Taylor's Take on Sun Storage

Sun is on to something - Open Storage

I freely admit, when Sun announced its open source storage community a year go I was a skeptic.  Sure, open source has its play in software and servers - but storage?  

Well, after a year of watching Sun's open storage investments, industry-standard hardware used in enterprise storage and working within Sun on today's announcement - Sun Extends World's First Open Storage Platform - I think Sun is on to something...

Also read all about Sun Open Storage here.... 

I'll make a brief case for open storage and Sun's leadership in it here.   We have also developed a series of open storage White Papers that give more detail on the below info - I'll post them here.  

What is Open Storage? 

Here is a simple definition:  Open storage is the combination of open source software with industry-standard hardware to create enterprise-class storage systems

Open source software like Linux or OpenSolaris OS.  Open source applications like MySQL database software.  And Sun has been one of the first companies to break the barrier with higher-level open source storage applications which include:

• Volume Management
• Snapshot, Data Mirroring and Replication
• Hierarchal Storage Management (HSM)
• Fixed Content Archive
  
• And one of the most advanced file systems on the planet - ZFS (Which includes advanced software RAID, data integrity, self-healing and storage management services) 
  

Industry-standard hardware is typically available through multiple vendors and is very price-competitive.  Examples include x86 servers and standard FC/SATA/SAS disk drives.  One could also include LTO tape because it is an industry-standard tape technology - but I'll primarily focus on disk systems, as this is the market that will be most impacted by open storage. 

In an open storage architecture, the customer selects the best hardware and software for the job.  In contrast, almost all of today's disk arrays and NAS appliances are closed - customers are locked into using the vendor's disk drives, controllers and proprietary software. 

The irony being that a lot of closed systems are built from open source software and industry-standard hardware - helping vendor margins but not customer budgets     

The Evolution of disk Architectures  

Our brilliant disk analyst, Bruce Norikane, also points out that industry disk systems have been evolving to more open architectures over time and with each new market introduction.  A similar trend has also happened in the server market.  Consider the graphic below:   

Early disk systems were custom, proprietary engineering projects starting with IBM's SLED (Single Large Expensive Disk)  in 1956 where everything was custom.  Then in the 1980's a high-volume disk market emerged thanks to PCs and servers; and in the 1990's Enterprise RAID was adopted.  Enterprise RAID incorporated a custom disk controller and these new market drives.  Modular storage then hit the market, consisting of a separate controller and disk enclosures that fit in a standard rack - more flexible and affordable.  Most recently we have seen the RAIN (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Nodes) architecture emerge - distributed storage based on server technologies offering better scalability at a better price point.  RAIN architectures are largely based on industry-standard servers, operating systems and networks.  However, while RAIN systems leverage open components, they tend to be build as closed systems with locked-in components from traditional vendors.

The next logical step is open storage - industry-standard hardware and open source software that drive down storage economics and spur greater innovation.  Again, this storage systems evolution is not unlike what happened in the server world - where servers were large, proprietary and expensive years ago. Smaller, industry-standard servers and open source software changed the economics in the server market - and they are doing the same thing to storage.

Why Open Storage?   

Four reasons:

1. Enterprise-class storage:  Systems that offer as much or more quality, reliability and data integrity as closed systems.  Sounds like a stretch?  Just see the InfoWorld review of Sun's x86, SATA, open source software-based archive solution.  It scored perfect 10s in reliability and scalability.  Let's also not forget that ZFS offers 19 9s of data integrity with predictive, self-healing features.          

2. An Open Storage Software Community:   This is important if you are a developer, a company that has developers or a company that is planning on hiring developers to differentiate through IT.  When we launched OpenSolaris Storage last year we had only a handful of open source projects - we now have over 30.  The OpenSolaris community has more than 96,000 registered members in all.  Why is this important?  Customers don't have to wait on a vendor for the features they need - they can find new innovations in the community or develop features themselves.  Innovation is not held back by vendor objectives or limited R&D budgets...  

