Happy New Year

So I guess it's time for the obligatory 'Happy New Year' blog post...

Out with the old year - as frankly speaking it's pretty worn out now, and it's been a fairly mixed year with it's fair share of ups & downs both professionally and personally. Change is always good, but some losses are never good - John & JP you'll both be missed RIP.

But now we look forward and the bright star studded sky ushers in the new pristine year, which I guessing could be a pretty intense one given that it goes up to eleven :)

I could make lots of predictions, promises & resoltuions, but the only certainty among them would that they'd be wrong and broken! However given that I'll have finished my IT infrastructure tenders early in Jan 2011, I will try and update this blog much more often, and most definitely on IT Infrastructure related topics. Oh and of course I'll aim to be at each months #StorageBeers, and the other 'peer only' validation forums we'll be working on...

Right, I'm off to relax, have a take-away and a drink with family & friends to welcome in 2011, so I'll leave you with Nollaig chridheil agus bliadhna mhath ùr and spare you my rendition of a classic song...

Amazon - Masters of marketing or perfecting the art of customer dissatisfaction?

Now this blog is not about AWS (which I'm a big fan of) or cloud (which is being over-inflated by traditional IT vendor hot air), but rather it's about the Amazon online web retail shops and experiences.

To be clear I'm a big fan of Amazon retail, especially how they've defined, improved and driven online retail so well. Indeed in just the last 5 years I've place over 300 orders on Amazon.co.uk alone - frankly I dread to think how much I've spent but my average order value appears to be well over £50 each time....

But like all good things, over time you come to notice a few items that start to irritate and then eventually if not treated they annoy. So it has come for me with Amazon, thus below is a list of current irritants & annoyances from Amazon...

Deliveries
Clearly the recent farce with Amazon.co.uk Christmas deliveries hasn't done much to help things, no they couldn't help the snow that descended upon major parts of the UK & Europe - but they certainly could have handled it as least as well as other online retailers. I find it strange that despite 'the weather' orders placed with other retailers and also Amazon MarketPlace sellers can arrive next day, but expedited (at extra delivery cost) orders placed with Amazon still haven't arrived 10 days later...

Customer Services

Nor it has to be said has their handling of customer support over this time excelled - sorry but posting web messages saying "due to volume, we're having delays responding to your customer service phone & email enquiries" just isn't good enough, hire some staff (heck why not use https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome ?). This is especially compounded when the return date deadline remains fixed despite the inability for customer services to respond - do the decent thing and extend the deadline if you can't handle the workload.

One could also be forgiven for thinking that Amazon also do their best to hide their customer support contact details - yes it's easy enough to contact & give feedback to MarketPlace providers, but for orders direct from Amazon no such easy actions exist. You certainly have to dig for a bit to find the Amazon customer services phone number of 0800 496 1081 compared to the ease of contacting their MarketPlace sellers.

Have you to tried to 'leave feedback' about an Amazon order as opposed to a MarketPlace order? Have you tried to chase up on a late delivery of an Amazon shipped order? perhaps they could patent & then impliment 'one click customer service'? ;)...

Loyalty

It disappoints me that they still lack of any form of customer loyalty scheme - I've been using Amazon.com & Amazon.co.uk for over 12 years, and yet I get no different an experience or pricing to a brand new customer.  Yes their recommendations are better tuned to the types of things I want & like, but some form of recognition (ie early releases, limited editions or exclusives, discounts, gift vouchers etc) of my past business would be good.

SmartPhone
It is very odd that there is still no Google Android application for Amazon one-click shopping in the UK - despite there being one in the USA, despite there being an Amazon MP3 download app in UK & USA and both of them for iPhone in UK & USA.

Information Management

Perhaps one of my biggest annoyances is that they still do effectively nothing with allowing customers to utilise the information about their orders & account history :-

• They really do need to embrace products like iMediaMan or Gurulib that allow customers to do their own catalogue and inventory mngt - in the age of increasingly digitalised assets (eg MP3, Kindle etc) it's essential for the customer to be able to manage & report on their assets.
• Ability for me to download an XML / CSV file re my order history and the products I've ordered? (useful for export into catalogue / library management tools, but also for keeping re household insurance records etc)
• An ability for me to 'tag' wish-list items and orders (& line items) against my own defined metadata categories (eg 'for work', 'for home', 'kids', 'gift' etc) would be useful for improving recommendations further
• Implement a simple warning if an order contains something you've previously purchased from them before, this is partially done in some areas of the site but certainly not complete or as a check prior to final order completion.

