Industry Trends and Perspectives: Tiered Storage, Systems and Mediums

This is part of an ongoing series of short industry trends and perspectives blog posts briefs.

These short posts compliment other longer posts along with traditional industry trends and perspective white papers, research reports, solution brief content found at www.storageio.com/reports.

Two years ago we read about how the magnetic disk drive would be dead in a couple of years at the hand of flash SSD. Guess what, it is a couple of years later and the magnetic disk drive is far from being dead. Granted high performance Fibre Channel disks will continue to be replaced by high performance, small form factor 2.5" SAS drives along with continued adoption of high capacity SAS and SATA devices.

Likewise, SSD or flash drives continue to be deployed, however outside of iPhone, iPod and other consumer or low end devices, nowhere near the projected or perhaps hoped for level. Rest assured the trend Im seeing and hearing from IT customers is that some will continue to look for places to strategically deploy SSD where possible, practical and affordable, there will continue to be a roll for disk and even tape devices on a go forward basis.

Also watch for more coverage and discussion around the emergence of the Hybrid Hard Disk Drive (HHDD) that was discussed about four to five years ago. The HHDD made an appearance and then quietly went away for some time, perhaps more R and D time in the labs while flash SSD garnered the spotlight.

There could be a good opportunity for HHDD technology leveraging the best of both worlds that is continued pricing decreases for disk with larger capacity using smaller yet more affordable amounts of flash in a solution that is transparent to the server or storage controller making for easier integration.

Related and companion material:
Blog: ILM = Has It Losts its Meaning
Blog: SSD and Storage System Performance
Blog: Has SSD put Hard Disk Drives (HDDs) On Endangered Species List
Blog: Optimize Data Storage for Performance and Capacity Efficiency

That is all for now, hope you find this ongoing series of current and emerging Industry Trends and Perspectives interesting.

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

Industry Trends and Perspectives: Converged Networking and IO Virtualization (IOV)

This is part of an ongoing series of short industry trends and perspectives blog posts briefs.

These short posts compliment other longer posts along with traditional industry trends and perspective white papers, research reports, solution brief content found at www.storageio.com/reports.

The trends that I am seeing with converged networking and I/O fall into a couple of categories. One being converged networking including unified communications, FCoE/DCB along with InfiniBand based discussions while the other being around I/O virtualization (IOV) including PCIe server based multi root IO virtualization (MRIOV).

As is often the case with new technologies the trend of some saying these are the next great things thus drop everything and adopt them now as they are working and ready for prime time mission critical deployment. Then there are those who say no, stop, do not waste your time on these as they are temporary, they will die and go away anyway. In between, there is reality which takes a bit of balancing the old with the new, look before you leap, do your homework, and do not be scared however have a strategy and a plan on how to achieve it.

Thus is FCoE a temporal or temporary technology? Well, in the scope that all technologies are temporary however it is their temporal timeframe that should be of interest. Thus given that FCoE will probably have at least a ten to fifteen year temporal timeline, I would say in technology terms it has a relative long life for supporting coexistence on the continued road to convergence which appears to be Ethernet.

Related and companion material:
Video: Storage and Networking Convergence
Blog: I/O Virtualization (IOV) Revisited
Blog: I/O, I/O, Its off to Virtual Work and VMworld I Go (or went)
Blog: EMC VPLEX: Virtual Storage Redefined or Respun?

That is all for now, hope you find this ongoing series of current and emerging Industry Trends and Perspectives interesting.

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

Upcoming Event: Industry Trends and Perspective European Seminar

Event Seminar Announcement:

IT Data Center, Storage and Virtualization Industry Trends and Perspective
June 16, 2010 Nijkerk, GELDERLAND Netherlands

Event TypeTraining/Seminar
Event TypeSeminar Training with Greg Schulz of US based Server and StorageIO
SponsorBrouwer Storage Consultancy
Target AudienceStorage Architects, Consultants, Pre-Sales, Customer (technical) decison makers
KeywordsCloud, Grid, Data Protection, Disaster Recovery, Storage, Green IT, VTL, Encryption, Dedupe, SAN, NAS, Backup, BC, DR, Performance, Virtualization, FCoE
Location and VenueAmpt van Nijkerk Berencamperweg
Nijkerk, GELDERLAND NL
WhenWed. June 16, 2010 9AM-5PM Local
Price€ 450,=
Event URLLinkedIn: https://storageioblog.com/book4.html
ContactGert Brouwer
Olevoortseweg 43
3861 MH Nijkerk
The Netherlands
Phone: +31-33-246-6825
Fax: +31-33-245-8956
Cell Phone: +31-652-601-309

info@brouwerconsultancy.com

AbstractGeneral items that will be covered include: What are current and emerging macro trends, issues, challenges and opportunities. Common IT customer and IT trends, issues and challenges. Opportunities for leveraging various current, new and emerging technologies, techniques. What are some new and improved technologies and techniques. The seminar will provide insight on how to address various IT and data storage management challenges, where and how new and emerging technologies can co-exist as well as compliment installed resources for maximum investment protection and business agility. Additional themes include cost and storage resource management, optimization and efficiency approaches along with where and how cloud, virtualizaiton and other topics fit into existing environments.

Buzzwords and topics to be discussed include among others: FC and FCoE, SAS, SATA, iSCSI and NAS, I/O Vritualization (IOV) and convergence SSD (Flash and RAM), RAID, Second Generation MAID and IPM, Tape Performance and Capacity planning, Performance and Capacity Optimization, Metrics IRM tools including DPM, E2E, SRA, SRM, as Well as Federated Management Data movement and migration including automation or policy enabled HA and Data protection including Backup/Restore, BC/DR , Security/Encryption VTL, CDP, Snapshots and replication for virtual and non virtual environments Dynamic IT and Optimization , the new Green IT (efficiency and productivity) Distributed data protection (DDP) and distributed data caching (DDC) Server and Storage Virtualization along with discussion about life beyond consolidation SAN, NAS, Clusters, Grids, Clouds (Public and Private), Bulk and object based Storage Unified and vendor prepackaged stacked solutions (e.g. EMC VCE among others) Data footprint reduction (Servers, Storage, Networks, Data Protection and Hypervisors among others.

Learn about other events involving Greg Schulz and StorageIO at www.storageio.com/events

Spring 2010 StorageIO Newsletter

Welcome to the spring 2010 edition of the Server and StorageIO (StorageIO) news letter.

This edition follows the inaugural issue (Winter 2010) incorporating feedback and suggestions as well as building on the fantastic responses received from recipients.

A couple of enhancements included in this issue (marked as New!) include a Featured Related Site along with Some Interesting Industry Links. Another enhancement based on feedback is to include additional comment that in upcoming issues will expand to include a column article along with industry trends and perspectives.

StorageIO News Letter Image
Spring 2010 Newsletter

You can access this news letter via various social media venues (some are shown below) in addition to StorageIO web sites and subscriptions. Click on the following links to view the spring 2010 newsletter as HTML or PDF or, to go to the newsletter page.

Follow via Goggle Feedburner here or via email subscription here.

