I believe that the v7000 will cause IBM some real problems around the XIV message; with the new GUI, the v7000 is pretty much as easy to manage as an XIV and realistically, that was XIV’s biggest selling point. The v7000 is more flexible, potentially more scalable and more performant that the XIV and I wonder how much of an influence that it’s development had on Moshe’s departure. I like to tease IBM that Barry Whyte is the new Moshe; he was brought up on the mean streets of Glasgow and no one crosses a WeeGie.

There are some features missing at launch which are interesting; the scalability for example seems to be being constrained for some reason. Certainly SVC can support an 8 node cluster at the moment and Barry has stated that there are no real issues going beyond this. So why doesn’t the v7000 not have clustering from day one? Perhaps to allow XIV some breathing space to get the long roadmapped clustering out of the door. A cluster-enabled 7000 would be a very interesting prospect and I wonder whether we’ll see a v9000 which offers clustering?

v7000′s integration with VMware does at first glance appear to be lacking; at the announcement, I don’t think VMware even got mentioned but v7000 shares all the current SVC/VMware integration points. However I do believe that IBM need to up their game on the VMware integration.

No compression or dedupe; this isn’t suprising really as IBM haven’t have StorWize for that long although it’s long enough to for StorWize to become the storage brand; certainly in the mid-range space. But I’d expect to see announcements around compression and dedupe in the next twelve months, I think IBM will motor on that one with their big focus on Storage Efficiency, it’s really obvious that they intend to do so. I’m pretty sure I saw Steve Kenniston sitting in the audience at the v7000 launch, I’d expect him to be on stage next time.

There’s a few really nice little touches which show that IBM are listening to customers and understand some of the day-to-day pain of the Storage Admin; for example, the v7000 comes with a USB key which can be plugged into a PC and all the initial configuration can be built there without the need for a serial cable. Once you have finished the configuration; plug the key into the v7000 and it’ll configure itself. So many laptops these days don’t come with serial ports, this shows some real thought on IBM’s part.

SONAS integration; will we see a unified interface from IBM to enable SONAS, SVC and the v7000 to all be managed from a common simple GUI? I know NetApp will jump up and down if anyone was to call that Unified Storage but I can see IBM doing something like that. There’s probably little reason why SONAS and SVC cannot co-exist on the same physical hardware. SONAS will certainly get Storwize integrated; I’d expect a rapid rebrand of the SONAS product to bring it in line with the Storwize branding.

OEM relationships with LSI, NetApp and DDN are probably going to become less crucial to IBM; IBM will have control of their own storage destiny again and I fully expect the number of OEMed products to reduce with the LSI relationship probably the first under serious pressure.

And IBM do amuse me; if EMC or NetApp had launched the v7000; there would have been fireworks, orchestras and ticker-tape parades; we would have had a teaser campaign and the whole works. This was all rather understated, there were bold statements made but there wasn’t the chest-thumping that we have come to expect from storage announcements.

© Martin for Gestalt IT, 2010. | Wize Up
Read more posts categorized as Storage

The storage industry got a lot more competitive this morning, as Dell announced plans to buy 3Par. This is the latest round in a well-established race for the enterprise storage dollar, challenging superpower (and Dell partner) EMC in the high-end SAN space. What does this acquisition say about the industry as a whole? Where are we headed?

I’ve long wished for a new enterprise storage superpower. Competition is good for everyone, and the enterprise storage space has always been highly competitive. Traditional SAN storage powers (EMC, HDS, HP, and IBM) have been under continual attack from tech-heavy upstarts like EqualLogic, LeftHand, Compellent, Xiotech, and 3Par. The smaller (revenue-wise) NAS market has been more serial, with NetApp knocking off Auspex, then challenged by EMC. Yet innovators have been thick there as well, from Exanet to Ibrix, Isilon to Onstor.

Through it all, one thing has been clear: The major companies, though perhaps lagging in technology, were usually able to withstand the attack of the upstarts through sheer strength of salesforce. Storage is a strategic investment, and selection of a storage platform is much more far-reaching than many IT product decisions. The inertia of an installed storage environment makes it a real challenge to switch vendors, giving the established players massive leverage.

