I invited two excellent guests to join me for this conversation:

1. Josh Goldstein, VP of Marketing, Cirtas
2. Andres Rodriguez, Founder and CEO, Nasuni

It was a pretty broad discussion, all packed into less than half an hour. I urge you to check out the podcast (and subscribe in iTunes, rss, or email) but I wanted to share a few excerpts. You can also read the entire transcript over at Foskett Services: I’ll be posting it as a series of articles over the next week!

Andres Rodriguez: I think one of the things that hurt StorageNetworks at the time was the fact that they couldn’t deploy the equipment in an efficient, multi-tenant way. And so, if you look at the new cloud architectures, (places like Nirvanix, places like Amazon) those systems are designed from the get-go to be shared among many, many users, and make very efficient use of the equipment and the software running it across that user base.

…

Josh Goldstein: Today, the cloud is built on top of process that are very difficult for most companies to replicate on their on. So, the price you’re paying to your cloud provider includes not just storing your data but also keeping multiple replicas of that data spread across different geographical sites.

You’re highly protected against not only a disk drive failure, but also an entire array failure or even an entire site failure where your information’s still is survived those kinds of events and is remaining accessible to your when you need it.

That’s something that for most organizations to engineer that level of reliability is extremely expensive and difficult for them. The cloud providers have been able to do that at scale and still deliver the capacity to you with that type of protection at a price point that’s really pretty amazing.

…

Andres Rodriguez: I’ll start there and I said anything that traditional storage world, we have file based systems. We have block based systems and that is exactly where Cirtas and Nasuni stand. We are the equivalent of say a company named EMC and NetApp for the cloud world. The approaches are complimentary. And they are both trying to solve the same problem. I’ll start on the file side but Josh can take on the block. But on the file level is really, look, if you want to have something that behaves very much like a file server, say like a NetApp box. It means you are going to have a file system, you want to have a protocol to export it locally on so something like CIFS, you are now going to have access to directory integration so that you can have access control. This is what makes a file server useful in the datacenter.

…

Andres Rodriguez: One of the really interesting things about that is that Josh is essentially describing thin provisioning in the classic sense. But unlike doing thin provisioning and this is the cloud is automatically provisioned. So he is essentially promising the volume. But then the volume is growing gradually, smoothly without any administrative interference. Without you having to worry about it; the volume is filling in its data as it goes. And that is one of the things we talked about in the beginning.

The cloud really allows you to build a different type of storage system, because automatic provisioning is really thin provisioning should be but isn’t. When you’re talking about physical linked arrays that are limited by actual hard drives, you know, running, spindles running in your datacenter.

Again, you can watch the video of the whole conversation right now over at Foskett Services, or you can read the transcripts that will be posted there over the next few days.

Disclaimer: I worked at StorageNetworks, and Nasuni is a client of Foskett Services.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2011. | Talking Cloud Storage Gateways With Nasuni and Cirtas
This post was categorized as Computer History, Enterprise storage, Gestalt IT, Personal, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

We need to move beyond fake disks and deploy application-centric storage

Change is not a word normally associated with storage, and revolution is practically unheard of. Today’s modern enterprise storage systems and networks employ massive resources to do one simple thing: Emulate the basic hard disk drives used over three decades ago. But cracks are appearing in our mausoleum of fake disks: Application developers are discovering the value of object storage, and storage systems are appearing to support this need.

I also wrote about this two years ago, proclaiming that We Need a Storage Revolution and forecasting The Techie/Business Schism

The CAS Revolution

Caringo founder and CTO, Paul Carpentier, rose to prominence around 2000 at FilePool, one of the prime movers in the content-addressable storage (CAS) space. I recall a light going off in my head as Paul introduced me to FilePool’s CAS technology back then, imagining the possibilities of the concept. Files would be stored based on “what they were” rather than “where they were” and could be organized according to application needs rather than the conventional “extent of blocks” or tree heirarchy.

CAS discarded decades of filesystem and block storage baggage, introducing a new method for storing and retrieving data that better-matched the burgeoning web and enterprise applications of today. I had seen the failure of the first wave of storage service providers from inside StorageNetworks, and it was this desire for a real storage revolution that led me to dive into cloud storage at Nirvanix almost a decade later. Although I am now on my own, I remain convinced that the future belongs to storage systems that look nothing like today’s SAN and NAS.

