New Blog Location

Thanks for visiting; from today, I have moved my blog address – from now on, you can find my posts at www.markmywordsblog.com. When you visit the new blog, you can update any RSS syndication that you have – or elect to be alerted via e-mail of my new blog posts.

I hope you'll choose to join me at my new blog address, where I look forward to continuing the discusssion.

Compact yet Ginormous

This entry is really just an opportunity for me to share an intriguing, somewhat academic, but nonetheless fascinating, conundrum, and to pose a question.

Here goes: how do you define 'mid-range storage?' Or, more accurately, how should we all define 'mid-range storage?' I pose thequestion because I'd love to get some input. The issue has arisen on multiple occasions recently and what seemed obvious quickly became somewhat bemusing. Maybe it's like pornography--you can't really define it, but you know it when you see it?

Is it by size alone (in which case, what size?) or is it by the size of the organization? Both seem artificially prescriptive. There is the proxy of certain functions and there is the proxy of price-bands, but both can be shifting foundations. Maybe I should change the question: is there such a thing as mid-range storage? Is it about reliability? Degree of usability? Or is it because it says so in the PowerPoint and brochure? I'm as guilty as anyone in using the term, but the line seems to be more blurred every day. We'll call it a middle-aged crisis that I need to know more!

Answers in a mid-length email or on a mid-sized postcard, please...

Non Storage Decisions for Storage Decisions

I spent a couple of days this week at the Storage Decisions conference in New York, but this note isn't about the intricacies of the vendors, attendees, applications or discussions, but instead about the conference itself. More precisely, it's about doing battle with any city when there's a big event on.

 

The event this week is that the UN is in session, and that - just to add to the fun - President Obama addressed the meeting (the UN, not Storage Decisions!) on Wednesday. Additionally, some guy called Bill Clinton had an event right by the conference hotel, which was, as years past, the Hilton on Avenue of the Americas.

 

So here's the good news - I can categorically assure you that there are a lot of police in New York! An abundance it seemed. They have access to miles of wooden and plastic barricades and also can call up a lot of friends in dark suits with curly wire growing out of their ears. The bad news is that it makes getting around a tad more challenging than usual- I spent over 90 minutes in a taxi from La Guardia, only for my driver - profusely apologetic - to give up after fruitless concentric circles around the Hilton and leave me to walk.

 

The decisions for Storage Decisions?

 

1) Any chance of meeting when the UN are not in town? I know the clash has happened before, and yet I can't imagine that many of the delegates that I saw being escorted around insiren-esconced speed and comfort were actually rushing from their matters of state to ensure they didn't miss a moment of my solid state presentation! I think the UN usually announces its schedule well in advance so it shouldn't be hard to avoid it?

 

2) Knowing that avoiding large crowds and meetings of some sort in NYC is about as likely as avoiding 'shifting paradigms' at a storage conference (in other words, not very likely at all) perhaps TechTarget could move it to a time that coincides with some event that's a bit more interesting than watching darkened SUV's whizz by? It had just been Fashion Week in New York - mightn't that be more fun than a whole host of police telling us we can't cross the street? Imagine the melee when the regular fashionistas get muddled in with and confused with the corporate polo- and chino-clad storage wonks!

 

I'll try to get back to TBs, throughput and TCO for my next blog...

Still some surprises in the storage world...

Three recent stories seem worth sharing because they show that things one might not imagine or predict can still happen in this business. Other than being a tad out of the ordinary, they share nothing at all. Enjoy!

1) NetApp offers up to a million - if only they could have had Austin Powers to do the news release announcement...'one meeelion dollars' worth of NetApp stuff is on offer to some lucky new NetApp customer that gets the judges' attention for its plans to reduce its storage usage by 50% - using NetApp of course - in a VMware environment. Yeah, yeah there will be mocking and cries of 'desperation' from the competitors, but I have to give NetApp credit where credit is due.....having worked in large corporations, I'm just amazed that it could get this program through the legal, financial, and 'we're here to stop you spending a million bucks on darned good advertising' departments!

2) Hitachi knows there's a mid market play! - let's face it, Hitachi is most famous for having rock-solid, super-high-quality, enterprise-focused storage. One of its challenges has been, and continues to be, that simple knowledge of this fact does not always translate into new customers: market dynamics, like giant line-blockers (aka EMC, HP, IBM etc), tend to get in the way. So, rather than just keep running the ball straight into these great defensive lines, Hitachi has added to its playbook by adding new, highly credible mid-market offerings that will allow it to run the option. Spread offense! By having more-than-decent NAS, teiring, and integrated management plays, the field might become more open for it. Who knew, eh?  

