Data Center Strategies

Beware the Ides of March – Cisco Sends a Warning to the Server Industry

It’s not every day that we see a major new player in the x86 server world, but that’s just what Cisco announced today. Both Drue Reeves and I will comment in detail about the announcement and its implications for the rest of the industry, so stay tuned.

I will update this entry with pointers to our blog entries as they get published.

Post #1: Cisco UCS: Why Now?

Post #2: Cisco the Computer Company, Act IV

Part #3: Unified Computing System: A Move Cisco Had to Make

Part #4: Winners and losers, and don't get caught on the wrong side of that line!

Posted by: Nik Simpson

Cisco continues Unified Fabric Push

===Updated 3Feb2009===

Many of you have seen the press announcement this week from Cisco about their next generation Nexus switches.  These products continue Cisco’s push towards their “Data Center 3.0” vision that includes a unified fabric – network and storage traffic over the same physical medium.

Burton Group shares a similar vision about the future data center; we call it the Dynamic Data Center.  A dynamic data center requires un-tethered mobility of resources.  Server virtualization is but one key building block offering agility, with storage and network virtualization being others.  Cisco introduced the unified fabric concept over a year ago, and with this recent announcement, is focusing on supporting the growth of server virtualization within the data center.

Now onto the subject of unified fabric.  A year ago when the unified fabric concept was first pushed on the industry in earnest, I heard from a number of IT server, network, and storage admins that they had no intention of ever running storage and network traffic through a common switch, let alone on a common fabric.  This was their visual way to keep the separation:  “you do your job, I’ll do mine.”   We are now a year later, and the next installments of unified fabric support are now announced with an increased push towards fanning the virtualization wild fire.  So has the attitude changed a year later?

I believe the answer is yes and no.  There are two opposing forces moving IT organizations to rethink the way they do things.  The biggest force being the downturn economy.  Tightening budgets mean postponing upgrades, slowing of data center growth, and holding onto what you have.  The opposing force to this is that often business slow downs are an opportunity to circle the wagons and seek out improved efficiencies - re-architect that which was hastily deployed just to keep ahead of the rapid growth during good times.  Re-thinking IT infrastructure goes beyond technological improvements to include policy and organizational changes.  I had a discussion last year with the IT ops manager of a company that was feeling the stress from the downturn.  They had a project they had attempted twice to accomplish over a nine month period of time.  It failed each time.  Their economic situation forced layoffs and an IT organizational restructure.  They attempted the project again, with fewer staff and succeeded in less than four weeks.  The ops manager indicated that hind-sight was 20x20 in this case.  The reason the project had failed the previous two times was because of their larger pre-reduction silo organization.  The layoff forced a restructure and broke down the silos and they were now successful.

The tug of war between these two forces: keep what you have to weather the storm versus opportunity to re-architect for a more agile future tend to play out differently organization by organization.  Fierce competition that accompanies a downturn economy tends to swing the strong towards preparing for future growth.  Then there are the few that had the foresight to implement change for agility during the good times - they are well positioned now.

I bring up the opposing forces of a downturn economy because I’ve seen them weathering a change on IT’s attitude towards many concepts including unified fabrics.  The arguments against a unified fabric have historically been grounded in the comfort of status quo and supported by organizational silos.  The need for increased IT agility that comes from a dynamic data center coupled with organizational changes has broken down the barriers of status quo.  The industry is now more prepared for the move to agile computing.

I’ve noticed a few organizations just starting to warm up to the ideas of a unified fabric.  Have they moved there yet?  No. The technologies are not mature enough to complete an entire unified fabric infrastructure.  Cisco knows this and is positioning the Nexus switch capabilities as a future proofing move. I found it interesting that of the three service provider case studies that Cisco used to promote their new products only one mentioned unified fabric as a future possibility.  Rather all focused interest in the product’s increased port density, total bandwidth, and non-stop maintenance.

We’d like to hear your take on unified fabrics.  Is it something you are considering for the future? If so, what intrigues you and if not, what are the problems you see?

