the storage anarchist

4.011: a bridge to nowhere

Finally.

Almost three years after Hitachi announced its High Availability Manager (HHAM), they have finally delivered introduced the long-promised nondisruptive migration service capability, heretofore to be referred to as The Bridge to Nowhere (BTN).

I mean, seriously, who in their right mind
would want to migrate from one to another Hitachi array… ;0)

Read the press release (and HDS CTO Hu Yoshida's blog post), and you'll be inclined to believe that Hitachi's engineers have one-upped the industry with their latest "capability."

But that would be incorrect, dear reader, for EMC's Federated Live Migration has been delivering zero-downtime migrations to VMAX arrays from prior-generation Symmetrix DMX arrays for over a year. In a race to remain relevant in the face of accelerating competition, Hitachi's engineers have seemingly abandoned the green eggs and ham clustered-array approach to tech refreshing its USP/VSP product line in favor of what is inarguably a direct copy of EMC's FLM.

Well, actually, it's not an exact copy – there are several rather significant deficiencies in Hitachi's nondisruptive migration service (aka the Bridge To Nowhere) as compared EMC's Federated Live Migration. We'll explore these after the break.

 

4.006: missing the point (yet again)

I guess I struck a nerve.

Although Hu Yoshida chose to show the top 10 largest Hitachi arrays as evidence of the benefits of virtualized external storage, his rebuttal to my response post claims that Hitachi isn't in competition with EMC to see who can ship the largest box.

Not surprising, I guess. Especially when the evidence reveals that there are no customers daring enough to push a Hitachi array beyond 1.4PB usable.

You can't compete if you can't demonstrate that you can deliver what customers want.

And that's exactly the point that Hu misses:

4.005: you call that big storage?

Earlier this month, Hu Yoshida posted yet another missive in his never-ending series of hype about the virtues of array-based virtualization. In it, he cited records from Hitachi's tracking systems showing the top VSPs and USP-Vs ranked by total capacity. Oddly, the older USP-V racked up the largest capacity deployed on a Hitachi array, even though its maximum internal capacity is less than the newer VSP (a feat that Hu asserts is because the USP-V has been in the market longer (4 years vs. the VSP's 10 months).

I had to laugh, especially given Hitachi's long-standing (and ridiculous) claims of supporting more than 240-something PB of external capacity.

For the record, being launched in April 2009, VMAX has indeed been shipping longer than VSP, but not as long as the USP-V. VMAX also does not (at the time of this writing) support virtualization of external storage.

With those caveats, herewith the top 10 VMAX arrays, sorted by usable internal capacity:

That's right, folks. The smallest of the top-10 VMAX arrays is larger than all reported VSPs and all but 2 of the largest USP-Vs.

Note also that several of these VMAX arrays are over-provisioned. Leveraging Symmetrix Virtual Provisioning, these arrays are exporting more capacity than they physically support contain. This affords customers improved capacity utilization, driving up efficiencies and driving down acquisition and operational expenses. In addition, most of these arrays are already positioned to leverage the benefits of Symmetrix FAST VP (if they aren't already – you can't tell from this report).

I have to say, though, that I almost spewed coffee on my keyboard when I read Hu's claim that the largest USP-V was actually virtualizing TWENTY FOUR frames from different vendors.

In an age when floor space, power, cooling, maintenance charges and operational complexity are seen as negatives to the bottom line, I'm actually quite surprised that there is even one USP-V customer operating in such an extremely inefficient manner.

It is quite probable that this poor customer would realize significant savings were he/she to replace that multi-headed behemoth of intertwined FC switches and multi-vendor arrays with the elegant simplicity of a single VMAX.

At the very least, he or she wouldn't be such a lonely pioneer of mega-capacity consolidation.
 

technorati tags: VMAX,EMC,Symmetrix,Big Data,Hitachi,VSP,USP-V,capacity,virtualization,efficiency,utilization,virtual provisioning,FAST VP,Fully Automated Storage Tiering,Hitachi Math

3.022: powerful, trusted and smart...meet dumb and dumber

So I posted back in January a two-part review of the key differentiating features and capabilities that make VMAX Fully Automated Storage Tiering for Virtual Pools (FAST VP) so much better than anything any competitor has put forth to date (or since, for that matter).

If you missed the posts, 3.018 is part 1 and 3.019 is part 2.

Oddly, I received nary a peep from either competitors or their customers about this post, which I found somewhat odd at the time (there was the one commenter who chastised me for being such a VMAX fanboi – sigh!).

Since those posts, I have had the opportunity to become better educated about the implementations of automated tiering from some competitors, including IBM (Easy Tier), Hitachi (Dynamic Tiering), and HP 3PAR (Adaptive Automation Optimization). Vendor documentation and best practices guides mostly, but I also gleaned some information from competitors' and independent blogs along with personal conversations with several with first-hand knowledge.

In my assessment, competitor silence in response to FAST VP simply underscores the assertion I made in those posts that VMAX FAST VP is in a class alone in comparison to those other products.

 

3.020: reality check - vsp vaai support

I've seen lots of bluster lately from the Hitachi PR machine about VSP being the first virtualization platform to support VMware's vStorage API for Array Integration (VAAI).

When you're next to last delivering something, I guess you gotta try something (I note that IBM has yet to deliver VAAI on either DS8K or on XIV – not surprising, since both seem to be on life support, if for different reasons).

Hitachi have spared no blather in their messaging. If you were to believe their PR proclamations, you would expect to gain all the benefits of VAAI without waiting for your existing storage platform to be upgraded with VAAI support. Just tuck it behind a spanking new VSP and forget all your troubles, they seem to say.

Reality Check time.

As Stephen Foskett essentially explains in his post VMware VAAI Storage Array Support in Plain English, VAAI was developed by VMware in cooperation of industry storage suppliers to address TWO issues:

1. Copy and Erase operations place a huge load on the servers, network and storage arrays
2. The SCSI reservation locking mechanism does not scale efficiently for large LUNs nor for large number of hosts sharing the same LUN(s)

What the Hitachi PR machine fails to mention is that moving the Bulk Zero and Bulk Copy workloads off of the server CPU is not the only benefit of a good VAAI implementation. In fact, with Done Right implementations like VMAX, moving these operations into the array allows the array to optimize the operations to further reduce the overhead and impact.
 

3.019: fast vp - world's smartest storage tiering (part 2)

In Part 1 of this article, I discussed how the new VMAX FAST VP is highly differentiated when it comes to implementation, architecture, algorithms and simplicity. In Part 2 I focus on differentiation in the granularity of data management and in the advanced controls for FAST VP.

Before I dive in, I also wanted to re-iterate that FAST VP is not the end-game for EMC’s investments in automated tiering. As we’ve said since we introduced the concept back in April 2009, EMC’s FAST Vision (and roadmap) is laid out in 5 stages, of which FAST VP is only the 2nd. Over the coming months and years, you will see EMC extend FAST in a progression:

1. Thick: VMAX FAST V1 provided policy-based optimization at the Full LUN level
2. Thin: VMAX FAST VP provides sub-LUN automated optimization
3. Small: Next up will be the incorporation of data reduction technologies to reduce the footprint of both idle and active data
4. Green: This phase will take efficiency to another level, moving idle data to spindle groups that will be automatically spun down until the data is actually needed
5. Gone: Finally, aged data blocks will be archived out of the VMAX itself to external archive platforms (like the one announced during the Record Breakers launch today)

So, in addition to the unique value propositions offered by The World’s Smartest Storage Tiering product, EMC’s larger vision is also highly differentiated. Although I do expect others will try to copy our vision as well…

On to Part 2!

 

3.018: fast vp - world's smartest storage tiering (part 1)

With the availability of VMAX Fully Automated Storage Tiering for Virtual Pools (FAST VP), there will undoubtedly be a raft of "we were first" and "me too" claims from competitors.

I will preemptively respond to both in this post.

As I've said many times before, being "first" in the market only really matters for as long as you are also "the only." As soon as there are more than one supplier of a feature, the discussion moves on to "which implementation is better."

