A rambling post about twitter, Steve Case and Revolution Healthcare (mostly twitter though)

I've been on twitter for a little while now. And I've had a few thoughts running through my head but never enough to warrant a post, until now. I want to cast these thoughts into bytes for later mockery. I expect when I retire I'll come back and read these posts (in what ever format they evolve into) and make a lot of fun of myself. Kind of like when I look at pictures of myself as a teenager now. The "what were you thinking!" kind of stuff. This could be a long and winding post, apologies in advance. On with the dreck!

So I'm on twitter, mostly as an easy method to update my facebook status, because Ecto (my blog editor of choice) has an option to set your twitter status to notify of new blog posts and lastly (and perhaps secretly the real reason) the pure geeky-ness of it. For the most part, I follow people I know, but I do follow some non-people, like The American Red Cross and a few celebrity types like Dr Tiki or The Big O and Dukes radio show. Recently I got back on the Diggnation bandwagon and decided to follow Alex, Kevin and a few others. Kevin Rose tweeted a note about a new website he put up: wefollow.com which is a twitter directory that ranks by number of followers. Good idea that fills a certain need for folks. I used it to find other interesting people to follow like Tim O'Reilly, Leo LaPorte, Snoop Dogg and Steve Case. Initially I started following people like crazy. Before I new it I had added a few dozen people. I did this late at night so it seems like a great idea at the time. Then the next day started. And I started to drown in an avalanche of tweets. Some very interesting ones, like Tim O'Reilly's or funny like Christopher Walken. The irony of cwalken to me is I distinctly remember not laughing very much when he was on SNL a few years back. Go figure. Anyway, the rest of them were just pure clutter for me. When I finally got back to check my timeline on my phone, I had 375 tweets waiting for me. In less than 12 hours. DOH! So I started dropping people like wet socks off a cloths line.

Brief interlude. Back in 2007 after leaving the Red Cross I was contacted by someone from HR at Revolution Healthcare. They made it clear that it was a Steve Case venture. Basically using his name and reputation as a recruiting tool. At first I wasn't very keen on the idea. Didn't seem like a great fit. But the more I thought about it the more I liked the idea. Healthcare, and in particular health insurance needs a revolution or at the very least a 'market correction' in this country. Steve Case's name could open the doors to companies that would otherwise ignore a startup. The ratio of insurance company people to health care providers in amazing to me (even worse when you look at just Doctors). So I thought working for Revolution Healthcare might be worth a second look. If Steve Case could use his name recognition and access to other execs to open doors, the venture could be very successful. Turns out it a good thing the HR person never got back in touch with me (although I was peeved at the time) since they've laid off a lot of people. It was nice idea. Hopefully they can weather the storm and keep trying. I would have liked to have been a part of it.

Back to twitter. Steve Case. Started following him because he came up in the top-10 for #tech on wefollow.com (doesn't seem to be anywhere on wefollow.com now) and because revolution health care. Wanted to see what kind of exec he might have been. Well turns out he likes the finer things it seems. He's had some expensive tweets (well at least for a lower pay scale guy like me). Pics from Sunset in Captiva FL, Advice on where to stay in Maui. Starting a resort in Costa Rica. Then there's the @user replies to people I don't know. Kind of weird only seeing half of a conversation. But I kept with it for about a week. Today, can't take it anymore, have to 'unfollow' Steve Case. Not that he knows or cares mind you. I wouldn't in his place. But he wasn't saying anything that was particularly interesting to me, especially in the context of what I use twitter for.

Which leads me to another Twitter thought. Twitter needs a feed filter ability. Not sure I've thought this idea out completely but I need two twitter feeds. One of my 'a-list' people I follow. Close friends, businesses that announce stuff via twitter (like MacHeist, w00t or Red Cross) and the like. Then the B-list twitter where all these other folks can go. I could then follow up with their stuff when I have spare time or an interest. Maybe another way to look at it is 'push' the tweets from group A but I'll 'pull' the tweets from group B when I want to see what they had to say. I'm sure there's a better way to say what I mean here. And who knows, maybe you can already passively follow people and not have them clutter up your timeline and I just haven't figured it out yet.