===Update=== 

Cisco is openly wanting to break down the IT silos.  Burton Group analyst, Eric Siegel updated his blog with a discussion on this topic and link to Cisco's CTO Padmasree Warrior's blog on this subject.  Go check it out.

[Posted by: Richard Jones]

Putting Your Data Center on a Diet

So Christmas is over and we are all looking somewhat ruefully at our waist lines and hoping to get back in shape before the summer rolls around. Data center operators have another problem, how to cut some of the fat out of their data centers and get their energy budget in shape for the new year. Just this week I was asked the question “How can I trim a million KW-hours energy consumption this year?” That sounds like a daunting, but worthy exercise, a million KW-hours sounds like a huge number, but at 8-cents a kilowatt-hour trimming 1 million kilowatt-hours would save $80,000 dollars in the first year (of course, price/KW-hour varies considerably by location, so your mileage may vary.)

The first point to note is that while the number seems huge, that simply reflects the size of the customer’s data center, the real question is “what changes will have the most impact on energy consumption?” So here’s some tips on how you can reduce energy consumption in the data center:

1. Reduce the amount of equipment in use: The quickest way to significant savings is to cut back the amount of equipment in use through technologies such as server virtualization. Let's assume that 1/3rd of the servers in a data center are suitable candidates for virtualization and that on average a 5:1 consolidation ratio is possible (and that’s a conservative estimate for the consolidation ratio.) A datacenter with a thousand servers would be able to virtualize 333 of them, replacing those 333 physical servers with just 67, a net reduction of  266 physical servers. Now lets assume that these original servers were 1U pizza-box servers each consuming 300 watts of power, and that the new servers are bigger (to accommodate the extra memory, processors etc) and consume 600 watts of power, the net power saving is almost 60 kilowatts. Such an approach would also reduce power consumption for cooling by a similar margin (assuming 1:1: ratio between power consumed by equipment and power consumed by cooling.) This step alone would save a million KW-hours, throw in some improved storage management practices and deduplication for data and the energy savings quickly pile up.
2. Get rid of old equipment: Some data centers continue to use equipment until it finally dies, that can mean servers that are 5 or even 10 years old (I've seen even worse cases). These servers are energy and space hogs and deliver very little work for the power consumed compared to a more modern system, especially if the more modern system is combined with server virtualization. 
3. Improve power distribution: This can take the form of a number of improvements and upgrades. For example old UPS equipment is substantially less efficient (i.e. wastes more energy) than modern UPS systems, replacing the old UPS could yield a 5-10% reduction in energy consumption. Also minimize the number of voltage conversions between the power as delivered by the utility and the power consumed by the equipment, i.e. bring high-voltage power as close to the racks as possible.  Data centers in the US still using 120V AC to power equipment in the racks, need to take a long hard look at switching to 240V AC, the equipment doesn’t care and it will save energy and simplify the wiring.
4. Cooling improvements: Air-side economizers can deliver big savings, especially in more temperate climates. Assume roughly half the energy consumed by the data center is used for cooling, and that the airside economizer can function for half the year, then potential savings in energy consumption are pretty obvious. Also improve hot-aisle/cold aisle separation or implement fully ducted hot-air removal from racks can increase cooling efficiency inside the data center.

The big lesson here is that the quickest payback for reducing energy consumption is to reduce the amount of equipment in the data center and opportunity presented by maturing server virtualization technology is too good to pass up! The downside is that to save money in the long term, you’ll have to spend some money in the short term.

Posted by: Nik Simpson

Dell and EMC renew their vows

Today Dell and EMC announced a new 5 year agreement to remain pals, hold hands and sell storage together.

The previous 5 year engagement of Dell and EMC has helped both Dell access EMC enterprise customers, and EMC expand into the SMB/SME space, Dell's traditional strong hold. With the renewal of the Dell - EMC agreement for the next 5 years, expect more of the same.

As it was 5 years ago, Dell is clearly avoiding the heavy investment necessary to develop enterprise class storage and is instead leveraging EMC capabilities in that space. As during the previous agreement, some storage product overlaps exist and are not likely to go away. EMC is the development muscle, Dell is the marketing muscle.

