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All The Gear

Apr 10th, 2014
by Martin Glassborow.
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IBM are a great technology company; they truly are great at technology and so many of the technologies we take for granted can be traced to back to them. And many of today’s implementations still are poorer than the original implementations.

And yet IBM are not the dominant force that they once were; an organisational behemoth, riven with politics and fiefdoms doesn’t always lend itself to agility in the market and often leads to products that are undercooked and have a bit of a ‘soggy bottom’.

I’ve been researching the GSS offering from IBM, GPFS Storage Server; as regular readers of this blog will know, I’m a big fan of GPFS and have a fair amount installed. But don’t think that I’m blinkered to some of the complexities around GPFS; yet it deserves a fair crack of the whip.

There’s a lot to like about GSS; it builds on the solid foundations of GPFS and brings a couple of excellent new features into play.

GPFS Native RAID; also known as declustered RAID is a software implementation of micro-RAID; RAID is done at a block level as opposed to a disk level; this generally means that the cost of rebuilds can be reduced and the time to get back to a protected level can be shortened. As disks continue to get larger, conventional RAID implementations struggle and you can be looking at hours if not days to get back to a protected state.

Disk Hospital; by constantly monitoring the health of the individual disks and collecting metrics for them; the GSS can detect failing disks very early on but there is a dirty secret in the storage world; most disk failures in a storage array are not really failures and could be simply recovered from, a simple power-cycle can be enough or a firmware reflash can be enough to prevent a failure and going into a recovery scenario.

X-IO have been advocating this for a long time; this can reduce maintenance windows and prevent unnecessary rebuilds. It should reduce maintenance costs as well.

Both of these technologies are great and very important to a scalable storage environment.

So why aren’t IBM pushing GSS in general; it’s stuffed full of technology and useful stuff?

The problem is GPFS…GPFS is currently too complicated for many, it’s never going to be a general purpose file system. The licensing model alone precludes that; so if you want to utilise it with a whole bunch of clients, you are going to be rolling your own NFS/SMB 3.0 gateway. Been there, done that…still doing that but it’s not really a sensible option for many.

If IBM really want the GSS to be a success; they need a scaleable and supported NAS gateway in front of it; it needs to be simple to manage. It needs integration with the various virtualisation platforms and they need to simplify the GPFS license model…when I say simplify, I mean get rid of the client license cost.

I want to like product and not just love the technology.

Until then…IBM have got all the gear and no idea….

Hats and Homes..

Apr 9th, 2014
by Martin Glassborow.
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As Chad breaks his principles to pimp his product and go negative on the other guy here; he hits on something interesting, well I think it’s interesting. It’s how a product becomes a feature; in this case ‘sync n’ share’ functionality.

We’ve seen products become features before; deduplication has moved from being a product to becoming a feature of most storage arrays. And I don’t think it’ll be too long before we see it beginning to appear in consumer storage devices either.

But ‘Sync n’ Share’ is of a whole different order; the valuations of some the companies is quite scary and Chad is probably right about the general unrealism of them. The ‘Sync n’ Share’ companies are vulnerable to attack via a number of vectors; this is not a criticism of the products…Dropbox for example is a great product on many levels; it has great functionality but maybe some questions about security and privacy.

However its ease of use and access means that it has been embraced by both the consumer and the business user (Yes, I know they are consumers); this has scared the crap out of the IT department who find it very hard to compete with ‘free’…you try and build a business case which competes with free; you can talk till you are tired about security concerns.

Few want to pay for it, certainly at scale; it starts to amount to a frightening figure. [Hmmm, business cases and responsibility for presenting them; that’s a whole different blog.] So what happens; the end-users, even if banned by security policies, will continue to use the services. The services are just too damn useful.

And as mobile/BYOD/desktop/laptop/home-working proliferates; they become necessary. People’s home directories are migrating to these services. Work on a document on your desktop, present it on your tablet…without having to transfer it; this workflow simply works.

What we are going to see is vendors of operating systems and storage systems start to build this functionality into their products as a feature. If you are a NAS vendor; you are going to provide an app that allows the user to access their home directories from their mobile device or the web etc…If you are Microsoft or Apple; you are going build this into the operating system. If you are sensible, you are not going to charge a huge amount to provide this functionality; those business cases become a lot simpler, especially if you are simply layering on top of existing home directories and shares.

