Consolidation

I don’t think anyone was surprised that 3Par was going to be purchased by someone. In this industry anyway, we all knew what the exit criteria was for 3Par. After all they have a good product, and when you compare it to the big guys, a great product.  The big guys like HP, and Dell and others that perhaps aren’t so obvious (Cisco? Oracle?) clearly would benefit from a new storage platform, and I think their ability to sell the 3Par gear will be quite a bit higher than 3Par against EMC, HDS, and the rest.

What took everyone by surprise I think is the size of the deal and how quickly it grew. Many say the bidding isn’t over yet, and some are predicting numbers in excess of $2B. Personally, I am very happy for the team at 3Par, it is a nice way to end over a decade of hard work in a very competitive market. EMC clearly didn’t think Dell could sell high end stuff.  I bet they are proved wrong.

HP could clearly benefit from a new storage platform and might really go to town with it relative to EMC. HP is already a storage giant as we all know, but their flagship lines are either old, or OEM’ed, a position they might rather not be in wouldn’t you say?

Who will win this deal? I think most people assume that HP will muscle Dell out – they have the deepest pockets after all. Donatelli is a strong player at HP, and it is obvious that Hurd’s departure hasn’t created a vacuum too big to stifle important deals like this. We’ll see how high the bidding goes.

One point worth mentioning is that the highest bidder doesn’t necessarily win. The preference or fit the Board of Directors sees amongst the bidders does come into play. For several dollars a share, it would be a tough argument to support the lowest bidder. But 10 cents a share premium will not necessarily prevail.  I expect to see a substantial bid from Dell tomorrow. If I’m wrong, I doubt that Dell will prevail because of two reasons: 1) HP made a great argument on the cultural and technology fit, and 2) There are multiple people in the decision loop who have ties and history to HP, and in a tight race I think the “tie” just may go to them.

At the end of the day, all customers will ultimately benefit from this. This is clear validation that next generation storage platforms are the wave of the future and the big guys are finally acknowledging it.

The world will end up with one less storage company, and it should be fun.

Server Virtualization – Storage Same-o Same-o or QoS

Have you ever seen ants marching single file (er, sequentially), from all directions back into their anthill? Looks very peaceful and orderly, doesn’t it? Like nature’s little orchestra taking place in front of your eyes; perfectly planned and organized sequential rows of ants each making their way back home. Yet when you look into the anthill you see them crawling all over each other…and your orchestra turns into punk-grunge fusion.

Server Virtualization (ala Citrix, Microsoft, Oracle, VMware) does the same thing to your storage I/O profile. When your applications are silo-ed on their own servers and storage, the I/O profile is easy to predict (think “IT symphony”). However, as some of you have discovered, after consolidating the same applications on a virtualized environment to “share” resources, your symphony begins to play a little off key. Your applications slow down, so you add more server and disk resources to each individual application. You end up with silos in the virtualized environment, and that’s self-defeating in Pillar’s perspective.

OK, why does this happen? And what does this have to do with ants? And why do I keep asking rhetorical questions? And why can’t I seem to stop? And where is my lawn mower, ya bastard?

Never mind the lawn mower for a moment.

Those ants represented your individual I/O profile for each application. That application may have perfectly optimized I/O. However, place that application on a virtualized server with another well-tuned application, have them share the same SAN or NAS storage array, and the two applications will to contend for the shared resources. Why?

Because over the past several decades, disks have gotten larger, but they haven’t gotten any faster:

9GB 15K RPM Fibre Channel Drive – 190 random IOPs                             (Circa 1997)

450GB 15K RPM Fibre Channel drive – 190 random IOPS                        (Circa 2009)

• Result 1: You create LUNs based on the capacity needs of the application, thus using less drives that deliver less IOPs (performance).
• Result 2: You create LUNs based on the performance needs of the application, thus using more drives and wasting A LOT of [expensive] capacity.

A corollary  to #2 – someone finds the “extra” space that is “just sitting there” and commandeers it for their virtual server. You will notice the performance hit immediately. This is called “Storage Tetris.”  See a hole, fill a hole.

If you have experienced this issue, don’t feel bad.  This is a common problem with legacy storage arrays.

So how is the Pillar Axiom different?

