Category Archives: Dell

DellEMC SC progressing well

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[Preamble: I was a delegate of Storage Field Day 14. My expenses, travel and accommodation were paid for by GestaltIT, the organizer and I was not obligated to blog or promote the technologies presented at this event. The content of this blog is of my own opinions and views]

I haven’t had a preview of the Compellent technology for a long time. My buddies at Impact Business Solutions were the first to introduce the Compellent technology called Data Progression to the local Malaysian market and I was invited to a preview back then. Around the same time, I also recalled another rather similar preview invitation by PTC Singapore for the 3PAR technology called Adaptive Provisioning (it is called Adaptive Optimization now).

Storage tiering was on the rise in the 2009-2010 years. Both Compellent and 3PAR were neck and neck leading the conversation and mind share of storage tiering, and IBM easyTIER and EMC FAST (Fully Automated Storage Tiering) were nowhere to be seen or heard. Vividly, the Compellent Data Progression technology was much more elegant compared to the 3PAR technology. While both intelligent storage tiering technologies were equally good, I took that the 3PAR founders were ex-Sun Microsystems folks, and Unix folks sucked at UX. In this case, Compellent’s Data Progression was a definitely a leg up better than 3PAR.

History aside, this week I have the chance to get a new preview of the Compellent technology again. Compellent was now rebranded as the SC series and was positioned as the mid-range storage arrays of DellEMC. And together with the other Storage Field Day 14 delegates, I have the pleasure to experience the latest SC Data Progression technology update, as well their latest SC All-Flash.

In Data Progression, one interesting feature which caught my attention was the RAID Tiering. This was a dynamic auto expand and auto contract set of RAID tiers – RAID 10 and RAID 5/6 in the Fast Tier and RAID 5/6 in the Lower Tier. RAID 10, RAID 5 and RAID 6 on the same set of drives (including SSDs), and depending on the “hotness” of the data, the location of the data blocks switched between the several RAID tiers in the Fast Tier. Over a longer period, the data blocks would relocate transparently to the Capacity Tier from the Fast Tier.

The Data Progression technology is extremely efficient. The movement of the data between the RAID Tiers and between the Performance/Capacity Tiers are in pages instead of blocks, making the write penalty and bandwidth to a negligible minimum.

The Storage Field Day 14 delegates were also privileged to be the first to get into the deep dive of the new All-Flash SC, just days of the announcement of the All-Flash SC. The All Flash SC redefines and refines the Data Progression to the next level. Among the new optimization, NAND Flash in the SC (both SLCs and MLCs, read-intensive and write-intensive) set the Data Progression default page size from 2MB to 512KB. These smaller 512KB pages enabled reduced bandwidth for tiering between the write-intensive and the read-intensive tier.

I didn’t get the latest SC family photos yet, but I managed to grab a screenshot of the announcement from The Register of the new DellEMC SC Series.

I was very encouraged with the DellEMC Midrange Storage presentation. Besides giving us a fantastic deep dive about the DellEMC SC All-Flash Storage, I was also very impressed by the candid and straightforward attitude of the team, led by their VP of Product Management, Pierluca Chiodelli. An EMC veteran, he was taking up the hard questions onslaught by the SFD14 delegate like a pro. His team’s demeanour was critical in instilling confidence and trust in how the bloggers and the analysts viewed Dell EMC merger, and how the SC and the Unity series would pan out in the technology roadmap.

Unlike the fiasco I went through with the DellEMC Forum 2017 in Malaysia, where I was disturbed with 3 calls in 3 consecutive days by DellEMC Malaysia, I was left with a profound respect for this DellEMC Storage team. They strongly supported their position within the DellEMC storage universe, and imparted their confidence in their technology solution in the marketplace.

Without a doubt, in my point of view, this DellEMC Mid-Range Storage team was the best I have enjoyed in Storage Field Day 14. Thank you.

Praying to the hypervisor God

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I was reading a great article by Frank Denneman about storage intelligence moving up the stack. It was pretty much in line with what I have been observing in the past 18 months or so, about the storage pendulum having swung back to DAS (direct attached storage). To be more precise, the DAS form factor I am referring to are physical server hardware that houses many disk drives.

