Has Storage Swift-Blogging Finally Jumped the Shark?

Apologies to my readers outside of the US or Canada, as this title employs American political and pop culture slang which may not be familiar.

It's not even over yet, but to say this has been an exceptional month in the storage blogosphere would be an understatement.  I witnessed something I frankly never expected to see in the hotly competitive enterprise storage marketing landscape.  The end of unchallenged blogging belligerence.

(Full disclosure:  Some of you know that I am a Canadian Citizen, which means I have no affiliation with either the US Democratic or Republican parties.  My Facebook profile labels me a Libertarian, so I guess theoretically I'd be voting for this guy if I even could.  Therefore, don't read any unintended political bias in my headline or this and other blog posts :)

Lessons Learned from Past Political Campaigns

Barak Obama's 2008 presidential campaign is on record as having learned the key competitive lesson from John Kerry's failed 2004 campaign.  Namely, when faced with relentless negative campaigning from your opponent, "staying above the fray" is not a successful strategy in the court of public opinion.  Regular readers of NetApp bloggers are probably noting that we are also taking this lesson to heart, and will not let unjustified outrageous claims against NetApp go unchallenged.  NetApp's renowned corporate culture discourages unnecessarily picking fights with our competitors, but there's nothing in our corporate culture which discourages righteousness in the face of aggression.  To put it frankly, we will finish any fight our competition chooses to start in the court of storage public opinion.

Integrity Stands up to Empty Rhetoric Bullying in the Storage Community

In an impressive act of clairvoyance, Chris Evans over at the Storage Architect Blog posted a timely note on the "merciless" aggressiveness of EMC's bloggers.  Right on queue, 3 of EMC's more outrageous bloggers rose to the occasion and attacked NetApp's VTL, NetApp's FAS and NetApp's partner IBM on their "stealth" XIV rollout.

That was pretty routine mudslinging by EMC's standards.  But then something unprecedented (at least in my relatively recent corporate blogging experience) happened.  The objective expert leaders of the online storage community stood up and proclaimed we're not gonna take it anymore (minus the hideous makeup :)

Recognized industry experts like Curtis Preston, Stephen Foskett, Chris Evans, Josh Krischer (and others listed in my new blog roll on the right) all waded in immediately questioning the premise of the mudslinging, as well as the transparently rigged and biased conclusions which EMC continuously arrives at.

The Usual (Mudslinging EMC) Suspects

Chuck Hollis is most certainly the Keyser Söze of this bunch, picking seemingly random artifacts from his own surroundings and weaving together a compelling story aimed only at misdirection.  His anti-NetApp fodder is clearly ghost-written for him by his competitive team, since the contents of his blogs almost always appear as official competitive "EMC Tech Notes" whitepapers within days before or after he posts.  Which makes you wonder - how many other of his sometimes interesting blog posts were "prepared" for him?

As Karma kicks in, cracks are appearing in Chuck's EMC marketing shell as even his own peers inside EMC chafe at the loss of credibility this manner of marketing is burdening EMC with.

The Backup Blog's Scott Waterhouse plays Chuck's "mini-me" on occasion, but his writing style is more simplistic in nature (indicating it's probably his own), often retreating to the amateurish comfort of comment censorship and absolutes when defending his equally outrageous claims.  The trouble is, his absolutes contradict themselves when he claims to be "conservative" in estimating the capabilities of his own products, while at the same time dabbling in wildly speculative "doomsday" scenarios about the competition.  At least he's consistent in his "worst-case" perspective of everything, but given the convenience of how he recklessly applies it, the experts aren't buying it.

The Storage Anarchist (currently obsessed with defending EMC's "post-Moshe" honor by relentlessly attacking XIV) lives in the legacy big-iron world of "Tier1", yet occasionally rises out of the tar pits to take a stab at what he considers "lesser" competitors.  Amusingly, his disdain for the EMC CLARiiON mid-range portfolio is easy to ascertain from his various postings.

EMC's blogging aggressiveness is rivaled only by the inherent contradictions of these 3 sample bloggers regarding the fundamentally different architectures of the platforms they dutifully pimp under one happy marketing umbrella.  I.e.  Depending on which of them you ask, RAID5, RAID6 or RAID1/0 is "best".  And it only gets worse from there if you dare to dabble into the muck of wildly different (thin or think) provisioning, replication, snapshots vs. clones, backup, deduplication, management and troubleshooting, etc ... approaches best suited to each of those very different platforms.

