SMP than VMware

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VMware is not a panacea for all your server virtualization requirements but because they do fantastic marketing (not to mention doing 1 small seminar every 1.5-2 months here in Malaysia last year), everyone thinks they are the only choice for server virtualization.

Efforts from Citrix Xen, Microsoft Hyper-V and RedHat Virtualization do not seem to make a dent into VMware’s armour and it is beginning to feel that VMware is the only choice for server virtualization. However, every new server virtualization proposal would end up with the customer buying a brand new, much more powerful server. More CPUs, more cores, and more RAM (I am not going into VMware vRAM licensing issues here but customers know they are caged-in).

You see, VMware’s style of server virtualization is a in-system virtualization. The amount of physical resources within the system are being pooled, virtualized and shared with the virtual machines (VMs) in the physical chassis. With exception to the concept of distributed vSwitches (dvSwitch), CPUs, processing CPU cores and RAM are pretty much confined within what’s available in the physical box in most server virtualization environment. You can envision the concept of VMware’s in-system virtualization in the diagram below:

So, the consolidation (and virtualization) phase of older physical servers would involve packing tons of CPU cores and tons of RAMs in a newer, high end server.

I just visited a prospect a few days ago. For about 30 users for an ERP system and perhaps 100 users of Zimbra mailboxes, he lamented that he had to invest into 2 Dell R710 servers with 64GB of RAM each and sporting 2 x 8-core Intel Xeon. That sounded to like an overkill but that is what is happening here in this part of the world. The customer is given the perception and the doubt of inadequacy when they virtualize their servers. “What if I don’t have enough cores?; what if I don’t have enough RAM?” That in itself is the typical Malaysian (and Singaporean) kiasu mentality. Check out the Wikipedia definition of kiasu here.

Such a high-end server costs a lot of moolahs. And furthermore, the scalability and performance of the virtualized servers in the VMs are trapped within how much these servers can scale physically. If the server is maxed out at 16-cores and 128GB of RAM, then the customer to upgrade again with a server forklift. That’s not good.

And one more thing. VMware server virtualization is not ready for High Performance Computing (HPC) …yet.

Let’s look at this in another way. Let’s assume that you can look the server virtualization approach in an outward manner rather than the inward within kind of thinking, like the VMware in-system method.

What if you can invest in lower-end x86 servers with 1 x quad-core CPUs, with 8GB of RAM? What if you can put aggregate many of these lower-end servers together and build a large cluster of lower-end x86 servers into a huge symmetric multiprocessing server farm that supports 1,024 CPUs of 16,384 cores, 64TB of RAM? Have a look at this video that explains what I just mentioned:

ScaleMP video

Yeah, yeah .. it’s a marketing video from ScaleMP. But I am looking beyond the company and looking at the possibility of this out-system type of server virtualization. The ability to pool together all the CPU processing power of many physical servers and the aggregation of physical RAMs of all the combined servers into a single shared memory architecture unleashes the true power of server virtualization. This is THE next generation symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) architecture, and it breaks free from the limitations and scalability the in-ward virtualization of physical servers.

In the past, SMP system rely on heavy programmability of the applications to scale with SMP systems. Applications didn’t necessary scale on-the-fly with SMP systems, and some level of configuration and programming have to be applied to address the proprietary  SMP methods and interconnects. ScaleMP’s vSMP Foundation hypervisor solution removes the proprietary nature of SMP and bringing x86 server virtualization to meet the demands of HPC.

Here’s a look at the high level architecture of ScaleMP vSMP:

This type architecture brings similarity to RNA Networks solutions that I blogged some time ago. RNA Network, which was acquired by Dell late last year, based their solution on the RDMA technology and protocol, and was more about enhancing scalability and performance with memory pooling via Memory Cloud. ScaleMP’s patent-pending technology is more than that. It pools both memory and processing cores as well, giving it greater scalability and performance, the much needed resources for the demands of HPC environments.

