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Guaranteed to make you laugh!

Apr 8th, 2009
by Martin Glassborow.
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I really thought we'd got away from guarantees which were caveated to hell and predicated on using the vendor's services but EMC I mean VMWare are at it this now. Chuck and Barry must be fuming; well if they weren't concentrating on their rare cat cross-breeding program allegedly!

It just goes to show really, that you can't keep a good/bad* (delete as appropriate) idea down. What has kind of amazed me is that VMWare have appeared to put even more caveats in place than NetApp. Can they actually fail? In two years time, will all of the savings be realised? It'd be interesting to see a long term review of these programs to see if the results are actually real. But I suspect in two years time, we won't care and it won't really matter that much.

And it also shows, don't make too much fun out of your competitors' marketing gimmicks, you just might find yourself doing the same thing. Still, it made me chuckle more than a little bit.

Don't get me wrong, virtualisation and consolidation is a good thing and I am sure these guarantees are a good way to get customers thinking about what they are doing. But at the end of the day, they are still about getting you to spend money and you might be able to realise significant savings without spending money.

Have a look at the guarantees and the caveats; the caveats do a nice job at helping you identifying where you should be concentrating your effort and identifying the low hanging fruit.

p.s I know why Barry has been so quiet but what about the other Barry? What is the Madster Inventor up to?

Campaign: Data Centre

Mar 19th, 2009
by Martin Glassborow.
3 comments

A question, if Cisco had announced storage as part of their Unified Computing System; would EMC and NetApp be quite so pro the strategy? Perhaps Cisco have decided that this campaign will be one of many battles and are picking them. But if Cisco do pull this off, an integrated storage product would be a natural evolution.

I like the Cisco vision but its lack of openess at present concerns me. I guess time will tell to how the vision firms up. A vision with a great degree of openess would be more compelling but perhaps Cisco have made the wise and pragmatic decision that the only way to make a standard is to build a de facto one.

Bigger Blue?

Mar 18th, 2009
by Martin Glassborow.
3 comments

IBM were always going to go acquisitive this year and it's no surprise to me that the first target appears to be Sun. They could have waited for Sun's stock price to tank even more but that was going to be a risk and who knows who else might have come in for the once celestial body. As other commentators have already pointed out, this is not a reaction to Cisco's announcement on Monday but more a strike against HP. This is about being Number 1 again!

IBM already make a huge amount of money out of selling software on Sun hardware, there's a lot of WebSphere out there running on Solaris servers. There's a lot of IBM software full-stop running on Sun kit. IBM Global Services probably run more Solaris servers than most; I know of a number of huge deals which involve IBM running Sun servers. By buying Sun, they can grab more of this dollar.

And there's the Open Source aspect; IBM embraced Open Source and especially Linux in a way which was most un-IBM like. Whilst Sun were sending mixed messages out, IBM set about working out how to make money out of Open Source by fully leveraging their services organisation. Sun, finally, came to the party and but like many late-comers, they overpaid for their entrance. But Sun still have technologies which I am sure that IBM would like to get their hands on and I am pretty sure that IBM know how to monetize them.

Java, a technology that IBM probably know better than Sun themselves. At times you would even believe that Java was already an IBM product.

IBM also pickup VirtualBox which shows some promise as a desktop virtualisation tool.

Yes IBM will have to kill products and at least one sacred cow will have to go; AIX or Solaris. That's a hard one to call. Solaris on pSeries would be an interesting proposition but I suspect AIX will survive; it'll pick up some technologies from Solaris, ZFS for example. And if Solaris goes; where does that leave Sparc?

And there's the storage aspect. Have HDS just lost a channel? I cannot see IBM reselling USP, Barry W would be apoplectic! NetApp relationship? I can see that being strained somewhat; with some further engineering, the 7000 series could be an excellent competitor at the low-mid range for NetApp FAS but there is a question mark over the future of Solaris as I mentioned earlier.

Enterprise Tape? Well, IBM will own that market with the addition of Storagetek. Hopefully someone will come and pick Quantum up! Stornext FTW!

IBM and Sun both resell LSI; so that shouldn't be a problem for them.

