the storage anarchist

0.047: sata for usp-v - trick, or treat?

I'm hearing from multiple sources that Hitachi will be announcing next week that their Japanese engineers have figured out how to make SATA-II disk drives work in a USP-V, with 750GB SATA-II drives shipping for the USP-V sometime in November, and 1TB drives available sometime in 2008.

Now, this must come as a complete surprise to HHSNBN and his HDS pals out in Santa Clara.

As I've pointed out before, Hitachi has repeatedly rejected the notion of putting SATA-class storage into an enterprise storage array, insisting instead to relegate the chore of managing and rebuilding slower drives to externally virtualized storage. In fact, if to hear them tell, you'd think that putting SATA drives into an enterprise array would be as dumb as putting screen doors on a submarine.

Given that well-established position, I wouldn't be surprised if there are a bunch of Hitachi (and HP and Sun) folks learning about this impending news right here, as they read this blog (oh, and they do read it, trust me - and so apparently do the Hitachi developers and management back in Japan, based on the traffic reports I get from Feedburner).

So it looks like we're going to see One Big Flip-Flop next week - a reversal of strategy and positioning worthy of realitycheck08.org ("all the flip-flops fit to print"). If so, this should be fun.

And imagine all those poor HDS Marketing folks who must be working overtime, trying to come up with a face-saving way to spin this one. That's even more entertaining.

I gotta wonder if they're going to have Mr. T explaining this to Wall Street?

Pity the fool who changes his mind!

0.046: spc-1 results for symmetrix dmx

This is your SPC-1 benchmark. And this is your SPC-1 benchmark on a calculator.

If you have lots of time and money on your hands (and something to prove, I guess), you can collect a boatload of hardware, create a totally unrealistic (and prohibitively expensive) configuration, execute the benchmark, independently validate your results, and wrap yourself in the banality of standardized testing to claim world dominance. (Oh, and hope no drives fail during your testing, because the added overhead of rebuilding a drive would skew the results, if you in fact included hot spares in your configuration in the first place - most don't).

Alternatively, now that EMC CTO and Distinguished Engineer Dr. Subramanian Kartik (aka dotConnector) has decoded the Q-factor for the SPC-1 benchmark, you can take the less expensive approach, and just run the SPC-1 on your handy-dandy calculator. Doesn't even have to be one of those fancy scientific calculators you just had to buy for your son or daughter - no heavy duty calculus required.

No, since Dr. Kartik has demonstrated beyond any doubt that the SPC-1 is nothing more than a measurement of the number of IOPS you can get per spindle, it's really simple. Plot out the slope of the line, plug in the number of drives you plan to use, and viola! SPC-1 IOPS, calculated within a few fractions of a percentage point of all historical measurements to date.

Heck, even the minor tweaking of the benchmark over the years doesn't seem to have made much of a difference - all the results fall on the same line, irrespective of version, platform or tested configuration!

Go figure! 
 

0.045: pushing daisies, ds8000 style

Well, it seems I spoke too soon. And it turns out I was wrong. Actually, I was right first...THEN I was mistaken. I'm sure some of you were fooled as well.

I'm not a doctor or coroner, but let me be the first to declare that despite the best attempts of IBM PR department and their paid cadre of industry analysts, it turns out that the rumours of the rebirth of the DS8000 were in fact premature.

The DS8000 officially passed away today, Tuesday, October 23, 2007.

Dead. Finished. Kaput. Expired. Done. Departed. Kicked the bucket. All but buried.

Go ahead - Google today's IBM announcements and coverage and see for yourself.

Now there are still some press and analysts out there who haven't seen the obituary. There are a few analysts-for-hire who are hungry enough for income to sing the praises of the DS8000 and to publicly declare that assertions of the DS8000's demise (like my prior "not dead yet" post) are nothing but FUD. But I think its becoming clear that these analysts aren't doing customers (or the industry they serve) any benefit by trying to help IBM hide the fact that they haven't been investing in the DS8000 for quite some time now.

