StorageMojo

Always learning
This week’s learning: a hacked web site. There’s been a lot of that going around. Writing has taken a back seat to fixing the problem.

It took a while to grok how deeply StorageMojo had been hacked.

First I got a note from my hosting company - something about a daemon - and I told them to take it down. Which they did.

Thought I was done.

But I wasn’t
Then Gary at Nexsan noted that StorageMojo was alarming his browser. Went into the StorageMojo files on WordPress and discovered some iframes that I hadn’t put there.

Pulled them out. Upgraded to the latest version of WordPress.

Thought I was done.

Wrong again
Fired up the SFTP client and took a look at my web site files. Saw a bunch with names I didn’t recall, like Emma, Alexander and Jordan. Inside, links to hundreds of sites I’d never heard of either.

Got rid of them.

Checked a couple of other sites I host on the account. One had been completely cleaned out by the spamsters - the site was gone - replaced with more collections of links.

Edited the junk out of those sites. Hoped I was done, but decided to go through every single file and folder on all three sites.

Found the malicious code. Very professional. Replicated in several places. Language = ru, whatever that means.

Corrective action
New passwords, of course. Notices that the Dreamhost web management system doesn’t make that easy to do - password management is spread across several different tools - which guarantees that people won’t change them very often.

Read up on security. A couple of good sites are Blog Security and Stop Badware. Google also has a helpful checklist.

Did some other housecleaning and site hardening.

The StorageMojo take
I now know I will never be done. The rest of you with blogs should learn by my misadventure.

The biggest surprise is that there are many things that can be done to make sites harder, but they are not the defaults. You have to do some research and sometimes some configuration.

That is wrong. Other than general exhortations to update software, the hosting companies do almost nothing to make it easy to manage security. Not many consumers are going to dig into log files every couple of days.

I’m more technical than the average blog writer and some of this stuff is a PITA. The Internet Operating System needs some security patches.

Comments welcome, of course. AFAIK nothing bad got sent to readers of StorageMojo.

Spent some time with Nick Pearce, a co-founder of Object Matrix, a UK-based software startup supporting commodity-based archiving.

Their MatrixStore product clusters off-the-shelf servers and storage to create a secure disk based archive. MatrixStore runs out of the box on Mac OS and will work with most Linux supported tin.

Commodity hardware and software
Archived data should not be tied to a specific storage platform. Proprietary formats or filesystems are an accident waiting to happen.

MatrixStore keeps the data on industry standard filesystems in the same format as on the client disk. The data will be retrievable even if the company has disappeared.

Platform lifecycle
Older gear can play in the same config as newer stuff. Roll old hardware out of production into the archive, and double its useful life. Upgrade in place, a critical consideration for archives.

Application-centric storage
MatrixStore is integrated with the recently released Final Cut Server from Apple. They provide life-cycle management of assets and metadata from ingest through archive.

The MatrixStore software stores the added FCS metadata using metadata operations supported by XFS on Linux. When ZFS is supported on Mac OS they plan to use its native metadata support as well.

MatrixStore also automates some tasks that usually require manual configuration, adding capacity, data redundancy, data authenticity and the like. Like Final Cut Server it’s designed for people who aren’t storage admins.

Cool pricing
They give away the first 15TB of software licenses away for free. After the first 15TB it’s $1000 per TB of protected content. There’s a pricing widget to help with configurations on their website.

The StorageMojo take
Digital archiving is a critical issue for content creators. Nick - who had worked at EMC - made choices that will become de rigueur for deep archiving as people come to understand the issues:

• Content in its original format
• Commodity hardware
• Upgrade in place
• Pay as you go
• Automate the small stuff

MatrixStore’s focus on Final Cut Server and their pricing model are both positives. Final Cut Studio has taken out a huge swath in the NLE market - over 1 million licenses sold - so the FC Server business should be a healthy one.

Their pricing transparency and unlimited-time 15 TB trial should also work well. All in all, an up-to-the-minute approach to the market. You might almost think they’re American.

Comments welcome, of course.