Yes their Personalisation, Preferencing & Profiling system is one of the best on the market, and having looked at this for VoD systems in the past I know just how complex and difficult this vital subject area is - and just how much IT infrastructure & data is needed to do this properly.

Some Enhancement Requests

1. Ability to have sub accounts that I can give an allocated spend allowance to - bit like gift carding an account but for sub-accounts that I can give an age rating and spend ceiling limit to, and to which I manage, review & approve orders on, with payment being fixed to being made by my one-click payment method. Thus allowing me give my children Amazon accounts whilst still being safe.
2. Capability to be able to place bids for products that vendors could then chose to accept, ignore or counter - a reverse auction if you like. This works on other sites, and Amazon use it well in their AWS business.
3. Of course the ability to give feedback, and contact support just as easily with an Amazon direct order as I can currently with a MarketPlace seller order

But despite these irritants and annoyances, Amazon is still the first place I go to buy anything, even before the real high-street let alone other internet retailers - so they must be managing my customer dissatisfaction fairly well I guess?

So whilst I'm looking at what Amazon recommends for me today I wish you, Happy Shopping...

2010 - Some more travel observations

I'm not travelling as much as I used to - but still too often - and I thought it was time for an update on my thoughts as a business traveller :-

1) It's certainly clear that economy class on flights is gradually getting worse - with less seating space, less catering and lower standards of staff

2) The frequent flyer schemes are getting tighter and with less benefits -hey @British_Airways just how many economy class (delayed / often late) flights in Europe do I have to make in a year to get anything above 'blue' frequent flyer status???

3) The standards of business lounges - even within the same airline - vary so much it's ridiculous. Take for example @British_Airways business lounges at LHR T5, Chavwick & Tampa.

• Heathrow T5 - full drinks selection, hot & cold meals, bacon butties, internet access, plenty of space
• Tampa - there are drinks and sandwiches, and somewhere quiet to sit with power for laptops
• Chavwick - there were cold snacks, cold drinks, an internet cafe and a dozen different alcoholic spirits (clearly a place where sadly alcohol is in more demand than bacon butties)

4) It's disappointing that a lot of long-haul Airlines have been so slow to add USB power points to seats - @Lufthansa_DE clearly have the lead here... Obviously it would also be good for the airline lounges to have similar power & USB charging points

5) Heathrow T5 has slowly improved with a lot of it's initial wrinkles now ironed out. But whilst the process & systems are getting a bit better there are still some material issues :-

• IRIS reliability - appears to be broken more often than working, perhaps a 3rd machine would help?
• Staff quality, engagement and care is still greatly missing
• The other Heathrow terminals don't seem to have improved at all (other than counting destroying parts of them as a well needed improvement)
• It continues to amaze me that BA staff buses operate at about 3 times the frequency of the buses for the business parking area

6) There are still some airlines that use a proprietary headphone connector - why? why? why? Oh and why put any type of headphone connector exactly where a person's leg goes - it's going to hurt their leg, break the connector or both...

7) Just how much easier flying was when only one bag was allowed on-board the plane, with no roll-on cases etc - really should make the rule one small item of hand-luggage and be done with it...

8) How very few hotels understand the need to provide :-

• Mains power points near the bedside table - to charge phones that are also used as alarm clocks
• Mains power points near to desk / table in the room - to charge laptops whilst they're used
• A clock in the bathroom
• A clock built into the TV (yes I'm always running late)
• A free bottle of water - water should not be a profit source!
• WiFi connectivity that's either free or reasonably priced (ie $2 a day)
• If we're on a wish list, a few USB charge points would be good as well!

9) With regards to in-flight entertainment systems :-

• It is rather surprising to see such small & poor selections of music given how little storage & bandwidth it consumes
• Given such a controlled environment and simple IT setup & requirements, I'm staggered as to how often the system fails and/or needs to be rebooted

So what do I regard as travel essentials nowadays :-

• Chanel Allure Homme a male aftershave with packaging designed for business travellers
• Dual USB worldwide travel adapter great for charging phones & devices without using laptop
• SlimPlug goes some way to reduce the bulk of the UK mains plug
• Battery powered phone & USB charger to charge the things you need when you're away from mains power
• Shure SE210 earphones for blocking out the rest of the world
• LiveScribe pen for taking all the notes and thoughts that spring to mind when you can't use a laptop or blackberry
• Micro umbrella

But I can safely say that the most off-putting thing that can happen to a traveller is to have a member of an airline's staff greet you happily by name as you wander mooching around a foreign airport's shops waiting for check-in to open - this happened to me not so long ago one Friday evening 2hrs before check-in opened, and a) totally freaked me out, and b) made me realise I clearly travel too often...

