StorageMojo

We’ve all heard the story before: little company mugged by Microsoft. So I was inclined to be sympathetic to Mandriva’s complaint against Microsoft last week. Until I looked into it.

Mandriva makes the sale
They signed a contract to sell 17,000 notebooks to Nigeria, loaded with Mandriva’s Linux distro.

They deliver the 17,000 notebooks with Linux and, I assume, got paid per the contract.

Sounds good so far.

Then the raptor of Redmond swoops in
Microsoft then persuaded the customer to replace Linux with Windows.

We actually closed the deal, we took the order, we qualified the software, we got the machine shipped. To conclude, we did our job. And, the machine are being delivered right now.

Now, we hear a different story from the customer : “we shall pay for the Mandriva Software as agreed, but we shall replace it by Windows afterward.”

Let me get this straight
You sold something. You delivered it. You got paid.

After the customer took delivery another vendor persuaded them to replace your software with theirs.

I’m not seeing the problem, unless you took a loss on the sale hoping to make it up in services or something. If that happened, then OK, be mad. But be mad at yourself.

Or is it the loss of follow-on business? I don’t know. You don’t say.

The StorageMojo take
Microsoft, like EMC, plays hardball. But the Mandriva complaint sounds like sour grapes. No harm, no foul.

Comments welcome, as always.

Meet Danny Rhodes and the Messengers
For a small town in the mountains of northern Arizona, 2 hours from Phoenix, we have a great local music scene. Ms. Mojo and I are out most weekend nights dancing to live music.

Our favorite bluesman is Danny Rhodes and the Messengers. He’s played in all 50 states, Canada, Japan, and Europe with a wide variety of artists, including Charlie Rich, Mel McDaniel and Brenda Lee. With these artists and with his own bands, he has performed on Austin City Limits , the Grand Ole Opry, HBO , and the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. In the late 70’s, Danny spent two years in Austin, TX and shared bills with Stevie Ray Vaughn and the Neville Brothers among others.

Isn’t this what storage is for?
Danny generously offered a free track to StorageMojo readers. I’ve uploaded a high-quality 320 kb/s, 8.1 MB mp3.zip of one of my favorites, Meadowlark. Just unzip the file and you’ll have a high quality track you can import into iTunes or put on any mp3 player.

http://storagemojo.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/dannyrhodes.thumbnail.jpg

Meadowlark is a cut from his album Welcome to the Night. You can listen to more excerpts from the album there as well. Also check out Cairo to Cottonwood.

Both albums are available from CD Baby, a great online music service. They offer physical CDs and high-quality, DRM-free mp3s. Unlike record companies, they pay 90% of the revenue to the artist. To date they’ve paid over $50 million to musicians.

Is that cool or what? Disclosure: I have no financial relationship with Danny - other than buying his CDs - or CD Baby.

The StorageMojo take
Data storage for personal - mostly entertainment - use is now driving disk sales. Here’s my chance to help Seagate, WD and the rest along.

With all the back and forth about architectures, features, products and business models on StorageMojo it is easy to forget that analog data storage got its start with entertainment: music, photography and later moving pictures. For many of us it is the business uses of data storage that pays the bills. Yet it is the personal use for photos, movies and music that brings us joy.

Download Meadowlark and the rest of Danny’s music and have a good time tonight.

Comments welcome, of course.
If people like this I’ll put up some more tracks by my favorite local musicians. Let me know what you think.

Update: The service wasn’t as helpful as I’d hoped. I’ll give them some time to tune it up and try it again.
End update.

I occasionally get folks either asking about jobs or wanting to offer jobs. I’ve never taken them up on it because admin is not one of my core competencies.

But the money would be nice.

Enter the job-a-matic
Today I came across Job-a-matic, a web site that offers a hosted jobs board. So I signed up for it. Their little ad is on the right column under the Google ad.

I’ve tried to limit the jobs they display to storage-related jobs, but it appears the filtering isn’t 100% successful. Please bear with me as I get it narrowed down.

The StorageMojo take
I hope the job board proves helpful. Let me know about your experiences with it, both good and bad.