Shortly after that 2001 meeting, EMC acquired FilePool and launched it as the Centera product line. But CAS systems quickly ran into a serious roadblock: Conventional applications cannot read and write to unconventional storage systems like Centera. EMC pushed key software vendors (especially in the archiving space) to create special Centera interfaces, and the industry bogged down developing the XAM standard. Other companies, like Seven Ten Storage Software, jumped in to help with the translation from proprietary CAS interfaces, but the transition from legacy files and blocks to object storage has been long and slow.

Cloud Storage: Another Dimension

Meanwhile, in an alternate dimension, web developers realized they had a serious problem. They were developing applications that scaled massively, spanning servers and exhausting conventional filesystems. Conventional systems just wouldn’t cut the mustard.

Since they were soaking in web applications, these developers applied the lessons of web services to storage: Why not just make an HTTP connection and ask for an object by a unique ID rather than walk a filesystem tree? Why not encapsulate the “state” of this request in the request itself rather than make a lasting connection and association between the client and server?

Thus was born cloud storage, and it was bookseller Amazon who opened the floodgates with their 2006 introduction of a “Simple Storage Service” or S3. They allowed anyone to store and retrieve objects from their massive web services infrastructure. S3 and similar services from Rackspace, Nirvanix, and others, are special-purpose web servers, and their simple interfaces are wonderfully attractive to web developers. For example, this WordPress-based blog uses cloud storage to serve images to your browser!

Similarities in CAS and Cloud

Although developed from vastly-differing starting points, CAS and cloud storage are essentially similar: Both reject conventional blocks and files in favor of object storage; both organize data with metadata databases; both multiply and scale out. There is one other major similarity between CAS and cloud storage: Both are attractive to service providers.

Imagine you operate a business that stores data for customers. You would want a flexible infrastructure that would scale with demand and segment each “tenant” from others for security and performance. As we learned at StorageNetworks, conventional SAN and NAS systems just weren’t meant to work in this kind of environment. Whether operating an internal service or a public cloud, service providers require something entirely different.

Cloud storage was designed from the start with service providers in mind, embedding per-object and per-”bucket” security, scalability, and abstraction between hardware and clients. Although quite complex to design, cloud storage is amazingly simple to use, provided an application can interface with it.

CAS wasn’t designed like this. Systems like EMC’s Centera were created for the needs of applications like enterprise archiving, but secure storage of content and extreme scalability are critical here as well. But early CAS systems didn’t need simple web-style interfaces or extreme hardware abstraction. These were enterprise systems, after all.

The CAS/Cloud Colission

CAS wasn’t exactly successful. Although object storage found a niche in enterprise archiving, the enterprise storage world has mostly continued with blocks and files. The major storage vendors all have some kind of object storage, but most are repurposed NAS rather than dedicated CAS like the Centera.

Although much skepticism has been raised about cloud storage in the enterprise, its impact on application development cannot be denied. Indeed, the majority of developers are now focused on programming platforms that abstract both compute and storage from conventional operating systems. The next generation of applications will run in “platform as a service” environments first, and cloud storage is a key component.

Storage vendors are rapidly moving to rework their conventional systems for cloud use. Although block and file systems from 3PAR, NetApp, Isilon, Symantec, HDS, HP, and others are useful in cloud environments, unconventional CAS becomes more valuable here. This is where EMC, Mezeo, and Caringo (with Dell) shine, and why HDS bought Parascale, NetApp bought Bycast, and what Overland could do with MaxiScale. In the mean time, “gateway” products from Nasuni, Cirtas, StorSimple, Twin Strata, and Asigra are awfully interesting.

Stephen’s Stance

The storage revolution is coming, whether we in the industry are ready or not. Developers are voting with their feet, targeting cloud storage and application platforms rather than conventional filesystems. Although the market for cloud storage products is slow to develop, the cloud storage concept will eventually dominate the landscape.

It seems most likely that this revolution will decimate the storage industry as we know it today. Unable to push high-margin storage arrays into the ballooning cloud space, product vendors will see their market share eroded by service providers with no use for these expensive systems. Monolithic file and block will soldier on in the new legacy applications, but the action will inevitably slip away.

The likely winners will be those who can leverage commodity hardware for scale-out cloud storage use. The proliferation of cloud platforms will settle down, with a few gaining traction and the rest discarded. Then we will see companies like HP, Dell, and Oracle rise to lead the storage sales charts with massive volume shipments to service providers.

Disclosure: I used to work for StorageNetworks (which is now defunct) and Nirvanix.

Image credit: Barcelona Graffiti by Aeioux

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2010. | From CAS to Cloud: Revolutionary Storage
This post was categorized as Computer History, Enterprise storage, 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.

Everyone is a vendor - what are you selling?