Dell's EqualLogic products and recently announce D2D products using Quantum's deduplication engine will overlap the low end of the EMC offerings - but these issues have existed in the past and were workable from a customer contact sharing point of view.

Will this relationship be more of the same or will both EMC and Dell collaborate on the implementation and offering of cloud based systems? I think the answer is yes as indicated in the announcement but who will take the top position when selling into large accounts is yet to be seen.

Is this relationship good for customers? Potentially for those interested in having a single vendor to deal with on purchasing decisions, but once the equipment lands in a data center, when the going gets tough each vendor will have to be dealt with. Certainly Dell's pressure to commoditize storage, reducing pricing to the bone is a good thing, but that's not new. In the past Dell had a very low touch model when it came to EMC products - little more than slapping on a logo and shipping it. I see no change there.

Watch for Clariion and EqualLogic sales folks arm wrestling in the parking lot over who's products get pitched to new accounts. Either way, no matter the outcome, both companies win. 

Its just too bad that Dell is not up to doing their own thing in the enterprise storage space. I suppose in these economic times there's just not room for another player.

Posted by Gene Ruth

Not Your Father's Data Center

When you decide to build a data center that holds 500,000+ servers and consume 120 MW of power it makes sense to think really hard about what that data center should look like. Do you take a conventional design and simply scale it up, i.e. a big empty box of a building filled with rows of racks that seem “to stretch out to the crack of doom”? Or do you start from first principles and question almost every piece of conventional wisdom about data center design including power distribution, cooling, and availability?

Interestingly, Microsoft chose the latter approach, and in the process, they have created their Generation 4 Modular Data Centers (I’ll call them G4M for short) which look nothing like a conventional data center. The details of their G4M Data Centers were publicized this week in a very interesting blog posting from Mike Manos at Microsoft. The key aspect of G4M data center is that it is completely containerized, not just the servers but everything, power, cooling etc all come in pre-built standard container configurations. The containers are deployed in the open air (think “trailer park” data center) and new modules can be added rapidly to meet demand. Different configurations of containers can be used to deal with different availability requirements ranging from very low (relying on air cooling and no redundant power) all the way to full “tier IV” availability with redundant everything. Just to give you an idea of how different this data center looks, here’s one of the graphics from the blog entry…

So in parting, if you are at all interested in the future of data center design, go read the blog!

 

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Posted by: Nik Simpson

Dell and Sun: The Time is Now

A number of months ago, I penned a blog about how HP's EDS acquisition left Dell in an IT services lurch. One of the side points in this blog was Dell's lack of enterprise credibility.... and Dell being a potential suitor to buy Sun Microsystems (It's Your Turn Dell). Fast-forward to this week, where Sun announced they would lay off 6,000 employees. Also notice Sun's market capitalization is now down to $3.1B US. If ever there were a time for Dell to scoop up Sun, this is it.

Why would Dell buy Sun? Isn't this madness? Doesn't Dell have enough problems of it's own? Yes, they do. But let's ask ourselves how Dell got into this position (and not just blame it on the current economic conditions).

The crux of my blog went back to a time when Compaq -- lacking enterprise credibility -- was in a similar situation to Dell. Here's an excerpt:

Dell’s product portfolio is lacking the power to reach into some enterprise accounts. This situation reminds me of a [compay wide] meeting at Compaq (circa 1994). The gist from executive management was that Compaq (a $20 Billion dollar company at the time) could not compete in some accounts because it did not have enterprise products necessary to win the [entire] account. In other accounts, it could only win a portion of the IT budget (those tied to x86 servers and small business storage). Compaq executives realized – correctly – that the Compaq brand lacked enterprise credibility; they needed to acquire the technology and talent necessary to compete, rather than building it internally over several years. As a result, they acquired Tandem (Non-stop platform) and DEC (enterprise services, storage, workstations, VAX, 64-bit computing, top-notch compiler team…the list is so long), which gave Compaq the goods and brand recognition to compete at an enterprise level.

