StorageRap

Curtis waves goodbye - but wait, last week was Thanksgiving - not Christmas!

W Curtis Preston follows his own path - always - and that is probably the main reason lots of storage geeks read his blog.  However, his unorthodox approach sometimes leaves me scratching my head, as it did today when he wrote a year end blog post on the last day of November, Data protection and data backup trends in 2009.  (Note to Curtis - There is still another month to go this year.)

Topics covered include companies and services that lost data, went out of business or had their futures prematurely stopped by corporate decree, so its not just saying goodbye to 2009, but to products and services that we'll never see again too. Will we need an addendum for the month of December? Stay tuned to Curtis' blog and find out.

StorageRap videos now available for download on iTunes and Podbean

Blog readers have asked for podcast-ready versions of StorageRap videos that they can download and play on their iPods, iPhones, Blackberry's or other portable devices. So now there is a new StorageRap Podcast site on Podbean as well as a podcast feed for StorageRap on iTunes.

You'll notice a few differences:

• Videos are smaller, formatted for 320x 240 small screens
• Videos do not stream, they download completely and then play - so it takes longer to start playing
• The content does not mirror that on StorageRap
• Content on iTunes lags that on Podbean by a day or so 
• The video images in the podcast player are different than those on 3PARTV and this blog

If there is something on this blog that you want in a podcast version, contact me on Twitter (3ParFarley) or through a blog comment and I'll make a podcast for you.

The most recent podcast posted was the video from VMworld with Jason Lochhead from Terremark where he talks about their new VMWare-based vCloud Express service and their use of 3PAR storage for both vCloud Express and their Enterprise Cloud service.

A Wonderful World Fantasy

Storagebod posted recently about the foibles of EMC not certifying Netapp's V Series Filer heads with their storage.  That certainly is not a decision made in the best interest of EMC's customers, no matter how they might try to spin it. FWIW, 3PAR is a Netapp V Series partner and we're happy to help customers get a best of breed SAN+NAS solution installed.

Anyway, it occurred to me how much less bickering there would be between Netapp and EMC if EMC would only certify the V Series....

The cult leader of cheap storage guzzles his own medicine

Jon Toigo likes to say that storage vendors exist to rip off their customers. If it was up to him, the world would run on do it yourself arrays made with adapter cards.  Read about his most recent experience with that approach on his blog where he says:.

Tell you what, folks:  if you are building big general purpose arrays with big drives, best to put RAID 5 in the rear view mirror.  Rebuild times for anything over a TB per drive suck big time.

That's one of the reasons to look at serious storage technology from 3PAR.  Here is what one of our customers had to say on their blog about their experience with array rebuilds on our product this week.

They have further cool things like fast RAID rebuild which was a big factor in deciding to go with SATA on their system, but even if the RAID rebuilds in 5 seconds that doesn’t make the physical disks more reliable, and this post is specifically about physical disk reliability rather than recovering from failure. But as a note I did measure rebuild rate, and for a fully loaded 750GB disk we can rebuild a degraded RAID array in about three hours, with no impact to array system performance.

Now its quite possible that some readers have spent a lot of money on expensive storage that takes forever to do RAID rebuilds.  If that's the case, then you might want to look at 3PAR. You will find a lot of other stuff to like too, including amazing utilization and performance. 

What Dell didn't say about EMC

 
Its interesting.  If you search the transcript from Dell's earnings call yesterday for "EMC" nothing comes up.

Searching on the word storage, I've copied and pasted every reference I found to storage in it.

Brian Gladden (part of his presentation)
Storage revenue was down 8% sequentially and 19% year-over-year. EqualLogic revenue was up 31% with continued strength from a margin standpoint. Our overall storage margin rates are up over 30% versus where they were last year.

Michael Dell (from his comments)
We are focused on expanding our recurring revenue and profit streams with a differentiated view of how to win in the enterprise. Storage and server revenues were up 5% sequentially as we continue to bring our customers an expanding portfolio of best value enterprise solutions.