Like it or not, the hypervisor has become the center of the universe in the IT space. VMware has become the indomitable force in the hypervisor technology, with Microsoft Hyper-V playing catch-up. The seismic shift of these 2 hypervisor technologies are leading storage vendors to place them on to the altar and revering them as deities. The others, with the likes of Xen and KVM, and to lesser extent Solaris Containers aren’t really worth mentioning.

This shift, as the pendulum swings from networked storage back to internal “direct-attached” storage are dictated by 4 main technology factors:

  • The x86 server architecture
  • Software-defined
  • Scale-out architecture
  • Flash-based storage technology

Anyone remember Thumper? Not the Disney character from the Bambi movie!

thumper-bambi-cartoon-character

When the SunFire X4500 (aka Thumper) was first released in (intermission: checking Wiki for the right year) in 2006, I felt that significant wound inflicted in the networked storage industry. Instead of the usual 4-8 hard disk drives in the all the industry servers at the time, the X4500 4U chassis housed 48 hard disk drives. The design and architecture were so astounding to me, I even went and bought a 1U SunFire X4150 for my personal server collection. Such was my adoration for Sun’s technology at the time.

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Convergence data strategy should not forget the branches

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The word “CONVERGENCE” is boiling over as the IT industry goes gaga over darlings like Simplivity and Nutanix, and the hyper-convergence market. Yet, if we take a step back and remove our emotional attachment from the frenzy, we realize that the application and implementation of hyper-convergence technologies forgot one crucial element – The other people and the other offices!

ROBOs (remote offices branch offices) are part of the organization, and often they are given the shorter end of the straw. ROBOs are like the family’s black sheeps. You know they are there but there is little mention of them most of the time.

Of course, through the decades, there are efforts to consolidate the organization’s circle to include ROBOs but somehow, technology was lacking. FTP used to be a popular but crude technology that binds the branch offices and the headquarter’s operations and data services. FTP is still used today, in countries where network bandwidth costs a premium. Data cloud services are beginning to appear of part of the organization’s outreaching strategy to include ROBOs but the fear of security weaknesses, data breaches and misuses is always there. Often, concerns of the weaknesses of the cloud overcome whatever bold strategies concocted and designed.

For those organizations in between, WAN acceleration/optimization techonolgy is another option. Companies like Riverbed, Silverpeak, F5 and Ipanema have addressed the ROBOs data strategy market well several years ago, but the demand for greater data consolidation and centralization, tighter and more effective data management and data control to meet the data compliance and data governance requirements, has grown much more sophisticated and advanced. Continue reading →

It’s all about executing the story

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I have been in hibernation mode, with a bit of “writer’s block”.

I woke up in Bangalore in India at 3am, not having adjusted myself to the local timezone. Plenty of things were on my mind but I can’t help thinking about what’s happening in the enterprise storage market after the Gartner Worldwide External Controller-Based report for 4Q12 came out  last night. Below is the consolidated table from Gartner:

Just a few weeks ago, it was IDC with its Worldwide Disk Storage Tracker and below is their table as well:

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VMware in step 1 breaking big 6 hegemony

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Happy Lunar New Year! This is the Year of the Water Snake, which just commenced 3 days ago.

I have always maintain that VMware has to power to become a storage killer. I mentioned that it was a silent storage killer in my blog post many moons ago.

And this week, VMware is not so silent anymore. Earlier this week, VMware had just acquired Virsto, a storage hypervisor technology company. News of the acquisition are plentiful on the web and can be found here and here. VMware is seriously pursuing its “Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC)” agenda and having completed its software-defined networking component with the acquisition of Nicira back in July 2012, the acquisition of Virsto represents another bedrock component of SDDC, software-defined storage.

Who is Virsto and what do they do? Well, in a nutshell, they abstract the underlying storage architecture and presents a single, global namespace for storage, a big storage pool for VM datastores. I got to know about their presence last year, when I was researching on the topic of storage virtualization.

