How could a company as mighty and diverse as HP have had so many issues with executive management?

HP stumbled mightily in 2011, and it had nothing to do with product or people. Even sales remained strong, though the PC business is changing. HP’s mighty stumble was a crisis of confidence due to a chain of shenanigans at the very top. This culminated with the short reign of Léo Apotheker, leaving HP to reassure the market of its strategy.

HP And the Enterprise IT Industry

Sometimes, it’s hard to get a sense of scale when talking about very large things. How big is the solar system? How far away is the nearest star? The same is true of earthly things, exemplified by popular misconceptions about the global financial crisis. It’s difficult for people to understand just how much money a trillion dollars is.

In my little world of enterprise storage, it’s difficult to reconcile “big storage” players like EMC and NetApp with “big storage and everything else” players like HP, Dell, Oracle and IBM. Sure, EMC and NetApp lead the pack in terms of market share, but they’re nowhere near as large as the integrated players. HP has more than 7 times the revenue of EMC, which makes 3 times more than NetApp.

This old slide might need updating, but you get the picture...

HP is an incredibly diverse company, dominant in the PC, printing, and blade server market and top 5 just about everywhere else, including networking, services, and enterprise storage. And HP has nearly 325,000 employees, all working to move the company forward in one direction or another.

NetApp is a motorcycle, with one drive wheel pushing it forward at high speed; HP is more like NASA’s shuttle crawler-transporter, a 16 motor mammoth. Single-purpose companies can be agile, but they can also be derailed by market downturn or technological shift. Storage specialists like NetApp continually try to innovate and acquire to keep themselves vital, while larger companies like Cisco and EMC try to diversify while maintaining market leadership. HP doesn’t need to try; it is diverse.

HP Is a Very Large Thing

I watched HP's rise in the server market of the 1990's

HP has long been synonymous with innovation, high-technology, and silicon Valley. I have been an HP customer as long as I have been in IT, and watched as they integrated technology from Apollo and Convex in the 1990’ s. The server products that resulted became the dominant UNIX platform, but HP’ s innovative storage concepts didn’ t take the market by storm.

After HP merged with Compaq (which brought Tandem and Digital Equipment Corporation), the company vaulted ahead in the Wintel market and also gained valuable storage expertise. Throughout the last decade, HP was firing on all cylinders and dominant in nearly every arena. The company owns half the blade server market, is tied for first in servers, leads in PCs and printers, and is a contender in networking and storage. It’s simply impossible to say what HP is in a single sentence.

HP storage has an extremely broad product range, which management is working to reconcile. Acquisitions of LeftHand, Ibrix, and 3PAR gave HP storage shot in the arm to be sure. An injection of startup mojo has energized the marketing and product groups within HP just when the company needed it. HP’ s market share has grown somewhat as a result, though not as much as the hyper-focused NetApp. HP networking similarly took on 3Com, bedeviling Cisco in the Ethernet switch market.

The Executive Soap Opera

It takes a lot to bring a mammoth to its knees, but a shot between the eyes usually does the trick. While the many engines of HP push it forward, the company’s upper management has seemed, at times, suicidal. Business schools could design an entire curriculum around the folly of Patricia “I spy” Dunn and Mark “penny-pinching” Hurd. Who would think that HP management could top this?

From August 2010 through September 2011, HP dominated IT headlines in completely the wrong way. The board wanted a change, and selected Léo Apotheker to transform HP. But it was a soap opera from the very start, with Oracle hiring Mark Hurd and sending Apotheker into hiding among accusations of corporate espionage while at SAP.

The new CEO didn’t seem to understand HP at all, though he was intent on steering it in a new direction. Apotheker set about dismantling HP’s consumer and end-user businesses, killing Palm/WebOS and threatening to sell off the PC business. The company was to focus instead on enterprise computing, but these drastic moves spooked the entire industry.

It wasn’t long before HP’s board struck again, with a shake up at the hands of Ray Lane and former eBay CEO Meg Whitman brought in to replace Apotheker. The first order of business for the new HP executive team appears to be reassuring the entire world that management has not gone completely insane.

Stephen’s Stance

To an outsider like me, the most disappointing thing about HP’s mighty stumble is that it has nothing to do with the people who really make the company what it is. I have met many creative, hard-working individuals in HP’s storage, server, networking, and printer groups, and they could not be more different from the executive soap opera. I only hope that this new board and CEO will bring some stability and let HP cruise forward once again.