3) Nexsan savors its own dogfood - this is my favorite recent example of the need to actually experience something before you fully appreciate it. I also like it because a) it's cool and b) because I witnessed it. Earlier this week, I had the pleasure of speaking at Nexsan's partner conference at the Venetian in Las Vegas. The company got great deals as it booked the hotel when the entire Strip was clamoring for business; however, by the time of the event, those great deals meant the place was packed. When the facilities people saw what Nexsan was going to run in its demo room, there was a hush when it was found that 'there isn't enough electricity' for the overall equipment power and cooling!! No more power for the room, no more for the hotel (hey, slot machines have priority!). After some head-scratching, the Nexsan boffins realized their own company has something to address just that issue! In went their AutoMAID and - bingo - problem solved! Power needs down 40-60%. I expect that whomever is the Nexsan partner covering the Venetian will be making a sales call soon!

Maybe there's a link here after all? Someone pushing their stuff, someone pushing new stuff, and someone smoking their own stuff. I surprise myself.  

WWII, the Internet... and What's Next

It is said that perception is reality - and certainly our perspective can deeply affect the way we all see things. A couple of current, vastly different, yet vastly significant, anniversaries strike me as particularly interesting in this vein. If someone asks about the start of World War II, I'm pretty sure most of us would put that in the 'long ago' category. After all the usually accepted date for the start of WWII is 09/01/1939. If, however, that person asks about the start of the Internet, then - apart from the fact that the latter is still very much a fact of daily life and the war ended after just under 6 years - I'm equally sure most of us would place that in the 'pretty recent' category. Seems like an accurate perception? And yet it is perfectly reasonable to see the start of the Internet as being 09/02/1969 - that was when Len Kleinrock and some 20 people at UCLA watched the first test data passbetween computers, giving birth to the Arpanet. Key protocols - e-mail and TCP/IP - followed over the next decade and, although the term 'Internet'  wasn't commonplace as such until after Tim Berners-Lee created the Web in the 90's, the start of the computing- and communication-underpinnings of our current daily lives was nearer to the start of WWII than it is to today!

OK, so maybe I'm stretching the point a little to make another point. And that is simply that our natural daily - current and truly recent - perspectives can mask an appreciation of when big shifts occur and how much things really can change. Discussions around IT and storage developments - think cloud and solid state for instance - tend to focus on 'if,' although the more interesting discussion might be 'when.' Maybe we'll be viewing a world in a handful of decades that shares just a small number of regional-mega-data-centers, largely devoid of things that spin,  which is used and operated via a mega [green?] 'cloud.' Tempting as it will be to marvel at how fast that change occurred, a broader historical perspective would show things differently - external solid state first shipped commercially in the late 1970s, and the cloud can be viewed as a consumption model that efficiently facilitates the resource sharing approach that was started even longer ago than that by the early computer bureau providers. From Arpanet to today's www is now 40 years - don't let your perceptions con you into thinking that today's computing realities are any sort of end-game.     

Announcing: August 25th

I'm sure someone somewhere tracks these things, so if you (whomever you are) happen to read this, I'd love to know what the record is for significant disk storage related announcements in one day. Whatever the answer, this 25th August is a busy day. Since I can't believe the PR folks all got together and decided to announce on the same day just to confuse us poor analysts, journalists, and users, there must be some other reason! Maybe it's because Christmas falls on the 25th of a month! Or is there a strange crop circle/Easter Island/Stonehenge disk-shaped thing going on?

Anyhow, today, we have the following announcements (in alphabetical vendor order to be fair to all):

EMC - with its promised CLARiiON updates and enhancements focused on VMware interoperability

IBM - premiers the new 5020 product that replaces the 4700 and that emphasizes mid-range value

LSI - which supplies the aforementioned IBM product, although it will appear in other channels too  

NetApp - unveils its long anticipated (and awaited) ONTAP 8 with a thoughtful cloud storage approach

Spectra Logic - adds nTier Deduplication, an integrated disk/tape deduping data protection package 

Trying to keep up with these, I hope I haven't missed any, although I'll bet there are even more 'momentum' releases and user case stories released as well. Amazing. Months with warm temperatures in the Northern hemisphere and with many kids still off school used to be quiet in terms of storage industry announcements. Clearly no more - I guess that what 25th August actually marks is the official end of summer!