3. Breakthrough Economics:  Probably the most compelling argument for open storage and why open storage is needed today.   The best way to understand how open storage can impact storage economics is through an overly-simplistic diagram of a closed system:

Now consider an open storage architecture:

In a nutshell, storage applications are free from licensing costs and open to developers.  Open storage users can choose the platform their IT staff is most familiar with.   An industry-standard server with ZFS (which again includes RAID, data management and data integrity features) can take the place on an expensive controller.   And affordable, market-priced disks can be deployed under the system - even fast and cheap JBOD if you leverage ZFS.

To see the real-world impact we compared some closed systems vs. open systems using Ideas International pricing:

In full disclosure, these are US list prices.  We did configure every system to be as close in capacity as possible using affordable SATA drives in most every configuration.  And finally, certain applications, features and environments simply must run higher-end arrays today - I am not implying that everyone throw out their closed storage and go with 100% open.  But at this economic price difference - users will be compelled to determine which applications and which data should migrate to more open storage - and we presume the data center mix of open vs. closed storage will change over time.         

You can also read about the open storage impact in the VTL space here...

4. Dynamic Scalability: Lastly, the ability to dynamically and efficiently scale to meet today's huge data demand has become business critical, especially with emerging Web 2.0 applications.  Sun sells systems that scale from less than 10TB to greater than 100PBs.   And OpenSolaris ZFS is a 128-bit file system that provides 16 billion, billion times (yes you read that right) the capacity of 32-bit or even 64-bit file systems. 

Sun Open Storage 

Sun offers every component of open storage:  A tried-and-tested enterprise platform in OpenSolaris, the leading HPC file system Lustre, and the open source storage applications mentioned above.  Sun also offers a complete portfolio of innovative and efficient industry-standard servers and storage. 

Sun has, and will announce, storage systems built on an open storage platform as well - Sun Fire X4500 and Sun StorageTek 5800 are Sun's first products built on a truly open storage platform. 

Sun also offers open storage services and resources through its community :

• Learn how to build a Storage Server in 10 minutes or less here
• Build a simple NAS appliance using Sun Open Storage components here 

Sun Open Storage Customers

More compelling than anything I can write is what our customers say about Sun and open storage:

DigiTar
DigiTar provides advanced messaging security and processing services over the Internet.  They are using the opensolaris, Solaris ZFS and Sun Fire X4500's.  Jason Williams is DigiTar's COO/CTO and highlights his expereince with Sun open storage in his blogpost Democratizing Storage.  Even though the DigiTar team is self-described as “Linux zealots,” OpenSolaris was brought in because it made a superior storage platform.  Some of my favorite quotes are below:

“That’s the really amazing thing about OpenSolaris as a storage platform. It has all of the features of an expensive array and because it allows you to build reliable storage out of commodity components, you can build the storage architecture you need instead of being held hostage by the one you can afford.”

“When you’ve got rock-solid iSCSI, NFS, and I/O multipathing implementations, as well as a file system (ZFS) that loves cheap disks…and none of it requires licensing…you can suddenly do anything.  Need to handle 3600 non-cached IOPs for under $60K? No problem. Have an existing array but can’t justify $10K for snapshotting? No problem. How ‘bout serving line-rate iSCSI with commodity storage and CPUs? No problemo.” 

“By using X4500s, we get the same reliability and redundancy for about 85% less cost. That kind of savings means we can deploy 6.8x more storage for the same price footprint and do all sorts of cool things..."

Nexenta
Nexenta has built its NexentaOS and NexentaStor software appliance on Sun open storage products – OpenSolaris and ZFS.  This is significant, as the Nexenta team developed an iSCSI stack that was adopted by the Linux community.  Nexenta's team choose OpenSolaris for their storage platform to actually build a new NAS appliance.  Nexenta's NexentaStor offering is a software-based NAS and iSCSI solution - read about it here.  There is also an excellent blog on ZFS and Nexenta here.   

