Storagebod's Blog

Clouds Ahead

Is our vision clouded or is it cloud? It appears at present that there is very little agreement on what clouds are, what advantages they bring and how to use them. Even individual cloud suppliers seem to have non consistent definitions. Take Amazon for example, one of the pioneers in this field, you can have       

• Amazon Compute Cloud

• Amazon Simple DB

• Amazon Simple Storage Service

• Amazon Cloudfront

• Amazon Simple Queue Service

It is the first service which really stands out in this crowd; this appears to be an attempt to redefine flexible hosting as a cloud service. The ability to build a virtual machine, configure it and then host it in Amazon's 'cloud'. I am currently struggling in seeing how this is a cloud as opposed to a dynamic deployment model or perhaps the cloud is simply a dynamic deployment model for virtualised infrastructure?

We are still going to need people to manage this virtualised infrastructure; people who are going to configure the AMIs, people who are going to secure the AMIs, people who are going to carry out capacity planning etc. And I'm not sure we are going to see any less of them.

So I am wondering, what is this cloud that we are all talking about? Is it going to be like virtualisation, a band-wagon that everyone jumps on? Is it going to be a new way of developing applications? Is it going to be simply Dynamic Infrastructure which is simply an evolution of the current virtualisation initiatives.

It's not really very clear, so perhaps Cloud is a very appropriate term. IT Archtitects love clouds, it's a fuzzy thing where magic happens; not sure what the magic is but it's magic!

Economic Realities

I found David Merrill's blog entry here on Squeezing (Easily) into Tight Jeans amusing. David is talking about a couple of his customers who were using various capabilities to reduce the amount of storage they needed; I suspect using techniques such as thin-provisioning and the ability of the USP-V to consolidate islands of storage into a usable pool of storage.

And then they were going to decommission a whole bunch of arrays and reduce the amount of storage on the floor. I think David was surprised that they were choosing to decommission the storage as opposed to simply use the reclaimed storage for growth.

But sitting on this side of the fence, the customer side; this is no big surprise at all. Depending on the age of the arrays and depending on the software sitting on the arrays and especially if the arrays were out of warranty periods; the maintenance costs are generally so high that it simply does not make economic sense to keep them around.  

Software maintenance on all of the Enterprise class arrays is just plain expensive. If you then factor in that if you are trying to sweat an asset for a couple of extra years; that is another couple of years of what are often power and space inefficient arrays and you are going to be looking at another migration effort in fairly short order, it does not make a huge amount of sense.

The situation is actually a lot less clear on mid-range arrays as the maintenance costs are often considerably lower but if you have got aging Enterprise arrays; get them out if you can.

Rat-Catchers

Ralph Waldo Emerson is credited with the remark, "Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door." So what have mousetraps and storage got to do with each other? Not a lot at first glance but if you have ever looked a buying a mousetrap; you might find there are more variations on a theme than you can possibly imagine but at the end of the day, they are simply variations on a theme. (useful hint: mice don’t like cheese but they love chocolate, bait your traps with chocolate).

So what makes one sell more than the other? I suspect their levels of efficiency are fairly similar and when we suffered a minor mouse invasion; we simply looked through the range and picked what we believed was going to be the most simple to use. Some of them just looked more complex than they needed to be and the simple snap-trap just seemed to be what was required.

Installation and set-up was pretty simple and within fairly short order our mouse invasion was terminated.

In years gone-by, we could have lived with the problem, bought a cat or hired a rat-catcher. Now we wouldn’t even consider living with the problem, buying a cat would be for companionship not for catching mice and the rat-catcher is pretty much a dead profession. Yes on occasion, we do need specialist pest-control people for bigger problems but in general we can deal with the problem ourselves.

We have developed better ways of controlling pests; changing environments, improvements in technology and the mass production of the humble snap-trap has generally reduced the need for rat-catchers. And historically it has been suggested that rat-catchers may even have increased demand for their services by breeding rats themselves.

