Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat

With yesterday’s release of both an iSCSI version of it’s entry-level DS3300 and a complete, Microsoft Simple SAN-certified DS3400 solution, IBM is bringing the love to the … umm … well … compact (?) end of the storage market. See, we can’t call it “low-end” because these devices are decidedly not “low-end” in their functionality. And we can’t call it “entry-level” or “small business” because lots of established players buy this stuff. Modular and monolithic may describe some hardware, but it hardly differentiates the market. I refuse to start with tall like Starbucks (though you can get a super-tasty short cappuccino there!) So let’s just ape the car market and call it “compact”. There’s no shame in owning a compact car, especially with gas prices where they are, so why not get some compact storage to go with your green data center?

So what’s IBM doing this time? Well, they’ve taken LSI’s proven Engenio 1333 array technology (which they’ve used for a while) and turned on iSCSI functionality. IBM veers off course from the startups by not bundling snapshot and replication technology with their new array, however. This reduces the cost of entry but diminishes the impact of this new technology, since adding that software can easily double the price of this Ford Escort storage system.

IBM has also certified a complete Fibre Channel SAN solution with Microsoft, if you’re into that sort of thing. Their DS3400 can chat with an Emulex HBA and Brocade switch with quick setup and guaranteed compatability or your money back! (I made up that last part…) I’ve been pleased by Microsoft’s Simple SAN push in the past and think this is an excellent alternative to iSCSI for sites that aren’t ready to take the storage-over-Ethernet plunge yet.

Why care? Well, simply because this “compact” market is where the big action is in storage right now. Thanks to the VMware explosion, just about every smaller-than-10-TB shop is currently buying and deploying SANs right now, a fact that has warmed the hearts (and fed the sales people) at companies like EqualLogic, LeftHand, HP, Dell, and the rest for a year or so now. IBM was too early to market with an iSCSI array back in 2001, but has had nothing to sell since they axed the Adaptec-powered DS300/400 back in January. Welcome back!

The stock market was alive with rumors that Seagate might be bought by an unnamed Chinese company, as reported in the New York Times, among others. This comes after a week of insider whispers about a possible tieup between Seagate and memory-makers, Micron or SanDisk, itself a Seagate spin-off. It seems that the hot disk drive and flash memory markets are shaking as sales heat up and margins thin out. Note that this is far from a done-deal. Rather, Seagate CEO, William Watkins, was merely noting in an interview that there was such an inquiry.

To my eyes, a Seagate buy-out would be little different from the sale of IBM’s disk drive operations to Hitachi back in 2002 or their sale of the PC group to Lenovo two years later. Seagate is a component maker, and although it is a critical piece of the storage industry it is not really a strategic entity. Certainly, the company’s contributions to standards like SATA, SAS, and (yes) hybrid drives are worthwhile, but apart from evault, the company contributes little to the value-added services landscape.

Still, if a buy-out softened scrappy Seagate I would miss the healthy contribution between them, Western Digital, Hitachi, and the other disk vendors. And it would be an end of an era, with Alan Shugart’s old company going the way of MG Rover and the rest.

Beth Pariseau over at SearchStorage.com has another great interview, this time with “Mr. SCSI”, Larry Boucher of Alacritech. Despite being early to market with TCP offload engine (TOE) Ethernet NICs, and iSCSI HBAs in particular, the company has been less successful than many would have expected. This is probably because most folks just didn’t use ‘em - iSCSI works fine with a plain-Jane gigabit NIC on today’s modern computers.

Boucher suspects (as do I) that 10 Gb speed will make TOEs much more critical, and he expects Alacritech to be well positioned to take advantage of this shift.  He sees TOE becoming integrated with future PC chipsets, and not just for storage.  Asked when he expects “the year of 10 gigabit” to come, Boucher estimated 2009.  Sounds reasonable to me!

OK, so let me get this straight. A recent study in the UK shows that 94% of IT managers in the UK regularly buy more storage than they need, 38% of all storage is unused, and 69% find storage management increasingly difficult. Yet only 44% feel that they shouldn’t have to do this? What’s wrong with the other half? Are they happy buying more storage than they need?

