Peter Christy

Cisco and EMC Announce (something)

Cisco held a press/analyst day just before RSA that included a very interesting customer visit to (and dinner with) Esurance, the Web-based auto insurance company with the flashy cartoon ads. The event started with a "big" announcement of a partnership with RSA (specifically integrating information from EMC's Infoscape technology -- where the Tablus DLP content analysis stuff ended up) with the Cisco Security Agent (so the user would be notified when they were about to do inappropriate stuff with sensitive files). The cooperation makes sense and the basic ideas are noteworthy but on balance the discussion seemed sort of premature because what was actually being committed to was vague and sounded more like a "Barney" announcement ("I love you, you love me, we're a happy family!). There was more than enough "side story" to make up for any holes however. Richard Palmer, the long term Cisco security SVP and GM is moving off to run the edge router group (a $6-7 B business!) and Scott Weiss, the GM and previous head of IronPort is going to take over the larger security effort. The IronPort guys certainly think of security well out of the network box so it will be interesting to see how they change direction and speed.

Flash in the Pan (fire in the hold!)

At the last EMC analyst conference Bob Gray (IDC) had made some provocative suggestions that the days of high-performance disk drives were numbered because they could soon be replaced functionally by commodity (SATA) drives with flash memory buffering with large cost and power savings to the user. Since the Flash Memory Summit was local I decided to catch up a little on this other interesting geeky infrastructure. In the past it has been hard for new computer technology to catch hold (remember bubble memory?) because it was hard to compete with the volume production advantages of incumbent technology (DRAM in this case). Consumer electronics have tipped that all over since the consumer use of flash memory swamps the computer usage of storage neutralizing or even inverting the volume/price advantage. What makes flash so interesting now is that it seems to be approaching a 10:1 price per bit advantage over DRAM assuring some role in many computer architectures (especially if the application or operating system is adjusted to use it). Dell and others now offer laptops with only flash memory (instead of hard disk). With Vista there is a neat (but almost impossible to understand) option -- ReadyBoost -- where a USB flash memory replaces the disk for access to operating system bits. Our future is bound to have more!

EMC Analyzed

It was a big month of those industry analyst junkets that everyone envies us for I (Peter) am sure. In addition to the STB analyst meeting that Microsoft held at MMS 2007, EMC convened the analyst faithful for a fabulous day and a half in beautiful Hopkinton (you have to have visited there to get the humor I think). EMC is a really interesting company as measured by the acquisitions they've made over the last 10 years, but they still talk about themselves (and think about themselves one would have to guess) more as a SAN storage company that sells companion products (like backup or document management). The time to reform may be sooner than they would like. Perhaps Al Gore has been by to visit, but for whatever reason EMC has started to exhibit green religion and noted that high performance disks and disk systems are real power hogs. According to people who are smarter than me on these topics, if you think briefly about the implications you can see the demise of the high performance disk drive in the next five years (at the most) replaced by hierarchies of flash memory and commodity disks. Q-Layer, an interesting company in Belgium claims they can build better and faster SAN out of software and commodity technology in a virtual data center anyway. Is the end-of-life of technology like Symmetrix in sight? The other interesting EMC event due soon is the pricing of the VMWare IPO (the S1 was just filed). My best guess is that the market will value VMWare north of $5B based on rapid growth software comps. Given that EMC stock has been more or less flat with VMWare incorporated, separation will raise some other questions about the urgency of new thinking. EMC has the right tinker toys to build with I think, but what will they build and when? Or is it just me imagining that what I smell is the fetid breath of wolves nipping at their heels?

Visiting the EMC Mothership

I had a chance to attend EMC's Industry Day back in lovely Hopkington, MA.  As the old phrase goes, "I don't think we're in Los Altos anymore!" If you want to stop for coffee it's Dunkin' Donuts, not Starbucks and certainly not Peet's. On the bright side, from my hotel in Milford, I got the best Verizon CDMA data services I've ever had (a reliable 1.4MBits/second!) probably because I was the lone local business traveler using Verizon data. As for EMC, although they have added a wealth of interesting system stuff to their basic storage offerings most of the analysts there were interested primarily in hearing the latest details about RAID striping rather than information security. The presenters too are most at ease talking about boxes and feeds and speeds. Although EMC is driving into very interesting new systems territory it's clear that Mr. Tucci has a lot of work ahead to change the internal culture and think systems. This is going to be fun to watch.