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

Because the unit is new and I decided to get it setup all by myself, asking questions where needed, some things are not as rosy as I had hoped they would be.  The biggest issue I have right now is domain joins.  It seems they fail all the time. I am working on this issue and hope to have it resolved this week.

The next issue that finds me a bit troubled is migration.  Sure there is copy and paste, but that smells of inefficiency to me.  I am trying to chase down some of the migration tools I have read about but the EMC-Copy utility doesn’t seem to get the job done (or I am using it wrong).

If all goes well, the users will be presented with the new storage in a week or so and then it is on to home directory “stuff”.

To move or let them move… that is the question

I am on the fence when it comes to Home Directories.  Yes we need them, yes they need to live on the Celerra, but who gets to be the one to put them there.  My initial thought was to shove all the data over in a migration and not worry about it, but that is not effective use of storage.  Keeping whatever is out there for as long as whenever is not a good move.  I am planning to e-mail the user community and let them know that they need to clean up their rooms by <insert deadline here> so that the useable data can be migrated.

This will save initial storage at the outset and allow everyone to be under their quota.  Users under quota are a good thing, because that way the hard limit wont hit right away and can actually be enforced.

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post’s poll.

I am leaning toward a set amount of storage per user, across the board.  This means that my co-workers need to reduce what is stored.  That should make for an interesting few weeks.  Some will have no problem as they do not use much now, some will have limit issues right away.

Either way, I think that will suit us best until we can determine needs and usage to allow additional shelves to be installed.

© derek for Gestalt IT, 2011. | Getting acquainted with storage
Read more posts categorized as All, 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

The Tech Field Day staff have been working behind the scenes to improve the quality and timeliness of video output from our event. We are pleased to present the first result of this work, in the form of live streaming from Tech Field Day 4 in San Jose this week.

NAS acceleration specialist Avere, led by industry veteran Ron Bianchini, was the third presenter at Tech Field Day 4 in San Jose. Ron and marketing VP Rebecca Thompson led the team through a rousing technical presentation, and left many delegates saying they were very impressed.

Following the Avere presentation, the delegates spent 20 minutes discussing the technology, application ideas, and the future of the company.

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2010. | Avere: Live From Tech Field Day San Jose
Read more posts categorized as Events, Exclusive, 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

Huawei Symantec recently introduced their SAN, NAS, and security offerings for the United States market

Surprise! Huawei Symantec has arrived in the United States, ready to take on the midrange storage and network security market with a line of devices that have proven their worth in the international market for three years. I sat down with the company’s management at Storage Networking World and quizzed them on their plans and aspirations for growth.

Introducing Huawei Symantec

It’s important to get one thing straight right off the bat: Huawei Symantec Technologies Co., Ltd (Huawei Symantec) is neither Chinese telecom giant, Huawei, nor American storage and security powerhouse, Symantec. It is an entity unto itself, formed in 2008 as a joint venture of the two but managed independently. And Huawei Symantec USA (HS USA) is a wholly-owned subsidiary of this China-based operation rather than a simple sales or marketing engine. Huawei Symantec USA is akin to NEC’s American operations rather than a global subsidiary like HDS or an integrator/reseller.

Huawei Symantec was created to commercialize the enterprise storage and server hardware of Huawei and the enterprise software offerings of Symantec, but blessed with its own independent 4,000-strong engineering, marketing, and sales force.

This independence is sometimes evident, though perhaps not in HS USA’s initial product offerings. They will enter the market with three products in two lines:

• “Oceanspace” storage:
  • S2600 “Low-End” Fibre Channel/iSCSI SAN array (see this technical whitepaper for more)
  • N8300 unified SAN/NAS array
• “Secospace” security:
  • Secospace USG2000BSR/HSR router/security appliance

Huawei Symantec has a much-broader product range, however, including VTL and PACS storage, cloud storage solutions, SSD drives, and SAN arrays on the storage side (all part of the Oceanspace line); UTM, Anti-DDoS, VPN, and IDS systems for security (referred to as Secospace); as well as servers. The HS USA team confirmed to me that they intend to broaden their product portfolio in America by bringing additional products to market in the near future.