I hereby assert than VMAX FAST VP is the smartest, most efficient, fastest,
easiest and most affordable sub-LUN automated tiering available in the market today
(and for the foreseeable future)

Second, I contend that no other vendors' automated tiering offering even comes close to VMAX FAST VP – and thus nobody has a basis for claiming "me too."

As I hope to explain, effective automated storage tiering requires much, much more than the basic ability to relocate data across tiers at a sub-LUN granularity. To even be considered as a contender, competitors will have to address three areas of FAST VP differentiation:

1. Effective Implementation
2. Granular Data Management
3. Advanced Controls

For each of these I will propose some questions the customers may want to consider when comparing implementations, along with the specific unique advantages offered by VMAX FAST VP.

I have split this post into two parts (it got a little longer than I planned).

Part 1 follows…

3.014: so much 'ado about . . .

Wow – what a bustling couple of weeks!

So many competitive storage announcements, you'd practically think they were all scheduled to maximize their disruptive impact on Q4 storage spend.

When you're the market leader, as EMC has been for the past 2 decades-plus, you learn to expect this almost annual frenzy. It comes with the target that leaders have tattooed on their backs.

This year the wanna-bee followers seem particularly agitated, though. Hitachi invested heavily in marketing sizzle for the first time since Mr. T was their chosen spokesperson – and with good reason, I'll admit: by my observations of IDC Storage Tracker data, Hitachi's delay in refreshing the aged USP-V (coupled with the loss of Sun as a reseller) has driven 5 straight quarters of USP-V market share declines vs. VMAX and the newly retired IBM DS8700.

Hitachi obviously had to try something different, even if it meant moving to yet-another new processor base. But unable to change their architecture to fully leverage industry-standard open components, their "rush" to market was slowed by the need to create FOUR proprietary ASICs. And those ASICs further handcuffed the move to the Intel platform. With the unavoidably long lead-times of ASIC development, Hitachi was locked into implementing with the PCIe Gen1-based infrastructure and processors, even as Intel is delivering the second-generation of PCIe Gen2 CPUs and interconnect. The net result? Using the same Intel processor as the 19-month old VMAX, the new VSP can't even double the performance of the USP-V that it doesn't quite replace.

That leaves VMAX at the top of the performance heap, having more than doubled the performance of the DMX4 when it was introduced in April 2009.

As a further testament to the insignificance of the VSP, I'll also note that HP has chosen to use a totally different name for the product in their lineup. Not only has my old boss shunned the brand, he and his new head of storage outright told the world that Hitachi remained in the product lineup only to support HP's mainframe customers and to fill the void above 3PAR until such time as it grows up. That must have thrilled HP EVA and XP customers alike, both groups who now find themselves sitting on dead-end kit with no defined escape path.

But that's a story for another day…

Yep, beneath all the new-found bravado and marketing spin, the simple reality is that Hitachi & HDS are still attempting to follow EMC's lead, and they're falling further and further behind.

3.011: hot air reclamation

As I said in a prior post, sometimes we in the storage industry misbehave.

And other times, we spew fish stories – the kind that would make Pinocchio’s nose grow a couple of feet instantly.

The latest fish tale to be exaggerated beyond all sense of reality is the Unused Space Reclamation geyser, and to hear it told is to be convinced that the world of underutilized storage hath been all but eliminated at long last by the ingenuity and design of a unique new magic trick that allows host software to tell storage systems they are no longer in need of certain blocks within a LUN.

Now, don’t get me wrong – this feature is extremely valuable and it will undoubtedly help us all to improve storage utilization and efficiency. But I’ve seen practically every vendor who is shipping support for this feature today practically claiming to have invented it, that it’s a key differentiating feature for their platforms, and that THEY are the ones driving the hypervisor, host operating system, file system, database and volume manager vendors to implement this new feature.

Reality Check Time

Folks, the fact is that the T10 SBC-3 committee has stabilized the RFCs for the two (yes 2) new SCSI commands that underpin all this hoopla. With stable RFCs, vendors are now able to implement one or both of these new operations without concern that the API is going to change (again). And these standards have been under development for over a year, with representation and comment from practically every vendor in the list I scribed above – as with most standards, it has been a communal effort.

Somehow, the early adopters see no need to explain these facts to their audiences, allowing encouraging them instead to think that each vendor alone has mastered alchemy to turn deleted files into reusable space.

Alchemy, indeed…

3.010: storage savvy: blogging with cred

Just a quick note to give a shout-out to a relatively new EMC employee blogger, Richard Anderson. His personal, not-reviewed-or-approved-by-EMC blog is at storagesavvy.com.

Richard joined EMC earlier this year, coming from Nintendo where he managed both EMC and NetApp kit. His experience provides the credibility to support a rather broad swath of topics, and he has been providing practical comparisons of EMC and NTAP products long well before joining EMC.

As interesting as those comparisons are (and surely they will be fodder for more competitive battles royale), I found his two recent posts on VPLEX (here and there) provided some very grounded perspectives. I’m hopeful that he might soon undertake a comparative review of VPLEX Metro and it’s fault-tolerant Active/Active presentation of LUNs.

If you haven’t read Richards’s material, there is a lot of content. I found it laced with grounded perspective from a hands-on technical perspective – very refreshing, if I do say so myself.

Welcome to the party, Richard – looks like you’ll fit right in…

3.009: whither the ds8700, or hath it withered already?

My followers know that I've been predicting the demise IBM's enterprise storage platforms (both DS6000 and DS8000 series) for several years now. And though I've been chastised for competitor bashing, I remain convinced that IBM will soon withdraw the DS8000 from marketing once and for all, just as they have the DS6000.

The product just isn't competitive in today's world, even with the unfair advantage IBM enjoys with its tight linkage to it mainframes and servers.

Supporting evidence for the impending demise comes from many directions and sources. Just this week I heard about a competitive deal Down Under where IBM withdrew the DS8700 from a competitive bid in the middle of the selection process. Pressed for an explanation, the new VMAX customer was told that the DS8700 would be EOL by year-end 2010, and IBM didn't want to propose a dead-end product.

How considerate of them!

Now, indeed, this is hearsay, and I can't promote any evidence as to the accuracy of this report. But it is another piece that seems to fit the emerging picture that IBM is winding down the DS8700 as we speak. IDC StorageTracker data shows a rather protracted decline in market share for the DS8000, one that began with the introduction of the Symmetrix VMAX back in April 2009.

In fact, if you compare the IDC StorageTracker data for EMC Symmetrix, IBM DS8K and Hitachi USP-V/VM for the 4 quarters beginning Q2'09, you'll see that VMAX share of the "high end array" pie has grown significantly, while both IBM and Hitachi have lost share dramatically.

Yes, to the attentive observer, it is pretty clear that the DS8K is on its deathbed – at least as we know it today.

3.008: shame on all of us

Sometimes we in the storage industry misbehave.

Sometimes Badly.

The most recent example surrounds the reports early this week about how a bank was unable to service its ATM customers as a result of a vendors' process mistake. Apparently an operator used an out-of-date procedure to execute a routine service operation during a planned outage and the result was an protracted unplanned outage. To their credit, the vendor publicly owned up to the mistake and is certainly taking steps to avoid similar occurrences in the future.

All fine and good, if we could have just left it there.

But no, it seems this is not to be the case. Sales reps from the vendor-at-fault's competitors are gleefully emailing these reports to every customer and prospect, in hopes of creating sufficient Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) about the competitor in the minds of these potential sources of revenue. I personally have had over a dozen emails in my inbox linking to the reports.

I find this deplorable, childish behavior.

And yes, that is directed at folks from my own company as well as those from competitors.

3.005: transparency as a competitive advantage

Several years ago, Symmetrix customers let us Symmetrix developers know that they wanted more transparency from us about code bugs issues. They wanted to know if anyone else had seen problems like they were seeing, and (more importantly) what the solution was. They wanted to know the extent of our testing, and (more importantly) they wanted to know whether their environments fit inside the standard test/regression scope that a release went through before GA. They wanted a way to identify things in their environments that weren't in step with the EMC Support Matrix. They wanted to know the bugs issues we fixed in each release, even if it had nothing to do with their environment. And they wanted us to protect them from issues that we knew about, even if THEY weren't aware of the issue.