And what was once a product..is now simply a feature.

Those valuations are going to plummet; I don’t think that application integration and APIs will save them. If I were Dropbox or Box…I’d be looking to sell myself off to a vendor who wants the feature. 

Comparisons with the fate of Netscape might well be made…

 

A Press Release From The Future…

Mar 20th, 2014
by Martin Glassborow.
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Future-View, CA – March 2018

Evian Storage – Storage so Pure it’s like a torrent of glacial water announced today the end of the All-Flash-Array with the announcement of it’s StupendoStore 20000 based around the HyperboleHype-based storage device.

Our research shows that All Flash Arrays are slowing down businesses in their move to meet the new business paradigms brought about by computing at the quantum scale. Their architectures simply can’t keep up and storage is yet again the bottle-neck and yet scaling economically also seems to be beyond them.  Customers have found themselves locked into an architecture which promised no more fork-lift upgrades but has delivered technology lock-in and all the agility of a dancing hippo. Forget about fork-lifts, we are talking cranes!

Fortunately our team’s experience in delivering hybrid arrays at such companies as EMC, HDS, NetApp and other vendors has enabled us to take advantage of the newest technology on the block but also leverage the economies of flash and indeed the huge capacity and scale of magnetic disk; we know that your data should live in the right place and although we admit that our arrays might not be as fast the Purest arrays…I’m sure we’re not the only ones who prefer their rocket fuel with a little mixer…

Yes, this is a dig at the All-Flash players…but it doesn’t matter how great your technology is today; there will always be something newer and faster round the corner. And as a customer, it is worth remembering that the future is always closer than you think. It could be only a single depreciation cycle away, a single tech-refresh away. The challenge for all vendors is delivering a sustainable model and product-set.

And no-one product will meet all your needs….no matter what the vendor tells you!

Chop Their Fingers Off!

Mar 16th, 2014
by Martin Glassborow.
5 comments

This is a very good piece on FAST-VP on VMAX, well-written and some good advice in it but it sums up almost everything that is wrong with VMAX today. VMAX has too many nerd-knobs and so people think they should fiddle and try and out-do the machine.

And hence probably make a right-old mess, FAST-VP ends up not working quite as well as it should and so people tend to fiddle even more and the next thing you know, you are trying to manage your VMAX in the way you would have managed an old-school Symm.

I think it is time that EMC and their users seriously consider breaking away from the past; the old-school nerd-knob fettling needs to stop. I know that is why storage admins get paid the big bucks but I do wonder if we might be better paying them to stop?

I long for the day when we see VMAX managed without worrying about what the internal engines are doing; when we set various performance parameters and let the array sort it out. When we pay for performance and capacity without worrying how the system gets to it.

There is at least one amusing part of advice in the article tho’ and it although it is well-argued and there appears to be good reason to do so; you still should keep the FC-tier on RAID-1 mirrored disks…Nothing really changes in the world of Symm!

 

 

Already Getting Busy…

Jan 15th, 2014
by Martin Glassborow.
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I’ve not been away but a mixture of illness, Christmas and general lethargy have meant that I’ve not bothered with writing for a bit. But 2014 and a new year appears to be upon us and I do wonder what it is going to bring us, especially in the world of IT infrastructure.

As we ended 2013, we saw both winners and losers in the world of Flash for example; Violin crashing as they struggle to increase sales and reduce burn; yet Pure seem to be on a stellar rise and hiring like maniacs. A UK launch is imminent and they are going to be interesting to watch. All Flash Arrays are still very much niche and even companies who need them are holding off on making any big decisions.

I’ve already spoken to a hybrid vendor this year; pushing their hybrid is good enough for most cases, very tied to the virtualisation use-case. And yes, VDI all over their powerpoints as a use-case. 2014, the year when VDI happens!!

I expect that I’ll spend time with more hybrid vendors who are playing some kind of chicken with SSD/Disk ratios; how low can they go? However, I’m also seeing more KVM/Openstack appearing on road-maps as they begin to realise that VMware might not be the only game in town.

