It is nearly impossible to unseat an incumbent without a triggering event – this is something you hear from Steve Duplessie (@stevedupe) fairly often.  Certainly the death of the sitting senator qualifies as a trigger for change – in this case it forces change that may not have happened for many years to come.  Humans are by nature change resistant, and that’s reflected pretty well in IT environments.  Once we have technology in place, we get comfortable with it, it’s predictable, and often the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t.  The longer it’s there and the more processes built around it, the higher switching costs become.  But then a compelling event comes around that triggers change.  Today in IT, the economic crisis has largely acted as a trigger event – budgetary pressures combined with technology advances like server virtualization and scale-out storage platforms have IT considering cloud infrastructure alternatives (both public and private).  It will be a long journey, but thanks to the economy and advent of enabling technologies the drive for greater efficiency in the data center has certainly begun.

If you’re coming from a position of weakness or in a vulnerable position, change the discussion.  It was a brilliant move on Brown’s part.  Scott Brown recognized that MA has a pretty strong Democratic party, so he changed the game from Democrat versus Republican to Democrat versus Independent.  Brown understands that despite the fact that registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans in MA by about 3:1, 51% of the registered voters in MA register as Independents.  And while most of the country thinks of MA as a solid blue state, for the 16 years prior to 2007, a Republican held the top state office.    We are proud independents, and Brown played to that.  We can see tech parallels – about a dozen years ago EMC Symmetrix was in a vulnerable position at the top of the storage market – HDS announced its new high-end systems and Symmetrix was getting long in the tooth.  Over a number of years EMC bought Data General (and a midrange storage business), Legato, Documentum, and changed the discussion to ILM and to building out an information infrastructure.  HDS is still perceived as a high-end storage company.

Leverage all of your available communication channels – including social media. Brown’s campaign used all available communication channels including social media, an area where Coakley’s efforts were pretty much nonexistent.  Momentum builds on itself–a small social medial push can snowball because it leverages the voices of everyone you touch, and fans out from there.  It’s like the old Pantene shampoo commercial that said “I told 2 friends, then they told 2 friends, then so on and so on.”  That was in the world of 1:1 communication.  In the social media world, we all have 1:many channels that give us exponential reach.  While social media did not win the election for Scott Brown, it certainly provided another communication channel that helped him rally his base – I saw a number of friends who are registered Independent start out as Coakley fans but swayed towards Brown in the final weeks by what they were reading (and pointed to) on Facebook!

The list could go on, from ensuring your message resounds with your target audience to complacency, arrogance and passion.  There was certainly a sense of EMC circa 2000 arrogance and complacency in the Coakley campaign, and NetApp circa 2000 passion and drive in the Brown campaign (fortunately for EMC, people are change resistant and that gave them time to respond to vulnerabilities by changing the discussion, and for NetApp, the growth in unstructured data provided a compelling need for big-iron file storage!).

I’ll spare you from more.  And yes, I am sure Brown won for more reasons than I am outlining here – but if there hadn’t been a compelling event, there would not have been a race.  If he hadn’t used all of his available communications channels, would he have effectively gotten his message out?  If he hadn’t changed the discussion, could the sentimentality that so many MA citizens felt about uncle Teddy’s senate seat have played a bigger role?  If Coakley spent more time on communications 2.0 rather than 1.0, would she have mobilized her base?  Post-mortems and what ifs are much easier than setting strategy – but they always provide an opportunity to learn something – we should all make sure to listen.

