The last installment of the Storage Migration Tools series covered RoboCopy, a command line copy utility and also its GUI add-on.  This one is for the GUI lovers.  Let’s get started.

What is Rich Copy?

Rich Copy is a utility that allows files to be copied via a GUI interface.  Some IT Professionals are command line guys, some are not.  If you are not, this tool might be your best free option.

This utility was featured in an Utility Spotlight in TechNet Magazine in the past but I thought it might be a good idea to get my hands on it and see just how it works.

When the utility starts you are presented with a simple working interface, a box to enter the source path and destination path and a dropdown for the copy options as shown in figure A.

 

Rich Copy

When you specify source and destination files, you can simply click the start button and the selected profile of options will copy the files.  The progress of the operation is shown in the bottom pane(s) of the interface.

Copy and Paste it ain’t

Here are two features of Rich Copy that are high on my list and they are not terribly fancy:

• Simple Interface – the simple pane of glass and easy appearance of the software is really refreshing
• Piles of options – because I can create copy profiles specifying options for different scenarios to use via a drop down box, the power of the application remains easy to use.

The options available are configured in an additional screen, shown in figure B, and can be saved in separate profiles.

 

Options available for Copy Jobs

The table below outlines the options available for use in a copy profile.

A quick note about source consolidation

The option to consolidate multiple sources is an interesting one.  If the option is not checked and multiple sources are specified, the source directories are copied into the destination.  Figure C shows a simple example of this scenario.  If the option is turned on, the directory structure from the source is created in the destination when files are copied.  Figure D shows an example of this scenario.

Note: Both images are provided from the Rich Copy help from Microsoft

Figure C

 

Consolidation Off

Figure D

 

Consolidation On

After using the Rich Copy and looking into it for this post, the copy profiles feature is really great if you copy files using similar options frequently.  For example, you might configure and save a profile for a backup job for the My Documents folder on your PC which might schedule it to be off loaded to removable media.  Using a profile allows you to configure it and re-use it as needed.

What’s My Take?

I like the feature set and functionality that Rich Copy brings to the table.  If you are a GUI user it is definitely worth a look.  Support for this utility can certainly be found within its help documentation and on the Internet, even though it is not officially supported by Microsoft.  The utility is very full featured and a breeze to use, as with any software, I can merely suggest that you give it a try and see its features for yourself.  I am very pleased with Rich Copy where I have used it.

© derek for Gestalt IT, 2011. | Storage Migration Tools: RichCopy
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Now that I have the storage in place and turned on, the planning of just how to cut it up can begin.  Because we are an all Windows shop, CIFS will be the method of choice for file systems.  I will likely keep a small section of disk for iSCSI just for opportunities sake.

What now?

Next comes moving the existing data to the Celerra.  This is where I am currently planning and determining how to proceed.  The goal of this series is to look at a few of the tools available to help with data migration and some of the planning that might go with moving data.

As this moves forward I will discuss planning of a migration and what you might consider when looking to migrate data as well as a few of the tools available to accomplish a migration.

Because things are still coming together for these posts, if there are things you want to see or know about, please let me know.

© derek for Gestalt IT, 2011. | Storage Migration Tools: A look at what’s around
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In this post I am going to look at using RoboCopy to migrate information to new storage.

Featured Tool: RoboCopy

RoboCopy is a command line tool from Microsoft that allows for multi-threaded file copying.  It functions similarly to Copy.exe or XCopy.exe but has a few of its own nuances which will be look at here.

Using RoboCopy is quite straight forward, specifying the source, destination, files to be copied,and any options you wish, for example:

robocopy “c:\myfiles” “d:\newstorage” blogpost.docx

Note: Examples in this post will use simple paths on my local machine, but these can be changed to accommodate any storage.

In the above example, the utility will move the blogpost.docx file from the C drive to the D driv

e.  If the file exists in the destination, it will be skipped without prompt.

