John McArthur’s New Venture Blog

I was describing to my rather-precocious, thirteen-year-old son the problem that companies have of getting the word out.  As part of “Career Week” at his school (five different jobs for five days at the end of the school year), my son decided he would make a stop-motion Lego video for Tek-Tools, one of my clients, to promote the company.   I told him that, if it was good enough, I would show it to the CEO, and maybe he would use it.  Little did I know that my son was going to, upon completion, post the video on YouTube.  But he did.  Without permission.  And my wife asked me, once again, “Why don’t we have more controls on his computer?” 

Ken Barth, the CEO of Tek-Tools,  was our first client at Walden Technology Partners.  A lot of people in the computer storage industry know him, and beyond the fact that he has been successful in everything that he has done, everyone who meets him says the same thing: “He’s a great guy.”  Ken’s company provides a superb solution for reporting, monitoring, forecasting, and profiling IT infrastructure.  It’s easy to install, easy to use, and provides immediate value.  What could be better?   (more…)

It’s only 7 a.m., and I’ve learned something new.  I woke up early (too early) and was catching up on some blog reading, including this one from Jon Toigo.  There, I stumbled on his use of the word bleg, which is a term I did not know.  As is my custom, I then went on a random internet walk (using the Google search term define: bleg) to find out what else I didn’t know.  That led me to a blogosphere glossary from Blogossary.  Have fun scrolling the list, and watch out for blogfat.

I recently had the pleasure of reading a draft of Dave Hitz’ new book (title intentionally withheld, so as not to play the spoiler).  Dave is one of the co-founders of NetApp (nee’ Network Appliance), and he wrote the book, at least in part, to give current NetApp employees a view into the early days of the company.  At recent growth rates, I suspect that substantially more than half of the employees have been with the company fewer than five years and missed not only the startup days, but the turnaround days, post-2001. (more…)

I recently visited the Massachusetts Office of International Trade and Investment (MOITI) with a friend, Bob Winter, who founded Robert-Louis Advisors.  At MOITI, we met with Patrick (Pat) Bench, who is Director of Business Development.  Patrick’s job is to get companies to open offices in Massachusetts, or rather, that’s how his success is measured.  What his job appears to be is to do everything possible to make it easy for non-U.S. companies to set up shop in Massachusetts.  (more…)

I spent an hour today with an Onaro customer and through the conversation learned a little bit about how different companies handle the separation of duties in IT processing.  I met with the customer to better understand the critical decision criteria that were behind his choice of Onaro, what features were most valued and what alternatives were considered.  Turns out, at the time of his decision several years ago, he didn’t see many alternatives.  Onaro, which was an independent software supplier at the time, was recently acquired by NetApp, a storage systems company.

This customer originally licensed Onaro’s SANscreen offering to ensure that the company’s IT change-control process was being followed in the storage network.  SANscreen maps the entire data path from the host bus adapter (HBA) in the server, through the cables and switches, ultimately to the storage array.  Anytime someone makes a change to the configuration of his fibre channel storage area network (FC-SAN), he gets a notification.  If the change hasn’t been authorized through the change-control process, he investigates.  As we were talking he showed me several alerts, that he had just received on his Blackberry, regarding changes that had not been authorized. (more…)

Thought I’d better write this before Jon Toigo corrects me.  It was late when I finished writing my last blog post.

Jon, please accept my apologies for ever implying that you would do anything in an abashed or covert way.

There’s nothing stealthy about Jon.  Here is Jon’s invite to his Non-SNW event in Orlando, available by way of link to Jon’s recent DrunkenData blog post, and reprinted here entirely without permission: (more…)

I’ve spent a good part of this past week getting ready for Storage Networking World, co-sponsored by SNIA and ComputerWorld, and the I’m-Not-Going-to-Storage-Networking-World event hosted entirely at his own expense by Jon Toigo at a nearby, but semi-secret, location.  In honor of the two events, I felt compelled to write about storage.  But first, I’ll start with a one-question qualifying quiz.

Small and Medium Business (SMB) Storage Administrator Qualifying Exam

Question: Your “storage system” consists of 25 disk drives that are housed in 8 separate database and file servers.  Some of your applications are growing rapidly and require a lot more storage.  Others are not growing. In total, you have plenty of available storage capacity, but it sits inside servers that aren’t accessible to the applications that need extra capacity.  You want to move to a storage area network, because you’ve heard that all of the storage will then be available to all of the applications and can be managed as a shared pool. You must accomplish the migration of data from the internal drives to a new, blazingly-fast, infinitely-scalable storage area network without interrupting application availability or data access, and without screwing up volume names.  From the following,  select the answer that most closely describes the correct approach: (more…)

While I am constantly immersed in some aspect of technology, on a personal level, I’m a bit of a technology laggard.  If something is working, I don’t have a driving need to replace it with the latest technology. I still own one black-and-white television and two of my televisions have rabbit ears, though I won’t keep them past February 17, 2009, when a  digital converter will be necessary to allow them to continue to work.

However, having just returned from the U.K., where I spent $0.99 per minute to make calls back to the U.S. on my AT&T Blackberry (that’s with the International Calling Plan discount), I decided I need to join the more-technically-current crowd.  Turns out that for many situations, a Logitech camera and microphone together with a Skype account provided the perfect remedy to the pain of expensive international calls.

I was in New York in 1964, to see the 1964 New York World’s Fair.  I don’t think that Skype and Logitech are what AT&T had in mind, when they showed their Picturephone at the Fair.  It’s rather impressive what 44 years of additional innovation can bring.

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I got a call today from a solutions specialist at one of IBM’s larger resellers.  He had what he thinks is the perfect first opportunity for our client, Tek-Tools. The opportunity was at a relatively small shop - 2 VMware ESX servers and one IBM N-Series filer.  The issue was that the person responsible for managing the environment was having performance problems and the environment was growing rather quickly.  Maybe too quickly.  So he needed some visibility into the source of the problems and the growth. I had shown him Tek-Tools Profiler for VMware and Profiler for NetApp, about a month ago. Sorry, I can’t give you the reseller’s name, because you never know how the parents might react, if you know what I mean.

Some have described Tek-Tools’ Profiler Suite as a bit of a Swiss Army Knife.  It provides reporting and monitoring on almost everything.

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It’s been just over a year, since I left IDC to form Walden Technology Partners, Inc. with David Burmon.  While I didn’t expect to continue spending so much time in the storage and data management industry, that is how things have worked out initially.  All of our current clients are involved, at least in part, in some aspect of information protection, storage, or management.  And with the continued growth in information and content, a growth that is relatively immune to the effects of economic conditions, it should not have been a surprise to me. 

Note that I said that the growth of content is relatively immune to economic conditions.  The market for storage hardware and information management software has been proven many times to be highly affected by economic conditions.

Problems in information management have been around forever, and will persist far into the future, as this YouTube video documents.  You’ve got to watch it.  Really.  And it’s not a product pitch.  (more…)