The Wikibon Blog - Latest Comments

Re: CEOs: Five Reasons Your CIO Quits

Scott Lowe — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 17:52:42 -0000

Michael - I actually agree with you on all points. CIOs that fail to do these things will be marginalized at best and fired at worst. However, even the best CIOs can sometimes find themselves working for the worst CEOs. In these situations, it becomes more likely that one or more of my five points will rear its head and drive the CIO to greener pastures where he can be successful by being allowed to employ the strategies you outlined.

Re: CEOs: Five Reasons Your CIO Quits

Michael Keen — Sun, 16 Jun 2013 13:15:42 -0000

Scott, I hate to say it man, but this is totally off base. CIOs are relegated to "keeping the lights on" because they have no idea, for the most part, on how to do anything but. Even though CIOs want to be engaged with the business, they don't speak the language and, again for the most part, don't understand how the business works and what the drivers are. If CIOs want to be successful, then throw away the old legacy mindsets and be a new type of business technology leader. If CIOs can't articulate how IT contributes to the following 4 things, then you are from becoming engaged more deeply with the business:
1. How does IT contribute to top-line growth?
2. How does IT contribute to bottom-line growth?
3. Can you, Mr. CIO, communicate clearly and effectively the return on invested capital and how IT helps with this?
4. How does IT contribute to the overall company reputation?
Approach everything in IT with this mindset and you wll be on your way to success.

Re: CEOs: Five Reasons Your CIO Quits

Alessandro Giacchino — Sat, 15 Jun 2013 08:24:10 -0000

"Of course, not all CIOs report directly to the CEO. Many report to
COOs or CFOs, which is perfectly fine as long as the CIO isn’t a second
string player in strategy discussions."

I totally agree: I think that CIO should be more Chief Innovation Officer, than Information, so when CIO report to COO/CFO there is no way to innovate, but just to be part of the "business as usual", focusing of saving costs.
Also, in my blog http://www.itware.com - unfortunatly for you in Italian - it's a long time now that I'm speaking about the new acronim CDO, where D stands for Digital, meaning that all process/documents/activities must now be digitalized.

Take, for example, the Marketing Department: how they could work without all digital technologies (Web, Social Networks, Mail Marketing, Article Marketing), or e-Commerce, or Big Data, or Mobile devices?
And who should be in charge to provide them the solutions, integrated whit the tradictional IT? How could that happen if the CIO/CDO would be reporting to CFO?

Re: New Gartner Magic Quadrant Signals an End to Traditional “Storage Arrays”

Ozzman — Tue, 11 Jun 2013 21:56:52 -0000

I find it amusing that you refer to "traditional Tier 1 players (IBM, HDS and EMC)". NetApp is the second largest storage provider in the world, over 6 billion turnover and has the most widely deployed storage O/S. Until the recent acquisition of Engenio, NetApp only had a single unfied storage offering, technically making them the largest and most focused storage company globally. Take a look a previous gartner NAS and SAN charts and you will see that NetApp have lead for many years... and you call them Tier 2. pffff!

Re: With Pivotal Investment, GE Takes on IBM to Win the Industrial Internet

returnofthemus — Thu, 06 Jun 2013 07:23:59 -0000

Not sure I'd view it quite as dramatically, though it does give GE an opportunity to leverage some of its inhouse expertise without all of the risk.
However, Big Blues recent $2Bln intention to acquire should demonstrate they are not resting on their laurels and even if GE were competing to win, I don't imagine they'd be that far behind.

Re: The Case for HP as the Leader in Converged Infrastructure

returnofthemus — Wed, 05 Jun 2013 12:29:41 -0000

Whilst respecting HP and the Moonshot stuff, very impressive, but noisy, I think when the market eventually matures, they'll end up a close second to IBM, not because of inferior technology, but because when you're talking about application optimised systems there is no one on the planet that does it better. In fact when I hear the term Converged Infrastructure, I think Mainframe, what's the difference?

Re: With Pivotal Investment, GE Takes on IBM to Win the Industrial Internet

greg — Tue, 04 Jun 2013 17:06:02 -0000

maybe they'll just ration your share.

Re: The Case for HP as the Leader in Converged Infrastructure

stu — Tue, 04 Jun 2013 15:01:14 -0000

Hi "Bobby" (would be great if you are transparent as to who you work for) - thanks for bringing up the point that HP leverages merchant silicon and leading components rather than mostly in-house solutions. There is no doubt that Cisco is a strong competitor with a lot of focus on driving converged solutions. Cisco relies on partners for storage. Networking margins have historically been higher than either storage or servers.

