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.

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

Lots of activity at VMworld this week, plus the predictable flurry of vendor announcements.

The ongoing battle for 3Par by HP & Dell tells us much more about the state of the IT Industry than just the desires of two companies to acquire some interesting storage tech.  It signals an acceptance that storage is a key feature in the future direction of the IT industry – more important than networking and almost as important as the virtualisation platform itself. This may seem like a bold statement to make, however we need to look forward to where the industry is headed.  First of all, vendors want us to buy their unified hardware stacks; it represents that move back to a consolidated architecture that kept one vendor dominant in the mainframe days – IBM.  “No-one gets fired for buying IBM” the saying goes (or used to go), demonstrating how IBM was seen as the data centre supplier for all things computing in the 70’s and 80’s.  Of course we know that politics within organisations and the cost of IBM hardware eventually broke the monopoly, but the status quo worked well for many companies for many years.

The recent proposed acquisition of 3Par by Dell and/or HP has made me think a little more about the direction the storage industry is taking in terms of their storage array design architecture.  Since storage arrays became a category of devices in their own right, we’ve seen the growth of the monolithic, sometimes called Enterprise storage array.  Hu Yoshida discusses the subject on one of his recent blog posts .  Looking at the wide range of storage devices, I’ve categorised arrays into the following groups: Monolithic – this architecture is characterised by Hitachi USP, HP XP & EMC DMX and consists of a shared memory architecture and multiple redundant components. Multi-Node – these devices use loosely coupled storage “nodes” with a high-speed interconnect providing scalability by adding extra nodes to the storage “cluster”.  Products in this category include EMC VMAX and 3Par InServ. Closely Coupled Dual Controller – this is the typical “modular” storage architecture characterised by IBM DS8000, EMC CLARiiON, Hitachi AMS and HP EVA

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.

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

Nothing like a little M&A action to spice up a Monday, no? Today's news is rather straightforward — Dell intends to purchase 3PAR.  Not entirely a surprise if you're a close industry-watcher like I am. Some interesting commentary is starting to result (including this piece by Dave Vellante), so I thought I'd offer up some personal observations as well.

This is a series of posts on the Promise SmartStor NS4600 home storage server.  Previous posts: Hardware Review: Promise SmartStor NS4600 – Part I Hardware Review: Promise SmartStor NS4600 – Part II In this post, we will discuss file layout, formats and protocols available on the NS4600.  The previous post (above) discussed how RAID is constructed across physical disks.  Multiple volumes can be constructed from the disks available in the system (subject to a disk being dedicated to only one volume).  Above this layer sits the file system and logical iSCSI devices. Filesystem Status The first screen shot shows the normal status of a file system.  In this example there are two drives paired together in a RAID-1 mirror, providing approximately 1675GB of storage space.  At present only around 1442GB of space as been allocated to the file system, with some 187GB of free capacity still available.  At first it may not seem obvious why all the available space shouldn’t be allocated to the file system, however the answer is simple; standard NAS file space and iSCSI LUNs sit beside each other together on the RAID volume.  Therefore as a file system is created, it can be sized as required, allowing future expansion as either additional file space or as iSCSI LUNs.  The creation of the iSCSI LUN is shown in subsequent screen shots, highlighting the initial available 187GB of space, followed by the creation of two 50GB iSCSI LUNs, reducing the available space to 87GB. Mixing data types on the same RAID set would not necessarily be best practice on a medium-tier or enterprise-class array; fortunately the ability to create multiple volumes enables some disks to be dedicated to file and others to block-level access, simply by creating multiple volumes.  Of course the main restriction is only having 4 drives to play with, however the underlying architecture enables multiple configurations to be created and potentially in the future, should Promise choose to create larger devices, would offer the fundamentals for sensible data segregation.  In any event, for single CPU, single NIC devices like the NS4600, high performance isn’t likely to be the main purchasing consideration and mixing file and block data on the same RAID group shouldn’t pose a problem. Protocols For file data, the NS4600 provides Windows, Mac, FTP and Unix connectivity.  See screenshot 9 in the gallery at the end of this post.  Protocols can be turned on/off system-wide or specified for each file share.  For Windows, the server is able to connect to an Active Directory domain.  This may not be everyone’s first choice but in a small office, centralising security is an essential requirement – I always look for Active Directory support as it simplifies my home lab setup.  Mac settings are pretty simple; on or off, with the ability to issue a message to connecting systems.  FTP is similarly simply specified and for Unix/Linux connectivity, the NS4600 can be connected to a NIS domain.  It also seems possible to connect a share to both a NIS domain and AD at the same time.  Now, unfortunately I don’t run NIS so couldn’t test this; however specifying two security domains does throw up issues of consistency and questions around which security model “wins” in the event of a conflict.  There doesn’t appear to be any way to specify userid translation as there is in Data ONTAP for example

The whole idea of a storage company making a video that reaches “viral status” is very interesting to me since I like making videos and I work for a storage company.  There are several problems with making a viral storage video including the relative size of the storage community, which is not large enough to generate large numbers of viewers and then there is the matter that competitors tend to not promote each others work very much, which creates a dampening effect on the whole word of mouth thing that I have associated with viral media. So, I get the idea of trying to promote a video, because you need a big lift beyond the industry to do it and you need to take advantage of the dynamics of the online video world. If you follow this link and read it ,  you’ll get an idea of how corporation can make viral videos. But not all viral videos are corporate – there are some that make it on creativity, execution and timing.  Although its against very steep odds, a non-corporate video video can succeed if its interesting and compelling enough for people to want to share it with others.  Being outrageous helps a lot.  The question remains – if most viral videos result from corporate marketing programs, what does that say about the definition of viral – is it only the most numbers of viewers, or is it something else?