Dell needs to do the same. They’re basically at the same point Compaq was in 1994. The Dell brand is lacking the enterprise punch to compete. And with more HP “feet on the street” than ever, Dell will increasingly be marginalized -- pushed out of accounts where they don’t have the product portfolio to “own the entire account”. They need to acquire the technology rather than slowly building internally/organically.

The blog went on to say that although Dell had some products in the enterprise space, they needed to beef up their server and storage enterprise credibility and that acquiring Sun would help Dell attain the credibility they need rather than waiting for Intel to push mini-computers out of the market using the x86 architecture.

Although x-86 servers make up a majority of the server market (especially in terms of units sold), for some applications, customers require systems that have a higher class of availability and performance. In this area, IBM and HP have products at the “mainframe” level (Z-Series and Superdome respectively) and the “workstation” level (P-Series/i-Series and Non-Stop/HP-UX respectively). Dell doesn’t. This problem is harder for Dell to solve. Perhaps Dell can wait for AMD and Intel to solve this product gap problem for them through the future scalability of the x86 server architecture. But another possible scenario is for Dell to acquire Sun (which could be had at a good price). This may sound like madness, but so did the HP/Compaq merger when Carly Firoina and Michael Capellas announced the plan in 2001. Today, the HP/Compaq merger is widely regarded as the right move because it gave HP the product portfolio and services it needed to compete with IBM in the enterprise. Dell needs the product punch and the enterprise brand credibility that Sun can provide.

Little did I know that the price would get much, much better.

Dell's business model has always been about draining profit pools. Dell jumps into a market when the competition has created a market with significant demand on a profit rich product. Dell MO is to come in at a lower price point, drive up tons of volume, and push the competition out of the market. At Dell, they call it "the curve". "The Dell curve" is drilled into the heads of Dell-ians from the day they walk through the front door. But many question the value of such a business model. What happens when there are no more profit pools to drain? What happens when margins are so slim that quality and support suffer? What perception does "low-cost leader" do to the brand? In enterprise circles, price is only one concern...availability, reliability, scalability, and management can be just as -- if not more -- important.

The margin-rich enterprise arena is where Sun excels. Sun has the credibility in enterprise hardware, operating systems, software, and several other technologies. The enterprise is Sun's home turf and they bring a truck-load of loyal enterprise customers.

The question is: would Dell make this move? It's a gamble to be sure. Dell would have to change their spots -- the way they operate, their mindset. Enterprise products are not made without investments in research.

From another viewpoint, Dell has the enough cash to make such a purchase. As of Friday, Dell had approximately $9B US in cash on hand, with about $2B US in debt. Sun, on the other hand, has $2.3B US in cash and $1.2B US in debt. And...one could make the argument that Dell should wait until the market recovers; Dell is in a better position to recover than Sun. But Dell has to think in terms of the compeition too. Dan Nosowitz from Gizmodo wrote an interesting blog on a CNET article concerning which PC company was best positioned to weather the current economic conditions.

I mean, what if HP or IBM bought Sun? What would Dell’s options be if that happened? With Sun off the market, who else could Dell buy to get into the enterprise game? Basically, no one. They’d have to settle for being a smaller player in the enterprise – hoping to grow the market organically (which could take years or never happen). HP buying Sun would leave Dell in an enterprise lurch they way HP's EDS acquisition did for services.

Dell missed their opportunity to buy EMC several years back and now they are kicking themselves. They should not make the same mistake with Sun. If HP bought Sun, Dell’s best option would probably be to move down market toward consumer devices. Meaning: become the best consumer gadget device company in the land because the enterprise space would be a much more difficult market to capture (Dell probably wouldn’t “give up” in the enterprise, but the road will only continue to get harder for them).

However, being a consumer device company would be difficult road too because 1) the margins are slim. 2) Discretionary consumer spending is much more sensitive to market downturns. 3) There is lots of competition from Apple, Sony, etc, where customer brand loyalty is strong. It’s much easier to drain profit pools where profit margins exist.

