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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.

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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

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Post Holiday IT Shopping Bargains, Dell Buying Exanet?

For consumers, the time leading up to the holiday Christmas season is usually busy including door busters as well as black Friday among other specials for purchasing gifts and other items. However savvy shoppers will wait for after Christmas or the holidays altogether perhaps well into the New Year when some good bargains can become available. IT customers are no different with budgets to use up before the end of the year thus a flurry of acquisitions that should become evident soon as we are entering earnings announcement season.

However there are also bargains for IT organizations looking to take advantage of special vendor promotions trying to stimulate sales, not to mention for IT vendors to do some shopping of their own. Consequently, in addition to the flurry of merger and acquisition (M and A) activity from last summer through the fall, there has been several recent deals, some of which might make Monty Hall blush!

Some recent acquisition activity include among others:

  • Dell bought Perot systems for $3.9B
  • DotHill bought Cloverleaf
  • Texas Memory Systems (TMS) bought Incipient
  • HP bought IBRIX and 3COM among others
  • LSI bought Onstor
  • VMware bought Zimbra
  • Micron bought Numonyx
  • Exar bought Neterion

Now the industry is abuzz about Dell, who is perhaps using some of the lose change left over from holiday sales as being in the process of acquiring Israeli clustered storage startup Exanet for about $12M USD. Compared to previous Dell acquisitions including EqualLogic in 2007 for about $1.4B or last years Perot deal in the $3.9B range, $12M is a bargain and would probably not even put a dent in the selling and marketing advertising budget let alone corporate cash coffers which as of their Q3-F10 balance sheet shows about $12.795B in cash.

Who is Exanet and what is their product solution?
Exanet is a small Israeli startup providing a clustered, scale out NAS file serving storage solution (Figure 1) that began shipping in 2003. The Exanet solution (ExaStore) can be either software based, or, as a package solution ExaStore software installed on standard x86 servers with external RAID storage arrays combining as a clustered NAS file server.

Product features include global name space, distributed metadata, expandable file systems, virtual volumes, quotas, snapshots, file migration, replication, and virus scanning, and load balancing, NFS, CIFS and AFP. Exanet scales up to 1 Exabyte of storage capacity along with supporting large files and billions of file per cluster.

The target market that Exanet pursues is large scale out NAS where performance (either small random or large sequential I/Os) along with capacity are required. Consequently, in the scale out, clustered NAS file serving space, competitors include IPM GPFS (SONAS), HP IBRIX or PolyServe, Sun Lustre and Symantec SFS among others.

Clustered Storage Model: Source The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC)
Figure 1 Generic clustered storage model (Courtesy The Green and Virtual Data Center(CRC)

For a turnkey solution, Exanet packaged their cluster file system software with various vendors storage combined with 3rd party external Fibre Channel or other storage. This should play well for Dell who can package the Exanet software on its own servers as well as leverage either SAS or Fibre Channel  MD1000/MD3000 external RAID storage among other options (see more below).

Click here to learn more about clustered storage including clustered NAS, clustered and parallel file systems.

Dell

Whats the dell play?

  • Its an opportunity to acquire some intellectual property (IP)
  • Its an opportunity to have IP similar to EMC, HP, IBM, NetApp, Oracle and Symantec among others
  • Its an opportunity to address a market gap or need
  • Its an opportunity to sell more Dell servers, storage and services
  • Its an opportunity time for doing acquisitions (bargain shopping)

Note: IBM also this past week announced their new bundled scale out clustered NAS file serving solution based on GPFS called SONAS. HP has IBRIX in addition to their previous PolyServe acquisition, Sun has ZFS and Lustre.

How does Exanet fit into the Dell lineup?

  • Dell sells Microsoft based NAS as NX series
  • Dell has an OEM relationship with EMC
  • Dell was OEMing or reselling IBRIX in the past for certain applications or environments
  • Dell has needed to expand its NAS story to balance its iSCSI centric storage story as well as compliment its multifunction block storage solutions (e.g. MD3000) and server solutions.

