Epic Facepalm: MS Azure Storage Cloud Down

Posted on February 22, 2013 by Gabriel

2-22-2013 1-52-20 PM

How an oversight of this magnitude appears for what I would consider is a mission critical platform like Cloud Storage is beyond my basic comprehension. It will be interesting to see what the blow back will be and how the Technology Press reports (or if they report) on this. As of right now I’ve only seen a handful of tweets about customers not being able to access the platform or having issues with their storage. I’ll be curious to see how quickly they can get this back up, honestly it shouldn’t be taking more than an hour if that, but almost 1 hour 10 minutes into this and its still a problem.

The service dashboard is still showing many areas with problems.

notgood

This comes on the heels of some breathless reporting earlier this week about Azure taking over from Amazon in the storage arena.  Microsoft Azure pips Amazon as king of cloud storage. Let me hazard a guess that the title of “king” might be changing hands soon. And because everyone loves a good laugh, file this under poorly timed tweets:

badtiming

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited: 8:08PM PST: a full 6 hours after I posted this and Current Status:

Storage is currently experiencing a worldwide outage impacting HTTPS operations (SSL traffic) due to an expired certificate. HTTP traffic is not impacted. We are validating the recovery options before implementing them. Further updates will be published to keep you apprised of the situation. We apologize for any inconvenience this causes our customers. Status of affected services will be updated in  the table below.

Ouch. This is why the storage “Cloud” isn’t ready for prime time. If something as simple as an SSL cert expiration can bring down a global platform, the true Enterprise will not trust it, in fact even the SMB-Mid market won’t. Then again, it depends on what you are putting up there to begin with. Is it just tertiary storage for long term retention or is it something mission critical? If its the latter, sucks to be you.

For those of us who work in the Enterprise IT arena, and have to deal with the end user space, its a very tough sell when it comes to pushing cloud solutions that have not been tested over time. And while the technical press might focus on something like “performance”, I’d rather wager my reputation on longevity and consistency. Not ready for prime time might be a better way to look at it, or good enough for things that won’t cripple my cash flow may be better.

Posted in Cloud Storage, Facepalm | Leave a comment

I am your technical resource on the sales team.

Posted on January 24, 2013 by Gabriel

keep-calm-and-join-the-dark-side-42I am here to do lots of things that I’ve never done before.

Roughly ten months into the embrace of the “Dark Side” and it’s time for a bit of a brain dump. I’m heading into my first Sales Kick Off in a few days where I will get to sit through countless hours of marketing presentations, some technical deep dives (if I’m lucky), and very long days (7am to 1am looks like I will be mainlining RedBull) . It’s been a bit of a challenge and I’ve faced some things that I feel are kind of unique for a newbie. For some of the situations I’ve faced, I have tried to seek answers online and have come up short. Resources and blog postings for Sales Engineers are kind of few and far between. There are a few good books out there, but it’s been my experience that reading and research alone are no substitutes for the experience you will gain on the job first hand. I believe this is why many jobs in the sales engineering role require experience before they will hire you.

So, what do I do?

I work for a small IO devices manufacturer that works with most of the top OEMs in the server and storage connectivity space. Alas HBA’s and CNA’s are not at the forefront of purchasing decisions, but I like the fact that we engage with the end users and channel partners to assist the customer base. If I had to breakdown what I do on a daily basis it would round out to this:

  •  Understand end user business requirements and how our technology can best serve them
  • Provide answers to technical questions that involve our product line and how they interact with the components of the OEM manufacturers that rebrand our technology
  • Demonstrate the value of our product line and why it is a better choice than that of our competitors (but don’t be a dick and FUD up the place in the process, though this doesn’t mean that you can’t shut down FUD when confronted with it)
  • Evaluate the competitive landscape and identify trends within the industry
  • Evangelize on behalf of our products and the vendors and groups we partner with
  • Present product information from a high to low level taking into account my audience and their skill level
  • Support the sales team from inside, channel and account managers as much as possible

Sounds easy doesn’t it?

zoolander-mugatu-crazy-pills Sometimes I feel like I’m taking crazy pills. It’s one thing to know about your own product line, it’s another to know how it best benefits and compliments your partner’s technologies. For a good portion of my career in IT, I worked with Dell and IBM servers and storage products. Now I find that I have to be up to date on the server and storage lines from nearly every tier 1 and 2 manufacturer, as well as their own special flavor of network Virtualization  and storage platform specifics. For the most part, each of the major big groups are doing something similar with the technology we provide them, they simply package it a little differently and utilize either other OEM components they are re-branding or components from acquisitions. The workflows and how they want to configure, deploy, and what functionality they want to keep or discard is where it can get a little more complicated. Throw in also that each wants to have their own delivery method for firmware, drivers, updates, etc and it’s enough to drive one a little mad.

