Storagebod Rotating Header Image

Storage

Hursley Heroes….

May 12th, 2014
by Martin Glassborow.
No comments yet

It has been very gratifying to see the V7000 and SVC getting some real love from IBM over the past couple of years; it’s a product which is going from strength to strength. The latest bunch of announcements are good; bigger, faster and yet presented with realism; Barry is not one to try and pull the wool over our eyes by quoting nonsensical performance figures.

The two features that catch the eye are the compression capabilities that should work very well for databases and the likes; Storage Pool Balancing, ensure that all disks in a pool are delivering the same performance is the feature which is most important.

I wonder if the Storage Pool Balancing is the first step to putting a disk-hospital into the V7000; allowing a much lower-touch maintenance and a subsequent reduction in maintenance costs (to IBM, not to the customer obviously). Identifying disks that are performing slower than their peers even minuscule levels is often the first indication that something is going wrong; it is also very important in IBM’s declustered RAID…something not yet announced in the V7000/SVC range but must be expected as disks get ever bigger.

The use of Intel’s QuickAssist technology to enable the compression chip should bring future enhancements such as encryption and deduplication.

So the future is pretty bright for the SVC and V7000…as long as IBM can actually manage to market and sell it.

If you also factor in the common look and feel across the storage range; you’d almost believe that IBM have a real future in storage…

p.s I see that IBM are persisting with the V7000U as well; I keep wondering whether the next V7000U announcement will be a withdrawal from market but I guess IBM need to keep trying to sell a traditional filer.

 

 

Stretching…

May 6th, 2014
by Martin Glassborow.
No comments yet

So EMC have finally productised Nile and given it the wonderful name of ‘Elastic Cloud Storage’; there is much to like about it and much I have been asking for…but before I talk about what I like about it, I’ll point out one thing…

Not Stretchy

It’s not very Elastic, well not when compared to the Public Cloud Offerings unless there is a very complicated finance model behind it and even then it might not be that Elastic. One of the things that people really like about Public Cloud Storage is that they pay for what they use and if their consumption goes down….then their costs go down.

Now EMC can probably come up with a monthly charge based on how much you are using; they certainly can do capacity on demand. And they might be able to do something with leasing to allow downscaling as well at a financial level but what they can’t easily do is take storage away on demand. So that 5 petabytes will be on premise and using space; it will also need maintaining even if it spins down to save power.

Currently EMC are stating 9%-28% lower TCO over Public Cloud…it needs to be. Also that is today; Google and Amazon are fighting a price-war, can EMC play in that space and react quickly enough? They claim that they are cheaper after the last round of price cutting but after the next?

So it’s not as Elastic as Public Cloud and this might matter…unless they are relying on the fact that storage demands never seem to go away.

Commodity

I can’t remember when I started writing about commodity storage and the convergence between storage and servers. Be it roll-your-own or when vendors were going to start doing something very similar; ZFS really sparked a movement who looked at storage and thought why do we need big vendors like EMC, NetApp, HDS and HP for example.

Yet there was always the thorny issue of support and for many of us; it was a bridge too far. In fact, it actually started to look more expensive than buying a supported product..and we quite liked sleeping at night.

But there were some interesting chassis out there that really started to catch our eyes and even our traditional server vendors were shipping interesting boxes. It was awfully tempting.

And so I kept nagging the traditional vendors…

Many didn’t want to play or were caught up in their traditional business. Some didn’t realise that this was something that they could do and some still don’t.

Acquisition

The one company who had the most to loose from a movement to commodity storage was EMC; really, this could be very bad news. There’s enough ‘hate’ in the market for a commodity movement to get some real traction. So they bought a company that could allow commoditisation of storage at scale; I think at least some of us thought that would be the end of that. Or it would disappear down a rabbit hole to resurface as an overpriced product.

And the initial indications were that it wasn’t going to disappear but it was going to be stupidly expensive.

Also getting EMC to talk sensibly about Scale-IO was a real struggle but the indication is that it was a good but expensive product.

Today

So what EMC have announced at EMC-World is kind of surprising in that it looks like that they may well be willing to rip the guts out of their own market. We can argue about the pricing and the TCO model but it looks a good start; street prices and list prices have a very loose relationship. The four year TCO they are quoting needs to drop by a bit to be really interesting.

