StorageRap

Dweeberville: Melvin's band plays a Vmware party

Dweeberville #2.  Melvin and the Melonheads talk about their upcoming gig at VMworld 2009.  (Click on the graphic to magnify the image):

DataPipe turns up the cloud service level with it's virtual, private and secure cloud service

There's some amount of cloud backlash going on, but the despite the "not ready for primetime claims",  cloud service providers are pushing forward to deliver better and better services based on leading technology from key cloud-enabling vendors.  People tend to think that their own security and data protection mechanisms are superior to what they can get from a service provider, but those beliefs are not necessarily always true.  Not all cloud services are the same.

For instance, the global, managed cloud IT services from DataPipe  were already excellent, but they just got a little better with the introduction of a virtualized service called "Stratosphere".   

Cloud, storage and virtualization geeks will be interested in finding out about virtual private arrays, or VPAs, and how they work with Stratosphere.  In a nutshell, a VPA uses 3PAR array Virtual Domain technology to establish secure virtual storage arrays that give private access to customer administrators.  Once storage is provisioned for a customer, the customer can have an administrative account established that gives them the ability to monitor and manage their virtual slice of storage.  DR protection is also available as part of the service through the use of 3PAR's remote copy functionality. 

Stratosphere is built from virtual system, network and storage technology from VMware, Cisco, 3PAR, HP, Intel and Brocade.

Dweeberville? meh

How to save a boatload on VMware and other great tips for admins

Nate at Techopsguys.com had a great post the other day on what you could do with the v-Sphere essentials pack.  One of the things he mentions that I didn't know was this:

Something that is kind of interesting is that the “free” vSphere supports thin provisioning, I have 11 hosts running that version with local storage at remote sites. Odd that they throw in that with the free license but not with essentials!

That's different and way blasted interesting!  This blog looks like it could become an admin's bible.  There are 4 guys working on it and so far in its short life, every post has been EXCELLENT.  Here are a couple of my fave quotes:  (google the quote to find them in context)

You can pry vmware from my cold dead hands, but I still want to dispel this myth on ESXi’s size.

So I filed a ticket with vmware, the support team worked on it for a couple of weeks, escalating it everywhere, but as far as anyone could tell it’s “doing what it’s supposed to do”.

What would I like to see? Let the FCoE folks keep their stuff, if it makes them happy I’m happy for them.

OK, so just go there now.

New 3P song suggests "Store heads" get their data on the cloud

Everybody has an opinion these days about Cloud Computing and Cloud Storage.  3P tells "Store Heads" in his new video below that they ought to start investigating how to do it.  The equipment used by cloud service providers matters a great deal to their success.  Technologies such as reservationless thin provisioning, full array wide striping and dynamic, load-balancing, active/active controllers make the cloud experience much more satisfying.  3PAR partners with Cloud Service providers through a program called Cloud Agile to bring 3PAR array technology to cloud computing and storage customers.  

Watch:

Storage bloggers showcasing their talents!

OK, the talent show of the decade is on!  The League of Suspicious Avatars (LOSA) has been working behind the scenes to bring you the very best of the storage blogosphere, complete with an astounding panel of judges.  Remember to submit your comments about who you think shows the most talent!

The not active active enough for VMware blues

Somebody asked me on Twitter the other day if our arrays allowed a pair of host HBAs to concurrently access a single LUN though two different controllers - telling me a competitor was saying we couldn't. Well, that was pretty whacked because our clustered architecture is designed specifically for that purpose. What they probably meant to say was that their own product couldn't do it. Anyway, it got the juices flowing for a new SWCSA vid!

If you are wondering how to get the most out of VMware's v-Sphere multipathing options, you need to make sure your storage array allows you to access individual LUNs through multiple controllers at the same time. 

Why would you limit yourself to one controller per LUN, like Clariion, Netapp and HDS among others when you can balance the load dynamically across multiple HBAs and controllers with 3PAR InServ arrays with mesh-active controllers. To be clear, this industry-leading clustered storage capability is designed into all our arrays, from our mid-range F Class arrays to our enterprise T Class arrays. 

