Storage Nation » enterprise storage

The journey is always the goal

admin — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 07:39:29 +0000

The last three weeks at 3PAR have been very satisfying. People throughout the industry have been calling us and emailing their regards, congratulations and best wishes regarding 3PAR's pending acquisition and future. Last week at the VMworld conference, we saw a significant boost in customers coming to our booth to learn about our company and products.

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The journey is always the goal

Review: Compellent Storage Center – Part I

admin — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 09:00:22 +0000

This is a series of posts reviewing the Compellent Storage Center Storage Array. Compellent Inc, founded in 2002, produces the Storage Center product, a SAN storage array build around commodity hardware. In addition to providing advanced features found on newer storage arrays (such as thin provisioning), the Compellent device has one unique (for now) feature that sets it apart from the competition and that’s the ability to tier storage at the block level, a feature known as Dynamic Block Architecture. Where traditional arrays place an entire LUN onto a single tier of storage, Storage Center breaks down the LUN into smaller chunks, allowing a finer granularity in the way data is written to disk. As we will see with this hardware and software feature review there’s more to the tiering than initially appears.

Continued here:
Review: Compellent Storage Center – Part I

3Par Acquisition: The Future For The Storage Industry

admin — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 09:51:29 +0000

The ongoing battle for 3Par by HP & Dell tells us much more about the state of the IT Industry than just the desires of two companies to acquire some interesting storage tech. It signals an acceptance that storage is a key feature in the future direction of the IT industry – more important than networking and almost as important as the virtualisation platform itself. This may seem like a bold statement to make, however we need to look forward to where the industry is headed. First of all, vendors want us to buy their unified hardware stacks; it represents that move back to a consolidated architecture that kept one vendor dominant in the mainframe days – IBM. “No-one gets fired for buying IBM” the saying goes (or used to go), demonstrating how IBM was seen as the data centre supplier for all things computing in the 70’s and 80’s. Of course we know that politics within organisations and the cost of IBM hardware eventually broke the monopoly, but the status quo worked well for many companies for many years.

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3Par Acquisition: The Future For The Storage Industry

Choosing Between Monolithic and Modular Architectures – Part II

admin — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 16:37:02 +0000

This is a series of post discussing storage array architectures. Previous posts: Choosing Between Monolithic and Modular Architectures – Part I In the first post, I discussed the shared storage model architectures typified by what we sometimes think of as Enterprise arrays, but I’ve called monolithic. This term harks back to the mainframe days of large single computers (see Wikipedia definition ), hence it’s use to describe storage arrays with a large single cache. In the last 10 years we have seen a move away from the single shared cache to a distributed cache architecture built from multiple storage engines or nodes, each with independent processing capability but sharing a fast network interconnect. Probably the most well known implementations of this technology have come from 3Par (InServ), IBM (XIV) and EMC (VMAX). Let’s have a look at these architectures in more detail. EMC VMAX The VMAX architecture consists of one to eight VMAX engines (storage nodes) connected together by what is described as the Virtual Matrix Architecture. Each engine acts as a storage array in its own right, with front-end host port connectivity, back-end disk directors, cache (which presumably is mirrored internally) and processors. The VMAX engines connect together using the Matrix Interface Board Enclosure (MIBE), which are duplicated for redundancy. The virtual matrix enables inter-engine memory access, which is required to provide connectivity when the host access port isn’t on the same engine as the data. There are two diagrams in the gallery at the end of this post, one showing the logical view of the interconnected engines and the second showing how back-end disk enclosures are dedicated to each engine. What’s not clear from the documentation is how the virtual matrix architecture operates, other than being based on the RapidIO. I’m not sure if VMAX engines have direct access to the cache in other engines or whether the processor of connected engines is required. In addition, can an engine access cache in another engine purely to manage throughput of the local host and disk connections? I’m not entirely sure.