The Axiom was built from the ground up with the concept of Quality of Service, or said another way – contention mitigation. What I described above, where two or more applications vie for the same disk, cache, etc. is defined as resource contention. The Axiom, with its Quality of Service metrics, is able to mitigate contention and thus provide the best of both worlds to our Customers: 80% written capacity utilization with no performance degradation. In other words, you get to have your cake and eat it too [cake not included].

Most of Pillar’s Customers run on one of the server virtualization platforms.  Many of those same Customers are also running at least 80% utilized on their arrays.

If you want to find out how, let’s chat. Our competitors prefer that you just keep doing things like ol’ “Mike” in Europe says – stick with the big guys and play it safe. The devil we know and all that rot. (Just because Mike doesn’t disclose his full name or company doesn’t make him an ‘anonymous coward’ to use The Register’s terminology. Really, it doesn’t.)

Are you going to run your servers on the new stuff (virtualization) and give up the advantages because you run storage the old way? I bet not.

I bet on you.

You Cannot Use 110%

As many of you know, I love hyperbole. It’s fun. In fact it’s more fun than anything else on earth regardless of the state of your clothing.

However, as an engineer something inside me dies a little when I hear people say something like “I am in 110% agreement with you” because it’s just not possible. When someone agrees with you, they agree with you, and if they feel more strongly about it than you do, then they aren’t in complete agreement.

Utilization is like that. You cannot use more than 100% of something. You either use all of it, or less than all of it. You can’t use more of something than you have, unless you are stealing it from someone, like that neighbor who never returned your lawnmower or the DVD they borrowed. Fine, next time they borrow a movie, I’ll scratch the last few tracks on the DVD, and voila, right at the end it will crap out on them. When they complain I’ll be able to say, “Oh, so you do have the movie then? Where’s my damn lawnmower?” Gotcha.

Storage is like that. You can only use what’s available, not more. If you have 25TB, and you try to write 25.000000000001 TB, you are SOL. This may be obvious to everyone.

With older architectures from HP and NetApp, the performance falls off as they fill up, and well before you get to 100%. This performance drop-off incents storage admins to do something – as application performance takes it in the shorts when this happens. The usual remedy is to “buy more shelves” if you can.

In a way, the performance degradation serves as a “penalty” motivating storage admins to do something before bad things happen, sort of like the annoying beep-beep-beep in your car if you don’t fasten your seatbelt. I don’t know about you, but just the thought of that damn beeping makes me cringe, so it works.

Fortunately the Axiom will not start to perform like that 2001 Windows XP laptop you refuse to throw away. Instead, it just keeps rolling along as you fill it up; very limited penalty.

What? We don’t have automated email alerts? Well of course we do. So does Microsoft. Haven’t you ever got an email warning you that your Mailbox is almost full? Unless you are Miss or Mister Goodie Two Shoes and stop everything to clean your mailbox, you just delete the message don’t you? After all, Balmer really bugs me, so the hell with him.

We need to add an annoying Beep-Beep-Beep function you cannot turn off by law. Congress has time to add this to the list of things we’re not allowed to do given that everything is going so well and I am sure they have a lull right now. Is that negative? Nope, just hyperbolic. And a run-on sentence to boot.

Here’s the punch line: If you are over 90% full on your Axiom out there, and you are deleting the email alerts, we are going to add a beep-beep-beeper to your Axiom. Else we want to borrow your lawnmower…then we’ll be able to bargain.

We’d return it but we are using it 110% of the time.

Keyser Söze Flies in to Go Over the “Usual Suspects”

In sales as in any business function, it is nice to have a defined process. Something that allows everyone to know the next steps ahead of time, so they can prepare and make things go smoothly, sort of like the “socks before shoes” rule you learned as a kid.

At Pillar, a new sales process is emerging as we win larger accounts with bigger budgets and brand name recognition. Sorry to say, our new process isn’t driven by Pillar, it is more of a reaction, kind of like when your brother threatened to give you a “monkey bump” on the arm without actually doing so, but you flinched anyway. Perhaps that was just the environment I grew up in. Everyone has memories from their childhood of this, no? Maybe it was your cousin, or the bully in the neighborhood instead of your brother, but hey, I’m betting you’ve experienced this one.

