Taylor's Take on Sun Storage
My storage team and I focus on three of the most important aspects in any industry: customers, competitors and market trends. There is insight to gain and share in this role, so here is our take on Sun and Storage - Taylor Allis
Friday's Storage Links: Week of June 23, 2008
Posted at 04:18PM Jun 27, 2008 by Taylor Allis in Storage News Links | Comments[0]
Open Storage: Early Customers
Now let's talk about what really matters when it comes down to Open Storage - customers. Now, forgive me for repeating myself because I mentioned some of these customer testimonials in my first Open Storage blog. But it just so happens that the ones I blogged about ended up in the Open Storage Adoption White Paper. So, I'll talk about them (again), but also throw some new ones in...
Customer Blog Comments: Before I do, I want to point to a couple of blog comments. The first one was submitted to Chuck Hollis' EMC blog post Do-It-Yourself Storage. After Mr. Hollis finished criticizing Open Storage, an experienced storage and IT customer posted this comment in response to his critique:
Posted at 05:54PM Jun 26, 2008 by Taylor Allis in Storage Intelligence | Comments[1]
Friday's Storage Links: Week of June 16, 2008
Posted at 02:12PM Jun 20, 2008 by Taylor Allis in Storage News Links | Comments[0]
My Switch from PC to Mac....
Well, I'm officially blogging from my new MacBook Pro after my old Dell PC fizzled out on me....
What a difference a decade makes. I started out on Apple as a Web developer. It was my platform of choice and I never thought I'd go to a PC - I was loyal to the core. I remember the good 'ol days of making sure my Config PPP screen showed two connected smiley faces; and the days of posting docs to my websites with my Gopher or Fetch (FTP) applications. The days of Mosaic...and then Netscape (I still remember how excited I was when I first saw Netscape). But then I left Web development to join an HP distributor and it was PCs from then on...
Why the switch?
Despite the great ads; I got into multimedia and Web 2.0 for lack of a better term. Even though I'm a "business/marketing guy"; I get to re-live the good 'ol days through my blog, Wikis and Podcasts. I also develop home movies and videos. So the switch started at home - I bought a Mac for our home computer several months ago b/c of all the multimedia features it had.
I made the switch to Mac for business this week after leaving Mac over 10 years ago. I use multimedia and Web features in business more now than I ever have before. The design and innovation coming out of Mac has been incredible lately - so the geek in me had some influence as well. Also, so far, all the applications I had on my PC work well (sometimes better) on this Mac (but of course I just got it).
But a large driver was also working at Sun - while my new Mac is pretty foreign to me at this point in time; I did see something familiar in its disk utility - ZFS. It's pretty cool to see your company's enterprise-class file system on your consumer laptop. A testament to the versatility to ZFS and open software...
Posted at 12:28PM Jun 19, 2008 by Taylor Allis in Storage Intelligence | Comments[2]
Open Storage: Vendor Landscape
Ok - chapter 5 in the Open Storage Adoption White Paper talks about the vendor landscape. We'll start with Sun.
Sun's Open Storage Differentiation
There are three areas that position Sun as the best partner for Open Storage solutions:
- Innovative HW systems: Sun’s hardware differentiation lies in design innovation. Three examples of this are the Sun Fire X4500 (Thumper) which combines a four-way x64 server with 48 TB of SATA disk in a 4U rack space - one of the most efficient and dense storage servers on the planet (and there is more to come). Sun's unique ST5800 (Honeycomb) archive platform scored perfect 10s in reliability and scalability with InfoWorld. On the server side, Sun's Blade 6000 is the most open blade platform in the industry - delivering Solaris, Linux, Windows or VMware on single and multicore processors by Sun, AMD, and Intel in one chassis.
- OpenSolaris as a storage platform: One of the most robust and reliable OSes in IT. Sun also offers advanced open-source file systems including NFS, the upcoming Parallel NFS (pNFS) and ZFS. ZFS can manage zettabytes of storage and offers data services including volume management, data integrity and software RAID.
