There's still a lot of discussion on the various blogs and Twitter about innovation or the lack of it in the world of corporate storage; if we look back at 2008, arguably this is very much the case.
EMC started the year making a big song and dance about EFDs but really how innovative was this? Just putting faster disks into an array and realistically, EMC's implementation of the EFDs is just faster disks (much faster) in a monolithic array. IBM then trumpeted their 1 Million IOPs but this is not a shipping product, a proof of concept maybe and still no shipping product. HDS announced late in the year, almost a 'me too embarrassed' press release. And a raft of other EFD-like announcements from the rest of the pack but honestly, faster is not really innovation.
Lots of FCoE related announcements and allegedly you can buy shipping product from NetApp. FCoE will happen but the price of DCE is going to be a huge factor in this; it needs to be cost comparable with 10 GbE initially and fairly rapidly needs to come down in price. 10 GbE is still expensive when compared to the cost of GbE and even 4/8 Gig FC. The costs and complexity of FC are overstated IMO; I've done some breakdowns of the cost and FC compares very favourably to iSCSI in the large enterprise and certainly in a blade environment where you really want to be putting 10 GbE into your blade chassis to drive performance.
The only thing which can possibly called innovative is EMC's Atmos product; an object-based storage system. But after months of hype, this was ultimately a let-down for many people; it's relevance to most businesses the moment is probably at first glance fairly minimal!
So what will 2009 bring?
Almost certainly there will be a new iteration of EMC's DMX series; I don't think I am in breach of NDAs, you only have to look at the release cycle for EMC's Enterprise class arrays; we had the DMX3 and we've had it's mid-life kicker; the DMX3.1, which some how becomes DMX4. I know a little bit about this, much of which I'd guessed even before being briefed. There's enough clues out there to guess quite a lot about what it may look like. And I'm really hoping for a Damascene moment for EMC in one or two areas; they've got a lot of software products masquerading as hardware or bundled solutions, I'm hoping for a decoupling.
So if there's a new DMX, I'm expecting something from Hitachi as well. Bigger, faster, more shiny no doubt. And to this day, I am surprised that they have not yet bought BlueArc. BlueArc would be a good buy for them and would certainly round out their storage range nicely.
IBM, who the hell knows? New iteration of SVC certainly, I'm expecting a big hardware revision and I'm expecting more scalability. XIV? It's no secret that there is is a bigger array due to address the scalability issues and maybe a smaller box as well. The one size fits all approach is not working; that goes for capacity, the RAID and the disk sizes; I wouldn't be surprised to see the Fusion I/O cards make an appearance. And then there is the eternal question, what the hell are IBM doing with the DS8K range? Are they going to kill it or rev it? They've never made the capital out of it that they should have that's for sure.
NetApp, well OnTap 8 should finally see GX merged into OnTap proper with a single code-base for the clustered and the non-clustered versions. I hope this works for NetApp, the GX saga has been a bit of a farce and I think that NetApp will have learnt some lessons about how not to integrate two products. I'm sure that there have been some very heated discussions internally.
HP? I can see another acquisition in their future; the EVA architecture is a bit long in the tooth and there will be some bargains available I suspect. But their strategy needs some clarity; like IBM, they appear to be on a random acquisition model.
Sun? You know what, if Sun can leverage ZFS and ensure that some of the features which are kicking around in some of the forks; it might actually have a storage story to tell. But the problem is for Sun that as it's open source; a smaller, more agile company might eat its lunch using Sun's knife and fork. And of course, there is Sun's long term future as a company to deal with.
And then there's 3Par, Compellent, Pillar, Copan, OnStor et all; I'd expect some of these to be swallowed up by the big boys, some may falter and a couple may well thrive. I reckon Dell's a company worth keeping an eye on; there's at least of a couple of acquisitions in that company's future; EMC relationship aside, some of my conversations suggest that they have big storage ambitions.
Specific technologies? Obviously, FCoE and EFDs will start to become mainstream but FC, iSCSI and spinning rust isn't dead yet and won't be for some time. I hear mutterings about Infiniband; this is not a dead technology by a long chalk and I'd expect to see some interest in Infiniband; I expect at least one and maybe two major players adopt Infiniband in some form or another. Virtualisation? Virtualisation initiatives will continue but I think we'll see a change in emphasis, I'm expecting to see virtualisation being positioned to enable modular arrays and less focus on hetereogenality.
Storage will continue to be a growth industry; businesses collecting data and at some point, they need to turn it into information and perhaps derive some knowledge from this information. But to get to this point, we're going to need to see some innovation and perhaps a shift in emphasis. I'll blog about this later but quite simply, it's all about SOFTWARE!
Great post! Just a couple of comments to make.
1) XIV is already available in a “half-rack” configuration. Works out to be 20-ish TB, if I remember correctly.
2) There were several updates made to the DS8000 last year. Admittedly, most of them were in the mainframe space. HyperPAV and Extended Address Volumes (EAVs) are catching on nicely in some of our larger shops.
There’s more to come in the DS8000 in 2009. I just can’t comment on it yet.
I get really frustrated at the other guy’s attempts to make it sound like the DS8000 is dead. It drives me crazy when competitors compete by denigrating other products. I refuse to stoop to that level.
I think the DS8k needs a good look at; firstly I’ve sat in XIV presentations where IBM have pratically admitted that the DS8K has really not got the penetration required in the Open Systems market, lets be honest it is the Open Systems market where you want to be playing! XIV is the new Open Systems array but it’s not really all that is it? 80 Terabytes useable is not an Enterprise array.
I think you might be surprised who is disappointed and frustrated with what you haven’t done with the DS8K range. You had the chance to do something very different, much of it was roadmapped and very little shipped.
Significantly, HyperPAVs and EAVs are both proprietary mainframe features which competitors are required to license from IBM in order to support them in their arrays. And no surprise they are “catching on nicely” in (some of) your larger sites…those are the ones already wrapped from head to toe in IBM blue.
Where are the rest of the things your competitors have been delivering? Like Thin Provisioning, Flash Drives, SATA drives, lerger write caches, faster processors, more spindles, dynamic partitioning, etc.? Even mainframe customers would benefit from most of these…yet IBM isn’t delivering.
Appreciated your roundup, and of course, we shared it on our BlueArc link blog. Some of the major trends continue to drive forward as 2008 turns to 2009, including the rise of unstructured data, greater disk capacities, and customer demands for greater storage utilization, reduced power consumption and simplified management.
Every vendor could improve, and the best way for them to do that is to listen well to their customers, and especially to those who are not yet their customers.
At BlueArc, we are looking forward to 2009 in a big way, as we see the market trends continuing to move in line with our roadmap. It’s been great to get to know you better especially over the last few months. Look forward to more posts and Tweets!