Dell has to make some hard choices. But, opportunity arises amid chaos.

[posted by: Drue Reeves]

SSDs based subsystems are getting interesting...proceed carefully

Two interesting things happened in the computer storage biz on Monday: Sun announced their new "Amber road" storage products and Violin Memory, a small startup, introduced a high performance pizza box storage appliance. Both these products are leveraging NAND flash SSD technology. Both in interesting ways.

BAM, new era...sorry couldn't resist.

It would be easy to go all gaga over these products but caution is advised. Both are innovative in their own right, both challenge the status quo of the data center class storage system business. These are innovative products. No matter what my comments to follow are, keep this in mind: these products are integrating new technologies in new ways and therefore, regardless of the technical prowess of the suppliers, caution should be exercised before inserting these products into a data center on a large scale.

Try'em to verify'em.

In my past blogs about SSDs, I've mentioned that flash SSDs are about transactional performance not capacity.  I stated that capacity will have to wait until flash memory density increases and pricing decreases dramatically - we will be waiting for awhile. So, I went on to suggest that a storage system based on SSDs, to be well rounded, must offer high performance but solve any capacity shortfall by including high capacity SATA disks. To make that workable, some magic is needed to move data around appropriately to match the data's dynamics.

That's what the new Sun storage product claims to do.

Sun, by leveraging their open source ZFS file system, with some crucial tweaks, marries SSD technology for performance and SATA hard disk technology for capacity. Compared to an all HDD system, Sun claims up to 3x read transactional performance, 5x less power, at about the same cost.

Not bad.

Turns out Sun uses SSDs tailored both for write performance to handle an internal logging function and then read optimized SSD to act essentially as a really large cache. All wrapped around their open-source ZFS file system hidden within the storage subsystem. Sun is demonstrating technology leadership by tightly integrating SSD technology into a complete storage subsystem - yes others have done a pluggable replacement for a HDD, but that's fairly obvious and less then optimal. And there have also been some demonstrations such as IBM's Quicksilver science experiment based on Fusion-io, but no significant shipping product.

There are certainly other nice features in the Sun "Amber Road" products such as an improved management interface, analytics and such but blah, blah, blah. The industry expects those things, they are the price of entry and are the nuts and bolts of any system. Of course you need good pricing, support, quality and the like - that's all good, but its expected. If a vendor does not live up to the expectation - they get voted off the island - fast.

Sun has a window of opportunity here to make some market share gains, before other major vendors show up to the party. Its on you Sun. Price the product to move, forget premium pricing. Get support right, and accounts will be won. Don't forget: others will arrive at the SSD party soon as well. Grab market share while you can. Show customers how Sun is setting a new price-performance bar only reachable with SSD technology. Game on. Watch your back, I expect strong competition in the SSD space over time, the vendors who don't react are no worry since they will not survive in the long run.

Back to Violin. Violin introduced a 2u (that's about 2 pizza boxes) flash based storage appliance. While this is not an holistic performance and capacity solution, it does offer an excellent example of what happens when you take the "D" out of SSD. No longer constrained by the HDD form factor, the Violin 1010 uses memory card like flash modules that plug into a motherboard. As part of the design, there is a RAID like redundancy for the flash modules with hot plug support in case one fails - but I gotta admit, I wouldn't touch the thing while its running. Find an intern to do it and if things go wrong make the intern the scape goat.

For those running transactional applications, like a database, this product could be a godsend. But I fear the pricing may be too high and you do need to accept working with a newbie in the space. The Violin 1010 attaches directly to PCIe (it also does FC and Ethernet) . PCIe is needed to achieve high iops - fibre channel and scsi in general add too much latency but that's the subject of a future blog.

The Violin product is interesting on its own but consider: Combine the Violin 1010 with a bunch of 1TB SATA hard disks and Sun's open storage software with ZFS. Add in a few tweaks for auto-tiering, do some soul searching about pricing and you could have an awesome product. 

So where is all this SSD technology going? Into data centers, sooner than anyone has imagined.

