Techno Musings

I was watching a TV show commercial-free on my AppleTV and an interesting thought occurred to me.  You see at the beginning I failed to understand the title of the episode, but about 75% of the way through I finally understood the title.  This also led me to an epiphany: the best way to name a work is not at the beginning.  Sure that might be what happens with a lot of creative endeavors, but then more often than not the title is changed to something that matches the work better.  Sometimes works are even left untitled because the creator could not generate a single name or phrase.  However, with all of that said, something of the intention of the author is in the original temporary or code name, maybe even something prescient. Take tigon (actually it should be Tiglon according to Wikipedia) for example which is a hybrid of a male tiger and a female lioness.  It is both of the source animals and neither, it is somewhat fertile (note that the females are not sterile and the males are) and when bred back to one of its originating progenitors can produce fragile offspring.

This selection of a code name describing a semi-sterile hard to produce halfbreed , in my opinion, and the fact that Symmetrix DMX still lives tells of a question begging to be asked: is the V-MAX really ready?  I mean EMC did not take a proven approach to this architecture and tie it to a lower end system first.  I mean I was there when IBM was transitioning to PowerPC and PCI/ISA from POWER and Microchannel respectively.  The choice that IBM made was to start from a lower tier product and slowly move up the food chain, eventually moving everything to PCI (and later PCIe, etc.).  With that rational approach I would have expected EMC to announce V-MAX as a part of their CX series and then from there talk about the child, CX, consuming the parent, DMX.  Instead EMC is taking a tigon approach to the Enterprise Storage market and they appear to have not figured out several things:

1. Is the product ready? [DMX is still around today and as I've talked about before this could be the sign that EMC has some serious doubts, and further my previous post solved a key mystery for me V is for, well, Voodoo.  Also Christophe's post also points out something key.]
2. How to market it to its customers? [Is it CX or Symmetrix?  The wisdom seems to be that it is both and not both all at the same time.  This gets back to a Freudian slip code name of tigon that half breed semi-sertile thing that produces weak offspring.  Hey perhaps EMC marketing should have code named the thing liger instead, but that would have tipped the marketing team's hand too soon.]
3. Speaking of sterility, what about that pricing model? [It seems like the 20% or so premium that  is charged for the V-MAX is a natural inhibitor.  If EMC wanted to set it up to be a part of their CX line then everyone could see the writing on the wall that this is a clustered CX and nothing more.  Further EMC's hand would be exposed: namely that V-MAX sets the tone for their enterprise class product, DMX, as they just did for their dead end CAS product, Centera, with the stealthily marketed replacement: ATMOS(T).  If EMC really exposed their hand I think that their customers would be trying to escape that Symmetrix-Titanic, and based upon the points I've been raising, I'm not sure that Voodoo-MAXiumus would be their rescue boat.]

I have to say thinking like a customer, just like when I suggested that customers should ask what is going on with Centera, I would ask about DMX/CX and where the Voodoo-MAXimus is heading, with a highly critical mind so that we can uncover some truth in that tigon liger.  Finally to close the post out, in this case perhaps EMC should not have come up at the end with the title V-MAX but left it alone as the Freudian slip tigon.