Storagebod's Blog

More Musings....

I think for a great many people in the storage industry, the Storage Array is the answer, the one true answer and do everything in the array. When this gets challenged, we get very defensive; the recent Forrester report asking whether we need a SAN any more elucidated some fairly defensive responses. But it's a question that we need to be asking ourselves more often; we need to be challenging ourselves regularly on this point. The core of our storage strategies may still be Networked/Shared Storage but this does not preclude doing things in a different way.

EMC, I think have woken up to this fact with Atmos; I'm not saying that Atmos is unique or special, I'll leave EMC to say that but Atmos is arguably the first attempt by the big storage boys to look at storage delivery in a different way. It really acknowledges that the special sauce is software; there is no real reason why Atmos could not be delivered as a software appliance, it runs on industry standard hardware utilising pretty dumb disk at the back-end. It is an *Interesting* product and I look forward to seeing it developed, matured and delivered.

But still Atmos delivers storage as a discrete entity, abstracted away from the application platform. I am beginning to come round to the idea that the application platform needs to become more tightly integrated with the storage and at time the application may well do things that the storage has done in the past.

Replication for example; don't get me wrong, array-based replication has served us well; integration, testing, maintenance, complexity and the magic pixie dust which makes replication work has kept many a storagebod fed, clothed and kept in the style to which they have become accustomed. But perhaps there is a better way, perhaps the applications themselves should be managing their replication, ensuring that they are transactionally consistent, after all they have a better view of what transactionally consistent may mean than us guys at the bottom of the stack.  We should be starting at the top of the application stack and asking the question, would it be better to do it here?

Clustering, back-up, archiving, many traditional infrastructure functions may be better carried out better at the application level. At least ask the question and think about the answer.

So why doesn't this happen? Firstly, generally Non Functional Requirement gathering is an afterthought! That's boring stuff and anyway, the infrastructure teams look after that stuff for us. Secondly, the clue was in the words  "infrastructure teams"; application teams and infrastructure teams rarely have a close relationship; often the first contact that the infrastructure team will have is when an application is delivered to be integrated into the infrastructure and they try to get the application to meet it's NFRs, SLAs etc. At this time, the relationship rapidly becomes antagonistic and fractious; surely the better thing would be for infrastructure teams and application teams to work closer together. The boundaries between the teams need to become blurred and some sacred cows need to be sacrificed. And yes, there is the belief that it will constantly mean re-inventing the wheel but with modern development methodologies and code re-use, this should not be the case.

Turning to the infrastructure to fix application problems, design flaws and oversights should become the back-stop; yes, we will still use infrastructure to fix many problems but less often and with a greater understanding of why and what the implications are.

I am hoping that as the downturn begins to bite that we will be forced to do this and that 2009 will become the year that applications and infrastructures become more integrated. Yes, you will still need storage, servers, networks but as the boundaries blur between infrastructure teams, so the boundaries between infrastructure and applications should blur as well. We all have a common goal in that we provide service. I live in hope...eternal optimist!!

A look back and a look forward!

There's still  a lot of discussion on the various blogs and Twitter about innovation or the lack of it in the world of corporate storage; if we look back at 2008, arguably this is very much the case.

EMC started the year making a big song and dance about EFDs but really how innovative was this? Just putting faster disks into an array and realistically, EMC's implementation of the EFDs is just faster disks (much faster) in a monolithic array. IBM then trumpeted their 1 Million IOPs but this is not a shipping product, a proof of concept maybe and still no shipping product. HDS announced late in the year, almost a 'me too embarrassed' press release. And a raft of other EFD-like announcements from the rest of the pack but honestly, faster is not really innovation.

Lots of FCoE related announcements and allegedly you can buy shipping product from NetApp. FCoE will happen but the price of DCE is going to be a huge factor in this; it needs to be cost comparable with 10 GbE initially and fairly rapidly needs to come down in price. 10 GbE is still expensive when compared to the cost of GbE and even 4/8 Gig FC. The costs and complexity of FC are overstated IMO; I've done some breakdowns of the cost and FC compares very favourably to iSCSI in the large enterprise and certainly in a blade environment where you really want to be putting 10 GbE into your blade chassis to drive performance.

The only thing which can possibly called innovative is EMC's Atmos product; an object-based storage system. But after months of hype, this was ultimately a let-down for many people; it's relevance to most businesses the moment is probably at first glance fairly minimal!

So what will 2009 bring?

Almost certainly there will be a new iteration of EMC's DMX series; I don't think I am in breach of NDAs, you only have to look at the release cycle for EMC's Enterprise class arrays; we had the DMX3 and we've had it's mid-life kicker; the DMX3.1, which some how becomes DMX4. I know a little bit about this, much of which I'd guessed even before being briefed. There's enough clues out there to guess quite a lot about what it may look like. And I'm really hoping for a Damascene moment for EMC in one or two areas; they've got a lot of software products masquerading as hardware or bundled solutions, I'm hoping for a decoupling.

