StorageRap

Nice video from Rodos on Ocarina Networks!

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

Ocarina Networks from Rodney Haywood on Vimeo.

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

Unraveling Brocade

I couldn't help but wonder a bit this morning when I saw the WSJ story that Brocade was considering selling itself to the highest bidder.   The article mentions that HP and Oracle would be potential acquirers, but the storage world is much more interesting and underhanded than THAT.  If this story is true, there will likely be a great fight for Brocade as tech giants try to figure out whether it will impact their ability to make a buck 5 years from now.

Some of the giants appear to be going stack raving made, (Cisco, EMC, HP, Oracle) while others are content to watch this from the sidelines (IBM and Dell).  The stack play is not aligned with the idea of open systems.  Companies want to control customers by offering stacks of related products. IMHO, the stack play is good for vendors and bad for customers. 

But it's the world we live in.  The question this go -round is whether or not anybody will be able to sit out and watch Brocade get swallowed up.  Here's my knee jerk breakdown of the pros and cons of the usual suspects making a move for Brocade:

HP:  Brocade's business could pull up their existing SAN business, but its just as likely that their existing SAN business be a lodestone to a Brocade in HP expansion.  The Procurve/Foundry mashup would claim severe casualties. 

Oracle:  I think this is the most ridiculous fantasy, but if it were to happen it would definitely answer the question about Oracle being in the HW business.  Now imagine meetings with your Oracle sales rep.

EMC:  Buy Brocade and kill it, make boyfriend Cisco ecstatically happy and piss off customers. Why not - nobody could stop it. 

Cisco:  No possible path to regulatory approval = see EMC above.

IBM:  If IBM can't get this done, they really are just a services company.

Dell:  It would finally get the networking company it needs to compete with Cisco, but imagine them trying to become an OEM vendor!  Do you think people would mess with 'em?  Really?

Microsoft:  No overlap, great shock value and they don't want Oracle to have it.

Dweeberville #3: It hurts so good

VMware has obviously had an enormous impact on the IT industry.  For starters, it provides us dweebs with a hot event - when most other trade shows were slowing down.  So, Thanks VMware for all the excitement and we look forward to seeing what's next around the bend. (click to see a magnified version)

How to save a boatload on VMware and other great tips for admins

Nate at Techopsguys.com had a great post the other day on what you could do with the v-Sphere essentials pack.  One of the things he mentions that I didn't know was this:

Something that is kind of interesting is that the “free” vSphere supports thin provisioning, I have 11 hosts running that version with local storage at remote sites. Odd that they throw in that with the free license but not with essentials!

That's different and way blasted interesting!  This blog looks like it could become an admin's bible.  There are 4 guys working on it and so far in its short life, every post has been EXCELLENT.  Here are a couple of my fave quotes:  (google the quote to find them in context)

You can pry vmware from my cold dead hands, but I still want to dispel this myth on ESXi’s size.

So I filed a ticket with vmware, the support team worked on it for a couple of weeks, escalating it everywhere, but as far as anyone could tell it’s “doing what it’s supposed to do”.

What would I like to see? Let the FCoE folks keep their stuff, if it makes them happy I’m happy for them.

OK, so just go there now.

Verizon CAAS gives customers security in the cloud

Verizon has just launched a new cloud service called CAAS (Computing as a Service). 

CAAS has a couple of key security elements that could help customers feel comfortable putting applications in the cloud:  the first is their global MPLS network and the second is their strength in managed security services.   By the way, if you are interested in understanding more about how security breaches are occurring, you might want to read this interview with Dr. Peter Tippett from Verizon that was published just yesterday.

The vendors supporting CAAS are a who's who of cloud infrastructures, including 3PAR, Cisco, HP, Microsoft, Red Hat and VMware.  One of the key requirements Verizon has for CAAS is to be able to respond quickly to customer demands for computing resources.  That's where 3PAR excels and is why so many leading cloud infrastructure companies use our arrays.

Is unified fabric breaking through during the downturn?

People who have followed my writing at EqualLogic, Dell and now here at 3PAR know that I haven't been a big believer in unified fabric.  But, over time I'm starting to think there are good reasons for customers to consider moving to unified fabric.

This post by Richard Jones at the Burton Group has some interesting insights into the dynamics of decisions and deployments of unified fabric. 

Here is a taste:

I’ve noticed a few organizations just starting to warm up to the ideas of a unified fabric.  Have they moved there yet?  No. The technologies are not mature enough to complete an entire unified fabric infrastructure.  Cisco knows this and is positioning the Nexus switch capabilities as a future proofing move.

Worth popping over for the short read.  

Brocade and Foundry - a good start today

Brocade's acquisition of Foundry completed today and from a very quick first glance and poking in Brocade's web site - the two companies look like they are prepared to get along and work hard.  Storage Pack Rat Stephen Foskett posted a few hours ago, wondering which company will be able to take control of the emerging 10Gb Ethernet market. 

It's hard to imagine anybody pushing Cisco out of the leadership role, but I have to say I'm impressed with the news from Brocade today - especially the addition of Marc Randall and Dave Stevens.  I don't know jack about either one of them, but its clear that Brocade has plans to remake itself into a much stronger, competitive networking company.

Top 10 Network Storage Innovations

Here's my list of what I think are the top 10 innovations in Storage Networking.  I decided to use a slightly different lens than Stephen Foskett, who wrote his top ten list of enterprise storage products. 