The folks at ScaleMP contacted me a couple of weeks back and shared some of their marketing datasheets and whitepapers. While the information passed to me were OK, I wish the information could have a deeper dive into the technology and implementation as well. I hope they could share it, and I don’t mind signing an NDA.

Well, this is done pro bono, because I want everyone to know the choices and possibilities out there. It is my worldly cause to have people educated because only by being informed, we make better choices. The server virtualization world isn’t always about VMware, you know.

4TB disks – the end of RAID

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Seriously? 4 freaking terabyte disk drives?

The enterprise SATA/SAS disks have just grown larger, up to 4TB now. Just a few days ago, Hitachi boasted the shipment of the first 4TB HDD, the 7,200 RPM Ultrastar™ 7K4000 Enterprise-Class Hard Drive.

And just weeks ago, Seagate touted their Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) technology will bring forth the 6TB hard disk drives in the near future, and 60TB HDDs not far in the horizon. 60TB is a lot of capacity but a big, big nightmare for disks availability and data backup. My NetApp Malaysia friend joked that the RAID reconstruction of 60TB HDDs would probably finish by the time his daughter finishes college, and his daughter is still in primary school!.

But the joke reflects something very serious we are facing as the capacity of the HDDs is forever growing into something that could be unmanageable if the traditional implementation of RAID does not change to meet such monstrous capacity.

Yes, RAID has changed since 1988 as every vendor approaches RAID differently. NetApp was always about RAID-4 and later RAID-DP and I remembered the days when EMC had a RAID-S. There was even a vendor in the past who marketed RAID-7 but it was proprietary and wasn’t an industry standard. But fundamentally, RAID did not change in a revolutionary way and continued to withstand the ever ballooning capacities (and pressures) of the HDDs. RAID-6 was introduced when the first 1TB HDDs first came out, to address the risk of a possible second disk failure in a parity-based RAID like RAID-4 or RAID-5. But today, the 4TB HDDs could be the last straw that will break the camel’s back, or in this case, RAID’s back.

RAID-5 obviously is dead. Even RAID-6 might be considered insufficient now. Having a 3rd parity drive (3P) is an option and the only commercial technology that I know of which has 3 parity drives support is ZFS. But having 3P will cause additional overhead in performance and usable capacity. Will the fickle customer ever accept such inadequate factors?

Note that 3P is not RAID-7. RAID-7 is a trademark of a old company called Storage Computer Corporation and RAID-7 is not a standard definition of RAID.

One of the biggest concerns is rebuild times. If a 4TB HDD fails, the average rebuild speed could take days. The failure of a second HDD could up the rebuild times to a week or so … and there is vulnerability when the disks are being rebuilt.

There are a lot of talks about declustered RAID, and I think it is about time we learn about this RAID technology. At the same time, we should demand this technology before we even consider buying storage arrays with 4TB hard disk drives!

I have said this before. I am still trying to wrap my head around declustered RAID. So I invite the gurus on this matter to comment on this concept, but I am giving my understanding on the subject of declustered RAID.

Panasas‘ founder, Dr. Garth Gibson is one of the people who proposed RAID declustering way back in 1999. He is a true visionary.

One of the issues of traditional RAID today is that we still treat the hard disk component in a RAID domain as a whole device. Traditional RAID is designed to protect whole disks with block-level redundancy.  An array of disks is treated as a RAID group, or protection domain, that can tolerate one or more failures and still recover a failed disk by the redundancy encoded on other drives. The RAID recovery requires reading all the surviving blocks on the other disks in the RAID group to recompute blocks lost on the failed disk. In short, the recovery, in the event of a disk failure, is on the whole object and therefore, a entire 4TB HDD has to be recovered. This is not good.

