Storage Nation

Hamlet was depressed when he posed the question, “to be to not to be”. There was no questions in Barry Burk’s mind when StorageNerve asked Michael Hay “ Where is the Hitachi BINfile” and Michael answered “Hitachi doesn’t have the concept of a ‘BINfile’.” Barry’s immediate response was that “EVERY intelligent storage array has the equivalent of a Binfile”. Barry also makes the correction that the correct name is .BIN file.

Steve Taylor, one of our SEs, created an animation that shows the multiple layers of virtualization that create the natively wide-striped data layout on a 3PAR storage server.  I think it's the coolest thing I'd seen since joining the company that quickly summarizes the multiple layers of virtualization in a 3PAR array.  All the functions shown are automatically done for the customer with minimal administrative effort.

Nigel Poulton tweeted today:  " What are peoples thoughts on best practices for multiple pools on the likes of USP V and VMAX. Trade-off between perf vs resiliency etc…" Good question Nigel, one of the biggest problems customers have is being able to fully utilize all their resources. It's not just that the ROI for storage tends to be underwhelming, but more frustrating is the fact that their storage was provisioned in a way that makes resources inappropriate or unavailable for the pressing needs at hand. Pools are used two ways – to reserve storage capacity for certain functions such as snapshots or to create QoS levels for storage.  The difficulty lies that in the creation of pools for QoS, resources that are committed to pools are practically locked into them and cannot be easily redistributed to other pools to meet changing demands.  As storage systems age and are filled with data, the various pools are consumed unevenly

Here's a video that TechTarget produced for us with one of our customers, Priceline.com . Here are a few highlights from the video: Priceline.com was one of the first e-commerce players to adopt virtualization.  That may account for why the company's IT organization is known for for it's high availability and ability to adapt quickly to changes in the market.  Given the fact that their business has a broad value-based appeal, their IT organization works very hard to get the best rate of return for their capital expenditures. 3PAR storage allowed them to increase their storage capacity over 400% over the last four years while reducing the administrative load required to manage it all. Ron Rose, ex-CIO at Priceline (now on the Sr

Chuck Hollis wrote a blog post earlier this week,titled "Once Upon a Time" .   I thought it was an excellent post, telling about the transition EMC made a decade ago starting when Joe Tucci replaced Mike Ruettgers.  FWIW, I think the diversification that Tucci accomplished at EMC has made all the difference there – especially the acquisition of VMware.  You might call it lucky (as I tend to do), but the fact was they were looking to diversify their business took them on a journey that has buoyed their company far beyond the capabilities that their storage products by themselves would have supported. At the end, he asks the question if history was bound to repeat itself again – which appeared to be a nudge towards some of the other companies in the industry.  I didn't think this was such an affront – Chuck has been known to tweak competitors from time to time, but for the last 6 months or so, he's restrained himself from doing so.   So I was surprised this morning when I saw some tweets that had me look at the post again.  And sure enough there was a blow up there involving a cadre of Netapp people that over-reacted to Chuck's post.   One of the consequences of this over reaction was that a benign blog post about EMC history became a referendum on Netapp's Secure Multi-Tenancy (SMT).  It wasn't what Chuck was driving at in his original post, but the comments from Netapp folks steered the discussion that direction. Chuck's main argument is that SMT isn't very secure if your service provider can gain access to a tenant's data. I'd add to that and say, it's not very secure if your service provider can delete volumes and destroy data too.  Inadvertent destruction of data by administrators is a larger threat than somebody pulling "an inside job".   But it doesn't just effect service provider scenarios.

Surprise, surprise.  After months after bad-mouthing their competitors for their capacity guarantee programs, EMC has done an about face and has announced their own, very restricted, guarantee program. EMC offers a 20% capacity guarantee, as opposed to 50% from 3PAR's Get Thin Guarantee program. (FWIW, other vendors have also made 50% guarantees)  I guess EMC must be concerned they won't really be able to do it. Also, 3PAR's capacity guarantee applies to EMC customers, but EMC's program does not apply to 3PAR customers.

What would my friends at EMC do without my parody of their announcement?  On the day a product is announced its pretty hard to make a serious analysis – that usually takes more time, but in the case of EMC, there are usually a couple things you can bank on. New levels of complexity to manage Eye popping professional services costs The second is an obvious consequence of the first.  Otherwise, I think Storage Federation is a very big deal for our industry and it's great that EMC is bringing attention to it.  People interested in reading more about this might want to check out Stuiesav's blog : and the article in The Register

Dave Vellante from Wikibon posted his summary of 3PAR's analyst call this week .  It's a good chance for people to get an unvarnished opinion how 3PAR is doing. One of the things that came up during the call was a discussion of Storage Federation . Here is what our CEO David Scott said were the three main points to understand about it: It’s different from virtualization. It allows separate peer, self-governing systems to act as a global whole (versus a hierarchical approach).

(A quote from Dieter Rams – former Chief of Design at Braun) It's hard to think of a company that has had more success with it's product designs than Apple. When you look into how Apple did it, you find out about Jonathan Ive – Apple's lead industrial designer – and how his designs have followed the philosophy outlined by Dieter Rams , who was the lead designer for many years at Braun.  When you compare photos of their designs, it is obvious that Ive has a strong appreciation for Rams' work. What Ive and others have found compelling in Rams' work is nicely summarized in the design principles Rams used at Braun for many years. Good design is innovative Good design makes a product useful Good design is aesthetic Good design makes a product understandable Good design is unobtrusive Good design is honest Good design is long-lasting Good design is thorough down to the last detail Good design is environmentally friendly Good design is as little design as possible The design goals for consumer products differ considerably from those for industrial products.

There were some problems with the links that were posted this week regarding Oracle's ASM Storage Reclamation Utility (ASRU) and 3PAR's Thin Persistence. ASRU is a stand alone utility that compacts data in a specified Oracle disk group and then frees up space that Oracle no longer needs. Here is a short white paper on it (PDF).