Welcome to this Storage Blog

Last week at Networld+Interop, while enjoying a few drinks with a friend from a well-known storage management software company, I was encouraged to develop a blog for the grossly underserved community of storage technology consumers and data managers.

I was dubious about the idea’s appeal, but the always hip and cool Marco (my friend) said that if I built it, they would come.

With a couple of drinks in me, the idea made enormous sense. But, now that I have left Las Vegas and returned to my sober digs in Tampa Bay Florida, I have to wonder: who is “they”? And, what are “they” looking for in a blog?

WHO “THEY” PROBABLY AREN’T

• Are “they” the metrosexuals working for Global 2000 companies who actually believe that “real men have SANs” — buying into the hype around Fibre Channel fabrics (not technically SANs, since FC is a channel protocol and not a network protocol and cannot therefore be used to construct what would properly be called a Storage Area Network)?
• Are “they” the Flashing Twelves who believe that they are best served by Big Iron, one-size-fits-most, storage arrays from vendors with 3-letter acronyms for names — arrays that come bundled with a bunch of “value add” software that has more functional holes than my old college t-shirt and serve no application requirements particularly well?
• Are “they” the clueless CFOs who, in the absence of baseline storage infrastructure and labor cost data, actually believe vendor propaganda about product ROI while ignoring the fact that most storage wares are essentially combinations of cheap commodity components whose price is artificially propped up with software functionality add-ons, 60 percent of which are never used?
• Might “they” be technology-challenged CEOs who fear the Wrath of Regulators, 25 year prison sentences and stiff fines for non-compliance with SOX, GLB, etc., and who have been persuaded to believe that compliance is a technology, rather than a people and process, problem?
• Are “they” the vendors themselves, desperately seeking fresh numbers to justify the highly questionable business value case that they have built around their products? Perhaps they have grown tired of hearing their own hype repeated back to them by industry analysts who they pay to quote their own questionable numbers.
• Or, are “they” the industry analysts who run an extortion racket that has become as institutionalized as bribery in China or graft in the US Congress — promising a good position for the vendor’s product in some “Magic Hexagon” in exchange for the vendor’s purchase of lots of “research and analysis services”?

I rather doubt that any of the above will take much interest in this blog. To a one, this “they” is already well-served by a huge marketing machine that reinforces their decisions and views.

After all, “they” recognize each other with an endless litany of meaningless trophies and awards. “They” exchange lots of chachka at exclusive customer and reseller events. “They” get invites to the best hotels and play on the best golf courses courtesy of a deft redirection of monies from VCs, investment bankers, or even nameless and faceless stockholders who believe there is still time to eek out profit from investments in storage hardware companies.

I rather doubt that this “they” is the “they” that Marco insisted would come to a blog like this one. This “they” already has a support network, whether it is SNIA or FCIA or Gartner or any of a growing number of industry sponsored “user groups” that make captive audiences of meeting attendees for their self-serving and increasingly absurd marketing pitches. This “they” is feeling a lot of love and doesn’t need any sort of input that might burst their bubble.

THE REAL “THEY”

The “they” to whom this blog is directed is a different group altogether. I’m talking about storage administrators and data managers. The folks in the trenches whose job it is to try to cobble together all of the half-baked technology into some sort of manageable platform for an organization’s most irreplaceable asset: its data. It is their job to make sense of the marketecture, surmount the hurdles erected by vendor product proprietariness, and to keep the information flowing to the applications and end users who need it.

They do not get a lot of recognition or chachkas or kudos or vendor love…or even money for the critical work that they do. They don’t get suites at the Ritz Carlton or tee times at Pebble Beach. Heck, they don’t even get recognized in many cases with a formal title that describes the important work that they do: managing and protecting the information asset.

Why not? Because they have a lot of common sense — something that most storage vendors fear. They see through the BS and make performance-based evaluations of the products that are being offered to them. They decide what technology is appropriate to their application requirements after evaluating all of the alternatives and they recommend the right solution that represents the best expenditure of hard-to-come-by budget.

Unfortunately, they are often overruled by some technically inept bean counter in management who has been “cultivated” by the vendor sales team over dinner and drinks (and maybe even dollars and dames) to buy the products that the IT guy already rejected. To a one, these guys have permanent marks on their backs from sales droids going over their heads to senior management and making the sale there.

