StorageRap

A case of overkill - and how tiering avoids it

A couple posts ago, discussing Netapp CEO, Tom Georgens' now famous quote on tiering, I wrote:

To be fair, Georgens DID get support from the contrarian Drunken Data. 

This was the only reference to Jon Toigo and his blog. Apparently this thoughtless insult set Jon off because a week later he wrote a whole lot of overkill  in response.  Considering the effort he made, it doesn't seem fair to just ignore it all.   

1.  I listen to customers, so do Chuck Hollis, Barry Burke, Mark Twomey, Val Bercovici, Alex McDonald, and most of the vendor bloggers. We might take away different things, but I'd bet there is a fair amount of overlap in those discussions.

2. Tiering is all about reducing cost.  It's not going to reduce costs for every customer, but customers needing performance acceleration for certain apps at various times can save a lot of money with tiering. There is no need to configure a system for overkill, when a smaller number of high-performance devices and tiering can do the job.

3. Bruce Kornfeld at Compellent is a blogging wannabe. He can change that if he wants to by engaging the rest of the storage blogosphere.

Speaking of overkill, there are a lot of installed arrays that are great examples of capacity overkill. It's often discussed as poor utilization, but that is just another way of saying customers purchased far more capacity than they needed. In other words, they bought an overkill solution.

3PAR's thin technologies are all about avoiding capacity overkill. If you think you might want to get away from overkill storage implementations, it's a good time to do it with 3PAR, while we have our 50% capacity guarantee program running.

Storage anarchist apprehended in 3PARvaTAR's chunklet matrix

Last week, the storage anarchist published a virtual talk show featuring virtual me (3parfarley) as the special guest. 

In a strange turn around of events, the 3D cartoon instantiation of storage anarchist was apprehended recently while sneaking around in 3PARvaTAR's chunklet matrix. Special cameo appearances are made by the Storage Architect, iKnerd and and Stephen Foskett direct from their karaoke concert last Thursday night @ #HPbladesday

 
3PAR, EMC, Netapp, IBM, Capacity Guarantee, storage, array, SAN, HDS

The SWCSA rides again: A smackback for Georgens' whacked fast smack

No, it's not a SWCSA rap, but it is a steering wheel cam, complete with a surprise ending- inspired by Stu @ at EMC.   

Forget Netapp, is 3PAR vulnerable to "good enough" competition?

In a self-described FUD piece today StorageBod wonders about Netapp's future.  To put a finer point on his thoughts, in a comment he wrote:

Your first billion was the easiest billion; the rest gets harder...there's a target pointed in the middle of your foreheads' now. You are going to have to run even faster, even to stand still. Can you do it and can you do it without increasing your product set?

Normally I would enjoy this sort of badgering, but in a subsequent comment he wrote:

Complaint about NetApp is how vulnerable they are...they are not the only ones tho'...there are more vulnerable companies out there; 3Par, Compellant, Isilon, BlueArc etc, etc...the trailing pack who need to grow quickly or get bought.

OK, at least he mentioned 3PAR first! After all, we are larger than the rest of the pack he mentioned, not to mention in a much stronger financial position. To put a finer point on it, 3PAR is not vulnerable to debt (we have none), nor to cash weaknesses ($108 Million and increasing every year).

So what vulnerability is StorageBod imagining?  I suspect it was similar to those voiced by EMC blogger Chuck Hollis:

But, as you point out, it doesn't strike many of us as a defensible position long-term. It's just too easy for competitors to provide a "good enough" and attack those rich margins.

EMC tended to think it was in an unassailable position a decade ago with the Symmetrix. We were quite wrong. If I was doing a storage startup, it'd be pointed directly at draining NetApp's profit pool.

I also think that single-product companies lose the benefit of hybridization -- combining multiple technologies in new and interesting ways.

My take on this is that the storage industry tends to have different dynamics than most other industries. Yes size matters and Netapp and 3PAR and everybody else plays by those rules, but after achieving a critical mass, size is less important than paying attention to details.  Doing things more effectively  - not just in a more grandiose fashion - makes the largest difference.

We are not concerned about competitors trying to copy us and providing "good enough".  A competitor's assessment of "good enough" will likely not be adequate to many customers. It's how we grew our business over the last 10 years inside the jaws of EMC's formerly unassailable Symmetrix business.  I was an independent outsider when 3PAR began and to tell the truth, I thought the folks at 3PAR were out of their minds. But 3PAR has steadily grown and continues to gain market share - primarily in the high end of the market.  Admittedly, the high end has not been a place for hottest growth over the last decade, but we've climbed and are still steadily climbing.  As the service provider model of IT evolves and gains traction, we like our chances with our products and technologies there. FWIW, our new mid range F-class systems are doing very well, but we probably need a larger reseller channel to address the number of mid-range opportunities we are seeing.  That is a growth problem, not a shrinkage problem.

