Storage Nation

Happy NewYear and welcome to 2010! I wish you all a healthy and productive new year. While the economy seems to be getting better, budget planners are still very cautious and so we will continue to see a drive to consolidate to reduce cost and thin down the fat to be more agile. Therefore data center virtualization will be a top priority for 2010.  We have already seen the adoption of server virtualization platforms with more competitive offerings and faster more powerful processors and networks becoming mainstream. The next major step in data center consolidation will be in the consolidation of storage through thin provisioning.

EMC announced FAST version 1 this week and one of the more insightful articles was by Beth Pariseau of SearchStorage.com. I am fairly certain EMC briefed Beth on this announcement and that she had access to their references, so it’s safe to say her information is pretty accurate here are my thoughts on what I read in the PR and from Beth’s article:   Is EMC behind the competition? – Hitachi has had policy based file and LUN level tiering for some time

SearchStorage ANZ’s Simon Sharwood posted an article referencing a NetApp presentation which was posted on a public RSS feed that NetApp provides for its user community. According to Sharwood’s article, the presentation was dated 2008 and published October 28, 2009

I visited a customer last week who was trying to run four 6 node ESX clusters with 200 to 240 instances per cluster on a large modular storage system.  It was not surprising that the modular storage system could not support that workload.

Monolithic Storage Systems Developed for Mainframe Virtualization Having been in the storage industry for some time now, I have the benefit of historical perspective. I started out when mainframe storage was the only external storage available. Mainframes were the original virtual server, built for running multiple partitions of concurrent applications which drove tremendous I/O loads across special processors called channels.  In order to support this type of workload, storage vendors had to build monolithic storage systems, that had multiple processors on the front ports to match the I/O load of the channels, a large global cache that could serve a consistent cached data image to multiple, load balancing, storage port processors, back end processors that could write the data to backend storage, and still other processors that could move data for business continuity. EMC developed the Symmetrix; IBM developed the Shark; and Hitachi developed the Freedom 7700 built around these features to address the I/O requirements of mainframe virtual servers.

Hitachi Data Systems announced a new portfolio of cloud technologies that delivers an integrated set of storage services across block, files and content storage to support cloud computing and enable organizations to implement cloud services at their own pace. From my perspective, we have been providing customers cloud enabling technologies since we introduced the virtualization capabilities of the USP. There are many SaaS providers and Network Computing companies like Telstra , Australia’s leading telecommunications and information services company, which is hosting and delivering their services through the cloud using Hitachi Data Systems storage virtualization services today. I am currently in the Nordics where many of the large service providers like EDB in Sweden and Norway are using Hitachi Storage to provide the performance and agility that is required to outsource and host storage services for companies that are striving to reduce costs during  economic down turn

Hitachi Data Systems announced a new portfolio of cloud technologies that delivers an integrated set of storage services across block, files and content storage to support cloud computing and enable organizations to implement cloud services at their own pace. From my perspective, we have been providing customers cloud enabling technologies since we introduced the virtualization capabilities of the USP. There are many SaaS providers and Network Computing companies like Telstra , Australia’s leading telecommunications and information services company, which is hosting and delivering their services through the cloud using Hitachi Data Systems storage virtualization services today

On my previous post, which was titled, I Agree With Chuck on Data Dedupe” I received a fair number of comments. Some were from Jered Floyd of Permabit and even one from Steve Duplessie . My post was intended to point out that while dedupe was an excellent tool for reducing storage bloat, it was addressing the symptom and not the cause which was stale data and over allocation at the source. Unfortunately this post was interpreted as supporting Chuck Hollis’ view on dedupe of primary data.

I am taking a break from the blogging wars over virtualization to plug a Webcast that I will be doing on The economic Benefits of Intelligent File Tiering.  It will be on Wednesday, September 30 from 9:00 am to 10:00 am. You can go to this website to register

Some of you may recall that late last year Barry Whyte of IBM and I had a discussion about storage virtualization as we do it with the USP V and San Volume Controller or SAN virtualization as IBM does it, using a cluster of appliances that sits in the middle of the SAN. SVC virtualizes the SAN so that it looks like disks.