So if there's a new DMX, I'm expecting something from Hitachi as well. Bigger, faster, more shiny no doubt. And to this day, I am surprised that they have not yet bought BlueArc. BlueArc would be a good buy for them and would certainly round out their storage range nicely.

IBM, who the hell knows? New iteration of SVC certainly, I'm expecting a big hardware revision and I'm expecting more scalability. XIV? It's no secret that there is is a bigger array due to address the scalability issues and maybe a smaller box as well. The one size fits all approach is not working; that goes for capacity, the RAID and the disk sizes; I wouldn't be surprised to see the Fusion I/O cards make an appearance. And then there is the eternal question, what the hell are IBM doing with the DS8K range? Are they going to kill it or rev it? They've never made the capital out of it that they should have that's for sure.

NetApp, well OnTap 8 should finally see GX merged into OnTap proper with a single code-base for the clustered and the non-clustered versions. I hope this works for NetApp, the GX saga has been a bit of a farce and I think that NetApp will have learnt some lessons about how not to integrate two products. I'm sure that there have been some very heated discussions internally.

HP? I can see another acquisition in their future; the EVA architecture is a bit long in the tooth and there will be some bargains available I suspect. But their strategy needs some clarity; like IBM, they appear to be on a random acquisition model.

Sun? You know what, if Sun can leverage ZFS and ensure that some of the features which are kicking around in some of the forks; it might actually have a storage story to tell. But the problem is for Sun that as it's open source; a smaller, more agile company might eat its lunch using Sun's knife and fork. And of course, there is Sun's long term future as a company to deal with.

And then there's 3Par, Compellent, Pillar, Copan, OnStor et all; I'd expect some of these to be swallowed up by the big boys, some may falter and a couple may well thrive. I reckon Dell's a company worth keeping an eye on; there's at least of a couple of acquisitions in that company's future; EMC relationship aside, some of my conversations suggest that they have big storage ambitions.

Specific technologies? Obviously, FCoE and EFDs will start to become mainstream but FC, iSCSI and spinning rust isn't dead yet and won't be for some time. I hear mutterings about Infiniband; this is not a dead technology by a long chalk and I'd expect to see some interest in Infiniband; I expect at least one and maybe two major players adopt Infiniband in some form or another. Virtualisation? Virtualisation initiatives will continue but I think we'll see a change in emphasis, I'm expecting to see virtualisation being positioned to enable modular arrays and less focus on hetereogenality.

Storage will continue to be a growth industry; businesses collecting data and at some point, they need to turn it into information and perhaps derive some knowledge from this information. But to get to this point, we're going to need to see some innovation and perhaps a shift in emphasis. I'll blog about this later but quite simply, it's all about SOFTWARE!

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas everyone!!

I've got cooking Christmas dinner to look forward to which will probably involve me throwing everyone out of my kitchen! After lunch, I'll probably go and hide upstairs; kill a few aliens or perhaps a few orcs! Then come down nicely relaxed and ready for the Doctor Who Christmas Special!

The recent twittering has given me a fair few ideas for some more storage blogs but for the time being, I'm enjoying my break!

Hope everyone has a fantastic break and that 2009 brings all that you would wish for (well at least some of it and only if it doesn't conflict with what I wish for).

A Good Use of Storage...

Another indulgent end of year blog I'm afraid; I've got a few ideas for storage blogs for next year but at the moment, I'm still doing my 'best of...'

I've bought more music this year than I have done for many years; maybe it's guilt catching up with me after a few years when I downloaded an awful lot or maybe that this is just a bumper year for good music and there is more that I'm willing to pay for. From John Tavener's 'The Protecting Veil' to Fleet Foxes debut to Kylie's 'X' (which I know was last year); I seem to have pretty much all bases covered this year.

Jools Holland's 'Later...' has as always been a fantastic show to find new music and to rediscover old favourites; if you can manage to get hold of copies of his shows, I can strongly recommend that you do as he has a wonderfully catholic taste in music.

The stand-out album this year by miles is The Last Shadow Puppets 'Age of Understatement'; this Scott Walker/early Bowie influenced album seals Alex Turner's position as the song-writing giant of his generation. He manages to eclipse the two previous Artic Monkeys' albums with this collaboration with Miles Kane; a fine achievement for someone so young. The production at times is completely over the top and breathless but who cares; it just leaves you with a smile and who can ask for more?

And talking about smiles, how the hell did the next band ever happen? How did a preppie-looking band from NYC end up creating a Soukous-tinged album which just makes you grin. Should never have happened and it certainly shouldn't have worked! But hey, Vampire Weekend's eponymous debut is just the thing to lighten up the bus-ride to work.

