Storage Nation

Chuck Hollis had an excellent post last week, discussing caching.   About 10 years ago a small team that I was a part of looked at starting a company that would do something similar to what IBM's SVC does.  The idea was to create a SAN front end controller with a lot of cache memory that would virtualize  "downstream" storage and provide performance boosts through various techniques such as caching, striping, and multi-way mirroring.  We gave up on the idea when it became apparent to us that the project was quite a bit larger than we initially thought and it was unclear when we would ever have sufficient resources to get a competitive product to market. I think we could have sold the idea to venture capital investors who were throwing money at storage startups, but we couldn't sell it to ourselves. For those of you that wonder why I tend to think SVC is an important product, that's why – I know some of the things IBM did to make it work and I admire their ability to bring it to market

Over the last week there have been a few stories catching my eye.  Here’s a brief paragraph on them. SGI Acquires COPAN Systems In fact to be more precise, SGI have acquired some of the assets of COPAN and left the liabilities behind for a mere $2 million in cash ( press release ).  The demise of COPAN raises two potential questions; is spin-down a dead technology or were COPAN in a market that wasn’t able to understand their technology

Separated at birth? There have been some interesting discussions lately about storage tiering   And just because 3PAR beat most everybody else to the punch this week with our AO announcement , I think it's important to keep things in perspective – storage tiering does not solve everybody's problems

Here’s my roundup of all the posts, pictures, video and comments from the HP Blades Tech Day Tweets The official hashtag for the event was #hpbladesday with hundreds of tweets being generated from the start of the Tech Day until now. Bloggers’ Posts By name order, here are the relevant posts from each blogger

Yesterday, 3PAR announced Adaptive Optimization (AO), our solution for storage tiering and support for SSD flash drives. Here are the elements of this technology that I believe will have the most impact on customers and the rest of the industry. 1) Tiering works by making copies of data on lower cost, low-IOPS storage to high-IOPS storage – and back again.  Storage tiering has been associated with ILM, which assumed data is initially located on more expensive, high-IOPS storage and, as it ages and is accessed less frequently, is moved to lower-cost, low-IOPS storage. The perception that tiering implies fast to slow data migration was reinforced by Compellent with it's early entrant storage tiering technology, Data Progression .

Home lab storage I’ve just about got my home lab fully organised; here’s a quick summary of what I have in place. Storage I’ve four main storage devices, DroboPro, Iomega ix4-200D (two) and an EMC CLARiiON CX-700.  This gives me NAS, iSCSI and Fibre Channel connectivity options on any testing I’m performing.  The storage is broken down as follows: DroboPro – 8.4TB of raw storage across 7 disks (nearly fully populated) – iSCSI Iomega ix4 – 2x 4TB of raw storage across 4 disks – iSCSI & NAS CLARiiON – 2.2TB of raw storage across 15 disks – Fibre Channel This gives me 18.6TB of raw capacity.  One of the ix4 devices is production, running my VMs on ESX, the other is for testing performance and configurations but will ultimately form my remote backup solution.  Servers Server Rack My main server is an Intel Based, 2 CPU, 8 core custom-build machine with 16GB of RAM.  It runs ESXi 4.0 and has access to all storage resources as well as another 1.6TB of internal storage.  This machine runs all my production and test virtual machines.  A second server runs Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V (upgraded this week).  This is my Hyper-V test server.  It has a single 500GB drive and access to all storage resources, including fibre channel via an Emulex LP12000 HBA card. I also have two other smaller servers that act as test machines in various scenarios, one of which is currently acting as an OPEN-E server (the subject of a future post). Fabric The fabric in my test lab is provided by a number of McDATA 3232 switches.  Although they are servicable, they are looking old now, so I’m looking to acquire a Cisco MDS switch to add to these for some time in the future

The news is here ,  and    here ,     and here . 3PAR announced its storage tiering technology today with the introduction of our Adaptive Optimization (AO) software and with support for flash SSDs.  There's probably going to be a lot of discussion about storage tiering and AO in the weeks to come, so stay tuned.

Day 2 of HP Blades Day took place in a new location – the Customer Experience Centre.  This was due to issues with Wifi on day 1, now resolved in our new location.  Order of the day was: Review of the previous day’s presentations with a quick question & answer session Presentation on Client Virtualisation Factory tour Client Virtualisation Joseph George presented to the bloggers on client (aka desktop) virtualisation.  Whilst HP seem to have a story in this area, I’m skeptical about the whole process of virtualising desktops at this stage, other than in certain use cases.  I can see benefits for the following: High availability environments such as financial traders, where loss of a desktop translates to financial loss. Large scale desktop deployments where functionality is generic.  A good example of this is call centres; desks only require access to limited features (so don’t need high powered devices) and physical desktops may be used by multiple users. Environments not suitable for desktop virtualisation will include mobile users and anyone running bespoke hardware or software with hardware dependencies

I was talking with my InfoSmack co-conspirator, Greg Knieriemen ( iknerd.com )  last week about virtual junk and how the word "virtualization" was so incredibly unwieldy. It was killing my lazy mouth to have to do so much work for such a well-understood term/topic. (BONUS QUESTION: is "virtualization" a noun, verb, or WHAT?

A couple posts ago , discussing Netapp CEO, Tom Georgens' now famous quote on tiering , I wrote: To be fair, Georgens DID get support from the contrarian Drunken Data.  This was the only reference to Jon Toigo and his blog. Apparently this thoughtless insult set Jon off because a week later he wrote a whole lot of overkill  in response.  Considering the effort he made, it doesn't seem fair to just ignore it all.    1.  I listen to customers, so do Chuck Hollis, Barry Burke, Mark Twomey, Val Bercovici, Alex McDonald, and most of the vendor bloggers.