This blog is in part a mechanism for recognizing the IT guy or gal who is trying against all odds to do the essential task of IT: data management.

If you look hard enough, you find them in the data centers of the Fortune 500, but you find them in even greater numbers in the millions of Small to Medium-sized businesses throughout the world. In the SMB (or SME, if you prefer), Roy is the entire IT department. He is reasonably sure that he is a man, whether he has a SAN or not. He just wants to buy the right technology at the right price to do his job: supporting business processes with effective IT. Now, there’s an idea!

Heck, I love Roy. He has a lot of horse sense. He prefers to work with local resellers and integrators when possible and doesn’t much care about brand names. Sure, he’ll wear a vendor-branded t-shirt or a golf-shirt that he picked up at a trade show, but just to cover his back — not to promote a vendor’s product or brand. When the shirt gets old, he uses it to polish his car, which he picked up at a used lot because he doesn’t understand why he wants to buy a depreciating asset when a previously owned vehicle will get his wife and kids to Disneyworld or to the beach once a year just as reliably.

Same holds true for storage equipment. Roy knows that storage ain’t sexy. An array is just a bunch of commodity spindles with a backplane, controller, fans and power supplies. Roy thinks the most important thing is for the stuff to be reliable, manageable, and cost-effective so he doesn’t have to make a career out of baby-sitting hardware or lose sleep over how he will pay for it.

All things considered, Roy would prefer to be hunting, fishing, playing with his kids, going to church, or making love with his wife — not responding to pages in the middle of the night about disk-full errors or nursing a complicated spreadsheet to figure out how much of the capacity he thought he bought is actually available for use by his apps and end users and not being used by the vendor for nonsensical purposes like point-in-time mirroring.

Roy is emminently practical. He is not a fashion victim. Maybe he wears a pair of top dollar cowboy boots — not to make a fashion statement, but because they are comfortable. Period. In general, he doesn’t buy anything from the International Male catalog that appears in his mailbox from time to time because his wife bought him a pair of uncomfortable underwear from the darn thing ten years ago on a lark.

Roy is, whether he knows it or not, being treated like a mushroom by storage vendors: kept in the dark and fed a line of crap whenever anything goes wrong with a product he has deployed. He is consistently told that any problems he has are his doing: user error. Since he doesn’t have an extensive network of fellow users to check with to determine if they are having the same problem with the same product, Roy basically accepts the vendor’s prognosis.

Roy begins to think that if he was just a little smarter, maybe even certified, he could do a better job. His core values kick in and he re-dedicates himself to trying very hard not to make the same mistake again.

My hat’s off to Roy, but I have to say that he is being a schmuck. What he needs to do is to stop believing the vendor. If we can get enough Roys to come to this blog, we might have a shot at turning the tables on our drunken data — both the stuff the vendors are handing us and the stuff that our users are generating.

This blog is where you can come to ask your questions and tell your stories to fellow users. Find out if anyone else is having the same problems that you are having. Compare notes. If enough folks share the same complaints, we might be able to begin developing a list of what products work and which ones don’t.

This blog will also see an ongoing discussion of data management. I believe that unmanaged data, in all of its manifestations, is the root cause of a lot of the pain that we have in IT. Storage now accounts for more than half of IT hardware spending on average, and I have not visited a single company where the storage investment has returned anything like the business value promised in the vendor brochure. As a friend of mine in the industry is fond of saying, “Our storage model is broken. If we don’t do something to fix it soon, it may well break us.”

Having just returned from a three day summit on data management and compliance, it is clear to me that solving the problems that lead to unmanaged data will require group think. Most certainly, we can’t depend on vendors to solve the problems for us. Their self-interest is doing little more than to confuse the core issues and promote technology solutions for what is really a problem rooted in both business and IT.

Hopefully, we will be able to use this site as a place to share what we have tried and what we are learning so that we can all benefit from our collective experience and come up with some strategies for attacking the ongoing problem of oversubscription and underutilization that plagues contemporary storage.

Along the way, we may also be able to develop some techniques and methods that will help us all to reign in our storage costs while deriving more business value from our storage investments.

So, welcome to DrunkenData.org. I hope that you will find it useful.