StorageRap

The technology I'm trusting today

By the time this is posted, I will be in a hospital having a fairly routine cardiac chatheterization procedure done to determine the level of blockage in my coronary arteries.  Cardiologists do a ton of these every year, saving people from inactive lives and open heart surgery.  Unbelievable technology, but I'll get back to that later. 

No Chest Pain Symptoms!

The main reason for this post is to help people understand that symptoms for heart trouble don't have to include chest pains.  I have had a little tightness of breath while exercising over the last year and I've noticed a drop in my cardio output, but I figured that's just what comes with aging.  I've been bike riding, skiing and hiking/walking, but my pace has been slower and hill climbs on the bike have been harder. Still I can do them without experiencing symptoms that make me worry.

However, climbing stairs has become really weird over the last 4 months. I've always tended to bounce quickly up stairs for some reason, but in the last few months, this has made me feel faint.  Once during the Christmas break and again about 5 weeks ago, I thought I was going to completely pass out after climbing a couple flights of stairs. I knew this wasn't just ordinary aging crap, so shortly after the second wiggy experience I went to see my doctor who referred me to a cardiologist. 

Went there, got the stress test (wires and a treadmill) and failed. That was a few weeks ago. Today we'll be taking the next step, which is a little scary, but for the most part I can't wait to experience the whole thing.

A Very Specific Application

The other reason for this post is to help people understand what goes on and what the technology is about.  Sometimes there is nothing better than analog technology and this is one of them. 

Coronary catheterization is typically an out-patient procedure performed in a hospital. That way, if something goes drastically haywire, such as having a heart attack, you are in the best place possible to deal with it.  If, during the process, the doctor decides to insert stents in your heart to push away the blockage, they'll keep you overnight for observation - and then it becomes an in-patient experience complete with institutional cuisine!

One of the positive things is that I'll have a drip bag with a variety of meds that should keep me chilled out while there is a tiny hose poking around the inside of my heart.  I'll be prone on my back on the platform of a specialized imaging machine made just for me (and thousands of others). The doctor gives me a little local numbing balm and then punctures me near the privates and starts working the catheter up towards my heartland. Former patients say they can hardly felt anything during this process, but I imagine I'll be comparing it to a root canal, even if I actually don't feel anything.

It's a bit like a real-life video game for the doctor, who watches the catheter action on the screen of the imaging system. When when the catheter is finally in the right location, it squirts out a dye that is super visible and he watches how it moves through the arteries - all in real time. People tend to feel the dye and I'm assuming its one of the least special moments for the patient during the whole thing.  My doctor has done this thousands of times and he knows what it looks like when there is a blockage.  There are three arteries that they check out this way, and this is what it looks like: (not mine, just some guy's on YouTube).

If my cardiologist sees something that he doesn't like, he'll probably insert a stent made of surgical steel that resembles one of those chinese finger traps. The stent is collapsed when they run it into your artery and up into your heart.  When it gets positioned in the area where the blockage is occurring, they inflate the stent with a balloon of sorts (at least that's how I understand it) until it pushes the artery walls out and blood can flow more or less normally again. The stent has an inert coating that lessens the likelihood of it irritating the heart. Something I would certainly like to avoid. 

There are a number of key technologies here: first is the catheter system that enters the body, follows the artery right into the heart, delivers the dye and puts stents in place. Next is the real-time imaging system that gives instantaneous feedback to the doctor as he plays the Fix Marc game, Last is the chemical technology used for the dye and the stent coating to mix with the blood, show up clearly on the imaging system and sit in your heart like it doesn't exist. Of course, there is a lot more technology than that, but that's how I'm breaking it down today and they are the things I'll be thinking about as all this work is going on.  Amazing stuff - I'm completely impressed.

Top 10 design principles for information infrastructure products

(A quote from Dieter Rams - former Chief of Design at Braun)

It's hard to think of a company that has had more success with it's product designs than Apple. When you look into how Apple did it, you find out about Jonathan Ive - Apple's lead industrial designer - and how his designs have followed the philosophy outlined by Dieter Rams, who was the lead designer for many years at Braun.  When you compare photos of their designs, it is obvious that Ive has a strong appreciation for Rams' work.

What Ive and others have found compelling in Rams' work is nicely summarized in the design principles Rams used at Braun for many years.

