The Storage Compass

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I am sure many people in IT get pissed with IT jargons and terminologies. More so if it is a customer, especially when he or she is not well versed with the fundamental concept behind the technology architecture.

Even after 20 years, with most of it in storage, I have a hard time switching from one vendor’s jargon to another (sometimes). But it has gotten harder for me lately, since I teach ONTAP courses for NetApp, EMC Cloud Infrastructure and doing my work with the ZFS stuff. Soon, I will take on EMC VNX, Information Storage Management (ISM), Big Data courses as well, and I also plan to do some Nexenta training too.

Who would know that an ONTAP NAS volume would be known as file system in EMC VNX for File (aka Celerra), and a data set in ZFS? Or a ONTAP aggregate is almost like a ZFS pool but with some differences or a clone might be called a replica in HDS and so on …

In fact, all the definitions above could be wrong because I am getting confused. 😉 You would be too if you have to switch from one vendor’s jargon to another. And the poor EMC pre-sales who has not been with any other vendor except for EMC all his career would have a hard time rewiring his brain if he had joined another vendor like NetApp.  Or IBM, or Dell, or Oracle or anyone for that matter.  No wonder the customers are pissed.  Continue reading →

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:

 

  Continue reading →

Houston, we have an OpenStack problem

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I have always wanted to look deeper into OpenStack, but I never got around to it. However, last week, something about NASA and OpenStack caught my attention … something about NASA pulling out of OpenStack development.

The spin was that “OpenStack has come on its own” is true, because OpenStack today has 180 (at last count on June 20th 2012) companies participating and contributing to the development, deployment and marketing of the highly popular Infrastructure-as-a-Service cloud computing project. So, the NASA withdrawal was not as badly felt as to what NASA had said next.

When NASA CIO Linda Cureton announced that NASA has shifted to Amazon Web Services (AWS) for their enterprise cloud-based infrastructure and they have saved almost a million dollars in costs, that was a clear and blatant impalement to the very heart and soul of OpenStack. NASA, one of the 2 founders of OpenStack in 2009, has switched sides to announce their preference to OpenStack’s rival, AWS. It pains me to just listen to the such a defection. Continue reading →

Swiss army of data management

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Back in 2000, before I joined NetApp, I bought one of my first storage technology books. It was “The Holy Grail of Data Storage Management” by Jon William Toigo. The book served me very well, because it opened up my eyes about the storage networking and data management world.

I mean, I have been doing storage for 7 years before the year 2000, but I was an implementation and support engineer. I installed my first storage arrays in 1993, the trusty but sometimes odd, SPARCstorage Array 1000. These “antiques” were running 0.25Gbps Fibre Channel, and that nationwide bank project gave me my first taste and insights of SAN. Point-to-point, but nonetheless SAN.

Then at Sun from 1997-2000, I was implementing the old Storage Disk Packs with FastWide SCSI, moving on to the A5000 Photons (remember these guys?) and was trained on the A7000, Sun’s acquisition of Encore way back in the late nineties. Then there was “Purple”, the T300s which I believe came from the acquisition of MaxStrat.

The implementation and support experience was good but my world opened up when I joined NetApp in mid-2000. And from the Jon Toigo’s book, I learned one of the most important lessons that I have carried with me till this day – “Data Storage Management is 3x more expensive that the data storage equipment itself“. Given the complexity of the data today compared to the early 2000s, I would say that it is likely to be 4-5x more expensive.

And yet, I am still perplexed that many customers and prospects still cannot see the importance and the gravity of data storage management, and more precisely, data management itself.

A couple of months ago, I had to opportunity to work on an RFP for project in Singapore. The customer had thousands of tapes storing digital media files in addition to tens of TBs running on IBM N-series storage (translated to a NetApp FAS3xxx). They wanted to revamp their architecture, and invited several vendors in Singapore to propose. I was working for a friend, who is an EMC reseller. But when I saw that tapes figured heavily in their environment, and the other resellers were proposing EMC Isilon and NetApp C-Mode, I thought that these resellers were just trying to stuff a square peg into a round hole. They had not addressed the customer’s issues and problems at all, and was just merely proposing storage for the sake of storage capacity. Sure, EMC Isilon is great for the media and entertainment business, but EMC Isilon is not the data management solution for this customer’s situation. Neither was NetApp with the C-Mode solution.

What the customer needed to solve was a data management solution, one that involved

  • Single namespace for video editors and programmers, regardless of online disk storage or archived tape storage
  • Transparent and automated storage tiering and addressing the value of the data to the storage media
  • A backup tier which kept a minimum 2 recent copies for file restoration in case of disasters
  • An archived tier which they could share with their counterparts in other regions
  • A transparent replication tier which would allow them to implement a simplified disaster recovery mechanism with their counterparts in Japan and China

And these were the key issues that needed to be addressed, not the scale-out, usual snapshot mechanism. These features are good for a primary, production storage infrastructure, but this customer’s business operations had about 70-80% data and files which were offline in tapes. I took the liberty to advise my friend to look into Quantum StorNext, because the solution could solve the business problem NOT solving it from an IT point of view. Continue reading →

Expensive hard disk is good

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No, I don’t mean to be bad, but the spinning HDDs’ prices will remain high even if the post-Thailand flood production has resumed to normalcy.

According to IHS iSuppli, a market research intelligence firm, the prices will continue to hold steady and will not fall to pre-flood level until 2014. The reason is simple. The prices of the hard disk drives are pretty much dictated by the only 2 real remaining hard disk companies in the world – Seagate and Western Digital. These guys controls more than 85% of the hard disk market and as demand of HDDs outstrips supply, the current hard disk prices are hitting the bottom line hard for just about everyone.

