the storage anarchist

1.057: symmetrix v-max - scale up, scale out, scale away!

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

Introducing the new Symmetrix V-Max^tm – the first enterprise storage platform to integrate the performance and efficiency of Scale-Up with the cost-effective flexibility of Scale-Out.

• Simple: Redefines enterprise storage architecture, ease-of-use and automation
• Scalable: start small, grow incrementally, supporting multiple tiers in a single array
• Cost-effective: more IOPS and more usable capacity per dollar (euro)
• Efficient: more IOPS and more usable GB per kilowatt
• Autonomic: Optimized for Fully Automated Storage Tiering across Flash, Fibre and SATA
• Compatible: Common management and SRDF interoperability with Symmetrix DMX
• Ready: Purpose-built for the Virtual Data Center

When you can list all those attributes for a single storage platform, you’ve made a statement.

Several years in development, today the new Symmetrix V-Max takes its place atop the world of external storage – right above the reigning #1 enterprise storage platform (according to IDC), the Symmetrix DMX4.

With its revolutionary scale-out Virtual Matrix Architecture, the Symmetrix V-Max literally redefines not only enterprise-class storage, but the entire storage landscape – because when an enterprise array offers the simplicity, performance, TCO, scale and flexibility previously found only in midrange offerings, you know you’ll change the world.

(By the way, BOTH Symmetrix DMX4 and Symmetrix V-Max are newer than either of IBM's and Hitachi's flagship enterprise arrays. It's like they're asleep at the wheel!)

And watch-out, you enterprise wanna-bees; V-Max has just raised the bar.

So, let’s take a look at the new king of the storage hill… 
 

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…

1.047: 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.
 

1.030: flash as cache - really?

Over the past week or so, Robin Harris, Chuck Hollis and Stephen Foskett each discussed the "appropriate" use of flash technology going forward. Chuck comes down pretty solidly in the "best as persistent storage" camp, while Robin seems more aligned with FusionIO and the "flash as cache" side of the argument, while Stephen seems content to accept that flash will appear at both the initiator and the target sides of the I/O conversation.

I myself tend to agree with Stephen.

BUT!

(You know there's always a BUT! with me).

A few things have been nagging at me about this whole flash-as-cache discourse. The first is centered around the fact that it takes longer to WRITE a block to NAND flash than it does to READ it.

Unlike traditional SDRAM where reads and writes complete at the same speed, with NAND even if your flash controller is smart enough to asynchronously pre-erase blocks, it still takes longer to perform a write than a read. And if you take the time to verify the accuracy of the write, it gets even worse.

So my question is, since it takes longer to write than to read a NAND block, and every read hit required at least one prior write:

What read hit ratios and repetitive reads of a block
are required to overcome the NAND write penalty?

inquiring minds want to know...

1.029: atmos. with, and without, the sphere

I'm just back from vacation cruising several Italian, French and Spanish ports aboard the Wind Star on the Mediterranean with my wife. It was a relaxing, multi-cultural Adventures Afloat trip arranged by her employer (Elderhostel), a not-for-profit who specialize in educational travel and learning opportunities. With a foundational belief that learning is an integral part of a healthy and fulfilling life, the organization offers its unique Adventures in Lifelong Learning to anyone who is interested - at an exceptional value! So, if you're looking for a travel programme with more than just the usual tourist trap visits, I encourage you to visit their web site and/or order their free catalog.

Oh, and don't let the name fool you: participation is quite diverse, and you'd better be in good shape or you might just get left behind.

Anyway, being on such a trip with my wife, I wisely avoided all things work for the duration.

Preserving the atmosphere, you might say.

But so much has gone on in the past couple of weeks, I thought I'd take a stab at connecting some of the key sights from my cruise with a few of the more interesting events of the past week or so.

So let's have a little fun. Shall we?
 

1.028: benchmarketing. badly.

OK, so my regular readers know where I stand on so-called "standardized" storage benchmarks: they are bad for our industry, and they lead customers (and vendors) to do dumb things.