EqualLogic grew 31% year-over-year with a strong pipeline heading into Q4 including demand for our recently launched PS4000 virtualized storage array. We have now added over 10,000 new customers to the EqualLogic platform bringing almost 15,000 customers and we continue to invest in the R&D, solutions and sales resources to expand this platform.

From the Q&A section:

David Bailey - Goldman Sachs

The non-EqualLogic storage sales were weak this quarter. What are you doing to reverse this trend and how long do you think it will take?

Michael Dell

There is a shift going on there where we are moving away from non-Dell branded storage offerings. You can think of this as dual margin pass through revenue. So our margin on storage continues to increase and with the additional, better mix of sales also comes service annuities which obviously are valuable over time to us. So we are moving more and more to the portfolio f Dell IP, Dell branded and in some cases co-branded products. That is the direction. That is why you see the shift in the mix and the increased margins.

Jayson Noland - Robert W. Baird & Co., Inc.

A question on the timing of various hardware categories. It seems like Dell storage and server has seen fairly positive trends over the past couple of quarters. If you could talk about how your customers are thinking about investment in data center hardware versus investment in the client?

Michael Dell

Well as I said earlier I think the mission critical data center activity has been high and the [inaudible] processor brought out the virtualization wave in a big way because it accelerated the number of servers you could virtualize in one platform. We have been particularly strong with our blade offering, with our data center custom solutions, with our storage offerings. We think our 11G combined server and really management solution that goes with that is a fantastic offering that is really resonating with customers. It is a place where there is a bias for investment inside these accounts.

So what's changed?

from CRN slightly more than 1 year ago:

Dell, on the other hand, accounted for 10.4 percent of EMC's total revenue, and slightly under 30 percent of Clariion revenue, Goulden said.

Dell has traditionally been EMC's largest channel partner, accounting for about one-third of EMC's revenue. However, Dell acquired EqualLogic early this year, giving it a product line and an indirect channel which competes with EMC.

When asked by analysts during the Q&A session following EMC's prepared statements about the 26-percent year-to-year and 10-percent quarter-to-quarter drop in Dell business, Joe Tucci, EMC's chairman, president, and CEO, said that the strong growth of the Clariion business came from two factors: a robust channel build-out and an increase in EMC's commercial and SMB business.

"On the other hand, we are very quickly and very actively working with Dell, and -- if you talk to (Dell Chairman and CEO) Michael Dell, he'll have the same statement -- we believe there's a lot more we can and should be doing together," Tucci said. "We probably got a little bit off track, and we're working hard to include the Dell channel on top of everything else we're doing." 

The StorageRap take on the whole mess:

Dell has figured out that EqualLogic's product is very strong and they like the higher margins.  But it doesn't look like they have figured out that it is targeted at SMB customers and isn't really a great fit for large data center and cloud customers. Dell needs to figure out there is a disconnect here or they might find themselves with a lot of explaining to do at some point in the future.

VCE.  EMC is in love with a new server systems friend named Cisco. The Cisco relationship has been getting a lot of attention from EMC this year and Dell feels rejected.  But what can they say after buying EqualLogic?  Nothing about EMC, apparently.

EMC has lost its star partner for Clariion.  It's not clear how its going to make that business back any time soon - especially with their big focus on VCE.  Its a big gamble to be sure.  Not that EMC has stopped developing Clariion, because they haven't, but the SMB options continue to improve - from Dell-EqualLogic, from Compellent and - at the high end of this space - from 3PAR with our F Class systems.  I don't see how Cisco is going to replace Dell any time soon as a friend for Clariion.

I'd like to invite everybody with aging Clariion systems to check out 3PAR's F Class cluster storage arrays - especially the Thin Conversion feature that can get you much higher utilization and consolidation rates than you think are possible from mid-range and enetrprise storage.

 

Nice video from Rodos on Ocarina Networks!

Rodney Haywood, author of the Musings of Rodos blog, was one of the delegates at the Gestalt IT Tech Field Day last week.  He posted about his visit to Ocarina Networks and I thought it was worth a mention here.  Heck more than that, I thought it was worth showing the video he made, so here it is.  But go to his blog and read his post too.

