John McArthur’s New Venture Blog

One of the sessions I attended at the New England Area VMware User Group meeting in Newport, Rhode Island last week included a discussion on how to take the internal storage of a VMware ESX host and turn it into a virtualized iSCSI storage appliance.  I happen to believe that the approach has great merit for many smaller IT shops and for remote office environments.  The internal storage of an ESX server, if totally useable and accessible to the ESX host and other ESX servers on the network, is probably the cheapest storage you will ever buy.  What I found particularly interesting about this session, however, was the fact that the presenter downplayed the approach as good enough to experiment with the storage virtualization software, but not good enough to run production applications.  In order to encourage companies to try the software, the developer offers a free 30-day trial, the expiration of which then renders the server unuseable, unless you purchase a permanent license.  While I believe the company has good software, I don’t understand the approach to the market. (more…)

I attended the New England Area VMware User Group meeting in Newport, Rhode Island last week.  It was a great opportunity to see what challenges IT managers are facing, what solutions they are adopting, and what problems remain to be solved.  It was also a good opportunity for me to revisit what I learned many years ago in studying the research of  Clayton Christensen and his concept of Disruptive Innovation.  Two of my clients have what I consider disruptive technologies.  I’ll write about Tek-Tools in this post, and then cover  StorMagic in a subsequent post. 

Tek-Tools offers the Profiler Suite of monitoring, reporting, and forecasting tools for servers, storage, applications, files, and, yes, VMware.  Why is it disruptive? Tek-Tools’ Profiler is easy to install, easy to afford, and easy to use, and it’s “good enough” for the bulk of today’s customers.  It does not overshoot current market requirements.  It gives quick answers to important questions like: How much storage do I have installed? How fast is it growing?  How much is allocated? How much is used? When will I need more storage? Where is my performance bottleneck? How old is my data? Who is violating data retention policies? Which virtual machines are using which storage? Which virtual machines are no longer in use? Which physical machines could I consolidate onto a  VMware ESX host, without encountering performance issues? Where is my orphaned storage? (That’s a technical term that means I deleted the virtual machine, but forgot to return the allocated storage to the storage pool.)  

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One of the things we used to discuss, when I was running the storage research practice at IDC, was “When will a market disappear and just become a feature of some larger market?”  Examples are numerous.  Remember when there was a market for browser software? And, while NetApp is going strong, both Microsoft and Sun Microsystems are trying to make NAS a feature of the operating system.

One of the reasons I joined the board of StorMagic was that I saw the potential for the company to be a market disruptor.  Today, StorMagic announced SvSAN software, which, when installed on a VMware ESX server, converts the internal storage of the ESX server into an iSCSI SAN.  VMware leverages the fact that most single applications don’t need all the computing power of today’s servers.  SvSAN leverages that same fact to provide the storage management function within the ESX server, and also takes advantage of the fact that the internal storage capacity of an ESX server, perhaps the least expensive storage you will ever purchase, is more than enough capacity for a large number of VMware ESX server-hosted applications.  (more…)

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…)

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 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…)

My recent blog post on Skype and Logitech inspired one of Skype’s bloggers, Villu Arak, to locate this history of picture phones.   If you look through the history, you’ll notice several different jobs that were being proposed for the picture phones: business communication, grandparents staying connected with grandchildren, soldiers calling home.  While AT&T’s initial implementations failed, the jobs still needed to be done.

This post by Villu confirms that fact, as he writes about some of the ways that Skype is being used today:

Distant lovers enjoying dinner — and each other’s company — over a free video call.

Local-government officials replacing meetings with multichats.

Homesick soldiers keeping a line open with their families. (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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A Google search on “Top 10″ will get you all kinds of interesting results.  When I did the search this afternoon, the first listing was “Top 10 Naked People on Google Earth.” Sorry, but I’m providing no hyperlink, and for the record, no, I did not go there.  Next is Time Magazine’s  50 Top 10 Lists for 2007, which shows a surprising lack of appreciation for symmetry.  Then comes The Late Show with David Letterman, which I thought should have come up higher on the list.  There’s also the Top 10 Dunks and Top 10 Women Drivers of the Year available courtesy of YouTube. I’m just going in order here.  No offense intended. 

For any startup or new technology, it’s difficult to get the door opened long enough to allow the first presentation of a product, company or concept to a potential customer or partner.  It’s not that customers don’t want to look at new stuff.  It’s just that there’s so much new stuff, and who’s got the time to look at everybody. So whether it’s analysts, or bloggers, or the press, it’s nice to have a little bit of focused attention on new companies and new technologies, and have them do some filtering.  Thus the creation of Top 10 lists that say, “Hey, pay attention to this.  It could be big.” (more…)