Then they added some of their best sales people to the mix including engineers and then went knocking on the doors of every large company in the world in a “no large customer left untouched” blitzkrieg of one on one marketing.

So What is Acadia made of ?

Acadia is offering a package of actual products (not PowerPoint releases) from EMC, Cisco and VMware using a marketing strategy called Vblock. At Boston Gestalt IT Field Day, we received an excellent presentation on the details around the Vblock package from Ed Sai and Scott Lowe that sparked a heated response. I felt that the key issues were around two points:

• Why are the Vblocks so Large ?
• What happens if you exceed the operational parameters of a Vblock ?

Because there was much discussion about why the Vblock that have some strict limitations, I wanted to look into why these limitations exist and why people would object so vehemently to them. And also talk around the question for why Vblocks are big. Too big for most people to buy.

Comprehending the Limits on the joint venture

Acadia is not a merger (yet) of EMC and Cisco, but a partnership focused on the Data Centre. The partnership only promotes selected product groups from each company and even specific products within those group. For example, a Vblock does not include a Nexus 7000 switch, only the Nexus 5000 / 6000 / 2000 as the edge switches. ( You would use your own backbone to connect to your Ethernet network and legacy FibreChannel network ). VMware does not offer VDI solutions. EMC offers CLARiiON in Vblock1, and Symmetrix in Vblock2.

These limits may mean that your choices are limited. Some people regard this as as major concern. I regard this as a reasonable trade off – good service, easy marketing against lack of choice and flexibility.

Other Companies

It’s worth remembering that the joint venture is not exclusive. Both EMC and Cisco are free to pursue partnerships with other companies, and both are actively seen partnering in the market with other companies. Thus recent Cisco / NetApp and EMC/IBM announcements could create a confusing picture for some people who don’t understand these dynamics. That said, from what I’ve seen the Acadia partnership seems to be a “big deal” for both sides with a lot of passion, commitment and, most importantly, significant amounts of cash that fund expensive marketing campaigns. In this case, marketing that seems to actually be relevant and useful.

Selected Products

Acadia only works with selected products from both Cisco, EMC and VMWare. That is, they only offers products from the Data Centre Business Unit from Cisco, selected products Centerra and Celera at EMC and VMWare vSphere. The product is positioned in the market as a private cloud so any technology not relevant to that message isn’t going to be considered eg. No firewalls, no edge routers, no wireless, no backup software, no deduplication,.

My perception is that clear business goals drive this logic:

• Market clarity – limiting the product set allows Acadia to have a highly targeted product message, especially with the “cloud” buzzword attached.
• Technical capacity to deliver an effective sales force
• Leaves space for ‘other partners’ to have similar relationships with customers and not ‘upset’ the reseller marketplace
• minimise the business impact if the project fails
• customer want guarantees that it will work which should get better sales results.
• Acadia has to deliver the solution and deliver the support promise. Not easy when so many technologies are involved, with so many competing interests

I particularly want to focus on the Technical Capacity and Customer Guarantees elements of the argument. If you figure that EMC, Cisco and VMware are bringing a group of vendor engineers together, think about the problems you might have: engineers may have little or no expertise outside of their own company or worked in a cross-functional team. To overcome these problems I would go for a narrow product selection and then expand it over time.

Remember that large companies create significant opportunities for ineptitude and incapacity. Layers of management can create indirection and misalignment just as easily as they can create opportunity and focus. Bringing together teams from three large companies could easily go wrong (case study – HP and it’s many divisions that are rarely coherent).

There are other topics, such as upsetting the resellers, market clarity are all pretty obvious and shouldn’t need discussion.

What are Vblocks ?

The Vblock components are the cumulative permissions of what the marketing and business limitations will allow. There are no technical limits to what equipment could be in a Vblock except for the ability of Acadia to provide a good level of support. These limits are somewhat onerous but not entirely unreasonable. There are currently two Vblocks defined (and more are planned) – known as Vblock 1 and Vblock Two, they are designed, tested and (as is the fashion) certified to within certain, rigidly defined performance levels.

Basic Components

The Vblock architecture is reduced to five layers of physical infrastructure and roughly shown in this diagram taken from “Vblock Infrastructure Packages Reference Architecture” released in 2010.


Outline Bill of Materials

From this, you can see there is a fair amount of variation within the Vblock parts list to cater for your specific requirements. To quote Acadia :

A Vblock consists of a minimum and maximum amount of components that offer balanced I/O, bandwidth, and storage capacity relative to the compute and storage arrays offered. Each Vblock is a fully redundant autonomous system that has 1+1 or N+1 redundancy enabled by default.

In practice, Vblock 1 storage is scaled to deliver from ~42 TB/41000 IOPS (Min) to ~68 TB/ 50000 IOPS (Max). Vblock 2 storage is scaled to deliver from ~140 TB/92000 IOPS (Min) to ~211 TB/140000 IOPS (Max). The hardware is selected to match your performance requirements.

Other flexibilities

Some other quotes from the Cisco / EMC / VMware reference architecture guide:

For Vblock 1, there are no hard disks on the B-200 series blades as all boot services and storage are provided by the SAN. Hawever a snall hard drive may be installed if local page memory is required for vSphere.