Disclaimer: HP has sponsored the Tech Field Day events which I organize, and has on occasion invited me to attend events at their expense.  But I do similar work with nearly every company in the IT industry, and this piece is my own opinion.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2012. | HP’s Mighty Stumble
This post was categorized as Computer History, Enterprise storage, Gestalt IT. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

VASA allows a "provider" application to tag vSphere storage with a "capabilities" string

The list of VMware storage integration features in vSphere is growing at a rapid pace. From backup to enterprise array offload, VMware is staking their claim. But information about one new storage feature in vSphere 5 has been scarce: The true nature of the Storage API for Storage Awareness (VASA) is only just beginning to be revealed.

VASA: Born of Necessity

vSphere has some amazing automated storage mobility features. The ease of moving data between LUNs and even arrays with Storage vMotion is a revelation to those of us unlucky enough to have used manual migration methods in the past. And VMware has automated this with the new Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) capability, allowing vSphere to make its own decisions about data placement.

But this kind of dynamic movement can hurt as well as help. What if an administrator moves a VMDK from high-performance to low-performance storage? Server responsiveness would suffer, perhaps even resulting in an application outage. And how could Storage DRS avoid doing the same thing?

VMware realized they needed some mechanism that could “tag” a storage resource with its capabilities. This is the real reason for their creation of Profile-Driven Storage and VASA.

VASA Does One Thing

In vSphere 5, VASA is incredible simple: It is a basic protocol for vSphere to request a “capabilities” string regarding a LUN or NFS share from a “provider”. The content of this response, and indeed the form that this provider will take, is left up to the individual storage vendors.

VASA Providers can take many forms. Dell is reportedly developing a vCenter plugin to report capabilities. EMC and NetApp will use a software application that runs on a virtual or physical server. In all cases, the software uses a proprietary call to the storage array, in effect relaying and translating the VMware request.

The VASA “Capabilities” string is undefined as well. Most vendors use a list of technical attributes as their response string, and each has adopted their own strategy about how to present information:

• Dell’s EqualLogic returns a comma-separated list like “RAID, SSD, REPLICATED”
• NetApp’s provider uses semicolons, as in “Dedupe; Replication”
• HP’s is very detailed, with a schema specifying Drive Type, RAID Type, Provisioning Type, VV Type, and Remotecopy
• EMC appears to have a standardized set of much-shorter tags, like “Performance”, “Multi-Tier”, “Capacity” and such

These are passed through to vCenter, where an administrator can decide how to interpret them.

VASA Today and Tomorrow

In its simplest form, VASA capabilities tags enable both manual and automatic storage placement features to respect tiered storage policies. This is important to maintain proper system performance and availability. In the future, I expect more advanced VASA providers, perhaps even integration of the providers into vCenter plugins. I also look forward to a standard capabilities tagging schema and smarter handling of returned tags. Right now, for example, EMC’s Clariion and Symmetrix lines both tag LUNs as “Performance”, but these are obviously not equivalent.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2011. | What is VMware VASA? Not Much (Yet)
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage, Features, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

whith·er – Adverb/ˈ(h)wiT͟Hər/
1. To what place or state: “whither are we bound?”.

VMworld always generates buzz, but news of a major push to change the basic access method for enterprise storage took many by surprise. Extending the work already done with VAAI and VASA, this new development takes VMware storage integration to a whole new level. But the one element of announcement caused alarm for many: VMware’s admission that they would be working with just five major enterprise storage companies to develop this technology. Missing along with the many exciting storage startups is Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), undoubtedly a major player in the industry.

HDS and VMware: Expertise and Partnership

Where is HDS in VMware's roadmap?

Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) is perhaps not as well-known as storage giants EMC and NetApp and server leviathans, IBM, HP, and Dell. But HDS is a major player in the industry with a long history of innovation and expertise in storage and server virtualization.

HDS has lately driven innovation in virtualization of block storage (the VSP), object storage (HCP), midrange performance (AMS), and recently announced they would acquire enterprise NAS contender, BlueArc. Although not quite market leaders, HDS has a huge base of enterprise storage customers and a broad product line from midrange to massive scale.