You can also subscribe to the news letter by simply sending an email to newsletter@storageio.com

Enjoy this edition of the StorageIO newsletter, let me know your comments and feedback.

Also, a very big thank you to everyone who has helped make StorageIO a success!.

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

Technology Tiering, Servers Storage and Snow Removal

Granted it is winter in the northern hemisphere and thus snow storms should not be a surprise.

However between December 2009 and early 2010, there has been plenty of record activity from in the U.K. (or here), to the U.S. east coast including New York, Boston and Washington DC, across the midwest and out to California, it made for a white christmas and SANta fun along with snow fun in general in the new year.

2010 Snow Storm via www.star-telegram.com

What does this have to do with Information Factories aka IT resources including public or private clouds, facilities, server, storage, networking along with data management let alone tiering?

What does this have to do with tiered snow removal, or even snow fun?

Simple, different tools are needed for addressing various types of snow from wet and heavy to light powdery or dustings to deep downfalls. Likewise, there are different types of servers, storage, data networks along with operating systems, management tools and even hyper visors to deal with various application needs or requirements.

First, lets look at tiered IT resources (servers, storage, networks, facilities, data protection and hyper visors) to meet various efficiency, optimization and service level needs.

Do you have tiered IT resources?

Let me rephrase that question to do you have different types of servers with various performance, availability, connectivity and software that support various applications and cost levels?

Thus the whole notion of tiered IT resources is to be abe to have different resources that can be aligned to the task at hand in order to meet performance, availability, capacity, energy along with economic along with service level agreement (SLA) requirements.

Computers or servers are targeted for different markets including Small Office Home Office (SOHO), Small Medium Business (SMB), Small Medium Enterprise (SME) and ultra large scale or extreme scaling, including high performance super computing. Servers are also positioned for different price bands and deployment scenarios.

General categories of tiered servers and computers include:

  • Laptops, desktops and workstations
  • Small floor standing towers or rack mounted 1U and 2U servers
  • Medium sizes floor standing towers or larger rack mounted servers
  • Blade Centers and Blade Servers
  • Large size floor standing servers, including mainframes
  • Specialized fault tolerant, rugged and embedded processing or real time servers

Servers have different names email server, database server, application server, web server, and video or file server, network server, security server, backup server or storage server associated with them depending on their use. In each of the previous examples, what defines the type of server is the type of software is being used to deliver a type of service. Sometimes the term appliance will be used for a server; this is indicative of the type of service the combined hardware and software solution are providing. For example, the same physical server running different software could be a general purpose applications server, a database server running for example Oracle, IBM, Microsoft or Teradata among other databases, an email server or a storage server.

This can lead to confusion when looking at servers in that a server may be able to support different types of workloads thus it should be considered a server, storage, networking or application platform. It depends on the type of software being used on the server. If, for example, storage software in the form a clustered and parallel file system is installed on a server to create highly scalable network attached storage (NAS) or cloud based storage service solution, then the server is a storage server. If the server has a general purpose operating system such as Microsoft Windows, Linux or UNIX and a database on it, it is a database server.

While not technically a type of server, some manufacturers use the term tin wrapped software in an attempt to not be classified as an appliance, server or hardware vendor but want their software to be positioned more as a turnkey solution. The idea is to avoid being perceived as a software only solution that requires integration with hardware. The solution is to use off the shelf commercially available general purpose servers with the vendors software technology pre integrated and installed ready for use. Thus, tin wrapped software is a turnkey software solution with some tin, or hardware, wrapped around it.

How about the same with tiered storage?

That is different tiers (Figure 1) of fast high performance disk including RAM or flash based SSD, fast Fibre Channel or SAS disk drives, or high capacity SAS and SATA disk drives along with magnetic tape as well as cloud based backup or archive?

Tiered Storage Resources
Figure 1: Tiered Storage resources

Tiered storage is also sometimes thought of in terms large enterprise class solutions or midrange, entry level, primary, secondary, near line and offline. Not to be forgotten, there are also tiered networks that support various speeds, convergence, multi tenancy and other capabilities from IO Virtualization (IOV) to traditional LAN, SAN, MAN and WANs including 1Gb Ethernet (1GbE), 10GbE up to emerging 40GbE and 100GbE not to mention various Fibre Channel speeds supporting various protocols.

The notion around tiered networks is like with servers and storage to enable aligning the right technology to be used for the task at hand economically while meeting service needs.

Two other common IT resource tiering techniques include facilities and data protection. Tiered facilities can indicate size, availability, resiliency among other characteristics. Likewise, tiered data protection is aligning the applicable technology to support different RTO and RPO requirements for example using synchronous replication where applicable vs. asynchronous time delayed for longer distance combined with snapshots. Other forms of tiered data protection include traditional backups either to disk, tape or cloud.

There is a new emerging form of tiering in many IT environments and that is tiered virtualization or specifically tiered server hyper visors in virtual data centers with similar objectives to having different server, storage, network, data protection or facilities tiers. Instead of an environment running all VMware, Microsoft HyperV or Xen among other hyper visors may be deployed to meet different application service class requirements. For example, VMware may be used for premium features and functionality on some applications, where others that do not need those features along with requiring lower operating costs leverage HyperV or Zen based solutions. Taking the tiering approach a step further, one could also declare tiered databases for example Oracle legacy vs. MySQL or Microsoft SQLserver among other examples.

What about IT clouds, are those different types of resources, or, essentially an extension of existing IT capabilities for example cloud storage being another tier of data storage?

There is another form of tiering, particularly during the winter months in the northern hemisphere where there is an abundance of snow this time of the year. That is, tiered snow management, removal or movement technologies.

What about tiered snow removal?

Well lets get back to that then.

Like IT resources, there are different technologies that can be used for moving, removing, melting or managing snow.

For example, I cant do much about getting ready of snow other than pushing it all down the hill and into the river, something that would take time and lots of fuel, or, I can manage where I put snow piles to be prepared for next storm, plus, to help put it where the piles of snow will melt and help avoid spring flood. Some technologies can be used for relocating snow elsewhere, kind of like archiving data onto different tiers of storage.

Regardless of if snowstorm or IT clouds (public or private), virtual, managed service provider (MSP), hosted or traditional IT data centers, all require physical servers, storage, I/O and data networks along with software including management tools.

Granted not all servers, storage or networking technology let alone software are the same as they address different needs. IT resources including servers, storage, networks, operating systems and even hyper visors for virtual machines are often categorized and aligned to different tiers corresponding to needs and characteristics (Figure 2).

Tiered IT Resources
Figure 2: Tiered IT resources

For example, in figure 3 there is a light weight plastic shovel (Shove 1) for moving small amounts of snow in a wide stripe or pass. Then there is a narrow shovel for digging things out, or breaking up snow piles (Shovel 2). Also shown are a light duty snow blower (snow thrower) capable of dealing with powdery or non wet snow, grooming in tight corners or small areas.

