How could a company as mighty and diverse as HP have had so many issues with executive management?

HP stumbled mightily in 2011, and it had nothing to do with product or people. Even sales remained strong, though the PC business is changing. HP’s mighty stumble was a crisis of confidence due to a chain of shenanigans at the very top. This culminated with the short reign of Léo Apotheker, leaving HP to reassure the market of its strategy.

HP And the Enterprise IT Industry

Sometimes, it’s hard to get a sense of scale when talking about very large things. How big is the solar system? How far away is the nearest star? The same is true of earthly things, exemplified by popular misconceptions about the global financial crisis. It’s difficult for people to understand just how much money a trillion dollars is.

In my little world of enterprise storage, it’s difficult to reconcile “big storage” players like EMC and NetApp with “big storage and everything else” players like HP, Dell, Oracle and IBM. Sure, EMC and NetApp lead the pack in terms of market share, but they’re nowhere near as large as the integrated players. HP has more than 7 times the revenue of EMC, which makes 3 times more than NetApp.

This old slide might need updating, but you get the picture…

HP is an incredibly diverse company, dominant in the PC, printing, and blade server market and top 5 just about everywhere else, including networking, services, and enterprise storage. And HP has nearly 325,000 employees, all working to move the company forward in one direction or another.

NetApp is a motorcycle, with one drive wheel pushing it forward at high speed; HP is more like NASA’s shuttle crawler-transporter, a 16 motor mammoth. Single-purpose companies can be agile, but they can also be derailed by market downturn or technological shift. Storage specialists like NetApp continually try to innovate and acquire to keep themselves vital, while larger companies like Cisco and EMC try to diversify while maintaining market leadership. HP doesn’t need to try; it is diverse.

HP Is a Very Large Thing

I watched HP's rise in the server market of the 1990's

HP has long been synonymous with innovation, high-technology, and silicon Valley. I have been an HP customer as long as I have been in IT, and watched as they integrated technology from Apollo and Convex in the 1990’ s. The server products that resulted became the dominant UNIX platform, but HP’ s innovative storage concepts didn’ t take the market by storm.

After HP merged with Compaq (which brought Tandem and Digital Equipment Corporation), the company vaulted ahead in the Wintel market and also gained valuable storage expertise. Throughout the last decade, HP was firing on all cylinders and dominant in nearly every arena. The company owns half the blade server market, is tied for first in servers, leads in PCs and printers, and is a contender in networking and storage. It’s simply impossible to say what HP is in a single sentence.

HP storage has an extremely broad product range, which management is working to reconcile. Acquisitions of LeftHand, Ibrix, and 3PAR gave HP storage shot in the arm to be sure. An injection of startup mojo has energized the marketing and product groups within HP just when the company needed it. HP’ s market share has grown somewhat as a result, though not as much as the hyper-focused NetApp. HP networking similarly took on 3Com, bedeviling Cisco in the Ethernet switch market.

The Executive Soap Opera

It takes a lot to bring a mammoth to its knees, but a shot between the eyes usually does the trick. While the many engines of HP push it forward, the company’s upper management has seemed, at times, suicidal. Business schools could design an entire curriculum around the folly of Patricia “I spy” Dunn and Mark “penny-pinching” Hurd. Who would think that HP management could top this?

From August 2010 through September 2011, HP dominated IT headlines in completely the wrong way. The board wanted a change, and selected Léo Apotheker to transform HP. But it was a soap opera from the very start, with Oracle hiring Mark Hurd and sending Apotheker into hiding among accusations of corporate espionage while at SAP.

The new CEO didn’t seem to understand HP at all, though he was intent on steering it in a new direction. Apotheker set about dismantling HP’s consumer and end-user businesses, killing Palm/WebOS and threatening to sell off the PC business. The company was to focus instead on enterprise computing, but these drastic moves spooked the entire industry.

It wasn’t long before HP’s board struck again, with a shake up at the hands of Ray Lane and former eBay CEO Meg Whitman brought in to replace Apotheker. The first order of business for the new HP executive team appears to be reassuring the entire world that management has not gone completely insane.

Stephen’s Stance

To an outsider like me, the most disappointing thing about HP’s mighty stumble is that it has nothing to do with the people who really make the company what it is. I have met many creative, hard-working individuals in HP’s storage, server, networking, and printer groups, and they could not be more different from the executive soap opera. I only hope that this new board and CEO will bring some stability and let HP cruise forward once again.