What, if any, is the value of multi-year storage uptime?

Xiotech and Atrato promise 5 and 3 year uninterrupted service on their new arrays. Now it is time to ask, as some commenters have, so what?

After all, enterprise data centers are already well-equipped to deal with disk failures. RAID keeps the data available. 7×24 service replaces the failed drive with a new hot spare. Experienced storage admins paper over the cracks.

It isn’t like you’re going to fire all your storage admins just because arrays stop breaking.

Opex vs capex
The direct cost saving - no maintenance contract for x years - may or may not be reflected in the purchase price. From a buyer’s perspective there are 2 costs: the capital expense - capex - and the operating expense - opex. Opex is fully tax deductible in the year incurred, so it is easier to get.

Atrato and Xiotech need to think creatively about maintenance pricing.

Breaking into the glass house
Breaking into data centers with the promise of cost savings isn’t easy. The provable cost savings have to be 50% or better to get conservative data centers to change vendors. And it helps if there is a recession or the business is tanking. Motivation.

A case can be made that after adding up a standard array’s maintenance costs, random disruption costs and additional management it will be cheaper to go with the new product. The CFO will demand it.

But if you want to change the market, you have to change the way the market thinks.

Re-thinking the issue
Straight cost-displacement arguments aren’t going to have the legs both companies would like. They need a different model.

Enterprise IT is manufacturing plant - not an engineering testbed. It confuses the engineers because it seems like a techie haven - but it isn’t.

It is all about shipping product, each and every day. Like a real factory.

SPC
Everyone accepts that statistical process control has changes the face of manufacturing. A core idea behind SPC, reducing variability improves quality, is directly applicable to IT factories.

What Atrato and Xiotech do, ideally, is reduce IT ops variability. There is always a known level of performance. Availability is 100%.

Thus most of the usual dependencies are no longer dependencies. I/O slowdowns and timeouts should disappear. Drive rebuilds won’t impact performance. Admins won’t pull the wrong drive - which happens about 2% of the time - and bring down the array. And so on.

The StorageMojo take
Enterprises over-configure because they never know what is going to hit them - but they do know it will be at the worst possible time. Ideally they want to be ready to handle the biggest shopping day of the year - even after an array failure.

Workload variability isn’t going away. But wouldn’t it be nice if equipment performance and availability variability did?

That’s what Atrato and Xiotech are selling. I wish them luck communicating a value prop that strikes at the heart of what every other array vendor is selling.

Comments welcome, of course.

I got quoted in Byte & Switch today about Hitachi Global Storage Technology and the new CIO. HGST has been a money pit for Hitachi since they bought the IBM disk operation.

They question is: are they ready to do something about it? The answer is yes.

An informant assures me that HGST has created Raj Das - late of SGI - the new SVP of Marketing.

How many psychiatrists does it take to change a lightbulb?
Raj and I worked together at Sun, where he was one of the few results-oriented, damn-the-torpedos marketing guys. He’s high energy and creative.

Turning around Hitachi marketing is going to take everything he’s got. Disk companies are not only engineering dominated - the engineers are even more anti-marketing than most. Add in the culture clash of two proud companies and, well, it isn’t good.

The engineers need to understand one thing. Until the Hitachi GST brand means something positive to consumers - at Fry’s and at datacenters around the world - the company won’t be able to justify an extra nickel of margin. Without that, profitability will remain a mirage.

One, but the lightbulb has to really want to change
I know Raj and I know what he can do. Will the guys across the pond let him do it?

The StorageMojo take
Disk vendors mostly compete on price. HGST has an opportunity to change this by re-thinking the disk value proposition - and the communication of it. The industry is at several inflection points.

Here’s hoping HGST can seize at least one of them. More competition will be good for all of us.

Comments welcome, of course. You can see Raj on the SGI video from a month ago below.

Fresh off the HD-DVD fiasco, Toshiba execs are stepping up to pursue another expensive flop: notebook SSDs. Memo to Toshiba: people won’t pay huge SSD premiums for nothing. And almost nothing is what flash SSDs provide today - and for the foreseeable future.

