Lee Johns is one of my new co-workers at HP and he gets himself into all sorts of interesting things - like the upper left corner of this video, where he talks about data sprawl, dedupe and HP's StoreOnce technology.
He does an excellent job highlighting how StoreOnce technology is portable and can be located in any location in the infrastructure with the ability to transfer deduped data without the necessity of rehydrating and deduping it.
Jay Livens and I were both in Boulder, CO last week for an HP worldwide storage marketing meeting where he spoke about HP's broad portfolio of data protection products.
The link (above the video) will take you to an ESG Lab Report on HP's Data Protector and Deduplication Solutions. Here is a taste of what you will find in that report:
A growing number of organizations are struggling to protect information assets residing in remote and branch offices. Most are alarmed at the rate of data growth in these locations. Many lack the IT staff and expertise needed to manage traditional tape-based protection methods. Many more are frustrated with the cost and complexity of managing tape media at remote offices. Disk-based backup and replication to a corporate data center reduces the complexity and risk, but, until recently, it’s been too expensive to justify due to the cost of remote office disk capacity and the WAN connectivity required.
At the time of testing, the street price started at $4,499 for a 2 TB system. This included dynamic deduplication and low bandwidth replication—ESG Lab found the HP Storageworks D2D to be an affordable, simple, and effective solution for the protection of valuable information assets residing in remote and branch offices. Data protector provides a single point of management and catalog for local and replicated backup data that reduces complexity and cost for distributed environments.
EMC made their big announcement for 2011 yesterday. The company has a track record of elaborate, showy announcements that are designed to make a big impression on the audience. This time, the effort ran amok, turning into an awkward variety infomercial.
Weeks before the announcement, EMC tired to make sure storage industry followers were aware that the theme for the announcement was "record breaking". They even went so far as to send analysts and bloggers packages of broken audio records. From what I could tell, most people who received them were slightly bemused by the gesture, but not necessarily impressed.
Unable to resist the urge to flog the theme, CEO Joe Tucci started his presentation explaining unconvincingly why the announcement was record breaking. He then went into the EMC cloud computing story, this time including concepts ripped straight out of 3PAR's message book, including using the word "autonomic" a couple times. I hope my good buddy Barry Burke (EMC's Storage Anarchist blogger) heard that so he can start learning how to pronounce it. Mark my word, before the end of the year, he's going to be saying it as if he had invented it, even though it tickles his gag reflex right now.
Tucci also copped the 3PAR messages of selling technology that is less complex and doesn't require support from 3rd party service provider companies. However, he stopped short of mentioning EMC's own professional services. Hmmm.... I guess this means he wants to sell even more expensive EMC services to their customers.
Pat Gelsinger came next and presided over an series of interesting, but pointless motoring stunts and videos. IMHO, he should seriously consider using the nickname, "Chips", seeing as how he repeatedly mentioned his background from Intel.
After a few compulsory cloud comments, Gelsinger asked the crowd what words came to mind when they thought of EMC. I give him credit for having the guts to ask that one - and I was surprised to hear him say "expensive". Just when it seemed that a reality show was going to break out, he then went on to make the claim that their new "baby VNXe" system will be cheaper than similar-class products from other vendors. Yeah sure.
It was kind of funny when Gelsinger announced the VNXe, it was accompanied by a fast and cheesy synthesizer sound and a smattering of applause. For those in the audience, it must have seemed slightly strange considering the VNXe is very small in stature (it looked like it was 4u high) - much smaller than the miniature Stonehenge model in Spinal Tap.
Somebody at EMC must really like Audi automobiles as they were featured prominently in several video segments. It was the perfect opportunity for EMC to have made some excellent steering wheel cam videos, but that was not in the offing.
One of the stranger things they did was cram 26 lithe dancers into a Mini Cooper to set a record for the Guiness Book of Records. I'm not really sure why they felt compelled to do this - maybe because they realized there wasn't any legitimacy to their record breaking claims, but it was a bizarre and slightly entertaining part of the show. I thought it was interesting that they turned to a professional services provider of sorts, the Pilobolus Dance Theatre to get the contortionist-like flexibility they needed to accomplish the act. As far as I know, no EMC employees actively participated in breaking the record, yet EMC wanted to share in the accomplishment. That's like publicising that they sold to some famous customer when they actually didn't.
Gelsinger suggested that EMC storage was similarly efficient in the use of storage space as Pilobolus had been in filling the mini. Strange, I don't ever recall telling admins to get their fingers and toes out of the way so I could shut the door on a storage system. In general, there was a lot of lip service given to EMC's storage efficiency in the presentations, but nothing to back it up besides a modern dance company. Perfect!
