I Promise Not To Quote That Old Annoying Dell PC Slogan

I’ve been buying Dell computers for decades, but not really because I loved them. Sure, my XPS laptop was awesome, but it burned out its motherboard and I never really touched the RMA replacement, having bought a MacBook Pro in the meantime. Enterprise buyers seem to have the same ambivalence about Dell. They buy it, but I’m not sure they really “buy” the company as an IT partner.

I’m sure you’ve heard the same comments as me: “Dell just assembles off-the-shelf components and sells them in volume” or “Dell’s a follower, not an innovator.” There seems to be a great deal of respect for Dell’s ability to produce competitive products and sell them at reasonable cost. Truly, most of their competitors would love to have this kind of reputation. But most of their competitors also have a reputation for partnership, innovation, and solution selling.

Dell Is Making An Effort

It seems clear that Dell would like to change this attitude, and they are investing serious resources to make it happen. While acquisitions like Compellent and Force10 raised eyebrows in storage and networking, it is the activity I see behind the scenes that paints the clearest picture. Dell isn’t just buying into new markets, they’re investing to change the company.

When Dell acquired EqualLogic in 2008, many assumed it was a tactical investment to increase margins over the (resold) EMC storage equipment the company was then pushing. Pundits were similarly dismissive of the acquisition of Perot Systems in 2009, calling it a “me too” effort after HP acquired rival EDS. Regardless of the motivations, however, Dell was becoming more of a serious challenger to HP and IBM every day.

After failing to acquire 3PAR in 2010, then picking up Compllent shortly after, accusations that Dell was “mini me” to HP were rampant. But HP stumbled mightily in 2011, and many in IT quickly lost confidence in that company’s management. All the while, Dell moved forward, increasing in-house IP and expanding enterprise offerings.

What Is The Result?

Today, one sees a very different landscape than just last year. Dell’s acquisitions focused on some of the ripest spots in storage and networking, and no one would disagree that the company has the ability strongly to push these products. Compellent and Force10 went from interesting startups to serious contenders overnight.

Dell really pulled out all the stops to tell us they are "Fluid by Design"

More importantly, Dell has retained much of the innovation these companies offered, from employees to support programs. Last week, I attended the Dell Storage Forum in London, an event initiated by Compellent prior to the acquisition. At the event, I talked to many Dell employees who came to the company through acquisition but had now been given power to challenge the status quo in their respective areas.

If Dell really intended only to push product, why retain marketing personnel? Why invest in the Dell Storage Forum? Why continue Compellent’s beloved Co-Pilot support program?

Then there are the products. Dell leveraged its investment in Ocarina Networks to create a deduplicating backup appliance, the new DR4000. They salvaged file system startup ExaNet and are beginning to bring scale out technology to market. The latest revision of the Compellent software finally brings it to parity in terms of VMware support. And Dell is really working to sell their DX Object Store.

This is the sort of activity one would expect from a contender, not a “box pusher”.

Stephen’s Stance

In the words of Malcolm Reynolds, my days of not taking Dell seriously are certainly coming to a middle. Dell is investing in product IP, innovative marketing and PR events, customer support, and personnel. This does not mean that Dell is instantly a player in the enterprise storage and networking markets, or that all this work will pay off. But I don’t laugh when I hear Dell boast that they intend to be a “top three” enterprise storage company in a few years. It could happen.

Disclaimer: Dell sponsored two Tech Field Day events in 2011, paid me as a speaker at two DX events, and paid for my trip to Dell Storage Forum in London. But no one can buy a post on this site, and I did similar business with IBM, HP, Cisco, and many other companies. This is my opinion.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2012. |
Why Should Anyone Take Dell Seriously in Enterprise Storage?


This post was categorized as Computer History, Enterprise storage, Gestalt IT, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you’d like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2012. | Why Should Anyone Take Dell Seriously in Enterprise Storage?
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One of the amusing aspects of being self-employed is watching all the giants battle it out. Every company is gunning for someone, but the amazing thing is that they rarely point their sights directly at each other: NetApp is gunning for EMC who’s more focused on HP who wants to knock off Oracle who’s fixated on IBM. It sounds very “high school romance” but this is deadly-serious business.

The Enterprise IT Ladder: Dell, HP, Oracle, and IBM

Dell -> HP

No question about it: Dell wants to beat HP. It was bad enough back when PCs were king, with Dell constantly undercutting HP on price and supply chain efficiency. Dell went to retail, elbowing HP aside on the shelves at Staples, and even introduced a line of printers. But the enterprise data center has taken things to a whole new level. Dell’s plays in blade servers and storage are drawn from the same playbook, only there’s more in-house IP and R&D involved this time. Dell arguably got the iSCSI prize in EqualLogic but couldn’t seal the deal for 3PAR, settling on Compellent instead. They’re working hard in the professional services market; Could networking be next?

