Claus's Blog

Welcome Back Barry!

We were all wondering why Barry Burke had been so quiet on the blog circuit for a few weeks and lo and behold, we now find out he was on vacation. Barry, it sounds like you had a good time and I hope you did. South Africa is a beautiful country. And I’m ready for a few weeks off myself. Someday…maybe…perhaps…relaxing on a sandy beach…

Well, time to snap out of my dream world and get back to reality. We’ll leave the travelogue discussion and home movies for another time, and get back to a couple of points he’s been digging me on and brings out again on his current post.

Firstly, a while ago, we had an exchange following Hitachi’s announcement of our High Availability Manager (HAM, time to resurrect the corny jokes). After our announcement, which was very well received, Barry put a couple of posts on my blog asking some very detailed and technical questions for a product not yet available. My incredible kindness, overflowing generosity, and immense good will towards Barry led me to (reluctantly) answer the first set. Then he immediately posted another salvo of technical questions and I’m thinking “why would I want feed this kind of information to our competitor?”. Besides, our customers (yes, EMC is a customer of ours) have access through the normal channels to get information like this. Basically, since I wasn’t going to answer them, I had that one blog removed (with detailed explanation why) and ever since then I have become the “evil censorship man” (ECM). I don’t mind the digging, mind you, but the implication that I censor every Barry-post is quite silly. Really! So under the assumption that Barry may have misunderstood my motivations, I humbly invite Barry back to my blog. Try it, Barry…it won’t hurt a bit. Olive branch extended.

The second point we’ve sparred on is the “who introduced what, first” debate. I thought we had that issue resolved in my “smackdown” post earlier this year. I say that because the final comment on my blog was from Barry and it simply said: “I stand humbly corrected.” So, why the repeated attempts to revise history? I don’t know, but I’ll keep correcting it. One interesting point is that I’ve run into a number of other EMC folk that believe the same, so I suspect it’s part of EMC’s “educational program”. But this time I’ll just point back to my “smackdown” post.

But to end this on a humorous note, I’d like to copy/paste a sentence from Barry’s recent blog:
Symmetrix continues to incorporate massively parallel and scalable I/O processing with independently operating front-end and back-end processing complexes that utilize low-latency inter-process communications for coordination and I/O request management and surround a massive-scale dynamically assigned global memory infrastructure.
Forty-five words, 105 syllables. Barry, did you really write that? That’s hysterical!! I had to read it three times since I kept dozing off. Barry, you gotta admit that’s pretty funny. I’m sure it means something very important but please include the glossary next time?
Seriously, welcome back…