So what has this got to do with storage? Not a lot I guess but the person who builds a better tool for controlling storage better watch out for the rat-catchers of the modern age; we wouldn’t want just anyone to be able to do it now, would we? Still, it’s unfortunate that the rat-breeders make a lot of money from supplying rat-catchers who are experts in building complex mouse-traps.

Another interesting fact, there are over 4000 patents for mouse-traps but only 20 or so have ever made any money with the humble and simple 'Little Nipper' snap-trap capturing over 60% of the market.

Just another feature...

Despite the inevitable EMC spin, I found myself nodding in agreement with this blog entry from Barry Burke. Wide-striping is now just another feature; it’s a very important feature but just another feature now.

3Par took wide striping and made it useable; EMC’s historic implementation using metas and hypers was painful and with the large arrays of today it becomes a full time job to performance manage an array. 3Par made it easy and much kudos to them for doing so. I think 3Par’s legacy will be the ease of management that they have brought to the Enterprise array (and thin provisioning).

I think it is worth pointing out to Barry, that you can simply use Wide-striping without Thin-provisioning with a 3Par box as well. LUNs do not need to be thin-provisioned and can be entirely pre-allocated.

Automated wide-striping simply makes the storage admin’s job easier; it de-skills it somewhat and hopefully it will bring an end to the endless poring over of spreadsheets trying to balance workloads.

SSDs will become just another feature with time as well; Barry wants this to be the case. It validates the decision to put SSDs into the DMX. Any good idea will eventually just become another feature if it is good enough and even if it is patented; people will find their way round eventually.

As Barry points out SSDs deliver massively increased IOPs and massively decreased response times; we need this, we desperately need this for some applications. Even if the magnetic disk manufacturers could get their disks to spin faster, the increase in power and cooling required would boil the oceans and hasten our demise as a race.

But until SSDs achieve parity per gigabyte with the cost of spinning disk, we need to find ways to efficiently use what is still a relatively expensive resource and SSDs probably are not the best fit for your file-serving and bulk storage requirements. The venerable Anandtech actually demonstrates with their benchmarks that using SSDs for log-files may not gain you much. It's actually an interesting if slightly flawed look at SSDs, SATA and SAS; it would have been more interesting if they'd done more work and gone more granular into the data-base tables.

They need to be used for appropriate workloads and ideally we need something like this from Compellent. Unfortunately for Compellent, I have horrid suspicion that this level of automated tiered storage will simply become another feature; you can’t keep a good idea down! Once we have block-level migration both automatic and rules-based we can work out quickly and easily how much SSD we need.

SSDs with automated tiering will save you money; probably both in terms of TCA and TCO. SSDs without automated tiering will save you money in terms of TCA for appropriate workloads but may end-up costing you in terms of TCO because the work needed to identify, balance and move data around.

Of course, it all comes down to the cost of the software needed to manage and automate the process. If the software is too expensive and the vendors simply try to milk it as a new cash-cow; we’ll not realise the savings of this brave new world.

Storage Virtualisation and Commoditisation

HDS' Hu makes a point in his latest blog entry in that Storage Virtualisation allows the end-user to turn commodity disk into enterprise disk by sticking it behind a virtualisation appliance; in Hu's case, he'd deeply love that to be USP.

I think in many ways his idea gets to the core about what might have gone wrong with the storage industry; we are paying too much for the commodity bit of the storage i.e the spinning stuff!!

But is what Hu is talking about truly virtualisation? Arguably not!  What HDS do and what IBM do with SVC is more loosely couple the array controller with the disk at the back-end. USP and SVC are simply array controllers. Storage virtualisation actually is not really that clever, the USP and SVC may have some fantastic code in but they are "simply" array controllers. And yes they have to deal with the vagaries of FC implementation across many different back-end disks and EMC would probably argue 'more fool them'.

So perhaps if instead of selling Virtualisation; IBM and HDS simply sold array controllers and said, 'You can buy your disk from us, EMC or whoever is giving the best deal today' and didn't make it out to be some mystical and magical thing; they might get more acceptance.

It actually changes the nature of conversation somewhat, end-users could then go back to EMC et al and ask the question, 'What makes your back-end disk so special? Why can't I just buy the directors and put what ever disk I like behind it?'.