Why Exanet?
Why Exanet, why not one of the other startups or small NAS or cloud file system vendors including BlueArc, Isilon, Panasas, Parascale, Reldata, OpenE or Zetta among others?

My take is that probably because those were either not relevant to what Dell is looking for, lack of seamless technology and business fit, technology tied to non Dell hardware, technology maturity, the investors are still expecting a premium valuation, or, some combination of the preceding.

Additional thoughts on why Exanet
I think that Dell simply saw an opportunity to acquire some intellectual property (IP) probably including a patent or two. The value of the patents could be in the form of current or future product offerings, perhaps a negotiating tool, or if nothing else as marketing tool. As a marketing tool, Dell via their EqualLogic acquisition among others has been able to demonstrate and generate awareness that they actually own some IP vs. OEM or resell those from others. I also think that this is an opportunity to either fill or supplement a solution offering that IBRIX provided to high performance, bulk storage and scale out file serving needs.

NAS and file serving supporting unstructured data are a strong growth market for commercial, high performance, specialized or research as well as small business environments. Thus, where EqualLogic plays to the iSCSI block theme, Dell needs to expand their NAS and file serving solutions to provide product diversity to meet various customer applications needs similar to what they do with block based storage. For example, while iSCSI based EqualLogic PS systems get the bulk of the marketing attention, Dell also has a robust business around the PowerVault MD1000/MD3000 (SAS/iSCSI/FC) and Microsoft multi protocol based PowerVault NX series not to mention their EMC CLARiiON based OEM solutions (E.g. Dell AX, Dell/EMC CX).

Thus, Dell can complement the Microsoft multi protocol (block and NAS file) NX with a packaged (Dell servers and MD (or other affordable block storage) powered with Exanet) solution. While it is possible that Dell will find a way to package Exanet as a NAS gateway in front of the iSCSI based EqualLogic PS systems, which would also make for an expensive scale out NAS solution compared to those from other vendors.

Thats it for now.

Lets see how this all plays out.

Cheers gs

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

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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

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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

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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

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    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.

    PCIe Fundamentals Server Storage I/O Network Essentials

    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

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    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

    Posted on

    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

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

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    Clarifying Clustered Storage Confusion

    Clustered storage can be iSCSI, Fibre Channel block based or NAS (NFS or CIFS or proprietary file system) file system based. Clustered storage can also be found in virtual tape library (VTL) including dedupe solutions along with other storage solutions such as those for archiving, cloud, medical or other specialized grids among others.

    Recently in the IT and data storage specific industry, there has been a flurry of merger and acquisition (M&A) (Here and here), new product enhancement or announcement activity around clustered storage. For example, HP buying clustered file system vendor IBRIX complimenting their previous acquisition of another clustered file system vendor (PolyServe) a few years ago, or, of iSCSI block clustered storage software vendor LeftHand earlier this year. Another recent acquisition is that of LSI buying clustered NAS vendor ONstor, not to mention Dell buying iSCSI block clustered storage vendor EqualLogic about a year and half ago, not to mention other vendor acquisitions or announcements involving storage and clustering.

    Where the confusion enters into play is the term cluster which means many things to different people, and even more so when clustered storage is combined with NAS or file based storage. For example, clustered NAS may infer a clustered file system when in reality a solution may only be multiple NAS filers, NAS heads, controllers or storage processors configured for availability or failover.

    What this means is that a NFS or CIFS file system may only be active on one node at a time, however in the event of a failover, the file system shifts from one NAS hardware device (e.g. NAS head or filer) to another. On the other hand, a clustered file system enables a NFS or CIFS or other file system to be active on multiple nodes (e.g. NAS heads, controllers, etc.) concurrently. The concurrent access may be for small random reads and writes for example supporting a popular website or file serving application, or, it may be for parallel reads or writes to a large sequential file.

