Charles Makes a Point (or Two)

CIO = Chief Information Officer

If I ask this question to most of the CIOs I know, assuming they answered me honestly, they would have to answer 'no.' The key to answering the question honestly is figuring out how well and how much you really know about the information sitting on the infrastructure in and out of your datacenter. How often do you go to the CEO, CFO, VP of Sales, Chief Marketing Officer, etc., and tell them you've uncovered something in your data that shows how if a process were changed, you could squeeze a little more profit out of every transaction, or if you stopped carrying this line of product you could spend more on another and increase revenues dramatically?

I don't think there are too many CIOs in the top 1,000 companies in the U.S. that could honestly say they've ever done it. Why? Because most CIOs are not chief INFORMATION officers. They would be more accurately titled Chief INFRASTRUCTURE Officers. Don't misunderstand, keeping the IT infrastructure operational is a critical function. But we're kidding ourselves if we think CIOs are doing what the title implies. To me, this is a great disservice to the businesses we work for. That's not to say it is the fault of the CIOs. With few exceptions all the CIOs I've ever met work as hard or harder than any other executive, have the best interests of their company at heart, and have no interest in spending company money on frivolous technology for technology's sake projects. But they aren't heading up the initiatives that mine through the critical business data and seek out revenue opportunities. They are shepherds of the infrastructure which is dramatically different than being a shepherd of the information.

Think of it this way. When you think of a Chief Financial Officer, what do you think of? You think of the ultimate financial decision maker, who has a grasp on the entire financial picture of his or her organization. While they may not know all the details of every minute financial transaction (although I've met some who do), they can tell you without hesitation what the financial health of the organization is and where they stand on any given day. They shepherd the money they are entrusted to oversee. That's their job, as the job title implies. They are the chief officer of all things financial.

Contrast that to the majority of CIOs you've ever worked with. Can they tell you what is contained in the databases of the most critical applications they provide infrastructure for? Do they have an information warehouse they can pull business intelligence information from, providing critical decision making analysis back to the other business heads in real or near real time? Have they established the 'truth' about the customer base across all sources of customer related information? Have they ever been able to recommend changes in business process based upon what they see in the information they so fastidiously watch over and provide infrastructure to process and store? Unfortunately, the answer to these questions would be 'no' for most CIOs.

In all fairness, most organizations don't understand this, and so they don't require their CIO to be a CIO. All they really think about is "my email isn't working", or "ERP is down all the time", etc. Very few organizations understand the fact that their most valuable asset isn't their products, their people, their real estate, etc., but it is the information they have about their customers. In a global economy, if you mess up my customer record—and by mess up I mean lose my account history, somehow change my shipping address, fail to secure my credit card information, whatever—you can count on me moving to your competitor. Cost of movement for me is very low, even with arbitrary termination fees like the wireless industry imposes. I can move my accounts around multiple times until I find a provider that takes the best care of me, regardless of the product or service I require.

If you understand how to use the information you have about me, you can more effectively satisfy me as a customer, but more importantly, you can find new ways to generate revenue off of me. I'm not talking about those phone calls you get from your credit card company where they hard sell you into buying some service you don't really need or want and then you spend six months trying to get them to cancel the fees. I'm talking about the ability to truly upsell me on newer products and services based on trends you see in my purchasing patterns. I'm talking about communicating with me directly that I've done X in the past, and I might suggest doing Y in the future as it will save me more money.

Go look at the concept behind Sam's Club and their eValues. I don't know who came up with the idea inside of the Wal-Mart company, and it could maybe be structured a little better, but that's the concept. They have this massive amount of information about what I've bought from them over the last 10 or so years, but they don't use it in a way that is effective to me as a customer, that ties me to them. If IT came up with the idea, that's the kind of thing I'm talking about. If they didn't, that's just not being a good steward of the information.

I'm going to try and explore this more with more of our customers. I'd like to explore it with any of you readers. Leave me a comment with your thoughts.

Why am I occupying real estate in cyberspace?

This is the question I'll try to answer in this, my first blog post.

