back to article EMC exec flames El Reg

Smack! Our story about Nexenta at the VMworld 2011 Hands-on Lab (HoL) created a frisson, more than that in fact, and an impassioned EMC exec who was quoted in the story sent in this rebuttal comment. It's forthright stuff. Here it is: Disclosure – EMCer here Chris, I know you need to create high drama to drive views to your …

COMMENTS

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  1. Charles Calthrop

    where's the gravestone icon?

    el reg pwnd

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    As flames go, it's pretty erudite

    needs more swearing and ALLCAPS, though

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      He said "heck" quite a lot. Does that count?

  3. thefutureboy
    Thumb Up

    Anyone who uses the word "behoove" gets my vote.

    1. ElReg!comments!Pierre
      Thumb Down

      ...

      And anyone who starts sentences with "Fact:" gets my hooves. Up their ass.

      The guy might be right, but I couldn't finish reading his piece because of that quite annoying quirk of him.

  4. Asiren
    Flame

    I hope your reply was

    Too long, didn't read.

  5. Thomas 4
    Flame

    This is a flame?!

    Where's the bad spelling? Where's the prolific use of impolite adjectives? Where are the foul insinuations about the author's parentage and behaviour of his mother.

    0/10 fuking terible, must try harder, noob.

  6. Mike Taylor
    Flame

    IT'S NOT A FLAME

    SURELY in the name of gods sake ITS not a FLAME!!!!!! EPIC FAIL ON SO MANY LEVELS no swaring no threats no EPIC LEVELS OF OTT WTF fanboi!

  7. This post has been deleted by its author

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    That's not a flame!

    More like a gentle smack on the back of the head.

    I've worked with EMC at trade shows. Nice guys, nice kit.

    1. Martin Huizing
      Thumb Up

      Donkey-punch?

  9. This post has been deleted by its author

  10. Graham Jordan

    Smiley face?

    Did you respond with LOL? Please tell me you did. Any email with a smiley face in cannot be taken seriously. Ever.

    :-)

  11. HP Cynic

    Impressed

    Being "passionate" about your work is a massively overused claim these days but this guy impressed me in that he not only cared about the product and service but actually knew his stuff.

    All credit to him for this letter (unless someone can disprove his claims!) and thanks Reg for printing it.

  12. Solomon Grundy
    Meh

    Flame?

    This isn't a flame. It's a well written response to an El Reg "drama" piece from a guy who obviously knows his stuff. The Register got put in its place.

    1. frank 3
      Thumb Up

      Ah yes, but thumbs up to el reg for publishing the rebuttal, in full, on the front page, in a way it knew lots of people would look at (surely everyone reads FOTW).

      So, I reckon the reg comes out ahead on points + as a bonus, if the guy's facts aren't right then others will point that out and then they do have a story!

      If it were a UK print daily, corrections and apologies would appear at the bottom of page 93.

      In 4 point type.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Surely you mean 0.4 point type?

      2. Pascal Monett Silver badge
        Thumb Up

        Agreed, frank 3

        El Reg is doing its job : biting the hand and posting rebuttals on the front page is, as far as I can determine, good journalism.

        So keep it up, vultures !

  13. Diginerd
    FAIL

    Fact - EMC are Bloody Expensive

    Marketing spin dosen't constitute smackdown.

    Truth is, despite the expense, CIO/CTOs love EMC because they know their jobs are safe buying storage from them. EMC gear breaks just like everyone else's, but the quality of their support and post install team is rivaled only by their sales team.

    If you're building datacenters for Bulge bracket banks or the Government there's only 2 players in the game - and HP are struggling. At that level Nextenta are not even close for contention. It's not just about price, it's about knowing you've got a solid solution. Speaking of which I admire EMC's restraint for not lobbing the obvious brick back at Nextenta - so tell me about the impact of the Oracle aquistition on on the longevity of your core OS and plans to shift away deo

    it.. Fugly!

    At smaller sites the likes of Nextenta and my personal favorite QuantaStor (If you've never heard of them they're REALLY work a look) come into play.

    Speaking of QuantaStor, they behave very much like a tiny EMC in terms of customer service and support. Their features are great an their pricing is good, and they know who their customers are and what they need.

