Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat

Why can't digital cameras come with a useful memory card?

Over the last year, I have purchased two Canon digital cameras. Both are excellent, and I would recommend them to anyone. But each came with a worthless 32 MB SD flash card. So did the (now broken) HP point-and-shoot I picked up last year. And the Nikon that preceded the Canon. In fact, it appears that just about every digital camera comes with a tiny, mostly-useless “starter” memory card.

I understand the reasoning of including a memory card - the camera won’t function without one, and people like to be able to play with their new electronics right out of the box.

But who thought it was a good idea to include such a tiny card? Continue Reading »

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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VMware just released Update 2 for VMware ESX Server 3.5 (Virtual Infrastructure), and it includes some storage fixes of note:

1. Support for Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) for filesystems Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008 guests.  This means VMware services like VCB and SRM can now signal Windows Server to quiesce filesystems before creating a clone or snapshot and is a major addition!
2. Windows Server 2003 guests also get application quiescing, where supported.
3. You can now extend a live, running VMFS volume as storage is added, just like Windows Vista and 2008 guests could already do with raw device mode (RDM).  Note that this only works for flat disks with no persistent snapshots open.

Continue Reading »

Network Appliance is no more. The company that made the second enterprise storage device I ever used, added the terms “filer” and “appliance” to the enterprise IT lexicon, and long suffered from a confusing array of names, is now officially called NetApp.

This is probably a good idea. A company needs a single name, and NetApp is what lots of people (even me) have long called the company. Plus, it’s never good to have your company name be the same as one of your products, at least when you make more than one. And NetApp has lots of different products, many of which are not network appliances…

They’ve added a new logo, too, which ironically looks like a thick blue dolmen to me, but was probably supposed to evoke a door and the letter, N. I always liked the old round peg in a round hole idea, myself… But then again, I always kinda liked yellow and purple and silver storage devices, too!

Remember the old days, when it was Apple Computer, HP still stood for Hewlett-Packard, Sun for Stanford University Network, and EMC for Evil Machine Company? (Just kidding, guys, I know it was Egan, Marino and Einstein’s equation…) But the world will end if IBM ever changes its logo!

Update: More coverage:

• Marc Farley liked the old logo better
• Robin Harris is wined and dined by NetApp in New York - where’s my invite, guys?
• Rajeev Karamchedu thinks it looks like an IBM lego house…
• Zerowait calls it a staple and compares it to New Coke - Ouch!
• The Register is even less complimentary…

Image by Andrew Dunn courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, cc-by-sa-2.0

Chris Evans’ posting about the lack of 2.5″ Enterprise Arrays got me thinking. About two years ago, I predicted that the 2.5″ form factor would make a significant entry in the enterprise space as a way to bring performance (in the form of more spindles) to the enterprise storage array world. I reiterated this in August when examining the world of enterprise hard drives. So where are these “small form factor” (SFF) arrays?

While you can already buy an amazing miniature RAID array that fits in a 5.25″ drive bay, and 2.5″ drives are seeing widespread use in blades and other compact servers, there isn’t much noise among enterprise array makers about the topic. About the only enterprise makers are Infortrend, ProStor, and HP.

Infortrend trumpeted the “world’s first external SFF array” in October, so at least they were pretty sure no one else sells one. But HP might beg to differ - their MSA70 shipped at the end of last year, supporting up to 25 SFF drives in 2U. They also apparently offer a 20-drive SFF shelf for other MSA systems, but I haven’t seen one.

Finally there’s ProStor with their cool RDX removable disk cartridges for backup. I’d love to see the TCO for these, but there are probably some enterprise users out there.

Like Chris, though, I’ve never seen these things outside a trade show. Is anyone using them? Or are we right in supposing that the weight, power, and heat issues associated with multiplying drive spindles offsets their performance advantages?

Cisco’s new product announcements this week got me thinking about our little storage pond.  Sure, VFrame isn’t breaking any new ground compared to Scalent, HP’s Opsware, and BladeLogic, but it’ll be a revelation to Cisco’s customers.  Remember, all the iPod had going for it was Apple’s brand name, customer base, and flawless execution!

The point is, VFrame makes no differentiation between storage and networking, just like Cisco itself.  Look across the rest of Cisco’s storage product line and if you squint hard enough you might be looking at their network line!  This was Cisco’s big contribution to the storage industry: bringing along everything they learn about networking.  For some reason, the rest of the Fibre Channel equipment makers were unable to take the lessons from networking and apply them to storage until Cisco came along.

Cisco’s new switch hardware continues to blur the line between storage and networking.  Although storage products are still separated from network equipment within the company, it’s clear that there’s a lot of technology sharing going on.  I wonder if the advent of 10 gigabit Ethernet will cause the two product lines to come even closer.

Clearly, it’s difficult to differentiate the products - just read the Byte and Switch article about Cisco’s announcement and watch James Rogers “seamlessly” blend Fibre Channel and Ethernet!  Yeah, yeah, like I’ve never made a mistake before!

Edit: Yup, I guess Raffo and the rest are alive - Byte and Switch swapped out the references to “4 gbit/s Ethernet”…

Yes, folks, China is rising in storage industry. A while back, my good friend Marc Staimer suggested that Huawei might become the next great storage vendor. Well, Huawei’s joint venture with 3Com has now become 3Com’s unit in China, H3C. That’s right, Bob Metcalfe’s old company bought Huawei out of the venture this year in an attempt to regain the number two market position in networking. And since H3C has long had a strong interest in the storage side of the network, we might see 3Com attack the low end of the storage industry next year!

H3C already has a long list of products, most based on in-house hardware and OEM software. On the storage side, the company makes an iSCSI storage array platform dubbed “Neocean”. This storage platform, selling strongly in China, is alleged to leverage technology licensed from FalconStor (on the low-end IX1000), Intransa (on the bigger IX5000), as well as iVivity and Xyratex. OEM storage developer Ciprico today announced that it will be working with H3C on the next generation. H3C also sells a WAFS accelerator leveraging Expand Networks software. All of these should be coming to the United States next year.

Huawei itself is also getting back into the storage market in the form of a joint venture with Symantec, creatively called Huawei-Symantec. This company is set to be coming out with a line of network devices with Veritas-based software built in. We’re hearing about virus scanning and content indexing appliances, as well as NAS and SAN arrays which will include storage foundation software from Symantec right out of the box.

Who knows what’s next from Huawei? I’d guess expanded services, more resellers in the West, and more OEM deals to create bigger systems. In a few years, they might give Hitachi and EMC trouble in the enterprise market, especially when big server vendors like Sun, SGI, Dell, and HP start rethinking their OEM strategies…