Ocarina Networks from Rodney Haywood on Vimeo.

I had no idea Rodney liked making videos so much until a couple minutes ago.  Here is the link to his video page on virtrualization and networking technology. Good stuff!

Storage is the Cookie! And sharing is beautiful!

A long time favorite of mine, Chris Evans: aka the StorageArchitect, has a new post on thin storage.  After he maps out the way disks are virtualized by thin provisioning systems, he writes about storage utilization before moving to open a brief discussion on storage reclamation, something he has been leading the charge on in the storage blogosphere over the last year or so.

He starts the discussion on reclamation by showing how file systems consume storage space and the typical inefficient utilization that follows. He ends the discussion by stating:

In a thin provisioned environment, storage would have been requested only for the blocks with valid data and in this way, a LUN can be less than 100% allocated.

Some readers might be tempted to think that LUN allocation percentage and has an inverse relationship to disk utilization,  - in other words, the lower the LUN allocation is, the higher the disk utilization is likely to be.  While that may appear to be the case, there are too many variables involved to say there is a mathematical (linear or otherwise) or causal relationship between them. Filing software, such as file systems, databases and virtualization platforms, that allocate capacity from storage, tend to consume more storage over time as users and applications create new, incremental data and files.  It follows that the percentage of a thinly provisioned LUN that is allocated is likely going to continue to increase over time.  Think of it as storage entropy, which might be some sort of new digital law (the amount of consumed storage in the universe is always increasing) enforced by the extremely high probability that we will continue to create lots more data all the time.

And this is where the idea of 3PAR's thin reclamation, persistence and conversion technologies come into play. These technologies are designed to deal with the ongoing life cycle problems of storage entropy, such as deleted files and in a virtual systems world - deleted systems. But more on that in posts to come.

Returning to Chris' post, it's fitting that he chose a Sesame Street analogy, considering that Sesame Street celebrated it's 40th anniversary last week.  He makes the point that storage can share capacity (cookies) among filing systems through reclamation and suggests four kinds of storage cookie monsters; greedy, selfish, nice and saintly.

As much as I love the Sesame Street gang (especially Grover), I'd suggest that the real Cookie Monsters are the filing systems (file systems, databases and virtual system platforms), and that the cookies are storage capacity. Filing systems have been historically bad at sharing the storage cookies they have been given and Symantec's Storage Foundation is truly a breakthrough product designed to share it's capacity cookies with any other filing system in the neighborhood.  Saintly behavior, indeed!

But the filing systems are not completely to blame here because storage hasn't provided the means for sharing allocated capacity. As in any system, the hardware and software have to move in something resembling unison. The way storage cookies are shared is by taking capacity that was previously allocated to a filing system and returning it to some form of unallocated storage plate. Using the Sesame Street theme, capacity reclamation is the process of putting storage cookies back on the array's plate where they can be allocated all over again by the monsters in your digital neighborhood.

Did I forget to mention that I LOVE data storage!  (munch munch munch munch....)

 

Boy, the Gestalt IT Tech Field Day yesterday sure was fun

Talk about a room full of high energy tech lovers.  Both at 3PAR HQ yesterday afternoon, as well as at the Computer History Museum and later at the Doubletree, San Jose.  I haven't experienced that kind of mind melding for a long time. It was electric. 

Big thanks to all the Tech Field Day attendees for bringing it, to Stephen Foskett and the team helping him who pulled off this amazing concept and to all the folks at 3PAR and Symantec for working so hard on our part of the day yesterday.  It was a sterling effort.

Sunshine Mugrabi and I made a video in Stephen Foskett's honor last night.  I thought I'd post it here to further pay tribute to a truly good guy:

An SWCSA twitstigation discovers unmatched socks and explores human error

There's nothing quite like repetitive tasks to make the mind go numb and when you are seeing cross-eyed, it's easy to make mistakes.  Welcome to the world of laundry and storage provisioning.