But at the end of the day, this isn't really about technology and it's not about storage. This is about market-share, this is about mind-share, this is about services and this is about coming out of the down-turn as Number 1. 

And if it isn't true; well, congratulations to the person who wanted to distract from Cisco's UCS..way to go!!

There aint nothing new anymore!

Mar 17th, 2009
by Martin Glassborow.
6 comments

So let the hyperbole begin; Cisco’s Unified Computing System has finally been announced (an amusing aside, I first found out about Project California about six months ago from…..Brocade! My Cisco Account Manager was not especially amused). It’s certainly a grand vision and a play for global domination not seen since the days of Smersh!

As has been stated, this is not simply a ‘me too’ Blade play from Cisco; this appears to be a full on, all-out assault on completely dominating the data centre space. Not since the days of mainframe dominance have we seen such an attempt to own the whole data centre. Well, not quite the whole data centre, storage seems to be currently the missing piece, Cisco are relying on their partners such as EMC and NetApp to provide the storage piece.

It is going to be interesting to say the least to see how HP, IBM and Sun et al react to this. I could see opportunities for Sun but it relies on them beginning to see the light and admitting to themselves that they are actually a software company. They could embrace the UCS platform and really start to shift. HP and IBM have problem now in that they need to put together a competing vision; it’ll be interesting to see what this vision is.

What do I think? It’s too early to say but Cisco are going to be very aggressive about this and their marketing is going to be much further up the food-chain than mere ‘Bods. Over the past months, I have come to the realisation that things need to change in Infrastructure and especially Infrastructure teams.

We have too many specialists, too many people who can only do one thing or at least profess to do one thing. There are far too many vested interests in many support organisations and there is a level of complicity which has reflected the status quo in the industry, I won’t step on your toes if you don’t step on mine.

Cisco’s vision challenges this world view and even if you don’t buy into the Cisco vision in its entirety; it is a vision which merits a second look.

And it’s not Cisco which powers this vision, it’s the virtualisation brought by products like vmware, Hyper-V and Xen. But it’s a vision which is really very old…what the hell happened Big Blue? How on earth did you let Cisco re-invent your original vision and claim it for themselves?

Talk to me….

Feb 26th, 2009
by Martin Glassborow.
No comments yet

In what might be a foolhardy experiment, I am going to put a contact email on the blog. Since I've started using gmail as my access method to my email, I've found that the spam-filters are so good that I rarely see any spam. So I thought I'd set up an email which I publish and if you want to contact me about anything on the blog you can do so, storagebod@spellen.org will reach me. Now if you've already got my email address, keep using that but to be honest, I'd prefer that storagebod related emails go to my personal domain.

Why? Well, I try and avoid reading my work email outside of work and my personal domain follows me; I've had it for a number of years and it's followed me through a number of jobs.  This doesn't mean that I'm about to change companies, the market isn't that good! But at some point it is possible I might go and do something else and I like to think that this blog which is nearly 6 months old will continue!

On another note, you've probably noticed that I'm now contributing to Gestalt IT and all my Enterprise IT related articles will also appear there. This means that I'm probably going to go off-topic here a bit more often. Feel free to follow me there or here, it's your choice.

Deal or No Deal?

Feb 21st, 2009
by Martin Glassborow.
1 comment

Stephen has a post here about pricing, about getting close to your vendor and developing a relationship with just a few trusted partners. Nice idea but in any relationship there needs to be some tension to keep it fresh and alive; otherwise you find yourselves doing something because you have always done so, it becomes comfortable.

Now comfort is all very well at home and in your personal life but when you are spending lots of money (your lots will vary) with a vendor, comfort is not good. I have walked into situations where the position has been far too comfortable and ultimately it becomes dangerous for both parties. You need to shake things up once in a while.

1) Single vendor relationships are not good to drive value. Competition is key, this does not mean that every bid should be competitive, there aren't enough hours in the day and everyone gets tired. But every eighteen months, pick a technology area and review it. Do both a technology review and a commercial review. Your review cycles may be shorter, it depends on your work load.

2) Review street prices regularly; there are a variety of sources for this, some formal, some informal. Vendors do not like it but they know it happens. But it is important to understand why prices differ; it could be size of organisation or it could be a prestige thing. Let your sales-man know that you are paying above street price and that you are reviewing things.

