Data Center Strategies

Create your own stimulus package.

The constant bombardment of gloom and doom about the economy can wear you down. With such negative vibes coming our way, it would be easy to put those IT storage projects on hold, hunker down and beautify the cabling on equipment racks. I have no doubt that many IT groups are meeting to cut spending and minimize expenses that are not critically needed. Those in the organization who are good at justifying what they have and need will fare well. The less forceful or articulate, no matter the intrinsic value of their cause will suffer. And so it will go for awhile.

But this downturn will not last.

The economy will turn around.

We will not end up living in our cars. To think otherwise is foolish.

There is talk in the stock market that for those with iron fortitude, some would say brass you know what's, now is an historic time to buy stocks. Warren Buffet thinks so. I'm not sure - don't take investment advice from me, I still work for a living - but it makes you think: is now a good time to be building out new storage infrastructure? Will pricing on storage infrastructure be lower than it is right now?

Being an optimist, my sense is that storage vendors are desperate to meet sales goals - even reduced sales goals. I hate to be a shark and kick good vendors when they are down but now may be a great time to buy new storage gear. Resetting those pricey service contracts may also be interesting. After all, unless you've completely lost hope, it can only be up from here, right?

Sooner or later the economy will start to grow again. That means storage vendors will be taking orders. Vendors who no doubt downsized, will be constrained by a lack of production capability. Once things turn around, prices will rise as demand rises. If not from a constrained production chain, then from the zillions of dollars that are being pumped into the financial system.

The value of a dollar for computer storage may be peaking now.

If you have any faith in your business and the continued need for storage in your data center, then the allocation of investment dollars to storage will be a good bet. Updating storage gear to leverage thin provisioning, improve power efficiencies or reduce data footprints with deduplication can justify an investment. For those driving costs down with server virtualization, updating the storage to go with it is inevitable.

It's hard not to imagine a business that doesn't think it will come out the other side of this economic crisis alive. And if the business is alive on the other side of this gulf, investing earlier in storage gear for a data center will have been a good bet for positioning the business for growth.

So, if you've got any cash left, or even if you don't - vendors may be willing to finance you - consider updating storage infrastructure now. Create a custom built stimulus package. Being ready to handle an improved business climate will pay off in the long run.

posted by Gene Ruth

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.

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

Has SNIA’s SMI-S failed?

“We’re not enamored of truth. It is too often painful, discouraging and it tends to undermine our self-image. We prefer comfort. Reassurance. Well being. Good Cheer. Naked optimism. Nobody wants to hear the facts when they clash with a happily imagined reality. It is after all, a terrible thing to be the only person in town who can see what’s really happening" [from “Odyssey” by Jack mcDevitt].

To IT data center storage vendors: Are you fooling yourselves about SMI-S? Is SMI-S relevant anymore? Is anybody really implementing it? And where is that mystical standards-based storage management console? All difficult questions and, I fear, with unpleasant answers. It’s been over 5 years since SMI-S was first kicked off. The truth must be faced. I’m not seeing truly complete standards-based storage management implementations. I mean implementations that completely manage a storage system or device within the confines of SMI-S, even assuming a few vendor unique extensions – which, btw, are allowed by the spec.

At this point, you may be scratching your head and wondering what SMI-S stands for. If you don’t know, stop reading this blog unless you relish the anticipation of a possible train wreck. For those who do, you may be wondering about my sanity or nodding your head in agreement.

Let us digress. For some education, go to this link and take a look at the SMI-S document. I'll wait. It might be awhile - the spec is over 1000 pages.

SMI-S is very complicated with a lot of loose ends but it CAN BE MADE to work.

The promise of SMI-S is simple: By getting storage vendors to instrument their gear in a standard way, theoretically, a single management infrastructure with a single console could manage multi-vendor storage environments in a common way. Sounds great doesn’t it? We all dream about this interoperability.

Trouble is, no-one-bothers in a serious fashion.

Sure, some of the top tier players - two, three, and four letter names – do implement some of SMI-S in their products. But it’s the “some” part that’s the rub. I frequently tele-conference with enterprise class storage subsystem vendors– large and small – to hear their latest, and I usually ask this question: Do you implement or plan to implement SMI-S? If so, how much and when? …Far and away, there’s a pause, I hear some shuffling and throats clearing, and get one of two answers: “we are watching that space and will provide an implementation when our customers ask for it”. In other words: forget about it.

Or I get told: “Yes, we do!”

And I ask: “Completely? Does that mean I don’t need your management application to configure and monitor your gear?”

And they respond: “Well, ah, no…”, again paper shuffling and whispering….

Back in June, Burton Group held its annual Catalyst Conference. During the conference, Drue Reeves (VP & Research Director) challenged the industry with his “count-down to interoperability”. He asked, “when will truly interoperable, standards-based storage management applications and instrumented systems be available?” He gave a one-year time frame – I fear he will be disappointed.

So has SMI-S failed? Will vendors seriously implement it? Vendors please let me know. Tell me you are nearly there. After all, as a matter of confession, I and others at Burton Group contributed to the spec and know many very smart people who have worked long and hard on it.

