EMC’s caveman creed, HP says FAST is its idea, Pillar crumbles

Ugh.

Hrrrmmm.

Fnhhhfhh!

The collected phonemes above, dear readers, are grunts. The most Neanderthal grunts we can transliterate.

We bring you the grunts because EMC wants us all to believe that cavemen invented social media.

Well not quite … but the video below, which we found over at Dave Talks Shop, is in his words EMC’s official rules for doing social media and “ people here actually get training credit for watching.”

Your turn!

Technical Deep Dive has the most interesting post of the last month, because it quotes an HP engineer as saying he once wrote a paper about tiering that got buried inside the HPocracy, but that “EMC took this paper and based their FAST/FAST VP technology on it.”

Them’s fighting words.

The other fight, of sorts, involves Pillar Data, the storage startup funded in part by one L Ellison of San Jose. You might have heard of his software company Oracle? And you may have heard how it bought Pillar? CEO Mike gives the company a find farewell. Storagebod says the buy proves Oracle is clueless on the subject of storage. Elisabeth Stahl takes offense at every Oracle storage utterance ever, in this or any other universe. ESG finds us some more storage startups to get excited about now that Pillar has become the last of its generation to be absorbed by a bigger player.

There’s also some contention about Page Size. Hu Yoshida is playing, along with Storage Anarchist.

The stabbiest post of all comes from Grumpy Storage, who seems to have concluded that the whole storage industry exists to make life tough for customers, lock them in and then milk them forever.

That’s the basic business model this column has long understood to be the dominant force in the industry ;-)

Compression is another popular topic from June. Ken Wood talks about single point compression, Storage Mojo calls for primary data compression and Backup Blog looks at Avamar and global dedupe.

Here comes Huawei

Another fascinating post from June came from the keyboard of Virtual Geek, which ostensibly talks up how good Iomega kit has become. Of more interest to us is the fact that Huawei Symantec is mentioned in a table of five NAS competitors. Last time we checked that double act had trivial market share, so why even bother ranking it? Unless it’s making waves and is therefore deserving of some competitive attention?

Watch this space it seems.

Elsewhere, the energetic Steve Foskett looks at just what constitutes failure, Storage Buddhist goes Storagebod declares tape well and truly alive. Preston de Guise says tape is alive, but goes terribly with dedupe.

Storage Architect looks at VM replication on block arrays, Zerowait contemplates storage stagflation and Canned Platypus looks at solid state silliness. DataCore ANZ wonders how many tiers are needed to make a tasty storage cake. Justin Warren’s Eigenmagic suggests you make sure your cloud neighbours aren’t dodgy.

Chuck’s blog has an interesting case study about a company called 3Tier and also runs a nice social media experiment.

Dept. of Weird

Backblaze has a wonderfully weird post about how its backup service unearthed a pile of dirty cash. Also weird, a bit, is Seagate’s new hard drive (ye olde spinning rust style) for tablet computers. Or at least tablet computers that have humungous batteries and don’t ever get rough handling.

Storagenerve gets down and dirty with his Macbook disk, and then does some advanced Mac OS X virtualisation by creating a bootable ESX memory stick.

Lastly, Storage Buddhist is running a poll to prove what we already know: HP’s storage products have really dumb names.