the storage anarchist

1.012: flash drives in enterprise storage

Yesterday I presented a webcast on Enterprise Flash Drives to EMC's investment community, as part of Investor Relations' ongoing Tech Talk series. If you'd like to see it, the slides and replay are available on EMC.com here: Tech Talk for Investors: Flash Drives in Enterprise Storage, but only until July 25, 2008.

Chris Mellor has also reported about this presentation over on Blocks and Files in his "EMC on enterprise flash drives" analysis piece. (Thanks for noticing, Chris - glad you were able to participate).

On a related topic, Network World's Jon Brodkin takes a look into the growing market demand for Flash technology in his article titled Flash storage gets enterprise attention as prices decline. The article provides a fairly comprehensive look at what's going on in the realm of enterprise flash across both storage and server vendors, and it is definitely worth the read.

But I have to admit I was kinda surprised by this quote that Jon included from Michael Workman, president and CEO of Pillar Data Systems:

"The best use of solid-state disk is direct-attached, not in a shared network array. The reason for that is the latencies for solid-state disk are so low that putting it on a network to get at it actually makes the latency of the solid-state disk much worse than it could be."

IMHO, that's a pretty uninformed position to take, especially by the chief executive of an external storage vendor.
 

1.008: emc world 2008 - the follow up begins

Most of us have managed to find our way home from Sin City, and now we deal with the rapid decompression as we reenter the atmosphere of EMC World, the Work Edition.

Thankfully, those of us who are US-based had the extra 24-hours afforded by the Memorial Day holiday.

Lots was learned at EMC World, both by our customers and by the EMC developers that ran nearly 100% of the sessions. For customers, future IT strategies will be tuned to better leverage the current and future technologies; and for development, a better understanding of customer requirements and use cases will serve to refine the future products and implementations. Enabling and leveraging this symbiotic relationship between supplier and consumer is the foundation of what EMC World is all about.

If this was your first EMC World, I'm sure you were overwhelmed by both the breadth of topics and the unfettered access to the people who create these products.

And if you've never been to an EMC World (aka Wizards, aka Tech Summit), then you're probably wondering what all the hype has been about.

I'll use the words of a customer to explain...

 

0.073: 5773 > c

In case you've been wondering, the previously announced Q1'08 Symmetrix enhancements, including Enginuity 5773, the 73GB and 146GB enterprise flash drives, the 1 TB SATA-II drive and the new GigE I/O director all shipped on schedule last week. As usual, there's quite a bit to talk about, because in addition to what has been announced already, there are several additional features in this code release that revenue recognition rules prohibited EMC from disclosing until everyone was confident that they would actually make the GA release in Q1.

But discussion of perhaps the most significant new feature in 5773 was held back for another reason: to get all the patent applications filed before it was disclosed. This one new feature could well prove to be the foundation of a whole new era in remote replication - potentially changing the nature of distance replication more than flash drives will change the storage media end of the equation.

But it'll take a little explaining (hint: it has something to do with the title of this post), so before I get into the details, a little background...
 

0.069: i work with smart people

Lots of them, actually.

In fact, pretty much everyone I work with is smart. By definition. That's why they are at EMC in the first place - the company seeks out smart people, and smart people like to work with other smart people.

As a result, there are an amazing number of smart people at EMC.

But you know, with so many smart people around you, it is all too easy to overlook just how smart they really are.

Now, before I go any further, it is important to note EMC is intensely focused on inspiring, nurturing and acknowledging the contributions of its people. In fact, the most recent edition of EMC.Now (a quarterly magazine for EMC employees worldwide) included a review of several of the newer ways that EMC is cultivating inspiration across the company. I thought the article might be of interest my readers, so I requested and received permission to reprint it here:

EMC.now: Inspiration cultivation
Copyright 2008, EMC Corp. Reprinted With Permission.

After reading that article, you'll understand that inside EMC we frequently get the opportunity to celebrate the innovative contributions that our fellow employees around the globe make to the continuing success of EMC - it's part of our culture.

But when one of your peers gets external recognition, and it's the kind that puts him in the  company of the most notable software engineers in the history of computing, it really makes you sit up and take notice. I mean, to be recognized alongside the inventors of UNIX, TCP/IP, the remote procedure call, the World-Wide Web, Mosaic, java, TeX & PostScript, SMALLTALK and VisiCalc (to name a few), well...that puts you in a whole different class of "smart" in my book.

So please indulge me this post to say "Congratulations" to Amnon Naamad for his recent ACM Software Systems Award...

 

0.060: blinded by the light

For those of you who were so breath-taken by EMC's unexpected "viper on steroids" lightning strike with Enterprise Flash SSDs, here's my perspective on the rest of Monday's Symmetrix announcements:

They were pretty neat, too, although clearly not as
revolutionary
as the enterprise-class flash drives will be.