Disclaimer: HP has sponsored the Tech Field Day events which I organize, and has on occasion invited me to attend events at their expense.  But I do similar work with nearly every company in the IT industry, and this piece is my own opinion.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2012. |
HP’s Mighty Stumble


This post was categorized as Computer History, Enterprise storage, Gestalt IT. 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. | HP’s Mighty Stumble
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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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The great battle of enterprise storage is on!

The time has come to take sides on the core question of storage for virtual servers: Do you want storage intelligence to live in the hypervisor or the array? Most administrators are already lining up on one side or the other, unintentionally casting their vote while the rest flounder. But the storage industry must wake up and embrace the divide.

Hypervisor Huggers Unite!

Do you “heart” virtualization?

VMware’s vSphere dominates the world of enterprise server virtualization and has become the core element of the modern open systems datacenter. Microsoft recognizes this but has been unable to field a competitive hypervisor ecosystem for the virtual datacenter. Today, vSphere is the state of the art and nowhere is this more apparent than in storage.

In just a few years, VMware has delivered and updated a host of advanced storage functionality, from provisioning to migration and load balancing to backup and data protection. vSphere 5 includes an advanced and scalable storage virtualization layer, delivering everything a datacenter needs. VMFS sculpts basic block storage into a shared resource for virtual machines, with snapshots, policy-based layout and movement, and flexible allocation and thin provisioning.

Most VMware administrators are “server guys” and relish these features. They have never experienced an automated “storage service” like this, and the enterprise storage world has never been able to construct anything remotely as flexible, user-friendly, and functional. And Hypervisor Huggers don’t need complex enterprise storage arrays to do it: They can use basic iSCSI or Fibre Channel devices to provide performance and capacity and let VMware do the rest!

Storage DRS is exemplary of the new virtual datacenter world. Introduced in vSphere 5 (and restricted to the pricey Enterprise Plus license), Storage DRS uses the core technology of Storage vMotion to dynamically balance I/O and capacity across a diverse pool of storage. Storage DRS even uses Policy-Driven Storage and VASA to enforce tiered storage and data placement strategy. This kind of virtualization has been a “holy grail” quest for the enterprise storage industry, but they’ve never delivered on their promises.

Cheers for Storage Stalwarts!

Do you wish all this virtualization nonsense would just go away?

But not every IT environment wants be 100% vSphere focused, and many aren’t convinced that dumb storage is the smartest place for their data. These Storage Stalwarts want smarter and better-integrated storage arrays, and VMware is innovating here as well.

VMware’s Storage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI) technology is squarely aimed at this market. VAAI allows vSphere to hand off heavy storage operations to the high-end storage arrays from the major players. It works transparently, too, coordinating cloning without the kind of scripting and hair-pulling that used to require. VAAI in vSphere 4.1 also includes block zeroing support and something called “atomic test and set” which we’ll get to in a moment. Microsoft announced their own cloning integration, ODX, but it won’t ship until Windows Server 8 appears sometime next year.

But cloning is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Hypervisor-to-array integration. The rising army of NAS users have seen the glory of more-complete array integration for a while, and they’re not quiet about it. They love that VMware’s NFS protocol support makes storage “disappear” in vCenter, becoming just another resource with integrated thin provisioning and flexible allocation and movement.

VMware is moving aggressively to please their Storage Stalwarts, adding more VAAI support for block and file in vSphere 5. But, as the company laid out at VMworld 2011, neither access method is ideal for virtual servers. So VMware has been pushing the enterprise array vendors for ever-greater integration. They see a future where a VAAI-based protocol enables arrays to de-multiplex I/O streams from the hypervisor and intelligently handle per-VM data.

Stephen’s Stance

You can spot a Hypervisor Hugger by their big LUNs: They would rather treat storage as a bulk commodity, and array vendors should be lining up to get their business. Storage Stalwarts will jump on each new VMware innovation, finally making use of the capabilities they have spent over a decade paying for but not utilizing. The only untenable stance is trying to keep a foot in both worlds: It’s foolish to buy an enterprise array and use it as bulk storage!