Ms. Mojo and I decided to put our trip to Italy on hold for a few months, so I suddenly became available to attend SNW.

Later today I head off to Phoenix and tomorrow morning to Dallas.

New toy!
I’m bringing my High Def camcorder. I’m hoping for some interesting visuals and/or some interviews. If you’ll be there and are up for either let me know. I’ll edit and post on Thursday and Friday.

I’ll arrive early Tuesday afternoon and leave late Wednesday afternoon.

See you there.

Barry, an EMC employee, graciously responded to yesterday’s post on free speech on both his blog and in a comment. Tony Pearson, an IBM employee, also pointed to IBM’s wiki-generated - walk the talk! - IBM blogging policy and guidelines.

However, a fundamental difference remains: Barry wants “corporate-sponsored” bloggers subject to the rules of commercial speech and I don’t. More on that below.

IBM guidelines
I like the IBM guidelines and so I’m reposting their summary of them:

Guidelines for IBM Bloggers: Executive Summary

1. Know and follow IBM’s Business Conduct Guidelines.
2. Blogs, wikis and other forms of online discourse are individual interactions, not corporate communications. IBMers are personally responsible for their posts. Be mindful that what you write will be public for a long time — protect your privacy.
3. Identify yourself — name and, when relevant, role at IBM — when you blog about IBM or IBM-related matters. And write in the first person. You must make it clear that you are speaking for yourself and not on behalf of IBM.
4. If you publish a blog or post to a blog and it has something to do with work you do or subjects associated with IBM, use a disclaimer such as this: “The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.”
5. Respect copyright, fair use and financial disclosure laws.
6. Don’t provide IBM’s or another’s confidential or other proprietary information.
7. Don’t cite or reference clients, partners or suppliers without their approval.
8. Respect your audience. Don’t use ethnic slurs, personal insults, obscenity, etc., and show proper consideration for others’ privacy and for topics that may be considered objectionable or inflammatory — such as politics and religion.
9. Find out who else is blogging on the topic, and cite them.
10. Don’t pick fights, be the first to correct your own mistakes, and don’t alter previous posts without indicating that you have done so.
11. Try to add value. Provide worthwhile information and perspective.

Note points 2 & 3 above. They are critical.

“Hard cases make bad law”
Barry makes much of the recent case of a Hitachi blogger on the Hitachi website who made inaccurate statements about a new product. Barry posted about it and the Hitachi blogger made corrections.

Isn’t that how the blogosphere is supposed to work? Assuming the blogger acknowledged the mistakes and changes in an update, then what is the problem? We’re in violent agreement that accurate information is a Good Thing, and that individuals should take responsibility for their screw-ups.

But Barry wants to take it a step further and place corporate bloggers under the rules of advertising rather than personal speech, broadening the legal liability for mistakes to the company’s deep pockets.

But IMHO, a corporate blogger also has an ethical and fiduciary responsibility for factual representation of his company’s products and services in his or her blog, to the same level of accuracy as her/his company would require for any other logo’d collateral they produce.

That’s my position: Plain and simple.

And that’s where I disagree. I’ll talk about that and then ask the interesting question: what is really going on here?

All in favor of “unethical” blogging stop reading now
What Barry is arguing for, intentionally or not, is for blogs on corporate sites to be treated as advertising rather than individual expression. There are a couple of fallacies behind this position:

1. The “same level of accuracy” as logo’d material argument implies something that isn’t true: that logo’d collateral is legally required to be factual. The common use of the “specifications subject to change without notice” qualifier belies this. The legal construct of puffery is an important qualifier. The common use of words such as “up to” which imply but do not promise - good thing too! - is another tactic to limit accuracy. There are bright line limits on commercial speech, but not many. Perhaps corporate bloggers should adopt disclaimers to avoid liability for mistakes.
2. It assumes that customers rely on blog posts for factual information about products and services. Is it reasonable to trust a blog post, even by a CTO or company founder, over the formal, reviewed-by-everyone statements in data sheets, press releases, product descriptions, change lists and SE presentations?

