Let’s see if I can get this thing to work. I guess what I write here will go out to everyone reading that confidential industry thing at that gestalt it web site. So I just sent my PR minder out for some coffee. And I told her to get something better than the canteen – some real Dunkies coffee not that fancy fake Starbucks stuff.

I wanted to take a minute to address this whole “Don Joey” thing. See, I’m not at all like this in person. They made up a picture of me looking like the Godfather, ferchrissakes! I’m not some kind of mafia guy, I’m more like a friendly grandfather. I guess my Italian heritage makes people take me wrong.

They sexed up the memos I wrote, too. And PR took out some great stuff I wanted to say about Mikey Dell. But I guess it’s for the better after the phone call I just had with him. He’s all over this acquisition idea, says I’m right that he just couldn’t find anyone in Round Rock that was ready to take over. Boy, I can sympathize with that!

I told him about my situation with Davey Donatelli. Damn, just saying that guy’s name burns me up. I thought he was gonna work out here on South Street but he was already making the wrong enemies. I guess him leaving was for the best since it meant I didn’t have to break the news to him that he’d never get my job. He just couldn’t handle it long term. He got lucky, made some good moves, but the boys on the board would have eaten him up. Glad I didn’t have to push him out with plan B!

But I’m luckier than Mikey since I got lots of other guys to choose from. I like what I’m getting from Pauley Maritz so far over at VMware. He’s sure easier to deal with than that woman who was running the place when I bought it! Then there’s Patty G, come over from Intel. They’re gonna miss him, let me tell you. I’ll let those two fight it out over who gets my seat at the $100 billion company I’m gonna leave behind!

Me and Mikey were also talking about how we would handle the PR situation that this is gonna create. We gotta win over the financial guys before we go public, but that’ll be easy enough to do. I’m gonna turn a few hundred million bucks into about $20 billion in valuation, and they’ll be drooling when I announce that!

The so-called industry analysts are another story. They all think they’re so smart, but this one guy takes the cake. It’s funny, see, because I fired him years ago but he likes to forget about all that. Instead he’s always kissing my ass on one side and kicking it on the other. You might think he’d be on board since we pay him so much for his “advice”, but it’s gonna take more than that. But I got a plan. If I make it look like he came up with the whole thing he’ll play ball. Sure he’ll go around taking credit for the whole thing, but who really cares?

Damn, that girl from PR is back already. I forgot how many Dunkies there are around here, next time I’ll send her for Krispy Kremes! She got herself a light and sweet, man, who can stand those things?

© Don Joey for Gestalt IT, 2010. | A Personal Word From Plain Old Joe
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So like I said last week, we got this problem looking for growth, and Cisco, HP and everything is keeping me up at night. So what have we got? I tell you what we got, we got an opportunity, and that opportunity is in Round Rock. Yeah, I know, sounds wacky, but think about it. Michael’s already retired once and had to come back because the yo-yo he left behind didn’t measure up. His heart’s not in it. The guy wants to let go, really, trust me.

And we can handle this. Dell is a $28.2 billion company now, market cap again, so we’re bigger. We run our storage racket, much, much better than Dell runs its system and server stuff, at least compared to HP and IBM. Think about it for a second: How much bigger could Dell be if we ran it and gave it the EMC smarts?

Look, the company is fading. Whatever Michael does, it’s fading. And it’s an EMC reseller, it fits. Think about it, it resells CLARiiON and Celerra. I know, the EqualLogic stuff is squeezing CLARiiON out but we can fix that problem quick. EqualLogic can become our iSCSI SAN brand or something, I mean its small potatoes.

Okay, my guys will be asking two things right? Where do we get the cash for the buy and won’t it piss off VMware’s server partners if we start selling our own servers. These guys are always seeing problems. It’s another opportunity, spelled out as in S – E – L – L – V – M – W – A – R – E.

