Enough already of this EMC fantasy about a unified platform!

How much kool aid can be consumed in the blogospere?  An infinite amount apparently.

Now that I see Steve Todd, EMC Intrapreneur, jumping on the circle jerk bandwagon of EMC's love for federated systems and the vaporware ideal of their having a unified platform - I have a very simple litmus test to offer:

1. Do EMC's many systems work together to protect customer's data?  Have they shown an ability to integrate data protection across their primary storage platforms? 

2. Do they have an integrated management system that allows customers to use the same tools across their primary storage products?

EMC customers understand the frustration of living with diversification much more than the joys of federation.

Do Clariions work with DMXes or v-Maxes for such basic bread and butter data protection applications as remote copy?  No. Do administrators have to learn different skills to deploy and manage EMC mid range and enterprise arrays? Yes.  You can talk about federated futures all you want, but the past and present tell the real story and saying its a simple matter of programming to bridge the gap is - well - saying its a simple matter of programming.

This is not EMC bashing, this is telling it like it really is - the way customers feel the pain. 

If you want examples of storage vendors who have already been delivering on the unified platform concept check out 3PAR and EqualLogic.

All 3PAR InServ arrays run the same software. Remote copy operations work between Enterprise (T class) and Mid Range (F class) storage clusters.  Admins of 3PAR systems learn a single set of skills that are transferable between mid range and enterprise clusters.  We do not mix F class and T class nodes in the same cluster - you either build an F class cluster or a T class cluster.  3PAR clusters are something we call Mesh Active, which refers to the uniform distribution of I/O activity and cache resources across all nodes in the cluster.

All EqualLogic arrays run the same software base. Remote copy operations work across all of their systems (I'm not sure about their new entry systems - but it would be a licensing restriction and not a code difference if these systems do not). Admins of EqualLogic arrays also learn a single set of skills that are transferable across all their products.  You can mix and match different EqualLogic products in a single group. A group is not a cluster and does not have the same performance and availability characteristics as a cluster.

If you want to talk about federated systems in the cloud, look at what 3PAR cloud computing customers are doing.  Our Cloud Agile partners have started rolling out ASSURED and SECURED services which demonstrate platform federation with remote copy and virtual private domains for storage in the cloud.

Comments

[Chuck Hollis]

Marc:

Need to correct a few points you made that ain't so.

Data protection is relatively well integrated across the EMC platform portfolio.

Advanced replication products like RecoverPoint are agnostic as to whether it's a V-Max or a CLARiiON. Our Disk Library products can use both platforms as either source or target. Our backup products (Avamar, NetWorker) are equally agnostic. File system archives (Rainfinity) are platform agnostic as well.

There are a few platform-specific exceptions, but it's a very different picture than the one you're attempting to paint.

I should point out that many of these capabilities are not available in any form whatsoever from 3Par, so it's an unfair comparison on my part.

Regarding management, you're right -- at a very low level, these products run different operating systems, much like an intel server could run either Windows or Linux as an operating system.

However, at a higher level, they present as SMI-S compliant storage arrays, and can be orchestrated with other resources (virtual servers, applications, networks) pretty much the same using our Ionix portfolio.

Again, 3Par doesn't offer any comparable management (or security) tools, so it's an unfair comparison on my part.

I would like to point out also that each of EMC's platform businesses (Symmetrix, CLARiiON, Celerra, Iomega, etc.) are many times larger than 3Par's entire revenue stream on a standalone basis, so -- again -- an unfair comparison on my part.

One of the reasons our storage business is so large is our product diversity -- we can address multiple segments of the market, since not everyone needs the exact same storage array.

If customers prefer not to have multiple storage arrays, they're free to stick to a single member of the EMC family, such as V-Max or CLARiiON, and many do just this.

Every time I see you use the word "enterprise" to describe your products, I think to myself "boy, they're really reaching here". Most accepted definitions of "enterprise storage" would not include your product, despite its many fine attributes.

For example, the analysts tend to use a definition that includes multiple protocols: FC, iSCSI, NAS/CIFS, FICON etc. Sorry, another unfair comparison.

Steve Todd is right -- federation is going to turn out to be an important topic for those of us in the storage industry. Making multiple arrays act as one -- especially at a distance -- will be very important for anyone who thinks of cloud as more than a marketing program.

Love the comic strips -- keep it up!

-- Chuck

[Charlie Dellacona]

One architecture, one operating system, one company, DEC! Oh I mean, Compaq, no HP.

Thank goodness though it worked well enough to get rid of IBM with their many disparate platforms. Oh wait, they are still here with mostly the same platform line up, ugh.

Some times a common platform can get stretched too far, then it pleases no one. VMS never conquered the high end, and it got in the way on the smallest applications, and I still love VMS.

