Information Playground

Braden's Bonfire

In the last few years I have covered the World Innovation Forum and the World Business Forum as a technology blogger. As a result I have been introduced to the world of innovation coverage: businesses consultants and independent advisors who study, teach, and communicate the art of innovation.

I have known Braden Kelley (@innovate on Twitter) for nearly two years and in my opinion his output and advice on all things innovation may be unrivaled:

• Braden has collected and published over 1750+ separate posts on his Blogging Innovation site.
• He has spoken at a variety of innovation conferences and is travelling to Mexico, Belgium, and New York City in the coming months.
• He reads every innovation book he can gets his hands on and publishes his own reviews.
• He networks with some of the top innovation bloggers in the world and recently ran a contest to get all of them more exposure.
• He has interviewed some of the top innovation speakers in the world and published his videos for all to see (see his interviews with Daniel Pink and Seth Godin).

Given this extraordinary level of collaboration, when Braden talks, people listen!

Needless to say, when I heard that Braden had written his own book, Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire, I was very interested in getting a copy. Braden was kind enough to forward me an electronic copy of his manuscript, which I plan on reading in short order!

I've pasted a copy of his book cover below, please click on it if you are interested in learning about Braden and/or acquiring your own copy.

Steve

Information Playground

Twitter: @SteveTodd

EMC Intrapreneur

 

 

A Flex-ible Strategy

One of the more interesting high-tech market shifts to observe has been the popularity of consumer storage and its' rise into the commercial sector. At the same time customers in this low-end commercial sector are asking for enterprise-class (and enterprise-hardened) features and functions in their storage devices.

As EMC developers have talked to customers about this phenomena (bringing enterprise-class features into smaller accounts) there has also been much discussion about user interface (e.g. GUI) technologies. The consistent message from customers sounds something like this:

When you bring enterprise-class storage technology into our business environment, don't bring your existing user interfaces with them.

There are many reasons behind this request:

• These customers are often storage novices (IT generalists). Any graphical interface that mentions a LUN, cache, zoning, etc., is potentially wasting screen space. These terms can get in the way of executing the main task (quickly allocating storage for a specific application). Drill-down, storage-specific menus and tree-views would likely never be used.
• A multitude of devices may be used to manage the storage, including traditional laptops and desktops, as well as smaller handheld devices. These smaller devices aren't as receptive to UI technologies that host enterprise-level business logic.
• The storage provisioning task makes more sense in the context of an application. Provisioning would be easier if it were done using terms familiar to the administrator, e.g. Hyper-V/VMware VMs, Exchange mailboxes, or SQL databases.
• Any storage monitoring tasks (e.g. events, alerts) are more easily received when they are phrased and handled in the terms of the application that is impacted/affected.
• The other interfaces in the customer environment are actually a good guideline for a management interface to the storage device. This translates to some of the "big icons" that are common in Windows 7 or MAC OS X.
• Browser technologies are commonly used for other IT management tasks in these environments, and Adobe Flash technologies get high marks. The penetration rate of Adobe Flash is high (flash player penetration statistics).

Unveiling Storage Concepts

One of the main discussion points from the above list is often the first item. Can storage interfaces be completely devoid of some of the underlying knobs and dials that allow for storage tuning?

The answer that continues to surface is that application-based tasks should be "wizard-like". As a user clicks through the suggested best practices, it makes a lot of sense to provide "advanced" tabs that introduce storage jargon and provide the option to manage the storage device in a more granular fashion.  In fact, as the user becomes more storage-savvy, it was also suggested that the system automatically recognize this and unveil even more terms (and perhaps more granular knobs and dials).

About 18 months ago (at EMC World Orlando) Chris Evans and I were discussing this very topic. We both agreed that automating common tasks while also providing granularity would be of immense value to enterprise customers as well.

Building to Requirement

When looking at all of the above requirements it became clear that it didn't make sense to morph or otherwise shoe-horn enterprise user interfaces into products that are created for smaller businesses.

It also seemed quite clear that many of the requirements from customers at smaller businesses, if implemented properly, would be quite attractive to enterprise customers as well.

So the decision was made to start building an internal library of re-usable GUI widgets using Flex technology.  Common login screens, alerting frameworks, wizard frameworks, and navigation schemes were developed with the intent of sharing across product lines.  This approach for management software is very akin to the re-usable componentization occuring on data path software via the CSX technology.

Chad posted a good video describing the move to Flex and showing screen shots of some of the new look-and-feel.

In addition, there is a VPLEX demo that illustrates the re-use of these Flex components in enterprise-class deployments.

Architecturally, the move to Adobe Flash has also resulted in a separation of storage management business logic into a separate layer. This positions the development team to create non-Flex user interfaces in the future (without having to re-write business logic).

Steve

Information Playground

Twitter: @SteveTodd

EMC Intrapreneur

 

 

 

CSX Technology

Last year I wrote a post about the "best acquisition" that EMC made last decade. I chose RSA, and I stated the reasons why I felt that way. Although the RSA acquisition was public, and the revenue generated by RSA was publicly known, I was basing my selection mainly upon the internal impact that I have personally seen inside of EMC.