Taking on childhood cancer

My friend and co-worker John Frizzell knows the pain of having a child who suffered with cancer. Having the energy and compassion to do something about it, he and his wife founded a charity to improve the situation for others.

Kalen’s Sweet Miracles is a charitable organization devoted to fighting childhood cancer in memory of Kalen Frizzell. From their website:

Our mission is to raise awareness of childhood cancer, to raise funds for childhood cancer research, and to grant funds to organizations that provide summer camp and year round activities for children diagnosed with cancer and their families.   

Kalen’s Sweet Miracles was founded by Kalen’s parents, John and Kimberly Frizzell.  The organization is appropriately named after the old fashioned sweet shop that Kalen had dreamed of opening in 2008 during her one year recovery period after a bone marrow transplant.  In her spirit of kindness and unselfishness, it was necessary to find an alternative way of keeping Kalen’s dream alive while hoping to make a difference so that other children like Kalen will have a greater chance of living their dreams.

Please feel free to explore the site and contact John and Kimberly if you are interested in helping.

Die Deutschen trojan?

I'm having the most unusual blogging experience.  A few days ago, my Typepad control panel pages converted to communicating to me (through Firefox) auf Deutsh. The blog postings are all in English and no other sites have been effected - just the Typepad dashboard.  Opera and IE both work, but I prefer working in Firefox for the thrills of tab hopping.

Its not the language settings, nor is it the encoding settings for the page.  For some reason Firefox just decided to translate the Typepad author interface into German!  I never should have quit the language after my first attempt at college.

Here are some of the words, I'm seeing now on the writing (schreiben) page:

Schlüsselwörter  - key words
Vorshau  - preview
Speichern  - save
Jetzt veroffentlichen  - publish now

Alles ist Wunderbar!  Deine Kommentare ist Welkommen!  Ich bin ein Berliner!

What's with that? Tech news on drugs.

I don't know about you, but I am somewhat concerned about the way news is created and presented to the world.  We've had various forms of propaganda for many years now, dictated by political doctrines or affiliations or other beliefs, but the fact is ALL news is created with some sort of editorial slant - no matter how objective the mission of the producers.

So we pick up bits and pieces from blogs, Twitter, Facebook and wherever and we synthesize our own information-scape. But every now and then I hit a few Chuckholes (oh no - no veiled reference to another storage blogger there!) on the road to my own private virtual reality - and this morning I found myself bottoming out on the Twitter information highway, hitting a few reports that just seemed wrong.

The first claimed Netapp was the first company to market with Native FCoE connectivity.  Its pretty clear from the article, that it was primarily a press release from Q Logic with Netapp's participation as a DESIGN WIN.  There is a huge difference between the headline and the story.  Shoot - the headline might as well have said "EMC loses race to Netapp for FCoE dominance" - or - "3PAR falls off FCoE cliff".  I really don't mind Netapp getting a little glory (yes, a TDF reference!) with Q Logic - that's the way things work in our business, but shouldn't somebody at either Q or Netapp have done a better job explaining to CNN that design wins are pretty far removed from shipped product?  Maybe there was nothing they could do - maybe the CNN editors were bound and determined to go off into National Enquirer land. 

The next one was a piece on Infoworld, where the author expressed the opinion that VMware has reached a premature middle age, by failing to innovate and pursuing such ridiculous technologies as V Motion.  Wow, somebody at Infoworld needs to get out the shepherds crook for this kook!  Maybe not, if enough people link over there to expose the authors ignorance it will be good for Infoworld - it's a strange world. But as CXI sarcastically tweeted this morning: "Why would people use vmotion? thats so sillie and ridiculous! next thing you're going to say people take snapshots?!"  Maybe tomorrow we'll see a thread that says businesses don't need to use snapshots anymore.

Get ready for the next big thing in social media - FaceFeed!

