshows do have some value after all?
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