I want to see it succeed.

But what do I tell my clients asking for a unified storage management environment?

If SMI-S has failed then what went wrong? Did vendors realize or anticipate that cooperating to make their equipment interoperable - at a management level - hurt revenues? Did storage systems get so complex and feature rich, that the modeling approach taken is too detailed? Or, is it simply that SMI-S is too complicated and vendors don’t see the payback for investing precious development dollars on it?

I suspect it’s all of the above.

Perhaps a new approach is needed.

Enterprise class storage subsystems have become feature rich over the past few years – what top tier vendor doesn’t do thin provisioning, tiering, replication, etc. All these features are uniquely implemented and a cause for vendor differentiation. The real value of these new features is the delivery of a Quality of Service (QOS) such as data protection, scalability in the face of data growth, performance, and the like. Unfortunately, SMI-S focuses on the down and dirty modeling of the internal specifics of these features – the place where vendors innovate and add their secret sauces.

I’d suggest a new approach: model storage management based on QOS or, more simply, service delivery. For example, rather than modeling the intricacies of thin provisioning or RAID sets, instead, through standard api’s, identify that the equipment supports specific features characterized by key standardized parameters associated with each feature. Why should users specify what disks go into a RAID set? Instead, let them define the level of redundancy and expected performance, letting the equipment figure it out from there. Some vendors already do this in a proprietary way – it's not a new idea. This can be conveniently modeled with XML.

So, back to the main question: Has SMI-S failed? What do you think? Is there hope or should the storage industry rethink how to achieve interoperability in IT data centers or, more to the point, do vendors want to do it to begin with? Where does the SNIA board stand on this issue? After all, the members represent the vendors whom this blog is addressed to.

I know one truth for sure: IT data center customers want storage management interoperability and they want it now.

Posted by Gene Ruth

Netapp's purchase of Onaro and other musings

Netapp’s purchase of Onaro (maker of storage network management software) closed Tuesday, 1/29. See the previous announcement here. The big  fish eats the little fish….Netapp has about 6600 employees, Onaro has about 50.

Onaro claims penetration into 32% of the Fortune 50 – that will include some mighty big storage area networks (SANs). Having Netapp backing them up should definitely put some muscle behind Onaro’s development teams. 

Onaro, for those not in the know, monitors the coming and goings of a SAN, measuring the traffic through, say a fibre port, and keeping track of what’s connected to what. One of the neat things about the software is its ability to verify that the leg bone really is connected to the knee bone… for instance, say you want to launch a new VM or hook a server to the SAN but you’re not sure everything is connected correctly to do that – well, that’s were Onaro’s software comes in. It provides a picture of the parts and pieces in a SAN so that you can tell what’s what and lets you know when things change. Nice.

Maybe not coincidently, Onaro recently announced expanded support for server virtualization and NAS network storage environments – adding “end to end” visibility to the NAS topology as well as the SAN.

So now put it all together and you’ve got a pretty decent way to peer into the bowl of SAN and NAS spaghetti and keep tabs on all of it. And maybe best of all, given that Onaro’s software provides topology intelligence, when the datacenter folks start switching SAN cables or equipment around, Onaro’s software will help prevent inadvertently bringing down a VM environment and getting to find out just how good that disaster recovery plan really is.

Now the question – will Onaro disappear into the Netapp labyrinth? And how will customers, not inclined to deal with Netapp, get at it? This is often an issue when small independent outfits get recognized for their good works and end up in the hands of a big player.  Certainly Onaro is a nice gem to add to Netapp’s collection, assuming Onaro scales down to smaller environments,  but one has to wonder what will happen when non Netapp shops come looking for this snazzy piece of software.

All in all this could be a big win for Netapp. It ties nicely into ReplicatorX, for instance, making sure the necessary SAN topology is in place to create replicates. As long as NetApp can keep the current Onaro base happy and bring in new players, who may not want the whole Netapp package, life will be good.

On a slight tangent, given that Onaro can help insure levels of service within a SAN topology, here’s a suggestion: marry the Onaro offering to a business continuity platform such as offered by (cleverly named) Continuity Software - a little startup (aren’t they all) out of Israel.

Think consolidation.

Continuity Software sells a package intended to scan an environment for databases and email to, first of all, know that they are there, and then secondly, to point out the sometimes embarrassing fact that some of those data sets are not being replicated as thought. It easy to get in this situation when moving data hither and yon in the course of doing business as is likely when deploying virtual machines and new storage.

Replication schedules may be in place but incomplete – leaving out data sets that have been added or moved. Imagine if an admin can not only get a handle on the SAN topology hooking servers and storage together but also, as an added bonus, ensure that data protect schemes are properly replicating the right stuff connected by that topology.

So, as Onaro tracks a SAN’s topology, performance bottlenecks and changes to it, in similar fashion, business continuity software could, as offered by Continuity Software, be tracking data additions and changes and whether that data is properly hooked into a protection scheme. From a business continuity consolidation point of view, combining these two functions into a common pane of glass could be a nice step towards SAN management consolidation and simplification.

Comments?

[Posted by Gene Ruth]