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?
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This is the last in a four-part series of posts on the Sun Storage 7000 USS storage arrays.  Previous posts in this series can be found here:

Review: Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System – Part I

Review: Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System – Part II

Review: Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System – Part III

Previous posts have discussed the physical hardware and what you can do with it.  Sun also do a simulator version of the 7000 series array, which can be used to evaluate the technology.  The Simulator is available for both VirtualBox and VMware.  I chose the VMware version and deployed it on VMware Fusion on my MacBook.

Installation

The installation process is remarkably simple.  Download and unzip the simulator (link here) and for Fusion, simply use File -> Open to open the file “SunStorage.vmwarevm”.  The configuration process then asks for some simple details – IP address, default gateway, password and so on.  Once this is complete, the simulator starts up and can be accessed via the standard web interface on port 215.  I’ve included a few screenshots at the end of this post that highlight the configuration process.

Configuration

Once logged into the simulator, a disclaimer is presented to the user indicating that this deployment isn’t for production usage or performance measurement. This is pretty obvious; the simulator shows functionally how things work but will never provide the same performance as a dedicated device.

The simulator provides 15x 2GB drives, which although not ‘real’ are more than enough to do evaluation with.  As far as I can tell, the simulator appears to be fully functional.

Summary

Sun have provided a simulator package that appears to pretty much mirror a real USS 7000 array.  Having a fully functional system like this enables new users to gain confidence with it; although not much training is needed, making the mistakes on a simulator is much more preferable to making them on the real thing.  In addition, it’s easy for any potential purchaser to get a real feel for how easy configuring the 7000 Series can be.

The 7000 simulator is probably equal or better than the Netapp simulator, which I’ve raved (and probably ranted) about many times.  It’s a shame that Netapp don’t choose to make their simulator open to all users, but that’s another discussion entirely.  The Sun 7000 simulator simply rounds out what to me is a great product, offering storage and simplicity in a single device.

Disclaimer: Sun Microsystems provided a USS 7000 series array on loan in order for me to evaluate this technology.  The unit has since been returned.  I have not been paid by Sun to write this series of posts or received any other benefit or inducement of any kind from Sun Microsystems.

© Chris for Gestalt IT, 2009. | Review: Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System – Part IV
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But if we dig a little deeper; is NetApp’s unified storage platform going to become a millstone? I suspect that it might; arguably it already has. Just looking at the length of time it took them to get OnTap 8 out of the doors and the issues that has brought; the bringing together of GX and traditional OnTap took too long and probably depleted them of development resources.

It might have been better if they had decided to let them live as two separate products rather than the painful union that faced them. Concentrating on making OnTap 8 64 bit and ensuring things such as seamless migration from 32 bit aggregates to 64 bit aggregates might have actually been of more value to more customers.

Having to integrate any new idea/innovation into OnTap slows time to market because time needs to be taken to work out how to technically integrate it; how to test it and generally make sure that it does not break existing functionality or at least have detrimental effect.

The competitors can ‘simply’ build a new product line without impacting their existing code-base; yes, they can borrow from the existing base and utilise common components; for example the underlying base operating system may be the same custom Linux environment across their products but they do not have to worry about detrimental impact.

And now we have object storage; is integrating object storage just a step too far for the USP. Actually, technically, it should not be a huge challenge but commercially I can see issues. NetApp’s object storage is going to be the most expensive object storage in the world! They are going to be competing with commodity disk prices and the only way that they can do this is to trash their own margins.

I think that is going to be painful. it might well be better for NetApp commercially to be able to sell OnTap ObjectStore (not it’s real name, I just made that up) as a completely different product but that would mean accepting that the Unified Storage Platform is not the best answer to what may well be a purely commercial problem. Technically and aesthetically it is very elegant but it is it long term practical?

Of course, EMC still have far too many storage products and their sales-team live in a general state of confusion.

© Martin for Gestalt IT, 2009. | Unified Storage Problems?
Read more posts categorized as Featured, Storage