Anyway, time to get back to the business at hand. Time to push 'publish' on this ramble and have it announce via twitter, go figure.

IBM to buy Sun?

According to the WSJ IBM is in talks to purchase Sun. The MSNBC version of the same story provides a lot more detail. There's a bloomberg article that seems to be down as I write this that indicates that Sun asked HP they turned it down.

One thing that strikes me is that all of this is coming from one source, so there may not be much to this. This could be just a bunch of speculative talk. This same speculative talk also indicates that HP was asked and HP turned Sun down (which is a bit surprising because HP and SUN would be a better fit IMHO).

But if we pretend for a moment that it's all reasonably true some interesting things come to mind. The cross-country nature of the two companies will be a big issue. It's east coast vs west coast. It's suits and ties vs pony tails and sandals. IBM's cathedral approach to Suns bazaar approach. On top of that you can't have HQ's on both coasts. Which one goes? In the end, IBM will 'win out' eventually just out of shear entrenchment, in my opinion. There just isn't enough Sun left to change things. There is the possibility of it being a separate entity, similar to EMC/VMWare. That's likely how they'd start, but eventually they'd restructure under the IBM way of doing things.

Another interesting choice is what becomes of the hardware lines long term? Do they push SPARC out in favor of POWER? Do they do both? Short term they would try both I'm sure, but eventually they would have to drop one or the other. I suspect they would drop SPARC. The high-thread low-Mhz model of the T1 and T2 chips doesn't have as much traction as I think Sun or IBM would like. The POWER line on the other hand takes the same tact as the SPARC64's but with much higher clock rates. Perhaps a T1/2 and POWER lineup would be workable. But it's a tough choice. Neither CPU has the broad adoption of the X86 instruction set CPUs of AMD and Intel. I think in a merged company the sun x86 lines would be gradually dropped within a year in favor of the IBM setup. Hopefully a 'best of both' approach would be taken but I doubt it. As long as the OS's could be ported to both, any of the possible permutations and combinations would likely be workable, with the possible exception of keep everything as is.

The AIX vs Solaris issue would also be interesting. Sun's current sunset dates (if maintained) would have IBM support Solaris for up to 5 years after the decision to stop Solaris. If they decide to drop AIX they're faced with a similar issue (although IBM's EOL policy is a bit more cryptic). Either way you slice this one there are going to be a lot of hurt feelings. The AIX vs Solaris camps would be bitter enemies if it weren't for the common Microsoft enemy. My hunch is Solaris would be taken out back behind the woodshed and not come back. It would likely happen after all of the corporate structures are merged and aligned. Then Solaris would be stopped and open solaris would be the road forward for Solaris hold outs.

The storage area is the only area that seems straight forward to me. And is the only technology area that IBM and Sun can merge easily. Since neither company is storage leader (although IBM has a much larger market share) merging the product lines would be relatively simple (compared to OS or hardware). Neither company has a good story to tell in the mid-range market (although the 7000 line from sun is interesting, if not proven). The high end market is dwindling and I think both companies will not invest a lot in that space and leave it to Hitachi, EMC and NetApp (I exclude HP because the XP is pretty much a HDS...). Combined they could also aggressively go after Dell's market share (and nibble at HP's). Dell is growing by virtue of selling tons of little storage, basically doing it on volume. And since the high-end Sun arrays are re-branded HDS gear, the just have to maintain the support infrastructure. Plus Sun has the better play in the emerging flash market and IP knowledge that would come with that. Add onto that the StorageTek side of the house and it's an idea with some promise. So far, this would be the easiest (but by no means simple) merger.

The other software assets could also bring some value to IBM. Mysql and Java would join IBM's already impressive web offerings. Add Sun's middle-tier and middleware offerings to that mix and you have a very expansive software portfolio. And then there's the Sun ports of Xen and purchase of virtual box. Both of these virtulization offerings would give IBM a small counter to the VMWare juggernaut. And then you can add Open/Star Office to the Lotus brand (when was the last time you saw a SmartSuite purchase?) for an enterprise desktop solution. After a bit of blue-washing the code base and essentially free access to the IBM patent portfolio these products could really take off. There would be a few orphans here and there, like NetBeans. Not sure where Netbeans fit's in a Rational world. But the software portfolios could be a great combined force.