• Good design is innovative
• Good design makes a product useful
• Good design is aesthetic
• Good design makes a product understandable
• Good design is unobtrusive
• Good design is honest
• Good design is long-lasting
• Good design is thorough down to the last detail
• Good design is environmentally friendly
• Good design is as little design as possible

The design goals for consumer products differ considerably from those for industrial products. For example, aesthetics and innovation tend to be less important than reliability and ROI - two characteristics that didn't even make it onto Rams' list of design principles.  But there are also principles that certainly belong to both, such as making a product useful and unobtrusive.  So, what should the 10 design principles be for information infrastructures products? Here's my list:

• Good design makes a product useful (it solves customer problems)
• Good design has recognized limitations
• Good design is unobtrusive (needs minimal management)
• Good design has an attainable ROI
• Good design makes efficient use of resources
• Good design is scalable (capacity, performance & management)
• Good design is resilient (sustains performance through sub-optimal conditions)
• Good design makes a product understandable (facilitates planning & changes)
• Good design is long-lasting (and accommodates future innovations)
• Good design is environmentally friendly 

Producing this list was much more interesting than I thought it would be.  For starters, it took me some time to get settled in a customer's perspective - as opposed to my usual vendor employee perspective. (l have this wonderful hammer you need).  Also, to clarify a point, the idea of management scalability involves the number of people who can effectively manage and control a system simultaneously. That might not be a concern for smaller IT systems, but it certainly is for large-scale systems.  

What would you change?  Would you reduce or expand this list?

Zeroing in on a definition for federated storage

(Federation Square, Melbourne)

There have been some excellent discussions recently in the storage blogosphere and on Twitter about the concept of Storage Federation among a number of storage people; known by their Twitter IDs as @stuiesav, @storageanarchy, @rootwyrm, @davegraham, @bwhyte, @ianhf, @esignoretti, me (@3parfarley) and others - as the interest continues to increase. 

There are two aspects of the discussion that I think are fascinating: first is the role of social media as the means to include customers, vendors and others in an open discussion that typically is conducted privately by a vendor preparing to release a new product or feature, second is the challenge of defining a storage capability with sufficient focus and vendor independence so that is is meaningful. There has been some amount of skepticism about this effort, suggesting that we are predetermined to end up with ambiguous terms that can be interpreted (spun) by anybody (any vendor) to mean anything (our product does it). I'm hopeful the results can be better than that, but subjectivity is the only constant of social media and it's not likely that everyone will like whatever happens.  

In general, the language of digital storage has many overlapping meanings, which causes a fair amount of confusion in our industry. I've been dealing with this problem for many years, going back to when I wrote Building Storage Networks and had the challenge of trying to invent generic terms for functions that had been coined by vendors and tied to specific products. My interest in defining Storage Federation goes beyond my role as an employee for 3PAR.

The notion of federated storage has been around for several years, but recently it came to light when Pat Gelsinger of EMC referred to it during a press briefing on March 11. EMC blogger Chuck Hollis wrote about it afterward and there was some chatter, culminating in a blog post by @Stuiesav on April 2, which proposed that the discussion about Storage Federation was just marketing hype attempting to rebrand storage virtualization.  EMC's Barry Burke (@Storageanarchy) and I (@3parfarley) both agreed that this was not the case this time around and then in the last couple days the discussion fired up again. The problem with Twitter is the limitations of 140 characters per tweet.  It's surprising what can be done with so few characters, but it does have limitations.

Skeptics Allowed

This weekend, @ianhf  posted in his Grumpy Storage blog echoed @Stuiesav's skepticism and expressed his perspective (as a customer) as to the things he would like to see when new technologies - in this case Storage Federation - are introduced.  Here are some of  the items from his list (Some of them don't fit our definition exercise because they assume there is a new product being introduced, which is not the case here).

• The specific customer requirements & problems this addresses & justify how
• The use cases this feature / function applies to, and those that it doesn't
• Why & how this feature is different to that own vendor's previous method for solving this problem
• Provide clarity over the non-functional impacts of the feature before, during & after it's use - ie impact on resilience, impact on performance, concurrency of usage etc (including provide up-front details of constraints)
• Naturally you'll also expect me to require TCO & ROI of the feature, and any changes to the models as a result of this feature

   

So lets get started (already!):

The definition of Storage Federation that was kicked around on Twitter is something like:  "the transparent, dynamic and non-disruptive distribution of storage resources across self-governing, discrete, peer storage systems."  (And yes, I did elaborate a bit on this while I was writing based on bits and pieces from comments I read and further thought of my own.)

