StorageRap

EMC, the Misanthropic Media Company?

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.

Debating secure multi-tenancy

Chuck Hollis wrote a blog post earlier this week,titled "Once Upon a Time".   I thought it was an excellent post, telling about the transition EMC made a decade ago starting when Joe Tucci replaced Mike Ruettgers.  FWIW, I think the diversification that Tucci accomplished at EMC has made all the difference there - especially the acquisition of VMware.  You might call it lucky (as I tend to do), but the fact was they were looking to diversify their business took them on a journey that has buoyed their company far beyond the capabilities that their storage products by themselves would have supported.

At the end, he asks the question if history was bound to repeat itself again - which appeared to be a nudge towards some of the other companies in the industry.  I didn't think this was such an affront - Chuck has been known to tweak competitors from time to time, but for the last 6 months or so, he's restrained himself from doing so.  

So I was surprised this morning when I saw some tweets that had me look at the post again.  And sure enough there was a blow up there involving a cadre of Netapp people that over-reacted to Chuck's post.  

One of the consequences of this over reaction was that a benign blog post about EMC history became a referendum on Netapp's Secure Multi-Tenancy (SMT).  It wasn't what Chuck was driving at in his original post, but the comments from Netapp folks steered the discussion that direction.

Chuck's main argument is that SMT isn't very secure if your service provider can gain access to a tenant's data. I'd add to that and say, it's not very secure if your service provider can delete volumes and destroy data too.  Inadvertent destruction of data by administrators is a larger threat than somebody pulling "an inside job".  

But it doesn't just effect service provider scenarios. The issue of multi-tenancy also applies to private data center operations.  There have been suggestions that the word "tenant" refer to the legal owner of the data, but the word "legal" is unnecessary and obscures the common understanding that a tenant is the application owner that uses a shared a resource, whether it is a physical server or storage array.   

A good example of multi-tenancy within the confines of a private data center is a corporate database that is managed by a DBA that doesn't want anything else to impact their performance and stability. When that database is moved to a virtual environment, the DBA expects to have multi-tenant protection that ensures nothing changes except a decrease in operating costs. The same applies to any application owner who would like, but can't afford the luxuries of dedicated resources.

Role-based administration combined with resource virtualization makes multi-tenant environments safe from administrator errors. Limiting the scope of what an admin can see as well as what actions they can take eliminates the possibility of them making a simple mistake with major consequences. Using the DBA example, if the DBA alone controls their own storage resources, there is no opportunity for a co-worker to screw things up for them. 

3PAR's Virtual Domain software (available since 2008) provides a role-based, restricted access system for managing storage resources. This certainly doesn't solve all the security problems for multi-tenant environments, but it's an excellent way to eliminate the most common concerns of application owners.

The technology can be extended to public cloud infrastructures as well if a service provider chooses to make it available.  A customer can be given Virtual Domain private control of their storage resources - without the ability to see any other customers' resources - to manage and provision as they see fit. In the service provider model, 3PAR provides the technology to its service provider partners who provide Virtual Domain-based services to their customers. 3PAR Cloud Agile partners who offer these services today are:

     Attenda
     DataPipe
     Data Intensity
     UCS Solutions

Its out there and available, for private or public use.

Info about Oracle's ASM Reclamation Utility

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

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

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

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

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

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

3PAR Countdown: Storage Reclamation with Oracle

Here is the news:

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

Top 10 Reasons HDS is out at Oracle

 iKnerd (Greg Knieriemen) broke the story yesterday about Oracle/Sun breaking off their relationship with HDS.  That got everybody twittering -  with the majority of tweets from the storage universe suggesting Oracle had greedy motives. How unfair!  So, the video below attempts to restore balance to the universe and brings Netapp, HP, cloud computing, 3PAR and Larry's toys into the discussion.

If you are a Sun storage customer and think its time to change, you should check out 3PAR. We have a lot of ex-Sun server engineers who designed our storage cluster. I'm sure you'll appreciate the architecture of our InServ arrays, as well as our 50% capacity reduction guarantee.

(Hey, Claus Mikkelson at HDS. I've had a comment in on your blog for a couple days and it hasn't  been posted yet.  I know things can slip through the cracks sometimes, so I thought I'd bring it to your attention.)