Although these initial products are based on Symantec software, this is not the case for the entire product line. The Oceanstore VTL appears to use FalconStor software, for example, and Huawei Symantec has created hardware and software components that are distinct from both of its famous parents.

What’s In A Name?

I imagine that the famous names attached to this organization might prove to be both a blessing and a curse. The Symantec name carries cachet in the enterprise IT space, much of it inherited from Veritas along with proven products like Storage Foundation, NetBackup, and Enterprise Vault. Although less familiar to Americans, Huawei is a giant in the data centers of the Far East, with thousands of engineers and customers worldwide. But many will undoubtedly draw conclusions about these parents’ motives and strategies and apply these to their child, Huawei Symantec.

I discussed the entry of HS USA with Symantec staff as well, and they stressed that the new company is not driven by (or coordinated with) their management in Mountain View. Their reaction to the new products appeared to reflect the curiosity and interest they might direct towards any new storage or security company that leveraged their products. In short, Symantec appears supportive but disconnected from HS USA. Although they share a name, Huawei Symantec is not an attempt by Symantec itself to enter the enterprise storage array and security appliance market.

The Huawei name and roots in China may prove somewhat perilous, however. Members of the United States Senate and NSA recently moved to block Sprint Nextel and AT&T from using Huawei telecommunications gear, and some of the IT managers I spoke to at Storage Networking World were similarly worried. They expressed skepticism about the build quality and engineering of Chinese products in general and wondered aloud if Huawei Symantec would meet enterprise standards in terms of localization and customer support. And every end user I spoke to was confused about the company’s relationship with Symantec in particular.

Stephen’s Stance

I have been watching Huawei Symantec’s growth for the last few years, and the company’s entry into the United States market has great potential. Huawei Symantec has proven itself on the international stage and brings tremendous engineering and financial resources to the midrange storage and security market. It leverages the contributions of its famous-name parents but enjoys autonomy to go beyond this base.

Make no mistake: Although this is not just another storage startup, its success is not a foregone conclusion. Localization of products, support, and sales is perilous, and every market is littered with examples of failure. Huawei Symantec must act quickly to build strong relationships with resellers, who have traditionally been the gatekeepers of the midrange storage and security market. They must also move aggressively to localize product marketing and develop collateral and strategies to support their new American customers. And they must reach out to educate the market about their relationship with Huawei and Symantec and their engineering credentials.

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2010. | Huawei Symantec Enters The United States Storage and Security Market
Read more posts categorized as All, Security, Storage

Like many I wonder what this does to the whole Unified Storage message because NetApp now have two disparate storage product sets which are not integrated; I’m sure that they are briefing the integration message under NDA and if not, I’d ask why? But I’d interested to see what form the integration takes, will be it be at the tools level or will be it more fundamental integration more akin to OnTap 8.

As NetApp have announced it under the Storage Management Software product set, it appears to be the former, certainly for the short to medium term and I suspect that NetApp are going to be very wary about going after a full blown integration or at least a public statement on it after the torturous integration of Spinnaker.

The data-sheet shows a software gateway layer sitting above the OnTap filers, well I think that’s what it shows. It says that the front-end app server supports NFS/CIFS/HTTP(Restful) protocols communicating with the back-end storage via NFSv3; so theoretically, the back-end storage could be anything supporting NFSv3? But at present the data sheet actually shows a very restricted storage environment supported, namely FAS31x0 and FAS20xx and only SATA drives, so there seems to be no way of utilising your legacy storage in your StorageGrid. This is a little disappointing but no huge surprise, if EMC decide to ‘support’ third party storage with Atmos, it should be no biggie for NetApp to follow suit with StorageGrid; or perhaps vice-versa.

And as ByCast StorageGrid was resold by a number of other vendors, what is the ongoing roadmap for those customers who are running StorageGrid with different vendors storage behind it? Are these customer’s going to be expected to move to NetApp storage?