If a more robust feature set is needed to act on files during the copy operation, robocopy supports the following options:

With the amount of options available for use with RoboCopy, it is an extremely robust tool.  If you are comfortable with the command line it might be the best choice for a data migration.  With a little scripting knowledge you could schedule copies and use the Windows Task Scheduler and options in RoboCopy to move/migrate piles of data.

While researching and playing with RoboCopy, I also discovered a GUI add-on for the utility, details on that can be found here. I highly recommend testing it for data migration, you might be surprised with what you get that you don’t need to pay for.

© derek for Gestalt IT, 2011. | Storage Migration Tools: RoboCopy
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However, I’ve now had time to reflect and one of the most interesting areas I covered this week which was the new storage features in vSphere 4.1. I had the chance to cover these in multiple sessions, see various demo’s and talk about it with the VMware developers and engineers responsible. There are two main features I want to cover in depth as I feel they are important indicators of the direction that storage for VMware is heading.

SIOC – Storage I/O Control

SIOC had been in the pipeline since VMworld 2009, I wrote an article on it previously called VMware DRS for Storage, slightly presumptuous of me at the time but I was only slightly off the mark. For those of you who are not aware of SIOC, to sum it up again at a very high level let’s start with the following statement from VMware themselves.

SIOC provides a dynamic control mechanism for proportional allocation of shared storage resources to VMs running on multiple hosts

Though you have always been able to add disk shares to VM’s on an ESX host, this only applied to that host, it was incapable of taking account of VM I/O Behaviour of other VMs on other hosts. Storage I/O control is different in that it is enabled on the datastore object itself, disk shares can then be assigned per VM inside that datastore. When a pre-defined latency level is exceeded on a VM it begins to throttle I/O based on the shares assigned to each VM.

How does it do this, what is happening in the background here? Well SIOC is aware of the storage array device level queue slots as well as the latency of workloads.  During periods of contention it decides how it can best keep machines below the predefined latency tolerance by manipulating all the ESX Host I/O Queues that affect that datastore.

In the example below you can see that based on disk share value all VM’s should ideally be making the same demands on the storage array device level queue slots.  Without SIOC enabled that does not happen. With SIOC enabled it begins throttling back the use of the second ESX host’s I/O queue from 24 slots to 12 slots, thus equalising the I/O across the hosts.

Paul Manning (Storage Architect – VMware product marketing) indicated during his session that there was a benefit to turning SIOC on and not even amending default share values.  This configuration would immediately introduce an element of I/O fairness across a datastore as shown in the example described above and shown below.

So this functionality is now available in vSphere 4.1 for Enterprise Plus licence holders only.  There are a few immediate caveats to be aware of, it’s only supported with block level storage (FC or ISCSI) so NFS datastores are not supported. It also does not support RDM’s or datastores constructed of extents, it only supports a 1:1 LUN to datastore mapping. I was told that extents can cause issues with how the latency and throughput values are calculated,  which could in turn lead to false positive I/O throttling, as a result they are not supported yet.

It’s a powerful feature which I really like the look of. I personally worry about I/O contention and the lack of control I have over what happens to those important mission critical VM’s when that scenario occurs. The “Noisy Neighbour” element can be dealt with at CPU and Memory level with shares but until now you couldn’t at a storage level. I have previously resorted to purchasing EMC PowerPath/VE to double the downstream I/O available from each host and thus reduce the chances of contention.  I may just rethink that one in future because of SIOC!

Further detailed information can be found in the following VMware technical documents

• SIOC – Technical Overview and Deployment Considerations
• Managing Performance Variance of applications using SIOC
• VMware performance engineering – SIOC Performance Study

VAAI – vStorage API for Array Integration

Shortly before the vSphere 4.1 announcement I listened to an EMC webcast run by Chad Sakacc.  In this webcast he described EMC’s integration with the new vStorage API, specifically around offloading tasks to the array. So what does all this mean, what exactly is being offloaded?