Tiered Snow tools
Figure 3: Tiered Snow management and migration tools

For other light dustings, a yard leaf blower does double duty for migrating or moving snow in small or tight corners such as decks, patios or for cleanup. Larger snowfalls, or, where there is a lot of area to clear involves heavier duty tools such as the Kawasaki mule with 5 foot curtis plow. The mule is a multifunction, multi protocol tool capable of being used for hauling items, towing, pulling or recreational tasks.

When all else fails, there is a pickup truck to get or go out and about, not to mention to pull other vehicles out of ditches or piles of snow when they become stuck!

Snow movement
Figure 4: Sometimes the snow light making for fast, low latency migration

Snow movement
Figure 5: And sometimes even snow migration technology goes off line!

Snow movement

And that is it for now!

Enjoy the northern hemisphere winter and snow while it lasts, make the best of it with the right tools to simplify the tasks of movement and management, similar to IT resources.

Keep in mind, its about the tools and when along with how to use them for various tasks for efficiency and effectiveness, and, a bit of snow fun.

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

2010 and 2011 Trends, Perspectives and Predictions: More of the same?

2011 is not a typo, I figured that since Im getting caught up on some things, why not get a jump as well.

Since 2009 went by so fast, and that Im finally getting around to doing an obligatory 2010 predictions post, lets take a look at both 2010 and 2011.

Actually Im getting around to doing a post here having already done interviews and articles for others soon to be released.

Based on prior trends and looking at forecasts, a simple predictions is that some of the items for 2010 will apply for 2011 as well given some of this years items may have been predicted by some in 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005 or, well ok, you get the picture. :)

Predictions are fun and funny in that for some, they are taken very seriously, while for others, at best they are taken with a grain of salt depending on where you sit. This applies both for the reader as well as who is making the predictions along with various motives or incentives.

Some are serious, some not so much…

For some, predictions are a great way of touting or promoting favorite wares (hard, soft or services) or getting yet another plug (YAP is a TLA BTW) in to meet coverage or exposure quota.

Meanwhile for others, predictions are a chance to brush up on new terms for the upcoming season of buzzword bingo games (did you pick up on YAP).

In honor of the Vancouver winter games, Im expecting some cool Olympic sized buzzword bingo games with a new slippery fast one being federation. Some buzzwords will take a break in 2010 as well as 2011 having been worked pretty hard the past few years, while others that have been on break, will reappear well rested, rejuvenated, and ready for duty.

Lets also clarify something regarding predictions and this is that they can be from at least two different perspectives. One view is that from a trend of what will be talked about or discussed in the industry. The other is in terms of what will actually be bought, deployed and used.

What can be confusing is sometimes the two perspectives are intermixed or assumed to be one and the same and for 2010 I see that trend continuing. In other words, there is adoption in terms of customers asking and investigating technologies vs. deployment where they are buying, installing and using those technologies in primary situations.

It is safe to say that there is still no such thing as an information, data or processing recession. Ok, surprise surprise; my dogs could have probably made that prediction during a nap. However what this means is more data will need to be moved, processed and stored for longer periods of time and at a lower cost without degrading performance or availability.

This means, denser technologies that enable a lower per unit cost of service without negatively impacting performance, availability, capacity or energy efficiency will be needed. In other words, watch for an expanded virtualization discussion around life beyond consolidation for servers, storage, desktops and networks with a theme around productivity and virtualization for agility and management enablement.

Certainly there will be continued merger and acquisitions on both a small as well as large scale ranging from liquidation sales or bargain hunting, to large and a mega block buster or two. Im thinking in terms of outside of the box, the type that will have people wondering perhaps confused as to why such a deal would be done until the whole picture is reveled and thought out.

In other words, outside of perhaps IBM, HP, Oracle, Intel or Microsoft among a few others, no vendor is too large not to be acquired, merged with, or even involved in a reverse merger. Im also thinking in terms of vendors filling in niche areas as well as building out their larger portfolio and IT stacks for integrated solutions.

Ok, lets take a look at some easy ones, lay ups or slam dunks:

  • More cluster, cloud conversations and confusion (public vs. private, service vs. product vs. architecture)
  • More server, desktop, IO and storage consolidation (excuse me, server virtualization)
  • Data footprint impact reduction ranging from deletion to archive to compress to dedupe among others
  • SSD and in particular flash continues to evolve with more conversations around PCM
  • Growing awareness of social media as yet another tool for customer relations management (CRM)
  • Security, data loss/leap prevention, digital forensics, PCI (payment card industry) and compliance
  • Focus expands from gaming/digital surveillance /security and energy to healthcare
  • Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) mainstream in discussions with some initial deployments
  • Continued confusion of Green IT and carbon reduction vs. economic and productivity (Green Gap)
  • No such thing as an information, data or processing recession, granted budgets are strained
  • Server, Storage or Systems Resource Analysis (SRA) with event correlation
  • SRA tools that provide and enable automation along with situational awareness

The green gap of confusion will continue with carbon or environment centric stories and messages continue to second back stage while people realize the other dimension of green being productivity.

As previously mentioned, virtualization of servers and storage continues to be popular with an expanding focus from just consolidation to one around agility, flexibility and enabling production, high performance or for other systems that do not lend themselves to consolidation to be virtualized.

6GB SAS interfaces as well as more SAS disk drives continue to gain popularity. I have said in the past there was a long shot that 8GFC disk drives might appear. We might very well see those in higher end systems while SAS drives continue to pick up the high performance spinning disk role in mid range systems.

Granted some types of disk drives will give way over time to others, for example high performance 3.5” 15.5K Fibre Channel disks will give way to 2.5” 15.5K SAS boosting densities, energy efficiency while maintaining performance. SSD will help to offload hot spots as they have in the past enabling disks to be more effectively used in their applicable roles or tiers with a net result of enhanced optimization, productivity and economics all of which have environmental benefits (e.g. the other Green IT closing the Green Gap).

What I dont see occurring, or at least in 2010

  • An information or data recession requiring less server, storage, I/O networking or software resources
  • OSD (object based disk storage without a gateway) at least in the context of T10
  • Mainframes, magnetic tape, disk drives, PCs, or Windows going away (at least physically)
  • Cisco cracking top 3, no wait, top 5, no make that top 10 server vendor ranking
  • More respect for growing and diverse SOHO market space
  • iSCSI taking over for all I/O connectivity, however I do see iSCSI expand its footprint
  • FCoE and flash based SSD reaching tipping point in terms of actual customer deployments
  • Large increases in IT Budgets and subsequent wild spending rivaling the dot com era
  • Backup, security, data loss prevention (DLP), data availability or protection issues going away
  • Brett Favre and the Minnesota Vikings winning the super bowl

What will be predicted at end of 2010 for 2011 (some of these will be DejaVU)

  • Many items that were predicted this year, last year, the year before that and so on…
  • Dedupe moving into primary and online active storage, rekindling of dedupe debates
  • Demise of cloud in terms of hype and confusion being replaced by federation
  • Clustered, grid, bulk and other forms of scale out storage grow in adoption
  • Disk, Tape, RAID, Mainframe, Fibre Channel, PCs, Windows being declared dead (again)
  • 2011 will be the year of Holographic storage and T10 OSD (an annual prediction by some)
  • FCoE kicks into broad and mainstream deployment adoption reaching tipping point
  • 16Gb (16GFC) Fibre Channel gets more attention stirring FCoE vs. FC vs. iSCSI debates
  • 100GbE gets more attention along with 4G adoption in order to move more data
  • Demise of iSCSI at the hands of SAS at low end, FCoE at high end and NAS from all angles