Gelsinger liked to use the word "unquestionable" when discussing efficiency and performance. Since the theme of the event involved records, I'll go on the record saying that we will very gladly compare our capacity and energy efficiency with EMC's. And speaking of records, with EMC's history of not going on the record by participating in standard industry benchmarks, like the SPC, next time Gelsinger might want to use the word "unproven" instead of unquestionable.
A lot of competitive claims were made that clearly didn't consider all their competitors, but that's normal for these types of things. But it was hardly a string of industry-leading achievements, the way it was portrayed. While EMC claimed they made 41 new product announcements, some of them were just repackaged software and licensing and some of the items had actually been available previously - but it's fairly common to delay announcing products in order to align with an event such as this.
The rest of the show was a smattering of platitudes and spin along with bits of information about what was actually announced and the occasional car/motorcycle stunt. In what had to be one of the strangest marketing ideas of all time, for the Grand Finale of the event, EMC hired a professional motorcycle named Bubba Blackwell to jump across a good sized number of Symmetrix cabinets. They never really tied this one into any product features, but it was sort of fun watching Bubba do his thing. Still I couldn't help but wonder what the difference would have been had he jumped over 3PAR systems - he probably would have only had to jump half the distance, given our efficiency advantages.
A screencast discussing the bid EMC is making for Isilon. Covers the topics EMC highlighted in their announcement, including "big data", Atmos integration and the EMC effect. Contrasts the differences between EMC's divergent NAS strategies and HP's Converged Infrastructure NAS strategy with the X9000 platform.
As 3PAR is integrated into HP, there is a lot of new stuff to for us to figure out. One of the most important concepts at HP is Converged Infrastructure (CI). The basic idea of CI is to maximize a customer's investement in technology by consolidating resources in common, modular building blocks. 3PAR customers are already accustomed to the idea from with our InServ storage systems, but CI goes far beyond 3PAR's storage vision by including server and network technologies. It's a big idea with huge implications for product engineering, manufacturing, maintenance and support - and it raises the importance of software in data center solutions.
I was somewhat familiar with Ibrix as a software product that powered NAS clusters, but the new ESG Labs report helped me grasp HP's vision for the X9000 storage appliances much better.
Interested readers should view the report to see the results as well as the methodology that was used. There were three test beds covering throughput, content delivery and file creation metrics culled from a mix of X9000 configurations. The X9320 is a storage appliance with internal disks and the X9300 is a gateway version of the product that connects to external SAN storage. Another model, the 9720, which is the super-sized version of the 9320 (full 42u rack) not used in the tests.
3PAR customers will be familiar with the processing architecture of the X9000. The granular "head unit" of the X9000 system is called a couplet, and is a pair of fault-tolerant NAS heads. This is similar to 3PAR's storage system architecture where nodes are added in pairs.
But the surprising thing about scalability for the x9000 is not necessarily how large it can grow, but how effectively it can also be employed in much smaller environments. As the ESG Labs report concludes:
Who would have guessed that companies overwhelmed by Word and PowerPoint archives could benefit from the same solution as those burdened by 100-TB annual growth of genome sequencing data? Who knew that a NAS file system developed for high-performance computing could evolve into a graceful, cost-effective scale-out solution with predictable and near-linear performance for small and large files and exotic and everyday applications? The challenges that scale-out NAS solves are much more “everyday” than “lunatic fringe,” and the X9000 makes it consumable by almost anyone. If you are facing file system growth and complexity challenges, you should consider the X9000. It’s affordable, includes commercial features like snapshots and replication, and lets NFS and CIFS work on the same file system. You can buy a scale-out architecture that will grow with you and meet the needs of your business without interruption. The Fusion segmented file system, combined with HP’s servers and storage (not to mention HP’s buying power and supply-chain advantage), brings what started as a niche solution to the masses.
There was an HP marketing event in Barcelona last week for European, Middle Eastern and African journalists, analysts and social media people. I was invited to attend and met a lot of people I hadn't met before - both from within HP as well as people from the storage blogosphere. The event was not exclusive to storage, but covered servers and networking products too - and emphasized HP's vision for doing more work with fewer products, which is the underlying philosophy of HP's Converged Infrastructure (CI).
The social media attendees were given front row seating during the product presentations. I'm sure it seemed a bit odd to the presenters that the first two rows of attendees were often heads-down engaged with the Twittersphere, but that's certainly indicative of the way social technologies are changing marketing. I give the HP marketing team a lot of credit for putting social media front and center during these sessions.
Barcelona is known for its fine restaurants - each of them better than the last - and we certainly ate well. My recommendation is a small restaurant called El Clandestino. Andy Bryant found it on Google and although it perplexed our taxi drivers by being on an almost invisible street on the maps, it was worth the effort.