3PAR has a new tool, called Autonomic Groups to help with repetitive provisioning tasks.

3PAR Countdown: Autonomic Groups

3PAR announced its new server cluster provisioning feature today - Autonomic Groups. The idea is to manage the clustered servers and the storage they use as sets of resources.  All members of the group inherit connections from the group, eliminating the drudgery and errors associated with repeating provisioning steps over and over again for all servers and storage volumes.

Zilla found a good read - you read it too.

StorageZilla just popped out a brief post with links to a couple items. 

I really liked the second one of these called EMC/Cisco/VMware vBlock - an Economists Perspective.  Its a very clear read that lays out the new competitive landscape, without bias.

Have a good weekend everybody!

The razor's edge on vBlocks

Nate at Techopsguys.com posted his first impressions of the new Cisco / EMC / VMware vBlock.  He's got a lot of knowledge and a lot of opinions and he's not shy about sharing either of them.  Here's a quote:

Third you get the sense that these aren’t really blocks at all. The first tier is composed of rack mount systems, the second tier is blade systems with CX4, the third tier is blade systems with V-MAX. Each tier has something unique which hardly makes it a solution you can build as a “block” as you might expect from something called a vBlock. Given the prices here I am honestly shocked that the first tier is using rack mount systems. Blade chassis do not cost much, I would of expected them to simply use a blade chassis with just one or two blades in it. Really shows that they didn’t spend much time thinking about this.

Wow, Nate. That pretty much cuts right to the core.  What is it about vBlocks that makes them modular, the way most of us tend to think about the concept of a block? Dissimilar components - especially CX-4 and V-Max for storage - is not exactly a plug and play environment.

EMC trips and kicks their supplier, STEC

Its all over the news today. STEC's stock is getting hammered because their largest customer, EMC, is delaying orders.   I feel for the folks at STEC, its difficult being a supplier to industry behemoths like EMC.  When realities don't meet expectations, things can crater in a hurry. 

There is nothing wrong with flash SSD technology, it's simply a matter that the market demand hasn't ramped yet.   Some of the EMC bloggers have chided me for my position on SSDs, but today's news pretty clearly vindicates what I've been saying all along:

• Flash SSDs are still considered expensive and are difficult to justify
• Customers can't use them intelligently or flexibly yet
• The market for customers needing extreme low latency, is not ramping that quickly

The situation is changing gradually.  Prices for SSDs are coming down, but there still needs to be a lot of work done by storage system vendors to flexibly use them - and this is going to continue to take time.  EMC has said they will release their first version of FAST this year, but almost everybody is looking at future versions of FAST to get the sort of functionality they can actually use.  Compellent's Data Progression software has the basic ability to move data on and off SSDs, but the number of SSDs that can be used per system is small and their sales are far too small to make up for what EMC has failed to deliver on.  SSDs have a bright future, its just going to take longer to flourish.

So where is 3PAR on SSDs?  We think they will be an important  technology in the future and we are working on integrating them into our products in a way that will allow customers to take advanatge of their capabilities. In other words, we're going to have them, but we're not going to sell something that costs a lot of money if our customers can't leverage them.

In the meantime we continue to sell the most efficient storage systems  that also happen to have the best implementation of wide striping on the planet, which delivers optimal mixed workload performance for our customers.

Game on! The rapid rise of bundled infrastructure products

Although I work for 3PAR, which is an EMC competitor, I admit there is something very intriguing about the vBlock concept - and that is the concept of buying pre-fabricated, pre-integrated, information systems. Its like the old LAN in a can or SAN in a can, but vBlock is a much more sophisticated bundle with a much broader vision than previous network bundles.  Integration is the dynamo of technology after all and maybe years from now, maybe we'll see Intel come out with a data center on a chip! (rim shot and cymbal)

But seriously folks,  the technology barriers to entry in this "data center in a can" business are not all that high. HP is planning on announcing their reaction today and  I expect that we'll see similar concepts announced within 6 months from various vendors and other industry alliances.  The stakes are too high for server companies to ignore. FWIW, if you haven't read Chris Mellor's excellent article in the Register from yesterday about HP's Data Center Cells, you should.  