So what do these features enable? Let’s take a look at them one by one.

Hardware assisted locking as described above provides improved LUN metadata locking.  This is very important for increasing VM to datastore density.  If we use the example of VDI boot storms, if only the blocks relevant to the VM being powered on are locked then you can have a more VM’s starting per datastore.  The same applies in a dynamic VDI environment where images are being cloned and then spun up; the impact of busy cloning periods, i.e. first thing in the morning is mitigated.

The full copy feature would also have an impact in the dynamic VDI space, cloning of machines taking a fraction of the time as the ESX host is not involved. What I mean by that is when a clone is taken now, the data has to be copied up to the ESX server and then pushed back down to the new VM storage location.  The same occurs when you do a storage vMotion, doing it without VAAI takes up valuable I/O Bandwidth and ESX CPU clock cycles. Offloading this to the array prevents this use of host resource and in tests has resulted in a saving of 99% on I/O traffic and 50% saving on CPU load.

In EMC Labs a test of storage vMotion was carried out with VAAI turned off, it took 2 mins 21 seconds.  The same test was tried again with VAAI enabled, this time the storage vMotion took 27 seconds to complete. That is a 5x improvement, and EMC have indicated that they have had a 10x improvement in some cases. Check out this great video which shows a storage vMotion and the impact on ESX and the underlying array.

There is also a 4th VAAI feature which has been left in the vStorage API but is currently unavailable, Mike Laverick wrote about it here. Its a Thin Provisioning API and Chad Sakacc explained during the group session that its main use is for Thin on Thin storage scenarios. The vStorage API will in the future provide vCenter insight into array level over provisioning as well as the VMware over provisioning.  It will also be used to proactively stun VM’s as opposed to letting them crash as currently happens.

As far as I knew EMC was the only storage vendor offering array compatibility with VAAI. Chad indicated that they are already working on VAAI v2 looking to add additional hardware offload support as well as NFS Support. It would appear that 3Par offer support, so that kind of means HP do to, right? Vaughan Stewart over at NetApp also blogged about their upcoming support of the VAAI, I’m sure all storage vendors will be rushing to make use of this functionality.

Further detailed information can be found at the following locations.

• What does VAAI mean to you? – Chad Sakac EMC
• EMC VAAI webcast – Chad Sakac EMC

Storage DRS – the future

If you’ve made it this far through the blog post then the fact we are taking about Storage DRS should come as no great surprise.  We’ve talked about managing I/O performance through disk latency monitoring and talked about array offloaded features such as storage vMotion and hardware assisted locking. These features in unison make Storage DRS an achievable reality.

SIOC brings the ability to measure VM latency, thus giving a set of metrics that can be used for storage DRS.  VMware are planning to add capacity to the storage DRS algorithm and then aggregate the two metrics for placement decisions.  This will ensure a storage vMotion of an underperforming VM does not lead to capacity issues and vice versa.

Hardware Assisted Locking in VAAI means we don’t have to be as concerned about the number of VM’s in a datastore, something you have to manage manually at the moment.  This removal of limitation means we can automate better, a storage DRS enabler if you will.

Improved Storage vMotion response due to VAAI hardware offloading means that the impact of storage DRS is minimised at the host level. This is one less thing for the VMware administrator to worry about and hence smoothes the path for storage DRS Adoption.  As you may have seen in the storage vMotion video above the overhead on the backend array also appears to have been reduced, so you’re not just shifting the problem somewhere else.

For more information I suggest checking out the following (VMworld 2010 account needed)

• TA7805 – Tech Preview – Storage DRS

Summary

There is so much content to take in across all three of these subjects I feel that I have merely scratched the surface.  What was abundantly clear from the meetings and session I attended at VMworld is that VMware and EMC are working closely to bring us easy storage tiering at the VMware level.  Storage DRS will be used to create graded / tiered data pools at the vCenter level, pools of similar type datastores (RAID, Disk type). Virtual machines will be created in these pools; auto placed and then moved about within that pool of datastores to ensure capacity and performance.