I was looking at Datacore first, because I was familiar with Datacore. I got to know Roni Putra, Datacore’s CTO, through a mutual friend, when he was back in Malaysia. There was a sense of pride knowing that Roni is a Malaysian. That was back in 2004. But Datacore isn’t the only player in the game, because the market is teeming with folks like Tintri, Nutanix, IBM, HDS and many more. It just so happens that Virsto has caught the eye of VMware as it embarks its first high-profile step (the one that VMware actually steps on the toes of the Storage Big 6 literally) into the storage game. The Big 6 are EMC, NetApp, IBM, HP, HDS and Dell (maybe I should include Fujitsu as well, since it has been taking market share of late)

Virsto installs as a VSA (virtual storage appliance) into ESXi, and in version 2.0, it plugs right in as an almost-native feature of ESXi, not a vCenter tab like most other storage. It looks and feels very much like a vSphere functionality and this blurs the lines of storage and VM management. To the vSphere administrator, the only time it needs to be involved in storage administration is when he/she is provisioning storage or expanding it. Those are the only 2 common “touch-points” that a vSphere administrator has to deal with storage. This, therefore, simplifies the administration and management job.

Here’s a look at the Virsto Storage Hypervisor architecture (credits to Google Images):

What Virsto does, as I understand from high-level, is to take any commodity storage and provides a virtual storage layer and consolidate them into a very large storage pool. The storage pool is called vSpace (previously known as LiveSpace?) and “allocates” Virsto vDisks to each VMs. Each Visto vDisk will look like a native zeroed thick VMDK, with the space efficiency of Linked Clones, but without the performance penalty of provisioning them.  The Virsto vDisks are presented as NFS exports to each VM.

Another important component is the asynchronous write to Virsto vLogs. This is configured at the deployment stage, and this is basically a software-based write cache, quickly acknowledging all writes for write optimization and in the background, asynchronously de-staged to the vSpace. Obviously it will have its own “secret sauce” to optimize the writes.

Within the vSpace, as disk clone groups internal to the Virsto, storage related features such as tiering, thin provisioning, cloning and snapshots are part and parcel of it. Other strong features of Virsto are its workflow wizard in storage provisioning, and its intuitive built-in performance and management console.

As with most technology acquisitions, the company will eventually come to a fork where they have to decide which way to go. VMware has experienced it before with its Nicira acquisition. It had to decide between VxLAN (an IETF standard popularized by Cisco) or Nicira’s own STT (Stateless Transport Tunneling). There is no clear winner because choosing one over the other will have its rewards and losses.

Likewise, the Virsto acquisition will have to be packaged in a friendly manner by VMware. It does not want to step on all toes of its storage Big 6 partners (yet). It still has to abide to some industry “co-opetition” game rules but it has started the ball rolling.

And I see that 2 critical disruptive points about this acquisition in this:

  1. It has endorsed the software-defined storage/storage hypervisor/storage virtualization technology and started the commodity storage hardware technology wave. This could the beginning of the end of proprietary storage hardware. This is also helped by other factors such as the Open Compute Project by Facebook. Read my blog post here.
  2. It is pushing VMware into a monopoly ala-Microsoft of the yesteryear. But this time around, Microsoft Hyper-V could be the benefactor of the VMware agenda. No wonder VMware needs to restructure and streamline its business. News of VMware laying off about 900 staff can be read here. Its unfavourable news of its shares going down can be read here.

I am sure the Storage Big 6 is on the alert and is probably already building other technology and partnerships beyond VMware. It the natural thing to do but there is no stopping VMware if it wants to step on the Big 6 toes now!

Is there no one to challenge EMC?

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It’s been a busy, busy month for me.

And when the IDC Worldwide Quarterly Disk Storage Systems Tracker for 3Q12 came out last week, I was reading in awe how impressive EMC was at the figures that came out. But most impressive of all is how the storage market continue to grow despite very challenging and uncertain business conditions. With the Eurozone crisis, China experiencing lower economic growth numbers and the uncertainty in the US economic sectors, it is unbelievable that the storage market grew 24.4% y-o-y. And for the first time, 7,104PB was shipped! Yes folks, more than 7 exabytes was shipped during that period!

In the Top 5 external disk storage market based on revenue, only EMC and HDS recorded respectable growth, recording 8.7% and 13.8% respectively. NetApp, my “little engine that could” seems to be running out of steam, earning only 0.9% growth. The rest of the field, IBM and HP, recorded negative growth. Here’s a look at the Top 5 and the rest of the pack:

HP -11% decline is shocking to me, and given the woes after woes that HP has been experiencing, HP has not seen the bottom yet. Let’s hope that the new slew of HP storage products and technologies announced at HP Discover 2012 will lift them up. It also looked like a total rebranding of the HP storage products as well, with a big play on the word “Store”. They have names like StoreOnce, StoreServ, StoreAll, StoreVirtual, StoreEasy and perhaps more coming.