Gaining ground in 2010 however not yet in full stride (at least from customer deployment)

  • On the connectivity front, iSCSI, 6Gb SAS, 8Gb Fibre Channel, FCoE and 100GbE
  • SSD/flash based storage everywhere, however continued expansion
  • Dedupe  everywhere including primary storage – its still far from its full potential
  • Public and private clouds along with pNFS as well as scale out or clustered storage
  • Policy based automated storage tiering and transparent data movement or migration
  • Microsoft HyperV and Oracle based server virtualization technologies
  • Open source based technologies along with heterogeneous encryption
  • Virtualization life beyond consolidation addressing agility, flexibility and ease of management
  • Desktop virtualization using Citrix, Microsoft and VMware along with Microsoft Windows 7

Buzzword bingo hot topics and themes (in no particular order) include:

  • 2009 and previous year carry over items including cloud, iSCSI, HyperV, Dedupe, open source
  • Federation takes over some of the work of cloud, virtualization, clusters and grids
  • E2E, End to End management preferably across different technologies
  • SAS, Serial Attached SCSI for server to storage systems and as disk to storage interface
  • SRA, E23, Event correlation and other situational awareness related IRM tools
  • Virtualization, Life beyond consolidation enabling agility, flexibility for desktop, server and storage
  • Green IT, Transitions from carbon focus to economic with efficiency enabling productivity
  • FCoE, Continues to evolve and mature with more deployments however still not at tipping point
  • SSD, Flash based mediums continue to evolve however tipping point is still over the horizon
  • IOV, I/O Virtualization for both virtual and non virtual servers
  • Other new or recycled buzzword bingo candidates include PCoIP, 4G,

RAID will again be pronounced as being dead no longer relevant yet being found in more diverse deployments from consumer to the enterprise. In other words, RAID may be boring and thus no longer relevant to talk about, yet it is being used everywhere and enhanced in evolutionary ways, perhaps for some even revolutionary.

Tape remains being declared dead (e.g. on the Zombie technology list) yet being enhanced, purchased and utilized at higher rates with more data stored than in past history. Instead of being killed off by the disk drive, tape is being kept around for both traditional uses as well as taking on new roles where it is best suited such as long term or bulk off-line storage of data in ultra dense and energy efficient not to mention economical manners.

What I am seeing and hearing is that customers using tape are able to reduce the number of drives or transports, yet due to leveraging disk buffers or caches including from VTL and dedupe devices, they are able to operate their devices at higher utilization, thus requiring fewer devices with more data stored on media than in the past.

Likewise, even though I have been a fan of SSD for about 20 years and am bullish on its continued adoption, I do not see SSD killing off the spinning disk drive anytime soon. Disk drives are helping tape take on this new role by being a buffer or cache in the form of VTLs, disk based backup and bulk storage enhanced with compression, dedupe, thin provision and replication among other functionality.

There you have it, my predictions, observations and perspectives for 2010 and 2011. It is a broad and diverse list however I also get asked about and see a lot of different technologies, techniques and trends tied to IT resources (servers, storage, I/O and networks, hardware, software and services).

Lets see how they play out.

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

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

    I/O Virtualization (IOV) Revisited

    Is I/O Virtualization (IOV) a server topic, a network topic, or a storage topic (See previous post)?

    Like server virtualization, IOV involves servers, storage, network, operating system, and other infrastructure resource management areas and disciplines. The business and technology value proposition or benefits of converged I/O networks and I/O virtualization are similar to those for server and storage virtualization.

    Additional benefits of IOV include:

    • Doing more with what resources (people and technology) already exist or reduce costs
    • Single (or pair for high availability) interconnect for networking and storage I/O
    • Reduction of power, cooling, floor space, and other green efficiency benefits
    • Simplified cabling and reduced complexity for server network and storage interconnects
    • Boosting servers performance to maximize I/O or mezzanine slots
    • reduce I/O and data center bottlenecks
    • Rapid re-deployment to meet changing workload and I/O profiles of virtual servers
    • Scaling I/O capacity to meet high-performance and clustered application needs
    • Leveraging common cabling infrastructure and physical networking facilities

    Before going further, lets take a step backwards for a few moments.

    To say that I/O and networking demands and requirements are increasing is an understatement. The amount of data being generated, copied, and retained for longer periods of time is elevating the importance of the role of data storage and infrastructure resource management (IRM). Networking and input/output (I/O) connectivity technologies (figure 1) tie facilities, servers, storage tools for measurement and management, and best practices on a local and wide area basis to enable an environmentally and economically friendly data center.

    TIERED ACCESS FOR SERVERS AND STORAGE
    There is an old saying that the best I/O, whether local or remote, is an I/O that does not have to occur. I/O is an essential activity for computers of all shapes, sizes, and focus to read and write data in and out of memory (including external storage) and to communicate with other computers and networking devices. This includes communicating on a local and wide area basis for access to or over Internet, cloud, XaaS, or managed services providers such as shown in figure 1.

    PCI SIG IOV (C) 2009 The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC)
    Figure 1 The Big Picture: Data Center I/O and Networking

    The challenge of I/O is that some form of connectivity (logical and physical), along with associated software is required along with time delays while waiting for reads and writes to occur. I/O operations that are closest to the CPU or main processor should be the fastest and occur most frequently for access to main memory using internal local CPU to memory interconnects. In other words, fast servers or processors need fast I/O, either in terms of low latency, I/O operations along with bandwidth capabilities.

    PCI SIG IOV (C) 2009 The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC)
    Figure 2 Tiered I/O and Networking Access

    Moving out and away from the main processor, I/O remains fairly fast with distance but is more flexible and cost effective. An example is the PCIe bus and I/O interconnect shown in Figure 2, which is slower than processor-to-memory interconnects but is still able to support attachment of various device adapters with very good performance in a cost effective manner.

    Farther from the main CPU or processor, various networking and I/O adapters can attach to PCIe, PCIx, or PCI interconnects for backward compatibility to support various distances, speeds, types of devices, and cost factors.

    In general, the faster a processor or server is, the more prone to a performance impact it will be when it has to wait for slower I/O operations.

    Consequently, faster servers need better-performing I/O connectivity and networks. Better performing means lower latency, more IOPS, and improved bandwidth to meet application profiles and types of operations.

    Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI)
    Having established that computers need to perform some form of I/O to various devices, at the heart of many I/O and networking connectivity solutions is the Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) interface. PCI is an industry standard that specifies the chipsets used to communicate between CPUs and memory and the outside world of I/O and networking device peripherals.

    Figure 3 shows an example of multiple servers or blades each with dedicated Fibre Channel (FC) and Ethernet adapters (there could be two or more for redundancy). Simply put the more servers and devices to attach to, the more adapters, cabling and complexity particularly for blade servers and dense rack mount systems.
    PCI SIG IOV (C) 2009 The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC)
    Figure 3 Dedicated PCI adapters for I/O and networking devices

    Figure 4 shows an example of a PCI implementation including various components such as bridges, adapter slots, and adapter types. PCIe leverages multiple serial unidirectional point to point links, known as lanes, in contrast to traditional PCI, which used a parallel bus design.

    PCI SIG IOV (C) 2009 The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC)

    Figure 4 PCI IOV Single Root Configuration Example

    In traditional PCI, bus width varied from 32 to 64 bits; in PCIe, the number of lanes combined with PCIe version and signaling rate determine performance. PCIe interfaces can have 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, or 32 lanes for data movement, depending on card or adapter format and form factor. For example, PCI and PCIx performance can be up to 528 MB per second with a 64 bit, 66 MHz signaling rate, and PCIe is capable of over 4 GB (e.g., 32 Gbit) in each direction using 16 lanes for high-end servers.

    The importance of PCIe and its predecessors is a shift from multiple vendors’ different proprietary interconnects for attaching peripherals to servers. For the most part, vendors have shifted to supporting PCIe or early generations of PCI in some form, ranging from native internal on laptops and workstations to I/O, networking, and peripheral slots on larger servers.

    The most current version of PCI, as defined by the PCI Special Interest Group (PCISIG), is PCI Express (PCIe). Backwards compatibility exists by bridging previous generations, including PCIx and PCI, off a native PCIe bus or, in the past, bridging a PCIe bus to a PCIx native implementation. Beyond speed and bus width differences for the various generations and implementations, PCI adapters also are available in several form factors and applications.

    Traditional PCI was generally limited to a main processor or was internal to a single computer, but current generations of PCI Express (PCIe) include support for PCI Special Interest Group (PCI) I/O virtualization (IOV), enabling the PCI bus to be extended to distances of a few feet. Compared to local area networking, storage interconnects, and other I/O connectivity technologies, a few feet is very short distance, but compared to the previous limit of a few inches, extended PCIe provides the ability for improved sharing of I/O and networking interconnects.

    I/O VIRTUALIZATION(IOV)
    On a traditional physical server, the operating system sees one or more instances of Fibre Channel and Ethernet adapters even if only a single physical adapter, such as an InfiniBand HCA, is installed in a PCI or PCIe slot. In the case of a virtualized server for example, Microsoft HyperV or VMware ESX/vSphere the hypervisor will be able to see and share a single physical adapter, or multiple adapters, for redundancy and performance to guest operating systems. The guest systems see what appears to be a standard SAS, FC or Ethernet adapter or NIC using standard plug-and-play drivers.

    Virtual HBA or virtual network interface cards (NICs) and switches are, as their names imply, virtual representations of a physical HBA or NIC, similar to how a virtual machine emulates a physical machine with a virtual server. With a virtual HBA or NIC, physical NIC resources are carved up and allocated as virtual machines, but instead of hosting a guest operating system like Windows, UNIX, or Linux, a SAS or FC HBA, FCoE converged network adapter (CNA) or Ethernet NIC is presented.

    In addition to virtual or software-based NICs, adapters, and switches found in server virtualization implementations, virtual LAN (VLAN), virtual SAN (VSAN), and virtual private network (VPN) are tools for providing abstraction and isolation or segmentation of physical resources. Using emulation and abstraction capabilities, various segments or sub networks can be physically connected yet logically isolated for management, performance, and security purposes. Some form of routing or gateway functionality enables various network segments or virtual networks to communicate with each other when appropriate security is met.

    PCI-SIG IOV
    PCI SIG IOV consists of a PCIe bridge attached to a PCI root complex along with an attachment to a separate PCI enclosure (Figure 5). Other components and facilities include address translation service (ATS), single-root IOV (SR IOV), and multiroot IOV (MR IOV). ATS enables performance to be optimized between an I/O device and a servers I/O memory management. Single root, SR IOV enables multiple guest operating systems to access a single I/O device simultaneously, without having to rely on a hypervisor for a virtual HBA or NIC.

    PCI SIG IOV (C) 2009 The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC)

    Figure 5 PCI SIG IOV

    The benefit is that physical adapter cards, located in a physically separate enclosure, can be shared within a single physical server without having to incur any potential I/O overhead via virtualization software infrastructure. MR IOV is the next step, enabling a PCIe or SR IOV device to be accessed through a shared PCIe fabric across different physically separated servers and PCIe adapter enclosures. The benefit is increased sharing of physical adapters across multiple servers and operating systems not to mention simplified cabling, reduced complexity and resource utilization.

    PCI SIG IOV (C) 2009 The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC)
    Figure 6 PCI SIG MR IOV

    Figure 6 shows an example of a PCIe switched environment, where two physically separate servers or blade servers attach to an external PCIe enclosure or card cage for attachment to PCIe, PCIx, or PCI devices. Instead of the adapter cards physically plugging into each server, a high performance short-distance cable connects the servers PCI root complex via a PCIe bridge port to a PCIe bridge port in the enclosure device.

    In figure 6, either SR IOV or MR IOV can take place, depending on specific PCIe firmware, server hardware, operating system, devices, and associated drivers and management software. For a SR IOV example, each server has access to some number of dedicated adapters in the external card cage, for example, InfiniBand, Fibre Channel, Ethernet, or Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and converged networking adapters (CNA) also known as HBAs. SR IOV implementations do not allow different physical servers to share adapter cards. MR IOV builds on SR IOV by enabling multiple physical servers to access and share PCI devices such as HBAs and NICs safely with transparency.

    The primary benefit of PCI IOV is to improve utilization of PCI devices, including adapters or mezzanine cards, as well as to enable performance and availability for slot-constrained and physical footprint or form factor-challenged servers. Caveats of PCI IOV are distance limitations and the need for hardware, firmware, operating system, and management software support to enable safe and transparent sharing of PCI devices. Examples of PCIe IOV vendors include Aprius, NextIO and Virtensys among others.

    InfiniBand IOV
    InfiniBand based IOV solutions are an alternative to Ethernet-based solutions. Essentially, InfiniBand approaches are similar, if not identical, to converged Ethernet approaches including FCoE, with the difference being InfiniBand as the network transport. InfiniBand HCAs with special firmware are installed into servers that then see a Fibre Channel HBA and Ethernet NIC from a single physical adapter. The InfiniBand HCA also attaches to a switch or director that in turn attaches to Fibre Channel SAN or Ethernet LAN networks.

    The value of InfiniBand converged networks are that they exist today, and they can be used for consolidation as well as to boost performance and availability. InfiniBand IOV also provides an alternative for those who do not choose to deploy Ethernet.

    From a power, cooling, floor-space or footprint standpoint, converged networks can be used for consolidation to reduce the total number of adapters and the associated power and cooling. In addition to removing unneeded adapters without loss of functionality, converged networks also free up or allow a reduction in the amount of cabling, which can improve airflow for cooling, resulting in additional energy efficiency. An example of a vendor using InfiniBand as a platform for I/O virtualization is Xsigo.

