the storage anarchist

1.015: stranger danger

If you have children, hopefully you've taught them about Stranger Danger at a very young age - prevention and awareness are the most powerful weapons we have to protect our families and friends.

And if Symmetrix DMX could talk, it surely would be yelling at the top of it's blower fans:

NO! I don't know you! You are not my Dad!

Let it hereby be known that Moshe Yanai is not the father of Symmetrix DMX.

No, despite the public assertions of IBM to the contrary, Moshe had virtually nothing to do with the creation of Symmetrix DMX. And on behalf of the hard-working, dedicated engineers, developers and patent-holders who did in fact design and deliver DMX to the market in February of 2003, it is high time to set the record straight.

Moshe's responsibilities for Symmetrix development ended in 2001, long before DMX production even began. And Symmetrix DMX was a radical change in virtually every dimension from the 5 generations of Symmetrix that preceded it under Moshe's watch.

I'm pretty sure Moshe didn't like anything very much about Symmetrix DMX.

And I will point out that Moshe left EMC in 2002 (for whatever reason), which was well before DMX was even introduced to beta sites or discussed under NDA with analysts and prospects.

I was the marketing lead for the launch of Symmetrix DMX, so I know first-hand that he wasn't involved.

So, as you can imagine, I find it curious that IBM is attempting to mislead everyone who will listen that the success of DMX is a feather in Moshe's cap - evidence of his storage prowess and foresight.

On behalf of DMX I say: thanks for the recognition as the market leader. But he still ain't my dad!
 

1.014: the laurel and hardy of thin provisioning

UPDATED (July 3, 2008): Deletions struck-out, additions noted in green.

One is decidedly skinny.

The other is unabashedly portly.

And I'm not talking about Stan and Ollie, folks.

No, such is the differentiation between the thin provisioning implementations of IBM's SVC and Hitachi's USP-V/USP-VM.

Sir Barry White eloquently describes the petite implementation of SVC's fine-grained Space-Efficient Virtual Disk (SEV for short) in a recent blog post (any resemblance of BarryW to fellow Brit Stan Laurel is purely coincidental, I'm sure).

Not to be outdone (and in an obvious attempt to justify the Hardy-ness of Hitachi's Dynamic Provisioning), HHSNBN explains why DP's heavyweight approach makes for better thinness (at least on the USP-V). Given the title of his post (When is Thin Provisioning Too Thin?), I figure ole' HHSNBN doesn't think the SVC's implementation is all that, shall we say, robust.

IMHO, both have managed to gloss over details that are very pertinent to understanding if, when and where one implementation is better than the other. Not surprising, especially since BarryW & I both know full well HHSNBN will never respond directly to any inquiries or challenges. No, HHSNB prefers only one-sided discourse (his side, of course), so I guess that leaves it up to me to try to tease out the truth.

So let's look a little deeper at these near-opposite implementations and see what we can figure out for ourselves, shall we?

Warning: readers of this blog have asked that I spend more time talking tech,
and less time bashing the competition.

This post is about as close as I can get to fulfilling those requests...

 

1.013: more on enterprise flash

Sometimes I just can't keep my opinions to myself.

Last Friday afternoon while I was perusing Chris Mellor's Blocks and Files, I was struck by the discontinuity of messaging that is emerging around the "best" application of Flash drives. From the "flash can't write fast enough" doom and gloom of the relatively unknown wanna-bee Infortrend to the "flash is too fast for external storage" justification for Sun's focus on server-based flash, it struck me that uninformed readers were likely being confused, if not outright mislead by the contradictory misinformation.

So I dashed a letter off to Chris outlining my concerns and rebutting the misrepresentations of the real benefits that the right flash drive is already delivering today - despite the unfounded claims of others in the storage and server industries. And upon his request, I granted him permission to publish this as an opinion piece on Blocks and Files, which he has done under the title of Missing the flash point (a fitting play on words, IMHO).

N.B. - Normally, I would have posted this to my own blog, but part of my concern is that the misleading information is being distributed by sites like Blocks and Files. My letter was in fact originally written in a context beseeching Chris to present a more balanced perspective on the realities of flash technology. When he offered to publish my opinion outright, I figured the best way to provide balance was to use the same billboard, so to speak.

Anyway, I hope that my opinion letter helps expand the conversation about flash technology. In my opinion, there's nothing to be gained by trying to polarize this into an either-or discussion. In fact, I honestly believe that there are appropriate applications for Flash-based storage in both servers and external storage arrays. And judging by the applications I've seen flash targeted for by customers, the early adopters are going to have a pretty big competitive advantage on their competitors.

