Bench-Marketing

September 12, 2008

Has Storage Swift-Blogging Finally Jumped the Shark?

JumpTheShark 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.

Continue reading "Has Storage Swift-Blogging Finally Jumped the Shark?" »

September 01, 2008

EMC's (botched) Storage Capacity Utilization Magic Trick

Prestige_poster One of my favorite movies is The Prestige.  Among the many virtues a movie needs to make it to my "favorites list" is the ability to stay enjoyable after repeated viewings, and perhaps even reveal a bit more each time you see it.  This movie delivers on both counts.

The plot cleverly revolves around the 3 parts or acts of "every great magic trick":

  1. The Pledge
  2. The Turn
  3. The Prestige

Continue reading "EMC's (botched) Storage Capacity Utilization Magic Trick" »

August 05, 2008

Before Flattery - EMC's Magic 8 Ball

magic-8-ball NetApp is an innovator.  EMC is an imitator.  Look no further than: Storage Simplicity, NAS is mission-critical, SATA in the Enterprise, Advanced D2D Backup & Recovery, Unified Storage, iSCSI, Oracle & VMware over NFS, Thin Provisioning / Rapid Cloning ... and soon end-to-end dedupe I predict.  Then again an integrated product line with ultra-fast RAID that's also recognized as the most space-efficient (by key ISV's) may be beyond even EMC's own imagination.  So apparently not everything can be imitated :)

But did you ever wonder what happens in the uncomfortably long (for EMC) timeframe between NetApp innovation and EMC imitation?  That's the topic we'll Expose today.

Continue reading "Before Flattery - EMC's Magic 8 Ball" »

December 10, 2007

Benchmarking – The game

In the world of Enterprise Storage, the target audience for any published benchmark should go a long way towards determining a vendor’s results and subsequent marketing spin. There are three common types of benchmarks I see storage vendors publish regularly. I’ve categorized them as follows:

  1. Bench-Marketing
  2. Imagineering
  3. Bench-Sizing

I’ll expose each of them starting with the first one today.

king-kongBench-Marketing

This term is actually becoming quite common in the IT industry. This type of result is often marketed with a testosterone-heavy “mine’s bigger” approach where a giant number is published which is somehow bigger than the one your rival published in the recent past. Attention is usually lavished on some gleaming new hardware architecture which has just been introduced. The benchmark report itself often resembles a tome the size of the Yellow Pages. Not because of any elaborate requirement for complete transparency or detailed configuration disclosure. Nope, the actual reason is that these systems must list customizations so extensive, that reading the entire IRS Tax Code seems simple in comparison.

As a customer, VAR or consultant though, one thing is for certain – you will never configure said system in the same manner for a production environment. Based on that sobering truism, these benchmarks have little value in the real world of storage deployments. Therefore it’s clear that the corporate ego-driven target audience for a Bench-Marketing report is essentially the vendor’s direct competitors. Despite that, I actually consider this somewhat  admirable, because the focus is still on improving your own product instead of tearing down your competitor’s – the subject of my next blog post.

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