Storage meets Wiki misses Eyeballs

Yesterday, Jeremiah O., the brain behind HDS blogs initiative, sent me a message mentioning his storage blogroll. He also posted this information in a comment to my post about David Merrill blog.

So here is plug for his storage blogroll one more time. Access it through his virtualized URL http://tinyurl.com/fzcrq. And in case his virtualization vendor drops off the earth, here is the un-virtualized version of blogroll URL http://storagebloggers.pbwiki.com/Data%20Storage%20Bloggers. ;-)

Also, check out Mario Apicella wondering about small world of storage bloggers in his post Why are storage folks not blogging?. He makes a very good point from customer perspective in response to my comment about low potential of wider readership of storage blogs:

The reality is that purchasing storage often generates transactions that are several orders of magnitude more expensive than buying new servers, for example. People may not look at storage very often but when they do they are in for big money and need good advice.

Here is my 'role-reversal' comment from vendor perspective. Potentially large cash inflow per deal encourages storage vendors to put muzzle on their employees ... impact of losing and wining a deal on bottom line is significant enough to discourage free flow of information from rank-and-files. Instead storage blogging is mostly restricted to vendors' upper echelon (See, my post from last year on related topic Does Blogging belong to Upper Echelon only?).

If people are not going to look at storage very often, they are not going to read about it often either resulting in fewer eyeballs for storage blogs.

Gatekeepers Babysitters Datacenters

For the past few weeks, I wasn't able to post regularly due to a very hectic schedule. So I am trying to write a series of quick short catchup posts summarizing the things I have been working on, thinking, reading and researching about. No indepth analysis, here. This is the first in this series:

In last couple of weeks, I visited about a dozen datacenters. What I noticed most is the inefficiencies, in the name of security, at datacenters for both services provider personnel and datacenter employees! During each visit, I spent 15 to 30 minutes going through the gatekeeper's entry procedures and datacenter employees spent two to four hours babysitting me while I was inside the datacenter. That is some serious productivity loss for both service providers and datacenter owners.

Another thing, I observed is the lack of security cameras inside the datacenters. Security cameras were everywhere outside and inside the buildings except in datacenters!

Aren't there better ways to handle gatekeeping and babysitting work at datacenters?

HDS TCO/ROI Guru starts Blogging

Today, I read in Hu Yoshida's blog entry that David Merrill has decided to join blogosphere community.

For last few years, I have extensively used ideas from his Storage ROI/TCO work in building business cases for storage technologies. Typically, vendor white papers have limited lifespan and focus on specific products. In my opinion, this is not the case with his work. With the longevity and usefulness of his ROI/TCO white papers, I sometime wonder how come he hasn't thought about writing a book on Economics of Storage.

If you are involved on business side of storage technologies, you may want to read his ROI/TCO work. It is time well wasted, comedy central style!

Welcome David, I am looking forward to reading your thoughts on storage economics. And considering how many HDS people are now blogging, may be you and Jeremiah want to collaborate on a case study for ROI of corporate blogs.