Spun Up About Solid State

I spent a good chunk of last week in San Jose at the Flash Memory Summit....which might pretty soon have to change its name to the Solid State Summit, since that was what a great deal of the discussions were actually about. I think I may previously have admitted my long-term interest in solid state...when you've sold a particular thing in the 80's, as I did with DRAM-based solid state, it's easy to have a compelling - even amusingly irrational - yearning to see it return and conquer! I'm also well aware that the Flash Memory Summit is choc-a-bloc with people talking about flash memory and that those people tend to have a unified exuberance for the goodness of - yeah, you guessed it - flash memory. 

But, all that said, I tell you this stuff is coming down the pike fast. Clearly, solid state is not everywhere quite yet and not in the numbers that mean it's reached a tipping point, but the progress is very noticeable. At the same event this time last year, there were few storage system vendors actually shipping, a lot of announcements, and not much more. This time around, there are few storage system vendors not shipping something, a raft of new announcements (many from new names emerging  from stealth), and - from all the sessions I attended and briefings I received - bucket-loads more to come. Hype is turning to fulfillment - take a look at the improvments in STEC's results if you need proof. And over the next couple of years, the increase in solid state speed, capacity, and the variety of implementation options are stunning. Already there are compact systems - from Texas Memory for instance - that support millions of IOPs and TBs of capacity. I even had serious conversations with some emerging vendors about the eventual demise of SANs and NAS as we know them today!

The potential for change is not like some car manufacturer adding a satnav or alloy wheels to the new model year; it's far bigger - more like the potential for moving from horse-drawn transport to combustion-engine-powered vehicles. Indeed, the adoption of the combustion engine provides some nice parallels - clearly, it was a step-change, it was pooh-poohed by many naysayers at the outset ('you'll spontaneously combust if you go over 15mph!") and yet it eventually supported many new 'applications' (even creating suburbia, mankind's housing 'cloud'); for sure, only the wealthy had it at first, sometimes even as a novelty, until the value gradually became self-evident. Even then there were issues - a lack of roads (aka network and storage bandwidth!), a lack of choice (not everyone can have a Bugatti!), and it could be hard to keep active (more hay bales than gas stations) or to interact with the existing 'infrastructure' (few roadsigns or rules about mules, donkeys or Mercedes first). But as the value became clear and as the economics became not only attractive, but eventually compelling, so the rate of conversion increased, until horse-powered transport ironically became - at least in the developed economies - something that only those with lots of leisure time and/or money could support. As with the car analogy, change in storage will not be instant....far from it. There were entrenched parties and interests that supported the horse industry back then; there were also many, many happy users that were not only heavily invested in horse transport but who saw no immediate reason to change. Inertia is a powerful force, but logic, efficiency, economics (and user references!) will eventually overcome it - whether it's the change from a horse and cart to a family saloon, or from spinning storage to solid state storage. Until all those factors are aligned, self-evident and communicated we will all continue to stay spun up on spinning rust for the majority of storage; but, long term, there is no law that storage must spin.   

In case you're wondering, I promise I took no hallucinatory substances in California - read this Blog entry again in a few years from now and you'll wonder how anyone doubted the eventual result. 

Lunar Storage

If you read this blog regularly, you'll know that I love examples of how far, and how fast, IT and storage have progressed. With all the talk of the wonders of various contemporary IT clouds, I saw something the other day that simultaneously amused and amazed me. I wanted to use it, but couldn't think how, other than as a standalone interesting snippet. And then - serendipity? - two things happened this last week to put it in perspective. So, first, here was the initial impetus: I was reading about Buzz Aldrin's new book detailing the Apollo 11 mission. In it he recounts the high level specifications of the lunar module's guidance computer - aside from a 19 button keyboard (I guess as long as it still had Ctrl+Alt+Del it was OK!), there was a 2.048 MHz processor and a whopping 74 kilobytes of memory. Yeah, I know we know things have moved along a tad on the storage beat, but 74 kilobytes!?

See, interesting eh? And now for the two pieces of perspective that I mentioned. First I got a press release from JMR, about its PCIe Extender being used to help the company that has been restoring the footage of the Apollo 11 moon landing. It enables PCI express bus expansion from a host server, and the set-up then had 5 PCIe expansion slots in an external 3U rackmount containing 16 SAS/SATA disk bays, and which becomes a RAID system by plugging in a PCIe SAS RAID controller - you can do the potential processing and storage math but it's a lot more than it took to go get the video footage in the first place! And yet, I know now that I have the answer to all this hard work in my basement. Last night I hooked up my AppleTV thingamedoodah. One power cord, one HDMI connection, some wireless automagic and within seconds I was watching footage - in HD I might add - from the surface of Mars! [well, OK, it was the trailer for a new series called Defying Gravity, but you get the point....]. If only the Apollo 11 guys had taken one of these boxes with them!       