The New Reality

EMC has enjoyed playing king of the storage hill for some time now, but the trend lines are disturbing for them.  Smaller competitors are out-innovating them at every turn and over the years, one of them (NetApp) has emerged as a true alternative offering a unique storage and data management value prop instead of yet another RAID array clone.

Gartner(SAN & NAS) and IDC (see image below) saw it a while ago, while customers continue to validate the unstoppable rise of NetApp via popular surveys for for SAN & NAS.

Bristol Palin is 34% Pregnant

Any Psych 101 major can easily see through the transparent underlying motivation of EMC's competitive blogging approach and the predictable resulting tactics of misdirection. Driven by fear of losing their perch atop the storage landscape, they attempt to maintain their illusion of superiority by simultaneously belittling EMC competitors within their blog posts, yet contradictingly dignify them via the sheer volume of obsessive posts targeted at key competitors like NetApp.

Notice who continuously tops the popularity of blog posts on common EMC blogs like Chuck's?

The Subterfuge of "Trust Me"

As their baseless claims are exposed via lack of any supporting facts, EMC bloggers have developed a nasty habit of resorting to internal sales anecdotes, cut & pasted private Emails and finally the old reliable internal documents as their imaginary references in support of discredited FUD.

Most disturbingly, EMC bloggers have resorted to gutless comment censorship by developing opportunistically thin skins as a defense mechanism against having to post credible yet sharp opposing views from competitors, customers and other legitimate skeptics.

Storage Experts Fight Back (Defenders of Truth)

Not exactly known as NetApp shills (but allergic to unjustified outrageous claims) the following independent storage industry experts are to be commended for rightfully challenging EMC's blogging belligerence and proving our industry has a backbone.  Kudos one and all!

Stephen Foskett (the Pack Rat) was very quick to illustrate the irrelevance of Chuck's premise in a recent example of unnecessary swift-blogging. Chuck's responses to Stephen's legitimate questions were unconvincing and remarkably evidence-free.

Curtis Preston (aka Mr. Backup) has been doing yeoman's work this month directly challenging the misleading claims of both Chuck Hollis and Scott Waterhouse on their respective blog pulpits.  It's rather amusing to see the desperation in Chuck's latest post where he pleads for Curtis to change his mind (then questions the limits of his knowledge) based on some convenient private Emails Chuck was able to manufacture supporting his failed argument.

Curtis' articulate and informative comments challenging Chuck on his own blog are excellent examples of knowledge trumping FUD.  Definitely worth the read!

• (opening perspective)
  http://chucksblog.typepad.com/chucks_blog/2008/08/updates-to-capa.html#comment-128805124
• (Q & A)
  http://chucksblog.typepad.com/chucks_blog/2008/08/updates-to-capa.html#comment-128961212
• (final thoughts)
  http://chucksblog.typepad.com/chucks_blog/2008/09/final-update--.html#comment-128966382
• (broader ramifications)
  http://chucksblog.typepad.com/chucks_blog/2008/09/final-update--.html#comment-129273498

Josh Krishner rose up to challenge EMC's Storage Anarchist's recent ""ignorant" claims against IBM's XIV - and more importantly linked them to EMC's malignantly questionable corporate culture.  After a respected analyst career at Gartner, Josh now independently publishes his works for various vendors here.

Robin Harris over @ StorageMojo has sparred with EMC numerous times in the past, most amusingly about the cavalier nature of EMC's approach to disk reliability as unwisely articulated by (you guessed it) Chuck Hollis yet again.

Chris Evans (the Storage Architect) has valiantly offered to act as a neutral 3rd party in helping resolve the storage efficiency spat Chuck started on in a sad attempt to promote the new CLARiiON CX4's claimed efficiency.  Chris is savvy enough not to hold his breath waiting for EMC's response on this one.  OTOH - NetApp and HP have indicated we are open to the idea.

Finally, the storage omni-blogger Scott Lowe also waded into related discussions recently over here.

Comments

[FilmBuff]

Remember that "Keyser Söze" was also "Verbal Kint" in the movie. Based on his blog, those seem like two very apt characterizations of Mr. Chuck Hollis.