And they made it quite clear they weren't going to take "no, sorry" for an answer.

And so began the virtuous cycle of transparency. For most of the last decade we have had teams focus on providing the tools and information that customers were demanding. Driven by customer feedback, we have expanded this transparency far beyond the original "baby-steps" into what today is at least a differentiator, if not a huge competitive advantage.

Just some of the things we've done:

• We changed the EMC eLab Support Matrix from a printout of hundreds of pages into an on-line database that supports ad-hoc and template inquiries;
• We provided customers the means to create templates of their environments that could automatically be used to validate against the on-line support matrix;
• We tied our test matrix into these systems so customers could see the scope of configuration testing that was applied to each release prior to GA;
• We provided customers with on-line access to all customer-reported issues, and empowered them to track progress, work-arounds and solutions to the problems as they were identified and implemented;
• We provided them with an automated interface into the issues database that can block scripts and management interfaces (GUI, SMI-S, etc.) from performing operations that are known to invoke potential issues – in real time, as they are discovered;
• And we document every potential DU/DL issue we fix in New Releases, Service Releases and Maintenance Releases – even if the issue has never been seen by a customer.

This last one is perhaps to most transparent thing we've ever done; more importantly, customers tell us that they really like what we've done. And all of this transparency is a foundational component of our overall commitment to TCE – maximizing the Total Customer Experience of our installed base.

2.046: virtualizing hitachi math

I cannot resist. Forth-with a demonstrative specimen of fact-based FUD, from yours truly:

Earlier this week, Beth Pariseau posted an interview she had with Hu Yoshida (see Hitachi Data Systems' Yoshida talks Sun/Oracle, USP refresh and storage virtualization). Beth's last question in this interview provides some almost shocking insight into the actual number of deployments of Hitachi's virtualization capabilities on the USP-V:

SearchStorage.com: Do you have any numbers or percentages about customers virtualizing external storage?

Yoshida: Fifty percent of our controllers are virtualization enabled, and of those enabled, about 25% virtualize third-party storage.

Simple math thus says that roughly 12.5% of USP-V and –VM controllers are actually virtualizing 3rd party storage (25% of 50% = 12.5%).

(By the way, if we took Hu literally, we could assume that the 50% that are NOT "virtualization enabled" are in fact AMS' and the rest are USP-V's, thus making the percentage of USP-V and VMs that front 3rd party storage a mere 6.25%.)

Given all the blog posts that Hu has written for the past several years, extolling the virtues of virtualization, that number seems really, really small.

But, it must be true, for the very next day, HDS announced (and Hu blogs on) a new HDS Professional Services offering to "speed storage virtualization implementations." The basic premise of this offering? HDS is apparently finding that in a significant portion of their customer base (using Hu's words):

…the virtualization technologies become shelf ware…

So in effect, HDS (and Hu) now admit that the numbers they've been quoting for years that 50% of USP-Vs and VMs were actually using virtualization were bogus. Clear admission of the fact that they too have been avid practitioners of Making Stuff Up (MSU).

As PFC Gomer Pyle used to say: Surprise, surprise, surprise!

Also in this post, Hu also provides us with another example of Hitachi Math by using the results of a validated survey of USP-V customers to make claims that "86% of USP V and VM customers have increased their performance" as compared to "their prior environment."

NFW! 86% of people who bought YOUR NEW STUFF found that it ran faster than their OLD STUFF?

hold on now…wait just a minute!

Did that survey actually find that 14% of HDS' NEW STUFF customers say it actually ran SLOWER than their OLD STUFF?

OMG!

You just can't make this stuff up!

(Please do not try this at home – I am a trained professional!)

technorati tags: Hitachi Math,HDS,Hu Yoshida,UVM,customer adoption,shelfware,shelf ware,USP-V,USP-VM

2.045: fud-slinging reaches new lows

OK, let me get this out of the way right up front: I am an experienced practitioner of using embarrassing facts about competitive kit to promote Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (aka FUD).

Nolo contendere.

Were I to contest the charges, my only defense would be that I try to leverage only fact-based FUD. I research my facts diligently, often enlisting the assistance of fellow bloggers to verify my facts before I post them. I fully allow comment and feedback on my posts, and I am swift to acknowledge my mistakes whenever I get the facts wrong. I will not argue that my intent is to provide fact-based cause for readers to consider flaws and risks that competitors all too often try to hide, ignore or disguise.

In my mind, "FUD" really should be an acronym for Fact-based Uncertainty and Doubt. Unfortunately, the use of facts is apparently not a staple for some representatives of EMC's competitors. Indeed, it seems more and more of them are resorting to Making Stuff Up (MSU) as the basis of their FUD.

One example of blatantly Making Stuff Up has been going on for the past several weeks. EMC account teams have encountered a sudden flurry of prospect inquiries as to the quality and reliability of Symmetrix V-Max. While such requests are not atypical for a new product (and EMC's Corporate Quality Team are always able to share the facts with customers upon such requests), it seems that many of these inquiries are being instigated by representatives of a certain three-letter-acronym (TLA) competitor as part of their sales playbook.

But this isn't the usual "the product is new and has no track record" kind of competitive FUD you might expect. Instead, this particular FUD attack leverages a table of metrics these unscrupulous TLA sales teams have been providing certain prospects during the sales process. TLA sales claim this table lists quality issues attributed to V-Max in "August" and "November" (year unspecified). Apparently limited to deals going on in southern-hemisphere non-Americas geographies, this table is frequently presented to prospects (as a GIF file) along with assertions that there were a lot of problems porting from RISC-based processors to Intel processors.

Hogwash!

I am here to tell you that the table itself is a total MSU fabrication, bearing no traceable attributes to connect it to either EMC (nor to it's actual source). More importantly, the data within this little table is entirely made up, and the categories of issues it lists bear no resemblance to the actual metrics that EMC uses to track reliability, availability and quality of its products.

 

2.044: ibm dumbs down storage marketing (again)

OK, this isn't going to be another one of my competitor-bashing diatribes. I've learned my lesson, based on reader feedback on my comments about IBM's past transgressions (who can forget IBM's initial "Let them use Tape" response to flash drives?)

Nope, this time, I don't have to be the one to do the tear-down: independent storage consultant self-proclaimed IBM proponent "PRJ" has exposed the (dare I say it) stoopidity in his post IBM Storage UK Has Codified Stupidity. In the middle of his post he highlights the following.

Yet again, this does not mean XIV does not meet some needs. What it does mean is that XIV is still not equal to nor does it offer performance comparable to the DS8000, and that IBM has said you - the customer - are too stupid to understand this blatantly obvious fact.

If I wrote that, you'd have blasted it as blatant FUD. But this guy says that he LIKES IBM…go figure.

And it appears that IBM Storage US is no better.

Case in point: in his latest post covering this week's IBM Storage product announcements, arch-nemesis Tony Pearson couldn't resist taking an entirely unrelated swipe at me and V-Max at the end of his post. (Tony clearly didn't appreciate my publicizing the impending death of the DS68000, nor my chastising of the way he (apparently intentionally) twisted a recent Chuck Hollis post into the offensive and insensitive accusation that EMC markets storage to terrorists).

In his attempt to take the high ground, TonyP steps into the land of Codifying Stupid when he includes a link to an (IBM-funded) "ITG white paper" titled Cost/Benefit Case for IBM XIV Storage System - Comparing Costs for IBM XIV and EMC V-Max Systems, and he then uses that paper to support an assertion that the XIV is up to 63% less expensive than "a comparable" V-Max.

With an assertion like that, you know I had to respond.

 

2.043: storage wrappin' about tiered storage

This just in…a particularly timely episode of Storage Wrappin' (source unknown)

(If you cannot see the embedded video, click here)
 

technorati tags: 3PAR,auto-mneumonic tiered storage,Hey Now!,Marc Farley

2.042: bring out your dead!

My, what a week already.

IBM finally got around to putting the still-borne DS6800 out of its misery – something I had thought they were smart enough to do over two years ago (I was apparently wrong). Not to worry, I guess – if you really want to have one of these useless beasts, I understand they are still available over on e-bay.