The bottom line is this - the sooner that more vendors stop quibbling over who, how or where flash is "best" and actually start bringing real flash technology to market in their respective products, the sooner (and faster) we collectively will drive up demand and drive down the costs.

And that, my friends, is the whole point...the flash point, as it were: leveraging Flash to cost-effectively bypass the inherent limitations of mechanical disk drives...

IMHO

 

technorati tags: flash drives,flash SSDs,enterprise flash drives,EFDs,Infortrend,Sun,Pillar Data Systems,storage performance,storage consolidation,NAND flash,SSD

1.010: sun adds critical mass to flash

Please join me in welcoming the latest member of the "we too will be delivering flash technology someday soon" consortium - the farm club for the "we are ALREADY shipping enterprise flash technology" league (of which EMC is the only current member).

Not to be outflanked by IBM, nor pigeon-holed by Hitachi's slow uptake of the technology, Sun Microsystems this week jumped aboard the NAND flash bandwagon with guns a-blazin'. They say they're going to put flash everywhere - in the server, in the storage, as primary storage, as intermediate cache, using both SLC and MLC dependent upon use case - you name it, they're going to do it.

And what's more, according to Sun:

"By the Christmas holidays, anyone with an I/O performance intensive application is going to be trying to find a way to get [SSDs] into their systems."

(And to think, just last week, people were quoting Gartner and challenging both Joe Tucci and Dave Donatelli for being too optimistic at EMC World about the uptake of flash.)

OK. Clearly, we've entered the hype phase of enterprise flash storage. And it is inevitable that we live through this hype - necessary, even...every new technology has to navigate the curve, cross the trough of disillusionment, and leap across the chasm before it can reach mass adoption. And with flash storage in the enterprise space, we're just getting started, so you know that there will be plenty more exuberant hyperbole to come.

Rather than deride it, we should welcome the hype of the newcomers with open arms, because every new supporter reinforces the viability of the technology and accelerates us further down the adoption curve.

I just wish the newcomers would bring a little more specificity to the picture.

Don't you?
 

1.009: fun with numbers (and charts)

One thing I've grown to depend upon over my past 13 months of blogging is that Fellow Blogger Tony Pearson will try and refute, twist and manipulate anything I say that could be construed as a challenge to IBM and/or its products. Guaranteed action/reaction.

It took him a couple of weeks to get around to responding to my post on GDDR vs. GDPS, but he didn't let me down.

And true to form, our resident Mr. Pennybags-lookalike spares no opportunity to misrepresent the facts in IBM's favor. Sure, you can run compile your own open-source version of Linux to run on IBM mainframe hardware as he says, but I sincerely doubt anyone would ever do that. That's awfully expensive hardware to be running generic home-brewed Linux on...

But fact is that you can't get IBM mainframe hardware from anywhere else but IBM, nor can you license the software necessary to run your z/OS-, z/VM-, z/VSE-, or z/TPF-based applications from anyone but IBM. And while GDPS might indeed support third party storage, the pre-requisite is that the storage vendor have licensed and implemented bug-compatible equivalents of PPRC and FlashCopy.

Hardly an "open system."

No, a real "open" version of GDPS would natively support TimeFinder and SRDF instead of the feature-limited IBM wanna-bee alternatives.

And though indeed EMC's GDDR supports only a subset of the capabilities of IBM's GDPS, that subset is pretty much 100% of what the vast majority IBM's GDPS customers are deploying - two site automated disaster restart for their geographically dispersed IBM z/OS-based Parallel Sysplexes running on IBM Series "z" hardware.

Yet GDDR costs SIGNIFICANTLY less to implement and maintain than IBM's GDPS for this same functionality. Does the same thing that most people need, for less. Plain, and simple...

To that fact, TonyP would have you believe that EMC is offering GDDR below cost - but you'll have to trust me on this one, nothing could be further from the truth.

No, the simple reality is that IBM has long been taking advantage of it's position as the sole-source provider to charge a massive premium for its mainframe products (hardware, software AND services). I'll go so far as to say that EMC's and IBM's costs to deploy their respective disaster restart solutions are probably very close to identical - IBM just charges more. A LOT more.

Which is why TonyP is throwing up all the FUD he can muster: he hopes to diffuse the very real threat to the exorbitant profits that GDPS has been delivering to IBM's bottom line.

Go figure....

 

1.005.2 hitachi hits new lows (reposted)

Notice: I withdrew this post yesterday afternoon after receiving a challenge from a commenter who insisted that I was mixing up Hitachi's disk drive results with their storage array business. After carefully reviewing Hitachi's published results, I am convinced that the revenue growth numbers I used for Hitachi's storage business are correct (and exclude HGST). Therefore, I have reinstating my post intact, with the addition of a new "Hitachi Math" section (in blue) below.