HP -> Oracle

For the longest time, HP wanted to be IBM. Then Oracle stomped on their servers with Sun and started flaunting their software-heavy profit margins. Appointing Leo Apothiker as CEO sends an unambiguous signal: HP’s gunning for Oracle. The printers, PC’s, servers, storage and networking gear isn’t going anywhere (HP’s got fights picked in each area), but software and services are the only way to make shares of HPQ perk up. Watch for some startling acquisitions and more bizarre rear-guard antics from Ellison and company.

Oracle -> IBM

Although Oracle is clearly enjoying poking sharp sticks in HP’s direction, they’re focused forward. Larry Ellison has seen the future, and it looks an awful lot like IBM: Massive services revenue, a “we do it all” executive sales pitch, and “hate to love us” handcuffs on the C-level executives at the largest global corporations. It’s worked so far: ORCL shares have risen steadily since the end of the last recession.

IBM -> IBM

IBM has seemed aimless for a decade. Armonk has won every enterprise IT war it’s fought, leaving it nowhere to turn. Spinning out the printer and PC businesses sent a signal that IBM was a different kind of company, and Wall Street is singing the chorus. In many ways, the middle-aged IBM of the 1980′s is the enemy of the new, with the company dreaming of a return to the “Mad Men” Big Blue of yore. Although this is much exactly what HP and Oracle are aiming for as well, IBM is the aloof valedictorian who just needs to keep his grades up until graduation.

Tag Team: EMC and Cisco -> HP

Cisco is like a mini IBM: All of their historical rivals are dead and buried, forcing them to look outside their traditional market for growth. Cisco seems loathe to climb the HP/Oracle/IBM ladder, seeking instead to take enough of their market to maintain solid revenue growth and profitability. Their blade servers smacked HP, which responded with a challenge in the networking space. Realizing they needed help, Cisco looked around for an “enemy of my enemy” to mount a serious IT infrastructure challenge.

What happens when you combine the market leaders in enterprise IT verticals like SAN storage, encryption and authentication, server virtualization, backup, and records management? You get EMC Corporation, the biggest company most “regular people” have never heard of. Something about “information.” Wall Street seems to have a hard time making sense of this company, too.

EMC seems overly concerned about smaller competitors (NetApp, Symantec, cloud providers), but the combination of EMC and Cisco is formidable indeed. The two and their joint venture, known as VCE, have the sales muscle to go head-to-head with Dell, HP, and IBM in the enterprise data center, and their control of key components make them a hard team to ignore.

The Wolves: NetApp and Juniper

NetApp -> EMC

Back in the 1980′s, Honda decimated the American carmakers with just a few models; They sold millions of Accords and Civics while GM watch whole brands disappear. That’s NetApp in the enterprise storage space. They pull in top-tier revenue quarter after quarter with essentially a single product line, taking on dozens of storage devices from HP, HDS, IBM, and EMC. Especially EMC. Talk to NetApp insiders and you’ll hear those three letters frequently, with precious little attention paid to anyone else. Data Domain might have made them a broader play, but NTAP shares have risen steadily since losing that takeover battle with EMC. Now NetApp is stripped down and running hard to close the revenue gap, too.

Juniper -> Cisco

Cisco is vulnerable in their core networking markets, and Juniper is ready to take them on. Since their $4 Billion acquisition of NetScreen in 2004, Juniper has been cherry-picking up-and-coming technologies in every market Cisco dominates, from the WAN to wireless. Though JNPR shares have taken their lumps, this is every bit a “Dell” to Cisco’s “HP”. The various networking sub-markets include many agile competitors, but Juniper is like NetApp: Insiders have a single-minded focus on the market leader.

Stephen’s Stance

The enterprise IT game is getting serious. Emerging from their historical strongholds, Dell, HP, and Oracle are each undermining the other, and everyone is chipping away at IBM. They each realize that they must focus upward for real growth rather than fighting a rear-guard against smaller and newer competitors. The challenge for HP and Oracle will be to expand rapidly enough to keep Wall Street from noticing the erosion from below.

Meanwhile, Cisco and EMC have joined forces out of necessity to grown both revenue and share price, while their own bases are chipped away by Juniper and NetApp. The upstarts can flourish within the verticals of networking and storage, but the VCE team is seems tenuous and uncertain. The joint venture can challenge the full-line players on a customer-by-customer basis, but history shows that only an integrated vendor can rock the enterprise IT world.

Although the information economy is growing, it will not be enough for everyone to survive. These competitors are too cut-throat to allow a smaller challenger to live, and each faces a real threat himself. The largest have a strong base to draw on, while the wolves will always find something to eat. It is those in the middle that face the most serious threat.

