A couple of days ago I was cited by one of my “buddy-bloggers in crime”, David Merrill (yes, he asked me first) for an outrageous comment I had made a few years ago, and continue to make, and that is as far as storage capacity (disk drives) is concerned, our customers treat capacity as “free” and “infinite”. Why else would someone buy an additional 50TB when they have a 30% utilization rate? Seriously!

But the new question is becoming: what is capacity? We’ve long-known that what an application “thinks” it has in capacity rarely equates to the hardware actually installed these days (see CoW snapshots, thin provisioning, etc.). What’s going on is that we storage vendors really are trying to reduce the amount of hardware that actually needs to be purchased. And that’s a very good thing. But there is no single “solution” in the list of “Capacity Efficiency” technologies and rather than engage in arguments over who has the more effective thin provisioning or better de-dupe technology, it’s time to “raise the discussion” to a level that includes all CE technologies offered by the venders since the effect of the combined technologies is what really matters, not just a single one. And the CE list will definitely vary by vendor. I’m not here to bash the other guys (this time, anyway), but merely to provide a thoughtful list of function that needs to be evaluated as a whole.

So I’ve started compiling a list of all the CE technologies I can think of and have come up with the following (there may be more):

• Thin Provisioning – I think all vendors have some form of TP these days, but some are surprisingly more efficient than others. Did you know that HDS’ Dynamic Provisioning (HDP) has a guarantee of 50% reduction in capacity? Pretty cool. Also, as part of HDP we have:

• o Zero Page Reclaim (ZPR) which is a background task that can return unused pages to the free space pool. This is great for existing data that has been (non-disruptively, by the way) moved into an HDP pool.

• o Write-Same – Using Symantec’s VxFS file system, we can now free space that was occupied by deleted files. The file system notifies us when a file is deleted and bang, we return the range back to the free space pool. This keeps the space consumption tight over time, as otherwise the effective utilization rate would continue to get worse. I think XIV also supports this, but EMC seems to be waiting for a ratified standard.

• o Thin provisioning of externally virtualized storage. That is, we can do TP on storage that doesn’t even support TP!!

• o Another advantage of our Dynamic Provisioning is that it can dramatically improve performance throughput. You might think that a performance boost is not a CE feature but it certainly is, since one might decide not to do TP if it comes with a performance degradation, which some implementations do. Another impact is to hopefully eliminate “short stroking” practices (limiting how much data is placed on a drive). This is common practice when provisioning databases.

• “Spaceless” CoW Snapshot – We all have that. But it makes a difference, so think about the flexibility, numbers of copies, and manageability of the copies.

• “Thick to thin” and “thin to thin” replication – Even though the original copy of data is not TP’d, the replicas can be. This is for synchronous remote replication, asynchronous remote replication, and in-system cloning.

• De-dupe during backup – I think this is becoming standard.

• Passthru 3-Datacenter replication (actually, for some reason we’ve decided to call this 2DC Passthru). Multi-datacenter replication is becoming more common, but requires multiple (greater than 2) copies of the critical data. Passthru gives you “no data loss” DR at long distances, but with only 2 copies. That’s pretty unique, I think.

• Archive stale data – We’ve got an excellent product in our Hitachi Content Platform. Actually, although not directly related to CE, is the great data discovery capability it has. Intelligent archiving is a very powerful tool in CE as the percentage of archived data in relation to the total data stored continues to grow at a healthy rate, which is good. Get the old stuff off of expensive storage, put it where it belongs, and find it again when you need it. Also, with HCP we have Single Instance Store – a capability within HCP to remove duplicate objects. This significantly improves CE.

• Here’s a big one. Because of our distributed parity and outboard processing of RAID function, our RAID 5/6 outperforms other RAID 10 schemes. That 50 TB turns into 100 TB of RAID 10 rather than the 62.5 TB with RAID 5, even less with 7+1.

• Metadata overhead – A lot of cool storage technology comes with metadata overhead. Ask your vendor how much additional metadata is being stored to handle TP, for example.