Once touted as the entry level Shark, the DS6800 was purported to share the vast majority of its code with the higher-end DS8000 series. Over time, it became clear that no such miracle had been performed – the DS6800 was even less feature rich than the DS8K. And with the brandy-spanking-new DS8700 lacking several features that were touted as foundational for the DS8000 platform family (e.g. thin provisioning, LPARs and the like), it has got to make you wonder how serious IBM is about this space.

But undoubtedly attracting the most attention has been the comments from NetApp's CEO Tom Georgens late last week that the notion of storage tiering is dead.

There has been a lot of Twitter chatter about Tom's assertion, and at least a few blog posts - e.g., Mark Twomey's (@StorageZilla) Virtual Vs. Static Provisioning. Martin Glassborow's (@storagebod) The Crying Game, and Chris Evans' (@chrismevens) Enterprise Computing – Death of Tiering?. And even today the debate rambles on in Twitterville, with Alex McDonald (@alextangent) in the middle of the debate over whether PAM II + SATA is "tiering" or simply "caching."

All good fun, but I'd like to bring forth a slightly different perspective for why there is more to tiering than simply Flash and SATA.
 

2.041: pack light!

OK, I don't usually do this, but what the heck…someone sent me this today, and I couldn't resist:

Coming from me, this is inarguably FUD, irrespective of whether there is any relationship to the actual truth.

But you gotta admit it is kinda funny .

technorati tags: NetApp,NTAP,High Overhead,Low Performance,Zero Scalability

2.038: the anarchist's universal storage guarantee*

 

I, the storage anarchist, do hereby guarantee to any and all information storage consumers, irrespective of such consumer’s chosen storage vendor or supplier, and/or said consumer’s geographic locale, and, without limits as to time or space, the following:

1. Your storage requirements for a given set of application(s) currently deployed on RAID 1 will be reduced by approximately 43% if you convert to using RAID 5 (7+1) or RAID 6 (14+2). If you choose a different source or target RAID protection ratio, your savings will vary. Your savings percentage can be calculated as 1-(NEW/OLD)%.
2. If you currently use “fat” provisioning and over-allocate capacity by 30% for a set of applications, you will reduce your storage requirements by 30% if you convert that capacity to a “thin” provisioned logical storage device(s). If your storage admins have been over-allocating more than 30%, your savings will be larger; if they have been carefully optimizing their provisioning and over allocating less than 30%, your savings will be less.
3. Your storage requirements for file-system based data can be reduced to only that capacity currently in use by objects stored in that file system if you convert the logical storage device containing that file system to a thinly provisioned device – but only if you are not already using thin provisioning.
4. “Zero space reclamation” features of thin provisioning can recover unused space and space that is specifically released by the host operating system/file system; however, on some popular host/server platforms (e.g. Windows), space for deleted files is not typically released or zeroed, reducing your total opportunity for savings.
5. Consolidating the storage from multiple applications, servers or “virtual machines” can reduce your capacity, CapEx and OpEx requirements vs. direct attached storage installed in your servers/hosts, especially if those applications have capacity and/or retention requirements that are not optimal for so-called “captive storage.”
6. If 10% of your data for a given set of applications changes between backups, you will require 90% less capacity for those applications’ point-in-time backup images if you use logical snapshots instead of full-volume clones. If more changes, your savings will be less.
7. Your on-line and/or backup storage requirements will be reduced by up to 50% through use of data compression, dependent upon data type, content, prior compression, etc.
8. If you routinely store and/or backup a large number of similar data containers (e.g., system/boot images, shared documents, development clones of production data, etc.), your physical storage / backup requirements will be reduced to 1/Nth of the total logical capacity of those containers (where “N” is the number of identical logical copies of the objects in those containers).
9. Archiving of information no longer being accessed but for which extended retention is required (e.g., by government or industry mandate) can significantly reduce both on-line and backup capacity requirements.
10. Your storage costs (CapEx and OpEx) will be reduced if you store your infrequently accessed data on larger capacity drives (e.g. large SATA drives), your frequently-accessed data on solid state storage (e.g., cache, DRAM, flash, etc.) – done right, you will be able to eliminate the most expensive storage device from your infrastructure in combined terms of $/GB and $/IOPS: the 10K/15K rpm enterprise disk drive.
11. If you use larger and/or faster drives as described, you will also reduce your total power, cooling and space requirements for storage.
12. Additional types of persistent storage may further reduce your costs, including both on-premises solid-state storage devices and the emerging availability of large-scale low-cost capacity made available by so-called “cloud” service providers.
13. You will further reduce your OpEx if your storage platform eliminates the need for time-consuming human intervention by autonomically optimizing the utilization of applied DRAM, Flash and SATA to meet your defined service level policies and objectives.
14. If combine multiple of the above conditions to a specific set of application(s), your savings will increase, although the savings may not be additive nor multiplicative.
15. Variation of actual savings will likely vary between vendors/suppliers, but any difference will generally be insignificant or temporary. The dynamics of supply and demand will continually drive vendors/suppliers to deliver similar solutions; thus market differentiation is most likely not to come from specific space-saving features themselves in the long run.
16. Oh, and yes: your information storage requirements will continue to increase year over year, ad infinitum (or as long as governance dictates, whichever comes first).
17. Your performance, availability, business continuity, disaster recovery and/or data retention requirements may limit your ability to realize one or more of the above savings potentials <thanks, Alex, for pointing that one out>

I personally guarantee it.

* excess installed capacity may be required to support future growth, and is therefore excluded from this guarantee.

 

Feel free to offer improvements, corrections and additions – I will update this Guarantee so long as the assertions are generally universal.

Change Log
2010-02-04 10:04AM EST: Added #17 in response to Alex's suggestion (below).
2010-02-04 04:00PM EST: Corrected syntax errors in #9

technorati tags: EMC, storage, guarantee

2.031: manual or automatic?

My, but hasn't EMC's FAST announcement generated a lot of discussion this week?

I've been very busy out in the land of social media, answering questions on Twitter and clarifying things for a broad range of bloggers – most supportive, others well, not so much.

In the midst of a rather respectful tete-a-tete with Pete Gerr over on his HDS "Ars Indicium" (the art of information) blog, I suddenly had a revelation about what distinguishes Symmetrix vs. the USP-v (et al).

It's the different approaches we each take to addressing customer problems.

Now, to be sure, we actually sell to many of the exact same customers, often competing head-to-head for business. So you'd figure we're both seeing the same requirements from these customers. We each have our own well-established technology and storage platforms, and we both get our drives and components from pretty much the same place. I'll stop short of saying that our software does the same thing, though, because this is where it is that I suddenly realize we really differentiate.

But it's not what you think. No, it's not about Virtual Provisioning vs. Dynamic Provisioning or SRDF vs. TrueCopy.

I think it is really something more fundamental than that: Hitachi Ltd. builds tools that customers can use to solve problems, while EMC provides automation to solve those same problems.

We're automatic, they're manual.

Let me explain what I mean…

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).
 

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

2.024: stuck in the middle with hu

You've got to admit that the lyrics of the Stealer's Wheel hit have an uncanny resonance with the FCoE misinformation being promoted by
you-know-Hu.

I hereby refer my readership to
Storagezilla's latest post on FCoE. 

technorati tags: FCoE,FUD

2.018: perspectives on compellent, 3par and others

Last week, Chris Mellor reported on revenue growth of Compellent in his "sparkling less brightly" post. At the end of that post, Chris included the following chart comparing Compellent's growth with that of perceived peers 3PAR, EqualLogic and Data Domain (chart used here with Chris' permission):

Although Compellent's slow-and-steady growth isn't all that surprising, I for one was somewhat taken aback by the relatively poor performance of 3PAR. Especially given all the bluster and bravado that routinely comes our way from both David Scott (3PAR's president) and Marc Farley (3PAR's resident cheerleader cum rapper cum blogger) – listening to them in blissful ignorance of the facts would have you believe they're a lot bigger and more relevant than they really are. In fact, it strikes me that there's a disproportionate amount of noise coming from a storage company that still hasn't found its way onto the exponential growth curve after more than 10 years in business.

