An infusion of fresh blood for storage

Are you keeping up with the never ending sequel of merges and acquisitions in Storage? It gets difficult to follow, doesn't it?

Perhaps even more difficult is trying to understand (or guess) what kind of an impact the operation will have on the patient. Why the medical metaphor? Because after all blending two companies into one is somewhat similar to doing transplant surgery and there is alway a certain degree of uncertainty about the results.

Granted, when there is a big disproportion in size (IBM acquiring CIMS Lab, Inc. comes to mind) it's unlikely that the receiving body (IBM, in this case) will be significantly changed because of the new parts.

However, what will happen if the patient goes through tens of similar operations with different donors? Will the recipient transmute into a new and different body?

Almost always yes. I would argue that all the companies that have gone through acquisitions are now sensibly different. That difference can be more or less obvious depending on how hardened the arteries of the patient are, but it's nevertheless there.

Time to give some examples, and IBM is a pretty good one. The company that Big Blue has become today is quite different from that supplier of mainframe gear and software I ordered from many years ago.

In fact, "that" IBM would never have opened the Pandora box of Weblogs to its employees. Was that change and others only because of the acquisitions IBM did or also the effect of natural evolution?

The answer is of course "both", I don't know how big of a role each factor played, but if anyone at IBM wants to minimize the impact on its corporate culture, not to mention the product portfolio, of purchasing a company like Tivoli, I am ready to listen.

One more example? I'll let aside what will probably be remembered as the mega-merger of the century, HP/Compaq, because the new company created by that acquisition still maintains many of the original traits and I would have a difficult time finding prevailing attributes from one ancestor or the other.

Perhaps it's because the acquisition was about "combining two highly complementary organizations and product families", as Carly Fiorina put it at that time? May be, but it's also worth noting the exceptional balance (I mean in technology , products and brain power) between the two parties, which is quite unusual if not unique in the history of acquisitions.

Regardless, another large vendor, EMC, is a crystal clear example of a company changing dramatically because of acquisitions, to the point that even its competitors admit it.

In early 2002, EMC told customers, reporters, and the industry that it already had virtualization. Essentially, EMC was trying to convince the market that traditional disk array technology was equal to virtualization.

I hear from one of those rivals' spokeperson.

In January of 2003, EMC talked about virtualization as "ill-defined'" and didn't like using the term.

the person continues.

Both quotes (and others that I am not including) are true and I remember EMC (together with other vendors, to be fair) taking those unsustainable stances at the time. But isn't that a proof of how much EMC has changed, again, also because of getting fresh blood from acquiring companies such as VMWare and Rainfinity?

Well, I think I proved my point: acquisitions will change a company corporate culture and usually for the best as it happened for virtualization to EMC.

However, there is another change I would like EMC to make. I would like to see (sometime this year, if possible) EMC rethink its position on performance benchmarks and join the Storage Performance Council.

The last time I checked their name was sorely missing from the SPC member roster and from the list of benchmark results.

Should I say that EMC previous refusals to publish benchmarks of their products sound at least odd? Especially when just about any other storage vendor is putting out those results for peer review.

Moreover, when EMC is announcing that a new product will bring a 4 fold performance improvement over traditional NAS solutions customers and other vendors should have the possibility to review those claims.

Will EMC change its standing on benchmarks as they did with virtualization?

I don't know, but that is one change that EMC should be able to initiate on its own, even without any more fresh blood from acquisitions. Don't you agree?

Learning how to secure those tapes

I got quite a response to the last Storage Insider column focused on media security.

To say that readers and vendors find that topic important is an under statement. There is an urgency for more information on storage security that, interestingly enough, is equally strong among both potential buyers and sellers.

Obviously vendors (and perhaps reporters?) need to do a better job of informing the public of what products and services are available in that area.

Spectra Logic seems to be ahead of the pack on this. As you may know, last year they began offering tape libraries with integrated encryption together with an update kit for some models.

If you are interested to learn more about encrypting data on tapes register for a free Webinar from Spectra Logic that should be available later this month.

If you know of other Webinars or interesting training material on this or other topics please let me know.

Disk drives, a thing of the past?

Speaking of the past, today is The Storage Network's first birthday

In fact, the first post was exactly on January 4 last year and has been followed by many more.

I want to thank all the people who helped this Weblog become popular. Their help was very much needed, because The Storage Insider is open to anybody who has something to say about storage, and wants to bring together the many voices that populate the storage world, including the opinions of vendors, readers and, why not, mine.

Back to the title, here is an e-mail exchange with Curtis Maurand, an experienced system administrator and network engineer.

Curtis was answering to my Storage insider columm:" Will Seagate's acquisition of Maxtor spell trouble for its rivals?"

Curtis:

Probably not. Samsung's new 32GB flash controller is about to make harddrives a thing of the past or just for archival storage. Too many things to break.

me:

You don't really believe that, Curtis, do you?

Curtis:

Yes I do. 5% of the power and no moving parts. And its faster than a harddrive. Systems are constantly waiting for the drives because no matter how fast they are, they're pathetically slow when compared to the rest of the system. It's a no brainer. Here is a link to the press releases and why I think Harddrives will become a thing of the past.

me(still playing the devil advocate):

OK, I am with you: Memory is faster and more reliable than harddrives, but is enormously more expensive, isn't it? Also that press release refers to consumer electronics not to enterprise products. I would like to see one of the EMC or Hitachi big boxes filled with the Samsung cards instead of drives but we are not quite there yet, are we?

Curtis:

No, but it's around the corner. According to Samsung, this new Nand technology is going to reduce capacity/price ratio to that of existing harddrives. Currently it is much more expensive and one of the articles that I read discussed that issue. What Samsung has done is nothing short of revolutionary. The capacities will go up even higher when they go to 50 nm or 30 nm processes.

I need to hear also your voice in this debate: are disk drives about to become obsolete?