The idea is to have multiple storage systems cooperating as a team (as opposed to under the direction of an external entity) to place data in the aggregated storage resources (LUNs or volumes) of all participating members. An example of Storage Federation is how Dell/EqualLogic arrays distribute their volumes over multiple systems. When a new EqualLogic array is added to an iSCSI SAN, the administrator is asked if the array should be placed in the same group as other arrays in the SAN. If this is done, the arrays start splitting their volumes (and workloads) across both arrays.

Five examples of storage federation capabilities are:

Storage expansion: You want to increase the storage capacity of an existing storage system that cannot accommodate the total amount of capacity desired. Storage Federation allows you to add additional storage capacity by adding a whole new system.  

Storage migration:  You want to migrate from an aging storage system to a new one.  Storage Federation allows the joining of the two systems and the evacuation from storage resources on the first onto the second and then the first system is removed.

Safe system upgrades:  System upgrades can be problematic for a number of reasons. Storage Federation allows a system to be removed from the federation and be re-inserted again after the successful completion of the upgrade.

Load balancing:  Similar to storage expansion, but on the performance axis, you might want to add additional storage systems to a Storage Federation in order to spread the workload across multiple systems.

Storage tiering:  In a similar light, storage systems in a Storage Federation could have different capacity/performance ratios that you could use for tiering data.  This is similar to the idea of dynamically re-striping data across the disk drives within a single storage system, such as with 3PAR's Dynamic Optimization software, but extends the concept to cross storage system boundaries.

These are all examples of Storage Federation that Dell/EqualLogic storage systems are capable of today. It's not intended to be an endorsement of their distributed volume manager, I am simply using it as an example of Storage Federation. Saying that, if you look for "Storage Federation" on the Dell/EqualLogic web site, you probably won't find it today because they don't describe it that way, but that doesn't mean that it is not in the product.

That's not it

People also want help understanding what the definition of Storage Federation should not include. Here are my thoughts:

In-band storage virtualization systems like IBM's SVC can provide all the capabilities listed above for Storage Federation. However, in-band virtualization products govern the behavior of the other storage systems networked to it and Storage Federation involves self-governing, peer systems. Another way of saying it is that Storage Federation does not have functionality in the network between host systems and storage.

File, object and data distribution technologies like EMC's Atmos certainly provide a type of federation insofar as multiple computer systems can access the same data objects from multiple locations that may be separated geographically. However, this capability primarily migrates files (data objects) - and is functionally orthogonal to Storage Federation, which works on volumes. A term like Data Federation is probably more precise than Storage Federation for this sort of capability. 

Clustered storage systems, like 3PAR's InServ storage systems or clustered NAS systems are not examples of Storage Federation because they function as single, scalable storage systems, not as discrete storage systems that are networked together.  Clustered storage systems can work together in Storage Federations with other clustered or non-clustered storage systems. In that case you could have a Storage Federation of clustered storage systems.

How is this different?

I thought I'd make a little effort to respond to @ianhf's requests.

The main problem Storage Federation addresses the limitations presented by a single storage system, such as capacity, performance and maintenance availability. 

Currently, when a new storage system is added to an existing environment, there are server administration tasks that need to be done in order to migrate volumes from an existing storage system to the new one. In addition, there is usually some amount of downtime and/or performance degradation associated with the migration and configuration of new data paths.  By contrast, with Storage Federation, a new storage system could be added without having to reconfigure host data paths and the migration would be processed transparently and dynamically, without any downtime or loss of path redundancy while the migration is in process.

Increasing performance for a particular volume in a Storage Federation is somewhat less obvious because the other federated storage systems might not have more performance-resources available to boost performance. For instance, if a new storage system inserted in a Storage Federation does not have more disk drives (spindles) or more flash SSD capacity, there is no guarantee that any volumes moved to it would provide faster performance. There is some likelihood that performance could be improved by moving a volume to a storage system running at lower utilization levels, but maintaining lower utilization levels is not realistic or very cost-effective. All this said, it is possible for a Storage Federation to use the aggregate resources of multiple storage systems to increase performance of a single volume - such as by spanning all the disk drives in the federation and by using the cache of all participating storage systems. An example of products that provides this capability today are the Dell/EqualLogic storage arrays. 