In the economy of three or four years ago, the “big guys” didn’t fight so hard for smaller customers. The good news for you if you’re a customer is, they do now. Besides, Pillar is in a lot more of their traditional “big accounts” fighting for business. We have earned the right to compete in larger businesses than when we first came to market five years ago. So now, our new process flow takes into account much more resistance from the competition in the form of the competition’s executive involvement; Keyser comes to town. A simplification of the revised process is outlined in the flow chart below:

Just for the record, let’s make sure we’re all on the same page here: Keyser Söze usually flies in on a corporate jet, is a pretty famous person, and might not be able to stay long as he probably has a tee time at noon. Occasionally, Keyser will take people to lunch or dinner, and if the original effort to derail the Pillar acquisition fails, he will drop his pants, metaphorically speaking of course. Nobody wants to see Keyser drop trou, but a huge price discount usually generates more enthusiasm for his Company. Of course some people are insulted by the competitor bashing, especially when full of misleading, deceptive, and inaccurate statements (sometimes even lying, gasp!). I don’t mind the bashing, as long as it is true. In other words, if the competitor says “Pillar is small,” that’s OK, we are small. But, as Winston Churchill said (obviously paraphrasing), “Yes, we are, but you are stupid, but we’ll be larger tomorrow”. OK, maybe we substituted small for inebriated, but I am sure Sir Winston would have backed me on this one.

So does this guy really exist? Keyser, I mean. Yes. Worse than that, there are several of them, and occasionally Keyser sends his lawyer. For example, lawyers are used to “represent Keyser’s interests” to resellers. “You actually sold a Pillar system to our customer? What were you thinking? Clearly Keyser isn’t happy with you. Don’t look out for your customer and find the best solution to a given problem if you expect to continue representing us,” the story goes. Often, threats like “Well, Keyser is considering new resellers, so you might want to reconsider your line card.” Oh brother.

So just who is Keyser Söze? Well if you search around a little, there are some indications that he could be someone you know. For example it didn’t take much time to find this line up of the Usual Suspects:

I love this business. Please don’t mistake the above for whining. It isn’t offered as a complaint – more of a manual for our customers and sales folks alike. Well, that and an excuse to laugh. Let’s face it, if we didn’t have great technology and happy customers the competitors wouldn’t need to send in Keyser, but we do, and they have to send him in. I think truthfully, the customer wins when a sensible, viable alternative exists to the well established players.

What the Cloud did to my Family

OK, this is a blatant rip off of Chuck Hollis’s “What the iPad did to my family” blog post. We all like it – Chuck is my favorite thing about EMC. No really, he is.

Here is what the Cloud did to my family:

1. They have no idea where their email is stored. Or who is running the applications that “make it happen”. They just know that it is, and that is good enough for them.
2. They don’t think about a PC like I do. They don’t give a damn about the processor, the RAM, the disk, or RAID. They don’t want to give a damn either. They aren’t even curious for the most part.
3. They continue to make me feel like an anachronism: the majority of the world’s population just wants to send email and surf the internet. They don’t want to understand dual cores, PCIe, and memory bandwidth..
4. They make me think back lovingly to the days at Berkeley with the goofballs in the PC club, toggling in binary programs.
5. They expect things to work. Of course I, on the other hand, expect them to fail. And failure is exciting to me, as it represents a technical challenge or some knothead trying to get a single Clariion controller to do the work of two without an increase in queue depth. Ha!
6. They think posting golf scores or homework assignments on a browser is simple. They have no idea what goes into making it happen and if you try to explain it with tears in your eyes they think you’re losing your marbles. OK, maybe you are losing your marbles, but damn it, I still love the technology and I love all you guys out there that make it happen. Thank you.

Tap tap tap….this is the sound I make on the keyboard paying for all this crap, understanding why it is worth it, while most people I know don’t give a rat’s rear end. Well, some of us do, and I think we still make a difference. And we write checks.

Tap tap tap….

Nuts to Tasers

Maybe this is off-topic, but it is hard to believe that you can spend many hundreds of dollars on an airline ticket and not be served a bag of pretzels or peanuts.. Seriously…not one measly peanut. @###$!?

Would it break the bank to give you a bag of nuts? How about I split a cashew with the guy in seat 2C? Is it possible that if we picked up some trash, or washed windows, we might earn an animal cracker, or an unsalted pretzel? Maybe we could pass a bunch of grapes through the cabin, and just have one each like they do at the Ashram that the guy in front of me probably spent the 70’s in?

At this point I’d settle for kale, or even fruitcake.

