Tag Archives: Dell

Is Dell Fluid Enough?

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Dell made a huge splash 2 weeks ago in London in their inaugural Dell Storage Forum. They dubbed their storage and management lineup as “Fluid Data Architecture” offering the ability for customers to quickly adapt and automate their business when it comes to storage networking and more importantly, data management.

In the London show, they showcased several key innovations and product development. Here’s a list of their jewels:

  • DR4000 – an inline, content optimized backup deduplication appliance (based on the acquired technology of Ocarina Networks)
  • Compellent Storage Center 6.0 – a major software release
  • Compellent key technology integration with VMware
  • Optimized object storage for Microsoft Sharepoint with the DX6000 Object Storage Platform – DX6000 is an OEM from Caringo
  • Broader support for Dell Force10, PowerConnect and their partner’s Brocade

The technology from Ocarina Networks is fantastic technology and I have always admired Ocarina. I have written about Ocarina in the past in my previous blog. But I was a bit perplexed why Dell chose to enter the secondary dedupe market with a backup dedupe appliance in the DR4000. They are already a latecomer into the secondary deduplication game and I thought HP was already late with their StoreOnce.

They could have used Ocarina’s technology to trailblaze the primary deduplication market. In my previous blog, I mentioned that primary deduplication hasn’t really taken off in a big way, and Dell with the technology from Ocarina could set the standard and establish themselves as the leader of the primary deduplication market space. I was disappointed that they didn’t, not just yet.

The Compellent Storage Center 6.0 release was a major release and it was, for better or for worse, coincided with the departure of Phil Soran, the founder and CEO of Compellent. Phil felt that he can let his baby go and Dell is certainly making the best of what they can do with Compellent as their flagship data storage product.

The major release included 64-bit support for greater performance and scalability and also include several key VMware technologies that other vendors already have. The technologies included:

  • VMware vStorage API for Array Integration (VAAI)
  • Storage Replication Adapter plug-in for VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM)
  • VSphere 5 client plug-in
  • Integration of Enterprise Manager and VSphere

Other storage related releases (I am not going to talk about Force10 or their PowerConnect solutions here) included Dell offering 16Gbps FibreChannel switches from Brocade and also their DX6000 Object Storage Platform optimized for Microsoft Sharepoint.

I think it is fantastic that Dell is adapting and evolving into a business-oriented, enterprise solution provider and their acquisitions in the past 3 years – EqualLogic, Exanet, Ocarina Networks, Force10 and Compellent – proves that Dell aims to take market share in the storage networking and data management market. They have key initiatives with CommVault, Symantec, VMware and Microsoft as well. And Michael Dell is becoming quite a celebrity lately, giving Dell the boost it needs to battle in this market.

But the question is, “Is their Fluid Data Architecture” fluid enough?” If I were a customer, would I bite?

As a customer, I look for completeness in the total solution, and I cannot fault Dell for having most of the pieces in the solution stack. They have networking in their PowerConnect, Force10 and Brocade. They have SAN in both Compellent and EqualLogic but their unified storage story is still a bit lacking. That’s because we have not seen Dell’s NAS storage yet. Exanet was a scale-out NAS and we have seen little rah-rah about this product.

From a data management perspective, their data protection story gels well with the Commvault and Symantec partnership, but I feel that Dell sales and SEs (at least in Malaysia) spends too much time touting the Compellent Automated Storage Tiering. I have spoken to folks who have listened to Dell guys’ pitches and it’s too one-dimensional. It’s always about storage tiering and little else about other Compellent technology.

At this point of time, the story that Dell sells here in Malaysia is still disjointed, but they are getting better. And eventually, the fluidity (pun intended ;-)) of their Fluid Data Architecture will soon improve.

How will Dell fare in 2012? They had taken a beating in the past 2 IDC’s quarter storage market tracker, losing some percentage points in market share but I think Dell will continue to tinker to get it right.

2012 will be their watershed year.

Primary Dedupe where are you?

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I am a bit surprised that primary storage deduplication has not taken off in a big way, unlike the times when the buzz of deduplication first came into being about 4 years ago.

