Tag: emc

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Kudos to HP CEO Mark Hurd for dignity to step down from his post

Yesterday (Friday) late afternoon, HP announced (or read here) that their CEO Mark Hurd was resigning due to improprieties uncovered during an internal investigation.

HP is far from being alone in the corporate world involving investigations, lawsuits by governments or allegations of bribes and impropriety.

However what stands out is that of the CEO stepping down.

While not unique, after all remember the former CA CEO Sanjay Kumar who was locked up, or former Brocade CEO Greg Reyes now stepping into new government provided accommodations due to illegal activities, not to mention those from Enron among others. Granted in those situations there were legal ramifications outside of the companies prompting the courts to get involved, something that looks like for now is not the case at HP. However, having the courts get involved with corporate activity is almost becoming a pattern of how business is done. For example, there is a whos who list (e.g.Cisco, Dell, EMC, IBM, Intel, or Oracle among others) of IT companies involved in (or recently settled) various government or financial dealing cases associated with bribes, kickbacks or other business improprieties reminiscent of Rodney Dangerfield character Thornton Melon explaining how business is conducted in the real world during Dr Phillip Barbay business class in Back to School.

Lets get back to and focus on the individual, that is Mr Hurd and what I think is something rare these days. That is a CEO or leader of a company or organization seriously taking responsibility for their actions or those that they are responsible for instead of lip service and spin doctoring.

I do not know whether Mr Hurd decided on his own or it was suggested to him that he step down from his post. However what I do know simply based on the story that has been put out by HP is that Mr Hurd either has, or is being portrayed as taking the high road of stepping down. That is, as the head of the HP organization, he is taking responsibility for actions, not looking for special status or exceptions and stepping down from his post instead of trying to sweep the dust or dirt under the rug. Thus Kudos to Mr Hurd for taking responsibility, not hiding, spinning or throwing someone else under the proverbial corporate politics bus to save his own hide.As the CEO of a major corporation the buck stops with him and he should not be above the law or polices of his own organizations that other employees would be expected to follow.

Too often today we hear stories of company or organization or government leaders getting or expecting special treatment in some cases not taking full and complete responsibility for their actions other than for a photo opportunity.

On a different yet related note, perhaps my thinking will change as more comes out on the story as well as they story behind the story, however this is an interesting example of how crisis management can be dealt with. Sure the story was released on a Friday afternoon which is typically when bad news is put out after the financial markets have closed. On the other hand, given the nature of HP being a tech company and with web, blogs, twitter, face book and other social media the chatter was significant for a late Friday afternoon.

Lets see how this plays out and if HP along with their PR crisis team played the right cards by getting the story out, CEO Mark Hurd stepping down to avoid prolonging the situations as well as how wall street will react short term and over the long haul.

This leaves me with a closing thought of if politicians from all sides (or across both sides of aisle or parties) did what HP CEO Mark Hurd did (resign) due to impropriety, we would have fewer elected officials. Thus I do not think Mr Hurd has a future in government politics not because of what he did that caused his stepping down at HP.

No, rather because either on his own or under advice of others he decided not to look for or seek special favor or cover up of what was done as well as try not to spin the story thus saving both him and his company (HP) for the long term.

Nuff said for now.

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz – Author The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

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Data footprint reduction (Part 2): Dell, IBM, Ocarina and Storwize

Dell

IBM

Over the past couple of weeks there has been a flurry of IT industry activity around data footprint impact reduction with Dell buying Ocarina and IBM acquiring Storwize. For those who want the quick (compacted, reduced) synopsis of what Dell buying Ocarina as well as IBM acquiring Storwize means read the first post in this two part series as well as some of my comments here and here.

This piece and it companion in part I of this two part series is about expanding the discussion to the much larger opportunity for vendors or vars of overall data footprint impact reduction beyond where they are currently focused. Likewise, this is about IT customers realizing that there are more opportunities to address data and storage optimization across your entire organization using various techniques instead of just focusing on backup or vmware virtual servers.

Who is Ocarina and Storwize?
Ocarina is a data and storage management software startup focused on data footprint reduction using a variety of approaches, techniques and algorithms. They differ from the traditional data dedupers (e.g. Asigra, Bakbone, Commvault, EMC Avamar, Datadomain and Networker, Exagrid, Falconstor, HP, IBM Protectier and TSM, Quantum, Sepaton and Symantec among others) by looking at data footprint reduction beyond just backup.

This means looking at how to reduce data footprint across different types of data including videos, image as well as text based documents among others. As a result, the market sweet spot for Ocarina is for general data footprint reduction including static along with active data including entertainment, video surveillance or gaming, reference data, web 2.0 and other bulk storage application data needs (this should compliment Dells recent Exanet acquisition).

What this means is that Ocarina is very well suited to address the rapidly growing amount of unstructured data that may not otherwise be handled as efficiently with by dedupe alone.

Storwize is a data and storage management startup focused on data footprint reduction using inline compression with an emphasis on maintaining performance for reads as well as writes of unstructured as well as structured database data. Consequently the market sweet spot for Storwize is around boosting the capacity of existing NAS storage systems from different vendors without negatively impacting performance. The trade off of the Storwize approach is that you do not get the spectacular data reduction ratios associated with backup centric or focused dedupe, however, you maintain performance associated with online storage that some dedupers dream of.

Both Dell and IBM have existing dedupe solutions for general purpose as well as backup along with other data footprint impact reduction tools (either owned or via partners). Now they are both expanding their focus and reach similar to what others such as EMC, HP, NetApp, Oracle and Symantec among others are doing. What this means is that someone at Dell and IBM see that there is much more to data footprint impact reduction than just a focus on dedupe for backup.

Wait, what does all of this discussion (or read here for background issues, challenges and opportunities) about unstructured data and changing access lifecycles have to do with dedupe, Ocarina and Storwize?

Continue reading on as this is about the expanding opportunity for data footprint reduction across entire organizations. That is, more data is being kept online and expanding data footprint impact needs to be addressed to meet business objectives using various techniques balancing performance, availability, capacity and energy or economics (PACE).

Dell

IBM

What does all of this have to do with IBM buying Storwize and Dell acquiring Ocarina?
If you have not pieced this together yet, let me net it out.

This is about the opportunity to address the organization wide expanding data footprint impact across all applications, types of data as well as tiers of storage to support business growth (more data to store) while maintaining QoS yet reduce per unit costs including management.

This is about expanding the story to the broader data footprint impact reduction from the more narrowly focused backup and dedupe discussion which are still in their infancy on a relative basis to their full market potential (read more here).

Now are you seeing where this is going and fits?

Does this mean IBM and Dell defocus on their existing Dedupe product lines or partners?
I do not believe so, at least as long as their respective revenue prevention departments are kept on the sidelines and off of the field of play. What I mean by this is that the challenge for IBM and Dell is similar to that of what others such as EMC are faced with having diverse portfolios or technology toolboxes. The challenge is messaging to the bigger issues, then aligning the right tool to the task at hand to address given issues and opportunities instead of singularly focused on a specific product causing revenue prevention elsewhere.

As an example, for backup, I would expect Dell to continue to work with its existing dedupe backup centric partners and technologies however find new opportunities to leverage their Ocarina solution. Likewise, IBM I would expect to continue to show customers where Tivoli software based dedupe or Protectier (aka the deduper formerly known as Diligent) or other target based dedupe fits and expand into other data footprint impact areas with Storewize.

Does this change the playing field?
IMHO these moves as well as some previous moves by the likes of EMC and NetApp among others are examples of expanding the scope and dimension of the playing field. That is, the focus is much more than just dedupe for backup or of virtual machines (e.g. VMware vSphere or Microsoft HyperV).

This signals a growing awareness around the much larger and broader opportunity around organization wide data footprint impact reduction. In the broader context some applications or data gets compressed either in application software such as databases, file systems, operating systems or even hypervisors as well as in networks using protocol or bandwidth optimizers as well as inline compression or post processing techniques as has been the case with streaming tape devices for some time.

This also means that where with dedupe the primary focus or marketing angle up until recently has been around reduction ratios, to meet the needs of time or performance sensitive applications data transfer rates also become important.

Hence the role of policy based data footprint reduction where the right tool or technique to meet specific service requirements is applied. For those vendors with a diverse data footprint impact reduction tool kit including archive, compression, dedupe, thin provision among other techniques, I would expect to hear expanded messaging around the theme of applying the right tool to the task at hand.

Does this mean Dell bought Ocarina to accessorize EqualLogic?
Perhaps, however that would then beg the question of why EqualLogic needs accessorizing. Granted there are many EqualLogic along with other Dell sold storage systems attached to Dell and other vendors servers operating as NFS or Windows CIFS file servers that are candidates for Ocarina. However there are also many environments that do not yet include Dell EqualLogic solutions where Ocarina is a means for Dell to extend their reach enabling those organizations to do more with what they have while supporting growth.

In other words, Ocarina can be used to accessorize, or, it can be used to generate and create pull through for various Dell products. I also see a very strong affinity and opportunity for Dell to combine their recent Exanet NAS storage clustering software with Dell servers, storage to create bulk or scale out solutions similar to what HP and other vendors have done. Of course what Dell does with the Ocarina software over time, where they integrate it into their own products as well as OEM to others should be interesting to watch or speculate upon.

Does this mean IBM bought Storwize to accessorize XIV?
Well, I guess if you put a gateway (or software on a server which is the same thing) in front of XIV to transform it into a NAS system, sure, then Storwize could be used to increase the net usable capacity of the XIV installed base. However that is a lot of work and cost for what is on a relative basis a small footprint, yet it is a viable option never the less.

IMHO IBM has much more of a play, perhaps a home run by walking before they run by placing Storwize in front of their existing large installed base of NetApp N series (not to mention targeting NetApps own install base) as well as complimenting their SONAS solutions. From there as IBM gets their legs and mojo, they could go on the attack by going after other vendors NAS solutions with an efficiency story similar to how IBM server groups target other vendors server business for takeout opportunities except in a complimenting manner.

Longer term I would not be surprised to see IBM continue development of the block based IP (as well as file) in the storwize product for deployment in solutions ranging from SVC to their own or OEM based products along with articulating their comprehensive data footprint reduction solution portfolio. What will be important for IBM to do is articulating what solution to use when, where, why and how without confusing their customers, partners and rest of the industry (something that Dell will also have to do).

Some links for additional reading on the above and related topics

Wrap up (for now)

Organizations of all shape and size are encountering some form of growing data footprint impact that currently, or soon will need to be addressed. Given that different applications and types of data along with associated storage mediums or tiers have various performance, availability, capacity, energy as well as economic characteristics multiple data footprint impact reduction tools or techniques are needed. What this all means is that the focus of data footprint reduction is expanding beyond that of just dedupe for backup or other early deployment scenarios.