I’m sure we’ll see more hype around hyper-convergence as attempts continue to build a new mainframe and I shall continue to struggle to work out why anyone wants to? I like being able to scale my infrastructure in right place; I don’t want to have to increase my compute to increase my storage and vice versa. Flexibility around compute/storage and network ratios is important.

Yet convergence of storage and compute will continue and there’s potentially some real challenge to the traditional storage technologies there. If I was building a new infrastructure today, I’d be looking hard whether I needed a SAN at all. But I wouldn’t be going straight to a hyper-converged infrastructure; there be dragons there I suspect.

I’ve already had my first vendor conversation where I’ve suggested that they are actually selling a software product and perhaps they should drop the hardware part; that and asking why the hell were they touting their own REST API for cloud-like storage…if industry giants like EMC have struggled against the Amazon juggernaut, what makes they think that they are any different?

And marketing as differentiation will probably continue….especially as the traditional vendors get more defensive around their legacy products.  No-one should get rich selling disk any more but it won’t stop them all trying.

 

2014 – A Look Forward….

Dec 16th, 2013
by Martin Glassborow.
3 comments

As as we come to the end of another year, it is worth looking forward to see what if anything is going to change in the storage world next year because this year has pretty much been a bust as to innovation and radical new products.

So what is going to change?

I get the feeling not a huge amount.

Storage growth is going to continue for the end-users but the vendors are going to continue to experience a plateau of revenues. As end-users, we will expect more for our money but it will be mostly more of the same.

More hype around Software-Defined-Everything will keep the marketeers and the marchitecture specialists well employed for the next twelve months but don’t expect anything radical. The only innovation is going to be around pricing and consumption models as vendors try to maintain margins.

Early conversations this year point to the fact that the vendors really have little idea how to price their products in this space; if your software+commodity-hardware=cost-of-enterprise-array, what is in it for me?  If vendors get their pricing right; this could be very disruptive but at what cost to their own market position?

We shall see more attempts to integrate storage into the whole-stacks and we’ll see more attempts to converge compute, network and storage at hardware and software levels. Most of these will be some kind of Frankenpliance and converged only in shrink-wrap.

Flash will continue to be hyped as the saviour of the data-centre but we’ll still struggle to find real value in the proposition in many places as will many investors. There is a reckoning coming. I think some of the hybrid manufacturers might do better than the All-Flash challengers.

Hopefully however the costs of commodity SSDs will keep coming down and it’ll finally allow everyone to enjoy better performance on their work-laptops!

Shingled Magnetic Recording will allow storage densities to increase and we’ll see larger capacity drives ship but don’t expect them to appear in mainstream arrays soon; the vibration issues and re-write process is going to require some clever software and hardware to fully commercialise these. Still for those of us who are interested in long-term archive disks, this is an area worth watching.

FCoE will continue to be a side-show and FC, like tape, will soldier on happily. NAS will continue to eat away at the block storage market and perhaps 2014 will be the year that Object storage finally takes off.

In With The New

Nov 19th, 2013
by Martin Glassborow.
3 comments

As vendors race to be better, faster and to differentiate themselves in an already busy marketplace, the real needs of the storage teams can be left un-met and also that of the storage consumer. At times it is as if the various vendors are building dragsters, calling them family saloons and hoping that nobody notices. The problems that I blogged about when I started out blogging seem still mostly unsolved.

Management

Storage management at scale is still problematic; it is still extremely hard to find a toolset that will allow a busy team to be able to assess health, performance, supportability and capacity at a glance. Still too many teams are using spreadsheets and manually maintained records to manage their storage.

Tools which allow end-to-end management of an infrastructure from rust to silicon and all parts in-between still don’t exist or if they do, they come with large price-tags which invariably do not have a real ROI or a realistic implementation strategy.

As we build more silos in the storage-infrastructure; getting a view of the whole estate is harder now than ever. Multi-vendor management tools are in general lacking in capability with many vendors using subtle changes to inflict damage on the competing management tools.

