Storage Nation

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

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 .

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.

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.

As an HDS customer I have had enough of the customer facing HDS Support Portal.

I’ve just been reading Greg Knieriemen’s post over at iknerd.com on the ending of Sun/Oracle’s OEM agreement with Hitachi to resell their high end storage arrays.  On the one hand I’m surprised by the announcement; on the other I’m not. Sun have resold Hitachi for some time under the 9990V and 9985V brand names.  These are no more than rebadged devices with Hitachi code and software under the covers.  From memory, I believe the only technical change is the cabinet door.  I have installed Sun supplied Hitachi technology in the past.  Sun provided no added value to the process – in fact when we encountered a microcode bug, Sun’s lack of knowledge hindered our problem resolution process

Last week, the storage anarchist published a virtual talk show featuring virtual me (3parfarley) as the special guest.  In a strange turn around of events, the 3D cartoon instantiation of storage anarchist was apprehended recently while sneaking around in 3PARvaTAR's chunklet matrix. Special cameo appearances are made by the Storage Architect , iKnerd and and Stephen Foskett direct from their karaoke concert last Thursday night @ #HPbladesday   3PAR, EMC, Netapp, IBM, Capacity Guarantee, storage, array, SAN, HDS

Some of you may be aware that I’m heading to Houston today for an HP sponsored field day looking at blade technology. I have to admit that blades are not my area of speciality, in fact I know precious little about them other than the obvious. Having said that, this is a time to start being more aware of the technology “stack” as we move towards converged architectures in the data centre.

Netapp has been on the hot seat ever since Tom Georgens, their CEO commented that tiering would soon be obsolete . Since then, a number of people have called him out on it, including yours truly (in a steering wheel cam), StorageBod , The Storage Architect , StorageZilla , a storage blogging wannabe , and last but not least, the Storage Anarchis t .  To be fair, Georgens DID get support from the contrarian Drunken Data.  At the end of his post, the Storage Anarchist asks: Are they just defending their chosen path of Flash-as-cache instead of –as-a-tier? Or is it deeper than that? Is there something inherent in WAFL that makes it different to implement multiple different tiers within a single array