So my point is that if you’re interested in reducing capacity, and who isn’t, look at the impact of ALL the CE technologies offered by a particular vendor, not just the few that dominate the Powerpoint decks. Ask the right questions and don’t be fooled.

So a week or so ago we, too, issued a press release of another success story of ours. This was about a customer: City of Coquitlam, British Columbia, Canada. “What??!!” you must be saying. Well, check it out…click this to bring up a map of the city and here is their website. OK, so it’s not London or Beijing, nor is it likely to land a Fortune 100 slot anytime soon (well, it’s a municipality so it can’t), but it has the same issues that are causing HDS to win many new customers of all sizes, worldwide. Some of the issues and requirements facing “the city”, were:

• 24/7 – needed exceptional storage reliability
• Desired to reduce carbon footprint
• Faced incredible storage capacity growth
• Needed to improve service to its users
• Data movement/migration challenges
• Massive increases in the number of applications and also database growth
• Limited staff to manage that growth
• Growing complexity of the infrastructure

Sound familiar? Well, it is, and it’s a theme I hear often and consistently from many customers of all sizes. So it does not matter whether you’re REALLY a Fortune 100 or a much smaller enterprise, the challenges are the same, as are the solutions.

So what did they do? Well, Coquitlam implemented an HDS USP-VM with tiered storage, storage virtualization, and Dynamic Provisioning, along with disaster recovery. It may sound too simple that a short list like this can solve these problems, but it can, big or small. Check it out. I think many can relate to the challenges they faced and why they made the decision they did.

On the thin provisioning front, we’re certainly not unique, since most other storage vendors have some form of thin provisioning, or at least claim to. But just like HDP, thin provisioning can be broken down into multiple components, and this is where implementations vary.

Firstly, TP in most implementations, works as advertised for newly provisioned storage. It doesn’t always work as advertised for existing data moved into a TP environment, except for HDS, which has a feature called Zero-Page-Reclaim (ZPR, or “zipper”) that can return unused pages of storage to the free space pool. We’re seeing a 30%-40% reclamation for previously provisioned storage moved into an HDP “pool”.

Secondly, and this also varies by implementation and vendor, is what happens when you add drives the pool of TP storage. In the HDS case, we initiate a background task to rebalance all the hard drives but at a LOGICAL LUN LEVEL (pardon the all-caps, I don’t want to appear to be yelling, but it’s an important point). It’s critical that this be done to maintain the performance benefits of HDP. I think we’re totally unique on that.

But thirdly - and this is where “a plan comes together” – is integration with the file systems. Of all the great things TP brings to the table, it does not inherently address what happens when data is deleted. Yes, that happens. By integrating with the file system, we can maintain the TP environment.

This week, (December 7th), Symantec announced their “completing the thin provisioning ecosystem” that includes the necessary API calls for the file system to “notify” the storage array when space is “deleted”. The interface is a previously disused and now revised/reused/repurposed SCSI command (called Write Same) which was jointly worked out with Symantec, Hitachi, and 3PAR. This command allows the file systems (in this case Veritas VxFS) to notify the storage systems that space is no longer occupied. How cool is that! There is also a subcommittee to INCITS T10 studying the standardization is this and SNIA is also studying this. It won’t be long before most file systems, databases, and storage vendors adopt this technology.

So here’s the deal, and help me out here, folks. So HDS supports “Write Same”, now. And although 3PAR have announced their support, it was not clear to me whether they actually support this in a deliverable product yet. 3PAR, do you currently have a GA product that supports the VxFS feature? I hope so! Same with IBM XIV, do you also currently support this feature? Information on your respective websites is a bit fuzzy. I doubt EMC supports “Write Same” now. But help me out, here, guys. Let’s see the line up of which storage vendors currently support “Write Same” and which ones will.

But the command, and support by VxFS and HDS, is the first step in bring thin provisioning to its final form. Other file systems will follow as will other storage vendors. Watch this space over the next months and watch this finally “come together”.