Corporate bloggers should be factual and I expect them to correct mistakes. Being human, they will make mistakes. The larger question is: is blogging on corporate sites a Good Thing? Because if we make individual expression a subject for lawsuits - and that is where Barry’s approach leads - we won’t have it, and I think that would be a terrible disservice to customers and the industry.

What we would have instead is the watered down, homogenized expression we find on most corporate websites, i.e. PR. Is that what we want?

What is this really about?
As Beth Pariseau reported in an article last month

Though EMC officials have been whispering elsewhere, the j’accuse duties were formally performed by a blogger, Barry A. Burke, who wrote a thorough criticism of HDS’s thin provisioning July 10.

So let me get this straight:

• An EMC employee who is an “unofficial” blogger, publishes the critique that other unnamed EMC officials have been “whispering” elsewhere.
• The “unofficial” blogger pushes for legal restraints on corporate bloggers.
• No comment on the ethics of using “unofficial” but loyal corporati to stick it your employer’s competitors.

Free speech for unofficial bloggers too
Barry hasn’t done anything wrong that I can see. It appears that his critique of a feature that EMC won’t have for another 6-9 months is factual and sincere. I don’t know enough about him to know if his analysis is his work product or not, but I’m willing to believe it is.

But this situation does raise a concern: will companies start encouraging and rewarding employees who go after competitors in blog posts and comments? EMC has a well-deserved reputation for bare-knuckle sales tactics, and what is storage blogging but selling by another name? To EMC management, anyway.

The StorageMojo take
EMC’s “command and control” management culture is antithetical to the hierarchy-flattening effects of networks and social media. EMC’s management no doubt sees the traffic and the higher recognition of competitor executives who blog. Dave Hitz and Hu Yoshida are genuinely nice guys, very smart, and that comes through in their blogs.

EMC, of all storage companies, would benefit by presenting a human face to customers and the industry. Their past arrogance is well-remembered by many.

They’d also do well to emulate IBM’s approach: encourage everyone to blog so EMC bloggers become part of the landscape rather than an object of curiosity. If it happens will EMC bloggers, official or not, ever be anything less than rabid company partisans?

Comments welcome, of course.

In a recent post, A Terabyte in the home? Hitachi’s CTO, the redoubtable Hu Yoshida writes

I don’t believe there will be a market for home storage units. I believe internet service providers will provide the storage and data management for our personal data. They will provide it as a service which we will be able to access whenever and where ever we want. Instead of trusting my data to a low cost home storage unit, I believe an ISP will be able to store it more reliably and cost effectively on a large enterprise class storage system which they can leverage across many thousands of users.

This world view is so at odds with the reality I see that it is hard to know where to start. But I’ll try.

Home storage already has a long history
People have always stored images, and later, text, in their homes. From the cave paintings of Lascaux to the wood block prints of Hokusai, people have always enjoyed having images of personal meaning in their homes. Television brought moving images to the home for the first time and later VHS and now DVD allow people to create libraries of moving images.

With the rise of literacy the home library became possible. Among those who could afford it the library became not only a storage area but a shelter from the cares of the world. The 21st century analogue is the home theater.

With the rise of Blu-Ray, it won’t be hard for an average family to acquire 2-3 TB of favorite programming. Especially families with children. People have always collected content and I don’t think that fundamental urge is going to abate any time soon. Today’s content just happens to be in a digital format.

Bandwidth and storage aren’t as fungible as Hu assumes
Home bandwidth is too low to support the kind of easy access to large files the home user wants: home video, graphics, games, movies. More importantly, many people, perhaps most, are visual thinkers. They need to see things to recall them. Thus collecting content in the home serves two purposes: high bandwidth and stimulating memory.

Now the album art images that iTunes displays are a pretty good substitute, especially if you are old enough to remember the LP version. Yet storing even the images locally has many advantages over placing them on the network.

No one is storing such content on a “large enterprise class storage system”
I guess Hu isn’t a regular StorageMojo reader or he’d know this already. Storage clusters and low(er) cost modular systems own the ISP storage business. No way are Tagmas or Symms ever going to compete for this business.