So far analyst reviews are mixed but trending towards 'thumbs down' and I can't say I disagree. The short run would be dreadful and IBM would have to walk a delicate line to avoid loosing Sun's existing customer base and its massive and active development communities. If end users and developers are going to be forced to change, there's no assurance that they will change to IBM. If you have to go through the trouble, you might as well look at all the options. Well, so far it's just idle speculation. Time will tell where this ends up.

Sun may be on to something...

Because I always love a good blog-battle, especially in the storage space, I was reading the storage blogs again, this time focusing on the Sun Flash camp vs the EMC Flash camp. And since I am easily distracted by shiny things (it's amazing I finish anything I write here) I read some other posts by Adam Leventhal from the Fishworks team. He's posted some details of the Sun Hybrid Storage Pool strategy and how it works with flash. The presentation here is of particular note.

The post that I found the most interesting and the reason I decided to write this is "Casting the shadow of the Hybrid Storage Pool." Mr Leventhal goes over the pros and cons of using flash as primary storage in an HSM array and correctly points out "The trouble with HSM is the burden of the M." Unless you have a good HSM tool that can slide old data to disk and leave the cache for 'hot' data, flash and disk combo arrays become a burden. Veritas addressed this issue in their VxVM product years ago to handle small fast drives vs big slow drives. So there's already a lot of ground covered in the industry here.   

The other approach you can take with flash drives is to use them as cache. It's a great idea. They're like memory that doesn't need battery backup or de-staging for power outages. As Adam puts it "Tersely, HSM without the M." Its the same school of thought taken by the HDD makers who slapped a few hundred MB onto their laptop drives. Fast access for the data you needed and bigger/slower storage for the rest. That idea never took off because no one wrote the drivers to take advantage of it (it's not as easy a problem to solve as it sounds). Well, in this case, Sun's "written the driver". In this case they've integrated it into ZFS. Pretty good strategy. They're certainly not alone. Netapp has taken a similar approach. I like the idea of getting the flash performance but removing the need to know about flash. Hybrid storage pools (HSP) could turn into the next storage optimization trend that all the vendors adopt.

The detail that makes me thing Sun's on to something is this isn't the only flash/HSP announcement recently, nor the only avenue they're pursuing. There's the "Open Flash Module" which is a JEDEC form factor flash drive for servers (kind of like a SO-DIMM that plugs into the mother board). The initial capacity is only 24Gb, but that will grow over time. If you take the drives out of a server, their power and size can drop considerably. This could be interesting for the embedded server and telco markets. They've also announced a truck load of servers with extensive flash support . There's also their NetApp competing product The Sun Storage 7000 series. Then there's the flash based optimizations like Logzilla integrated into products. The point is that Sun isn't taking a 'lets graft flash onto our existing products' approach. They're not simply replacing existing components with flash equivalents and saying 'we do flash!" They're embracing and extending what flash can do. Now, that's not to say everyone else isn't as well, it's just that Sun is more open/up front about it. I think sun is on to something with their product designs that utilize flash at multiple points across the product line.

So design is one thing, but Implementation is another. The best designs can mean nothing if the implementation is poor. According to several reviews, my beloved t-mobile G1 is an example. I'm no expert on server design and engineering so I'm just speculating here, but all of Sun's design work can be for naught if they screw up the implementation. If it doesn't live up to the design's promises because the hardware doesn't hold up it's end, if it's just a bear to manage, or if it does things in such a non-standard way, then it will likely fail. On top of that, the hardware and software needs to be reliable and fail sanely. Nothing is a bigger product buzz-kill than data loss or down time. But lets assume that the implementations are reasonably sound.