For Vblock 2, each B-200 series blade module has 72GB SATA drive for page memory purposes. If required, these can be removed to reduce power and cooling overhead, increase MTBF or save costs.

The MDS9506 switches are recommended, but may optionally be changed for 9509 or 9513 to scale capacity or reduced to an MDS 9222i is less density is required

Inflexibilties

For Vblock 1, there are no hard disks on the B-200 series blades as all boot services and storage are provided by the SAN. Hawever a snall hard drive may be installed if local page memory is required for vSphere. If the local disk is user for main storage or operating system storage, it is not considered a Vblock and is a custom implementation at this point.

It is also acceptable for operating system and applications to be run directly on the B-200 series blades. It should be noted that other hypervisors are not supported by Vblocks and invalidate the Vblock support agreement (my emphasis)

The Limits are arbitrary, practical and mainly marketing

At the Boston Tech Field Day, we saw a number of questions on why there are limits, and what happens if you exceed the solution parameters. I believe it is a simple marketing reason – simple products, simple factors, easy to comprehend makes for a product that is easy for sales to sell, and even easier for customers to buy. Pricing is clear and unambiguous, and sales peoples will attempt to focus the customers away from price onto other topics. Like low power, special UCS features, ease of operation, etc etc.

The key factor is that the Cisco UCS server will be perceived by many as unproven. You can be sure that HP / IBM / Dell are going to work that Fear / Uncertainty / Doubt in a competitive situation.

Exceeding the Limits – You Certainly SHOULD

If you choose to exceed the offered the solution, then that is a simple choice. It’s not something to be particularly concerned about. Currently, we all build stacks of servers, storage and networks and provide our own support. Why would buying a guaranteed stack make any difference ?

These limits are to ensure that service guarantees can be met. The service guarantee exists to help customer to buy these products., it does not exist to make the products work. However, when the CIO is about to approve a purchase order for half million pounds they will be looking for a comfort level that it’s going to work. Those Cisco UCS servers are new and you want some assurance.

So once the system is working, feel free to head out in your own direction. Meeting the requirements of your business is more important that having a an end-to-end guarantee in overall picture. Remember, Cisco / EMC / VMware is still going to support each product using the same process that we have today.

The Fear of Lock In

My concern with the Vblock bundle is fear of lock in. The Cisco UCS product is a closed solution within the racks. Across the backbone of the Data Centre will also be Cisco Nexus 7000 switches for “best compatibility”. All server components must be purchased from Cisco who will be able to arbitrarily set the price. All and any server upgrades, and extra server must come from Cisco.

All storage vendors are an effective lock in today. The so-called “certification programs” ensure that EMC and other “chosen few” are restricted to the supply of drives and accessories.

If Cisco / EMC achieves a dominant position then they have the ability to control pricing. Since both companies are already dominant in their respective markets, and tend to “reassuringly expensive” price models, this is a well founded concern.

What does a Vblock physically look like ?

While every Data Centre is different, every rack looks pretty much the same. During my research, I have realised that a Vblock takes very little space in the data centre. In fact, it’s not until you see the amount of space that you realise the impact to

Vblock 1 – Racked

This is a front view of the Vblock 1 with storage, servers and switches.

Caption Text.(Click for a full size image)

And this is the rear view. Notice how few cables are used for physical connections here.

Caption Text.(Click for a full size image)

Vblock 2 Racked

A Vblock 2 is quite a bit larger and needs more storage. The server blades are larger (more CPU, more RAM per blade). I believe that the increased IOPS for the storage subsystem means that bigger storage units are needed. I think five racks is at the smaller side of the Vblock 2 possibilities.

Caption Text.(Click for a full size image)



Realising the dream – no cables

Caption Text.(Click for a full size image)

Vblock expansion

Even though the Vblock is modular, you can bet that Acadia has a nice little pitch around expansion. Sure enough, it is spelled out in the Architecture Reference:

Caption Text.(Click for a full size image)

As Vblocks are adde, the capacity of the Vblock scales either as an aggregated pool, whereby any ICS blade can access any storage disks n the SAN or as an isolated silo. For example, it is perfectly acceptable to aggragte to Vblock 1′s to provide capacity for 6000 VMs that can share common storage capacity… As long as storage capacity is added in conjunction with compute capacity to maintain balanced performance as published within the Vblock, the system does not require any additional validation .

Heh, you bet they want to sell you lots more so of course there is an answer for this. Once you have made the first purchase, you are likely to come back for more. Lets make it easy for the customer to do that.

So, Why are vBlocks so Large ?

A Vblock 1 is expected to support from 800 to 3000 VMs, and a VBlock 2 is expected to support 3000 to 6000 virtual machines. Since I started writing this post, a Vblock 0 has been announced that supports 300 to 800 VMs.

You might think that 800 is a lot of VMs. You might think that the price of a Vblock is too much. In which case, you aren’t someone who is going to buy it. If you can’t scratch together the several hundred thousand in single purchase order, you do’t understand the question. Today, many companies buy infrastructure as part of the project. If a project needs a server and a switch then that is funded. If a project needs a data centre, then a data centre is built. If a project needs fifty servers, then they MIGHT consider using VMware. Mostly we wait a few years and then have a big project to clear up the mess created by project funding of infrastructure.