I recently started thinking about innovation inside of EMC. Which innovation from last decade has been most impactful internally? My view of the innovative output of thousands of global employees is restricted. My exposure to new product ideas is limited to the engineering teams I worked with last decade (e.g. CLARiiON, Symmetrix, Celerra, Centera, VPLEX, PowerPath, Atmos, etc).

Given my restricted view, my choice is a technology known as CSX.

Common Software Execution Environment

EMC has a huge amount of software technology that can be described as "data path" software. This software has been the lifeblood of EMC innovation for a long, long time. Data path software allocates the buffers that hold customer data and protects this information from cradle to grave.

All data path software is characterized by similar software interfaces to underlying kernel primitives: interrupt handling, device driver APIs, scheduling, and memory allocation. For example, if the CLARiiON data path wants to invoke a lower-level device driver, it calls a kernel-level API. In the case of CLARiiON, the FLARE software invokes an embedded Windows subroutine. Symmetrix, Celerra, and Centera, for example, all have similar (but different) API calls.

One of the advanced development teams within EMC surveyed this landscape and had an idea: what if these APIs could be changed to a vanilla, common software API set?

Portability environments are nothing new. The Adaptive Communication Environment (ACE) is a great example of a portability API. But it doesn't provide support for the most basic, common primitives required by data path software (there's really nothing out there that does).

So EMC invented one. It is an API that is available to many different internal groups within EMC. New data path software can be written to invoke operating-system-neutral kernel services.

This is really, really cool. But it's only half the story.

The operating-system-neutral primitives must call into an execution environment that implements the primitives on each specific platform.

And this is where the true innovation comes into play.

Kernel or User Space

The engineers that built this API had a vision that the "execution environment" would have two unique features:

1. It could run on any platform
2. It could run in kernel or user space

These are two incredibly powerful features. Let me explain how these features can be leveraged.

Consider the compression functionality introduced inside Celerra last year.  The compression software itself was written as a component using the CSX API. This resulted in a re-usable component providing operating-system-neutral compression functionality. This component was tested thoroughly in its standalone form. In order to run inside a product, however, this compression component needed to be embedded alongside a CSX execution environment.

EMC engineers created an execution environment within Celerra's operating system (DART). The compression component was embedded inside of Celerra. The integration of DART/CSX/Compression was tested thoroughly.  The feature was shipped to customers.

Moving forward, the component can also be embedded inside of CLARiiON, in the Windows kernel, or in Windows user space. All that is required is a CSX execution environment that runs in either of those two places. This enables CLARiiON data path developers the choice to implement compression in either (or both) of those locations.

EMC engineers have been building, testing, and qualifying production CSX execution environments on multiple platforms, in both the kernel and user space, for the better part of the last (and current) decade.

Of Components and Services

In May I wrote from EMC World that more and more products built by EMC engineers were being created via reusable components underneath customer-targeted service interfaces.

It is much simpler these days for an engineer to take any asset from EMC's storehouse of software acquisitions, isolate the critical intellectual property into a reusable component, and begin to share it and embed it across multiple product lines (no matter what operating system runs inside that product line).

Why is it so much fun to work here? Think about the permutations of products I can build from scratch using this approach. I select the reusable components that I need, create a service interface over those components, and I'm off and running.

It's all high-quality. CSX and its execution environment are themselves components which can be tested standalone on any platform (in both user space and kernel space).

This is why I believe the CSX invention was the most powerful creation of the last decade. It has had a tangible impact on EMC's internal innovative capacity.

Steve

http://stevetodd.typepad.com

Twitter: @SteveTodd

EMC Intrapreneur

September Acceleration

Whilst driving to work on the 1st of September yesterday I noticed that the traffic had picked up quite a bit and the school busses were on the roads. My commute took an extra 15-20 minutes; the busy season has pretty much started.

Couple this with the fact that it was my first day back after a great summer-ending trip to Utah with my son for a little rafting and fly-fishing, and it was no wonder that I was unprepared for the increased pace of busy New England.

Work-wise the task that is picking up the most is my participation in the global planning of the yearly EMC Innovation Showcase on October 20. There is a lot of activity happening:

• We're sending out film crews to some of our global facilities (e.g. Cork, St. Petersburg) to document the innovative work of their respective employees. As can be seen out at #vmworld this year, EMC is moving towards a lot of "TV-style" interviews and segments.
• Most of us on the planning committee have paired up with another global employee to help plan their local agendas for the event. I'm working with St. Petersburg and Cairo. In all cases the teams are planning guest speakers, customer visits, and/or technical panels.
• The finalists for the global idea contest have been whittled down from 1500+ to about 50. Posters are being prepared and a team of marketing leaders are helping the inventors to pitch their ideas effectively.
• The process of sending invitiations to the local event in Franklin, MA is being ironed out. I'm trying to reserve ten seats for the minions.
• A whole lot more....

Coming back from vacation to try and plan the big event (not to mention working on my day job) is a bit overwhelming but clearly it's a key event in EMC's Calendar that's well worth the effort.

As a last note I'll post a slide which summarizes where in the world the 1,500 ideas came from, as well as which geographies will be hosting their own local events.

 

Steve

http://stevetodd.typepad.com

Twitter: @SteveTodd

EMC Intrapreneur