In my opinion it’s an exciting technology, one I think simplifies life for the VMware administrator but complicates life for the VMware designer. It’s another performance variable to concern yourself with and as I heard someone in the VMworld labs comment “it’s a loaded shotgun for those that don’t know what they’re doing”.  Myself, I’d be happy to use it now that I have taken the time to understand it; hopefully this post has made it a little clearer for you to.

© Craig for Gestalt IT, 2010. | Whats new in vSphere 4.1 Storage: SIOC, VAAI, and DRS
Read more posts categorized as Featured, Server Virtualization, Storage

But the approvals haven’t stopped Mr. Ellison’s Team from redesigning the SUN ORACLE Exadata platform Version 2 (With SUN ORACLE logo’s on it). A joint venture between ORACLE and SUN has been on for several years now. Today was the day when the new Exadata platform version 2 was presented to the world by Mr. Ellison himself. It was truly visible, that Mr. Ellison is already taking a lot of pride with this acquisition even before its approved.

There was an advertisement earlier this week from ORACLE SUN challenging IBM and all its products and how Mr. Ellison now wants to go after IBM to become the top Infrastructure company. Said that, there are only 3 big infrastructure companies today, IBM and HP going neck to neck in terms of revenues competing for the 1st position, while the pending approval of ORACLE – SUN at number three.

Through it is great to see the vision of Mr. Ellison and how he is internally transforming ORACLE from being a software database company to an Infrastructure company. Today’s announcement of SUN ORACLE Exadata version 2 platform is very unique in that sense. Exadata products has been developed with years of partnership between SUN and ORACLE, but goes to show how both the combined companies can fulfill the datacenter vision END to END.

This platform extensively uses the SUN FlashFire technology and is truly the first OLTP (Online Transaction Processing) System designed to optimize customer data processing using a mix of SUN hardware and ORACLE software. It was very noticeable during the 35 minutes introduction where Mr. Ellison drove the presentation for more than 25 minutes and then handed over to John Fowler, EVP SUN for a technical talk.

Clearly ORACLE is targeting IBM and NCR – Teradata products with the release of this platform. It was obvious in the presentation that Mr. Larry Ellison used the word “THEY” numerous times signaling towards IBM and NCR. Though it was not said during the presentation, “THEY” could include HP as well. At this point without the final approval of the SUN purchase, it wouldn’t make a lot of sense for ORACLE to make another enemy, HP.

Here are some SUN ORACLE Exadata Version 2 platform highlights

1. Exadata Version 2 is optimized for OLTP (Online Transaction Processing), first in its kind to hit the market.
2. Typically SUN ORACLE Exadata Version 2 should give customers a 50X to 100X better performance than standard data warehousing servers.
3. Optimized for Random I/O
4. 1M IOPS per system cabinet
5. Each system cabinet has 8 Compute servers, 176 total processors, 336 TB of Raw Disk, 5TB of Flash Cache (56 Flash Cache cards), 400GB to total DRAM in the 8 compute servers.
6. Intel Nehalem processors, Infiniband switching, FlashCache, 4 Ethernet links per database node.
7. Runs Linux System, Oracle manages cache, fully redundant compute servers and storage. On demand capacity expansion as it relates to compute servers, storage or Infiniband switches.
8. 1 Node (computer server) is the smallest configuration, large configurations can be 8 nodes in one cabinet or 32 cabinets combined together to massively have 32 Million IOPS or several 100 Petabyte of storage optimized for OLTP.
9. Infiniband speed per link is 40 Gbps aggregating to 880 Gbps for a system (cabinet), Non Blocking switch gives a full open & distributed system access for faster processing.
10. Power consumption less than Exadata version 1.0 by 14%
11. Fastest OLTP system, Fastest Data Warehousing system in the world
12. All calculations done in memory (FlashCache), optimizing the system.
13. Massively Parallel Processing, the scale out architecture helps and enables easy on demand expansion.

