StorageRap

3PAR CEO David Scott on Storage Federation

Dave Vellante from Wikibon posted his summary of 3PAR's analyst call this week.  It's a good chance for people to get an unvarnished opinion how 3PAR is doing.

One of the things that came up during the call was a discussion of Storage Federation. Here is what our CEO David Scott said were the three main points to understand about it:

1. It’s different from virtualization. It allows separate peer, self-governing systems to act as a global whole (versus a hierarchical approach).
2. Automomic storage will be a critical enabler to federation as stuff gets moved around the virtualized network.
3. Storage federation is following a natural evolution from data center–>metro–>globally shared storage

Storage Federation is a new concept that has been getting a lot of attention from storage bloggers all of a sudden. People interested in following these discussions can start on Stuiesav's blog and follow the links in his posting.  

A team of storage systems

A good analogy for Storage Federation is that storage systems work together in a team. Each member of the team has the ability to manage it's own resources and can make the information about its resources available to the team so that they can act together according to internal algorithms and policies.

Autonomic management is scoped from the individual storage system to the Storage Federation. The same types of algorithms and policies that relocate volumes within an individual array are used to relocate volumes within the Federation. For instance, the autonomic management technology used in 3PAR's volume and sub-volume relocation software, Dynamic Optimization and Adaptive Optimization, could be adapted for use in 3PAR's Storage Federation.

The graphic below illustrates the two levels of autonomic storage management. On the bottom, three storage systems manage their own resources and share resource information to the Federation where they can be accessed and managed by Federal algorithms and policies. If you click the graphic, you will see a slightly larger version that is easier to see.

 

Some of the thorniest storage ownership problems can be addressed by Storage Federation, including load balancing, firmware upgrades, system maintenance and data migrations. 

Zilla found a good read - you read it too.

StorageZilla just popped out a brief post with links to a couple items. 

I really liked the second one of these called EMC/Cisco/VMware vBlock - an Economists Perspective.  Its a very clear read that lays out the new competitive landscape, without bias.

Have a good weekend everybody!

The razor's edge on vBlocks

Nate at Techopsguys.com posted his first impressions of the new Cisco / EMC / VMware vBlock.  He's got a lot of knowledge and a lot of opinions and he's not shy about sharing either of them.  Here's a quote:

Third you get the sense that these aren’t really blocks at all. The first tier is composed of rack mount systems, the second tier is blade systems with CX4, the third tier is blade systems with V-MAX. Each tier has something unique which hardly makes it a solution you can build as a “block” as you might expect from something called a vBlock. Given the prices here I am honestly shocked that the first tier is using rack mount systems. Blade chassis do not cost much, I would of expected them to simply use a blade chassis with just one or two blades in it. Really shows that they didn’t spend much time thinking about this.

Wow, Nate. That pretty much cuts right to the core.  What is it about vBlocks that makes them modular, the way most of us tend to think about the concept of a block? Dissimilar components - especially CX-4 and V-Max for storage - is not exactly a plug and play environment.

Game on! The rapid rise of bundled infrastructure products

Although I work for 3PAR, which is an EMC competitor, I admit there is something very intriguing about the vBlock concept - and that is the concept of buying pre-fabricated, pre-integrated, information systems. Its like the old LAN in a can or SAN in a can, but vBlock is a much more sophisticated bundle with a much broader vision than previous network bundles.  Integration is the dynamo of technology after all and maybe years from now, maybe we'll see Intel come out with a data center on a chip! (rim shot and cymbal)

But seriously folks,  the technology barriers to entry in this "data center in a can" business are not all that high. HP is planning on announcing their reaction today and  I expect that we'll see similar concepts announced within 6 months from various vendors and other industry alliances.  The stakes are too high for server companies to ignore. FWIW, if you haven't read Chris Mellor's excellent article in the Register from yesterday about HP's Data Center Cells, you should.  

To underscore how low the barriers to entry are, think about how easily Cisco, a company with no server sales to date, is using vBlock to legitimize their UCS server business.  By burying UCS in the data center bundle, Cisco can claim certain things that are unique and special about it's server business, but I doubt the rest of the server industry will grant them (or HP) uniqueness for very long.  The only thing keeping IBM from doing something similar is IBM itself.  Certainly they could draft people from IGS to respond very quickly if they wanted to.

As we see vBlock knock-offs emerge, its going to become increasingly obvious that the integration of all this virtualization technology is not that difficult when you use cloud-oriented virtualization technology.  The sudden change of positioning from EMC, Cisco and VMware is curious - for many months, virtualization has been the thing that makes life easier and all of a sudden now we are to believe it it is the thing that needs to be made easier. 