TACC 
Open Storage also has a large play in HPC - consider one of the world's largest supercomputer built from Sun's open storage, servers and traditional storage offerings.  TACC's Ranger system will be used in computational science & technology research.  Ranger runs 3,936 nodes and 62,976 processing cores; has 23TB of memory and 504TFlops at peak performance; and uses 1.73PB of shared disk and 31.4TB of local disk.  Ranger uses Lustre file system running across 72 Sun Fire X4500 servers. For long-term data retention and archive, Ranger runs Sun StorageTek SAM software over six metadata servers - and deploys five Sun StorageTek SL8500 libraries with 48 StorageTek T10000 tape drives.  Ranger will scale to over 3.1PB of online storage and 200PB of near-line storage. 

From a simple NAS appliance to one of the world's largest supercomputers - open storage scales!

You can read more user case studies below: 

• The University of Oxford is storing 19th century works with the ST5800
  
• Gracenote uses Sun Fire X4500's for its mobile music services
• Web 2.0 SaaS provider Sapotek says, "The ZFS file system feature of the Solaris 10 OS is a marvel. It creates a common storage pool where all storage performs as fast as if it were local. Our administrators can grow, add or remove storage on the fly in a single step. Just 2 people administer 24 terabytes.”
  

What about Sun's other Storage offerings? 

I invariably get this question when we highlight one architecture or approach.  So, to be clear - Sun sells closed systems too...and we sell a lot of them.  We now sell both depending on customer needs.  But we see the need for open storage - and we are investing in it while other vendors are not.  We are also investing in our traditional storage products - our customers deploy a mix of storage architectures depending on their needs - so Sun sells both.  Lastly, you can't claim breakthrough economics without leveraging tape in your portfolio.  If you want to hear about Sun's tape commitments, read about my trip down to Imation. 

But as far as open storage goes, I think Sun is on to something...

---- Updates ---- 

Other Open Storage Blogs: 

• Bob Porras says Open Storage IS the news...
• Lynn Rohrer's Community Perspective 
  
• Jeff interviews Sun Open Storage customers Nexenta and LiveAmmo

Posted at 07:19AM Apr 29, 2008 by Taylor Allis in Storage Intelligence  |  Comments[0]

HP's Upline goes Offline

HP Upline is HP's new SaaS offering for online storage, backup and data migration services - from HP's recent acquisition of Opelin.  They offer "unlimited storage" for $299 for year 1 or $599 for 2 years.

Unfortunately HP Upline crashed just a few days after it was launched.   To be fair, this stuff isn't always easy - we had several obstacles to overcome with our own SaaS compute service.

However, HP probably didn't count on an active EMC blogger as an early adopter (openness has its pros and cons).  EMC's Storagezilla posted a blog with HP's notice to customers about the crash.   EMC's own SaaS storage service, Mozy, wasted no time on capitalizing on HP's crash in true EMC fashion - launching a Google text ad titled "Shafted by Upline?" and "Is Upline jerking you around?"

Another significant point Mr. Zilla points out is that the current SaaS leader, Amazon Web Services' (AWS) total revenue for 2007 was $100M.  

Bottom line:  The market and storage industry is adopting SaaS - but the market is still new and emerging.  Like most trends, SaaS won't take over the world - but the datacenter mix will change, evolve over time.   And while simple backup technologies and strategies are not as sexy as new trends like Web 2.0 or SaaS - a simple backup strategy will still have its place in the new world. 

Posted at 02:12PM Apr 23, 2008 by Taylor Allis in Storage Intelligence  |  Comments[2]

Imation knows how to treat its customers

Yesterday I was fortunate enough to speak at Imation's 15th Annual End User Council (EUC) Symposium along with IBM, HP, some of Imation's larger customers and industry storage guru Fred Moore. 

Imation is the leading removable data storage developer and supplier - offering magnetic tape, optical, flash and removable hard disk storage to the consumer and enterprise markets.  Imation is a co-developer and supplier of Sun StorageTek 9840 and Sun StorageTek 9940 1/2 inch enterprise tape cartridges - and the product management and sales folks at Imation and Sun have done an excellent job growing this business over the past year.

Customers at the event include Bank of America, Citigroup, FedEx, JPMorgan Chase and Wachovia.  The event is at the Hyatt Regency in Bonita Springs, Florida - a beautiful place (despite the multiple mosquito bites I left with).