When the first deduplication solutions first came out, it was particularly aimed at the backup data space. It is now more popularly known as secondary data deduplication, the technology has reduced the inefficiencies of backup and helped sparked the frenzy of adulation of companies like Data Domain, Exagrid, Sepaton and Quantum a few years ago. The software vendors were not left out either. Symantec, Commvault, and everyone else in town had data deduplication for backup and archiving.

It was no surprise that EMC battled NetApp and finally won the rights to acquire Data Domain for USD$2.4 billion in 2009. Today, in my opinion, the landscape of secondary data deduplication has pretty much settled and matured. Practically everyone has some sort of secondary data deduplication technology or solution in place.

But then the talk of primary data deduplication hardly cause a ripple when compared a few years ago, especially here in Malaysia. Yeah, the IT crowd is pretty fickle that way because most tend to follow the trend of the moment. Last year was Cloud Computing and now the big buzz word is Big Data.

We are here to look at technologies to solve problems, folks, and primary data deduplication technology solutions should be considered in any IT planning. And it is our job as storage networking professionals to continue to advise customers about what is relevant to their business and addressing their pain points.

I get a bit cheesed off that companies like EMC, or HDS continue to spend their marketing dollars on hyping the trends of the moment rather than using some of their funds to promote good technologies such as primary data deduplication that solve real life problems. The same goes for most IT magazines, publications and other communications mediums, rarely giving space to technologies that solves problems on the ground, and just harping on hypes, fuzz and buzz. It gets a bit too ordinary (and mundane) when they are trying too hard to be extraordinary because everyone is basically talking about the same freaking thing at the same time, over and over again. (Hmmm … I think I am speaking off topic now .. I better shut up!)

We are facing an avalanche of data. The other day, the CEO of Nexenta used the word “data tsunami” but whatever terms used do not matter. There is too much data. Secondary data deduplication solved one part of the problem and now it’s time to talk about the other part, which is data in primary storage, hence primary data deduplication.

What is out there?  Who’s doing what in term of primary data deduplication?

NetApp has their A-SIS (now NetApp Dedupe) for years and they are good in my books. They talk to customers about the benefits of deduplication on their FAS filers. (Side note: I am seeing more benefits of using data compression in primary storage but I am not going to there in this entry). EMC has primary data deduplication in their Celerra years ago but they hardly talk much about it. It’s on their VNX as well but again, nobody in EMC ever speak about their primary deduplication feature.

I have always loved Ocarina Networks ECO technology and Dell don’t give much hoot about Ocarina since the acquisition in  2010. The technology surfaced a few months ago in Dell DX6000G Storage Compression Node for its Object Storage Platform, but then again, all Dell talks about is their Fluid Data Architecture from the Compellent division. Hey Dell, you guys are so one-dimensional! Ocarina is a wonderful gem in their jewel case, and yet all their storage guys talk about are Compellent  and EqualLogic.

Moving on … I ought to knock Oracle on the head too. ZFS has great data deduplication technology that is meant for primary data and a couple of years back, Greenbytes took that and made a solution out of it. I don’t follow what Greenbytes is doing nowadays but I do hope that the big wave of primary data deduplication will rise for companies such as Greenbytes to take off in a big way. No thanks to Oracle for ignoring another gem in ZFS and wasting their resources on pre-sales (in Malaysia) and partners (in Malaysia) that hardly know much about the immense power of ZFS.

But an unexpected source coming from Microsoft could help trigger greater interest in primary data deduplication. I have just read that the next version of Windows Server OS will have primary data deduplication integrated into NTFS. The feature will be available in Windows 8 and the architectural view is shown below:

The primary data deduplication in NTFS will be a feature add-on for Windows Server users. It is implemented as a filter driver on a per volume basis, with each volume a complete, self describing unit. It is cluster aware, and fully crash consistent on all operations.

The technology is Microsoft’s own technology, built from scratch and will be working to position Hyper-V as an strong enterprise choice in its battle for the server virtualization space with VMware. Mind you, VMware already has a big, big lead and this is just something that Microsoft must do-or-die to keep Hyper-V playing catch-up. Otherwise, the gap between Microsoft and VMware in the server virtualization space will be even greater.