Cisco and EMC don’t want to sell this product to small business. Cisco in particular wants to establish themselves in the marketplace as quickly as possible. Therefore selling to big companies, who are doing the “big cleanup project”, who are taking the time to evaluate the whole cost of ownership cycle, implementing with a full cycle approach is what Cisco wants. This is important.

Why ? Because Cisco wants to be able to produce white papers claiming the “huge cost reductions”, and “radical operations alignment” and “enabling technologies” etc etc. These white papers have real impact on the analysts and customers who figure that if they buy the product they will get those benefits. All these great stories, so loved by ‘journalists’ convince the middle sized market to buy Cisco servers.

What does EMC get ? EMC gets to move into the mid-sized market right alongside Cisco. EMC has been targeting the high end of the market, and they need new markets. A move down into the mid-sized market must not damage the high end products and branding (since this could affect profits), and attaching to a “differentiated” product will keep the premium marketing message intact.

EtherealMind View

Basically, I view the Acadia partnership as an upmarket fancy marketing campaign with extensive tie-ins. It’s “dressed up with a little black dress and killer set of heels” and well funded to boot. This type of thing normally makes me distrustful as many of these initiatives have turned out to be one night stands with an uncomfortable and unhappy morning after.

On the other hand, both Cisco and EMC have attached their corporate goodwill to this program in a major way. If Acadia fails, both companies will suffer significant image loss. It’s not marriage, but they are definitely living together.

The Challenge to the Status Quo

One of the most exciting (to my mind) aspects of the Vblock concept, is the potential to change the purchasing cycle of IT Projects. Many companies fund new purchases from projects only. This tends to create an inherently failed infrastructure buildout where each project buys what it needs. Project “cost controls” mean that infrastructure is rarely purchased to outside the project requirements. That is, buying additional disk drives or edge switches is easy, but buying additional arrays or core switches is almost impossible.

A Vblock could represent a “once a year” purchase of server infrastructure. Much easier than endlessly integrating, and reintegrating a hodge podge of servers, memory, disk drives and accessories into some sort of complete system. Compare this with the HP C-Class chassis concept which requires endless upgrades to scale into new and more useful configurations.

Most importantly, once engineers are freed from mundane tasks of installing memory and disk drives, they can move to focussing on the management platforms and dramatically enhancing the business value of computing. Tasks such as automating software and OS deployment, automated failure responses, performance analysis and

Cisco needs to buy EMC

Ultimately I remain convinced that Cisco must and will buy EMC to compete with HP and IBM. The Acadia joint venture looks a lot like a trial or temporary position while the market reaction is gauged. EMC has a marcap of USD$34 billion and revenue of USD$14 billion while Cisco has marcap of USD$154 billion on revenue of USD$35.5 billing. Cisco appears capable of acquiring EMC and is believed to have sufficient cash reserves to make a substantial cash rich offer. EMC probably has pretentions to be a lot bigger and don’t want to be bought right now. EMC egos are well known for their ‘capacity’ and they work hard at that. Combine that with a Wall Street that is anti-acquisition at the moment, and Cisco can’t make a move right now.

Public Clouds are not ready for the Enterprise

Public Clouds are fine for people that are not conducting serious business today. Dot Com startups, marketing pushes, publicity campaigns and other low vitality requirements could be considered for cloud infrastructure due to their trivial nature, but serious business applications are unlikely to move into the cloud with the current level of capability.

However, private clouds are practical today. To me, Vblock looks like an early mover in the Private Cloud space for IaaS. The option for a corporate IT department to build a three rack system that hosts between 300 to 700 servers is an exciting development. If I can reduce the amount of time my operations teams spend doing trivial and repetitive tasks and move them into systems automation on the management platforms, then we are moving to better place.

Technology Acceptance

There are no technology issues in this stack. In general, people perceive that Cisco and EMC are market leaders in their respective spaces, and the corporately the two companies fit well together. Unlike other stacks, there doesn’t appear to be a product that is less than excellent. In this sense, few people will dismiss the Acadia solution on technology grounds.

Conclusion

Convincing IT Management to take on the change put forward by Cisco / EMC is going to require a lot of marketing and sales. And that’s exactly what Acadia is all about. The technology takes care of itself here, Acadia is just marketing exercise, but a good one.

© Etherealmind for Gestalt IT, 2010. | Market positioning Acadia, EMC, Cisco and the whole vBlock Idea
Read more posts categorized as Cloud Computing, Featured, Networking, Server Virtualization, Storage, Top Story

EMC is the 800 lb gorilla of the enterprise storage industry, but the company has much bigger plans. Although CEO Joe Tucci kicked off his keynote by claiming “We are an infrastructure company and proud of it,” EMC’s ambitions must go way beyond IT infrastructure. Each acquisition and strategy announcement is an attempt by EMC adapt to a fundamentally-transformed enterprise IT world.

The Non-Box Company

EMC moved out of the “box company” role in 2003, purchasing Legato Systems to move into enterprise backup software and Documentum for enterprise content management, but this was only a warm-up. Many were puzzled by the 2003 purchase of virtualization pioneer, VMware, but it has played out to be one of the shrewdest moves of the decade. Although their revenue remains small in comparison to the parent company, VMware is arguably more important today to the modern data center than EMC itself. Later purchases like System Management Arts (SMARTS), Configuresoft, and RSA further expanded EMC’s footprint.