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2010. | Every Company Is Gunning For Someone Else
Read more posts categorized as All, Featured, Networking, Server Virtualization, Storage

A Compelling Product

At its core, Compellent is a storage software company. Their Storage Center software creates a “virtual storage array” from standard building blocks. The resulting storage product is one of the most flexible and (excuse the pun) compelling midrange storage systems on the market. Consider the following roundtable discussion from our recent Tech Field Day event in Seattle, which includes a discussion of Compellent’s products and technologies by independent voices in the industry:

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 8:59 — 102.7MB)

Compellent’s Storage Center scales up, adding additional storage capacity to existing arrays without disruption and integrating this added bandwidth and capacity seamlessly. Compellent also has an impressive tiered storage and thin provisioning story, since data blocks are virtualized and can be moved between tiers dynamically. Full-featured integrated snapshot technology completes the picture, adding data protection credentials.

Compellent’s scale-out story is impressive as well, but is more about replication and virtualization than the clustering technology used by others, including Dell’s EqualLogic. Compellent’s newly-introduced Live Volume can be thought of as a volume manager for virtual servers, allowing their storage to exist simultaneously on two different storage arrays. Supporting VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, and Citrix XenServer, Compellent claims that Live Volume enables a “grid of Compellent arrays”, but it’s not the sort of scale-out grid one would get from EMC’s recently purchased Isilon, HP’s LeftHand, Dell’s Compellent, or NAS specialist Panasas. It’s more of an active-active mirror of storage than a true cluster. Learn more about Live Volume in the following video by Rodos:

Let’s also take a moment to consider the hardware Compellent currently uses: They deploy and sell this software on SuperMicro servers with Xyratex disk enclosures, and Seagate hard disk drives, and connect everything with QLogic, Emulex, and Brocade storage networking gear. This is all pretty much standard-issue for storage vendors: Most no longer produce their own controllers or disk enclosures, and the standard components Compellent uses can be swapped from other sources if needed.

Compellent’s Mid-Market Strategy

Compellent has not traditionally competed in the stratosphere of enterprise storage dominated by EMC’s Symmetrix V-Max, the HDS/HP USP/VSP, and (to a lesser extend) the HP 3PAR InServ. Instead, the Minneapolis-based company has been happy to sell into the fat middle of the market, and has gained a loyal following in smaller-but-still-impressive enterprises. Nowhere is this more evident than at Compellent’s annual “C-Drive” customer conference: It’s amazing, really, for a smallish storage company to have such a devoted user base!

Although they offer two NAS front-ends, Compellent is a block storage player through and through. Their “Storage Center with NAS” offering is decidedly low-end, employing Windows Storage Server 2008 on a 1U server for SMB and NFS connectivity. The newer and more-impressive zNAS is based on the OpenSolaris operating system, including ZFS a friendly interface “co-developed” with Nexenta. Neither product is an in-house Compellent design, nor are they competitive in the high-end “big data” market touted by NAS leaders EMC, NetApp, and BlueArc.

Compellent’s Fit Within Dell

Assuming the acquisition goes through, attention will turn to the fit for Compellent’s Storage Center technology and marketing within Dell. What will Dell get for three quarters of a billion dollars? What will it mean to the enterprise storage market as a whole?

Dell’s EqualLogic acquisition, though expensive, is now widely seen as a success. The Round Rock management team allowed EqualLogic the freedom to develop and compete, while bolstering their hardware and manufacturing story with commodity components. The combination has become a dominant plater in the mid-market iSCSI storage space, and Dell is likely to attempt a repeat of that strategy here. It was widely rumored that 3PAR management preferred Dell’s to HP’s offering based on a promise of similar autonomy.

We assume Dell would replace the EMC-sourced CLARiiON with Compellent in their midrange storage arsenal, replacing the SuperMicro servers. Although Compellent would likely be allowed to develop and grow within the Dell umbrella, there is substantial overlap with the existing EqualLogic line. One would expect Compellent to focus more on Fibre Channel and FCoE (which they recently delivered), though iSCSI support is unlikely to be dropped. A longer-term strategy would see EqualLogic and Compellent combining their midrange storage IP and management team within Dell.

Considering their success selling CLARiiON block storage, Dell’s acquisition would strap a rocket to Compellent’s sales. Once the Dell hardware is grafted in, profits will grow substantially as well. This is a major win for Dell, which needs the kind of margins that only in-house IP can drive. The price is right, the market is ready, and the fit is solid.