I'm reminded of a line from the movie The Sixth Sense:

I see dead storage products. They just don't know they're dead yet.
 

0.044: not dead yet, I guess

I feel somewhat like the poor sot at the beginning of the classic Monty Python and the Holy Grail, having tossed my poor plague-ridden uncle into the death-cart -- only to have him whimper "I'm not dead, yet!"

Seems I may have prematurely declared the demise of the DS8000 in my prior blognostications. Oh, the DS6000 has clearly succumbed to a myriad of afflictions, but there's been a growing rumble that there will be an update to the DS8000 Turbo announced on Tuesday, October 23^rd. I'd been hearing about this from my inside-EMC channels for a while now, but today I received what I will conclude is external confirmation in the form of this week's Peer Incite review over at Wikibon.

An excerpt:

On Tuesday October 23^rd the Wikibon community will be reviewing an announcement from one of the world's leading storage suppliers.

The Wikibon community will explore implications for customers, especially emphasizing near term procurement actions. [name redacted], a well known and highly regarded analyst for the storage industry will be the lead analyst on the call.

Each week, Wikibon hosts Peer Incite, a free, unbiased research and advisory call on important storage topics. Please join other practitioners, technologists and consultants as we explore critical storage industry issues.

Now honestly, I don't know how critical this could be in real life, especially given that [name redacted] isn't necessarily all that "unbiased." But if you want to see what all the fuss is about, you'll have to register to participate over at WikiBon.

 

0.043: storage cage match

Nigel over that The Monkeys has a radical proposition: a no-holds-barred F1-style competition series for storage, where any modification or alteration is legal to meet the demands of various race styles.

Sort of a WWF "Tag Team Cage Match Roulette" for storage arrays.

Missing from Nigel's proposal is any form of prize, though, and we all know that you gotta have prizes in any real race, elsewise there's just no incentive to win cheat enter the race.

Nigel's proposal reminded me of the article I read on the trip down here to Mickey Land in WIRED about Google's Race (back) to the Moon - the Google Lunar X Prize ). Now clearly there probably isn't going to be much of the $20M prize money left over after expenses for the winner, and the losers will likely be faced with bankruptcy even with the $5M consolation prize.

But the first thought I had was how at least one contestant will undoubtedly attempt to leverage the long-standing assertion that the whole Apollo Moon Landing was faked by the US Government. Build a set, fake the takeoff and landing, then trickle a faked rover video "back" to Earth over an old 300 BAUD modem, just to simulate the transmission delay.

Hey - it fooled us all once, why not again?

Being as I've sworn off of making derogatory remarks about competitors and benchmarks for a while, I'll just leave this post at that.

0.042: yeah, what he said

Chuck Hollis' blog today is a tribute to EMC's (not so) "secret" sales force.

I too am down here in the Land That Walt Built, surrounded by those who are inarguably EMC's best and brightest, and I just wanted to add my shout out to these unsung heroes.

And importantly, I don't mean "unsung heroes of EMC."

No, as several of the customers who have appeared on stage today have testified, this community of technology specialists are the Trusted Advisors who are helping some of the world's most demanding IT organizations wade through the ever-changing technology landscape to solve information challenges not even imagined by the one-trick-pony startups that seem to attract so much attention. And without these insightful ladies and gentlemen, there are an awful lot of household-name information enterprises that wouldn't be who they are, and there is an awful lot of digital information that you and I just wouldn't be taking for granted every day.

So my "thank you" to this community goes out for the challenges you handle every day, AND for the challenges you bring back to me and my peers back in headquarters. As many of us discussed today, understanding and responding to the challenges our customers face is an EMC competitive advantage that doesn't happen on trade show floors or in catered cocktail seminars. No, it happens only because you have earned the right to live, breathe and influence our customers' IT strategy and infrastructure.