More telling are the moves VMware has made. SpringSource, Zimbra, and GemStone add up to very much a non-infrastructure world for the “infrastructure company.” EMC is clearly moving into the application platform space, leveraging this reach to consolidate their control over the underlying infrastructure.

Moving On Up

This seems to be the real EMC vision: Move up the stack, offer a compelling IT strategy, and move tons of heavy datacenter gear. This isn’t unique; It’s a re-play of IBM’s game plan from decades past. But EMC finds itself in a moment of transformation for corporate IT: Application development teams no longer care about infrastructure, and the rest of IT must finally transform itself to keep up with their needs.

Read my thoughts on The Techie/Business Schism for more on this IT transformation

Make no mistake: IT is in the middle of a revolution, not a simple equipment transition (think mainframe-mini-micro). Rather, the new world of IT is application-centric and big enterprise iron is becoming less visible and strategic. Surely, future IT architects will be able to deploy monolithic integrated blocks or stacks (like the EMC/Cisco vBlock), but many will choose to deploy lighter scale-out systems based on commodity hardware. The choice will be made based on finance or business strategy, not technological capabilities because higher-layer software will make hardware increasingly irrelevant.

Selling the Strategy

What is an avowed infrastructure company like EMC to do? Many of their competitors are doubling down on advanced storage hardware, but the smart ones are focusing on software instead. EMC is certainly moving towards a common hardware platform differentiated by software “personality” but their strategy must go well beyond this. The company must focus on the new IT world, selling product as a foundation for the next generation of applications, not merely a “faster/better” storage box for today’s apps.

Yet it would be foolish to make a wholesale move and abandon existing systems and protocols. EMC’s revenue stream depends on continued Fibre Channel, iSCSI, and NAS array sales even as they transition to systems that bear little resemblance to today’s Symmetrix or Celerra. They must develop and market a forward-looking strategy yet not abandon their cash cows.

In other words, EMC must say one thing while, for the most part, doing something entirely different. This “run the business while changing the business” challenge has been the downfall of many. The few who have successfully transitioned are the exception rather than the rule. EMC has a tough road ahead, but my conversations with company insiders at EMC World this week show that they are well aware of the challenge. This puts them well ahead of many in the storage industry, and explains my continuing focus on EMC.

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2010. | EMC’s Tough Road to the Post-Infrastructure Future
Read more posts categorized as Cloud Computing, Storage

So, what is this thing called the stack?

Actually the stack is just that, a stack. A stack of what you say? A stack of solutions, bound together by one or more management tools, offered to you as a happy meal that allows you to run the desired workloads on this stack. Or to put things more simply and quote from the Gestalt IT stack wars post:

• Standard hardware configurations are specified for ease of purchasing and support
• The hardware stack includes blade servers, integrated I/O technology, Ethernet networking for connectivity, and SAN or NAS storage
• Unifying software is included to manage the hardware components in one interface
• A joint services organization is available to help in selection, architecture, and deployment
• Higher-level software, from the virtualization hypervisor through application platforms, will be included as well

Until now, we have usually seen a standardized form of hardware, including storage and connectivity. Vendors mix that up with one or multiple management tools and tend to target some form of virtualization. Finally a service offering is included to allow the customer to get service and support from one source.

This strategy has it’s advantages

Compatibility is one of my favorite ones. You no longer need to work trough compatibility guides that are 1400 pages long and will burn you for installing a firmware version that was just one digit off and is now no longer supported in combination with one of your favorite storage arrays. You no longer have to juggle different release notes from your business warehouse provider, your hardware provider, your storage and network provider, your operating system and tomorrow’s weather forecast. Trying to find the lowest common denominator through all of this is still something magical. It’s actually a form of dark magic that usually means working long hours to find out if your configuration is even supported by all the vendors you are dealing with.

This is no longer the case with these stacks. Usually they are purpose or workload built and you have one central source where you get your support from. This source will tell you that you need at least firmware version X.Y on these parts to be eligible for support and you are pretty much set after that. And because you are working with a federated solution and received management tools for the entire stack, your admins can pretty much manage everything from this one console or GUI and be done with it. Or, if you don’t want to that you can use the service offering and have it done for you.

So far so good, right?

Yes, but things get more complicated from here on. For one there is one major problem, and that is flexibility. One of the bigger concerns came up during the Gestalt IT tech field day vBlock session at Cisco. With the vBlock, I have a fixed configuration and it will run smoothly and within certain performance boundaries as long as I stick to the specifications. In the case of a vBlock this was a quite obvious example, where if I add more RAM to a server blade then is specified, I no longer have a vBlock and basically no longer have those advantages previously stated.

Solution stacks force me to think about the future. I might be a Oracle shop now as far as my database goes. And Oracle will run fine on newly purchased stack. But what if I want to switch to Microsoft SQL Server in 3 years, because Mr. Ellison decided that he needs a new yacht and I no longer want to use Oracle? Is my stack also certified to run a different SQL server or am I no longer within my stack boundaries and lost my single service source or the guaranteed workload it could hold?