I don’t have the full details of this but I read that the NTFS primary deduplication chunk sizes will be between 32KB to 128KB and it will be post-processing.

With Microsoft introducing their technology soon, I hope primary data deduplication will get some deserving accolades because I think most companies are really not doing justice to the great technologies that they have in their jewel cases. And I hope Microsoft, with all its marketing savviness and adeptness, will do some justice to a technology that solves real life’s data problems.

I bid you good luck – Primary Data Deduplication! You deserved better.

Gartner 3Q2011 WW ECB Disk Storage Market

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Just after IDC released their numbers of their worldwide Disk Storage System Tracker (Read my blog) 10 days ago, Gartner released their Worldwide External Controller Based (ECB) Disk Storage Market report for Q3 of 2011.

The storage market remains resilient (for now) and growing 10.4% in terms of revenue, despite the hard economic conditions. The table below shows the top 7 storage vendors and their relation to their Q2 numbers.

 

EMC remained at the top and gained a massive 3.6% jump in market share. Looks like they are firing all cylinders and chugging like an unstoppable steam train. IBM gained 0.1% in second place as its stable of DS8000, XIV and Storewize V7000 is taking shape. Even though IBM has been holding steadily, I still think that their present storage lineup is staggered and lacks that seamless upgrade path for their customers.

NetApp, which I always terms as the “little engine that could”, is slowing down. They were badly hit in the last quarter, delivering lower than expected revenue numbers according to the analysts. Their stock took a tumble too. As quoted by Gartner, “NetApp’s third-quarter results reflect an overdependence on a few large customers, limited geographic coverage in high-growth countries and increased competition from Dell, EMC, HP and IBM in the midrange modular ECB disk array market segment.”

I wrote in my recent blog, that NetApp has to start evolving from a pure-play storage vendor into a total storage and data management solution vendor. The recent rumours of NetApp’s interests in Commvault and Quantum should make a lot of sense if NetApp decides to make that move. Come on, NetApp! What are you waiting for?

HP came back strong in this report. They are in 4th place with 10.4% market share and hot on NetApp’s heels. After many months of nonsensical madness – Leo Apotheker firing, trying to ditch the PC business, the killing of WebOS tablet, the very public Oracle-HP spat – things are beginning to settle a bit under their new CEO, Meg Whitman. In a recent HP Discover conference in Vienna, it was reported that the HP storage team is gung-ho of what they have in their arsenal right now. They called it “The 4 Jewels of HP Storage Crown” which includes 3PAR, Ibrix, StoreOnce and LeftHand. They also leap-frogged over HDS and Dell in the recent Gartner Magic Quadrant (See below).

Kudos to HP and team.

HDS seems to be doing well, and so is Dell. But the Gartner numbers tell a different story. HDS, lost market share and now shares 7.8% market share with Dell. Dell, despite its strong marketing on Compellent, could not make up its loss after breaking off with EMC.

Fujitsu and Oracle completes the line up.

My conclusion: HP and IBM are coming back; EMC is well and far ahead of everyone else; NetApp has to evolve; Dell still lacking in enterprise storage savviness despite having good technology; No comments about HDS. 

Magic on storage players

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It’s that time of the year again where Gartner releases it Magic Quadrant for the block-access, external controller-based, mid-range and high-end modular disk arrays market. This particular is very important because it represents the mainstay of the overall storage industry, viewed from a more qualitative angle. Whereas the other charts and reports work with statistics and numbers, this is the chart that everyone in the industry flock to. Gartner Magic Quadrant (MQ) is the storage industry indicator of who’s are the leaders; who are the visionaries; who are the executive wizards and who are the laggards (also known as niche players).

So, this time around, who’s in the Leaders Quadrant?

The perennial players in the Leader’s Quadrant are EMC, IBM, NetApp, HP, Dell, and HDS. In my previous blog, I shared with you the IDC figures about market shares but the Gartner MQ shows are more subtle side, and one that perhaps carry more weight to organizations.