For context, newcomers are encouraged to revisit my earlier post on the subject: 0.021 the case against standardized (performance) testing. 

As if  to underscore my point, there have recently been three separate applications of what I'll call Bad Benchmarketing that have caught my attention:

1. IBM's Quicksilver science experiment to attain 1M IOPS using jury-rigged unreleased kit
2. Texas Memory Systems' inevitable response to Quicksilver using equally jury rigged kit
3. IBM's "enterprise" benchmark of the new DS5000, commissioned to ESG

IMHO, as I'll explain below, this sort of benchmarketing isn't helping consumers to make informed decisions. In fact, if anything, these are nothing more than carefully architected marketing ploys masked as "scientifically representative tests" intended to influence the relative naïveté of the masses who truly have no real understanding of how to measure or compare performance.

Benchmarketing personified.

UPDATED Oct 31, 2008 with corrections provided by BarryW (IBM) and Woody Hutsell (RamSAN).

1.026: development strategies for solid state storage

There have been some good discussion started on last week's flash wars post. This week, Marc Farley has extended the conversation a bit to include the perspective of NAND-vs.-SDRAM for I/O caching and raises some of the challenges of using solid-state storage merely as a disk drive. I've commented on his post with some added perspective, and I encourage others to weigh in with their own points of view, both here and over on Marc's blog.

Another battle front in these so-called flash wars is whether or not application re-architecture and custom development will be required to leverage the value of NAND flash.

Clearly, integrating NAND as a cache buffer in front of spinning disks might require some hefty integration work - or perhaps not, as has been suggested by the ZFS folks. On the other hand, using a flash SSD in place of a bunch of 15K rpm disk drives requires little more than segmenting the application I/O workload onto the faster media - database administrators and applications developers already do this today when they segment tables and indexes between 15K rpm and 10K rpm drives (for example).

My own opinion is that while solid-state storage will enable application architects as programmers some new opportunities, the fact is that most applications today are able to gain incredible acceleration from DRAM-based solid-state storage and from intelligent cached disk arrays with little or no programming required. In one test case I've seen, simply moving the LUNs off of the 8 heaviest utilized drives from a workload that spans 192 15K rpm 146GB disk drives onto 8 146GB enterprise flash drives resulted in reducing average response times across all the drives by more than 60%. That's a huge improvement that can drive significant ROI without the inherent overhead or complexity of the development/test/change control process.

Not to be outdone by Marc's near-daily vidblog posts, I was recently interviewed on the subject of developing for flash technology by the EMC Developer's Network. If you are an applications developer interested in what it takes to leverage the performance benefit of flash, you might enjoy the interview.

And if you develop applications or tools for use with (or on) EMC products who isn't really interested in developing for flash storage, you might still want to do some social networking with other developers at the new EMC Developer Network - it's the essential community for the EMC developer.

 

technorati tags: enterprise flash drives,EFDs,EMC,Symmetrix,NAND flash,EMC Developer Network,storage cache,application acceleration,database acceleration,SSDs,solid-state storage

1.025: flash wars and the great debate

No, I'm not talking about the on-again US presidential debates scheduled for tonight in at Ole Miss.

Nor the decades-long debate over whether Nikon or Canon make the best intelligent TTL flashes for their cameras. (I choose Canon).

I'm referring to the ongoing debate about where NAND Flash should be used - server, network or storage.

It seems that everywhere I turn I find proponents arguing about where the technology is "best utilized." And like the presidential debates, the positions tend to fall along party lines: server vendors and their suppliers insist you can't get everything NAND has to offer unless you install in right next to the server CPU, ideally with a native memory bus or I/O bus (e.g. PCI/x) interface; the external storage vendors and their supply chain insist that the disk drive form factor and interface is best; and of course the network storage appliance world insists that NAND belongs as a service in the middle.

And they're all correct.