What about updates for features that are important to me as a single customer? Or what about the fact that these solution stacks work great for new landscapes, or in a highly homogeneous environment? But what about those other Cisco switches that I would love to manage from the tools that are offered within my vBlock, but are outside of the vBlock scope, even if they are the same models?

What about something simple as a “stack lock-in”? I don’t really have a vendor lock-in since only very few companies have the option of offering everything first hand. Microsoft doesn’t make server blades, Cisco doesn’t make SAN storage and that list goes on and on. But with my choice of stack, I am now locked in to a set of vendors, and I certainly have some tools to migrate in to that stack, but migrating out is an entirely different story.

The trend is the stack, it’s as simple as that. But for how long?

We can see the trend clearly. Every vendor seems to be working on a stack offering. I’m still missing Fujitsu as a big hardware vendor in this area, but I am absolutely certain we will see something coming from them. Smaller companies will probably offer part of their portfolio under some sort of OEM license or perhaps features will just be re-branded. And if they are successful enough, they will most likely be swallowed by the bigger vendors at some point.

But as with all in the IT, this is just a trend. Anyone who has been in the business longer than me can probably confirm this. We’ve seen a start with centralized systems, then moving towards a de-centralized environment. Now we are on the move again, centralizing everything.

I’m actually much more interested to see how long this trend will continue. I’m am certain that we will be seeing some more companies offer a complete solution stack, or joining in coalitions to offer said stack. I still think that Oracle was one of the first that pointed in this direction, but they were not the first to offer the complete stack.

So, how do you think this is going to continue? Do you agree with us? What companies do you think are likely to be swallowed, or will we see more coalitions from smaller companies? What are your takes on the advantages and disadvantages?

I’m curious to hear your take on this so let me know. I’m looking forward to what you have to say!

© Bas for Gestalt IT, 2010. | My take on the stack wars
Read more posts categorized as Featured, Networking, Server Virtualization, Storage

Tech Field Day Boston was a major success, generating perhaps the most absorbing discussions yet. Our new delegate roundtable time was applauded by all involved, and we will be posting video podcasts of these sessions on our new Roundtable Podcast category (subscribe in iTunes).

Subscribe to our Roundtable Podcast series on iTunes!

As usual, the Tech Field Day event received massive amounts of attention, generating thousands of tweets and dozens of blog posts and videos from delegates and bystanders alike. We will attempt to collect those links here for reference and review. We will undoubtedly miss some – please leave a comment with any links we have overlooked and we will add them!

Official Channels

• Gestalt IT Tech Field Day videos on Vimeo
• Gestalt IT Tech Field Day videos on YouTube
• Gestalt IT Tech Field Day photos on Flickr
• Gestalt IT Tech Field Day Roundtable Podcast on iTunes
• Gestalt IT Tech Field Day Posterous
• Gestalt IT Tech Field Day Facebook Group

Delegate Blogs

The Tech Field Day Boston 2010 Delegates: (L-R) John Obeto, Greg Ferro, Gabrie van Zanten, Edward Haletky, Devang Panchigar, Bas Raayman, David Davis, Simon Long, Carlo Costanzo, Simon Seagrave, Matt Simmons, Jason Boche, Stephen Foskett (not present: Robin Harris, Greg Knieriemen, Scott D. Lowe)

• Simon Long:
  • TechFieldDay Boston – Brilliant!
  • Drobo FS, Where does it fit?
  • Gestalt IT Tech Field Day – Boston
• Edward Haletky
  • GestaltIT Tech Field Day: Virtualization Line Up
  • GestaltIT Tech Field Day: Storage Line Up
• John Obeto:
  • Tech Field Day Boston 2010 Summary
  • Gestalt IT Tech Field Day Boston 2010, Day 1 Liveblog
  • Gestalt IT Tech Field Day Boston 2010
• Devang Panchigar:
  • GestaltIT Tech Field Day 2: HP IBRIX (X9000) Presentation
  • GestaltIT Tech Field Day 2010: Secure Multi Tenancy – Presentation
  • GestaltIT Tech Field Day 2: Pictures
  • GestaltIT Tech Field Day 2010: VBlocks Presentation
  • GestaltIT Tech Field Day 2010: Twitter Archives of all the action
  • GestaltIT Tech Field Day 2010: EMC – Vmware Vision
  • GestaltIT TechFieldDay 2: The Delegates, the Presenters and the Technology Innovators
  • GestaltIT #TechFieldDay 2, let the fun begin…
• Greg Ferro:
  • DroboFS: Gigabit Ethernet, Serverless and Cloudy
  • Outbursts for 10 April 2010
  • Outbursts for 9 April 2010
  • Featured: Boston Tech Field Day
  • RAID is OLD Technology. And it looks it.
• Gabrie van Zanten
  • [Gestalt] vBlock, great product, just not for you
  • [Gestalt] On my way to Gestalt IT event
• Matt Simmons:
  • The future of storage technology
  • First day of Tech Field Day
  • Tech Field Day Preview: VKernel
  • Tech Field Day Preview: HP
  • Tech Field Day Preview / Overview
  • Small Infrastructure, meet the Enterprise
  • Gestalt IT’s Tech Field Day: I’m in!
• Simon Seagrave:
  • Live Video Feed – Gestalt IT Tech Field Day – Boston 2010
  • Live Coverage: Gestalt IT Tech Field Day – Boston 2010
  • New Drobo FS Networked Storage Device Released
  • Gestalt IT Tech Field Day: 2010
• Robin Harris:
  • Cisco’s UCS limited scale
  • VKernel
  • A deep dive into Cisco’s UCS
• Bas Raayman:
  • Gestalt IT Tech Field Day – On Cisco and UCS
  • Drobo announces their new Drobo FS
  • Getting ready for the Gestalt IT Tech Field Day 2010 – Boston
• Scott D. Lowe:
  • VCE coalition “Vblock 0” represents an interesting opportunity for smaller environments
  • Simplify infrastructure rollouts with Vblocks
  • Use VKernel’s Capacity View in your VM right-sizing efforts
  • IT-as-a-service offering proves that alignment disagreements are alive and well
• Carlo Costanzo:
  • Tech Field Day Bahston!