Another social mashup today - Facebook acquires Friendfeed.   I'd like to see the names blended, then we would have something that appeals to everybody, not just word eaters.  I like Facefeed.

Is 3PAR the BMW of the storage industry? Yes, if you include the Mini!

Stephen Foskett had a whimsical post last Friday proposing which storage companies would be matched with which automobile companies.  The meme is going around this summer in various forms, like this one on Steve Duplessie's blog,  or this one on CIO's web site in the UK.

In his post, Foskett compared 3PAR to BMW, insinuating that our ultimate storage machines are only appreciated by the high end of the market.   However, BMW also has the Mini, which appeals to a much different kind of customer - but still it's a customer that enjoys an excellent driving experience. Similarly, 3PAR has it's ultimate mid-range storage array - our F Class arrays that deliver great performance and efficiencies to our customers. 

So thanks Stephen for the analogy!  It fits even better than you thought. 

  =

 

 

 

The group blogging circus and FUD findings: Anarchist, Enrico, Hu and the no shows from Compellent

(Author's note:  a couple typos in the next to last paragraph have been corrected, which should make things clearer  -mf 8-08-2009)

It's funny how things work in the stoblogosphere.  The  Anarchist goes after my reservationless post and steps in a pot hole of tchit and in the process brings blogging newcomer Enrico Signoretti - a Compellent reseller from Italy - out of the woodwork to howl about the stench. 

A couple things about what Anarchist and Enrico said brought to light that people get 3PAR and Compellent confused sometimes. Mostly these are financial people - but lately Anarchist seems to be looking for a new career as a financial analyst as the long slow decline of Symmetrix sets in. Anyway, I felt compelled  to point out the differences between 3PAR and Compellent, which got Enrico's attention again and like a true defender of the faith he posted on some things he felt I mis-spun.  God, I love blogging.  And for money's worth - it is much, much richer than  twittering.

Of course, as things go, I recognized some pretty lame Compellent FUD that they have been feeding their resellers for some time now about 3PAR's hardware, which reminded me to post about it because it's actually a huge advantage for us. FWIW, I'm betting that no one from Compellent shows up to challenge it as they seem content to let their FUD-fed resellers do the dirty work for them.  Clever, but in the end it's not a nice thing to do to guys like Enrico (have them carry you FUD for you).  To be clear Enrico, you are OK with me, my gripe is not with you.

3PAR has been using Intel processors from it's inception in it's storage controllers.  There are a lot of good things about this and it's heartwarming to see EMC finally move to Intel on V-Max after all these years.  It takes them a long time to get caught up and of course, the target continues to move in front of them - despite their hollow declarations of parity.  Oh yeah!  And implementations don't matter either!

The proprietary stuff in Compellent's FUD has to do with our ASIC, which is a co-processor for storage functions.  While Intel platforms have some great advantages (that we recognized 10 years ago), there are some shortcomings to using them - like segregating different types of I/O traffic - especially small database I/O versus long sequential streams.  The ASIC in our system does this superbly, which is why our mixed application workload is so freaking good (along with our reservationless true wide striping.)  Why would you want to buy a different array for each major application - that's a waste of resources.

But why would Compellent tell their resellers that 3PAR runs on proprietary hardware, when we run on Intel with a kick-ass co-processor to handle the hard stuff?  It wouldn't be the usual disingenuous marketing tactics they like to accuse EMC of - would it?

The other thing our ASIC does is compute parity.  Why on earth would you want to tie up your main controller processor doing this?  Because you don't have the architecture to do it in a co-processor.

Which brings me to some of Hu Yoshida's recent posts. Hu has obviously been fed some things from the engineers in Odawara, Japan when he recently wrote about about the trade offs you have to make when you select your allocation size. Now I don't have much beef with Hu personally because he is a pretty good guy, but this post really only exposes the limitations of Hitachi's engineering team.  Yes, there are trade offs in every design decision, but there are are an almost infinite number of ways to pay for them.  3PAR's design inception is still way ahead of the rest of the industry because people that designed high end cluster server systems for SUN designed the 3PAR architecture. I don't want to be too snide, but it's pretty clear that Hitachi has  does not have the same sort of perspective on clustered systems design.