It’s great to see Microsoft take the chains off of its SLA documentation, but I do have one more request (and I can talk about it now that the NDA is no longer in place).  The SLA is pretty straightforward – Microsoft offers service credits if its uptime falls below 99.9%.  But it is difficult to determine the exclusions, so I ask Microsoft – please provide a pointer within this document to the “technical documentation” to which the SLA refers!  I have searched the site and can’t find it anywhere.  Here’s what I am referring to, directly from the now public SLA, I highlighted the reference with bold font:

“Total Storage Transactions” are all the storage transactions in a given time interval (initially set at one hour) for a subscription, with a few notable exceptions.  Examples of excluded transactions include pre-authentication failures, transactions that are throttled based on suspicion of abusive behavior, authentication failures, attempted transactions for accounts over their prescribed quotas, creation or deletion of containers, tables or queues, or clearing of queues.  These exceptions do not count toward either Total Storage Transactions or Failed Storage Transactions.  Please refer to our technical documentation for further information regarding Total Storage Transactions.

There are other spots where Microsoft refers to the technical documentation for further information, including where it refers to defining failed storage transactions as “Transactions not processed within the time period specified in our technical documentation.”

Microsoft – thank you, you took a big giant step forward, but there is a little more work to do to finish up, the SLA is good, but not complete!

Over the course of business today I was stunned to come across this:

Digging into Microsoft Azure cloud storage services, I went looking for the SLA.  Microsoft posts the SLA as a publicly available Word doc for download, but posts the following on the download page:

“The Service Level Agreements (“SLAs”) posted on this site are the confidential information of Microsoft. You may view the SLAs if you have purchased or are considering the purchase of Online Services from Microsoft. You agree not to disclose the SLAs to any other third party or to make use of the information for purposes not related to the your (SIC) purchase or prospective purchase of Online Services from Microsoft. By downloading or viewing this document, you agree to these terms.”

I am always considering buying online storage services, so of course I downloaded the agreement and read it.  But I can’t talk about what it said.  In this era of social media and transparency, I am (almost) speechless that Microsoft would put this confidentiality language around its services.

Service providers are asking us to trust them with our data and consume storage as a service; how can vendors go about hiding details behind service levels?  If the electric company started out by saying “I’ll tell you what type of service you’ll get from us, as long as you don’t tell anyone else”  we’d probably still be using candles… it just makes me wonder what they are trying to hide!

The cloud storage SLA agreement (and associated confidentiality language) can be found at:  http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=d32702dd-a85c-464d-b54d-422a23939871

Is this even enforceable?  Does it mean we can’t discuss the information I found publicly available on the web?  Am I the only one that thinks this is whacked?

Microsoft, are you listening?

The top three issues facing CIOs today are avoiding or reducing risk to existing business activities, reducing cycle time to deliver innovation, and reducing cost.  Vendors often focus on only one vector when positioning and selling their products, and this is often a weak spot in vendor strategy.  It is important to keep all three vectors in mind – because missing on one  can cost a vendor a sale and  missing on two creates a big hole the competition can exploit.  Think about it – cost savings is really attractive in this macroeconomic environment – but how many of you as vendors walk in with incredible TCO and ROI models and think your cost proposition is a sure winner – only to lose the deal?  CIOs won’t put money-saving efforts in place if there is a chance of introducing risk into the equation and even the most compelling cost-savings solutions are undone if they increase cycle times.  Understanding how you can help the business by reducing cycle time, without introducing risk, is a compelling value proposition.

On the storage front where I focus, managing data growth is an ongoing challenge for IT. It is also the “low hanging fruit” with which CIOs can make an impact on all three vectors.  Keeping up with data growth has become an ever more costly effort as it has been historically limited by traditionally inefficient and complex processes to manage scale-up architectures.  These stove-pipes make it difficult to respond to changing business conditions and create risk by the sheer complexity created when trying to manage an environment with petabyes of storage.

IT needs to change the storage model – it is starting to collapse under the complexity and complexity’s byproduct, waste.   IT’s ability to respond to business needs must occur in real time, which in turn is driving IT to look at deploying newer technologies (like cloud services and scale-out architectures) that can provide a platform for business agility, consolidation, ease-of use, and availability.  In the next few blogs I’ll be looking at the “golden triangle” (okay – we’re working on naming it and making it prettier – but I didn’t want to wait for the branding to be finished to discuss this!) in relation to scale-out architectures and the interest in cloud services.