This leads to my first difficulty, you can end up being miles wide and inches deep. How do you cope and deal with that? Well that’s where the other part of my job comes in:

  • Network with your peers and associates to build technical relationships
  • Serve as a resource for those same peers and encourage them to rely on you for expert advice
  • Discover new opportunities that are mutually beneficial to you and your partner groups business goals
  • Cross train with other sales and system engineers within your own group and outside
  • Be the customers advocate in the sales cycle and champion their needs

I’ve got people skills:

tom2That last one is important, because I’ve always been a people person for the most part and I like to build relationships with the people I work with. This also counts for the people I sell solutions to. I firmly believe that people will buy from people they like. I did it myself, and I think it’s a part of human nature to want to do business with people you can trust and rely on. In my previous career I was burned by a few VAR’s, in fact I have to call on those same groups today, and I really have to check myself at the door before I go into situations where I have to work with those same people. I guess you might call that “being professional”. One thing about this business is that it is a small world, and everyone knows everyone else. One day you can be competing with someone across the aisle  the next day you are working with them hand in hand.

In the end what it boils down to is treat others as you wish them to treat you. I think this is where my history on the other side of the aisle is beneficial; it’s that whole put yourself in the other persons shoes form of personal interaction.

This leads me to some of the great advice I was given. I wish I could say I wrote this myself but I didn’t  my boss sent me this:

  •   When I am on a sales call my customer expects me to have expertise in my chosen field.  When they want to draw on that expertise my customer will ask me questions
  • When I answer I will be clear, concise and I shall not bloviate
  • My sales rep no matter how junior or senior is fighting for this business.  They have called on me to be their teammate
  • I will never interrupt my sales rep or my customer.  If I do they will never forgive me because they don’t have to.
  • If I don’t know the answer I shall answer “I don’t know”.  Then I will make a commitment to take the question as a follow up action
  • I will follow up on every action I commit to.

I think that list is pretty succinct, and it can apply to a lot of things outside of simply interacting with customers. I naturally like to talk so I have to constantly remind myself to settle and slow down when interacting with customers. I also have found that there is a special science of knowing when to inject your thoughts into a conversation, and how best to word responses. I do find myself re-reading customer correspondence emails several times before I send them and I like to keep things short and simple. I also have made it a rule to attempt to respond to email or calls in a quick manner, usually no less than 20 minutes if possible.

There are some major changes coming up that I honestly have no idea how they will effect my current role; if it changes, stays the same, mutates into something else. I just don’t know. I will say this though, that I really enjoy what I’m doing, I enjoy the customer interaction, the learning about new environments, new technologies, and the general style of camaraderie that you get within the sales side of things. I equate it partly to my past military life, but with far less major conflict in foreign nations and all that jazz.

 

Posted in Sales Engineering, Whazzup | 2 Comments

TechCrunch seems a little fixated on something

Posted on January 23, 2013 by Gabriel

really-techcrunchHmmm I wonder what it could be? I’m pretty sure  nearly everyone of those “articles” could be combined into one decent article that discussed the Apple earnings report, but then there would be 20 out of work “writers” clogging up the unemployment system.

 

Posted in Bad Media, Tech Marketing | Leave a comment

Patent Law: EMC vs Zerto, sometimes it’s “personal”

Posted on January 23, 2013 by Gabriel

nilIt seems like the last few years  have seen a plethora of lawsuits between major players against smaller competitors who have started to encroach upon their business. I have written about Symantec vs Veeam/Acronis in the past and I continue to have a keen interest in the use of patent infringement law and its deployment as a weapon against competitors. Let me preface the following by saying that a company has every right to litigate against another that infringes upon their intellectual property. I do believe that there are legitimate cases to be made for infringement, but I also believe that the process in which overly broad patents are awarded is broken to the point that its harmful to innovation and a competitive and open playing field for businesses today. Patent trolls continue to abuse the system and are a significant problem that has yet to be addressed fully.

But what really gets my goat:

Is selective patent enforcement. I believe that if anyone infringes on your licensed intellectual property and you bring suit, then you should not be only able to selectively enforce the patents against a select group. Meaning, if two companies are infringing on your technology you should have to sue both of them, not just the one you want to punish.  Also, if let’s say Company A has a technology that they license to Company C, and it infringes on say Company B’s technology  then Company A should be on the hook for legal costs associated with any suit. This tends to not be the case in many instances, especially in manufacturing where contacts will have liability limit clauses.