Add in the news that COPAN is struggling for relevance and ONSTor has been bought for pennies on the dollar, and the emerging estimates that Pillar Data is operating somewhere around the $44M annual revenue mark, and you get a pretty clear picture of chaos down at this end of the market.

read on for more perspectives…

2.015: challenge accepted -- free vp

No, Joe Biden isn't being set free – he's not even in jail as far as I know. Nor is this about VP wanna-bee Sarah Palin, who indeed will be free from her gubernatorial responsibilities at the end of July.

No, this post is about a different kind of VP altogether.

In his latest blog post (Set the Wide Stripes Free) Martin Glassborow (aka StorageBod) makes yet another passionate plea for enterprise storage vendors to make thin provisioning a standard feature of their products rather than a separately licensed, chargeable option. His request is in response to HDS's recent deluge of blog posts touting the benefits of their thin provisioning offering (Dynamic Provisioning), including the inherent performance benefits of wide-striping LUNs across a large number of spindles.

In his post, Martin insists that the current pricing strategies for thin provisioning from both HDS and EMC are a disincentive to the adoption of the otherwise compelling feature that makes enterprise arrays easier and more cost-effective to manage and deploy.

These very conversations have been going on within the walls of EMC, and it has been decided that Virtual Provisioning will in fact be included at no charge and with no capacity limitations for all Symmetrix V-Max and DMX 4 orders beginning this quarter.  As a result, all Symmetrix V-Max and DMX 4 customers will be able to leverage the speed and ease of storage provisioning, improved capacity utilization and the inherent benefits of wide striping afforded by Virtual Provisioning, all at no extra charge.

We'll see if others follow suit.

 

UPDATE 13 Jul 2009: Corporate has clarified that Virtual Provisioning will be free for ALL supported Symmetrix platforms, new and existing, beginning this quarter. That’s ALL V-Max arrays plus DMX3 & DMX4 arrays running Enginuity 5773.

Another exciting post from http://thestorageanarchist.com
[UPDATED to add DMX 4 at about 3:30pm on 10 July 09]

technorati tags: EMC,Symmetrix,V-Max,Virtual Provisioning,thin provisioning,Dynamic Provisioning,HDS,Hitachi,USP-V,wide striping,chunk,extent,free,no charge

2.012: how to mind the future of a mission-critical world

A couple of weeks ago, in the midst of Hitachi's recent green eggs and HHAM announcement, HDS bloggers Claus Mikkelsen and Michael Hay teamed up to assert that I have nothing better to do with my time than to comment on their blogs. Michael even went so far as to comment:

Claus I agree with your approach here, and I do wonder if our Boy Wonder, Barry, is a full time blogger for EMC without anything else to do.

After that slap-in-the-face, both Claus and Michael have has chosen to censor my comments on their respective blogs his blog, and it appears that Christophe Bertrand will no longer publish my comments either. [UPDATE 21 June 2009: Although he obviously agreed with Claus’ decision to censor me, Michael now says he hasn’t received any of my comments on his blog- I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt – for now.]

Was it something I said? 

Fortunately, the storage anarchist does have a day job.

In fact, the latest issue of the EMC.now magazine includes an article about how the Symmetrix Product Group stays closely connected with the requirements and future vision of its customers and prospects, and provides some insight about what I really do here at EMC. If you're interested, the article is How to mind the future of a mission-critical world and it can be found on page 18 of the on-line version or on page 10 of the PDF version of the EMC.now magazine.

In fact, this close customer interaction that the Symmetrix management team maintains is the real reason why the words "from a unique perspective" is included in my blog's masthead. I get to see the future of storage technology through the eyes of customers dealing with the here and now.

Customer insight is also why I can ask EMC's competitors the tough questions so quickly and precisely whenever they make an announcement – I actually DO live and breathe customer requirements for storage, and it really IS part of my job to understand if, when and how competitors are addressing the customer requirements I learn about daily. So as irritating as my questions are, I know that the competitors are getting these same questions from their prospects. And their bloggers have come to know that  that I won't hesitate to call them out on a BS answer – especially when they make stuff up or misrepresent the facts.

And if that makes me persona non grata, so be it. Anarchy cannot be censored!

By the way, there are lots of other interesting articles in this issue of EMC.now. Whether you are an EMC customer, partner, prospect or competitor, I encourage you to give it a thorough read. And if you'd like to discuss any of the content, feel free to post your thoughts and questions here.

I promise you won't be censored, even if I might not be able to answer all of your questions.

 

This is another post from the storage anarchist.

technorati tags: EMC,strategic planning,Symmetrix,V-Max,EMC.now,voice of the customer,TCE,mission-critical,storage strategy,HDS censorship

2.011: i guess making sh*t up just comes natural for hds

Sad, but true.

Carrying over the theme from my last post, it seems that it isn't just HDS bloggers and competitive marketing teams who like to make stuff up. In fact, it seems to come straight from the top, as Beth Pariseau found when she dug into assertions being made by HDS's vice president of corporate marketing Eric-Jan Schmidt:

IDC: HDS market share numbers not accurate

Caught 'em red-handed.

The fundamental error in the whole discussion is that IDC does not report revenues by product or platform – their quarterly data only reports revenues by end-user vendor bucketed into several different price bands.

Mr. Schmidt apparently used the IDC buckets US$300,000 and above as the cut-off for "enterprise storage," but the reality is that there are indeed "enterprise" array sales below that mark as well as "mid-tier" sales above it. That shouldn't come as a shocker when the list price for an entry-level Symmetrix is around US$240,000, and CLARiiON systems can scale as large as 960 disk drives.

But then again, as I have been observing here for several years now, Misleading Marketing (and Hitachi Math) are hallmarks of HDS PR.

 

This is an original post from the storage anarchist.

technorati tags: Hitachi Math,IDC,storage market share,HDS,Hitachi,EMC,Symmetrix,CLARiiON,Beth Pariseau

2.010: pity the fool

V-Max sure has gotten under the skin of the HDS and their bloggers.

Not only has the pitiful HDS marketing machine rushed out yet another overhyped and underwhelming (green eggs and HAM) announcement, but every HDS blogger seems determined to take as many uninformed pot-shots of FUD at a product they clearly have not even yet begun to comprehend.

And it’s not just the bloggers who clearly don’t get it: a customer recently told me about some Hitachi marketing materials he has seen that attacked V-Max based entirely upon a Hitachi “suspicion” about the architectural utility of the Virtual Matrix. Seems based on that (mistaken) “suspicion” Hitachi’s conclusion is that V-Max simply cannot work. PERIOD.

When you don’t understand how something works, I guess all you CAN do is make sh*t up!

The latest blatantly uninformed attempt to discredit V-Max comes from HDS’ Christophe Bertrand as he delves deep into the FUD-bucket. In his latest post he tries to cast aspersions against V-Max while trying to deflect several of my very, shall-we-say, PESKY observations about the limitations of TSM – especially when it comes to relocating volumes that are being replicated.

Historically, Chris tends to mislead through incompletely reasoned logic and abject blind bias (I’ve suggested to him on more than one occasion that he is insulting the intelligence of his audience, but he still persists with his blissfully ignorant attacks). And he doesn’t fail to follow form with his latest…

In fact, it’s almost as if Christophe is Mr. T reincarnated (remember THOSE silly adverts?)!
 

2.009: claus censors the anarchist's ham inquiries

By his own admission, Claus Mikkelsen over at HDS has censored a list of questions that I had the AUDACITY to post on his HAM blog posts.

Seems Claus (and HDS) don't want to answer any tough questions about HAM.

What are they hiding?

 

2.003: sgt. friday and the ibm flash competency debate

It appears that both Tony Pearson and Barry Whyte are wont to try to diffuse the debate I started in my ibm really really doesn't get flash post with yet more innuendo, misinformation and unsubstantiated fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD).

Which is all they can do, I guess, unless they are going to publicly explain in concrete terms why IBM is unable (or unwilling) to support the larger-capacity STEC ZeusIOPS drives in the DS8K that EMC has been shipping for Symmetrix since February 2009.