But the bad news is turning into good news for solid state storage devices. NAND-Flash based devices are driving a new clan of storage start-ups in the likes of Violin Memory, Kaminario, Pure Storage and Virident. The EMC acquisition of XtremIO was a strong endorsement that cements the cornerstone of all enterprise storage arrays to come. Even the Register predicted that the EMC VMAX will be the last primary storage array before the flash tsunami.

The NAND-Flash solid state of multi-level cells (MLCs) and single level cells (SLCs) and even triple level cells (TLCs) are going through birth, puberty, adolescent extremely fast because the demand for faster and faster IOPS, throughput and lower latency is hitting at full speed. And it is likely that all the xLCs (SLCs, MLCs and TLCs) could go through cycle in an extremely short lifespan, because there is a new class of solid state that is pushing the performance-price envelope closer and closer to speed of DRAM but with the price of Flash. This new type of solid state is Storage Class Memory (SCM). Continue reading →

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 →

“I want to put in my own hard disk”

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“I want to put in my own hard disk“.

If a customer ever utter that sentence, it will trigger a storage vendor meltdown. Panic buttons, alarm bells, and everything else that will lead a salesman to go berserk. That’s a big NO, NO!

For decades, storage vendors have relied on proprietary hardware to keep customers in line, and have customers continue to sign hefty maintenance contracts until the next tech refresh. The maintenance contract, with support, software upgrades and hardware spares replacement, defines the storage networking industry that we are in. Even as some vendors have commoditized their hardware on the x86 platforms, and on standard enterprise hard disk drives (HDDs), NICs and HBAs, that openness and convenience of commodity hardware savings are usually not passed on the customers.

It is easy to explain to customers that keeping their enterprise data in reliable and high performance storage hardware with performance optimization and special firmware is paramount, and any unwarranted and unvalidated hardware would put the customer’s data at high risk.

There is a choice now. The ripple of enterprise-grade, open storage kernel and file system has just started its first ring, and we hope that this small ripple will reverberate across the storage industry in the next few years.

Continue reading →

Xtreme future?

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EMC acquisition of XtremIO sent shockwaves across the industry. The news of the acquisition, reported costing EMC USD$430 million can be found here, here and here.

The news of EMC’s would be acquisition a few weeks ago was an open secret and rumour has it that NetApp was eyeing XtremIO as well. Looks like EMC has beaten NetApp to it yet again.

The interesting part was of course, the price. USD$430 million is a very high price to pay for a stealthy, 2-year old company which has 2 rounds of funding totaling USD$25 million. Why such a large amount?

XtremIO has a talented team of engineers; the notable ones being Yaron Segev and Shahar Frank. They have their background in InfiniBand, and Shahar Frank was the chief architect of Exanet scale-out NAS (which was acquired by Dell). However, as quoted by 451Group, XtremeIO is building an all-flash SAN array that “provides consistently high performance, high levels of flash endurance, and advanced functionality around thin provisioning, de-dupe and space-efficient snapshots“.

Furthermore, XtremeIO has developed a real-time inline deduplication engine that does not degrade performance. It does this by spreading the write I/Os over the entire array. There is little information about this deduplication engine, but I bet XtremIO has developed a real-time, inherent deduplication file system that spreads all the I/Os to balance the wear-leveling as well as having scaling performance. I bet XtremIO will dedupe everything that it stores, has a B+ tree, copy-on-write file system with a super-duper efficient hashing algorithm for address mapping (pointers) with this deduplication file system. Ok, ok, I am getting carried away here, because it is likely that I will be wrong, but I can imagine, can’t I? Continue reading →

ARC reactor also caches?

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The fictional arc reactor in Iron Man’s suit was the epitome of coolness for us geeks. In the latest edition of Oracle Magazine, Iron Man is on the cover, as well as the other 5 Avengers in a limited edition series (see below).

Just about the same time, I am reading up on the ARC (Adaptive Replacement Caching) that is adopted in ZFS. I am learning in depth of how ZFS caching works as opposed to the more popular LRU (Least Recently Used) caching algorithm that is used in most storage cache memory. Having said that, most storage vendors employed a modified LRU algorithm, with the intention to keep the most recently accessed pages in memory as long as possible. This is true in NetApp’s Data ONTAP (maybe not the ONTAP GX in which I have little experience) and EMC FlareOE. ONTAP goes further to by keeping the most frequently accessed pages permanently in memory. EMC folks would probably refer to most recently accessed as spatial locality while most frequently accessed as temporal locality.

Why is ZFS using ARC and what is ARC? Continue reading →

SAP wants to kill Oracle

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It’s not new. SAP has been trying to do it for years but with little success. SAP applications and its modules still very much rely on the Oracle database as its core engine but all that that could change within the next few years. SAP has HANA now.

I thought it is befitting to use the movie poster of “Hanna” (albeit an extra “N” in the spelling) to portray SAP who clearly has Oracle in its sights now, with a sharpened arrow head aimed at the jugular of the Oracle beast. (If you haven’t watched the movie, you will see the girl Hanna, using the bow and arrow to hunt a large reindeer).

What is HANA anyway? It was previously an analytics appliance in SAP HANA 1.0SP2. Its key component is the HANA in-memory database (IMDB) and it was not aimed for the general purpose, relational database market yet. Or perhaps, that’s what SAP wants Oracle to believe. Continue reading →