To underscore how low the barriers to entry are, think about how easily Cisco, a company with no server sales to date, is using vBlock to legitimize their UCS server business.  By burying UCS in the data center bundle, Cisco can claim certain things that are unique and special about it's server business, but I doubt the rest of the server industry will grant them (or HP) uniqueness for very long.  The only thing keeping IBM from doing something similar is IBM itself.  Certainly they could draft people from IGS to respond very quickly if they wanted to.

As we see vBlock knock-offs emerge, its going to become increasingly obvious that the integration of all this virtualization technology is not that difficult when you use cloud-oriented virtualization technology.  The sudden change of positioning from EMC, Cisco and VMware is curious - for many months, virtualization has been the thing that makes life easier and all of a sudden now we are to believe it it is the thing that needs to be made easier. 

Infrastructures by nature are adopted and used based on their stability (which includes scalability), flexibility, and efficiency.  The integration characteristics and features of individual products in those infrastructures will determine how successful those competing infrastructures are.  For both servers and storage integration, these characteristics and features will include:

• robust, modular components that can scale from small implementations to large ones
• efficient provisioning and re-provisioning of resources - including storage reclamation
  
• high densities, such as VM/server ratios and storage utilization
• predictable performance for mixed workloads and under stress conditions  

FWIW, professional services are a drag on efficiency as added cost or a drag on flexibility as added time to deployment.  Ease of use and automation features will continue to be an important key for cloud vendor success.

I used a fox in the henhouse photo the other day, when I posted in reaction to the rumor of Cisco and EMC competing with cloud service providers. And yes, I probably deserved much worse than the reaction I received from both Chad Sakak (The Virtual Geek) and Chuck Hollis. 

Of course , the most clever fox eats eggs instead of chickens.  The problem with professional services engagements is that they have a way of sticking around a lot longer time than expected.  It's entirely possible that vBlock won't require any, but it certainly looks like Cisco and EMC want to sell them.  I have to hand it to both EMC and Cisco - they are very clever companies.

EMC, Cisco, vBlock and trust - how long will it last?

"I trust Joe with my life" 

 John Chambers spoke about trust at some length during the vBlock cloud computing announcement today. He is obviously trying to communicate something to his people.  FWIW, Joe Tucci didn't have as much to say about it, but he did echo those sentiments. 

The difficult part of what EMC and Cisco are trying to accomplish does not involve virtual technologies nearly as much as it involves the very real world of compensation.  EMC is a company that is driven by goals tied to compensation.  Their culture does not let anything get in the way of their goals. Whether you like it or not, it's what's made that company what it is today and it's a culture that was started by founder Dick Egan, long before Joe Tucci took the reigns, and it is ingrained at EMC.

Cisco is a different animal. Obviously they are aggressive too, but they do it differently. As Chambers said, 80% of what Cisco does is through partners - something very different from EMC.  When Chambers mentioned that partners will get most of the revenue from vBlock, Tucci was silent. I don't believe Tucci believes this for a minute. The sales engagement process for this will be very interesting to watch.  When the question was asked later about who will sell vBlock, Tucci's response was to say it will be figured out.  That's probably why they are forming a joint venture - Acadia - to deal with the sales problems.  But that doesn't mean the problems are resolved - they will simply be transferred elsewhere.  The accounting on this should be interesting to say the least, but unlike EMC and Cisco, Acadia will be a private company. 

Chambers also made the somewhat ironic comment, "Companies like to control their customers, that's wrong."  While many would agree with that, I'm wondering if he is familiar with the measures taken in the storage industry to maintain account control.  How far will EMC bend in maintaining account control to help their partner Cisco make sales of UCS servers?   Probably not very far.

There is a lot of risk with vBlock for both EMC and Cisco. Certainly, its an opportunity for Cisco and EMC to expand their markets, but sharing is hard for companies with voracious appetites and flattening revenue streams.