HDS was right there with EMC and NetApp at VMware’s original announcement of VAAI, even as the mainstream products from IBM and HP lagged months behind. And HDS’ Chief Scientist, Clais Mikkelsen, assured me at their “Geek Day” earlier this year that his company was deeply involved in developing the VAAI specification with VMware. Indeed, VAAI was a major theme of the presentations back in March, with Virtualization Product Manager Michael Heffernan dazzling us with his knowledge of the subject.

You might also like reading Concerning HDS and VMware VAAI Storage Array Support in Plain English

Wherefore Art Thou, HDS?

Now that all that has been said, consider how startling VMware’s omission of HDS was when outlining “VAAI 3.” This is a huge snub for such a major player in the industry with deep expertise and a long history of partnership with VMware. Contrast this to IBM and HP, who were notably absent in many earlier discussions of VAAI, and are still working to bring VAAI to all their platforms. Only HP’s LeftHand and (ironically) Hitachi-sourced XP/P9000 arrays included VAAI plugins from the start. HP’s 3PAR had VAAI too, but HP didn’t have that yet.

Many will likely blame EMC, claiming their influence on VMware (a child company) pushed HDS aside. This same line of reasoning was suggested regarding IBM and HP when VAAI version 1 appeared. But IBM and HP (not to mention NetApp and EMC’s new rival Dell) are at the table this time around, and EMC seems far more concerned by competition from them (not to mention new startups!)

So Where is HDS?

Let me get this straight: WMware is NOT working with HDS on next-gen VAAI storage?

Perhaps this is all some sort of gigantic mistake. Maybe the VMware presenter simply failed to include HDS in his list. Or maybe HDS didn’t choose to get involved this time around, though I can’t fathom why. I put the question to HDS on Twitter over the weekend and hope to hear some sort of answer, though I fear that a convincing response might not come.

The HDS response was unsurprisingly nonspecific (and surprisingly "teen txt-spk")

The only response I got from HDS was a tweet from Claus Mikkelsen stating that HDS and VMware “work all levels to deliver solutions” and that there was “more 2 come.”

What does this mean? I can think of a few possibilities:

1. HDS is way beyond every other storage company, and the “VAAI Cabal” are themselves the odd ones out, trying to keep up with HDS’ “L33T” tech and VMware influence
2. HDS was indeed omitted from the list and possibly the “cabal” and are busy working in the background to make sure they’re included in the future

Personally, the second possibility seems much more plausible.

Update: Some responses to this post:

• Exclusion or Not? (Scott Lowe of EMC)
• VAAI Posturing (Chris Evans)

Stephen’s Stance

If VMware aims to transform storage presentation, and is working with major storage vendors to make it happen, HDS ought to be part of it. Their history, technology, and market position earn them a spot in the “VAAI Cabal” and their omission was a bombshell to industry-watchers like me.

Then there is the other question: What about the startups? Innovation in enterprise storage is often driven by new companies, and VMware would be better served by working with the likes of Tintri, Nutanix, and Fusion-io than the same old major players. But this, as they say, is a topic for a different day.

Disclaimer: I’ve never done business with HDS, but they did fly me to the UK for their 2011 “Geek Day” along with a number of other independent bloggers. I have attended similar events sponsored by HP, IBM, and EMC. VMware, EMC, Dell, HP, and NetApp have sponsored Tech Field Day, and I am currently writing for an online community supported by IBM.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2011. | Alas, VMware, Whither HDS?
This post was categorized as Computer History, Enterprise storage, Everything, Gestalt IT, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

NetApp has begun to unify their Onaro and Akorri acquisitions under the OnCommand Insight name

NetApp has long wanted to be known for its “unified storage” offerings, storage arrays that combine NAS and SAN. But the company has expanded its storage software footprint as well, and recently unified these offerings under the “OnCommand” banner. Some of these products are intended solely for NetApp storage, but many are suitable for heterogeneous and even non-NetApp environments. Let’s take a look!

OnCommand: A Broad Banner

The whole OnCommand software line is extremely diverse

The “OnCommand” name applies generally to much of NetApp’s storage software, from their System Manager to the Insight analysis products to integration plug-ins for vSphere and Hyper-V. It took me a while to get my head around just what was and wasn’t part of this cadre of products, as well as what it all was useful for. Here’s my attempt, but I apologize in advance if I get it wrong!

OnCommand includes both management and integration software, much of which is specific to NetApp’s well-known “Filer” storage arrays. The “Manage” range includes the OnCommand Insight family, which draws from the Onaro (SANscreen) and Akorri (BalancePoint) acquisitions.

