Test Me If You Can

Ever see a headline on a press release like this?

“According to the widely respected OhGosh Group, OUR Product Performs Better Than THEIR Product!”

or

“New Report from World-Renowned Acme Consulting Proves XYZ Technology’s New Stamflatz 10000 delivers More Gigaflux Capacity than ABC Technology’s Burgpultz 500!”

Or how about my personal favorite?

“Industry Leading Analyst Firm Ranks XYZ Technology’s New Stamflatz 10000 the Clear Leader in Customer Satisfaction!”

Oh, and the tweets are even worse:

“Great News! We absolutely blow away Burgpultz! But, don’t take our word for it.. check out HTTP.BS.B.LY”

You know the type – usually sounds all hyperventilated and squealy. Ugh.

My good friend and colleage, Lori MacVittie just wrote a blog on this subject, For Thirty Pieces of Silver My Product Can Beat Your Product, that got my 'marketing professional' dander dandying.

Now a word about the relevancy of File Virtualization

Having just discussed the ninny-ness of calling something relevant, now you can call me, Old Storage Ninny (OSN).

First, let's establish my cred before I start jumping up and down screaming that File Virtualization is relevant.

I am speaking for myself here – not my employer. While acknowledging that I work for a company that sells file virtualization technology, I want to be clear that my position here is mine – it’s personal this time. Sure, I want my employer to succeed, but I am speaking now from the heart, and from my 30 years of storage industry experience.

Irrelevant is the hardest word

"What do I do to make you love me?  What have I got to do to be heard?”
© 1976 Big Pig Music Limited

In ’76, Elton John tried to convince us “Sorry” was the hardest word. He was wrong.

If you want to hurt someone or something – the 2010 attack of choice is to declare him or it ‘Irrelevant’.

Two months after a stunning win that rocked the entire USA, Scott Brown was declared irrelevant by the media yesterday.

ir•rel•e•vant (ĭ-rěl'ə-vənt) adj. Unrelated to the matter being considered. having no bearing on or connection with the subject at issue

Super Duper Deduper (for iTunes on Windows7)

I made the mistake of turning on Home Sharing in the iTunes version 9.1.3 (don't do this...).

The OSG family has about 10 computers lying around the home network, just waiting to pounce.  In no time, my poor iTunes library was flooded with multiple copies of musical bilge - seriously what in heaven's name are those kids listening, too?  (and Watching!!! - but that's another blog for another day...).

I found I had 12 versions of Dream On, , and Paperback Writer was written is 18 places on my drowning disk drive - I was Suddenly Numb (17 versions/copies).

I started to manually remove them - ever tried that in iTunes?  About every 3rd delete it makes you confirm that you really, yes, really, I said REALLY, gd it!!, want to move the file to the recycle bin.  Who wrote that damn feature?  After 10 minutes I gave up - seriously considered deleting the whole thing and starting over...

Before pulling the red cord, I checked around online for an iTunes friendly deduper.  Not an easy task if you run W7.  A superstar named Doug Adams wrote some brilliant shareware script for this - "Corral iTunes Dupes AppleScript 7" - but it only runs on Apple.  Molesoft will let you download a free version of  Duplicate File Finder, but that only tells you the baby's ugly - it doesn't actually DO anything.  You have to pay up if you want to actualy fix your problem.  I have no problem paying for software - but it isn't worth $$ to me to dedupe iTunes.  I am irritated, but not incapacitated.

Finally tripped over a duper-souper, wicked-pissa FREE (well, voluntary contribution model) deduper that works fine with Windows7 iTunes, called  Meta-iPod.  Actually it does much more than dedupe.  It analyzes your library, determines ratings, checks and fixes mismatched metadata (more on this in a minute), finds lost tracks, locates album artwork, and dedupes.  It is really coolio, awesome - seriously.

The artwork search is extensive - this thing searches all over the world for album art and gives you a dozen choices for each album.  If the metadata's right, it will automagically add artwork for each song on the album at once - which saves you doing it individually. Its still a hump if you have lots of albums - and each person will have to determine how much work its worth, but its definitely fun to mess around.

I am a Stay-at-Home Failure

The OSG family Wife/Homemaker/Mom is on vacation this week. Visiting her mom and grandmom down in FLA. Sleeping late, sunning at the pool, maybe taking a stroll, living large, taking it easy.

Meanwhile, the rest of the OSG family is teetering dangerously close to derailing.

There is no food in the house. Someone clogged and overflowed a toilet upstairs. Sister needs rides to cheerleading at the same time Brother needs rides to the hockey banquet. Dad has saddle sores from driving errands and shuttling teenagers. The dog is still at the kennel from last week’s trip because no one has the time or inclination to go retrieve her. One of the cars is stuck in the garage with a dead battery. We missed the weekly trash pickup. Everyone is running low on underwear and sox. First spawn needs help packing for his school trip to Russia. Somebody’s girlfriend is coming over this afternoon, and we were just informed there is a middle school party here this weekend??

Calendar is showing 7 work-related conference calls today – silly season looms, couple of very pressing issues, some routine stuff, and about a dozen live projects on the burner.

Friend of ours is a homemaker/dad – wife’s a mucky-muck in perfumes or something. I love the guy, seems so relaxed, funny. Whenever we get together, I chuckle and tease Mrs. OSG about his ‘arrangement’ – ‘gee, I wish my wife would take care of me like that…I’d love to stay home, get my nails done, and watch some Soaps’…

OK, God – I get the message.

Final errand before she gets home will be a stop at the Jewelry store.

But first I gotta get the dog.

O curlers, come, we're brithers a' (and good luck to you)

Every four winters, the population of the world with televisions gets the notion that it can compete in the Olympics.  Very few think, "Hey, I can just sit on those big fat skis, slide down that 300' foot jump, stand up at the end, and get a gold medal.  Even fewer - especially this year - think to themselves, "I can ride a sled! I'll just lie down on that thing and slide to victory, nothing to it..."

But, every four years people sitting in their living rooms, eating pretzels and drinking beer, think, "Hey, that curling is silly, it's shuffleboard on ice, any idiot can do that.  Heck, I am going to the Olympics and do some curling..."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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...

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?

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.

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.

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....

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.

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.