Marketing masquerading as “Tech Journalism”, Or how not to write a stealth press release

Let me preface this by saying that this may come across as snarky and malicious, but that’s not the full intent. I’m using this as a simple illustration of what bothers me about tech journalism. There is a trend I continue to see in technical marketing that bothers me to no end, it’s the press release that masquerades as a legitimate piece of tech reporting.

Case in point, this piece by Mike Vizard at IT Business Edge. There is so much wrong in this piece that I felt compelled to address it.

One of the first storage vendors to add specific support for the vStorage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI) in VMware vSphere is Tintri, a provider of storage appliances that combine Flash memory and SATA drives in a way that is specifically optimized for the VMware file system.

Interesting. A company founded in 2008, that doesn’t even come out of stealth until March 2011, somehow is one of the first storage vendors to add support for VAAI which was first referenced by EMC Japan in June 2010, and announced by VMware with the release of vSphere 4.1 in July 2010.  Whats that, almost a year before Tintri even ships its first box?

And what of being one of the “first” to offer VAAI support? Well given that Tintri still doesn’t (it’s coming this summer), I’d say that claim is a little off. In reality,EMC, 3Par, and Netapp were the first groups to really offer VAAI support on their arrays. IBM followed up pretty quick on their XIV and Storwise platforms. Compellent, HP, etc. etc. all soon followed.The list was initially pretty small, but if you look at the HCL today its growing with most of the Enterprise players having support for the first 3 primitives, and most supporting all 5 with the release of vSphere5.

Trust me, tech journalism isn’t the only group out there that takes a press release and regurgitates it to appear as a researched article with “facts”, the political press has done this for years. It’s sloppy and lazy, and frankly we deserve better.

For the record, I love what Tintri is doing and wish I could get one of their rigs to play with. This is by no means an attack on them, there are some really scary smart people working on that team. I spent almost half an hour with Dr. Harty at VMWorld going over the product and getting some real insight into what Tintri wants to do with their systems.  Still, it doesn’t do them any benefit to make claims that are simply not correct.

 

This entry was posted in Storage, Storage & Virtualization, Tech Marketing, VMWare. Bookmark the permalink.

1 Response to Marketing masquerading as “Tech Journalism”, Or how not to write a stealth press release

  1. Richard Powers says:

    Maybe their array is so fast that the IOs time travel

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