Think about it. We sell VMware off for about $15 billion, keeping 10% and board representation so we don’t get screwed down the pike. Now we have $15 billion green ones cash plus our own shares to buy Dell. This gives us a $65 billion chunk of the pie and we’re up to half the size, sort of, against IBM ($173 billion), HP ($124 billion) and Cisco ($140 billion). We get our own integrated stack, D-Blocks, whatever, we don’t piss off VMware’s partners, and we get a chance to screw around with Microsoft and Intel by owning Dell servers and PCs. Look guys, we gotta grow, we gotta grow big and this is a plan to die for. I know, I’m the only one that can see this and that’s why I’m top dog around Hopkinton.

So we buy Dell in 2010/2011, integrate all that, and then it’s time for the big takedown. This will be a $50 billion buy that take us up into Cisco, HP and IBM territory. Then I can retire. I got an idea about that, about how we can do it, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I’m telling my guys to have a look at Dell.

Trust me, Michael’s tired and he knows he can’t hack it. We could give it to Gelsinger as his proving ground. Something tells me he’s maybe good enough to run the whole show. It’s between him and Maritz but there’s plenty of time for that. I’m going to have me a little sit-down with Michael.

© Don Joey for Gestalt IT, 2010. | The Dell Opportunity
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I got something to say to Mark Hurd over at HP. Okay, we geddit Mark, you’re gonna beat us with a big stick called Ballmer. Not content with hiring our uber-manager Dave “Ninja Turtle” Donatelli you’re getting in bed with Redmond. Well, excuse me while I yawn.

You may have Dave and he may be free to work on storage now but we got the nearest thing to God in this business; we got Gelsinger. So anyway, you’re sucking up to Microsoft with this FrontLine schtick and putting in a quarter of a billion to get your products skin-to-skin with Hyper-V and System Center and whatever but it don’t amount to much at all really because we’re mounting a flanker on you.

Yep, we got NetApp, those Sunnyvale boy scouts, cosying up to Cisco and VMware and saying they’re better partners for them than we are at Hopkinton – like anybody will believe that, really! Chambers won’t be there – that tells everybody what he thinks about it – but it’s VMware baby, ESX all the way. Sure, NetApp has its Microsoft affair going full blast too but VMware is where the action is and everybody knows it.

We’ll have Paul Maritz sitting alongside Tom G at the VCN event on the 26th and he’ll pour smooth sauce all over Microsoft. He should be able to do that; he worked at Redmond alongside Ballmer. Hyper-V sucks; we all know it, it’s the Vista of virtualisation, we just can’t say it – yet.

So what’s the real story with Donatelli? Because this ain’t it. Is it going to be this big EVA re-jig thing with X86 controllers taking on different storage personalities? You ducked starting over with the high-end refresh, going with that USP-V-on-steroids thing coming out of HDS. The Frontline money had to come from somewhere, right? Good luck. While that’s getting started we’re coining it with V-Max, like FAST – geddit? Hah!

No, Donatelli’s playground is gonna be the EVA re-invention. Mark, we looked at this. I mean seriously, we did. But the customers want differentiation, they want to buy different iron, different brands for different jobs. Why else do you think we can get ten times as much for our stuff than yours? Just having software identities won’t cut it. Look at NetApp. They really only got one product and there they are, stuck. Yeah, they’re bigger than the chorus line suppliers, the 3PARs, the Compellents, the Pillars whatever. But they’re not a star. They’re not EMC.

Give Warmenhoven credit, he tried to go our way by buying Data Domain, parading Slootman like a big country club trophy at his all hands meeting. A lotta good it did him once the Hopkinton dogs barked and showered dollars all over the floor. Now Slootman is mine and Dan? He’s off polishing his putter, flying his jet between golf courses, and out of it with Georgens running the show.

These guys are dancing to our tune and you’ve got no chance with Hyper-V. Gelsinger is a God-driven dynamo and you’ll find Donatelli is a fish out of the water. He’s maybe got one good product refresh in him and than that’s it. He’ll become another one of the worn-out has-been execs you inherited when you walked into HP.

No, Donatelli won’t cut it. Word is he’s already pissed off Roberson. Maybe I’ll have HR give Roberson a call, eh? Would you like that? We could give him CLARiiON or Celerra or something like that to play with.

Hey, that’s enough for now. I gotta look at the new candidate acquisition list. What; Pillar? Really? Okay, you got Workman’s number… No, better call Larry first.

