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.

SANscreen also helps the customer plan better for changes.  For example, if he needs to swap out a storage system or a switch, he can leverage SANscreen to determine which servers will be affected.  He can then notify the server administrators of an upcoming outage, and they can plan accordingly.  When he told me that, I then added “and the applications owners, too, right?”  To which he responded, “Oh, no.  For security reasons, I’m not allowed to see which applications run on which servers.”  That answer was a surprise to me, since when I recently asked a storage administrator at a major financial institution how his job was changing, he told me that he was now accountable not simply for storage system performance, but for application performance.  Perhaps, however, his answer shouldn’t have been a surprise, since the company recently fell victim to a substantial security breach and had a heightened awareness of the need for separation of duties.

What all this means to management-application developers is that they need to be mindful of the fact that there are significant differences in how companies handle IT governance.  While one company might give a single person control of application software, servers, networking, storage and data, others will separate those roles into isolated functions.  A management-software solution that will serve the entire market has to be designed with sufficient flexibility to enable secure, customizable, role-based reporting, regardless of how the customers choose to organize.  It also means that while many things are possible, such as running storage as an application in a virtualized server, for reasons of separation of duties, it may not be desirable for some companies.

BzzAgent claims to have 400,000 “buzz agents,” who have agreed to review products and services and to share with their friends and colleagues their honest opinion.  BzzAgents get the products for free.  They test them.  And they create buzz.  The buzz could be good, or it could be bad, but it’s buzz.  I don’t know if Iron Mountain Digital uses BzzAgent, but I can see the fit, since, Iron Mountain offers desktop and server backup services to homes and businesses. 

At the $80,000 entry price that Megan mentioned, you’ll want to get a lot of buzz for the investment, and you’ll want to have enough confidence in your product to expect that most of the buzz will be good.   In the consumer products and services area, I see a great opportunity to leverage BzzAgent.  It’s hard to see the fit for the kinds of enterprise IT infrastructure providers with whom we are working. But, Megan suggested I check out their Frogpond offering, which I will do when I get a chance. 

In the meantime, after listening to the pitch from Megan, I decided to sign up myself.  I am now officially a BzzAgent.  I’ll let you know how it goes.  For now, I’ve just filled out a bunch of surveys about my drinking habits (softdrink and otherwise).  Fortunately, the fortunes of Coke and Pepsi don’t depend much on my soft-drink habits. If they did, the companies would be broke.

In the first survey, I got a lot of feedback.  Almost an hour’s worth.  There was some very positive feedback about certain components of the offering, but I heard many more negative comments, such as:

• They are barely keeping up with free alternatives.
• The leadership was great for a startup, but needs to step aside if they are to get to the next level.
• They are not listening to their customers.
• They treat everyone the same, and don’t listen to the different needs of different customers.
• No one thinks their product or their service is adequate.
• I have to go to a third party to fix the problems they aren’t addressing, and I know other customers who are doing the same thing.
• I shouldn’t have to pay someone else to do the job that they should be doing.

I was fully prepared to hear more of the same when I started the second interview, but instead I heard:

• They exceeded my expectations.
• They are extraordinary.
• They are terrific.
• Ridiculously good.
• Great management and a great product!
• They are very flexible.
• What more could you want?

It might be easy to dismiss the negative feedback by saying, “Well, you can’t please everyone.”  Remember, however, that the person providing the constructive, but very negative feedback really wants the company to succeed.  That person might respond to the one giving the glowing report, “They are blind to the reality of the situation, and they are not helping them improve.”  Both individuals use the same product.  But they also have vastly different expectations, and thus vastly different experiences when using the product. 

In any startup, it is critically important to identify and market to the opportunities with customers that you can satisfy, and not try to market to everyone.  I know that may seem patently obvious, but too many startups chase every opportunity and respond to every expressed need with, “Yeh, we could do that.”  The correct answer in most cases is, “No, we can’t do that now. We do this.  Do you know anyone who needs this?” 