Elbow's 'Seldom Seen Kid' deserves to be on the list for the beginning to 'Grounds for Divorce' alone but the whole album is equally good. A well-deserved Mercury award for one of most-underated British bands around.

But there's so much other good stuff around from the guilty pleasure of Katy Perry's 'I Kissed A Girl', The Streets' 'Everything is Borrowed', Kings of Leon's 'Only By the Night' (oh the joys of explaining what he is singing about to 7 year old...Sex on Fire indeed), Seasick Steve's 'I Started Out With Nothing' and even a good Oasis album.

And much, much more.....

Books of the Year

Sometimes I think I am single-handely sustaining the publishing industry; we've moved house
once because we ran out of space for books and couldn't bare to get rid of any of them. These days, we're a little more disciplined and have actually been known to give books away. I think this year, I averaged a book every two days might even be slightly more than that.
 
After several years of absence, we made a return to Eastercon and my wife was over the moon to get the chance to have coffee with Neil Gaiman. My daughter was impressed to meet real writers such as Neil Gaiman and also people who make money drawing pictures.
 
Anyway, top books of the year are:
 
The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman: Neil Gaiman re-imagines Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book and sets it in a disused graveyard full of ghosts who look him after the rest of his family are slaughtered by a
mysterious assassin. The hero is called Bod but that's not the reason I rate this so highly; Gaiman finally finds his feet as a children's author in this book but it's eminently readable as a 'adult'; he paints his hero so well and manages to make you believe that this is a boy growing up in a Graveyard.

His hero makes mistakes as we all do as we are growing up but his mistakes lead him through each stage of his development and you get the genuine sense of someone growing.

Neil's ability to write with clarity and craft letting the reader to do the heavy lifting of the imagining probably comes from his background in graphic novels where he lets his collaborators fill the white-space of the frame. If Harry Potter had been written by Neil Gaiman, the whole series would have been condensed into a single volume.
 
Anathem by Neal Stephenson: Neil Stephenson is not an easy writer; he used to be, novels like Snow Crash are a blast but he seems to delight in challenging the reader with every new set of books. The Baroque Cycle was dense and you needed to trust the author that there was a story worth telling and ultimately you were rewards. Anathem is even more challenging, a new language, a new world, full of complex ideas about maths, philosophy and although the ending is little bit of a let down I feel, it's a book well worth investing your time in.

And if you don't like it, it'll make a pretty good door stop!
 
The Coroner's Lunch by Colin Cotterill: A book about a 72 year-old coroner based in the communist Laos a year after the 1975 revolution probably doesn't sound too promising but this is a rattling good read if you like murder-mystery novels with a touch of the supernatural. Cotterill's witty and humourous writing style with an engaging and likable protagonist is marvellously refreshing, the story rattles along and the pages keep turning. 

Honourable mentions go to:
 
Blown to Bits: Your Life, Libery and Happiness After the Digital Explosion by Hal Abelson,
Ken Ledeen and Harry Lewis: Everybody knows everything about you! A book about the sheer amount of information which has been gathered on all aspects of our lives. 
 
Lonely Werewolf Girl by Martin Millar: it's fantastic to have Martin Millar back writing again; he's a writer who deserves to be as well-known as Neil Gaiman and this book set deserves to be made into a film or a TV series. He takes the exploding werewolf genre, sets it in Britain, Camden and the Scottish Highlands; stirs in some subculture referencing much of his influences and his cultural loves, the result
is an exciting and different take on the werewolf story. Looking forward to the sequel.

Nearly Xmas

It's nearly Xmas, so I'm going to slow down the posting frequency; okay, it's probable that I will slow down! But I suspect I need a little bit of break from the breakneck pace I've set myself!

I'll probably do a few posts between now and New Year; like Chris Evans, I might put up my Xmas list! Hey, you can always find my Amazon list and buy me something of it!

I might do a list of my favourite things from the year; books, music, games, gadgets etc that I've enjoyed. But I don't intend to do any 'serious' posts for the next couple of weeks or so. One thing I'm not going to do is any predictions apart from the fact, there will not be as many storage companies around this time next year and at least one shock merger will happen.

You are the future...I hope!

Steve Foskett's blog is currently my favourite storage blog for a number of reasons; I like the clean design, it's nicely laid out and easy to read. He also has a nice fluency to his writing style which I kind of envy but more importantly his content is excellent and thought provoking.

He is considering the impact of virtualisation, true virtualisation on IT and it's future. He talks about value, not cost-savings but bringing value to the businesses we support. Changing the way IT works and delivers, he acknowledges that this is a while away but it has implications for storage management and infrastructure management in general.