Whew - rant over.  I'm going for my first coffee of the day now.

Welcome Enrico Signoretti to the WW Storage Blogosphere!

Enrico Signoretti is a blogger from Italy (la docle vita!) who just started posting in English.  He has been on Twitter for some time and has expanded his voice to the ww storage blogosphere with his Cinetica Blog.

He is passionate about his business as a reseller for Compellent.  People might wonder why I would refer to a blog from a Compellent reseller and the reason is that we have had a discussion about 3PAR and Compellent there that started with my last blog post - which was inspired somewhat by his first English blog post, which reminded me of a few things that I thought needed mentioning. That's blogging for you!

There are never enough bloggers who are passionate about their work!  I also think it is very brave for a guy for a guy from Italy to talk about EMC the way he does.  He obviously follows the storage blogosphere and knows what the big battle royale of storage blogging is like.  It can be intimidating, but that hasn't stopped Enrico from jumping into the fray.

People may wonder why Compellent themselves did not respond to my previous blog posts.  Et Tu - Compellent?

Clearing up the Compellent Confusion

The storage industry can be confusing - even to insiders.  For example, people often compare 3PAR and Compellent because both companies are "newer" vendors working their way up against established competitors.  

But that's about where the comparisons end.  3PAR arrays scale to performance levels that far exceed Compellent's.  While it may be possible to attach the same number of drives to both arrays, when you push them both for total throughput, 3PAR crushes Compellent.   With 100+ drive systems, there is no comparison.  If you think you might need hundreds of drives, instead of less than 100, it's a slam dunk for 3PAR.

With less than 100 drives, our product lines overlap and that's probably where the confusion comes from because 3PAR's F-Class arrays compete with Compellent's. Our smallest F Class - the F200 scales from 16 to 192 drives and its bigger brother the F400 scales from 16 to 384 drives (with the addition of 2 more mesh active controllers).  FWIW, you won't saturate a 3PAR controller by loading too many drives on it - the F Class controllers can handle 192 15K RPM drives with overhead to spare. Realistically, its probably not fair to Compellent to compare any of their systems to one of our quad controller F400s. 

Nobody handles mixed workloads like 3PAR.  Which means customers can put many different applications on our arrays and get excellent performance from their systems at very high disk utilization levels.  Don't just take my word for it, see what our customers have said on TechValidate. (will require a login - it's not a 3PAR site).  The key to this is the fine-grained allocations of storage combined with true wide striping - not based on pools and metas and hypers and such.

Both companies have delivered important storage virtualization innovations to the industry.  3PAR didn't invent thin provisioning, but we forced the issue in the industry and now it's a mandatory feature in all enterprise arrays.  FWIW, our work in storage efficiency and utilization technologies continues and you can expect to see more from us in the future that allows customers to get the most from their capacity.  We are always happy when customers dig deeper into this technology and compare our reservationless thin storage with any other vendor's thin implementations. 

In Compellent's case, the delivery of Data Progression has been a key stimulus to the rest of the industry.  EMC's FAST technology, due in its first release late this year is a clear attempt to catch up with Compellent.   However, just as Thin Provisioning is not a 3PAR invention, the ability to move data between storage tiers is hardly a Compellent invention.  When I was at EqualLogic, the product had the ability to move data automatically between tiers of storage spanning different systems. Their evacuate and replace capabilities rely on their automated tiering technology. 

3PAR introduced it's Dynamic Optimization (DO) product in 2005, which redistributes data from one set of resources across an expanded or different set of resources. For instance, today a customer can add new drives to a 3PAR system and redistribute volumes across all the drives in the system using DO. They might do this for either capacity or performance reasons - or both. With storage capacity needs continuing to grow, it's important to be able to scale with performance and agility.  When you add new drives to a 3PAR system, their capacity is a reservationless resources that can be used by any application, on demand - including for use as snapshots for existing or new applications.