Churnalism - yet another evil in the field of benefits reporting

So @stevie_chambers decided to wind me up with this tweet yesterday morning :- 

Cisco Unified Computing System selected by Slumberland http://bit.ly/d1FDqd < saved $368k @ianhf :)

Now Steve is somebody that I regard as a friend and that I have immense respect for - despite us having differing views on the technology widget Steve's company sells I have more respect for Steve than the majority of his employers organisation put together.

So with that out of the way - I was simply staggered that he should choose to highlight such a terrible article & classic example of Churnalism to me - I can only put it down to 'new baby head', or perhaps a desire to see me off with ever increasing blood pressure? So let's just review the 'article' :) (note I'm not saying anything about the technology here at all - merely what & how 'benefits' are purported)

This is the kind of lazy, half arsed, factless, press release driven tripe that masquerading as 'reporting' that drives me (and I hope you) insane! So time for the usual list :-

• How long did this take to achieve?
• How exactly was it achieved, which how much effort & disruption?
• Re "saved" - where did they start from re SLAs, technology, organisation & processes?
• Compared to what & whom?
• Where is the before & after comparison of TCO and TTM?
• What was the investment required to achieve this?
• What was the ROI & IRR?
• What is the timeframe over which the benefit is calculated & reported?
• How much more would be possible with other ways, priorities & measures?
• What is the scale of the environment?
• What is the scope of the environment?

I'm not arguing that Slumberland haven't benefited, and that they haven't improved things for themselves - but as with all case-studies, customer references or benefits reports it is absolutely imperative to have full & total contextual disclosure of the before & after situations, the objectives, the success metrics and priorities.

As I previously blogged about here it really is time for the IT industry to grow up and get some simple quality & disclosure standards about reporting and marketing... This current level of information just doesn't help anybody...

Quick Thought/Rant - Storage Commodities

So just a rapid fire quick thought below :-

Now @chuckhollis make some good comments here about storage being a commodity - something of which I have some views on :)

Interestingly through the discussion Chuck still talks about the 'problem statement' from a storage technician perspective (with an introduction of diversity & complexity in the technology mix, which glosses over two major TCO cost elements - complexity & diversity of solution spaces) - until the closing section, which is where I agree with him.

You see, as far as I'm (and my CIO is) concerned storage is a commodity - however it's the physical storage that's currently a total commodity, the logical layer (software) still has a bit of a way to go to become a commodity. I think a lot of the sensible people have made the leap past caring about many of the internal storage service widgets & sprockets - and frankly, no longer care - 80% of storage products in data-centres are capable of supporting 80% of the requirements.

But I 100% agree that people around storage have to change - the processes, the eco-system, the value, the religion, the entrenched conservatism, the lack of transparency, the products, the "can't tell you in advance without a full PoC", the tools, the 'buy our magic beans' culture, the org structure, the "we're special, honest", the cost & value, the people, the sales model, the support model... All of this has to change in order to accept the fact that storage is now a commodity hygiene factor and no longer the king of the castle in the infrastructure space...

I just wish that more of the people involved would realise this!

(Oh and we'll leave the 'shiny new baubles' of mngt tool nirvana for an expensive (for anything re mngt tools is always 10x more expensive than you believe and always 0.3x the value you're told) rant another day...)

That's all for me for now - I'm still around building up a major backlog of rants, but current work (both volume and subject matter) prohibits me from posting much of it right now. Normal service should resume towards the end of the year.

