StorageRap

A conversation with Jordan Gross & Michael Shanks of Ultraspeed

Ultraspeed describes their hosting business as providing enterprise level solutions at mid-market prices.  In this interview, Jordan Gross and Michael Shanks of Ultraspeed talk about how they do it; from running diskless, DC-powered servers, to implementing virtual systems with 3PAR virtual storage and operating data centers in London and Amsterdam.

3PAR Tool Talk: Vish Mulchand on Synchronous Long Distance Remote Copy

Earlier this week, we announced our new Synchronous Long Distance Remote Copy software.  It lowers the cost of long distance disaster recovery two ways:

1. Reduces communications costs by using lower cost asynchronous communications to a far away DR site while using a high-speed local or metropolitan link for synchronous copies.
   
2. Let's customers mix and match enterprise and mid-range arrays in the configuration.

Storage Technology Refresh? Spend a lot less in a big hurry

When your existing storage approaches the end of its affordable life, you probably wonder if there might be a better way to get the job done.  It would be great if you could spend a lot less on storage capacity and not have to do so much planning for your RAID groups, semi-wide stripes, service levels, snapshots and remote copy space.  It would be even better if you could avoid the same surprising and painful hidden professional services fees that make storage seem more like a luxury item than an infrastructure technology. Best yet, how would it feel to actually decrease your storage footprint during your next technology refresh, as opposed to watching it grow larger than you care to think about. Think you'll get those kinds of options from the Ever Mounting Costs company?

Like most I/O performance demonstrations, the video below is a bit reminiscent of watching paint dry,  but if you understand what's going on, its pretty cool.   3PAR's Thin Conversion is a block data transfer function where empty blocks coming into a thin volume on a 3PAR InServ array are identified as such and not written to the receiving thinly provisioned volume space.  The result is a significantly faster data transfer and an efficient, thin volume with high storage utilization when the transfer completes.

In this video, block data from a thick (or fat) source volume is being migrated to a new thin target volume using 3PAR's Thin Conversion technology.  The demo shows reads from the source in red and writes to the target in blue so you can see the impact of 3PAR's hardware-based zero detection technology.  During the demo, zero-detection is turned off and writes spike to a much higher level and then it is turned on again to show writes returning to zero. 

Because Thin Conversion only writes actual data on the target and does not copy empty space, it's insanely fast and because it's implemented in hardware, there isn't any performance degradation in the controller.  Also notice that the amount of storage needed on the target volume will be much less than on the source volume and storage utilization for the array will be much higher.

Thin Conversion is a great way to pare storage costs when you are considering a technology refresh. Instead of buying more new storage than you want and increasing the storage footprint in your data center, you can buy less storage, reducing your storage footprint. Thin Conversion works with both T-Class (Enterprise) and F-Class (Mid range) arrays from 3PAR and is independent of the types of drives in the system.  Check it out, you might surprise yourself at how little you actually need to spend.

3PAR Countdown: Attenda first in Europe to start Assured and Secured services

Check it out.

Enough already of this EMC fantasy about a unified platform!

How much kool aid can be consumed in the blogospere?  An infinite amount apparently.

Now that I see Steve Todd, EMC Intrapreneur, jumping on the circle jerk bandwagon of EMC's love for federated systems and the vaporware ideal of their having a unified platform - I have a very simple litmus test to offer:

1. Do EMC's many systems work together to protect customer's data?  Have they shown an ability to integrate data protection across their primary storage platforms? 

2. Do they have an integrated management system that allows customers to use the same tools across their primary storage products?

EMC customers understand the frustration of living with diversification much more than the joys of federation.

Do Clariions work with DMXes or v-Maxes for such basic bread and butter data protection applications as remote copy?  No. Do administrators have to learn different skills to deploy and manage EMC mid range and enterprise arrays? Yes.  You can talk about federated futures all you want, but the past and present tell the real story and saying its a simple matter of programming to bridge the gap is - well - saying its a simple matter of programming.

This is not EMC bashing, this is telling it like it really is - the way customers feel the pain. 

If you want examples of storage vendors who have already been delivering on the unified platform concept check out 3PAR and EqualLogic.

All 3PAR InServ arrays run the same software. Remote copy operations work between Enterprise (T class) and Mid Range (F class) storage clusters.  Admins of 3PAR systems learn a single set of skills that are transferable between mid range and enterprise clusters.  We do not mix F class and T class nodes in the same cluster - you either build an F class cluster or a T class cluster.  3PAR clusters are something we call Mesh Active, which refers to the uniform distribution of I/O activity and cache resources across all nodes in the cluster.

All EqualLogic arrays run the same software base. Remote copy operations work across all of their systems (I'm not sure about their new entry systems - but it would be a licensing restriction and not a code difference if these systems do not). Admins of EqualLogic arrays also learn a single set of skills that are transferable across all their products.  You can mix and match different EqualLogic products in a single group. A group is not a cluster and does not have the same performance and availability characteristics as a cluster.

If you want to talk about federated systems in the cloud, look at what 3PAR cloud computing customers are doing.  Our Cloud Agile partners have started rolling out ASSURED and SECURED services which demonstrate platform federation with remote copy and virtual private domains for storage in the cloud.

Duplessie cloud redux

Steve Duplessie clarified his recent 'pot-stirring' post on cloud storage economics, with this new post, which was thoughtful and well written.  

He brings up the history lessons of the over-hyped, over-financed bubble and demise of storage service providers (SSPs) during the early years of this decade, arguing that their failure was the inability to deliver sufficient value.  I'd add that the technology available at that time was insufficient to allow the SSPs to deliver much other than expensive bulk storage. The evolution of virtualization technologies since then has made a big difference, changing the cost equations for service providers and allowing them to focus on application specialization and service delivery.

Steve argues that adding application value is the key, which I don't disagree with, but storage applications have always been tricky to define - just as storage technology is always very tricky to develop. I contend that value-add in storage comes from things that often seem very mundane, such as being bulletproof & flexible - a perspective I took in this YouTube video on 3PARTV.  Just in time delivery of applications and the corresponding "right-sized", immediately available storage to support those applications makes a huge difference to service providers and their customers.  Reservationless,  incremental storage provisioning does not sound like much of an application, but it certainly is the way everybody wants storage delivered to their applications.

The ability to right-size storage - and the flexibility to make changes to storage at a moments notice is what drives 3PAR's technology development.  It's why we have been so successful selling our products to cloud service providers.  In the weeks to come, look for more service-oriented innovations from us.

Data replication the amazingly fast and easy way

3PAR's Remote Copy software broke all the rules for the cost and effort required to make remote data replication work.  Huge savings in cost, time and capacity.