Hitachi announced their earnings this past Tuesday (May 13th), and their Storage Solutions results (among others) were particularly gloomy. Not as bad as the free-fall in plasma TV sales in the US that they experienced, maybe, but dismal nonetheless.

In what is their fiscal Q4, once high-flying Hitachi only managed to eek out storage revenues that were down 1% from a year ago and down 3% from last quarter, while both EMC and IBM (if you include Tape) actually grew revenues double digits Y/Y in the same period. It marks a notably downward trend in Hitachi's Storage Solutions revenue growth over the past couple of years, as can be seen in this chart:

And Hitachi's projections for the future was for even more revenue contraction for this quarter and next - shrinking perhaps another 5% before they expect a turn-around, they said.

more hitachi math

As I noted above, the above results were challenged yesterday with an assertion that the "decline" was due to HGST. Fact is, these numbers are taken directly from Hitachi's earnings supplement, where they report "Storage Solutions" (array hardware, software and services) separately from "Hard Disk Drives" (see the top of page 2).

You'll note that Hitachi reports by halves (wouldn't want to make it easy to figure quarterly results now, would you?) - but if you go back to last quarters' results, you can do the math to verify that their Storage Solutions revenues were up 2% Y/Y in FQ3'07 and down 1% Y/Y and 3% Q/Q in FQ4'07 - just like I said.

In researching the accuracy of the numbers used in the chart, I was also allowed to see a couple of financial analyst's reports that included additional revenue insights provided them by HDS executives. While I cannot reprint specifically what these analysts published, I must say that there is something that smells an awful lot like Hitachi Math in their reports. Perhaps they just misunderstood what the HDS execs told them, but the numbers the published in their reports simply don't add up.

More importantly, since HDS only sees revenues excluding Japan, their perspective undoubtedly skews any possible analysis - especially since it's not clear whether HP and/or Sun storage revenues are reported through HDS or if they go directly to Hitachi Ltd. (I'm pretty sure they go directly to Japan).

And if revenues really weren't shrinking, then why the heck would HDS execs be trying to spin the story with Wall Street in the first place?

Bottom line: Hitachi Headquarters reported (and documented) that FQ4'07 Storage Solutions (ex-hard disk) was down 3% Q/Q and down 1% Y/Y - just like I said.

And on top of declining revenues, word on the street is that morale in Hitachi's US field operations is at an all-time low. Nobody seems to know if morale is suffering from the recent out-sourcing of customer service, the collapsing of the former solution/consulting business with the former Hitachi Data Systems subsidiary, or the new Japanese management that are running the new US holding company now. Or maybe it's something else?

Given that the flagship USP-V is nearly a year old, it seems very odd that revenues would be shrinking at a time when the new system should be really starting to gain traction.

It all makes me wonder...
 

1.004: are you wasting money on your mainframe dr solution?

You are if you've invested in IBM's Geographically Dispersed Parallel Sysplex (GDPS®).

It is widely understood that IBM derives a significant percentage of its profits off of its installed base of "Z" mainframe customers. When there are really no other options for either the hardware or the system software, it is a given that customers will be paying more than if there were real competition.

If you're an IBM mainframe customer, you are - by definition - IBM's profit stream. And there are enough of you that it adds up to some pretty darn interesting numbers.

That IBM has nearly perfected the art of vendor lock-in is inarguable - Mr. Pennybags himself (TonyP) took two whole blog posts to reiterate the ways IBM can legally take away any hope of choice so as to maximize your contributions to their bottom line (see: The Pot and the Kettle and More exploration into Vendor Lock-in - combined they are a comprehensive tutorial on the subject, from an obvious expert).

So, if you need a mainframe to run your business, today you really have no choice but to buy that mainframe (and the operating software) from IBM. For a fair -if not competitive - price, I'm sure (NOT!).

And if you need comprehensive multi-site disaster recovery? Lucky you - IBM will happily sell you a comprehensive GDPS engagement to automate your DR fail-over (and hopefully fail-back). Imagine, months, if not years, of IBM GS folks on-site, tinkering in your environment, crafting and testing proprietary DR automation scripts for you - right before your very eyes. And for no more than couple of million smackers to start (depending upon how much you need to fail over, in both MIPS and GBs), plus ongoing maintenance and consulting fees for upgrades.

Such a Deal!

And you'd better enjoy it, because you really don't have any choice in the matter.

Until now, that is...
 

1.001: this is like déjà vu all over again

Is it just me, or have IBM's storage execs suddenly started sounding like their mainframe execs used to a few decades ago?

Seems that every day someone else over there at Big Blue wants to go on record insisting that the best IT solution is one that is supplied by a single vendor - end-to-end integration, replace the "stickiness" of unique solutions with the "stickiness" of IBM software. And all that.