Re: The Case for HP as the Leader in Converged Infrastructure

Bobby — Tue, 04 Jun 2013 14:54:53 -0000

HP can't compete with Unified Fabric/CNA/Fcoe/Ucsm/dcnm/prime

Re: CEOs: Five Reasons Your CIO Quits

Jon Alesch — Fri, 31 May 2013 10:02:14 -0000

Agreed. This absolutely tracks with my experience. IT as been asked to understand how the business is run for the last twenty years, and I've seen real effort to step up to that. Conversely, I have seen almost no evidence that business leaders have tried to understand their own technology architecture and how it drives business automation, products and services.

Admittedly, part of a CIO's job is to help bridge that gap, but per the article, I have not experienced even ONE organization (other than those whose products are technology), where the CIO is an active, equal player in the vision and strategy of the company with the rest of the "C" levels. They almost always report up through the CFO (a mistake in my opinion).

Re: Whither NetApp: The Future of a Silicon Valley Icon

Dimitris Krekoukias — Thu, 30 May 2013 08:30:05 -0000

Hi all, Dimitris from NetApp Engineering here.

Jim - it's worthwhile noting that cluster mode does NOT result in a 46% degradation.

See here why for a full explanation:

http://recoverymonkey.org/2011...

We tested under worst-case-scenario conditions, forcing I/O to happen over the cluster network. In a real implementation there would be a lot more direct I/O between host and storage node that owns the capacity.

We did this to help avoid competitor accusations about rigging the test.

Then of course we get commentary like yours.

Some math:

2x 6240, 7-mode ONTAP 8.0.1: 190,675 SPEC SFS NFS ops. Best case scenario - direct access.

24x 6240, C-Mode ONTAP 8.1 (different OS - different overheads): 1,512,784 ops.

Divide that by 12 to get just 2 controllers: 126,065 - worst-case-scenario.

Then there's block performance - which is stellar:

http://recoverymonkey.org/2012...

Your other commentary is interesting - but I will posit that everyone does things differently. Striping across all disks in the array - OK, what does that do to failure domains?

And having multiple RAID types in the same disk - why bother if NetApp does RAID6-equivalent protection for EVERYTHING?

Such arguments are like trying to argue how come a Porsche 911 Turbo has a much smaller engine than a Ford Crown Victoria.

Ultimately - does the architecture solve more customer problems that most other architectures is the question you need to be asking.

I say it does. The feature list is longer than any other storage system out there.

There's tons of innovation - and combining ONTAP 7-mode with the Spinnaker acquisition is what took years.

Other vendors just acquire but never combine. They leave the acquired technologies as-is.

Thx

Re: Whither NetApp: The Future of a Silicon Valley Icon

Jim — Thu, 30 May 2013 04:09:15 -0000

Thanks for this article. It raises some interesting questions in regards NetApp’s future. My opinion is that of the top 5 storage vendors, NetApp is the most vulnerable right now. This opinion comes from a variety of sources but most convincingly from talking to sales reps who have left NetApp over the past year primarily because of the pressure to sell a very problematic Cluster-Mode and because of the lack of overall innovation. NetApp Cluster-Mode sales are growing but so is customer resentment. Many feel pressured to move to NetApp’s more complex and expensive clustered OS, not because of its compelling value proposition, but because that’s where NetApp announced much of its future R&D will go. For example, why would a customer want to move to an OS that cuts their current performance by 46%. You can verify this by comparing NetApp’s single system 2-controller FAS 6240 SPECsfs result to that of their FAS 6240 4-controller Cluster-Mode.
There was a time when NetApp was innovative and had some unique features but those days are gone. Not only has the industry passed them by in performance, block ease-of-use, capacity utilization, rate of innovation, and disaster recovery, but there is a growing sense that their 1992 ONTAP code has been fully tapped out. How else do you explain their ONTAP innovation practically grinding to a halt over the past few years? – and this is the platform on which the entire company depends for its existence. You can test this by asking NetApp customers what NetApp innovations are they currently using that were released in the past two years. All of the popular NetApp features were introduced years ago: including Unified Storage (2003), SnapManager (2000), Dedupe (2007 – originally called Advanced Single Instance Storage or ASIS), Flash Cache (2008 – originally called Performance Acceleration Module or PAM), Cluster-Mode (2006 – originally called GX), and ONTAP 8.0 64-bit OS (2009). NetApp acquired Spinnaker in January 2004 and here it is over 9 years later and NetApp and the industry still talk about Cluster-Mode as if it were just introduced and they’re still working out the bugs. Also, NetApp’s current all-flash array is not based on ONTAP but on non-SSD optimized technology from Engenio. Clearly, NetApp would have loved to make ONTAP their flash platform – they didn’t and there is reason.
At one point in your article, you mentioned how virtualized the NetApp architecture is. I see your point, and I do agree that they (and every other major vendor) have software that works with VMware and other application vendors, but I’m not sure that is a result of NetApp’s prowess in virtualization. All storage is virtualized to some extent, but the more advanced versions manage to stripe across all the disks in the array, put different RAID levels on the same disks, and offer competent thin provisioning. NetApp has none of these. In fact, NetApp enables thin provisioning not by turning on a feature but by turning one off – turning off space reservations, which if you understand the NetApp technology you will know are in there for a very good reason. Also, they have no native ability to reclaim zeroes but require separate SnapDrive licences for each OS. In my opinion, these are not the traits of a highly virtualized array. For all these reasons and more, I believe NetApp is in for some rough years ahead. Note: I work for a NetApp competitor.

