the storage anarchist

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

0.078: lions and tigers and bears!

Driving in to work today, I heard a news report about the Hollywood Grizzly Bear that killed his trainer yesterday.

When I got to the office, I listened to Joe field questions during EMC's earnings call (19 consecutive quarters of double-digit year-over-year revenue growth). Several of the participating financial analysts inquired about the potential impact that the newly-delivered virtual provisioning for Symmetrix might have on future capacity demands. From the tone of the questions, you could easily imagine a pride of lions circling their prey.

And sure enough, by noon Beth Pariseau had her coverage posted on SearchStorage, under the headline EMC's Tucci: Thin provisioning mandatory but overrated.

Shortly after the earnings call, a colleague forwarded me the link to a Byte and Switch article by Mary Jander entitled Your Storage Arrays May Be Dangerous. In this article, Mary decries that people need to "rethink the environmental impact of storage gear," because the EPA has reported that electricity use for storage is growing faster than the energy used for the data center overall. Not surprisingly, the EPA called for "storage virtualization, data deduplication, storage tiering, and movement of archival data to storage devices that can be powered down when not in use" as strategies for avoiding environmental damage if not disaster.

Oh my!

In fulfilling my promise to get back to blogging about technology, I thought I'd invest today's post to provide a slightly less sensationalist perspective on thin provisioning, storage capacity and energy efficiency.

And all I have to say about the bear is: remember, these are wild animals, and they're driven by instinct and not logic or trust.

Any resemblance between wild animals and industry experts is purely coincidental!

 

0.064: meet bob and joe

You may have run across these two already, but Bob and Joe are two rising superstars in the world of storage administration, and there's a lot of things we all can learn from these guys.

You know, things like "A Mind Is A Terrible Thing to Waste" (ad slogan quoted respectfully in honor of Black History Month).

So grab some popcorn, set aside a few minutes on your weekly timecard for OTJ training and tune in to these soon-to-be-classic edutorials (and if you only watch one, I recommend it be the last one):

Bob and Joe: Fun With Tape
 

Bob and Joe: Energy Efficiency
 

Bob and Joe: Mainframe Show and Tell
 

Oh, and I am very sorry, but I cannot promise that there won't be more of these in the future.

 

technorati tags: viral video,viral marketing,EMC,Symmetrix,Mainframe,Mainframe Storage,Energy Efficiency,Green IT,Tape is Dead

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.
 

0.050: 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.

0.046: spc-1 results for symmetrix dmx

This is your SPC-1 benchmark. And this is your SPC-1 benchmark on a calculator.

If you have lots of time and money on your hands (and something to prove, I guess), you can collect a boatload of hardware, create a totally unrealistic (and prohibitively expensive) configuration, execute the benchmark, independently validate your results, and wrap yourself in the banality of standardized testing to claim world dominance. (Oh, and hope no drives fail during your testing, because the added overhead of rebuilding a drive would skew the results, if you in fact included hot spares in your configuration in the first place - most don't).

Alternatively, now that EMC CTO and Distinguished Engineer Dr. Subramanian Kartik (aka dotConnector) has decoded the Q-factor for the SPC-1 benchmark, you can take the less expensive approach, and just run the SPC-1 on your handy-dandy calculator. Doesn't even have to be one of those fancy scientific calculators you just had to buy for your son or daughter - no heavy duty calculus required.

No, since Dr. Kartik has demonstrated beyond any doubt that the SPC-1 is nothing more than a measurement of the number of IOPS you can get per spindle, it's really simple. Plot out the slope of the line, plug in the number of drives you plan to use, and viola! SPC-1 IOPS, calculated within a few fractions of a percentage point of all historical measurements to date.

Heck, even the minor tweaking of the benchmark over the years doesn't seem to have made much of a difference - all the results fall on the same line, irrespective of version, platform or tested configuration!

Go figure! 
 

0.024: green envy and twisted truths

You usually can tell that you're on to something big when the competition starts trying to reshape the facts.

Today's case in point: EMC's recent DMX-4 launch and specifically the focus on the DMX-4's power efficiency advantage.

In the launch, EMC made three claims about the DMX's so-called "green" advantage over the competition:

1. The current DMX-3 requires less power than the competitor's high-end storage products
    
2. The DMX-4 and Enginuity 5772 delivers even more performance without requiring more power than the DMX-3
    
3. The DMX-4 will support the new 750GB SATA-II drives, for an even greater power savings (lower $/GB and Watts/GB/year)

Pretty simple and straightforward.

But obviously also a very uncomfortable set of claims for both the competition. And apparently for the EMC nay-sayers who apparently can't accept the notion that EMC could actually be better on anything, much less such a fundamental matter as power & cooling.

He Hu Shall Not Be Named (Nor Linked) attempts his usual blogketing misdirection by focusing on the math he couldn't decipher (because it's not that mythical Hitachi Math, I guess). Of course he also asserts that virtualization is the answer to everything, now including Green IT (is World Hunger next?). On the other coast, IBM Brand Manager (and Fellow Blogger) Tony Pearson tries to redirect the conversation to focus on the power-efficiency of Linux mainframes vs. Intel servers, even as IBM remains the major reseller of EMC's VMware virtualization platform for Intel servers. Neither disavows EMC's claims, or even mentions the power utilization of their respective high-end storage products (much less defends their power-hungry designs).

Then there's the self-anointed Anti-EMC community, made up of certain other Fellow Bloggers, Industry Analysts, 2-ego-centric industry pundits (he hates to be included in the 'Industry Analyst' category), and the occasional blog comment/message board/discussion forum "contributor." These folks have chimed in from virtually every corner of the world to challenge the claims of DMX-3 and DMX-4 power advantage. And almost to the person, they mistakenly assert that the DMX-4's power advantage is only dues to the SATA drives, making it a hollow claim. From that simple misrepresentation of the truth, the discussion devolves into challenges about the performance, applicability or viability of low-cost storage in an enterprise array.

Allow me to set the record straight -

Both the DMX-4 and the DMX-3 require less power (& cooling) to support the identical drive, port and memory configurations as the competition.

0.013: customers say the darnedest things

Well, it's the last week of the quarter, and things around work are much like they probably are at virtually every product company on the planet - everybody is on-call to do whatever it takes to close business and get the products shipped in order to recognize the revenue this quarter. Even many of us in engineering will be called in to help close deals - we even have a slogan for this practice: "Everyone Makes Closing Calls" (that's the EMC "squared" version).

Down the road in Franklin and Apex and over the pond in Cork, at this time of the quarter EMC stands for "Empty Manufacturing's Closets," the goal being that everything is in the trucks (or lorries) and well down the road by midnight Saturday, with the manufacturing floors as barren as Old Mother Hubbard's cupboards.

Given this quarterly ritual, and next week's impending US Independence holiday, I expect the blog traffic to be relatively lighter this week than others. So I thought I'd have a little fun between briefings and con-calls and explore a few of the odder things I've heard from customers and prospects over the years.

Regarding the title of today's entry, many of you probably remember the similarly-titled children's show hosted by Bill Cosby back in the 90's. Many of you will also remember that it was Art Linkletter who first ran the concept as a segment on his CBS radio show back in the 1940's and later on his TV show (from 1952 through 1970). Fewer of you will actually remember the name of that show: it was "Art Linkletter's House Party."

There - the genealogy is documented. Now I don't want to see any folderol out in blog-land about who actually invented the darnedest things nor who stole them from Art. Especially not from a certain inebriated mis-information peddler. OK?