In Andy Monshaw's interview with eWeek.com, he makes it pretty clear that he believes that the best IT solution comes from a single vendor, with end-to-end integration. As in: buy your servers, your storage, your networking, your applications and your services all from IBM. Don't worry about vendor lock-in, because you'll be able to put IBM SVC kit in front of your old third party gear and do things the Blue Way with little or no hassle.

Oh, and really fast flash-based storage simply isn't good enough (go figure, since they don't have that in their portfolio). No, apparently (according to Andy) you're going to need to integrate flash into every aspect of your compute platform before you can gain any measurable value.

Bullship, I say to that: Bullship!

Andy goes on to say he no longer needs to "sweep the floor" - that an unintended benefit of the SVC is that customers no longer have to be locked into their storage platforms (as if they ever where - really).

But don't be fooled - despite the eloquent words, make no mistake: in Andy's vision, you'll still be handcuffed. He'll just paint whatever you have on the floor IBM Blue with his SVC spray paint.

It's what's best for the customer, he asserts.

In Andy's world, apparantely, there's nothing wrong with vendor lock-in, so long as you're wrapped from head to toe in IBM Blue.

Go figure! 

0.076: oops!... i(bm) did it again!

I know that many of you are getting tired of me pointing out the frequent faux-pas made by competitor's executives. To you, I apologize in advance for today's post, and I'll understand completely if you skip this entry or unsubscribe from my feed in protest.

Especially those of you from IBM, on both sides of the pond. I seem to get more hits from the ibm.com domain on these articles than from anywhere else!

I am sincerely trying to stop, honest I am. But just I can't. At least not until these guys stop feeding me material.
 

Before I continue, though...a note about today's theme.

About a year ago, when I was first thinking of starting up this blog, Chuck Hollis told me one of his super-secret tricks for attracting hits to his blog. He said he would include "Britney Spears" as one of the keywords for every one of his posts, and that he'd get a sizable percentage of hits from search engines like Google and Yahoo! as a result. Not that I need the hits, but the song title fits my topic, so I figured I might try it to see what happens.

So, if you're a Britney fan who accidentally got lured here by this little ploy, my apologies to you as well. This probably isn't what you were looking for.

But if you're both a storage geek and a Britney fan - Welcome! You'll probably recognize the subtitles below...

 

0.070: horton hears a hu

My sides hurt.

I ended last week rotflmao!, thanks to IBM's Charlie Andrews and his creative response to flash-based solid state storage (tape, he said...TAPE!). At the time, I figured that nobody could top that for the flat-out wackiest statement of the year.

Apparently, I underestimated Hu Yoshida.

Not content with his first round of uninformed comments about flash SSDs, HDS' so-called "chief technology officer" piled on a few more layers of baloney in an interview with IT Week UK's Dave Bailey:

IT Week:

What are your views on Flash memory storage, which EMC recently announced it would be putting onto its DMX systems?

Hu:

There are a number of problems with Flash memory. First, the price, which can be up to 20 times as much as spinning disks. Secondly, there’s supplier viability – there’s only a few vendors of this technology at the minute. You’ve also got to remember that Flash disks have a rewrite limitation and we need to have some diagnostics to predict when that limit could occur. For hard disks, we have self-monitoring analysis and reporting technology (Smart), but there’s nothing like that for Flash disks. What happens if you’re in the middle of a financial transaction and a write failure occurs, after a write commit? As for performance, just because it’s solid state doesn’t mean it would be any faster than a spinning disk. Remember all those interfaces between your application and the disk are slowing the data transfer rates, so it would be a good idea to benchmark your set-up.

What happens on a write failure, he asks?

LSHIPMP!

OK, well, I almost PMP...

Wait, let me catch my breath...

Come on, he can't be serious...I mean, it's not like disk drives don't suffer from the occasional write failure, yet somehow we manage not to lose data. At least, EMC arrays manage not to lose data - with multiple layers of protection and recovery.

Can it be that Hu is really that out of touch with reality?

 

0.068: rotflmao!

And I almost couldn't get back up...

Regular readers know that I've been predicting the market exit of the DS8000 for most of my tenure in the blogsophere. As can be expected, this has attracted the ire of IBM bloggers, who routinely dismiss my observations as misinformed FUD. I've even been called "silly" by members of the IBM blogging corps.

So perhaps you'll understand why I was laughing hysterically after reading comments made by Charlie Andrews, IBM's marketing director of storage systems, in Beth Pariseau's recent SearchStorage article (see IBM: Thin provisioning on the way for DS8000).