What Comes Next

Some are suggesting that this is the end of the storage acquisition parade, but many holes remain. Dell still lacks enterprise NAS, data deduplication, and cloud storage success, and companies like Oracle have only just begun to bulk up their storage strategies. Dell’s acquisitions of Ocarina and Exanet have yet to pay dividends, likely driven by the immaturity of those products. One would not be at all surprised if they continued shopping in the storage space: Panasas, BlueArc, Sepaton, FalconStor, and Overland all look ripe for purchase. Although Compellent is a win for Dell, it is not likely to be their last acquisition.

Disclosure: Compellent sponsored and presented at Gestalt IT’s Tech Field Day 3.

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2010. | Thoughts On A Dell Acquisition Of Compellent
Read more posts categorized as Exclusive, Featured, Storage, Top Story

One of the most-interesting points raised concerns the recent technological advances made by the major vendors. Is it too late for a small, innovative company to seize market share or will the big guys match their functionality and head off their advance?

Another key issue in the conversation is W. Curtis Preston‘s discussion of snapshots and data protection. Can traditional backup be made obsolete by storage system snapshots? “Mr. Backup” doesn’t see why not, and suggests that Compellent be more aggressive in pushing this capability.

This episode includes also discussion of the following:

• Bob Plankers‘ initial impressions of the product
• Ethan Banks‘ reaction to a long-distance replication configuration (is this an affordable alternative to EMC V-Plex?)
• Jason Boche notes the “21st century” management interface that, as Howard Marks notes, reduces the need for expensive training classes
• Howard also points out that licenses can be carried forward as the system is upgraded
• Craig Stewart is impressed but questions Compellent’s presence in the European market

Download the compellent roundtable podcast now, or subscribe in iTunes to tune in to the discussion!

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2010. | Podcast 9: Compellent Roundtable at Tech Field Day
Read more posts categorized as Exclusive, Featured, Storage, Tech, Tech Field Day Roundtable Podcast, Top Story

The players are lining up for the biggest acquisition game enterprise IT has witnessed in a while

Today is the (a?) day of reckoning in the 3Par saga, with Dell widely expected to make a counter-offer higher than HP’s bid. But this mega deal, like the Data Domain war before it, sends a strong signal to the enterprise IT world: It’s open season on data storage companies! But the rising superpowers are also likely looking at networking as an area of expansion. The game is afoot!

The Competitors

The simple fact is, enterprise IT prefers to buy from large, established names like HP and IBM rather than smaller and less-familiar companies with names like Ocarina, EqualLogic, or even 3Par. The acceleration of sales by enterprise providers is what makes these big acquisitions so successful and why others involving less-powerful players often fail to deliver the same results.

Full-line “superpowers” like IBM, HP and now Dell and the new Oracle can influence purchasing decisions across a broad spectrum of hardware and software. Many large organizations are tightly coupled to one of these vendors, and will give their products stronger consideration even when they are new or unfamiliar. HP is already flexing their muscle selling their broadened network lineup, and Dell found that it could do this in data storage.

Software vendors like Microsoft, Citrix, and Oracle adamantly maintained a neutral stance toward hardware, but Ellison and company seem serious about changing this. Oracle’s success in selling Sun hardware will likely dictate further software acquisitions for Dell and HP, though IBM already has strength there. Then there is Intel, the wild card who just got wilder with their acquisition of McAfee.

Companies with narrower focus like Cisco, EMC, NetApp, Juniper, and Brocade have the same power within their sphere of influence but cannot pull in wholly-distinct products. Cisco is in the midst of this fight with their technically-excellent UCS blade servers: Although they were certainly a strategic CIO-level vendor in the largest organizations, “blades from a networking company” isn’t the as easy a decision as “networking gear from a full-line company.”

The Game

Then one must consider the market in contention. The enterprise IT space is not expanding, especially in the United States. This is very close to a zero-sum game, with Oracle’s or Dell’s wins being HP’s or IBM’s losses and vice-versa. There is massive money in play, and flexibility enough for it to swing between the competitors, but growth is not unlimited.

Enterprise storage and data center and campus networking are two areas where smaller companies retain enviably-large slices of the pie, explaining the interest in these spaces among the superpowers. These verticals still have room for sales to grow without displacing a fierce full-line foe, and the superpowers have lately been weak here. Storage and networking are enticing opportunities, but each slice is similarly dominated by “vertical superpowers” and partners EMC and Cisco.

So this is the game: Four full-line enterprise superpowers battling each other for datacenter dominance and coveting the extra profits of a few verticals. HP clearly believes they can chip away at EMC and Cisco in storage and networking; Dell and IBM have so far focused mainly on storage; and Oracle hasn’t made a move in either direction, instead challenging the other three in the core server and software space.

Pawns or Knights?