    General takeaway points include the following:

    • Minimize the impact of I/O delays to applications, servers, storage, and networks
    • Do more with what you have, including improving utilization and performance
    • Consider latency, effective bandwidth, and availability in addition to cost
    • Apply the appropriate type and tiered I/O and networking to the task at hand
    • I/O operations and connectivity are being virtualized to simplify management
    • Convergence of networking transports and protocols continues to evolve
    • PCIe IOV is complimentary to converged networking including FCoE

    Moving forward, a revolutionary new technology may emerge that finally eliminates the need for I/O operations. However until that time, or at least for the foreseeable future, several things can be done to minimize the impacts of I/O for local and remote networking as well as to simplify connectivity.

    Learn more about IOV, converged networks, LAN, SAN, MAN and WAN related topics in Chapter 9 (Networking with your servers and storage) of The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC) as well as in Resilient Storage Networks: Designing Flexible Scalable Data Infrastructures (Elsevier).

    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

    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)

    Storage Efficiency and Optimization – The Other Green

    For those of you in the New York City area, I will be presenting live in person at Storage Decisions September 23, 2009 conference The Other Green, Storage Efficiency and Optimization.

    Throw out the "green“: buzzword, and you’re still left with the task of saving or maximizing use of space, power, and cooling while stretching available IT dollars to support growth and business sustainability. For some environments the solution may be consolation while others need to maintain quality of service response time, performance and availability necessitating faster, energy efficient technologies to achieve optimization objectives.

    To accomplish these and other related issues, you can turn to the cloud, virtualization, intelligent power management, data footprint reduction and data management not to mention various types of tiered storage and performance optimization techniques. The session will look at various techniques and strategies to optimize either on-line active or primary as well as near-line or secondary storage environment during tough economic times, as well as to position for future growth, after all, there is no such thing as a data recession!

    Topics, technologies and techniques that will be discussed include among others:

    • Energy efficiency (strategic) vs. energy avoidance (tactical), whats different between them
    • Optimization and the need for speed vs. the need for capacity, finding the right balance
    • Metrics & measurements for management insight, what the industry is doing (or not doing)
    • Tiered storage and tiered access including SSD, FC, SAS, tape, clouds and more
    • Data footprint reduction (archive, compress, dedupe) and thin provision among others
    • Best practices, financial incentives and what you can do today

    This is a free event for IT professionals, however space I hear is limited, learn more and register here.

    For those interested in broader IT data center and infrastructure optimization, check out the on-going seminar series The Infrastructure Optimization and Planning Best Practices (V2.009) – Doing more with less without sacrificing storage, system or network capabilities Seminar series continues September 22, 2009 with a stop in Chicago. This is also a free Seminar, register and learn more here or 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

    I/O, I/O, Its off to Virtual Work and VMworld I Go (or went)

    Ok, so I should have used that intro last week before heading off to VMworld in San Francisco instead of after the fact.

    Think of it as a high latency title or intro, kind of like attaching a fast SSD to a slow, high latency storage controller, or a fast server attached to a slow network, or fast network with slow storage and servers, it is what it is.

    I/O virtualization (IOV), Virtual I/O (VIO) along with I/O and networking convergence have been getting more and more attention lately, particularly on the convergence front. In fact one might conclude that it is trendy to all of a sudden to be on the IOV, VIO and convergence bandwagon given how clouds, soa and SaaS hype are being challenged, perhaps even turning to storm clouds?

    Lets get back on track, or in the case of the past week, get back in the car, get back in the plane, get back into the virtual office and what it all has to do with Virtual I/O and VMworld.

    The convergence game has at its center Brocade emanating from the data center and storage centric I/O corner challenging Cisco hailing from the MAN, WAN, LAN general networking corner.

    Granted both vendors have dabbled with success in each others corners or areas of focus in the past. For example, Brocade as via acquisitions (McData+Nishan+CNT+INRANGE among others) a diverse and capable stable of local and long distance SAN connectivity and channel extension for mainframe and open systems supporting data replication, remote tape and wide area clustering. Not to mention deep bench experience with the technologies, protocols and partners solutions for LAN, MAN (xWDM), WAN (iFCP, FCIP, etc) and even FAN (file area networking aka NAS) along with iSCSI in addition to Fibre Channel and FICON solutions.

    Disclosure: Here’s another plug ;) Learn more about SANs, LANs, MANs, WANs, POTs, PANs and related technologies and techniques in my book “Resilient Storage NetworksDesigning Flexible Scalable Data Infrastructures" (Elsevier).

    Cisco not to be outdone has a background in the LAN, MAN, WAN space directly, or similar to Brocade via partnerships with product and experience and depth. In fact while many of my former INRANGE and CNT associates ended up at Brocade via McData or in-directly, some ended up at Cisco. While Cisco is known for general networking, the past several years they have gone from zero to being successful in the Fibre Channel and yes, even the FICON mainframe space while like Brocade (HBAs) dabbling in other areas like servers and storage not to mention consumer products.

    What does this have to do with IOV and VIO, let alone VMworld and my virtual office, hang on, hold that thought for a moment, lets get the convergence aspect out of the way first.

    On the I/O and networking convergence (e.g. Fibre Channel over Ethernet – FCoE) scene both Brocade (Converged Enhanced Ethernet-CEE) and Cisco (Data Center Ethernet – DCE) along with their partners are rallying around each others camps. This is similar to how a pair of prize fighters maneuvers in advance of a match including plenty of trash talk, hype and all that goes with it. Brocade and Cisco throwing mud balls (or spam) at each other, or having someone else do it is nothing new, however in the past each has had their core areas of focus coming from different tenets in some cases selling to different people in an IT environment or those in VAR and partner organizations. Brocade and Cisco are not alone nor is the I/O networking convergence game the only one in play as it is being complimented by the IOV and VIO technologies addressing different value propositions in IT data centers.

    Now on to the IOV and VIO aspect along with VMworld.

    For those of you that attended VMworld and managed to get outside of session rooms, or media/analyst briefing or reeducation rooms, or out of partner and advisory board meetings walking the expo hall show floor, there was the usual sea of vendors and technology. There were the servers (physical and virtual), storage (physical and virtual), terminals, displays and other hardware, I/O and networking, data protection, security, cloud and managed services, development and visualization tools, infrastructure resource management (IRM) software tools, manufactures and VARs, consulting firms and even some analysts with booths selling their wares among others.

    Likewise, in the onsite physical data center to support the virtual environment, there were servers, storage, networking, cabling and associated hardware along with applicable software and tucked away in all of that, there were also some converged I/O and networking, and, IOV technologies.

    Yes, IOV, VIO and I/O networking convergence were at VMworld in force, just ask Jon Torr of Xsigo who was beaming like a proud papa wanting to tell anyone who would listen that his wares were part of the VMworld data center (Disclosure: Thanks for the T-Shirt).