The availability of storage systems needing maintenance could be greatly improved by Storage Federation if an existing storage system can be removed from the federation after having it's volumes evacuated (think v-Motion but for storage systems) to other storage systems in the federation. After being removed from the federation, the storage system could be downed to have any sort of maintenance operation done to it without risking the availability of any of the volumes that had previously been on the system undergoing maintenance.Obviously, all of this would take time planning and ensuring the Storage Federation would not be overloaded with data and workloads, but there are probably many customers that would prefer to do maintenance to storage systems when they are offline. 

One of the possible exposures of Storage Federation is the increased exposure to system failures. For instance, a Storage Federation that distributes a single volume over three separate storage systems is 3 times more likely to have a failure than a Storage federation that does not allow volumes to span across storage system boundaries. FWIW, this is the main weakness of the Dell/EqualLogic implementation of Storage Federation. 

That's all for now

It's late and there is plenty of material here for the grinder. Please feel free to comment in any way; agree, disagree, correct mistakes and ask questions.  Thanks for reading.

Interview with Lawrence Lessig

Lawrence Lessig is a noted expert on legal aspects of the Internet and a political activist working on changing the incentives that influence our government. He spoke at the Storage Networking World Conference last week with a presentation titled America's Broadband Policy and I had the opportunity to interview him afterwords, which will certainly be one of the highlights of my year.  I think his work at FixCongressFirst.org is very important because it provides a realistic perspective on the problem of money in government and is working to bring change to something that many of us agree is broken.  You can play the interview by clicking the little green arrow on the sound bar below:

Knobs, Prison Knobs and STACK WARS

Technology integration makes computing products much easier to use and significantly drives down the cost and effort of owning it. For instance, technologies such as WiFi that were recently beyond the grasp of most people are now inexpensively integrated into PCs and usable by almost anyone.

The trick with integration is understanding what variables should be exposed - or as my friend Rick Vanover likes to say - how many knobs there are to turn.  End user and infrastructure provider requirements differ considerably when it comes to knobs. For instance, Apple computers are great end user machines because they lack knobs, but are not always loved by technology professionals for the same reason. Data center operators need products with knobs in order to accommodate all the cross-purposed requirements that stretch beyond a one-size-fits-all design.

So knobs are generally good - but like so many things - their usefulness depends on how effective they are and their station in FARLEY'S HIERARCHY OF KNOBS, which includes the following levels:

Suicide Knobs:  knobs that delete data and make things blow up.  A good example of a Suicide Knob is something that formats storage.

Prison Knobs:  knobs that make changes that are very difficult or impossible to reverse.  Many storage provisioning knobs fall into this category. Once you provision and reserve storage with most storage arrays today you are stuck with that decision until the array's EOL.

Faux Knobs:  knobs that never seem to do anything, no matter how far you turn them.  For features past and future, but not now.

Random Knobs:  knobs that produce unanticipated results that can go unnoticed for years.  These are the knobs that fuel the technical publishing industry.

Slippery Slope Knobs: knobs that start you down a path to ruin through a chain of system dependencies. These are the knobs you spend a lot of money to learn about in vendor classes. 

Dumb Ass Knobs:  knobs that do things, but not anything useful. Granted there is a LOT of subjectivity in making a call on a dumb ass knob - but we all agree they exist.

Honest Knobs:  knobs that actually do something you need them to without having to plan for weeks on how to use them.  Most knobs should fall into this category, but alas!

Magic Knobs: knobs that do things so useful it makes you wonder how anybody thought of a knob like that. Most of these knobs are actually Honest Knobs, but we are so accustomed to seeing Suicide, Prison, Faux, Random, Slippery Slope and Dumb Ass knobs that we are blown away by a truly great Honest Knob.

Which brings me indirectly to the discussion of STACK WARS,  which, have been centered around the announcement of VCE (VMware\Cisco\EMC) and their vBlock concept last November. 

 

I'd like to say I was surprised yesterday when graphically-challenged Hitachi announced their intention to sell their own Unified Cloud Graphic, (complete with Hitachi compute servers!).  But it wasn't a big shock considering their marketing strategy of "just copy it".  

 

I really don't know how they expect their graphic to compete with vBlock's graphic, with all the color, multiple font sizes and graphics within graphics.