The Open SAN market, which includes iSCSI has EMC again at Number 1, with 29.8%, followed by IBM (14%), HDS (12.2%) and HP (11.8%). When combined with NAS numbers, the NAS + Open SAN market, EMC has 33.5% while NetApp is 13.7%.

Of course, it is just not about external storage because the direct-attached storage numbers count too. With that, the server vendors of IBM, HP and Dell are still placed behind EMC. Here’s a look at that table from IDC:

There’s a highlight of Dell in the table above. Dell actually grew by 4.0% compared to decline in HP and IBM, gaining 0.1%. However, their numbers seem too tepid and led to the exit of Darren Thomas, Dell’s storage group head honco. News of Darren’s exit was on TheRegister.

I also want to note that NAS growth numbers actually outpaced Open SAN numbers including iSCSI.

This leads me to say that there is a dire need for NAS technical and technology expertise in the local storage market. As the adoption of NFSv4 under way and SMB 2.0 and 3.0 coming into the picture, I urge all storage networking professionals who are more pro-SAN to step out of their comfort zone and look into NAS as well. The world is changing and it is no longer SAN vs NAS anymore. And NFSv4.1 is blurring the lines even more with the concepts of layout.

But back to the subject to storage market, is there no one out there challenging EMC in a big way? NetApp was, some years ago, recorded double digit growth and challenging EMC neck-and-neck, but that mantle seems to be taken over by HDS. But both are long way to go to get close to EMC.

Kudos to the EMC team for damn good execution!

Did Dell buy a dud?

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In the past few weeks, I certainly have an axe to grind with Dell, notably their acquisition of Quest Software. I have been full of praise of how Dell was purchasing the right companies in the past and how the companies Dell acquired were important chess pieces that will propel Dell into the enterprise space. Until now …

Since its first significant acquisition into the enterprise with EqualLogic in 2008, there were PerotSystems, Kace, Scalent, Boomi, Compellent, Exanet, Ocarina Networks, Force10, SonicWall, Wyse Technologies, AppAssure, and RNA Networks. (I might have missed one or two). To me, all these were good buys, and these were solid companies with a strong future in their technology and offerings. Until Dell decides to acquire Quest Software.

At the back of my mind, why the heck is Dell buying Quest Software for? And for a ballistic USD2.4 billion! That’s hell of a lot of money to spend on a company which does not have a strong portfolio of solutions and are not exactly leaders in their respective disciplines, barring Quest’s Foglight and TOAD. A quick check into Quest’s website revealed that they are in the following disciplines:

 

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The reports are out!

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It’s another quarter and both Gartner and IDC reports on disk storage market are out.

What does it take to slow down EMC, who is like a behemoth beast mowing down its competition? EMC, has again tops both the charts. IDC Worldwide Disk Storage Tracker for Q1 of 2012 puts EMC at 29.0% of the market share, followed by NetApp at 14.1%, and IBM at 11.4%. In fourth place is HP with 10.2% and HDS is placed fifth with 9.4%.

In the Gartner report, EMC has the lead of 32.5%, followed by NetApp at 12.7% and IBM with 11.0%. HDS held fourth place at 9.5% and HP is fifth with 9.0%. Continue reading →

Dell acquires Wyse Technology

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There is no stopping Dell. It is in the news again, this time, acquiring privately owned Wyse Technology.

The name Wyse certainly brings back memories about the times where Wyse were the VT100 and VT220 terminals. They were also one of the early leaders in thin client computing, where it required an X Windows server to provide client applications on “dumb” workstations running X Windows Manager. They used to compute with companies like NCD (Network Computing Devices) and HummingBird. My first company, CSA, was a distributor of NCD clients and I remember Sime Darby was the distributor of Wyse thin clients.