Also from the diagram in the data-sheet;

‘NetApp StorageGRID object-based storage solution brings the best of NAS and RESTful HTTP client access together’

Now I am willing accept that NetApp claim that the Filer product set are the best of NAS but to provide this ‘best of breed functionality’ with the StorageGrid product would imply a deeper level of integration than I can currently see or are they claiming that the Bycast product was actually the best NAS product out there?

Is the Filer behind the Gateway being treated as pretty a dumb-share-only Filer and not leveraging any of the OnTap features at all? Even if this is the case, it is a cute move politically as the sales-team will not see any potential Filer sales being cannibalised by this new product. A problem that I believe that EMC might have had to deal with the Atmos product set.

One of the keys will be how NetApp present the integration; will they add StorageGrid to Ops Manager? It seems to make sense that you add it at that level because Ops Manager is the preferred way of managing multiple Filers and to get the most out of StorageGrid, there will be many Filers.It also keeps it in the realms of the familiar.

If it is seen as very much a different product it makes the Unified Storage pitch a little harder as it becomes mostly-Unified-Storage product which is a bit like being a little bit unique.

So this announcement asks many more questions than it answers!

And one final comment, what is the difference between an Storage Grid and a Storage Cloud? Is it an Object Cloud or an Object Grid? Does the Object Cloud live in the Storage Grid??

© Martin for Gestalt IT, 2010. | NetApp StorageGrid – More Questions than Answers?
Read more posts categorized as Cloud Computing, Storage

Why does network-attached storage (NAS) have such a poor reputation? This isn’t what the vendors want to be talking about, but some recent product announcements and discussions led to this thought. IT folks as a whole don’t trust NAS for real work, and 20 years of effort from big names like Sun, Microsoft, NetApp, IBM, and the rest hasn’t changed that.

Fear

Back when I used to teach the “Storage 101″ session at Storage Decisions, I was consistently amazed to find little awareness of enterprise NAS systems. People complained about LUNs and Fibre Channel but when I suggested using NFS or SMB their heads almost exploded. “We would never use that for application storage,” they shouted. “File servers are for home directories, not data center stuff!” Clearly, NAS faces an uphill battle.

In a recent piece I wrote, I referred to what I consider to be the prime best practice: Use the right tool for the job. It’s a simple statement, and one that resonates beyond IT and the technology world. But it can be devilishly difficult to see what the right tool is sometimes. Why not use NAS for virtual machine storage? NetApp has been beating that drum for years, yet NAS has a very small footprint in VMware. How about databases on NFS? Exchange over SMB? Block storage has a massive lead over NAS in all of these areas.

Rear this “best practices” piece, Use Process Solutions For Process Problems, Technical Solutions For Technical Ones

IT folks seem downright fearful of file-level storage protocols. Has NFS really burned them that badly over the decades? Can SMB/CIFS really be as bad as they think?

Loathing

I wonder if this terror has more to do with the products people have used than the fundamental concept of file services. Many NAS servers (and clients) are barely functional. Sadly, NFS and SMB are easy to get 80% right, but the 20% corner case interaction takes decades to overcome. My daily storage consulting work exposes me to a myriad of NAS configurations, and few of the multi-platform combinations end well.

Note: Although it has long been known by a variety of names, the Windows NAS protocol is currently called Server Message Block or SMB. Common Internet File System (CIFS) was a failed mid-1990’s attempt by Microsoft to make this protocol standard on the Internet.

Consider the Mac. Apple added an SMB client to OS X in 2001 but, despite many updates, it is far from reliable. Mac users in general loathe connecting to Windows file servers, and business users have located numerous bugs in the handling of Mac-specific file types. It’s bad enough that one company, GroupLogic, created an entire AFP server for Windows just to solve these tricky issues.

This situation often happens in reverse, too. Windows admins are justifiably cautious when deploying non-Windows SMB servers, whether software (Samba, Novell, etc) or system (NetApp, Celerra, BlueArc, etc). As a very early NetApp user, I watched their CIFS/SMB server evolve over a decade and a half into a fairly robust solution, but the early years were downright painful.