Waiting For The Other Shoe to Drop

This week, Microsoft announced it’s cloud platform Windows Azure and one thing is for sure, it looks nothing like VMware’s Virtual Data Center OS initiative (VDC-OS) announced at last month’s VMworld conference (for reference, see Chris Wolf’s Keynote Blog). The two approaches represent fundamentally different views of how the cloud should be built and what form applications will take.

VMware’s approach is really an evolution of virtual server environment we know today. A cloud data center running VDC-OS will consist of several components:

• Servers - lots of ‘em. Companies are already building giant cloud data centers which hold hundreds of thousands of server and consume megawatts of energy.
• Storage – by the terabyte: Storage will come in a variety of forms and will likely include NAS, SAN and direct attached disk.
• Networks - thousands of ports: Networks tie everything together and connect the cloud the outside world.
• Software layer - virtualize the hardware: Provides a hypervisor, virtual storage plus storage services like thin-provisioning, virtual networks to manage connectivity, provisioning and deployment for virtual machine images.
• Workloads – where the work gets done: At its simplest a workload is simply a virtual machine containing an operating system (i.e. Windows or LINUX) and the application. To handle more complex multi-tier applications (say a web server, database server and a application load balancer) administrators will create workload containers that consist of multiple virtual machines with connectivity, service levels, and other critical information defined for the container.

The beauty of this approach is that it will run anything that you run today, a virtual machine workload could host Exchange, Apache, DB2, etc, so it  provides a relatively simple migration path to the cloud. VMware isn’t the only vendor going down this road, Amazon’s EC2 and 3Tera’s AppLogic platform are other examples of virtual machine-based approach to cloud computing. This VM-based approach is what Drue referred to as “system infrastructure as a service” in his recent blog on defining cloud computing.

Microsoft’s Azure is a bird of a different color and fits Drue’s definition of “platform as a service”. The hardware in the data center of an Azure cloud will look much the same as what you would see in a cloud data center running VDC-OS, the difference is in the software layer, and how applications are built. The software layer for Azure (hopefully they’ll be more details of this later) consists of two pieces:

• Microsoft Azure operating system: This part is responsible for managing all the hardware (servers, storage, networks etc) and creating highly flexible and efficient compute infrastructure. For the record, Microsoft seems to be in two minds about what to call this layer, in their keynote (which Drue covered here) they were very keen not to call this layer an operating system for fear of confusing people about the nature of the platform. Unfortunately, in a presentation they gave to analysts, they described Azure as "An Internet scale cloud services platform hosted in Microsoft data centers, which provides an operating system (my emphasis) and set of developer services that can be used individually or together"
• Microsoft Azure Platform Services: These are relatively high levels services including database, identity management, .NET execution environment, SharePoint document management etc.

Workloads in this cloud will be built using .NET, and will leverage the various platform services to build an application. As such those applications if written correctly will run on standalone Windows servers or in the Azure cloud, so there is no virtual machine in the server virtualization sense. Instead each .NET application running in the cloud will be running in a virtual environment that prevents unplanned interactions between different applications.

Perhaps the best way to understand the difference is to look at an example. Let’s say we want to offer word processing as a cloud application on both platforms. For VDC-OS we could leverage an existing application such OpenOffice and use a virtual desktop approach where each user gets a copy of the word processor along with a minimal operating system (perhaps a stripped down LINUX) running inside a virtual machine. For Azure, the word processor would have to be written as a .NET application from scratch, making use of the Azure Platform Services to handle such things as storing data, ensuring access control and privacy etc. The user interface would be a web browser, and each new user would have a separate instance of the .NET application running in the cloud.

If you’ve been following the “cloud”, then the Microsoft model should sound familiar, it is very similar to Google’s cloud which also offers an application programming interface and key services such as databases. The unanswered question at this point is whether Microsoft’s Azure (which is aimed exclusively at Google) is the only weapon in their armory or will they also announce a platform built around a future version of HyperV to compete with VMware’s VDC-OS? My bet is that they will “drop the other shoe” in 2009 and announce VDC-OS type platform. Stay tuned to see if I’m right!