From the IDC numbers announced previously, we have seen Dell taking a beating. They have lost market share and similarly in this latest Gartner MQ, they have lost their significance of their influence as well. Everyone expected their Compellent solution to be robust and having EqualLogic, Ocarina and Exanet in its stable would strengthen their presence in the storage industry. Surprisingly, Dell lost on both IDC statistically charged market numbers and this Gartner MQ as well. Perhaps they were too hasty to dump EMC a few months ago?

Gartner also reported that HP has made significant leap in the Leader’s Quadrant. It has leapfrogged over HDS and IBM when comparing their position in Gartner’s MQ chart. This could be coming from their concerted effort to pitch their Converged Infrastructure, a vision that in my opinion, simplified computing. HP Malaysia shared with me their vision a few months ago, and I was impressed. What I was not very impressed then and even now, is that their storage solutions story is still staggered, lacking the gel. Perhaps it is work in progress for HP, the 3PAR, the IBRIX and the EVA. But one things for sure. They are slowly but surely getting the StoreOnce story right and that’s good news for customers. I did a review of HP StoreOnce technology a few months ago.

Perhaps it’s time for HP to ditch their VLS deduplication, which to me, confuses customers. By the way, HP VLS is an OEM from Sepaton. (Sepaton is “No tapes” spelled backwards)

Here’s a glimpse of last year’s Magic Quadrant.

 

In the Niche Quadrant, there are a few players making waves as well. 2 companies to watch out for are Huawei (they dropped Symantec 2 weeks ago) and Nexsan. Nexsan has been beefing up its marketing of late, and I often see them in mailing lists and ads on some websites I went to.

But the one to watch will be Huawei. This is a company with deep pockets, hiring the best in the storage industry and also has a very strong domestic market in China. In the next 2-3 years, Huawei could emerge as a strong contender to the big boys. So watch out!

Gartner Magic Quadrant is indeed weaving its magic and this time around the magic is good to HP.

Crisis? What crisis?

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The storage train is still chugging hard and fast as IDC just released its Worldwide Disk Storage System Tracker for 3Q11. Despite the economic climate, the storage market posted a strong 8.5% revenue growth and a whopping 30.7% growth in terms of petabytes shipped. In total, 5,429PB were shipped in Q3.

So how did everyone do in this latest Tracker report?

In the Worldwide Total External Disk Storage Systems, EMC is still holding on to the #1 position, with 28.6%. IBM and NetApp came in at 12.7% and 12.1% respectively. The table below summarizes the percentage view of the top storage players, in terms of revenue.

 

From the table, everyone benefited from the strong buying of storage in the last quarter. EMC gained a strong market gain of almost 3%, while everyone else either gained or lost less than 1% market share.  But the more interesting numbers are not from the market share column but the % growth column.

HDS posted the strongest growth of 22.1%, slightly higher than EMC of 22.0%. HDS is beginning to get their story right, putting the right storage solutions in place, and has been strongly focused in their services offering as well. That’s simply great news for HDS because this is a company is not known for their marketing and advertising. The Japanese “culture” within HDS probably has taught it to be prudent but to see HDS growing faster than the big boys like IBM and HP is something their competitors should respect. I believe customers are beginning to see the true potential of HDS.

As for EMC, everyone labels them as the 800-pound gorilla but they have been very nimble and strong in the storage market for many quarters. This is due to the strong management team headed by Joe Tucci and his heir-in-waiting, Pat Gelsinger. Several of their acquisitions are doing well, with the likes of Isilon, Greenplum, Data Domain, and of course VMware. Even though VMware does not contribute the EMC revenue numbers, the very fact that EMC owns more than 80% of VMware has already given EMC a lot of credibility in the storage battlefield. They are certainly going great guns.

NetApp took a hit in the last quarter, when they missed the street revenue numbers last quarter. Their stock took a beating and there were rumours in the market that NetApp might acquire Commvault and Quantum to compete with EMC. EMC has been able to leverage the list of companies and acquired solutions very well, from data protection solutions like Networker and Avamar, deduplication solutions like Data Domain and Avamar, Documentum for content management and so on, while NetApp has been, for the longest time, prefer a more “loosely-coupled” approach with their partners for a more complete solution set.