So where does this leave the smaller players? Are they merely pawns in the game, waiting to be sacrificed, or are they knights who can wield power across the field? The largest (Cisco and EMC especially) appear to have ambitions of their own as well as the financial and technical strength to shake up the game. They are unlikely to be acquired by the superpowers. Brocade, too, has broad strength in storage and networking but maintains relationships across the board that make an acquisition difficult.

Strong vertical players like Juniper, NetApp, Riverbed, and Compellent are ripe for acquisition, as were Foundry, 3Com, Data Domain, and 3Par. IBM, Dell, and Oracle are all likely buyers of the networking players, though HP may consider filling in where 3Com was found lacking. All four will likely take a strong look at the remaining storage players as well, with the loser in the battle for 3Par likely to be hungry indeed.

One should also consider the potential impact of smaller acquisitions. Although they would not immediately “move the needle” for a massive superpower, there are many excellent technology companies that could be bought low and pushed strongly. The enterprise-class technology at Sepaton, Pillar Data, Xiotech, BlueArc, Extreme Networks, Force10, Blue Coat, Isilon, CommVault, FalconStor, and many others should not be overlooked. If a superpower can drive a larger acquisition to succeed, imagine what they can do with strong but inexpensive technology from one of these!

Stephen’s Stance

This game is nowhere near finished. The 3Par acquisition will not only generate revenue, it will shake up the ranking of data storage array dominance. This is very likely to kick off additional acquisition in the data storage space, spurring either Dell or HP to pick up additional technology and perhaps causing IBM or Oracle to engage as well. With no easy alternatives to 3Par, I expect Compellent, Xiotech, and Pillar to get closer looks, but Sepaton and BlueArc are just as ripe. NetApp may be too expensive at this point, but would be a nice match for Oracle’s strategy.

HP’s acquisition of 3Com could also signal a race to integrate datacenter and campus networking technology into the stack. Many are suggesting a Brocade acquisition, and it would be much cheaper than Juniper, but OEM ties make it a difficult purchase for any of the superpowers. Extreme and Force10 would be excellent and less-expensive alternatives.

We should also keep our eyes outside the superpower space. Intel showed that they can make big moves, and Microsoft might consider a diversification into hardware as well. One should also look to the East, where Huawei could try to enter the Western market with a merger or joint-venture to cast off the China stigma. Although I would love to see a rebel alliance rise (imagine Juniper, NetApp, and Symantec joining forces!) this is not a likely scenario.

Image credit: Chess Board by mosdave

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2010. | The Enterprise IT Acquisition Game
Read more posts categorized as Featured, Networking, Storage

The storage industry got a lot more competitive this morning, as Dell announced plans to buy 3Par. This is the latest round in a well-established race for the enterprise storage dollar, challenging superpower (and Dell partner) EMC in the high-end SAN space. What does this acquisition say about the industry as a whole? Where are we headed?

I’ve long wished for a new enterprise storage superpower. Competition is good for everyone, and the enterprise storage space has always been highly competitive. Traditional SAN storage powers (EMC, HDS, HP, and IBM) have been under continual attack from tech-heavy upstarts like EqualLogic, LeftHand, Compellent, Xiotech, and 3Par. The smaller (revenue-wise) NAS market has been more serial, with NetApp knocking off Auspex, then challenged by EMC. Yet innovators have been thick there as well, from Exanet to Ibrix, Isilon to Onstor.

Through it all, one thing has been clear: The major companies, though perhaps lagging in technology, were usually able to withstand the attack of the upstarts through sheer strength of salesforce. Storage is a strategic investment, and selection of a storage platform is much more far-reaching than many IT product decisions. The inertia of an installed storage environment makes it a real challenge to switch vendors, giving the established players massive leverage.

It became clear to me and many others that the best way for upstart companies (and, by extension, technologies) was to be part of an established vendor’s sales process. OEM relationships were a big part of this (witness the success of BlueArc and even NetApp and HDS) but acquisition was a much stronger proposition. If customers were warmer to OEM products than independent sales, they are much hotter when it comes to acquired technology. HP, Dell, IBM, and EMC have all demonstrated the power that comes when an established company buys a startup and puts the power of their sales force behind these new products.

This explains Dell’s fantastic success with EqualLogic. They took a product that was emerging as dominant in its niche (midrange iSCSI SAN) and blasted it into the market, while at the same time optimizing manufacturing and deployment. EMC did the same with Clariion and DataDomain, and HP is showing strong signs of health with LeftHand and Ibrix. Then there is IBM, who took XIV out of Israel and made it a source of irritation to the rest of the industry.