Who manages what in the new virtualised world? I wonder if we are going to at last see some of the boundaries between infrastructure teams come down? I hope so but I can see a number of conflicts as we progress. Some of them are looming large now!

• Converged Fabric - I already see the network teams eyeing the Cisco SAN infrastructure; well it's got Cisco on the front!
• Virtualised Intel Servers - the Unix and Windows teams are already beginning to butt heads; who defines standards? Who manages performance?
• Database Appliances - Things like Netezza; the DBAs and the Application teams are also beginning to rub each other up the wrong way!

And in the current climate, there's alot of scared people who want to keep their turf and perhaps take a bit more of someone else's. It's going to be fraught but if corporate IT departments are not careful, the businesses that they serve are going to look in and see a whole playground full of squabbles. I'm really not sure what the solution will be but I hope the storage bods can be a big part of this and I think we can.

Most storage bods come from another discipline to start with; no-one starts in storage (well no-one who should be allowed out by themselves). We are used to dealing with everyone and everything, we understand the complexity or at least have an appreciation of the complexity of the infrastructures which are now in place. The network teams and ourselves are the people who have the experience of running shared infrastructures; the disciplines which the new virtualised infrastructures which are being built are already instilled in our teams.

But we do tend towards the 'Fortress Storage' mentality and it is this we need to break down; it is time for us to become a bit more cuddly, less inclined to obsfucate and be more open. However I do believe that as long as we as a discipline can embrace the change, we've got a lot to offer.

Failed to Replicate

NetApp's withdrawal of their heterogeneous replication product last week and their reasons for doing so is a bit of a disappointment and I hope really doesn't reflect their views. They claim that people are only interested in homogeneous replication and not an any-to-any replication product; well, in my opinion, they are wrong!

I am certainly interested in a scalable, robust, heterogeneous replication product; one which scales and is easy to deploy. One which does not mean installing agents on all my hosts and taking a CPU hit on them, one which sits in the SAN and quietly without fuss replicates to another array of any other type.

Unfortunately, NetApp didn't have such a product which is why I think they have failed to be honest. People don't want to be installing agents everywhere, can you imagine how an agent based replication would work in a virtualised environment? It would be painful trying to deploy the agent on hundreds of VMs.

And yes I know that some of the storage virtualisation products allow heterogeneous replication; I think that there is a market for those people who don't want to fully virtualise their environment. A half-way house which enables data-mobility without completely changing the environment?

Oh well, when VMware completely dominates the data-center environment perhaps we'll have that as it will be built into the VMWare level. Just deploy software appliances with JEOS ontop of VMware and let VMware do all the heavy lifting but even VMware will still have a hit of some sort on the server infrastructure.

Scourge of Sunnyvale

In response to Chuck's latest on emulated FC, the ability to lay arrays out to the n^th degree etc? How many people still write assembler? Why not? Life too short? Compilers do a pretty good of optimising these days?

I think in the past, Chuck had a point...the value of this point is rapidly diminishing. Mine that vein till it runs out but it's looking a little played out now. Let's talk wide-striping, let's talk automated storage tiering, let's talk object storage, let's talk rapid provisioning but let's put that specific FUD away.

Enough of the playing the big bad, a plucky teenage girl and her gang of pals might stake you!

V have questions!

Okay, I think I know the answer to this but here's a quick question to those people reading who are using in-band virtualisation (or any of the virtualisation tools). If I virtualise my estate using something like a USP-V or SVC; when it becomes time to migrate/upgrade due for accounting reasons, support issues etc; is this disruptive? Will HDS enable me to go to USP-V++ with no disruption? Will SVC? Will Invista?

At the moment, array migrations are a pain but they aren't actually very disruptive in a lot of our estate. Bring the new Luns in, use the volume manager to move the data, drop the luns and maybe a reboot at some point to completely remove them. We can schedule the reboot around our normal maintenance windows and it's not a big hassle. It's a bit time consuming but not a huge hassle, we recently did 10 arrays down to 2 and it took about three months.

How does this work when I'm moving between virtualisation devices?

What would the flow be?

Do I need swing disk to achieve this?

Can a virtualised lun be presented to two different virtualisation appliances at different levels so that I can do a path at a time?

Once I've finished virtualising my estate, do I need to start planning to migrate to the next iteration of the virtualisation device?

We already artificially constrain the size of our arrays for a variety of reasons; one of those is the sheer terror of having to migrate a petabyte of data at array refresh time. If I've got all my storage virtualised, I could be looking a migrating multi-petabytes at virtualisation device refresh time.

I am intrigued as to how this all going to be handled? Do I virtualise the virtualisation device? Arrrrrghhh...my brain hurts!! So Tony A, Barry W? How does it work it your world?