Comments on: StorageMojo NPI

By: Roland

Roland — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 11:17:21 +0000

Hi Robin,
I found it very helpful, reading spec sheets and analysis is allvery well, hearing the sales pitch is completely different. It was also helpful to get a feel for the CTO as a person, she’s the key to how the product develops in the future and again it’s something you jsut don’t get from a static web page.
I hope you do more of them. Could we have Lefthand and Caringo next please?

By: DaleU

DaleU — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 21:23:04 +0000

Robin,
Good Job! I think the video clips bring a real human element to the technology…something that has been missing. You asked for feedback and I think the only thing I would change would be the walking/talking segment at the end. You need rails and a grip for that! Check out http://www.sellingpower.com/video/, they have a neat video daily feature but it is not any more professional than yours. Your off to a good start.
Dale

By: Richard

Richard — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 16:19:50 +0000

Robin,
A good show….but the tour of hardware was somewhat brief….I guess it is very expensive to hold inventory.

I still have a problem with the concept.
I understand how data is cached on writes and how reads can be easily re-directed to cache. But…perhaps Nisha could explain what happens on ‘reads’ when the data is not in cache.

In particular, what happens when (say) there are multiple sequential video streams and the data needs to be pre-fetched ( i.e. read-ahead from disks )to enable uninterrupted streaming…?

By: Rex

Rex — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 19:18:36 +0000

YouTube is blocked by our corporate web nanny filters, so I can’t offer an opinion on the content of your first video.

In general, good videos are a complement to good writing, but should not replace writing. Bad videos are an infuriating waste of time. At least with writing, I can scan for the hidden gems, if the topic is sufficiently interesting.

By: Bill Todd

Bill Todd — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 02:34:03 +0000

I beg to differ: *I* read white papers, and I’d read a lot more (as I used to) if they didn’t require some kind of silly registration (hey, if companies want people to read their spin, placing irritating obstacles in the way of doing so is *not* the best way to go about it).

But perhaps I’m not a great example of the audience that you’re targeting, since I’d rather have the opportunity to analyze hard technical data about a product than listen to someone (whether you or some CTO) babble on about how wonderful it is (not to denigrate Gear6’s product: it’s probably as useful in some circumstances – and as useless in others – as the good old PrestoServe product which is its logical single-system ancestor, since some workloads respond well to caching and others benefit not at all from it and instead require actual performance at the disk level, contradicting the suggestion that this product necessarily decouples performance and capacity).

Give me back my free-to-download-without-registering white papers and I’ll happily ignore your cheerful but content-poor videos (not to suggest that a certain clientele won’t gobble them up like jelly beans, of course: substance is not everyone’s cup of tea). But I’ll still enjoy longer presentations with real technical content – e.g., some of the long videos with Q&A that the ZFS implementors released.

Well, you did ask for comment. As to your final question, I suspect that there’s *no* way to get really valuable content into a 3 – 5 minute video, almost as little as there is to get it into a 30-second campaign commercial. But don’t let that stand in your way: I’m sure there’s a way to *sell* such a vehicle, meager in actual value though it may be.

- bill