Many industry watchers have long wondered what would happen if the smaller guys got together, forming a new superpower of their own. Would 3Par, BlueArc, and Sepaton be a real challenger? What about Xiotech or Compellent and Isilon or FalconStor? Is mixing and matching some smaller companies a recipe for success? The answer was often a counter-question: What if someone like Dell, who knows how to manufacture and sell, picked them up instead? This seemed much more like a sure-thing, since the established management and financials stave off potential integration issues.

It appears that this is the future. Established players will pick up smaller companies, fortifying their offerings and accelerating sales in a way the little guys weren’t capable of. Dell’s billion-dollar acquisition of 3Par reportedly headed off a similar offer from HP, and will likely spark another acquisition. I imagine the management teams at Compellent and Xiotech just got a lot busier…

Clearly, Dell and HP are playing this game. IBM and EMC are in it, too. But what about Cisco and Oracle? Could they be planning storage acquisitions of their own, to the detriment of partners like EMC and Hitachi? What about the strong contingent from Japan, NEC and Hitachi? And who gets picked up next? We shall see!

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2010. | Dell + EqualLogic, Exanet, Ocarina, 3Par = What?
Read more posts categorized as Storage

Presentation #3 was by F5 networks at the F5 Technology Center.  During the first half-hour or so, F5 gave the TFD delegates a product line overview, and then kicked over into technical presentation mode.  The first technical demonstration was of a long-distance VMotion.  The Packet Pushers podcast covered this in some detail in Episode 2.  In summary, F5 is providing the ability to move a virtual host between ESX clusters living in two different data centers without the VMware administrator having to touch the F5 appliance.

So how does the long-distance VMotion work?  In summary, VMware vCenter Orchestrator uses the F5 iControl API to move a specific virtual machine from one data center to another.  If you didn’t catch that, there’s some real magic going on there.  F5 has partnered with VMware, such that vCenter will tell the F5 what to do using F5′s iControl.  iControl is F5′s API to instruct the device what to do.  So when the VMware admin goes into vCenter to move a virtual machine to a different cluster, vCenter will tell the F5 to move the host from the pool in the one data center and move it to the other data center, while maintaining TCP connection integrity.  This allows you to do live migrations between data centers without killing all your clients, something very difficult to consider before.  There’s some additional “magic” here in that 2 F5′s – one in one data center and one in another – build an EtherIP tunnel between each other, running wide-area optimizations between them (WOM is an add-on module providing deduplication, compression, and TCP optimizations) to facilitate a contiguous layer 2 space between the data centers.  In the live demo, F5 stated that they had tested this with latency as high as 300ms, with as little as 10Mbps of WAN connectivity.

After the impressive live demo of long-distance VMotion, Joe Pruitt, Senior Strategic Architect, gave a talk on the F5 APIs:  iControl (remotely controlling an F5) and iRules (TCL scripts that are attached to a virtual server and react to data flowing through the F5, providing customizable behavior).  I have written my own simple iRules, which have saved me lots of time over radical reconfiguration of the F5 appliance to accomplish certain tasks.

First up, Joe talked about iControl, which he described as a set of web services.  iControl gives you the ability to automate manual tasks such as management and monitoring.  Using PowerShell, Perl, Java, and other languages, you can call over 3,000 iControl methods to cause the LTM to perform various tasks.  Joe demonstrated the extensibility iControl offers by creating an RSS feed of F5 appliance events and tweeting BIGIP status messages.

After iControl, Joe moved on to a discussion of iRules.  What are iRules?  In short, iRules are a superset of TCL, allowing you to customize the behavior of an LTM as traffic flows into the box.  There is an iRule Editor available for free, which includes syntax checking and highlighting.  It’s a nice little tool I have used.  Joe pointed out some coding examples, including a credit card scrubber that uses regex to match a potential number, and replaces that text with something obfuscated before returning the page to the HTTP client.

Joe referenced an important site that I believe to be a big part of the F5 platform’s appeal:  DevCentral.  DevCentral is an F5 community site where end users can contribute their own iRule and iControl code.  I know that when I have an iRule to build, DevCentral is where I start.

Remaining demos involved the BIGIP Edge client which includes WOM to improve VPN user experience, and storage optimization using ARX.

The highlight here was automated tiered storage.  Compellent’s solution is a Fibre Channel play, as well as lower cost spindle, depending on the tier.  Their chassis (Storage Center) is disk agnostic.  Fluid Data automatically takes aging data and dumps it to lower-cost spindle.  When data is determined to be “old” is based on frequency of access, coupled with metadata stats on what’s been touched.  Customers can control what gets moved do a different tier when, but by default there is an automated profile that works in most contexts.

When we went into the demo room, what I saw from a networking perspective was a rack full of storage, each storage shelf interconnected with multiple gigabit ethernet links.   NEC-branded ethernet switches were also used to connect the storage rack to the network.  NEC can ship just a shelf, but depending on the scale of the system you’re buying, can ship you an entire rack.  As I recall, there are interoperability guides for uplinking the rack to a Cisco or other environment.