The concept of RAID declustering is to break away from the whole device idea. Apply RAID at a more granular scale. IBM GPFS works with logical tracks and RAID is applied at the logical track level. Here’s an overview of how is compares to the traditional RAID:

The logical tracks are spread out algorithmically spread out across all physical HDDs and the RAID protection layer is applied at the track level, not at the HDD device level. So, when a disk actually fails, the RAID rebuild is applied at the track level. This significant improves the rebuild times of the failed device, and does not affect the performance of the entire RAID volume much. The diagram below shows the declustered RAID’s time and performance impact when compared to a traditional RAID:

While the IBM GPFS approach to declustered RAID is applied at a semi-device level, the future is leaning towards OSD. OSD or object storage device is the next generation of storage and I blogged about it some time back. Panasas is the leader when it comes to OSD and their radical approach to this is applying RAID at the object level. They call this Object RAID.

“With object RAID, data protection occurs at the file-level. The Panasas system integrates the file system and data protection to provide novel, robust data protection for the file system.  Each file is divided into chunks that are stored in different objects on different storage devices (OSD).  File data is written into those container objects using a RAID algorithm to produce redundant data specific to that file.  If any object is damaged for whatever reason, the system can recompute the lost object(s) using redundant information in other objects that store the rest of the file.“

The above was a quote from the blog of Brent Welch, Panasas’ Director of Software Architecture. As mentioned, the RAID protection of the objects in the OSD architecture in Panasas occurs at file-level, and the file or files constitute the object. Therefore, the recovery domain in Object RAID is at the file level, confining the risk and damage of data loss within the file level and not at the entire device level. Consequently, the speed of recovery is much, much faster, even for 4TB HDDs.

Reliability is the key objective here. Without reliability, there is no availability. Without availability, there is no performance factors to consider. Therefore, the system’s reliability is paramount when it comes to having the data protected. RAID has been the guardian all these years. It’s time to have a revolutionary approach to safeguard the reliability and ensure data availability.

So, how many vendors can claim they have declustered RAID?

Panasas is a big YES, and they apply their intelligence in large HPC (high performance computing) environments. Their technology is tried and tested. IBM GPFS is another. But where are the rest?

 

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.

Feed us with Filr

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I have checked about the progress of Novell Filr, which has generated a lot of buzz on the web. I blogged about it here and here and I was hoping to get a job to review the product. But I didn’t get the job yet, because the product will only be available in Q4 of 2012.

That’s a long time to come to market, considering that from the time it was announced in Novell BrainShare in November 2011. And the competitors are gearing up as well. There is Dropbox for the enterprise called Dropbox for Teams, and VMware is doing something along the same lines called Project Octopus. I am pretty sure there are plenty of other vendors who are already offering something equivalent to what the Novell Filr can do.

I browsed around the web for more info about the Novell Filr, hoping that it won’t be like a blackhole after Novell’s announcement. Fortunately, I found more details which I thought was interesting but it took a while after 5 or 6 Google pages.

The set of slides I found belonged to Anthony Priestman of Novell. The slides started with the Novell Filr ease of installation.

  • Local Administrator/Password
  • Server Name
  • IP Address
  • Finalize the configuration with a browser

In a nutshell Novell Filr is a virtualization service. It virtualizes the backend NTFS shares, CIFS shares, identity management through Active Directory or Novell eDirectory, as well as access control and security to present a “merged-view” of files and folders from different disparate sources.

Going deeper, the Novell Filr becomes the orchestrator and broker, linking up the backend to the front end with ease and simplicity. Even though it sounds easy, the entire architecture and its implementation is complicated because there are so many components and services involved.

Therefore, to make file services and authentication services matters easy and simple should be considered genius, and we shall see how Novell Filr pans out when it is released. I have no doubt in my mind that it will be easy and simple.

Here’s a deeper look at the architecture:

The Filr integrates with both Novell eDirectory and Windows Active Directory for authentication and file access control. I

One of the new concepts is called File Spaces. This is great, because this is going to do away with drive letters that we are so used to in mapped drives concept in Windows. There is a running joke that the number of mapped drives in Windows will run out after the letter Z:.