With all due respect, Hu needs a reality check on this part of the vision. I know some of the folks at EMC are ahead of him, and by extension Hitachi, on this point.

The StorageMojo take
I agree with Hu that all other things being equal, people would rather not have a storage array in their house. The point is they never will. Consumer-grade storage systems that work a lot better than today’s storage arrays will arrive, such as Drobo.

Those 1 TB disks will also be popular, combined with off-site backup for the truly paranoid, as people embrace the concept of Lots Of Copies Keep Stuff Safe. People like having stuff around where they can see and touch it. Home data storage is no different.

Comments welcome, as always. I discovered that I’ve been taking a break from blogging lately without planning to. I’ve discovered some new topics, so stay tuned.

But we knew it all along
Infoworld published a follow-up clarifying Apple’s inclusion of ZFS in Mac OS X 10.5.0. And doing quite a bit of tap dancing.

Apple now says that the ZFS file system will be available in the forthcoming Mac operating system, sort of.
Seeking to clarify a statement made on Monday by Brian Croll, senior director of Mac OS X Product Marketing, to two InformationWeek reporters that Apple’s new “Leopard” operating system would not include the ZFS file system, an Apple spokesperson indicated that ZFS would be available as a limited option, but not as the default file system.

ZFS “is only available a read-only option from the command line,” according to an Apple spokesperson.

In a follow-up interview today, Croll explained, “ZFS is not the default file system for Leopard. We are exploring it as a file system option for high-end storage systems with really large storage. As a result, we have included ZFS — a read-only copy of ZFS — in Leopard.”

“Read-only means that at a later date, if there are ZFS volumes, those systems would be able to read ZFS volumes,” Croll added. “You cannot write data into the system. It will allow you to read ZFS volumes later.”

Asked whether ZFS might be implemented for Apple’s Xserve rack mountable server line, Croll said, “Where we head in the future, we’re not able to talk about.”

Apple omerta aside, the direction is clear even if the timetable is not.

Update: ZFS clone on Linux: Chris Mason announced that he’s releasing something that looks like a ZFS clone for Linux.

[ANNOUNCE] Btrfs: a copy on write, snapshotting FS

Maybe you could help him. [Thanks, Wes.]

Now back to our regularly scheduled programming.

I wrote about Gordon Bell’s MyLifeBits project a year ago. Gordon Bell, now of Microsoft Research, was once the CTO of Digital Equipment and a pioneer in computer networks and clusters, among many other research initiatives. Now The New Yorker is writing about him and MyLifeBits too.

Thanks for the memories
MyLifeBits is Bell’s project to record his life and to make that record accessible. So far, the former is a lot easier than the latter.

Among the several interesting threads in the article is how might such a record impact our perception of our life. It has only in the last 100 years - out of 7,000 years of human civilization - that high quality recordings of events and performances have been possible. Today, thanks to cheap cameras and storage, almost anyone amongst the relatively few living in affluent industrial economies can now take a stab at recording far more of their life in high-def color than anyone dreamed even 40 years ago.

From the article:

Memory revises itself endlessly. We remember a vivid person, a remark, a sight that was unexpected, an occasion on which we felt something profoundly. The rest falls away. We become more exalted in our memories than we actually were, or less so. The interior stories we tell about ourselves rarely agree with the truth. Someone uneasy with the candor of his archive could delete the material that pained him. People do it all the time: they destroy papers; they leave instructions in their wills for letters to be burned. In the novel “So Long, See You Tomorrow,” William Maxwell writes, “Too many conflicting emotional interests are involved for life ever to be wholly acceptable, and possibly it is the work of the storyteller to rearrange things so that they conform to this end. In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw.” In “The Seven Sins of Memory,” the Harvard psychologist Daniel Schacter mentions the work of Shelley Taylor, a psychologist at U.C.L.A., who has written that optimistic people tend to recall their pasts more favorably, and that the versions of their selves that they recalled contributed to their mental and physical health.

