Most companies aren’t in business for the fun of it. Some exist to make a difference and change the world, a few exist for fun… Most companies exist to make money. I hope you find purpose in the work you do and really enjoy it. I LOVE what I do, and I enjoy the people I work with. But as much as I love my job, if I were independently wealthy, I would stay home with my wife on Monday morning. 😉 I might not work for months while we travel the country! But alas, I work to make money. And most business make money so they can pay their employees money.

The fact that some companies exist to make money often leads them to become greedy, to hoard their resources, and to eventually put themselves out of business by not being a valuable part of the whole ecosystem that is the global economy. Just like is true of people, it is also true that in business, generosity, cooperation, and being a good citizen may seem to cost you at times, but that investment will pay off big in the end.

Cooperation and VAIO

I mentioned something in the Thursday edition of the vExpert Daily at VMworld 2014 that I wanted to expound on. At Tech Field Day Extra on Tuesday, we heard from SanDisk about their work with VMware in developing the vSphere APIs for IO Filtering. VMware has also partnered with the EMC RecoverPoint team on this project. VAIO for short, the APIs allow third-party vendors access to the raw I/O stream which is incredibly useful for developing products in the deduplication, replication, and server-side caching areas. The “I/O filter” is installed as a VIB on an ESXi host, and in order to limit the size of the fault domain, the filter will run in the VM user space. This means that if something goes sideways, only the VM will be impacted and the host will remain stable.

What really excites me about this whole deal (besides the technical beauty) is what level of innovation and progress is possible when companies play nice as a healthy part of the larger ecosystem. Yes, VMware could have made this IO Filtering capability proprietary and only open to them (and actually, they tried. Remember vFlash Read Cache?) but how many other businesses benefit from that? On the other hand, how many businesses benefit from allowing third-party vendors to contribute their IP to that space and perhaps do things VMware doesn’t have the time or resources to develop? Who isn’t better off because of APIs like VAAI and VASA? In my mind, this is a solid win for all parties, and I want to see more of this sort of cooperation!