Storage Nation

This week we shared with our partners that Oracle and HDS will not renew the current distribution agreement for our Enterprise Storage platform that we had with Sun Microsystems prior to the Oracle acquisition. That agreement expires on March 31. We have enjoyed a very good relationship with Sun over the past nine years and have many joint customers whom we consider as our own. Oracle has ongoing capability to service their installations beyond the end of the Sun contract and we will continue to work with them to ensure that these customers receive the same high level service and support.

I was talking with my InfoSmack co-conspirator, Greg Knieriemen ( iknerd.com )  last week about virtual junk and how the word "virtualization" was so incredibly unwieldy. It was killing my lazy mouth to have to do so much work for such a well-understood term/topic. (BONUS QUESTION: is "virtualization" a noun, verb, or WHAT?

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.

Last week, the storage anarchist published a virtual talk show featuring virtual me (3parfarley) as the special guest.  In a strange turn around of events, the 3D cartoon instantiation of storage anarchist was apprehended recently while sneaking around in 3PARvaTAR's chunklet matrix. Special cameo appearances are made by the Storage Architect , iKnerd and and Stephen Foskett direct from their karaoke concert last Thursday night @ #HPbladesday   3PAR, EMC, Netapp, IBM, Capacity Guarantee, storage, array, SAN, HDS

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 …

OK, cool contest alert. The folks at the EMC Developer Network are sponsoring their first ever EMC Monster Mash with over $25K of prize money .  Hint: that's better than a free iPod The idea is simple: go over to the EDN site and create a creative mashup of two or more EMC products using the published interfaces, combining external services as you see fit, and submit your entry. Lots of EMC platforms to choose from, storage, security, management, content, etc.  And, of course, a big world of non-EMC external services as well … Why are we doing this?  First, we've got a big world of mashable capabilities across our portfolio, and we'd like people to get more familiar with them.  Second, we think that intermixing this stuff with popular online services would be pretty interesting, and demonstrate even more powerful functionality.  Finally, we thought it'd be pretty fun.

In a self-described FUD piece today StorageBod wonders about Netapp's future.

I agree that breaking the storage encapsulation in Virtual Machines is generally a bad thing.  What do I mean?   That the entirety of the Virtual Machine is not contained in VMDKs stored on some datastore.   Examples of this are RDMs, iSCSI in guest and NFS mounts in guest. In general, breaking the encapsulation model is something to do rarely, not frequently.  Why?  It makes management more complex, makes certain operations impossible (ergo you can’t do a storage vmotion for a device that is mounted via iSCSI in a guest). But – just like all things – there’s a couple reasons why the purists who say “Never!” should be walked away from… slowly… Real world example from yesterday.  A customer is using Oracle 11g on an NFS datastore and has 1GbE connectivity.   For those of you who read the blog post that Vaughn and I wrote here , you immediately see that you will be bound by the bandwidth (MBps) of a single vmnic on the NFS datastore, as the TCP/IP hashing used for link aggregation only applies if you have multiple TCP sessions, and NFSv3 uses only 2 TCP sessions (control and data) per datastore. So, in the spirit of being a purist, the answer is: Switch to a block datastore (which can parallelize across multiple links via RR or PowerPath/VE) Switch to 10GbE (drive more bandwidth down a single link – a lot more) And if you’re SUCH a purist that you would rather throw out the baby with the bath water rather than compromise dramatic principles: dont’ visualize that workload until a future vSphere release that supports NFSv4 or pNFS.

SYSDBA is our excellent 3PAR business partner in South Africa ,  Some of their team came to 3PAR  headquarters recently and I had the chance to record this interview with Nick de Beer, a technology expert with a wide range of experiences including Oracle, storage and virtualization.  In this interview, Nick talks briefly about 3PAR's Recovery Manager software , which allows customers to recover data from many point in time snapshots.

I was at a customer dinner event last night, and predictably I got asked what I thought about yesterday's NetApp announcement by several EMC people.