I saw a gal bring a bag of fries on board. She’ll probably be mugged before we cross the Mason-Dixon Line. Nobody with a bag of fries is making it off this peanut-less flight alive unless they share. Her kid has a Happy Meal. I think he’s also going down hard unless his McNuggets are parceled out… fast.

Perhaps a distraction staged with the Ronald McDonald pickle flute could save him, but only if the flight attendant blocks the guy in 31C with the *empty* cart, ‘cause that guy looks like he snarfs down at least two roast chickens for dinner. And by the look in his eye, he’s already snorted out the scent of fries in the air. A guy that big is not falling for the ol’ pickle flute gambit… he’s been around the block a few times for sure.

Trouble is brewing. Now I know how the pioneers felt up there on Donner Pass in 1846. At this point, no sleep, no bathroom, no resting both eyes at the same time, ‘cause the older chap in 6A moves like a cat; I am watching him closely. Right now all I can think about is a nice juicy hamburger. And rings. Let me tell you, if someone had onion rings on this plane they’d be a dead man. Nobody would even dream of turning four of the rings into wheels by fastening them to a baked potato with toothpicks. No way – too precious to make an onion-wheeled potato wagon on this flight.

If I worked for a major airline, I think I would let the flight attendants pack iron on 2 hour+ flights. Let’s face it, it’s probably cheaper to buy each crew member a taser pen or stun gun than it is to buy each passenger a bag of peanuts. With a $50 rechargeable taser per flight attendant, the airlines would be way ahead of the peanut treadmill that they have been on for years. Makes you wonder what the old airline bosses were thinking when they were having stewardesses serving prime rib and baked potatoes in First Class off the slicing trolley, doesn’t it?

I’ll tell you what they were thinking. They were thinking, “What would customers like?” and “Oil is over $14 a barrel now, we better start replacing the prime rib with kale, potato and bacon soup.” That is what they were thinking.

So the moral of the story is this: There is probably a happy medium for all companies thinking about cutting back on customer service to save money. At Pillar we have been adding people to improve the “Customer Experience”, which from my own personal experience in life has to be a good thing. For those contemplating arming flight attendants with stun guns to avoid giving well-paying customers even a measly bag of peanuts, think again.

Performance under Fault – Lethal Circumstances

I find a large amount of misperception around how systemsrespond when something fails. Weall understand the self evident term “single point of failure.” A “high availability” storage systemalways makes every element redundant to maintain data availability in the eventof a failure. Most everyone gets this, but there’s more to the story.

Let’s say you are in a two engine plane and one enginefails. Are you safe? At the risk of sounding like a lawyer, the answer is, it depends. A two engine plane cansafely land with one engine sometimes, but not all the time. If the plane is loaded to or beyond itsmaximum gross weight, it may not have much time in the air if one of theengines fails. The load on the remaining engine may be too great for the planeto remain in the air for long enough to mitigate dire consequences.

There are thousands of examples of this all around each ofus in this technologically sophisticated world. Will the 3 surviving tires on your grape-hauling trailerwork if the 4^th one blows out? Well, yes, if each of the four wasn’tloaded to the maximum load limit. If you picked up 2 tons of Cabernet, and thefarmer gave you a bit extra because he likes you and you brought him some goodwine, the 3 tires left might not carry the load for long. Maybe less than, say,14 minutes. Not that this has ever happened to me on Highway 101 between PasoRobles and Salinas, near the Bear Road Cutoff. Not even close.

Recently EMC took it in the shorts in an article by BethPariseau. Believe it or not, Ithink it’s unfair to lay the blame solely on EMC. Oh I know nobody expects meto rush to EMC’s defense, but hey, we are all wrong sometimes.

As explained by EMC, they had a software bug. So far thisdoesn’t make them unique. All machines have them, unless they don’t havesoftware. If they don’t have software, then a tire blows. It’s the way theworld is. Next, the failed controller “panicked” and took itself offline. Justas it should, the other controller picked up the load. Unfortunately, the loadit took over when added to its existing load was greater than 100% of its capability.Soon, everyone will be out of the car staring at a trailer full of two tons ofgrapes wondering what went wrong. Grapes are heavy and it quickly becomesobvious that stuffing them in your pockets won’t work. Time for Plan B.

Most people are amazed that we even heard about an EMCfailure. Several of my industry friends remarked that the cover-up must havegone awry. Nobody likes bad press, and especially one that’s not entirely yourfault, and EMC usually does a good job of “handling” a sticky situation.