Other Links

• VKernel Blog: Gestalt IT Tech Field Day
• Pl.atyp.us: Tech Field Day
• Storage Anarchist: 2.047: the gestalt are coming, the gestalt are coming!
• Stu Miniman: Tapping into blogger communities
• Rick Vanover: Up and down the stack: Secure Multi-Tenancy

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2010. | Tech Field Day Boston: The Links
Read more posts categorized as All, Events, Exclusive, Featured, Tech

Now it can ship Solaris/SPARC/Sun Storage stacks underneath its database and other middleware and use Solaris virtualization features. Where does that leave us, wanting as we do to sell storage and our software into Oracle shops?

I’ve had an exec group working on this for some months and I’m gonna let you in on our game plan.

For those Oracle shops that run Oracle software on third-party servers, it’s the same story as now, for now. We pich the UCS vBlocks against the servers there and our Symmetrix/CLARiiON/Celerra against the storage alternatives there; basically no change.

In the longer term, though, we have to weaken Oracle in those accounts because Ellison’s crew will be selling the integrated Oracle stack story, what I call blowing Sun shine up their asses. That cuts us out, it’s a door-closer. The first way we counter this is to start making friends with SAP and Microsoft SQL. We’ll look for joint-selling type deals because we now have a shared enemy so we better be friends, right? This is my kind of fun.

The second way is for us to extend vBlocks up the stack. Customers are going to want integrated stacks from their applications right through to their disk spindles and flash drives. Larry may be a weird west coast cookie with a taste for things outside normal family life but he’s no flake when it comes to business. He’s right on the nail over this integrated stack thing. We’re going to have to talk to people like SAP and SQL and Terradata and Netezza and say, let’s build our own integrated app stack, let’s build a SAP vBlock, a SQL vBlock, whatever. Integrate your software onto our vBlock hardware and let’s bite Larry in the ass.

The third thing we have to do is push our aquisition horizons up a bit more. Oracle buys Sun and heads our way. Okay Larry, you want a fight, you got a fight. Let’s buy into his middleware market core, let’s stick a stake right in his heartland. Could we buy SAP? Would this be a better idea than buying Dell? I’m having our acquisitions team look around Larry’s software territory and spy out the possibilities.

Where Larry sells Sun storage separately, into Oracle shops using third-party servers and into non-Oracle shops if that’s what he’s going to do, then we should do well. The 7000 is obviously not mission-critical and not tested for that kind of work in enterprise data centers. It was put together by too-clever Sun engineers with open source software, so how can you rely on it? That systems organization at Sun was run by a guy that couldn’t comb his hair and he reported to a guy with a pony-tail. These people were flakes, they still are flakes, and you can’t trust them or their products.

Now joke time; the mid-range and low-end Sun storage arrays are not even on the same planet as CLARiiON and Celerra. We’ve been busting their chops and will continue doing that. The hybrid storage servers, Thumper or whatever the thing is called, is probably doomed but I’m having a team look over the possibility of putting a few UCS blades alongside bladed CLARiiON stores into an appliance and then we’ve got a Thumper-buster if we need one.

What about the StorageTek tapes? Two words: Data and Domain. If that’s not enough we can do a deal with Spectra, as Belluzzo isn’t talking to us anymore. That’ll give us a big enough tape library until Atmos clouds can do the business.

Larry E is just a wildly successful big mouth who’s going to over-reach himself. His golden goose is his software profitability through commoditizing everything else. We’re going to chip away at that by doing deals with SAP and the others and cut this over-grown Silicon Valley playboy down to size. He’s disrespectful but we can’t yet make him an offer he can’t refuse. Trust me, we’re going to be working on it, and Larry’s going to regret the day that he ever let McNealy soft soap him.

© Don Joey for Gestalt IT, 2010. | Ellison Ain’t No Sun King
Read more posts categorized as Industry Confidential

FAST (FULLY AUTOMATED STORAGE TIERING)

FAST made a debut in the storage market yesterday (12/08/09). Finally after the market buzz we got a preview of the product in terms of its features, functionality, characteristics, possible shortcomings and use cases.

This blog post focuses on the features, the drawbacks and some applications around FAST.  By no means is this a comprehensive or an exhaustive list of the above.

After all, FAST makes a debut, (The previous post on FAST).