SANscreen had been part of the NetApp lineup since the company’s 2008 acquisition of Onaro, but the five SANscreen components have been rationalized into three:

1. OnCommand Insight Assure includes the Service Insight, Service Assurance, and VM Insight components of SANscreen
2. OnCommand Insight Perform maps to the former Application Insight software component
3. OnCommand Insight Plan is the Capacity Manager component of SANscreen

NetApp acquired Akorri in February of this year, and has moved quickly to begin integrating their BalancePoint software into the OnCommand family. As discussed at Tech Field Day, BalancePoint is now known as OnCommand Insight Balance and has been updated.

Customers can order all of OnCommand Insight as a single package including all four components, or can purchase them separately. NetApp is actively working to integrate these products, including updating the look and feel, combining authorization, and pulling everything into a portal with multi-tenant support.

Stephen’s Stance

NetApp picked some good products when they acquired Onaro and Akorri, and it is great to see them moving forward with cross-platform support. Frankly, if these were rolled into some NetApp-only suite they would have been wasted and withered on the vine. But it remains to be seen if customers will select NetApp software for storage and service management, especially if they are not NetApp storage shops!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2011. | NetApp Unifies and Consolidates Software, Not Just Storage Capacity
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage, Everything, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

These look to be Teradata Extreme Data Appliance racks

1. In the first photo, we have rows of swoopy racks – at least 30 are pictured. These appear to be Teradata Extreme Data Appliance racks. The gray color and funky doors give them away.


This photo features rack servers and NetApp storage

2. The second photo includes a 1U rack server with six 2.5″ drives featuring “HP purple” drive eject buttons. There are over 100 in this photo, receding to infinity. Looks like HP ProLiant DL360 G7 servers to me.
3. We also have a 2U rack server with 16 2.5″ drive bays. I count over 20 of these. They don’t quite look like HP to me, but could be high-density HP DL380 G7 servers.
4. What looks like a NetApp FAS6200 to me is at the lower right. It looks to be 6U high, compared to the shelves.
5. We also have a number of disk shelves for the NetApp. I’m guessing NetApp DS2246 shelves.


This still from Apple's official video shows more NetApp storage and HP servers

6. In this third shot, we see more HP 1U servers, possibly ProLiant DL360 G7′s as noted above.
7. We have another NetApp filer “head” similar to the one in the second shot.
8. Some sort of 6U beige rackmount device is found in the bottom of two racks
9. We have many more NetApp disk shelves or 1U servers above

Note that these racks contain many 1U Chatsworth “HotLok” filler panels. They’re not very efficiently racked, but perhaps this was due to flexibility or power requirements…

Stephen’s Stance

Whatever Apple bought for this datacenter, they bought a lot of it. Just the hint that they purchased Isilon bumped parent company EMC’s stock a few months back. I imagine Teradata and NetApp might see similar bumps from these images!

It’s also interesting to speculate on the political implications of Apple’s datacenter buys. Would they still buy HP equipment, now that Palm and WebOS are re-emerging as iOS-killer contenders? Would Jobs’ friendship with Larry Ellison indicate a proclivity to buy Oracle or Pillar Data? Maybe the Apple/Cisco Détente would suggest UCS or even EMC? And what about that rumored Isilon buy. Was that displaced by Teradata and NetApp?

Images from MacRumors.com

Note: This has been one of my most-popular posts, and has been referenced a lot by major news organizations. Here’s a list of those who linked and mentioned me. Thanks!

• The web’s watchful eye fixes on Apple’s cloud gear
• Steve Jobs Provides A Look Inside the iDataCenter
• WWDC: Has Apple turned to Oracle for iCloud?
• What Kind Of Gear Is Apple Using In Its Huge New Data Center? (AAPL)
• How Green Is Apple’s iCloud?

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2011. | What Datacenter Equipment Is Apple Using?
This post was categorized as Apple, Enterprise storage, Personal. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

VMware's PSA is awash in abbreviations and options

I am often questioned during my Storage for Virtual Environments seminar presentations about VMware’s Pluggable Storage Architecture (PSA). This system is fairly straightforward and concept: VMware provides native multipathing support for a variety of storage arrays, and allows third parties to substitute their own plug-ins at various points in the stack. But the profusion of acronyms and third-party options makes it difficult for end-users to figure out what is going on. In an effort to help, I present here another entry in my “VMware storage features in plain English” series.