UPDATE: Steve O’Donnell expands on his thoughts about the golden triangle in his latest blog – give it a read:  http://www.enterprisestrategygroup.com/2010/01/what-influences-it-buying-decisions/

Lo and behold, the next day as I was working from home my laptop wouldn’t boot up.  It is not the first time that’s happened this year and probably won’t be the last.  But this time my productivity didn’t suffer.  I was able to get up and running almost immediately, without having to run my laptop into the office and have Dan try to access my files and put them on the loaner laptop,   (or worst-case, having to locate and restore the files from backup!).  I just logged into my home computer, opened Dropbox, and voila, I was up and running.  I lost minutes, instead of the hours lost in past outages.  Cloud storage had come to my rescue.

I’ve blogged in the past about cloud storage data availability, or more accurately lack of data availability SLAs.  Dropbox is no exception.  There is a lengthy terms of service page where I got the excerpt below:

Dropbox is Available “AS-IS”

THE SITE, CONTENT, FILES AND SERVICES ARE PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OR CONDITION OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESS OR IMPLIED. WITHOUT LIMITING THE FOREGOING, DROPBOX EXPLICITLY DISCLAIMS ANY WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE OR NON-INFRINGEMENT AND ANY WARRANTIES ARISING OUT OF COURSE OF DEALING OR USAGE OF TRADE. YOU ACKNOWLEDGE THAT USE OF THE SITE, CONTENT, FILE AND SERVICES MAY RESULT IN UNEXPECTED RESULTS, LOSS OR CORRUPTION OF DATA OR COMMUNICATIONS, PROJECT DELAYS, OTHER UNPREDICTABLE DAMAGE OR LOSS, OR EXPOSURE OF YOUR DATA OR YOUR FILES TO UNINTENDED THIRD PARTIES.

DROPBOX MAKES NO WARRANTY THAT THE SITE, CONTENT, FILES OR SERVICES WILL MEET YOUR REQUIREMENTS OR BE AVAILABLE ON AN UNINTERRUPTED, SECURE, OR ERROR-FREE BASIS. DROPBOX MAKES NO WARRANTY REGARDING THE QUALITY OF ANY PRODUCTS, SERVICES, OR INFORMATION PURCHASED OR OBTAINED THROUGH THE SITE, CONTENT, OR SERVICES, OR THE ACCURACY, TIMELINESS, TRUTHFULNESS, COMPLETENESS OR RELIABILITY OF ANY INFORMATION OBTAINED THROUGH THE SITE, CONTENT, FILES OR SERVICES.

NO ADVICE OR INFORMATION, WHETHER ORAL OR WRITTEN, OBTAINED FROM DROPBOX OR THROUGH THE SITE, CONTENT, FILES OR SERVICES, WILL CREATE ANY WARRANTY NOT EXPRESSLY MADE HEREIN.

But even with absolutely no guarantees about availability of the data or Dropbox service, it is okay for my purposes.  If the service is unavailable or even crashes and loses all my data, my files are synched locally on my laptop so I can still access them.  I am paranoid so everything is also synched with my home computer.  I now have three copies of my data when I used to have one.

Cloud storage services are still pretty new.  Most are consumer-grade solutions trying to move upmarket and provide business solutions and the SLAs reflect that.  Always read the terms of service so you know what you are getting into.  But there is some class of data in most enterprises that is entirely suitable for moving to the cloud as it exists today – as my work folders are.  And for me, cloud storage allowed me to keep working when my laptop wouldn’t.   I expect in 2010 we’ll see a lot of cloud buzz die down and cloud storage vendors or their partners start to tackle data availability issues.  For now, I am really really happy that I am a cloud storage user.

Disclosure:  I did not set out to write a Dropbox commercial – even though this sounds like one.  I don’t do business with Dropbox outside of being a user and the company is not currently a client of ESG.