But the packaging and the option to deploy on your own hardware; although this is going to be from a carefully controlled catalogue I guess; is a real change from EMC. But you will also notice that EMC have got into the server-game; a shot across the bows of the converged players?

And don’t just expect this to be a content dump; Scale-IO can do serious I/O if you deploy SSDs.

Tomorrow

My biggest problem with Scale-IO is that it breaks EMC; breaks them in a good way but it’s a completely different sales model. For large storage consumers, an Enterprise License Agreement with all you can eat and deploying onto your chosen commodity platform is going to be very attractive. Now the ELA might be a big-sum but as a per terabyte cost; it might not be so big and the more you use; the cheaper it gets.

And Old EMC might struggle a bit with that. They’ll probably try to sell you a VMAX to sit behind your ViPR nodes.

Competitors?

RedHat have an opportunity now with Ceph; especially amongst those who hate EMC for being EMC. IBM could do something with GPFS. HP have a variety of products.

There are certainly smaller competitors as well.

And then there’s VMware with VSAN; which I still don’t understand!

There’s an opportunity here for a number of people…they need to grasp it and compete. This isn’t going to go away any more.

 

 

Missing – One Big Iron

May 6th, 2014
by Martin Glassborow.
No comments yet

There appears to be a missing announcement at EMC-World; I think the world and their dog were expecting a VMAX announcement. I certainly was; we’ve not had a big VMAX announcement at EMC-World for a couple of years.

So what gives?

Now, have no doubt….there is a new VMAX coming and EMC’s high-end array sales show that the market is expecting it and might well be holding off on new purchases and refreshes. Question is, is it late or is it something else entirely?

I’m tending towards the latter; I think EMC are trying their hardest to transition to a new culture and product-set; they can’t do this if they have a VMAX announcement as a distraction.

So I’m guessing we’ll see a special event later in the year…won’t that be great! Looking forward to it!!

May Means Marketing Malarkey…

May 5th, 2014
by Martin Glassborow.
1 comment

Okay, storage vendor posts another stupid guarantee; it’s like deja-vu all over again.

And EMC, if you are so confident about your claims…make the guarantee unlimited, not time-bound and so when there are enough of the arrays around to ensure that there is a decent sample-base of strange corner-cases to cause problems.

Otherwise it’s just another marketing stunt!

 

Not So Potty

May 5th, 2014
by Martin Glassborow.
2 comments

Virtual Openness

I don’t always agree with Trevor Pott but this piece on ServerSAN, VSAN and storage acceleration is spot on; the question about VSAN running in the kernel and the advantages that brings to performance; and indeed, I’ve also heard comments about reliability, support and the likes over competing products is very much one which has left me scratching my head and feeling very irritated.

If running VSAN in the kernel is so much better and it almost feels that it should be; it kind of asks another question, perhaps I would be better running all my workloads on bare-metal or as close as I can.

Or perhaps VMware need to be allowing a lot more access to the kernel or a pluggable architecture that allows various infrastructure services to run at that level. There are a number of vendors that would welcome that move and it might actually hasten the adoption of VMware yet further or at least take out some of the more entrenched resistance around it.

I do hope more competition in the virtualisation space will bring more openness to the VMware hypervisor stack.

And it does seem that we are beginning towards data-centres which host competing virtualisation technologies; so it would be good if that at a certain level that these became more infrastructure agnostic. From a purely selfish point of view; it would be good to have the same technology to present storage space to VMware, Hyper-V, KVM and anything else.

I would like to easily share data between systems that run on different technologies and hypervisors; if I use VSAN, I can’t do this without putting in some other technology on top.

Perhaps VMware don’t really want me to have more than one hypervisor in my data-centre; the same way that EMC would prefer that all my storage was from them…but they have begun to learn to live with reality and perhaps they need to encourage VMware to live in the real world as well.  I certainly have use-cases that utilise bare-metal for some specific tasks but that data does find its way into virtualised environments.

Speedy Storage

There are many products that promise to speed-up your centralised storage and they work very well, especially in simple use-cases. Trevor calls this Centralised Storage Acceleration (CSA); some are software products, some come with hardware devices and some are mixture of both.

They can have some significant impact on the performance of your workloads; databases can benefit from them especially (most databases benefit more with decent DBAs and developers how-ever); they are a quick fix for many performance issues and remove that bottleneck which is spinning rust.