    Clustered storage is no longer exclusive to the confines of high-performance sequential and parallel scientific computing or ultra large environments. Small files and I/O (read or write), including meta-data information, are also being supported by a new generation of multipurpose, flexible, clustered storage solutions that can be tailored to support different applications workloads.

    There are many different types of clustered and bulk storage systems. Clustered storage solutions may be block (iSCSI or Fibre Channel), NAS or file serving, virtual tape library (VTL), or archiving and object-or content-addressable storage. Clustered storage in general is similar to using clustered servers, providing scale beyond the limits of a single traditional system—scale for performance, scale for availability, and scale for capacity and to enable growth in a modular fashion, adding performance and intelligence capabilities along with capacity.

    For smaller environments, clustered storage enables modular pay-as-you-grow capabilities to address specific performance or capacity needs. For larger environments, clustered storage enables growth beyond the limits of a single storage system to meet performance, capacity, or availability needs.

    Applications that lend themselves to clustered and bulk storage solutions include:

    • Unstructured data files, including spreadsheets, PDFs, slide decks, and other documents
    • Email systems, including Microsoft Exchange Personal (.PST) files stored on file servers
    • Users’ home directories and online file storage for documents and multimedia
    • Web-based managed service providers for online data storage, backup, and restore
    • Rich media data delivery, hosting, and social networking Internet sites
    • Media and entertainment creation, including animation rendering and post processing
    • High-performance databases such as Oracle with NFS direct I/O
    • Financial services and telecommunications, transportation, logistics, and manufacturing
    • Project-oriented development, simulation, and energy exploration
    • Low-cost, high-performance caching for transient and look-up or reference data
    • Real-time performance including fraud detection and electronic surveillance
    • Life sciences, chemical research, and computer-aided design

    Clustered storage solutions go beyond meeting the basic requirements of supporting large sequential parallel or concurrent file access. Clustered storage systems can also support random access of small files for highly concurrent online and other applications. Scalable and flexible clustered file servers that leverage commonly deployed servers, networking, and storage technologies are well suited for new and emerging applications, including bulk storage of online unstructured data, cloud services, and multimedia, where extreme scaling of performance (IOPS or bandwidth), low latency, storage capacity, and flexibility at a low cost are needed.

    The bandwidth-intensive and parallel-access performance characteristics associated with clustered storage are generally known; what is not so commonly known is the breakthrough to support small and random IOPS associated with database, email, general-purpose file serving, home directories, and meta-data look-up (Figure 1). Note that a clustered storage system, and in particular, a clustered NAS may or may not include a clustered file system.

    Clustered Storage Model: Source The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC)
    Figure 1 – Generic clustered storage model (Courtesy “The Green and Virtual Data Center  (CRC)”

    More nodes, ports, memory, and disks do not guarantee more performance for applications. Performance depends on how those resources are deployed and how the storage management software enables those resources to avoid bottlenecks. For some clustered NAS and storage systems, more nodes are required to compensate for overhead or performance congestion when processing diverse application workloads. Other things to consider include support for industry-standard interfaces, protocols, and technologies.

    Scalable and flexible clustered file server and storage systems provide the potential to leverage the inherent processing capabilities of constantly improving underlying hardware platforms. For example, software-based clustered storage systems that do not rely on proprietary hardware can be deployed on industry-standard high-density servers and blade centers and utilizes third-party internal or external storage.

    Clustered storage is no longer exclusive to niche applications or scientific and high-performance computing environments. Organizations of all sizes can benefit from ultra scalable, flexible, clustered NAS storage that supports application performance needs from small random I/O to meta-data lookup and large-stream sequential I/O that scales with stability to grow with business and application needs.

    Additional considerations for clustered NAS storage solutions include the following.