A reliance on the actual record might also inadvertently distort our impressions. Schacter has conducted experiments in which he photographed subjects performing several simple activities. He showed some of the subjects photographs of them doing a few of the activities. They recalled those activities easily, but were less likely to recall the activities that they had not been shown.

“What it suggests is that there might be unknown or unintended effects,” he told me. “By overemphasizing certain parts, by recalling July 4th, for example, you might make it more difficult to recall July 5th. Even if you had time, which you don’t, to recall all of it, your review has to be held onto by your memory, and at some point you’re going to run into the limitations of memory. The archive idea suggests you could have it both ways, and in a limited extent it might be helpful, but I don’t think it would end up being so utopian. The limitations of memory will intercede.”

Two sides to every story - just one set of facts
The irony of this effort to record everything in a man’s life, juxtaposed against the deliberate loss of 5 million emails by the White House in a successful effort to conceal unethical and criminal actions, suggests a glimmer of hope for the future.

So much of what passes for political discourse consists of arguments about facts. What if we could agree on the facts thanks to advanced recording and storage technology? Would it be useful if we could spend that time discussing why some people approve of the facts and others don’t?

The power of partial memory
One of the problems with laws and regulations is that, if successful, the problem they eliminate disappears from human memory, while the laws themselves remain all too visible. Take the American abortion debate. Pictures of aborted fetuses stir sympathy. There are no recent pictures of dead women lying in pools of blood in hotel bathrooms. The latter records helped shaped the abortion debate in the 1960s. Their absence today lets the anti-abortion folks ignore a very likely outcome if they get their way. And that is just one example.

The StorageMojo take
No technology, such as MyLifeBits, can improve human nature. It just might be that if we could see ourselves as others see us, we might generally become kinder and gentler people, and more likely to think about how we might be creating the reactions we see in others. Maybe.

In any case, massive storage is creating possibilities of which we are only dimly aware.

Read The New Yorker article here.

Comments welcome, of course. Monday is Memorial Day, a national holiday in America. To my fellow Americans, I wish you a happy holiday. To the rest of the world Monday may be a little quiet.

You always knew techies were different. . .
Market segmentation is a black art. Some people believe that markets can be finely segmented in ways that are meaningful over time. Perhaps because I spend a lot of time marketing leading edge stuff I believe that segments are a static take on on a dynamic flow. Useful at the time you take the picture, useful for comparisons later, but trailing rather than leading market behavior. Fun to play with.

Cut to the Pew Internet & American Life Project
The latest report out of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, called A Typology of Information and Communication Technology Users - what people will do for academic respectability - combines two favorite topics: readers of StorageMojo and market segmentation.

About half of the American population doesn’t much care about the internet
This will be news to Silicon Valley.

Here’s their segmentation. Where do you fit?

I’m trying to find myself in there and not having much luck
Strong affinity for the Omnivore, yet there is a lot of technology that I’m not interested in using. Like, my phone doesn’t even take pictures! I stopped using my PDA several years ago. I’ve tried to get excited about newsreaders and haven’t. I don’t like tinkering with technology all that much. I much prefer it works.

On the other hand I do have a WDS extended wireless network for my home/office. Love VOIP. Mindmapping, which I’ve known about for decades, has recently joined my creative and organizational armentarium. Have two laser printers on the network. Airtunes. DTS surround sound. Two blogs and am contemplating a third.

Done some video editing and made a couple of DVDs, complete with menus. I chat, both text and video, with friends and family.

The common thread: it all has to be easy.

Call me a lackluster omnivore
Oh, and in case you were wondering why techies seem to have a hard time with women: here’s another graph from the Pew report:

Darn!

Comments welcome. How do you see yourself?

Totally off topic:
Buy great chair on Ebay. Shipped Monday on DHL. Thanks to massive storage and distributed networks, I knew it was in Phoenix - a two hour drive from where I live - Tuesday morning. Fantastic!

Tuesday morning: “Delivery arranged, no details expected.”
Oh, boy! Tuesday comes and goes, no chair. Scheduled delivery: Wednesday. Hm-m-m.