Note: I am more of a storage guy than a virtualization expert. I consider myself one of those end-users who have had trouble figuring out what’s going on with PSA specifically, in VMware storage features in general. I welcome comments and suggestions for corrections or improvements to this and all of my articles. Thanks for your help!

Introducing Pluggable Storage Architecture (PSA)

Pluggable storage architecture was one of the major enhancements introduced in vSphere 4. Functionally similar to Microsoft’s MPIO stack for Windows, PSA includes native multipathing support and allows vendors to plug in their own advanced features.

I find the VMware diagram confusing. Is mine more or less accurate and readable?

The ESX kernel (VMkernel) walks down through three layers when communicating with storage:

1. In the top layer, VMware native NMP or third-party MPP software decides which SATP to use, or whether to use the native interface. MASK_PATH also operates at this layer.
2. The SATP layer includes native generic path selection (active/active, active/passive), standard ALUA, as well as allowing third-party plugins (SATP) to override its behavior. The SATP monitors these paths, reports changes, and initiates fail-over on the array as needed.
3. At the PSP layer, software decides which physical channel to use for I/O requests.

There are three types of PSA plugins for vSphere 4:

1. Storage Array Type Plug-In (SATP)
2. Path Selection Plug-in (PSP)
3. A complete third-party multipathing software stack (MPP)

As is the case with VAAI, VMware includes a number of third-party plug-ins in the ESXi install. Users can simply activate many of these according to their needs, though some require additional fees and licensing.

Storage Array Type Plug-in (SATP) List

Storage Array Type Plug-Ins (SATPs) to the VMware Pluggable Storage Architecture multipathing solution for the specific characteristics of the storage array. This is very important, since each storage array design differs substantially in detail and support, especially when it comes to load-balancing and failover between controllers, ports, and paths. So it is critical for VMware to have developed a standard interface to communicate with arrays.

SATPs allow load balancing across multiple paths, intelligent path selection, and over troubled conditions such as “chatter”, when passed rapidly fail back and forth between controllers.

The SATP has critical tasks to perform in the PSA stack:

1. Decide which method of communication to use with the storage (PSA or native)
2. Monitor the health of the physical I/O channels or paths
3. Report any changes in the state of the paths up the stack
4. Perform actions required to fail over storage between controllers on the array

VMware vSphere includes a variety of generic plugins for storage arrays. I’ve identified the following:

• VMW_SATP_LOCAL – Local SATP for direct-attached devices
• VMW_SATP_DEFAULT_AA – Generic for active/active arrays
• VMW_SATP_DEFAULT_AP – Generic for active/passive arrays
• VMW_SATP_ALUA – Asymmetric Logical Unit Access-compliant arrays

Although I have sometimes seen other SATP plug-ins mentioned, the following plug-ins are all that are listed in the VMware ESX Hardware Compatibility List.

• VMW_SATP_LSI – LSI/NetApp arrays from Dell, HDS, IBM, Oracle, SGI
• VMW_SATP_SVC – IBM SVC-based systems (SVC, V7000, Actifio)
• VMW_SATP_CX – EMC/Dell CLARiiON  and Celerra (also VMW_SATP_ALUA_CX)
• VMW_SATP_SYMM – EMC Symmetrix DMX-3/DMX-4/VMAX, Invista
• VMW_SATP_INV – EMC Invista and VPLEX
• VMW_SATP_EQL – Dell EqualLogic systems

EMC PowerPath and HDS HDLM also support a variety of storage arrays, but I would classify these as full MPP replacements for PSA, rather than SATP plug-ins.

You can see which SATP plug-ins are available using the following esxcli command:

esxcli nmp satp list

Path selection plug-in (PSP) List

In contrast to the diversity of VAAI and SATP plug-ins, the universe of path selection plug-ins is fairly small. Most storage arrays are supported with either Most Recently Used (MRU) or Fixed path selection approaches. Many also support Round Robin (RR) path selection. The only vendor with a specific PSP that is not also part of a full MPP (like EMC PowerPath or HDS HDLM) is Dell, which offers a special routed path selection plug-in for the EqualLogic iSCSI arrays.