3PAR's capacity guarantee program works because we consistently deliver utilization levels that our customers didn't think were possible and we stand behind it with a contract.  Customers continue to check it out and are coming to the understanding that great utilization comes from a system designed for optimal efficiency and not simply to be "good enough".  If you stop thinking about storage administration as managing disk layouts you are on the right track. 3PAR admins don't manage disk layouts.

The question of hybridization and crossover potential is very interesting. Innovation can come from trying to tie disparate things together and this sort of integration is incredibly valuable when done well.  However, a hybridization mind set often assumes that most core innovation has already been done and that most future gains will come from integrating across functional boundaries. 3PAR doesn't think fundamental storage technology is even close to being fully developed. The problems customers assume they have to live with should not be tolerated. 

So yes, it's possible that we are vulnerable. The storms of technology change could make 3PAR and Netapp irrelevant in the years to come. Speaking only for 3PAR, we believe there is still a gold mine in revolutionizing storage efficiency and will continue to compete based on that belief. 

Customer says 3PAR's online upgrade process is "Easy as Pie!"

From a customer's blog:

In the last few weeks 3PAR released a major software upgrade for their arrays which enables a boatload of new features, including enhanced thin provisioning, autonomic provisioning, and RAID-MP. Today I performed the upgrade to Inform OS 2.3.1, and it went without a hitch and was quite easy. Unlike high-end arrays from Hitachi, EMC, and IBM, the upgrade process is not complex and took no more than an hour of time.

The whole blog post is here:   Thanks for the kind words,  Derek!

Click on the image below to find out about our capacity guarantee program. The program EMC doesn't want you to check out.

Is your storage vendor a doctor, a used car salesman or just without a capacity guarantee?

There's been a dysfunctional discussion of capacity guarantee programs over on Chuck's blog. There had been more sensible, independent discussions on the Storage Architect's blog, but that apparently wasn't good enough for EMC - a company without a capacity guarantee program of their own.  Unfortunately, Chuck decided to shut down comments on his post, citing an overload of vendor hash - which could continue to go on as long as there is breath left in any bloggers from Netapp.

Chuck's post poses the question - do you want to buy from a doctor or a used car salesman.  The suggestion he makes is that EMC treats you like a doctor while 3PAR, HDS and Netapp treat you like  used car salesmen. 

The doctor picture he used was this one:

Which reminded me of Scrubs - but of course there are other doctor images he could have used:

In case you've been shunning the news, this is Dr. Conrad Murray.

The used car salesman picture was pretty funny:

I'd suggest Chuck is using classic used car sales tactics: "Who loves ya baby? The warranty them guys offer don't protect you from nuthin'. Your engine will blow up the day after the warranty expires. All they want is your munny!"  

Still, seeing as how he was linking this image to 3PAR (in one way or another), I'd have hoped he would have used a picture like this instead:

You might not end up buying that car, but you should at least check it out.

 

Chuck characterizes capacity guarantee programs as not being in the customer's best interests. That would be true if 3PAR, HDS and Netapp wanted to increase the number of unhappy customers they have, but that is just CRAZY EMC thought diarrheaship:

 

Instead, I'm pretty sure we all want our customers to be very happy with their storage solution:

 

Yes, 3PAR's capacity guarantee is a way to attract customers, but it's much more than that - it's a way to back up our efficiency claims by putting our money where our mouths are:

 

RecoveryMonkey had a post recently about FUD and the ridiculous corner case claims storage vendors sometimes make about each other.   3PAR has been telling customers for years that our products are more efficient than theirs and we are now backing it up with our capacity guarantee. It's not FUD, it's not spin and its definitely not a corner case.

EMC skating in the rear with IBM, HP (and Oracle/Sun) at the back of the capacity garantee derby

As Mike Riley points out on his Netapptips blog today, I was not exactly a fan of Netapp's guarantee program when it first came out, but now I am an unabashed supporter.  Sometimes other vendors come up with excellent ideas. 

Yesterday HDS announced their capacity guarantee program and although it depends heavily on the capacity differences between RAID 1 and RAID 5 (which is a little cheesy), they offer a contract and appear to be ready to put back the program with more than a hand wave. That leaves HP, IBM and EMC (oh wait - and Oracle Sun) as the major storage players who aren't offering a capacity guarantee for customers making a technology refresh on storage.

 The question is - are these programs just marketing ploys?    Sure they are, just as any customer satisfaction guarantee for any product is a marketing ploy designed to hook customers - whether it's soap, kitchen knives, bass lures, vacuum cleaners, etc, but these ploys and the products behind them are targeted directly at data center operators that are tired of over-spending on storage. All are serious products from some of the biggest names in the storage industry and proven technology leaders.  3PAR's thin technologies (provisioning, conversion, persistence, reclamation and zero-detection) continue to lead our industry.