    Virtensys had their wares on display with Bob Nappa more than happy to show the technology beyond an UhiGui demo including how their solution includes disk drives and an LSI MegaRAID adapter to support VM boot while leveraging off-the shelf or existing PCIe adapters (SAS, FC, FCoE, Ethernet, SATA, etc.) while allowing adapter sharing across servers, not to mention, they won best new technology at VMworld award.

    NextIO who is involved in the IOV / VIO game was there along with convergence vendors Brocade, Cisco, Qlogic and Emulex among others. Rest assured, there are many other vendors and VARs in the VIO and IOV game either still in stealth, semi-stealth or having recently launched.

    IOV and VIO are complimentary to I/O and networking convergence in that solutions like those from Aprius, Virtensys, Xsigo, NextIO and others. While they sound similar, and in fact there is confusion as to if Fibre Channel N_Port Virtual ID (FC_NPVID) and VMware virtual adapters are IOV and VIO vs. solutions that are focused on PCIe device/resource extension and sharing.

    Another point of confusion around I/O virtualization and virtual I/O are blade system or blade center connectivity solutions such as HP Virtual Connect or IBM Fabric Manger not to mention those form Engenera add confusion to the equation. Some of the buzzwords that you will be hearing and reading more about include PCIe Single Root IOV (SR-IOV) and Multi-Root IOV (MR-IOV). Think of it this way, within VMware you have virtual adapters, and Fibre Channel Virtualization N_Port IDs for LUN mapping/masking, zone management and other tasks.

    IOV enables localized sharing of physical adapters across different physical servers (blades or chassis) with distances measured in a few meters; after all, it’s the PCIe bus that is being extended. Thus, it is not a replacement for longer distance in the data center solutions such as FCoE or even SAS for that matter, thus they are complimentary, or at least should be considered complimentary.

    The following are some links to previous articles and related material including an excerpt (yes, another plug ;)) from chapter 9 “Networking with you servers and storage” of new book “The Green and Virtual Data Center” (CRC). Speaking of virtual and physical, “The Green and Virtual Data Center” (CRC) was on sale at the physical VMworld book store this week, as well as at the virtual book stores including Amazon.com

    The Green and Virtual Data Center

    The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC) on book shelves at VMworld Book Store

    Links to some IOV, VIO and I/O networking convergence pieces among others, as well as news coverage, comments and interviews can be found here and here with StorageIOblog posts that may be of interest found here and here.

    SearchSystemChannel: Comparing I/O virtualization and virtual I/O benefits – August 2009

    Enterprise Storage Forum: I/O, I/O, It’s Off to Virtual Work We Go – December 2007

    Byte and Switch: I/O, I/O, It’s Off to Virtual Work We Go (Book Chapter Excerpt) – April 2009

    Thus I went to VMworld in San Francisco this past week as much of the work I do is involved with convergence similar to my background, that is, servers, storage, I/O networking, hardware, software, virtualization, data protection, performance and capacity planning.

    As to the virtual work, well, I spent some time on airplanes this week which as is often the case, my virtual office, granted it was real work that had to be done, however I also had a chance to meet up with some fellow tweeters at a tweet up Tuesday evening before getting back in a plane in my virtual office.

    Now, I/O, I/O, its back to real work I go at Server and StorageIO , kind of rhymes doesnt it!

    I/O, I/O, Its off to Virtual Work and VMworld I Go (or went)

    Recent tips, videos, articles and more

    Its been a busy year so far and there is still plenty more to do. Taking advantage of a short summer break, I’m getting caught up on some items including putting up a link to some of the recent articles, tips, reports, webcasts, videos and more that I have eluded to in recent posts. Realizing that some prefer blogs to webs to tweets to other venues, here are some links to recent articles, tips, videos, podcasts, webcasts, white papers and more that can be found on the StorageIO Tips, tools and White Papers pages.

    Recent articles, columns, tips, white papers and reports:

  • ITworld: The new green data center: From energy avoidance to energy efficiency August 2009
  • SearchSystemsChannel: Comparing I/O virtualization and virtual I/O benefits July 2009
  • SearchDisasterRecovery: Top server virtualization myths in DR and BC July 2009
  • Enterprise Storage Forum: Saving Money with Green Data Storage Technology July 2009
  • SearchSMB ATE Tips: SMB Tips and ATE by Greg Schulz
  • SearchSMB ATE Tip: Tape library storage July 2009
  • SearchSMB ATE Tip: Server-based operating systems vs. PC-based operating systems June 2009
  • SearchSMB ATE Tip: Pros/cons of block/variable block dedupe June 2009
  • FedTechAt the Ready: High-availability storage hinges on being ready for a system failure May 2009
  • Byte & Switch Part XI – Key Elements For A Green and Virtual Data Center May 2009
  • Byte & Switch Part X – Basic Steps For Building a Green and Virtual Data Center May 2009
  • InfoStor Technology Options for Green Storage: April 2009
  • Byte & Switch Part IX – I/O, I/O, Its off to Virtual Work We Go: Networks role in Virtual Data Centers April 2009
  • Byte & Switch Part VIII – Data Storage Can Become Green: There are many steps you can take April 2009
  • Byte & Switch Part VII – Server Virtualization Can Save Costs April 2009
  • Byte & Switch Part VI – Building a Habitat for Technology April 2009
  • Byte & Switch Part V – Data Center Measurement, Metrics & Capacity Planning April 2009
  • zJournal Storage & Data Management: Tips for Enabling Green and Virtual Efficient Data Management March 2009
  • Serial Storage Wire (STA): Green and SASy = Energy and Economic, Effective Storage March 2009
  • SearchSystemsChannel: FAQs: Green IT strategies for solutions providers March 2009
  • Computer Technology Review: Recent Comments on The Green and Virtual Data Center March 2009
  • Byte & Switch Part IV – Virtual Data Centers Can Promote Business Growth March 2009
  • Byte & Switch Part III – The Challenge of IT Infrastructure Resource Management March 2009
  • Byte & Switch Part II – Building an Efficient & Ecologically Friendly Data Center March 2009
  • Byte & Switch Part I – The Green Gap – Addressing Environmental & Economic Sustainability March 2009
  • Byte & Switch Green IT and the Green Gap February 2009
  • GreenerComputing: Enabling a Green and Virtual Data Center February 2009
  • Some recent videos and podcasts include:

  • bmighty.com The dark side of SMB virtualization July 2009
  • bmighty.com SMBs Are Now Virtualization’s “Sweet Spot” July 2009
  • eWeek.com Green IT is not dead, its new focus is about efficiency July 2009
  • SearchSystemsChannel FAQ: Using cloud computing services opportunities to get more business July 2009
  • SearchStorage FAQ guide – How Fibre Channel over Ethernet can combine networks July 2009
  • SearchDataCenter Business Benefits of Boosting Web hosting Efficiency June 2009
  • SearchStorageChannel Disaster recovery services for solution providers June 2009
  • The Serverside The Changing Dynamic of the Data Center April 2009
  • TechTarget Virtualization and Consolidation for Agility: Intels Xeon Processor 5500 series May 2009
  • TechTarget Virtualization and Consolidation for Agility: Intels Xeon Processor 5500 series May 2009
  • Intel Reduce Energy Usage while Increasing Business Productivity in the Data Center May 2009
  • WSRadio Closing the green gap and shifting towards an IT efficiency and productivity April 2009
  • bmighty.com July 2009
  • Check out the Tips, Tools and White Papers, and News pages for more commentary, coverage and related content or events.