Why, in the name of all that is good and holy, am I writing a blog? There are probably billions of people in the world that know more than I do about any one of the topics I might post about. So why would I do this? Well, the fact of the matter is, my boss wants me to.

I asked him not to make me do it, so if you end up getting upset over something I write, take it up with him. :-] When I asked him why he wanted me to do this, his answer was pretty simple. I tell people what I think, based upon reason and facts, and I communicate what I think with passion based on those reasons. He didn't put it QUITE that way, but that's what he meant. I think.

I'm not sure how that qualifies me to be a blogger. I really don't. I regularly read Chad Sakac's blog over at VirtualGeek, Chuck Hollis' blog, StorageZilla, Storage Anarchist, Barry Whyte, and a lot of other guys and gals out there and never once put myself in the category of people that should regularly be read by a card-carrying, dyed-in-the-wool, proud to be geek. Not once. Still don't.

That said, I'm supposed to write. What can you expect from me? You can expect a lot of opinion. I'm probably not going to tell you how to configure your Avamar system for maximum throughput of de-duplicated bits across a converged network. I'm probably not going to give you great bits of Linux tweaking advice or try to be crowned the ESX guru of the century with sage advice on how not to tune all the kernel parameters. I'll tell you what I think of things going on in the technology world. I'll tell you how I think they really matter, or really don't matter, to real customers, with real data centers, and real jobs they're trying to keep. I'll try to make sense out of the hype, the homerism, and the marketing stuff and boil it down. If I do that, then maybe people will read. If I miss the mark, probably not.

Who am I?

I'm the newest member of IDS' engineering team. I come from almost 8 years of experience at EMC. While there, I supported Sprint PCS, the Channel, the Proven Professional program (yes, you can blame me for a lot of the questions on the E20-521 exam and a few others), and the Commercial Division. I was a Systems Engineer, Technical Consultant, District Channel Manager, Technology Solutions Manager, and a Global Solutions Architect. I did a lot of things in 8 years. Before that, I spent several years in the telco space, with a CLEC and an (at the time) up-start wireless carrier.

Why does any of that matter? To you, it might not. To customers, it means that I've seen a lot of different things. I've been involved in complete project failures, and partial project successes. I've helped customers who have 'data centers' the size of a small broom cabinet to customers with data centers the size of a shopping mall do one thing: meld the technical and the business.

That's why I do what I do (besides the fact it feeds my seven kids -- do you KNOW how much food seven kids can eat? That's another blog for another day :-]). Anyway, it's what I do. I knew from the time I took apart an Apple IIe in 5th grade and made it work with the LOGO turtle robot, that making computers do things for people in ways that mattered was what I wanted to do.

So, that's what I try to do.

I'm not always right (mostly not), but I always have a reason for what I think. I can always tell you why I think what I think and endeavor to do so in terms that make sense TO YOU. You don't have to agree with me. You don't have to like me. I honestly don't care either way. I'm going to make more than a few of you upset, I'm sure. I'll probably start more than a few flame wars, and I'm okay with that. As long as things stay civil, we'll all have some fun with spirited debate (assuming anyone actually reads my drivel). I have always thought that Chuck Hollis' approach to things was the right way to go -- let comments come and allow them to be seen even when they disagree with you, but I won't allow this blog to become a sounding board of derogatory remarks or silliness. Comments will be moderated.

SO, without further ado.............

Why the V-Max was cool, but not all that exciting to me.

Now before all you EMCers go off telling me I've betrayed the family and how could I defame the good name Symmetrix, hear me out. And anti-EMCers, back off. There's no blood in the water here or reason for you to take a swipe. I could fill reams of paper with the utter ho-hum nature of your last 3 or 4 product "updates".

I'm very impressed with the technology. I'm floored by the technology, actually. I think it's quite amazing what's been done to take DMX concepts into a virtualized hardware layer that then (without too much hyperbole) can infinitely scale (there's probably still some hyperbole there, because nothing scales infinitely outside of Time, but still).  The scale we're talking about here is truly astounding for a storage subsystem.