[Stephen Foskett]

Thanks for the hilarious imagery, Val! Between your Usual Suspects references and Alex's Douglas Adams reference, I'm liking NetApp's people more and more!

[Val Bercovici]

Thanks guys. Between politics and movies, I may never run out of analogies and metaphors for our cozy little industry! :)

[Roger]

Val,

You forgot to mention all the negative comment sentiment calling bull**** on EMC's claims over at the Register's article on this (linked at my name below)

Perhaps the icing on this poison cake from EMC is the most recent comment today:
http://chucksblog.typepad.com/chucks_blog/2008/09/odds-and-ends.html#comment-130726354

"Now, just to upset the apple-cart and in fair disclosure; our Exchange 2003 environment currently sits on DMX-3 146 Gig drives in a RAID-1 format. Why, because Microsoft and EMC told us so. Throw the protected BCVs into the mix and our utilization in this environment is terrible!!!"

Truly priceless.

[Val Bercovici]

Thanks Roger.

That is such a great customer quote! I took the liberty of highlighting it in your comment above so that it gets the attention it so rightfully deserves.

Curtis - if you're still following this, enjoy! It completely reinforces your perspective on this whole matter.

[Martin G]

Hey, I'm the customer who said that and it is indeed true but I'm not sure EMC can shoulder the whole blame; there are a huge number of people involved in producing such a terrible utilisation. Not just EMC, but Microsoft and HP are all in the mix. But put it like this, I don't have any disk bottle neck issues :) So at least that environment doesn't keep me up at night.

I commented a couple of times on the whole utilisation thread but I guess from a customer point of view....I don't care to a certain extent about my RAW to Utilisable disk figures; what I really care about is how much the Utilisable disk costs me and how it performs.

Basically, I get really annoyed when someone quotes me a cost for RAW, then tells my senior exec that cost and I then have to explain that actually the cost to store data on that disk is actually twice what he thought; yes he thought he was buying 400 Terabytes of disk but no, he can't copy 400 Terabytes of video files onto it. I then have to do the full spiel on RAID levels, the difference between base 2 and base 10 etc, etc. BTW I picked HD video files because they tend not to dedupe very well, so I can't use any vendor's special sauce to dedupe it.

[Val Bercovici]

Good points Martin. At NetApp we have a saying "disks can do two things well - store lots of data or serve lots of iops - but rarely both at the same time".

MS Exchange is a particularly challenging application due to all its random reads, but we believe our RAID(6)DP solutions yield the highest possible safe storage efficiency compared to RAID 1/0-based competitive offerings. Add in NetApp snapshot vs EMC BCV storage efficiency, and the capacity savings compound.

The good news is 64-bit memory addressing lets Exchange 2007 cache much more I/O than Ex2k3, meaning the short-stroking for random-reads is reduced.

At the other end of the spectrum - your HD video example is useful for lay people. Streaming workloads are less stressful for disks heads to serve, thereby letting customers enjoy more performance per GB than a random-access workload like Exchange.

[Martin G]

"disks can do two things well - store lots of data or serve lots of iops - but rarely both at the same time"

This is so true and it needs repeating again and again. The sheer increase in the size of disks has left all the focus on price per terabyte; lay people often look at the cost of the disk they put in their PC and then compare to what enterprise disk costs. It's never pretty! It's time for all storage vendors to be more open and perhaps a little bit cleverer about how they market; clarifying the differences in performance, helping us guys in the storage teams get the message across.

And it depends what you are doing with the HD video...

[Steve Marsden]

Val you have excelled yourself. You make out like NetApp are a poor innocent bystander. If you can't take the heat - get out of the kitchen. You guys play your own dirty tricks but it does look like EMC have got under your skin. Keep blogging Chuck.

[Val Bercovici]

Hi Steve, and welcome to Exposed!

Look around this and other NetApp blogs lately to see we are in fact loving the heat - and are enjoying bringing the fight for truth right back to EMC's face!

The beauty of these blogs (from all sides) is the transparency they bring to the discussion. In the past, these "discussions" were held with a nudge-and-a-wink inside the old boys networks of various country clubs - where no balanced opinions were available to be heard.

Therefore, I fully concur with your desire to keep Chuck and other like-minded EMC bloggers active and vocal.

Finally, please do indulge us all with examples of the "dirty tricks" you have witnessed. Exposed's readers want to know!