In the interest of those who really don't want to sift through the cruft to get to the reality behind the discussion, I outline for you here the simple facts of the debate:

1. EMC is shipping today the two largest-capacity enterprise-class flash drives available in the market – the STEC ZeusIOPS 4Gb/s Fibre Channel SLC-based drives in 200GB and 400GB capacities.
2. EMC refers to these drives as "Enterprise Flash Drives" (EFD) in recognition of their specific designs to support the availability and data integrity requirements of enterprise storage, and as opposed to the more common drives targeted at the server or laptop markets.
3. IBM reports to be shipping today the STEC ZeusIOPS 4Gb/s Fibre Channel SLC-based drives in 73GB and 146GB capacities only.
4. IBM calls its flash drives simply Solid State Drives (SSDs).
5. EMC's 200GB EFD and IBM's 146GB SSD are the same physical STEC ZeusIOPS drive, with 256GB of internal SLC NAND flash – the only difference between the two is that the EMC version provides more usable capacity from the same amount of flash.
6. EMC alone ships STEC's newest and largest ZeusIOPS 4GB/s FC drive with 512GB of SLC NAND, formatted for 400GB usable capacity.
7. EMC's 400GB EFD further reduces customer cost per usable GB, enabling customers to get more than twice the usable capacity from the same number of drives as IBM's largest SSD, or to use fewer 400GB EFDs to meet their capacity targets and thereby enjoy not only lower acquisition costs vs. the IBM DS8K, but reduced power, cooling and space requirements as well.
8. EMC asserts that the 200GB and 400GB formatting does not significantly reduce the practical life of either drive in any workload when used in EMC arrays, including pathological/artificial write-intensive workloads.
9. EMC stands behind this assertion with the same replacement and service warranty as is offered for both Fibre Channel and SATA-based hard disk drives in EMC storage arrays.
10. IBM has not yet explained publicly why it can not (or will not) offer similar capacities and the corollary cost savings on the DS8K.

Just the facts , ma'am.

This post is from the storage anarchist.

technorati tags: EMC,enterprise flash drive,EFD,SSD,solid state storage,STEC,ZeusIOPS,Symmetrix,DMX-4,V-Max,Tony Pearson,Barry Whyte,IBM,DS8000

2.002: meh – ibm really, really doesn't get flash

Someone sent me this today:

And I have been trying so hard not to be The Storage Antagonist ;-}

Word to the wise, though – if you don't understand something, don't blog about it as if you do.

I've tried to get IBM's Tony Pearson to understand this repeatedly over the years, and he just keeps making the same mistakes. Probably has him despising me as much as that other blogger with the same first name, because every time he slips up, I'm usually there to correct him before his misinformation gets any traction.

This week TonyP is trying to wax intelligent on Flash Drives for the DS8K, but in his attempts to discredit my previous post, he removes any lingering doubt that IBM doesn't "get" flash.

Be sure to take the time to read the comments, and you'll see that TonyP clearly didn't take the time to understand the STEC ZeusIOPS drive or its wear-leveling algorithms. As a result, he pretty much embarrasses himself and his employer (not to mention the IBM Distinguished Engineers he throws under the bus) in the process.

At least he didn't try to drag Master Scientist BarryW down with him!

So, knowing that TonyP wouldn't dare to actually do the math for his readers, I will…
 

2.001: ibm's amazing splash dance, part deux

A couple of month's ago, I posted a review of how the various storage vendors were embracing flash drives (or weren't, as the case may be). I then followed that up with a post lamenting the lame (and factually incorrect) white paper describing IBM's approach to enterprise flash drives.

I complained then that IBM was throwing cold water on a very key new technology; the fact that the errors in that white paper STILL haven't been corrected after nearly TWO MONTHS underscores my observation that IBM is totally out of touch with reality, and no longer the "trusted advisor" they once were.

(What happened, BarryW – I know you were working on getting those errors corrected!)

But today's news takes the cake: instead of doing it themselves (today IS IBM-Announcement-Tuesday, after all), IBM let STEC be the one to announce IBM's support for flash SSDs.

In my book, when you trivialize the importance of ANY technology to the point of having your supplier announce GA and availability rather than doing it yourself, it means something. And when IBM's sales force is to this day telling prospects that flash SSDs are "unproven technology" and "not ready for the enterprise," I can only conclude that IBM is embarrassed to admit some huge limitation or inadequacy of their products when used with Flash.

So, I asked myself…
 

1.064: hitachi exits storage market

CAUTION! Satirical parody ahead!

After a week that saw its flagship product superseded by EMC’s Symmetrix V-Max, its sole product differentiation obsoleted by VMware’s vSphere, and the remains of it’s second-largest reseller literally swept out from under their feet, Hitachi Data Systems has decided to call it quits in the information storage market.

In the midst of the global economy rattled by recession, parent company Hitachi Ltd. (Japan) was apparently no longer able (or willing) to support the foolish acquisitions and free-falling margins delivered by its Santa Clara-based Hitachi Data Systems subsidiary as they struggled to challenge 18-year market leader EMC and its VMware virtualization juggernaut division.

Not surprisingly, and even though the myriad of misguided marketing campaigns over the past several years have clearly been an embarrassment to the mother ship, the latest instantiation of the HDS marketing machine is going out with one last hurrah.

Launched yesterday with fanfare not seen since Circuit City’s going out of business close-out scam, the HDS “Switch IT Off!" Liquidation Sale leverages the Earth Day platform as it aims to unload the massive inventories of unsold USP-V enterprise-class-wanna-bee storage arrays on unsuspecting consumers world-wide.

Although companies in the IT space come and go all the time, the demise of HDS is unique, if only in its timeline. Riding high just a week ago when they announced version 2.0 of their VMware SRM adapter, HDS executives had no reason to suspect that things would get so bad so fast.

But on the very day of their SRM announcement, they found themselves caught in the beginnings of what can only be called a “perfect storm”: the undeniable superiority of Symmetrix V-Max, being locked out of the vSphere virtual data center of the future by VMware, and Oracle's unexpected total eclipse of the Sun. Despite the valiant efforts of the HDS bloggers (and bloggers-for-hire) to mislead and misdirect, the aftermath of these events has apparently left HDS leadership with no choice but to cut their losses and refocus on construction equipment consumer electronics set-top cable boxes whatever's next.

Neither HDS nor Hitachi Ltd. officials were available for comment on this story.

 

I know, it isn't April Fool's Day. But I missed it this year, and I just couldn't resist! 

 

technorati tags: EMC,Symmetrix,V-Max,VMware,vSphere,Hitachi Ltd.,HDS,Hitachi Data Systems,Liquidation Sale,Switch IT On!,Switch IT Off!,virtualization,virtual data center of the future,Inspire the Next

1.063: vmware vsphere 4 to the power of v-max

Last month, Cisco UCS. Last week, EMC Symmetrix V-Max. This week VMware vSphere 4.

The virtual data center becomes real.

And if I may be so humble, more important to customers than the announcements themselves is the Day 1 integration between and across the products and companies.

Case in point: EMC has so many integration points with vSphere 4 that it takes two press releases to include everything:

• EMC Integrates with VMware vSphere 4 for Next-Generation Virtualized Data Centers
  Aligns Products, Solutions and Services with VMware vSphere 4 for Next-Gen Levels of IT Choice, Control and Flexibility
• EMC Delivers High Availability Path Management for VMware Vsphere 4 Data Centers
  New EMC PowerPath/VE Enables Customers to Improve Performance, and Simplify, Standardize and Automate Path Management Across Physical and Virtual Environments

Many of the V-Max ease-of-use features announced last week are targeted specifically for massive-scale vSphere environments, while things like the EMC Storage Viewer vCenter Plugin,   EMC's adapters for Site Recovery Manager, and now the new EMC PowerPath/VE work equally well with all of EMC's arrays, including both DMX and V-Max.

Chad Sakac, EMC's resident VMware evangelist-extraordinaire provides his take on today's announcements over on his Virtual Geek blog – I imagine he'll have more to say (he's the only storage blogger that writes longer articles than me, BTW – you were warned!).
 