We’re All Selling Something

I’ve always been a vendor blogger, and so have you. It took me a long time to come to terms with this, but nearly everybody is a vendor of one sort or another: Regardless of whether you deliver results to your employer, sell your own services, or push a product, we’re all selling something.

I’ve been delivering enterprise IT consulting for a living for almost 15 years now. It’s easy to pretend that human services like consulting are somehow more pure than the “box pushers”, but this is simply not the case. Even internal end-user employees are trying to keep themselves employed, and the most effective way to do this is to promote their company and themselves.

It’s not a black and white scale. If we are all selling ourselves and our employers,then we are all vendors to greater or lesser extents. We all have our axes to grind, our prejudices to expose, and only our experience to draw on. So no one is perfectly credible and no one is perfectly tainted.

I’ve long labored to maintain my credibility and independence, even as I have moved from an IT outsourcer (Sprint Paranet) to a storage service provider (StorageNetworks) to strategic consulting companies (GlassHouse Technologies and Contoural) to a cloud storage provider (Nirvanix). I’ve always remained separate from any product focus, but I’ve always been part of the sales and delivery process for consulting services.

Get Out Of Jail Free?

The fact that it’s all shades of gray does not mean, however, that we are free to twist the facts with impunity or that we should object when others pass judgement on our motivations. Quite the opposite: If we are all vendors, we all had better be careful what our actions say about us!

This is the most important lesson I have learned about blogging: Credibility is our currency, and no one has yet offered me enough reward to sacrifice mine. Can I be bought? Well, in the words of Jayne Cobb, “that’ll be an interesting day!”

Because I recognize the importance of credibility, I try to keep a level head and maintain a respectable persona. This means avoiding personality-driven battles and engaging in accptable business practices I would be proud for the world to know. This isn’t always easy: As your personal profile rises, there will be outside pressure (or inside temptation) to leverage it. Our shared challenge is to keep level heads.

The Messenger Matters

One inescapable fact remains: Employees of companies known for FUD are held to a higher standard of scrutiny. No matter how personally responsible and credible you are, if you work for a marketing-driven product vendor, you will be under the microscope.

Comments that would be considered innocuous or even respectably aloof from an “independent” might seem like mud slinging from a vendor employee. Imagine reading blog posts or tweets from an end user criticizing the products of Microsoft and IBM. If the exact same statements were made by employees of EMC or HP, wouldn’t they be seen in a different light? The message is the same, but the messenger matters.

I have personally experienced the doors that close when moving from a consulting company to a managed service provider. Certain publications and event organizers have strict rules denying “vendors” the right to participate; others have no such restrictions. I was sad to say goodbye to TechTarget after 5 years, but I respect their rules. Happily, as their door closed, others opened and I was able to write and present more last year than any year previous!

If you enjoyed reading this, you’ll probably also like my Foskett Services blog!

My Approach

My new role at Nirvanix explicitly allowed me to continue my personal social media presence, including organizing Gestalt IT and Tech Field Day. Management saw that my reputation was a benefit to the company and trusted I would remain objective and keep my work and non-work roles separated.

I’ve endeavored to do just that, launching a new blog, Enterprise Storage Strategies, specifically for cloud storage strategy and restricted crossover between the two domains. In the interest of objectivity, I’ve also “recused” myself from discussions of cloud storage on the Gestalt IT web site and at Tech Field Day.

I don’t want to say that this is the correct approach for everyone, but it’s worked well for me. What do you think? How can vendor bloggers remain credible in the increasingly social world?

Hot dog cart image by rollingrck

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2010. | What I’ve Learned From Vendor Blogging
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage, Personal, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

The good news is that this is no longer a technical problem: Modern virtualized and networked servers ought to have decent utilization of storage capacity, and technology is improving all the time. Consider the compounded impact of modern technology on storage capacity utilization:

• Shared storage (SAN and NAS) allows different servers to share a common pool of storage, reducing the likelihood that excess capacity will be stranded in isolated “puddles”. Pervasive use of NAS technology, and the rise of simple and inexpensive iSCSI SANs, means that every system in the modern data center can use shared storage.
• Organizational and architectural optimization allows storage to be provisioned from a common pool rather than building “stovepipe systems” with their own resources. Quicker provisioning also helps reduce over-provisioning.
• Network connectivity allows servers to share resources, including storage, on a peer-to-peer or client-server basis, ultimately resulting in things like cloud computing.
• Managed and utility services reduce the impact of low utilization, potentially focusing on efficiency or perhaps passing the buck to a service provider.
• Thin provisioning might help certain systems to keep less storage in reserve.