The next hurdle for me is delivery. How does Sun deliver this design and implementation to you? Great design, great implementation, but horrific admin software would kill adoption. If the learning curve is too steep or it requires a change in thinking from the current method of doing things it will also slow adoption. I'm struggling to think of a good example of a change in thinking, so this example is a bit weak. If the current line of thinking is to "S.A.M.E." your data (stripe always, mirror everything), but Sun's approach is to "S.N.M.N." ( Stripe nothing, mirror nothing), this will hinder adoption as well. Because the industry best practices from software vendors and other 3rd parties will advocate "S.A.M.E." and the sys admin will constantly be fighting the 'but this is different so I don't have to S.A.M.E.' battle. At some point, people just stop pushing the rock up hill and forgo the benefits of doing it right for peace and harmony with their co-workers. Another delivery obstical is that the default or basic implementations must also be sane for the majority of deployments. So a ZFS pool with hybrid storage should provide benefits and perform well with default configurations. It doesn't have to perform optimally but it should perform well. If it requires infinite tinkering specific to every use case, then there will be a flood of experiences at each end of the spectrum. People who love to tinker and fine tune will offer up tales of wonderful performance and extoll it's virtues. The 'set it and forget it' crowd will likely have a different view and will poo-poo the product every change they get. Lastly, they need to get the flash optimized options in front of people for around the same price or with minimal added cost. Price can be a significant barrier to entry.

It's an uphill climb to be sure. But I think Sun is on to something. If they can execute their vision and deliver on the promise of Hybrid Storage, they can become a relevant player in the storage market. Here's hoping the 'previous performance is not an indicator of future success' axiom hold true for Sun in this case.

In case my recent birthday wasn't proof, I'm old...

So, if it wasn't already clear to me by my birthday and the fact that I'm now pushing 40 reeeeealy hard, here's an SMS conversation I had the other day that I could barely understand.

First, I should note, it was a wrong number, second I have a full qwerty keyboard so typing isn't as big a pain for me I guess.

HER: Hey

ME: Hey? This is rich, who is this?

HER: Sarah:-)

ME: Ok... don't think I know you

HER: Sarah jjs gf

ME: Uhhhh doesn't ring any bells wrong #?

HER: Ugh no i go to ur skwl sms u no u jus found out how i look lyk gosh

ME: I'm 39 and haven't been in school for years

HER: O ok sory rong #

So Sarah is the girlfriend of "J.J.S." I presume. And If I read the long reply right, we go to the same school. And I'm pretending not to know who she is because I think she's ugly. That's my guess anyway. I'm glad I don't know any Sarah's well enough to SMS with them. Not that I SMS much, but if I did and started talking to the wrong Sarah I could be on a dateline special... YIKES!

Desktop or Laptop part II

Previously, I was debating myself on whether or not I should get a laptop or a desktop to run virtuals on.. Well things have changed a bit. On March 3rd, Apple upgraded the iMacs. They go to 8Gb now. Further, HP makes a 17" laptop that supports 8Gb and is around $760 (after rebates) maybe even cheaper elsewhere. Slam dunk, you'd think right? Replace my 2006 iMac with a new iMac beefed up to 8Gb and all my problems are solved and I didn't take up any more space on my crowded desk. Ahh, but life's never that simple. Go to the apple store and try to buy a 20" iMac (or any size, doesn't matter) and customize it to 8Gb. Go ahead. I'll wait.

Did you see what happened to the price? YIIIIKES! That 1199 iMac just jumps to 2199. OUCH! I could buy a drawer full of Asus laptops for that and just set them on the floor when I need them. Same price jump is true for the HP laptops. It's between $400 and $600 per 4Gb SO-DIMM to upgrade these things. So I could go the 20" iMac route (or treat myself to a 24" iMac) and then go 3rd party at a later date and not pick up yet another device burning electricity in my house. I like that aspect. Keeps the same footprint but gets over my memory limitation.

Well I have the desktop I'm going to buy picked out. A Dell XPS 435MT. Costco and Microcenter both have them for $999.99 (until march 31st). Other places (dell.com perhaps) probably have them too at that price. It's an intel i7, which is quad-core with hyperthreading, which is kinda like having 8 cores. It comes with a 750Gb drive plus 6Gb of ram, and a good assortment of ports and expansion options. So I get lots of horsepower at the expense of floor space, lugging out the monitor every time it needs to be rebooted and the fan noise. But it would be SWEET!

If it weren't for my desire to have a small, relatively clean computer area this would have been a no-brainer. Why do I need to make things so complicated?

The next assalt on storage arrays...