    • Can memory, processors, and I/O devices be varied to meet application needs?
    • Is there support for large file systems supporting many small files as well as large files?
    • What is the performance for small random IOPS and bandwidth for large sequential I/O?
    • How is performance enabled across different application in the same cluster instance?
    • Are I/O requests, including meta-data look-up, funneled through a single node?
    • How does a solution scale as the number of nodes and storage devices is increased?
    • How disruptive and time-consuming is adding new or replacing existing storage?
    • Is proprietary hardware needed, or can industry-standard servers and storage be used?
    • What data management features, including load balancing and data protection, exists?
    • What storage interface can be used: SAS, SATA, iSCSI, or Fibre Channel?
    • What types of storage devices are supported: SSD, SAS, Fibre Channel, or SATA disks?

    As with most storage systems, it is not the total number of hard disk drives (HDDs), the quantity and speed of tiered-access I/O connectivity, the types and speeds of the processors, or even the amount of cache memory that determines performance. The performance differentiator is how a manufacturer combines the various components to create a solution that delivers a given level of performance with lower power consumption.

    To avoid performance surprises, be leery of performance claims based solely on speed and quantity of HDDs or the speed and number of ports, processors and memory. How the resources are deployed and how the storage management software enables those resources to avoid bottlenecks are more important. For some clustered NAS and storage systems, more nodes are required to compensate for overhead or performance congestion.

    Learn more about clustered storage (block, file, VTL/dedupe, archive), clustered NAS, clustered file system, grids and cloud storage among other topics in the following links:

    "The Many faces of NAS – Which is appropriate for you?"

    Article: Clarifying Storage Cluster Confusion
    Presentation: Clustered Storage: “From SMB, to Scientific, to File Serving, to Commercial, Social Networking and Web 2.0”
    Video Interview: How to Scale Data Storage Systems with Clustering
    Guidelines for controlling clustering
    The benefits of clustered storage

    Along with other material on the StorageIO Tips and Tools or portfolio archive or events pages.

    Ok, nuff said.

    Cheers gs

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

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

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    Summer Weddings: EMC+Datadomain and HP+IBRIX

    Storage I/O trends

    Are you friend or family of the bride or groom?

    Here’s comes the bride! (Audio)

    That’s a question me and Mrs. Schulz were asked recently when we attended a wedding.

    Summer months particularly June and August are known as wedding months (Hmmm, more merger & acquisition activity to come?). Summer is a nice time of the year for marriages at least in the U.S. and how ironic that we have already seen two well publicized IT data storage industry unions in the past couple of weeks, not to mention other smaller less publicized ones.

    In one case, the California based bride (Datadomain-DDUP) had two courtiers (Massachusetts based EMC and California based NetApp, plus rumors of others). Fortunately one of those had a prenuptial that earned them a cool $57 million for their efforts (NetApp-NTAP) when EMC won the bride. Read more including some of my comments and perspectives among others about EMC, NTAP and DDUP here and here.

    Yesterday, on a mid-July Friday, when things are normally quiet, in true wedding industry forum, news was released (here and here) that California based HP announced that it had bought Massachusetts based data and storage management software vendor IBRIX.

    That’s a lot of activity involving California and Massachusetts in the past couple of weeks, not to mention the tornado sightings in the vicinity of EMCs Hopington Massachusetts headquarters coincidently around the same time the marriage to DDUP was formerly announced! What’s’ next, Aerosmith is out on tour, perhaps the Del Fuegos or Boston will perform at one of these wedding parties?

    Within the data storage industry, publicly traded Datadomain (DDUP) is fairly well known to many for their role in helping to popularize the data footprint impact reduction technique refereed to as de-duplication (e.g. normalization, commonality factoring, intelligent compression, etc.). Adding to the awareness of DDUP was the recent highly public courtship with EMC eventually out-bidding NTAP with a dowry of about $2.1B USD. That type of press coverage and monetary amounts might normally be expected for the likes of a Madonna, Brittney Spears, Michael Jackson-RIP, Paris Hilton, Elizabeth Taylor or other celebrity unions covered by paparazzi with a similar number of attorneys involved.