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2011. | Are You a Hypervisor Hugger or a Storage Stalwart?
Read more posts categorized as Featured, Server Virtualization, Storage

I’ve got a new video podcast up and running: Raising the Floor is a series of discussions about the future of enterprise IT. I kicked the series off talking about one of my favorite topics: Cloud storage.

I invited two excellent guests to join me for this conversation:

1. Josh Goldstein, VP of Marketing, Cirtas
2. Andres Rodriguez, Founder and CEO, Nasuni

It was a pretty broad discussion, all packed into less than half an hour. I urge you to check out the podcast (and subscribe in iTunes, rss, or email) but I wanted to share a few excerpts. You can also read the entire transcript over at Foskett Services: I’ll be posting it as a series of articles over the next week!

Andres Rodriguez: I think one of the things that hurt StorageNetworks at the time was the fact that they couldn’t deploy the equipment in an efficient, multi-tenant way. And so, if you look at the new cloud architectures, (places like Nirvanix, places like Amazon) those systems are designed from the get-go to be shared among many, many users, and make very efficient use of the equipment and the software running it across that user base.

…

Josh Goldstein: Today, the cloud is built on top of process that are very difficult for most companies to replicate on their on. So, the price you’re paying to your cloud provider includes not just storing your data but also keeping multiple replicas of that data spread across different geographical sites.

You’re highly protected against not only a disk drive failure, but also an entire array failure or even an entire site failure where your information’s still is survived those kinds of events and is remaining accessible to your when you need it.

That’s something that for most organizations to engineer that level of reliability is extremely expensive and difficult for them. The cloud providers have been able to do that at scale and still deliver the capacity to you with that type of protection at a price point that’s really pretty amazing.

…

Andres Rodriguez: I’ll start there and I said anything that traditional storage world, we have file based systems. We have block based systems and that is exactly where Cirtas and Nasuni stand. We are the equivalent of say a company named EMC and NetApp for the cloud world. The approaches are complimentary. And they are both trying to solve the same problem. I’ll start on the file side but Josh can take on the block. But on the file level is really, look, if you want to have something that behaves very much like a file server, say like a NetApp box. It means you are going to have a file system, you want to have a protocol to export it locally on so something like CIFS, you are now going to have access to directory integration so that you can have access control. This is what makes a file server useful in the datacenter.

…

Andres Rodriguez: One of the really interesting things about that is that Josh is essentially describing thin provisioning in the classic sense. But unlike doing thin provisioning and this is the cloud is automatically provisioned. So he is essentially promising the volume. But then the volume is growing gradually, smoothly without any administrative interference. Without you having to worry about it; the volume is filling in its data as it goes. And that is one of the things we talked about in the beginning.

The cloud really allows you to build a different type of storage system, because automatic provisioning is really thin provisioning should be but isn’t. When you’re talking about physical linked arrays that are limited by actual hard drives, you know, running, spindles running in your datacenter.

Again, you can watch the video of the whole conversation right now over at Foskett Services, or you can read the transcripts that will be posted there over the next few days.

Disclaimer: I worked at StorageNetworks, and Nasuni is a client of Foskett Services.

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2011. | Talking Cloud Storage Gateways With Nasuni and Cirtas
Read more posts categorized as All, Storage, Tech Field Day Roundtable Podcast

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2011. | Storage is Not Getting Cheaper
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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

IT is crossing a chasm, and we may not be prepared for the new direction we are taking

I’m an IT revolutionary. I talk all the time about the quaint backwards “state of the art” in enterprise IT, what with its (many) decades old protocols, paradigms, and practices. What we call modern is really just a charade of faked-out old-fashioned open systems infrastructure: Pretend servers talking to fake disks over frankenstein networking technology.

What is Flexible IT?

I’ll be doing a “Twitterview” about Flexible IT today with NetApp. While I’m sure most companies would like to define flexible IT as “what we have in our product catalog,” I’m not going to play that game. IT has to change its ways or The Techie/Business Schismwill get us all.

I see the roadmap ahead as one journey over two paths:

1. Tactically, IT infrastructure groups must immediately begin implementing technologies that are responsive to user needs and focused on improving the performance of the business applications they support. This is what NetApp is calling Flexible IT.
2. Strategically, IT infrastructure must change entirely, implementing revolutionary platforms to support the next-generation apps that are being widely developed. Call this “cloud” if you must, but just about everything we take for granted today will lose significance in this new era.