Depending on the applications and requirements of your data center some of these products and programs will be a better fit than others.  All of them should save you money on capacity purchases, but there are other things to consider, such as required software and services.  The details of each vendors' programs are different. That said, if you are offered a contract to reduce your storage capacity costs, that's pretty strong negotiating leverage with any other vendor - whether or not they offer a guarantee.  And even if you are not ready to make a purchase now, you might want to know how these programs work so you can be better prepared when the time comes.

To find out more about 3PAR's capacity program, click the image below. 

EMC takes dumbass award with denial of reality strategem: Secure Multi-Tenancy and Virtual Domains

EMC can't help themselves.  Given what appears to be a new corporate mandate to deny competitive threats in their massive propaganda machine, they look pretty stupid when one of those threats involves their new BFF Cisco and their trophy-acquisition raison d'etre,VMware.   

Yesterday, Netapp, Cisco and VMware made a planned, well-orchestrated announcement of their secure, multi-tenancy architecture.  Trust me - everyone in the industry knew it was coming and it was the main reason we chose to time our vSPhere and vCenter Server announcement for Monday this week. Chuck Hollis, EMC's StorageMonkeys poll winner, responded with an incredibly ignorant post that does not even mention the companies involved, nor does it link to any of the numerous online postings discussing it. For as many words as La Bombast put into this blog entry, you would think he would have at least mentioned Cisco in his discussion on network security. Granted, this announcement puts EMC in a compromised position, seeing as how their most strategic partners have chosen to develop an advancement in data center technology with one of their most dangerous competitors, Netapp.  Nonetheless, EMC's inability to deal with the reality of it underscores the difficulties they have holding an objective, honest and open public discussion.

I like what Netapp, VMware and Cisco have done with their Secure Multi-Tenancy architecture. The ability to segregate and align applications, data and IT resources for management purposes is a very big deal. It is also one of the key concepts in virtualization technology.  Sharing resources among multiple applications and users provides powerful economic leverage (doh!) and aligning security and access controls on virtual boundaries is not only desirable - it is essential.  Role-based administration is certainly nothing new, and bringing that into the virtual data center is a necessary evolution in the technology's development.

So what about 3PAR?  Been there, done that and continue to lead in utility storage infrastructure technologies. 3PAR developed our Virtual Domain technology more than two years ago that brought  role-based administration and firewalls to utility storage. It's also why we developed our Cloud-Agile program for utility computing service providers and designed ourCloud-Agile SECURED solution into it.  We have done many things over the years that have been ahead of their time and Virtual Domains was one of them. We're happy to see Netapp, Cisco and VMware shine a light on this important technology area.  Too bad for EMC that they missed on this one. Guess they have some 'splainin and fudding to do!

Check out our capacity guarantee -
the program EMC doesn't want you to know about.

The difference between a rant and thought diarrheaship.

Its been pretty quiet in the storage blogosphere so far in 2010.  Innocuous stuff.  No smack ups.  We all got the message late last year that readers were fed up with vendor bashing.  Well, the truce apparently can't last forever - or can it?

One of the most followed storage bloggers who works for a very large storage company wrote a post today that he characterized as a rant.  It wasn't much of a rant, but there were certainly aspects of it that fit this part of the Merriam-Webster definition:

    to utter in a bombastic declamatory fashion.

I think of rants as having elements of dark humor and scathing, pointed accusations.  This bombast had neither, but it did have pieces of whine mixed in.  Whining about how a competitor of theirs, 3PAR had come out with a program that they don't have an answer to.  Whine-bast that their strengths should be considered as the only ones that matter.  A general whine-bast that they should be the only ones allowed to make the rules.  A load of baloney, but not anything truly disgusting.

    Sort of a thought diarrheaship piece.

Does anybody actually get anything out of reading such tripe?

Meebeep! Keep trying V-Max!

EMC apparently thinks that V-Max will catch up to 3PAR soon! 

  

 

They say it's easy to use!

  

 They keep trying all kinds of things!

  

That look great on paper!

  

But they haven't been working out the way they planned!

  

3PAR has a vision for utility storage that EMC just doesn't get!

  

Maybe EMC shouldn't have killed off the DMX so F.A.S.T.!

   

Maybe EMC should try some of these!

   

Try to catch us tomorrow with your ACME V-MAX, EMC!