So why don’t things get better? It’s hard to be sure why people don’t use these pervasive tools to improve storage utilization, but I do have some ideas…

• Storage utilization might not be a priority. Utilization isn’t often in the critical path of performance or availability, so overtaxed IT departments aren’t going to focus on it.
• Incentives can be lacking. With the cost of storage constantly falling, the effort required to improve the efficiency of already-allocated storage can be just as easily spent migrating to a newer, cheaper storage platform.
• Virtualization has perversely harmed the efficiency of allocation. One might think that the ease and flexibility of virtual disks would improve things, but it hasn’t. Server and storage virtualization just adds another place to hide unused storage.
• Metrics remain a problem, since everyone gets all balled up trying even to talk about capacity utilization.

I think this last point is something we in the industry really ought to do something about. We say “utilization” but what do we mean? Chris Evans has proposed a set of metrics for the “storage waterfall“, and I mentioned back in October that this all boils down to three key metrics: Raw, usable, and used. The key question is where to apply them!

Way back before the 2001 bubble-burst, I managed professional services for a company called StorageNetworks. At that time, I was quite aggressive in pushing this same idea, even co-writing a whitepaper on the topic titled Measuring and Improving Storage Utilization. My co-author (Jonathan Lunt) and I recently reminisced about that paper, and we both agreed that everything in it still stands today, apart from the high dollar cost per gigabyte.

Each ratio in the storage waterfall can be diagnosed and improved

I suggest that the following key storage utilization ratios (taken directly from this paper) make just as much sense today as they did then:

• Array Overhead is the percentage of installed storage capacity that is not usable. Dividing Array Usable by Array Raw and subtracting that number from 100% yields the percent of overhead. Overhead here is usually due to the desired level of data protection (e.g. RAID, mirroring) rather than to poor management.
• Array Utilization is the percentage of usable array capacity that is allocated to hosts. It indicates the efficiency of storage deployment operations.
• Allocation Efficiency reflects the ratio of storage presented or allocated to hosts to the amount actually seen by them. In many mature environments this ratio is near 100% (i.e. all the storage allocated is being seen), but this ratio can be extremely difficult to determine. It relies on accurate measurements of both Array Used storage and Host Raw.
• Host Overhead reflects the amount of storage configured for use versus the amount the host can see. Since the Host Raw metric is a function of the storage administration team and the Host Usable a function of the systems administration team, this metric is a useful measurement of how well the two functions are cooperating. Data for this classification is collected from the host.
• File System Utilization is the amount of available file system space that actually contains data. File system utilization is familiar to most systems administrators. This metric is often shown in simple system commands like “df” on UNIX or “dir” on Windows. Data for this classification is collected from the host.
• Total Storage Utilization summarizes how well a company manages its storage assets across the entire business. This ratio is the default storage utilization metric used in publications and reflects the actual value an enterprise is deriving from its storage asset. Care is required in calculating this ratio to ensure that it accurately indicates utilization of the storage environment. Since the result of this ratio is often used in business cases and receives wide attention, it must be both logical and defendable.

To these, I would add another intermediate and optional set of virtualization metrics and ratios for environments with storage or server virtualization. One could also presumably add a higher-level set of application efficiency ratios as well.

In the paper, Jon and I also proposed three best practices to improve storage utilization:

1. Drive Array Utilization (Array Usable to Array Used) to greater than 90% (a storage administration responsibility)
2. Drive Allocation Efficiency: Bring Host Usable to be as close to Array Used as possible (a joint responsibility)
3. Drive Filesystem Utilization (“Host Usable to Host Used”) above 80% (a systems administration responsibility)

Go read the paper and let me know what you think. Are we still stuck in 2001?

This post can also be found on Gestalt IT: Storage Utilization Remains at 2001 Levels: Low!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2009. | Storage Utilization Remains at 2001 Levels: Low!
This post was categorized as Computer History, Enterprise storage, 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.

This is the second entry in my Top-Ten in Storage series.

Not every innovative product can succeed in the market, and no matter how good some ideas seem, they can fail to make much of an impact. The truth is, people buy solutions, not technologies.

This list includes products so cool, so ahead of their time, that they just couldn’t fail. But they did.

1988 EMC Orion/Allegro

EMC’s RAM-based storage array predated and presaged its Symmetrix, offering lightning-quick I/O for very small workloads. But the Orion had a few serious drawbacks: It was astonishingly expensive, offered tiny capacity, and was never available for open systems. EMC’s initial offerings in the open systems market, Centriplex and Harmonix, also deserve mention though the company proved its worth with its “best” Symmetrix a few years later.