But as soon as you start to add complexity; clustering, availability and moving beyond a basic write-cache functionality…they stop being a quick-fix and become yet another system to go wrong and manage.

Fairly soon; that CSA becomes something a lot closer to a ServerSAN and you are sticking that in front of your expensive SAN infrastructure.

The one place that a CSA becomes interesting is as Cloud Storage Acceleration; a small amount of flash storage on server but with the bulk of data sitting in a cloud of some sort.

So what is going on?

It is unusual to have such a number of competing deployment models for infrastructure; in storage, we have an increasing number of deployment models.

  • Centralised Storage – the traditional NAS and SAN devices
  • Direct Attached Storage – Local disk with the application layer doing all the replication and other data management services
  • Distributed Storage – Server-SAN; think VSAN and competitors

And we can layer an acceleration infrastructure on top of those; this acceleration infrastructure could be local to the server or perhaps an appliance sitting in the ‘network’.

All of these have use-cases and the answer may well be that to run a ‘large’ infrastructure; you need a mixture of them all?

Storage was supposed to get simple and we were supposed to focus on the data and providing data services. I think people forgot that just calling something a service didn’t make it simple and the problems go away.

 

Licensed To Bill

Apr 30th, 2014
by Martin Glassborow.
No comments yet

‘*sigh* Another change to a licensing model and you can bet it’s not going to work out any cheaper for me’ was the first thought that flickered through my mind during a presentation about  GPFS 4.1 at the GPFS UG meeting in London (if you are a GPFS user in the UK, you should attend this next time…probably the best UG meeting I’ve been at for a long time).

This started up another train of thought; in this new world of Software Defined Storage, how should the software be licensed? And how should the value be reflected?

Should we be moving to a capacity based model?

Should I get charged per terabyte of storage being ‘managed’?

Or perhaps per server that has this software defined storage presented to it?

Perhaps per socket? Per core?

But this might not work well if I’m running at hyperscale?

And if I fully embrace a programmatic provisioning model that dynamically changes the storage configuration…does any model make any sense apart from some kind of flat-fee, all-you-can-eat model.

Chatting to a few people; it seems that no-one really has any idea what the licensing model should look like. Funnily enough; it is this sort of thing which could really de-rail ServerSAN and Software Defined Storage; it’s not going to be a technical challenge but if the licensing model gets too complex, hard to manage and generally too costly, it is going to fail.

Of course inevitably someone is going to pop-up and mention Open-Source…and I will simply point out, RedHat make quite a lot of money out of Open-Source; you pay for support based on some kind of model. Cost of acquisition is just a part of IT infrastructure spend.

So what is a reasonable price? Anyone?

 

 

FUD Returns?

Apr 29th, 2014
by Martin Glassborow.
No comments yet

Are we drifting into another round of the storage wars where FUD starts to fly? It always makes for good copy. The little guy complaining about the big guy who is complaining about the little guy; David with his sling versus Goliath with his rocket launcher.

EMC versus 3Par NetApp Pure Storage?

The thing with FUD is that it doesn’t really work unless there is the tiniest grain of truth in their somewhere; you take the smallest and most inconsequential thing and magnify it. And in storage, it is really easy to do it….why?

Because it depends!

Storage workloads can be very different and have very different characteristics; a great majority of my workloads are very different to most peoples. And I find myself taking exception to almost every marketing message out there from all vendors.

Tape Is Dead? Not in my workloads; tape is really the only current economical media for long term digital archives.

Disk is cheaper than tape? Only if you can get significant dedupe and compression.

SSD is better than disk? When throughput is king; disk and SSD end-up about the same.

SSD same price as disk?   Only if you can get significant dedupe and compression.

Scale-Up versus Scale-Out? I happen to think that Scale-Out is the best architecture, it suits my applications..if you have a large legacy estate, you might find that Scale-Up works better for you.

There are so many factors to account for in many workloads; from application design to the nature of the data…

Storage doesn’t really distil down into a nice simple marketing message but it doesn’t stop them from trying and hence we get FUD.

