No Time for BS

I have been buried getting ready for several upcoming events that will see me in Las Vegas, then Minneapolis, then New York, then Chicago, then…  Preparation involves developing a bunch of presentations, white papers, book chapters, etc.  Very busy…therefore slow to post. 

That said, when I received this link today in email, I was so steamed, I had to take a break and write about it. 

The article is Rob Enderle’s view of tape, which he describes as a “dead technology.”  Why?  Because EMC says so. 

Now, I am told that Enderle is a respectable guy who has been knocking around the trade press and analyst community for a bunch of years.  I would have hoped that, given that background, he would know how to filter BS when he encounters it.  Apparently that isn’t the case.

Of course, hope is never a strategy; only preparedness is.  (For proof, just look at the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.  I can’t see it from my house…yet.)

If you read the article, you learn that EMC World is going on in Boston (yawn) and that Rob is there, clearly drinking the Kool-Aid.  From his account, you will learn that tape is dead because companies can no longer afford to use it.  They need restore to be faster after an interruption event.  (He neglects to note what Gartner says about interruption events, which mostly result not from smoke and rubble disasters, but from simple things like hardware/software/user errors.)  

His other takeaway is that great technology companies are not defined by the superiority of their technology but by the trust they inspire in customers. 

That’s a talking point are right out of EMC’s play book.  Enderle is a tool for echoing it.   Readers of this blog may recall a while back when I posted something about EMC’s effort to prioritize “love branding” over real product value.  The company really really wants to deflect customers from any serious evaluation of what they sell and to focus the customer’s attention instead on pretty blue neon tubes on the outside of the box that draw the eye inevitably to an EMC logo on the box.  They are pretty successful at it — for much the same reason that BP or Goldman Sachs are good at what they do:  they tell a story that gives folks someone to blame (other than themselves). 

Is your storage in disarray?  Are files oozing out like oil from 5000 feet down and disappearing through the cracks in your raised floor like the value of a derivatives and credit default swaps  (for the finance speak impaired, derivitatives and CDSs are like virtualized mortgage backed securities — as prone to failure as a bunch of guested servers on a hypervisor). Well, that’s not your fault, Mr. Customer.  Those idiots down in IT don’t know what they are doing.  What you need is a trusted vendor to solve your problems.  And a lot of money, of course.

Rob, tape is only dead because EMC wants to sell disk everywhere.  Only idiots believe that tape is too slow to help companies survive a significant interruption event – idiots who never had disk array failures, idiots who don’t know the comparative speeds and feeds of a well groomed tape infrastructure versus a bunch of disk drives, idiots who don’t realize that only a fraction of their applications are sufficiently mission critical to require the expense of WAN-based disk-to-disk replication with failover (let alone that such HA configurations are best provided by software geoclustering solutions that don’t commit you to a single vendor’s rig), idiots who don’t realize that about 70% of the world’s data protection is accomplished using tape — in short, idiots that substitute blind trust in a three-letter acronym for their own common sense.

AT&T gave the definitive testimony on the foibles of a strategy to replace tape with de-duplicating VTLs in a brilliant on-stage presentation they made at the FujiFilm Global IT Executive Summit in Austin TX last month.  AT&T went that route, discovered the many many issues involved in making such a strategy work, and abandoned the path — returning to tape – for a bunch of good fact-based reasons. 

Only, now, both the video and presentation deck are gone.  The post was removed at the request of AT&T corporate compliance officers, I am told.  I am betting that the decision followed a few phone calls from their trusted storage vendor, EMC.  Recall that EMC has a codicil in its warranty and maintenance agreement that threatens, metaphorically, to cut off your bumper to bumper warranty if you tell anyone how many miles per gallon you get from their cruddy cars.  I suspect that AT&T caved to pressure from Hopkinton.  I may be wrong.  No one will confirm or deny.

Bottom line:  Trust is hard to come buy in these days of economic uncertainty.  EMC doesn’t do much in my opinion to cultivate my trust.  The latest BS they are shoveling about tape is just the tip of the iceberg.  The greasy slick of untrustworthiness is pervasive throughout that organization.  Ask former engineers who worked on Centera clustering and they will tell you that it is utter crap…but never on the record because of gag orders in their separation agreements.  Ask suppliers who have been told to restock parts for arrays that were never actually purchased but that made quarterly sales numbers look better nonetheless…but not on the record, because they might lose their relationship with the lords of Hopkinton.  Ask customers who are sick of paying for value-add controller software they never use but had to buy anyway.  Or the ones who are convinced that the holdbacks on their capacity imposed by Hopkinton are obscene but won’t go public with this fact because their evidence lives on a spreadsheet…only EMC SEs have tools to actually see T-bits.  Ask the customers who know that they are being charged 10s of $1000s per TB for commodity disk that cost a fraction of that amount on NewEgg. 

Trust EMC?  Hell, former EMCers, to a one, seem to be doing whatever they can, post-Hopkinton, to redeem their souls before they die.  The “former EMC employee” label hangs around their collective necks like the proverbial dead albatross.  These folks fear that, when they expire, the devil to usher them to the front of the line that leads to Hades.  “You worked with EMC?  No waiting for you.  Go on in.”   

Today, I start an award that I will call “Tool of EMC.”  The first recipient is…drum roll…Rob Enderle.

Tagged as: EMC, tape, trust