One of the big questions people had before this event was what would happen to HP's EVA product line after the 3PAR acquisition. The video below, taken at Montjuic on my way out of town (more on that later) discusses that topic.
Cloud infrastructures need to be efficient if they are going to compete. Money saved on operations is an annuity to cloud service providers that goes to the bottom line every day.
Terremark is a leading cloud service provider that delivers just in time infrastructure services, as described in this excellent post on the Boxed Ice blog today titled, The New Server Density Infrastructure. This post, written by a Terremark customer shows that Terremark is not only interested in driving down their own costs, but also in helping their customers be more efficient too.
If you are interested in a behind the scenes look at how Teerremark does it, you owe it to yourself to check out this case study on Wikibon today. This chart from the Wikibon study shows how Terremark derives its operational savings (click on it to see an enlarged version)
Savings from storage were projected to be 86%.
Guess who their storage vendor is? (The report says what equipment they are using). But one big clue is that it isn't EMC, as EMC's Chuck Hollis suggested back in July.
Cloud industry insiders know this stuff. We don't have all the cloud customers, but we have some of the most largest and most influential ones. Nobody really knows what changes cloud computing will bring to our industry, but 3PAR is very well prepared to be a key component of those infrastructures.
Derek Seaman posted in his blog yesterday about capacity thinning, zero reclamation technologies and included a test of 3PAR's Thin Persistence software. In his post he lists the steps he took to run the test, including the setup and final results. Please go read what he wrote, but I thought I'd post his summary:
This test proved that the 3PAR zero reclaim feature worked as advertised, happens in real time, and take very little effort to use. The same process would work for a virtual machine as well. If I was using the Veritas Storage Foundation I would not have to use the sdelete command and it would be fully automated. Hopefully they will work with Microsoft and VMware to support a fully automatic and native method to reclaim the deleted space. Until then, you can run sdelete from time to time to drop those extra pounds from your fat LUNs.
3PAR sees thinning technology as a strategic advantage that we are committed to advancing in the industry with software partnerships. Examples of progress on these fronts include the automated thinning for Oracle ASM and implementing VMware's VAAI Block Zeroing, which turns a thick volume into a thin one on 3PAR storage with Thin Persistence.
It's getting very hard to keep up with all the crazy social media stunts coming out of Hopkington, but they seem to have done it to themselves again. First was the questionable spamming for viewers so they could claim they had a viral video, then today they just "leaked" a 3PAR sales "kill sheet" - and also apparently established a "secret" site with the URL Notapp.com, where they compared their own guarantee program to Netapp's. According to Simon Sharwood at Search Storage Australia, the site was removed and accessing the URL directed browsers to EMC's site.
Perhaps it is all part of a new marketing strategy by newcomer Jeremy Burton, who joined EMC as Chief Marketing Officer back in March. As best I can tell, Burton's new marketing strategy for the company is that people will believe anything. Maybe he doesn't think there are enough new products coming out of EMC - or that the delays in getting their ballyhooed FAST out the door are too embarrassing - but instead of trying to promote EMC on its own merits, it looks like he is doing his utmost to mud wrestle. Is that what EMC is paying him the big bucks for?
EMC suddenly is taking a bigger interest in 3PAR. That's good. Search Storage Australia just published parts of a competitive document that EMC was circulating to it's partners about 3PAR. It certainly wasn't a surprise because we'd seen it previously, but I was sorry to see it published because it made EMC look ridiculous, which was working pretty well for us. But now that it's been outed, here is what we have to say about it (in the guise of Ineption's lead character, the CRO)
The messaging is not built in, but our zero detection technology for optimizing capacity is. The host SW commands to do this are short and do not require "careful coordination". Veritas, Oracle, Windows Server and Linux software all work with minimal operator effort. For instance, this document from Oracle, describes the whole process, with the sole operator command being this: #bash ASRU LDATA.
Can EMC provide online reclamation of zeroed space without risking capacity overruns and with tolerable performance? 3PAR can. Does EMC have these capabilities in both mid-range and enterprise storage arrays? 3PAR does.
3PAR has both Flash and 1 TB SATA drives. We also have Adaptive Optimization software that uses Flash SSDs for storage tiering. EMC still doesn't have it after they made such a big deal about it last year. They like to tell customers that their size gives them development advantages, but their track record doesn't support their claim.
3PAR arrays allow users to create many tiers, but without the need for disk pools. Tiers are constructed from the combination of drive type plus RAID level. For instance, you can have separate tiers for SATA, FC and Flash SSD drives with the RAID level you select. Our Dynamic Optimization software allows admins to move data from one tier to another. You can "dial in" the performance and protection you want.