Note what this means is that dedupe has an even brighter future than where it currently is focused which is still only scratching the surface of potential market adoption as was discussed in part 1 of this series.

However this also means that dedupe is not the only solution to all data footprint reduction scenarios. Other techniques including archiving, compression, data management, thin provisioning, data deletion, tiered storage and consolidation will start to gain respect, coverage discussions and debates.

Bottom line, use the most applicable technologies or combinations along with best practice for the task and activity at hand.

For some applications reduction ratios are an important focus on the tools or modes of operations that achieve those results.

Likewise for other applications where the focus is on performance with some data reduction benefit, tools are optimized for performance first and reduction secondary.

Thus I expect messaging from some vendors to adjust (expand) to those capabilities that they have in their toolboxes (product portfolios) offerings

Consequently, IMHO some of the backup centric dedupe solutions may find themselves in niche roles in the future unless they can diversity. Vendors with multiple data footprint reduction tools will also do better than those with only a single function or focused tool.

However for those who only have a single or perhaps a couple of tools, well, guess what the approach and messaging will be. After all, if all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail, if all you have is a screw driver, well, you get the picture.

On the other hand, if you are still not clear on what all this means, send me a note, give a call, post a comment or a tweet and will be happy to discuss with you.

Oh, FWIW, if interested, disclosure: Storwize was a client a couple of years ago.

Ok, nuff said.

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved

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Two companies on parallel tracks moving like trains offset by time: EMC and NetApp

View from VIA Rail Canada taken using Gregs iFlip

I see some similarities and parallels between two competing companies. Those companies happen to be in the same sector (e.g. IT data storage) however offset by time (about a decade or) subject to continued execution by both.

Those two companies are EMC and NetApp.

Some people might assert that these two companies are complete opposites. Perhaps claiming that one is on the up swing while the other on the down path (have heard claims and counter claims of both being on the other path). I will leave the discussion or debate of which is on the up and which is on the down path to the twittervile and blogsphere ultimate tag team mud wrestling arena or You Tube video rooms.

I see EMC and NetApp a bit differently which you can take it for what that is, simply an opinion or perspective having been the competitor and partner of both when I was on the vendor side of the table and later covering the two as an industry analyst.

Without going too far down the memory lane route, in a nut shell, I recall when EMC was still a fledgling startup who wanted to sell me (I was on the customer side then) rebrand Fujitsu disk drives to attach to my VAX/VMS systems and memory for our mainframes. Come to think about it, Emulex was also selling disk drives back then before reinventing themselves later as an HBA and hub vendor.

Later as a vendor, around late 94 or early 95, it was the up and coming small little bay area NAS filer appliance vendor (e.g. the toaster era) that we partnered with including a very brief OEM deal involving repackaging their product which was NetApp or Network Appliance as they were formerly known then. Once that ended after a year or so NetApp become a competitor as was EMC who at the time had as the main act the Symmetrix and about to do the EPOCH backup and McData acquisitions as well as landing the HP OEM deal for open systems.

Ironically NetApp was out to knock off Auspex which happened fairly quickly while EMC was struggling to get its NAS act together with the early DART behemoth while successfully knocking out IBM and other entrenched high-end solutions. In a twist of fate, the company I was working for ended up selling off all of their RAID (initially a few, then later all of them) patents to EMC for some cash and later transitioned out of the hardware business becoming simply a VAR of EMC (that was MTI).

While at INRANGE which later merged into CNT before acquired by McData (I left before that) and then Brocade, both EMC and NetApp were partners across different product lines.

What they have in common

Ok, enough of the memory lane stuff; lets get back to where the similarities exist.

Back in the mid 90s, EMC was essentially a one trick pony with a very software feature function rich large storage system that sold for a premium generating lots of cash from its use of cache. Likewise, NetApp is a vendor that while it has many product offerings and has some acquisitions, still relies very much on their flagship NAS storage systems that are also feature function (e.g. software) rich that leverage cache to generate cash.

Both companies are growing in terms of revenues, installed base, partners/OEMs and product diversity. Likewise each company needs to continue expansion into those as well as other adjacent areas.

Can NetApp catch EMC? Maybe, maybe not, however IMHO the question should be are there other areas that NetApp can extend its reach into causing EMC to react to those, like how EMC took advantage of opportunities causing IBM and others to react.

Here are some other similarities I see of and for EMC and NetApp:

  • Both have great outreach programs where information is provided without having to ask or dig in a proactive way, yet when something is needed, they give it without fanfare
  • Both are engaging at multiple levels, from customer, to financial and investors, to var, to partner, trade groups, to trade and other media, to analysts to social networking and beyond
  • Both are passionate about their companies, cultures, products, solutions and customers
  • Both can walk the talk, however both also like to talk and see the other balk
  • Both lead by example and not afraid to tell you what they think about something
  • Both embrace social media in connection with traditional mediums for communication with people as opposed to a giant megaphone for talking at or spamming people (when will other vendors figure that out?)
  • Both also are willing to hear what you have to say even if they do not agree with it
  • Neither is scared of the other (or at least not in public)
  • Both cause the other to play and execute a stronger game
  • Both are not above throwing a mud ball or fire cracker at the other
  • Both are not above burying the hatchet and getting along when or where needed
  • Both compete vigorously on some fronts, yet partner (publicly or privately) on other fronts
  • Both have been direct focused with some vars and some OEMs
  • Both started somewhere else and now going and moving to different places and in some ways returning to their roots or at least making sure they are not forgotten
  • Both are synonymous with their core focus products and background
  • One comes from an open systems focus working to prove itself in the enterprise
  • One comes from the enterprise establishing itself in SOHO, SMB and other spaces
  • Both have many solutions, some would say long in the tooth, others would say revolutionary
  • Both are growing via organic growth as well as acquisition and partnering
  • Both have celebrity leaders and team role players to support and back then up
  • Both also have deep benches and technical folks in the trenches to get things done
  • Both have developed leadership along with rank and file employees internal
  • Both have gone outside and brought in leadership and skilled players to expand their employee ranks
  • Both are very much involved with server virtualization (Microsoft and VMware)
  • Both are very much involved in storage virtualization and associated management
  • Both are involved with cloud solutions for enabling public or private storage
  • Both are independent storage vendors not part of a larger server organization
  • Both have interoperability programs with other vendors servers and software and networks
  • Both also get beat up about their pricing models for extensive software feature function portfolios associated with respective storage solutions
  • Both get criticized by customers or the industry as is often the case of market leaders

What I see EMC needing to do

  • Articulate where their multiple products and services fit and play into their different target market opportunities while worrying less about the color hue of logos or video backgrounds
  • Avoiding competing with itself or becoming its own major or main competitor
  • Clarify cloud (public and private) cloud confusion transitioning into cloud cash and opportunity
  • Minimize or cut channel contention and confusion internally and across partners
  • Remember where they came from and core competences however avoid a death grip on them
  • Look to the future, leverage lessons learned that helped EMC succeed where others failed
  • EMC needs NetApp as a strong NAS competitor as each plays stronger when against the other. This is like watching world-class athletes, artists or musicians that step up their games or works when paired with another

What I see NTAP needing to do

  • Doing an acquisition in an adjacent space, perhaps even a reverse merger of sorts to move up and out into a broader space that compliments their core offerings. For example, something outside of the normal comfort zone which arguably Datadomain would have been close to their comfort zone. Likewise acquiring a software player such as Commvault would be similar to EMC having acquired Legato, Documentum and so forth. That is NetApp would have to do a series of those. So why not something really big like a reverse merger or partial acquisition of say Symantecs data protection and management group (aka the old Veritas suite including backup, management tools, clustered file server software, volume managers etc).
  • In addition to adjacent acquisition, opportunities plays such as the recent Bycast move makes sense however then those need to be integrated and rolled out similar to what EMC has done with so many of their purchases.
  • Minimize or cut channel contention and confusion both internal across products and with partners.
  • NetApp started at the lower end SMB, grew into the SME and now enterprise place, however they tried with the StorVault and backed out of that market leaving it to EMC Iomega, Cisco, HP, Dell and others. Maybe they do not need a low-end play, however I rather liked the low-end StorVault story as well as where it was going. Oh well, needless to say I ended up buying an EMC Iomega IX4 as the StorVault left the market. Hmm, does that mean NetApp should acquire SNAP or Drobo or some other low-end SOHO play? Only if the price is right and there is an existing customer base and channel in place otherwise it would be a distraction from the core business. BTW, did I mention EMC Legato, oh excuse me, Networker came from the desktop and SMB environment however grew to the enterprise (yes I know, that is debatable) however now is difficult to put into SOHO environments.
  • Does NetApp need a stronger block storage play, perhaps a 3PAR acquisition? Maybe, perhaps not depending on if they are competing for today’s market or tomorrows.
  • Does NetApp need to be acquired? I think they can stay independent; however they need to expand their presence and footprint from a product, partner and customer perspective.
  • NetApp needs a strong NAS competitor in the likes of an EMC as the competition IMHO makes each stronger as well as providing competition which should play well for customers. Not to mention the back and forth mud ball and fire cracker tossing can be entertaining for some.

What is your take?

Are EMC and NetApp two companies on parallel tracks offset by time and perhaps execution?

Cast your vote and see what others have indicated in the following poll.

View from VIA Rail Canada taken using Gregs iFlip

Ok, nuff said.

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz – Microsoft MVP Cloud and Data Center Management, vSAN and VMware vExpert. Author of Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press), as well as Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press), Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier) and twitter @storageio.

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2023 Server StorageIO(R) and UnlimitedIO All Rights Reserved

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EMC VPLEX: Virtual Storage Redefined or Respun?

In a flurry of announcements that coincide with EMCworld occurring in Boston this week of May 10 2010 EMC officially unveiled the Virtual Storage vision initiative (aka twitter hash tag of #emcvs) and initial VPLEX product. The Virtual Storage initiative was virtually previewed back in March (See my previous post here along with one from Stu Miniman (twitter @stu) of EMC here or here) and according to EMC the VPLEX product was made generally available (GA) back in April.

