StorageRap

Tiering is not for Chuck Norris

Separated at birth?

There have been some interesting discussions lately about storage tiering  And just because 3PAR beat most everybody else to the punch this week with our AO announcement, I think it's important to keep things in perspective - storage tiering does not solve everybody's problems. Here is my top 10 list of reasons some people don't want to embrace tiering: 

10. Chuck Norris does not need automation, automation needs Chuck Norris.

9.  The Chuck Norris of IT, Larry Ellison, says Exadata is the only tier you need.

8.  Chuck Norris & Larry Ellison will race to determine if tiering is good or evil.

7.  Heard it uses gerbils, which is unfair to guinea pigs.

6.  Chuck Norris got to Tom Georgens, he will get to you too.  

5.  Chuck Norris designed 3PAR's wide striping - who needs tiering?

4.  Chuck Norris already tunes my storage in his sleep.

3.  Larry Ellison is going to buy all the world's SSDs and corner the market.

2.  Waiting to hear if Chuck Norris will discuss tiering this week on InfoSmack. 

1.  Too busy celebrating Chuck Norris' 70th b-day today to care about tiering.

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.

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

Fred Moore on Getting Rid of Data

I've always liked Fred Moore's analysis of our industry.  Here is his latest writ on the Wikibon site where he talks about thin provisioning and dedupe:

In traditional storage provisioning, application teams guess at how much storage they might consume and reserve that full amount on day one. The amount reserved can be used only by that application and is not available to others. This means that within a data center, large portions of costly storage go unused, and consume power and cooling resources even though no data is actually written to the disk.

That pretty much nails it.  Not all thin provisioning implementations are equal, so look into the details of each vendor that you are considering. 3PAR continues to lead the industry in technical innovations for thin provisioning.

Energy savings and rebates with 3PAR's thin provisioning

Its no secret that server and storage consolidation saves customers money through energy savings.  If you are planning to make changes to your IT infrastructure make sure you include energy costs (duh!) in your plans and check out any rebates that might be available too.  For instance, PG&E in California has excellent financial incentive programs to help IT customers conserve energy - including design assistance.

Efficient storage from 3PAR with industry leading thin provisioning technology can save you a lot in energy costs.

3PAR Reports Financial Results for Third Quarter of Fiscal 2009

The bottom line:

Revenue for the third quarter was $48.2 million, an increase of 57% compared to revenue of $30.8 million for the same period a year ago, and an increase of 7% compared to $45.1 million in the prior quarter, which ended September 30, 2008.

David Scott's (our CEO) said:

"The strong financial results we report for the third quarter of fiscal 2009 result from a continued focus on fiscal discipline and reflect the unique value that 3PAR Utility Storage brings to organizations that need to do more with less in challenging economic times.  As datacenters have continued to look for new ways to economize, they have continued to turn to 3PAR to lower CAPEX and OPEX by reducing disk capacity purchases, energy costs, and storage administration effort by up to 80%."

For more details, go the the CNN Money page.

Five ways thin storage can help you get through lean times

In this economic climate, where business costs are under such close scrutiny, storage customers need to know how to get the largest return on their storage investments.  Here are five ways 3PAR InServ storage arrays can help customers get through these tough times.

1.  3PAR customers typically buy only the disk capacity they need when they first install their InServ arrays and then add capacity later when it is needed. This "pay as you grow" approach to buying storage is what thin provisioning was designed for.  Customers save money with their initial purchase and also when they later buy additional capacity due to the declining cost of storage capacity over time.  

2. 3PAR customers run their InServ arrays at higher disk utilization levels, which means they get more productivity from their storage investment.  Higher utilization is one of several benefits derived from 3PAR’s wide striping disk layout scheme that spreads data across a very large number of drives (hundreds of drives are common).  This randomizes the workload, effectively applying all drive resources to all applications and removing drive performance bottlenecks – even at high utilization levels.

3. 3PAR customers use automated tools to provision and expand their InServ arrays, which means they can avoid spending money on professional services or spending lots of time planning and performing provisioning tasks. The ease with which InServ arrays are provisioned and expanded comes from the combination of wide striping, fine-grained volume management (RAID) and autonomic disk layout functionality.  

4. 3PAR customers mix drive types, workloads and platforms in their InServ arrays.  Mixing drive types reduces the cost per GB when lower cost nearline (7200 rpm) drives are used for primary storage. Mixing workloads and platforms means customers can achieve greater levels of storage and server consolidation, which reduces both capital and administrative costs.

 

5. 3PAR customers typically spend less on power, cooling and floor space for a given workload.  This is due primarily to thin provisioning and higher utilization levels on InServ arrays, but it also comes from the use of nearline drives for primary storage, which combine greater densities with reduced power and cooling requirements.

Practical limitations to storage energy standards

 

Geoff Hough,  Sr. Director, Business Strategy

Kudos to the SNIA Green Initiative for continuing to drive awareness and standards around storage energy consumption.  Note last week’s announcement around a taxonomy and power measurement spec  (at idle… but hey, it’s a start and getting a number of opinionated storage folks to agree on a spec is no easy task).

Playing this out to its hoped-for conclusion:  what if all storage devices brought to market were measured for energy consumption using the same set of metrics and would it matter?   The answer is most certainly “yes.”  As part of any storage evaluation process, you would compare the projected consumption of kilowatt hours between alternatives, multiplying any difference by your local utility’s charge per kilowatt hour.

But for those who run their storage devices in co-location environments, the calculus of energy savings can get quite distorted.  Since many co-lo’s charge for energy consumption based on the number of line drops, co-lo occupants lack the economic motivation to select energy efficient storage technology.   How many Californians would select low-flow shower heads if they paid for their water based on the number of pipes connected to their homes?

So, modern storage technologies like MAID, thin provisioning, and SSDs may be attractive for many reasons, but any effective energy savings they provide to their owners is disproportionately small in a co-lo environment.  More to the point, if technologies like these are chosen for their other merits, any residual energy benefit goes largely into the pocket of the co-lo.

One wonders if there are any SNIA-like industry organizations for the co-lo community that contemplate their role in global warming.  If so, we can only speculate if their agenda includes pricing initiatives that give their customers an incentive to implement energy saving storage products.

The green efforts underway in the storage industry will be more effective if we can get alignment on energy efficiency goals across all constituents of the IT industry. 

Symantec's Veritas Operations Services and green storage

Symantec announced their Veritas Operations Services today, built around their Storage Foundation and Veritas Clustered Server products.  I think there is a lot more than meets the eye with this - utility computing customers of Veritas and 3PAR will soon be able to take advantage of the recently announced Veritas Thin Reclamation API which reclaims storage space that is no longer being used. The end result is much more efficient use of storage, which means fewer disk drives will be needed, which means the cost of storage and the power and cooling costs associated with it can be significantly minimized. 

If you are worried about spending too much on storage and on managing storage, you need to look into this.  If you are in California you can even get an energy rebate from PG&E for buying 3PAR storage.  Its not greenwashing or posing - its real energy efficiency.

Hot Aisle interview with Geoff Hough

The Hot Aisle blog is one of the best sources of useful info I know of for data center operators.  Steve O’Donnell, the author of the blog recently interviewed 3PAR's Geoff Hough and talked about architecture and power characteristics of our InServ thin provisioning storage systems.

Storage energy discussions

There have been a couple blogs this week about energy efficiency and storage.  Chris Evans started the week asking why Conserve IT was necessary.  Yesterday, Chuck Hollis noted a number of ways computer and communications technologies were reducing energy consumption. 

This morning I stumbled across an interesting site - a google map showing solar energy projects in the US.