Chuck's Blog

When IT Tries To Do Too Much

My days are now full of IT transformational discussions.  Dozens of conversations have become literally hundreds, and -- better yet -- more of our partners are seriously interested.  All good.

More data points means -- of course -- more patterns observed: inherent mindsets and behaviors that inhibit any sort of serious IT transformation. 

When I find them, I share them: realizing you have a problem is always part of the answer.

One aspect of the problem?  IT people have an inherent engineering bent.  They try to fix the entire problem -- all aspects -- as if IT production and consumption was a self-contained, optimally-designed system with full access to all the components and knobs.

Well, that's not how the real world usually works.  You only control a small part of the equation.  You're a cog in a much bigger machine.  Trying to solve every problem holistically means that you'll probably end up solving no problems.

And I find myself getting into these "tough love" conversation more and more frequently.

More Flash Goodness: VFCache 1.5 Update

If you're in the IT infrastructure business, you know that flash storage is changing the way we think about performance.
 
Among IT vendors, EMC is somewhat unique in that we've invested more aggressively (and in more ways) in this industry transition than anyone else.
 
Back in 2008, EMC was the first enterprise storage vendor to introduce enterprise flash drives.  Intelligently mixing flash and traditional disk continues to be a popular theme, as evidenced by the success of FAST (fully automated storage tiering) as seen in both the VMAX and VNX arrays. 

Just for completeness: Isilon uses flash to speed up inode and metadata handling in their scale-out clustered array.
 
At EMC World last May, we laid out a much broader vision: flash in the server (EMC VFCache), shared server cache (referred to as Project Thunder, not yet GA) as well as an all-flash block storage array referred to Project X (based on the XtremIO acquisition). 

And we've got strong evidence that customers will be interested in one, a few or potentially all of these different approaches -- depending on their requirements. 

We're not forced into arguing the merits of one approach, or the disadvantages of another.
 
Since we're investing so broadly, it sort of forces competing vendors to pick one or two areas to try and compete, since no one to date has announced their intention to compete across the board.
 
One particular focus area that's drawing a lot of attention is server-side flash caching.  Fusion IO got to market first, resulting in an increasingly familiar compare between what they're doing and what EMC is doing with VFCache.
 
With today's announcement at VMworld, you'll see clear evidence that EMC is starting to pour on the R&D muscle we're well known for.

Announcing VMware vSphere Data Protection

This week is the big VMworld show in San Francisco.  EMC pulls out all the stops for this event; Chad's blog has an excellent roundup of all the EMC VMworld activities.

But there are a handful of big announcements planned that got my attention. 

The first really isn't an EMC announcement -- it's a new VMware product based on EMC's Avamar technology. 

And definitely worthy of a quick blog post.

The CIO Dinner

I'm starting to really like visiting the outlying IT geographies.  Places like Milwaukee, Wisconsin to name one.   If you haven't been, it's an excellent example of an industrious and progressive midwestern US city.

Compared to the grind of larger cities, travel was almost a pleasure.  And I could see a real sense of community  -- it seems there are no strangers in Milwaukee, just really nice people you haven't met yet.

I also like the broad mix of industry sectors, and IT shops of wildly varying sizes -- from quite large to, well, "very leveraged".  I found the IT leadership style here very progressive, collaborative yet ultimately self-sufficient.

EMC recently hosted a wonderful intimate dinner here for about 8 of our customers and partners.  Great food, great wine -- and an insightful range of topics worth sharing.

Thriving In A Post-ITaaS World: Clouds As Platforms For Innovation

For me personally, it's been crazier-than-normal-crazy over the last few months.  Most years, summer slows things down a bit, but not this year. 

Why?  As I might have predicted, the brunt of the ITaaS (IT as a service) transformational wave has started to hit.  We are now starting to be collectively besieged by growing cadres of  IT leaders who want to start driving meaningful change in their own organizations. 

I couldn't be more pleased.

The hard part is that since I've been so personally identified with this subject, I seem to be the first call people make, so I've been completely swamped.  But help is on the way, as many parts of the EMC organization are now investing their time and cycles to learn more about ITaaS, and specifically how to best help our customers who want to make that journey. 

Most of our customer and partner engagements start with the lessons we've learned from EMC IT's own transformation, roughly from 2009-2011. 

Not every situation is identical, but there's a lot to be absorbed from someone who's already made that big investment in transformation. 

Thanks to the EMC IT team, there's no shortage of that material here in my blog.

But, in some sense, EMC IT has now moved to a post-ITaaS world. 

Yes, they've done the heavy lifting to transform to a service provider model.  They've re-architected and re-skilled.  They've changed the way IT services are produced and consumed.  They've established price transparency and started to shift the very way IT is funded at EMC. 

Always more to do, but -- now that they've achieved a great measure of success -- there's now an important question: where do we go from here?

And the answer is turning out to be "all sorts of great places".

When Flash Changed Storage: XtremIO Preview

Anyone in the IT infrastructure business is fully aware that flash memory is redefining how we think about performance, and not just storage itself.

With most applications, you're usually performance limited by the physical challenge of getting data into (and out of) the processor; shrinking I/O latency from milliseconds to microseconds means a huge boon for anyone concerned about cost-efficient performance.

As a result, flash is redrawing the storage landscape.  Flash has found its way into traditional storage arrays (e.g. EMC's FAST), server-side caching (e.g. EMC's VFcache), and will soon be available as caching appliance, e.g. EMC's Project Thunder.

But all of these variations have a buried assumption: they assume that there's traditional disk-based storage (aka "rotating rust") somewhere in the mix. 

What if you built a storage array entirely out of flash?  And, in doing so, were able to free yourself from twenty years of legacy storage approaches as a result?

That bright, shiny thought is what makes XtremIO's approach to block storage so compelling.

As a reminder, EMC announced the acquisition of XtremIO in May of this year.  We went sort of quiet about the technology at EMC World a few weeks later, only mentioning "Project X" in passing.  But as we get closer to announcing an offical EMC product based on XtremIO technology, people are justifiably curious as to what might make it so special. 

Especially as there seems to be a lot of interest in the topic lately :)

Standard disclaimer: the statements here are based on XtremIO's technology prior to EMC's acquisition.  Don't take this a commitment that all of these capabilities may find their way into an eventual EMC product.  No, I don't have a date for an official announcement.  If you'd like more details, or perhaps participate in a beta of some sort, please contact your EMC representative.

Digital Literacy For Business Leaders

It's happened more times than I care to count. 

I'm meeting with relatively senior business leader, not an IT person.  We're talking about what's going on in their world. 

I ask an open-ended question around, say, social or mobile or cloud, or maybe big data analytics, and I don't get the response I was expecting.

It's obvious I've committed some sort of faux pas.  There's a stiffening, a deer-in-the-headlights sort of look, followed by a quick referral to "someone in IT who's working on it". 

An awkward pause usually follows.

I bet if I asked a more familiar question around competition, or business strategy, or budgets or people or globalization -- I'd probably get a knowledgeable and engaged response.

I used to think it was my fault for bringing up the topic.  Not anymore.