EMC worked with IDC to make a Worldwide Information Growth Ticker as seen here:
One thing I’ve noticed in all this talk about explosive information growth is how most vendors are sticking to a strategy of how to store it and manage it. A lot of these vendors make a lot of money storing content but I’m beginning to wonder how good being a bunch of digital “pack rats” truly is. Even if we build systems to manage the information, how much value can we extract out of the digital “junk” we keep. It’s not the responsibility of companies to figure out the value of the information for us but it would be nice to know along with the calculator, how much that information truly costs. I think as the information grows, we’ll start to see people come to terms with how they manage that information and what they decide to consume or store.
Here’s an example: My digital camera (Fuji Finepix S5 Pro) shoots 25MB raw files and I choose to shoot raw because it’s a “digital negative”. Now compared to Canon and Nikon, Fuji’s raw format is horribly inefficient. On some days I can run through an 8GB flash card which gets me roughly 260 pictures. That gives me 84 days of pictures assuming I fill up a card. That’s a lot of pictures to shoot but even if I shoot half as much, I could end up filling up a 750GB SATA drive in a couple of years given how often I take pictures. That is a ton of data to create, manage and protect. Pile on all the mp3′s and movies people download and it’s even easier to see how people fill up 500GB hard drives in a years time. Now maybe I’m an extreme case but the point is that even cutting the average user’s data creation rate by 1/8th of mine, it isn’t cheap. Most consumers aren’t used to buying new drives every couple of years and also figuring out how to protect that kind of data.
I don’t think technology is keeping up with generating at least from a consistent cost perspective. Part of my reasoning is that now people are placing much more value on their data than they used to. How will the average joe handle the this cost and growth?
I skipped out on some of the technical sessions yesterday to meet with some of the bloggers and folks on twitter. I think a lot of people will agree that the social aspect is just as valuable if not more so than the technical sessions.
I had lunch with Bill Petro, Joyce Tompsett, Jon Collins, David Spencer, and Jason Benway. We discussed about the benefit of transparency and social media for companies. A great book to read is the Cluetrain Manifesto which talks about how companies benefit from genuine conversation with their prospects and customers. Jon made a great point that Cluetrain is not the solution but rather a feature or ingredient that corporate social media must have. A lot of the points I made as an EMC outsider were that pointing my customers to genuine conversations within EMC be it technical or business-oriented are much easier than me saying, “Trust me, they are listeners and truly care.” One of my biggest challenges aside from competition has been convincing skeptics that EMC is not The Big Evil Machine(tm).
Later on I met up with Mark Twomey and Scott W. and talked with them for almost two hours. Mark and Scott have the inside track and do a great job of blogging about EMC’s technology and how it honestly stacks up against the competition. They’re not a marketing machine but rather two passionate individuals who go to bat for what they believe but take critical feedback. No kool-aid there folks.
Overall a great last couple of days.
EMCWorld 2008 is well underway. The keynote was much like last years keynote in that there was talk about how information growth is continuing to explode. Unfortunately cloud computing was touched on only briefly and specific EMC strategy wasn’t discussed.
I did meet with Ryan Johnson who is the product manager for EMC’s Lifeline software. Lifeline is “Network storage OEM software for the SOHO and Prosumer market.” In a nutshell, this is home centralized storage done right. You can store your music, movies and even surveillance camera data all on one device that will support remote backup to EMC’s Mozy online backup service. The software is at release 1 today but a ton more features will be coming in version 2. The Intel demo was really slick with about 4-5 HD videos streaming simultaneously to a TV, an iMac and an xbox 360. Currently Intel has a product that holds 4 drives and is starting to ship today. Iomega will have a device with 2 drives shipping in August. The biggest challenges for EMC have been making a easy to use interface but giving the device a lot of features. I did mention silent data corruption and ZFS to Ryan and he said they were looking at innovating in the data integrity area.
I attended a lot of VMware-specific architectual and performance engineering sessions since that seems to be my focus with my customers right now. Some of the information was new but a lot of it I have heard last year. Interestingly enough, it seemed that there were some mixed messages emerging from VMware folks who work on the same team.
A lot of my customers are just getting into centralized storage for VMware and are having a hard time deciding if they should do fibre channel, iSCSI or even NFS. There are no performance differences between storage protocols (iSCSI, fibre channel or NFS). Now there is a throughput difference between 1 gigabit iSCSI and 4 gigabit fibre channel. Most importantly, if you’re going to consolidate a lot of hosts and could push the 1 gigabit barrier, 4gb fibre channel makes things a little easier without having to aggregate lots of smaller links.
That’s all for now, on to day 3.