The Virtual Storage vision and associated announcements consisted of:

  • Virtual Storage vision – Big picture  initiative view of what and how to enable private clouds
  • VPLEX architecture – Big picture view of federated data storage management and access
  • First VPLEX based product – Local and campus (Metro to about 100km) solutions
  • Glimpses of how the architecture will evolve with future products and enhancements


Figure 1: EMC Virtual Storage and Virtual Server Vision and Big Pictures

The Big Picture
The EMC Virtual Storage vision (Figure 1) is the foundation of a private IT cloud which should enable characteristics including transparency, agility, flexibility, efficient, always on, resiliency, security, on demand and scalable. Think of it this way, EMC wants to enable and facilitate for storage what is being done by server virtualization hypervisor vendors including VMware (which happens to be owned by EMC), Microsoft HyperV and Citrix/Xen among others. That is, break down the physical barriers or constraints around storage similar to how virtual servers release applications and their operating systems from being tied to a physical server.

While the current focus of desktop, server and storage virtualization has been focused on consolidation and cost avoidance, the next big wave or phase is life beyond consolidation where the emphasis expands to agility, flexibility, ease of use, transparency, and portability (Figure 2). In the next phase which puts an emphasis around enablement and doing more with what you have while enhancing business agility focus extends from how much can be consolidated or the number of virtual machines per physical machine to that of using virtualization for flexibility, transparency (read more here and here or watch here).


Figure 2: Virtual Storage Big Picture

That same trend will be happening with storage where the emphasis also expands from how much data can be squeezed or consolidated onto a given device to that of enabling flexibility and agility for load balancing, BC/DR, technology upgrades, maintenance and other routine Infrastructure Resource Management (IRM) tasks.

For EMC, achieving this vision (both directly for storage, and indirectly for servers via their VMware subsidiary) is via local and distributed (metro and wide area) federation management of physical resources to support virtual data center operations. EMC building blocks for delivering this vision including VPLEX, data and storage management federation across EMC and third party products, FAST (fully automated storage tiering), SSD, data protection and data footprint reduction and data protection management products among others.

Buzzword bingo aside (e.g. LAN, SAN, MAN, WAN, Pots and Pans) along with Automation, DWDM, Asynchronous, BC, BE or Back End, Cache coherency, Cache consistency, Chargeback, Cluster, db loss, DCB, Director, Distributed, DLM or Distributed Lock Management, DR, Foe or Fibre Channel over Ethernet, FE or Front End, Federated, FAST, Fibre Channel, Grid, HyperV, Hypervisor, IRM or Infrastructure Resource Management, I/O redirection, I/O shipping, Latency, Look aside, Metadata, Metrics, Public/Private Cloud, Read ahead, Replication, SAS, Shipping off to Boston, SRA, SRM, SSD, Stale Reads, Storage virtualization, Synchronization, Synchronous, Tiering, Virtual storage, VMware and Write through among many other possible candidates the big picture here is about enabling flexibility, agility, ease of deployment and management along with boosting resource usage effectiveness and presumably productivity on a local, metro and future global basis.


Figure 3: EMC Storage Federation and Enabling Technology Big Picture

The VPLEX Big Picture
Some of the tenants of the VPLEX architecture (Figure 3) include a scale out cluster or grid design for local and distributed (metro and wide area) access where you can start small and evolve as needed in a predictable and deterministic manner.


Figure 4: Generic Virtual Storage (Local SAN and MAN/WAN) and where VPLEX fits

The VPLEX architecture is targeted towards enabling next generation data centers including private clouds where ease and transparency of data movement, access and agility are essential. VPLEX sits atop existing EMC and third party storage as a virtualization layer between physical or virtual servers and in theory, other storage systems that rely on underlying block storage. For example in theory a NAS (NFS, CIFS, and AFS) gateway, CAS content archiving or Object based storage system or purpose specific database machine could sit between actual application servers and VPLEX enabling multiple layers of flexibility and agility for larger environments.

At the heart of the architecture is an engine running a highly distributed data caching algorithm that uses an approach where a minimal amount of data is sent to other nodes or members in the VPLEX environment to reduce overhead and latency (in theory boosting performance). For data consistency and integrity, a distributed cache coherency model is employed to protect against stale reads and writes along with load balancing, resource sharing and failover for high availability. A VPLEX environment consists of a federated management view across multiple VPLEX clusters including the ability to create a stretch volume that is accessible across multiple VPLEX clusters (Figure 5).


Figure 5: EMC VPLEX Big Picture


Figure 6: EMC VPLEX Local with 1 to 4 Engines

Each VPLEX local cluster (Figure 6) is made up of 1 to 4 engines (Figure 7) per rack with each engine consisting of two directors each having 64GByte of cache, localized compute Intel processors, 16 Front End (FE) and 16 Back End (BE) Fibre Channel ports configured in a high availability (HA). Communications between the directors and engines is Fibre Channel based. Meta data is moved between the directors and engines in 4K blocks to maintain consistency and coherency. Components are fully redundant and include phone home support.


Figure 7: EMC VPLEX Engine with redundant directors

VPLEX initially host servers supported include VMware, Cisco UCS, Windows, Solaris, IBM AIX, HPUX and Linux along with EMC PowerPath and Windows multipath management drivers. Local server clusters supported include Symantec VCS, Microsoft MSCS and Oracle RAC along with various volume mangers. SAN fabric connectivity supported includes Brocade and Cisco as well as Legacy McData based products.

VPLEX also supports cache (Figure 8 ) write thru to preserve underlying array based functionality and performance with 8,000 total virtualized LUNs per system. Note that underlying LUNs can be aggregated or simply passed through the VPLEX. Storage that attaches to the BE Fibre Channel ports include EMC Symmetrix VMAX and DMX along with CLARiiON CX and CX4. Third party storage supported includes HDS9000 and USPV/VM along with IBM DS8000 and others to be added as they are certified. In theory given that the VPLEX presents block based storage to hosts; one would also expect that NAS, CAS or other object based gateways and servers that rely on underlying block storage to also be supported in the future.


Figure 8: VPLEX Architecture and Distributed Cache Overview

Functionality that can be performed between the cluster nodes and engines with VPLEX include data migration and workload movement across different physical storage systems or sites along with shared access with read caching on a local and distributed basis. LUNS can also be pooled across different vendors underlying storage solutions that also retain their native feature functionality via VPLEX write thru caching.

Reads from various servers can be resolved by any node or engine that checks their cache tables (Figure 8 ) to determine where to resolve the actual I/O operation from. Data integrity checks are also maintained to prevent stale reads or write operations from occurring. Actual meta data communications between nodes is very small to enable state fullness while reducing overhead and maximizing performance. When a change to cache data occurs, meta information is sent to other nodes to maintain the distributed cache management index schema. Note that only pointers to where data and fresh cache entries reside are what is stored and communicated in the meta data via the distributed caching algorithm.


Figure 9: EMC VPLEX Metro Today

For metro deployments, two clusters (Figure 9) are utilized with distances supported up to about 100km or about 5ms of latency in a synchronous manner utilizing long distance Fibre Channel optics and transceivers including Dense Wave Division Multiplexing (DWDM) technologies (See Chapter 6: Metropolitan and Wide Area Storage Networking in Resilient Storage Networking (Elsevier) for additional details on LAN, MAN and WAN topics).

Initially EMC is supporting local or Metro including Campus based VPLEX deployments requiring synchronous communications however asynchronous (WAN) Geo and Global based solutions are planned for the future (Figure 10).


Figure 10: EMC VPLEX Future Wide Area and Global

Online Workload Migration across Systems and Sites
Online workload or data movement and migration across storage systems or sites is not new with solutions available from different vendors including Brocade, Cisco, Datacore, EMC, Fujitsu, HDS, HP, IBM, LSI and NetApp among others.

For synchronization and data mobility operations such as a VMware Vmotion or Microsoft HyperV Live migration over distance, information is written to separate LUNs in different locations across what are known as stretch volumes to enable non disruptive workload relocation across different storage systems (arrays) from various vendors. Once synchronization is completed, the original source can be disconnected or taken offline for maintenance or other common IRM tasks. Note that at least two LUNs are required, or put another way, for every stretch volume, two LUNs are subtracted from the total number of available LUNs similar to how RAID 1 mirroring requires at least two disk drives.

Unlike other approaches that for coherency and performance rely on either no cached data, or, extensive amounts of cached data along with subsequent overhead for maintaining state fullness (consistency and coherency) including avoiding stale reads or writes, VPLEX relies on a combination of distributed cache lookup tables along with pass thru access to underlying storage when or where needed. Consequently large amounts of data does not need to be cached as well as shipped between VPLEX devices to maintain data consistency, coherency or performance which should also help to keep costs affordable.

Approach is not unique, it is the implementation
Some storage virtualization solutions that have been software based running on an appliance or network switch as well as hardware system based have had a focus of emulating or providing competing capabilities with those of mid to high end storage systems. The premise has been to use lower cost, less feature enabled storage systems aggregated behind the appliance, switch or hardware based system to provide advanced data and storage management capabilities found in traditional higher end storage products.

VPLEX while like any tool or technology could be and probably will be made to do other things than what it is intended for is really focused on, flexibility, transparency and agility as opposed to being used as a means of replacing underlying storage system functionality. What this means is that while there is data movement and migration capabilities including ability to synchronize data across sites or locations, VPLEX by itself is not a replacement for the underlying functionality present in both EMC and third party (e.g. HDS, HP, IBM, NetApp, Oracle/Sun or others) storage systems.

This will make for some interesting discussions, debates and applies to oranges comparisons in particular with those vendors whose products are focused around replacing or providing functionality not found in underlying storage system products.

In a nut shell summary, VPLEX and the Virtual Storage story (vision) is about enabling agility, resiliency, flexibility, data and resource mobility to simply IT Infrastructure Resource Management (IRM). One of the key themes of global storage federation is anywhere access on a local, metro, wide area and global basis across both EMC and heterogeneous third party vendor hardware.

Lets Put it Together: When and Where to use a VPLEX
While many storage virtualization solutions are focused around consolidation or pooling, similar to first wave server and desktop virtualization, the next general broad wave of virtualization is life beyond consolidation. That means expanding the focus of virtualization from consolidation, pooling or LUN aggregation to that of enabling transparency for agility, flexibility, data or system movement, technology refresh and other common time consuming IRM tasks.

Some applications or usage scenarios in the future should include in addition to VMware Vmotion, Microsoft HypverV and Microsoft Clustering along with other host server closuring solutions.


Figure 11: EMC VPLEX Usage Scenarios

Thoughts and Industry Trends Perspectives:

The following are various thoughts, comments, perspectives and questions pertaining to this and storage, virtualization and IT in general.

Is this truly unique as is being claimed?

Interestingly, the message Im hearing out of EMC is not the claim that this is unique, revolutionary or the industries first as is so often the case by vendors, rather that it is their implementation and ability to deploy on a broad perspective basis that is unique. Now granted you will probably hear as is often the case with any vendor or fan boy/fan girl spins of it being unique and Im sure this will also serve up plenty of fodder for mudslinging in the blogsphere, YouTube galleries, twitter land and beyond.

What is the DejaVu factor here?

For some it will be nonexistent, yet for others there is certainly a DejaVu depending on your experience or what you have seen and heard in the past. In some ways this is the manifestation of many vision and initiatives from the late 90s and early 2000s when storage virtualization or virtual storage in an open context jumped into the limelight coinciding with SAN activity. There have been products rolled out along with proof of concept technology demonstrators, some of which are still in the market, others including companies have fallen by the way side for a variety of reasons.

Consequently if you were part of or read or listened to any of the discussions and initiatives from Brocade (Rhapsody), Cisco (SVC, VxVM and others), INRANGE (Tempest) or its successor CNT UMD not to mention IBM SVC, StorAge (now LSI), Incipient (now part of Texas Memory) or Troika among others you should have some DejaVu.

I guess that also begs the question of what is VPLEX, in band, out of band or hybrid fast path control path? From what I have seen it appears to be a fast path approach combined with distributed caching as opposed to a cache centric inband approaches such as IBM SVC (either on a server or as was tried on the Cisco special service blade) among others.

Likewise if you are familiar with IBM Mainframe GDPS or even EMC GDDR as well as OpenVMS Local and Metro clusters with distributed lock management you should also have DejaVu. Similarly if you had looked at or are familiar with any of the YottaYotta products or presentations, this should also be familiar as EMC acquired the assets of that now defunct company.

Is this a way for EMC to sell more hardware along with software products?

By removing barriers enabling IT staffs to support more data on more storage in a denser and more agile footprint the answer should be yes, something that we may see other vendors emulate, or, make noise about what they can or have been doing already.

How is this virtual storage spin different from the storage virtualization story?

That all depends on your view or definition as well as belief systems and preferences for what is or what is not virtual storage vs. storage virtualization. For some who believe that storage virtualization is only virtualization if and only if it involves software running on some hardware appliance or vendors storage system for aggregation and common functionality than you probably wont see this as virtual storage let alone storage virtualization. However for others, it will be confusing hence EMC introducing terms such as federation and avoiding terms including grid to minimize confusion yet play off of cloud crowd commotion.

Is VPLEX a replacement for storage system based tiering and replication?

I do not believe so and even though some vendors are making claims that tiered storage is dead, just like some vendors declared a couple of years ago that disk drives were going to be dead this year at the hands of SSD, neither has come to life so to speak pun intended. What this means for VPLEX is that it leverages underlying automated or manual tiering found in storage systems such as EMC FAST enabled or similar policy and manual functions in third party products.

What VPLEX brings to the table is the ability to transparently present a LUN or volume locally or over distance with shared access while maintaining cache and data coherency. This means that if a LUN or volume moves the applications or file system or volume managers expecting to access that storage will not be surprised, panic or encounter failover problems. Of course there will be plenty of details to be dug into and seen how it all actually works as is the case with any new technology.

Who is this for?

I see this as for environments that need flexibility and agility across multiple storage systems either from one or multiple vendors on a local or metro or wide area basis. This is for those environments that need ability to move workloads, applications and data between different storage systems and sites for maintenance, upgrades, technology refresh, BC/DR, load balancing or other IRM functions similar to how they would use virtual server migration such as VMotion or Live migration among others.

Do VPLEX and Virtual Storage eliminate need for Storage System functionality?

I see some storage virtualization solutions or appliances that have a focus of replacing underlying storage system functionality instead of coexisting or complementing. A way to test for this approach is to listen or read if the vendor or provider says anything along the lines of eliminating vendor lock in or control of the underlying storage system. That can be a sign of the golden rule of virtualization of whoever controls the virtualization functionality (at the server hypervisor or storage) controls the gold! This is why on the server side of things we are starting to see tiered hypervisors similar to tiered servers and storage where mixed hypervisors are being used for different purposes. Will we see tiered storage hypervisors or virtual storage solutions the answer could be perhaps or it depends.

Was Invista a failure not going into production and this a second attempt at virtualization?

There is a popular myth in the industry that Invista never saw the light of day outside of trade show expo or other demos however the reality is that there are actual customer deployments. Invista unlike other storage virtualization products had a different focus which was that around enabling agility and flexibility for common IRM tasks, similar the expanded focus of VPLEX. Consequently Invista has often been in apples to oranges comparison with other virtualization appliances that have as focus pooling along with other functions or in some cases serving as an appliance based storage system.

The focus around Invista and usage by those customers who have deployed it that I have talked with is around enabling agility for maintenance, facilitating upgrades, moves or reconfiguration and other common IRM tasks vs using it for pooling of storage for consolidation purposes. Thus I see VPLEX extending on the vision of Invista in a role of complimenting and leveraging underlying storage system functionality instead of trying to replace those capabilities with that of the storage virtualizer.

Is this a replacement for EMC Invista?

According to EMC the answer is no and that customers using Invista (Yes, there are customers that I have actually talked to) will continue to be supported. However I suspect that over time Invista will either become a low end entry for VPLEX, or, an entry level VPLEX solution will appear sometime in the future.

How does this stack up or compare with what others are doing?

If you are looking to compare to cache centric platforms such as IBMs SVC that adds extensive functionality and capabilities within the storage virtualization framework this is an apples to oranges comparison. VPLEX is providing cache pointers on a local and global basis functioning in a compliment to underlying storage system model where SVC caches at the specific cluster basis and enhancing functionality of underlying storage system. Rest assured there will be other apples to oranges comparisons made between these platforms.

How will this be priced?

When I asked EMC about pricing, they would not commit to a specific price prior to the announcement other than indicating that there will be options for on demand or consumption (e.g. cloud pricing) as well as pricing per engine capacity as well as subscription models (pay as you go).

What is the overhead of VPLEX?

While EMC runs various workload simulations (including benchmarks) internally as well as some publicly (e.g. Microsoft ESRP among others) they have been opposed to some storage simulation benchmarks such as SPC. The EMC opposition to simulations such as SPC have been varied however this could be a good and interesting opportunity for them to silence the industry (including myself) who continue ask them (along with a couple of other vendors including IBM and their XIV) when they will release public results.

What the interesting opportunity I think is for EMC is that they do not even have to benchmark one of their own storage systems such as a CLARiiON or VMAX, instead simply show the performance of some third party product that already is tested on the SPC website and then a submission with that product running attached to a VPLEX.

If the performance or low latency forecasts are as good as they have been described, EMC can accomplish a couple of things by:

  • Demonstrating the low latency and minimal to no overhead of VPLEX
  • Show VPLEX with a third party product comparing latency before and after
  • Provide a comparison to other virtualization platforms including IBM SVC

As for EMC submitting a VMAX or CLARiiON SPC test in general, Im not going to hold my breath for that, instead, will continue to look at the other public workload tests such as ESRP.

Additional related reading material and links:

Resilient Storage Networks: Designing Flexible Scalable Data Infrastructures (Elsevier)
Chapter 3: Networking Your Storage
Chapter 4: Storage and IO Networking
Chapter 6: Metropolitan and Wide Area Storage Networking
Chapter 11: Storage Management
Chapter 16: Metropolitan and Wide Area Examples

The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC)
Chapter 3: (see also here) What Defines a Next-Generation and Virtual Data Center
Chapter 4: IT Infrastructure Resource Management (IRM)
Chapter 5: Measurement, Metrics, and Management of IT Resources
Chapter 7: Server: Physical, Virtual, and Software
Chapter 9: Networking with your Servers and Storage

Also see these:

Virtual Storage and Social Media: What did EMC not Announce?
Server and Storage Virtualization – Life beyond Consolidation
Should Everything Be Virtualized?
Was today the proverbial day that he!! Froze over?
Moving Beyond the Benchmark Brouhaha

Closing comments (For now):
As with any new vision, initiative, architecture and initial product there will be plenty of questions to ask, items to investigate, early adopter customers or users to talk with and determine what is real, what is future, what is usable and practical along with what is nice to have. Likewise there will be plenty of mud ball throwing and slinging between competitors, fans and foes which for those who enjoy watching or reading those you should be well entertained.

In general, the EMC vision and story builds on and presumably delivers on past industry hype, buzz and vision with solutions that can be put into environments as productivity tool that works for the customer, instead of the customer working for the tool.

Remember the golden rule of virtualization which is in play here is that whoever controls the virtualization or associated management controls the gold. Likewise keep in mind that aggregation can cause aggravation. So do not be scared, however look before you leap meaning do your homework and due diligence with appropriate levels of expectations, aligning applicable technology to the task at hand.

Also, if you have seen or experienced something in the past, you are more likely to have DejaVu as opposed to seeing things as revolutionary. However it is also important to leverage lessons learned for future success. YottaYotta was a lot of NaddaNadda, lets see if EMC can leverage their past experiences to make this a LottaLotta.

Ok, nuff said.

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved

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Does IBM Power7 processor announcement signal storage upgrades?

IBM recently announced the Power7 as the latest generation of processors that the company uses in some of its mid range and high end compute servers including the iSeries and pSeries.


IBM Power7 processor wafers (chips)

 

What is the Power7 processor?
The Power7 is the latest generation of IBM processors (chips) that are used as the CPUs in IBM mid range and high end open systems (pSeries) for Unix (AIX) and Linux as well as for the iSeries (aka AS400 successor). Building on previous Power series processors, the Power7 increases the performance per core (CPU) along with the number of cores per socket (chip) footprint. For example, each Power7 chip that plugs into a socket on a processor card in a server can have up to 8 cores or CPUs. Note that sometimes cores are also known as micro CPUs as well as virtual CPUs not to be confused with their presented via Hypervisor abstraction.

Sometimes you may also here the term or phrase 2 way, 4 way (not to be confused with a Cincinnati style 4 way chili) or 8 way among others that refers to the number of cores on a chip. Hence, a dual 2 way would be a pair of processor chips each with 2 cores while a quad 8 way would be 4 processors chips each with 8 cores and so on.


IBM Power7 with up to eight cores per processor (chip)

In addition to faster and more cores in a denser footprint, there are also energy efficiency enhancements including Energy Star for enterprise servers qualification along with intelligent power management (IPM also see here) implementation. IPM is implanted in what IBM refers to as Intelligent Energy technology for turning on or off various parts of the system along with varying processor clock speeds. The benefit is when there is work to be done, get it down quickly or if there is less work, turn some cores off or slow clock speed down. This is similar to what other industry leaders including Intel have deployed with their Nehalem series of processors that also support IPM.

Additional features of the Power7 include (varies by system solutions):

  • Energy Star for server qualified providing enhanced performance and efficiency.

  • IBM Systems Director Express, Standard and Enterprise Editions for simplified management including virtualization capabilities across pools of Power servers as a single entity.

  • PowerVM (Hypervisor) virtualization for AIX, iSeries and Linux operating systems.

  • ActiveMemory enables effective memory capacity to be larger than physical memory, similar to how virtual memory works within many operating systems. The benefit is to enable a partition to have access to more memory which is important for virtual machines along with the ability to support more partitions in a given physical memory footprint.

  • TurboCore and Intelligent Threads enable workload optimization by selecting the applicable mode for the work to be done. For example, single thread per core along with simultaneous threads (2 or 4) modes per core. The trade off is to have more threads per core for concurrent processing, or, fewer threads to boost single stream performance.

IBM has announced several Power7 enabled or based server system models with various numbers of processors and cores along with standalone and clustered configurations including:

IBM Power7 family of server systems

  • Power 750 Express, 4U server with one to four socket server supporting up to 32 cores (3.0 to 3.5 GHz) and 128 threads (4 threads per core), PowerVM (Hypervisor) along with main memory capacity of 512GB or 1TByte of virtual memory using Active Memory Expansion.
  • Power 755, 32 3.3Ghz Power7 cores (8 cores per processor) with memory up to 256GB along with AltiVec and VSX SIMD instruction set support. Up to 64 755 nodes each with 32 cores can be clustered together for high performance applications.
  • Power 770, Up to 64 Power7 cores providing more performance while consuming less energy per core compared to previous Power6 generations. Support for up to 2TB of main memory or RAM using 32GB DIMM when available later in 2010.
  • Power 780, 64 Power7 cores with TurboCore workload optimization providing performance boost per core. With TurboCore, 64 cores can operate at 3.8 GHz, or, enable up to 32 cores at 4.1 GHz and twice the amount of cache when more speed per thread is needed. Support for up to 2TB of main memory or RAM using 32GB DIMM when available later in 2010.

Additional Power7 specifications and details can be found here.

 

What is the DS8000?
The DS8000 is the latest generation of a family of high end enterprise class storage systems supporting IBM mainframe (zSeries), Open systems along with mixed workloads. Being high end open systems or mainframe, the DS8000 competes with similar systems from EMC (Symmetrix/DMX/VMAX), Fujitsu (Eternus DX8000), HDS (Hitachi) and HP (XP series OEM from Hitachi). Previous generations of the DS8000 (aka predecessors) include the ESS (Enterprise Storage System) Model 2105 (aka Shark) and VSS (Versatile Storage Server). Current generation family members include the Power5 based DS8100 and DS8300 along with the Power6 based DS8700.

IBM DS8000 Storage System

Learn more about the DS8000 here, here, here and here.

 

What is the association between the Power7 and DS8000?
Disclosure: Before I go any further, lets be clear on something, what I am about to post on is based entirely on researching, analyzing, correlating (connecting the dots) of what is publicly and freely available from IBM on the Web (e.g. there is no NDA material being disclosed here that I am aware of) along with prior trends and tendency of IBM and their solutions. In other words, you can call it speculation, a prediction, industry analysis perspective, looking into the proverbial crystal ball or educated guess and thus should not be taken as an indicator of what IBM may actually do or be working on. As to what may actually be done or not done, for that you will need to contact one of the IBM truth squad members.

As to what is the linkage between Power7 and the DS8000?

The linkage between the Power7 and the DS8000 is just that, the Power processors!

At the heart of the DS8000 are Power series processors coupled or clustered together in pairs for performance and availability that run IBM developed storage systems software. While the spin doctors may not agree, essentially the DS8000 and its predecessors are based on and around Power series processors clustered together with a high speed interconnect that combine to host an operating system and IBM developed storage system application software.

Thus IBM has been able to for over a decade leverage technology improvement curve advantages with faster processors, increased memory and I/O connectivity in denser footprints while enhancing their storage system application software.

Given that the current DS8000 family members utilize 2 way (2 core) or 4 way (4 core) Power5 and Power6 processors, similar to how their predecessors utilized previous generation Power4, Power3 and so forth processors, it only makes sense that IBM might possibly use a Power7 processor in a future DS8000 (or derivative perhaps even with a different name or model number). Again, this is just based all on historical trends and patterns of IBM storage systems group leveraging the latest generation of Power processors; after all, they are a large customer of the Power systems group.

Consequently it would make sense for IBM storage folks to leverage the new Power7 processors and features similar to how EMC is leveraging Intel processor enhances along with what other vendors are doing.

There is certainly room in the DS8000 architecture for growth in terms of supporting additional nodes or complexes or controllers (or whatever your term preference of choice is for describing a server) each equipped with multiple processors (chips or sockets) that have multiple cores. While IBM has only commercially released two complex or dual server versions of the DS8000 with various numbers of cores per server, they have come nowhere close to their architecture limit of nodes. In fact with this release of Power7, as an example, the model 755 can be clustered via InfiniBand with up to 64 nodes, with each node having 4 sockets (e.g. 4 way) with up to 8 cores each. That means on paper, 64 x 4 x 8 = 2048 cores and each core could have up to 4 threads for concurrency, or half as many cores for more cache performance. Now will IBM ever come out with a 64 node DS8000 on steroids?

Tough to say, maybe possibly some day to play specmanship vs EMC VMAX 256 node architectural limit, however Im not holding my breath just yet. Thus with more and faster cores per processor, ability to increase number of processors per server or node, along with architectural capabilities to boost the number of nodes in an instance or cluster, on paper alone, there is lots of head room for the DS8000 or a future derivative.

What about software and functionality, sure IBM could in theory simply turn the crank and use a new hardware platform that is faster, more capacity, denser, better energy efficiency, however what about new features?

Can IBM enhance its storage systems application software that it evolved from the ESS with new features to leverage underlying hardware capabilities including TurboCore, PowerVM, device and I/O sharing, Intelligent Energy efficiency along with threads enhancements?

Can IBM leverage those and other features to support not only scaling of performance, availability, capacity and energy efficiency in an economical manner, however also add features for advanced automated tiering or data movement plus other popular industry buzzword functionality?

 

Additional thoughts and perspectives
One of the things I find interesting is that some IBM folks along with their channel partners will go to great lengths to explain why and how the DS8000 is not just a pair of Power enabled based servers tightly coupled together. Yet, on the other hand, some of those folks will go to great lengths touting the advantages of leveraging off the shelf or commercial enabled servers based on Intel or AMD based systems such as IBMs own XIV storage solution.

I can understand in the past when the likes of EMC, Hitachi and Fujitsu were all competing with IBM building bigger and more function rich monolithic systems, however that trend is shifting. The trend now as is being seen with EMC and VMAX is to decouple and leverage more off the shelf commercially available technology combined with custom ASICs where and when needed.

Thus at a time where more attention and discussion is around clustered, grid, scalable storage systems, will we see or hear the IBM folks change their tune about the architectural scale up and out capabilities of the Power enabled DS8000 family?

There had been some industry speculation that the DS8000 would be the end of the line if the Power7 had not been released which will now (assuming that IBM leverages the Power7 for storage) shift to if there will be a Power8 or Power9 and so forth.

From a storage perspective, is the DS8K still relevant?

I say yes given its installed base and need for IBM to have an enterprise solution (sorry, IMHO XIV does not fit that bill just yet) of their own, lest they cut an OEM deal with the likes of Hitachi or Fujitsu which while possible, I do not see it as likely near term. Another soft point on its relevance is to gauge reaction from their competitors including EMC and HDS.

From a server perspective, what is the benefit of the new Power7 enabled servers from IBM?

Simple, increase scale of performance for single thread as well as concurrent or parallel application workloads.

In other words, supporting more web sites, partitions for virtual machines and guest operating system instances, databases, compute and other applications that demand performance and economy of scale.

This also means that IBM has a platform to aggressively go after Sun Solaris server customers with a lifeline during the Oracle transition, not to mention being a platform for running Oracle in addition to its own UDB/DB2 database. In addition to being a platform for Unix AIX as well as Linux, the Power7 series also are at the heart of current generation iSeries (the server formerly known as the AS400).

Additional links and resources:

Closing comments (for now):
Given IBMs history of following a Power chip enhancement with a new upgraded version of the DS8000 (or ESS/2105 aka Shark/VSS) and its predecessors by a reasonable amount of time, I would be surprised if we do not see a new DS8000 (perhaps even renamed or renumbered) within the year.

This is similar to how other vendors leverage new processor chip technology evolution to pace their systems upgrades for example how many vendors who leverage Intel processes have done announcements over the past year since the Nehalem series rolled out including EMC among others.

Lets see what the IBM truth squads have to say, or, not have to say :)

Ok, nuff said.

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved

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Infosmack Episode 34, VMware, Microsoft and More

Following on the heals of several guest appearances late in 2009 ( here, here, here and here) on the Storage Monkeys Infosmack weekly pod cast, I was recently asked to join them again for the inaugural 2010 show (Episode 34).

Along with VMguru Rich Brambley and hosts Greg Knieriemen and Marc Farley we discussed several recent industry topics in this first show of the year which can be accessed here or on iTunes.

Heres a link to the pod cast where you can listen to the discussion including VMware Go, VMware buying Zimbra, Vendor Alliances such as HP and Microsoft HyperV and EMC+Cisco+VMware, along with data protection for virtual servers issues options (or opportunities) among other topics.

I have included the following links that pertain to some of the items we discussed during the show.

Enjoy the show.

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press, 2011), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press, 2009), and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier, 2004)

twitter @storageio

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2012 StorageIO and UnlimitedIO All Rights Reserved

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EMC Storage and Management Software Getting FAST

EMC has announced the availability of the first phase of FAST (Fully Automated Storage Tiering) functionality for their Symmetrix VMAX, CLARiiON and Celerra storage systems.

FAST was first previewed earlier this year (see here and here).

Key themes of FAST are to leverage policies for enabling automation to support large scale environments, doing more with what you have along with enabling virtual data centers for traditional, private and public clouds as well as enhancing IT economics.

This means enabling performance and capacity planning analysis along with facilitating load balancing or other infrastructure optimization activities to boost productivity, efficiency and resource usage effectiveness not to mention enabling Green IT.

Is FAST revolutionary? That will depend on who you talk or listen to.

Some vendors will jump up and down similar to donkey in shrek wanting to be picked or noticed claiming to have been the first to implement LUN or file movement inside of storage systems, or, as operating system or file system or volume manager built in. Others will claim to have done it via third party information lifecycle management (ILM) software including hierarchal storage management (HSM) tools among others. Ok, fair enough, than let their games begin (or continue) and I will leave it up to the variou vendors and their followings to debate whos got what or not.

BTW, anyone remember system manage storage on IBM mainframes or array based movement in HP AutoRAID among others?

Vendors have also in the past provided built in or third party add on tools for providing insight and awareness ranging from capacity or space usage and allocation storage resource management (SRM) tools, performance advisory activity monitors or charge back among others. For example, hot files analysis and reporting tool have been popular in the past, often operating system specific for identifying candidate files for placement on SSD or other fast storage. Granted the tools provided insight and awareness, there was still the time and error prone task of decision making and subsequently data movement, not to mention associated down time.

What is new here with FAST is the integrated approach, tools that are operating system independent, functionality in the array, available for different product family and price bands as well as that are optimized for improving user and IT productivity in medium to high-end enterprise scale environments.

One of the knocks on previous technology is either the performance impact to an application when data was moved, or, impact to other applications when data is being moved in the background. Another issue has been avoiding excessive thrashing due to data being moved at the expense of taking performance cycles from production applications. This would also be similar to having too many snapshots or raid rebuild that are not optimized running in the background on a storage system lacking sufficient performance capability. Another knock has been that historically, either 3rd party host or appliance based software was needed, or, solutions were designed and targeted for workgroup, departmental or small environments.

What is FAST and how is it implemented
FAST is technology for moving data within storage systems (and external for Celerra) for load balancing, capacity and performance optimization to meet quality of service (QoS) performance, availability, capacity along with energy and economic initiatives (figure1) across different tiers or types of storage devices. For example, moving data from slower SATA disks where a performance bottleneck exists to faster Fibre Channel or SSD devices. Similarly, cold or infrequently data on faster more expensive storage devices can be marked as candidates for migration to lower cost SATA devices based on customer policies.

EMC FAST
Figure 1 FAST big picture Source EMC

The premise is that policies are defined based on activity along with capacity to determine when data becomes a candidate for movement. All movement is performed in the background concurrently while applications are accessing data without disruptions. This means that there are no stub files or application pause or timeouts that occur or erratic I/O activity while data is being migrated. Another aspect of FAST data movement which is performed in the actual storage systems by their respective controllers is the ability for EMC management tools to identify hot or active LUNs or volumes (files in the case of Celerra) as candidates for moving (figure 2).

EMC FAST
Figure 2 FAST what it does Source EMC

However, users specify if they want data moved on its own or under supervision enabling a deterministic environment where the storage system and associated management tools makes recommendations and suggestions for administrators to approve before migration occurs. This capacity can be a safeguard as well as a learn mode enabling organizations to become comfortable with the technology along with its recommendations while applying knowledge of current business dynamics (figure 3).

EMC FAST
Figure 3 The Value proposition of FAST Source EMC

FAST is implemented as technology resident or embedded in the EMC VMAX (aka Symmetrix), CLARiiON and Cellera along with external management software tools. In the case of the block (figure 4) storage systems including DMX/VMAX and CLARiiON family of products that support FAST, data movement is on a LUN or volume basis and within a single storage system. For NAS or file based Cellera storage systems, FAST is implanted using FMA technology enabling either in the box or externally to other storage systems on a file basis.

EMC FAST
Figure 4 Example of FAST activity Source EMC

What this means is that data at the LUN or volume level can be moved across different tiers of storage or disk drives within a CLARiiON instance, or, within a VMAX instance (e.g. amongst the nodes). For example, Virtual LUNs are a building block that is leveraged for data movement and migration combined with external management tools including Navisphere for the CLARiiON and Symmetrix management console along with Ionix all of which has been enhanced.

Note however that initially data is not moved externally between different CLARiiONs or VMAX systems. For external data movement, other existing EMC tools would be deployed. In the case of Celerra, files can be moved within a specific CLARiiON as well as externally across other storage systems. External storage systems that files can be moved across using EMC FMA technology includes other Celleras, Centera and ATMOS solutions based upon defined policies.

What do I like most and why?

Integration of management tools providing insight with ability for user to setup polices as well as approve or intercede with data movement and placement as their specific philosophies dictate. This is key, for those who want to, let the system manage it self with your supervision of course. For those who prefer to take their time, then take simple steps by using the solution for initially providing insight into hot or cold spots and then helping to make decisions on what changes to make. Use the solution and adapt it to your specific environment and philosophy approach, what a concept, a tool that works for you, vs you working for it.

What dont I like and why?

There is and will remain some confusion about intra and inter box or system data movement and migration, operations that can be done by other EMC technology today for those who need it. For example I have had questions asking if FAST is nothing more than EMC Invista or some other data mover appliance sitting in front of Symmetrix or CLARiiONs and the answer is NO. Thus EMC will need to articulate that FAST is both an umbrella term as well as a product feature set combining the storage system along with associated management tools unique to each of the different storage systems. In addition, there will be confusion at least with GA of lack of support for Symmetrix DMX vs supported VMAX. Of course with EMC pricing is always a question so lets see how this plays out in the market with customer acceptance.

What about the others?

Certainly some will jump up and down claiming ratification of their visions welcoming EMC to the game while forgetting that there were others before them. However, it can also be said that EMC like others who have had LUN and volume movement or cloning capabilities for large scale solutions are taking the next step. Thus I would expect other vendors to continue movement in the same direction with their own unique spin and approach. For others who have in the past made automated tiering their marketing differentiation, I would suggest they come up with some new spins and stories as those functions are about to become table stakes or common feature functionality on a go forward basis.

When and where to use?

In theory, anyone with a Symmetrix/VMAX, CLARiiON or Celerra that supports the new functionality should be a candidate for the capabilities, that is, at least the insight, analysis, monitoring and situation awareness capabilities Note that does not mean actually enabling the automated movement initially.

While the concept is to enable automated system managed storage (Hmmm, Mainframe DejaVu anyone), for those who want to walk before they run, enabling the insight and awareness capabilities can provide valuable information about how resources are being used. The next step would then to look at the recommendations of the tools, and if you concur with the recommendations, then take remedial action by telling the system when the movement can occur at your desired time.

For those ready to run, then let it rip and take off as FAST as you want. In either situation, look at FAST for providing insight and situational awareness of hot and cold storage, where opportunities exist for optimizing and gaining efficiency in how resources are used, all important aspects for enabling a Green and Virtual Data Center not to mention as well as supporting public and private clouds.

FYI, FTC Disclosure and FWIW

I have done content related projects for EMC in the past (see here), they are not currently a client nor have they sponsored, underwritten, influenced, renumerated, utilize third party off shore swiss, cayman or south american unnumbered bank accounts, or provided any other reimbursement for this post, however I did personally sign and hand to Joe Tucci a copy of my book The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC) ;).

Bottom line

Do I like what EMC is doing with FAST and this approach? Yes.

Do I think there is room for improvement and additional enhancements? Absolutely!

Whats my recommendation? Have a look, do your homework, due diligence and see if its applicable to your environment while asking others vendors what they will be doing (under NDA if needed).

Ok, nuff said.

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved

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What is the Future of Servers?

Recently I provided some comments and perspectives on the future of servers in an article over at Processor.com.

In general, blade servers will become more ubiquitous, that is they wont go away even with cloud, rather become more common place with even higher density processors with more cores and performance along with faster I/O and larger memory capacity per given footprint.

While the term blade server may fade giving way to some new term or phrase, rest assured their capabilities and functionality will not disappear, rather be further enhanced to support virtualization with VMware vsphere, Microsoft HyperV, Citrix/Zen along with public and private clouds, both for consolidation and in the next wave of virtualization called life beyond consolidation.

The other trend is that not only will servers be able to support more processing and memory per footprint; they will also do that drawing less energy requiring lower cooling demands, hence more Ghz per watt along with energy savings modes when less work needs to be performed.

Another trend is around convergence both in terms of packaging along with technology improvements from a server, I/O networking and storage perspective. For example, enhancements to shared PCIe with I/O virtualization, hypervisor optimization, and integration such as the recently announced EMC, Cisco, Intel and VMware VCE coalition and vblocks.

Read more including my comments in the article here.

Ok, nuff said.

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved

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Did HP respond to EMC and Cisco VCE with Microsoft HyperV bundle?

Last week EMC and Cisco along with Intel and VMware created the VCE collation along with a consumption model based service joint venture called Acadia.

In other activity last week, HP made several announcements including:

  • Improvements in sensing technologies
  • StorageWorks enhancements (SVSP, IBRIX, EVA and HyperV, X9000 and others)

EMC and Cisco were relatively quiet this week on announcement front, however HP unleashed another round of announcements that among others included:

  • Quarterly financial results
  • SMB server, storage, network and virtualization enhancements (here, here, here and here)
  • Acquisitions of 3COM (see related blog post here)

The reason I bring up all of this HP activity is not to simply re-cap all of the news and announcements which you can find on many other blogs or news sites, rather I see as a trend.

That trend appears to be one of a company on the move, not ready to sit back on its laurels, rather a company that continues to innovate in-house and via acquisitions.

Some of those acquisitions including IBRIX were relatively small, some like EDS last year and the one this week of 3COM to some would be large while to others perhaps as being seen as medium sized. Either way, HP has been busy expanding its portfolio of technology solution and services offerings along with its comprehensive IT stack.

Cisco, EMC and HP are examples of companies looking to expand their IT stacks and footprint in terms of diversifying current product focus and reach, along with extending into new or further into existing customer and market sector areas. Last weeks EMC and Cisco signaled two large players combing their resources to make virtualization and private clouds easy to acquire and deploy for mid to large size environments with a theme around VMware.

This week buried in all of the HP announcements was one that caught my eye which is a virtualization solution bundle designed for small business (that is something smaller than a vblock0), something that was missing in the Cisco and EMC news of last week however one that Im sure will be addressed sooner versus later.

In the case of HP, the other thing with their virtualization bundle was the focus on the mid to small business that fall into the broad and diverse SMB category, not to mention including Microsoft.

Yes, that is right, while a VMware based solution from HP would be a no-brainer given all of the activity the two companies are involved  in as joint partners, Microsoft HyperV was front and center.

Is this a reaction to last weeks Cisco and EMC salvo?

Perhaps and some will jump to that conclusion. However I will also offer this alternative scenario, 85-90 percent of servers consolidated into virtual machines (VMs) on VMware or other hypervisors including Microsoft HyperV are Windows based.