BUSINESS INSIGHT: You’ve done some research that suggests IT-savvy companies are more profitable than others. Tell me a bit about that.

DR. WEILL: The IT-savvy companies are 21% more profitable than non-IT-savvy companies. And the profitability shows up in two ways. One is that IT-savvy companies have identified the best way to run their core day-to-day processes. Think about UPS or Southwest Airlines or Amazon: They run those core processes flawlessly, 24 hours a day.

The second thing is that IT-savvy companies are faster to market with new products and services that are add-ons, because their innovations are so much easier to integrate than in a company with siloed technology architecture, where you have to glue together everything and test it and make sure that it all works. We call that the agility paradox—the companies that have more standardized and digitized business processes are faster to market and get more revenue from new products.

Those are the two sources of their greater profitability: lower costs for running existing business processes, and faster innovation

Wow – 21% more profitable.  One could argue that the increased profitability is a result of operational excellence across the board, with “IT savviness” as a function of that.  Or one could argue that leveraging IT helps the company identify and react to new business opportunities more quickly, so it is a direct contributor and enabler of the increased profitability.  Dr. Weill has a book out (IT Savvy: What Top Executives Must Know to Go From Pain to Gain) that goes deeper into his research on the topic and the article did its job, I am planning to buy it.  If anyone has read it, I would appreciate your feedback and comments!

Today’s NAS environments seem to have a jump on this one.  One reason for this is that NAS systems have knowledge about the data.  They know when a file was created and when it was last accessed.  They can identify, and migrate, the 80% or more of files that haven’t been accessed lately.   Another reason for the NAS jump is that the data management layer in some NAS system is software-based, virtualizing the underlying hardware environment.  That means users can transparently move data to a lower cost system (disks, enclosure, electronics and all).  A number of file systems have built-in policy engines that automate the data movement so it can be operationalized.

A challenge for block-based systems (and a number of file-based systems) is the tightly coupled relationship between the storage controller and the disk drives.   These systems need a higher-level application or appliance to help move data from tier 1 to bulk storage tiers, typically an archiving application or virtualization appliance.  If you don’t have some type of higher level abstraction that manages communication and movement between platforms, you are likely paying a “tiering tax” on all the data stored on the slow, dense drives that are surrounded by high end controllers and electronics.

There are “out of the box” tiering solutions available for both block and file data.  Both F5 and AutoVirt offer file system virtualization solutions (AutoVirt is Windows-only) and a number of companies offer block virtualization including HDS, IBM and HP.  There are also some innovative solutions coming into the market, like those from Avere and StorSpeed, that take a new approach to the problem and “cache” performance sensitive data while storing everything else in 3^rd party bulk storage – both of these solutions are targeted at NAS environments and take very different approaches, but both show what can be done when you don’t start with an array-based approach.

So what should end-users do?  Like the answer to almost everything in the data center, it depends.  Not every data center is the same so there is no prescriptive response.  But, users can ask their storage vendors, push their storage vendors, to provide solutions that help migrate data between physical tiers.

Vendors have been selling this story for years; calling it storage tiering, data lifecycle management, information lifecycle management (ILM), and, way back when, it was called hierarchical storage management (HSM). In reality, users have not seen the promised benefits because:

