0.065: for whom the bell tolls

IBM today announced the addition of NTAP's top-of-the-line FAS6000 storage platforms to the Big Blue Product Portfolio, rebranded as the N7000 series, and positioned specifically in enterprise storage market segment.

With that move, IBM now resells a directly competing product for 100% of their Systems Storage disk portfolio. From the lowly DS3000, to the DS4000, through the DS6000 and the DS8000 families, there is now also an N series product designed (by NTAP) to compete head-to-head with IBM's product lineup.

And even the vaunted SVC now has a direct challenger from the N series, in the N7000 "gateway", IBM's rebranded version of NetApp's V-Series (V-is-for-virtualization, don't you know).

That's gotta get confusing if you're an IBM sales rep or channel partner.

Not to mention if you're a potential customer.

Cue Flight of the Valkyries ...

inexplicable business motivations?

Acknowledging the foresight that was once the hallmark of Big Blue, I figured IBM would provide a comprehensive product comparison to help customers (and sales rep) choose the right tool for their application, and when I found the freshly updated IBM System Storage Product Guide, I thought I'd hit gold.

Turned out to be fool's gold, though, since no attempt whatsoever is made in this document to rationalize the various product lineups. It's apparently up to YOU to decide if you need departmental, workgroup, small enterprise, enterprise, virtualized or a "unified" storage platform. Only after YOU figure that out, the guide will help you pick the right box in that family.

Brilliant?

Well, if you're IBM's marketing collateral department, it might well be a very smart and prescient move. Think about it, when IBM ultimately does acquire NetApp, it sure will make the job easier: just delete any section label "DS" from the Guide and you're done!

With all the focus and attention IBM is giving the N series, it's pretty clear that the inevitable death-by-inattention is getting ever closer with  for the doomed DS8000 (see not dead yet, i guess and pushing daisies, ds8000 style) and DS6000 (see my half-heartedly rebutted r.i.p. dear ds6000 post). I mean, they came right out and said it, that the N7000 series is their enterprise storage offering!

As to why IBM would think the N7000 will far any better against the DMX than than the FAS6000, I haven't a clue. Somehow I doubt a name change is going to overcome the inadequacies of NetApp's one-size-fits-all hardware and software architecture. But that's a story for another day.

Not surprisingly, when Beth Pariseau of SearchStorage asked for IBM's comment on my observations, all she got was the usual denial, accompanied only by crickets when she pressed for specific roadmap details.

You'd think if there was a roadmap, IBM wouldn't want to hide it. Especially since they're falling even further behind in the enterprise space with the DS8000 - and not just behind EMC and Hitachi, but behind the very products they OEM as well!

I mean, if you're a customer, why would you by a DS8000 now? Unless it came for free with your mainframe purchase, I guess...otherwise you gotta be thinking that if IBM is willing to bring in third party products to compete with its own home-brew kit, they're basically throwing in the towel.

the death knell looms

More and more I'm sure I'm right, that IBM has secretly stopped development on both of their in-house-developed DS product lines. Between the N series and the (not-yet-ready-for-prime-time) XIV Nextra, the DS8000 and DS6000 are an unnecessary waste of resources.

The conspiracy theorists would say that IBM management may well have stopped development without even telling anyone who is authorized to speak publicly. Plausible Deniability, they call it, and IBM would need a boatload of it when they actually start admitting to customers that last year's announcements really were the end-of-the-road for the DS6000 and DS8000 products.

But I think the title to this post is the real answer:

Perchance, he for whom this bell tolls may be so ill, as that he knows not it tolls for him;

Meditation #17 By John Donne
From Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1623), XVII

I see dead people...

 

technorati tags: IBM,DS8000,DS6000,XIV Nextra,end-of-life,N Series,N7000,N700 Gateway,enterprise storage,storage,IBM Systems Storage,DS8300 Turbo,withdrawn from market,disk,SVC,virtualization,NetApp,NTAP,FAS6000,V-Series

Comments

[Barry Whyte]

Maybe competing products they would be if NAS was anywhere near as fast as block or CKD.

Anyway, as always you are theorising incorrectly, I'm in Austin this week at an internal summit - if only you could be a fly on the wall...

[the storage anarchist]

Hmmm...perhaps you haven't been reading the NetApp (er) N Series marketing materials all that closely.

Or maybe you're just as confused as your sales force must be.

FYI - the "Unified" storage platform IBM OEMs supports block-based I/O over Fibre Channel in addition to NAS protocols (and iSCSI) over IP.

In fact, I've seen NetApp marketing materials that claim that the "enterprise-class" FAS6000 is faster than a DS8000 in FC-based block I/O.

And if I were you, I wouldn't be surprised to find NetApp V-series collateral that positions it head-to-head against the SVC. And somehow I doubt it'll say the SVC is better.

Hey - maybe next thing you know, NetApp will do a third-party SPC comparison of IBM kit vs. their own stuff.

Now wouldn't THAT be cool? ;^)

I wonder if they'd notify IBM before they published the results (now that the policy has been changed, you wouldn't get an advanced notice now, would you?).

All in good fun, my friend - all in good fun.

[Alan McLachlan]

Barry Whyte,

To really make a comparison you have to understand what these boxes are "under the hood".

The SVC is basically an AIX box with FC initiatior and target ports, using the AIX LVM to provide virtualisation. On top of that it has the storage management software to provide added replication, application integration tools for cloning/snapshots, and the nice GUI for administration.

The NetApp V-Series is, well, a NetApp filer running Data OnTap with it it's log-structured filesystem and storage managemment capabilities.

Which is better? Depends what your goals are and which features you decide to use, and of course your budget. The N3500 is not an SVC competitor for performance or scalability, but there are NetApp V-series gateways that well outperform any current SVC model. Of course, they cost more too :)

The old adage "you get what you pay for" applies as always.

There are other issues to consider: the N-series architecture provides multiple snapshots without a performance hit, the SVC does not. That is, the SVC performance degrades with snapshots because it has to use an active copy-on-write to a cache area, whereas N-series always writes to new locations anyway. As soon as you start using any advanced cloning or replication features SVC will degrade in performance more quickly and more noticeably than N-series/V-series. The reasons for this become easy to understand once you understand the underlying architecture of both products. Also, the N-series/V-series are much more granular and flexible with respect to LUN management, and their host integration software such as SnapDrive for Windows is more mature and imposes less limitations with respect to application quiescing for clean snaps etc.

So I don't upset Mr. Burke, I won't get into Invista architecture; let's just say there are pros and cons there as well :)

Hope this helps.