And so, before I dig into the rest of the neat that was announced, you gotta admit - it is truly exhilarating to be totally surprised with the announcement of a disruptive technology that could very well supercede the performance, power (and hopefully the cost) limitations of spinning disk drives!

Of course, the competition has responded with the expected aplomb. Hitachi has gone on record with the assertion that this is all an uninteresting niche play limited to the needs of the Fortune 50 . Meanwhile, IBM's designated storage blogger is gleefully cheering from the sidelines that EMC is retreating to its roots in solid-state storage.

Methinks perhaps they've been blinded by the flash (if not outright  blind-sided).

From my perspective, the roots of the so-called EMC Specialty Shop aren't in solid-state storage at all, but rather they are entwined with a proven track record of out-innovating competitors in the storage space for nearly 3 decades. You need only look at EMC's Innovation Timeline to see the legacy of being the first to deliver solutions to very real and broad-based customer problems over that timeframe - from RAID to ICDA to SRDF to DMX and now flash drives.

Even IBM's recent XIV acquisition is an admission of that fact, coming months after Joe Tucci let the world know that EMC had set its sights on the cloud storage market with the impending Hulk & Maui products. And given that it is likely to be at least a year before the IBM Blue logo goes on the Nextra box and it gets into the bags of IBM's mainstream sales machine, I suspect that Hulk/Maui will technically beat IBM into that market as well.

That said, rest assured that neither IBM nor Hitachi are internally treating enterprise-ready flash drives as another Al Capone's vault. Inside they all (now) know that enterprise flash drives are very real, that they serve a very real and current customer problem, that they will inevitably change the way we think about storage in the future, and that they need scramble to catch up to the lead that EMC has established. They're not really stoopid - they'll be trying to get into the game as quickly as they can.

And while today's enterprise-flash drive benefits may primarily be their incredibly fast response times and energy-efficient IOPS/watt, we all know that customer demand and cost erosion will rapidly expand the market. The future of flash-based storage is inarguably ahead of us.

As to why TonyP would try (in his blog) to compare the 73GB & 146GB enterprise flash drives that EMC just announced to the new "larger" 31.5GB (and 10x slower) consumer-grade flash drives that IBM just announced this week for their blade servers (the drives that come with only a one-year, limited warranty) ?

I honestly haven't a clue.

 
OK - enough of that fun. On with the new Symmetrix stuff...as usual, there's lots to talk about! 
 

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.

0.033: elvis has left the building

Yesterday afternoon it became official: with the signing of the Product Ship Authorization (PSA), Enginuity release 5772+ ("plus") and the Symmetrix DMX-4 are now Generally Available.

Less than 24 hours later, shipments of both are already underway (along with the updated releases of Symmetrix Management Console, Solutions Enabler, the SMI-S provider and the mainframe Host Components, just for completeness).

Last month, I described the content and feature set of DMX-4 and the accompanying Enginuity 5772+ release (which also runs on existing DMX-3 platforms). There are lots of highlights, including the DMX-4's 4Gb back-end and its first (and still only) native support for SATA-II drives. And numerous software enhancements that deliver significantly improved response time, throughput and replication capabilities for both DMX-3 and DMX-4.

Since the announcement, customer interest in DMX-4 and the new software update has been strong, while the competitive response has been noticeably weak . In fact, I think that almost all of the DMX-4's in backlog will be shipping with at least some 500GB SATA-II drives alongside the faster FC capacity, in stark contradiction to the assertions that customers (and certain vendors) don't want to put lower tier data into their Tier 1 platform.

And like I said - it's great when you're the only SATA game in town. And even better when it's a game customers want to play. I expect our sales teams will be leveraging this /GB advantage pretty heavily for the foreseeable future.

Hats off to the team of development, quality assurance, customer service, product management, marketing, professional services, training, manufacturing, finance and human resources for a job well done! It takes more than a village, and y'all done good.
 

but wait - there's more!

0.029: a perspective on software architecture and engineering

I've been participating in some brainstorming/debates about the requirements and planning the implementation process for one of those "next big thing" type projects over the past several weeks (no, sorry, I can't tell you what it is ).

One of the clean-sheet discussions we've been having is about which comes first: hardware or software? Now, deep down, we all really know that the answer is that we have to design a system of complimentary parts. But it is somewhat funny (to me, at least) that the Software Gurus want to focus on the hardware first, while the Hardware Gurus want to know what the software intends to do before they tack down a strawman for the physical platform.

At least everyone is actively working together, which is always a plus.

From the HW perspectives, designing the hardware platform is reasonably straightforward - in fact, we already have our equivalent of the back-of-the-napkin design spec completed (in full-motion PowerPoint, no less). And from the SW perspective, well - you just gotta admire the cowboys who are confident that they can "break" (or "gentle") just about anything the HW dudes throw at them.

But we haven't quite converged on how the whole thing's supposed to work when we're done.

So when one of us challenged the team to start roughing out the Software Architecture, we all got a chuckle by the following emailed response from one of the lead SW engineers...

