Many of my colleagues are writing about the Megalaunch II announcements from EMC this week, which is nice because I’m not a product guy and my contribution would be overkill anyway. See how easily I justify my laziness?
That story line was working until I saw this:
- Article on DrunkenData.com blog.
- Another on The Register.
Since we’re taking the word of a single blogger about the comments attributed to Steve Zivanic and finding any other corroboration at the moment is tough, I’ll address just the most egregious examples of stupidity in the lot. If it turns out Steve didn’t actually say any of this nonsense, so much the better.
Number 1:
EMC…has no public cloud of its own and therefore cannot consistently enforce SLAs and SLOs–as well as data security–between two completely unrelated clouds.
To the extent that as of late 2010 we no longer offer public cloud services to customers, there is a sliver of truth. But just because you personally can’t purchase it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. We used to call it AtmosOnline. We still do (among other things). In consulting we use it as a research test bed. It federates nicely, thank you.
Number 2:
Did you know that Atmos nodes all have to be at the same exact code level in order to replicate data?
So? The rest of the paragraph makes it sound like he’s onto something. “Yeah, Marlene, that sounds complicated and stuff; EMC must be bad people…”. Or something. Guess what? We’re talking about 2 Atmos nodes out of dozens replicating to one another. Any two. The whole point of this distributed model is to eliminate these challenges. So upgrade any two of them and you’re replicating. Get to the rest when you can. Steve here has pointed out one of the chief advantages of Atmos and paints it like a drawback. What are you smoking? Share, please. He goes on, however:
How would a customer attempt to upgrade multiple nodes at petabyte-scale across several locations?
By putting the disc in the drive and pushing the button. Really. It’s pretty simple, even for me.
There’s not much on that list that indicates any connection between the author and reality. I am going to go walk the EMC World floor and talk to my old colleagues at Atmos. Maybe they know something I don’t.