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.

It reminds me of work that I did several years ago with a company called Innosight, leveraging a Jobs-To-Be-Done methodology for product development.  It seems that Skype is well along the path of thinking this way.  In addition, Skype is using blogs to keep an open line of communications with customers, who can be the most significant source of innovation. 

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:

Toigo Partners will be in Orlando on Monday April 7 through Tuesday April 8. THIS IS NOT AFFILIATED IN ANY WAY WITH STORAGE NETWORKING WORLD.

We will be meeting with select vendors and clients from 10AM 4/7 through 3PM 4/8. Some meetings will be videotaped for StorageTV, only with the consent of the attendees.

The current plan is to use the suite where we will be staying for one on one meetings. However, the venue may shift to the boardroom facility at the site.

Book your time now.

Residence Inn® by Marriott® Orlando Lake Buena Vista
11450 Marbella Palm Court
Orlando, Florida 32836 USA
Phone:1-407-465-0075
Fax: 1-407-465-0050
Maps and driving directions can be found on the website

OK, the cut and paste is not entirely accurate, because Skype, which I started using recently, has cleverly formatted every voice (but not fax) number it sees in my internet browser to an opportunity to use (or ad for) the Skype service.

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:

1. Install EMC’s Invista and watch your troubles disappear.
2. Install HDS’s USP and watch your troubles disappear.
3. Install IBM’s SVC and watch your troubles disappear.
4. Abandon hope. There’s no such thing as a blazingly-fast, infinitely-scalable storage area network that provides non-disruptive data migration.
5. Abandon hope.  While blazingly-fast, infinitely-scalable storage area networks exist, you can’t get there from here.
6. Do nothing. You don’t have enough information. 
7. This is a trick question.  SMB’s don’t have Storage Administrators.

It’s Saturday, and I finally have a little time to read some of my favorite tech blogs.  Reading blogs for me is a little bit like taking a slow rambling walk.  Starting with the percipient Jon Toigo, blog author of DrunkenData, whose recent post reminded me once again that he is not writing UIAS (Under the Influence of Ad Sales), I followed a comment posted by Chris Mellor of TechWorld, which lead to a post that he had done on IBM SVC vs. HDS USP, which then, after reading the discussion, lead me to Barry Whyte, an IBM Master Inventor, who writes his own storage blog and therein recommended that SMB’s (Small and Medium Businesses) use IBM’s SVC to achieve data migrations.

In all of the discussion about where virtualization should be and who can truly provide non-disruptive data migration in a storage virtualization solution, I’m reminded of a discussion a long time ago with Dave Vellante, former IDC executive, and recent founder of Wikibon.  Dave knows a little bit about horse racing, and he tells me there are different horses for different courses.  Some horses are good mudders.  Others are good on a dry track.  Some are good at 5 furlongs. Others on a longer track.  I know nothing about horses nor horse racing, but do know a bit about the differences in company requirements, particularly as it relates to such things as computer storage.

In the world of storage, there are, as Dave would say, horses for courses.  And when asked the question, “What’s the right storage solution?”, the only correct answer can be “It depends.”  Each of the solutions mentioned in the blog posts has a fit.  They just don’t fit everywhere.  One of my clients, StorMagic, has a very good solution for the SMB market.  It was designed specifically for the SMB, in fact, more S than M.  It’s not a good solution for large data centers with massive storage requirements.  But it scales large enough, and performs well enough, and is affordable enough, for even the smaller end of the SMB market segment.  Even with claims of being an appropriate solution for SMBs, if IBM SVC, HDS USP, or EMC Invista show up competing for the same deal, one of the companies is in the wrong deal and wasting their time.

The positioning of StorMagic is for those who would answer #7 to the question above.  While the solution is not infinitely scalable, it does enable completely transparent data migration, without screwing up drive letters, and it provides on-the-fly storage upgrade capabilities, at a price small customers can afford.