Mobility

Data mobility across tiers where those tiers are spread across multiple vendors is hard; applications are generally not currently architected to encapsulate this functionality in their non-functional specifications. And many vendors don’t want you to be able to move data between their devices and competitors for obvious reasons.

But surely the most blinkered flash start-up must realise that this needs to be addressed; it is going to be an unusual company who will put all of their data onto flash.

Of course this is not just a problem for the start-ups but it could be a major barrier for adoption and is one of the hardest hurdles to overcome.

Scaling

Although we have scale-out and scale-up solutions; scaling is a problem. Yes, we can scale to what appears to be almost limitless size these days but the process of scaling brings problems. Adding additional capacity is relatively simple; rebalancing performance to effectively use that capacity is not so easy. If you don’t rebalance, you risk hotspots and even under-utilisation.

It requires careful planning and timing even with tools; it means understanding the underlying performance characteristics and requirements of your applications. And with some of the newer architectures that are storing metadata and de-duping; this appears to be a challenge to vendors. Ask questions of vendors as to why they are limited to a number of nodes; there will sheepish shuffling of feet and alternative methods of federating a number of arrays into one logical entity will quickly come into play.

And then mobility between arrays becomes an issue to be addressed.

Deterministic Performance

As arrays get larger; more workloads get consolidated onto a single array and without the ability to isolate workloads or guarantee performance; the risk of bad and noisy neighbours increases. Few vendors have yet grasped the nettle of QoS and yet fewer developers actually understand what their performance characteristics and requirements.

Data Growth

Despite all efforts to curtail this; we store ever larger amounts of data. We need an industry-wide initiative to look at how we better curate and manage data. And yet if we solve the problems above, the growth issue will simply get worse..as we reduce the friction and the management overhead, we’ll simply consume more and more.

Perhaps the vendors should be concentrating on making it harder and even more expensive to store data. It might be the only way to slow down the inexorable demand for ever more storage. Still, that’s not really in their interest.

All of the above is in their interest…makes you wonder why they are still problems.

 

 

Xpect More…

Nov 18th, 2013
by Martin Glassborow.
1 comment

So we finally have the GA of XtremIO; not that the GA is much different from the DA in many ways, it is still going to be pretty hard to get hold of an XtremIO if you want one. And that is of course a big *if*; do you really need an All-Flash-Array? Can you use it? Is it just going to be a sledge-hammer to crack a performance nut!

Firstly, I think that you have to point out that presently even under GA, the XtremIO array has some pretty horrible official caveats; not guaranteed non-disruptive upgrade, lack of replication services and the like mean that this is no-where near ready to replace the normal use case for an Enterprise array.

Add in today’s fairly limited scalability and it is obvious that this is not a VMAX replacement today. So will it be in future?

At the moment, that is pretty unclear; we’re due a tick in the tick-tock of VMAX releases; I’d say EMCWorld 2014 is going to be all about the next generation of the VMAX.

But what about the XtremIO in general?

Is it a good idea or even a good implementation of a good idea? It’s odd because looking at the architecture…it feels like what would have happened if XIV had built an all-flash-array as opposed to the spinning-rust array that they have. Much of what we are coming to expect from a modern array from an architectural point-of-view is here; balanced i/o, no hot spots, no tuning, no tiering and minimal management is here. Yet without the aforementioned Enterprise features such as replication, it all feels….well, undercooked.

And there is still the question as to where you are going to use an All-Flash-Array; if I never see another presentation from a flash vendor that mentions VDI again, it’ll be too soon! Let’s just use our AFA arrays as super-fast boot-drives!

So where else are you going to use it? Probably in the same place that you are already using hybrid arrays…to accelerate poorly performing applications? But do you need to keep all your data on AFA and can you tier easily between multiple array types?   You see, you need a capacity tier and you need data mobility…data has to flow. The hybrids have a distinct advantage here. So what is the answer for XtremIO

If you manage the data silos at the application layer; you might well find that you begin to loose the value of an all-flash-array, you’ll be moving data from the array to another array. Doing more I/Os at the host level..

I’m intrigued to see how EMC and others begin to solve this problem because we are not looking at an All-Flash data-storage environment for most people for some time.

Could we see clustering of XtremIO with other arrays? Or are we doomed to manage storage as silos forever.