Chris Evans had an interesting post discussing the cost of enterprise storage. This post was spawned by a question posted on ittoolbox.com by Ditchboy434. Yikes, it's like I'm spreading rumors in the eight grade again... and then she said that he said that they said... Anyway, the brass tacks are: Why is enterprise class storage's cost per GB so drastically higher than personal storage? Why does 50Tb of enterprise storage cost $500,000 but 50Tb of personal storage cost $5000? (Seriously, 50 1Tb drives can be found for around $100 each) Chris accurately points out all the reasons why Enterprise storage is more expensive. It has added value. More hosts can share that 50Tb. You can cluster nodes with that storage. It has redundant/dual everything. Fancy features for backup and spare copies, etc. It's fairly straight forward to explain what those extra zeros get you and for the most part the business case holds.

But I think there could be a change on the horizon. Maybe it's already here and I just don't know it. With local storage getting so large, it's possible to put storage amounts in a 4U server that would dwarf arrays from 5 years ago. Even in a 'standard' server it's possible to put ridiculous amounts of local storage on a server. It used to be the only way to attach large amounts of storage to a server was to attach it to an array. That's not the case anymore. Now the array is surviving on it's RAS and feature sets. So you might get an array so you can move data between two servers in a cluster. If your primary sql server fails, the cluster moves the storage to the backup node automatically and your back in business. But in MS SQL 2005, for example, it has the ability to mirror a database in software. You no longer need an array. Just put equal amounts in both boxes and you're on your way. The price per Gb of individual drives and the price to performance ratio of servers has gotten so low that it's now a real option. Instead of a redundant array of disks, you can have a redundant racks of servers. More and more enterprise apps are adding replication abilities at the app level. And as that replication moves up the hardware stack, the case for enterprise arrays gets harder.

A brief tangent. Cloud storage is the latest thing in storage. The idea is you tell 'the cloud' to write your data and it takes care of finding a home for it, making sure it's secure, and making sure it's protected from loss. The same kind of features an enterprise array provides, but outside of a single array now. Provided you have bandwidth to spare you can have the storage spread out across the globe. Or you can simply buy storage as a service from a vendor, like Amazon. If you have the bandwidth, it can be a great way to handle ever growing storage needs.

Ok, back on track. So cloud storage in most cases means wide area. I.E. Not within a single data center. If you're in a single data center, don't buy our cloud storage product, just buy an enterprise class array instead! Or at least that's how I think the argument would go. But what if someone comes up with an easy and efficient 'cloud within the data center' scheme? What if you could suddenly take all that local storage and pool it into "our storage" and share and share alike? I believe there are already some niche products that do something similar to this, but they have requirements and restrictions (and perhaps consumer perception issues) that has prevented broad adoption. What if, for example, Sun's ZFS was able to work across servers with minimal admin intervention? I have to throw that caveat on there because what I'm describing could loosely be considered ZFS and NFS used together, but there's a lot of admin intervention there. Plus I would envision it doing iSCSI or FCoE instead of the NFS protocol. Now who needs an enterprise array anymore? When you fill a rack in your data center, you'd get a 2-for-1 special. One rack would have the computing power and the storage.

Now, having said all that, it'll be a long time before anything resembling this comes to pass. Gig-E vs 2, 4 or 8 Gb fiber channel is one reason. Storage I/O performance is another. One of the big attractions to enterprise class storage is the raw performance of it, and that will be hard to overcome for now. On top of that, with the way storage vendors snipe at each other, their skills will be well honed to attack a common enemy.

On the upside, failed drives could lead to an interesting game of whack-a-mole. With all the leg work running from rack to rack, sys-admin obesity could be a thing of the past.

EDIT: corrected some spelling, grammar and the price of 50 1Tb drives.

Cats and foil....

So I’ve always been told that putting tinfoil on counter tops and the like will keep cats from getting on it. Suposedly they don't like the sound or feel of it. Lola likes to get in front of the TV, esp when we’re playing Wii. So I decided to put foil on it to keep her off of there. Here’s what Lola thought of my foil and attempts to remove her from the center of attention:

She so unbothered by the foil that she even naps on it.

I'm not about to break out the squirt bottles next to my HDTV…. Oh well, as long as she keeps her head down and I can see the screen…