    Nextenta are using tennisballs to take in an armored division. Poor choice of strategy, even though they're using some sporty tennis balls!

  14. Z80

    This comment is damn sexy

    You may not think it is, but it is.

  15. bear_all
    Devil

    I kinda agree...

    I read the original article and the rebuttle from the EMCer, and I think El Reg might have been a bit naughty in its original post.

    It would be a bit like AutoExpress posting that "we took the 16 year old diesel VW and the new Lambo to do the shopping. The VW cruised to victory with a massive six bags of shopping while the Lambo sturggled with my Kellogs Variety Pack. Lambo have just been pwnd."

    The infamous "yes and no" answer. Yes, the challenge was to do the shopping and get it home, but you wouldn't buy a Lambo to do the shopping in.

    (This analogy was bought to you by The Acme Analogy Corp Foundation, where analogies are like a VW....)

    1. Chris Mellor 1
      Happy

      Taking the pith

      A most pithy comment sir bear_all, most pithy. In fact it takes the pith. The thing of it is though, inn'it shurely, that the Lambo (EMC and NetApp) were there at VMworld's HOL to do the same job as the Nexenta (VW cheap-mobile), and the Nexenta kept up with the EMC and NetApp big boys.

      For EMC to say its VNX twosome were over-specced for the job and so the Nexenta cost comparison isn't fair or accurate, and Nexenta-supplied prices are wrong (so what are EMC's and NetApp's prices?) is a bit... well... rich is the word that comes to mind.

      And yes, Chad Sakac is a straightforward guy who tells it how he sees it, and Nexenta CEO Evan Powell is a straightforward guy who tells it how he sees it - and they differ. So who is right? We'll put a call in to King Solomon and ask him...

      Chris.

      1. jai

        King Solomon?

        There's only one way to settle it.... put a call in to Harry Hill...

  16. heyrick Silver badge

    Wow.

    This guy is the exec of a tech company? Not one obscenity, he *welcomes* competition, and I bet he's never thrown a telephone.

    <victor meldrew> I don't believe it... </>

  17. virtualgeek

    Thank you Chris!

    Disclosure - EMCer here.

    Chris - thank you for posting the comment, was honourable to post it in my view.

    FWIW - while I disagree with the original article, I do think Nexenta did well on their initial participation in the HoL. Like my first comment - these sorts of live mass events are full of danger, problems, and it's a real test of tech and people.

    With that said, back to the marketplace battlefield - where there is enough room for broad competition, and broad choice.

    (the author of the response) - Chad Sakac (aka virtual geek - http://virtualgeek.typepad.com)

    PS, if it seems erudite, overly polite, low on swear count - that's purely because I'm Canadian. Trust me - where I come from, that was a full out furious flame :-)

    1. Assumed Name
      IT Angle

      Shockingly profane and offensive

      Knowing the author, I was shocked and dismayed by the relative level of profanity and malevolence displayed in his note. But seriously, world, this is the real face of the Evil Machine Company. Thoughtful, respectful, and restrained. As long as you are not a member of the Tea Party, apparently.

  18. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    TL;DR

    Pictures or it never happened

  19. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I remember all the same comments when IBM dissed the impact of client-server on their mainframe business. Remember Microsoft and UNIX?

    The "solution you'll never be fired for buying" argument is good until the competition works well, the price is 50% and the the performance 2x. And perish the thought that competition does some things you can't do!

    People still buy mainframes, but there is zero interest in the technology press about them. Big Iron storage will likely go that way, with the 50% coming from commodity components made in China, the 2x coming from flash/SSD, and the new features coming from a designed from scratch Openstack with a very powerful S3-like object store.

    Sic transit!

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      re: "you'll never be fired for buying"

      so intel should be looking over its shoulder....

      but that was true ten years ago as well...

  20. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Boring but...

    While uninterested in that particular subject matter I do love to read a good flame. To be honest this was reasoned out fairly well, not particularly nasty and even made me skim through the original story. =)

    Fair play for posting his comments tho Reg :)

  21. VeeMan
    Coffee/keyboard

    Heck Yeah... oh but.