Re: Visualizing the Universe of Big Data

Sri — Sun, 26 May 2013 09:57:33 -0000

services and software are swapped in the legend.

Re: CEOs: Five Reasons Your CIO Quits

Adam Gerrard — Fri, 24 May 2013 19:13:48 -0000

all of the above... absolutely spot on!!!

Re: Visualizing the Universe of Big Data

John Knightly — Thu, 16 May 2013 12:58:00 -0000

Cool chart. But it looks like your legend isn't correct. The red and brown colors should be swapped (e.g. software should be red and services brown), assuming Accenture, PWC, etc. are deriving their revenues from services vs software.

Re: With Pivotal Investment, GE Takes on IBM to Win the Industrial Internet

professional web design — Tue, 14 May 2013 01:57:34 -0000

Amazing write-up! Awesome Post.

Re: Inside the Federation at EMC World 2013

professional web design — Tue, 14 May 2013 01:56:30 -0000

Thanks for the well presented post.

Re: Something’s Missing from the Big Data Conversation

JoeLoveATL — Mon, 13 May 2013 11:54:17 -0000

There are some harsh realities in business that make the output of Big Data Analytics less effective. The challenge to overcome these obstacles requires some serious soul searching by Executive Management.

In no particular order and of course not a complete list:

Cart before the horse - Data Governance is an afterthought
Source data is provided AFTER departmental parsing
Initial qualifiers, set by managers, that exclude data
Data order, in a traditional structured database, based on assumptions
Executives trump data analyst's recommendation
Answer is sometimes predetermined and it WILL be confirmed
The current business model is not understood
Exposed trends are ignored or denied
Unfortunately, many times, the truth is not what is sought

It is not always about technology. Many leaders who take pride in not understanding the technology make limiting decisions that, through their own admission, they don't understand. Accepting the expert advice of an underling is what differentiates a Leader from a titular Executive. Properly governed Big Data needs a position of power and truth in a company that is not subject to being swept under the rug of hidden agendas.

I expect many readers can relate to my comments as the story of their working lives, and others, may deny there are any valid assertions.

Re: Visualizing Data: 15 Fantastic Examples

professional web design — Mon, 06 May 2013 06:10:37 -0000

I need to read the highlights of this post every morning before logging on and every evening before calling it a day.

Re: How Big is the World of Cloud Computing? [Infographic]

Senthil — Fri, 03 May 2013 22:17:31 -0000

Agree with Puru. Lot of options exist to interface with cloud platform like python, Ruby etc, but cloud migration stragedy notably complex application to Paas/Saas cloud environment still debatable not proven yet no credible success stories.

Re: Data Science & The Role of the Data Scientist

Chat — Thu, 02 May 2013 12:39:30 -0000

very nice publish, i definitely love this website, keep on it.

Re: The Art of Cable Organization

cristtos — Thu, 02 May 2013 01:27:06 -0000

What a bunch of wussies!! the "tidy" look will last for a day or so :-)
Unless is a setup that no one ever touches again, then what is the point as no one will take advantage of the tidiness... How is yours?

Re: Flash Wars Heat Up as EMC and Fusion-io Battle for Top Gun

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Re: With Pivotal Investment, GE Takes on IBM to Win the Industrial Internet

Sundar — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 15:00:46 -0000

I can't believe how analysing the reality which is a common knowledge can solve the real problems faced by human kind! Well these companies will surely be able to provide currency notes to feed the future generation deprived by water , clean air and non-poisoned food !

Re: 14 Key Points in Computer Development Since 1940

Jason — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 15:49:57 -0000

So was the lisa computer $10,000 or $1,000? The paragraph under "1984 - Macintosh..." says "... Lisa's $1,0000 [that's 4 zeros] price tag ..."