What's missing from the both stack graphics are the knobs that administrators use to get real work done.  Yes, knobs tend to be part of the underlying details, but to anybody that actually uses a product, they are very important details. The detail that C-level executives need to understand is that the stack does not have nearly the automation that is being promised today and that administrators will be doing a lot of work, turning the knobs that the stack provides. Again, it's not the number of knobs that matters, as much as it is the quality of those knobs.

Some people have speculated that the vBlock was a knob-less invention that originated in the board rooms of the VCE companies. Some have even suggested that it was the fallout after a failed acquisition bid by Cisco to acquire EMC.  I don't know if THAT's true, but there is some evidence that the engineering groups in the companies involved have been scrambling to put meat on the bone.

Maybe someday stacks will be the next big thing, but I don't see it playing out that way unless an awful lot changes in the underlying products that make up the stack. Here's my take on STACK WARS:

STACK WARS give everybody something to write about- me included, right now!

Bloggers that write about stacks have a chance of getting jobs with stack vendors. If you are out of a job, start a stack blog today and twitter your back-stack off!

Stacks are all about packaging. Stacks will be assembled and shipped together (presumably), which could make things easier if your goal is to streamline receiving.

Stack products, are actually more services than products. However, if you ever want to make configuration changes in your stack it might not be economically feasible. (Think gigantic FRUs) For example, there is not a lot of flexibility in vBlock's configurations.

Due to the limited configuration options, stack resources are not likely to be used very efficiently and the economic return on the investment will lag. However, EMC customers are already accustomed to low storage utilization levels - so poor utilization might not be THAT big a deal. Definitely a weird way to win a point, but I 'll concede it grudgingly.

The business advantage of integration should be much lower costs. However, the VCE companies all need to maintain their margins if they want to satisfy investors. It's not clear how they will be able to leverage the integration effort to reduce the cost of vBlock, but then again if STACK WARS turn into PRICING WARS for STACKS, things could get very interesting. IBM must be STACKING up something - after all Hitachi already beat them to the punch.

The C level view of stacks are that they smooth out purchasing and operations expenses by providing a smaller number of Purchasing Knobs (that would be a Faux Knob).  John Nash posted in his blog last week,"The Case for the vBlock":

What is interesting is that, usually, the higher up in an organization you are communicating the better the Vblock conversation goes. Remove the detailed technical questions and the value of the Vblock idea really shines. You get a known “product” from trusted sources. You get known costs today as well as known costs for future expansion. It greatly removes the risk from the organization with unknown infrastructure expenses.

There you have it, vBlocks will be sold from the top down by Cisco and EMC - companies that are good at selling from the top down, which will make it somewhat easier for the VCE companies to justify their price tag. But that won't make the price any easier to swallow. 

As Nash wrote, "remove the detailed technical questions and the value of the Vblock idea really shines."  That's like saying chapulines (fried grasshoppers) might appeal if Anthony Bourdain is talking about them on TV, but your own personal experience chewing and swallowing them might be different. I'm not talking about price here, I'm referring to the experience of running the vBlock. There is going to be a lot more involved than the knob-less graphics portray.

The weakest link in the vBlock chain today is EMC's contribution.  There are far too many Prison (provisioning) and Slippery Slope Knobs in EMC storage.  They aren't the only vendor with this problem, but they are the E in VCE.  Provisioning storage with a v-Max is the about the same as it was with a DMX - despite what EMC employees would have you believe. 

Prison Knob provisioning creates a lot of problems for customers as storage ages and as demands shift.  Once storage has been reserved for usage in an EMC system, it is pretty much bound to that purpose. 

My advice is to buy the products with the most Magic Knobs and avoid those with the most Prison provisioning Knobs. If you have ever felt trapped by a storage configuration that you couldn't live with or afford, you know what I'm talking about.  Magic Knobs are those that reduce the effort to manage and change storage, increase the efficiency of storage and provide the most versatility for all applications, workloads and multi-tenancy.

The Cloud Storage Talk Show

InfoSmack podcasters Greg Knieriemen and Yours Truly interview Greg Kleiman (Netapp), Eran Farajun (Asigra), Brad Rooke (JumpPoint) and Daniel MIlburn (Consonus) about the current status of Cloud storage, the impact CDMI will have and get their thoughts on how they think this industry will evolve over the next several years. Recorded at SNW 2010 in Orlando.