For more background, check out these blog posts announcing HCP from Hu and Michael in October. And back in April, I posted on the ever expanding capabilities of the HC(A)P. Fast forward to now, we GA’d HCP a couple of weeks ago on November 20th, so all the new features are available and shipping to our customers. Now!

So a couple of days ago, EMC announced their newest enhancements to Centera, and I was left asking myself “What was that all about?” It was the same feeling I had when InVista was announced (man, was that ever a flop!), and even the VMax announcement. But to the point, EMC’s announcement was nothing more than saying they can centrally manage multiple Centeras, even over distance. Well, that’s a good step forward. Really, it is. But I’ve chided EMC relentlessly over the years on their propagation of what I call “buckets of storage”: the DMX bucket, the Clariiiiion bucket, the Centera bucket, the Celera bucket, and the Atmos bucket (another “what was that all about?”) so this announcement doesn’t really address what I see as a major weakness in the overall EMC strategy, namely, lack of integration.

But back to the Hitachi Content (don’t-call-it-archive) Platform, in addition to consolidating many tiers of storage into a simple platform, having amazing data discovery capabilities and secure multi-tenancy features, and containing all the expected compliancy, encryption, and retention requirements you’d expect, it also can integrate with multiple different storage systems. I’m not going to repeat the announcement material here, but suffice it to say that the two announcements expose the different tacks that HDS and EMC are on when it comes to, well, archiving. We believe in delivering even more intelligent functions to enhance an already solid and integrated content platform; EMC is content to deliver small-step solutions without addressing the much larger issue of how this all ties together. Too bad, but we’re having fun with HCP and our customers are “getting it”.

The clever timing is that this 4-day weekend launches an unrivaled shopping frenzy that lasts for almost a month and generates essentially 99.999% of the retail shopping revenue for the entire year in the US (did I exaggerate?). But it’s now time to shop, shop, and shop to get ready for the gift-giving holiday of your choice.

So I’ve been thinking what to buy whom, and oftentimes we like to buy gifts that we would ourselves like, meaning I’m thinking storage! Seriously, who wouldn’t want a few more terabytes for themselves? But the problem with any purchase is “for a little bit more” you can have this feature and that feature. This is certainly this is true for electronics and appliances, but also for cars, homes, vacations, etc. I was even in a bookstore this week, and “for only a few dollars more” you could get a CD of the author. Nice gift. So what does this have to do with modular storage? No, I’m not buying an AMS2500 for anyone, including me (although I’d LOVE one in case someone wants to take up a donation). But this is “feature creep” and we all face those decisions.

Not that many years ago there was a major gap between modular (midrange) storage and the enterprise stuff. At Hitachi (and EMC and IBM and…), we even had separate development organizations for these separate products (no longer). There was no danger of “feature creep” driving you up the food chain and you either had to choose between a fairly basic midrange RAID box with little function, or jumping into the enterprise class arena. It was like having to choose between a golf cart and a BMW for transportation (what if it snows?) with no options in between.

That’s no longer true for storage, which is good for the consumer and customer, and many of the features historically available only on enterprise storage are now doing a “reverse feature creep” to the midrange space.

I’ve recently been involved in a number of conversations with customers over this dilemma since it’s not as “crisp” as it used to be. Wanna play golf? Buy a golf cart. Much of the conversation revolves around the feature/function available on each platform, the performance requirement, and the “scale up” vs. “scale out” capability. Oh yes, and cost!! I’ve thought about developing a “decision chart” to help folks decide, but there are too many “apples and oranges” comparisons to make that useful, and in the end it oftentimes comes down to price. But there are some features now available on modular/midrange that are getting enough attention that the decisions are becoming easier to make.

