StorageRap

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.

3PAR Countdown: 3PAR's Thin Guarantee Program

The news is here.



Very easy & straightforward.  Start fat and move to thin, efficient storage on a 3PAR F or T Class system.

For more information on 3PAR's Thin Guarantee Program, check out the page on 3PAR's web site here.

 

Copan's MAID fades away: forget about disk for archiving applications

The rumor is that Copan is shuttindg down.  If so, I suspect MAID storage will quickly become an afterthought now, except for a small number of customers and applications that will keep the technology on life support.  The problem with MAID is that there aren't enough applications for selectively-spinning disks.  Selectively spinning disk drives are more expensive than tape for archiving and are more problematic than standard disk systems for backup.  That leaves applications such as video on demand, which is not a large enough market to float a serious startup these days. Thin provisioning for primary storage and dedupe for backup have become the technologies of choice for customers looking to increase the efficiency of storage. 

The outcome of Copan's failure means that tape will continue to be the most prevalent technology for archiving. In turn, that means archiving software will continue to be tied to tape for some time, including all the problems inherent in maintaining metadata for it. If you are in the legal industry and hoping to see leapfrog improvements in digital discovery processes, don't hold your breath.  Discovery from data on tape will continue to be a laborious task.  SSDs for archiving would appear to be a slam-dunk at some distant time in the future, but the cost has to come down a long, long way first.

EMC trips and kicks their supplier, STEC

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

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

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

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

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

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

Comparing thin provisioning with VMware and on a storage array

In this video, 3PAR's Michael Haag illustrates the differences in how thin provisioning works in v-Sphere and on a storage array. First he shows how VMware storage is established without thin provisioning, then he shows what VMware brought to the table with v-Sphere and then he shows how array based thin provisioning from 3PAR works. At the end he diagrams how both VMware and 3PAR thin provisioning can be used jointly.

And the Word is: Reservationless

OK, even I thought my last video was weird, but its nice to have it confirmed by Simon Sharwood's weekly storage dish last week.   (As a lover of blogfo-tainment, I look forward to his weekend roundup of the storage blogosphere with my usual hidrosis, knowing that his diagnosis of my public neurosis - without prescribed  pharmaceuticals to expand my gnosis - might cower me into sleeping late on Saturday morning.)

Here it is a new month and a new week and a new opportunity to expand the vocabulary of storage blogging with a new word!  We won't be talking about clouds today, or even allocation sizes except to say that computer engineering is not an exercise in Newtonian mechanics as the folks at Hitachi seem to think. 

The new word for month of August (at least!) is RESERVATIONLESS.  You can try to look it up, but it does not seem to be an official word in any dictionaries that matter.  Whatever, you already know what it means, unlike words like "CLOUD", here shrowded in verbosity by Chuck Hollis or "GREEN", as discussed by William Shatner (the SHAT) here.  (Is it just me or does it make sense that I just put Chuck and the SHAT together in that thought?)  This could be a new storage blogosphere meme - Chuck Hollis as the SHAT of storage!

Reservationless means that you can do something when you want to or need to as opposed to making plans that may or may not work out.  You know how it is, you make a dinner reservation at the hottest new restaurant for 4 and then for significant-otherly reasons you show up 10 minutes late with a party of 6. Or you make a prepaid reservation for a Hotel and a late night arrival and an early morning presentation - only to arrive and find out the place is next to a switching yard.

Reservationless means you can adjust your plans as you need to without penalty.  Reservationless means you don't have to pay a penalty for changing plans.  Reservationless means you can have access to resources without painful rework to change the plans you already put in place. Reservationless means you don't have to undo anything - because you never had to do it (whatever it is) to begin with.

3PAR InServ storage arrays are Reservationless, by design.  You don't have to reserve snapshot capacity that you might not ever need, you don't have to create special pools of disk drives that are only used for thin provisioning and best of all you don't have to pay for professional capacity planning services that you end up changing later anyway. 

Back to today's new storage meme:

 

One of us (storage companies) is not like the others

I thought I should blog about EMC's enterprise SSD (or EFD) announcement this week, considering that it got so little attention from the press. Heck, we probably got more press for announcing our Tickets.com win than EMC got for announcing their new SSDs. 

Maybe it was overshadowed by Cisco's UCS event, maybe the IBM/Sun mashup cast too large a shadow, ot maybe it's just because the whole SSD story is running out of gas, seeing as how nearly every array manufacturer offers them.

Except 3PAR. Yes, 3PAR will have SSDs someday. We are working with them, but are not in any rush to be a me too player. No, we aren't intimidated at all by EMC, the leading company in our industry and a tough competitor, and their large scale efforts to promote SSDs as the next great technology.  SSDs have some terrific characteristics - especially low power consumption - which is something 3PAR works very hard on. In fact, the biggest advantage we see with SSD technology is reduced energy consumption - something we are very proud of with all our products.

But SSD performance doesn't make us flinch. Whether its for Oracle or SQL Server databases, media streaming, large Exchange installations or any mix of applications running concurrently on a VMware machine. 

The reason is our industry leading wide striping. 3PAR InServ customers typically stripe their data across hundreds of disk drives, which means disk drive queues are short and contention problems are minimal.  We have a software product called System Tuner to address situations in the unlikely event disk contention causes problems - and we have hardly sold any of it because customers rarely need it. 

Most people know 3PAR for our industry leading thin provisioning and we have benefited a great deal from the fact that most other array companies offer it.  There is a big difference between technologies that begin life as core architectures - as opposed to being bolt-on afterthoughts.  Unfortunately for us, only a few competitors have developed "me too" wide striping features, which makes it more difficult for us to get the word out on it. 

Performance is always an issue and sometimes old architectures have problems delivering it.  Rather than re-architecting their systems to get wide striping performance, EMC (and now others) added SSDs. There's no question that implementing SSDs was a shorter path to high performance for them, but everything has it's trade offs, such as the initial high cost when technologies are new and extending designs with weaknesses, such as outdated storage provisioning methods.

Next to 3PAR's, the best wide striping implementations belong to XIV and Oracle's Exadata. XIV's implementation lacks high performance drives and the ability to scale to a large number of drives. Exadata does a good job with wide striping, but its a niche product and is pretty much useless for the mixed workload environments that most customers have.

3PAR InServ arrays may be the only viable way to get wide striping performance and scalability. That makes us different than everybody else.  Our next-generation capacity saving Thin Provisioning does too, but the rest of the industry tries to make THAT issue a little less obvious.

Download the mp3 of Cal State East Bay talking about saving energy costs with virtualization

Cal State University East Bay (CSUEB) is a 3PAR customer that is saving a lot of money in power and cooling and admin costs by implementing VMware with 3PAR virtualized storage. Rather than write much about it here, you can read about it on the Wikibon Case Study.  The thing that's most interesting to me about this situation was the fact that CSUEB was running into a power wall and needed to do something relatively quickly.

And if you want to hear it straight from the customer, this link downloads the MP3 file of the Peer Incite interview with Rich Avila from CSUEB and Dave Vellante from Wikibon that was broadcast on Tuesday March 17, 2009

Starting the 3PAR Youtube Channel

Geoff Hough started a YouTube channel for 3PAR last year and its high time we developed it further and added content.

Here is the URL:  http://www.youtube.com/UtilityStorage

And here is the starting set of videos on Youtube: