Tag: Ethernet

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Chelsio Storage over IP and other Networks Enable Data Infrastructures

Chelsio Storage over IP Enable Data Infrastructures

server storage I/O data infrastructure trends

Chelsio and Storage over IP (SoIP) continue to enable Data Infrastructures from legacy to software defined virtual, container, cloud as well as converged. This past week I had a chance to visit with Chelsio to discuss data infrastructures, server storage I/O networking along with other related topics. More on Chelsio later in this post, however, for now lets take a quick step back and refresh what is SoIP (Storage over IP) along with Storage over Ethernet (among other networks).

Data Infrastructures Protect Preserve Secure and Serve Information
Various IT and Cloud Infrastructure Layers including Data Infrastructures

Server Storage over IP Revisited

There are many variations of SoIP from network attached storage (NAS) file based processing including NFS, SAMBA/SMB (aka Windows File sharing) among others. In addition there is various block such as SCSI over IP (e.g. iSCSI), along with object via HTTP/HTTPS, not to mention the buzzword bingo list of RoCE, iSER, iWARP, RDMA, DDPK, FTP, FCoE, IFCP, and SMB3 direct to name a few.

Who is Chelsio

For those who are not aware or need a refresher, Chelsio is involved with enabling server storage I/O by creating ASICs (Application Specific Integrated Circuits) that do various functions offloading those from the host server processor. What this means for some is a throw back to the early 2000s of the TCP Offload Engine (TOE) era where various processing to handle regular along with iSCSI and other storage over Ethernet and IP could be accelerated.

Chelsio data infrastructure focus

Chelsio ecosystem across different data infrastructure focus areas and application workloads

As seen in the image above, certainly there is a server and storage I/O network play with Chelsio, along with traffic management, packet inspection, security (encryption, SSL and other offload), traditional, commercial, web, high performance compute (HPC) along with high profit or productivity compute (the other HPC). Chelsio also enables data infrastructures that are part of physical bare metal (BM), software defined virtual, container, cloud, serverless among others.

Chelsio server storage I/O focus

The above image shows how Chelsio enables initiators on server and storage appliances as well as targets via various storage over IP (or Ethernet) protocols.

Chelsio enabling various data center resources

Chelsio also plays in several different sectors from *NIX to Windows, Cloud to Containers, Various processor architectures and hypervisors.

Chelsio ecosystem

Besides diverse server storage I/O enabling capabilities across various data infrastructure environments, what caught my eye with Chelsio is how far they, and storage over IP have progressed over the past decade (or more). Granted there are faster underlying networks today, however the offload and specialized chip sets (e.g. ASICs) have also progressed as seen in the above and next series of images via Chelsio.

The above showing TCP and UDP acceleration, the following show Microsoft SMB 3.1.1 performance something important for doing Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) and Windows-based Converged Infrastructure (CI) along with Hyper Converged Infrastructures (HCI) deployments.

Chelsio software environments

Something else that caught my eye was iSCSI performance which in the following shows 4 initiators accessing a single target doing about 4 million IOPs (reads and writes), various size and configurations. Granted that is with a 100Gb network interface, however it also shows that potential bottlenecks are removed enabling that faster network to be more effectively used.

Chelsio server storage I/O performance

Moving on from TCP, UDP and iSCSI, NVMe and in particular NVMe over Fabric (NVMeoF) have become popular industry topics so check out the following. One of my comments to Chelsio is to add host or server CPU usage to the following chart to help show the story and value proposition of NVMe in general to do more I/O activity while consuming less server-side resources. Lets see what they put out in the future.

Chelsio

Ok, so Chelsio does storage over IP, storage over Ethernet and other interfaces accelerating performance, as well as regular TCP and UDP activity. One of the other benefits of what Chelsio and others are doing with their ASICs (or FPGA by some) is to also offload processing for security among other topics. Given the increased focus around server storage I/O and data infrastructure security from encryption to SSL and related usage that requires more resources, these new ASIC such as from Chelsio help to offload various specialized processing from the server.

The customer benefit is that more productive application work can be done by their servers (or storage appliances). For example, if you have a database server, that means more product ivy data base transactions per second per licensed software. Put another way, want to get more value out of your Oracle, Microsoft or other vendors software licenses, simple, get more work done per server that is licensed by offloading and eliminate waits or other bottlenecks.

Using offloads and removing server bottlenecks might seem like common sense however I’m still amazed that the number of organizations who are more focused on getting extra value out of their hardware vs. getting value out of their software licenses (which might be more expensive).

Chelsio

Where To Learn More

Learn more about related technology, trends, tools, techniques, and tips with the following links.

Data Infrastructures Protect Preserve Secure and Serve Information
Various IT and Cloud Infrastructure Layers including Data Infrastructures

What This All Means

Data Infrastructures exist to protect, preserve, secure and serve information along with the applications and data they depend on. With more data being created at a faster rate, along with the size of data becoming larger, increased application functionality to transform data into information means more demands on data infrastructures and their underlying resources.

This means more server I/O to storage system and other servers, along with increased use of SoIP as well as storage over Ethernet and other interfaces including NVMe. Chelsio (and others) are addressing the various application and workload demands by enabling more robust, productive, effective and efficient data infrastructures.

Check out Chelsio and how they are enabling storage over IPO (SoIP) to enable Data Infrastructures from legacy to software defined virtual, container, cloud as well as converged, oh, and thanks Chelsio for being able to use the above images.

Ok, nuff said, for now.
Gs

Greg Schulz – Multi-year Microsoft MVP Cloud and Data Center Management, VMware vExpert (and vSAN). 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.

Courteous comments are welcome for consideration. First published on https://storageioblog.com any reproduction in whole, in part, with changes to content, without source attribution under title or without permission is forbidden.

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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June 2017 Server StorageIO Data Infrastructures Update Newsletter

Volume 17, Issue VI

Hello and welcome to the June 2017 issue of the Server StorageIO update newsletter.

For those of you in the northern hemisphere it is time for summer holidays, while in the southern hemisphere its winter time. That means there is a lot going on outside of work, however June has also seen a lot of activity in and around IT data infrastructure along with data centers. Check out some of the industry trends news and updates below.

Software-Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials SDDI SDDC

A quick update following up from the May newsletter is that my new book is now available via Amazon.com, CRC Press and other venues in hardcopy hardcover as well as electronic versions. Think of this as the soft launch with a formal launch and more information being rolled out soon. For now, you can visit the landing page for Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials – Cloud, Converged, and Virtual Fundamental Server Storage I/O Tradecraft (CRC PRess/Taylor Francis/Auerbach) at storageio.com/book4 to learn more including view table of contents, preface, how organized among other items.

In This Issue

Enjoy this edition of the Server StorageIO update newsletter.

Cheers GS

Data Infrastructure and IT Industry Activity Trends

Some recent Industry Activities, Trends, News and Announcements include:

Cavium announced 10, 25, 50 and 50Gbps Ethernet server storage I/O NIC solutions (e.g. FastLine 41000 series).

The NVMe Express trade group (e.g. nvmexpress.org) announced the completion of NVMe 1.3 specification. New optional features include support for mobile platforms and book, along with scaling for enterprise as well as cloud environments. Learn more about specifications at the NVMexpress.org site as well as more NVMe material at thenvmeplace.com.

Keep in mind that if the answer is NVMe, what are the questions along with various options from front end to back-end, NVMe and PCIe, NVMeoF, U.2/8639, M2/NGFF among others.

The Fibre Channel Industry Association announced FC-NVMe interoperability plugfest and Gen 6 32GFC activity to support next generation data infrastructures and data centers.

Storage vendor Tegile announced they are joining the growing ranks of vendors adding NVMe support with their InteliFlash OS 3.7 along with other enhancements.

For those of you who are involved with Windows Servers environments along with server, storage and I/O networks, check out Darryl VanderPeijl multi-part series on RDMA, DCB, PFC, ETS and related topics.

HPE and Hedvig announced solutions combing forces to address hybrid cloud storage needs.

IBM and Cisco announced enhancements around their converged (Cisco powered servers) solution for VDI and Hybrid cloud workloads.

Big Data and Analytics vendor Mapr announced enhancements to their converged data management platform for cloud scale data fabrics.

Panzura has enhanced its Freedom software defined storage management solution with version 7 to support expanded unstructured data growth while easing management functions, along with performance updates.

Red Hat announced Ceph Storage 2.3 including Ceph 10.2 (Jewel) combing an NFS gateway.

Scality announced enhancements to its Ring software defined storage cloud and object solution including enhanced security along with data protection capabilities.

Check out other industry news, comments, trends perspectives here.

 

Server StorageIOblog Posts

Recent and popular Server StorageIOblog posts include:

View other recent as well as past StorageIOblog posts here

Server StorageIO Commentary in the news

Recent Server StorageIO industry trends perspectives commentary in the news.

Via EnterpriseStorageForum: 5 Hot Storage Technologies to Watch
Storage can be held back by slow I/O performance, which caused expensive compute resources and memory to be consumed. NVMe reduces wait time while increasing the amount of effective work, enabling higher-profitability compute. The storage I/O capabilities of flash can be fed across PCIe faster to enable multi-core processors to complete more useful work in less time.

Via EnterpriseStorageForum: 10-Year Review of Data Storage
The adoption of hybrid cloud and hybrid converged server storage has appeared more rapidly than many expected. And despite firm pronouncements of their demise, FC, tape and HDD are still very much with us.

Via CDW: Your IT Department Can Help Your Companys Bottom Line Heres How
Not only are the servers more robust performance wise, but they’ve got more compute capability, can handle more workloads, have more memory and also have better resiliency.

Via EnterpriseStorageForum: Top 10 Tips for Software-Defined Storage Deployment
Dell 14g PowerEdge Servers give you greater compute and IO capability, as well as the density you need, NVMe and 25 Gig Ethernet on board,

Via CDW: Meeting IoTs Demands for Networking

View more Server, Storage and I/O trends and perspectives comments here

Events and Activities

Recent and upcoming event activities.

Sep. 13-15, 2017 – Fujifilm IT Executive Summit – Seattle WA

August 28-30, 2017 – VMworld – Las Vegas

June 22, 2017 – Webinar – GDPR and Microsoft Environments

May 11, 2017 – Webinar – Email Archiving, Compliance and Ransomware

See more webinars and activities on the Server StorageIO Events page here.

Server StorageIO Industry Resources and Links

Useful links and pages:
Microsoft TechNet – Various Microsoft related from Azure to Docker to Windows
storageio.com/links – Various industry links (over 1,000 with more to be added soon)
objectstoragecenter.com – Cloud and object storage topics, tips and news items
OpenStack.org – Various OpenStack related items
storageio.com/protect – Various data protection items and topics
thenvmeplace.com – Focus on NVMe trends and technologies
thessdplace.com – NVM and Solid State Disk topics, tips and techniques
storageio.com/converge – Various CI, HCI and related SDS topics
storageio.com/performance – Various server, storage and I/O benchmark and tools
VMware Technical Network – Various VMware related items

Cheers
Gs

Greg Schulz – Multi-year Microsoft MVP Cloud and Data Center Management, VMware vExpert (and vSAN). 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.

Courteous comments are welcome for consideration. First published on https://storageioblog.com any reproduction in whole, in part, with changes to content, without source attribution under title or without permission is forbidden.

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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The Future of Ethernet – 2016 Roadmap released by Ethernet Alliance

The Future of Ethernet – 2016 Roadmap released by Ethernet Alliance

server storage I/O trends

The Future of Ethernet – 2016 Roadmap released by Ethernet Alliance

Ethernet Alliance Roadmap

The Ethernet Alliance has announced their 2016 roadmap of enhancements for Ethernet.

Ethernet enhancements include speeds, connectivity interfaces that span needs from consumer, enterprise, to cloud and managed service providers.

Highlights of Ethernet Roadmap

  • FlexEthernet (FlexE)
  • QSFP-DD, microQSFP and OBO interfaces
  • Speeds from 10Mbps to 400GbE.
  • 4 Pair Power over Ethernet (PoE)
  • Power over Data Line (PoDL)

Ethernet Alliance 2016 Roadmap Image
Images via EthernetAlliance.org

Who is the Ethernet Alliance

The Ethernet Alliance (@ethernetallianc) is an industry trade and marketing consortium focused on the advancement and success of Ethernet related technologies.

Where to learn more

The Ethernet Alliance has also made available via their web site two presentations part one here and part two here (or click on the following images).

Ethernet Alliance 2016 roadmap presentation #1 Ethernet Alliance 2016 roadmap presentation #2

Also visit www.ethernetalliance.org/roadmap

What this all means

Ethernet technologies continue to be enhanced from consumer focused, Internet of Things (IoT) and Internet of Devices (IoD) to enterprise, data centers, IT and non-IT usage as well as cloud and managed service providers. At the lower end where there is broad adoption, the continued evolution of easier to use, lower cost, interoperable technologies and interfaces expands Ethernet adoption footprint while at the higher-end, all of those IoT, IoD, consumer and other devices aggregated (consolidate) into cloud and other services that have the need for speeds from 10GbE, 40GbE, 100GbE and 400GbE.

With the 2016 Roadmap the Ethernet Alliance has provided good direction as to where Ethernet fits today and tomorrow.

Ok, nuff said (for now)

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 2006-2023 Server StorageIO(R) and UnlimitedIO All Rights Reserved

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Fall 2013 StorageIO Update Newsletter

Storage I/O trends

Fall 2013 StorageIO Update Newsletter

Welcome to the Fall 2013 (joint September and October) edition of the StorageIO Update (newsletter) containing trends perspectives on cloud, virtualization and data infrastructure topics. It is fall (at least here in north America) which means conferences, symposium, virtual and physical events, seminars, webinars in addition to normal client project activities. Starting with VMworld back in late August, that event occurred in San Francisco which kicked off the fall (or back to school) season of activity. VMworld was followed with many other events including in-person along with virtual or on-line such as webinars, Google+ hangouts among others, not to mention all the briefings for vendor product announcements and updates. Check out the industry trends perspectives articles, comments and blog posts below that covers some activity over the past few months.

VMworld 2013
Congratulations to VMworld on the 10th anniversary of the event. With the largest installment yet of a VMworld in terms of attendance, there were also many announcements. Here are a synopsis of some of those announcements which of course included plenty of software defined marketing (SDM).

CMG and Storage Performance
During mid-September I was invited to give an industry trends and perspectives presentation to the Storage Performance Council (SPC) board. The SPC board were meeting in the Minneapolis area and I gave a brief talk about Metrics that Matter and importance of context with focus on applications. Speaking of the Minneapolis area, Tom Becchetti (@tbecchetti) organized a great CMG event hosted over at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota. I gave a discussion around Technolutionary, technology evolution and revolution, using old and new things in new ways.

Check out our backup, restore, BC, DR and archiving (Under the resources section on StorageIO.com) for various presentation, book chapter downloads and other content.

SNW Fall 2013 Long Beach
Talking about traveling, there was a quick trip out to Long Beach for the fall 2013 edition of Storage Networking World (SNW) where I had some good meetings and conversations with those who were actually there. No need to sugar coat it, likewise no need to kick sand in its face. Plain and simple, SNW is not the event it used to be has been a common discussion theme for several years which I had set my expectation accordingly.

Some have asked me why I even spent time, money and resources to attend SNW?

My answer is that I had some meetings to attend to, wanted to see and meet with others who were going to be there, and perhaps even say goodbye to an event that I have been involved with for over a decade.

Does that mean I’m all done with SNW?

Not sure yet as will have to wait and see what SNIA and IDG/Computerworld the event co-owners and producers put together for future events. However there are enough other events and activities to pick up the slack which is part of what has caused the steady decline in events like SNW among others.

Perhaps it is time for SNIA to partner with another adjacent yet like-minded organization such as CMG to collaborate and try doing something like what was done in the early 2000s? That is SNIA providing their own seminars along with others such as myself who involved with both CMG, SNW and SNIA to beef up or set up a storage and I/O focused track at the CMG event.

Beyond those items mentioned above, or in the following section, there are plenty of interesting and exciting things occurring in the background that I cant talk about yet. However watch for future posts, commentary, perspectives and other information down the road (and in the not so distant future).

Enjoy this edition of the StorageIO Update newsletter.

Ok, nuff said (for now)

Cheers gs

StorageIO Industry Trends and PerspectivesIndustry trends perspectives and commentary
What is being seen, heard and talked about while out and about

The following is a synopsis of some StorageIOblog posts, articles and comments in different venues on various industry trends, perspectives and related themes about clouds, virtualization, data and storage infrastructure topics among related themes.

Storage I/O trends

InfoStor: Perspectives on Data Dynamics file migration tool (Read more about StorageX later in this newsletter)
SearchStorage: Perspectives on Data Dynamics resurrects StorageX for file migration
SearchStorage: Perspectives on Cisco buying SSD storage vendor Whiptail

Recent StorageIO Tips and Articles in various venues:

21cIT:  Why You Should Consider Object Storage
InfoStor:  HDDs Are Still Spinning (Rust Never Sleeps)
21cIT:  Object Storage Is in Your Future, Even if You Use Files
21cIT:  Playing the Name Game With Virtual Storage
InfoStor:  Flash Data Storage: Myth vs. Reality
InfoStor:  The Nand Flash Cache SSD Cash Dance
SearchEnterpriseWAN:  Remote Office / ROBO backup and data protection for networking Pro’s
TheVirtualizationPractice:  When and Where to use NAND Flash SSD for Virtual Servers
FedTech:  These Data Center (DCIM) Tools Can Streamline Computing Resources

Storage I/O posts

Recent StorageIO blog post:

Seagate Kinetic Cloud and Object Storage I/O platform (and Ethernet HDD)
Cloud conversations: Has Nirvanix shutdown caused cloud confidence concerns?
Cisco buys Whiptail continuing the SSD storage I/O flash cash cache dash
WD buys nand flash SSD storage I/O cache vendor Virident
EMC New VNX MCx doing more storage I/O work vs. just being more
Is more of something always better? Depends on what you are doing
VMworld 2013 Vmware, server, storage I/O and networking update (Day 1)
EMC ViPR software defined object storage part II

Check out our objectstoragecenter.com page where you will find a growing collection of information and links pertaining to cloud and object storage themes, technologies and trends.

Brouwer Storage Consultancy

StorageIO in Europe (Netherlands)
Spent over a week in the Netherlands where I presented three different seminar workshop sessions organized by Brouwer Storage Consultancy who is celebrating their 10th anniversary in business. These sessions spanned five full days of interactive discussions with an engaged diverse group of attendees in the Nijkerk area who came from across Holland to take part in these workshops.

Congratulations to Gert and Frank Brouwer on their ten years of being in business and best wishes for many more. Fwiw those who are curious StorageIO will be ten years young in business in about two years.

StorageIO Industry Trends and Perspectives

Some observations from while in Europe:

Continued cloud privacy concerns amplified by NSA and suspicion of US-based companies, yet many are not aware of similar concerns of European or UK-based firms from those outside those areas. While there were some cloud concern conversations over the demise of Nirvanix, those seemed less so then in the media or US given that at least in Holland they have seen other cloud and storage as a service firms come and go already. It should be noted that the US has also seen cloud and storage as a service startups come and go, however I think sometimes we or at least the media tends to have a short if not selective memory at times.

In one of our workshops sessions we were talking about service level objectives (SLO), service level agreements (SLA), recovery point objectives (RPO) and recovery time objectives (RTO) among other themes. Somebody mentioned why the focus of time in RPO and questions why not a transactional perspective which I thought was a brilliant question. We had a good conversation in the group and concurred that while RPO is what the industry uses, that there also needs to be a transactional state context tie to what is inferred or assumed with RPO and RTO. Thus the importance of looking beyond just the point in time, however the importance of a transactional context or state, such as not just the time, however to a given transactional point.

Note that transactional could mean database, file system, backup or data protection index or catalog, meta data repository or other entity. This is where some should be jumping up and down like Donkey in Shrek wanting to point out that is exactly what RTO and RPO refer to which would be great. However all to often what is assumed is not conveyed, thus those who don’t know, well, they assume or simply don’t know what others.

StorageIO Industry Trends and Perspectives

Data Dynamics StorageX 7.0 Intelligent Policy Based File Data Migration – There is no such thing as a data or information recession . Likewise, people and data are living longer as well as getting larger. These span various use cases from traditional to personal or at work productivity. From little to big data content, collaboration including file or document sharing to rich media applications all of which are leveraging unstructured data. For example, email, word processing back-office documents, web and text files, presentations (e.g. PowerPoint), photos, audio and video among others. These macro trends result in the continued growth of unstructured Network Attached Storage (NAS) file data.

Thus, a common theme is adding management including automated data movement and migration to carry out structure around unstructured NAS file data. More than a data mover or storage migration tool, Data Dynamics StorageX is a software platform for adding storage management structure around unstructured local and distributed NAS file data. This includes heterogeneous vendor support across different storage system, protocols and tools including Windows CIFS and Unix/Linux NFS.
(Disclosure DataDynamics has been a StorageIO client). Visit Data Dynamics at www.datadynamicsinc.com/

Server and StorageIO seminars, conferences, web cats, events, activities StorageIO activities (out and about)

Seminars, symposium, conferences, webinars
Live in person and recorded recent and upcoming events

Announcing: Backup.U brought to you by Dell

Some on-line (live and recorded) events have include an ongoing series tied to data protection (Backup/restore, HA, BC, DR and Archiving) called Backup.U organized and sponsored by Dell Data Protection Software that you can learn more about at the landing page www.software.dell.com/backupu (more on this in a future post). In addition to data protection, some other events and activities including a BrightTalk webinar on storage I/O and networking for cloud environments (here).

In addition to the above, check out the StorageIO calendar to see more recent and upcoming activities.

Watch for more 2013 events to be added soon to the StorageIO events calendar page. Topics include data protection modernization (backup/restore, HA, BC, DR, archive), data footprint reduction (archive, compression, dedupe), storage optimization, SSD, object storage, server and storage virtualization, big data, little data, cloud and object storage, performance and management trends among others.

Vendors, VAR’s and event organizers, give us a call or send an email to discuss having us involved in your upcoming pod cast, web cast, virtual seminar, conference or other events.

If you missed the Summer (July and August) 2013 StorageIO update newsletter, click here to view that and other previous editions as HTML or PDF versions. Subscribe to this newsletter (and pass it along)

and click here to subscribe to this news letter. View archives of past StorageIO update news letters as well as download PDF versions at: www.storageio.com/newsletter

Ok, nuff said (for now)

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)

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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Seagate Kinetic Cloud and Object Storage I/O platform (and Ethernet HDD)

Storage I/O trends

Seagate Kinetic Cloud and Object Storage I/O platform

Seagate announced today their Kinetic platform and drive designed for use by object API accessed storage including for cloud deployments. The Kinetic platform includes Hard Disk Drives (HDD) that feature 1Gb Ethernet (1 GbE) attached devices that speak object access API or what Seagate refers to as a key / value.

Seagate Kinetic architecture

What is being announced with Seagate Kinetic Cloud and Object (Ethernet HDD) Storage?

  • Kinetic Open Storage Platform – Ethernet drives, key / value (object access) API, partner software
  • Software developer’s kits (SDK) – Developer tools, documentation, drive simulator, code libraries, code samples including for SwiftStack and Riak.
  • Partner ecosystem

What is Kinetic?

While it has 1 GbE ports, do not expect to be able to use those for iSCSI or NAS including NFS, CIFS or other standard access methods. Being Ethernet based, the Kinetic drive only supports the key value object access API. What this means is that applications, cloud or object stacks, key value and NoSQL data repositories, or other software that adopt the API can communicate directly using object access.

Seagate Kinetic storage

Internal, the HDD functions as a normal drive would store and accessing data, the object access function and translation layer shifts from being in an Object Storage Device (OSD) server node to inside the HDD. The Kinetic drive takes on the key value API personality over 1 GbE ports instead of traditional Logical Block Addressing (LBA) and Logical Block Number (LBN) access using 3g, 6g or emerging 12g SAS or SATA interfaces. Instead Kinetic drives respond to object access (aka what Seagate calls key / value) API commands such as Get, Put among others. Learn more about object storage, access and clouds at www.objectstoragecenter.com.

Storage I/O trends

Some questions and comments

Is this the same as what was attempted almost a decade ago now with the T10 OSD drives?

Seagate claims no.

What is different this time around with Seagate doing a drive that to some may vaguely resemble the predecessor failed T10 OSD approach?

Industry support for object access and API development have progressed from an era of build it and they will come thinking, to now where the drives are adapted to support current cloud, object and key value software deployment.

Wont 1GbE ports be too slow vs. 12g or 6g or even 3g SAS and SATA ports?

Keep in mind those would be apples to oranges comparisons based on the protocols and types of activity being handled. Kinetic types of devices initially will be used for large data intensive applications where emphasis is on storing or retrieving large amounts of information, vs. low latency transactional. Also, keep in mind that one of the design premises is to keep cost low, spread the work over many nodes, devices to meet those goals while relying on server-side caching tools.

Storage I/O trends

Does this mean that the HDD is actually software defined?

Seagate or other HDD manufactures have not yet noticed the software defined marketing (SDM) bandwagon. They could join the software defined fun (SDF) and talk about a software defined disk (SDD) or software defined HDD (SDHDD) however let us leave that alone for now.

The reality is that there is far more software that exists in a typical HDD than what is realized. Sure some of that is packaged inside ASICs (Application Specific Integrated Circuits) or running as firmware that can be updated. However, there is a lot of software running in a HDD hence the need for power yet energy-efficient processors found in those devices. On a drive per drive basis, you may see a Kinetic device consume more energy vs. other equivalence HDDs due to the increase in processing (compute) needed to run the extra software. However that also represents an off-load of some work from servers enabling them to be smaller or do more work.

Are these drives for everybody?

It depends on if your application, environment, platform and technology can leverage them or not. This means if you view the world only through what is new or emerging then these drives may be for all of those environments, while other environments will continue to leverage different drive options.

Object storage access

Does this mean that block storage access is now dead?

Not quite, after all there is still some block activity involved, it is just that they have been further abstracted. On the other hand, many applications, systems or environments still rely on block as well as file based access.

What about OpenStack, Ceph, Cassandra, Mongo, Hbase and other support?

Seagate has indicated those and others are targeted to be included in the ecosystem.

Seagate needs to be careful balancing their story and message with Kinetic to play to and support those focused on the new and emerging, while also addressing their bread and butter legacy markets. The balancing act is communicating options, flexibility to choose and adopt the right technology for the task without being scared of the future, or clinging to the past, not to mention throwing the baby out with the bath water in exchange for something new.

For those looking to do object storage systems, or cloud and other scale based solutions, Kinetic represents a new tool to do your due diligence and learn more about.

Ok, nuff said (for now)

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)

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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Dude, is Dell going to buy Brocade?

Some IT industry buzz this week is around continued speculation (or here) of who will Dell buy next and will it be Brocade.

Brocade was mentioned as a possible acquisition by some in the IT industry last fall after Dell stepped back from the 3PAR bidding war with HP. Industry rumors or speculations are not new involving Dell and Brocade some going back a year or more (or here or here).

Dell

Last fall I did a blog post commenting that I thought Dell would go on to buy someone else (turned out to be Compellent and Insight One). Those acquisitions by Dell followed their purchases of companies including Scalent, Kace, Exanet, Perot, and Ocarina among others. In that post, I also commented that I did not think (at least at that time) that Brocade would be a likely or good fit for Dell given their different business models, go to market strategy and other factors.

Dell is clearly looking to move further up into the enterprise space which means adding more products and routes to market of which one is via networking and another involves people with associated skill sets. The networking business at Dell has been good for them along with storage to complement their traditional server and workstation business, not to mention their continued expansion into medical, life science and healthcare related solutions. All of those are key building blocks for moving to cloud, virtual and data storage networking environments.

Dell has also done some interesting acquisitions around management and service or workflow tools with Scalent and Kace not to mention their scale out NAS file system (excuse me, big data) solutions via Exanet and data footprint reduction tools with Ocarina, all of which have plays in the enterprise, cloud and traditional Dell markets.

But what about Brocade?

Is it a good fit for Dell?

Dell certainly could benefit from owning Brocade as a means of expanding their Ethernet and IP businesses beyond OEM partnerships, like HP supplementing their networking business with 3COM and IBM with Blade networks.

However, would Dell acquiring Brocade disrupt their relationships with Cisco or other networking providers?

If Dell were to make a bid for Brocade, would Huawei (or here) sit on the sidelines and watch or jump in the game to stir things up?

Would Cisco counter with a deal Dell could not refuse to tighten their partnership at different levels perhaps even involving something with the UCS that was discussed on a recent Infosmack episode?

How would EMC, Fujitsu, HDS, HP, IBM, NetApp and Oracle among others, all of who are partners with Brocade respond to Dell now becoming their OEM supplier for some products?

Would those OEM partnerships continue or cause some of those vendors to become closer aligned with Cisco or others?

Again the question, will Huawei sit back or decide to enter the market on a more serious basis or continue to quietly increase their presences around the periphery?

Brocade could be a good fit for Dell giving them a networking solution (both Ethernet via the Foundry acquisition along with Fibre Channel and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE)) not to mention many other pieces of IP including some NAS and file management tools collecting dust on some Brocade shelf somewhere. What Dell would also get is a sales force that knows how to sell to OEMs, the channel and to enterprise customers, some of whom are networking (Ethernet or Fibre Channel) focused, some who have broader diverse backgrounds.

While it is possible that Dell could end up with Brocade along with a later bidding battle (unless others just let a possible deal go as is), Dell would find itself in new and unfamiliar waters similar to Brocade gaining its feet moving into the Ethernet and IP space after having been comfortable in the Fibre Channel storage centric space for over a decade.

While the networking products would be a good fit for Dell assuming that they were to do such a deal, the diamond in the rough so to speak could be Brocade channel, OEM and direct sales contact team of sales people, business development, systems engineers and support staff on a global basis. Keep in mind that while some of those Brocadians are network focused, many have connected servers and storage from mainframe to open systems across all vendors for years or in some cases decades. Some of those people who I know personally are even talented enough to sell ice to an Eskimo (that is a sales joke btw).

Sure the Brocadians would have to be leveraged to keep selling what they have done, a task similar to what NetApp is currently facing with their integration of Engenio.

However that DNA could help Dell set up more presences in organizations where they have not been in the past. In other words, Dell could use networking to pull the rest of their product lines into those accounts, vars or resellers.

Hmmm, does that sound like another large California based networking company?

Dell

After all, June is a popular month for weddings, lets see what happens next week down in Orlando during the Dell Storage Forum as some have speculated might be a launching pad for some type of deal.

Here are some related links to more material:

  • HP Buys one of the seven networking dwarfs and gets a bargain
  • Dell Will Buy Someone, However Not Brocade (At least for now)
  • While HP and Dell make counter bids, exclusive interview with 3PAR CEO David Scott
  • Acadia VCE: VMware + Cisco + EMC = Virtual Computing Environment
  • Did someone forget to tell Dell that Tape is dead?
  • Data footprint reduction (Part 1): Life beyond dedupe and changing data lifecycles
  • Data footprint reduction (Part 2): Dell, IBM, Ocarina and Storwize
  • What is DFR or Data Footprint Reduction?
  • Could Huawei buy Brocade?
  • Has FCoE entered the trough of disillusionment?
  • More on Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE)
  • Dude, is Dell doing a disk deal again with Compellent?
  • Post Holiday IT Shopping Bargains, Dell Buying Exanet?
  • Back to school shopping: Dude, Dell Digests 3PAR Disk storage
  • Huawei should buy brocade
  • NetApp buying LSIs Engenio Storage Business Unit

    • Ok, nuff said for now

    Cheers Gs

    Greg Schulz – Author The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC), Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier) and coming summer 2011 Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC)
    twitter @storageio

    All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2011 StorageIO and UnlimitedIO All Rights Reserved

    Posted on

    From bits to bytes: Decoding Encoding

    With networking, care should be taken to understand if a given speed or performance capacity is being specified in bits or bytes as well as in base 2 (binary) or base 10 (decimal).

    Another consideration and potential point of confusion are line rates (GBaud) and link speed which can vary based on encoding and low level frame or packet size. For example 1GbE along with 1, 2, 4 and 8Gb Fibre Channel along with Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) use an 8b/10b encoding scheme. This means that at the lowest physical layer 8bits of data are placed into 10bits for transmission with 2 bits being for data integrity.

    With an 8Gb link using 8b/10b encoding, 2 out of every 10 bits are overhead. To determine the actual data throughput for bandwidth, or, number of IOPS, frames or packets per second is a function of the link speed, encoding and baud rate. For example, 1Gb FC has a 1.0625 Gb per second speed which is multiple by the current generation so 8Gb FC or 8GFC would be 8 x 1.0625 = 8.5Gb per second.

    Remember to factor in that encoding overhead (e.g. 8 of 10 bits are for data with 8b/10b) and usable bandwidth on the 8GFC link is about 6.8Gb per second or about 850Mbytes (6.8Gb / 8 bits) per second. 10GbE uses 64b/66b encoding which means that for every 64 bits of data, only 2 bits are used for data integrity checks thus less overhead.

    What do all of this bits and bytes have to do with clouds and virtual data storage network?

    Quite a bit when you consider what we have talked about the need to support more information processing, moving as well as storing in a denser footprint.

    In order to support higher densities faster servers, storage and networks are not enough and require various approaches to reducing the data footprint impact.

    What this means is for fast networks to be effective they also have to have lower overhead to avoid moving more extra data in the same amount of time instead using that capacity for productive work and data.

    PCIe leverages multiple serial unidirectional point to point links, known as lanes, compared to traditional PCI that used a parallel bus based design. With traditional PCI, the bus width varied from 32 to 64 bits while with PCIe, the number of lanes combined with PCIe version and signaling rate determines performance. PCIe interfaces can have one, two, four, eight, sixteen or thirty two lanes for data movement depending on card or adapter format and form factor.  For example, PCI and PCIx performance can be up to 528 MByte per second with 64 bit 66 MHz signaling rate.

     

    PCIe Gen 1

    PCIe Gen 2

    PCIe Gen 3

    Giga transfers per second

    2.5

    5

    8

    Encoding scheme

    8b/10b

    8b/10b

    128b/130b

    Data rate per lane per second

    250MB

    500MB

    1GB

    x32 lanes

    8GB

    16GBs

    32GB

    Table 1: PCIe generation comparisons

    Table 1 shows performance characteristics of PCIe various generations. With PCIe Gen 3, the effective performance essentially doubles however the actual underlying transfer speed does not double as it has in the past. Instead the improved performance is a combination of about 60 percent link speed and 40 percent efficiency improvements by switching from an 8b/10b to 128b/130b encoding scheme among other optimizations.

    Serial interface

    Encoding

    PCIe Gen 1

    8b/10b

    PCIe Gen 2

    8b/10b

    PCIe Gen 3

    128b/120b

    Ethernet 1Gb

    8b/10b

    Ethernet 10Gb

    64b/66b

    Fibre Channel 1/2/4/8 Gb

    8b/10b

    SAS 6Gb

    8b/10b

    Table 2: Common encoding

    Bringing this all together is that in order to support cloud and virtual computing environments, data networks need to become faster as well as more efficient otherwise you will be paying for more overhead per second vs. productive work being done. For example, with 64b/66b encoding on a 10GbE or FCoE link, 96.96% of the overall bandwidth or about 9.7Gb per second are available for useful work.

    By comparison if an 8b/10b encoding were used, the result would be only 80% of available bandwidth for useful data movement. For environments or applications this means better throughput or bandwidth while for applications that require lower response time or latency it means more IOPS, frames or packets per second.

    The above is an example of where a small change such as the encoding scheme can have large benefit when applied to high volume or large environments.

    Learn more in The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC), Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier) and coming summer 2011 Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC) at https://storageio.com/books

    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

    Posted on

    Poll: Networking Convergence, Ethernet, InfiniBand or both?

    I just received an email in my inbox from Voltaire along with a pile of other advertisements, advisories, alerts and announcements from other folks.

    What caught my eye on the email was that it is announcing a new survey results that you can read here as well as below.

    The question that this survey announcements prompts for me and hence why I am posting it here is how dominant will InfiniBand be on a go forward basis, the answer I think is it depends…

    It depends on the target market or audience, what their applications and technology preferences are along with other service requirements.

    I think that there is and will remain a place for Infiniband, the question is where and for what types of environments as well as why have both InfiniBand and Ethernet including Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) in support of unified or converged I/O and data networking.

    So here is the note that I received from Voltaire:

     

    Hello,

    A new survey by Voltaire (NASDAQ: VOLT) reveals that IT executives plan to use InfiniBand and Ethernet technologies together as they refresh or build new data centers. They’re choosing a converged network strategy to improve fabric performance which in turn furthers their infrastructure consolidation and efficiency objectives.

    The full press release is below.  Please contact me if you would like to speak with a Voltaire executive for further commentary.

    Regards,
    Christy

    ____________________________________________________________
    Christy Lynch| 978.439.5407(o) |617.794.1362(m)
    Director, Corporate Communications
    Voltaire – The Leader in Scale-Out Data Center Fabrics
    christyl@voltaire.com | www.voltaire.com
    Follow us on Twitter: www.twitter.com/voltaireltd

    FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

    IT Survey Finds Executives Planning Converged Network Strategy:
    Using Both InfiniBand and Ethernet

    Fabric Performance Key to Making Data Centers Operate More Efficiently

    CHELMSFORD, Mass. and ANANA, Israel January 12, 2010 – A new survey by Voltaire (NASDAQ: VOLT) reveals that IT executives plan to use InfiniBand and Ethernet technologies together as they refresh or build new data centers. They’re choosing a converged network strategy to improve fabric performance which in turn furthers their infrastructure consolidation and efficiency objectives.

    Voltaire queried more than 120 members of the Global CIO & Executive IT Group, which includes CIOs, senior IT executives, and others in the field that attended the 2009 MIT Sloan CIO Symposium. The survey explored their data center networking needs, their choice of interconnect technologies (fabrics) for the enterprise, and criteria for making technology purchasing decisions.

    “Increasingly, InfiniBand and Ethernet share the ability to address key networking requirements of virtualized, scale-out data centers, such as performance, efficiency, and scalability,” noted Asaf Somekh, vice president of marketing, Voltaire. “By adopting a converged network strategy, IT executives can build on their pre-existing investments, and leverage the best of both technologies.”

    When asked about their fabric choices, 45 percent of the respondents said they planned to implement both InfiniBand with Ethernet as they made future data center enhancements. Another 54 percent intended to rely on Ethernet alone.

    Among additional survey results:

    • When asked to rank the most important characteristics for their data center fabric, the largest number (31 percent) cited high bandwidth. Twenty-two percent cited low latency, and 17 percent said scalability.
    • When asked about their top data center networking priorities for the next two years, 34 percent again cited performance. Twenty-seven percent mentioned reducing costs, and 16 percent cited improving service levels.
    • A majority (nearly 60 percent) favored a fabric/network that is supported or backed by a global server manufacturer.

    InfiniBand and Ethernet interconnect technologies are widely used in today’s data centers to speed up and make the most of computing applications, and to enable faster sharing of data among storage and server networks. Voltaire’s server and storage fabric switches leverage both technologies for optimum efficiency. The company provides InfiniBand products used in supercomputers, high-performance computing, and enterprise environments, as well as its Ethernet products to help a broad array of enterprise data centers meet their performance requirements and consolidation plans.

    About Voltaire
    Voltaire (NASDAQ: VOLT) is a leading provider of scale-out computing fabrics for data centers, high performance computing and cloud environments. Voltaire’s family of server and storage fabric switches and advanced management software improve performance of mission-critical applications, increase efficiency and reduce costs through infrastructure consolidation and lower power consumption. Used by more than 30 percent of the Fortune 100 and other premier organizations across many industries, including many of the TOP500 supercomputers, Voltaire products are included in server and blade offerings from Bull, HP, IBM, NEC and Sun. Founded in 1997, Voltaire is headquartered in Ra’anana, Israel and Chelmsford, Massachusetts. More information is available at www.voltaire.com or by calling 1-800-865-8247.

    Forward Looking Statements
    Information provided in this press release may contain statements relating to current expectations, estimates, forecasts and projections about future events that are "forward-looking statements" as defined in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements generally relate to Voltaire’s plans, objectives and expectations for future operations and are based upon management’s current estimates and projections of future results or trends. They also include third-party projections regarding expected industry growth rates. Actual future results may differ materially from those projected as a result of certain risks and uncertainties. These factors include, but are not limited to, those discussed under the heading "Risk Factors" in Voltaire’s annual report on Form 20-F for the year ended December 31, 2008. These forward-looking statements are made only as of the date hereof, and we undertake no obligation to update or revise the forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

    ###

    All product and company names mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.

     

    End of Voltaire transmission:

    I/O, storage and networking interface wars come and go similar to other technology debates of what is the best or that will be supreme.

    Some recent debates have been around Fibre Channel vs. iSCSI or iSCSI vs. Fibre Channel (depends on your perspective), SAN vs. NAS, NAS vs. SAS, SAS vs. iSCSI or Fibre Channel, Fibre Channel vs. Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) vs. iSCSI vs. InfiniBand, xWDM vs. SONET or MPLS, IP vs UDP or other IP based services, not to mention the whole LAN, SAN, MAN, WAN POTS and PAN speed games of 1G, 2G, 4G, 8G, 10G, 40G or 100G. Of course there are also the I/O virtualization (IOV) discussions including PCIe Single Root (SR) and Multi Root (MR) for attachment of SAS/SATA, Ethernet, Fibre Channel or other adapters vs. other approaches.

    Thus when I routinely get asked about what is the best, my answer usually is a qualified it depends based on what you are doing, trying to accomplish, your environment, preferences among others. In other words, Im not hung up or tied to anyone particular networking transport, protocol, network or interface, rather, the ones that work and are most applicable to the task at hand

    Now getting back to Voltaire and InfiniBand which I think has a future for some environments, however I dont see it being the be all end all it was once promoted to be. And outside of the InfiniBand faithful (there are also iSCSI, SAS, Fibre Channel, FCoE, CEE and DCE among other devotees), I suspect that the results would be mixed.

    I suspect that the Voltaire survey reflects that as well as if I surveyed an Ethernet dominate environment I can take a pretty good guess at the results, likewise for a Fibre Channel, or FCoE influenced environment. Not to mention the composition of the environment, focus and business or applications being supported. One would also expect a slightly different survey results from the likes of Aprius, Broadcom, Brocade, Cisco, Emulex, Mellanox (they also are involved with InfiniBand), NextIO, Qlogic (they actually do some Infiniband activity as well), Virtensys or Xsigo (actually, they support convergence of Fibre Channel and Ethernet via Infiniband) among others.

    Ok, so what is your take?

    Whats your preffered network interface for convergence?

    For additional reading, here are some related links:

  • I/O Virtualization (IOV) Revisited
  • I/O, I/O, Its off to Virtual Work and VMworld I Go (or went)
  • Buzzword Bingo 1.0 – Are you ready for fall product announcements?
  • StorageIO in the News Update V2010.1
  • The Green and Virtual Data Center (Chapter 9)
  • Also check out what others including Scott Lowe have to say about IOV here or, Stuart Miniman about FCoE here, or of Greg Ferro here.

    • Oh, and for what its worth for those concerned about FTC disclosure, Voltaire is not nor have they been a client of StorageIO, however, I did used to work for a Fibre Channel, iSCSI, IP storage, LAN, SAN, MAN, WAN vendor and wrote a book on the topics :).

    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

    Posted on

    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)

    Posted on

    Cisco wins FCoE Pre-Season and Primaries – Now for the Main Event!

    Storage I/O trends

    Ok, unless you have turned off all of your news feeds, RSS feeds, discontinued all printed industry and trade related publications and stopped visiting blogs and other on-line venues, you may not have heard that Cisco, NetApp, EMC, Emulex and Qlogic have made a series of announcements signaling proof of life for the emerging Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) based on the Cisco Data Center Ethernet (DCE) or on the emerging more general Converged Enhanced Ethernet (CEE).

    Now if you have not heard, check out the various industry news and information venues and blogs. Likewise if you are a Brocadian, dont worry and do not get upset by the early poll or exit poll results from the primaries, the real and broad adoption game has not started yet, however, get your game faces on.

    At this point given the newness of the technology and early adopter status, its safe to say that Cisco has won the pre-season or primaries for the first FCoE battle. However, despite the hype and proof of life activity which can be gauged by the counter claims from the iSCSI camps, the main event or real market adoption and deployment will start ramping up in 2009 and with broader adoption occurring in the 2010 to 2011 timeframes.

    This is not to say that there will not be any adoption of FCoE between now and the next 12-18 months, quite the opposite, there will be plenty of early adopters, test and pilot cases as well as Cisco faithful who chose to go the FCoE route vs. another round of Fibre Channel at 8Gb, or, for those who want to go to FCoE at 10Gb instead of iSCSI or NAS at 10GbE for what ever reasons. However the core target market for FCoE is the higher-end, risk adverse environments that shy away from bleeding edge technology unless there is an adjacent and fully redundant blood bank located next door if not on-site.

    Consequently similar how Fibre Channel and FICON were slow to ramp-up taking a couple of years from first product and components availability, FCoE will continue to gain ground and as the complete and open ecosystem comes into place including adapters, switches and directors, routers, bridges and gateways, storage systems as well as management tools and associated training and skills development.

    Watch for vendors to ratchet up discussions about how many FCoE or FCoE enabled systems are shipped with an eye on the keyword, FCoE enabled which means that the systems may or may not actually be deployed in FCoE mode, rather that they are ready for it, sound familiar to early iSCSI or event FC product shipments?

    Rest assured, FCoE has a very bright future (see here and here) at the mid to high-end of the market while iSCSI will continue to grow and gain in adoption in the mid-market down to the lower reaches of the SMB market. Of course there will be border skirmishes as iSCSI tries to move up market and FCoE tries to move down market and of course there will be those that stay the course for another round of Fibre Channel beyond 8Gb while NAS continues to gain ground in all market segments and SAS at the very low-end where even iSCSI is to expensive. Learn more over at the Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA) or FCoE Portal sites as well as at Brocade, Cisco, EMC, Emulex, NetApp and Qlogic sites among others.

    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

    Posted on

    Brocade to Buy Foundry Networks – Prelude to Upcoming Converged Ethernet and FCoE Battle

    Storage I/O trends

    The emerging and maturing Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and Converged Ethernet, aka Data Center Ethernet, Converged Enhanced Ethernet, Enterprise Ethernet among others marketing names activity is picking up. Today Brocade took a major step to shore up its already announced FCoE and converged Ethernet story which includes new directors and converged host bus adapters
    by announcing intentions of buying

    Ethernet high performance switching vendor Foundry Networks in a deal valued around $3B USD and some change. Not a bad deal for Foundry, some would say an expensive deal for Brocade, perhaps paying to much, however given some of the recent storage and networking related deals. For example IBM spending around $300M for a startup called XIV who claims to have shipped a few storage systems to a few customers, or, Dell spending about $1.3B to buy EqualLogic who had a few thousand customers (Could be the deal of the century for Dell compared to IBM and XIV, however time will tell), or EMC and some of its recent purchases like RSA, Avamar or bargains like WysDM, Mozy and Iomega not to mention Cisco having not been bashful about dropping some serious coin for standalone companies like Neuspeed (where are they now) for iSCSI as well as Andimao and more recently Nuovo. Regardless of if Mike Klayko (Brocade CEO) paid too much or not, he did what he had to do as part of his continuing activities to re-invent Brocade and leverage their core DNA and business focus of data infrastructures.

    Brocade could probably have made a nice business for a few more years like some of the companies they have recently acquired tried to do including McData, CNT, INRANGE and so forth. However the reality is that sooner or later, they too (Brocade) would probably have been acquired by someone perhaps. With the acquisition of Foundry Networks, along with previous announcements for FCoE technologies and their existing products for NAS or file based storage management and iSCSI solutions, Brocade is signaling that they want to fight for survival as opposed to circle the wagons and guard their installed base and wheel house.

    With the up-coming Converged Ethernet and FCoE battle royal shaping up to start in about 12 to 18 months, sooner for the early adopters who like to test and kick around technology early, or for those who want to go right to 10GbE today instead of 8Gb Fibre Channel, or, for those who like bleeding edge solutions. The reality even with recent proof of life plug-fest demos and claims of being ready for primetime, core Brocade customers particularly at the high-end of the market tend to be rather risk averse and cautions with their data infrastructure thus moving at a slower pace. For them, upgrading to 8Gb Fibre Channel may be the near term future while watching FCoE and converged Ethernet or converged enhanced Ethernet evolve and being transitioning in a couple of years. For these risk adverse type customers, bleeding edge technology means having a blood bank nearby and on call as downtime and disruption is not an option.

    Rest assured, with Ciscopushing hard to stimulate the FCoE market and get people to skip 8Gb FC and switch over to 10GbE, there will be plenty more plug fest and proof of life demos, plenty of trash talking by both sides that will rival some of the best heavy weight match-ups.

    Buyers beware, do your home work and if being an early adopter of FCoE and converged networks is right for you, with due diligence do some testing to see how everything really works in your environment from storage systems, to adapters, to switches, to protocol converters and gateways to management and diagnostic software. How does the whole ecosystem that matches your environment work for your scenario. If you are not comfortable with where the FCoE and converged Ethernet technologies and more importantly supporting ecosystem are at, take your time, monitor the situation as it unfolds over the next year or so leading up to the big battle royal between Brocade and Cisco.

    Something that I think is interesting is that here we have Brocade and Cisco squaring off in a convergence battle between a general networking vendor (Cisco) and storage centric networking vendor (Brocade), both of whom have been built on organic growth as well as acquisitions. What?s even more interesting is that around 10 years ago back when Brocade was just getting started and Cisco was still trying to figure out Fibre Channel and iSCSI, 3COM had at the time the foresight to put together an alliance of Storage related partners to get into the then emerging SAN market place. The alliance was to include various storage vendors, switch and HBA as well as router or gateway vendors along with data and backup software vendors. Before the program could be officially launched, it was canceled just as all of the promotional material was about to be distributed due to poor finical health of 3COM. With a few exceptions, most of the participants in that early program, which was probably a year or two ahead of its time have either been bought or disappeared altogether. 3COM could have been a major force in a converged LAN and SAN market place instead of now watching Brocade and Cisco form the sidelines.

    For now, congratulations to Mike Klayko and crew for demonstrating that they want to put up a fight and provide an alternative for their customers to Cisco and that they are serious about being a serious contender in the data infrastructure solution provider fight. For Cisco, looks like two of your competitors have now become one. Good luck and best wishes to both sides, Brocade and Cisco and I will be watching this battle from ring side as both parties line up and re-align their partner ecosystems.

    Cheers
    gs

    Posted on

    Just When You Thought It Was Safe To Go In The Water Again!

    In the shark infested waters where I/O and networking debates often rage, the Fibre Channel vs. iSCSI, or, is that iSCSI vs. Fibre Channel debates continue which is about as surprising as an ice berg melting because it floated into warmer water or hot air in the tropics.

    Here’s a link to an article at Processor.com by Kurt Marko “iSCSI vs. Fibre Channel: A Cost Comparison iSCSI Targets the Low-End SAN, But Are The Cost Advantages Worth The Performance Trade-offs?” that looks at a recent iSCSI justification report and some additional commentary about apples to oranges comparisons by me.

    Here’s the thing, no one in their right mind would try to refute that iSCSI at 1GbE levering built-in server NICs and standard Ethernet switches and operating system supplied path managers is cheaper than say 4Gb Fibre Channel or even legacy 1Gb and 2Gb Fibre Channel. However that’s hardly an apple to apples comparison.

    A more interesting comparison is for example 10GbE iSCSI compared to 1GbE iSCSI (again not a fair comparison), or, look at for example the new solution from HP and Qlogic that for about $8,200 USD, you get a 8Gb FC switch with a bunch of ports for expansion, four (4) PCIe 8Gb FC adapters plus cables plus transceiver optics which while not as cheap as 1GbE ports built into a server or an off the shelf Ethernet switch, is a far cry from the usual apples to oranges no cost Ethernet NICs vs. $1,500 FC adapters and high price FC director ports.

    To be fair, put this into comparison with 10GbE adapters (and probably not a real apples to apples comparison at that) which on CDW go from about $600 USD (without no transceivers) to $1,100 to $1,500 for single port with transceivers or about $2,500 to $3,000 or more for dual or multi-port.

    So the usual counter argument to trying to make a more apples to apples comparison is that iSCSI deployments do not need the performance of 10GbE or 8GbE Fibre Channel which is very valid, however then a comparison should be iSCSI vs. NAS.

    Here’s the bottom line, I like iSCSI for its target markets and see lots of huge upside and growth opportunity just like I see a continued place for Fibre Channel and moving forward FCoE leveraging Ethernet as the common denominator (at least for now) as well as NAS for data sharing and SAS for small deployments requiring shared storage (assuming a shared SAS array that is).

    I?m a fan of using the right technology or tool for the task at hand and if that gets me in trouble with the iSCSI purist who wants everything on iSCSI, well, too bad, so be it. Likewise, if the FC police are not happy that I?m not ready and willing to squash out the evil iSCSI, well, too bad, get over it, same with NAS, InfiniBand and SAS and that’s not to mean I don?t take a side or preference, rather, applied to the right task at hand, I?m a huge fan of these and other technologies and hence the discussion about apples to apples comparisons and applicability.

    Cheers
    GS