The G-Spots

So time for some more positive commentary - a new page on this site here now highlights the 'Grumpy Spotlight' awards for great quality or service.

Naturally this is an entirely personal and subjective list, based on my experiences - but I hope it goes to highlight some places / things that really deserve all the recognition they can get.

I'd welcome any of your recommendations or comments on the items I list.

That time of year....

Well it's that time of year again.

When tens of thousands of fanboys (& fangirls) flock to the west coast of the USA to watch, listen to and worship a benevolent dictator, regarded by the fanboys as almost a messiah, impart the golden missives that will fuel their blinkered direction for the next twelve months...

Now of course, this is either the latest #EvilFruitSeller product release or #CrazyIvan's SnoracleWorld marketing branwashing fiction fest...

So which should you go to? well would it surprise you if I said - "neither, spend your time with your friends & family". Frankly speaking both are about as little value to the average enterprise customer...

Whilst of course both operate an artificially dominante position in certain segments, and certainly market above their stations, they do clearly set certain parts of the IT agenda - BUT frankly as far as I can see there's little point in attending as whatever happens will happen just the same regardless.

Some assorted personal thoughts about both companies :-

• neither is worth trying to engage with dialogue in as neither empowers their staff to have any meaningful dialogue
• neither entity listens & changes their ideas or directions easily
• both companies are most certainly driven strongly with clear internal direction
• both entities are driven by a singular personality - undoubtedly clever & focused, but one that makes decisions in a seemingly random & emotional fashion
• both companies will have to undergo major changes in the public view & internal structure of their senior management teams
• both companies will this week announce new instances of their proprietary lock-in technologies
• both companies trade on emotions & subjective reasoning in the customer base, with little challenge by the fanboys to their cost models or purported benefits 
• both companies are aggressive & arrogant in their manipulation of perceived position in terms of creating lock-in, eroding open standards and attempting to eliminate competition
• both companies specialise in competing with their partners
• both companies have made significant direction changes with their strategies and technology offerings
• both companies have the attention of senior management in their customer bases, and will most certainly drive a number of key areas in the near future

There's plenty more, but let's see how the announcements play out first :)

NDA Briefings - the content lap-dance?

So those who follow my twitter profile, or know me in person, will understand that one of my major annoyances in life is the topic of NDAs.

Now I fully understand what an NDA entails (I've spent enough time with lawyers in my life to know this area very well), and understand why anything more than 2 way NDAs are a genuinely terrifying concept. I also personally know what it means for all involved to 'tear-down' and NDA in 'an aggressive fashion'.

Naturally in my line of work, probably 70% of the external discussions I have are of a confidential content nature, with a high % being purportedly related to NDAs.

So why do they annoy me?

http://twitter.com/ianhf/status/9569522994
Why the hell don't vendors trust customers when under NDA with a copy of the slides? either respect an NDA or don't bother at all..#Annoyed

Well as far as I can see they are increasingly used as a way to restrict the content, or method of delivery of the content, provided to customers. With phrases such as "can't give you to document or presentation as it's NDA" being uttered on a weekly basis - the concepts of trust and respect being lost forever.

A common use of the NDA is to cover future roadmap discussions - naturally enough as for any supplier this is a very sensitive are. But my position is that roadmaps should change, and that's fine. The key is to ensure that there is regular communication & dialogue about the changes. The customer of course needs to have some reference artefacts for a point in time to use for their own decisions, after-all we have to create our own 6/12/18/36mth internal strategies.

Clearly if we can't have a secure & trusted copy of information from a point in time, then we can't reference the information - as my memory is such that I could very easily get information very wrong. In short - if a copy of the information isn't provided that we have little choice but to 'strike it from the record' and ignore it - making the whole 'NDA' exercise worthless all round... As far as I'm concerned this just shows that many vendors simply don't trust or respect their staff or their customers - these are not the vendors I'm interested in working with.

