Over the last few weeks, the blogosphere has been kind of quiet.
But this week, it is game on.
Bigtime.
The game starts here,
where HP dredges up a
NetApp swipe from last April and then unloads on the way NetApp conducts benchmarks.
EMC’s Chuck Hollis has joined in the fun by popping a nasty comment into the post, which
includes this missive:
“NetApp's degradation under heavy sustained write loads is legendary within the industry, but somehow they manage to market around it.”
NetApp fires back, through competitive analyst Alex McDonald, and says that the way HP has interpreted its tests is a “big fail.”
(There’s another measurement fight going on between Emulex and Brocade, too, which you can
read here.)
For what it is worth, HP thinks it is on a winner here, because the HP Storage Guy himself,
Calvin Zito, made sure this column knew about it by sending us a tweet. This, we note,
could make some readers feel this column has been compromised by corporate messaging. Fear not,
however, a our regular mode is pointing out how dull
and PR-ridden posts like this one are, or the fact that the NetApp rebuttal post we mention
above contains pathetic bleating about not being able to get TypePad working properly. See … that’s
not what the PRs want us to say, is it?
Re-education camp
What the PRs want, it transpires, is for storage bloggers to attend HP’s Storage tech Day, described by Storage Mojo as “A re-education camp for bloggers.” StorageNerve went and filed two pieces, so maybe the PR stuff works … or maybe it doesn’t, if we are to take Jay’s Blog from NetApp at face value, as he writes that his customers don’t want to “do more with less” but want to “do the same, or less, for much less cost.”
For what it is worth, we have also found an Adaptec post this week that manages to be
interesting while also making sure it gets some key messages out there. Read on, here, to behold modern
corporate blogging at a high standard.
EMC vs. HDS
Another brawl this week sees EMC take on HDS over the nuances of Fibre Channel over Ethernet.
Normally I’d list the battle in detail, but Chuck Hollis has done it for me
in this post, which is kind of useful because I am really busy this week!
HDS’ Hu Yoshida, the source of the battle Hollis describes, retires
from the battlefield a little bruised, wethinks, after the likes of About Restore
weighed in.
Hollis is in the centre of a third battle this week, too, and again we have a nifty summary of
it to show you. (Which is good, because this battle happened on Twitter and finding all the URLs
involved is hard!) NetApp turns its rebuttal into this
very, very long post, which also includes the Tweets that started it all.
Also long, and a bit too technical given the current state of my mind, is a
post from the leading San Marino based storage integrator, Cinetica, which we think accuses EMC
of some FUD around its automated storage tiering plans, almost at the behest of IBM’s Barry Whyte.
Another conversation threading its way through the Net started with ESG analyst Steve
Duplessie wondering about
the economics of cloud storage, as he reckons you can buy lots of storage and run it for less
than you can hire it. Storagebod weighs
in, before MatrixStore has a go and
Grumpy Storage grazes on
similar issues. Duplessie then returns to the idea.
Other posts worth a peek this week include Scott Lowe on vSwitch Load
Balancing, Chris Ober’s ponderings
on the future of storage networking and Preston de Guise on copies vs. backups.