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.

SNW Spring | April 12-15, 2010 | Rosen Shingle Creek | Orlando, FL Qualified IT end-user members of Storage Monkey may attend SNW Spring for free!  To apply for this special registration offer (a $1690 value), you must have IT responsibilities in an end-user organization and be a member of the Storage Monkey community ( http://www.storagemonkeys.com/ ).  Register now at:  http://www.snwusa.com/monkey  SNW is the world’s largest event on stoRead More…

A while back we did a storage assessment for a non HDS customer and showed him that his storage utilization was actually around 30% which is typical in most accounts. While that was not surprising to the operations people this was a surprise to the financial people who could not understand why 70% of their storage capacity, in this case, several hundred TBs, was not being utilized. Management was embarrassed and immediately fingers were being pointed at the storage architect and storage administrators, who in turn pointed to the application users who were asking for way more storage than they appeared to need.

I was pleased to see that we just announced our most recent senior hire : Jeremy Burton who will be EMC's new CMO — chief marketing officer. I'm reasonably sure that he's going to like it at EMC.  It looks like the right person in the right position at the right time. Marketing at EMC Historically, I've always seen EMC as built on three exceptional pillars: a great product organization, a great sales organization and a great customer support organization.  Marketing, while always relevant, hasn't historically been one of the things that we could lay claim to being "best in class", simply because it typically hasn't been a top priority

It's funny how memes circulate within a larger corporation, especially one as socially connected (internally and externally) as EMC.  If you work in these sorts of environments, they're an interesting reflection of the organizational psyche.

ESJ.com is running another of our C-4 Project video segments, this time with CEO and Chairman of FalconStor, ReiJane Huai.  Check it out. Mr. Huai reflected on his role in bringing tape backup to the distributed world, then offered commentary on several topics of interest including the formation of mini-me mainframes (“if you are going to

The tickler I received in email this AM filled me with interest in what Mr. Foskett, lately of Nirvanix, was going to write about this question in his multi-part blog.  My fingers tingled with expectation as I keyed in the URL for his postings

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 .

Yes, I know — all of this talk about private clouds can seem very futuristic to some. In essence, though, we're talking about nothing more than the industrialization of IT infrastructure.  If you're inside the IT business, it all can seem so complex.  But if you're outside of IT, you might wonder "what's the big deal?"