Speaking only of the HDS AMS2xxx line, what customers seem to be gravitating to are things like:

• Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning (HDP) that not only provides thin provisioning, but performance and ease of provisioning. That’s a big one.
• “Dense trays” - providing not only an intermix of SAS and SATA drives, but with reduced power consumption.
• Active/active architecture providing dynamic workload balancing as well as failover.
• Cache partitioning – this provides dramatically greater “scale up” capability since workloads can be partitioned.
• Full suite of replication products including synchronous and asynchronous disaster recovery capability and cloning.
• Sizzling performance with 32 concurrent I/Os and 900,000 IOPS and almost 10GB in bandwidth (9.6GB to be precise)
• Non-disruptive microcode upgrades
• And if you also have the USP-V enterprise class storage, single management and commands.
• And much more…

If I had looked at this list a few years ago, I would have assumed this was describing enterprise-class storage, not midrange/modular storage. Midrange/modular has grown up and although the gap between the two platforms won’t close, it is interesting to see the “reverse feature creep” take place. I think this is a trend that will continue and it is a very good trend. Oh yes, and they’re less expensive.  Midrange/modular development has become very aggressive of late, certainly for Hitachi.

And now back to some overindulgence of food and drink and figuring out who in my family could use some storage…

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…

So, what brought this to light was reading Josh Krischer’s rather (very!) excellent white paper on storage architectures. Although it is entitled: “Storage is Still Not a Commodity: an Updated Comparison of High End Storage Subsystems”, it talks little about the “commodity” part but a lot of the storage architecture part. That’s good. My take on this is that storage is not a commodity, obviously, but it used to be.

Prior to April 1992 (I’ll explain that date in a moment) storage was indeed a commodity. The only metrics us storage vendors had to promote our products was performance, reliability (anyone remember R-Plus?), and price, or as most customers would say: price, Price, and PRICE. Now that’s a commodity!! The April 1992 date was when the first “intelligent” storage function was released by IBM (Concurrent Copy which introduced what now is called Copy on Write). Josh got it a little wrong when he said EMC was the first to introduce feature/function. A couple of other corrections: the days of XRC/PPRC/SRDF rollout were a blur of two vendors trying to roll out function that was a little prior to “prime time”; it’s hard to say who beat whom here since it was all happening at the same time. Also, my position is that EMC’s TimeFinder was really just a reaction to the availability of STK’s Snapshot on the Iceberg and IBM RVA after IBM went on a marketing blitz for it.

BTW, before I go further, I do strongly recommend reading this white paper. Josh has done a lot of research and his conclusions are well worth noting.

Anyway, my passion over the past few decades has largely been storage architectures. It still is. And when I look at what is available today from all the major vendors, I’m amused, surprised, and sometimes shocked at the numbers of different architectures available, obviously some better and more robust that others.

Architectures are at the heart of everything electronic we have in our lives. As an example, OS’s have an architecture. Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, Windows, and z/OS all have different architectures. Windows, as an example, can run on Dell, Lenovo, Acer, Gateway, HPQ, and a myriad of other hunks of hardware. Similarly, that hardware can be powered by Intel or AMD. My point is that “architecture” in this context has little to do with hardware. Another example, if you’ll allow me to be biased, is EMC, which although they’ve changed the hardware (basically, chips and wires), their architecture, in my estimation, has NOT changed in the last couple of decades. As long as they cling to static cache assignments and “bin files”, my argument is that the underlying “architecture” has remained unchanged (evolved and improved, yes) since the old Mosaic 2000 days (such a quaint name now that it’s 2009). Changing the body parts does not change the architecture. VMax may change this, but little is known about VMax so it’s too early to tell (for me, at least).

At this point, I will expect (and will entertain) the cadre of EMC loyalists to take me to the mat on this, but I’m publicly voicing an opinion I’ve had for some time. And to reiterate strongly, I am NOT saying that EMC has not made improvements over the years in function and performance; I am saying the architecture has not materially changed. This limits their ability to roll out advanced feature/function which is one of the points Josh makes in his white paper.

I think it was Larry the Cable Guy who said the 47.2% of all statistics are made up on the spot. Well, I’m gonna say that 81.3% of those of you that read the white paper will like what it has to say, or at least learn from it. Try it out…

The problem (not always bad, mind you) is that whether you’re a startup attempting to secure VC money or trying to get R&D funding within an established company, the gig is the same. How do you get someone to invest money in your scheme? The answer is obviously simple: you hype the hell out of it. Expectations soar, you’re in business, and now you only have to deliver. We often forget that last little fact.