Please sir, may I have another!
Given the multi-billion dollar cost of semiconductor fabs, getting the notebook SSD market wrong would make Toshiba’s $250 million HD-DVD loss look cheap. The president of Toshiba semi, Shozo Saito, recently opined that flash drives will be in 25% of notebooks by beginning 2011.

He is so-o-o wrong.

Hand me the back of the envelope, please
Guessing 200M notebook sales in 2011, 50 million flash drives of, say 250 GB, for total sales of 12.5 million TB of flash. Assuming a cost reduction curve of 50% annually from today’s spot market MLC $2500/TB to ~$320/TB in 2011 . . . hmm-m . . . $4 billion in chip sales.

Give or take. Yummy!

If Toshiba projects winning 20% of the market, $800 million in sales would justify over $1 billion in flash factory capacity. And if the market doesn’t appear, a billion dollar write off.

Same power, same performance and way more costly - I’m sold!
If flash drives delivered what proponents claim there would be no problem. But they don’t and they won’t.

Power: no SSD notebook has gained more than 10 minutes battery life over disks. Since flash is already power-efficient that won’t change. Disks have multiple opportunities to improve power use - and with over a $1 billion a year in R&D behind them - they will.

Performance: tested application performance hardly changes either - even with a $3,800 flash drive. Notebook I/O doesn’t favor flash drives - and the engineering contortions needed to fix flash aren’t cheap.

The one big win for flash performance: boot and app load times. It makes the system feel a lot snappier - if you often reboot. Sleep mode makes that much less important.

Reliability/durability: flash vendors tout 2 million hour MTBFs and superior shock & vibe specs. Yet Dell reports that their SSD infant failure rates are about the same as disks. And the return rates are higher.

So where, exactly, is the flash advantage? Plus, it is only conjecture that flash drives will prove to be more reliable in actual notebook use. Only time will tell.

And what about the 4-bit MLC that Toshiba is counting on to drive costs down at 40-50% per year? This will less durable than current SLC. No hard numbers from the vendors - depends on how good their signal processing algorithms are - but it could easily be 5,000 writes - down from 10,000 today.

How do you explain that to consumers?

Data integrity: the unasked question Of all the questions about flash drives, this is the biggest. I have yet to see an SSD read error spec.

Flash has read errors - that’s why vendors implement error detection.

But flash has a problem disks don’t: flash drives move your data around a lot more often than disks do. Every time a flash drive writes a page, it has to erase the entire block that page is in.

So what happens to the data in the block? It gets read - almost always correctly - and rewritten along with the new page. The new location must be tracked by the drive.

The map that keeps track of where your data is rapidly gets very complex - and itself is regularly read and rewritten. How well protected is this critical data structure? If it isn’t bulletproof you can kiss your data good bye.

If FTL’s are like every other storage product, catastrophic failure modes are hiding in the statistical weeds. Enterprise IT is rightly suspicious of storage that “auto-magically” moves data around. Consumers have no idea. SSD vendors better have their act together or the class action suits could be as big a problem as the empty fabs.

The StorageMojo take
The further I wade into flash issues, the worse it gets. My sense is that the flash industry close to creating a multi-billion dollar fiasco. Why?

• Over-promising on performance, reliability, battery life and data integrity. Take a systems level perspective, folks. Consumers do.
• Over-broad positioning of flash drives as a general replacement for notebook hard drives - when pricing clearly says they aren’t.
• Relying on system OEMs like Dell to market SSDs to consumers is a freeway to failure. They don’t have the bandwidth. The flash vendors need to market flash SSDs directly to consumers. Not sell them - market them.

The flash guys are caught in a vise: big expensive fabs that need to run all year; and seasonal demand that whipsaws their pricing all year.

Notebook flash drives can help even out demand - but only if consumers accept them for the right reasons. Otherwise Toshiba’s new fabs will build chips for a non-existent market.

