Storage Nation

IOPS Per RAID Group, ordered by most to least I took part in a podcast last night that discussed the XIV platform.  One of the “key features” of XIV is the wide striping of data across all spindles.  It’s a concept we’re seeing more and more in contemporary storage hardware architectures and one that’s being shoe-horned into older storage arrays too.  Have you ever wondered what the point is?  Take a look at the following graphic.  It shows the number of write operations per RAID group, ordered by the busiest RAID group to the least active.  It’s real data from a real system.  What you see is the Long Tail effect, where a small number of RAID groups are doing most of the I/O.  In this example, 80% of the workload is performed by 50% of the RAID groups; only 3 RAID groups account for 20% of the workload.

It's easy to get caught up in the excitement of new concepts in this business and it's one of the things us marketing people like the most.  We also like love competition, (oh really!), which means there is  pressure to be omniscient – or at least to appear to be. Whether it's bluster or public brainstorming, we've all listened to somebody who appeared to be very confident in what they were saying, only to find out later that they were pretty much clueless. Sometimes the industry plays a giant game of telephone, where there is a massive exchange of misspoken, misinterpreted and misaligned thought experiments.  One of the symptoms of mass-confusion is an abundance of definitions as people struggle to understand new terminology.  Defining a legitimate new concept makes it easier to think about and puts it in a frame of reference where it can be scrubbed for financial and technical viability.  Rarely, things like Twitter defy financial gravity, but most other half-baked technology concepts acquire a fish-belly patina under the harsh  light of a CFO's or CEO's scrutiny. "Tell me again why you think we need this new capital black hole and when you figure it's going to recoup half the ROI – and why we are paying you to waste your time on it?" Larry Ellison has proven himself over many years to have an excellent perspective on technology trends and he wonders what cloud computing is.

Latency-sensitive applications are the best candidates for storage tiering to SSDs with 3PAR's AO (Adaptive Optimization .Typically, these are: High performance transaction processing, like securities trading, or Single threaded applications that are idle while storage I/Os complete People ask about Microsoft Exchange and I tell them it benefits a great deal from big, wide striping, but not much from tiering because Exchange performance is mostly a matter of providing adequate throughput. An app that people run daily but is seldom associated with transaction processing is backup.  This SWCSA video discusses backup as well as the prevailing shift to dashcams and the implications for SWCSA branding.  

The news is here . It's gratifying to see our international business growing

I finally managed to attend a London CloudCamp last Thursday, which conveniently co-incided with a #storagebeers evening.  For two hours of listening to the collective wisdom of the presenters and the “unpanel” we were offered free beer and food

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.