My personal and professional thanks to each and every one of you. You are indeed our EMC's most important competitive advantage.

0.041: the oxymoronic spc-1 results from sun and hp

OK, now this is really, REALLY funny. I have to give credit to Steve Duplessie for pointing this out, but did you realize that both the HP and Sun entries for the USP-V on the SPC-1 results page are the identical documents posted by Hitachi?

The hilarious oxymoron here is that the server platform used by Hitachi is the IBM p5 595 Model 9119. Not an HP SuperDome, nor a Sun Enterprise M9000 or a Fire E25K. In fact, it seems that both Sun and HP have published the Hitachi SPC results verbatim - complete with photos of the p5 and everything. Only the title page and the product name has been changed.

Seems strange, given that the SPC-1 is supposed to be a storage benchmark - some might assume that the choice of server wouldn't have any bearing on the results - ANY server should get the same answers using the same storage - right? (Nope - wrong. Even the SPC knows that isn't true...that's why they include the disclaimer I posted about earlier.)

Now given that neither Sun nor HP specialize in enterprise-class storage, opting instead to OEM the wares of the world's largest tractor manufacturer, I'm sure that I'm not the only one that finds it ironic that they'd both choose to promote their #1 competitor's server platform in their quest to establish storage superiority.

Can it be that challenging EMC to an SPC duel is more important to HP & Sun than conceding the server market to IBM?
 

0.040: where's the spc disclaimer?

There's been lots of feedback and response to my post earlier this week on Hitachi's USP-V SPC-1 results. Most of it has been very insightful, including additional observations by several people that I only scratched the surface on the inconsistencies between the various tested platforms, etc. From the responses, I am encouraged that many of you are actually taking the time to more thoroughly research and understand exactly what the SPC does, and does not, actually mean.

Importantly, the SPC benchmarks are not a test of whether a platform is "enterprise" or not. Nor is it appropriate to use the results as the basis claim superiority within any such category. In fact, the SPC tests are intentionally agnostic to the "class" of storage, even while they are intentionally cache-hostile benchmarks (noting that most "enterprise" arrays do typically have lots of cache and do derive performance benefits from large cache, which the SPC tests try to factor out of the results).

So since the SPC doesn't define a criteria or measurement of "enterprise" any such claims of "superiority within class" are merely  examples of Bad Blogketing, in the same category as Hitachi Math- unsubstantiated, unverifiable, and bearing no real relationship to reality.

In fact, the SPC disclaimer, taken directly from the specifications of the SPC-1 tests, says exactly this.
 

0.039: ibm and spc vs. hitachi math

Hitachi dropped another shoe Monday with its announcement of the best-ever SPC-1 benchmark results for an Enterprise Storage System.

I'm sure the "thud" was pretty deafening over in Blue-ville, especially given this recent reiteration of IBM superiority by Tony Pearson - partially on the back of the DS8000's (now defunct) claims to the top spot on the SPC stepladder.

I pretty much established my position as a disbeliever in the real-world value of benchmarks such as the SPC in my prior post entitled the case against standardized benchmarking, so I won't rehash my arguments of irrelevance here.

But I will take the opportunity to add to my continuing expose of Hitachi math, both as a service to my readers, and in support my pals Tony & BarryW over at Poor Old Big Blue. I'm sure they'll have their own spin soon, but I figured I might be able to jump-start their responses.

But before you read on, I'm curious: Were YOU able to recognize the Hitachi math in this announcement?
 

0.038: how much is too much information?

IDC and EMC have collaborated on a cool new Flash widget that tracks the forecasted growth of information being created and replicated in the digital universe this year.
 

Pretty amazing, especially since we collectively only created about 161 exabytes of information in all of 2006!

Note that both the white paper and the ticker are compliments of EMC and IDC, free for appropriate use on your web site, blog or desktop. I'm going to try to give this widget a prominent position on my blog site somewhere (turns out it's pretty scalable).

Neat, huh?