The show has 3 parts:  1) intro,early stage apps, backup;  2) CDMI;  3) a look into the future and the competitive landscape in cloud storage services.

Info about Oracle's ASM Reclamation Utility

There were some problems with the links that were posted this week regarding Oracle's ASM Storage Reclamation Utility (ASRU) and 3PAR's Thin Persistence.

ASRU is a stand alone utility that compacts data in a specified Oracle disk group and then frees up space that Oracle no longer needs. Here is a short white paper on it (PDF).

A second joint white paper written by Oracle and 3PAR describes the interaction of both products and gives an example showing how they work together. 

Both of these white papers pretty fast reads, without hyperbole and do a nice job clarifying the differences between thin provisioning and storage reclamation. 

The ability to reorganize an Oracle database shouldn't have to be limited by the storage structures that database resides on, but its a common problem for DBAs.  In addition to the technologies discussed in these white papers, 3PAR's architecture is reservationless, which means storage resources (capacity) are not locked for future use by specific purposes or applications. 

Another 3PAR product that database admins find very useful is Dynamic Optimization, which allows data to be transparently re-striped across resources in an array - which is especially useful when adding new drives to an array, adjusting RAID levels and changing the quality of service for a particular volume.

Big days at SNW

Greg Knieriemen and I covered SNW as the Storage Monkeys/Infosmack team yesterday and will be repeating the act again today.  There is a huge amount of stuff going on here and we are trying to give people a feeling for what the news is and how the event is going down. Videos are going up to the Infosmack Channel on YouTube.

There were two big highlights for me yesterday. The first was SNIA's announcement of CDMI - Cloud Data Management Interface, which has to be one of the most significant standards SNIA has ever produced - and the other was interviewing Lawrence Lessig after his keynote presentation yesterday.

Here's a video we made that has a cameo appearance from 3PAR's Karl Swartz:

3PAR Countdown: Storage Reclamation with Oracle

Here is the news:

3PAR storage can now reclaim storage space from Oracle 10g and 11g databases using Oracle's Storage Reclamation Utility and 3PAR's Thin Persistence.

The technology underdog - the sysadmin

Who gets to:

Wear the beeper 24 x 7?  The sysadmin.

Have almost every thought interrupted?  The sysadmin.

Mind the gap between hype and reality? The sysadmin.

Watch over the "minor details"? The sysadmin

Listen to hold music while a blowtorch singes the body part that gets copied?  The sysadmin

Have purchase recommendations be ignored political decree?  The sysadmin.

Face the wrath when somebody else's bad idea breaks? The sysadmin.

Stay at work while the bosses go out for a round of mucky muck?  The sysadmin.

Have everybody else tell them what they really ought to be doing?  The sysadmin.

Netapp to re-cast Bycast

This morning Netapp announced plans to acquire Bycast, Inc., a privately held company in Vancouver BC. I can see wanting an office in Vancouver, so congrats to Netapp on that front.  Also congrats for sticking it in the eyes of storage competitor, HP - and probably their N-Series partner, IBM, - who have been acting as the OEM sales channel for Bycast.

Here are the main points:

1. Bycast is private, which means EMC won't be able to force a stockholder interruptus, like they did with DDUP a year ago.
2. It's a cash deal, which is really good for Bycast stockholders, but it leaves Netapp with less leverage with Bycast employees after the deal closes.
3. Netapp will need to replace whatever revenue stream Bycast had through their OEM agreements with HP and IBM.  That's not just a simple matter of selling.  
4. Netapp bought an archiving technology company, but is trying to re-cast Bycast as object storage, possibly confusing everybody with nerd-spin.

Here is how Bycast decribes itself (from their Company Overview page):

Bycast is the leading provider of advanced storage virtualization software for large-scale digital archives and storage clouds. For organizations whose business depends on access to vital data, Bycast protects and preserves digital assets over their lifetime. Bycast StorageGRID® software simplifies the management of massive fixed-content storage systems and enables organizations to optimize their storage infrastructure and ensure the integrity and availability of their valuable data assets. StorageGRID also enables the formation of archives that can scale to petabytes of data across hundreds of sites. StorageGRID is sold globally through OEM relationships with two of the world’s major storage vendors. Bycast Inc. is a privately held company headquartered in Vancouver, BC.