Couple things to note:

1. Mr. Ellison calls Flash Disk as Dumb Flask Disk, truly remarkable.
2. Also another highlight was to use 56 Flash Cache cards per system (5 TB) and then use 168 x 2TB SATA drives (Possibly 7.2K RPM) to optimize data space (Somehow didn’t make a lot of sense).

Some Questions to Consider :

1. Is this a real threat to Storage & Host providers where you have specialized Hardware / Software combination optimizing your performance for certain applications?
2. Is this the power of ORACLE SUN that we will see in the future?
3. How does this compete with EMC COMPUTE platform (rumors) or the Cisco – EMC Alpine Project (rumors)?
4. Does the VCE (VMware – Cisco – EMC) partnership really focus towards the giant to come ORACLE SUN?
5. What will happen to the ORACLE – HP partnership if the ORACLE SUN buyout gets approval, what happens to HP – Oracle Exadata?
6. Does this create any Antitrust scenarios for the future?
7. Is Mr. Ellison’s dream to own the infrastructure end with the purchase of SUN?

Here are some links for references if you would like to read more about Exadata products

http://www.orafaq.com/wiki/Exadata_FAQ

http://www.sun.com

http://www.oracle.com

© Devang for Gestalt IT, 2009. | SUN ORACLE Exadata Version 2: Showing the power of ORACLE SUN
Read more posts categorized as All, Cloud Computing, Featured, Networking, Storage

To read about Storage Economics – Hardware Maintenance – Part 1

Topics we covered in the previous post included

The concept of Hardware Maintenance

The Strategy related to Hardware Maintenance

The Facts about Hardware Maintenance

The beliefs about Hardware Maintenance

Here are a few other components related to storage hardware maintenance services as it fits into a concept of Storage Economics.

There was an interesting post by David Merrill at HDS regarding how a customer in the APAC market has been able to leverage Independent Service Providers for various different assets that they own and how they decide what stays with the manufacturer and what is being maintained by Independent Service Providers.

The Plan for Hardware Maintenance

Hardware Support: Support on storage assets could be available through Independent Service Providers (ISP’s), which could help reduce CapEx, OpEx and improve ROA by levering the existing technology on the floor for a longer time span.

Remote Support and Diagnostics: Independent Service Providers can enable storage frames for remote call home features, remote support and perform diagnostics for troubleshooting.
Code Upgrades (firmware) and Engineering: This support is typically only available through the manufacturer. But here is a fact; at the end of a 3 year life cycle of the equipment (when you start paying for off warranty support) how many times have you seen code upgrades being offered to customers, since vendors are more focused on technology that is current today).

Global technical Support: Global 24 x 7 technical support is often provided by Independent Service Providers as a part of service offerings.

Onsite Certified & Trained engineers: Independent Service Providers typically hire the same engineers that have been working for the vendor and redeploy them onsite for services

Spares: Spare parts are standard offering through Independent Service Providers to have them shipped at the site within the 4-hour SLA or possibly store it as onsite spares.

SLA: Normally Independent Service Providers SLA’s are matched to vendor specifications.  Also a custom tailored support plan can be created for the test and development systems – non critical systems, which might not need the utmost priority.

Software Support: In most cases Software support can be continued with the vendor, which enables you to receive software updates for your host environment or any other layered software. If your storage platform is more than 5 years old, may be you can investigate into dropping the software support.

The Pricing for Hardware Maintenance

So typically off-warranty hardware maintenance services may be available to you at 50% to 70% discount of vendors list price since these organizations do not have a sustaining engineering cost.

This will help increase the life of the asset you already own on the floor, which is fully functional and operational.