All systems have a peak output , ours just happens to have a lot more throughput than theirs - and at higher disk utilizations. We have published benchmarks that show how our systems perform. They don't. Adding disk drives to a system and utilizing those drives is far easier with a 3PAR system than either VMAX or Clariion where you have to wrestle with putting drives in the pools you want to use them for.
There are no disk pools in 3PAR storage. Pools trap resources so you can't use them. Work isolation in pools leads to hot spots and storage admin nightmares. Wide striping does not mean you can't have tiers. That is an idiotic statement.
VMAX can configure large pools - and all the drives in them have to be at the same RAID level meaning you can't create multiple tiers within those pools. If you want multiple tiers, you need multiple pools and all the headaches that involves. Change management in an environment with multiple pools is complicated. You also need to consider the pools needed for snapshots and remote replication. Are those easy to provision and change on EMC storage. Most would say "no".
3PAR uses all disk spindles all the time for delivering IOPS and pro-active sparing is done using reserved space on those drives. Rebuilds do process quickly. Would EMC have you believe they never have to perform drive rebuilds? Really?
The RAID6 thing really makes me sad. They look so stupid when they say it. We're all sorry to say goodbye to that piece of FUD.
Our front end archiecture was designed for large-scale parallel connectivity to match the massive bandwidth capabilities of our wide striped back end. Our benchmarks and the cost per IOPs in those benchmarks speak for themselves. Our customers also tend to run 3PAR systems at much higher disk utilizations than they run other vendor's arrays.
We support a huge number of ports on our systems w/full
active/active data access across all controllers. All controller nodes can be used to access all data volumes. We have a number of customers that run fairly sizable SANS without switches because they have enough ports on their arrays so they don't need to consolidate access through switches.
5- 9s? We're there. Our systems get pounded on every day in some of the largest private and public data centers in the world. They are designed with complete redundancy in all components and have advanced capabilities such as Persistent Cache to maintain high levels of performance even after the loss of a controller.
The delays in bringing their FAST tiering software - a product they were hyping in April of 2009 - to market have shown that size doesn't matter much when it comes to delivering technology on time. I'm not saying 3PAR always delivers on time, but EMC is far from immune to these problems. In fact, the need for them to coordinate across multiple product lines creates certain disadvantages for them.
As to their comments on our support; they are pure FUD and grasping for straws. We would not be able to maintain the customers we have if it were not for our efforts at supporting them.
* * * * * *
The following content was added on July 30th by Rusty Walther, 3PAR's Vice President of Customer Services & Support.
Stating
that 3PAR “outsources support” is just plain silly, especially coming from a
company that keeps most of the worlds’ largest offshore outsourcing companies
in business. Like EMC, 3PAR uses Third Party Maintenance suppliers
(TPM’s) for break-fix field activities. In some geographies, EMC and 3PAR
even use the “same” TPM. But EMC also outsources most of their volume call center and Level-1 Technical Support to offshore suppliers. Not so at
3PAR. Everyone that touches a 3PAR support case is a 3PAR-badged
employee. I challenge EMC to identify a single outsourcing company that
handles 3PAR technical support. EMC’s outsourced technical support
sub-contractors could be listed alphabetically, by geography, or by technology category
… but you’d need a couple of sheets of paper to do it.
The twitterverse is busy again today with discussions surrounding EMC's us of spambots to generate views of videos they are trying to make viral. If you are interested in seeing what is being said, check out these people's tweets and you'll be off on a trip down a dark hole.
Here are a couple cartoons I made about it last week from my new cartoon, Ineption:
Netapp's Val Bercovici suggest this viral spamming as the end of innocence in social media, but innocence exited the social media stage long ago.
I'm much more concerned about how large companies like EMC can use social media to suggest product and customer relationships that stretch the truth well beyond the impressions that a reader might take away from reading suggestive blog posts from respected corporate voices. As "unofficial company statements" that are more influential than press releases, social media pieces can distort things in a way that more-accountable corporate marketing are not allowed to.
Last week, Chad Sakac and Chuck Hollis published blog posts that pointed to an EMC white paper about details of a VMAX implementation at Terremark, an excellent 3PAR customer. Readers of these posts would probably think that VMAX was being used as the storage behind Terremark's multi-tenant, Enterprise Cloud service offering. That would be stretching things more than just a little bit. I commented on both blogs and the responses to my comments were interesting. I guess I feel a little kinder towards Chad as a result.
It is possible that somewhere in the world, a VMAX is being used by Terremark. One would expect Terremark to be looking at various storage platforms as a matter of course, it only makes sense for them. After all, VMware made a significant investment in Terremark last year and we all know who owns VMware. There are certain favors that EMC can ask that vendors such as 3PAR can't. But Terremark also has to operate Enterprise Cloud in their US major data centers every day and the storage they use for that is not in a test lab - it's production - and it is 3PAR storage.