    On the other hand, IBRIX while known to some, is a lessor known entity compared to DDUP having taken a lower profile than even some of their close competitors. However for those who have been following and covering the clustered storage market (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here ), IBRIX is a well known entity.

    IBRIX also has had ties to EMC having been involved in a pre-mari age affair with an reseller arrangement along with being "rumored" ;) to have been involved with ATMOS cloud or policy based storage solution formerly known as "Hulk". IBRIX has also quietly been involved with others like Dell as well as HP in similar to EMC reseller arrangements. Where IBRIX has been positioned is to address high performance, scale out parallel or concurrent clustered file system needs, both big and small I/O, sequential and random data storage and access. For example, in the media/entertainment and other industries along with enabling large Internet providers a bulk (low cost, high capacity) scale-out NAS (NFS & CIFS) option.

    One of the reasons that IBRIX has been involved with the likes of EMC, Dell and HP among others is that unlike other vendors such as BlueArc, the once high-flying Isilon, NetApp, Onstor or Panasas, not to mention EMC Cellera NAS , is that those solutions are all bundled with proprietary hardware while IBRIX is software based. Where IBRIX Fusion fits is to enable NAS storage solutions using industry standard hardware (servers and storage) that are capable of being configured for both high performance compute (HPC) along with for low-cost general purpose bulk storage to support Web 2.0, social networking, home directories or on-line archives.

    Consequently, and HP or Dell who just happen to sell servers, have had the ability of meeting large scale out and scale up NAS file serving applications by re-selling IBRIX installed on their servers or blade servers with either their own entry to mid-range lower cost, high performance and high capacity storage along with that of 3rd party vendors.

    Ironically one of IBRIX’s competitors in the software NAS solution market was and remains PolyServe, software that HP acquired a couple of years ago to create their own scale out NAS solution (e.g. EFS). Other software based solutions include among others Lustre (Sun), CXFS (SGI), EMC ATMOS (I’m sure some will argue this is not scale out or NAS, will leave it at that for now) ;) not to mention those from IBM, Microsoft, Quantum (also re-sold by HP) or Symantec.

    What does HP get with IBRIX?

    Simple, the ability to own the IP (intellectual proprietary) that one of their competitors had been "rumored" to have been working with at one point, IP that their competitors had been reselling like themselves.

    Thus HP gets more software IP that can and has been sold along with their hardware such as the Proliant servers and blade servers giving their customers choice, similar to what HP and other vendors do with their open servers. For example, HP had the ExDS9000 extreme storage system built on a blade server with high density, low cost, high capacity HP storage (e.g. HP Modular Disk System 600, HP MSA or even EVA).

    This makes for a nice solution for bulk on-line and near-line storage applications where the emphasis is not as much on performance, rather massive scalability for storing on-line documents, archives, videos, images and other unstructured content which is where there is a lot of growth activity. The challenge is that the ExDS9x00 has only been available with the HP PolyServe software which works good for some environments, yet, for others, the clustered file system scale out capabilities of IBRIX were deployed.

    With the addition of IBRIX, HP now should be able to provide their customers and prospects the choice of software to meet specific needs while maintaining an HP footprint, that is both hardware, software and services. HP has several different storage software stacks that they now own (e.g. Lefthand for clustered iSCSI, PolyServe for NFS/CIFS NAS, IBRIX for Clustered File system scale out NAS) not to mention those that it OEMS including among others Bycast (Medical Archive System) that is also OEM’d by IBM as their Medical Grid combined with IBM SOFS, Quantum StorNext and Microsoft Windows Storage Server and Sepaton (VTL and Dedupe) to name a few.

    Do I think this was a good move by HP?