It became clear to me and many others that the best way for upstart companies (and, by extension, technologies) was to be part of an established vendor’s sales process. OEM relationships were a big part of this (witness the success of BlueArc and even NetApp and HDS) but acquisition was a much stronger proposition. If customers were warmer to OEM products than independent sales, they are much hotter when it comes to acquired technology. HP, Dell, IBM, and EMC have all demonstrated the power that comes when an established company buys a startup and puts the power of their sales force behind these new products.

This explains Dell’s fantastic success with EqualLogic. They took a product that was emerging as dominant in its niche (midrange iSCSI SAN) and blasted it into the market, while at the same time optimizing manufacturing and deployment. EMC did the same with Clariion and DataDomain, and HP is showing strong signs of health with LeftHand and Ibrix. Then there is IBM, who took XIV out of Israel and made it a source of irritation to the rest of the industry.

Many industry watchers have long wondered what would happen if the smaller guys got together, forming a new superpower of their own. Would 3Par, BlueArc, and Sepaton be a real challenger? What about Xiotech or Compellent and Isilon or FalconStor? Is mixing and matching some smaller companies a recipe for success? The answer was often a counter-question: What if someone like Dell, who knows how to manufacture and sell, picked them up instead? This seemed much more like a sure-thing, since the established management and financials stave off potential integration issues.

It appears that this is the future. Established players will pick up smaller companies, fortifying their offerings and accelerating sales in a way the little guys weren’t capable of. Dell’s billion-dollar acquisition of 3Par reportedly headed off a similar offer from HP, and will likely spark another acquisition. I imagine the management teams at Compellent and Xiotech just got a lot busier…

Clearly, Dell and HP are playing this game. IBM and EMC are in it, too. But what about Cisco and Oracle? Could they be planning storage acquisitions of their own, to the detriment of partners like EMC and Hitachi? What about the strong contingent from Japan, NEC and Hitachi? And who gets picked up next? We shall see!

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2010. | Dell + EqualLogic, Exanet, Ocarina, 3Par = What?
Read more posts categorized as Storage

IOPS Per RAID Group, ordered by most to least

I took part in a podcast last night that discussed the XIV platform.  One of the “key features” of XIV is the wide striping of data across all spindles.  It’s a concept we’re seeing more and more in contemporary storage hardware architectures and one that’s being shoe-horned into older storage arrays too.  Have you ever wondered what the point is?  Take a look at the following graphic.  It shows the number of write operations per RAID group, ordered by the busiest RAID group to the least active.  It’s real data from a real system.  What you see is the Long Tail effect, where a small number of RAID groups are doing most of the I/O.  In this example, 80% of the workload is performed by 50% of the RAID groups; only 3 RAID groups account for 20% of the workload.

The chart shows that in some array designs (typically the older Enterprise arrays), I/O distribution was not evenly balanced and so not all drives were being used to their full capacity.  This was mitigated by using tools to move LUNs or sub-LUNs around; alternatively concatenated devices like metas and LUSEs were employed to spread the load.

The only real solution to the I/O balancing problem is genuine wide striping.  Manual or even automated rebalancing, or the use of metas are just workarounds.  Once wide striping is in place, either more work can be performed or the number of spindles or their “quality” can be reduced, i.e. you can build a complete SATA array like XIV.

There are of course disadvantages to having your data more widely spread.  The most obvious is the increased risk of data loss when the RAID system fails – i.e. a double disk failure.  The wider the striping, the wider the impact.  The tradeoff is the benefit of increased performance.  You have to choose what level of risk/impact you consider acceptable versus the potential gains.

If you’re not doing wide striping today then you should seriously be considering it.  After all, you’re only harnessing performance capacity within the array that you’ve already paid for.

© Chris for Gestalt IT, 2010. | The Benefits of Wide Striping – Avoiding A Long Tail
Read more posts categorized as Featured, Server Virtualization, Storage

How many of you run clusters of servers? HA/CMP? Veritas Cluster? Microsoft Cluster? VMWare Clustering? I suspect lots of you do? How many of you cluster NAS heads? Yet again, I suspect lots of you do? How many of you cluster arrays? Not so many I guess? Certainly in my experience, it is uncommon to cluster an array. And when I talk about clustering an array, I don’t mean the implementation of replication.

So, if you don’t cluster your arrays; how do you protect against the failure of a RAID rank? Statistically unlikely but it is it more or less unlikely than a loss of data-centre? I’m not sure and the failure of a RAID rank for many people could well mean the invocation of the disaster recovery plan. Why?