Update: Flash has a place in one notebook niche: below the $40-$50 minimum cost of a disk. As we’re already seeing with the Asus Eee, replacing $50 of disk with $10 of flash makes a big price difference. But those units won’t solve the seasonality problem and may even make it worse. End update.

Comments welcome, of course.

A video networking company in StorageMojo?
Omneon isn’t new to StorageMojo. Their price list has been on price list page since January 2007.

Their booth was about 50 yards from Isilon’s and EMC’s and it was a madhouse each time I walked by. Partly that was because they were holding all their meetings there, but it also seemed like there was lots of traffic.

Building storage into an app
Founded in 1998, Omneon started offering storage in response to customer demand. They decided on a commodity-based cluster and built their own storage software, MediaGrid.

Their architecture hews to the post-array Google-style storage model:

• No RAID - slices are replicated one or more times based on policy or demand
• Single global namespace
• Out-of-band meta-data servers manage content servers

<strike>They can rebuild a failed 1 TB drive in less than an hour.</strike> They can replicate the data from a failed 1 TB drive in less than an hour.  Just add 4 or 24 drive content servers to scale capacity. <strong>Update:</strong> My original wording was incorrect. Thanks to Bill Todd for elucidating Omneon’s mechanism.<strong> End update.</strong>

But that’s not all!
Omneon’s content servers do more than serve content. They put their unused CPU power to work doing jobs like transcoding - translating content from one format like HD to iPhone-suitable QuickTime.

Given the growth in multi-core processors that will become a more important part of their market appeal over time. Since they process files, not blocks, they have many more opportunities to add value than a modular array.

The StorageMojo take
Omneon made a lot of smart choices with their MediaGrid architecture. It shows how a company with a few bright engineers can build a basic storage utility to take advantage of low commodity costs.

Where they win is their integration with the application and the workflow. They’ve created a video utility that integrates ingest, post, media management and playout with the smart and scalable storage needed to make it all work.

Application specific storage writ large. They’ve taken the same storage the rest of us use and wrapped broadcast interfaces around it that broadcasters already know.

Comments welcome, of course.

Isilon at NAB
Stopped by the Isilon booth a couple of times. Traffic seemed steady. Isilon held their meetings away from the booth, so it didn’t have the level of activity of, say, Omneon’s booth.

NAB is their biggest show of the year and the market where they have the biggest footprint. Their booth was the same size as EMC’s nearby - and much quieter booth - despite a Hulk display that looked like an embarrassed afterthought.

Personnel changes at Isilon
Isilon CEO Sujal Patel was there. We discussed my theory that Peter van Oppen had joined the board as a prelude to becoming CEO. Sujal assured me I’d gotten it wrong - that he was in it for the long haul, with Peter as a senior and trusted advisor.

Looking at him I believed. Sujal has developed the gravitas of a leader. Watching his company almost die - and his net worth drop from $75 million to $12 million - seems to have concentrated his mind.

He’s also hired a CTO. Looks like Sujal has moved on for good.

The StorageMojo take
Anyone waiting for Isilon to lay down and die has a long wait. While they may have alienated Wall Street - for good reason - customers seem to like what they have. They’re coming through the storm.

Comments welcome, of course. Isilon was also doing the “shown but not announced” thing with some products due later this year. Sujal asked that I not write about them and I said I wouldn’t. But the engineers have been busy.

NAB frame by frame
SNW and NAB did not overlap this year, so I spent 3 days each at both. The 2 events are very different: storage is the topic at one and merely central to what everyone is doing at the other. I enjoy both.

Rather than tackle NAB in one piece I’m writing a series of short takes on a number of companies.

SNW is the past. NAB is the future.
Storage is in the midst of a massive transition from an IOPS focus to a bandwidth focus. Like computing’s shift from batch to interactive in the ’60s and ’70s this transition is about bringing the technology closer to how people live. Not consumerizing, humanizing.

Life is a sequential access workload. Our eyes, ears and our pattern-hungry brains crave bandwidth. New display technologies push patterns at us at rates that used to require roller-coasters.