Flexible IT (as it stands today) is tactical. IT infrastructure must be entirely virtualized to enable “right now” provisioning and reconfiguration. This means embracing enabling technologies like server-side hypervisors, blade computing, converged networking and I/O, and advanced storage technologies.

What Does it Mean to be a Service Provider?

But real IT flexibility will mean higher-level abstraction. The next applications won’t want to run on “a server” – even a very flexible one. These apps will require a programming platform that abstracts away the entire concept of “server.” Although there will always be servers and disks and such, they will fade into the background, hidden under a layer of application services.

You know how some people like to think of themselves as “service providers”? They’re on the right track, though I’m not sure that they (yet) grasp the full significance of that concept.

A service provider has to provide the services required by consumers or it will fail. This means IT infrastructure has to prepare the environment demanded by IT application developers, rather than just shuffling around the chairs and tables and hoping customers will stream in.

What happens when the IT applications group asks the IT infrastructure manager to implement Microsoft’s Azure Services Platform? What if they want to run on App Engine or Force.com? The head-scratching in the VMware community about SpringSource is a sign that IT infrastructure just doesn’t comprehend what’s happening (yet).

Stephen’s Stance

This is a strategic shift, and we have to be ready. Being ready means changing not just what we do but also how we do it. The systems we employ in a decade might look familiar inside, but the process of delivering services on them will be entirely different. Making this shift requires real flexibility from IT, not just another round virtualization fake-outs.

Image credits: Highway construction Guizhou S0404 by sweart, VW engine by Grant Foskett

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2010. | Flexible IT and the Path to the Services Future
Read more posts categorized as All, Cloud Computing, Storage

We need to move beyond fake disks and deploy application-centric storage

Change is not a word normally associated with storage, and revolution is practically unheard of. Today’s modern enterprise storage systems and networks employ massive resources to do one simple thing: Emulate the basic hard disk drives used over three decades ago. But cracks are appearing in our mausoleum of fake disks: Application developers are discovering the value of object storage, and storage systems are appearing to support this need.

I also wrote about this two years ago, proclaiming that We Need a Storage Revolution and forecasting The Techie/Business Schism

The CAS Revolution

Caringo founder and CTO, Paul Carpentier, rose to prominence around 2000 at FilePool, one of the prime movers in the content-addressable storage (CAS) space. I recall a light going off in my head as Paul introduced me to FilePool’s CAS technology back then, imagining the possibilities of the concept. Files would be stored based on “what they were” rather than “where they were” and could be organized according to application needs rather than the conventional “extent of blocks” or tree heirarchy.

CAS discarded decades of filesystem and block storage baggage, introducing a new method for storing and retrieving data that better-matched the burgeoning web and enterprise applications of today. I had seen the failure of the first wave of storage service providers from inside StorageNetworks, and it was this desire for a real storage revolution that led me to dive into cloud storage at Nirvanix almost a decade later. Although I am now on my own, I remain convinced that the future belongs to storage systems that look nothing like today’s SAN and NAS.

Shortly after that 2001 meeting, EMC acquired FilePool and launched it as the Centera product line. But CAS systems quickly ran into a serious roadblock: Conventional applications cannot read and write to unconventional storage systems like Centera. EMC pushed key software vendors (especially in the archiving space) to create special Centera interfaces, and the industry bogged down developing the XAM standard. Other companies, like Seven Ten Storage Software, jumped in to help with the translation from proprietary CAS interfaces, but the transition from legacy files and blocks to object storage has been long and slow.

Cloud Storage: Another Dimension

Meanwhile, in an alternate dimension, web developers realized they had a serious problem. They were developing applications that scaled massively, spanning servers and exhausting conventional filesystems. Conventional systems just wouldn’t cut the mustard.

Since they were soaking in web applications, these developers applied the lessons of web services to storage: Why not just make an HTTP connection and ask for an object by a unique ID rather than walk a filesystem tree? Why not encapsulate the “state” of this request in the request itself rather than make a lasting connection and association between the client and server?