Likewise as one of the largest if not largest server vendors (pick your favorite server category or price band) who also happens to be one of the largest Microsoft Windows partners, I would have been more surprised if HP had not done a HyperV bundle.

While Cisco and EMC may stay the course or at least talk the talk with a VMware affinity in the Acadia and VCE coalition for the time being, I would expect HP to flex its wings a bit and show diversity of support for multiple Hypervisors, Operating Systems across its various server, network, storage and services platforms.

I would not be surprised to see some VMware based bundles appear over time building on previous announced HP blade systems matrix solution bundles.

Welcome back my friends to the show that never ends, that is the on-going server, storage, networking, virtualization, hardware, software and services solutions game for enabling the adaptive, dynamic, flexible, scalable, resilient, service oriented, public or private cloud, infrastructure as a service green and virtual data center.

Stay tuned, there is much more to come!

Ok, nuff said.

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press, 2011), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press, 2009), and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier, 2004)

twitter @storageio

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2012 StorageIO and UnlimitedIO All Rights Reserved

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HP Buys one of the seven networking dwarfs and gets a bargain

Last week EMC and Cisco announced their VCE collation and Acadia.

The other day, HP continued its early holiday shopping by plucking down $2.7B USD and bought 3COM, one of the networking seven dwarfs (e.g. when compared to networking giant Cisco).

Some of the other so called networking dwarfs when compared to Cisco include Brocade, Ciena and Juniper among others.

Why is 3COM a bargain at $2.7B

Sure HP paid a slight multiplier premium on 3COM trailing revenues or a slight small multiplier on their market cap.

Sure HP gets to acquire one of the networking seven dwarfs at a time when Cisco is flexing its muscles to move into the server space.

Sure HP gets to extend their networking groups capabilities including additional offerings for HPs broad SMB and lower-end SOHO and even consumer markets not to mention enterprise ROBO or workgroups.

Sure HP gets to extend their security and Voice over IP (VoIP) via 3COM and their US Robotics brand perhaps to better compete with Cisco at the consumer, prosumer, SOHO or low-end of SMB markets.

Sure HP gets access to H3C as a means of further its reach into China and the growing Asian market, perhaps even getting closer to Huawei as a future possible partner.

Sure HP could have bought Brocade however IMHO that would have cost a few more deceased presidents (aka very large dollar bills) and assumed over a billion dollars in debt, however lets leave the Brocadians and that discussion on the back burner for a different discussion on another day.

Sure HP gets to signal to the world that they are alive, they have a ton of money in their war chest, and last I checked, actually more cash in the 11B range (minus about 2.7B being spent on 3COM) that exceeds the $5B USD cash position of Cisco.

Sure HP could have done and perhaps will still do some smaller networking related deals in couple of hundreds of million dollar type range to beef up product offerings such as a Riverbed or others, or, perhaps wait for some fire sales or price shop on those shopping themselves around.

ROI is the bargin IMHO, not to mention other pieces including H3C!

3COM was and is a bargain for all of the above, plus given the revenues of about 1.3B, HP CEO Mark Hurd stands to reap a better return on cash investment than having it sitting in a bank account earning a few points. Plus, HP still has around 8-9B in cash leaving room for some other opportunistic holiday shopping, who knows, maybe adopt yet another networking or storage or server related dwarf!

Stay tuned, this game is far from being over as there are plenty of days left in the 2009 holiday shopping season!

Ok, nuff said.

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved

twitter @storageio

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2012 StorageIO and UnlimitedIO All Rights Reserved

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Poll: EMC and Cisco Acadia VCE, what does it mean?

EMC and Cisco recently announced their new Acadia VCE coalition along with Intel and VMware.

As part of the VCE the collation or joint venture is also providing to market pre-acted vblocks that include Cisco servers power by Intel and network switches, EMC storage and management tools (Inonx and RSA for security), VMware vsphere virtualization along with pre-post sales services.

How does this move from a technology, packaging, integration as well as business or alliance perspective change the server, storage, networking, hardware, software and services game?

Whats your take?

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz – StorageIO, Author “The Green and Virtual Data Center” (CRC)

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Acadia VCE: VMware + Cisco + EMC = Virtual Computing Environment

Was today the day the music died? (click here or here if you are not familar with the expression)

Add another three letter acronym (TLA) to your IT vocabulary if you are involved with server, storage, networking, virtualization, security and related infrastructure resource management (IRM) topics.

That new TLA is Virtual Computing Environment (VCE), a coalition formed by EMC and Cisco along with partner Intel called Acadia that was announced today. Of course, EMC who also happens to own VMware for virtualization and RSA for security software tools bring those to the coalition (read press release here).

For some quick fun, twittervile and the blogosphere have come up with other meanings such as:

VCE = Virtualization Communications Endpoint
VCE = VMware Cisco EMC
VCE = Very Cash Efficient
VCE = VMware Controls Everything
VCE = Virtualization Causes Enthusiasm
VCE = VMware Cisco Exclusive

Ok, so much for some fun, at least for now.

With Cisco, EMC and VMware announcing their new VCE coalition, has this signaled the end of servers, storage, networking, hardware and software for physical, virtual and clouding computing as we know it?

Does this mean all other vendors not in this announcement should pack it up, game over and go home?

The answer in my perspective is NO!

No, the music did not end today!

NO, servers, storage and networking for virtual or cloud environments has not ended.

Also, NO, other vendors do not have to go home today, the game is not over!

However a new game is on, one that some have seen before, for others it is something new, exciting perhaps revolutionary or an industry first.

What was announced?
Figure 1 shows a general vision or positioning from the three major players involved along with four tenants or topic areas of focus. Here is a link to a press release where you can read more.

CiscoVirtualizationCoalition.png
Figure 1: Source: Cisco, EMC, VMware

General points include:

  • A new coalition (e.g. VCE) focused on virtual compute for cloud and non cloud environments
  • A new company Acadia owned by EMC and Cisco (1/3 each) along with Intel and VMware
  • A new go to market pre-sales, service and support cross technology domain skill set team
  • Solution bundles or vblocks with technology from Cisco, EMC, Intel and VMware

What are the vblocks and components?
Pre-configured (see this link for a 3D model), tested, and supported with a single throat to choke model for streamlined end to end management and acquisition. There are three vblocks or virtual building blocks that include server, storage, I/O networking, and virtualization hypervisor software along with associated IRM software tools.

Cisco is bringing to the game their Unified Compute Solution (UCS) server along with Nexus 1000v and Multilayer Director (MDS) switches, EMC is bringing storage (Symmetrix VMax, CLARiiON and unified storage) along with their RSA security and Ionix IRM tools. VMware is providing their vSphere hypervisors running on Intel based services (via Cisco).

The components include:

  • EMC Ionix management tools and framework – The IRM tools
  • EMC RSA security framework software – The security tools
  • EMC VMware vSphere hypervisor virtualization software – The virtualization layer
  • EMC VMax, CLARiiON and unified storage systems – The storage
  • Cisco Nexus 1000v and MDS switches – The Network and connectivity
  • Cisco Unified Compute Solution (UCS) – The physical servers
  • Services and support – Cross technology domain presales, delivery and professional services

CiscoEMCVMwarevblock.jpg
Figure 2: Source: Cisco vblock (Server, Storage, Networking and Virtualization Software) via Cisco

The three vblock models are:
Vblock0: entry level system due out in 2010 supporting 300 to 800 VMs for initial customer consolidation, private clouds or other diverse applications in small or medium sized business. You can think of this as a SAN in a CAN or Data Center in a box with Cisco UCS and Nexus 1000v, EMC unified storage secured by RSA and VMware vSphere.

Vblock1: mid sized building block supporting 800 to 3000 VMs for consolidation and other optimization initiatives using Cisco UCS, Nexus and MDS switches along with EMC CLARiiON storage secured with RSA software hosting VMware hypervisors.

Vblock2 high end supporting up 3000 to 6000 VMs for large scale data center transformation or new virtualization efforts combing Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS), Nexus 1000v and MDS switches and EMC VMax Symmetix storage with RSA security software hosting VMware vSpshere hypervisor.

What does this all mean?
With this move, for some it will add fuel to the campfire that Cisco is moving closer to EMC and or VMware with a pre-nuptial via Acadia. For others, this will be seen as fragmentation for virtualization particularly if other vendors such as Dell, Fujitsu, HP, IBM and Microsoft among others are kept out of the game, not to mention their channels of vars or IT customers barriers.

Acadia is a new company or more precisely, a joint venture being created by major backers EMC and Cisco with minority backers being VMware and Intel.

Like any other joint ventures, for examples those commonly seen in the airline industry (e.g. transportation utility) where carriers pool resources such as SkyTeam whose members include Delta who had a JV with Airframe owner of KLM who had a antitrust immunity JV with northwest (now being digested by Delta).

These joint ventures can range from simple marketing alliances like you see with EMC programs such as their Select program to more formal OEM to ownership as is the case with VMware and RSA to this new model for Acadia.

An airline analogy may not be the most appropriate, yet there are some interesting similarities, least of which that air carriers rely on information systems and technologies provided by members of this collation among others. There is also a correlation in that joint ventures are about streamlining and creating a seamless end to end customer experience. That is, give them enough choice and options, keep them happy, take out the complexities and hopefully some cost, and with customer control come revenue and margin or profits.

Certainly there are opportunities to streamline and not just simply cut corners, perhaps that’s another area or analogy with the airlines where there is a current focus on cutting, nickel and dimming for services. Hopefully the Acadia and VCE are not just another example of vendors getting together around the campfire to sing Kumbaya in the name of increasing customer adoption, cost cutting or putting a marketing spin on how to sell more to customers for account control.

Now with all due respect to the individual companies and personal, at least in this iteration, it is not as much about the technology or packaging. Likewise, while important, it is also not just about bundling, integration and testing (they are important) as we have seen similar solutions before.

Rather, I think this has the potential for changing the way server, storage and networking hardware along with IRM and virtualization software are sold into organizations, for the better or worse.

What Im watching is how Acadia and their principal backers can navigate the channel maze and ultimately the customer maze to sell a cross technology domain solution. For example, will a sales call require six to fourteen legs (e.g. one person is a two legged call for those not up on sales or vendor lingo) with a storage, server, networking, VMware, RSA, Ionix and services representative?

Or, can a model to drive down the number of people or product specialist involved in a given sales call be achieved leveraging people with cross technology domain skills (e.g. someone who can speak server and storage hardware and software along with networking)?

Assuming Acadia and VCE vblocks address product integration issues, I see the bigger issue as being streamlining the sales process (including compensation plans) along with how partners are dealt with not to mention customers.