According to Charlie, the DS8000 is indeed still being updated, although apparently only to support IBM's newest mainframe monopoly models. Some neat stuff - like larger volumes and granular fail-over (welcome to the 21st century, zSeries!).

But when I read Charlie's responses to Beth's inquiries about the increasingly long list of features missing from the DS8000, I literally fell out of my chair laughing.

Not almost - I actually hit the floor. LMAO

Read on to learn why...

[UPDATED 7AM EST February 29, 2008 - see below]
 

0.065: for whom the bell tolls

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

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

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

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

Not to mention if you're a potential customer.

Cue Flight of the Valkyries ...

0.063: a totally different benchmark standard

There seems to be a lot of talk lately about benchmarking, especially the so-called "vendor-neutral" kind. Oddly, the Council behind all this seems to be anything but "vendor-neutral," especially when you take a look at the member roster for this exclusive club.

Notice anything odd?

Vendors in the storage industry outnumber "customer" members on the SPC by something like 28-5.

Go Figure.

Even though they managed to squeak the word "customers" into their mission statement, it is pretty clear this organization is really more about the competitive objectives of their vendor-led membership, and not so much about the interests of the consumers. At least, it's the vendors who are paying the bills (and you know that works the same for the SPC as it does down in DC).

In fact, given the relative dearth of customer participation, you really have to wonder if customers care about these benchmarks at all. Obviously, they clearly don't care enough to spend their money to ensure that the tests and the results are truly meaningful, unbiased and accurate. And you might even ask yourself why the press makes such a big deal about these benchmarks when clearly the customers don't see them as being all that important or relevant.

OK. So maybe it's just ME that wonders about these things. Oh, and Beth. And John. And Marc.

So where is the voice of the customer?

0.062: r.i.p. dear ds6000 - forgotten, but not alone

On January 11th 2008, with no fanfare, comment or replacement,  IBM's ill-fated "enterprise-class storage in a small, scalable package" slipped silently into the Big Blue Storage Graveyard, with the final removal of all extended service agreements from the pricebook.

I guess this one slipped unnoticed out of Ringmaster TonyP's circus tent (to join the missing elephant, I'm sure). At least, he seems not to be shedding any tears.

When introduced (along with the DS8000) back in 2004, the DS6000 was touted as living proof of the flexibility and agility of the software that attempted to turn an RS6000 cluster into enterprise-class storage. Just over 3 years later and half of that announcement has already been end-of-lifed.

Go figure.

"These are the most significant storage announcements we have made in more than a decade. IBM is focused on being the storage innovator and clear technology leader," said Dan Colby, General Manager, IBM Storage Systems. "Today, we are delivering new economics and choice by leveraging common components, breakthrough technologies from mainframes and supercomputers, and unmatched virtualization and management capabilities."

IBM Press Release: IBM Delivers New Storage Economics and Choice
October 12, 2004

By all accounts of the day, the DS6000 was clearly intended to be a DMX-800 killer - a lofty ambition that seems not to have been able to meet the demands of the market (meanwhile, the DMX-4 950 thrives on).

 

0.057: of blind men and an elephant

For some reason, IBM's brand marketing dude (and Fellow Blogger) Tony Pearson has taken it upon himself to single handedly justify and defend IBM's recently announced acquisition of XIV. (I don't know, maybe its his job, or something.)

In yesterday's salvo he attempts to clarify the alchemy of blob-based replication and recovery. But alas, his logic still doesn't hold up: there's nothing in Nextra that protects against data loss from the inevitable double drive failure, no matter how how hard he tries to mix in irrelevant "facts" to redirect the conversation.

But I'll have to admit he floored me with his "observation" (buried within the follow-up comments) that cosmic rays basically defeat any potential benefits of RAID6! I guess that explains why the DS8000 still doesn't support RAID6 or support drives larger than 500GB, since the DS8000's read memory isn't mirrored and there's no error detection/correction like the SNCDND logic that is utilized in all generations of Symmetrix DMX.

Go figure!

But what shocked me the most was Tony's assertion that SATA drives are cheap enough that the Web 2.0 world can in fact afford not only to mirror them, but also use that mirrored capacity at less than 50% full!

Now, I don't know about you, but in the world I'm living in, nothing could be further from the truth.

0.056: the emperor and his new clothes

Oh my. It seems I have ruffled the feathers of fellow blogger Tony Pearson.

Seems he can't understand why one little voice would dare disrupt the majestic unveiling of the emperor's new wardrobe, especially since it was crafted by none other than the master magician of storage himself, and now forms the cornerstone of IBM's newest invention - Web 2.0 Storage!

Move over, Al Gore! We need some room on that there podium!