File Spaces allows a simple folder to represent any Windows shares, NAS CIFS shares or Novell NSS volumes. This is based on UNC (Universal Naming Convention), so it is straightforward. File Spaces also allows users to right-click to share their files easily, probably similar to how you share Google Docs files when you want to invite team members to collaborate on files. And it will update you on notifications after files have been updated or modified. This ease-of-sharing, of course, is governed with higher, company-wide policies about file sharing, both internally and externally (across firewalls as well)

Both the most powerful feature of File Spaces is the ability to have a single, “merged-view” of all files and folders with all types of devices, from tablets, to smartphones to laptops. The slide below explains a bit of File Spaces “Merged Views”:

The view of files and folders will look like the following below:

The Novell Filr concept and technology is going to define the new file sharing, home and user directories landscape in IT. The archaic concept of mapped drives will slowly fade away, and the Filr will bring forth new frontiers of tight and secure enterprise user and resource management, but with the ease of use and simplicity of sharing concepts of social media. 

Some older implementations from Novell will eventually be replaced by Filr. iFolder, Netstorage, and QuickFinder will go the way of the dodos, while the next generation Filr will become the flagship of the new Novell.

This sounds dandy. Unfortunately, I personally am worried about how Novell’s new owner, Attachmate will be good to Novell. Right now, the future of Novell seems like business as usual but that’s not good. Novell has been losing mindshare and they had better make their stand with a strong product like Novell Filr.

Like I said earlier, the product is shipping in late of 2012. It was announced in late 2011. That’s a whole 12 months in which Novell could do much better by feeding the minds of followers of Novell Filr. Let them and people like me, learn more about the technology. Let us help spread the idea and word and keep the Novell Filr interests up and the fire burning until the launch date.

NFO for DFR

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It has not caused severe pain yet but it will. Storage is cheap but as capacity grows, it will eventually hit a limit that makes storage difficult to maintain from a cost perspective.

I wrote about the lack of attention of primary storage deduplication solutions in the local industry. Perhaps deduplication has matured to a point that it has become a no-brainer or perhaps customers are already getting sick and tired of the word “dedupe”. Either way, we should not be distracted from the fact that data footprint reduction (DFR) in a generic sense or storage efficiency as a fancy marketing term, must be applied somewhere to slow down the purchase of storage capacity.

Storage is getting fatter, and storage vendors’ revenue is getting fatter along with it. While this is good for the pockets of vendors, the customers have to face higher costs associated with

  • Power, Cooling and Floorspace
  • Administration and management
  • Bandwidth
  • Resource utilization

All these are not prudent storage management practices, because fat storage is bad, just like human beings getting fatter. Similarly, storage must go on a diet and deduplication is one of the few solutions out there. However, I have spoken out that deduplication is just shrinking the container that holds the bits of data, completely unaware of what the content is. Deduplication does not shrink the data itself, and if the occurrence of the data is high, deduplication does not help in reducing the storage capacity. There is no advantage unless the data footprint reduction (DFR) technology is content aware. (Note that I am using DFS as a generic term rather than data deduplication. The reason is obvious.)

That is why data deduplication technologies does not work well with seismic files or encoded video files, because the files are already highly optimized. But there is a technology that can look deeper into such unstructured files and produce storage capacity reduction with specific algorithms for specific type of files and file objects. That technology, I believe, is the truest form of data footprint reduction and it is called Native Format Optimization (NFO).

I want to relate an old story I had experienced when I brought an EMC BURA (Back Up Recovery & Archive – a precursor to its present BRS division) senior manager to see a highly respected technical manager in Schlumberger in Malaysia a few years back. Schlumberger is the world’s largest oilfield services company and provides seismic analysis and interpretation software and seismic files are highly encoded and compressed.

As usual, the senior manager being a typical sales guy started blabbering how great Data Domain (this was just after the EMC acquisition) was, and how it can dedupe any kind of files giving 20:1 (exaggerated to 500:1 to certain text files), even for seismic files. I was signalling to the EMC senior manager to stop his bullsh*t, but he went on and on. In the end, the Schlumberger technical manager politely told the EMC senior manager to shut up, because he has little understand of what seismic files are like.

Now, back to Native Format Optimization (NFO) technology. In a nutshell, NFO plays trick with our human visual system. The goal is to reduce the size of unstructured files without reducing the visual quality of the images (text, texture, colour, resolution, depth, hue, contrast, etc) of the files. 

