Storage Nation

Last night, IDC released their storage market share analysis for what happened in Q2.  Some things remained the same, other parts seem to be changing. And if you watch this market as closely as I do, it's worth reviewing some of the more interesting bits. What You Need To Know For many years, IDC has published the most authoritative numbers on storage hardware and software sales.  While no methodology is perfect, I've come to view IDC's numbers as absolutely essential to anyone in the storage business. EMC doesn't give IDC access to any privileged information, they have to figure things out from published reports.  Generally speaking, IDC's estimates of EMC's business are usually within a few points (plus or minus) of our own.

As I sit back and contemplate the last few weeks, I keep coming to the same conclusion.  The market has clearly expressed its strong interest in all things cloud-like, and just about every technology vendor on the planet — large and small — is frantically repositioning themselves just as quickly as possible. Whatever "tipping point" we all were waiting for, it's clearly happened.  Game on. And I think this rapid shift has caught many in the IT industry by surprise: technology vendors, system integrators, consultants — few people are really interested in IT as usual.  Everyone wants to talk about the cloud.

There are three new white papers available on the site that may be of interest.  They are: Create a Smarter Storage Strategy http://thestoragearchitect.tradepub.com/free/w_fnet24 Availability and the Cloud http://thestoragearchitect.tradepub.com/free/w_fnet22/ The Economic Impact of File Virtualization: Reducing Costs and Improving Efficiency for File-Based Storage http://thestoragearchitect.tradepub.com/free/w_fnet09/ As usual I welcome any feedback as to whether this part of the site is useful. Disclaimer:  For each subscription I receive a payment which goes to fund the running of this site and www.thevirtualisationarchitect.com.  This includes covering the costs of trial subscriptions to cloud services.

So here , we showed how vSphere 4.1 SIOC and EMC FAST can work together to make DRS for storage possible today.

With VMworld in San Francisco this week, it's only fitting that Michael Haag is on the Hotspot discussing 3PAR's support for server virtualization . If you are at VMworld this year, please stop by our booth, #313, to see what all the commotion is about and why 3PAR storage is so popular for cloud computing .

In my series on data center transformation I started with Server transformation and the closer integration of server and storage virtualization through the use of VAAI or vStorage APIs for storage arrays. These APIs were introduced at VMworld in 2008 when VMware announced their vStorage initiatives. When VMware released these APIs on July 13, 2010, Hitachi jointly released support for these APIs on our AMS 2000 storage arrays . A lot of effort went into this integration as it is a massive technology enhancement for the transformation of the data center. The testing that we have done with Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning volumes on an AMS 2300 with VAAI has shown the following results: Full copy – 18% performance improvement (speed to copy VM’s) Write same – 85% performance improvement (speed to clone VM’s) Hardware Assisted Locking – 25% to 35% performance improvement including the removal of SCSI reserves (powering on 1400 VM’s on 4 x Servers simultaneously) See what VMware CTO Steve Herrod says about these enhancements in his executive blog.

Quite suddenly, 3PAR is a very hot company.  To a lot of people, especially those who are unfamiliar with the storage industry, one of the obvious questions is "Who are these people and where did they come from?" The answer is that the company was formed by a group of server-cluster engineers from Sun and has been around for over a decade developing and selling large scale storage products designed for something that used to be called "utility computing" seven years ago, but today is just called "the cloud". We've been very successful with our cloud strategy and have 7 of the top 10 IAAS (infrastructure-as-a-service) customers as clients.  3PAR products work very hard in the background for a lot of household-name customers.

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

Thank you to all that participated in the Virtualgeek 2010 Survey (originally at this post).

I’ve added a new section to the site, which you can find at the top of the navigation bar – “ Storage White Papers “.  The selections are free, specifically storage orientated and here are a few examples to get you started: Create a Smarter Storage Strategy Availability and the Cloud The Economic Impact of File Virtualisation: Reducing Costs and Improving Efficiency for File-Based Storage These are vendor sponsored and you’ll need to register (which is the tradeoff for them being free).  Please let me know what you think if you download any of these white papers. Disclaimer: I receive a small fee for whitepaper subscriptions as part of this service.  This will go towards running the site, which, due to traffic is now increasing in expense.