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.

In my discussions with customers, I often ask the "V" question: how are you doing with virtualization? Occasionally I get an interesting response: they're entrenched IBM customer, and they point to the use of virtualization on their mainframe, and perhaps their big AIX boxen, and say they're largely virtualized.  Asked and answered. I need to ask them a better question: how are you doing with pooling of resources? The Bigger The Better Any time you pool resources, you're angling for a better outcome.  Lower cost-to-serve through scale efficiencies.  The ability to load-level across multiple, shifting demands.  Being able to react quickly to new and unforseen demands.  Efficient processes that manage resources in the aggregate, rather than individually

Phew – I hate tap-dancing around things, and I’ve been saying “project Redwood” for too long.  I’m glad the name got changed to vCloud Director – “vCloud Service Director” was a mouthful (note that the builds right before VMworld still have the old name).

Customer interest in active/active datacenters is through the roof – it’s a compelling idea. We’ve got a little pile of VPLEX/vTeleportation sessions at VMworld – I’m doing PC8051 with Beth Phalen, who is the VP who owns the product (which covers practical questions, how it works, but also shows where we are going).   Scott Lowe is doing session TA8101 (which is very focused on do’s, don’ts and best practices in these active/active datacenter use cases. The VMware KB article that covers how EMC VPLEX supports VM HA stretched cluster also went up, you can read it here . I remain convinced that we (VMware and the storage community) have more work to do (specifically around VM HA details discussed in our sessions, as well as partition handling at the VMware and storage layers) before I would personally do this myself.  But we decided that people were going to do stretched clusters, so it was more useful to be explicit about how to do it, pitfalls to be aware of.   The solution spot that is a rock right now is VMotion between clusters.

DRS is not only a critical feature in vSphere, but also a critical IDEA for virtualization and cloud models (private or public).   The idea is basic: Virtualization encapsulates compute, and vMotion liberates those encapsulated objects, but VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) is the thing that actually turns the cluster of servers in a dynamic pool of resources. Not only is this important for efficiency, but prioritization and QoS are critical as everyone starts to virtualize things that come with SLA requirements

How’s that for a headline?

Just wanted to share the most recent (and the funniest!) EMC 20% Guarantee video, this one starring Oggie — The Prince of Dataness.

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.