Infrastructures by nature are adopted and used based on their stability (which includes scalability), flexibility, and efficiency.  The integration characteristics and features of individual products in those infrastructures will determine how successful those competing infrastructures are.  For both servers and storage integration, these characteristics and features will include:

• robust, modular components that can scale from small implementations to large ones
• efficient provisioning and re-provisioning of resources - including storage reclamation
  
• high densities, such as VM/server ratios and storage utilization
• predictable performance for mixed workloads and under stress conditions  

FWIW, professional services are a drag on efficiency as added cost or a drag on flexibility as added time to deployment.  Ease of use and automation features will continue to be an important key for cloud vendor success.

I used a fox in the henhouse photo the other day, when I posted in reaction to the rumor of Cisco and EMC competing with cloud service providers. And yes, I probably deserved much worse than the reaction I received from both Chad Sakak (The Virtual Geek) and Chuck Hollis. 

Of course , the most clever fox eats eggs instead of chickens.  The problem with professional services engagements is that they have a way of sticking around a lot longer time than expected.  It's entirely possible that vBlock won't require any, but it certainly looks like Cisco and EMC want to sell them.  I have to hand it to both EMC and Cisco - they are very clever companies.

EMC, Cisco, vBlock and trust - how long will it last?

"I trust Joe with my life" 

 John Chambers spoke about trust at some length during the vBlock cloud computing announcement today. He is obviously trying to communicate something to his people.  FWIW, Joe Tucci didn't have as much to say about it, but he did echo those sentiments. 

The difficult part of what EMC and Cisco are trying to accomplish does not involve virtual technologies nearly as much as it involves the very real world of compensation.  EMC is a company that is driven by goals tied to compensation.  Their culture does not let anything get in the way of their goals. Whether you like it or not, it's what's made that company what it is today and it's a culture that was started by founder Dick Egan, long before Joe Tucci took the reigns, and it is ingrained at EMC.

Cisco is a different animal. Obviously they are aggressive too, but they do it differently. As Chambers said, 80% of what Cisco does is through partners - something very different from EMC.  When Chambers mentioned that partners will get most of the revenue from vBlock, Tucci was silent. I don't believe Tucci believes this for a minute. The sales engagement process for this will be very interesting to watch.  When the question was asked later about who will sell vBlock, Tucci's response was to say it will be figured out.  That's probably why they are forming a joint venture - Acadia - to deal with the sales problems.  But that doesn't mean the problems are resolved - they will simply be transferred elsewhere.  The accounting on this should be interesting to say the least, but unlike EMC and Cisco, Acadia will be a private company. 

Chambers also made the somewhat ironic comment, "Companies like to control their customers, that's wrong."  While many would agree with that, I'm wondering if he is familiar with the measures taken in the storage industry to maintain account control.  How far will EMC bend in maintaining account control to help their partner Cisco make sales of UCS servers?   Probably not very far.

There is a lot of risk with vBlock for both EMC and Cisco. Certainly, its an opportunity for Cisco and EMC to expand their markets, but sharing is hard for companies with voracious appetites and flattening revenue streams.  

 

If this is what marriage is like - I want the divorce first!

Funny things happen when markets retract.  The growth requirement of corporate existence has to do extreme things and former industry friends find themselves at odds.  The question before us today is whether or not Cisco is a manifestation of the economic bubble and - if they are - what are they willing to do to make it less obvious to investors. I guess server sales were not enough.  Now its moving into data center services business too. The rumors about EMC and Cisco forming a services business appear to be true.  Yes, if your margins are under attack in a stagnant market, you have to find other ways to separate customers from their cash.  Voila!

This will ruffle feathers throughout the IT industry.  HP and IBM certainly won't be crazy about it, and Dell appears to already be digging trenches and laying mines.  Of course, Cisco and Dell are not necessarily friends and just a couple days ago Dell announced its strategic relationship with Brocade for data center solutions.

To me, the interesting thing about this is the Dell/EMC relationship. After Dell bought EqualLogic, the talk was that Dell and EMC would fall apart, but both companies insisted they were good partners and that the relationship would continue for many years.  This link is to VMware's VMTN forums in November 2007, the day the deal was announced - some might find my comment interesting, but from my perspective as an Equallogic blogger, it was a straight response.

But a couple years later, it appears that Dell likes selling EqualLogic more than it expected due to the higher margins than almost anything else Dell sells. I don't know whether or not this has had an impact on Dell Clariion sales, but judging by EMC's actions with Cisco to actively pursue Cisco UCS server services agreements at Dell's expense, it seems that things probably aren't the same between EMC and Dell any longer.  There is no way to sugar coat this one.  EMC and its large services business is going to do whatever it can to help new best friend Cisco replace Dell's, HP's and IBM's servers wherever they happen to be.  Dell, lacking a competitve services business, must be astoundingly frustrated by being turned on by EMC this way. 