The moral of the story is this – Pillar must continue to proactivelymonitor the call home information closely for conditions which could have similarresults. For our prospective and current customers, Pillar and its partnersoffer a Health Check product to examine your networks, servers, and Axioms. PersonallyI think it is a wise (and not large) periodic investment, similar to personalphysical exams.

Besides it is better than explaining grape juice stains allover your pants, and easier than that exam involving our nether regions we havewhen we turn fifty. Also, a checkup is far less “lethal” than a waiting for amore serious problem.

Out with the Old, In with the New (Mostly)

Is it just me or does it seem that much of the US air fleet is aging?

The plane I recently took for a 5 hour flight must have been built in Bedrock. Little screens folded down out of the ceiling for shows and my audio didn’t work. As I was thinking about that, a notice for some show popped up stating “Time Stood Still.” Great, but did it have to freeze in the 90’s? I mean, couldn’t time have picked a better moment to park itself, like when the DJIA was at 14,000? I suppose it could have been worse. I could have been in an uncovered wagon or at the Ice Capades.

I expected to see the pilot and copilot’s feet hanging below the cockpit for taxiing, especially as I gazed out the window and noticed a Dodo bird strapped to the wing as an engine.

Seriously, it’s not that I hate flying. I mean where else can you have such delicious food five miles above the Earth? I always wished they would serve beer and wings, or nachos, or basic sandwiches. Instead, we have some chef from Paris or New York trying to make his or her mark with arugula or kale. It seems to me that while they try, and they do try, there are some aspects of fine dining are vexed on an airplane — like crisp -40 degree silverware that freezes to the skin; never mind the kale. Do people really eat kale on purpose? I digress.

I don’t need fancy on an airplane. Fancy is for great friends, a great bottle of wine, and an over use of lecithin to make foamed sauces. I don’t want a fillet of beef that is over cooked; it’s like the steer gave up his life for nothing, almost as bad as shark’s fin anything. Oops, another digression.

All this made me think of those little packages of pepper. Salt works fine in packages like that, as it is sodium chloride, not an aromatic spice that rapidly loses the volatile compounds that differentiate it from sawdust. After thinking about it, I realized that there has to be something really dangerous about a pepper grinder. After all, I can’t be the first person to suggest using them. Perhaps I missed the board game where Monsieur Tourbillion was whacked in the kitchen with a pepper grinder instead of a candlestick. Those French are creative in the kitchen I tell ya. Relax… I’m getting closer to my point.

It’s funny, that unlike pepper grinders which are an old contrivance, your data deserves to be stored and handled in a better way. The little wax paper packages should be doomed to the Smithsonian or the British Museum of Technology Gone Wrong. Besides, in the case of data storage newer technology allows better prioritization of services, like making sure the oven is left alone while the soufflà© finishes, rather than being taken over by an aluminum sheet of Bagel Bites or Croissants stuffed with sausages.

In summary, I make the following important recommendations:

Transportation:    Choose Modern Technology

Storage:               Choose Modern Technology

Pepper:                Choose Old Technology

Kale:                     No

See, I told you I’d get there.

Stop Storage Waste, and Throw your Clariion out the Window

Is it me or is it warm in here? After reading the Economist last week I decided that it wasn’t me. Somebody must have turned up the Global thermostat. Apparently, over the last decade we have seen an unprecedented warming trend that made very few people optimistic save the Executive Team at Trane, the air conditioning company. Well, unprecedented in the prior few decades that is. Before that warming periods happened often, but we didn’t have air conditioning so nobody was alarmed enough by their outrageous utility bills to take notice.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like I am not alarmed about 380 ppm of CO₂. Eventually, it may be impossible to have anything but sparkling water.

One of the fun things about beer is its carbonation, but when everything is carbonated some of the shine is coming off the ol’ Barley Pop. Still Beer? You may think this is what’s left over in half empty glasses the morning after the house party, but it could become a delicacy.

No matter what your mind set is in the global warming debate, it is hard to argue planet Earth needs an atmosphere with more CO₂ in it, unless you own the patent on uncarbonated Barley Pop. Putting more CO₂ in the atmosphere may be good for photosynthetic life forms and the Trane Company, but I would assert an effort not to do so would be prudent. The argument comes in the gulf between lifting a finger and spending trillions of dollars in the face of uncertain consequences.