    Yes as it gives them control over IP that they had been reselling as had some of their competitors who left IBRIX to HP to grab up. HP now has the IP which they can package with their hardware similar to how they have been doing, and giving customers choices to align the right hardware and software technology to the task at hand.

    Whether it be Bycast for medical archiving, PolyServe or IBRIX for scale out NAS, Lefthand for clustered iSCSI, Sepaton for VTL and dedupe, Microsoft, Quantum StorNext for shared block storage serving or any of the other software packages HP offers with their industry standard servers, the customer has options.

    For IBRIX customers and prospects, this move will give them a boost in a confidence that their decisions and investments are safe.

    Ironically, vendors like Symantec with their Scaleable File Serving (SFS) clustered NAS solution that is also software based and runs on anyone’s open servers including those from HP gets a potential shot in the arm with HP validating the model and approach for bulk-storage and clustered NAS (Oh Mr. Salem, Mr. Dell is holding on Line 1, Mr. Chambers is on line 2 and Mr. Ellison on line 3 ;) )

    Who’s going to be at the alter next? IMHO, I would keep an eye on (and this all just pure speculation) Bycast, Symantec, EMLX (Broadcom was a wake up call), Quantum, Sepaton, STEC, StorMagic, or ACS, maybe even 3PAR among other possibilities (think outside of the lines). I would not rule out a major game changer such as someone buying NetApp or the likes of an HP buying an EMC or Oracle buying a CSC, maybe even a CSCO buying someone like NTAP, how about Oracle buying NTAP and putting some attorneys out of work, not to mention, who will MSFT hook up with? Anything is possible as we have seen and traditional M&A wisdom is out the window.

    Have fun at the next wedding you attend, go easy on the cake and wedding punch, especially if you will be doing any dancing (please, no You tube videos of the chicken dance) and be careful throwing rice or other items.

    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

    Did someone forget to tell Dell that Tape is dead?

    Storage I/O trends

    Did someone forget to send a memo to Dell that magnetic tape is dead, or, perhaps pre-occupied with other activities? Maybe no body at Dell read the “virtual” or “fictional” memo that tape is dead?

    Ok, enough with the cynicism and joking around, tape is not dead (See recent Computerworld and Dell story) and Dell is one of several vendors including IBM who still find time to talk about tape as part of a solution to different customer and environment needs.

    Sure, tape might be in or heading into its golden years or what can also be called the plateau of productivity (for customers) or profitability (for some vendors), tape does not get the marketing dollars and media coverage as its been around as a technology for a long time and their are cooler and niftier (techno term) things to discuss including disk based backup and data protection, CDP, VTLs, de-dupe debates, clusters, grids and clouds, FCoE vs. iSCSI, NAS, SAS, virtualization, OSD and pretty much anything except tape.

    However, the reality is that many organizations, particular larger organizations still use and rely on tape based data protection for backup/BC/DR as well as archive for compliance and non-compliance data retention or data preservation activities, in some cases complimenting and co-existing with disk based solutions.

    Disk to disk (D2D) based backups and data protection certainly continue to gain adoption and deployments in both large and small environments, however, the shift to disk based data protection, or, clinging to tape with a death grip does not have to be, nor should it be an all or nothing value proposition, that is, they can and do co-exist for different uses and purposes leveraging the various economics and benefits of the technologies to address various tasks and requirements.

    New and emerging technologies certainly need to be discussed, dissected, developed and deployed as they are the future for maintaining and sustaining business growth via IT service delivery in economical and reliable fashion, that is, apply what technologies makes economic and business sense at a given point in time to minimize risk while maximizing useful benefits to your business.

    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

    DAS, SAS, FCoE, Green Efficient Storage and I/O Podcast & FAQs

    Storage I/O trends

    Here are some links to several recent podcast and FAQs pertaining to various popular technolgies and trends.

    Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) FAQs

    Direct Attached Storage for SMB and other enviromnets that do not need networked (SAN or NAS) storage.