The company's market leadership is illustrated by a global customer base, a vibrant application partner ecosystem, and strategic partnerships with industry-leading storage vendors IBM and HP. Bycast StorageGRID is unique in that it is proven to address the needs of both centralized and distributed organizations, across heterogeneous hardware environments.

StorageGRID has won numerous industry awards including 2006 Storage Product of the Year and the Frost & Sullivan Healthcare Technology Innovation award. By providing a storage virtualization layer that sits transparently between enterprise applications and industry-standard storage hardware, StorageGRID addresses the needs of key, high-growth segments of the digital archiving market:

• Multi-site enterprises with archives distributed across multiple data centers
• Regional archives with independent organizations sharing common data centers
• Small and medium sized businesses that require a robust digital archiving platform
• Service providers delivering long term data archiving as a service

Here is the full text from Netapp's press release today: (Skip past the italics if you've already read it or don't like reading press releases)

NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP) today announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Bycast Inc., a privately held company headquartered in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, in an all-cash transaction.

Bycast is a leading developer of object-based storage software designed to manage petabyte-scale, globally distributed repositories of images, video, and records for enterprises and service providers. Customers whose business depends on access to critical data across geographically distributed locations rely on Bycast to better share and retain content anywhere, any time to quickly respond to their changing business requirements. Founded more than 10 years ago, Bycast has helped more than 250 customers worldwide dramatically improve their operational efficiency and reduce the administrative burden of managing massive quantities of data across multiple geographies.

Bycast extends NetApp's leadership position in unified storage by adding an object-based storage software offering. Object-based storage is a new and emerging approach to storing and accessing data based on object names and rich metadata that describes the content in greater detail, which simplifies the task of large-scale object storage while improving the ability to quickly search and locate data objects.

For example, a media company can use an object-based storage solution to provide its graphic artists around the world with the ability to simultaneously access data and collaborate on common projects. Object-based storage interfaces greatly simplify the administration of the storage used for this purpose. With the acquisition of Bycast, NetApp broadens its capabilities in serving key verticals such as digital media, Web 2.0, healthcare, and cloud services providers and helps customers create even greater efficiencies across data centers around the globe.

"Bycast extends our unified storage strategy and enhances our solution for shared storage infrastructure by adding new capabilities for global data access and mobility," said Manish Goel, executive vice president, Product Operations, NetApp. "The addition of Bycast's products enables NetApp to offer our enterprise customers and service provider partners a complementary solution that enables them to efficiently build and manage a very large-scale global repository of data central to many IT-as-a-service offerings."

Portfolio and People Synergy
Bycast enables NetApp to expand into new opportunities and markets for petabyte-scale, billion-object content repositories. In addition to its products, Bycast brings to NetApp valuable technology and talented employees. Bycast employees' technical expertise, experience, and support of their customers create powerful synergies with the NetApp culture, values, and commitment to customer success. Bycast's Vancouver headquarters will become a technology center for NetApp and will be responsible for existing Bycast products and future product development.

As a proven market leader in the storage industry, NetApp provides Bycast immediate enterprise credibility. In addition, NetApp's global sales organization and partnerships will expand the delivery of the Bycast portfolio and enable broader market reach to enterprise customers, service providers, international markets, and additional vertical markets to drive adoption and success of its products.

"We are excited and look forward to joining the NetApp team," said Moe Kermani, CEO of Bycast. "We share a complementary vision and a common dedication to excellence. Together we will offer customers the best-in-class content repository solutions that further their drive toward a unified storage infrastructure."

The acquisition is expected to close in May 2010, subject to the satisfaction of customary closing conditions.

Normally, I wouldn't publish another company's press release, but I wanted to make things easier for readers. If you search these two distinct descriptions you will find Bycast describes itself using the words "archives or  archiving" seven times. Netapp avoids the word altogether. Conversely, in describing Bycast, Netapp uses the word "object" nine times, whereas Bycast left it out completely.

Here is a little scoreboard for all the storage spin fans out there:

• Bycast + Archiving = 7     Bycast + Object = 0
• Netapp + Archiving = 0     Netapp + Object  = 9

And so the spin win goes to Netapp! The company assuming all the risks.

3PAR customer MySpace talk about storage

Here's a ComputerWorld produced video from last year that is an interview with Hala Al-Adwan, VP of Data, and Richard Buckingham, VP of Technical Operations at MySPace.  In it they talk about the scaling challenges they have and how 3PAR helps them produce their massive site every day.