That's right - while EMC and I are both proponents of using persistent solid state storage as a faster alternative to spinning rust, I personally believe that there is no reason the technology won't be applied at every layer - and probably in multiple places along the same I/O path!

In support of my postulate, look no further than all the rest of computing technology - CPU's, DDR SDRAM, spinning disks, PCI/x, protocols, interfaces, connectivity, etc...every single component - both hardware and software - is today applied in servers, and in networks, and in external storage. We put DDR SDRAM and/or processing power into external storage devices and connect servers to them using Fibre Channel, and we also build servers with terabytes of addressable local memory - both approaches can accelerate existing applications without requiring applications to be re-architected or redesigned.

Is there any reason to believe that NAND (or any solid state storage technology) should be applied any differently?

I think not.

So why the continuing debate?

 

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...

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

1.012: 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.
 

1.006: enterprise flash: when speed is what you need

I wish I had come up with that title for the presentation I'm about to give here at EMC World, but I didn't. Instead my session has the awe-inspiring title of "Performance Best Practices: Symmetrix Flash Drives."

Network World gets the credit for the title of this post. It is actually the headline for the podcast interview that I did with them on the differentiation and benefits of the new Enterprise Flash Drives that EMC has been shipping for the Symmetrix DMX-4 since Q1'2008.

Gotta admit the timing of this podcast is interesting, though. Not only am I presenting a superset of this discussion at EMC World today, but this morning Hitachi did a 180 on their prior nonchalance over flash technology That's right, despite HHSNBN's repeated public denials that there is any reason for anyone to need flash drives, Hitachi today announced that they indeed did intend to announce something about adding some kind of flash drives from one or more unspecified vendors in an unknown capacity point  (or points) with undefined performance and reliability to their storage lineup sometime late in Q4 (whether calendar or fiscal Q4 was apparently not mentioned).

Gotta love the specificity!

I hope to post more on both topics later this week (both my EMC World flash presentation and Hitachi's latest attempt-to-catch-up-and-stop-the-bleeding announcement)

For now, here's the link my enterprise flash interview on  Network World Panorama.

Enjoy!

 

technorati tags: enterprise flash drives,EMC,Symmetrix DMX-4,Network World Panorama,SSDs,flash SSDs,HHSNBN

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...
 

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!

 

0.076: 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...

 

0.074: emc world 2008

EMC World 2008 is just about a month and a half away, and the preparation  activity around the office is really picking up. Presentation content is being reviewed and critiqued, the kinks are getting worked out of the hands-on workshops and show-floor challenges, the chatchkies and prizes are starting to come in, and everyone's travel arrangements are being buttoned up.

And now that Q1 is complete (and 5773 is shipping), the excitement will really start building, hopefully to crescendo May 19-22 in Las Vegas.

A couple of weeks ago, I recorded a "teaser" for my session on Flash Drive performance and best practices. Mostly, the teaser is just the marketing side of the story. In my session I'll actually be diving into details on the performance customers can expect to attain for different workloads, as well as discussing the various tools that can be used to identify applications (or parts of applications) that could benefit most from sub-millisecond response times that Enterprise Flash Drives deliver on Symmetrix.

(Check out the video after the page break)

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...

 

0.068: 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]
 

0.063: 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?

0.060: 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! 
 

0.048: 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!

0.046: 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! 
 

0.043: 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.

0.041: the oxymoronic spc-1 results from sun and hp

OK, now this is really, REALLY funny. I have to give credit to Steve Duplessie for pointing this out, but did you realize that both the HP and Sun entries for the USP-V on the SPC-1 results page are the identical documents posted by Hitachi?

The hilarious oxymoron here is that the server platform used by Hitachi is the IBM p5 595 Model 9119. Not an HP SuperDome, nor a Sun Enterprise M9000 or a Fire E25K. In fact, it seems that both Sun and HP have published the Hitachi SPC results verbatim - complete with photos of the p5 and everything. Only the title page and the product name has been changed.

