Storage Nation

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

EMC apparently thinks that V-Max will catch up to 3PAR soon!       They say it's easy to use!     They keep trying all kinds of things!    That look great on paper!    But they haven't been working out the way they planned!    3PAR has a vision for utility storage that EMC just doesn't get!    Maybe EMC shouldn't have killed off the DMX so F.A.S.T.!     Maybe EMC should try some of these!     Try to catch us tomorrow with your ACME V-MAX, EMC!    

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

Chris Evans, the Storage Architect, had an unexpected analysis of EMC's FAST announcement today on his blog . The point he makes is that with FAST only being available on Intel-based array architectures – and not the DMX product line – that EMC has put themselves at a peer level with the rest of the industry.  As he says: So what’s my point?  Well, simply this; EMC have legitimised the enterprise modular architecture characterised by V-Max.  This accepts that the future is commodity-based hardware with differentiation in software.  However, EMC are no longer the leaders in this field and are having to play catch up. It's an interesting angle to be sure and it will be interesting to see how EMC's new platform works out after all the bluster and FUD over FAST is long forgotten.  EMC is going to busy in the years to come as they try to convert their DMX customers to v-Max customers.  All vendors go through this sort of thing when they introduce new architectures and even their most loyal customers are more or less forced to consider alternatives.  There is a lot of pressure on EMC all of a sudden to bring software to market that justifies the switch from the DMX -to v-MAX.  FAST has failed to do that so far.

So, to my VMware-centric readers, you may have no idea what I’m talking about.   But if I asked you “don’t you wish Storage did what DRS does?” – well the answer to that would be YES, right? Fully Automated Storage Tiering (FAST) is the core idea of automatically moving information to the right tier at the right time. FAST is immediately available accross the EMC platforms.   On V-Max, CX4 it automates the reconfiguration of LUNs to optimize against policy.  In the V-Max case, it will automatically move and swap LUNs between solid state, FC and SATA.  In the CLARiiON case, it will recommend and move from FC to EFD and SATA to optimize the total configuration.    On Celerra it will automatically and transparently move files between filesystems/tiers on a platform, between platforms, and actually to Atmos (whether it’s Atmos in your internal cloud or external cloud).    Through 2010, FAST use cases will continue to expand in breadth and depth. So – if you’re scratching your head and the impact doesn’t immediately make sense (perhaps you’re not a storage person) – here’s a way to think about it…

This post is the third (and hopefully final) post in a series triggered by EMC's announcement of FAST going GA today. The first post described the primary impacts of the FAST technology, and noted similarities / synergies between the virtualization of servers and the continuing virtualization of storage

Today's thematic post was triggered by EMC's announcement that FAST (fully automated storage tiering)  is now GA (generally available) on Symmetrix, CLARiiON and Celerra product lines. Rather than get into the gritty details, I saw today's announcement as just another step in the journey of storage becoming a fully virtualized and dynamic resource, much in the way networks have been, and servers are fast becoming. The FAST Headlines Perhaps no storage technology has been more discussed this year than EMC's FAST.  We believe that technologies such as FAST will change the economics of storage in much the same way VMware has changed the economics of servers. When we look at the vast majority of application I/O profiles, we usually see the exact same thing.  A small amount of data responsible for the majority of I/Os.  And almost all of it is infrequently accessed.  The same effect you see on your C: drive plays out in most enterprise applications.  Unfortunately, the hot spots tend to move around