Wednesday morning: “Shipment arrived at incorrect facility. Sent to correct destination.”
They sent it to Lake Havasu City. But they caught the error. OK, stuff happens.

Thursday evening: “In transit”

Friday morning, on the phone: “absolutely will be delivered today”

Friday evening, on the phone: “will be delivered tonight, late, due to Mother’s Day”

Saturday morning: “In transit. Wilmington - Clinton Field, OH”
Aar-r-r-gh! Not only did they NOT deliver it, they air-freighted it to Ohio, about 1400 air miles away.

The StorageMojo take
To err is human. To really screw things up takes automation. I suspect a combination of management problems in the Phoenix Regional Hub, DHL process problems - shipping back to their Ohio hub is probably equivalent to hitting “reset” - and some Mother’s Day craziness.

Needless to say, DHL is off StorageMojo’s preferred vendor list. And the shipper’s.

Update: after arriving in Phoenix on Tuesday morning, just as it had the previous week, DHhell delivered it to the rock-bound splendor of Chez Mojo in the early afternoon. I almost didn’t believe it.

And the chair, a Freedom chair - with gel seat and headrest - from Humanscale is wonderful. Forget the Aeron’s dozen or so adjustments that I, for one, would certainly get wrong. Freedom has four, and once adjusted, you’re sitting the lap of ergonomic comfort. Yum!

Got any shipping horror stories? Go ahead, share the pain. Say what you will about storage networks, they will never ship your data to Wilmington, Ohio.

Walter Purvis, my very analytical colleague at Data Mobility Group, wrote in to call me on an apparent contradiction:

Yesterday you were flogging EMC for “the lack of a vision, or goal, that EMC is aiming for… where is EMC investing its R&D dollars to create the products, services and architectures that customers will need in three years?”

Today, you say “please, spare me your roadmap.”

Do you or do you not want EMC to tell you where it’s going? Please clarify.

(You’re ludicrously wrong about EMC not having a vision, of course, but that’s a different matter.)

Hey, George Herbert Walker Bush never got “the vision thing” either
Walter asks a good question: if I am not impressed by roadmaps, what do I want? A fluff-laden detour into technology la-la land?

Neither.

What works for me, and may not work for anyone else, is something more basic. I like to know how people think about problems. Do they integrate a lot of seemingly disparate data points? Do they look at long term secular trends, especially exponential ones, and do the math to arrive at reasonable conclusions? [Power factors are something people are congenitally awful at, even folks with Ph.Ds.] Can they articulate when the trends will create new solution sets or challenges? Things like that.

At other companies, that is what CTOs do. Maybe Mr. Nick is doing it, and I haven’t seen it.

It is partly psychological. Task-oriented people say “show me the roadmap and I’ll know the answers to all those questions.” Me, I don’t trust roadmaps out beyond 12 months. Can you say “de-commit?”

We live in interesting times
Late ’80s IBM had a lot of roadmaps, great technology, smart people. And John Akers was driving them off a cliff. It took a few years for that to become obvious to the board. Another couple of years to figure out what they needed. Wrenching change. Which Lou Gerstner provided with a rethinking of IBM’s problems and market approach.

It isn’t about product roadmaps
I know that EMC has been hard at work remaking themselves as a software company, with some success. I know they’ve been hiring storage engineers to create VMware-based storage products. They’ve even gotten a few cluster storage patents. Mr. Nick is a pioneer in grid computing, right up there with Ian Foster. Good stuff, all.

Is EMC planning massive grid-based storage? They could be. If I’d gone to their analyst meeting I might even know. I just couldn’t tell you.

Is Dick Cheney EMC’s VP of PR?
What about the innovation network that was just announced? Good concept. Mary Jander captures how EMC’s “command and control” mindset turns a potentially worthy effort into an inept looking marketing ploy. Maybe the new board can help the company start acting like an adult instead of a sullen adolescent.