For a common data protection strategy we do have Recoverpoint, which works very well between platforms.

[Steve Todd]

Marc,
If you didn't like my particular post, just wait 'til the end of the week! I've got another one coming just like it!
Your friend the EMC Intrapreneur

[marc farley]

Is your official title now "Intrapreneur"? Would you send me a copy of your business card? Congrats on having one of the best jobs in the universe and on you recently published (June 2009) book, where you undoubtedly write about being an intrapreneur. Congratulations on both items - a solid success.

[marc farley]

Chuck, It's true that 3PAR is a much smaller company than EMC, but the size of the company doesn't equate with the markets it participates in. 3PAR definitely sells enterprise gear to enterprise companies. Of course it makes sense for EMC to position us differently, but that doesn't keep enterprise customers from buying 3PAR enterprise products at EMC's expense.

I've long admired EMC's acquisition strategy. EMC has had very good timing picking up companies and figuring out how to optimize profits quickly without wasting too much time on integration efforts. The acquisition of Kashya - which has been rebranded by EMC as Recoverpoint is a great example.

When you contrast that to Netapp's acquisition approach of wanting most everything they sell to be integrated with their filers, its pretty clear that EMC has had a better M&A strategy.

But saying that an appliance, like Recoverpoint, provides platform federation is a pretty loose interpretation of federation. Layering appliances (not to mention professional services) to cover platform incompatibilities is not exactly platform federation - it's bloat. And that's the hard part of EMC's successful M&A strategy. Things like platform federation are not easily generated by M&A efforts but are designed into product architectures. If the same architecture is used in products that span class and market boundaries, federation is very easy and inexpensive to accomplish.

In 3PAR's case, we took the unusual path of getting there by making a smaller version of our enterprise storage systems. Same clustered controller architecture, same automated wide striping, same reservationless thin provisioning, same everything, but smaller and costing less. Our enterprise customers don't have to buy layers of appliances and services to make it work. It's an IT-driven strategy, as opposed to being an M&A strategy.

[Chuck Hollis]

Marc -- you don't consider the V-Max architectural model "federation"?

I must be missing something -- how do you define it?

-- Chuck

[marc farley]

I think most products, such as a 3PAR T-class, F-class or V-Max allow customers to build a federated infrastructure of distributed installations. But when you mix other products with them, such as Clariion arrays with V-Max, the compatibility differences keep this from being federated.

To your point, a distributed system of multiple V-Maxes should be able to form a federated environment for your customers. I have no idea about combining DMX and V-Max, but Clariion and either of the other two, no.

Recoverpoint is yet a third type of system with a "tweener" role. To me this is not federation, although it enables a level of interoperation that isn't there otherwise.

[John F.]

@Marc,

I'd have to agree.. Federated Resources? With RecoverPoint? Someone has been watching reruns of Robot Chicken and learned a new buzzword I do believe...

John

[marc farley]

Robot chicken? I'm unfamiliar. Do tell.

[John F.]

Nor was I until my teenage daughter brought it up. Seems to be a mashup of characters thrown together in odd ways. Apparently there's an episode called "Federated Resources".

http://robotchicken.wikia.com/wiki/Federated_Resources

John

[the storage anarchist]

Marc - you speak as if federating Symmetrix and CLARiiON is an impossibility; I can assure you that it isn't.

You also may have overlooked the fact that we've already begun to align management interfaces and terminology used across our products, starting with Virtual Provisioning. Very soon more aligned interfaces will be revealed as we roll out FAST.

Federation is not a product, it is a journey. Over the coming year many of the innovations that we have initiated over the past half-decade will converge, presenting a markedly different management experience than the one our customers dealt with 10 years ago.

And as a result, EMC's massive installed base will benefit from many of the value propositions that 3PAR embodies - and much, much more - without switching vendors. And I'm not attacking your relatively tiny size; it requires an order of magnitude more innovation to implement new capabilities without disrupting your installed base.

[Bob]

Marc,
I see your mention of "Mesh Active" controllers. Are these "active-active symmetric", "active-active asymmetric", "dual-active", something else??? Where can I read up on this "Mesh Active" technology?

[marc farley]

Bob, if you want to think of them as active/active symmetric, that's a good place to start. Mesh active is full parallel I/O over multiple paths to a single LUN target, with cache coherency. In practice this typically means dual active connections, but a host cluster could have more connections than that processing I/Os simultaneously. One of the important elements is the sub-volume distribution among controller nodes in a 3PAR cluster.

I'll white board this on a video later today and post it on the blog.

[marc farley]

Anarchist, I agree that federation is an evolution. You make it sound like the race is already over, but the fact is we are still gaining ground. We certainly can't out-staff EMC, so we can't afford to develop and over-hype flops like Invista.

