the storage anarchist

2.028: not so fast, hitachi & hp

Today's post comes verbatim from one of EMC's respected Technical Business Consultants, Jerry Zeisler. Jerry recently posted this analysis of misleading claims that Hitachi and HP are making that they already deliver what EMC's FAST is promising on EMC's internal social media community (EMC|One). With the launch of EMC's first FAST deliverables fast approaching, I thought this article might be of interest to my readers (customers, partners, technical advisors and yes, even competitors alike).

Not so FAST: Responding to Hitachi and HP FAST Claims

As one might expect, this incredibly important and innovative feature from EMC is beginning to bring out the “Me-too,” “We had it first,” and the “You don’t need it because we have a better solution” crowds. Since the announcement of EMC’s FAST solution for Symmetrix V-Max and other EMC  storage arrays, Hitachi and HP have been claiming that they’ve had a similar capability since 2000.

Nice try.

When Hitachi or HP try to claim their data migration tools are comparable to FAST or claim that they’ve had automation since 2000 or so, I start by first defining FAST, as it appears that they misunderstand or ignore what FAST is all about: FAST (Fully Automated Storage Tiering) is an automated, policy-driven method of placing the right data on the right storage at the right time, allowing for unattended and quick response to rapidly changing business and application requirements. FAST does the research for you to uncover migration and target candidates, as opposed to other methods that require user input or effort. FAST is not a performance tuning or load balancing application. Other competent tools provide those capabilities.

What are Hitachi and HP Claiming?

• They’ve had automated storage tiering in their high-end arrays since 2000, and in 2004 they claim to have extended automated tiering to externally attached storage.
• Tiered Storage Manager “allows you to automatically and non-disruptively migrate data between tiers of storage while applications remain on line.”
• “You set performance goals and limits, and HP XP AutoLUN Software does the rest.”
• “The capabilities are built into the XP’s firmware and therefore native and are licensed key enabled.”
• DMX and V-Max require external software to read and write data across internal tiers of storage and move or copy data from the DMX to V-Max.
• Tiering by File is the way to go, not volume.
  

2.027: scale-out for virtual servers!

Earlier this week, Hu Yoshida wrote a blog post challenging the viability of scale-out storage architectures as a platform for virtual server compute platforms (such as VMware).

I can't sit on the sidelines and let that post go unanswered.

Hu is asserting that scale-out cannot support the Virtual Server world, but he makes no real case to back this assertion up. More importantly, it appears to me that he still doesn't understand how V-Max scale-out works.

What's more, his attacks on “modular” appear to be nothing more than an obvious attempt to defend Hitachi's “monolithic” architecture. And those of us with longer memories will recognize that Hu's position is in fact a 180-degree reversal of the position HDS took against Symmetrix for the last decade or so – Hu rarely missed an opportunity to beat EMC up for the fixed-cabinet “monolithic” storage of Symm 5 and DMX 1&2. Hitachi even had slides (and a few You-Tube videos) attacking the “Symmetrix monolith”.

And here Hu is today defending the very monolithic approach that HDS so aggressively challenged not so long ago.

 

2.026: what's in a name – ds8700

Back in April, Dave Graham had a little fun with V-Max and a couple of other products that share the same name. I got a good chuckle from his post at the time, so I thought I might recreate his idea in support (!) of today's DS8700 announcement by IBM.

In no particular order, here are several namesakes of IBM's latest enterprise-class storage wanna-bee:

DS-8700 High-speed lockstitch sewing machine

Dongsen's website description for the DS-8700 starts off with "A new generation model designed for a quiet and smooth performance," a statement that pretty much confirms that this isn't your typical storage product. And not surprisingly, there's also a knock-off version of the DS-8700 from DASU, marketed as the DS8700 (without the hyphen – how clever).

 

 

 

 

 

 

Same exact model number, with just enough visual differentiation to sidestep any legal concerns… 
 

2.025: r.i.p. ds8300

The pain and agony is finally over.

After nearly 3 years of denial, we now have proof-positive that the IBM DS8300 has been unceremoniously removed from life support. I've been told of numerous prospects whose IBM account teams vehemently denied the impending introduction of the DS8700 during the last quarter, even as EMC account teams asserted (with confidence) that the DS8300 was indeed on its deathbed.

True to my prediction back in February, the DS8700 intro is now inarguably imminent…see for yourself with this Google search. And the word is that many customers actually received quotes for the new DS8700 over the past several weeks.

Pity those who were suckered into buying a DS8300 this year (remember, I tried to warn you!)

This time I'll not play the role of truth-in-marketing (as I did for the XIV intro), so you'd better buckle your seat belts for another round of Meaningless Marketing coming from Big Blue as they try to convince you that the aging and decrepit Sharkitecture has been resuscitated with the magic face cream of P6 processors and the life-giving breath of flash drives.

i sincerely doubt that any of these will even come close to overcoming the inherent shortcomings of that architecture, though. Already I'm seeing outlandish claims that the DS8700 has ASTONISHING improvements for "distinct" workloads – which probably means they found some benchmark that looks good, even as the non-distinct workloads realize little or no new value.

Word is the DS8700 is part of next Tuesday's set of weekly IBM announcements, so it should be a fun couple of weeks in the blogosphere sifting through the FUD and marketing misrepresentations.

Cue TonyP!

 

technorati tags: IBM,XIV,DS8700,DS8300,Shark