    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

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    SPC and Storage Benchmarking Games

    Storage I/O trends

    There is a post over in one of the LinkedIn Discussion forums about storage performance council (SPC) benchmarks being miss-leading that I just did a short response post to. Here’s the full post as LinkedIn has a short post response limit.

    While the SPC is far from perfect, it is at least for block, arguably better than doing nothing.

    For the most part, SPC has become a de facto standard for at least block storage benchmarks independent of using IOmeter or other tools or vendor specific simulations, similar how MSFT ESRP is for exchange, TPC for database, SPEC for NFS and so forth. In fact, SPC even recently rather quietly rolled out a new set of what could be considered the basis for Green storage benchmarks. I would argue that SPC results in themselves are not misleading, particularly if you take the time to look at both the executive and full disclosures and look beyond the summary.

    Some vendors have taken advantage of the SPC results playing games with discounting on prices (something that’s allowed under SPC rules) to show and make apples to oranges comparisons on cost per IOP or other ploys. This proactive is nothing new to the IT industry or other industries for that matter, hence benchmark games.

    Where the misleading SPC issue can come into play is for those who simply look at what a vendor is claiming and not looking at the rest of the story, or taking the time to look at the results and making apples to apples, instead of believing the apples to oranges comparison. After all, the results are there for a reason. That reason is for those really interested to dig in and sift through the material, granted not everyone wants to do that.

    For example, some vendors can show a highly discounted list price to get a better IOP per cost on an apple to oranges basis, however, when processes are normalized, the results can be quite different. However here’s the real gem for those who dig into the SPC results, including looking at the configurations and that is that latency under workload is also reported.

    The reason that latency is a gem is that generally speaking, latency does not lie.

    What this means is that if vendor A doubles the amount of cache, doubles the number of controllers, doubles the number of disk drives, plays games with actual storage utilization (ASU), utilizes fast interfaces from 10 GbE  iSCSI to 8Gb FC or FCoE or SAS to get a better cost per IOP number with discounting, look at the latency numbers. There have been some recent examples of this where vendor A has a better cost per IOP while achieving a higher number of IOPS at a lower cost compared to vendor B, which is what is typically reported in a press release or news story. (See a blog entry that also points to a CMG presentation discussion around this topic here.

    Then go and look at the two results, vendor B may be at list price while vendor A is severely discounted which is not a bad thing, as that is then the starting list price as to which customers should start negotiations. However to be fair, normalize the pricing for fun, look at how much more equipment vendor A may need while having to discount to get the price to offset the increased amount of hardware, then look at latency.

    In some of the recent record reported results, the latency results are actually better for a vendor B than for a vendor A and why does latency matter? Beyond showing what a controller can actually do in terms of levering  the number of disks, cache, interface ports and so forth, the big kicker is for those talking about SSD (RAM or FLASH) in that SSD generally is about latency. To fully effectively utilize SSD which is a low latency device, you would want a controller that can do a decent job at handling IOPS; however you also need a controller that can do a decent job of handling IOPS with low latency under heavy workload conditions.

    Thus the SPC again while far from perfect, at least for a thumb nail sketch and comparison is not necessarily misleading, more often than not it’s how the results are utilized that is misleading. Now in the quest for the SPC administrators to try and gain more members and broader industry participation and thus secure their own future, is the SPC organization or administration opening itself up to being used more and more as a marketing tool in ways that potentially compromise all the credibility (I know, some will dispute the validity of SPC, however that’s reserved for a different discussion ;) )?

    There is a bit of Déjà here for those involved with RAID and storage who recall how the RAID Advisory Board (RAB) in its quest to gain broader industry adoption and support succumbed to marketing pressures and use or what some would describe as miss-use and is now a member of the “Where are they now” club!

    Don’t get me wrong here; I like the SPC tests/results/format, there is a lot of good information in the SPC. The various vendor folks who work very hard behind the scenes to make the SPC actually work and continue to evolve it also all deserve a great big kudos, an “atta boy” or “atta girl” for the fine work that have been doing, work that I hope does not become lost in the quest to gain market adoption for the SPC.

    Ok, so then this should all then beg the question of what is the best benchmark. Simple, the one that most closely resembles your actual applications, workload, conditions, configuration and environment.

    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)
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    Storage Decisions Spring 2009 Sessions Update

    StorageDecisions Logo

    The conference lineup and details for the Spring 2009 Storage Decisions event (June 1st and 2nd) in Chicago is coming together including two talks/presentations that I will be doing. One will be in Track 2 (Disaster Recovery) titled "Server Virtualization, Business Continuance and Disaster Recovery" and the other in Track 6 (Management/Executive) titled "The Other Green — Storage Efficiency and Optimization" with both sessions leveraging themes and topics from my new book "The Green and Virtual Data Center" (CRC).

    Track 2: Disaster Recovery
    Server Virtualization, Business Continuance and Disaster Recovery
    Presented by Greg Schulz, Founder and Senior Analyst, StorageIO
    Server virtualization has the potential to bring sophisticated business continuance (BC) and disaster recovery (DR) techniques to organizations that previously didn’t have the means to adopt them. Likewise, virtualized as well as cloud environments need to be included in a BC/DR plan to enable application and data availability. Learn tips and tricks on building an accessible BC/DR strategy and plan using server virtualization and the storage products that enable efficient, flexible green and virtual data centers.

    Topics include:
    * Cross technology domain data protection management
    * Tiered data protection to stretch your IT budget dollar
    * What’s needed to enable BC/DR for virtualized environments
    * How virtualization can enable BC/DR for non-virtualized environments
    * General HA, BC/DR and data protection tips for virtual environments

    Track 6: Management/Executive
    The Other Green — Storage Efficiency and Optimization
    Throw out the "green“: buzzword, and you’re still left with the task of saving or maximizing use of space, power, and cooling while stretching available IT dollars to support growth and business sustainability. For some environments the solution may be consolation while others need to maintain quality of service response time, performance and availability necessitating faster, energy efficient technologies to achieve optimization objectives. To accomplish these and other related issues, you can turn to the cloud, virtualization, intelligent power management, data footprint reduction and data management not to mention various types of tiered storage and performance optimization techniques. The session will look at various techniques and strategies to optimize either on-line active or primary as well as near-line or secondary storage environment during tough economic times, as well as to position for future growth, after all, there is no such thing as a data recession!

    Topics include:
    * Energy efficiency (strategic) vs. energy avoidance (tactical)
    * Optimization and the need for speed vs. the need for capacity
    * Metrics and measurements for management insight
    * Tiered storage and tiered access including SSD, FC, SAS and clouds
    * Data footprint reduction (archive, compress, dedupe) and thin provision
    * Best practices, financial incentives and what you can do today

    See you in Chicago in June if not before then. Learn more about other upcoming events and activities on the StorageIO events page.

    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