1985 3COM 3Server

I’ve written about the 3Server before, but let’s sum up: Before RAID, SAN, and NAS, and even before NetWare and NFS became entrenched, 3COM introduced a flexible multi-disk network storage and print server called the 3Server. It was an innovative combination of hardware and software, but it lost out to NetWare on open PC hardware in the market. Although the 3Server lasted just a few years, it made a lasting contribution to the field: Its 3+Share software became 3+Open, then LAN Manager, and was finally absorbed by Microsoft to become SMB/CIFS.

HP AutoRAID (High Availability Disk Array Model 12)

The first post-RAID virtual sprang fully-formed from the big brains at HP to challenge the industry-leading modular offerings from Data General’s CLARiiON and DEC/Compaq’s StorageWorks. It one-upped everyone with automatic relocation of LUNs between different RAID levels based on workload about a decade before Compellent, EqualLogic, and 3PAR had anything of the sort. But the AutoRAID had two key drawbacks: Like mama bear, it wasn’t big enough for big companies but was too big and expensive for little ones, and it was SCSI-only (though a Fibre Channel bridge was a common accessory). Some of the concepts lived on in the HP EVA line, but AutoRAID didn’t last long.

Microsoft Object File System (OFS)/Relational File System (RFS)/WinFS

Microsoft shoulda-coulda-woulda revolutionized file storage with nearly every major operating system release. It looks the same every time: A database/filesystem hybrid that would add structure to the vast unstructured file world. Despite the hype, we haven’t seen it yet. 

MangoSoft Medley

Consider the typical LAN: Lots of clients with lots of hard drive space connected to a server with yet more disk capacity. Wouldn’t it be nice if the space on these clients could be used as a virtual network server? Well that’s just what MangoSoft announced in 1997, gaining much attention in the PC press. Sadly, the idea never really caught on, although MangoSoft continued. But distributed network storage has become the industry’s Brigadoon, trotted out as a new idea year after year.

StorageNetworks

This is my flop – I worked for StorageNetworks from 1999 through 2001.

StorageNetworks was launched in 1998 to provide off-premise storage and backup as an on-demand service for enterprise customers. They sought to take advantage of the emergence of high-speed Fibre Channel connectivity over metro distances to commoditize storage capacity. But only Houston (where I worked) had an acceptable infrastructure for the service, so the company changed focus to hosting centers. Then off-site backup. Then software. Nothing worked apart from vendor-independent services, and the (now public) company was shy to base its revenues on that. StorageNetworks was gone in 2003, but does the service remind anyone of Amazon S3 or Nirvanix? Maybe it was just ahead of its time.

Compaq VersaStor

Announced in 1999, VersaStor would have been a revolution in Fibre Channel SANs, a full out of band virtualization solution leveraging specialized HBAs directing traffic. It was continually pushed back, finally being “merged” (after Compaq) with HP’s StorageApps in-band SANLink to become CASA. But then EMC sued HP over virtualization patents, derailing CASA, and the whole mess was permanently shelved at the end of 2003.

IBM Ice Cube/Collective Intelligent Bricks Hardware

IBM rocked the storage press in 2003 with their announcement of Almaden Research’s Ice Cube concept. Instantly dubbed “Lego brick storage” (trademarks be damned!), the storage units could be stacked in two dimensions, scaling without limit. Coolest of all (literally), the bricks were chilled with water! Although the concept progressed, we still haven’t seen it. But this didn’t stop Seagate from developing a similar concept, ISE, which is now Xiotech’s main offering. IBM’s Storage Tank and VSS could have been nominated, too, but I’m not a sadist.

Revivio CDP

Revivio was the pioneer of continuous data protection (CDP), with great technology and people. But no one (other than Symantec, eventually) bought it.

Pirus

Little Pirus was working on a small but scalable virtualized target when it was acquired by Sun in September of 2002. Their technology was launched as the StorEdge 6920, a mini alternative to the HDS USP in 2004, but (according to insiders) it didn’t exactly light the world on fire. Sun finally pulled the plug on the 6920 in early 2007, with HDS taking over continuing support for anyone who bought the moribund product.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2008. | Top Ten Coolest Enterprise Storage Flops
This post was categorized as Computer History, Enterprise storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

Thanks to Storagezilla for breaking the news.  Someone should probably update the WysDM web site, too…

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2008. | EMC Quietly Acquires WysDM Software
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.