Day: May 21, 2012

Pre-announceing Mavericks

Today EMC pre-announced the new version of OneFS that we’re working on: “Mavericks”.1 In fact, the storage industry is all abuzz about it:

The last one is by Chuck Hollis, an EMC VP who blogs regularly.

If you check out his entry, you’ll see this slide showing the improved performance for 4k random writes. I generated that data for Al over the past two weeks. It was shared in the slide deck last Thursday at the Engineering Lunch and, much to my surprise, appeared on the web today (and I presume on some slide deck at EMC World which is happening this week). This is mind boggling to me. At IBM we weren’t allowed to release any ITIM performance numbers without having an NDA in place and here these preliminary numbers (it says so right there on the slide!) are getting press attention. Scary.

Chuck also talks about our new X400 platform and how it blows the socks off our older X-series hardware. Guess who generated all of those numbers for sales & marketing? Yup, that’d be me.

The other thing I find interesting is how marketing presents performance numbers and how I do. Every time I give someone a number, it comes with an entire laundry list of assumptions and caveats. No number exists in a vaccuum. Marketing, however, wants a single number. This makes sense – no one wants a second slide of fine print about how the test was run, the testing environment, client version numbers, hardware configuration details, etc, etc. But it makes me cringe when I see naked numbers — it goes against everything I know.

Mavericks has been announced. Now we just need to finish our planned execution to get it out the door.

1 Errr, maybe I wasn’t suppose to tell everyone what our internal code name was back in January. Oops!