The fact that manageability has taken a quantum leap forward for the Symmetrix is an indication that the engineering sea change that was supposed to have happened several years ago may have actually begun to occur, and Symmetrix Engineering may have begun to realize that 1) not all customers are idiots who can't manage complex technology, but 2) not all customers want to obtain a PhD in how to manage storage technology because some of them have lives. That's a whole lot of goodness as far as I'm concerned.

The geek in me looks at this thing and says 'holy cow, how'd they really do that'? The fact that this technology enables VMware to truly scale and become serious about commoditizing the compute layer is utterly awesome. This, I think, along with a truly modularized server layer and the converged network, is what VMware needs in order to become the de facto data center OS.

I'm glad they moved to commodity processors. I see a ton of potential in management and down-market mobility afforded by moving to a commodity processor platform. I think this is an infinitely cool machine.

The business guy in me says 'great, another device on the market that is supposed to save the world, but only plays to the top 5%' (or less). I'm not sure how else to see this. Part of it is that I play in a space, and have for several years now, that looks at systems like the DMX, or V-Max, where to acquire one is more than the entire total cost of their infrastructure, including plumbing, electrical, the parking lot, the soda machine, oh, and IT. I get that my perspective is a little bit skewed toward the middle to lower end of the market. I'm happy to play here, because in my experience, they listen more, are more receptive to new ideas, and generally have a passion about what they do, more than most people working in large IT shops do. They're not a cog in the wheel, they ARE the wheel, so to speak.

So what set me off about the whole V-Max thing is how this is 'the vision of the future data center'. That's great. 150 of the data centers of the world will be able to take advantage of these ground-breaking features, functions, and benefits.

Okay, I'm being hyperbolic now, but you get the point. There's no down-stream message. If you don't play with V-Max, you aren't doing anything worth talking about. If you're not going to deploy something that can support 8 bazillion drives, you don't need the uber-integration with VMware (or perhaps aren't worthy of it).

Once again, EMC has basically laid it out that you aren't going to be included in the wave of data center efficiency if your data center consists of 3 or 4 ESX hosts running less than 100 VMs. Apparently it's okay for you to still do everything manually, with no end to end visibility and management capability.

Okay, now I'm being harsh. But again, you get the point.

Don't get me wrong, I love CLARiiON. I've sold and architected a LOT of it. It's a superb platform to everything in its space, hands down, bar none; NAS, SAN, whatever. What I guess I'm upset about is that EMC thinks the only place to revolutionize the industry is in the top 5%. And no, quite frankly, I do NOT consider the CX4 revolutionary. Putting modular connectivity was a must to stay ahead, not a revolutionary idea (servers have had PCIe slots you can put different multi-port cards into for years). But it goes deeper than that. Go back and compare the CX4 launch to the V-Max. Not even close in comparison. The CX4 launch was a blip on the sub-radar of the V-Max. There was no passion to it, no earth-shattering feel to it, just another generation of CLARiiON. 'yay'.

I understand how much revenue comes from that top space, but how much GROWTH? Not much, if any. I feel like EMC missed the opportunity to REALLY turn the tables upside down. Why not go completely downstream (not to the AX4 or CX4-120 space, but that CX4-240 or 480 level and up) with this massively scalable virtualized engine and introduce GREATER than 5 9s to the mid market? Scalable doesn't only mean bigger. It means it can grow and contract. It means it can start out small, AND SMALL MEANS <96 DRIVES IS AFFORDABLE.

This architecture should support that concept. These are Intel processors now, with even more commodity parts, right? Then bring the joy of mass production TO the masses, guys. Scale this baby down and turn the storage world upside down. How could HDS possibly compete with that? NTAP, are you kidding me? They couldn't touch it. Don't even get me started on Compellent, Xiotech, or 3Par. And Equallogic, errr, Dell? Right.

I'm sold on the V-Max conceptually. It's the reality I'm left to deal with, though, and I'm not feeling it. At least not yet.