Have a look at these 2 files. One is optimized with NFO and one is un-optimized. Can you tell the difference?

 

The human visual system is known to be:

  • Less sensitive to high frequency of colour variation
  • More sensitive to brightness than colour variation
  • Less sensitive to background colour in lower resolution
  • More sensitive to a picture’s motion than picture’s texture

Therefore, the eyes perceive an image based on mostly the lowest quality baseline. I got this information from George Crump’s Storage Switzerland’s article.

Because NFO is already in its native form, the files does not need to be rehydrated like deduped files.

The capacity reduction savings is tremendous and because NFO approach is content aware, the benefits translates to higher cost savings in

  • Reduction of power, cooling and floorspace
  • Reduction in data management and administration tasks, especially backup
  • Improved bandwidth and improved disaster recovery
  • Higher performance
  • Delayed storage capacity purchase
  • many more

After Ocarina acquisition by Dell in 2010, a search on the web revealed that probably only one vendor in Europe has boldly continued to enhance NFO technology in their products. The company is balesio and you can read about their NFO technology here.

 

Linking Apple to SAN

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Serendipity is what I would describe this encounter. I was introduced to Promise Technology Channel Sales Director early this week. When I saw his face, I realized that I already knew him, a Malaysian who previously worked at EMC in Taiwan, but has been residing in that country for many years. We laughed and joked like old buddies and hence, the story begins …

I have known of Promise through its popular VTrak storage, which many Apple users here ignorantly associate as an Apple product. Here it is, appearing on Apple’s website:

Yes, that’s the 3rd picture from your left.

Another very strong Apple product from Promise Technology is Pegasus, a storage line of direct-attached storage (DAS) sporting the Thunderbolt, a very fast interface that connects peripherals to Macs through its Mini DisplayPort. I found this strange having a graphics display port being used to connect to a storage device, but as I looked deeper into Thunderbolt, I found that the technology was meant to extend the PCIe bus with the DisplayPort into a conduit that delivers high throughput serially. Impressive!

The picture below shows the Thunderbolt link connections, in which
Intel will provide two types of Thunderbolt controllers, a 2 port type and a 1 port type.

But Thunderbolt is not a network-based technology. It is channel-based, and hence, connecting to a Fibre Channel SAN is like mixing oil with water. Apple is not known for accessing storage through Fibre Channel, and since Apple products do not have a Fibre Channel interface, Promise Technology has come up with Thunderbolt to Fibre Channel converter. They call it SANLink. And the picture below shows how it is done:

The SANLink can also be daisy-chained. In the example below, the Pegasus DAS is daisy-chained to a SANLink which then extends and expands its capacity from the Fibre Channel connected VTrak Ex30 or Ex10.

The connectivity can be 8Gbps for the VTrak Ex30, and 4Gbps for the Ex10, and it has been validated to work with MacOS X, Final Cut Studio and Apple’s Xsan.

This is targeted to the Apple’s presence in the video editing and video production environment. I have 1 customer using our storage for their Apple file sharing purpose, and I realized that these guys work in isolation most of the time. They are like a sheep-shearing house, taking one job, work on it a bit and then pass it on to another colleague for the next stage in the video production process. Sharing is clearly not well known in this type of environment. And Promise wants to change that by opening to those hermit-like video editors and producers to share and collaborate in their work.

I don’t know much about other vendors besides Apple that pushes the Thunderbolt technology. It is very high performance interface, capable of delivering 20Gbps but I am afraid that Thunderbolt may suffer from the Apple-only syndrome.

Apple tend to be very cutting-edge when it comes to most technologies that go into their products. That makes Apple high risk takers, and that puts Thunderbolt into that risky category when if Apple fails, Thunderbolt fails. So far, I have not seen Thunderbolt spreading like wildfire, but opening Apple to SAN, both iSCSI and Fibre Channel, is good. It is time Apple embrace more of the storage networking technologies and standards out there, rather than being steadfast with their proprietary implementation of storage. Apple File Protocol (AFP) and Thunderbolt (for now) comes to mind. It is good to be stubborn but …

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.