Batch isn’t going away - Google probably runs more batch jobs than most F100 firms - and neither is transaction processing. But the investment goes to the growth areas and bandwidth intensive storage is a growth area.

HD 3D: the Next Big Thing?
3D is getting good and will be the next step in home theater. Whether it is good enough to break through in theaters is another issue. But the net is that high quality 3D doubles data rates.

NAB gets this. They also get that to be useful, storage has to be integrated with the application, whether that app is production, editing, distribution or presentation. A new wide world is opening up to people who know storage and can learn an application. Much easier than the reverse, to be sure.

And, of course, they have a very reliable market to pay for all the innovation: entertainment. Cool.

Comments welcome, of course. First up: Isilon.

After 8 years of hard slogging the folks at InPhase are ready to ship the world’s first holographic storage system.

As StorageMojo noted 2 years ago:

InPhase is claiming they will ship drives with removable holographic disks with 300GB capacity and 20Mbps transfer rate later this year.

I love holographic technology and wish InPhase the best, but I don’t believe they have a viable business with their technology - yet. The problem: 3.5″ disk drives will reach 750GB by the end of this year with much faster transfer rates. InPhase’s 20 Mbps is only 2.5 million bytes per second or only 9GB per hour. It will take over 30 hours just to fill one disk! I predict that hard drives will still be more convenient and fairly cost-competitive than this promising new technology.

But keep at it guys. Lightning will strike if your investors are patient enough.

So what’s different now? They’re saying they will ship next month instead of “later.” The transfer rate is 20 MB/sec. And the media archive life is 50 years - higher density and longer life than tape.

Limited availability until fall
I saw a unit - not sure it was functional - at NAB last week. Marketing VP Liz Murphy gave me the pitch, about 110 seconds of which you can watch here:

The yellow plastic on the drive is for display purposes. Note the nifty see-through media.

Target market
As befits a small company with an $18,000 holographic drive whose media is quantity 1 $180 a copy, InPhase has a sharp focus on people who need a 50 year archive life. Like film studios, whose film-based archives are bulky and subject to the vagaries of physical chemistry.

The media price is reasonable - compared to Blu-ray. NewEgg has TDK 25 GB blu-ray media for $17. 12x that - to get 300 GB - is $204. Plus the clutter. The burners are cheaper though.

Why did it take 8 years?
InPhase had to literally invent almost every piece of the system.

• The optical media.
• The manufacturing process for fabricating thick, optically-flat and high-dynamic range media.
• The mathematics and circuitry needed to use digital camera CMOS chips for high-speed and high-accuracy image reconstruction.
• A new method - polytopic multiplexing - for a 10x density increase.
• Holographic mastering techniques for commercial reproduction.

For example, in order to use commercial, l.e. affordable, CMOS optical sensors to read the holograms, InPhase engineers had to do a deep dive (pdf) into optical information theory:

For holographic data storage it is advantageous to limit the spatial bandwidth of the object beam to only slightly higher than the Nyquist frequency of the data pattern. Typically an aperture in a Fourier plane is used to band limit the data beam (thereby also minimizing the size of the holograms in a Fourier-transform geometry). The data pattern may contain at most 1 cycle/2 data image pixels, so that the Nyquist frequency of the optical field of the object beam is minimally 1 sample/pixel. However, since the spectrum of the irradiance pattern is the auto-correlation of the spectrum of the optical field, the Nyquist frequency of the detectable signal is actually 2 linear samples/pixel minimum. Thus any method relying on less than 4 detector elements/data image pixel is operating in a sub-Nyquist regime where the Nyquist rate is defined with respect to the actual irradiance pattern impinging on the detector.

As Liz noted, you can’t hire experienced holographic storage engineers. InPhase has trained every one of them.

The StorageMojo take
Kudos to InPhase for a magnificent achievement. This is comparable to IBM’s original RAMAC disk effort back in 1957. They all deserve to get rich.

15 years ago a 3x CD reader cost a few hundred dollars. Perhaps in 15 years holographic burners will be $50 and the media less than a $1.

Learn more about the technology at the InPhase Technologies web site.