Other interesting reports from IDC are the Open SAN/NAS market, the NAS market and the iSCSI market.

The Open SAN/NAS market combination, according to IDC goes like this:

EMC 31.3%
NetApp 14.4%

In the NAS only market, EMC and Isilon (under the one EMC umbrella) competes with NetApp and the table is like this:

EMC 46.7%
NetApp 30.7%

The iSCSI only market is led by Dell (EqualLogic and Compellent combined), followed by EMC and IBM. Here’s the summarized table:

Dell 30.3%
EMC 19.2%
IBM 14.0%

The strong growth is indeed good news as the storage market continues to weather the economic crisis storm. I have been saying this all along. The storage market in IT is still the growth engine as data keeps growing and growing, even though it was never the darling of the IT industry. Let’s hope the trend continues.

Data Deduplication – Dell is first and last

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A very interesting report surfaced in front of me today. It is Information Week’s IT Pro ranking of Data Deduplication vendors, just made available a few weeks ago, and it is the overview of the dedupe market so far.

It surveyed over 400 IT professionals from various industries with companies ranging from less than 50 employees to over 10,000 employees and revenues of less than USD5 million to USD1 billion. Overall, it had a good mix of respondents. But the results were quite interesting.

It surveyed 2 segments

  1. Overall performance – product reliability, product performance, acquisition costs, operations costs etc.
  2. Technical features – replication, VTL, encryption, iSCSI and FCoE support etc.

When I saw the results (shown below), surprise, surprise! Here’s the overall performance survey chart:

Dell/Compellent scored the highest in this survey while EMC/Data Domain ranked the lowest. However, the difference between the first place and the last place vendor is only 4%, and this is to suggest that EMC/Data Domain was about just as good as the Dell/Compellent solution, but it scored poorly in the areas that matters most to the customer. In fact, as we drill down into the requirements of the overall performance one-by-one, as shown below,

there is little difference among the 7 vendors.

However, when it comes to Technical Features, Dell/Compellent is ranked last, the complete opposite. As you can see from the survey chart below, IBM ProtecTier, NetApp and HP are all ranked #1.

The details, as per the technical requirements of the customers, are shown below:

These figures show that the competition between the vendors is very, very stiff, with little edge difference from one to another. But what I was more interested were the following findings, because these figures tell a story.

In the survey, only 34% of the respondents say they have implemented some data deduplication solutions, while the rest are evaluating and plan to evaluation. This means that the overall market is not saturated and there is still a window of opportunity for the vendors. However, the speed of the a maturing data deduplication market, from early adopters perhaps 4-5 years ago to overall market adoption, surprised many, because the storage industry tend to be a bit less trendy than most areas of IT. With the way the rate of data deduplication is going, it will be very much a standard feature of all storage vendors in the very near future.

The second figures that is probably not-so-surprising is, for most of the customers who have already implemented the data deduplication solution, almost 99% are satisfied or somewhat satisfied with their solutions. Therefore, the likelihood of these customer switching vendors and replacing their gear is very low, perhaps partly because of the reliability of the solution as well as those products performing as they should.

The Information Week’s IT Pro survey probably reflected well of where the deduplication market is going and there isn’t much difference in terms of technical and technology features from vendor to vendor. Customer will have to choose beyond the usual technology pitch, and look for other (and perhaps more important) subtleties such as customer service, price and flexibility of doing business with. EMC/Data Domain, being king-of-the-hill, has not been the best of vendor when it comes to price, quality of post-sales support and service innovation. Let’s hope they are not like the EMC sales folks of the past, carrying the “Take it or leave it” tag when they develop their relationship with their future customers. And it will not help if word-of-mouth goes around the industry about EMC’s arrogance of their dominance. It may not be true, and let’s hope it is not true because the EMC of today has changed plenty compared to the Symmetrix days. EMC/Data Domain is now part of their Backup Recovery Service (BRS) team, and I have good friends there at EMC Malaysia and Singapore. They are good guys but remember guys, customer is still king!