And its not for lack of trying on EMC's part. Last November when VCE was announced, Terremark was discussed as a featured customer in both Chad's and Chuck's blogs. That was OK, I understand the excitement that surrounds a big announcement. But nine months later, to suggest that this announcement had given birth to a major production environment for a service that it is not supporting sort of stuck in my craw.
There was a lot written last week surrounding VMware's release of vSphere 4.1. Netapp appeared to have a lot to say, but it was confusing to figure out what they were really talking about. I think I've got it now.
It's unusual for a company to be invited as a centerpiece of high-visibility festivities and then mysteriously decide not to follow through. It would be like getting complimentary tickets and backstage passes from
Lady Ga Ga herself, telling all your friends about it and then not going. It it does make one wonder. Why wouldn't you do whatever it takes to be included in VMware's big summer announcement party? Well, if you're Netapp, the answer appears to be - "Being there is over-rated. Just make sure everyone thinks you were." Call it Photoshop for PR or call it keeping your poker face, it's a mash up of a blown opportunity and opportunistic courage.
The excitement for VMware's storage partners was concentrated in two areas: VAAI (vStorage API for array integration) and SIOC (Storage I/O Control). The initial release of VAAI includes new SCSI block storage commands that allow the arrays to offload host systems from redundant, resource-consuming tasks. SIOC is a method for managing I/O queues to create more fairness in accessing storage resources. Netapp issued a press release last week in conjunction with the vSphere 4.1 release, but it was for their Virtual Storage Console, not for the support of the storage enhancements in vSPhere 4.1. There was a flag waving mention of VAAI:
"Additionally, NetApp is supporting the new VMware vStorage APIs for
Array Integration (VAAI) capabilities that offload data management tasks
from the host server to the storage system. This can free up host CPU
cycles for better performance and increased virtual machine density."
That's not exactly saying anything, but its more than they had to say about SIOC, which was zilch.
The bottom of the release directs readers to Vaughn Stewart's blog for more info. Apparently, Netapp's PR department left the rest of the innuendo up to Vaughn - a diligent and loyal Netapp employee who understands that sometimes a vendor blogger doubles as a PR bagman. It looks like I need to add a new chapter to Vendor Blogging with Dummies.
You have to dig into the comments to get some of the details, but Vaughn's blog does a decent job explaining that Netapp is working on delivering VAAI functionality in
Q4 2010. Now, that's not all that late considering its only 6 months or so away, but as a privileged insider to VAAI development, it's not a great showing either. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if
some of the companies who were not in the program, such as Compellent, HP, IBM and Xiotech come out
with VAAI plug-ins before Netapp does. As for 3PAR, we will have
our VAAI plug-in available in September as part of a maintenance
release. We didn't have a lot of time to develop VAAI functionality after gaining access to the APIs in early 2010, but we fast-tracked the
development of it in order to make the announcement.
As much as I admire Vaughn's hutzpah for stepping in to carry the load that others at Netapp should have, there were a few problems with what he said. First was the absurd statement that "
SAN is attempting to be more NAS-like". There is so much wrong with that statement that it's difficult to find a place to start. Who or what is SAN? Is VMWare SAN? Is the T10 SCSI standards committee SAN? Is SAN the being an embodiment of SAN the block protocol? Is there a virtual reality thing going on here? And what is NAS-like anyway? Does it have anything to do with the size of one's beak or the way particular vowels resonate in the sinus cavities? Or is it like racing the back roads in a used chevy? Whatever Vaughn meant, I tend to dislike the imprecision of technology anthropomorphism.
The second thing Vaughn said was "As for the first release of VAAI... These features ALREADY EXIST in NFS." Really, block zeroing? That is a function developed for EagerZeroThick volumes, which are only supported on VMFS datastores, not NFS datastores. Perhaps we will see that change in the future, but for now its SAN only.
Hardware assisted locking is a way to allow smaller granular locking for VMFS and addresses an issue with VMDK-level operations in a shared datastore. Because NFS puts VMDKs in separate datastores, which are locked independently, hardware assisted locking is unnecessary for NFS. In other words, its a SAN only function because the current NFS datastore architecture doesn't need it.
The other API in VAAI is Full Copy. This VAAI API appears to be functionally equivalent to a Netapp utility called RCU (Rapid Cloning Utility) that was included as a function in their Virtual Storage Console. It is not, however, something that exists in NFS, unless Netapp wants to give that feature to all it's NAS competitors. As a vSphere function, Full Copy will be available to all vendors that implement the VAAI APIs. It will be interesting to see what differences there are as far as programmatic control using the VAAI plug-ins, vendor-specific consoles and Powershell.