Storwize acquires Steering Wheel Cam Society of America from 3PAR

Fremont CA:  3PAR, the leading Steering Wheel Camera Society of America (SWCSA) producer of Steering Wheel Camera Technology and Smart Car chase scene videos has come to an agreement with Storwize, a Steering Wheel Camera Society of America member company from Marlborough, MA for Storwize to acquire the assets of the Steering Wheel Society of America.

Marc Farley, founder of the SWCSA, said: "It kind of sucks to have the SWCSA ripped out from under my complete creative control," before blowing his nose and continuing "now I don't even know where to drive."

Steve Kenniston, Director of Driving at Storwize was only available to speak from his mobile phone from within Storwize's state of the art Studio on Wheels was quoted as saying: "mmmbblgurg,  tan you he..  sshhhtdf... can you here me?" And then dropped this bombshell: "Were trying to pass legislation here is Massachusetts requiring everybody to make at least one SWCSA video per month."

Here is his latest video:

Calculating the output of storage tiering in wide striping arrays

I wrote a post yesterday that showed IOPS calculations for a few different native wide striping configurations and I thought I'd add storage tiering to the mix today.  Native wide striping places data from all volumes across all drives in the array (or of a certain drive class if you have mixed drives in your array) and randomizes workloads across all resources. The biggest advantages of native wide striping over traditional array designs that rely on multiple pools and workload isolation are:

• Avoiding poor storage utilization associated with workload isolation
• Avoiding IOPS and capacity limits associated with workload isolation
• Avoiding hotspots associated with legacy RAID striping
• Sustaining dependable, high performance for mixed workloads
• Improving both VM and storage densities

Although native wide striping can handle complex, mixed workloads of transaction and sequential data access, applications that are either latency sensitive or single threaded can significantly increase their storage performance through the use of SSDs and storage tiering.

3PAR's software for storage tiering is called Adaptive Optimization, or AO.  Based on administrator policies and algorithms keyed off QOS gradients, a 3PAR InServ array autonomically copies data from lower IOPS disk drives onto high IOPS SSDs. 

The 3PAR tiering solution uses STEC MACHIOPS SSDs with a sustainable I/O rate of 10,000 IOPS. These devices have 50GB capacities and are installed as sets of eight SSDs across all mesh active controllers in a 3PAR InServ array to balance the high IOPS workload load over all controllers as well as drives. 

IOPS calculations

Below are a few calculations for maximum sustainable IOPS from InServ arrays that use both SATA drives as well as SSDs with AO.  I used 5,000 IOPS as the metric for calculating SSD performance, which is a conservative estimate for the STEC MACHIOPS performance, but actual performance from an AO-enabled array could be lower due to a number of variables including the I/O activity levels that can be sustained by both applications and servers, policy settings made by storage administrators, the accuracy of algorithms to select data for tiering and copy operations that populate and de-populate the SSDs. 

Storage tiering is still in it's early stages and the industry is going to learn a great deal about this technology over the next several years. Performance models will certainly evolve as key variables are identified, which will almost certainly include server and application components.

Array 1:  160 SATA disk drives; 80% reads, no SSDs

Total IOPS of all drives in the array:   12,800

IOPS delivered to all servers w/RAID 5:   8,000

IOPS delivered to all servers w/RAID 10: 10,667

IOPS delivered to all servers w/RAID 6:   5,998

Array 2: 160 SATA disk drives; 80% reads - 8 SSDs; 50% reads

Total IOPS of all drives in the array:   52,800

IOPS delivered to all servers w/RAID6 (SATA) & RAID5 (FC): 21,998

Array 3: 160 SATA disk drives; 80% reads - 32 SSDs; 50% reads

Total IOPS of all drives in the array:   172,800

IOPS delivered to all servers w/RAID6 (SATA) & RAID5 (FC): 69,998

Array 4: 480 SATA disk drives; 80% reads - 32 SSDs; 50% reads

Total IOPS of all drives in the array:   198,400

IOPS delivered to all servers w/RAID6 (SATA) & RAID5 (FC): 81,994

Conclusions

Even a relatively small amount of SSD storage can boost performance approximately four times, as shown by Arrays # 1 and 2 above where eight SSDs totaling 400GB were added to an all-SATA configuration. It's also interesting to note the performance differences between arrays #3 and #4 above. Although the number of SATA drives tripled, the IOPS performance increased only 15%.