    Green and Energy Efficient Storage as well as FCoE and related topics

    Along with several other topics found 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

    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

    Why XIV is so important to IBMs storage business – Its Not About the Technology or Product!

    Storage I/O trends

    Ok, so I know I’m not taking a popular stance on this one from both camps, the IBMers and their faithful followers as well as the growing legion of XIV followers will take exception I’m sure.

    Likewise, the nay sayers would argue why not take a real swing and knock the ball out of the park as if it were baseball batting practice. No, I’m going a different route as actually, either of the approaches would be too easy and have been pretty well addressed already.

    The IBM XIV product that IBM acquired back in January 2008 is getting a lot of buzz (some good, some not so good) lately in the media and blog sphere (here and here which in turn lead to many others) as well as in various industry and customer discussions.

    How ironic that the 2008 version of storage in an election year in the U.S. pits the IBM and XIV faithful in one camp and the nay sayers and competition in the other camps. To hear both camps go at it with points, counter points, mud-slinging and lipstick slurs should be of no surprise when it comes vendor?s points and counter points. In fact the only thing missing from some of the discussions or excuse me, debates is the impromptu appearance on-stage by either Senators Bidden, Clinton, McCain or Obama or Governor Palin to weigh in on the issues, after all, it is the 2008 edition of storage in an election year here in the United States.

    Rather than jump on the bashing XIV bandwagon which about everyone in the industry is now doing except for, the proponents or, folks taking a step back looking at the bigger non-partisan picture like Steve Duplessie the genesis billionaire founder of ESG and probably the future owner of the New England Patriots (American) Football team whose valuation may have dripped enough for Steve to buy now that their start quarterback Tom Brady is out with a leg injury that will take longer to rebuild than all the RAID 6 configured 1 TByte SATA disk drives in 3PAR, Dell, EMC, HGST, HP, IBM, NetApp, Seagate, Sun and Western Digital as well as many other vendors test labs combined. As for the proponents or faithful, in the spirit of providing freedom of choice and flexible options, the cool-aid comes in both XIV orange as well as traditional IBM XIV blue, nuff said.

    In my opinion, which is just that, an opinion, XIV is going to help and may have already done so for IBMs storage business not from the technical architecture or product capabilities or even in the number of units that IBM might eventually sell bundled or un-bundled. Rather, XIV is getting IBM exposure and coverage to be able to sit at the table with some re-invigorated spirit to tell the customer what IBM is doing and if they pay attention, in-between slide decks, grasp the orders for upgrades, expansion or new installs for the existing IBM storage product line, then continue on with their pitch until the customer asks to place another upgraded or expansion order, then quickly grab that order, then continue on with the presentation while touching lightly on the products IBM customers continue to buy and looking to upgrade including:

    IBM disk
    IBM tape – tape and virtual tape
    DS8000 – Mainframe and open systems storage
    DS5000 – New version of DS4000 to compete with new EMC CLARiiON CX4s
    DS4000 ? aka the Array formerly known as the FastT
    DS3000 – Entry level iSCSI, SAS and FC storage
    NetApp based N-Series – For NAS windows CIFS and NFS file sharing
    DR550 archiving solution
    SAN Volume Controller-SVC

    Not to mention other niche products such as the Data Direct Networks-DDN based DCS9550 or IBM developed DS6000 or recently acquired Diligent VTL and de-duping software.

    IBM will be successful with XIV not by how many systems they sell or give away, oh, excuse me, add value to other solutions. How IBM should be gauging XIV success is based on increased sales of their other storage systems and associated software and networking technologies including the mainframe attachable DS8000, the new high performance midrange DS5000 that builds on the success of the DS4000, all of which should have both Brocade and Cisco salivating given their performance need for more Fibre Channel (and FICON for DS8000) 4GFC and 8GFC Fibre Channel ports, switches, adapters and directors. Then there is the netapp based N series for NAS and file serving to support unstructured data including Web and social networking.