How often are NDA pitches one-way presentations? Sadly all too often :( There are still some good people out there that do genuinely have the sessions as NDA discussions and will influence their roadmaps and/or decisions based on dialogue & requirements - but these are most certainly in the minority.

Whilst I accept some customers may leak NDA information, either consciously or unconsciously, my thoughts are that people should have the courage to penalise those that breach NDA clauses, make an example of them don't penalise those who understand & respect them. But, surely we also need to address the information moving between competitors in the increasingly incestuous IT sales & engineering industry job shuffle (or are lobotomies standard practice in changing jobs between IT suppliers? well now I mention it that would explain many things...,)

A major irony of this is that at least 3 suppliers (eg EeeMSee, SumNotech & SnOracle) all sell commercial IRM/DRM products, but yet they refuse to use these with their own customers for protection of NDA content. Now if this doesn't fit a perfect target use case for IMR/DRM tools then I don't know what would! If partners won't use these products to protect their own content then I sure as heck won't be buying their tools to protect mine! You'd think their own sales teams would be pushing use of the IRM/DRM tools to 'spread the word' so to speak... Either way they should use & trust their DRM tools or kill them...

All of this sadly leaves me to the conclusion that 'NDA briefings' are often now little more than than marketing meetings wrapped in a 'special legal secret sauce' to puff, fluff & massage the ego of the invitees - the "I've been somewhere special" & "I know something you don't" playground taunt factor...

There are words for those who are paid to say & do nice things purely to boost a customers ego - and candidly, I think we'd all rather be with partners than whores!

The Bar

So I thought I'd do a quick summary of the drinks in the home cellar / bar - wine list will be added when I find time :) http://www.grumpystorage.com/p/bar.html

vCrack(d)

So VMwere have come out and publicly revealed vSpore v5, including disclosing their new extortion licensing racket model for vSpore v5 here.

Now the positive messages re new features, functions, performance and capability improvements of vSpore 5 have been outweighed in the press & user base by noise around the new license model, and specifically the now licensing of RAM usage.

I don't know about your environments, but I know when we look at our farms they are already RAM constrained and not CPU/core constrained - and this is at RAM/CPU ratios considerably higher than the new licences would enable without additional licence purchases. For us we're also seeing the RAM/CPU ratio increasing from our application providers - everything is increasingly demanding larger quantities of RAM.

This reminds me of a similar approach used by the "independent mobile high-street pharmaceutical suppliers" :-

1. Release an exciting product to establish lust & demand
2. Make chunks of it free (eg ESXi) to widen the customer base & hearts/minds
3. Encourage large deployment & consolidation based on over-subscription and utilisation
4. Then change the payment rules for the next version and drive the requirement for additional licences (hence revenue) for exactly the same solution & architecture between existing & future versions

To me it's clear that when a company measures itself on revenue & profit growth, and especially if they are in a rapidly commoditising market, that there has to be new ways of obtaining the growth (let alone standing still against increased competition). So it would appear the current model is to extract revenue from the core value the product offers. In itself making the overall virtualisation offering less beneficial from an ROI/TCO perspective - but I guess the assumption is that people are so addicted committed to the product & solution that they wont bother questioning the value of the solution again.

I also think VMwere are trying to deflect their changes by talking about 'Align the vSpore licensing model with IT as a service', somehow avoiding the point that most organisations already happily translate capex+opex investment -> to internal recharge. In fact many don't want their private hypervisor farms to have a cost profile more aligned to public IaaS (ie variable opex).

Page 11 of the vSpore licensing FAQ pdf also makes a claim re "today’s average consolidation ratios of 5:1" - this seems to be considerably different (ie lower) than the claims & statements VMwere make in all their sales & marketing materials of consolidation rations of 10-20:1 being common. Love to hear more about 'average VMwere is only 5:1'....

So what sort of impact will this have?