My apologies Tony, sir, I mean not to offend, sir, but merely to point out that the emperor, well sir, the emperor...umm...you see sir, the clothes he's wearing, sir...well, umm...they aren't new, sir! Nor are they made of magical thread, sir. In fact, sir, yes indeed, sir...they look almost exactly like the clothes EMC made 6 years ago when they created the CAS market. Oddly similar, sir, as anyone who looks can plainly see!

But please, sir, I mean not to offend.

But apparently, sir, you did. The implications of the your response are repugnant and unprofessional.
 

0.055: obligatory "ibm buys xiv" post

Well, I thought I'd wait a day and let the dust settle on this before I made any comments.

Turns out I saved myself a lot of redundant typing. Chuck Hollis covered much of what I would have said (albeit a bit more elegantly). I share his notion that IBM may be using a Web 2.0 smoke-screen to hide their real intent to use Nextra as either A): a response to DELL+EqualLogic and/or 3PAR; or B): as a replacement for the woefully under-funded (and near-dead) DS8000.

I also think there's a potential C): merge Nextra with SVC to solve SVC's emerging Rube-Goldberg scalability problems and get FlashCopy/Global Mirror compatibility onto a truly scalable platform. I guess that the lack of end-to-end data integrity protection is starting to tarnish the SVC image, with wholesale replacements and exorcisms being held on both sides of the pond (or so I've been told). But that's just me being me, I guess (and perhaps in a manner that's a bit more argumentative than Chuck would have written - I'm sure I'll be hearing from BarryW soon on that one).

Steve Duplessie and Mark Peters over at ESG did an good job of explaining what the Nextra is all about, and lends some credibility that this really might be all about Web 2.0 after all, given IBM's need to find a viable replacement for the now aging and somewhat archaic DR500 (tape is dead, haven't you guys heard yet?). But I don't think you really know what Nextra can really do until you actually hear what the current customers are doing with it, and it seems that all of them have lost their tongues for some odd reason. And for the record, I also think Steve's comments that this is probably at least as much about Moshe as it is about Nextra are right on.

At the very least, on his reputation alone Moshe will probably get IBM an audience with a few of those Wall Street IT shops that have banished Big Blue storage from their data centers because of all the incompatible product churn they've incurred since the days of RAMAC, Iceberg, Sharks and now the dead-end can-you-say-downtime DS8000's.

Not to be outdone, Fellow Blogger Tony Pearson took his own shot at explaining what he thinks is the revolutionary neat new technology in Nextra. Unfortunately, he doesn't have much understanding of the Centera architecture, so he mistakenly thinks is this all new. But heck, even though back before Christmas he was joining forces with TwoEgos in a premature wake for Centera, I'll give him a pass on the fact that Centera's been doing this exact type of blob striping and protection since day one (back at the beginning of 2002).

I'm feeling oddly benevolent to start this New Year for some reason...

0.053: when 2 + 2 isn't 4

IBM seems to be learning Hitachi math.

At least, some of their field sales representatives appear to be experimenting with Hitachi's notorious approach of magically mangling numbers in order to subliminally mislead perceptions.

In a recent RFP (one that I admittedly heard about third hand), the customer-to-be reportedly specified that all bidders must propose only storage systems that are 4Gb/s Fibre Channel front and back.

Now, if you follow high-end storage at all, you know that ONLY the EMC DMX-4 and the Hitachi/HP/Sun USP-V today employ a 4Gb/s FC back-end, while all models of the IBM DS8300 use only a 2Gb FC back-end. A simple fact that's easily verified reading the specification sheets for each product - no room for argument.

So imagine the buyers' surprise to receive a proposal from their local IBM rep, complete with  written confirmation that the proposed DS8300 Turbo did indeed come with a 4Gb FC back-end!

As I've been told, the fun didn't stop there. When the customer confronted his (or her, I'm not sure) friendly IBM-badged sales representative, they were even more surprised to be told that the 8300's back-end indeed was 4Gb/s. The rep explained, with a totally straight face, that each disk drive was serviced by not one, but TWO 2Gb/s Fibre Channel connections, which clearly adds up to the required 4Gb/s.

You just gotta admire the chutzpah!

0.050: thin provisioning - don't leap before you look

I've been hanging out over at the Wikibon this week, both to monitor the feedback on Hitachi's latest announcements as well as just getting to know some of the folks there. Lots of familiar faces, and far too many "lurkers" who haven't yet stepped up to be heard. I have high hopes that this Web 2.0 approach to collaborative storage analysis is the wave of the future. Heck, I can't imagine why anyone would pay the Gartners, IDCs or Evaluator Groups of the world anything once this Wikibon community gets its legs under it.