This will further help you reduce your CAPEX (by not purchasing new assets), reduce your OPEX (by reducing your maintenance cost) and improve your ROA (an asset you have already paid for).

This savings will need a 12-month cycle to fully qualify since hardware maintenance services are charged on a monthly basis.

With 50% to 70% savings per device (Storage Frame), if you have an environment with 1PB storage, your organization could see a savings of millions of dollars over 3 years and a 5PB environment might see a double-digit million dollar savings over 3 years.

Is this something that sounds interesting and can help you overall preserve your CapEx and reduce your OpEx?

Your Alternatives for Hardware Maintenance

Are people within your organization ready and open for this concept?

Do your homework in selecting the right service provider.

It is okay to consider giving the Independent Service Providers a partial environment that might consists of Test and Development Systems, to get a better feel for their services and response times.

Compare service offerings from multiple independent service providers.

Ask the right questions and see how long transition plans would take for a cut over.

Ask questions related to outages in these environments and the Independent Service Providers experience around it.

It is completely okay to drill the Independent Service Providers technical folks with tons of questions related to your environment.

Here are some additional things to ask the Independent Service Provider:

Ask about recertification cost

Ask about reconfiguration cost

Ask for any hidden cost

Ask about spares that are used

Ask about spares procurement process

Ask about spares testing process

Ask to see their operations (visit the ISP)

Ask about support plan

Ask to access the online service calls portal

Ask about online web portal for advisories and errors

Ask about response times

Look into escalation plans

Look into call flow processes

Ask about gaps in service compared to the vendor

Ask for a dedicated trained engineer (based on the amount of business)

Ask about training for engineers

Ask for a dedicated account manager

Ask for a dedicated technical contact

Ask for sales contact for your account

Ask for escalation contacts

Ask for project plan related to the transition from vendor to ISP

Investigate how big the Independent Service Provider is

Check references, ask reference customers about outages, parts replacement process, about hardware – software issues and call ownership issues

Compare SLA’s

Check the viability of the support solution (tools, processes, escalation, risks, etc)

Do not make decision on pricing only

Determine contingency plans.

So where do you find these alternatives?

Well, your initial search can begin on the web. Following that, you should further inquire into the company and try to dig into their area of expertise. Ask them about their competition and inquire with the competition on support plans.

If you have a Storage partner, go to them and ask them to find an Independent Service Provider for your organization.

If you have Global Outsourcing partners, inquire with them, to see if they have any strategic partners they recommend.

Honestly, working with so many different customers over the world, I have seen Independent Service Providers do good, they help the customer reduce CapEx and OpEx, extend the life of the equipment and most importantly run the entire operations without any disruptions, but that said, I have seen many Independent Service Providers fail miserably to deliver on promised services.

Do the research and jump on this if it is a viable option for your organization.

Its all about Storage Economics!!!!

© Devang for Gestalt IT, 2009. | Storage Economics – Hardware Maintenance – Part 2
Read more posts categorized as Storage

For example purposes, lets assume we are only talking about one single Storage device (frame) in the environment. Also for this blog post, lets assume the manufacturer (OEM) of the Storage frame is the vendor.

The concept of Hardware Maintenance

You purchased a storage asset 3 years ago. Spend a million dollars in acquisition cost on that storage device, also paid for software licenses, implementation cost, migration cost and training cost.  You are almost at a 2 million dollar mark to implement this Enterprise Class Storage, which includes your Tier1 and / or Tier 2 data.

How is this Storage frame doing today?

It’s working great, applications associated with it are robust, Thank God over the past 3 years we haven’t seen any outages in this environment.

Oh…………by the way, the vendor just visited today and is proposing we do a tech refresh in this environment.

The Strategy related to Hardware Maintenance

So the first question, are you ready for this tech refresh?

Is your business ready for this tech refresh?

Is your team ready and trained for this new technology?

Do you need external resources for this tech refresh?

Are there budgets and proposed growth in the business to pay for this tech refresh?

