Tony Pearson is a Master Inventor and Senior IT Architect for the IBM Storage product line at the
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Cover-Up is Worse than the Original CrimeOn my last blog post [Is this what HDS tells our mainframe clients?], I poked fun at Hu Yoshida's blog post that contained a graphic with questionable results. Suddenly, the blog post disappeared altogether. Poof! Gone! Just so that I am not accused of taking a graph out of context, here is Hu's original post, in its entirety:
At this point, you might be wondering: "If Hu Yoshida deleted his blog post, how did Tony get a copy of it? Did Tony save a copy of the HTML source before Hu deleted it?" No. I should have, in retrospect, in case lawyers got involved. It turns out that deleting a blog post does not clear the various copies in various RSS Feed Reader caches. I was able to dig out the previous version from the vast Google repository. (Many thanks to my friends at Google!!!). The graph itself was hosted separately has been deleted, but it was just taken from slide 10 of the HDS presentation [How to Apply the Latest Advances in Hitachi Mainframe Storage], so it was easy to recreate. (Lesson to all bloggers: If you write a blog post, and later decide to remove it for whatever legal, ethical, moral reasons, it is better to edit the post to remove offending content, and add a comment that the post was edited, and why. Shrinking a 700-word article down to 'Sorry Folks - I decided to remove this blog post because...' would do the trick. This new edited version will then slowly propagate across to all of the RSS Feed Reader caches, eliminating most traces to the original. Of course, the original may have been saved by any number of your readers, but at least if you have an edited version, it can serve as the official or canonical version.) Perhaps there was a reason why HDS did not want to make public the FUD its sales team use in private meetings with IBM mainframe clients. Whatever it was, this appears to be another case where the cover-up is worse than the original crime!
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Is this what HDS tells our mainframe clients?Five years ago, I sprayed coffee all over my screen from something I read on a blog post from fellow blogger Hu Yoshida from HDS. You can read what cased my reaction in my now infamous post [Hu Yoshida should know better]. Subsequently, over the years, I have disagreed with Hu on a variety of of topics, as documented in my 2010 blog post [Hu Yoshida Does It Again]. (Apparently, I am not alone, as the process of spraying one's coffee onto one's computer screen while reading other blog posts has been referred to as "Pulling a Tony" or "Doing a Tony" by other bloggers!) Fortunately, my IBM colleague David Sacks doesn't drink coffee. Last month, David noticed that Hu had posted a graph in a recent blog entry titled [Additional Storage Performance Efficiencies for Mainframes], comparing the performance of HDS's Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) to IBM's DS8000. 
For those not familiar with disk performance graphs, flatter is better, lower response time and larger IOPS are always desired. This graph implies that the HDS disk system is astonishingly faster than IBM's DS8000 series disk system. Certainly, the HDS VSP qualifies as a member of the elite [Super High-End club] with impressive SPC benchmark numbers, and is generally recognized as a device that works in IBM mainframe environments. But this new comparison graph is just ridiculous! (Note: While SPC benchmarks are useful for making purchase decisions, different disk systems respond differently to different workloads. As the former lead architect of DFSMS for z/OS, I am often brought in to consult on mainframe performance issues in complex situations. Several times, we have fixed performance problems for our mainframe clients by replacing their HDS systems with IBM DS8000 series!) Since Hu's blog entry contained very little information about the performance test used to generate the graph, David submitted a comment directly to Hu's blog asking a few simple questions to help IBM and Hu's readers determine whether the test was fair. Here is David's comment as submitted: "Hello, Hu, Unlike my blog on IBM, HDS bloggers like Hu are allowed to reject or deny comments before they appear on his blog post. We were disappointed that HDS never posted David's comment nor responded to it. That certainly raises questions about the quality of the comparison. So, perhaps this is yet another case of [Hitachi Math], a phrase coined by fellow blogger Barry Burke from EMC back in 2007 in reference to outlandish HDS claims. My earliest mention was in my blog post [Not letting the Wookie Win]. By the way, since the test was about z/OS Extended Address Volumes (EAV), it is worth mentioning that IBM's DS8700 and DS8800 support 3390 volume capacities up to 1 TB each, while the HDS VSP is limited to only 223 GB per volume. Larger volume capacities help support ease-of-growth and help reduce the number of volumes storage administrators need to manage; that's just one example of how the DS8000 series continues to provide the best storage system support for z/OS environments. Personally, I am all for running both IBM and HDS boxes side-by-side and publishing the methodology, the workload characteristics, the configuration details, and the results. Sunshine is always the best disinfectant!
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