Comments welcome, of course. See a more accessible version of this article on my ZDnet blog, Storage Bits.

NAB comes closer to the future of storage than any other show I’ve seen. Both in the storage demand generated by digitizing existing content and in the bulk storage supply needed to house it, NAB points to the future of massive digital storage.

If you or your company are there, send me an email with your booth number and I’ll try to stop by.

The StorageMojo take
Posting will be a little light again this week. Lots of great stuff lined up for next week though.

Comments welcome, of course.

What’s behind the hype?
Congrats to the Xiotech team on generating the most interest at SNW. Their demos were crowded with the curious. Their claims bordered on the implausible, but the credibility of the engineering team kept derision in the corners.

I talked to Ellen Lary, engineering VP, and Steve Sicola, CTO, as well as taping the very helpful Chad. Before going any further, let’s roll the 103 second - less if you skip the credits - tape:

How do they do it?
Darned if I know - they weren’t talking. Reading between the lines:

• Systems thinking: each disk drive is more powerful than that 1980’s workhorse VAX 11-780 supermini. Put that intelligence to work!
• Clean code: Xiotech has had free run of Seagate’s best thinking - so they’ve gotten rid of the firmware hairballs inside disk drives to create a distributed architecture where components cooperate in a trusted environment instead of competing. Their disks won’t work with your Brand X controller.
• Spare no expense: the Xiotech team is going for the gold with a top-of-the-line resource-intensive architecture. If you have to ask how much it costs you can’t afford it.

With 350 IOPS per 15k FC drive claimed - and Sicola said more was coming - this is a lot of bang. When we see some pricing we’ll know about the bucks.

The value proposition
Xiotech’s bet is this: all is forgiven if it kicks butt 7×24 for 5 years. Each ISE is a storage utility writ small. With these building blocks, they promise, you can build an infrastructure whose availability and performance - still the storage ne plus ultra - will beat anything from EMC, IBM or HP.

A worthy goal, indeed.

The StorageMojo take
Just when EMC is assuming that Maui’s new Über-layer will win them the undying cashflow of multinationals, Xiotech comes along and exposes EMC’s feet of clay.

That sucking sound you hear is EMC emptying the datacenter’s coffers to run 7×23.999. If Xiotech can win even 10% of EMC’s business, they’ll be a $1 billion company sooner than they dreamed. And their VCs will be high-fiving in Aspen this winter.

NetApp, IBM and HP should worry as well. It sounded like Xiotech was OEM’ing the ISE to others - if so it makes sense to add them to the product line.

The disk-in-a-box model needed a thorough rethink and kudos to Xiotech for doing it. But many promising - on paper - products have failed. Once Xiotech is shipping and there is independent testing - then we’ll know what they’ve really got.

Comments welcome, of course. The indefatiguable Beth Pariseau homes in on the Atrato/Xiotech nexus.

It looks like Xiotech is going to cop the “Best Announcement at Spring SNW ‘08″ prize. See the nifty flash intro.

I did speak to Ellen Lary, Engineering VP last night after going through their mobbed booth. Later today I have an appointment with Steve Sicola, Xiotech’s CTO. I’ll have a more complete report later. Here’s what I’ve gleaned so far.

Remember Atrato?
Interesting stuff:

• Sealed unit starting at 1.5 TB. They had a 1 PB system on display in 3 54 RU - i.e. bigger than you use - racks.
• 5 year warranty and nifty blue LED light. Are we in a data center or a cocktail lounge?
• Uses the draft T10 DIF (Data In Flight or Data Integrity Field, Data Integrity Feature - depending on where you read it - evidence that humans have a far greater problem with data integrity than computers do) standard to protect data within the array.
• Uses Seagate’s own drive test software to attempt repairs on drives in place. Ellen said that about 70% of drives work normally after a power cycle.
• If power cycling doesn’t work, the box can perform a complete reformat of the drive, starting with laying down tracks and proceeding on to what you and I consider “formatting”.
• If a particular head is the problem, they can electrically disable that side of a platter while continuing to use the rest of the capacity of the drive.
• It is cheaper to put in a couple of extra high-end drives than it is to make a service call. This won’t be true in China of course.