Posted by: Nik Simpson

Fall SNW 2008 Trip Report

get ready for some rambling - lots to cover....

For those unfamiliar, Storage Networking World is a Computerworld magazine and SNIA sponsored event. Held twice a year in the US. The largest storage-only event. This is a vendor love fest, designed to bring end-users and vendors together to talk things over, get educated and generally develop a sense of the storage market for businesses. Definitely not for consumers.

As an analyst, at SNW I spend my time meeting with vendors, to hear their latest, discuss hot topics and encourage them to address customer needs. It's also a great opportunity to talk with end-users to discuss what's of interest to them.

Prior to attending SNW, I recently posted blogs on SNIA's SMI-S and SSDs and was interested to hear views on FCOE as was my Research Director Drue Reeves.

Frankly I was unprepared for the intense reaction I got regarding my SMI-S blog - I could hardly walk around without someone bending my ear about it - but more on that later.

Here's a quick drive by of what I learned:

FCOE:

This turned out to be an intense topic - I was not expecting the passion on this subject. In a meeting with Cisco, it was clear that they are all over it and pushing it hard.

We at Burton Group have been somewhat tepid on the FCOE subject. Yes, FCOE helps bridge the gap between an FC and Ethernet topology, but iSCSI offers a better price point for new installs. There is a place and value for both technologies.

Intel (they've got a 10Gig adapter) expressed an agnostic view on the subject, supporting both FCOE and iSCSI. Intel is definitely in the "let's see what develops" camp providing product support either way. Of course Emulex is all over the FC/FCOE market with their adapters. Netapp, bravely leading the market from the FCOE target side and taking a "let's see what happens view", will be delivering an FCOE target - nothing new here just reiteration of past activity.

Mostly I heard - "let's see how it goes". For the risk adverse, its still early for FCOE. Expect to see credible full implementations the second half 2009.

So we'll see how FCOE adoption goes - the market will decide. To hear more of the Burton Group view, jump on a plane to Prague and attend the Catalyst event starting this week.  Good luck with the airplane ticket prices!

SMI-s:

Based on my SMI-S blog, at times I thought I might need a security detail to escort me around the convention ;-} I had barely left the registration desk before being hit up for a discussion. My comments are meant to be constructive. There are some inconvenient  truths to be dealt with here. After meeting with the leadership of the SNIA board, it's clear that it's time for SNIA folks to huddle and develop a SMI-s game plan. A restatement of the goals for SMI-s would be a good first step. SNIA is teeming with smart people. Best wishes.

Storage Products:

Storage is getting so complicated - you'd think that it would be getting simpler. So many vendors, so many product variants. The product overlap is overwhelming.  There are lots of great storage products out there, it must make customers' heads explode...hmmm bad image...

Microsoft told about where they're taking DPM. They said that ...opps can't talk about it but take a look at this blog and look for significant enhancements. And Sun let us know about their plans for ...opps can't talk about it but look for leveraging of the Sun open storage initiative and the application of SSDs...IBM ran through their SAN volume controller for mid-range businesses - a full featured yet less performing version of their enterprise product. HDS has a new mid-range truly active-active 3Gb/s SAS disk array. Xiotech with their over-the-top marketing sung themselves praises. Hats off to Xiotech for having an actual customer in the briefing. Riverbed is making noise about getting into the storage biz with an appliance that does inline dedup, consolidation and WAN acceleration - I'm not sure how to categorize it. Bluearc has a nice story for performance NAS using TMS's SSDs as a high performance tier. And finally F5-Acopia  describe their existing network based virtualization appliance to me.

All good stuff, too much to cover in this blog.

Drum roll please..*************BAM

SSD's

My favorite subject. You may recall in my SSD related blog I said, "we need storage subsystem providers to start shipping product with SSDs in them!" Products are starting to arrive. Yes, they are somewhat brutish and much optimization lies ahead, but the game is on.