• for some people & use case it'll make no difference
• for others it will drive material impacts on capex for additional licences, and of course opex as it relates to support/maint of the licences
• generally I feel this will make life more complex for virtualisation designers & architects that now need to design & estate manage around RAM specifically

My feeling is that this will trigger a number of things :-

• Draw attention to the review of actual benefits/cost Vs forecast benefits/costs of ongoing virtualisation programmes
• Inhibit some new virtualisation projects due to cost increases
• Allow VMwere's competitors to be able to promote & market their technology based upon costs/value, in turn generating noise in the IT ecosystem and thus consuming the customer's time in FUD / hype fighting
• Cause many customers to expedite their reviews of the rapidly maturing viable alternate hypervisor / IaaS tooling market, with a view to move wholesale to an alternative or to dual source hypervisors
• I'm also wondering if this is a step towards VMwere licensing their technology by active virtual machines (and dimensions of machines) rather than the underpinning physical infrastructure

I fully understand, agree with and respect the need for companies to make revenue and profit, but I always find it strange when successful companies decide to shoot a foot off or commit slow suicide through strangling their customers...

Rounding the wagons?

So the tin providers can see the differentiation end coming, they can see the need to drop their high margins are vast & costly sales structures and move into other areas.

A few of these talk a story, but very very few of them appear to be able to do something meaningful or lasting.

Consolidation in the infrastructure stack market - lots of blogs talking about this, lots of disruption and issues, lots of risk & downside for the customer.

Oracle made the first move with an application provider acquiring Sun in order to control their own destiny re infrastructure and have better control of their own margins, but despite this they have a dead h/ware business that they are desperate to force onto customers (although I think few Oracle people understand the word customer, most seem to  interpret it as fund payer for their Porsche & holiday homes). Increasingly we now see that Snoracle's applications are 'only provided' or 'only supported' if bolted to the tin albatrosses bodged together by themselves.

EMC and their pet VMWare are nibbling around the edges purchasing software development tool companies, acquirin some serious individual tallent and now into the DW/BI and eventually database area.

If I look at HP, they have lots - but several areas they are lacking in (excusing the clear lack of sales, marketing & product proposition talent) are :-

• Database
• Middleware
• x86 Server Operating Systems

If I look at IBM, they have everything except direction, sales, marketing, focus and conviction...

SAP buying Sybase was interesting for a number of reasons :-

• Removes the last major (meaning deployments in existing data-centres) RDBMS from the table for those infrastructure companies desperate to have a plat in the database world (eg EMC, HP etc)
• Will further muddy the water with SAP's database usage relationship with Oracle
• Might knock some sense into Sybase's management team
• Doesn't seem to add much obvious additional value, synergies or savings for SAP
• Will likely start a bidding war for other 'platform tool' players in the mobility market - although all of these will be competing with the networks & the device providers themselves...

But when do we see the first IT infrastructure company buy a business application software provider? Would you put money on EMC or HP acquiring Teradata, SAP, SAS, Amdocs, Comverse, Sage, Tibco

Is anybody interested in acquiring Citrix? BMC? Symantec? RedHat? Novell?

Of course all of the infrastructure companies are courting Microsoft for partnership scraps off the table in the SMB application areas.

So whilst the masters of FUD fight their whispering battles against each other, the account teams become increasingly desperate and high-maintenance and the manufacturers fight each other (eg Snoralce Vs Intel/HP) as far as I can see it's only the customer that loses - quality, clarity, options, stability all reducing...

Metric, SI & ISO matters

So watching @rootwyrm & @bradhedlund argue about DC design and facilities so time back reminded me of one of my main pet hates. That of people that still use imperial measurements!

Heck even the country that defined them has (mainly) moved on to SI & ISO units. So you can imagine quite how irritating / depressing / demoralising it is to hear technology people talk about lbs, feet, BTU etc

Metric is very simple, more precise and used in the majority of countries. KPIs and measurements matter seriously, and in this global culture it is vital that everybody uses & thoroughly understands exactly the same dimensions and measures.

But yet even in this age of iPads & Android phones, IT vendors still use archaic measurements in their specifications & benchmarks.

Woe betide the first provider I hear offering me 14lbs of cloud servers. or 5/16th of a TB/s bandwidth...