Tag Archives: HDS

HDS HNAS kicks ass

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I am dusting off the cobwebs of my blog. After almost 3 months of inactivity, (and trying to avoid the Social Guidelines Media of my present company), I have bolstered enough energy to start writing again. I am tired, and I am finishing off the previous engagements prior to joining HDS. But I am glad those are coming to an end, with the last job in Beijing next week.

So officially, I will be in HDS as of November 4, 2013 . And to get into my employer’s good books, I think I should start with something that HDS has proved many critics wrong. The notion that HDS is poor with NAS solutions has been dispelled with a recent benchmark report from SPECSfs, especially when it comes to NFS file performance. HDS has never been much of a big shouter about their HNAS, even back in the days of OEM with BlueArc. The gap period after the BlueArc acquisition was also, in my opinion, quiet unless it was the gestation period for this Kick-Ass announcement a couple of weeks ago. Here is one of the news circling in the web, from the ever trusty El-Reg.

HDS has never been big shouting like the guys, like EMC and NetApp, who have plenty of marketing dollars to spend. EMC Isilon and NetApp C-Mode have always touted their mighty SPECSfs numbers, usually with a high number of controllers or nodes behind the benchmarks. More often than not, many readers would probably focus more on the NFSops/sec figures rather than the number of heads required to generate the figures.

Unaware of this HDS announcement, I was already asking myself that question about NFSops/sec per SINGLE controller head. So, on September 26 2013, I did a table comparing some key participants of the SPECSfs2008_nfs.v3 and here is the table:

SPECSfs2008_nfs.v3-26-Sept-2013In the last columns of the 2 halves (which I have highlighted in Red), the NFSops/sec/single controller head numbers are shown. I hope that readers would view the performance numbers more objectively after reading this. Therefore, I let you make your own decisions but ultimately, they are what they are. One should not be over-mesmerized by the super million NFSops/sec until one looks under the hood. Secondly, one should also look at things more holistically such as $/NFSops/sec, $/ORT (overall response time), and $/GB/NFSops/managed and other relevant indicators of the systems sold.

But I do not want to take the thunder away from HDS’ HNAS platforms in this recent benchmark. In summary,

HDS SPECbench summaryTo reach a respectable number of 607,647 NFSops/sec with a sub-second response time is quite incredible. The ORT of 0.59 msecs should not be taken lightly because to eke just about a 0.1 msec is not easy. Therefore, reaching 0.5 millisecond is pretty awesome.

This is my first blog after 3 months. I am glad to be back and hopefully with the monkey off my back (I am referring to my outstanding engagements), I can concentrating on writing good stuff again. I know, I know … I still owe some people some entries. It’s great to be back 🙂

Washing too much software defined

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There’s been practically a firestorm when EMC announced ViPR, its own version of “software-defined storage” at EMC World last week. Whether you want to call it Virtualization Platform Re-defined or Re-imagined, competitors such as NetApp, HDS, Nexenta have taken pot-shots at EMC, and touting their own version of software-defined storage.

In the release announcement, EMC claimed the following (a cut-&-paste from the announcement):

  • The EMC ViPR Software-Defined Storage Platform uniquely provides the ability to both manage storage infrastructure (Control Plane) and the data residing within that infrastructure (Data Plane).
  • The EMC ViPR Controller leverages existing storage infrastructures for traditional workloads, but provisions new ViPR Object Data Services (with access via Amazon S3 or HDFS APIs) for next-generation workloads. ViPR Object Data Services integrate with OpenStack via Swift and can be run against enterprise or commodity storage.
  • EMC ViPR integrates tightly with VMware’s Software Defined Data Center through industry standard APIs and interoperates with Microsoft and OpenStack.

The separation of the Control Plane and the Data Plane of the ViPR allows the abstraction of 2 main layers.

Layer 1 is the abstraction of the underlying storage hardware infrastructure. Although I don’t have the full details (EMC guys please enlighten me, please!), I believe storage administrator no longer need to carve out LUNs from RAID groups or Storage Pools, striped and sliced them and further provision them into meta file systems before they are exported or shared through NAS protocols. I am , of course, quoting the underlying provisioning architecture of Celerra, which can be quite complex. Anyone who has done manual provisioning with Celerra Manager should know what I mean.

Here’s the provisioning architecture of Celerra:

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Is there no one to challenge EMC?