I hope to see you at SNW or the “Not SNW” event.

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.

Conservation of cash is critical in any startup.  And while you may not want to use Skype for important meetings with potential customers, the technology is more than good enough, given a halfway decent internet connection, for internal meetings.  And the video capabilities add a nice, friendly touch.  So save your cash!

Today I made four Skype calls to my client, StorMagic, in the UK, at no additional cost.  And whenever possible, I’ll do future calls with my client, Axxana, in Israel, using Skype.  Given that I work with startups, it’s a nice way to help them save money, too.

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

The big difference at Tek-Tools is that the product family is truly modular. If you only want reporting for your TSM environment, you get Profiler for TSM. If you only want reporting on your NetApp filers, you get Profiler for NetApp. And if you only want VMware reporting, you get Profiler for VMware.If you are a startup and you have big dreams of starting small and branching out broadly as you grow, remember to keep your architecture modular. One tightly integrated environment might seem like the right approach, but as you grow, your development efforts will be crushed under their own weight. And, unless you want to sell to the rare few that value the full set of tools, you better be able to sell the one tool that gets the job done. Sometimes, all you really need is a knife.

• Maximized seat density, making it impossible for anyone with an inseam greater than 32″ to slouch in the seat.
• Eliminated the removable safety-instructions card and replaced them with laminated labels on each seatback.
• Eliminated the seat-back pockets so passengers won’t put trash in them, thus reducing the time to clean a plane.
• Boarded and deplaned from both the front and the rear of the plane, thus reducing the airport turnaround time to about 25 minutes.
• Standardized on a single style plane, the Boeing 737-800, to reduce pilot and crew costs.
• Arranged for landing rights and terminal gates in the lowest-cost locations in Europe.

You may be asking, “If RyanAir’s not in the airline business, then what business are they in?”  Well, here’s a hint…

Here’s my flight attendant from my latest RyanAir flight from Bristol to Dublin. Those cards in her right hand are scratch cards.  Yes, you, too, could win 1,000,000 Euros, which, by the way, are worth a lot more than $1,000,000 these days.

From the moment she checked us through the gate, until the moment I retrieved my slightly-damaged baggage, she worked constantly, jumping effortlessly from one business to the next. 

Here’s my partial list of RyanAir businesses that she supported:

• Parcel delivery services
• Gaming
• Newspaper sales
• Food and softdrinks sales
• Alcohol sales
• Airport transfer services
• Car rentals (or Car Hires for those in Europe)
• Advertising services
• Catalog sales

I also saw 42 banner ads for alpine ski vacations covering the overhead bins and approximately 150 ads for Inviseo Media on the seat backs in front of us.

My favorite ads were the ones for 2-for-1 specials on Bullseye Baggies of Super Premium Vodka that were taped like streamers below the bins.

If you go to the RyanAir website, you’ll find even more services, including airport parking, airport transfer tickets, concert and sporting event tickets, hostels and bed and breakfast rentals, and even utilities, as in gas and electricity.

Now, I’m not sure what all this means for startups, except to say that one clever company figured out that you can look like your in one business, while actually being in another (or several others).  It’s a good thing that RyanAir’s not in the airline business.  I hear that’s not very profitable these days.

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. 

Current approaches leave plenty of room for new companies and new innovations.  And budget stresses at data centers create both the opportunity and requirement for innovative approaches.  We think we have chosen a few companies with innovative approaches.  What these smaller companies tend to do is innovate faster than larger companies.  What they can’t always do is test their solution among every one of the 10,000,000 possible combinations of hardware, software, and microcode options available.  Actually, I’m making that number up.  It’s really much greater. More likely in the trillions or quadrillions.

The role we have taken in the last year, is to find opportunities to put innovative, smaller companies together with large companies with the reach and interoperability testing capabilities that can help the innovation reach its full potential.

Thanks to Vernon Turner for bringing this YouTube link to my attention a year ago.