    From all vendors EMC is the least likely to provide samples for benchmarking. Why? "...because uh, your tests doesn't relate to real-world conditions..."

    So I would have expected nothing less than this very long response, the latter part of it with that amount of times where "sexy" and approval of EMC kit in the same sentence, a clear lack of spelling mistakes comes through as being censored by their top marketing exec pre-"send button".

    Not that We'll all run and buy some white boxes and befriend Nexenta tomorrow, but shame it must be a scary world for you if an article praising a different vendor passes through the channel Mr big-bucks, "no you can't have SNMP on our basic model", EMC.

  22. virtualgeek

    LOL - no spelling mistakes = edit?

    Disclosure - EMCer here.

    @VeeMan - trust me - that's just how I write and speak :-) Had it come through any approval by marketing - all the technical info would have been cut. And YES, I'm **THAT** verbose (much to my wife's chagrin). If you want evidence of the type of person I am - just read my blog (easy - google "virtual geek"). I've been out there for a while, so who I am is no secret.

    I'd quit before being censored in the way you suggest. Coaching, guidance - man, I need that constantly. But changing what I say? Never. My comments are my own - my blog is my own - for better or for worse....

    Also - FWIW - theres a lot of "old tapes" in your response. We're pretty active in the benchmarking game - and have been through 2010 (and will continue). We've learned and adapted. True - almost all benchmarks (at least in storage land) don't reflect well on the nature of the bizarro-world that is the real world - all shared storage subsystems very rarely support a single type of workload at a given time. That said - the lesson was learnt. People like "record breakers", so - were doing it constantly now.

  23. SirWired 1
    FAIL

    "when you are the leader, it doesn't behoove us to go negative"

    You are absolutely right, it doesn't "behoove" EMC to go negative, but that's never stopped them from doing so in the past.

  24. ps2os2
    FAIL

    Can He Behoove his hooves?

    He might want to go to a professional behoover and have the illness looked after.

  25. Alain
    Thumb Down

    At EMC, our technology, our customers, and our results speak for themselves

    Well, I am one of your bloody customers, and I'm must say I'm quite unhappy if I may "speak".

    If it weren't for running contracts signed in my (government) organisation well above my head, we would have dumped EMC by now where I manage things.

    Your tech support sucks big time these days and keeps going worse, especially the response times, qualification and spare parts logistics. I don't know if it's specific to EMC France, but support used to be quite decent 2 or 3 years ago but it's been going down the drain since then. Nowadays the kind of service we get for the (expensive) maintenance and support contracts we pay for is plain and simply unacceptable.

    H/W reliability isn't what it used to be either. We keep replacing drives on our latest Clariion and we have a lot of failures on our Centeras.

    1. J.T

      Have you complained? If you go up the account chain there are several people who will look into what's going on. The last time I filled out a survey I got a rather huge response the same day. If your CE isn't cutting it, say something to your account team.

      I'm going to guess that you are replacing a lot of Seagates on your latest Clariion.

    2. Hoosier Storage Guy
      Stop

      EMC doesn't make the drives

      @Alain

      Another point to consider, storage companies don't manufacture the drives. Seagate, Hitachi GST, and in some cases WD do. Some arrays are better than others at detecting failures proactively, but those drives could have ended up in any array and would be failing regardless.

  26. virtualgeek

    Resolving support issues.

    Disclosure, EMCer here.

    @Alain - to double-up on J.T.'s comment - please escalate.

    Actually, let me apologize first - you shouldnt be having support issues, and I'm sincerely sorry to hear that.

    If you don't know how, or where, to escalate with your account team - you can contact me. Easiest way to do this while remaining anonymous is to post a comment on my blog (http://virtualgeek.typepad.com). I won't post your comment, but will direct you internally poste haste. If you can also get me SR (service request numbers), I can followup with the people that gave you unsatisfactory service.

    BTW guys - most CLARiiONs are now 3-5 years old, and are pretty aged. And, JT has obviously been around the block (not saying there is any issue with any specific component), but as with anything mass manufactured, when a part fails, there is a tendency to fail in many places/customers at once (as there was a manufacturing issue).

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