First, Intel announced availability of their enterprise SSD. Awesome performance. Small capacity. But a great start. Intel continues to legitimize the SSD enterprise offerings. Yes, kudo's to the other suppliers out there. Request to Intel: please help to standardize the spec'ing of SSDs. Performance, power, wear, bit error rates and failure rates need to be addressed. Intel, you know what to do.

The vendors offering SSD's in their products increased dramatically. Joining the existing SSD gang, EMC, Fusion-IO, TMS are vendors that either announced product or intent: Compellent, Verari, Sun, Wasabi and Rackable. More are coming - I just can't spill the beans just yet. If I missed someone, please comment on the blog - the list grows every week. Lots of rumors out there. IBM's showing a SVC-based million IOP beast using Fusion-IO under the covers, expect this to be productized as well.

Of course, HP now ships blade servers, not to mention laptops, with SSDs. How long will it be before SSD chip sets end up on a server motherboard?

For Burton Group clients, watch for my upcoming in depth research document on SSD's.

I declare the SSD games open!

But I would call these Novelty products - designed for extreme IOPs, not so much a blended IOP-capacity capability and, unfortunately, with premium pricing. Close but not yet where the market needs to go.

Here's what the market will really love: a blended system with SSDs for performance and terabyte SATA disks for capacity. To make this work, auto-tiering will be needed under the covers, transparent to users. Ideally, this product would allow policy-based data movement leveraging usage patterns and storage costs. Compellent is uniquely positioned to do this, but I fear their infrastructure is not yet optimized for SSDs. SUN's got some interesting ideas using ZFS. And, Wasabi, a small but innovative vendor, is combining SSDs with an object-based file system, which theoretically can easily identify and move data objects across performance tiers.

And to drive down SSD subsystem costs, the "D" must be removed from SSD and replaced with "PM" for persistent memory. Repackaging SSPM's within a storage subsystem will greatly reduce costs and allow for performance optimization, not unlike what Fusion-IO and Violin already conceive.

Exciting times. But be patient - this may take years to unfold...development cycles can be long...and, of course, whatever we end up with will likely be complex beyond comprehension.

Perhaps the geniuses who dreamed up credit default swaps can help out ;-}

Let me know what you thought of SNW by commenting on this blog. Thanks!

Posted by Gene Ruth

Can a Cloud Get Ahead of Itself?

 

The recent Amazon S3 outage has left me wondering if we aren't in danger of getting caught up in the incessant hype of cloud computing and deploying important applications on it before it's really ready. The end user impact of the S3 outage was bad enough, about 6 hours of downtime for S3, not good if you were doing weekly image backups using a backup service provider that leveraged S3 for storage! More troubling was the cause of the outage; corrupt control messages that rapidly turned into a firestorm of mutual recrimination between the nodes as they argued about the state of the cloud until finally the whole thing went to hell in a hand basket. All this happened because there was little or no error checking on the inter node message traffic so the corruption went unnoticed until it was too late to do anything but reboot the entire S3 infrastructure. With hindsight, the importance of protecting the integrity of the inter-node messages seems obvious, and I'm sure Amazon will fix that problem, in fact they may already have done so. What's really worrying is that a design flaw of that magnitude could ever have made into a production system hosting customer data, it begs the question, "what other surprises are buried in the code currently powering cloud computing applications?"

Don't get me wrong, I do believe that in time cloud computing in one form or another will be a key part of corporate IT, the question is when, not if. In the past, something as experimental as the "cloud" would have been hammered on in academia long before it became a part of IT infrastructure. But today, this type of development happens at breakneck pace with commercial companies (often relying on VC money which creates a requirement for rapid customer growth) claiming "enterprise readiness" for products that have barely advanced beyond the science project stage. In conclusion, I think the Amazon S3 outage should make IT organizations put the cloud on the back burner for the moment or at least limit it to the lab and non-essential applications. Let's give the vendors at least a couple of years to:

• Shake the bugs out on non-mission critical services where 6 hours of unplanned downtime isn't a resume generating event (RGE).
• Demonstrate their ability to deliver the continuous service needed for enterprise applications

 

Posted by: Nik Simpson