One thing I’ve seen repeatedly is the constant prediction of the demise of the disk, or the hard drive. After all, mechanical things in our lives all seem to eventually disappear, being replaced by the electronic version of the same thing. Record players, 8-track tapes, cassettes, and CD players have all given way to iPhones and MP3 players. Telephones, with those round dials, even buttons, have yielded to voice recognition and speed dial. In fact, the only three components of a datacenter these days (that I can think of) that still largely rely on mechanical components are printers, tape devices, and storage. Even printing is becoming a victim of online reading and browsing (but will not disappear in my career or lifetime) and tape as a standalone technology is being marginalized by virtual tape (i.e. disk). That leaves storage and that little workhorse often overlooked: the hard drive. I’m fascinated that it is still around! And yes, it’s still round.

Off the top of my head I can recall the wild promises of bubble memory, crystal memory, optical memory, optical drives, holographic memory (that one is still some potential), and now SSD’s or flash drives. That last one also is a potential replacement for hard drives, but not for a very long time in my estimation. There are many other promising technologies that have made their way into the technology dumpster over the years.

Why is this? Well, for one reason, the disk drive guys, remarkably, continue to dramatically increase aerial densities and after 53 years of existence, that’s a tough act going. And at the same time they continue to deliver the goods at a 30%-35% decline in price every year. These are averages over a 53-year span but that’s still a tough rabbit to chase both from a technology perspective and an economic one.

Why am I writing about this now? Well, for one thing, as I bounce around the planet talking about technology, folks are more and more asking about the disk drive business. Where is it going; will it ever be replaced? The simple answer is: YES. I believe the disk drive will disappear. I won’t be around to see it and I might even question whether either of my two children will be around to see this total transformation.

But before I get into the “why” of this, let’s look at the past. A totally fascinating piece was assembled by Chris Preimesberger showing up on eWeek. If you ever want to know where we’re going, it’s always nice to see where we’ve come from. I hated history class in school, but I like it now, especially when it includes cool pictures, which this does. Check out this piece, and look at the specs attached to each picture. There is a term they use called “megabyte”. Anyone remember what that was?

But what does the future hold for the hard drive industry? Well, this little snippet published in The MIT Technology Review might give a hint. To give you a perspective, today’s densest drives are recorded at just under a terabit (tb) per square inch (or .155 tb per square cm for the metric fans amongst us). Seagate has now prototyped a technology called “heat (or thermally) assisted magnetic recording” or HAMR or TAMR that can drive densities up to 50 tb per sq/in. Are we looking at a 50 terabyte drive in a few years…probably. Hitachi Global Storage Technologies is working on “Patterned Recording” that has similarly grand claims of increased densities. This is by no means the only research activity on mega-densities but the most visible. Whether these happen or not is hard to say but we have an industry with an enviable track record. And anyone who thinks we won’t suck up that capacity as quickly as we can doesn’t ascribe to my “closet principle” which basically states there is no such thing as an empty closet. We’re a clever species and we’ll fill that capacity in short order. The next question here is how do we manage these capacities (see your local HDS rep for that answer but briefly it relates to storage virtualization and dynamic provisioning and archiving).

One question I do get a lot these days is whether SSD’s will replace the hard drive. My quick answer is “no”. We (HDS) love selling these things and they give incredible performance boosts to those cache unfriendly workloads that keep us up at night, but SSD’s replacing the whole drive industry in short order…I think not. I know EMC likes to position them as drive replacements, but I would argue seriously against this. They have their place, use them there, but they’re still a small segment of the market and show little short-term sign of dominance in the capacity space.

What might ultimately replace the hard drive? Well, boys and girls, if I knew the answer to that question I’d be sunning on my yacht anchored off a beach somewhere rather than writing this blog. But the best hope is what is generically called Storage Class Memories (SCM’s). Scientific American had a great article on this a few months ago, but if you click on the link I think they will ask you for money to read this, but there are many other articles on SCM’s that you can collect through your favorite search engine.