1.058: v-max does what hi-star can't?

This is the fifth in a series of posts on EMC's Overtake the future launch on 14 April 2009.

Taking a pause here from the launch to present an observation.

Remember how Hu Yoshida spent the first half of 2008 telling everyone who would listen that customers didn't need or want flash drives (if you missed it, I wrote about it here and there)? Hu was later silenced once Hitachi Japan announced that they actually would be selling the very same EFDs that EMC had been shipping since the beginning of 2008. (FWIW: Hitachi was supposed to ship the first of those drives in Q1'09, but I haven't been able to verify anyone receiving them).

Well, with the introduction of Symmetrix V-Max and the Virtual Matrix Architecture, it seems that EMC has once again done precisely what Hitachi's technical experts have been telling the world cannot be done. This time, however, I don't think Hitachi is going to be able to play follow the leader, since they're so mired in their backplane-limited Hitachi Universal Star Network crossbar switch architecture (formerly known simply as "Hi-Star").

Moreover, given their ever-increasing dependence on custom (expensive) ASICs, FPGAs and off-load engines, I predict it will be years before Hitachi's engineers can re-tool to leverage the price/performance curve of industry-standard components.

In support of these opinions, I offer the perspectives of none other than Hu Yoshida himself and fellow Hitachi blogger Michael Hay, in two separate and otherwise unrelated stories.

1.052: over-hyping wide striping

When the capabilities you use to differentiate your product in the market are no longer unique, marketing tends to morph into hype.

That appears to be what’s happening to 3PAR.

Once the paragon of Thin Provisioning and Tiny Chunklets, today they struggle for relevance in a market where virtually every storage platform offers thin provisioning as just one among a long list of features.

What’s worse is that 3PAR, like XIV, is saddled with an architecture that makes it difficult (although surely not impossible) to integrate support for Enterprise Flash Drives. In fact, along with NTAP and XIV, 3PAR remains one of the few companies that have not yet figured out how to deliver the performance benefits of flash storage technology to their customers.

Marc Farley, who I respect immensely (and not just for his rappin’), stepped out this week in his blog to assert that while 3PAR is working on flash, they are “in no rush to be a me too player.”

(Out of respect, I’ll pass over that obvious softball.)

But I did find his suggestion that Wide Striping was 3PAR’s answer to EFDs rather funny. Almost as hilarious as IBM’s assertion that had me rotflmao! last year – the one where they said that their customers didn’t need flash drives, they needed TAPE!

Even more, um, dare I say ridiculous, was Marc’s assertion that EMC was using EFDs to avoid the efforts of re-architecting their products to deliver wide striping.

No offense intended, Marc, but you know I’m not one to let anyone get away with such misleading hype and outright false FUD.

Allow me to set the record straight…

1.048: news flash! information is still growing!!!!

From the Business Section of the March 11, 2009 Financial Times comes this earth-shattering dilemma:

Storage: The bytes build up –
but where can we put them?

Seems that Mark Vargo, IBM’s own Chief Strategy Officer, and Hu Yoshida, Hitachi Data System’s Chief Technology Officer both agree that digital information is still growing.

Shocking!

Oddly, it was almost 2 years ago to the day the Mark was quoted by the very same Financial Times on the very same topic, except back then, he seemed to have an answer:

Surely we can squeeze a bit more in somewhere

I don’t know which is sadder, the fact that the Financial Times reruns topics, or that IBM and HDS are taking ipso-facto credit for the EMC-sponsored IDC research on the Expanding Digital Universe that is behind the observations of these two. (That some of their quotes are lifted directly from the research papers is, well, no longer astonishing).

OK – I’ll make it unanimous: EMC’s Chief Strategy Officer for Symmetrix also asserts that indeed, we will collectively have more digital information to store tomorrow than we did yesterday.

Who knew?

 

There, that said, I’ll return to working on The Perfect Storage Array, per Martin’s specifications.

 

technorati tags: digital universe, digital information, EMC, IDC, research, Financial Times, information explosion, data growth, IBM, HDS

1.047: dancin' with the starz

No, I'm not talking about The Woz's performance last night with Karina Smirnoff (although "A Teletubby going mad" was indeed an accurate description).

Nope, this is yet another follow-up to my flash dance / splash dance observations of the wild and sometimes whacky world of solid state storage.

Somebody has been taking dance lessons.

Or at least, they're paying attention.

Now appearing on the main stage: HP!

Yup, unlike IBM who seem to be totally unable to figure out the steps to this Flash SSD tango, HP has delivered a fairly coherent white paper outlining their perspective of Flash technology, entitled Solid State Disks for HP StorageWorks Arrays Whitepaper.

A welcome contrast to IBM's gloom-and-doom SSD white paper (the one that they still haven't figured out needs correcting).

I'll hasten to add that HP's paper represents a totally NEW perspective for the company – it was just a few weeks ago that the only thing SSD on HP's solid state landing page was about laptop and server applications. And after spending most of last year telling everyone that the technology wasn't ready for the enterprise and that it was being overhyped (by moi?), their solid state landing page has been recently updated to reflect a far more optimistic and comprehensive outlook for the technology. This is a most welcomed change of tune, because it will take the support of all of us in the storage industry to drive down the cost and expand the applicable use cases for solid-state technologies.

Welcome to the party, gents. You can stop trying to dance now, I guess.

But I do hope the Tucson Boys in Blue are paying attention.

1.044: ibm's amazing splash dance

Leave it to the folks over at Big Blue to throw cold water on the whole flash storage revolution.

On the same day that both IDC and Gartner confirmed that IBM is losing share in the external storage market while EMC is gaining, the following Tweet from "ibmstorage" floated across my TweetDeck:

IBM's approach to new storage technology
"Solid state disks for enterprise storage" http://tinyurl.com/acom2s (pdf)
ibmstorage , Fri 06 Mar 10:32 via web

The links gets you this white paper: Solid state disks for enterprise storage - IBM’s approach to new storage technology.

UPDATE: Just in case IBM moves or withdraws the referenced white paper, I have saved a copy of it here on my blog site.

With a title like that, I figured this paper would be the long-waited IBM response to my previous Flashdance post, even though it was probably at least in draft weeks before I started my post.

I wasn't to be disappointed.
 

1.042: modular storage - what's in a name?

OK. I did the last one. Now it's your turn.

What is the definition of modular storage?

It sure seems that I really got under the skins of the Dancing Giraffes over at NetApp with my "Flash Dance" expose of how slowly the competitors are embracing the value of flash technology.

First there was their uninformed challenge to the term Enterprise Flash Drives. Not surprisingly, everyone else (except NetApp) seems now to understand that indeed there is a sufficient differentiation among solid-state storage devices to justify the "enterprise" classification, just as we also distinguish enterprise disk drives.

The second salvo from NetApp comes in the form of a brandy-new blog, authored by a pool of NetApp engineers, although it seems Mike Riley has taken the lead role, authoring the first 3 posts. In the latest post, Mike seizes the opportunity to a) cast me as an angry villain, b) offer me a hug, and c) assert that the last economic downturn fostered the era of "modular storage" and the end of monolithic storage's world domination.

Hence my question: what the heck is "modular storage" (as you can see from that link, even Wikipedia doesn't seem to know).

Mike continues with an outlandish assertion that "Hardware offers zero differentiation".

I guess I can agree with Mike in the sense that we all can use the same parts to make our products. But there does seem to be rather significant differentiation based on what components we actually do choose to use.

For example, the fact that Symmetrix DMX4 natively supports EFDs today, while NetApp still doesn't support flash drives of any sort with their mainstream storage arrays is pretty highly differentiated.

EMC is delivering the value, while NetApp is bringing forth more people rappers dancers.

And seriously, I am interested in hearing how you'd characterize or define "modular storage" these days…does the term even have meaning any more?

Oh, and thanks for the hug, Mike. You'll never know how much I needed it this week!

technorati tags: modular storage,flash drives,EFDs,enterprise flash drives,EMC,Symmetrix,DMX4,NetApp

1.039: don't miss the amazing vendor flash dance

UPDATED: 17 Feb 2009 - changes in green

Flash dancing was a form of tap dance evolved in 1920s-1930s which combined tap with acrobatics.