• VMW_PSP_MRU – Most-Recently Used (MRU) – Supports hundreds of storage arrays
• VMW_PSP_FIXED – Fixed – Supports hundreds of storage arrays
• VMW_PSP_RR – Round-Robin – Supports dozens of storage arrays
• DELL_PSP_EQL_ROUTED – Dell EqualLogic iSCSI arrays

As mentioned, EMC PowerPath also offers path selection as a plug-in in addition to the full MPP stack. Many other vendors offer unique path selection plug-ins, over 100 in total, but these are not specifically called out in the VMware HCL apart from their existence. I would love to learn more about them, however.

You can see which SATP plug-ins are available using the following esxcli command:

esxcli nmp psp list

Tell Me More About PSA!

As mentioned above, I am by no means an expert in VMware Pluggable Storage Architecture. Rather, I am interested in learning more and passing on this knowledge to others. I welcome your comments and feedback, and especially your corrections to the information presented here. I will try to keep this page updated as new versions of vSphere are introduced and as I learn more about this technology. Thank you for your help and understanding!

Further Reading:

• What’s New in VMware vSphere 4: Storage
• Next-Generation ESX Storage: A Pluggable Core Storage Architecture
• Storage Changes in the VMware vSphere 4 Family
• Pluggable Storage Architecture, exploring the next version of ESX/vCenter
• Vmware vSphere 4.1 PSA (Pluggable Storage Architecture) Understanding
• Explain the Pluggable Storage Architecture (PSA) Layout

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2011. | VMware PSP and SATP in Plain English
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage, Everything, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

How granular is your storage? This question is just as relevant today as when I first published this article in 2008!

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.

Storage Management: Scaling Up

As I discussed in a previous Sunday Series piece, Turning the Page on RAID, the data storage industry has traditionally focused on reducing granularity. Disk capacity has expanded, and RAID technology has multiplied this by combining multiple physical drive mechanisms into a single virtual one. Storage virtualization technologies, from the SAN to the server, have also often been touted primarily as a mechanism to reduce heterogeneity. From a technical perspective, therefore, granularity has been an obstacle to overcome.

The core organizational best practice for storage management is the reduction of complexity and the enforcement of standardization. Consolidation of storage arrays and file servers is a common goal, as IT seeks to benefit from economies of scale. The goal of both initiatives is the creation of a storage utility or managed storage service. This mirrors efforts on the server and network sides to consolidate and virtualize hardware.

Although both technological and organizational factors have traditionally driven granularity out of storage, this does not have to be the case. Virtual pools of storage are ideal for providing storage on demand, as disk-focused RAID groups give way to more flexible sub-disk storage arrangements. And an operational focus on standardized storage service offerings has the potential to enable scalable management of these smaller units.

Filing Service

File-based protocols would seem to have more potential for granular storage management, but they have been undermined by the hierarchical nature of modern file storage. Whether the connection to a file server uses NFS, CIFS, or AFP, the key unit of management is actually the shared directory, not the file. All files in the share \\firefly\backups would be located on the same server and would be managed as a unit.

NAS virtualization can change this somewhat, as can more specialized NAS servers. Although Microsoft DFS enables consolidation and virtualization of NAS shares, it does not allow subdivision of shares below the directory level – all files in a directory must be placed on the same server. Tricks like stubbing and links allow for some movement, but these do not solve the core issue. Specialized virtual NAS devices from F5 (the ARX, nee Acopia), NetApp, BlueArc, Symantec, and others have the ability to move files individually, providing as much a virtualized storage environment as any block-focused enterprise array. Avere is also beginning to talk about granular file management.

But even an ideal virtualized file server lacks the kind of granularity demanded by users. They care about data, not files, and most applications consolidate their data storage into a few files. Consider a database, for example, where users want each record treated uniquely but storage devices see just a few much larger files. We need a storage revolution, where someone creates an ideal storage platform in which each individual record or object includes custom metadata and is managed independently. This would truly be a massive change, however, and it is not clear that all applications will follow the object storage model of Google and Amazon.

Small is Beautiful

Barring a revolution in data management, our best hope is to allow greater granularity in storage management. As mentioned above, virtualization technology has the potential to enable management and protection of any unit of storage, right down to the individual block or record. But the reality of storage virtualization has not matched its promise.