There are lots of interesting topics flying around over there in Wikibon-land in addition to coverage of vendor announcements and strategies. If you've followed my call to action to join Dr. Kartik's efforts to redefine storage performance benchmarks, you'll notice that Dave Vellante has thrown the energy of Wikibon behind that initiative. And capitalizing on the benefits and returns of green storage is another interesting topic that's getting a lot of attention over at the Wikibon.

0.049: hitachi rifs mr. t

Like me, you probably noticed that the warfare and annihilation was markedly toned down in the latest round of press releases out of Hitachi Data Systems. So much so, I had to wonder why?

So I did a little digging, and learned that HDS's PR dude Steve Zivanic was recently RIF'd by the new VP of Marketing over an apparent culture clash. Steve was reportedly the guy responsible for those over-the-top (IMHO) Mr. T YouTube-omericals ( (original, "T" for Trucker and mid-TEEr T).

Or at least he was the guy held responsible for these tasteless productions (again, IMHO). Presumably he was also the brains behind the comic-book expressions littered throughout most of the HDS press releases we've seen over the past several years.

Steve has been reportedly replaced by a fellow named Emory Epperson.

While I personally can't say that I'm sad to see Mr. Zivanic go, I was also heartened to learn (from a source who requested anonymity) that former HDS blogger David Merrill was still under the employment of HDS (just muzzled for his honesty, apparently).

But I was more than a bit concerned that poor old Mr. T might be turned out to pasture as well. 

0.048: a "new deal" storage benchmark

Dr. Kartik has picked up on the challenge to define a real-world benchmark for storage arrays. This will be an inherently complex undertaking, probably rivaling the hornet's nest that was FDR's New Deal, but I'd like to be the first to put my support behind the effort.

More important than my participation, however, is YOURS.

And where the SPC benchmarks (and the TPC benchmarks before them) were designed by a membership-only club that worked in the privacy of their meetings, I encourage THIS attempt at defining a benchmark to be conducted entirely in the public, using the open & unrestricted platform of wikis, blogs and discussion forums to engage as many people around the globe as possible.

dotConnector has opened up the conversion in his blog, and his call to action needs your input and perspectives.                           dotConnector wants YOU!

Let's ALL join in!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pity the fool who changes his mind!

0.045: pushing daisies, ds8000 style

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

0.043: storage cage match

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

0.042: yeah, what he said

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

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

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

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

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

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

0.039: ibm and spc vs. hitachi math

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

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

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

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

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

0.035: hitachi drops another shoe (it sounded like a slipper!)

I guess I should be ashamed. Embarrassed at least.

Yesterday, someone asked me why I hadn't yet commented here about Hitachi's baby USP-VM announcement made earlier this week, and I responded "what announcement?"

Yep. I missed it. Completely.

Not that I wasn't aware it was coming...Mr. T doesn't make the rounds on Wall Street on the arms of HDS PR folks for nothing, nor do you wake poor old Claus from his year-long blogging hiatus unless something really important is about to happen.

As I had prior blognosticated, there were (and still are) gaping holes in the initial USPV announcement - clearly the team back in Japan had much more in mind than had been announced back in May. And at least a few rumors indicated that many of these would make it through the QA gauntlet before the end of Q3'07.

Guess this stuff really is hard for everyone.

So I guess because I'd expected so much more, the actual announcement of the USPV "mini-me" slipped right under my radar. I probably shouldn't have taken Nigel's advice and stopped stalking HHSNBN (although it has been therapeutic not to read about yet another world calamity that UVM can solve for a couple of weeks, mind you).

But now that mini-me has been brought to my attention, you just know I have to comment. Interestingly though, this time I'm not alone in correcting the typical misleading marketing that the Hitachi Data Systems Santa Clara marketing miscreants have become known for.

It seems I have some new friends in my quest to keep things honest.
 

0.025: heroes or hiro's?

News Flash! Mr. T has reportedly been seen walking the sidewalks of Wall St, under the watchful escort of Hitachi Data Systems’ PR agency.

Now why would Hitachi Data Systems be parading an aged, almost-forgotten actor-nee-comic book hero around the offices of prominent Wall St. financial analysts? I mean, it’s not like he’s any sort of expert on storage technology, or technology of any sort, for that matter. As I recall, Mr. T's character was the muscle of the A-Team, not the brains; he was they guy you sent in for a round of intimidation when logic, good looks or the uncontrolled psychotic couldn't do the trick.

So why has Hitachi hooked up with Mr. T: The "T" in I.T. again? Heck, being a Japanese company, you’d think Hitachi would spring for a hero that was a bit more contemporary.

Like maybe Hiro.