Do we really need a tech refresh?

Are your applications ready for this tech refresh?

Would your host environments be ready for this tech refresh?

What is that you are trying to gain by this tech refresh – Processing Power, Speed, Savings, Green Data Center, Power, Electricity, management cost, etc?

Are your users complaining about your application performance?

Is the number of users growing on these apps?

So how many Nah’s and Yah’s do we have on the questions above?

The Facts about Hardware Maintenance

The vendor is proposing a substantial savings and helping us reduce the TCO on these assets over the next three years.

Cost of hardware maintenance from the vendor for year 4, year 5 and year 6 (on the existing storage asset) is almost equivalent to the cost of purchasing new assets

We are being offered the best deal, free training, the vendor reduced the hardware acquisition cost by 20% and they have another 5% discount for the quarter closing tomorrow.

The beliefs about Hardware Maintenance

Hardware Support: No one other than the vendor can provide hardware support on the Storage assets because it is just too complex to manage.

Remote Support and Diagnostics: No one other than the vendor can provide remote support and diagnostics.

Code Upgrades (Firmware) and Engineering Support: No one other than the vendor can provide Code upgrades and Engineering Support.

Global Technical Support: No one other than the vendor has a 24 x 7 global technical support.

Onsite Certified & Trained Engineers: Only the vendor has trained and certified onsite engineers.

Spares: 24 x 7, 4 hour response spare parts logistics, only the vendor has it.

SLA: Only the vendor can provide a mission critical or a premium SLA that would include either 24 x 7 x 2 support or 24 x 7 x 4 support.

Software Support: No one other than the vendor can provide Software support

So, how do you get around these industry notions?

Please stay tuned for the next blog post on Storage Economics – Hardware Maintenance – Part 2 tomorrow.

© Devang for Gestalt IT, 2009. | Storage Economics – Hardware Maintenance – Part 1
Read more posts categorized as All, Storage

We at Gestalt IT applaud Cisco, and especially Wendy Mars, for their straightforward responses to our concerns. Cisco responds particularly to some of the question we and others (see the list below) have raised:

• Is it really more than a blade server?
• Who’s going to deliver the solution?
• Is this a data center in a box?
• Do enterprises want to unify networks, storage, and servers? (This is where she calls us out by name)
• The challenge of outages and downtime
• Is UCS only suitable for green-field sites?
• Will this lock customers into a proprietary system?

Our Response

Cisco responds to our question about the reluctance of existing IT infrastructure organizations to want to “unify” the various parts of their environment (server, networks, storage), which would seem to be the result of adopting the UCS vision. Wendy flatly says “they do” want to do this, that “they’ve been demanding this for some time”, and that Forrester and Gartner support this. Perhaps it is true that “C-level” management would love to unify these organizations, but do the “foot soldiers” want to do it? Certainly not! 

There is massive resistance to unifying storage, servers, and networking among IT professionals:

• Storage folks claim that server and networking groups don’t understand just how hard it is to meet the massive I/O demands placed on them. They also feel like critical elements like latency and storage resource management are overlooked by the rest of the infrastructure community. Storage is just a bunch of disk drives, right?
• Networking folks typically de-value storage and servers as mere end points and feel that the rest of the infrastructure community doesn’t understand how hard it is to keep everything talking. Networking is just some cabling, right?
• Server people feel like their domain is where all the real work happens, and storage and networks are just enablers. They’re closest to the end users, so they feel like network and storage groups don’t see the business pressures they face. But servers are just big PCs, right?

Whenever these three organizations meet, they disagree about priorities and root cause. They don’t speak each other’s languages. They don’t understand the best practices that have evolved. And when a company tries to merge them into a single organization, balls start dropping. The network is neglected. Or the storage is left to rot. Or the servers are virtualized just to get “that PC hardware” out of the way.