A conversation with Charlotte Melen of Comic Relief

The UK-based charity, Comic Relief, is once again using 3PAR storage as part of its IT infrastructure for raising millions of Pounds during it's nationwide Sport Relief campaign the weekend of March 19-21.  StorageRap spoke with Comic Relief's Web Technology Manager, Charlotte Melen recently about the intangible benefits of working for Comic Relief and what technologies they use for their donations platform.   Besides 3PAR, other key vendors include HP, Cisco, VMware and Oracle along with payment services from Paypal and RBS.

3PARvaTAR Episode #2: What will Mr. Oracle do for an encore?

.

There are many things Larry Ellison can do.  If he wanted to run for public office, he certainly wouldn't have to worry about campaign funding.  I mean, if he can buy a bad NBA basketball team, he can certainly afford a series of popularity ads showing his over flowing empathy. But if he still wants to be the CEO of the largest software company in the world - it's not clear that getting into the hardware business will help him do it. Time will tell.

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. 

A conversation with Nick de Beer of SYSDBA

SYSDBA is our excellent 3PAR business partner in South Africa,  Some of their team came to 3PAR  headquarters recently and I had the chance to record this interview with Nick de Beer, a technology expert with a wide range of experiences including Oracle, storage and virtualization.  In this interview, Nick talks briefly about 3PAR's Recovery Manager software, which allows customers to recover data from many point in time snapshots.

3vaPAR Episode #1: The invasion of the legacy storage warriors

.

Here is the first episode of our new video show for 2010: 3vaPAR.  3vaPAR is a world inhabited by storage people who are very skilled and work diligently to help others be successful with their storage lives.

In this video, the people of 3vaPAR offer a capacity guarantee to legacy storage people.  Hmmm, just like 3PAR announcing their capacity guarantee program today?

Industry consolidation and service provider value may be at odds

In today’s Register, Chris Mellor wrote an intriguing piece about the trend in cloud computing and the wave of industry consolidation that is occurring.  He posits that the two are linked by a broader consolidation wherein IT equipment purchases will be made by a much smaller number of service-provider customers that sell services to enterprise customers, as opposed to those enterprise customers running their data centers and making their own purchases today.  Mr. Mellor suggests that this shift from enterprise to cloud computing is the driver for industry consolidation and writes that  service providers will “want to buy integrated and very efficient data centre kit.”  In other words, service providers will be inclined to buy vertically integrated solutions from a small set of vendors.

But that leaves the question as to how service providers will differentiate their services. A major component of a service provider’s business value is the selection, integration, and organization of best-of-class infrastructure, which allows them to create unique services, features and cost advantages.  Given this, why would they want to limit themselves to single-vendor solutions that are inhibited by their vendors' business models and weaknesses? If, as the cloud computing trend suggests, service providers gain increased purchasing clout, they are more likely to demand that IT vendors provide greater interoperability and standards in order to allow them the greatest choice in mixing best-in-class elements of the IT stack (storage, servers, hypervisors, OS’s, applications, etc.).  

Vendor consolidation may very well be motivated by the desire of large vendors to vertically integrate their businesses to take advantage of future cloud-driven customer consolidation. Whether or not this strategy eventually claims an advantage will only be decided years from now.

Geoff Hough,
Senior Director of Business Strategy
3PAR

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.

dw'Ville: The value of moon water

What do you think moon water is worth?  We have over 50 patents....

dw'Ville breaking news: Larry Have no fear, Pillar storage is here!

Here's a link to an actual news article on the topic.

Newest Infosmack podcast is online

***  Updated May 20, 2009 **  Infosmack podcasts are now available on iTunes here.  If you have iTunes installed on your computer, click the link to open the Infosmack page on iTunes.

Greg Knieriemen and I host a weekly podcast we call "Infosmack"  This week's Infosmack features John Webster from Illuminata, Inc and Storagezilla from EMC.

Infosmack covers a wide variety of data center topics, with a lot of talk about the storage world.  This week's show covers Cisco/EMC acquisition rumors, Oracle/Sun's potential, Netapp, Brocade, Twitter and the new Star Trek movie.  Click the player below to check out a few sound bytes from the show.  If you want to hear more, click the link above for this week's episode.

Powered by Podbean.com