If it sounds convoluted and confusing, it kind of is. Legal fees for a basic defense can rack up quickly into the multi-millions, and in many cases the only group who comes out on top financially is the attorneys who get to reap hundreds of hours of fees as well as payments to legal experts who testify.  The perceived tendency is for both parties to reach agreement without going to trial, as it saves considerably on costs, but there are always those cases where one company will refuse to settle regardless of benefit, and are using the legal system to put a company out of business or punish them. Sometimes it’s not even due to any loss of business, it’s simply personal

Time for some rank speculation on my part:

Now as for EMC vs Zerto: reading through the initial filing, I think the case could be made for an infringement claim on its face, but I think it could also be “personal”. I have friends who work at both companies, so it’s one of those delicate situations to discuss. Also, the problem with a simple filing is that it provides only one side of the story and so far I’ve not seen any legal response to the initial filing so its hard to see where both parties are coming from.

Sometimes you can read through the lines to get the general impression of whats at stake. The simple  story revolves around 3 patents all stemming from Recovery Point Manager which is an EMC product that both of the primarily founders of Zerto worked on while at EMC. I think the key factor here is that EMC bought Kashya (where the Zerto Founders came to EMC) and in turn own certain technologies that EMC is stating that Zerto is infringing upon.

To me, a case like this should be pretty straight forward and will hinge on independent code review to see if the technology indeed infringes.  Still, I can’t help but think that Zerto isn’t cutting too much into EMC’s bottom line (I’d think more VMware and their SRM product), but given the history of the relationships between the parties involved, this may just be “personal”.

I’d hazard a guess that the vast majority of people who read this had no idea that the two companies were engaged in legal processes, and I have not seen much if anything in the trade press regarding this suit. It was only brought to my attention via discussion on twitter. Technology is a tough business, stuff like this makes it tougher. I’m interested to see where this goes because I know a lot of people like the Zerto product, and they have gained significant momentum with their Best of VMworld 2011 win. I will simply have to wait and see what comes next.

 

 

Posted in Patent Law | 11 Comments

Life Imitates Facebook

Posted on January 9, 2013 by Gabriel

File under Facepalm/Epic Fail on my part.

 

facepalm2

Posted in Facepalm | Tagged | Leave a comment

ATWT: Around the Web Today

Posted on January 8, 2013 by Gabriel

Just some random musing found today:

Around-The-Web1

Chris Evans: Storage QoS – How hard can it be? Apparently hard, and no SSD’s will not fix everything.

Got mad Vmware skillz? Live in Phoenix, AZ? Hey look a job.

The last people who need it are getting “free wifi” courtesy of Google.

Gobble Gobble, EMC buys iWave.

Low Latency Summit is in London this Spring, alas I probably won’t be going.

Where we’re going we won’t need roads, The Journey you need to take to deliver IaaS.

VNX and Celerra VSA’s to download (very useful)

Facebook going direct for storage, which makes sense when you have the budget and storage needs they do.

Speaking In Tech #40: George Reese

 

Posted in ATWT | Leave a comment

I took a vacation and forgot to read stuff

Posted on January 7, 2013 by Gabriel

Fun fact: this was the first holiday period I have didn’t have to work through in probably the last 12 years. Vacation or Holiday downtime in the past has consisted of me carrying my phone and laptop around with me and being tethered to both over Christmas and New Years. Normally, I’ve always had a smart phone for at a bare minimum the ability to check email and respond quickly, if not having had my laptop within reach to fire up and remote into the office to fix or put out a fire. So since transitioning to the non-IT side for the first time in many years, I was able to simply have time off, unchained from my electronic devices and the worry of a server crashing. For the record, it was awesome.

Fun fact 2: if you dont check your RSS feeds for two weeks you end up with 2800+ unread items.

I’ve had discussions with other people about how we consume media and content. I’ve been an avid user of Google Reader for some time now. I have specific plugins that help me categorize and sift through the hundreds of feeds. I’ve always used Colorful list view as I hated Googles obsession with white space:
RSSfeeds

 

See that’s a typical glance at consumption for me, I probably will ready through 50 full articles (or at least skim them) per day, cursory glance another 100-200, and skip over some others. I think on average I’m getting anywhere from 150-300 new articles a day in the full spectrum of everything I’m reading, but I probably only read 25-35% of them. Some are redundant and repeat a bit, some are initially not interesting to me or not subjects that are on my radar.  The trends stats are misleading since I read on my phone, ipad, work, and home computers

From your 187 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 1,332 items, clicked 369 items

Still I don’t have a full frame of reference to compare my reading habits to others. I’d be curious to know if I’m low consumption or high, or maybe just in the middle. Google has made changes to the reader platform that I have not liked in the past that made it almost all but useless. I’ve found that once I get into a consumption habit, the routine is a daily thing and I tend to follow a certain type of reading ritual.