It will be interesting to see how this impacts Cisco's reseller channel and if they will find themselves squeezed out by EMC hyper-competitive and jealous sales culture. There will be the usual words of inclusion and growth and a beautiful future together, but down in the trenches, blue sky is a figment of somebody else's imagination.

Good bye SGI. Hey, Cisco, are you paying attention to this?

The news today was that SGI was purchased by Rackable for $25 Million.  Its sad to see it go, but its been terminal there for a long time.  Like Sun, they found it very difficult trying to be an open systems server company.  Unlike they Sun they didn't have as large an install base to help keep them going. 

The server business is pretty brutal. 

Would we have done things differently had we known about UCS?

Readers who have followed me as an independent writer, then as a blogger at Equallogic and later at Dell before coming to 3PAR might be familiar with my thoughts on the wisdom of keeping data networks and storage networks separate.   This led me to take a position opposing FCoE and some sparring with Chuck Hollis over the matter. 

Last year I gave up on the EqualLogic-born idea that iSCSI could become the defacto SAN network after HP acquired Lefthand. It's possible that native iSCSI could become the defacto way to connect storage over 10g Ethernet networks, but I've lost faith. FCoE is going to be the leading 10g SAN technology.

That said, I maintained my opinion that isolating LAN and SAN networks for fault determination and change management was prefereable.  In other words, run FCoE on a separate network from LAN and IP traffic.  However, after Cisco's announcement yesterday I'm starting to see the potential advantages of a superior virtual network infrastructure for everything. If excellent virtual resource management functions are in place to monitor, provision, federate and fence all the resources in the network, I have to agree with the erudite blogger StorageBod that it would be a better way of doing things.  The questions are can we get to that point and how long will it take?

Anyway, about a year ago I wrote a blog post at Dell stating my LAN/SAN separatist opinions and stated that I thought FCoE was stupid and that native iSCSI over Ethernet would be less expensive and complex.  There was a push back about this from within Dell because the company was preparing to support Cisco's Unified Fabric initiative and FCoE - in large part to support EMC's roadmap.  This episode was one of the first indications to me that maybe I wasn't such a good fit for Dell.  

Now today, I wonder how Dell feels about their decision to back Unified Fabric.  I just read a blog post from Dell (thanks to Stephen Foskett for tweeting) that says seems to indicate that it wouldn't make a difference. What else can they say or do now?  I know with certainty that if I had a vision for enterprise virtual networking a year ago, like Cisco laid out yesterday that my opinions about unified networking would have been significantly different.  Regardless. I'm happy where I am today.

It's going to be interesting to watch the relationship between Cisco, Dell and EMC in the months to come. What happens when Cisco, Dell and EMC are all working on a sale and the server business goes to Cisco? Does that mean the next time Dell would lead with EqualLogic and pure iSCSI? Then what happens after that to Dell's Unified Fabric strategy?  Relationships will be strained, but will they break? This is just one example of how risky UCS is for the industry and why it is so compelling to think about.

What people are writing about Cisco's UCS

New links added 17 are below, yesterday's links are at the bottom: Its a work in progress and more links will be added.

StorageBod

Stephen Foskett

Scott Lowe

Infrastructure 2.0

Burton Group1

Burton Group2

ESG

Storage Soup

Network World, Brad Reece

OpenSource Magazine

OpenSource Magazine

TG Daily

eWeek

Infoworld

Infoworld again

bNet

Network World Cisco Subnet Blog

Netapp's Jay Kidd

Hamburger (Open) Solaris User Group Blog

ITWire

Etheral Mind

Scalability.org

Cloud Ave

Elastic Vapor

Extra hop

Microsoft Presspass

Sipy

Om Malik

Computing.co.uk

Straylog

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Below are links posted 3-16-09

Cisco bids for data centre glory

Cisco unveils its virtualization-friendly blade platform Unified Computing System

Cisco UCS  Its an Architecture Stupid!

Cisco UCS: A Let Down; All eyes on Big Blue

Cisco Enters Server Market

BMC's role in Cisco's Unified Computing System launch

The Good and Bad of Cisco's UCS Servers

Brave New Thinking from Cisco

 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Added later in the day, as promised....

Cisco to rivals - tonight you sleep in hell

Yankee Group

GigaOm

Storage Mojo's take

Cisco's Data Center Networks blog

24/7 Wall Street

PacketRancher

Virtualization.com - the details

Zerowait

Forrester

IP carrier

Data Center Knowledge

Storage Architectures for Unified Computing

The UCS news from Cisco this morning is pretty blasted interesting.  Lots of excitement and mystery: what does this mean for companies that sell servers such as HP, Dell and IBM. Will Intel's involvement cause them to move more towards systems from AMD?  There will be lots of speculation over that for a long time.  There is an incredible amount of heavy lifting that needs to be done to pull all of this off.  But there is no doubt that their focus on flexibility, efficiency and utility computing (cloud computing with measurements and resource management) is spot on.

