@Martin- I agree with you here. Companies tend to move from innovative and bold to conservative and pragmatic. Not bad qualities necessarily, but very different for sure. Here's to change!

@Martin- That would be the Virtual Provisioning that requires pool management, right? The one with the 121 page white paper on emc.com that describes how to use it, how not to let the pools get too full, and how each pool needs to have it's own RAID type, etc? So I'll still be making decisions regarding which physical devices get built into data devices, and how those get added to the pools, on top of which I can "simplify".

@Storagezilla - I'm a little bit confused. Marc posted about wide striping and you are talking about Thin Provisioning. 3PAR's system stripes all volumes wide, with or without provisioning groups, with or without Thin Provisioning. If you need 500GB you do that with a single command line (or quick GUI wizard) without ~any~ previous setup. 3PAR delivers a blank, unconfigured array and the administrator creates a wide striped volume with the first command that he runs. So we can do this with DMX and get wide striping "autonomically" as 3PAR likes to say?

Oh, for a minute I thought this blog title had something to do with a new update on the EMC/Donatelli/HP situation. ;)

Marc- You have to be pissy to win a pissing contest. You'll lose this one. Storage Anarchist- EMC shrunk fast enough (see March 31 quarter end results vs. 2008 numbers) to avoid a loss. That's good management, I applaud them for takinng the initiative. But there is a ~bottom~ to that game. How many people can EMC take off the street and still bring in new business? There are a whole lot of EMC (and NetApp) sales people, I should say ~former~ that took it in the neck in recent months and quarters, to make sure that these large vendors could cut expenses as fast as they were shrinking revenues.

@Nigel- In the spirit of friendly debate, I'll counter the Devil's advocate position. Switching to a competitor doesn't defacto damage the first company (other than loss of a productive person). Revealing trade secrets or company internals ~does~ damage the first company directly. Do we jail people based on their looks, or do we wait to see their actions? Should sports cars be banned because they are capable of going ~criminally~ fast, or should we jut go after the reckless drivers that do so? Just because it is hard to catch someone breaking a contract, doesn't mean we assume that he will and punish him proactively. Civil law and criminal law are different, but the issue of fairness should remain. Signing on with a company shouldn't result in the modern equivalent of indentured servitude, even if you are shackled with golden handcuffs. If EMC deems it self a competitor in the free-market economy (or the facsimile we have today), and you know they see themselves as such, then they could have found a way to keep him. If they couldn't satisfy his needs, and HP could, then he should be free to go. Just my two libertarian cents.

@Geoff_Mitchell- Non-competes are inherently coercive. Your statement "you can choose not to (sign the non-compete)" is the equivalent of condoning other coercive behavior behind corporate doors and saying "you don't have to work here if you don't like it". Yes, people can choose to change their profession or move. It is difficult sometimes to exercise that "choice"... it is not without cost. I'm against any coercive act with regards to employment. That covers non-competes as well as mandatory unions (try getting a job at an automobile plant as an auto-worker without your UAW card). I can't recall exactly, but I do believe that I was required to sign the NC when I joined EMC "back in the day". I didn't care, as I knew the clause was ineffective in California. I was not an executive, but rather a lower level individual contributor. Note that NDAs are still useful for controlling employee behavior should they jump ship. And that's the way it should be. The penalty should be for the behavior that harms the company (revealing secrets, etc.), not for something that does not in itself damage the company.