Dell, new with their acquisition of Compellent and Ocarina Networks, seems very eager to win the business and kudos to them as well. In fact, I heard from a little birdie that Dell is “giving away” several units of Compellents to selected customers in Malaysia. I did not and cannot ascertain if this is true or not but if it is, that’s what I call thinking-out-of-the-box, given Dell as a late comer into the storage game. Well done!

One thing to note is that the survey took in 17 vendors, including Exagrid, Falconstor, Quantum, Sepaton and so on, but only the top-7 shown in the charts qualified.

In the end, I believe the deduplication vendors had better scramble to grab as much as they can in the coming months, because this market will be going, going, gone pretty soon with nothing much to grab after that, unless there is a disruptive innovation to the deduplication technology

Ocarina rising

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After more than a year since Dell acquired Ocarina Networks, it has finally surfaced last week in the form of Dell DX Object Storage 6000G SCN (Storage Compression Node).

Ocarina is a content-aware storage optimization engine, and their solution is one of the best I have seen out there. Its unique ECOsystem technology, as described in the diagram below, is impressive.

Unlike most deduplication and compression solutions out there, Ocarina Networks solution takes storage optimization a step further.  Ocarina works at the file level and given the rise and crazy, crazy growth of unstructured files in the NAS space, the web and the clouds, storage optimization is one priority that has to be addressed immediately. It takes a 3-step process – Extract, Correlate and Optimize.

Today’s files are no longer a flat structure of a single object but more of a compounded file where many objects are amalgamated from different sources. Microsoft Office is a perfect example of this. An Excel file would consists of objects from Windows Metafile Formats, XML objects, OLE (Object Linking and Embedding) Compound Storage Objects and so on. (Note: That’s just Microsoft way of retaining monopolistic control). Similarly, a web page is a compound of XML, HTML, Flash, ASP, PHP object codes.

In Step 1, the technology takes files and breaks it down to its basic components. It is kind of like breaking apart every part of a car down to its nuts and bolt and layout every bit on the gravel porch. That is the “Extraction” process and it decodes each file to get the fundamental components of the files.

Once the compounded file object is “extracted”, identified and indexed, each fundamental object is Correlated in Step 2. The correlation is executed with the file and across files under the purview of Ocarina. Matching and duplicated objects are flagged and deduplicated. The deduplication is done at the byte-level, unlike most deduplication solutions that operate at the block-level. This deeper and more granular approach further reduces the capacity of the storage required, making Ocarina one of the most efficient storage optimization solutions currently available. That is why Ocarina can efficiently reduce the size of even zipped and highly encoded files.

It takes this storage optimization even further in Step 3. It applies content-aware compactors for each fundamental object type, uniquely compressing each object further. That means that there are specialized compactors for PDF objects, ZIP objects and so on. They even have compactors for Oil & Gas seismic files. At the time I was exposed to Ocarina Networks and evaluating it, it had about 600+ unique compactors.

After Dell bought Ocarina in July 2010, the whole Ocarina went into a stealth mode. Many already predicted that the Ocarina technology would be integrated and embedded into Dell’s primary storage solutions of Compellent and EqualLogic. It is not there yet, but will likely be soon.

Meanwhile, the first glimpse of Ocarina will be integrated as a gateway solution to Dell DX6000 Object Storage. DX Object Storage is a technology which Dell has OEMed from Caringo. DX6000 Object Storage (I did not read in depth) has the concept of the old EMC Centera, but with a much newer, and more approach based on XML and HTTP REST. It has published an open API and Dell is getting ISV partners to develop their applications to interact with the DX6000 including Commvault, EMC, Symantec, StoredIQ are some of the ISV partners working closely with Dell.

(24/10/2011: Editor note: Previously I associated Dell DX6000 Object Storage with Exanet. I was wrong and I would like to thank Jim Dtuton of Caringo for pointing out my mistake)

Ocarina’s first mission is to reduce the big, big capacities in Big Data space of the DX6000 Object Storage, and the Ocarina ECOsystem technology looks a good bet for Dell as a key technology differentiator.