I wrote about the fact that we already had zero detect technology in our product, which is useful for the new Full Copy command because it allows customers to remove zeroed data from clones when they are created and return them to array free space.
The discussion became a bit confused when Chad interpreted what I was saying as pertaining to Block Zeroing.
Block Zeroing and Full Copy are different aspect of the VAAI API. The intent of block zeroing is to reduce the amount of CPU effort and storage traffic required to write zeroes across an entire EagerZeroThick (EZT) VMDK when it is created. The intent of Full Copy is to make clones of VMs quickly without consuming I/O bandwidth. Things get interesting when you start thinking about making a full copy of an EZT VMDK that was created using VAAI with block zeroing - but I'll discuss that later.
I also want to clarify what zero detection technology is. 3PAR T and F class arrays have zero detection technology, which is enabled by Thin Persistence software, that recognizes zeroed blocks as they are read by the array and returns them to the array's free pool. Any read requests made to these block addresses will return a zero value. In essence it is dedupe for zeroes.
However, Zero detection is not needed when an EZT VMDK is created using the VAAI plug-in because the array will recognize the intent of the command and not write the zeroes. In other words, the VMDK will only contain a very small amount of reserved space when it is created. Again, any attempts to read blocks in those ranges will return zero values. Zero detection is effectively bypassed during the creation of the EZT VMDK.
The exception to this behavior is when the EZT VMDK being created is written to a thick volume - in that case the array will write zeroes across the entire VMDK.
The remaining cases for the creation of EZT VMDKs on 3PAR arrays occur when the VAAI is not used. For a thick volume, the entire VMDK has zeroes written to it. Thin volumes not using zero detect also have zeroes written over the entire VMDK. Thin volumes with zero detect will not have zeroes written to them and will contain only a small amount of reserved space.
FWIW, the reserved space is used as instantly-available capacity that can be allocated on-demand when writes start coming into the volume. 3PAR arrays always "read ahead" free space to improve the performance of thin provisioning.
The next bit here could be a bit thorny, so clear your head. The matter of making a Full Copy of an EZT VMDK to a thinly provisioned volume was something Chad said was not allowed. My assumption here is that the type of thin provisioning used makes a big difference.
For instance, if you are using TP from VMware, I could see where they would not allow a full copy to be made. The problem is that the full copy will return all the zero values for the source VMDK, whether or not those zeroes were ever actually written - and write them to the target TP volume. In other words, the target could be much larger than the source. In the VMware TP scheme, this could make for problems in a hurry if you were making a bunch of clones this way.
In contrast, if you were using a 3PAR array with zero detection, the Full Copy of the source VMDK would return zeroes for the entire VMDK, but the zero detection would strip them out again as the target was being written. You could make as many clones as you wanted this way, knowing that the physical capacity they consume would be a multiple of the physical capacity consumed by the source VMDK. In other words, you wouldn't have to worry about virtual zero bloat making a mess of your VMFS volume.
One of the big differences between 3PAR's zero detection technology and other vendors zero-reclaim technology is that 3PAR's process is real-time-on-ingestion as data comes into the array, whereas zero-reclaim works in a post processing fashion after the zeroes have already consumed disk space. This could be a significant difference in many cases because the post-processing method has the potential to create unexpected capacity-full conditions before the zero-reclamation process even has a chance to start.
We've been anxiously waiting for VMware's announcement of vSphere 4.1 for weeks. There are many big things in this release, including significantly scaling the management capabilities of vCenter and increasing the number of simultaneous vMotions that are supported. The door is open for ESX deployments to achieve much greater densities than they could previously and that's a big deal to large enterprises who want to get more resources under the control of fewer points of management. There are still great gains to be made in consolidation - more on that later.
In the storage world, there are a couple big things, SIOC and array integration through the VAAI API.Technodrone has put together an excellent post on SIOC and I highly recommend that anyone wondering how to make this functionality works should go to this post and read it. Array integration has been advanced in three ways:
Hardware assisted locking
Full copy
Block zeroing
Array integration through the VAAI API is already at a very advanced status at 3PAR with some of the most important functions implemented through our I/O co-processor ASIC. While some companies want to write off the importance of hardware, 3PAR believes there are many things that need to be done in hardware to get the performance needed to truly scale storage for virtual environments. Our co-processors are key to getting much greater storage utilization and higher VM ratios and are one of the 3PAR innovations that separate our best of breed products from everybody else. The capabilities discussed below are available in the hardware today, and will be enabled with a software upgrade in September.
OK, lets talk about hardware assisted locking first. For customers that have experienced locking problems, this is a big deal. The problem has been well-documented online - but in a nutshell, customers have run into problems where an operation that locked the LUN for a VMFS did not complete, thereby freezing all I/Os for all systems using that LUN. That was certainly a nasty problem - not a bug necessarily, but certainly an incredible pain in the rear to all involved.