© Don Joey for Gestalt IT, 2010. | What Are HP and Hurd Up To?
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Server virtualization challenges the enterprise storage status quo, so storage must change to support virtualization. Virtualization platforms like VMware vSphere concentrate and randomize I/O, demanding low latency and high performance from underlying storage systems. Although many conventional storage arrays can provide the I/O required by VMware, the next step will be tighter integration between storage systems and the hypervisor.

Introducing EvoStor

Coming out of stealth at VMworld 2009 in San Francisco, startup EvoStor exemplifies this new virtualization-optimized storage concept. Taking existing storage concepts like scale-out grid and automated storage layout, EvoStor’s offering is designed exclusively to support the VMware vSphere platform. This level of focus is unprecedented in the industry, and demonstrates the incipient power of storage virtualization in general and VMware in particular.

So what exactly is EvoStor? Although their coming-out party at the Museum of Modern Art was well-attended and included an appearance by VMware CEO, Paul Maritz, many were left wanting details. The company set up a demo lab next door at the W hotel, and I was able to examine their product in more detail.

EvoStor is a scale-out clustering storage product running on commodity-based (though custom-built) storage server hardware. The company eschews many long-standing storage traditions, including RAID, and instead relies on intelligent data placement for data protection, performance, and availability. Each node contains a complete x86 server and has 12 slots full of SATA, SAS, or flash drives. The minimum configuration is three nodes, which the company promises will sell for under US$50,000.

What Do VMware Admins Need?

The product probably doesn’t sound all that novel at this point, but the innovation of the EvoStor platform lies in its integration with VMware. Conventional storage arrays use iSCSI or Fibre Channel connectivity to present LUNs (virtual disk drives) and rely on VMware’s VMFS and storage APIs for feature integration. Although the storage appears to be a conventional iSCSI LUN, EvoStor uses a proprietary back-end protocol over Ethernet. They couple their back-end storage intelligence with the VMware hypervisor, linking data placement with the demands of virtual machines.

See those iSCSI LUNs? They're not really LUNs, and they don't really use iSCSI!

Although the product is still in development, this concept holds great promise. The company could enable per-virtual machine performance or availability SLAs, backing these up with automated block-level storage tuning. A high-priority VM could be provisioned on flash with extra redundant copies, while a test machine could live on bulk SATA. Both would be thin-provisioned and could later be migrated on a granular basis to alternate tiers of storage as requirements changed.

Like Drobo, EvoStor is designed to automate powerful storage features and bring them to non-storage audiences. Interaction with the system is through vCenter and, although EvoStor-specific tabs are added, very little configuration and tuning is required. Storage is allocated and data placed automatically as virtual machines are added and the system promises to keep everything running without end-user input. Also like Drobo (and EqualLogic, LeftHand, and many others), EvoStor can be expanded simply by adding additional storage nodes, with each integrated into the existing environment.

EvoStor administration is dead-simple, integrated into vCenter

Achieving this kind of lights-out automation with conventional SAN storage is challenging. As VMware’s own Jon Bock told me at VMworld, the vStorage APIs are still appearing, evolving, and maturing. Virtual machine awareness currently requires information that just isn’t available to storage arrays. Instead, they take a shot in the dark, using what little information they have to divine performance requirements. Active blocks of any sort are moved to high-performance storage, while less-active data is migrated down. But they have no ability to logically group capacity below the LUN level in order to offer more advanced availability or reliability services.

Conclusion

One must approach the claims of any startup with skepticism, and this is especially true of one which has not yet shipped a product. But EvoStor’s concept is sound, and it lays out an exciting direction for storage to evolve. The key is in the company’s focus on what their target market needs, not just what their technology is (theoretically) capable of. EvoStor promises that their product will ship early next year.

This is the bottom line for me: Many VMware shops, especially smaller ones, have no history of specialized storage know-how and want something that just works. But VMware ESX has a nasty habit of pounding low-end storage systems with random I/O. VMware users in the midsize market need a storage solution that is integrated into the VMware experience, expands effortlessly, and self-tunes, and this is precisely what EvoStor is promising. I look forward to putting the product through its paces once it is out of the garage and generally available!

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2009. | EvoStor: VMware Storage Evolved!
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