Mr. Black divorces Miss Purple

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The writing’s on the wall and the relationship has been on the rocks since Mr. Black decided to take on 2 new wives (one in 2007 and one in 2010) and Miss Purple had a good run when things were hot.

Why Black and Purple? For a while within the local circle of EMC Malaysia, Dell’s EMC CLARiiONs were known as “Black” while EMC’s own CLARiiON was “Purple”. They were the colours of the bezels of each respective storage box. And the relationship, which Dell signed with EMC in 2003, was supposed to last 10 years but today, Dell has decided to end that relationship 2 years early. Here is one of the news at eWeek.com.

The “divorce” was inevitable. Gaps started showing up in the relationship when Dell acquired EqualLogic in 2007 and this relationship went to a point of no return when Dell started pursuing 3PAR back in 2010. Dell eventually lost 3PAR to HP and got Compellent instead. It was bound to happen, sooner or later.

Storage is becoming a very important strategy for Dell. As server virtualization grows, the demand for Dell servers wanes but storage demand kept growing. That is why it makes sense for Dell to have their own storage techonology. In addition to Compellent and EqualLogic, Dell has also acquired Exanet and Ocarina Networks in 2010.

It has been a good run for both companies, especially EMC, who was able to make use of Dell’s aggressive sales force to increase their market penetration for CLARiiON. And given the market dynamics, it is crucial that a company like Dell, with little innovation in the past, change their approach of reselling other people’s products and start owning and developing their own technology.

IDC EMEA External Disk Storage Systems 2Q11 trends

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Europe is the worst hit region in this present economic crisis. We have seen countries such as Greece, Portugal and Ireland being some of the worst hit countries and Italy was just downgraded last week by S&P. Last week was also the release of the 2Q2011 External Disk Storage Systems figures from IDC and the poor economic sentiments are reflected in the IDC figures as well.

Overall, the factory revenue for Western Europe grew 6% compared to the year before, but declined 5% when compared to 1Q2011. As I was reading a summary of the report, 2 very interesting trends were clear.

  • The high-end market of above USD250,000 AND the lower-end market of less than USD50,000 increased while the mid-end market of between USD50,000-100,000 price range declined
  • Sentiments revealed that storage buyers are increasingly looking for platforms that are quick to deploy and easy to manage.

As older systems are refreshed, larger companies are definitely consolidating into larger, higher-end systems to support the consolidation of their businesses and operations. Fundamentals such as storage consolidation, centralized data protection, disaster recovery and server virtualization are likely to be the key initiatives by larger organization to cut operational costs and maximizing of storage economics. This has translated to the EMEA market spending more on the higher-end storage solutions from EMC, IBM, HDS and HP.

NetApp, which has been always very strong in the mid-end market, did well to increase their market share and factory revenue at IBM’s and HP’s expense because their sales were flattish. Dell, while transitioning from its partnership with EMC to its Dell Compellent boxes, was the worst hit.

The lower-end storage solution market, according to IDC figures, increased between 10-25% depending on the price ranges of USD5,000 to USD10,000 to USD15,000. This could mean a few things but the obvious call would be the economic situation of most Western European SMBs/SMEs. This could also mean that the mid-end market could be on the decline as many of the lower-end systems are good enough to do the job. One thing the economic crisis can teach us is to be very prudent with our spendings and I believe the Western European companies are taking the same path to control their costs and maximizing their investments.

The second trend was more interesting to me. The quote of “quick to deploy and easy to manage” is definitely pushing the market to react to more off-the-shelf and open components. From an HP stand point of their Converged Infrastructure, the x86 strategy for their storage solutions is making good sense, because I believe there will be lesser need for proprietary hardware from traditional storage vendors like EMC, NetApp and others (HP included). Likewise, having storage solutions such as VSA (Virtual Storage Appliance) and storage appliance software that runs on the x86 platforms such as Nexenta and Gluster could spell out the next wave in the storage networking industry. To have things easy, specialized appliances which I have spoke much of lately, hits the requirement of “quick to deploy and easy to manage” right on the dot.