My RSS feed list in its current form is much smaller than when I first started out, and its far more tailored towards work activities now. When I did other forms of blogging many years ago, the list had several hundred feeds on it, now its sitting at a more manageable 187 (though I plan to shrink it down to get rid of the sites that don’t update. Still, I find that Google Reader for me is the best platform for mass media consumption. I don’t use the star function, though I probably should. My fear with that is akin to my fear of thin provisioning. I may forget and let it grow too large.

Posted in Social Media | Leave a comment

Tech Reporting Should Be Better

Posted on December 12, 2012 by Gabriel

double-facepalmMy RSS feed has a lot of technology reporting sites in it. I keep most of the feeds segmented into groups like Virtualization, Storage, etc. The interesting thing in doing it that way is that you get to see a lot of different sites headlines in rapid succession.

One thing  I’ve noticed over the last year or so, there are tech news/aggregation/blog sites that simply crib each other and call it reporting. But in reality,  Its simply a regurgitation of the same rote talking points with a different banner at the top.

Don’t believe me, look at the coverage of a company you’ve never heard of, Chill:

copycat

Yeah, thats 3 sites, publishing within in a few seconds of each other, essentially the same article. I’m not even sure I blame these guys for this kind of reporting, because the pay for click model is what drives it. Still it doesn’t mean that its a good thing, in fact, when I see stuff like this it leads me to simply gloss over content and ignore the site completely.  Perhaps the way I ingest content is not how others do and this is simply an issue for me.

Now lets take for instance the announcement of Juniper buying out virtually unheard of SDN “provider” Contrail for 176 Million in Cash and Stock (initially reported 5 days ago at StreetInsider)

Here is All Things D:  Juniper Spends $176 Million on Networking Start-Up Contrail and then there is GigaOm: Juniper to buy SDN startup Contrail in Deal worth $176M

Both of those articles are nearly identical, and neither go much farther than simply rewording a press release, and honestly I expect a certain level of actual reporting and or digging and getting to the actual meat of the issue when it comes to tech coverage. There seems to be a total lack of curiosity in a lot of this coverage. The critical analysis really isnt there. Perhaps I’m being nitpicky, perhaps I just like my tech reporting to have a little more snark and skepticism.

So who does it right? Well The Register actually manages to put two and two together:

It is also just as likely that Juniper wanted to get Kireeti Kompella, formerly CTO and Chief Architect at Juniper before he left to be CTO at Contrail, back on board.

Same with Enterprise Networking Planet who goes into far more depth than pretty much anyone else.

Contrail and Juniper aren’t entirely strangers in terms of staffing either. Kireeti Kompell CTO of Contrail was formerly the CTO and Chief Architect for Junos at Juniper. Junos is the core network operating system that underpins all of Juniper’s networking gear

I’m still waiting for TechCrunch and Pando Daily to put up their pieces about this. I’m guessing there was a holiday party that all the interns were invited to so maybe they are busy, but rest assured they will come out with something soon. Since crafting the bulk of this post last night not much has really changed, other than I noticed that a few more details were added to the articles above. For me thats part of the problem with the desire to be first with the headline, but last with the details.

 

Posted in Enterprise Tech, Facepalm, Tech Marketing | 2 Comments

FUD WARS – Educational Benefits

Posted on December 10, 2012 by Gabriel


FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) have a long history of being deployed as a weapon of choice in the vendor space. I think we have all seen our fair share of mud flinging either in good sporting gest, or in some instances, full fledged battle.

This last week brought us Storagezilla vs StorageMojo who got into a spat about EMC and their XtremeIO (aka Project X).

Opening Salvo:

StorageMojo: EMC’s Pravda, Chuck Hollis, chats in an interview about XtremIO’s problems. This quote from a Storage Newsletter interview may have some transcription errors, since SN is a French publication, but let’s not split hairs.

Followed by a Jules-esque Retort:

 Storagezilla: Looking to generate some cheap heat (And because EMC doesn’t speak to him at all) Robin Harris has started making things up about Project X.

Storagebod commented about the whole affair today as well.