It’s sometimes Funny

It’s mostly Useless

It’s written by Drones…

And we’ll get more of it this year than we have had for a few years…

And where’s Marc Farley when you need him…

 

 

Too Cheap To Manage…

Apr 24th, 2014
by Martin Glassborow.
1 comment

Five years or so when I started this blog, I spent much time venting my spleen at EMC and especially the abomination that was Control-Center; a product so poor that a peer in the inudstry once described it as being too expensive even if it was free.

And yet still the search for the perfect storage management product still continues; there have been contenders along the way and yet they still continue to fall short and as the administration tools have got better and easier to use, the actual management tools have still fallen some way short of the mark.

But something else has happened and it was only a chance conversation today that highlighted this to me; the tenuous business case that many have been purchased on has collapsed…many storage management products are purchased with the business case that ultimately that they will save you money by allowing you to right-size your storage estate….they will maximise the usage of the estate that you have on the floor.

Unfortunately and it surprises to say this; the price of enterprise storage has collapsed…seriously, although it is still obviously too expensive (I have to say that); the price of storage management products has not declined at the same rate. This means that it is doubtful that I can actually save enough capacity to make it worth my time trying too hard and putting in a tool to do so, the economics don’t actually stack up.

So there has to be whole new business case around risk mitigation, change-planning, improved agility…or the licensing model that tends to be capacity-based in some form or another has to be reviewed.

Do we still need good storage management tools? Yes but they need to focused on automation and service delivery; not on simply improving the utilisation of the estate.

Thin-provisioning, deduplication, compression and the likes are already driving down these costs; they do this ways that are easier than reclaiming orphaned storage and even under-utilised SAN ports.And as long as I am clever, I can pick-up a lot of orphaned storage on refresh.

If ‘Server-SAN’ is a real thing; these tools are going to converge into the general management tools, giving me a whole new topic to vent at..because most of these aren’t especially great either.

p.s If you want to embarrass EMC and make them sheepish…just mention Control-Center…you’d think it’d killed someone..

Buy Savvy….

Apr 18th, 2014
by Martin Glassborow.
1 comment

Howard has a piece titled ‘Separating Storage Startups From Upstarts’; it actually feels more like a piece on how to be a technology buyer and how to be a savvy buyer. As someone who on occasion buys a bit of technology or at least influences buying decisions…here’s some of my thoughts.

List price from any vendor is completely meaningless; most vendors only seem to have list prices to comply with various corporate governance regimes. And of course having a list price means that the procurement department can feel special when they’ve negotiated the price down to some stupidly low percentage of the original quote; in a world where 50%+ discounts are common, list is nonsense.

What is true is that often a start-ups list price will be lower than the traditional vendor; it’s got to be even to start a conversation.

In my experience; the biggest mistake an end-user can make is not being willing to take any bid competitive; dual supplier type arrangements are good but often can lead to complexity in an environment. If you can split your infrastructure into domains; say for example you buy all your block from one vendor and your file from another vendor..or perhaps, you have a tiering strategy that allows you to do something similar.

But loyalty can bring rewards as well; partnership is thrown around but learning to work with your vendor is important. Knowing which buttons to press and learning how a vendor organisation works is often key to getting the most out of infrastructure procurement.

Howard’s assertion about a three-year life of an array in a data centre? This doesn’t seem to ring true for me and many of my peers; four-five years seems  to the minimum life in general. If it were three years, we would generally be looking at an actual two-year useful life of an array; six months to get on, two years running and six months to get off. Many organisations are struggling with four years and as arrays get bigger; this is getting longer.

And the pain of going through a technology refresh every three years; well we’d be living in a constant sea of moving data whilst trying to do new things as well. So my advice, plan for a five year refresh cycle…

My advice to any technology buyer is to pay close attention to the ‘UpStarts’ but also pay attention to your existing relationships; know what you want and what you need. Make sure that any vendor or potential vendor can do what they say; understand what they can do when there are problems. Test their commitment and flexibility.

Look very carefully at any new offering from anyone; is it a product or a feature?  If it is a feature; is it one that is going to change your world substantially? Violin arguably fell into the trap of being a feature; extreme performance…it’s something that few really need.

And when dealing with a new company; understand where their sales-culture has come from…if you had a bad experience with their previous employer, there’s a fair chance that you might have a similar experience again.

 

All The Gear

Apr 10th, 2014
by Martin Glassborow.
No comments yet

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….

← Earlier Posts Newer Posts →