That description pretty much sums up what Sun, HP, Hitachi, IBM and NetApp have been doing (and saying) about Flash Storage over the past couple of weeks. Some are tap dancing around their continual delays in getting product to market, while others have resorted to high-wire theatrics to cover up the fact that they’re still nowhere near ready to integrate flash tech.

And almost all of them have finally realized that EMC was right over a year ago – the first place we’re going to see benefits from flash technology is indeed as a new tier in high performance storage arrays. That’s right, after a year of excuses and a cacophony of claims that EMC’s introduction of Enterprise Flash Drives (EFDs) wasn’t innovative, today we find virtually every storage vendor (with one major exception) having announced that they, too, will soon be shipping EFDs in their arrays.

And every one of them has chosen the very supplier (STEC) and the same drive (ZeusIOPS) that EMC introduced to the world over a year ago.

To be honest, I’ve expected all along that this is where we’d be at this point in time, but I surely didn’t think it would take them this long to admit figure out that array-based EFDs is where they should start.

Where we are today is remarkable, and no one can argue that we’d be here were it not for EMC’s vision and investment in bringing the game-changing NAND technology to market ahead of all expectations.

But though the road we’ve travelled to get where we are today is relatively short, it has been littered with some remarkable Flash Dancing (and FUD) from the competition.

Let’s take a look at each of these vendors journeys on this Road to Flash, shall we?

WARNING: this one’s long – probably the longest ever. My apologies…I had lots to say

1.038: val - exposed

A blogger's credibility is all that stands between valuable insight and total irrelevance.

Credibility is built upon the integrity of truth and humility: the basis of arguments and opinions on facts, and the ability to admit when your facts or your conclusions are wrong. Over the past couple of years I've had the opportunity to help several Fellow Bloggers realize that their arguments were based on mistaken understandings, misleading information and even urban legends. I've also had the opportunity to have my own misunderstandings and misrepresentations called out by my readers and peers. My own credibility is fundamentally important to my core being, and so I hope I can get away with saying that I've done a pretty good job of admitting (and correcting) my mistakes, just as many of my fellow bloggers have had the fortitude and integrity to admit and correct theirs.

But I'm clearly not having total success in my on-going efforts to keep us all honest, as Chris Mellor explains in his careful and patient analysis of a tangle started last week by Fellow Blogger Val Bercovici over at NetApp.

Go ahead, take the time to read Chris' article – it's the sort of thing you wouldn't want to hear from me first.

1.037: xiv does hitachi math with roman numerals

UPDATED 21 Jan, 2009 - changes noted and highlighted in green.

I almost didn’t believe it.

And I still wouldn’t, if it wasn’t corroborated from several sources.

I’ve been told that there are actually people trying to sell XIV to unsuspecting prospects using good old Hitachi Math.

That’s right. Hitachi Math. That “modernistic form of algebra that arrives at irreproducible results that also have the unique property of having absolutely no bearing on reality” that I’ve talked about here on numerous occasions. That same whacky logic that Hitachi has been using for years to mislead us all about how many meel-yun IOPS a USP can do by counting reads serviced exclusively from the buffers on the front-end Fibre Channel ports – a totally meaningless statistic.

Apparently, there are at least some who sell XIV arrays that are willing to stoop to these same lows in their quest to unseat the competition and gain footprint.

I guess given the growing market comprehension of the inarguable space and power inefficiencies of XIV’s “revolutionary” approach, coupled with the forced admissions that simultaneous dual drive failures in two separate XIV drive bays are indeed fatal and the growing realization that just because Moshe was there for the dawn of the Symmetrix era doesn’t make him all-powerful (nor the parent of today’s DMX)…well, I guess this all has proven just too much to overcome with IBM’s vaunted “trusted partner” approach to sales.

Nope, you won’t get no vendor bashing from those guys, just plain unadulterated crap-ola. When the facts get in the way, all you can do is lead with what you do best, I guess.

But I never would have guessed that anyone would attempt Hitachi Math using roman numerals.

Apparently it has been done.

 

1.032: xiv closeout - buy one, get one free!

Is XIV destined to be the Ginsu knife of storage?

An email came across my desk yesterday noting a competitive situation where IBM was bidding XIV against a CLARiiON CX4. The XIV account team must have known their backs were against the wall, what with the better capacity utilization and power efficiency of the CLARiiON.

Not to mention a few other XIV deficiencies that I've pointed out before.

But things must be getting really desperate over there in Moshe-land, because this deal offered the customer TWO (2) XIV gen 2 arrays for the price of ONE!

Just in time for Christmas!

Now, I'll admit that IBM has come up with a creative way to get around the incredibly high probability of data loss with XIV's RAID-X architecture...simply mirror everything on XIV "A" over to XIV "B", and then whenever "A" suffers the data loss from the inevitable double-drive-in-two-separate-drive-modules failure, you can simply swap over to the intact data on "B" and carry on.

Of course, that does mean you'd be using 360TB of raw storage to get only 80TB of usable storage. Heck, even NetApp offers better utilization than that! (not much better, mind you, but better than 22.2%). Not to mention that you'd be paying for something like FOUR TIMES the power you'd need for 80TB usable of CX4 storage. Like I said before, you have to ask yourself: How much does a "free" XIV really cost?

But hey, if that's what it takes to get an XIV up to a respectable 4 or 5 9's of availability, who am I to quibble?

Now, to be fair, I'm not sure if IBM is offering these deals in the US - the bid I saw was admittedly out of China. Why there and not in the US or EMEA? Maybe IBM is interested in helping out the ailing Chinese economy, instead of its own back yard here in the US. I've also heard that the factory output of working XIV boxes is rather limited, and that for some reason or another, IBM hasn't been able to build enough systems to sell one to EMC.

So maybe this isn't an economic conspiracy on IBM's part. Could it be that the abject lack of any traction in the US has pushed IBM into an inventory sell-off in China? With all those XIV demo systems being returned by the banks and telcos as they tighten their belts, what better to do than dump them on the poor, unsuspecting Chinese? 
 

1.024: something you should know (about xiv)

Here in the States there is a radio show hosted by Mike Carruthers called "Something You Should Know." Each weekday on the show, which is broadcast by 150 radio stations across the most of mainland US, Mike interviews interesting people who have information about something you should know.

I think he needs to interview an IBM "Top Gun" customer service engineer soon.

Why? Because they know something that YOU should know -  something that IBM marketing, bloggers and your IBM XIV salesperson probably have been neglecting to discuss honestly with you.

It's the answer to this simple question:

"What happens if a second drive fails before my XIV array has completed rebuilding the first failed drive?"

Now, I'm sure that you've been told that the XIV can rebuild the data on a failed 1TB SATA drive in something like 20-30 minutes. And you probably understand that this makes for a very short window of opportunity that a second drive might fail on its own.

But the probability isn't zero - it can't be. Especially when you factor in human error (wrong drive pulled) or adjacent failures (a node dies). But let's not argue the math - let's just explore the results of such a double failure for the moment, irrespective of the probability.

And lest I be accused of spreading FUD, I won't even tell you the answer (until after the break).

Go call your IBM customer service engineer and ask him or her the question (I'd suggest not asking your sales rep - at least, not if you want an honest and complete answer). Note that you may have to ask specifically to speak with a "Top Gun" storage CSE - not all of IBM's service engineers have been trained on XIV service yet. But the Top Guns have.

You might want to be seated for the answer...the chairs are still available.

 

1.023: it's just a flash-y science experiment

And now, my oft-requested take on the 1 Meellyun IOPS flash technology science experiment that IBM is promoting so heavily:

Way Cool.

That's right - Barry Whyte and IBM's Almaden Lab team are to be congratulated for their accomplishment, as I actually did in the first comment to BarryW's boastful blog post on the event. This is indeed an important milestone on the road to wide-scale commercialization of solid-state persistent storage, even if it isn't an actual product announcement (IBM admits you can't buy their experimental configuration for at least 9-12 months).

Commendations all around...

But surely you don't think that's all I have to say now, do you...