I do have some sympathy for the company. It isn’t easy being EMC. Compared to IBM and HP, they are tiny. A big chunk of their revenue comes from Dell, who could drop them in a heart beat. High growth and surging stock price are behind them, not ahead. Their corporate culture and track record makes them much less admired than NetApp and Seagate. Not to mention pesky bloggers.

The StorageMojo take
This all started with my comment that I chose not to go to EMC annual analyst meeting because they require an NDA. Most analysts go anyway and I don’t judge them. I made a choice, I informed EMC analyst relations and PR, and I’ve offered my opinion through my personal blog. I’m happy to live with consequences of my decision. EMC might rethink it, but I won’t be surprised if they don’t. Or they could explain it better. I’m open to persuasion.

The irony is that I have a lot of admiration for EMC. I just feel they are operating far below their potential. I’d like to see them live up to the ideals their website. Eat their own young and reinvent the storage industry.

And for all you EMC’ers who feel I’ve been so-o-o unfair: I’ve been even harder on Sun. So count your blessings. And learn to play well with others.

Comments welcome. I’d especially like to hear from anyone who’s met Richard Egan and either Ken Olsen or An Wang. What were your impressions?

Stay too long in storage and this could happen to you
A buddy of mine from DEC, Kirby Wadsworth, has started a started a blog that I’ll be watching. Normally I don’t blog about blogging or bloggers - drinking one’s own bath water and all that - so to what does Kirby owe the honor of this mention?

For one, I always enjoyed his bad attitude about the storage industry. Kirby tends to get passionate and is what sales people call an expressive: you always know how things are with Kirby. I like that in people.

What you see is what you get?
But what really grabbed me is his picture in Storage Sanity:

How many marketing VPs would dare?

The proof is in the pudding
I know Kirby can produce 100 proof stuff if he can devote the time. He has a day job at Acopia, after all. I’ll be interested to see how it goes.

Good luck, Kirby.

As if I wasn’t busy enough already
I’ve taken on another blog called Storage Bits at ZDnet.

I’d been blogging for Computerworld on a volunteer basis, so when ZDnet started waving obscene amounts of money (obscenely low, but at least a positive integer) at me, I thought I’d give it a shot.

What does this mean for StorageMojo?
Beats me. I’m going to feel the thing out for a while. Current fantasy is that I’ll do more topical, quick hit kind of stuff on ZDnet and the more analytical, research intensive pieces here on StorageMojo. I’ll also be cutting back a bit here as well, to 3-4 days a week. I’ve done 5 days a week - mostly - for the last year and I sometimes get the feeling from readers that maybe, just maybe, that is more storage comment than they can handle.

The StorageMojo take
I can only compliment the ZDnet editorial team for their discriminating taste in fine storage blogging. As storage is, I believe, the toughest problem in IT - right up there with parallel programming - I’m hoping the new platform will help me spread greater appreciation for the wonders and opportunities in storage technology. Some groupies would be nice too.

Comments welcome, as always.

A distinguished scholar published a book last year about data replication in the Greek-speaking ancient world. He examined a group of texts and how the technology and context of the times affected data integrity.

He looked at (I think he had some help) over 5700 ancient source texts, all of them at least copies of copies of copies, to find textual variants. There are over 250,000 variants, or more than one for every word of the texts. Makes floppies look like graven stone.

Boy, do we have it good!
We may complain about migrating data from one Windows machine to another, but the ancients had it far worse. Data replication technology was a guy looking at a text and copying it. No printing presses, not even punchcards. Primitive in the extreme.

The UI really stunk!
The standard scribal technique was to write without lifting pen from parchment, papyrus, vellum or whatever. No gaps between the words. No punctuation. TheywouldjustwriteandwriteuntilwellIdonotknowwhentheywouldstop. And they wouldn’t have that period there. Needless to say, no paragraphs, headers or hypertext links.

No wonder people couldn’t read. With text like that who would want to?