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It’s been a busy, busy month for me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kudos to the EMC team for damn good execution!

HUS VM is not virtual storage appliance

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I was very confused with an recent HDS announcement, and it has been at the back of my mind for several weeks now.

On the last week of September 2012, HDS announced their Hitachi Unified Storage VM, aimed at small/medium enterprises (SMEs). Nothing wrong with that, except the VM part. I am not sure if it was the Computerworld author’s mistake, but he specifically mentioned VM as “virtual machine”. Check out the link here and the screenshot below:

It got me a bit riled up thinking this was some kind of virtual storage ala VMware Virtual Storage Appliance or NetApp ONTAP-V or even the early innovation of HP Lefthand Virtual SAN Appliance. Apparently not!

I did some short investigation and found Nigel Poulton’s blog which gave a fantastic dissection about the HUS VM. The VM is not virtual machine, but Virtual Midrange!

The HUS VM architecture is deep in ASICs, given HDS long history in ASICs design and manufacturing. SiliconFS, is the NAS front end, while the iSCSI and FC part are being serviced from the same HDS microcode of the higher end HDS VSP. Here’s a look at the hardware architectural diagram from Nigel’s blog:

There are plenty of bells and whistles in the HUS VM, armed with plenty of 8Gbps FC ports, SAS 6Gbps backend, SSDs, and software such as Dynamic Provisioning (thin provisioning) and Dynamic Tiering.

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The reports are out!

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

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

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

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?

IDC 4Q11 Tracker numbers are in

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It was a challenging 2011 but the tremendous growth of data continues to spur the growth of storage. According to IDC in its latest Worldwide Quarterly Disk Storage Systems Tracker, the storage market grew a healthy 7.7% in factory revenues, and the total disk storage capacity shipped was 6,279 petabytes, up 22.4% year-on-year! What Greg Schulz once said was absolutely true. “There is no recession in storage” 

Let’s look at the numbers. Overall, the positions of the storage vendors did not change much, but to me, the more exciting part is the growth quarter over quarter.

EMC and NetApp continue to post double digit growth perennially, with 25.9% and 16.6% respectively. Once again, taking market share from HP and others. HP, with the upheaval that is going on right now throughout the organization, got hit badly with a decline of 3.8%, while IBM held ground of 0.0%. And a data growth of 0.0% when the data growth is at more than 20% is not good, not good at all.

HDS, continuing its momentum with a good story, took a decent 11.6% and a fantastic number from HDS’s perspective. I have been out with my HDS buddies and I can feel their excitement and energy that I have never seen before. And that is a good indicator of the innovation and new technology that is coming out from HDS. They just need to work on their marketing and tell the industry more about what they are doing. Japanese can be so modest.

From the report, 2 things peeved me.

  • IDC reports that NetApp and HP are *tied* at 3rd. This does not make any sense at all! How can they be tied when NetApp has double digit growth, 11.2% market share and a revenue of USD$734 million while HP has negative growth, 10.3% market share and USD$677 million revenue? The logic boggles my mind!
  • They lumped Dell and Oracle into others! And others had a -1.4% growth. I am eager to find out how these 2 companies are doing, especially Dell who has been touting superb growth with their storage story.

Meanwhile, in TOTAL, here’s the table for the Total Worldwide Disk Storage Market share for 4Q11.

Numbers don’t lie. HP and IBM, in both 2nd and 3rd place respectively, are not in good shape. Negative growth in an upward trending market spells more trouble in the long run, and they had better buck up.

In this table, Dell gained and went up to #4 ahead of NetApp and from the look of things, Dell is doing all the right things to make sure that their storage market story is gelling together. Kudos! In fact, NetApp’s position and perception in the last 2-3 quarters have been shaky with Dell and HDS breathing down its neck. There isn’t likely to be significant dent to NetApp by HDS or Dell at this point in time, but having been the “the little engine that could” (that’s what I used to call NetApp) for the last few years, NetApp seems to be losing a bit of the extra “ooomph” that has excited the market in the past.

Lastly, I just want to say that my comments are based on the facts and figures in the tables published by IDC. I remember the last time I commented with the same approach, buddies of mine in the industry disagreed with me, saying that each of them are doing great in the Malaysian or South East Asian market.

Sorry guys, I blog I was see and I welcome you to take me to your sessions to let me know how well you are doing here. I would be glad to write more about it. (Hint, hint).

 

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.