Lest you throw rocks at Redmond, know that SMB is not alone with functionality problems. The interoperability of NFS servers and clients is a bit better thanks to open(ish) standards and open source implementations, but its reputation is just as bad. And Apple’s proprietary AFP protocol is downright notorious.

I’ve been there myself many times. I tried to set up a home server based on open source software (Linux, FreeBSD, Samba, Netatalk, etc) but rejected it outright after many frustrating years. Today I use a Mac Mini for file sharing in OS X and serving iTunes music and movies (goodbye, Firefly!) And years of fighting with Samba in enterprise environments taught me two things: It’s possible to get it running well with Windows clients but it’s astonishingly easy to get it wrong.

Enterprise NAS?

We all know that interoperability is devilishly difficult. I don’t envy the NetApp and EMC engineers that have to tweak and tune their server for every possible client, bugs and all. And I am impressed that, after probably millions of man-hours of work, they were able to come up with something stable for a subset of use cases. But this just makes me even more cautious about third-party NAS servers.

I talk to storage vendors all the time, and many of their new products support NFS and SMB. But my internal alarms start going off when I hear about these products. There are two simple reasons for this:

1. As mentioned above, NAS is rare in primary data center applications. It may be common for user files (euphemistically called “unstructured data”) and certain distributed applications (simulation, rendering, etc), but most use cases still call for block SCSI (FC/iSCSI) storage.
2. As further mentioned, getting NAS right takes a massive amount of effort. New and small vendors tend to slap Samba on their (Linux-based) box and call it a day. This is very, very far from being sufficient for enterprise use.

This is why I usually ignore NAS functionality in storage systems except for long-tenured and deep-pocketed vendors. Although the world is turning to “Unified Storage” and multi-protocol support, I’m focusing primarily on block (SCSI) and cloud (REST) capability because the former has proven somewhat easier than NAS to get working and the latter is both simple and “green field” with no legacy concerns.

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2010. | Why Do I Ignore NAS?
Read more posts categorized as Storage

More photos from this event may be found on Flickr

The Field Day delegates were keen on discussing the overall HP strategy, returning time and again to HP’s complete end-to-end product lineup. They were concerned that they had not yet seen HP’s cohesive strategy, but many felt that they could see it emerging as management and product changes are being made. The scale-out NAS concept impressed the delegate crew, and they praised its feature set and the logic of integrating this technology in the company’s newly-unified hardware stack.

Joining HP for this roundtable discussion were the fifteen Tech Field Day Boston delegates.

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

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2010. | Podcast 5: HP Roundtable at Tech Field Day
Read more posts categorized as All, Events, Exclusive, Featured, Storage, Tech Field Day Roundtable Podcast, Top Story

Nimbus claims that the S-class will deliver new levels of performance in a compact, reliable, and affordable package. The array starts at around $25,000 for 2.5 TB of thin-provisioned, deduplicated flash storage and scales to 100 TB and 500,000 IOPS. The array also boasts high-performance snapshots and integrated replication.

Joining Nimbus for this roundtable discussion were ten Tech Field Day delegates:

• Jason Boche (@JasonBoche, Boche.net)
• Carlo Costanzo (@CCostan, VMware Info)
• Chris Evans (@ChrisMEvans, The Storage Architect)
• Greg Ferro (@EtherealMind, EtherealMind)
• Scott D. Lowe (@ScottDLowe, Tech Republic)
• Scott Lowe (@Scott_Lowe, ScottLowe.org)
• Devang Panchigar (@StorageNerve, StorageNerve)
• Bas Raayman (@BasRaayman, Bas Raayman)
• Matt Simmons (@StandaloneSA, Standalone Sysadmin)
• Rick Vanover (@RickVanover, Virtualization Review)

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© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2010. | Podcast 4: Virtual Field Day Nimbus Roundtable
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