Reading a Turing machine tape, except in Greek
People make mistakes. Bored people make mistakes. Poorly trained people make more mistakes. Usually the folks copying these texts were amateurs, making a copy for themselves or for friends, maybe at the end of a long day. The words all running together, many of the words looking alike. Some common error patterns emerged, such as:

• Mistaking one letter or word for another
• Eye-skips, where the copyist skipped a line
• Dictation errors, where one person was reading to the copyist and a word was substituted for one it sounded like

Mistakes on purpose
People, being people, often have opinions about a text, and sometimes the copyist would change the text to, in their opinion, correct or improve the text. Much of the book is taken up with analyzing where and why these changes were introduced, using rules developed by scholars over several hundred years to attempt to reconstruct the original text.

AFAIK no other ancient text has received such rigorous scholarly treatment. I find the techniques fascinating, even if they result in less certainty, rather than more, about the original, long lost, text.

Modern day counterparts
Our ability to store massive amounts of data has a downside: we can store massive amounts of error as well. Credit reports have high error rates that can cost people real money. America’s infamous “no-fly” list has snagged Senator Ted Kennedy and the wife of another Senator. To err is human. To err and preserve it in computer files demonic.

Oh, and the text is:
The New Testament. The book on textual analysis is Bart D. Ehrman’s Misquoting Jesus, The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why. Bart is chairman of the religious studies department at UNC. A fascinating book, aimed at laypeople, on New Testament textual analysis. I highly recommend it.

The StorageMojo take
I’m not making or asking for any comment of the religious implications of Bart’s textual analysis of the New Testament. What is valuable, IMHO, is the awareness that information gets altered in many ways for many reasons.

Even in the age of bit-perfect digital copies, we also have tools that allow us to edit, alter and even fake digital information. One of the highest purposes of education is foster the ability to evaluate information independently of supposed authority, provenance or reliability. I don’t think that will ever change no matter what technological marvels we develop.

Comments welcome, of course. I haven’t been writing as frequently as I would like on StorageMojo due partly to travel and to other work, including my new blog on ZDnet. I plan to keep up with both, yet I expect it will take some time for me to figure out what, if any, the audience differences are between the two.

Intel last week provided a window into just how screwed up even wealthy, forward looking companies are around document retention for pending litigation. In the law biz these policies go under the general term of “litigation hold”. Intel is in Federal court on an anti-trust suit filed by competitor AMD in June 2005.

The recent changes in the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) added explicit requirements for electronically stored information (ESI) on December 1st, but litigation hold policies have been around for ages (for more info see Sto’Mo’s 3 Minute Guide to Electronic Discovery and Today’s the Day: New FRCP Rules Now in Effect). Which makes Intel’s behavior even more peculiar.

Let 1,000 litigation hold policies bloom
Intel’s email system automatically purges emails after short time, said by Intel to be about three months. It was only in October of 2005 that they started a weekly backup of the emails of executives whose actions might be relevant to the case. Until then they asked that employees voluntarily retain any emails that might be germane. Even after the backups started, an employee could receive and delete an email immediately to avoid having it backed up.

In effect, Intel replaced a single corporate litigation hold policy with one for every employee. With potentially billions of dollars damages at stake may one be forgiven for thinking that one of the world’s most successful high-tech companies might have done better?

Dumb, yes; malicious, maybe not
There is no evidence now that Intel sought to hide incriminating emails, which could bring disastrous “adverse inferences” from the judge if the case goes to a jury. Yet AMD’s legal team will be looking for evidence that Intel is hiding something, and if they find any Intel will have no one but itself to blame.

Intel will now invest in software that automatically preserves the emails of designated employees. One has to wonder why they waited until now.

The StorageMojo take
The resolution of Intel’s email retention liability may add to the evolving case law of ESI and electronic discovery. It certainly should serve as a warning to large companies that audited litigation hold policies are a necessity.

A sheepish “oops!” and a good-faith effort to recover lost documents may protect a company if no evidence of a cover up is found today, but in a few years judges and corporate audit committees will not be so forgiving. Get your litigation hold policies in order now, or face real pain sooner rather than later.

Comments welcome, please. I’m spending much of the day on an airplane headed back to StorageMojo’s Fortress of Solitude in the Arizona mountains, so moderation will be a bit slow.