At the risk of digging a deeper hole, what i was trying to say was that lashing together a bunch of unprotected flash devices behind a jury-rigged combination of servers-acting-as-storage, all fronted by a non-standard configuration of SVC nodes just to demostrate a “magical number” of 1M IOPS was nothing more than a marketing game…

There was nothing involving “new methods or original ideas” in this demonstration. It was truly nothing more than simple aggregation of I/O hardware, that in fact was unable to leverage more than a fraction of the performance of the fastest components. Heck – you could have connected a couple of TMS boxes directly to a p5 server and done the same thing.

That, and the demo proved nothing, opened no new doors. We have no example of a real-world application that would generate that many I/Os from such a small amount of capacity, nor that could tolerate a storage solution that offered no data integrity validation or availability protection. Nor do we have a reference of cost for putting such a kludge together if one actually could define a need for it.

QuickSilver was a best a clever marketing ploy – admittedly better than at least some of the Green Items in your list, even.

But innovative?

Hardly in the same class as any of the black items in your list. Heck – I’d say that both IBM StorageTank and IceCube were more innovative than QuickSilver…and BOTH of them have failed the test of time.

Ah well – ’tis truly a spirited debate…glad to have been part of it.

By the way: what color do you think Atmos is today, 3 days after announcement?

The original point of this thread seems to have been lost and that was to question whether EMC (BarryB) was right to discount IBM’s Quicksilver project as “benchmarketing”. http://thestorageanarchist.typepad.com/weblog/2008/10/1028-benchmarketing-badly.html being the original post.

Now we’ve gone full circle with your comments and those from Stephen and by the definition there’s no reason why Quicksilver shouldn’t count as innovation. Whether it leads to a new product or an improvement of a product is irrelevant. To quote Barry on Quicksilver:

“Hardly revolutionary, much less innovative or awe-inspiring.

It is, however, Benchmarketing.”

Does that apply to EMC’s announcements last year – Hulk and Maui? Were they purely “Tuccimarketing”?

If EMC/Barry is prepared to sling the mud then expect some of it to come back. I’m not defending IBM, far from it, they have bloggers who can do that themselves, however once in a while I feel obliged to comment – as do Storagezilla, you, BarryB, BarryW, Tony Pearson and others when they feel strongly on a subject.

I like the debate – keep it coming!

Although I agree that lots of those marketing-type things don’t count as particularly innovative, the following are definitely truly completely innovative, and EMC deserves a whole pile of credit for them. I came on the storage scene in the mid-1990s and saw many of them come, and I was impressed!

* Flash in DMX – Flash != Orion – this was probably the most important innovation of 2008!
* DMX – this was huge, a complete reinvention of the Symmetrix and a really important product
* PowerPath – incredibly important and truly innovative (but it came from an acquisition)
* Multi-platform FC – I remember this at the time and it was a serious change
* TimeFinder – no one would doubt the importance of TimeFinder and SRDF
* Symmetrix 3000 – enterprise storage for open systems was huge, and I watched it happen as a customer
* SRDF – see above
* Symmetrix – no need to say more
* Orion/Allegro SSD – I had one of these way back when, and they’re impressive even today – served as the architecture for the Symm!
* IBM DASD – EMC’s most important innovation, and the birth of the enterprise storage market

I say these things as an independent – I’ve never worked for EMC. The company has a serious history of innovation!

Even some acquisitions were innovative – VMware, RSA, and DG all looked questionable at the time but worked out well.

Stephen

Now Control Center! Yeah, that’s innovative! How many products have made it to version 6 and still not worked properly!

So, this begs the question — what really is innovation in this (or any other) technology industry?

Is it inventing something entirely new? Or being able to spot promising areas of technology, and investing in them wisely?

One of your counter arguments is “that doesn’t count, that was an acquisition!”. Well, given the high failure rate of most tech acquisitions, I tend to give EMC points for spotting the hot areas, paying big bucks, and making the results work in the bigger picture.

If one imagines that EMC started with a very small employee count (3 or 4 as I remember), then — by definition — just about every idea was “acquired” after that point, either by buying a company, or hiring an individual.

I won’t recite the industry litany to you — Apple didn’t invent the MP3 player, but boy they really ran with the concept. Ditto with Microsoft and MS-DOS and Windows. Amazon was not the first online retailer. Google was not the first internet search engine. IBM didn’t invent virtual memory, nor the mainframe, but they did more with the concept than anyone else.

On the other side, Xerox PARC came up with ethernet and the WIMP interface, but did nothing with it. Bell Labs begat UNIX, but couldn’t figure out how to commercialize it.

Lots of woulda-coulda-shoulda stories in this industry as well, no?

OK, I’ll quit now, but you get the point — what really matters in the big scheme of things?

Indeed, what matters more? Being the very first on the planet to come up with an idea? Or being able to make it work for a very large audience?

I would argue that the latter is far more important than the former.

Cheers!

To me, there is only one type of innovation that a company should pursue, and that is one that fulfills a customer need that was unmet and does it in a way that provides value to the customer. Whether it is via acquisition, process improvement or the creation of a new product altogether is a matter of existing constraints, available technology, budget available and expected ROI.

Vicente