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NOTE: Out of the box thinking by EMC, imagine the flexibility one would have with a large infrastructure and FAST moving data based on policy. Its all about the big picture.

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Here are some features, highlights of FAST and how it operates.

• FAST will perform data movement based on IOPS, average I/O size and write percentage. This is currently true for the Symmetrix V-Max, Clariion CX4 and Celerra NS.

• Three elements that define FAST: Storage Type, FAST policies and Storage Groups.

• FAST is based on user defined – configuration policies.

• The configuration of FAST is typically done through FAST wizards (Symmetrix Management Console) on Symmetrix V-Max, FAST LUN Migrator for Clariion CX4 and Rainfinity File Management Appliance or VE for Celerra NS.

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• User defined analysis period for FAST. That will enable FAST to recommend or perform data analysis and then a data move based on policy.

• FAST created policies will associate with Storage Groups.

• FAST policies will be configurable at a LUN / drive / drive type / speed etc level.

• Data movement will take place based on a time of the date policy called “COLD” move or on usage policy called “HOT” move.

• Data movement will take place between various drive types, various LUN types and LUN sizes. (LUN types, LUN sizes will need to be same for the source and destination LUNs). For example a 9GB FBA LUN being migrated from Fibre to FLASH will need similar source and destination LUN properties.

• FAST data analysis will be performed in the background.

• For Symmetrix V-Max platform FAST will perform all analysis without the use of Symmetrix Performance Analyzer. Understanding is there will be some sort of API plugin available on the Service Processor of the V-Max that will enable Symmetrix Management Console (FAST plugin) to interface with the Symmetrix through the SYMAPI interface.

• For Clariions, the performance data of the array will be monitored and collected by Navisphere Analyzer.

• Based on the source LUN analysis, FAST will recommend the user to move the data either a faster speed drives or a slower speed drives.

• FAST will enable roll back based on user preferences (automated).

• FAST will be configurable by Symmetrix Management console wizards or SYMCLI

• FAST configurable by Clariion Naviseccli and installed on a host connected to Clariion, Host software called FAST LUN Migrator.

• FAST configurable by Rainfinity File Management Appliance GUI or CLI for Celerra NS “out-of-box data” movement. This enables the Celerra to move data to another Celerra or Centera or Atmos.

• FAST configurable by Rainfinity File Management / VE (Virtual Appliance) for Celerra NS “in-the-box” data movement.

• FAST can be installed non-disruptively on all platforms.

• FAST will operate both at an FBA and CKD level supporting open systems and mainframes for V-Max.

• FAST will operate at a LUN level on Symmetrix V-Max

• FAST will operate at a LUN level on Clariion CX4

• FAST will operate at a file level on Celerra NS

• FAST v1 users will be able to purchase a FAST v2 upgrade when it’s released in second half of 2010.

• FAST can be purchased as a FAST suite or part of an ATSM (Advanced Tiering Storage Management) suite with bundled discounting prices.

• For a unified storage system like a front end NAS (Celerra) with a backend SAN (Clariion), FAST can coexists at both levels. But it is not recommended to deploy FAST at a Celerra LUN level.

• FAST integrates with Symmetrix Management Console and with Rainfinity GUI (Celerra) for simple management. Though Clariion implementation will need one to specialize in CLI.

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FAST introduction by EMC

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FAST Drawbacks

Here are some drawbacks of FAST as I see it today.

• Does not support Virtual provisioning. So the Virtual provisioned LUNs will not be FAST enabled. Sub-LUN expected in second half of 2010

• FAST is not free and is charged based on RAW CAPACITY of the Storage Array.

• FAST will only work with similar LUN types (example FBA LUNs can be migrated to FBA) and LUN sizes (9GB LUN can be migrated to a 9GB LUN) only.

• FAST will require Professional Services and is not recommended for customer self implementation at least for the Clariion and the Celerra platforms. EMC is making a claim that FAST can be self provisioned on the Symmetrix V-Max platform.

• FAST works only on current generation systems like EMC V-Max Enginuity 5874, Clariion CX4 Release 29 and Celerra NS.

• With Clariion CX4 and FAST implementation, requirement is to have Navisphere Analyzer.

• With Celerra NS and FAST implementation, requirement is to have Rainfinity File Management /VE or Appliance.

• With Symmetrix V-Max FAST implementation, requirement is to have Symmetrix Management Console (Not free any more starting with the V-Max)

• For the Clariions, FAST only analyzes Fibre drives and LUN movement has to initiate from Fibre channel to FLASH or Fibre channel to SATA drives only. Movement from FLASH to Fibre or SATA to Fibre has to be initiated manually.

• A customer implementing Virtual Provisioning on Clariion CX4 and Symmetrix V-Max that is using 50% Thick Provisioning and 50% Virtual Provisioning. FAST will not work with Virtual Provisioned LUNs. But the customer will probably pay for 100% of Storage Raw Capacity when it comes to paying for FAST either non-bundled or bundled in an ATSM (Advanced Tiering Storage Management).

• FAST does not support IBM System I platform currently.

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Some real world FAST applications

• Acadia Service Model can now add granularity with offerings around on-demand resources using FAST at its core.

• On Demand application and workload needs can be met for OLTP, Data Warehousing, Mainframe compute and Virtual compute using FAST driven policies.