VMware's response in vSphere 4.1 was to include a command in the VAAI API using an atomic test and set instruction for implementing fine grained locks for small block sizes. There will still be locking in VMware, but on a much smaller scale.
Unique to 3PAR is the fact that this new locking mechanism is implemented in our I/O co-processors where it completes very quickly, as opposed to implementing it in code in the controller. If you consider an environment with high VM ratios and multiple vMotions going on you want this granular locking mechanism to as quickly as possible. Nobody else comes close to the speed that 3PAR processes them.
Next is the new Full Copy capability - also with co-processor assistance to reduce the capacity of the copy that is made. 3PAR has zero detect and reclaim technology integrated into the co-processor. With zero detection running in an array, as new writes are made, strings of zeros are detected by the co-processor and those blocks are returned to free space inside the array. If future reads are made to those blocks, zero values are returned, but not from disk. The result is that copies of VMDKs with lots of zeros in it, will be much smaller after the copy is made - and the copy will proceed much faster.
This sort of functionality works amazingly well with EagerZeroThick (EZT) volumes in vSPhere. VMware requires EZT for Fault Tolerance (FT) and MSCS clusters and also recommends EZT for high performance. The main complaints about EZT are that it takes extra time to write all those zeroes when the VMDK is created and that it doesn't work well with thin provisioning. With 3PAR's zero detection, the time it takes to writes all those zeros and the space they consume is a non-issue, but more on that later. Virtual Geek at EMC wrote about VAAI today
and in his discussion of what does not work for full copy he mentioned
copying from an EZT volume to a thin provisioned one. Actually, he's
wrong about that where 3PAR is concerned, because EZT to Thin works
very well on a 3PAR array with zero detect.
The image below illustrates the advantages of using EZT on a 3PAR array with zero detection:
The last API element to discuss is Block Zeroing. The idea is that the host communicates to the array to write a string of zeros when it is provisioning storage or overwriting blocks to a non-EZT VMDK. vSphere writes a lot of zeroes in order to maintain data integrity with multi-tenancy. The hypervisor zeroes zero out blocks prior to writing them in order to ensure that a virtual data imprint from an old VM does not occur for a new VM.
But writing all those zeroes consumes CPU and I/O bandwidth that could actually be used productively, so VMware included a new command to offload the host from writing zeroes, effectively shunting that workload to the array. Voila - problem solved with 3PAR!! The zero detection and reclamation technology in a 3PAR array not only offloads the host from writing zeroes, but it also gives customers instantaneous reclamation of capacity with a smaller digital footprint (less capacity consumed) and faster performance. That's pretty cool and it's a trifecta that only 3PAR has.
What is amazingly cool about today's vSphere announcement for 3PAR customers is that all three API elements, hardware assisted locking, full copy and block zeroing are already implemented in 3PAR's T and F series hardware platforms, and will be usable by the end of September with a firmware upgrade.
Our co-processor architecture really delivered for us this time. But it's been delivering the goods for our customers for a long time already. In virtualized environments our customers tell us they double their VM density, while cutting their storage capacity in half - all while reducing the amount of storage administration necessary by 90%. Those stats can be hard to believe, but when you look at what we delivered on the first day vSphere 4.1 was announced - when most people didn't even know we were working on it - it might make it easier for people to understand why.
We take virtualized environments very seriously. People that don't know about 3PAR don't consider us to be a leader in virtualization, but when they find out the depth of technology we have and how well it works across our entire product line they understand we are leading in ways that really pay off for them. And the bigger they are, the bigger the rewards can be - especially after today.
The blogosphere can be a lot of fun if you have the right approach. However, if you don't understand its nuances, it can be harsh and threatening. This guide is written for people who work for vendors and write blogs. Independent bloggers should also read it just in case they end up working for a vendor someday and find themselves with new, unexpected circumstances.
Chapter One: Thicken Your skin
One of the reasons people start blogging is that they like to feel important and relevant. Blogging gives them a sense of accomplishment. When their mother asks what they did that day, they can say: "I wrote a heart-felt, objective blog about technical minutiae". That is of course, unless they happen to be blogging for a vendor. In that case, they are better off telling mom that they are an Internet Security engineer and that she wouldn't understand even if you could find words for it.
Vendor blogging is not about pride because hostile bloggers will damage it when they can. The best way to protect your pride as a vendor blogger is to have none. If there is nothing to injure, it doesn't hurt so much. The best thing to do when you start vendor blogging is to engage teenage children at a shopping mall and start asking them stupid questions about things like cell phone etiquette and rap music. When you feel like you can't take another insult, make sure to ask "Is that all you've got, punk?" You'll be glad you did later as a full-fledged vendor blogger.