I think the discussion becomes a lot less philosophical and a lot more pragmatic if this approach is taken. I know EMC have answers as to why their back-end disk is special but perhaps you should ask the question also. We can get down to talking about each storage array's USP...no pun intended!

Campaign: Data Centre

A question, if Cisco had announced storage as part of their Unified Computing System; would EMC and NetApp be quite so pro the strategy? Perhaps Cisco have decided that this campaign will be one of many battles and are picking them. But if Cisco do pull this off, an integrated storage product would be a natural evolution.

I like the Cisco vision but its lack of openess at present concerns me. I guess time will tell to how the vision firms up. A vision with a great degree of openess would be more compelling but perhaps Cisco have made the wise and pragmatic decision that the only way to make a standard is to build a de facto one.

Bigger Blue?

IBM were always going to go acquisitive this year and it's no surprise to me that the first target appears to be Sun. They could have waited for Sun's stock price to tank even more but that was going to be a risk and who knows who else might have come in for the once celestial body. As other commentators have already pointed out, this is not a reaction to Cisco's announcement on Monday but more a strike against HP. This is about being Number 1 again!

IBM already make a huge amount of money out of selling software on Sun hardware, there's a lot of WebSphere out there running on Solaris servers. There's a lot of IBM software full-stop running on Sun kit. IBM Global Services probably run more Solaris servers than most; I know of a number of huge deals which involve IBM running Sun servers. By buying Sun, they can grab more of this dollar.

And there's the Open Source aspect; IBM embraced Open Source and especially Linux in a way which was most un-IBM like. Whilst Sun were sending mixed messages out, IBM set about working out how to make money out of Open Source by fully leveraging their services organisation. Sun, finally, came to the party and but like many late-comers, they overpaid for their entrance. But Sun still have technologies which I am sure that IBM would like to get their hands on and I am pretty sure that IBM know how to monetize them.

Java, a technology that IBM probably know better than Sun themselves. At times you would even believe that Java was already an IBM product.

IBM also pickup VirtualBox which shows some promise as a desktop virtualisation tool.

Yes IBM will have to kill products and at least one sacred cow will have to go; AIX or Solaris. That's a hard one to call. Solaris on pSeries would be an interesting proposition but I suspect AIX will survive; it'll pick up some technologies from Solaris, ZFS for example. And if Solaris goes; where does that leave Sparc?

And there's the storage aspect. Have HDS just lost a channel? I cannot see IBM reselling USP, Barry W would be apoplectic! NetApp relationship? I can see that being strained somewhat; with some further engineering, the 7000 series could be an excellent competitor at the low-mid range for NetApp FAS but there is a question mark over the future of Solaris as I mentioned earlier.

Enterprise Tape? Well, IBM will own that market with the addition of Storagetek. Hopefully someone will come and pick Quantum up! Stornext FTW!

IBM and Sun both resell LSI; so that shouldn't be a problem for them.

But at the end of the day, this isn't really about technology and it's not about storage. This is about market-share, this is about mind-share, this is about services and this is about coming out of the down-turn as Number 1. 

And if it isn't true; well, congratulations to the person who wanted to distract from Cisco's UCS..way to go!!

There aint nothing new anymore!

So let the hyperbole begin; Cisco’s Unified Computing System has finally been announced (an amusing aside, I first found out about Project California about six months ago from…..Brocade! My Cisco Account Manager was not especially amused). It’s certainly a grand vision and a play for global domination not seen since the days of Smersh!

As has been stated, this is not simply a ‘me too’ Blade play from Cisco; this appears to be a full on, all-out assault on completely dominating the data centre space. Not since the days of mainframe dominance have we seen such an attempt to own the whole data centre. Well, not quite the whole data centre, storage seems to be currently the missing piece, Cisco are relying on their partners such as EMC and NetApp to provide the storage piece.