The overall fundamentals of the external disk storage systems market remain strong. Below is the present standings in the EMEA market as reported by IDC.

 

VMware – the silent storage killer

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When VMware 5.0 was launched last month, I heard the feature called Virtual Storage Appliance (VSA) was finally out and is now being offered as an SMB/SME “storage” solution. In my mind, alarm bells were ringing because in its own stealthy manner, VMware had just become a storage player.

What VMware is offering is “Hey! If you don’t have money to buy your enterprise storage array, don’t worry. Make your own shared storage with our very own VMware VSA“. VSA utilizes the internal disks of the ESX/ESXi host as its shared storage.

VSA is nothing new. For years, LeftHand Networks had one for its engineers to do demo and show the functionality of their solution. EMC had it too, and recently I found out that NetApp has its own VSA, but only resell through its partner, Fujitsu. I am not 100% sure about the NetApp thing and I need a NetApp guy to verify this.

Smaller players, but not insignificant, such as Nutanix, Nexenta and Tintri are already offering their own versions and implementation of VSA to their customers, each with its own uniqueness and differences. With the release of the VMware VSA into the open, we shall see all the big storage players offering their VSAs to VMware, like natives offering sacrifices to VMware God. Or perhaps, it has already begun. It is ala-Nexus 1000v all over again.

VMware has become a huge juggernaut and it is merely using its advantage to consolidate the storage component under its control. When VMware version 4.0 came out, vStorage API was introduced along with VAAI (vStorage API for Array Integration). VAAI was created to enhance the storage experience by offloading specific storage operations to the native features of that supported storage platform. That’s all I know about VAAI at this moment, but with this feature, the storage array is tightly integrating its platform to VMware, or should I say … quietly ensnared by VMware tentacles of doom! (Evil laugh in the background! Mua ha ha ha ….!)

In the recently past VMworld, this storage story is slowly being unfurled even more to the world. VASA (vStorage API for Storage Awareness) was recently announced and EMC’s COO Pat Gelsinger spoke about the tighter integration (that word again!) that blurs the administration domain of the VMware admin and the storage admin. Below is a video of Pat Gelsinger talking about VASA below (this is long 55 minute video – Click only if you have the time).

Mind you, the entire vStorage API is still evolving as VMware 5.0 rolls out but here’s the thing. VMware has come out and say that the storage world about LUNs, RAID groups and mount points are a level below what the VMware admin should be concerned about. VMware admins handles their storage at the VM level or as VMDK and therefore, anything below it is of little significance to them. Again, you can see that VMware is using its muscle to say “If you guys want to play, you have to play by my rules“.

So, some new announcements came out from VMworld for storage such as Capacity Pools, I/O Multiplexer, and Storage DRS (Storage Distributed Resource Management) and also an enhanced version (probably more storage resilient) SRM (Site Recovery Manager). All these are being managed at a level above the traditional storage admin level and VMware has said that the VMware admin would be able to carve out a VM volume with its own set of default storage properties, defined snapshot retentions, replication and perhaps even compression and deduplication. But all these will be happening at the VM volume or VMDK level, not a level below that.

Details are still sketchy at this point in time and we probably won’t see these GA until probably VMware version 6.0. But the inertia has been rocked quietly and the VMware storage momentum will gain strength as time passes by. We could see that VMware would just need JBOD (just a bunch of disks) because it has its own enterprise storage features through its vStorage APIs or its future storage specifications. We have seen it happening in VSA with VMware offering its own storage.

From the similar news, what surprised me was what was quoted as shown below.

The presenters said VMware developed the APIs with EMC, NetApp, Dell,
IBM and Hewlett-Packard,but they began the session with a disclaimer
that none of those vendors has committed to support the APIs in
their arrays.

Why the hell would EMC, NetApp, Dell, IBM and HP do something like that?!! Don’t they know that this could contribute to their insignificance in the future?

I am still perplexed but as the whole thing is still evolving, VMware seems to be only obvious winner here.