I know, it’s just a study, and studies are flawed. I’ve done enough myself to know that it is difficult to ask the right questions to get clear answers. I do question these results though. Especially the “38% unused” number - my own surveys revealed a much higher number than this. But I guess if storage management is increasingly difficult, it’s also just as difficult to get good utilization numbers…

I’ve decided to add additional sub-feeds to my blog for those who don’t care about one topic or another. If you’re currently subscribed, this means nothing to you since the current feed is a super-set containing all posts. But if you want just a subset, read on!

There are now five Foskett feeds!

1. All Posts (the superset of the following)
2. Computer History - mapped to the Computer History category and containing posts about this history of computers and other oldy moldy topics
3. Enterprise Storage - mapped to the Enterprise Storage category and containing lots of industry news and opinions
4. Personal - mapped to the Personal category and containing posts of interest to friends and family
5. Terabyte Home - mapped to the Terabyte Home category and containing posts about TiVo, iPhone, SoundBridge, home NAS, Windows, and the like

There will be much overlap between categories (see the posts in the current list) but I thought this might help folks not have to listen to so much that they don’t care about. Just call me Fox News!

I’ve been working with a team at Contoural on an e-Book for TechTarget on the topic of email archiving, sponsored by Symantec. Now that four chapters are posted, I thought I would mention it. I’ve written two more chapters, which will probably be posted in the coming months, and will be working on more after that as well. I believe you have to register for TechTarget’s Bitpipe in order to download them, but once you do you can access lots of other great material there.

So, without further ado, the e-Book:

1. Email-archiving project roadmap (by Kathryn Hilton and me)
2. Defining an email-archiving policy (by Kathryn and Marion Weiler)
3. Choosing product features for compliance and risk reduction (by Kathryn and Marion)
4. Improve storage management and user productivity with archiving (by Kathryn and Marion)

Look for future chapters (by me) on selecting a product and vendor and running an RFP process.

Robin Harris blogged today about Google’s pay-for-storage service, and he hit the nail on the head. It (and pretty much every other current online storage service) is nearly worthless to most folks because it lacks one simple thing: A usable interface. Set aside Google’s traditionally horrid (lack of) marketing and you’re left with a service that’s sure to confound everyone. But Microsoft’s recently unveiled SkyDrive isn’t any better… Read on for my take on these services and what they should offer.
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One of Mr. Toigo’s readers posted a thoughtful question about why IT isn’t more strategic in their thinking. I started writing this as a comment there, but it got longer and longer and I liked it more and more, so I put it here instead!

I think this lack of strategic thinking is a reaction to the reality of life in IT rather than any deficiency on the part of IT folks. Modern distributed-systems (read UNIX and Windows) IT infrastructure managers are treated like second-class citizens - “here, watch this stuff while I do some real work.” They have little real knowledge of the applications they supposedly support (even IT applications people have little to do with infrastructure folk) and thus are totally unable to appropriately manage systems, especially storage.

Imagine is your rich uncle gave you a garage half full of blank boxes and said “keep this all safe for me, but don’t look inside the boxes, ok?” Then every few days he came by and handed you some more blank boxes, some heavy, some misshapen, but all unknown. After a year or so, you came to him and said “ummm, the garage is full and I don’t know what to do!” His reaction would, of course, be “I told you to manage it!” Then, patronizingly, “very well, I’ll get you another garage…”

Sound like the storage industry? We simply cannot be strategic until we know more about the data we are storing, and that means we have to muscle our way to a seat at the grand business applications table. This is the true challenge of IT in the coming years, not green computing or ILM or any of those other supposedly strategic things we focus on.

But all of these pseudo-strategy we do presents an opportunity. Take on a challenge like ILM with a data classification or tiered storage project. Put your results in front of Management - real business management, not the VP of IT operations or whatever. Show them that you do have the ability to form complex thoughts and ask for their input. You might even get invited to the table…

As the virtualization world turns, hot on the heels of VMware’s successful IPO (it’s riding over $50 today), many might wonder about that company’s only major competitor.  Well, the answer is here: XenSource is being acquired by client-side virtualizer, Citrix!  Word is it’s a $500 million deal.  Not bad for little XenSource!

This looks like a replay for Citrix, which has long fought Microsoft’s Terminal Services in the client application access world and now will set itself up against both Microsoft and VMware in the server virtualization market.

Wonder no more - 3PAR will hit the street sometime at some price to raise some money so they can do something. That’s right, their vague initial S-1 was announced yesterday. About the only thing we do know about 3PAR’s IPO is that it’s being handled jointly by Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse. Good luck, guys!