Do Better!!

Storage workloads can be measured in a number of metrics but have historically been measured on one rating alone; capacity! How much disk! Now storage workloads can be measured in a combination of the below

1) Space
2) IOPs
3) Throughput
4) Latency/Response times.

The problem is that the industry has really struggled in the trade-off between the top one and the metrics below. Disks have got bigger and bigger with whilst the others on a per-spindle basis have stayed pretty much constant; this has resulted in the cost/GB falling dramatically whereas the decline in the others has been less dramatic.

As a result of this, we have seen the effective utilisable capacity of the disks in many cases fall off the cliff. Storage has become horribly inefficient apparently; in fact, some techniques such as primary storage dedupe could actually exasperate the whole situation; deduping the data on 100% saturated disks would just make things even less efficient.

So just over a year ago, EMC introduced SSDs into their DMX array; followed by the CX range later on in the year. Big fanfares from EMC and lots of raspberries by the rest of the industry followed by a number of 'me too' announcements.

Now EMC argue that for some workloads, the deployment of SSDs will save you money; you need a lot less of them to fulfill particular types of workload. However, EMC's implementation in the DMX/CX was arguably too early, too expensive and a pain the rear to get the implementation right.

Yes, we had a feasibility study done and although it would have had substantial improvements in performance; the cost savings might well have been outweighed by the amount of work to relay the array out and more importantly to re-engineer some of the application file-system layouts. It was decided that it did not make economic sense at this time to do the work.

I had also had a number of discussions with various storage vendors including EMC about the most efficient use of SSDs; almost everyone agreed that sub-LUN storage tiering would bring about massive improvements in the effectiveness of SSDs and the use of SATA drives. It seems that a large amount of research was going on in various vendors to enable this. EMC even had a name for theirs; Fully Automated Storage Tiering but they are certainly not the only people I had this discussion with.

I was a tad disappointed because I thought I was a genius and had come up with the concept; it seems that I was a little late to the party because so many of the buggers were already working on it.

And I'll tell you another thing; no storage vendor I have spoken to believes that SSDs are a bad thing! Some of them are waiting for the costs to come down and they are coming down extremely rapidly; some are still puzzling how to make the most effective use of them (I'll give you a clue, automatic migration of hot data blocks is a really good idea!!) and some are probably having a bit of a sulk because EMC got there first.

The latter is not really surprising because I have seen EMC do the same thing; their RAID-5 implementation was lousy, so they rubbished everyone else! Now, it is fairly unusual to hear an EMCer seriously suggest that RAID-5 is not appropriate for most Tier-1 workloads. The horror stories I heard in the past are going away.

Then 3Par started the thin-provisioning meme in a big way and yet again we were warned that the seas would boil and our data disappear into the ether! Now that EMC have wide-striping and virtual provisioning; it's all goodness!

External storage virtualisation is the work of the Devil Incarnate and a gateway to the underworld would be opened. EMC still believe this and I suspect that secretly they believe that VMWare is actually playing with unnatural powers with some of their storage virtualisation stuff! 

Guess what, none of this is true!

And guess what, at some point all storage vendors will probably have SSDs in their systems; EMC just had the misfortune to be first! They've also gone and launched their biggest revision to the Symmetrix line since DMX in an economic down-turn. That takes balls! I'm intrigued to see if the other vendors who last year were planning big announcements this year actually release product into a fairly hostile market.

But if you don't; EMC are going to have a huge headstart, they might not ship shed-loads of V-MAX this year and they may not ship shed-loads of SSD, however their sales-guys, their flag-wavers etc can all talk about this stuff openly and they can steal a march.

This might not be time to take large orders but it's time to be bold and to talk to customers; get your new products out in the open; share roadmaps. Sure the end-users still have to keep the lights on and grow our estates but we are in 'make and mend' mode at the moment; we are probably buying less but we are planning to come out of this downturn and we might have time at the moment to make some more considered decisions. Don't rubbish EMC's roadmap and vision…do better!