Chuck D was right

So we are less than a week into 2011 and the Hype has already started; I was hoping that this was the year that we moved beyond superficial marketing and into something more substantial to reflect the market but instead EMC are mailing out broken records hyping some announcement that they intending to make later on this month. This is also accompanied with an on-line campaign with a whole host of EMCers singing from the corporate hymn-sheet having spent the festive season learning the words and consuming the kool-aid.

I'm sure that they will announce a new product which will surpass everyone else's current product; yet another manifestation of the commonly seen phenomena that 'my new product is better than your old product'; this will be inevitably followed in the next six months by someone announcing a product which surpasses the announcements made by EMC. The whole thing is reminiscent of the old DB2 vs Oracle or the Sun vs IBM vs HP benchmarketing wars of yore. Do we really want a year of boy-racer announcements from the storage vendors? 

I really hope that I am wrong and that EMC's focus of their announcement is not going to be purely performance based and how fast it is? Or even worse how it is the fastest array when combined with VMware and UCS but only in perfect weather conditions and being driven at a steady 60 miles per hour? 

I actually think that most of the storage vendors have some interesting things to talk about and there are some big themes to be tackled but it's less than a week into the New Year and I'm already irritated! And if this announcement does merely turn out to being all about how fast EMC arrays are, I hope that NetApp et al show some maturity and do not respond with similar hyperbolic and meaningless announcements.

Until then, can I recommend track 3 on Public Enemy's 'It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back'? A record worth holding and keeping.