    If I were Brocade, Cisco, NetApp or any of the other many IBM suppliers, I would be putting solution bundles together certainly to ride the XIV wave, however have solution bundles ready to play to the collateral impact of all the other IBM storage products getting coverage. For example sure Brocade and Cisco will want to talk about more Fibre Channel and iSCSI switch ports for the XIV, however, also talk performance to be able to unleash the capabilities of the DS8000 and DS5000, or, file management tools for the N-Series as well as bundles around the archiving DR550 solution.

    The N-Series NAS gateway that could be used in theory to dress up XIV and actually make it usable for NAS file serving, file sharing and Web 2.0 related applications or unstructured data. There is the IBM SAN Volume Controller-SVC that virtualizes almost everything except the kitchen sink which may be in a future release. There is the DR550 archiving and compliance platform that not only provides RAID 6 protected energy-efficient storage, it also supports movement of data to tape, now if IBM could get the story out on that solution which maybe in the course of talking about XIV, IBM DR550 might get discovered as well. Of course there are all the other backup, archiving, data protection management and associated tools that will get pick-up and traction as well.

    You see even if IBM quadruples the XIV footprint of revenue installed in production systems with 400% growth rates year over year, never mind that the nay-sayers that would only be about 1/20 or 1/50th of what Dell/EqualLogic, or LeftHand via HP/Intel or even IBM xseries not to mention all the others using IBRIX, HP/PolyServe, Isilon, 3PAR, Panasas, Permabit, NEC and the list goes on with similar clustered solutions have already done.

    The point is watch for up-tick even if only 10% on the installed DS8000 or DS5000 (new) or DS4000 or DS3000 or N-Series (NetApp) or DR550 (the archive appliance IBM should talk more about), or SVC or the TS series VTLs.

    Even a 1% jump due to IBM folks getting out and in front of customers and business partners, a 10% jump on the installed based of somewhere around 40,000 DS8000 (and earlier ESS versions) is 4,000 new systems, on the combined DS5000/DS4000/DS3000 formerly known as FasT with combined footprint of over 100,000 systems in the field, 10% would be 10,000 new systems. Take the SVC, with about 3,000 instances (or about 11,000 clustered nodes), 10% would mean another new 300 instances and continue this sort of improvement across the rest of the line and IBM will have paid for not only XIV and Moshe?s (former EMCer and founded of XIV and now IBM fellow) retirement fund.

    IBM may be laughing to the big blue bank even after having enough money to finally buy a clustered NAS file system for Web 2.0 and bulk storage such as IBRIX before someone else like Dell, EMC or HP gets their hands on it. So while everyone else continues to bash how bad XIV is performing. Whether this is a by design strategy or one that IBM can simply fall into, it could be brilliant if played out and well executed however only time will tell.

    If those who want to rip on xiv really want to inflict damage, cease and ignore XIV for what it is or is not and find something else to talk about and rest assured, if there are other good stories, they will get covered and xiv will be ignored.

    Instead of ripping on XIV, or listening to more XIV hype, I’m going fishing and maybe will come back with a fish story to rival the XIV hype, in the meantime, look I forward to seeing the IBM success for their storage business as a whole due to the opportunity for IBMers and their partners getting excited to go and talk about storage and being surprised by their customers giving them orders for other IBM products, that is unless the IBM revenue prevention department gets in the way. For example if IBMers or their partners in the excitement of the XIV moment forget to sell to customers what customers want, and will buy today or are ready to buy and grab the low hanging fruit (sales orders for upgrades and new sales) of current and recently enhanced products while trying to reprogram and re-condition customers to the XIV story.

    Congratulations to IBM and their partners as well as OEM suppliers if they can collective pull the ruse off and actually stimulate total storage sales while XIV becomes a decoy and maybe even gets a few more installs and some revenue to help prop it up as a decoy.

    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