Seeing the latest spat involving EMC regarding Xtreme-IO is kind of nice; it feels like the arguments of days gone by; swap NAS and Flash, you’ll probably find the same blog entries work and the same arguments made.

Pretty tame by Storage FUD Wars standards, but interesting all the same. You have to go back to the battles that raged from the years 2007 to 2010 to get a feeling for the long protracted combat that took place. By comparison what transpired above would have served as an Amuse–bouche to cleanse the palate. Back when the FUD was flung hot and heavy I was simply a spectator on the sidelines who watched with great amusement as some of the major players in online storage marketecture would battle it out on the comments pages of the various storage blogs. I will say this about the FUD Wars, they were educational, and I learned a lot about the various vendors, their selling practices, and their systems benefits/faults by watching them take place.

For example, because I was an early XIV adopter I would scour online for information about the platform, one of the better FUD battles regarding the platform took place on the pages of Wikibon.  Phil (aka Rootwyrm) lead the charge, and while Phil and I disagree when it came to XIV (and other things) he is a very good technical resource on a lot of things, and I’d recommend checking out his site Error 404. I’ve learned a lot from him over the years, and I owe that to the FUD Wars.

Dimitrious (aka Recovery Monkey) had a pretty big FUD Fest when he called out EMC when their VNX launched. His site has some truly great technical knowledge when it comes to performance metrics, and the SPEC performance results. His post on Short-Stroking is well worth a read for the depth he goes into to explain the practice and how its used in performance testing.

One more for fun was the hot mess that Hu Yoshida got into with SVC back in 2009, with a follow up   later in a tit-for-tat between Hu and Tony Pearson of IBM over the SVC vs VSP platforms. This serves more as an example of the longevity of what some might call “bad blood” between some of the vendors, it also serves as a reminder that this is a business, and things can and do get heated and even personal.

I link to these events not to call out the people or the companies involved, but to illustrate a point that a FUD can serve a purpose. For me the FUD Wars were a great education into the storage world, and the various vendors products. I used the FUD points about the XIV system to help validate the platform when Moshe  came to discuss the platform at our offices, and in the end the rebuttal to the points brought up helped us understand the platforms potential faults and benefits.

Now that I work in the vendor space myself, FUD can become one of many tools that can be deployed in the sales process. For me personally, FUD isn’t the thing I like to lead with. I believe that if the products merits should be able to close the sale, but there can be some instances when there is a need to fight FUD with FUD, and when those occasions arise, I may reach into my quiver.

Posted in FUD Wars, Storage, Tech Marketing | Leave a comment

Yes more Veeam Holiday Goodness Giveaways

Posted on December 10, 2012 by Gabriel

Full disclosure, I have many friends who work at Veeam, I have also been a guest of theirs as a customer reference in 2011. That said, I’ve written a bit about Veeam in the past on this blog. I’ve also used their products since 2009 for my own production and lab environments. My personal preference when it comes to using tools for monitoring, as well as backup and replication is to keep it simple; design to meet SLA’s and ensure the ability to meet RPO/RTO. On the monitoring front, I want agent-less if possible, with the bonus of having historical metrics that can go back at least one year,

My move to the Veeam suite was reached in tandem with my growth in understanding of VMware and virtualization in general. In our first true ESX  deployment came the recommendations from the VAR we were working with to use the vRanger and vFoglight products. Suffice it to say, I didn’t know what I didn’t know and what at first glance appeared to be solid products that provided the kind of functionality we were looking for, turned out to be less than what we expected.  That said, when the time came to build out more advanced production clusters, and with the knowledge gained over the previous years endeavors  I was armed with a greater understanding of what the environment called for and we moved to  using the Veeam suite of products for Backup/Recovery and Monitoring.

So theres some history, but the true thrust of this post is to highlight the New Years Gift that Veeam is presenting which is a wicked home lab.

  • TWO HP ProLiant ML 310e G8 Servers
  • NETGEAR ReadyNAS storage system with 4 SSDs drives
  • HP V1410-16G Ethernet switch
  • TechNet Plus subscription for 1 year
  • Online course, books and test from
    VMware Education Services or Microsoft Learning
  • …and a MICROSOFT SURFACE!

Pretty sweet setup. I shall say that I wouldn’t mind winning that rig myself and thus, increasing my ever growing power bill in the process. So do yourself a favor, head over and register at the Veeam site for your chance to win. I’m in the process of a new lab build out myself so as soon as I get it up and running I’ll be checking out the new Veeam Enterprise class products and write up a review to share.


Posted in Backup & Recovery, Hyper-V, Veeam, VMWare | 1 Comment