Amazon Kindle v3 - Really Rather Good :)

So when I arrived home yesterday from my most recent week travelling abroad with work, as well as a happy wife and bouncing excited children, there were 2 new parcels from Amazon for me to open. (Well actually there were 4 parcels but that's about a normal week for me, and 2 new pairs of headphones for work aren't that interesting)

One contained a shiny new Kindle v3 WiFi+3G
The other contained it's Orange Leather Cover

Things I really like :-

1. Packaging - there's a feel of value / quality about the simple cardboard boxes (not the usual Amazon wrap-around boxes), the internal packaging is clean purposeful, elegant, appears recycled (in a good way) and contains no clutter. Somebody has clearly though a lot about the feel, appearance & impact of the packaging as well as the environmental impact (no unneeded cable twists, or plastic bags, of marketeering pamphlets etc)
2. The fact that it's pre-configured and setup with your own personal account before you power it on. This really was a surprise and a great customer touch, when I switched it on it already said "Hello Ian", was named "Ian's Kindle" and had the four books I'd ordered from the web site already available on it. Its a small thing, but shows a company totally focused on user experience - imagine if your next new phone already had all your contacts, settings, ringtones and applications on it the first time you powered it on without you having to do anything at all?
3. The multi-platform seamless integration. With reader applications all running on my Kindle, NexusOne Android & PC - all showing the same content, reading locations and annotations etc. Shows how a proper 'cloud service' should work - mix of devices and always there synchronised content.
4. Purposeful use model - in the same way I like and respect my Blackberry 8707 for clear and focused usability and design, the Kindle has that same brilliant focused feel, no clutter no tat no spamware just useful. In short it has engineered in simplicity & usability that many other products should rightly be envious of.
5. Naturally you'd expect a world-leading retail merchant like Amazon to focus on the ease of content purchase & management, and they certainly have here. It's a 'one click' process to purchase content and it arrives effortlessly on the Kindle.
6. Rapid nature of purchase & delivery - it's an almost real-time purchase from the web site (or device) to delivery of the content on the Kindle.
7. The E-Ink screen itself - I genuinely thought the text show when it opened the box was printed on a transparent film, the clarity & contrast really are that good! It really is very easy on the eyes and as clean to read as a paperback book.
8. The combined WiFi & 3G option means it's networking is always on & accessible, and downloads / purchases made have arrived perfectly - in the same way TonTom Live uses networking in a transparent and seamless fashion, Kindle makes the technology transparent.
9. The power adapter - it's very very small, uses the normal USB cable to plug-in and connect to a tiny power plug. Just aesthetically nice :)
10. The power off screen is a great touch - showing different images of relevant people / things each time it's powered down, I spent 10 minutes just power cycling it to see different images!

So what are the only down-sides so far?

a) The nice lady guide shown in the advert didn't actually get shipped by Amazon, disappointing for me but I guess my wife is rather happier about this :)

b) There still seems to be a minor 'gotcha' when loading many (ie 100s) books / files onto the device at the same time - in that the inbuilt search system then goes into index update/rebuild mode. This is totally a background process and doesn't impact any functionality or usage - except the general web consensus is that it drains the battery a lot quicker, and that some parts of the software platform are a little 'fragile' whilst this is going on.

c) The black-white-black millisecond screen flash when changing pages could be better if it were reduced or removed, but it isn't anywhere near as irritating or distracting as I thought it might be.

d) There is a minor mental / emotional frustration that I'd like to be able to see all the physical books I've purchased from Amazon available on the Kindle free and immediately, but I understand the content rights owner issues behind this.

Now I'm going to be interested to see :-

• How quickly Amazon's recommendation platform moves me over to recommending eBooks rather than physical books
• That Amazon list all of the physical books I've purchased over the years from them, and make it easy for me to obtain the Kindle eBook variant of each book (preferably at some discount price given I already own the physical medium)
• If Amazon will buy MediaMan and really start to exploit the 'making metadata available to customers' as a differentiation and business opportunity (eg the obvious case of inventory listing for insurance purposes etc)
• If Amazon will ever release a loyalty based reward scheme...

So the end of day 1 rating :-

• Would I buy the same one again? Yes
• Do I like using & reading off it? Yes
• Have I downloaded content? Yes
• Have I purchased new books? Yes
• Has my wife looked at it and said "that's ok"? Yes

Recommended.

Some interesting web sites I've found relating to Kindle v3 topics :-

       http://www.kindleminds.net/

       http://www.mobileread.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=140

NotApp - Random thoughts

So as usual @chrismevans latest blog post here raises some good points that need discussing. In a previous post a while ago I highlighted some of these but I think Chris brings a number clearly to the fore.

FlexVols are inherently a good thing (although some of the sales use cases are rather flawed - eg copy prod to dev/test, which of course ignores all the information security issues), similarly so is the concept of Aggregates - but the issue for me is that these features haven't moved with the times. Some points below...