Thus was born cloud storage, and it was bookseller Amazon who opened the floodgates with their 2006 introduction of a “Simple Storage Service” or S3. They allowed anyone to store and retrieve objects from their massive web services infrastructure. S3 and similar services from Rackspace, Nirvanix, and others, are special-purpose web servers, and their simple interfaces are wonderfully attractive to web developers. For example, this WordPress-based blog uses cloud storage to serve images to your browser!

Similarities in CAS and Cloud

Although developed from vastly-differing starting points, CAS and cloud storage are essentially similar: Both reject conventional blocks and files in favor of object storage; both organize data with metadata databases; both multiply and scale out. There is one other major similarity between CAS and cloud storage: Both are attractive to service providers.

Imagine you operate a business that stores data for customers. You would want a flexible infrastructure that would scale with demand and segment each “tenant” from others for security and performance. As we learned at StorageNetworks, conventional SAN and NAS systems just weren’t meant to work in this kind of environment. Whether operating an internal service or a public cloud, service providers require something entirely different.

Cloud storage was designed from the start with service providers in mind, embedding per-object and per-”bucket” security, scalability, and abstraction between hardware and clients. Although quite complex to design, cloud storage is amazingly simple to use, provided an application can interface with it.

CAS wasn’t designed like this. Systems like EMC’s Centera were created for the needs of applications like enterprise archiving, but secure storage of content and extreme scalability are critical here as well. But early CAS systems didn’t need simple web-style interfaces or extreme hardware abstraction. These were enterprise systems, after all.

The CAS/Cloud Colission

CAS wasn’t exactly successful. Although object storage found a niche in enterprise archiving, the enterprise storage world has mostly continued with blocks and files. The major storage vendors all have some kind of object storage, but most are repurposed NAS rather than dedicated CAS like the Centera.

Although much skepticism has been raised about cloud storage in the enterprise, its impact on application development cannot be denied. Indeed, the majority of developers are now focused on programming platforms that abstract both compute and storage from conventional operating systems. The next generation of applications will run in “platform as a service” environments first, and cloud storage is a key component.

Storage vendors are rapidly moving to rework their conventional systems for cloud use. Although block and file systems from 3PAR, NetApp, Isilon, Symantec, HDS, HP, and others are useful in cloud environments, unconventional CAS becomes more valuable here. This is where EMC, Mezeo, and Caringo (with Dell) shine, and why HDS bought Parascale, NetApp bought Bycast, and what Overland could do with MaxiScale. In the mean time, “gateway” products from Nasuni, Cirtas, StorSimple, Twin Strata, and Asigra are awfully interesting.

Stephen’s Stance

The storage revolution is coming, whether we in the industry are ready or not. Developers are voting with their feet, targeting cloud storage and application platforms rather than conventional filesystems. Although the market for cloud storage products is slow to develop, the cloud storage concept will eventually dominate the landscape.

It seems most likely that this revolution will decimate the storage industry as we know it today. Unable to push high-margin storage arrays into the ballooning cloud space, product vendors will see their market share eroded by service providers with no use for these expensive systems. Monolithic file and block will soldier on in the new legacy applications, but the action will inevitably slip away.

The likely winners will be those who can leverage commodity hardware for scale-out cloud storage use. The proliferation of cloud platforms will settle down, with a few gaining traction and the rest discarded. Then we will see companies like HP, Dell, and Oracle rise to lead the storage sales charts with massive volume shipments to service providers.

Disclosure: I used to work for StorageNetworks (which is now defunct) and Nirvanix.

Image credit: Barcelona Graffiti by Aeioux

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2010. | From CAS to Cloud: Revolutionary Storage
Read more posts categorized as All, Cloud Computing, Storage

Overland’s SnapServer will soon scale out to hundreds of nodes, thanks to MaxiScale’s technology

Overland Storage is showing intriguing signs of life. Once relegated to OEM tape library duty, Overland received an injection of cash and (more importantly) talent this year. Now the company is stepping up the technology behind their SnapServer NAS array by acquiring scale-out file storage company, MaxiScale. They intend to bring the scalable capacity and performance normally associated with enterprise and high-performance computing systems to the mass market.

