Storage Nation

Separated at birth? There have been some interesting discussions lately about storage tiering   And just because 3PAR beat most everybody else to the punch this week with our AO announcement , I think it's important to keep things in perspective – storage tiering does not solve everybody's problems

Here’s my roundup of all the posts, pictures, video and comments from the HP Blades Tech Day Tweets The official hashtag for the event was #hpbladesday with hundreds of tweets being generated from the start of the Tech Day until now. Bloggers’ Posts By name order, here are the relevant posts from each blogger

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 .

Happy day for EMC unified customers.   A whole bunch of new integration, additional cost savings – all for existing and new EMC customers.   Oh, and it’s all free Here’s the PR , but in usual fashion, I tend to like the nerd version. Read on for more! So – without further ado, what’s new and GA?

Home lab storage I’ve just about got my home lab fully organised; here’s a quick summary of what I have in place. Storage I’ve four main storage devices, DroboPro, Iomega ix4-200D (two) and an EMC CLARiiON CX-700.  This gives me NAS, iSCSI and Fibre Channel connectivity options on any testing I’m performing.  The storage is broken down as follows: DroboPro – 8.4TB of raw storage across 7 disks (nearly fully populated) – iSCSI Iomega ix4 – 2x 4TB of raw storage across 4 disks – iSCSI & NAS CLARiiON – 2.2TB of raw storage across 15 disks – Fibre Channel This gives me 18.6TB of raw capacity.  One of the ix4 devices is production, running my VMs on ESX, the other is for testing performance and configurations but will ultimately form my remote backup solution.  Servers Server Rack My main server is an Intel Based, 2 CPU, 8 core custom-build machine with 16GB of RAM.  It runs ESXi 4.0 and has access to all storage resources as well as another 1.6TB of internal storage.  This machine runs all my production and test virtual machines.  A second server runs Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V (upgraded this week).  This is my Hyper-V test server.  It has a single 500GB drive and access to all storage resources, including fibre channel via an Emulex LP12000 HBA card. I also have two other smaller servers that act as test machines in various scenarios, one of which is currently acting as an OPEN-E server (the subject of a future post). Fabric The fabric in my test lab is provided by a number of McDATA 3232 switches.  Although they are servicable, they are looking old now, so I’m looking to acquire a Cisco MDS switch to add to these for some time in the future

Day 2 of HP Blades Day took place in a new location – the Customer Experience Centre.  This was due to issues with Wifi on day 1, now resolved in our new location.  Order of the day was: Review of the previous day’s presentations with a quick question & answer session Presentation on Client Virtualisation Factory tour Client Virtualisation Joseph George presented to the bloggers on client (aka desktop) virtualisation.  Whilst HP seem to have a story in this area, I’m skeptical about the whole process of virtualising desktops at this stage, other than in certain use cases.  I can see benefits for the following: High availability environments such as financial traders, where loss of a desktop translates to financial loss. Large scale desktop deployments where functionality is generic.  A good example of this is call centres; desks only require access to limited features (so don’t need high powered devices) and physical desktops may be used by multiple users. Environments not suitable for desktop virtualisation will include mobile users and anyone running bespoke hardware or software with hardware dependencies

If you've been following the storage banter over the last few weeks, this issue has been hotly debated back and forth. Rather than weigh in on one side or another, I thought I'd take a few moments to share the basic concepts, and to shine a light as to why different vendors are lining up on one side or another of the discussion. Now, since this is a simple treatment, I'm sure that others will want to either extend or amend some of my comments here.  And, yes, this is an over-simplified treatment — that's the point. Please feel free to do so.

 iKnerd (Greg Knieriemen) broke the story yesterday about Oracle/Sun breaking off their relationship with HDS .  That got everybody twittering -  with the majority of tweets from the storage universe suggesting Oracle had greedy motives. How unfair!  So, the video below attempts to restore balance to the universe and brings Netapp, HP, cloud computing, 3PAR and Larry's toys into the discussion. If you are a Sun storage customer and think its time to change, you should check out 3PAR.

I’ve just been reading Greg Knieriemen’s post over at iknerd.com on the ending of Sun/Oracle’s OEM agreement with Hitachi to resell their high end storage arrays.  On the one hand I’m surprised by the announcement; on the other I’m not. Sun have resold Hitachi for some time under the 9990V and 9985V brand names.  These are no more than rebadged devices with Hitachi code and software under the covers.  From memory, I believe the only technical change is the cabinet door.  I have installed Sun supplied Hitachi technology in the past.  Sun provided no added value to the process – in fact when we encountered a microcode bug, Sun’s lack of knowledge hindered our problem resolution process

Unlike many of my fellow bloggers, it seems, I have been engaging with consumers — nearly a hundred in the last two weeks — and gathering their insights about this whole tempest in a teapot called on-array tiering.  That’s code for 1) establishing a tier of Flash SSD in a conventional disk array, 2) adding