Aggregates limited to 16TB - this is an increasing issue for several reasons. Firstly the simple point that as disks increase in capacity we have fewer drives that can participate within an aggregate, impacting performance and risk. Secondly the first impact also impacts costs - as NetApp themselves are having to recommend smaller disk sizes with aggregates, which of course prevents any cost/gb benefits of larger disk sizes. Thirdly of course there are times when the actual capacity of an aggregate is just needed to be bigger than this limit.

Full support - so as Dimitris points out, in 8.0 a FlexVol can now be the same size as an aggregate (a good thing) but there is a new restriction, this cannot be a dedupe/ASIS volume (they are still limited in size). So a case of 'feature marketing' - in that most customers will now be using dedupe on their storage, meaning this new limit increase is pure theoretical at this point.

Mixed disks - The fact that today aggregates can only include a single disk type (ignoring PAM) is frankly painful, heck even EMC have understood this message and delivered upon it (still more work need Boston based dues!). But not to see this in OnTap after all this time is depressing to say the least.

Non-disruptive - for me this comes in two main areas that still appear to be missing :-

• Non-disruptive move of volumes between disk types and/or aggregates within the same array
• Non-disruptive in-place upgrade from 32bit to 64bit aggregates

NameSpace abstraction in the NAS area is still a major issue - primary for technology refresh & migrations, yes vFilers help for some of it but really just snowplough the problem around rather than actually remove the problem. I think NetApp certainly do need to spend more time looking at the migration & tech refresh areas, and spend time looking at environments where customers run a variety of ages of platform - to see what can be done to improve these parts. Otherwise they'll find that customers invest in the heterogeneous namespace virtualisation areas (eg F5 ARX, EMC RainFininty etc) rather than the persistence layer.

Reducing the size of an aggregate - hasn't been an issue in the past but will most certainly be an issue with larger aggregate sizes for companies with decent sized estates that need to move their storage hardware and/or capacities around within their estate.

Legacy Management - in talking of versions of OnTap we naturally get into the topic of estate management - by this I mean two key areas. Firstly the interop with & between various versions of OnTap - for many customers this will be a key factor, how to move over time to newer releases and how functionality works/is constrained by backwards & forwards compatibility. Secondly but related, is the equipment that the latest versions of OnTap are actually supported on, as much as vendors would like a new OS release to drive hardware refresh this just isn't possible or realistic in any well managed storage estate. So a key factor is that a current release is provided and supported on previous generations of hardware and that it is clear & flexible how the deployments of software interact with each other from a functionality perspective.

Multi-Protocol - yes this is interesting and can be of use, but reality is that is reasonable sized data-centres instance deployments of arrays still then to be protocol aligned (eg a 3160 for NAS, a different 3160 for FC etc). For me the bigger benefit is that the same interface and firmware/software is used over the different platforms as opposed to the myriad of platform software from other vendors.

But for me the greatest issue is that we're still discussing the same points re OnTap that we were 4 years ago, and little real progress has been made. I'm certainly not going to hold my breath for the v8.1 release that people allude to including lots of stuff that was needed 3 years ago. The talk of future releases is always bothersome, and is a standard sales tactic 'ignore the construction debris, look at possible the shiny future' - look at the disclaimers on any presentation on futures and then ask "why should I believe any of this is actually going to happen when & how stated?". I'm increasingly of the view that the OnTap code-chest is getting too old, too complex and too over-stuffed from an architectural clarity perspective for NetApp to be able to make sensible progression, and I'm wondering a) when it needs a tear down & rebuild with full architectural clarity? (as I don't believe 8 release is that) and b) what the next set of innovations are coming from?

Are they still better than the competitors? In a number of areas clearly & most definitely yes (eg MetroCluster, Failover between arrays, MultiStore etc), have they innovated ahead of others? yes (eg ASIS), but increasingly far too rarely & slowly and the market is rapidly catching up and will pass them very soon.

It's positive to see NetApp people commenting positively on Chris's blog, but NetApp if you want to improve things for the future? Run some a customer council sessions, listen to your customers discussing between them in a forum, take the information and act rapidly upon it - heck EMC did and they made big strides forward...

Overall - my view is that NetApp product management, particularly the WAFL & OnTap strategy teams have been asleep at the wheel for a few years and they, but more importantly their customers, are now paying a heavy price for this failure.