ORIGINALLY POSTED 11th September 2008

7,362 views on developerworks

Last week I was about to post congratulating Chris Mellor on his ‘Blocks and Files’ site being absorbed, acquired, defunct, by his move to The Register. I’ve followed Chris since his days over at TechWorld, where he posted a few articles after reading my blog, abstracting some ‘jouralistic license’ and making 2+2=5. However it was all relatively positive and interesting to see his take.

Blocks and Files became one of my regular daily RSS toolbar views, checking what Chris and the team’s perspective on things.

I read his post on The Register regarding this weeks product announcements and was shocked at his tone. Something I’d expect more from a competitor. I considered if I should post a retort, or not give him the link. Other than his obvious un-impressedness, I think he did miss a few point.

IBM has a corporate requirement to RFA (Release for Announce) its products 30-60 days prior to their availability. This has always been the case, and the RFA site now gets picked up by google and so new RFA’s easier to find! So it looks like Chris has discovered this and checks for updates so he can ‘scoop’ new offerings. There is a difference between an RFA (a technical breakdown of what a product contains), and an official press release, where we set the scene for the product and give more general background to its place in the portfolio.

The research press release from Monday was a summary of the ongoing research work being done in storage, so yes we have disclosed most of these in the past, and of course most recently our ‘Quicksliver’ flash proof of concept project, judging by the response we have had from clients, there is huge interest in this out there and rest assured we have many people working on a whole raft of next generation storage products.

The product releases, XIV, DS5000, DS8000 R4 and Tape products are new, they may have been already scooped by Chris an others, but they are only just now available to customers, and this was the first IBM had openly spoken of them, wanting to save the details and the strategy for the Montpelier launch day. So although Chris reeled off the links to his Block and Files snippets, the press that attended the 3 day event now have a lot more details of the products and how they fit with our Information Infrastructure strategy. These products build on IBM’s existing world leading storage products, services, software and Systems.

If Chris had attended the days and the breakout product sessions maybe he would have had more to talk about, indeed maybe that was his frustration, I guess his invite was lost in the mail..

PS. Kinda appropriate : http://indexed.blogspot.com/2008/09/friend-told-me-about-it.html