With your ego sufficiently trampled, you will have the proper perspective to vendor blog in earnest.
Chapter Two: Look good
Chapter Three: Get lots of help
Everybody thinks they know something about blogging. How hard can it be - right? Co-workers, including management come up with all kinds of suggestions of things that would make unbelievably good blog posts. The trick is that people with bad blog ideas will seek you out and the people with good blog ideas
hide from you when they see you coming. You may need to adopt Machiavellian techniques for getting what you need.
Rest assured, you will need help as a vendor blogger. Some bloggers suffer from writers block and others have too many other things going on to write new blog material. Vendor bloggers often need help arguing against a really bad idea from a really important person and sometimes they lose those arguments and need to subjugate their egos and write a bad blog. In such cases, the smaller the ego, the better. When that happens, the best approach is to seek help from others and turn the bad blog into a group project. Even though readers will think it came from your own addled brains, internally you can still garner major props for team building.
You may find yourself defending the flag when competitive bloggers attack it with flamethrowers. Co-workers can help you respond in several ways such as strapping you to a gurney until you cool down or sitting with you while you count to 10,000. Sometimes you may only need encouragement and re-assurance that your own flamethrowers are bigger and hotter than theirs. Sometimes you might need the assistance of competitive analysts who may be able to keep you from making outrageous claims about your own products. Naw, making outrageous claims about your own products is the stuff of legend and wins you a preferred seating at corporate functions.
Chapter Four: Find ways to not travel
Chapter Five: Dumb it down
The people with the best perspective for a vendor blog are the people in product development and product management. The problem is that they tend to use terms that are difficult to understand and have to be translated to industry-standard 10th grade English. Its unclear how the 10th grade level became the standard, but you might as well go along with the convention because it makes it much easier for the dropouts writing competitive blogs to know when you've insulted them.
Sophisticated vendor blogging is rarely successful. Pictures, animations and videos might add an air of sophistication to the blog, but make sure they don't remind people of a documentary or educational film. Better to keep people awake talking about nothing than to put them asleep droning on about some detail that they can't remember.
Chapter Six: Just joking
Chapter Seven: Apologize not
One of the biggest differences between standard blogging etiquette and vendor blogging etiquette (if you can call it that) is how you perform the mea culpa. As a non-vendor blogger, you want to be careful not to offend people and create an unwanted shitstorm. Its not much fun to be dragged through the mud in public for bad behavior. It's much, much worse to be threatened by some whacko who is stalking you or by a combatant of some anarchist, militant organization.
Think of vendor blogging as a battle royale of sorts - a cage match of verbal abuse. Would a luchador apologize after delivering a pile driver to his unconscious opponent? Of course not! So why would a vendor apologize to a competitive blogger after pointing out the ridiculous argument they made in a piece of shill writing?
As a vendor blogger engaged in online discussions with other vendor bloggers, it is bad form to apologize about anything, unless you use the apology to continue to insult. For example, am apology that saves face could be something like this: "Sorry to have depicted your argument as sheep droppings previously, because it was actually much more like the diarrhea from a a llama"
The only reason for a vendor blogger to apologize is for screwing up online and embarrassing your company and its products. (Remember the blogger has no ego left to damage). In that case, you may need to apologize to fellow employees and stockholders for besmirching the reputation of the fine organization you represent and the products/services that that generate the revenue stream that everyone so heavily depends on.
Appendix: Bloggers for hire
Special considerations need to be made for bloggers who are not employees of a company, but are paid to blog on their behalf. The hired gunslinger is sometimes likened to a prostitute, which some would say is unfair to prostitutes, but there is nothing wrong with providing a biased opinion and being paid for it -
even if the idea is to appear as objective as possible. In contrast, there is something decidedly rotten about a non-vendor blogger proclaiming themselves as a customer advocate when they are being paid by vendors.
Gunslingers need to have a long-lasting resistance to insults because non-vendor bloggers sometimes take offense to the gunslinger making what appears to be easy money and launch scathing attacks that can last many months. An attack from a non-vendor blogger accusing you of being a shill is always much more difficult to deal with than an attack from a vendor blogger, who is an obvious shill themselves.
The gunslinger has to be impartial because their tenure is tenuous. That instability means they can't afford to trash a competitor too much because they could end up being their next source of revenue. This, behavior disappoints their current boss, who wants the gunslinger to be more lethal than a mercenary can afford to be.
Ex-vendor bloggers that find themselves in a mercenary position blogging for hire need to be careful to avoid using insults that they may have been saving for months. It's your own fault that you didn't use them when you had the chance.