3) New requirements need to go competitive. A sign that things have got too comfortable is that you simply default giving new business to the incumbent.

4) Be aware of the market, talk to the incumbent about competitive products; let them know that you are aware of the competition. Attend trade-shows; talk to other vendors, I know sales-guys are irritating but when the incumbent phones up and finds you are in a meeting with their rivals, there will be a moment of doubt.

And when you are doing the deal, here's a few tips and thoughts. I am not a procurement expert but I have spent a few million here and there on storage.

1) List price is meaningless; discount levels are meaningless. Vendors should produce a cost of manufacturer and then try to negotiate a premium on this. Vendors also hate breaking things down by line-item as it reveals that you are paying massive amounts for commodity items. Do not let a vendor flannel you with a cost for a solution, get it broken down and understand what you are paying for.

2) Maintenance; you should always be able to negotiate improved maintenance terms. Hardware maintenance is pretty easy to get extended gratis, software is often harder. Review maintenance regularly; if a piece of software is at or close to it's terminal release, consider dropping the maintenance. If you really need it at a latter point, you can often re-instate, you'll have to pay the back maintenance but you'll likely not need it anyway. Make sure this is contractually agreed.

3) Technical refresh/take-out; if you are refreshing with the current vendor, only pay maintenance on one lot of kit whilst the refresh is happening. If you are refreshing with a new vendor, agree that the new maintenance/warranty period only starts when the migration is complete. Always try to negotiate a trade-in.

4) Software licensing; try to negotiate a pay for the amount you use as opposed to the pay for the whole frame!  And always try to agree that software licenses are transferable between frames.

5) A vendor TCO model is worthless unless they are willing to guarantee it without caveats. If they think their kit will save you money, skin in the game is key!

6) Training; I have had teams which have had more training than any other team in a department because I ensure that any deal is sweetened by the provision of training for 'free'. Big deals should come with free training and I am amazed at the number of people who do not leverage this.

7) One-off-deals; one-off-deals, you know the end of quarter/year specials? We all do them, we all regret them at times. Plan your one-off-deals, you know they're coming but treat them like a normal deal. You know when the vendor quarters/year-ends are; so try and align your procurement cycles if you can. And I've never had the pricing on a one-off-deal pulled because I have missed the cut-off.

8) Guaranteed price decline, the cost of kit goes down all the time; ensure that you've got a guaranteed price deflator on a quarter-by-quarter basis to reflect this.

You will not get all of the above but at least vendors will know that you are serious, that you are thinking about things. And if your sales-man agrees any kind of special, non-standard terms; get it in writing and keep the evidence. Sales-men move around a lot and the next guy may not honour a verbal, gentleman's agreement; get the evidence.

I am sure there's more tricks that I have forgotten or not even be aware of; please share!

Schrodinger Today

Dec 11th, 2008
by Martin Glassborow.
4 comments

If Schrodinger was alive today, I don't think he'd be writing about cats! He'd be writing about IT; he'd have a wealth of things to write about! But I'm going to pick on two storage related ones!

  • BackUps – all backups are good until you try to recover it
  • Disaster Recovery Plans – they all work until you try them

It is scary when I talk to colleagues who seem to think that just because the back-up server has reported that something has backed-up correctly, that you actually have a good back-up. There is a good likelihood that you have backed-up something but until you try to recover it, you can't be sure. So it might be well to instigate a testing regime.

But the scariest thing is the Disaster Recovery thing; the number of companies I come across who think that because

                    1) They have some kit to recover on
                    2) They have a plan

that they can recover in a disaster but when you ask if they test it; you will be faced with blank looks and excuses that it is too complicated and complex, anyway who has time to test it?

Well if it is too complicated and complex to do when you are not working under the pressure of restoring a business which is currently down; how much worse is it going to be when you are actually trying to save your business?

In the current climate, I can see a lot of these things going by the by because we've got another excuse; that is…we don't have enough resource and we can't afford it anyway.

Badger your management to do their DR tests, to periodically do recovery testing…otherwise you might find yourself with a lot of boxes full of dead cats. And eventually, they'll start to smell and you won't even have to open them to find that out.