The best announcement that WASN’T made at Spring SNW
A company has figured out how to enable long distance synchronous replication. Here in America we like things big - including our idiots in Washington - and our disasters are no exception.

Hurricanes, earthquakes, volcanos, floods, blizzards, tornados and fires - and purblind ideologues - can lay waste to hundreds or thousands of square miles. So normal synchronous replication distances don’t cut it for gotta-have-it infrastructure.

The still-in-stealth-mode company’s Chief Engineer, Montgomery Scott, explained that by running dilithium crystals a little hot, a special hyperspace “tunnel” is created enabling . . . .

Just kidding. Their actual solution looked good in principle but the devil is in the details. I asked all the hard questions I could think of and they had answers for all of them, so it looks like they have something real.

Look for a fall announce.

The StorageMojo take
Those of you wondering if this year would be more of the same old, same old, fear not. The spirit and fact of invention is still strong in the ever-more-vital storage industry.

Comments welcome, of course. Would you use 1,000 mile synchronous replication if you could get it?

On the occasion of announcing a new HPC modular array, the Engenio-based 4600, SGI commissioned me to do a StorageMojo video for them.

Some interesting comments about modular vs cluster storage and CXFS. And I got to practice my radio voice.

We spoke for about an hour and I boiled down the comments of Raj Das of SGI and LSI’s Flavio Santoni - before putting the StorageMojo take on it.

Must get video page up soon
One thing about video: every syllable counts. This one gets into Apple’s Motion for the first time. Nothing wild though.

Update: The video came down for a couple of modest tweaks. Now it’s back - new and improved.
End update.

The StorageMojo take
Video is another way to reach people who aren’t going to plow through a white paper. In 4 minutes you meet some people, get exposed to some new ideas and maybe learn something. And you can be drinking coffee in your bathrobe at the same time!

Comments welcome, of course.

Already?
Didn’t we just have one of those?

Leaving sunny Arizona for sunny Florida today. Say hi if you see me.

NAB next week
I’m driving to Las Vegas next week to see what’s cool in media storage.

And EMC World next month!
Never been to one before. Hope to hear all about Maui, the new global digital repository.

Squeezing in a trip to Chicago next month too.
No business planned, but I think I will have some downtime.

Self-service pricing is coming
A reader wrote in the other morning to say:

I wanted to take a moment to thank Robin for this invaluable tool. As an architect I often use this site to get Rough Order of Magnitude costs for components and set these up in spreadsheets that allow others to apply thier vendor discounts to get my ROM costs closer to their actuals. The site lets me rough out a Vendor A solution and a Vendor B solution and quickly get to comparative pricing without waiting for negotiations around pricing.

You are very welcome.

But now there is something better
An approval-based system that gives you up-to-date pricing. Go to pricing pages for 3par, CommVault, DataDomain, Lefthand, VMWare or EqualLogic and click on the reseller ad.

That will take you to their site where you can request a quote. This isn’t an anonymous system - you have to provide personal information - and the reseller has to approve sending you the quote.

Normally that should be a quick process. I tried it once and got a response in 5 minutes. The service is available from a company named Echoquote.

The StorageMojo take
Marketing, and many sales people, like to keep a tight hold on pricing for reasons that may have once made sense but don’t today. As we saw with the latest “Dear Uncle StorageMojo” a qualified buyer limited his research because pricing and feature opaqueness made it too difficult to compare many vendors.

That is just wrong if you’re the company losing the business. And since smaller companies are the ones losing most of the business, they’re the ones who should be easiest to deal with.

At DEC I used to hand out our thick price lists - marked “Company Confidential” - to all the regular customers. With a $20,000 per working day budget I didn’t have time to quote every cable and network interface. My value was product knowledge - not pricing.

And not to worry, I will still update the StorageMojo price lists every 6 months or so.

Comments welcome, of course. Who is the easiest storage company you’ve dealt with?