0.016: storage blognostications

From time to time, several of us engineers will get together for an hour or two of non-linear thinking, just for the heck of it. In the office, we call these Innovation Events - the sort of brainstorming sessions I'm sure you've all participated in. But we also hold special outside the office sessions, where our focus areas tend not to be on customer problems, new technologies or The Next Big Thing.

And yes - there is usually alcohol involved in off-site these mental calisthenics events. It is indeed very convenient that we have a tavern virtually in the middle of our South Street campus in Hopkinton so that we can stop off for a quick, ah ... brainstorming session on our way home. And in fact, the establishment is owned and operated by EMC'ers no less - a pretty smart bunch, those O'Tooles.

Anyhoo, after the third beer or so, what does the conversation inevitably turn towards (after all the Red Sox gossip has been exhausted, that is)? Simple -- it's EMC's competition -- and what people think they're going to do next.

And the more beer, the better the prognostications .

Try these on for size ...

0.014: beware of blogketing

Hu Yoshida has done another bang-up job of explaining the utilization challenge bearing down on customer budgets in his latest 2-part bloguturial (my contraction of "blogger's tutorial"). In the first part, he does a great job of outlining the problem, and in part 2, he credibly describes a vision for a solution. In fact, if you removed all the references to Hitachi products, those two blog entries should probably be mandatory reading for every storage architect in both mid-tier and enterprise IT shops (and probably their suppliers as well).

It could have been that good - if only Hu had separated fact from vision.

Written in the style of a print-media advertorial (a contraction of "editorial advertising," where ad space is purchased to run an editorial-like assessment of a product or service), the blogutorial is emerging as a new, and so-far unchecked marketing tool. Importantly, truth-in-advertising laws require published advertorials to be plainly marked as "paid advertisements" (usually in tiny font in the header where you might not notice it). Apparently this isn't so for blogketing ("blog marketing")- even when done by official corporate spokespersons in the public forum of the Internet. Apparently the blog-world is unfettered by truth-in-advertising rules.

This concerns me, because it allows bloggers to act like the snake-oil vendors of the past, getting away unchecked with unsubstantiated claims and misleading inferences of undeliverable capabilities.

Hu's blogutorial is a prime case in point. The way he litters the product references throughout the two articles would lead the uninformed reader to believe that Hitachi's newly-announced (and yet to ship) Dynamic Provisioning solves all the problems Hu describes. And in fact, this is clearly his intent - the two blogs are nothing more than thinly veiled marketing collateral written by an authoritative industry expert and delivered in the latest marketing medium, the Corporate Blog.

But the complete lack of any disclaimers begs for someone to call "foul."

Enter the storage anarchist...

0.006: usp-v launched! (yawn)

Just perused the launch materials for Hitachi's new USP-V, and I've got to say that if *I* were a customer, I'd be thinking:

"You're over 6 months late, and THAT'S all you managed to do?"

Something weird must be going on in Hitachi's Japan development center. I mean, the ostensibly did SOMETHING to improve the performance, but it looks like someone forgot to tell the hardware guys to make room for more disk drives. This brandy-new USP-V still can only support a maximum of directly-connected 1152 disk drives - what's up with that? And there's no support for cost- (and energy-) efficient disk drives - the largest drive supported is still only the 300GB, and only the 10K rpm version at that.

The Symmetrix DMX-3 has supported up to 2400 drives for over a year, and today supports both the 500GB 7200rpm LC-FC and 300GB 15K rpm drives for optimal "green" tiering. Maybe Hitachi just can't support drives this large, unless they're in someone else's storage array...but why buy two controllers to get more power-efficient storage?

I dunno, do you?

0.004: get ready for tagma-too!

Word's out - there's soon to be a new USP from our pals at Hitachi/HP/Sun. And I'm sure you didn't hear about it first from me.

It's about time.

Hitachi had been on a pretty set schedule of bringing new high-end platforms to market just about exactly every 24 months. And in fact, it seems many customers were specifically told in early 2006 to expect the next-gen "Tagma" in the September 2006 (ish) time frame, almost exactly 2 years after the original USP12000/9990v was announced.

That would make next week's (rumored expected) announcement just about 8 months late. Makes one wonder what when wrong - what happened in 2006 to cause such a delay? A delay so long that Hitachi's Wall Street Minions were out in force late last summer, admitting to anyone who'd listen that the company would likely suffer significant loss of market share through calendar Q4'06 and Q1'07.

Although the numbers aren't all in yet for Q1'07, the predicted loss of storage market share the last couple of quarters looks very likely to have been correct. In fact, estimates I've seen indicate that IBM's DS8000 surpassed Hitachi's USP+NSC sales in the high-end for the first time back in Q4'06.

After such a long wait, I'm pretty sure what the folks over at Hitachi are thinking right about now...

...Welcome to the machine!