Upside to the downside

Dec 4th, 2008
by Martin Glassborow.
2 comments

There is one upside to the downside at the moment; that is I'm not currently involved in negotiating any procurement in the Q4 fire-sale! You see some users love the Q4 fire-sale but I hate it! Why? Because some really stupid buying decisions are made which do no-one any favours. And this the analogy which will get me into trouble…

Its like a woman in a shoe-sale; she buys a load of shoes because they are cheap. Bargains! And then get's them home to discover that she has nothing to go with them and then spends a fortune on an outfit, a new bag, new ear-rings etc…so these bargain shoes end up costing a fortune.

And every year, this happens in IT departments and god forbid that your vendor's end of year correlates to your end of year; that way madness lies. I know some poor technical architect who sketched out a design saying something along the lines of 'Well, we probably need 3xp690s, some disk etc'; go on leave and come back to find it'd all been ordered. He'd not actually sized it, certainly not designed the clusters and spent the next several months ordering things which had been forgotten, delaying the project. Some bargain that turned out to be.

I know there's no solution to this but at least this year, we don't appear to be participating in the madness! Yet…I'm sure some sales-man will get to the CIO with a once-in-a-lifetime-never-to-be-repeated-deal-and-I'm-Cutting-Me-Own-Throat-honest-guv! But at the moment, the coast seems clear!

And another thing….

Dec 1st, 2008
by Martin Glassborow.
9 comments

This isn't just a criticism aimed at the Storage industry, it can be aimed at IT vendors and consultancies in general.

At some point it is useful to have some idea of the real world and how it works, I can cope with the 'La-la Land' world view of sales-men but I think it is important that the vendor TCs/SEs or whatever you want to call them have a grounding in reality and how things work.

It would also help if the support guys/developers that you employ also have a reality-based experience. For example, an appreciation of change control and configuration management would be extremely useful; so that you don't merely expect us to roll-out new code at a drop of a hat.

Vendors also have to appreciate that we do not build environments just using their kit; even the truest of the Blue companies have other vendors on the floor. And it is only really 'Big Blue' which stands even half a chance to be able to do this. Environments are complex and inter-connected; just shaking your head and saying it's not supported will a) not stop us doing it and b) not stop us shouting at you when it breaks. You guys have got to learn to talk to each other!

Let me make a humble proposal; every five-ten years, you encourage your technical staff to take secondments to a customer for upto a year but certainly not less than three months. You will learn so much from this that the investment has got to be worthwhile and you will have technical staff who can really appreciate what customers are trying to do.

You might even get some great ideas for new products. It could be the best market research you ever do.

A New Addiction

Nov 26th, 2008
by Martin Glassborow.
2 comments

I have identified a new medical condition, 'Speedy Storage Dependancy'. This addiction is suffered from many developers, DBAs, PMs and many others in the IT industry. It can take many forms depending on the addict but the most common form is based on the instant gratification recieved by putting your poorly written and designed application onto fast disk.

Unfortunately, the addiction is often accompanied by another addiction 'Supersized Storage Dependancy'. This has the impact of making the addictions exponentially more expensive as unfortunately no company has yet developed a 'SuperSized Speedy Storage Device'.

Often the excuse for this addiction is that it is too hard to change now and the alternatives are just too expensive to comtemplate!

As the enablers to this addiction, we in the infrastructure teams need to stage an intervention and develop alternative coping mechanisms. Otherwise the dream of Clustered Storage, Cloud Optimised Storage and fluffy Fairyland Storage will just remain that, a dream!! We need to point out the behaviour which leads to these addictions but in order to do this, we need assistance from the manufacturers of the addictive substances.

Unfortunately, the manufactuers of the addictive substances appear to be more interested in creating the crystal meth equivalent to yet further fuel the 'Speedy Storage Dependancy'. Just say No to SSD until a suitable dependancy plan is developed!

We need bring the consequences of this addiction to the attention of the addicts. I am going to campaign for a health warning to be put on all disk arrays in future, 'This Disk Array may lead to overweight, unfit and unsafe applications which may damage the health of your company!'.

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