• Multi-tenancy with Private Clouds

• Move high demand data on faster drives while rarely used data goes on slower drives.

• Sell ITaaS based on SLA’s. Higher SLA’s can mean higher price. All automated processes controlled by policy.

• Higher transactions typically mean low overall cost; mean higher efficiency means higher profits all achievable through FAST policy engine.

Need to see some real world implementations of FAST now. In theory and on paper, FAST looks pretty compelling but practically will it do the magic.

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Some unanswered questions today

• How does it prevent from LUNs jumping between Fiber, FLASH and SATA if the application has un-expected performance that day?

• Manageability of FAST interfaces.

• Usability of FAST interfaces.

• Granular configuration policies associated with analysis.

• Future upgrades.

• Current implementations and how long and how effective are those.

• Can you improve performance without using SSD’s. Example with Fibre and SATA drives only.

• With future upgrades from FAST v1 to FAST v2 what happens with current user defined policies.

• Would Symcli scripts change with FAST implementation?

• During lockout periods (Where Symmetrix configuration cannot change, eg before a BIN file change) would FAST still operate.

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To read some of the answers to the questions, as commented by Barry Burke on the StorageNerve Blog

FAST is a bit of a new subject for me. Any experts please feel free to correct me if my understanding of FAST is incorrect at any level.

Stay tuned for a series of FAST posts over the next few days talking about various topics and how FAST plays within those areas.

© Devang for Gestalt IT, 2009. | FAST: Features, Drawbacks, Applications and some Questions
Read more posts categorized as Storage

Confused? Me too. Time will clear the fog and, as promised, reveal the vBlock based Cloud.

VCE vBlock is big, bad, and designed for scale like VMworld 2009 Infrastructure (without being told as much, my bet is that what we saw at the bottom of the stairs in the Moscone Center was a vBlock test drive). Apparently, VMworld’s spotlight on vCloud Express provider Terremark was another hidden VCE vBlock showcase from Vmworld. It all was happening in plain sight. If we only knew then what we know now. 

My thoughts (or this rant) can best be described as “now what!?”. I’ve spent the last 5 years figuring out how to design customized, application specific, performance optimized, and product feature specific virtual infrastructure designs for the enterprise data center. This is because I’ve listened to everybody explain that a “cookie cutter” infrastructure is not adequate for their solutions. Change this setting for feature A, provision these LUNs for feature B, add these VLANs for feature C, etc., etc. Now, VMware, Cisco, and EMC have figured out all the tough stuff and come up with a “connect the dots” data center reference architecture to make it easy to move to the Cloud? Really? I mean, I know we’ve been told this had to happen in order for the Cloud to work, but REALLY?!! Oh well, the only constant is change.

Ok, I feel a little better. Anybody else care to vent?

Here’s some more random links and quoted information to help others with similar change anxiety issues as me.

From the Cisco press release: Cisco and EMC, Together with VMware, Form Coalition to Accelerate Pervasive Virtualization and Private Cloud Infrastructures The following family of Vblock Infrastructure Packages is being offered by the Virtual Computing Environment coalition:

• Vblock 2 is a high-end configuration supporting up to 3,000-6,000 virtual machines that is completely extensible to meet the most demanding IT needs of large enterprises and service providers. Designed for large-scale and ‘green field’ virtualization, Vblock 2 takes advantage of Cisco’s Unified Computing System (UCS), Nexus 1000v and Multilayer Directional Switches (MDS), EMC’s Symmetrix V-Max storage (secured by RSA), and the VMware vSphere platform.
• Vblock 1 is a mid-sized configuration supporting 800 up to 3,000 virtual machines to deliver a broad range of IT capabilities to organizations of all sizes. Designed for consolidation and optimization initiatives, Vblock 1 is comprised of a repeatable model leveraging Cisco’s UCS, Nexus 1000v and MDS, EMC’s CLARiiON storage (secured by RSA), and the VMware vSphere platform.
• Vblock 0 will be an entry-level configuration available in 2010, supporting 300 up to 800 virtual machines, for the first time bringing the benefits of private clouds within reach of medium-sized businesses, small data centers or organizations, and for test and development by channel partners, systems integrators, service providers, ISVs, and customers. Vblock 0 is also comprised of a repeatable model leveraging Cisco’s UCSand Nexus 1000v, EMC’s Unified Storage (secured by RSA), and the VMware vSphere platform.

Cisco VCE vBlock Youtube video

The Coalition leaders calls VCE vBlock “IT as a Service”

Chuck’s Blog: Announcing The VCE Coalition

Introducing The Vblock

Building virtualized infrastructure at scale?  We’ve created a new option for you — the Vblock.

We’ve taken the best of the best from the three respective companies, and create a pre-architected and pre-qualified environment for virtualization at scale: storage, fabric, compute, hypervisor, management and security.  We’ve also characterized its behavior for specific use cases as well.

Whether you actually want to buy one, or just use the reference architecture as a blueprint for your own efforts — there’s an entirely new option available to accelerate the transition to a fully virtualized environments.

© Rich for Gestalt IT, 2009. | Does VCE vBlock Really Mean Cookie Cutter Architecture For The Cloud?
Read more posts categorized as Cloud Computing, Server Virtualization