What is needed is greater integration. Each layer of virtualization (file system, volume manager, hypervisor, network, array, and RAID) also hides necessary details from lower layers. Consider the case of a virtual server snapshot: The application and filesystem must be in a quiesced state to allow a snapshot to be taken at the storage level, but the storage array has no intrinsic information about how its capacity is used. A given LUN might contain dozens of servers on a shared VMFS volume, so all must be snapped together.

Integration can be enabled by sharing more information through APIs. VMware leverages Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) integration for shared storage so a VMFS snapshot can call the operating system and even applications (Windows Server 2003 only, for now) to prepare the data. Similarly, VSS can communicate directly with supported iSCSI and Fibre Channel arrays, calling a snapshot at the right moment. And Microsoft is, no doubt, enhancing VSS as we speak.

As virtualization technology matures, expect this type of integration to improve. We hope to see more APIs exposed by VMware and Microsoft, allowing communication up and down the stack to break through the information barrier. Imagine a future where a standard API like VSS can pass a message through VMware, Xen, and Hyper-V to the underlying storage array to initiate a snap. I predict that this kind of integration-enabled granularity is not too far off.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2011. | Granularity: The Hidden Challenge of Storage Management
This post was categorized as Computer History, Enterprise storage, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

SME storage arrays like the AberSAN Z-Series pack solid enterprise-class features

It’s never been a better time to be in the market for enterprise storage products, with many excellent options available at affordable prices. But the market can be confusing for the uninitiated, with a variety of network options and capabilities. Even those of us “in the know” about enterprise storage are sometimes surprised by the offerings and companies in this space! So when Jerome Wendt from DCIG approached me to collect data for a market overview and buyer’s guide, I was excited. It was my big chance to really get to know these products!

Dividing the Storage Market

An enterprise storage array is a strategic investment, with prices often reaching into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. But there are smaller arrays as well, and these aren’t just stripped-down cheapies: Midrange storage arrays are emerging as serious challengers for the high-end enterprise arrays, and even the small array segment is improving. Long the home of simple RAID systems, small enterprise storage arrays are now full-featured systems with advanced integration and features.

This is the segment of the storage market I was eager to take a look at: The small-enterprise arrays, ranging in price from $5,000 to $30,000 and capacity from a few terabytes to over one hundred (with expansion shelves). To keep it sensible, I eliminated systems with less than 8 hard disk drives (since they really couldn’t deliver the IOPS needed for a production application) and those that can’t be shared using storage networking protocols like iSCSI, Fibre Channel, or NAS. This left a great cross-section, including small systems from big players like EMC, NetApp, Dell, and HP as well as smaller companies like Drobo, Aberdeen, StoneFly, and Promise.

Little Systems With Big Capabilities

Gathering data for this buyer’s guide entailed creating a master list of all the features any of the systems might have and then filling in the blanks with vendor input and public information. Although I felt that my list of questions was comprehensive, I was amazed to find that the available systems exceeded even my expectations. For example, I was surprised to see 10 GbE support in more than 1/3 of the arrays I looked at, yet only 1/4 of them included NAS protocols. Amazingly, every NAS system also supported iSCSI, meaning unified storage dominates the SME array market!

DCIG likes to rank the systems listed in their buyer’s guides, so it was left to me to come up with weights and scores. I decided to score each feature on a 1 to 5 scale based on my own expectations: A feature I was surprised by (more than 4 GB of cache, for example) got a 5 while one that was conspicuously absent (scalability beyond internal drives) got a 1. An average system would get all 3′s, but there really were no average systems!

I then weighted the features based on how relevant they are to small enterprise IT. Features like scalability (drives), data protection (RAID 6), and reliability (redundant power supplies and dual controllers) received more weight than less-critical things like ROHS compliance and even multi-pathing.

After all this work, we boiled down the scores to categories (controller, capacity, support, etc) and finally a single overall score. I was surprised at the results, really. I hadn’t spent much time with Aberdeen or StoneFly prior to this experience, but came away impressed by their products. The strong showing of EMC’s new VNXe and NetApp’s FAS2020 was as I had expected, but the D-Link DSN-5110, Dell’s PowerVault MD3200i, HP’s P2000, and the Promise and Winchester arrays caught me off-guard. These really-capable systems at low prices and should be on buyers’ short-lists!

Stephen’s Stance

I tried to put myself in the place of the buyer evaluating these systems, but of course every buyer will have his own priorities. Perhaps in the future we will make the raw data available so they can make their own ranking and determine which array works best for them. I will work with DCIG to make this happen, since the feature-focused rankings used this time aren’t right for everyone.