LSI to grow NAS by acquiring ONStor

I guess we suspected it would be a busy year on the acquisition front - and two notable purchases in just four days is certainly proof of that. Following hot on the heels of HP snapping up IBRIX last Friday, comes today's news from LSI that it is purchasing ONStor. For a moment, I worried that any company whose name starts with a consonant will be buying one starting with a vowel! However, before you wonder who's saving up to buy IBM, remember Oracle is in the midst of acquiring Sun and EMC is getting Data Domain. Phew!

Clearly, the economy has made the whole acquisition landscape more attractive to both acquirers and acquirees - attractive terms for those buying and a chance at an extended life for those being bought. It is the way of the world. In this latest example, LSI, which is a fine OEM block-storage provider, has managed to get its mitts on some proven, solid NAS capabilities without having to open up its reserve piggy-bank. The amount paid means there's no real downside to LSI and with the NAS business being one where it needs more of a presence, there looks to be only potential upside.  

My colleague Terri McClure has some more details on the NAS implications in her blog, but the larger market-space picture seems pretty clear. LSI's primary OEM is IBM, which relies mainly on an outside supplier (NetApp) for its main NAS product. Then there's HP, which does have products (and more with IBRIX), but is also broad enough that it can always use a proven high performance NAS interface from a trusted supplier. At the highest level, this move from LSI is another indication that offering 'unified' storage is something that more and more vendors are embracing in order to stay fully relevant over the coming years. More specific to LSI, one has to ask whether it can simultaneously handle the integration of the - much smaller - ONStor while also significantly benefiting from the extended business potential that it promises. If history is any guide, then this should be possible - LSI has been able to do well with its purchase of StoreAge (interestingly, also a channel product like ONStor), and has HP and others carrying the product.

Overall, this is a sensible and positive move for both LSI and ONStor, and there's every reason to think it can be good for the OEMs and users too. For sure (as much as anything can be sure!), this won't be the last storage market consolidation this year. And, finally, you may read or hear that ESG is buying ONStor - no, we are not changing our business; ESG, in this case, stands for the Engenio Storage Group, the new home within LSI for ONstor! 

Devil and delight in the details

A couple of things have recently struck me as interesting - the shared theme being that there's more of interest than just the superficial details.

First, my colleague Terri McClure wrote a piece examining the features that our ESG research team has found users are most looking for in NAS systems. It generated plenty of animated written discussion; one of the commentators suggesting that "Flash is the least compelling storage technology in ESG survey" and that "flash SSDs ranked at the bottom of all the potential technologies people might buy". Well, while admitting that I'm a big fan of solid state storage (both in limited use now, and much expanded use over time) my point is not to disagree with those who are less enthusiastic about the technology - I expect time to win that battle for me - but rather to remind us all to be careful of the conclusions we draw from various inputs. The real focus of the research quoted in Terri's blog was to determine the extent to which certain features and attributes are absolute or preferred prerequisites for users purchasing NAS systems. It did not claim to be a complete list of all the technologies, just some that are becoming more essential in the minds of users. And, in this respect, when it came to flash drives 58% of the respondents chose to say either that they 'would not purchase a NAS system without this attribute' or that they 'would strongly prefer a NAS system to include this attribute but would purchase one without it'. Frankly, I was surprised that flash had made it so far, so fast in the NAS community. 

My second 'aha' of late came after a couple of recent vendor briefings. While a strong list of partners seems to be de-riguer these days, the actual co-operation is often somewhat loose and indeed can be viewed as mutually-defensive (after all, it's not really in anyone's interest for things to not work together). It is a rather different thing than actually selling, or investing in, someone else's stuff (per the old joke about the chicken and the pig's contribution to breakfast it's the difference between being involved and being committed!). It struck me as interesting that two of the more complete and impressive lists in these respects are at opposite ends of the storage spectrum. Both ProStor, with its removable RDX disk offering, and Fusion-io with it's solid state drives, are tight in some form or fashion with the behemoths - HP, IBM and Dell. After my comments above, I'd hate to read too much into this of course - certainly, however, for all the advances in the mainstream technologies there's always room for new approaches on all sides of storage.