2.029: don't look back!

I’m just back from 2 weeks of holiday in South Africa, passing through home long enough to switch suitcases for my trip back across the Atlantic to Prague for Customer Council (I promise to post more pictures soon).

Up early to try and stay in the Czech Republic’s time zone during my brief stop-over, I noticed that self-proclaimed storage historian Claus Mikkelsen has leveraged a new report by his long-time compatriot and fellow Symmetrix-hater Josh Krischer to take yet another pass at bashing the Symmetrix architecture in his latest blog entitled Oh, the Commodity of it All!!

Of course I couldn’t just let that post go un-answered.

Follows an open letter response to Claus (and Josh). Normally, I would have posted this as a comment on Claus’ blog, but it appears I continue to be persona-non-grata on HDS blogs (excepting Michael Hay’s, who continues to respectfully engage…thanks Michael).
 

Claus -

Historian you may be, but you (and Josh) don't seem to be keeping up with the times very well. And that's understandable: it is obviously much easier for you to compete in rhetoric against the Symmetrix of 2002 than it is to deal with the reality of the 2009 Symmetrix V-Max.

FYI, Symmetrix has not used "static" cache assignments since the introduction of the original DMX in  2003. And while "BIN Files" still exist, 95%+ of configurations changes are now made on-line via dynamic system calls to the running code, and then recorded in those files for use in the event of a catastrophic failure that would require a cold restart.

That said, I actually won't argue that the core architecture of Symmetrix has not changed: indeed, Symmetrix continues to incorporate massively parallel and scalable I/O processing with independently operating front-end and back-end processing complexes that utilize low-latency inter-process communications for coordination and I/O request management and surround a massive-scale dynamically assigned global memory infrastructure.

Additionally, Symmetrix incorporates end-to-end data integrity protection throughout all I/O transactions (validating out to disk), and incorporates perhaps some of the world's most intelligent cache prefetch and resource/priority management algorithms, while providing on-demand real-time storage allocation, and completely non-disruptive data replication and relocation.

Just as today's latest generation Intel processors are still inherently based around the original x86 architecture, today's V-Max has implemented the proven Symmetrix/Mosaic/Enginuity operating software using a modern processor and interconnect architecture.

But your (and Josh's) conclusion that the underlying architecture prohibits the introduction of new functionality is ludicrous.

While the customer/market priorities for Symmetrix and Hitachi's high end may differ, the singular feature of the USP-V that the V-Max does not today support is virtualization of third party storage. Conversely, Symmetrix has LED the way in a plethora of storage capabilities, including multi-site replication, copy-on-first-write snapshots (and asynchronous copy-on-write), non-disruptive on-line code updates, SATA drives, Flash drives, direct heterogeneous replication to/from third party storage (without an intervening proprietary controller), native Gigabit Ethernet for both iSCSI and remote replication, maximum global memory support, native secure erase, and a plethora of other features.

On top of this, Symmetrix today can create, allocate, relocate, and replicate storage (both thick and thin) significantly faster, easier, and with less impact to concurrent workloads than does the USP-V. And the Q4 Enginuity update will further extend these advantages in multiple dimensions.

All this without even mentioning the upcoming releases of FAST (Fully Automated Storage Tiering).

Symmetrix is 20 years old this year, and despite your and Josh's negative aspersions, Symmetrix is hardly mired in its architecture. Although not always first with new features, Symmetrix continues to lead the way in the high-end storage market, and in virtually every dimension.

Said simply, today's V-Max bears little resemblance to the Symmetrix that you and Josh seem to remember so fondly. As the market share numbers continue to demonstrate, most customers take the time to understand today's modern reality rather than depend upon the out of date (and obviously biased) perspectives of two historians.

Respectfully,
Barry

  

technorati tags: EMC, Symmetrix, V-Max, DMX, storage architecture, commodity storage, innovation, USP-V, Hitachi, HDS, flash, EFD, FAST, automation, BIN File, dynamic Cache Partitioning, Claus Mikkelsen, Josh Krischer, storage historians, storage market share

Comments

[Just A Storage Guy]

Barry-

One question I've had about the V-Max since its announcement that no one at EMC seems to be able to answer is why monolithic? By all accounts (IDC, Gartner,etc) the monolithic frame market continues to rapidly decline while all the storage growth is in modular. Even for EMC- according to your sales, it looks like most of the sales growth is in CX and Celerra.

So why not Clariion or Celerra V-Max instead of Symmetrix V-Max? To me, that's a much more interesting product.

I know the product line has been around since the end of the furniture and mainframe memory days, but why not keep HDS at bay with incremental DMX updates while focusing on the growth market of modular?

[the storage anarchist]

Storage Guy -

You ask why we did scale-out on our flagship enterprise stoage product platform first?

I can give you a couple of reasons:

a) Because we could - Enginuity has long been a "scale out" software infrastructure;

b) to reduce costs - not only to reach lower into the market, but also to afford customers many of the benefits offered by the startups without sacrificing the world-renowned service, support and realizability that comes with the Symmetrix Brand.

And for what it's worth, Gartner's perspective on the high-end storage market isn't necessarily reflective of reality.

[soikki]

Hi Barry,

Quote: "And while "BIN Files" still exist, 95%+ of configurations changes are now made on-line via dynamic system calls to the running code"

This poses still an issue for dynamic environments (ie. service providers). Even with V-Max, I heard, adding physical disks still requires several days having the Symmetrix locked. Same with current DMX's as well. During this time no configuration changes can be made. It is very difficult to explain to our customers that we are unable to add capacity to their hosts as there is disk addition under progress for some days.

I really hope this will be solved soon...