Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat

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.

Many storage challenges focus on correlating high-level uses of data (such as applications) with the nuts and bolts of storage infrastructure. These discussions often revolve around the conflict between data management, which demands an ever-smaller unit of management, and storage management, which benefits most from consolidation. Developing data management capability that is both granular enough for applications and scalable enough for storage is one key to the future of storage.

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In an article for Enterprise Storage Forum, Paul Shread comments on the positive reviews that various deduplication technologies got at Storage Decisions from analysts and end users. He suggests that less than 10% of attendees were using deduplication already, but that others were inspired by their experience and would be using it soon.

Paul goes on to quote me, saying I “didn’t think primary data de-duplication technology was ready for prime time just yet.” I absolutely did say these words, but I am not sure if my point came across.

I’ve recently expounded about the benefits of deduplication technology, but have warned that it might not be all it’s cracked up to be in primary storage environments. By “primary” I mean those storage environments serving mission-critical applications. Although dedupe works great for backup and archiving, the random I/O, low latency, and high throughput of primary storage (and especially virtualized servers) might be too much for current systems. And as of now, only NetApp, Riverbed (soon), and startups greenBytes (see my story) and Ocarina (more on them another time) were willing to go on record with me as supporting deduplication of primary storage.

So what I meant was that deduplication is not yet ready for prime time in primary storage applications. No one should hesitate to use the technology for backup or archiving at this point, but make sure you do a thorough evaluation of the specific product you are selecting to make sure it delivers the performance you require!

This is a follow-up to my story, De-Duplication Goes Mainstream

Although deduplication of storage is nothing new, with Data Domain and other making hay with the technique for years, it has never been ready for prime time - reduction of active primary storage applications like email and databases. Instead, deduplication has been relegated to second- or third-tier status, deduplicating archives and backup data. But change is in the air, and deduplication vendors are starting to bustle towards the bright lights of primary storage.

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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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I had two great storage virtualization seminars this week, in New York and Philadelphia.  As usual, audience participation was key, and interest in VMware and Hyper-V remains high.

One of the main questions I always get is which protocol one should use for VMware storage. My recommendation remains that the answer is an organizational one more than a technical one.  There are certainly performance, CPU utilization, and support differences between Fibre Channel, SCSI, iSCSI, and NFS on VMware, all of these can work fine in many situations.  Although this is addressed in my presentation, I thought it wise to point out some of my sources and (concurring) opinions.

First, I point you to the official VMware VI Team blog, where they reiterate that VMware is protocol-agnostic.  They commit to support all storage protocols equally, and promise to add missing support as soon as possible.  See especially their table of support, which shows that iSCSI currently can’t be used for clustering (!), among other insights.

I’d also like to point out three sources for my seminar slides:

• VMware’s Comparison of Storage Protocol Performance paper, which pits Fibre Channel against hardware iSCSI, software iSCSI, and NFS.
• VMware’s Performance Characterization of VMFS and RDM Using a SAN, which shows that there is a negligible performance difference between shared storage and the two varieties of RDM.
• NetApp’s NetApp and VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3 Storage Best Practices (recently updated), which is a wealth of information on shared storage with NFS, even if you’re not a NetApp customer.

Lotsa people use and love data de-duplication (to hyphen or not - that is the question) technology for backup and archiving, but it looks like this tech is about to bust out for primary, live, real, mainstream, what-you-are-using-to-store-your-stuff storage. Big news!

First up was the company now officially called NetApp, which officially blessed the use of their advanced single instance storage (A-SIS) de-dupe tech for primary storage use as of now. They added block-based de-dupe way back when, and even said people could use it for primary storage, but it doesn’t look like that happened much. So the new release of OnTap 7G includes performance tweaks and more powerful blessing from the company, making this the first play for primary storage de-dupe that I know of. Some have been (predictably) skeptical of Network Appliance NetApp’s A-SIS technology, but others appreciate the results…

Next is the smarties over at Hifn, who make super (de)duper storage controller hardware that often finds its way into OEM products. On Monday, the company announced availability of a card that can handle de-duplication, compression, and encryption, though not all three at once and only at 250 megabyte per second speed. And it looks like a partnership with Freescale Semiconductor will give a big performance boost later in the year, enabling gigabyte per second throughput and all three functions at once. This could really be something, with upstart OEMs launching de-duping storage arrays for little bucks before Storage Decisions comes to San Francisco!

Image by Gila Brand, used according to Creative Commons 2.5 license

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