Now take a networking company like Cisco and watch it try to enter the world of storage and servers. Is it any surprise that there is resistance and even backlash against these “uninformed newcomers”? Cisco did everything right with their Fibre Channel storage product line, yet they failed to dominate the market. They probably hastened the marriage of Brocade and McData, but the fabric boys are probably stronger now then they have ever been. Cisco’s storage products were not a mistake, but they were not the runaway hit that many (including me) thought they would be. Once the dust settled, the most common question I heard from enterprise storage and networking folks was a simple one: “Is there any benefit to consolidating storage and networking with one vendor?”

Yet UCS, and the entire datacenter Ethernet vision, is something else entirely. It’s not consolidation on a single vendor with no urgent reason, as was the case with storage. UCS is real consolidation. Storage and networking and server hardware and virtualization all living under one roof and all managed together. All friends. Will this work? I don’t think the jury is in with a verdict. In fact, I think the jury has just started hearing evidence!

Watch the Video!

Cisco’s UCS Blogroll

If you’re interested, Cisco closes the video with a blogroll. Here it is in clickable form:

• Scott Lowe
• The Hot Aisle (note corrected URL)
• Rational Survivability
• Colin McNamara
• Storagebod (A Gestalt IT author)
• LANZen
• Brian Madden
• Christopher Crowhurst
• Gestalt IT (Hey, that’s us!)
• VMLover
• Open Source Juicer
• Storage Rap
• Solori
• Marc Hamilton
• SOA Real World
• Paul Fallon
• Ethereal Mind (A Gestalt IT author)
• Storage Mojo
• Cloud of Data
• Mark Wilson
• TechHead

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2009. | Cisco is Loud and Proud About UCS
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Compellent – the billion-dollar storage company? • The Register: “It seems that both Emulex and QLogic are possible sources of this technology, QK+Logic iSCSI and FC cards being shipped by Compellent currently. Emulex points out that its Gen 2 converged network adapter (CNA) card will be half the size of the Gen 1 card and include iSCSI, TCP/IP offload, FCoE, 10gigE, RDMA, and iWARP – think host clustering – in its single ASIC. The company expects that the equivalent QLogic product will only have FCoE and 10gigE. Emulex can offer, it says, better use of server and controller ports.”

Anyone know if Emulex has made an announcement on this ? I’d like to know more.

© Etherealmind for Gestalt IT, 2009. | Storage: Emulex silicon will have iSCSI, TOE, FCoE, RDMA & iWarp in a single chip
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Dave has been with EMC since his early college days and more or less these days was talked about being the next CEO at EMC. Something might have changed over this past year, that made him make this move. People in these positions, well respected, accomplished a tons of things, groomed to be the next CEO, have a passion for something they do, and you see them jump the ship…something more to the story. There has been a new appointment into EMC board in 2008, Mr. Hu, I think it was a quite appointment, but a big one, as Hu comes with a great industry M&A knowledge and has been well respected within the consulting, investment and IT business environments. 

Jumping back to Mr. Donatelli, he has been a great icon of EMC Storage division and has played a major role with shaping where EMC stands today from a Storage perspective. 

As news will probably flow over the next couple of weeks, we should see a shift within EMC’s top management with some new faces coming into picture. The latest was Mr. Frank Hauck currently managing Global marketing and customer quality will be taking over Dave Donatelli’s role. 

So the move for Mr. Donatelli comes at a very crucial time, a big bang redo of the EMC Symmetrix products and then at the after launch party, resign from the company.  With this move, we should more or less see some other folks within EMC follow his foot steps . The question becomes, who within the Storage Blogosphere will end up among the executive profiles of EMC’s leadership chart.

Good luck and Good Wishes to a bright, smart man, Mr. Donatelli.

Here are some other blog posts covering Mr. Donatelli’s move, here, here, here, here, and I am sure more to follow tomorrow morning.

© Devang for Gestalt IT, 2009. | Dave Donatelli’s move from EMC to HP
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