The use of virtualization to mask the complexity of the underlying hardware is key.  So what storage architectures are best aligned with the type of virtualization management system that Cisco has envisioned? 

I'd suggest the following elements are going to be key:

• Automated provisioning that exercises all physical resources (wide striping is one way to do this)
• Thin provisioning that conserves resources and creates the most efficient environment
• Management domain fencing that allows role, profile and customer isolation for federated resources
• Cluster-like scaling that allows discrete storage arrays to combine resources and operate as a single system for capacity, performance and non-disruptive fault/failure protection

3PAR InServ arrays have those things already.

James Koopman at DCIG wrote today about Lifescript.com's deployment of 3PAR storage and mentions a few of these key elements. 

Here's a quote from his article:

Using 3PAR, LifeScript's Web 2.0 portal and email processing engine now supports three billion transactions per month at a third of the cost than its previous storage system. LifeScript's new infrastructure has also reduced average time to provision new servers from several hours to just minutes. Jack Hogan, Chief Operations Officer for LifeScript, says, "3PAR offered us both capacity savings and intelligent integration with VMware to curb storage costs and provide greater performance and agility."

Bob Beauchamp, CEO of BMC Software on Unified Computing System

More from the Cisco event:  Bob Beauchamp CEO of BMC software mentioned:

• A single pane of glass to manage to the entire stack
• Advancements in provisioning and change management for data center
• Dynamic provisioning based on service profiles

Change management is one of the hardest elements in SAN management. This will be an interetsing development. Also, management by service profiles will be very interesting. 

Paul Maritz, VMware CEO on Cisco's Unified Computing Platform

Paul Maritz, VMware's CEO during Cisco's Unified Computing Announcement (going on now):

• Virtualization is the layer that “software sees the underlying infrastructure”
• Customers are reaching for new levels of flexibility and efficiency
• Revolutionary work with vSPhere and unified computing to provide an evolutionary road
• Incredible technical work between the two companies
• Innovations with VN-link to facilitate management of the physical and virtual worlds
• “Our oxygen is really great hardware” that allows us to do wonderful things and bails us out of our sins

Cisco and Intel - "joined at the chip"

Yep - Cisco's Unified Computing System (UCS) announcement (going on right now) is the biggest news in the technology business in 2009 and maybe for several years to come.

Paul Chambers:  CEO Cisco and Paul Otellini: CEO Intel, talked about Intel's role as the silicon and microprocessor partner for Cisco's Unified Computing Architecture today.  The big picture of this partnership is:

1. Creation of standards
2. Building on the trust they've developed with data center customers with a history of delivering on their promises
3. Business scalability can reach all markets

Chambers to Otellini:  "I know we won't let you down and I know you won't let us down."

One of the more interesting aspects of this architecture called Memory Extension. There will no doubt be a lot written about that in the months to come.

Cisco: Give me those red dice - We're going to attack!

Some of you have played the game RISK.  As a kid we used to stay up all night trying to wipe various family members off the map and achieve our well-deserved world domination.  There was double crossing, alliances and betrayals, deception, hoarding and aggression - all the characteristics of great movie plots. RISK is a zero-sum game. There is no expansion or growth that doesn't happen at the expense of another player.  We're not used to thinking about business that way because we have had a long run of expanding markets.  Those assumptions have obviously been questioned during the current recession.

Well, this post on Cisco's Data Center Networks blog yesterday immediately made me think of RISK.  They have a big set to turn in and are getting ready to move into a new continent (servers = Europe, which is highly prized but very difficult to hold). 

Cisco's moving into blade servers is probably bad news for everybody in the server business that are not closely involved in whatever Cisco is doing. I doubt that Cisco is undertaking this lightly because it will cause major disruptions to their business relationships. Cisco certainly understands the gravity of what they are doing and are well prepared for the fight to come.

Why now?  Well, there's the economy, and there's the juggernaut of virtualization which is a big threat to Cisco's core networking business because it eliminates lots of network ports.  If servers and desktops now have their traffic combined over many fewer, higher bandwidth network interfaces there will be a corresponding reduction in the number of ports they sell.  The current economy amplifies the impact of the virtualization trend.  So where will Cisco go to maintain their business growth when the core business resembles a zero-sum game - or worse?  Servers apparently, but also virtualization because a force like virtualization cannot be beaten - only joined.

In light of this, I'm still somewhat skeptical about unified networking It certainly helps Cisco solve their suddenly zero-sum business problems and it should help them launch their blade server/virtualization businesses but I'm less convinced that it solves real problems that customers are having.