The pistol shot heard this week was the starting gun for FCoE, not the execution of iSCSI

To hear this week’s storage industry news reports, one might think that Wagner’s fat lady came to Storage Networking World (SNW), singing her song as the iSCSI world collapses. Storagebod wonders what iSCSI’s death will look like. Chris Mellor at The Register says “Game Over” as NetApp, QLogic, Emulex and VMware join EMC and Cisco in singing the praises of Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE). Mellor suggests that the protocol will devalue Dell’s EqualLogic investment, as if HP’s acquisition of LeftHand wasn’t enough, even as fellow Register-ite, Bryan Betts disagrees.

But The Register didn’t invent the “FCoE kills iSCSI” meme - it’s just natural to imagine that these two protocols would be in a fight to the death. And if it’s a duel, then this year’s SNW conference would seem to be the first volley, as EMC introduced a FCoE Connectrix switch (based on Cisco), NetApp announced the first native FCoE array, and everyone qualified Emulex and QLogic adapters. However, despite these announcements, it’s way too early to bury iSCSI!

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Yes! Compellent has just announced at Storage Networking World that they’ll be adding enterprise solid state drives (SSDs) to their excellent fully-virtualized storage arrays. Why is this worth shouting about? Simply because their automated block-based tiered storage architecture ought to be able to really take full advantage of the performance offered by SSDs. If you’ll pardon the pun, SSD in a Compellent array is positively compelling!

Let’s take a second to review: EMC became the first modern storage vendor to include NAND flash-based solid state drives as a standard tier of storage in an enterprise storage product when they announced flash in the Symmetrix DMX in January. Although every other vendor has made “me too” comments since then, enterprise flash remains pretty rare. Could Compellent really be the second major vendor to actually do something, coming along 10 months later?

More than a year ago, I rhetorically asked where the enterprise solid state drives were. In that post, and others that followed, I suggested that SSD wouldn’t really “work” as a mainstream tier unless a storage array was smart enough to dynamically allocate content to this “tier-0″ in a granular fashion. In other words, adding a big lump of flash to a static storage array and trying to manually allocate it on a LUN-by-LUN basis to hot applications is not likely to meet anyone’s cost/benefit sniff test!

But if a post-RAID storage system was smart, it could really make use of the technology, and that’s what makes Compellent’s announcement so interesting. They dynamically move blocks (rather than the much-bigger LUNs) around, and could thus make a smaller amount of flash go a lot further. Add a few flash drives and let the system tune itself! This is a big differentiator, folks!

Of course, this is not just Compellent’s advantage. Any fully-virtualized system could do the same, and we’ve heard such talk from folks as diverse as HP (I’d love to see it in both EVA and LeftHand), IBM (for real in SVC, not the science experiment), Sun (combined with ZFS), Dell/EqualLogic, and I’d love to hear it from 3PAR. Bring it on, folks! Listen to Greg!  Let’s get this technology integrated, tested, released, and in the field!

Update: Compellent probably won’t ship their SSDs in volume ’till Q1. But Chris Evans seems to agree with me 100%, and Dell is talking SSD (but no promises yet).

It’s all over the industry news - HP will acquire LeftHand Networks for a reported $360 million in cash. The last funding press release I could find was dated September 8, 2005, when Valhalla Partners led a $25 million round, bringing LeftHand’s total funding to $75 million. This is a very nice payday for the boys from Boulder, and I hope everyone benefits from it.

Of course, many were quick to compare this move to Dell’s acquisition of EqualLogic late last year for $1.4 billion, as well as HP’s acquisition of PolyServe. Does the price disparity reflect the relative strength of EqualLogic’s offerings, or is the market to blame? LeftHand has definitely benefited from Dell’s move, which both validated their products and offered a new market of disaffected users. The bigger question is how HP will integrate LeftHand’s software with its own line of storage systems.

This is part of an ongoing series of longer articles I will be posting every Sunday as part of an experiment in offering more in-depth content.

It has been the core technology behind the storage industry since day one, but the sun is setting on traditional RAID technology. After two decades of refinement and fragmentation, we are abandoning the core concepts of disk-centric data protection as storage and servers go virtual. Next-generation storage products will feature refined and integrated capabilities based on pools of storage rather than combinations of disk drives, and we will all benefit from improved reliability and performance.

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I get the same questions all the time: Should I buy X or Y? Is Z better than Q? But as much as it sounds like a cop-out, I always answer, “well, this sounds like a cop-out, but that depends on what you’re doing with it…”

Now EMC’s Chuck Hollis has (bravely) stuck his neck out to try to actually compare the capacity efficiency three storage arrays in a realistic way. Good luck, Chuck! I can hear the knives sharpening over at NetApp and HP already!

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So NetApp is bundling their software for their low-end iSCSI arrays according to CRN. Aah that perennial battle of a la carte pricing versus bundles… Is it better to offer customers everything they might need at a single price or to give them the chance to pick and choose? Let’s think about it…

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I’ve said before that Microsoft’s work in the field of enterprise storage was truly remarkable. Every other operating system vendor, as well as the grubby hordes developing Linux and BSD, should be ashamed that the “evil empire” beat them to the punch with great storage ideas like VSS, VDS, and transportable backup integration. Well, it seems Microsoft is changing the SAN landscape in another way - the Simple SAN initiative.

Although most folks haven’t heard about it, Simple SAN is Redmond’s way to force vendors to improve interoperability and ease of installation for networked SAN storage, whether it is Fibre Channel or iSCSI. Continue Reading »