1. Netware 286. The first major file and print solution.  Despite what people at Sun think, Netware was more influential than NFS.  Microsoft ended up kicking Novell's butt, but the market and memes for LAN servers originated with Netware 286.
2. Network Appliance FASServer Filer.  The first major storage appliance.  Auspex was earlier, but Netapp innovated in many more ways and really defined almost everything NAS, including multi-protocol filing and file-based snapshots.
3. Brocade Silkworm.  The first Silkworm switches were the glue that allowed the fledgling Fibre Channel technology to work amazingly well.  Silkworms defined SAN fabric operations.
4. SAN Volume Controller.  The have been many attempts to make SAN-based virtualization work, but SVC has been by far the most succesful.  It set the standard for SAN virtualization. 
5. Digital DLT 2000. Although the DLT drives started life as VAX-oriented products, they had limited success until they burst on the scene in the late 90's as high performance, high capacity LAN backup drives.  They killed off most helical scan competitors and established linear tape as the overwhelming favorite.
6. Veritas Volume Manager.  Host-based software that let every admin with the courage and skills perform the logical configuration of storage. It allowed many people to understand volume management as a discrete technology area in network storage. 
7. EMC Symmetrix 3.0. The EMC Symm 3 with SRDF remote copy capabilities is probably the single most important innovation in the history of network storage. Block-based snapshots and multi-tenancy are also major innovations that EMC led the market with.
8. 3PAR InServ Storage Array. Its hard to sell SAN storage today without some form of Thin Provisioning.  In time, though, 3PAR's wide striping may prove to be more influential.
9. Data Domain.  Data deduplication is gaining ground very quickly in the network storage industry, thanks in large part to Data Domain's success and leadership. 
10. VMware VMFS.  The ability to maintain a logical data store for guest systems running in a virtualization server servers has been critical to the success of server virtualization.  

Here's a few honorable mentions:

Vortex Retrochron  - CDP that was way ahead of its time.
Palindrome Network Archivist  - Another product ahead of its time, with automated data archiving.
Seagate Barracuda FC - SANs wouldn't have happened if not for Seagate.
EqualLogic PS Series - Ease of installation/management makes SANs achievable for SMBs.

Atmos, Dead or not dead? Innovative or repetitive?

The storage software formerly known as Maui  is now called Atmos. (Thanks Storagebod for the photo idea).

In a nutshell, Atmos looks like its a new wrapper for your uncle's old WAFS , but with an object-based access method and policies that apparently are applied at the object level.  Whether its object-ness is deeply embedded or a higher level application layer remains to be seen.  In other words, it might have a more familiar file system under the cover with a translation layer providing the object mechanisms.

Until more information is available, I'll put Atmos in WAFS storage windmill jousting camp that has attempted to add value by making multiple copies of data objects and storing them at multiple sites around the globe.  It follows a time-tested business model of EMC's that works by convincing customers to fill up multiple storage products at multiple locations with the same data.  Its good business when you can get it.

Wide area file systems have been attempted many times before and have gone into the dark cold night alone or have been folded into WAN offerings of networking companies. Is it a feature or a product? - only your local soothsayer knows for sure.  As most previous WAFS technologies have ended up being bought up to become features of networking products, this announcement from EMC could even restart the rumor mill about a Cisco acquisition. 

So storage bloggers, the question is whether or not Atmos is innovative.  I'd say the wide area stuff is not innovative, the object stuff is not innovative and the policy stuff is not innovative - but the combination of the three together might be - and there could still be key parts missing - such as network components. 

Sometimes it helps to understand a new technology by looking at what it competes with. Here's what I think Atmos competes with:

The now defunct Cisco WAFS

Globalscape WAFS

Expand Networks WAFS

Packeteer WAFS WAN Optimization

XtreemFS

Riverbed Wide Area Data Services

F5 WANjet

Feel free to add your own past or present Atmos competitors to this list or to offer adjustments to this opinon.

Chuck, I will fight no more over iSCSI

Chuck Hollis at EMC and I have disagreed some about the future of protocols for SANs - sometimes it spilled over and included others, like Dante Malagrino from Cisco. 

So I'm done with the great protocol debate, at least for now.  With HP's intent to buy Lefthand, the lone iSCSI -exclusive SAN storage company is going away into corporate purgatory.  I don't see HP doing that much more to promote iSCSI than what Dell has done - letting customers "vote with their wallets". 

(FWIW, 3PAR has customers using both FC and iSCSI. Funny how working for a protocol-agnostic company can mellow one out.)

Who will survive unified fabric?

Cisco thinks everybody should get on board with unified fabric.  I think it sounds like Armageddon in the IT organization.

Low latency controller communications with a big, phat, backplane

How do we do what we do @ 3PAR?

Terrific engineering.  We make clustered storage - and we solved the thorny problems that were so difficult for so many years.  One of those tough problems was communications between nodes.  We don't use a network, at least not the kind of network that most people think about.  Our nodes communicate across a big old gnarly backplane.  We combine a heavy duty structure with super lightweight protocols for lighting fast communications.  That allows us to maintain cache coherency and to scale high performance linearly as we expand the cluster. 

3PAR's big, fat, indestructable interconnect

Its big, its fat, it is the perfect, brute force interconnect for a storage cluster.