 

Gartner WW ECB 4Q11

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The Gartner Worldwide External Controller Based Disk Storage market numbers were out last night, and perennially follows IDC Disk Storage System Tracker.

The numbers posted little surprise, after a topsy-turvy year for vendors like IBM, HP and especially NetApp. Overall, the positions did not change much, but we can see that the 3 vendors I mentioned are facing very challenging waters ahead. Here’s a look at the overall 2011 numbers:

EMC is unstoppable, and gaining 3.6% market share and IBM lost 0.2% market share despite having strong sales with their XIV and StorWize V7000 solutions. This could be due to the lower than expected numbers from their jaded DS-series. IBM needs to ramp up.

HP stayed stagnant, even though their 3PAR numbers have been growing well. They were hit by poor numbers from the EVA (now renumbered as P6000s), and surprisingly their P4000s as well. Looks like they are short-lefthanded (pun intended) and given the C-level upheavals it went through in the past year, things are not looking good for HP.

Meanwhile, Dell is unable to shake off their EMC divorce alimony, losing 0.8% market share. We know that Dell has been pushing very, very hard with their Compellent, EqualLogic, and other technologies they acquired, but somehow things are not working as well yet.

HDS has been the one to watch, with its revenue numbers growing in double digits like NetApp and EMC. Their market share gain was 0.6%, which is very good for HDS standards. NetApp gained 0.8% market share but they seem vulnerable after 2 poor quarters.

The 4th quarter for 2011 numbers are shown below:

I did not blog about IDC QView numbers, which reports the storage software market share but just to give this entry a bit of perspective from a software point of view. From the charts of The Register, EMC has been gaining marketshare at the expense of the rest of the competitors like Symantec, IBM and NetApp.

Tabulated differently, here’s another set of data:

On all fronts, EMC is firing all cylinders. Like a well-oiled V12 engine, EMC is going at it with so much momentum right now. Who is going to stop EMC?

Chink in NetApp MetroCluster?

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Ok, let me clear the air about the word “Chink” (before I get into trouble), which is not racially offensive unlike the news about ESPN having to fire 2 of their employees for using the word “Chink” on Jeremy Lin.  According to my dictionary (Collins COBUILD), chink is a very narrow crack or opening on a surface and I don’t really know the derogatory meaning of “chink” other than the one in my dictionary.

I have been doing a spot of work for a friend who has just recently proposed NetApp MetroCluster. When I was at NetApp many years ago, I did not have a chance to get to know more about the solution, but I do know of its capability. After 6 years away, coming back to do a bit of NetApp was fun for me, because I was always very comfortable with the NetApp technology. But NetApp MetroCluster, and in this opportunity, NetApp Fabric MetroCluster presented me an opportunity to get closer to the technology.

I have no doubt in my mind, this is one of the highest available storage solutions in the market, and NetApp is not modest about beating its own drums. It touts “No SPOF (Single Point of Failure“, and rightly so, because it has put in all the right plugs for all the points that can fail.

NetApp Fabric MetroCluster is a continuous availability solution that stretches over 100km. It is basically a NetApp Cluster with mirrored storage but with half of  its infrastructure mirror being linked very far apart, over Fibre Channel components and dark fiber. Here’s a diagram of how NetApp Fabric Metrocluster works for a VMware FT (Fault Tolerant) environment.

There’s a lot of simplicity in the design, because when I started explaining it to the prospect, I was amazed how easy it was to articulate about it, without all the fancy technical jargons or fuzz. I just said … “imagine a typical cluster, with an interconnect heartbeat, and the storage are mirrored. Then imagine the 2 halves are being pulled very far apart … That’s NetApp Fabric MetroCluster”. It was simply blissful.