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Choosing Between Monolithic and Modular Architectures – Part II

HP Challenges Dell for 3Par

admin — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 11:57:54 +0000

So there we have it. A week after Dell announce their intention to acquire 3Par, HP put their cards on the table and trump the Dell bid with an updated offer of $24 a share. This represents a 1/3 increase over the Dell $18/share offer. HP have been pretty acquisitive in the storage arena over the last few years, acquiring LeftHand, Ibrix and others. Why now would they want to acquire 3Par

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HP Challenges Dell for 3Par

I suppose it was inevitable

admin — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 11:06:00 +0000

There is no question that I'm going to get a lot of ribbing from friends of mine in the business when they read about this. After all, I was at Convergenet prior to it's acquisition by Dell and then again years later at EqualLogic when it was acquired by Dell and – as some have teased me about the inevitability of another Dell acquisition – it now appears that Dell intends to acquire 3PAR too .

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I suppose it was inevitable

Demo: Thin Reclamation for Symantec Storage Foundation

admin — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 17:57:05 +0000

This is an older video I shot from late last year with Chakri Avala from Symantec and and Karl Swarz for 3PAR demoing how thin reclamation for Symantec Storage Foundation works.

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Demo: Thin Reclamation for Symantec Storage Foundation

Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know

admin — Sun, 08 Aug 2010 19:07:10 +0000

Well, it appears from comments on recent blog entries that I’m all of the above! The post(s) in question are as follows; http://www.thestoragearchitect.com/2010/08/02/netapp-the-inflexibility-of-flexvols/ http://storagebod.typepad.com/storagebods_blog/2010/08/and-bod-makes-three.html http://www.grumpystorage.com/2010/08/notapp-random-thoughts.html http://blog.nigelpoulton.com/netapp-some-good-and-some-errrrr/ I thank those who have made positive comments on my behalf, it is most appreciated. I find it even more amusing that my style of writing has been described as tabloid. Perhaps I need a few more appropriate blog titles. How about the following: Netapp ate my Hamster or Gotcha! (when EMC outbid Netapp for Data Domain). The things I write about are coloured by the work I do – which is for and on behalf of customers. It’s my job to cut through the marketing hype and understand the real issues in deploying and managing technology in the most efficient and cost effective way. No vendors are without faults and I can point to many posts that place each vendor in a negative light. However in my defence where I see something I like, I also talk about it. If you don’t like what I write, I urge you to unsubscribe now. If you do like what I write about, I’d appreciate your views on what else you’d like to see me discuss. If you have something to say, then leave a comment that can be treated as courteous. I always post comments – apart from the SPAM ones. I’m happy to discuss things in a reasoned manner and to admit when I’m wrong. You never know, if we continue in that manner we all may just enjoy the blogosphere more.

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Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know

3PAR thin persistence storage reclamation, customer tested and verified

admin — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 15:26:18 +0000

Derek Seaman posted in his blog yesterday about capacity thinning, zero reclamation technologies and included a test of 3PAR's Thin Persistence software. In his post he lists the steps he took to run the test, including the setup and final results.

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3PAR thin persistence storage reclamation, customer tested and verified

Monolithic versus modular storage is not an either/or question

admin — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 17:00:30 +0000

Those of you who subscribe to Gartner reports may have seen their recent report: “ Choosing Between Monolithic Versus Modular Storage: Robustness, Scalability and Price Are the Tiebreakers ” While I agree with some of their definitions of monolithic and modular storage, it is no longer a question of one versus the other. With the Hitachi USP V/VM we combine the best of both worlds, by providing a “monolithic” or enterprise tier 1 front-end with lower cost modular back-end storage. I agree with their description of monolithic storage as having many controllers that share direct access to a large, high performance, global cache, supporting a large number of host connections, including mainframes, and providing redundancy to ensure high availability and reliability. I also agree with their definition of modular storage, which contains two variants, a dual controller architecture with separate cache memory and a scale out architecture that can have many nodes with separate caches in each node.

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Monolithic versus modular storage is not an either/or question