NetApp - Exposed

Jon Stewart Makes History Tonight

Mainstream news networks, financial news networks, professional journalism websites and even blogs have all tried and failed to accomplish what Jon Stewart and his staff on The Daily Show accomplished in one remarkably brilliant week of late-night TV intellectual vigilantism.  Ironically this accomplishment parallels the events of the Exposed blog about a month ago.

Set the Trap

For Stewart, Step One was to call out Wall St for their blatant hypocrisy.  They were hijacking the US government (both Bush’s & Obama’s) to the tune of over trillion dollars in bailouts, while at the same time complaining about a far more modest (especially per capita) homeowner bailout package by the Obama administration.

It's Never The Underlying Scandal That Gets You In Trouble

... Rather, it's always the attempted cover-up.  I asked a clear question on my blog yesterday about why a mainstream IT article covering Centera went from white in the morning to black by the same afternoon?

EMC responded with a lot of huffing and puffing, even a technical diatribe.  But apart from not even addressing the technology behind a simple MD5 hack to intentionally make data disappear forever on earlier generations of Centera, they avoided the elephant in the room altogether.

Why did they try (and fail) to cover it all up?

Based on EMC's track record to date, expecting a straight answer on this critical question is about as likely as EMC being voted the best place to work for in the US by Fortune Magazine.

Amping up the exposure on this whole topic has been my aim from the beginning. I never expected the other side to help out quite this much, but I am satisfied my goal has been accomplished.  Barring any unforeseen events, I'm going to retire this topic on my end for now.

Bercovici ... OUT! :)

Will the Real Storage Deep Throat Please Stand Up?

What do Georgina Dickinson, Richard Johnson, Bob Woodward & Carl Bernstein have in common?  They work(ed) for The News of the World, New York Post, and The Washington Post respectively.

The last two names should ring a very familiar bell to those who follow American Political Scandals, but I am also fascinated by the first two and their associations.

The Significance of Obama's Victory to the Storage Industry

Having just finished watching his inspirational yet humble victory speech, it's clear to me Nov 4th, 2008 will go down in history as a transformational date not only for the United States, but for the world as a whole.

While this seemingly endless US presidential campaign stretched the patience and passion of most Americans, I had the luxury of observing it as a neutral 3rd party from both a personal as well as professional perspective.

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.

Blogruptcy

Blog Bankruptcy or "Blogruptcy" comes about with the convergence of 3 underlying factors.  "Comment Bankruptcy", "Logical Bankruptcy" and finally "Ethical Bankruptcy".  I don't do this lightly, but this past week I've witnessed events which lead me to declare one particular blog completely bankrupt.

Tales from the crypt - Sizing and Provisioning a NetApp SAN

Yesterday I promised to conclude my analysis of EMC's (botched) Storage Capacity Utilization Magic Trick with the NetApp Prestige.  Allow me to maintain the suspense a little longer while I indulge a bit more in the Turn, courtesy of some illustrative screenshots.

Some would have you believe configuring 99.99% LUN reservations on a NetApp SAN would result in storage admin's being immediately covered by the umbrella of a mushroom cloud explosion ...

EMC's (botched) Storage Capacity Utilization Magic Trick

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

Before Flattery - EMC's 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.

Where's my red stapler?

My post last week continues to get a lot of comments from all sides, as well as some media coverage, which has kept the topic on my mind.  In fact, the past couple of weeks have been rife with current events which fully support NetApp's decision to act decisively and responsibly on behalf of our compliance customers.

The threat from within

Is there a Milton on your team?