How will the sales pitch be to the Cisco network people at VARs or customer sites, or too the storage or server or VMware teams, or, all of the above?

What about the others?
Cisco has relationships with Dell, HP, IBM, Microsoft and Oracle/Sun among others that they will be stepping even more on the partner toes than when they launched the UCS earlier this year. EMC for its part if fairly diversified and is not as subservient to IBM however has a history of partnering with Dell, Oracle and Microsoft among others.

VMware has a smaller investment and thus more in the wings as is Intel given that both have large partnership with Dell, HP, IBM and Microsoft. Microsoft is of interest here because on one front the bulk of all servers virtualized into VMware VMs are Windows based.

On the other hand, Microsoft has their own virtualization hypervisor HyperV that depending upon how you look at it, could be a competitor of VMware or simply a nuisance. Im of the mindset that its still to early and don’t judge this game on the first round which VMware has won. Keep in mind the history such as desktop and browser wars that Microsoft lost in the first round only to come back strong later. This move could very well invigorate Microsoft, or perhaps Oracle, Citrix among others.

Now this is far from the first time that we have seen alliances, coalitions, marketing or sales promotion cross technology vendor clubs in the industry let alone from the specific vendors involved in this announcement.

One that comes to mind was 3COMs failed attempt in the late 90s to become the first traditional networking vendor to get into SANs, that was many years before Cisco could spell SAN let alone their Andiamo startup incubated. The 3COM initiative which was cancelled due to financial issues literally on the eve of rollout was to include the likes of STK (pre-sun), Qlogic, Anchor (People were still learning how to spell Brocade), Crossroads (FC to SCSI routers for tape), Legato (pre-EMC), DG CLARiiON (Pre-EMC), MTI (sold their patents to EMC, became a reseller, now defunct) along with some others slated to jump on the bandwagon.

Lets also not forget that while among the traditional networking market vendors Cisco is the $32B giant and all of the others including 3Com, Brocade, Broadcom, Ciena, Emulex, Juniper and Qlogic are the seven plus dwarfs. However, keep the $23B USD Huawei networking vendor that is growing at a 45% annual rate in mind.

I would keep an eye on AMD, Brocade, Citrix, Dell, Fujitsu, HP, Huawei, Juniper, Microsoft, NetApp, Oracle/Sun, Rackable and Symantec among many others for similar joint venture or marketing alliances.

Some of these have already surfaced with Brocade and Oracle sharing hugs and chugs (another sales term referring to alliance meetings over beers or shots).

Also keep in mind that VMware has a large software (customer business) footprint deployed on HP with Intel (and AMD) servers.

Oh, and those VMware based VMs running on HP servers also just happen to be hosting in their neighbor of 80% or more Windows based guests operating systems, I would say its game on time.

When I say its game on time, I dont think VMware is brash enough to cut HP (or others) off forcing them to move to Microsoft for virtualization. However the game is about control, control of technology stacks and partnerships, control of vars, integrators and the channel, as well as control of customers.

If you cannot tell, I find this topic fun and interesting.

For those who only know me from servers they often ask when did I learn about networking to which I say check out one of my books (Resilient Storage Networks-Elsevier). Meanwhile for others who know me from storage I get asked when did I learn about or get into servers to which I respond about 28 years ago when I worked in IT as the customer.

Bottom line on Acadia, vblocks and VCE for now, I like the idea of a unified and bundled solution as long as they are open and flexible.

On the other hand, I have many questions and even skeptical in some areas including of how this plays out for Cisco and EMC in terms of if it can be a unifier or polarized causing market fragmentation.

For some this is or will be dejavu, back to the future, while for others it is a new, exciting and revolutionary approach while for others it will be new fodder for smack talk!

More to follow soon.

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press, 2011), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press, 2009), and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier, 2004)

twitter @storageio

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2012 StorageIO and UnlimitedIO All Rights Reserved

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Could Huawei buy Brocade?

Disclosure: I have no connection to Huawei. I own no stock in, nor have I worked for Brocade as an employee; however I did work for three years at SAN vendor INRANGE which was acquired by CNT. However I left to become an industry analyst prior to the acquisition by McData and well before Brocade bought McData. Brocade is not a current client; however I have done speaking events pertaining to general industry trends and perspectives at various Brocade customer events for them in the past.

Is Brocade for sale?

Last week a Wall Street Journal article mentioned Brocade (BRCD) might be for sale.

BRCD has a diverse product portfolio for Fibre Channel, Ethernet along with the emerging Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) market and a whos who of OEM and channel partners. Why not be for sale, good timing for investors, CEO Mike Klayko and his team have arguably done a good job of shifting and evolving the company.

Generally speaking, lets keep in perspective, everything is always for sale, and in an economy like now, bargains are everywhere. Many business are shopping, its just a matter of how visible the shopping for a seller or buyer is along with motivations and objectives including shareholder value.

Consequently, the coconut wires are abuzz with talk and speculation of who will buy Brocade or perhaps who Brocade might buy among other Merger and Acquisition (M and A) activity of who will buy who. For example, who might buy BRCD, why not EMC (they sold McData off years ago via IPO), or IBM (they sold some of their networking business to Cisco years ago) or HP (currently an OEM partner of BRCD) as possible buyers?

Last week I posted on twitter a response to a comment about who would want to buy Brocade with a response to the effect of why not a Huawei to which there was some silence except for industry luminary Steve Duplessie (have a look to see what Steve had to say).

Part of being an analyst IMHO should be to actually analyze things vs. simply reporting on what others want you to report or what you have read or hear elsewhere. This also means talking about scenarios that are of out of the box or in adjacent boxes from some perspectives or that might not be in-line with traditional thinking. Sometimes this means breaking away and thinking and saying what may not be obvious or practical. Having said that, lets take a step back for a moment as to why Brocade may or might not be for sale and who might or may not be interested in them.

IMHO, it has a lot to do with Cisco and not just because Brocade sees no opportunity to continue competing with the 800lb guerilla of LAN/MAN networking that has moved into Brocades stronghold of storage network SANs. Cisco is upsetting the table or apple cart with its server partners IBM, Dell, HP, Oracle/Sun and others by testing the waters of the server world with their UCS. So far I see this as something akin to a threat testing the defenses of a target before actually full out attacking.

In other words, checking to see how the opposition responds, what defense are put up, collect G2 or intelligence as well as how the rest of the world or industry might respond to an all out assault or shift of power or control. Of course, HP, IBM, Dell and Sun/Oracle will not take this move into their revenue and account control goes un-noticed with initial counter announcements having been made some re-emphasize relationship with Brocade along with their recent acquisition of Ethernet/IP vendor Foundry.

Now what does this have to do with Brocade potentially being sold and why the title involving Huawei?

Many of the recent industry acquisitions have been focused on shoring up technology or intellectual property (IP), eliminating a competitor or simply taking advantage of market conditions. For example, Datadomain was sold to EMC in a bidding war with NetApp, HP bought IBRIX, Oracle bought or is trying to buy Sun, Oracle also bought Virtual Iron, Dell bought Perot after HP bought EDS a year or so ago while Xerox bought ACS and so the M and A game continues among other deals.

Some of the deals are strategic, many being tactical, Brocade being bought I would put in the category of a strategic scenario, a bargaining chip or even pawn if you prefer in a much bigger game that is more than about switches, directors, HBAs, LANs, SANs, MANSs, WANs, POTS and PANs (Checkout my  book “Resilient Storage Networks”-Elsevier)!

So with conversations focused around Cisco expanding into servers to control the data center discussion, mindset, thinking, budgets and decision making, why wouldnt an HP, IBM, Dell let alone a NetApp, Oracle/Sun or even EMC want to buy Brocade as a bargaining chip in a bigger game? Why not a Ciena (they just bought some of Nortels assets), Juniper or 3Com (more of a merger of equals to fight Cisco), Microsoft (might upset their partner Cisco) or Fujitsu (Their Telco group that is) among others?

Then why not Huawei, a company some may have heard of, one that others may not have.

Who is Huawei you might ask?

Simple, they are a very large IT solutions provider who is also a large player in China with global operations including R&D in North America and many partnerships with U.S. vendors. By rough comparison, Cisco most recently reported annual revenue are about 36.1B (All are USD), BRCD about 1.5B, Juniper about $3.5B and 3COM about $1.3B and Huawei at about 23B USD with a year over year sales increase of 45%. Huawei has previous partnerships with storage vendors including Symantec and Falconstor among others. Huawei also has had partnership with 3com (H3C), a company that was first of the LAN vendors to get into SANs (pre-maturely) beating Cisco easily by several years.

Sure there would be many hurdles and issues, similar to the ones CNT and INRANGE had to overcome, or McData and CNT, or Brocade and McData among others. However in the much bigger game of IT account and thus budget control is played by HP, IBM, and Sun/Oracle among others, wouldn’t maintaining a dual-source for customers networking needs make sense, or, at least serve as a check to Cisco expansion efforts? If nothing else, maintaining the status quo in the industry for now, or, if the rules and game are changing, wouldn’t some of the bigger vendors want to get closer to the markets where Huawei is seeing rapid growth?

Does this mean that Brocade could be bought? Sure.
Does this mean Brocade cannot compete or is a sign of defeat? I don’t think so.
Does this mean that Brocade could end up buying or merging with someone else? Sure, why not.
Or, is it possible that someone like Huawei could end up buying Brocade? Why not!

Now, if Huawei were to buy Brocade, which begs the question for fun, could they be renamed or spun off as a division called HuaweiCade or HuaCadeWei? Anything is possible when you look outside the box.

Nuff said for now, food for thought.

Cheers – gs

Greg Schulz – StorageIO, Author “The Green and Virtual Data Center” (CRC)

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StorageIO aka Greg Schulz appears on Infosmack

If you are in the IT industry, and specifically have any interest or tie to data infrastructures from servers, to storage and networking including hardware, software, services not to mention virtualization and clouds, InfoSmack and Storage Monkeys should be on your read or listen list.

Recently I was invited to be a guest on the InfoSmack podcast which is about a 50 some minute talk show format around storage, networking, virtualization and related topics.

The topics discussed include Sun and Oracle from a storage standpoint, Solid State Disk (SSD) among others.

Now, a word of caution, InfoSmack is not your typical prim and proper venue, nor is it a low class trash talking production.

Its fun and informative where the hosts and attendees are not afraid of poking fun at them selves while exploring topics and the story behind the story in a candid non scripted manner.

Check it out.

Cheers – gs

Greg Schulz – StorageIOblog, twitter @storageio Author “The Green and Virtual Data Center” (CRC)