What I said at the venue 

My topic was "IT Trends Impacting Sun Storage Investment" - download my presentation here.

There was one important question that I heard in several 1:1 customer conversations.  These customers were large tape users - which means their business is dependent on enterprise tape, fast-access tape drives and most (if not all) work in mainframe shops.  There were several customers that wanted to know about Sun's commitment to tape and Sun's commitment to the mainframe.  This is a fair question, as Sun's core operating system is an open platform - Solaris. 

But I was also saddened to hear that a Sun storage competitor had been telling some customers that "Sun is not committed to tape and does not have future tape roadmaps."  This is simply a falsehood.  Below is what I told these customers and what I said during my presentation about Sun's current commitment to tape and mainframe storage:

• Fact: Sun has Tape roadmaps for every tape product.  If a customer wants to see them, they can under NDA.   I make this offer to any customer with a concern. 
  
• Fact:  StorageTek was a mainframe tape company and Sun acquired StorageTek for ~$4B.   Why would Sun (or any company) spend that much on an acquisition to discontinue that company's products?
• Fact (and the most impressive fact to me):  Sun StorageTek has launched the following Open Systems and/or Mainframe products JUST THIS YEAR (1H CY08).  I'm from StorageTek - and can't remember this many tape announcements in the first half of a year: 
  
• Sun StorageTek SL3000:  Brand new Mainframe & Open Systems Library.  200-3000 slots, up to 50% the footprint and 1/3 power improvement over competitive products.  Supports LTO, T10000 and T9840 drives & media. 
  
• T9840D Tape Drive & Media: 4th generation drives that re-use the same media.  Backward compatible over 4 generations - now that's investment protection.  2x capacity increase with built-in data encryption.  <20 second access time to the 1st byte.
• Crypto KMS 2.0: Policy-based encryption key management station that now supports T10000A, T9840D and HP LTO4 drives.
• Sun StorageTek VTL Prime: Open systems VTL now with de-duplication!

Sun can be criticized for a lot of things - but Sun should be credited for its new investments in mainframe storage and tape systems.  Between the recent SL8500, SL3000, T10000 + Encryption and the new T9840D products, Sun StorageTek has the newest and most comprehensive line of enterprise tape systems in the industry - over IBM.  And most of the above items were announced AFTER the StorageTek acquisition. 

About the venue 

The event was well run - and there was a closeness and loyalty between Imation and its top customers that had to be admired.  People had fun, there was a stacked agenda and great networking opportunities.  Imation treated its customers (and speakers) right.  Kudos to Imation for thanking its customers in this way - especially at a time where everyone's budgets are tight.  The customers I spoke to were the people who did the real storage work as well - storage managers, administrators, etc.  There were no execs or VPs (that I saw) but Imation treated their core users like they were top-level execs.

My Nature Walk 

The hotel and grounds were amazing too - I didn't get to stay long, but I got to walk the grounds before I jumped on my flight.  I am a bit of a nature person, so here is what I saw:  The hotel is located in Southwest Florida - on the edge of a great Florida Mangrove Forrest. To get to the ocean you have to walk on a pathway that cuts through the Mangroves (picture at left).  On the path, I saw thousands of Fiddler Crabs scurry to their holes as I walked.  I saw the shell to a horseshoe crab - but not a live one unfortunately.  There were a ton of orb spider webs among the trees and I came upon a very large and beautiful "Crab-Like Spiny Orb Weaver" in the middle of its web.  Amazing if you like spiders - scary if you don't.

You are awarded at the end of your walk by a pier that jets out into the ocean (picture at right).  There was a beautiful White Egret standing at the edge of the pier.  But one of the coolest things I saw was when I looked into the water off the pier.  I saw several green reeds that looked like floating grass and Mangrove leaves - until I walked by and the "reeds" started to swim away.  Turns out I was standing over a school of Alligator Pipefish - pretty amazing...

 Thanks Imation!

Posted at 11:09AM Apr 15, 2008 by Taylor Allis in Storage Intelligence  |  Comments[1]