The larger the company, the more difficult it is to innovate - even if you have talented Intrapreneurs like Steve Todd working for you. FWIW, this is one of the reasons I begrudgingly applaud EMC's M&A strategy. You've had many good acquisitions that have been well managed. Of course, none have had more impact than the VMware acquisition. EMC would be in a much different position had it not acquired VMware - that was a brilliant - and lucky move.

But now EMC is tweeking the VMware success recipe with closed development of such things like object protocols, such as Chuck and Dave Graham have been hinting at in their blogs. Those things could become sliced bread and they could also become real lodestones if they don't quite work as promised. I don't agree that size gives EMC a leg up where innovation is concerned - it simply changes the magnitude of the rewards and punishments.

[the storage anarchist]

I'll have to disagree with you that the ability to innovate is inversely porportional to company size.

In real fact, here at EMC, we enjoy somewhere around 40,000 full-time innovators, delivering a very wide swath of products to a diverse set of target markets and customers. Indeed, with size and profits comes the ability to invest more broadly - to expand the focus beyond the next quarters' revenues and the next product release.

Although you yuk it up pointing out the missteps, the company has literally breathed life into many, many new markets and introduced dozens of revolutionary new technologoies over the past 3 decades. From the original Plug-Compatible Memories, to Intelligent Large-Cached RAID Arrays, to Scale-Out enterprise NAS, to Content-Addressable Storage, to Disk Libraries, to Enterprise Flash Doohickeys and yes, even the VMware-fueled Virtual Data Center Operating System, to the thousands of patents - EMC Innovation is today used by hundreds of thousands of customers around the globe (and that's not counting the IOMega customer base).

And rest assured, there is much more EMC innovation to be seen in the coming months and years.

[Chris Fricke]

Late to the party but but as the resident "EqualLogic guy" I felt it important to note that yes - the PS4000 series arrays (the new entry systems mentioned) join the same groups and run under the same toolset as any other array since the PS100. They did impose some soft limits (two such arrays per group and fewer snapshots etc) but it's still just "plug it in and go".

[Bill]

@Chuck_Hollis:

The least you can do is to capitalize 3PAR's name properly. I don't see Marc calling your company Emc. Both company names are derived from their founders names, both should be capitalized.

You mainly point out how EMC's host-based software will work with most/all of EMC's hardware. Marc's point is that all of your storage arrays have different core array software, and different management interfaces. They can't replicate to each other natively. Is this a horrible thing? No, it's just a fact that's a bit painful for us users of storage. It's also true of most of the big competitors (notably IBM, HP, and of course EMC).

So you can use your magician's wand of misdirection and talk about all your host-based software all you want, but Marc's statements don't really need correction. You just wanted to point the spotlight on other stuff you sell.

If Marc is so off-base, and if 3PAR is not participating in what you call Enterprise storage, what are you doing here debating the first place? Your presence here is validating the truth that 3PAR is in your market, and is a small but valid competitor in the Enterprise storage space. Othewise you'd just shoo Marc away like a horse does a fly.

3PAR just doesn't have the breadth of products that EMC has, but their breadth of products is very reminiscent of what EMC had just at the time they acquired DG... but with a single unified array OS.

[Adam Day - with correct grammar and spelling :)]

Mr Hollis and the Anarchist

"the lady doth protest too much methinks" as a great writer once said , and to echo Bills summary.

Everybody starts somewhere and 3PAR seem to have had an exceptional start that has caused you to sit up and take notice.

Always remember competition is healthy and drives innovation , the EMC's of the world need the 3PAR's to push them to add more value to their offerings , and this as it should , benefits the customer.

I would like to see constructive comments as opposed to thinly veiled attempts to market your offerings and weak insults about small companies - please check where EMC came from , they did not start with 40 000 employees

Cheers

Adam Day

[the storage anarchist]

Adam - you misinterpret my comments as derogetory; they are not intended as such.

Instead, I am defending EMC against Marc's "thinly veiled" attacks on EMC's ability to innovate and trying to explain how a large, diverse installed base influences when, where and how that innovation comes to be.

And my presence here has nothing to do with "enterprise" vs. "mid-tier" - I participate in the discussion because it's about a topic (cross-platform federation) that interests me.

@storageanarchy

[marc farley]

Anarchist, you are a hoot. EMC always plays the Biggus Dickus card with pride.

BTW, You of ALL storage bloggers should know what a real attack looks like. A real attack would have been something like: "EMC is on its way to becoming the Vasa of the storage industry - too many cannons, not enough ballast." with the obligatory picture of a barnacled encrusted ship on the bottom of the ocean.

[Bill]

Marc-

Don't go Toigo on us...

;)

[marc farley]

LOL, Bill I did not say "rusty scupper"!