Wyse as quoted:

Wyse Technology is the global leader in Cloud Client Computing. The Wyse portfolio includes industry-leading thin, zero and cloud PC client solutions with advanced management, desktop virtualization and cloud software supporting desktops, laptops and next generation mobile devices. Wyse has shipped more than 20 million units and has over 200 million people interacting with their products each day, enabling the leading private, public, hybrid and government cloud implementations worldwide. Wyse works with industry-leading IT vendors, including Cisco®, Citrix®, IBM®, Microsoft, and VMware® as well as globally-recognized distribution and service providers. Wyse is headquartered in San Jose, California, U.S.A., with offices worldwide.

The Dell acquisition of Wyse shows that Dell is serious about Virtual Desktop Infrastructure type of technology (VDI), especially when the client cloud computing space. And the VDI space is going to heat up as many vendors are pushing hard to get the market going.

Dell, for better or for worse, has just added another acquisition that fits into the jigsaw puzzle that they are trying to build. Wyse looks like a good buy as it has a mature technology and the legacy in the thin client space. I hope Dell will energize the Wyse Technology team but while acquisition is easy, the tough part will be the implementation part. How well Dell mobilizes the Wyse Technology team will depend on how well Wyse blends into Dell’s culture.

Server way of locked-in storage

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It is kind of interesting when every vendor out there claims that they are as open as they can be but the very reality is, the competitive nature of the game is really forcing storage vendors to speak open, but their actions are certainly not.

Confused? I am beginning to see a trend … a trend that is forcing customers to be locked-in with a certain storage vendor. I am beginning to feel that customers are given lesser choices, especially when the brand of the server they select for their applications  will have implications on the brand of storage they will be locked in into.

And surprise, surprise, SSDs are the pawns of this new cloak-and-dagger game. How? Well, I have been observing this for quite a while now, and when HP announced their SMART portfolio for their storage, it’s time for me to say something.

In the announcement, it was reported that HP is coming out with its 8th generation ProLiant servers. As quoted:

“The eighth generation ProLiant is turbo-charging its storage with a Smart Array containing solid state drives and Smart Caching.”

“It also includes two Smart storage items: the Smart Array controllers and Smart Caching, which both feature solid state storage to solve the disk I/O bottleneck problem, as well as Smart Data Services software to use this hardware”

From the outside, analysts are claiming this is a reaction to the recent EMC VFCache product. (I blogged about it here) and HP was there to put the EMC VFcache solution as a first generation product, lacking the smarts (pun intended) of what the HP products have to offer. You can read about its performance prowess in the HP Connect blog.

Similarly, Dell announced their ExpressFlash solution that ties up its 12th generation PowerEdge servers with their flagship (what else), Dell Compellent storage.

The idea is very obvious. Put in a PCIe-based flash caching card in the server, and use a condescending caching/tiering technology that ties the server to a certain brand of storage. Only with this card, that (incidentally) works only with this brand of servers, will you, Mr. Customer, be able to take advantage of the performance power of this brand of storage. Does that sound open to you?

HP is doing it with its ProLiant servers; Dell is doing it with its ExpressFlash; EMC’s VFCache, while not advocating any brand of servers, is doing it because VFCache works only with EMC storage. We have seen Oracle doing it with Oracle ExaData. Oracle Enterprise database works best with Oracle’s own storage and the intelligence is in its SmartScan layer, a proprietary technology that works exclusively with the storage layer in the Exadata. Hitachi Japan, with its Hitachi servers (yes, Hitachi servers that we rarely see in Malaysia), already has such a technology since the last 2 years. I wouldn’t be surprised that IBM and Fujitsu already have something in store (or probably I missed the announcement).

NetApp has been slow in the game, but we hope to see them coming out with their own server-based caching products soon. More pure play storage are already singing the tune of SSDs (though not necessarily server-based).

The trend is obviously too, because the messaging is almost always about storage performance.

Yes, I totally agree that storage (any storage) has a performance bottleneck, especially when it comes to IOPS, response time and throughput. And every storage vendor is claiming SSDs, in one form or another, is the knight in shining armour, ready to rid the world of lousy storage performance. Well, SSDs are not the panacea of storage performance headaches because while they solve some performance issues, they introduce new ones somewhere else.

But it is becoming an excuse to introduce storage vendor lock-in, and how has the customers responded this new “concept”? Things are fairly new right now, but I would always advise customers to find out and ask questions.

Cloud storage for no vendor lock-in? Going to the cloud also has cloud service provider lock-in as well, but that’s another story.