Storage Nation

Chuck Hollis had an excellent post last week, discussing caching.   About 10 years ago a small team that I was a part of looked at starting a company that would do something similar to what IBM's SVC does.  The idea was to create a SAN front end controller with a lot of cache memory that would virtualize  "downstream" storage and provide performance boosts through various techniques such as caching, striping, and multi-way mirroring.  We gave up on the idea when it became apparent to us that the project was quite a bit larger than we initially thought and it was unclear when we would ever have sufficient resources to get a competitive product to market. I think we could have sold the idea to venture capital investors who were throwing money at storage startups, but we couldn't sell it to ourselves. For those of you that wonder why I tend to think SVC is an important product, that's why – I know some of the things IBM did to make it work and I admire their ability to bring it to market

Lots to talk about as a follow-on from today's discussion around virtual storage, global federation and the underlying distributed cache coherence technology that makes all this wonderful juju possible. Most of the focus was on the specific capabilities around global storage federation, and the underlying distributed cache coherence technology that makes all of this useful and interesting

For those of us in the IT business, we occasionally encounter a fundamental new enabling technology that forces us to reconsider some of our long-held notions around the way things work. I'd put server and desktop virtualization into that category, as well as the ubiquitous web.  If you're a storage person, flash has that potential as well.  If backup is your thing, the combination of dedupe and low-cost disks has changed how you think about things. In this post, I'd like to start to introduce a technology concept that — yes — has the potential to change a great deal of how we think about IT at scale.  And, yes, this is going to be a long post … Context Today, Pat Gelsinger did an important event with industry analysts.  You can see his materials and webcast here .  In addition, I wanted to offer up my views on this topic as well.  I'll be using his slide deck as a reference point

No, this is not another shameless pitch to attend yet-another-vendor show.

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 .

Lots of back and forth with various folks internally on this in the last couple of days, and thought I would just put it out there: Despite the obvious simplicity that would come from directly connecting a UCS to an iSCSI, NFS, FC or FCoE target, this is currently (as of this posting on March 3rd, 2010) not possible with just a UCS chassis and UCS 6100 series fabric interconnect. I’ve had a couple people ask me “why” – after all, they’re just standard SFP+ connectors – you should be able to “plug Tab A into Slot B”. This is not new info (Scott and Rick have hit on this), but since I got asked so much (twice last week at different customers in a New York City tour), I thought I would summarize it here, as our readerships are not the same

These webcasts which EMC and VMware are doing jointly on tier-1 apps in the VMware context are generally very popular.

A couple posts ago , discussing Netapp CEO, Tom Georgens' now famous quote on tiering , I wrote: To be fair, Georgens DID get support from the contrarian Drunken Data.  This was the only reference to Jon Toigo and his blog. Apparently this thoughtless insult set Jon off because a week later he wrote a whole lot of overkill  in response.  Considering the effort he made, it doesn't seem fair to just ignore it all.    1.  I listen to customers, so do Chuck Hollis, Barry Burke, Mark Twomey, Val Bercovici, Alex McDonald, and most of the vendor bloggers.

The Cisco guys do a killer job on these tight, concise TechWise TV episodes… The one this Thursday is on Vblocks.  Hari is the main man in the VCE solutions squad in Santa Clara, and Vblock builder – a great resource to listen to, talk to and get to know. You can register here: http://www.cisco.com/en/US/solutions/ns340/ns339/ns638/ns914/html_TWTV/twtv_episode_62.html?sid=188290_26

Given all the things that I'm engaged with these days, it was rewarding to see our friends at Cisco make a good set of announcements around enabling service providers with IaaS — Infrastructure as a Service.  And I'm a bit embarrassed that I didn't catch this earlier … But — at the same time — as I digest this announcement, I'm torn. There's a lot to like here.  But it also reinforces my notion that we — as an industry — have just started to travel down a rather long road …