More Than Just Words

In an industry that calls something a storage area network that isnt a network at all, you should expect a bit of fast-and-loose playing with words.

Case in point: Sometime soon, one vendor will tout its latest Fibre Channel fabric innovation as a “SAN within a SAN” – following on the heels of another announcement awhile back that extolled the merits of something called a “SAN in a box.”

Both terms are oxymoronical in the extreme, of course, if not downright funny. But consumers seem content to adopt the position I take with my autistic son as he draws motion picture studio logos in chalk on every door in the house: Just look the other way.

This raises the perennial question of the importance of language – especially when it comes to marketing. To the product marketer, words are tools. They are used to re-contextualize, spin, and dumb down whatever information or position the vendor wants to communicate.

For instance, Fibre Channel is a network protocol because Cisco Systems – that onetime passionate advocate of iSCSI, now turned Fibre Channel switch vendor – says that it is.Dumbing down the language to make a sale is an old story. The veracity of former President Clinton’s claim that he did not have sex with Ms. Lewinsky depended entirely on a common definition of what constitutes sex. The same holds true of the industry’s claims that they are selling SANs.

Put simply, marketing folks are engineers, whose tools are words. And they are not so much interested in getting at the truth of things, as in harnessing whatever is known or believed about a thing to achieve a desired result.

Sure, we could call contemporary SANs what they really are, switched point-to-point fabric topologies, but “SPTPFT” doesn’t roll off the tongue like “SAN.” Moreover, given the extraordinary amount of money spent to make SAN part of the storage vocabulary by members of SNIA and the FCIA, why not capitalize on the investment?

Still, I grimace every time an otherwise savvy CIO or storage admin refers to his fabric as a SAN. I know what a SAN is supposed to be – Digital Equipment guys who went over to Compaq in the late 1990s blessed us with a white paper that defined them. The Enterprise Network Storage Architecture (ENSA) paper in 1997 was every bit the charter document that the 1977 Berkeley white paper was for RAID. And by the way, if you can’t find a copy (HP, purveyor of the SAN in a Box, seems to have "disappeared" them all), there is one permanently available on at least two of my Websites.

— Jon William Toigo, Contributing Editor, Byte and SwitchThe problem with the pathetic lack of attention paid to the accuracy of terminology in storage is not just that it obfuscates reasonable discussion, it also creates a slippery slope. Just as lies beget more lies, the use of deliberately inaccurate verbiage diminishes the value placed upon accuracy and opens the door to tactics that do violence to language as a whole.

Here is a cautionary tale to illustrate my point: The other day, a friend of mine reported that Google refused his advertisement. He sells aftermarket maintenance and services on gear from Network Appliance, among others. He provides support to customers who have legitimate, licensed filers on their floor that Sunnyvale has decided to remove from support. (Why is it that any vendor can sell equipment on a multi-year lease that it takes off support in 18 months? A topic for another time perhaps.)

Anyway, my friend provides a respectable service at an affordable price, helping customers to derive continued value from their investment over time. At the same time, my friend is a self-appointed watchdog of Network Appliance. He monitors everything that NetApp folks say and all aspects of their publicly articulated value proposition.

Often, he finds incongruities between their marketing claims and reality, which he reports in his own blog. Sometimes, he just echoes the comments offered on the Toasters bulletin board at toasters.mathworks.com, where a lot of NetApp users hang out.

Bottom line: My friend often finds himself questioning the statements and assertions coming out of Sunnyvale. I suppose he has a broad enough readership that Network Appliance doesn’t much like that fact that someone is questioning their product announcements and public statements. As a result, NetApp told Google that the terms “Network Appliance” and “NetApp” are trademarked and cannot be used in advertisements from my friend's company. Not all advertisements from all companies, mind you: Only ads from his firm (and any others they do not like).Google goes along with this, of course. We are talking about a company, after all, whose Chinese search engine censors all references to Tibet – an obvious collusion with the overlords of that up-and-coming market.

The result of this blatant censorship is that one avenue of articulating a valid offer of service and support has been cut off to customers NetApp is not servicing anyway (except to offer them new replacement gear that doesn’t perform as well as their previous models, in some cases).

In this instance, NetApp's determination to control the printed word has led to a selective application of trademark laws. No wonder that an expression that has come into currency of late is the verb “NetApped” – as in, “I am tired of being NetApped. Why don’t people just speak honestly and openly about things?”

Is that really the meaning that NetApp wants vested in their trademark name?

Equally interesting is EMC’s use of copyright law to try to dumb down debate over the efficacy of various data protection and disaster recovery techniques. I was recently told EMC was seeking to copyright the expressions “Recovery Point” and “Recover Point” to prevent their competitors from using them in discussions of their continuous data protection solutions.EMC has a product called RecoverPoint that they have paid a lot of analysts a lot of money to say good things about. Apparently, this endorsement isn’t enough: They want to own the expression to prevent others from using it.

As someone who has been working in the realm of disaster recovery and business continuity for nearly 25 years – even before EMC moved from the furniture business to the storage business – the terms “recovery point objective” and “recover point” have always been in common parlance in the DR trade: shorthand terms expressing general goals of application recovery.

Recovery point and recovery time went hand in hand as descriptions of the general recovery objective. Recovery time referred to the maximum length of time, post interruption, by which restoration of operations was to be accomplished. Recovery point referred to the transactional state of an application at the time at which recovery was accomplished. For example, if we wanted to lose no more than 10 minutes of transactions, our recovery point objective would be event minus ten minutes.

There has been nothing magical about the term recovery point or recover point. That EMC elected to use it as a brand name for a product merely reflected the widespread understanding of a shorthand expression already in common use.

But when competitive CDP makers appeared on the market a couple of years ago who were also using the expressions recovery point and recover point to express the value of their products over point-in-time mirror splitting (EMC’s claim to fame), apparently the wheels in Hopkinton began to spin. Why not trademark the expression to shut up the competitors -- or make those rivals' efforts to explain their competitive value that much more difficult?This little trick has been tried before. Xerox used to threaten lawsuits when a competitor used the term “Xeroxing” to describe photocopying. And in storage, Kevin Daly, while CEO at Avamar Technologies, trademarked the expression “RAIN” (“Redundant Array of Independent Nodes”) just to be a pest to EMC, which was using the expression all over its website at the time. Daly, to his credit, never sought to enforce the trademark, which probably explains why RAIN is still all over EMC’s site, but without a trademark symbol. It was simply Daly's quirky humor at work.

Anyway, trying to take such expressions off the available list of valid terminology for no reason other than to limit open discussion and debate of technology options is just wrong, in my humble opinion. It is another example of the slippery slope that is created when you dumb down the meaning of words.

Feel free to disagree. Console yourself with the old saw, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” Words may not hurt, but not having them has a way of limiting your ability to express your ideas or to see your options.

Any way you look at it, we are talking about more than just words.

— Jon William Toigo, Contributing Editor, Byte and Switch