About 10 years ago the Earth Rangers organization was founded in Canada. Essentially the Earth Rangers are dedicated to teaching kids not to waste. Resources are precious, and squandering them is a human  tragedy in the making. The thought goes that teaching kids this helps them become mindful, constructive members of society instead of wasteful jackasses.

To build its data center, the IT team at Earth Rangers chose Dell servers, VMWare for server virtualization, and Pillar for storage efficiency and storage virtualization. We were proud last week when they won the SNW Best Practices award for Green Computing, Energy Efficiency and Data Center innovation. We advocated using SATA when others said it  wasn’t fit for purpose, and we still do (well technically, we advocate using SATA when it is fit for purpose which occurs more frequently with the Axiom). We also invented QoS for storage which allows us to guarantee industry-leading utilization with performance that can double storage power efficiency.

Bingo, another reason to move to the Axiom. That, and although I like wine, I do enjoy a good Barley Pop.

Don’t throw your Clariions out the window. If you use them for backup targets, a DR site, or whatever we will give you an incentive to retire it to a recycler, just like the Utility Companies ask you to retire your old inefficient refrigerator instead of running it in the garage.

PS – The Trane Company makes fine products, I own a few. Trane is part of Ingersoll Rand and they have great programs targeted at reducing waste, which is why I picked them as an example of a company that makes air conditioning

Can we all Unify around Unified Storage?

No.

LOL. I kill me. Sorry but this really made me laugh.

This is funny to me on two levels. First, Pillar has been shipping the Axiom Unified NAS & SAN platform for 5 years now – Happy Anniversary to us! When we explained this 5 years ago, people said things like “EMC has that. You just buy a gateway for NAS…” Wow. By that definition everyone has always had unified storage for crying out loud. Some goofball at HP told me they were the biggest NAS supplier in the industry. Huh? They’ve never had a NAS product in their portfolio, so how is that? Easy! They said, “We strap Polyserve on Proliant, that’s how.” Well, I can put a hat and some polka dots on my Dachshund but that doesn’t make him a clown.

Second, everyone knows that EMC is trying desperately to put a “Unified Storage” platform together. NetApps in particular has been on a campaign blitz to deflate the EMC Unified Storage Balloon and make EMC look like a bunch of boobs when they announce their mashup of the Clariion and the Celerra. Personally, I hope they name the thing “Vista,” but that’s just mean.

Well, Pillar’s first product, introduced 5 years ago, was Unified Storage by a more useful definition: a storage system that supports block-based access protocols like FCP and iSCSI and file-based protocols like CIFS and NFS natively and simultaneously, using the same management tool.

Most vendors stick a NAS gateway device in front of their block device. Interposing a gateway gives you two management interfaces and the management overhead of provisioning storage on both devices to get the job done once. While anyone can offer a gateway solution, nobody prefers one except maybe to sop up a little excess capacity on a SAN array and provide file-based access on the cheap. Sure it’s a headache, but it might be cheaper in the short term if you already have the underutilized SAN.

Here’s the skinny on who has unified storage and who doesn’t as of right now:

Aren’t I nice to NetApps? Considering they emulate a block storage device (SAN) on top of a log structured file system (which is worse than the other way around), yes I am downright kind. Key block-based attributes (like sequential reads without defragmentation) disappear under a log-structured array architecture. I’ll stop now to keep this nice.

So what will EMC announce? Well, I am positive it will be:

1. A leadership product despite being 5 years behind the curve.

2. Just another industry first if you discount the two companies that had it half a decade earlier.

3. A huge step forward for the industry, if you define the industry as EMC.

4. The pinnacle of innovation, or nadir of originality.

5. A huge argument between NetApps and EMC, which I eagerly anticipate.

6. A few Corporate IP and Twitter addresses like www.unifiedstorageinventedhere.com and @unificationatlast

So, are we all going to unify around Unified Storage. Not any time soon. Hell, the people poised to claim they invented it wouldn’t even acknowledge that it was beneficial 5 years ago. Just like SATA in the Enterprise or QoS or distributed RAID or … well, you get the point….

I thought it was especially funny that my response to “Can’t we all just get along?” was “No.” No, not if you are going to redefine the NAS industry or start chasing my dog around with Clown paint or one of those goofy clown hats.