So where does this bring us? Well, in my little world I’d say the hard drive is here to stay and for a long time. Use them, enjoy them, fill them up, back them up, and replicate the contents. Especially in the data center where technologies such as dynamic provisioning, de-duplication, “spaceless” snapshots, and storage virtualization, mean that “virtual” capacity is different than physical capacity. And also remember that the cynic writing this blog might actually be wrong. I’d be interested in your thoughts…

Check out the above video where I explain in a bit more detail the benefits of Dynamic Provisioning outside of the more well-known ‘thin provisioning’ benefits. For those who don’t have perfect streaming, or don’t have the time to watch my 3:30 minute video, here’s what I cover:

- There’s a significant performance boost from the wide striping of large page sizes, since it essentially allows a high number of drives to participate in read activity.
- Because of the wide striping, we also have essentially obviated the need for what I call “provisioning for performance” since HDSP will out-perform anything that is manually provisioned
- Carve out what you need, not what best fits the storage array to maximize capacity. Since LUNs are carved out of a common pool, anything to do with physical awareness of LUNs - for example static LUN sizes - are a thing of the past. You need 3GB? Just provision it. How about 147GB? Provision that as well. A 1.3TB LUN? You get the idea.
- What we’ve done is essentially provided that last abstraction layer of virtualization so that we can all start provisioning storage based on what the application needs. That’s a significant milestone.

Hope you enjoy! Look forward to your thoughts.

EMC plus Data Domain equals what exactly?

Or as I prefer to write it:

EMC plus Dat oin q wh xy?

But the past few weeks have been pretty interesting watching the bidding war between EMC and NetApp over Data Domain. With the final numbers in, it appears EMC are shelling out something north of $2.4B to acquire a technology they’ve already acquired in the form of Avamar. But is it worth $2.4B? I’m not sure, but that might be the war I would want to lose, but history tends to be the ultimate arbiter on such things; everything else is just opinion.

But it points to a stark difference between our two companies in terms of strategy, and that’s something I would like to cover: It’s all about integration.

Before I go further, I’d like to throw out a trivia question. Of all the dozens of storage companies EMC have purchased over the past 12-15 years, which is the only one that was actually integrated into EMC’s storage line? I may be wrong here, and I’m will to be corrected in public, but I can only think of one, and that’s PowerPath. All of the others seem to be more or less left as separate entities. Correct me if I’m wrong on this…

Now this is fine for the likes of VMware and SMARTS, but looking at the Hopkington storage lineup makes me think of a large warehouse with a leaky rooftop with a different bucket under each leak. We have DMX/V-Max, Clariiiioon, Celera, Centera, Iomega, and now Atmos. To manage this array of buckets requires multiple products as well. And then we have the appliance fraternity of Avamar, Kashya, and my favorite, InVista. Now add DataDomain to the mix. I’m sure I’ve forgotten a few, but does anyone see a problem here? How many storage buckets does this world really need? That’s a rhetorical question of course, and I’m not suggesting it always has to be one, but each additional bucket not only complicates the scene, it begs for more plumbing!

Contrast this to HDS and you see an entirely different picture and strategy. We’re not adverse to acquisitions, but we are big fans of consolidation, integration, ease of use, and simplified environments, and we believe an integrated approach is the right approach. Whether mainframe, open systems, block, file, archival, and all tiers of storage, we pretty much have that under one (not-so-leaky) roof. Wanna blend a bunch of different storage types and tiers into a single manageable pool, and be able to non-disruptively move data amongst those types and tiers? We can even include EMC’s “buckets” into the mix!

So while EMC increases its “bucket count”, we simply add function and scalability to an ever-increasing pool managed by the same stack. OK, we still all have a bit to go but that’s clearly our direction.

But every time EMC acquires another company, I keep waiting for the follow-on announcement of what they will actually be doing with that technology, but it never seems to come.

Personally, I’d like to know that I can buy multiple storage types and tiers and have it all fit together…nicely.