0.019: dmx-4 and oh so much more

As you probably already have seen, EMC had a pretty major platforms update announcement on Monday, with updates to virtually every storage platform product we offer.

Given the size of the company and the scope of our product portfolio, gone are the days when we have the luxury of launching only on a single product at a time -- there just aren't enough weeks in the year (and it does take weeks, with all the pre-briefings, scheduling, invitations, etc.). So we pretty much have to do these so-called "roll-up" announcements, and this one was pretty significant.

In fact, there were so many, many things announced across Symmetrix, CLARiiON, Celerra and Centera that it's near impossible to summarize them all in one place. For the next several weeks, if you want to learn about specific updates, I invite you to visit www.EMC.com directly. You can select the key product line areas from the rotating landing page banner, or you can follow the link to the Executive Summary presented by Barbara Robidoux, the Storage Platforms Marketing VP (but be forewarned, she has a LOT to summarize!).

I'll throw in a special recognition of EMC's marketing folks who created this launch - they've done a bang-up job of announcing a boatload of stuff without the overwhelming use of superlatives and hyperbole. In fact, it's obvious that there was a focused effort to communicate this announcement in terms of realizable customer benefits, instead of mind-numbing speeds-and-feeds. It certainly makes everybody's job easier when we don't have to answer questions like "so what?"

But if you really want to know the inside scoop about the launch, you've come to the right place. Well, so far as the Symmetrix side of the launch is concerned that is. My pal Storagezilla has adeptly covered the CLARiiON, Celerra, Centera, and RainFinity announcements over at his blog.

So, want to know more about DMX-4? Read on, Gunga Din!

0.008: world's largest appliance

Amidst all the hubbub and blogging about Hitachi's new USP-V, several people (including yours truly) noted that it seemed odd that Hitachi would double the processor speed inside their array, yet didn't add support for more drives or larger drives than the original (30 month old) USP supports.

And when I noted that only the DMX-3 supports more than 1152 drives (up to 2400, in fact), I was promptly slapped with the "FUD-slinger" label. I was even challenged to defend myself with evidence of ANY customer using 2400 drives, and my assertion that there are several installed DMX-3s with more than 1152 drives (the current USP/USPV maximum) was seemingly dismissed as insufficient evidence of demand.

On Monday, at EMC World 2007 in Orlando, EMC Introduced The World's Largest Open Systems Virtual Tape Library, built upon configurations of the Symmetrix DMX-3 with up to 2400 500GB low-cost Fibre Channel drives. (This is apparently what the Backup Wizard was hinting about so cryptically last week).

Although we may not have sold or installed one yet (the DL6000's won't be GA until June), I feel somewhat vindicated. The exploding customer demand for cost-effective VTL (and backup to disk) solutions are precisely the sort of applications that motivates EMC to build, qualify and support modular arrays that can scale to huge proportions within a single platform.

And now we've taken the World's Largest Storage Array, and made it also the World's Largest Virtual Tape Appliance.

Go Figure!

0.005: self tuning storage - today & tomorrow

Over in the land of Dullness, Chris Evans drops an interesting challenge - self-tuning storage.

For now, I'll overlook his jabs about the "whose array is better" tete-a-tete and focus instead on the admittedly more interesting story (although I will note that Hu's pretty much been playing solitaire in the "mine's better" game until the Anarchist came along ;*).

Self-Tuning Storage: that's what we've been working on with Symmetrix for about 16 years.

Now, I was going to write about this from an entirely different angle, exploring how no matter how much you improve on the interface for managing performance, customers will want more. I'll (eventually) get to that, but first things first.

Fact is, Symmetrix was the first self-tuning storage array, and remains essentially the only array that actively optimizes itself, in real time, dynamically under changing workloads, with little or no need for human intervention.

It's not yet perfected or complete. But Enginuity 5772 takes this to a new level.

0.003: beware the blogger: urban folklore at work

The trouble with tribbles (er) blogging is that you just never know who (or what) to believe. Too bad there isn't an automated BS Detector that could tell you in advance when something simply isn't true.

Usually, these misrepresentations result in little measurable or lasting damage. But occasionally they take on a life of their own. Left unchecked, they get repeated so often and with such conviction that people actually start to believe them.

In many (hopefully most) cases, such untruths may be unintentional and accidental. These usually get caught early, and before they are unwittingly repeated far and wide. I'm sure that sooner or later we all get caught in a misunderstanding or even the context-changing typo here and there.

But all too often, these untruths have every appearance of being intentional. There are those who stop at nothing to make a point, and who have no qualms in adjusting the facts to support their position. And others will resort to the age-old marketing tactic of comparing their TODAY product to the competition's YESTERDAY product in their quest to establish the perception of radical superiority.

And some people are so durn good at twisting truths that their assertions become part of the urban folklore sometimes faster than facts and realities do.

Who ya gonna call?