It is going to be interesting to say the least to see how HP, IBM and Sun et al react to this. I could see opportunities for Sun but it relies on them beginning to see the light and admitting to themselves that they are actually a software company. They could embrace the UCS platform and really start to shift. HP and IBM have problem now in that they need to put together a competing vision; it’ll be interesting to see what this vision is.

What do I think? It’s too early to say but Cisco are going to be very aggressive about this and their marketing is going to be much further up the food-chain than mere ‘Bods. Over the past months, I have come to the realisation that things need to change in Infrastructure and especially Infrastructure teams.

We have too many specialists, too many people who can only do one thing or at least profess to do one thing. There are far too many vested interests in many support organisations and there is a level of complicity which has reflected the status quo in the industry, I won’t step on your toes if you don’t step on mine.

Cisco’s vision challenges this world view and even if you don’t buy into the Cisco vision in its entirety; it is a vision which merits a second look.

And it’s not Cisco which powers this vision, it’s the virtualisation brought by products like vmware, Hyper-V and Xen. But it’s a vision which is really very old…what the hell happened Big Blue? How on earth did you let Cisco re-invent your original vision and claim it for themselves?

Six Months On...

It's just over six months into the blog and although my posting rate has dropped a little; the passion for doing this doesn't seem to be diminishing. A few people have asked why do this; I'm not paid, I'm not promoting any particular product and just why spend time doing it? Indeed, where do I find the time.

Firstly, I do have a product to sell and that's me! I am hoping that when I decide to move on, there might be some kind of market awareness for the 'Storagebod' brand. I am sure I am not the only person who looks at their blog as a sales-window for themselves. Personal branding is an interesting phenomena and we can all have a strong brand in our own niche.

Secondly, I get to put my views across to some senior people in the industry and I've probably spent more virtual time with senior players in the storage industry than most CIOs. I may not have any real influence but at least I know my views are getting read, they even respond to my emails.

It is fascinating sometimes going through the accesses and working out where they are coming from. It is gratifying when the links are coming from an internal website and it lets me believe that the vendors are interested in what their users are saying.

Thirdly, I am passionate about the IT industry and to steal EMC's buzz-phrase, the 'Information Infrastructure' especially and this blog lets me express my passion.

As for time, most of my blog entries are mentally composed on the journey to and from work.  TSA has now ruined this by advocating audio-books but I suspect even those might generate some more ideas. Although I am not sure what comparisons I can draw between the Storage Industry and 'Paul of Dune' which I am currently listening too!

Perfection....

Although I give the various players a hard time; the industry doesn't do everything badly and I try to see the positives as well as the negatives. So I was thinking about the perfect array and what features I would like to see! So a random stream of consciousness produced the following!

• Reliability - DMX-like reliability and robustness
• Scalability - DMX-like scalability for block, IBM SOFS for NAS
• Performance - DMX-like performance for block, BlueArc for NAS
• Flexibility - Support for all protocols in a common consistent manner like OnTap
• Thin Provisioning - 3Par's thin provisioning
• Wide Striping - Genuine wide-stripping across ALL Spindles not just a proportion or across groups of spindles - Think 3Par
• Automated Storage Tiering - Think Compellant on steroids!
• Automated Optimisation - Think 3Par
• Dedupe - Dedupe at block or file level - not seen a truly great dedupe solution yet
• Scalable Heterogeneous Support - IBM SVC or HDS
• Minimal-performance impacting Snapshots - think NetApp or....Sun
• Writeable Thin Clones - think LSI's DPM8400
• Synchronous Replication - think SRDF
• Asynchronous Replication - think of something which works without a huge amount of work
• Provisioning interface - think XIV, think 3Par
• Analytics - think Sun
• Monitoring/reporting - think Onaro
• Cost - think PC World (who are too expensive to but you get the idea!)

So a merger between IBM/EMC/HDS/NetApp/Sun/Compellant/BlueArc/LSI/3Par would be a great start. Let's throw Cisco into the mix as well for a unified data-centre fabric and we're done!

What features do you want to see? I'd love to know!

And vendors, without too much marchitecture, what are your killer features? The things that you are most proud of? I don't want a big bragging list but what's the one problem you think you've solved which you are most proud of?