   

FAST 0.5 exposes the changed game of storage

Chris Evans, the Storage Architect, had an unexpected analysis of EMC's FAST announcement today on his blog. The point he makes is that with FAST only being available on Intel-based array architectures - and not the DMX product line - that EMC has put themselves at a peer level with the rest of the industry.  As he says:

So what’s my point?  Well, simply this; EMC have legitimised the enterprise modular architecture characterised by V-Max.  This accepts that the future is commodity-based hardware with differentiation in software.  However, EMC are no longer the leaders in this field and are having to play catch up.

It's an interesting angle to be sure and it will be interesting to see how EMC's new platform works out after all the bluster and FUD over FAST is long forgotten.  EMC is going to busy in the years to come as they try to convert their DMX customers to v-Max customers.  All vendors go through this sort of thing when they introduce new architectures and even their most loyal customers are more or less forced to consider alternatives.  There is a lot of pressure on EMC all of a sudden to bring software to market that justifies the switch from the DMX -to v-MAX.  FAST has failed to do that so far.

EMC's pre-announcement of FAST earlier this year was presumably done to shore up their disappointing SSD sales - a tactic that apparently did not help their enterprise business much. But having played the FAST hand so early, they had no choice but to release FAST version 0.5 before the end of the year.  Will this help answer the questions about EMC's ability to develop enterprise level software for v_Max?  The answer has been loud and clear - let's wait until Fast 2.0.

EMC was way too early with SSDs and they just repeated the same mistake with FAST. Instead of creating an advantage for themselves, they allowed their competitors to observe what they are doing without applying any pressure. Instead, unexpectedly, the pressure is now on EMC to do better.  

Considering that 2009 was a year of backpedaling for EMC, I want to offer lessons in the art with this video:

Agility & Bull

3PAR has been designing and marketing it's agile storage for years. Recently, Hitachi started using the word "agile" in their messaging.  Imitation is a form of flattery, but at least they should link to our Cloud Agile partner page when they plagiarize like that. 

In contrast, EMC's announcement of FAST today only uses the word agile once, in Pat Gelsinger's quote:

“Over the past two years, EMC has optimized all of its major storage architectures to support new levels of automation required in virtual data center environments and for the transition to private clouds. These dynamic and agile environments require the capabilities that EMC’s FAST technology provides for effective management and scaling.  This is an area of significant investment for EMC and we are the only one offering this technology across high-end, mid-tier and unified platforms.”
- Pat Gelsinger, EMC President and Chief Operating Officer, Information Infrastructure Products

Online data movement is a big deal for storage and FAST puts it squarely in the mainstream of storage software. Gelsinger is right about virtual environments being dynamic and agile, but the problem with FAST is that the underlying storage does not measure up and FAST shines a spotlight on those shortcomings.  If you are going to have online data movement, you need to have the ability to make the results of those data movement operations productive - without turning your storage utilization goals upside down. FAST undoubtedly will work great where EMC storage is under-utilized and very expensive, but how will it work when you are trying to reduce the cost of storage by increasing storage utilization? 

It also looks like EMC is backing away slightly from their bullish position on SSDs. I was wondering how they were going to deal with their disappointing SSD sales when they finally announced FAST.

Speaking of bullish, I found this little video that I thought I'd share with you of some truly agile guys that really know their bull!

Symantec beats FAST out the door with SSD support in Dynamic Storage Tiering

While some have wondered whether or not EMC was going to be able to get their FAST product announced this year, others have been keeping their heads down getting work done.  For instance, Symantec, who today announced their Dynamic Storage Tiering feature for SSDs in their Storage Foundation products.

Of course, many probably wonder why the heck I'm writing about this seeing how 3PAR doesn't have support for SSDs in it's products yet.  That's easy. A v-Max with FAST is going to be more of a science project than a production system that actually gets work done.  I'm more concerned about customers buying somebody else's SSD-enabled array and using it with Symantec's Dynamic Storage Tiering than I am about FAST on v-Max.

But I'm not that concerned because the SSD market has been slow to develop - even by EMC, the company that has been leading the charge (and inventory buildup).  And even though they like to point to the check boxes in the feature checklist, big wide striping (the kind that flattens disk contention problems) with a v-Max is still an exercise in storage contortionism, unlike on a 3PAR, where its the default behavior.

But all this will change over time and the cost of deploying SSDs is going to come down as enabling software for SSDs becomes available and is refined. Even EMC's software will slowly get better. Despite the performance of the SSD devices - and EMC's wishes, the race for best of breed SSD functionality is going to be much more of a marathon than a sprint.

So where's 3PAR?  We've been shipping DO (Dynamic Optimization) for 4 years and today we announced the policy advisor for automating most of the tasks that used to take admins time to work through.  Changing service levels for volumes just got a lot easier. Drive speed, RAID levels, additional drives - if you want to change them, you can - and it doesn't take weeks or months and piles of spreadsheets to figure it out.

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.

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....