I don’t see XtremIO as replacing the Enterprise storage arrays anytime soon; I think the traditional EMC sales-drone has plenty of refresh opportunity for some time.

 

 

Bearing the Standard…

Nov 13th, 2013
by Martin Glassborow.
3 comments

At SNW Europe, I had a chance to sit down with David Dale of SNIA; we talked about various things, how SNIA becomes more relevant, how it becomes a more globally focused organisation and the IT industry in general. And we had a chat about SNIA’s role in the development of standards and suddenly companies who were not interested in standards are suddenly becoming interested in standards.

It appears in the world of Software-Defined everything; vendors are beginning to realise that they need standards to make this all to work. Although it is possible to write plug-ins for every vendor’s bit of kit; there is a dawning realisation amongst the more realistic that this is a bit of a fool’s errand.

So after years of dissing things like SMI-S; a certain large vendor who is trying to make a large play in the software-defined storage world is coming to the table. A company who in the past have been especially standards non-friendly…

Of course, they are busy trying to work out how to make their software-defined-storage API the de-facto standard but it is one of the more amusing things to see SMI-S dotted all over presentations from EMC.

But I think that it is a good point and important for us customers; standards to control and manage our storage are very important, we need to do more to demand that our vendors start to play ball. Storage infrastructure is becoming increasingly complex due to the new silos that are springing up in our data-centre.

It may well to be too early to predict the death of the Enterprise-Do-Everything-Array but a vigorously supported management standard could hasten its demise; if I can manage my silos simply, automating provisioning, billing and all my admin tasks…I can start to purchase best of breed without seriously overloading my admin team.

This does somewhat beggar the question, why are EMC playing in this space? Perhaps because they have more silos than any one company at the moment and they need a way of selling them all to the same customer at the same time…

EMC, the standard’s standard bearer…oh well, stranger things have happened…

 

 

 

Looking for the Exit

Oct 31st, 2013
by Martin Glassborow.
No comments yet

Sitting on the exhibition floor at Powering the Cloud; you sometimes wonder how many of these companies will be still here next year, the sheer volume of flash start-ups is quite frightening; I can see Pure, Tintri, Nimble, Fusion-IO, Violin all from where I am sitting. And really there is little to choose between them. All trying to do the same thing…all trying to be the next big thing, the next NetApp. And do any of them stand any chance of doing this?

There is little uniqueness about any of them; they’ll all claim technical superiority over each other but for most this is a marketing war driven by a desire to exit. Technically the differentiation between them is slight, scratch many of them and you will find a relatively standard dual-head array running Linux with some kind of fork of ZFS. Tuned for flash? Well, NetApp have spent years trying to tune WAFL for flash and have pretty much given up. Hence the purchase of Engenio and the new Flashray products.

This is not to say that new start-ups are bringing nothing new to the party but we have a mulitude of products; from pure flash plays to hybrid flash to flash in the server; lots of product overlap and little differentiation. Choice is good though?

So what does this mean to the end-user delegates walking the floor; well, there has to be a certain amount of wariness about the whole thing. Who do you spend your money with, who do you make a strategic investment in and who is going to be around next year?

The biggest stands here are that of Oracle, HP, Dell and NetApp. All companies who might be in the market for such an acquisition. I guess the question in the back of everyone’s mind is who might they acquire, if anyone. And will acquisition even be good for the customers of the acquired company? How many products have we seen acquired and pushed into dusty corners.

End-users are bad enough when it comes to shelfware but the big technology companies are even worse, they acquire whole companies and turn them into shelf-ware.

So we need to be looking at more standards and ways of deploying storage in ways that it becomes more standardised and removes the risk from taking risks.

And there in lies a problem for many start-ups; how do you disrupt without disrupting. How do you lock-in without actually locking-in. Perhaps some help on that question might come from an unusual place but more another time.

But I’ve pretty much come to the conclusion that most of them don’t really care. It’s all about the exit; some might make it to IPO but even then most will want to be acquired. I’m not seeing a huge amount of evidence of a desire to build a sustainable and stable business.

It is as if the storage industry has lost it’s soul or at least sold it.

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