All in all, NEC’s demonstration of the raw power of the array was very impressive.  I should also add that while I’m not specifically focused on storage or backup technologies, the guys in the room that were seemed to like the HYDRAstor solution very much.

© ethan for Gestalt IT, 2010. | GestaltIT.com Seattle Tech Field Day July 2010 – Presentations Overview Part 2 of 2
Read more posts categorized as Networking, Storage

Even though the presentations I saw targeted the storage and virtualization guys more than the networking guy (uh, me), all of the products had serious implications for the network.  Storage is presented to hosts via iSCSI, CIFS, and NFS.  NAS heads with multiple switch ports uplink to the network via MPIO, LACP, and in other ways.  Storage arrays could replicate their data across the LAN or across a WAN of various bandwidths and latencies.  Some replication schemes WAN optimize themselves, but can still be helped by external WAN accelerators.  VMware virtual machines can be moved from one ESX cluster to another using VMotion, which naturally traverses the network, possibly even a WAN link.

What follows is a brief overview of the presentations.  Since I’m not yet in deep with storage and virtualization technologies like I am with networking, what I am opting to do is briefly outline each company, and what they presented on.  From there, you can click the links to dig in if you want more information.

1. Veeam‘s focus is on virtualization environment management, backup, and disaster recovery.  Veeam presented on their virtual machine backup and restoration features.  I knew nothing about Veeam’s product set before their presentation, and from folks I know who’ve known Veeam for a while, they’ve come a long way in a hurry, making a feature-rich product of great use to VMware shops.  The feature that stood out to me the most during the presentation was the ability to instantly bring back up a failed virtual host by starting up the backed up image of the dead production host.  While it’s a little like running on “the donut” after experiencing a flat tire in your care, it helps minimize the outage time, while you work on bringing the full virtual host back into production.Read more about Veeam’s backup product set via the following links:
   http://www.veeam.com/vmware-esx-backup.html
   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KB9ktninyc
2. Nimble Storage was, for me personally, the most interesting presentation.  Nimble launched at Tech Field Day, bringing their converged storage, backup, and disaster recovery solution to market.  Nimble is targeting the medium business market with 12TB or 24TB raw capacity arrays that include all features with no additional licensing.  Nimble has created the CASL (Cache Accelerated Sequential Layout) architecture, which describes how they gain very high IOPS using inline compression and a large adaptive flash cache while writing to high capacity SATA disks (saving overall cost).  Nimble is working with resellers starting at the west coast of North America, and moving east.  The EMEA market is on their radar for 2011.

Stay tuned for part 2…

© ethan for Gestalt IT, 2010. | GestaltIT.com Seattle Tech Field Day July 2010 – Presentations Overview Part 1 of 2
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Compellent were one of the main sponsors for the Seattle Tech Field Day and were responsible for us getting access to the Microsoft Campus. So a big thank you to Compellent for their support of Tech Field Day.

Compellent are a company I have had dealings with before, I looked at buying one of their storage devices back in 2008 and was very impressed by the product they had on offer at the time.  This was a great chance for me to revisit Compellent two years on and see how things had changed.

Compellent in general still appears to be much the same product that I liked so much back in 2008.  Their pooled storage model, software controlled RAID write down, space efficient snapshots and WAN optimised thin replication are all superb  features. There main differentiator back in 2008 was their ability to do automated storage tiering (Data Progression™), something that others in the industry are starting to catch up to (EMC FAST). Compellent’s Data Progression technology is one that many customers actively use with good results, I was slightly disappointed though to learn that their data movement engine only executes once every 24 hours and cannot be made more frequent.  I’m not sure how that compares to EMC FAST but is something I’ll include in a more expansive post.

A feature I had heard of but didn’t quite understand previously was Compellent’s Live Volume.  It’s another unique feature for Compellent and one of my fellow delegates even described it as “EMC vPlex that you could actually afford”. Compellent implement the Live Volume feature at software level as opposed to a hardware based implementation like EMC vPlex. Compellent are able to present the same volume, with the same identity in two different locations, they do this using the underlying WAN optimised asynchronous replication. One point of note was that this is not an active / active DR like setup,  this is a setup for use in a controlled maintenance scenario, such as SAN fabric maintenance or a DC Power down test.

Compellent also took the opportunity to share some roadmap information. Highlights included the release of the 64 bit, Series 40 Controller base on the Intel Nehalem, encrypted USB device for seeding replication, a move to smaller 2.5” drives and 256 bit full disk encryption among others.