Seems strange, given that the SPC-1 is supposed to be a storage benchmark - some might assume that the choice of server wouldn't have any bearing on the results - ANY server should get the same answers using the same storage - right? (Nope - wrong. Even the SPC knows that isn't true...that's why they include the disclaimer I posted about earlier.)

Now given that neither Sun nor HP specialize in enterprise-class storage, opting instead to OEM the wares of the world's largest tractor manufacturer, I'm sure that I'm not the only one that finds it ironic that they'd both choose to promote their #1 competitor's server platform in their quest to establish storage superiority.

Can it be that challenging EMC to an SPC duel is more important to HP & Sun than conceding the server market to IBM?
 

0.040: where's the spc disclaimer?

There's been lots of feedback and response to my post earlier this week on Hitachi's USP-V SPC-1 results. Most of it has been very insightful, including additional observations by several people that I only scratched the surface on the inconsistencies between the various tested platforms, etc. From the responses, I am encouraged that many of you are actually taking the time to more thoroughly research and understand exactly what the SPC does, and does not, actually mean.

Importantly, the SPC benchmarks are not a test of whether a platform is "enterprise" or not. Nor is it appropriate to use the results as the basis claim superiority within any such category. In fact, the SPC tests are intentionally agnostic to the "class" of storage, even while they are intentionally cache-hostile benchmarks (noting that most "enterprise" arrays do typically have lots of cache and do derive performance benefits from large cache, which the SPC tests try to factor out of the results).

So since the SPC doesn't define a criteria or measurement of "enterprise" any such claims of "superiority within class" are merely  examples of Bad Blogketing, in the same category as Hitachi Math- unsubstantiated, unverifiable, and bearing no real relationship to reality.

In fact, the SPC disclaimer, taken directly from the specifications of the SPC-1 tests, says exactly this.
 

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?
 

0.033: 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!

0.021 the case against standardized (performance) testing

Fellow blogger Tony Pearson has just completed a week-long series on the values and merits of standardized storage performance benchmarking, in a not-so-subtle attempt to justify his recent assertion that a SPC-2 win for the SVC has awe-inspiring relevance to customers. And he's done so in an eloquent, perhaps even masterful manner, deftly leveraging the subtleties and nuances of the English language (who knew?) to make his case.

But if you ask me, he's failed miserably. Unless his readers get lost in the misdirection and fail to realize that his metaphors are totally unrelated to the world of storage performance. In fact, his tutorial underscores the problems associated with standardized testing.

Elsewhere in the blogosphere, I have offered my own personal perspective on standardized benchmarking, which boils down to this:

• Standardized benchmarking oversimplifies the complex interactions that make up a real-world environment --the requirement for "controlled and repeatable" forces standardized benchmarks to exclude the chaos of random, but normally occurring, events and overheads, often masking or even intentionally subverting key differentiating capabilities of the test targets
   
• The inherent quest to be best in standardized benchmarks inevitably drives participants in to optimize their test targets for the test
   
• There is very little documented correlation between standardized testing results and the intended real-world application of the test target, and most people don't understand what the tests actually measure
   
• The inbred survival instincts of humans leads us to subconsciously establish relationships and hierarchies between similar objects, and in the absence of in-depth situational/contextual understanding, we will assign "better" based solely on whatever limited data points are available to us

I know - heady assertions, and my opinions all. But note that I harbor these opinions for ANY standardized test, be it the SPC, TPC, MPG, EER, SAT or every state's equivalent of MCAS. And my reasoning is simple:

Standardized testing homogenizes comparisons to a meaningless baseline that masks the unique strengths of the test targets, be they cars, servers, storage arrays or high school students. Unless you fully understand the test itself and the relevant requirements of your own application of the test target, you can draw no real conclusions on how standardized test results apply to your expected results.

So when Tony tries to convince readers that the SPC is like MPG, well...you know me, I gotta take exception.

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!

0.006: 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?

0.005: 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.