But then there were a lot of FUDs (fear, uncertainty, doubt) thrown in by the competitor, feeding the prospect with plenty of ammunition. Yes, I agree with some of the limitations, such as no SATA support for now. But then again, there is no perfect storage solution. In fact, Chris Mellor of The Register wrote about God’s box, the perfect storage, but to get to that level, be prepared to spend lots and lots of money! Furthermore, once you fix one limitation or bottleneck in one part of the storage, it introduces a few more challenges here and there. It’s never ending!

Side note: The conversation triggered the team to check with NetApp for SATA support in Fabric MetroCluster. Yes, it is already supported in ONTAP 8.1 and the present version is 8.1RC3. Yes, SATA support will be here soon. 

More FUDs as we went along and when I was doing my research, some HP storage guys on the web were hitting at NetApp MetroCluster. Poor HP! If you do a search of NetApp MetroCluster, I am sure you will come across these 2 HP blogs in 2010, deriding the MetroCluster solution. Check out this and the followup on the first blog. What these guys chose to do was to break the MetroCluster apart into 2 single controllers after a network failure, and attack it from that level.

Yes, when you break up the halves, it is basically a NetApp system with several single point of failure (SPOF). But then again, who isn’t? Almost every vendor’s storage will have some SPOFs when you break the mirror.

Well, I can tell you is, the weakness of NetApp MetroCluster is, it’s not continuous data protection (CDP). Once your applications have written garbage on one volume, the garbage is reflected on the mirrored volume. You can’t roll back and you live with the data corruption. That is why storage vendors, including NetApp, offer snapshots – point-in-time copies where you can roll back to the point before the data corruption occurred. That is why CDP gives the complete granularity of recovery in every write I/O and that’s something NetApp does not have. That’s NetApp’s MetroCluster weakness.

But CDP is aimed towards data recovery, NOT data availability. It is focused on customers’ whose requirements are ability to get the data back to some usable state or form after the event of a disaster (big or small), while the MetroCluster solution is focused on having the data available all the time. They are 2 different set of requirements. So, it depends on what the customer’s requirement is.

Then again, come to think of it, NetApp has no CDP technology of their own … isn’t it?

Quest Software going private

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Just a couple of days ago, Quest Software Inc, got an offer from Insight Venture partners. The offer of USD$23 per share will bring the offer close to USD$2 billion, and the company will be taken private.

This is the second big-name taken off and going private. The first one being BlueCoat after it has agreed to be take private for a price of USD$1.3 billion by Thoma Bravo, a private equity firm.

Quest Software is the maker of the famous Oracle performance analyzer, Toad and also has acquired smaller companies like Bakbone and Vizioncore in the past, but this around it has become the acquisition target.

This brings a very interesting fact, that, more and more public companies are going private. Here in home ground, the largest mobile carrier, Maxis, went private a few years ago.

Why? Typically most companies go private when the shareholders think that the stock market does not give the company share the right value. The market perhaps has stagnated and not growing. However, BlueCoat and Quest Software are not in a stagnant market. Security, application acceleration, data protection and data analytics are big market in the cusp of exploding growth. Then why are these companies going private?

Here are a few possible reasons (my take):

  1. With the buy-out, these companies can be free from the encumbrances that come with being a public company. Some of them include lengthy approvals from shareholders, board of directors and regulators, which could slow the decision-making process
  2. These new owners are looking at plans to expand into markets that they can’t get to globally without being scrutinized by the regulators and certain shareholders. Going private mean that they could offer their services across the globe in the cloud space, with lesser restrictions and prohibitions.
  3. They want to be really aggressive and being public just bogs them down.
  4. The new owners plan to “shoeshine” these lackluster companies and hoping to sell them out again to get a huge profit.

Thoma Bravo, for example, already has several companies in its security portfolio – Entrust, Hyland Software, SonicWall and TripWire and the BlueCoat acquisition just adds more to its “great view of security“. Thoma Bravo, as described, is a technology investment firm specializing in revamping and growing established companies.

Insight Venture Partners (IVP), too, is in the business of private equity and venture capital, and has invested in companies such as Solarwinds, Acronis and DataCore.

This Quest Software acquisition could IVP’s biggest yet, but the question remains. Why?