I have been working on this guide for almost a year now, and think the finished product really shines. I hope it will help buyers come up with a list of products to consider, and also that it helps the smaller vendors get some attention in this crowded space. Due to their strong showing, Aberdeen has licensed the guide and made it available for free (after registration) on their web site.

Download the guide and see for yourself!

Note that Aberdeen did not “sponsor” the creation of the guide: DCIG paid Foskett Services to create it with no sponsor in mind, I alone gathered the data, and our ranking and editing was finished before Aberdeen or any other vendor got involved financially. No one was more surprised than me by the strong showing of their AberSAN storage system, though the fact that it features Nexenta’s excellent software piqued my interest. Some have criticized DCIG’s guides and methodology in the past, but I personally stand behind this effort. I will happily answer any questions – just leave a comment here!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2011. | Which Small Enterprise Storage Arrays Are Worth Considering?
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage, Everything, Personal, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

I'd love to be greeted by this scene on April 1!

I love April Fools day. Like Halloween, it gives us all a chance to take ourselves a little less seriously and just have some fun. And the best April Fools pranks are those that point out real limitations in our thinking and mindset. That’s always been my April 1 goal: Why not combine Wi-Fi and PoE? And doesn’t the “giant iPod Touch” sound like a hoax?

I’ll be cataloging my favorite April Fools pranks from this year on this page. Check back as I update it!

• Wireless Fun
  • Jennifer Huber takes on the proliferation of ugly wireless access points Making Wireless Sexy – HourglassAire
  • Narrowcom To Unveil Wi-FiBASE-T (by yours truly!)
  • Aerohive…Now with Rainbows – what a clever and well-made video!
  • Airesham Redefines Wireless Convergence – a really silly wireless networking spoof by Lee H. Badman
• Enterprise Storage FTW!
  • From Storage Newsletter: NetApp to Acquire EMC for $9.5 Bilion
  • Seagate triples up heads/platter ratio
  • SNW to Offer Free Access to Press Room, Embrace Social Media, MORE!
• Networking What?
  • Cisco and Brocade working together on interoperable TRILL products
  • Alternative to IPv6 in the Works
  • VMware’s vSphere 5 vStorage API for Token Ring Integration:
    • FCoTR To Take Over The World (Howard Marks)
    • vSphere 5 To Include vStorage API for Token Ring Integration (Me)
    • Storage Vendors Announce FCoTR and VATRI Support (Scott Boss)
• Enterprise IT Funnies
  • From Debian, the Canterbury Project
  • From VMware comes Cloud City
• In the Workplace
  • Computer Training for Moms
  • @Chyldofthebit upgraded his co-worker’s computer
• Around the Internets
  • Nokia Microsoft deal falls through as Nokia merges with Google
  • Robert Novak outdid himself with GoDaddy announces new PKoIP protocol, innovates tying panties in knots over the Internet
  • CloudEra MapIncrease
  • Livedrive announces industry leading, game changing technology for online backup and data storage
  • Google brings us Gmail Motion, the Voice-alyzer, and is hiring 32,000 WPM typists as autocompleters
  • Google Inadvertently Classifies Google Places As A “Content Farm” And Removes From Search Index
• More Fun
  • PLAYMOBIL(TM) Apple Store Playset
  • Okay, We Give Up (from Scientific American)
  • Officially Official: 420-HP BMW M3 Pickup hauls ass, nearly 1,000 pounds
  • Introducing the NWC Royale Membership
  • iPad colocation from MacMiniColo
  • Kodak Relationshiffft
  • B&H Double Takes
  • The best new iPhone/Android app: GreyScale
  • Introducing Starbucks Mobile Pour
  • Deals For Hipsters
  • A 3D monocle from Toshiba

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2011. | April Fools 2011 Roundup
This post was categorized as Personal. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

• Revolution Wi-Fi: Wireless Tech Field Day – Day 1 Quick Recap
• NetApp and Engenio – Part 2 – A Hypothesis
• Verizon Clarifies iPad Activation Fes – NYTimes.com

Subscribe to my Google Reader feed or follow me on Twitter to see these in real-time.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2011. | Back From the Pile: Interesting Links, March 18, 2011
This post was categorized as Everything. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.