Overland In A Snap

Snap Appliance and Overland Storage are familiar names in the enterprise storage space, but the two companies have had a convoluted history. Snap was born in 1998 as a product of Meridian Data and acquired by backup giant Quantum one year later for about $85 million. Although successful, the Snap NAS products were not at home among Quantum’s tape-heavy product lines. The division was re-purchased in 2002 as Snap Appliance by private investors, led by current CEO Eric Kelly, for just $11 million. Two years later Snap was again absorbed by a familiar storage name: This time $100 million brought it into Adaptec.

Quantum competitor Overland Storage re-purchased Snap from Adaptec in 2008 for just $3.6 million and brought Kelly back as CEO in 2009. Kelly brought back former Snap (and Data Robotics) marketing guru Jillian Mansolf this year, and they were soon joined by Dr. Geoff Barrall, founder of Data Robotics and BlueArc. Although a public company, Overland (NASDAQ:OVRL) also raised an additional $12 million in private equity financing, an unknown amount of which went to purchase MaxiScale.

You may also want to read The Rebirth of Overland Storage

This brings us to today, with Overland Storage on the rise, with strong OEM and channel sales in tape and disk storage devices. Overland’s product lines include the NEO tape libraries, REO virtual tape devices, SnapSAN block arrays and various SnapServer unified and NAS systems.

The highlight of Overland’s storage offerings is the SnapServer N2000, a unified iSCSI and NAS array solidly placed in the entry- to mid-market. Like many competitors, Overland relies on a single- or dual-controller storage “head” based on industry-standard CPU technology and scales with additional disk “shelves”. Unusually, Overland’s N2000 line currently relies on a single SAS connection daisy-chained to its E2000 expansion units. One hopes dual connections and faster connectivity are coming soon.

MaxiScale: Scale-Out NAS

Venture-funded startup MaxiScale developed a scale-out NAS capability, allowing multiple NAS servers to be consolidated into a unified namespace without the usual bottlenecks of clustered solutions. The company headed for the cloud storage market, boasting massive scalability and management benefits.

MaxiScale’s technology differentiator was in their rejection of conventional clustering and scale-out approaches. Many scale-out solutions rely on shared-nothing coordinated nodes, but it is often difficult to scale and manage these solutions. This has caused much effort to build cluster coordination through metadata, exemplified by SAN filesystems (including EMC’s MPFS and Quantum’s StorNext) as well as clustered NAS solutions like pNFS.

This MaxiScale illustration shows their distribution of metadata and content as well as their unified namespace

MaxiScale’s “FLEX” technology takes an entirely different approach. It distributes “peer sets” of data across multiple nodes like pNFS but also distributes metadata rather than relying on a single central node. Combining this with a unified namespace, MaxiScale claims to scale to thousands of nodes with linear performance. The company had targeted cloud service providers interested in massive scale using commodity hardware.

Overland + MaxiScale = SnapScale?

Overland appears to be bringing MaxiScale back down to earth, leveraging their technology to combine a set of in-datacenter SnapServers into a unified, high-performance cluster. Although a number of other companies claim scale-out capabilities (Isilon and HP X9000 spring to mind), this is a unique capability in the SMB and midrange NAS market, and Overland will surely make hay as a low-priced alternative.

The company could quickly implement MaxiScale’s software on their existing industry-standard hardware and push a line of “SnapScale” appliances. But things will get more interesting once they begin integrating the technology into their GuardianOS software. Imagine a scale-out solution that enables a company to grow from a single sub-$10,000 NAS to a vast cluster of thousands of nodes with linear performance gains. Even being able to add a half-dozen NAS heads would be a welcome alternative to Dell, HP, and NetApp offerings. In the longer term, Overland could use this technology to break from the head-and-expansion architecture they currently employ, shifting to a cloud-like distributed architecture.

Stephen’s Stance

Overland is making all the right moves. Eric Kelly should be commended for taking bold action to re-energize the company with an infusion of money, talent, and technology. The MaxiScale technology is impressive, and adding it to Snap for a mid-market offering is potentially game-changing.

There are lots of SMB and midrange NAS systems, and most are fairly similar in terms of technology. Overland fell in that group as well until now, but the addition of MaxiScale is a real differentiator for the company. Mansolf and Barrall have proven that they can take out-of-the-ordinary technology and market it to the masses, and this acquisition gives Overland another chance to execute. I will be watching their progress with great interest!

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2010. | Overland Snaps Up MaxiScale to Scale Up Snap
Read more posts categorized as All, Storage

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