Although we were situated on Microsoft’s Campus for a large part of Tech Field day we were never presented to by Microsoft, which was a shame.  We did however get the chance to visit the Microsoft store which is for employees only.  It gave us all a chance to buy some discounted Microsoft Software and souvenirs of our visit to Redmond which we all took advantage of.

Tech Field Day delegates Kevin Houston, Stephen Foskett and Jason Boche using their iPhones and iPads in the heart of the Microsoft campus. Note Jason Boche using an iPad and wearing his VMware VCDX shirt, brilliant!

Our afternoon session was spent a short bus ride away from Microsoft at NEC America’s Seattle office.  We were here to hear about NEC’s storage offering (I had no idea they even did storage) and more specifically the NEC HYDRAstor range. We had a very in depth session on this fascinating product with Gideon Senderov, Director of Product Management for the HYDRAstor range.

NEC have taken an innovative approach with this product, one I was not expecting. They utilise full blown NEC servers to provide a two tier architecture made up of front end accelerator nodes and back end storage nodes.  On top of this they don’t use the traditional RAID model, instead using something known as erasure coding to provide improved data protection. I will deep-dive this particular data protection method in another article but it was a very interesting and different approach to what I’m used to.

The HYDRAstor grid is marketed as “Storage for the next 100 years” and with it’s grid architecture it’s reasonably easy to see how that statement could be realised.  You can add additional nodes into the grid and it will automatically redistribute itself to take advantage of the capacity.  You can also mark nodes for removal,  the system evacuating the data to enable nodes to be removed from the grid.  This combined with the ability to co-exist old and new HYDRAstor nodes shows why it’s a good storage location for data with a very long term retention requirement.

It appeared to me that HYDRAstor was designed specifically as a location for the output of archive or backup data and not a primary data storage solution. The reason I say this is that when we discussed in-line de-duplication the product was already integrated with major backup vendors (Symantec NetBackup, CommVault Simpana, Tivoli Storage Manager and EMC Networker). NEC were getting very clever by stripping out metadata from these backup vendors to improve the level of de-dedupe that could be achieved with the product when storing backup data.

I will revisit the HYDRAstor, once I have had a chance to go over my notes I fully intend to dedicate a full article to it as I was very impressed.

Rodney Haywood and Gideon Senderov white boarding the configuration of the NEC HYDRAstor

© Craig for Gestalt IT, 2010. | Gestalt IT Seattle Tech Field Day – Day 2 Summary
Read more posts categorized as Events, Featured, Storage

Following are three questions answered by Compellent Director of Corporate Communications, Liem Nguyen. Read my answers over at Compellent’s Around the Block blog!

What makes the Field Day event a good match for Compellent?

A typical tradeshow gets a bunch of people together in one location and you end up with vendors showcasing their wares in booths and holding meetings with customers, partners, and thought leaders. Compellent goes to many each year, and we love them because we meet lots of people in our community. However, not everyone who has a day job – i.e. bloggers – can take time away to meet with us to get the scoop on product updates and share ideas on important trends.

Tech Field Day is unique because it allows Compellent to make connections with a lot of sharp people who we might not normally meet face to face – or may have known only through Twitter or their blogs. It’s a great forum for exchange of ideas and for us to get feedback on our product strategy and direction – listening to feedback and acting upon it is something we’ve always tried to do, even before we launched our very first product.

What will you do to make your presentation really stand out?

I’ve always felt that giving people great content to chew on makes a big difference. We’re planning to give the usual overview to introduce ourselves to some new folks, but we’re also going to do some chalk talks to really get into the bits and blocks on what makes Fluid Data tick and what makes it different from other virtualized storage vendors. I’m excited that we’ll have a great group of folks who’ve been with Compellent for years, have seen us through a lot of change and growth, and were there almost at the beginning. Guys like Bob Fine, Scott DesBles and Justin Braun. They’re the big brains. I’m just the not-so-pretty face.

How will you know if the Field Day event was a success for Compellent?

Well, a big indicator will be whether the delegates understand the Compellent differentiators and report on them—such as the notion that not all automated tiered storage and thin provisioning are created equal. I’m just being honest here. If we were successful at describing who we are and the storage pain points we’re trying to address with Fluid Data, then we’ll know soon enough when we get their reactions in person and online. I’m sure nobody’s going to hold back their opinions, and frankly, we want honest feedback. It’s the only way we get better as a company.

Second, I hope to know people a little better afterward, talk to them online and continue the discussion. So we better get a lot of new followers on Twitter!

Follow @Compellent on Twitter, or use the @TechFieldDay Twitter lists: Seattle Sponsors and Seattle Delegates. More information is available at our Tech Field Day Seattle page!

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2010. | 3 Questions For Field Day Sponsor, Compellent
Read more posts categorized as Events, Exclusive, Featured, Storage