The loss of a RAID rank might well lead to the loss of an application/service and if it is an absolutely business critical service, can you bring it up at the remote replication site in isolation? As a discrete component? If you can, can you cope with increased transaction times due to latency? Many applications now have complex interactions with partner applications; these might not be well understood. So the failure of RAID rank could lead to the invocation of the Disaster Recovery Plan. Actually in my experience, this is very nearly always the case unless the service has been designed with recovery in mind; this requires infrastructure and application teams to work together, something which we are not exactly good at.

But you now take the challenge and make sure that every application can be failed over as a discrete component. Excellent, a winner is you! You know the impact of loosing a RAID rank, you know what applications it impacts, you’ve done your service mappings etc, etc. And you have been very careful to lay things out to minimise a single RAID failure’s impact.

And then you implement automated storage tiering. Firstly, you now have no idea in advance what impact a RAID rank failure may have; you have no idea what applications may be impacted. And actually, the failure of a single RAID rank may well have huge impact. We could be looking at restoring many terabytes of data to cope with the failure of a couple of terabytes and many applications failing.

It will depend on the implementation of the automated storage tiering and I am concerned that at present we do not know enough about the various implementations which will hitting our arrays over the next eighteen months. So despite automation making things day-to-day a lot easier, we cannot treat it as Automagic Storage Tiering; we need to know how this works and how we plan to manage this.

And perhaps for key applications, we will need to cluster storage arrays locally; that in itself will bring challenges.

I’m still a big fan of automated storage tiering but over the next few months, I would like to see the various vendors start talking about how they mitigate some of this risk. Barry Burke has made a big thing about the impact of a double disk failure on an XIV array in the past; in a FAST v2 environment, I would like to see how EMC mitigate against very similar problems.

I would also like to know what impact of a PAM card failure from NetApp is; does the array degrade to the extent where it is not useable? What kind of tools can NetApp give me to assess potential impact. As Preston points out here; failure of individual components within an array could have significant impacts.

We are heading to a situation where technology gets every more complex and arguably ever more reliable. But we rely on it to ever more greater extents; so we must understand risks and mitigations to a much greater amount than we have in the past.

© Martin for Gestalt IT, 2010. | Disastrous Thinking
Read more posts categorized as Storage

Yesterday, EMC announced Fully Automated Storage Tiering (FAST), their much hyped and much anticipated storage feature enabling the automated moving of data between tiers of storage on a policy basis.  However the most notable missing feature in the EMC announcement was the lack of support for legacy DMX-3 and DMX-4 platforms.  This to me sends a message loud and clear that despite continuing to sell it, the DMX3/4 legacy monolithic hardware is dead.  If that’s the case, why bother buying from EMC any more?

Discounting EMC in the storage array market may seem like a naive and perhaps foolish comment to make.  After all, recent IDC numbers show EMC top of the pile at nearly a quarter of all external storage arrays sold, depending on which figure you choose to use.  However, take a moment to look at the EMC briefing pages on FAST (you can find them here).  There you will see Intel co-branded with EMC, highlighting many previous messages that monolithic architectures are dead and commodity modular boxes are the way of the future.  We’ve seen that this year already with the release of Atmos.

To my knowledge, FAST is the first “innovation” of the new V-Max product line, but it isn’t unique.  In fact, I don’t think any features of V-Max are unique; the architecture is found in many other products.  There’s a whole raft of mid-range storage arrays from IBM (XIV), 3Par, Compellent, Pillar, Dell/Equallogic and HP (Lefthand) with the last two being acquisitions of successful companies.  I expect in the next 12 months we’ll see enterprise modular releases from Hitachi/HP and a revamped EVA.  Most of the products mentioned here have been designed from scratch to remove the legacy encumberances of the past that products such as V-Max still retain.

So what’s my point?  Well, simply this; EMC have legitimised the enterprise modular architecture characterised by V-Max.  This accepts that the future is commodity-based hardware with differentiation in software.  However, EMC are no longer the leaders in this field and are having to play catch up.

 There’s never been a better time to look wider than the Big 4 (EMC/Hitachi/HP/IBM) and see if the features you need can be found elsewhere.

© Chris for Gestalt IT, 2009. | Enterprise Computing: Is There Any Point Buying From EMC?
Read more posts categorized as Server Virtualization, Storage