• Solutions lack standards.  Sure, vendors have tools to automate migration, but they typically require that all of the storage tiers come from them or in many cases even that the data stay in the Tier 1 array on denser disk drives (more on that in a follow-up blog). So if you’ve deployed what you believe to be a best of breed architecture with vendor A for Tier 1 and vendor B for Tier 2, it won’t work. You need to be homogeneous, because vendor A’s and B’s products won’t work together, nor will their engineering teams. That makes life that much harder.
• Granularity is not properly addressed.  Almost everything traditional block storage vendors, and some NAS vendors, do is done at the LUN or volume (logical unit or a logical representation of a disk drive) level. “Hot” LUNs get moved to SSD or high performance disk. That’s great, but if only a portion of the data on that LUN is hot—as is often the case, you are wasting expensive storage real estate on cold data. NAS vendors often have a file, file system, or directory level approach that again provides insufficient granularity to ensure storage resources are optimized. In both cases, for block and file data, if the container is not sufficiently granular, tiering does help some, but won’t really get you all the way to the promised land.
• Data migration is not easy.  Copying or moving data from primary to secondary storage consumes lots of system overhead at either the storage or server processor, depending on the technology used. That means taking a performance hit for those really important, 24 x 7 x 365 high performance applications that are staying behind on Tier 1 storage. And all the cleanup work is not pretty: moving data between storage tiers means remapping data paths or mount points to point applications to the new data location. In a world where data locations are mapped on massive Excel spreadsheets, there is a lot of room for human error in the equation and organizations risk losing data rather than moving it to a long-term storage tier.

Will vendors solve these issues?  It depends.  Some of the issues, like migration, can be addressed with storage virtualization technology.  And some vendors are happy collecting the “tiering tax” and leaving everything in tier 1 arrays on denser drives.  More on that tomorrow.

Clean House host Niecy Nash filming the intro for yard sale day.

I went to the yard sale last Saturday.  As I entered the football-field-sized tent where the yard sale was being held, I was overwhelmed at the thought that all this “stuff” ever actually fit in one house – I had already seen a couch being carried out by someone as I was walking in but there were at least four more still for sale.  There were several dining sets, 6 or 7 televisions, a dozen or so bureaus, clothes and knick-knacks covered about twenty more tables.  Wow.  I spoke to the woman whose house was under siege, and she was holding up pretty well, considering.  She was mad at her daughter, who turned her in, and emotional about giving up all her things.  Much of the furniture had come from her parents, both of whom have passed away – she had furniture and “stuff” from her grandparents as well.  She did not get any use from her “stuff,” it was scattered everywhere with no rhyme or reason, but she was emotionally attached to it.  Collecting “stuff” had become a way of life, and she was having a hard time getting her mind around the changes she needed to make so that her home could no longer be considered dangerous and a fire hazard (her son’s terms).

As I thought about her situation I couldn’t help but think about the parallels in IT.  How many IT departments have too much “stuff” (CPU cycles, storage capacity) that they can’t use efficiently but they are hanging on to?  They stand up new applications with new servers and new storage capacity, building stovepipes of infrastructure that can’t be pooled or shared, and end up with data scattered everywhere, no easy way to get around and manage it, low utilization rates – it probably starts to look a lot like an IT version of this woman’s house!

They do it because that is what they know and love – and for many years they had to do it because that was all technology allowed.  They become emotionally attached to vendors and tools because there is a comfort in doing things the way they have for years – their entire careers!  They know the tools and can use them with their eyes closed.  But then a compelling event happens –for this lady, her daughter turns her in — for IT, the economy tanks, leading to budget cuts.  Or power and floorspace become constraints on future growth.  Maybe management starts looking at moving some data or operations to the cloud because it’s more efficient.  And though it’s hard and a long journey to make the infrastructure and operational changes to clean things up in the data center, managers realize it has to happen, that 30 or 40% utilization rates are no longer acceptable.  But this type of change won’t happen in a week, like it does in Clean House, it will evolve over time.

What vendors will users turn to for help?  It depends.  Lots of vendors are good at talking high level vision and private cloudy futures, but the tools and management are still somewhat immature and storage standards for systems to be pooled and shared are nonexistent.  Maybe it is finally time for storage virtualization to realize its promise, allowing users to pool heterogeneous storage into a truly shared resource, improving utilization, enabling non-disruptive migrations between platforms and tiers of storage, which can help reduce the “stuff” they have to house, manage, power and cool.  Storage virtualization, just like server virtualization, is a good start on taking the journey towards a more efficient services-oriented IT department, and can help users begin to clean their IT houses.