Open-source storage applications: Sun has now open-sourced more high-level storage application software than any other storage vendor. Applications like remote-mirror-copy and point-in-time-copy. Take a look at Sun's complete open-source, end-to-end storage portfolio (a storage developer's dream):
Other "Open Storage" Efforts
In keeping with the definition of open source software + industry standard HW = Open Storage (aka a more scalable, economic storage architecture) let's look at what other vendors are doing with open source software and industry-standard hardware. But remember, several vendors use open source software and industry standard hardware - but still limit customer choice and charge higher rates in their implementations...
IBM: 
In terms of industry-standard hardware, IBM sells Intel and AMD servers as well as SAS- and SATA-based disk and JBOD systems. IBM does see value in open source as it is a large Linux supporter. (However, Sun has more than 3,000 members and 30 open-source storage projects in development for OpenSolaris AND has even open-sourced its commercial applications like the Sun StorageTek Availability Suite - giving its customers full and affordable access to its own IP). IBM’s recent investment in the storage market has been its recent acquisition of XIV - see IBM buys XIV - good move or bad? XIV NEXTRA does use industry-standard hardware, but its software is proprietary (not open source). XIV shows IBM has realized customers need more than what traditional disk products offer today - the design points of the XIV architecture are low cost and massive scalability. However, the technology is new and IBM’s claims of low cost are yet to be determined.
HP: HP also sells Intel and AMD processor-based servers; as well as SAS, SATA and SCSI JBOD arrays. HP sells ProLiant servers or industry-standard servers running Windows Storage Server (Not open source, but obviously a high-volume OS). HP acquired PolyServe in 2007 to cluster its storage and server systems. HP recently announced its HP StorageWorks 9100 Extreme Data Storage System (ExDS9100) - a large NAS appliance with an entry configuration of a whopping 246TB of standard disk. HP also broke away from Windows in its implementation - using open-source Linux as the platform for this higher-capacity platform. HP says it will ship the ExDS9100 by year's end, but without some features like CIFS support. (And by the time the ExDS9100 ships, Sun's X4500 will have been on the market for over 2 years with over 250 petabytes installed.)
EMC: EMC primarily offers closed systems today - custom components and software that are available only through EMC. But EMC can identify business/IT trends and adapt to them. In January 2008, EMC announced its first Storage as a Service (SaaS) or “Cloud” storage offering. EMC is also investing in two products code-named “HULK” and “MAUI.” MAUI is software that will provide what EMC calls a “global repository” - but not much in known at the time of this blog. According to this blogger, HULK's official name is EMC InfiniFlex and a single system consists of a full 44U rack with up to 300 drives (10 disk trays x 30 disks). They fit these 30 drives in 3U it looks like (and does the front-to-back cooling suggest they stick the extra disk behind the front-end disk?) It also uses 12 dual core, 1U servers as well as 2 ethernet switches. So, it essentially looks like industry-standard HW (storage & servers) with TBD software. HULK and MAUI may be EMC’s first venture into the open-storage space - especially if the systems are able to work with other, third-party, industry-standard components. But the benefits to EMC’s new offerings, and just how “open” they are, are yet to be announced...
NetApp: NetApp sells their own proprietary hardware and also develops their own custom operating system called Data OnTap (while others in the industry have been moving to an open or high-volume
operating system for storage - like Solaris, Linux or Windows.) NetApp does not open-source its storage operating system software.
Dell: Dell has built its business on industry-standard, volume-based products. Dell lets customers configure servers with industry-standard Intel and AMD processors, SATA disk drives and various Linux distributions. Dell can be credited for its online configuration and ordering services; but Open Storage customers really require enterprise-class software, services and tech support from their Open Storage vendors - like Sun offers.
Next Blog...
Open Storage Case Studies
Posted at 03:10PM Jun 17, 2008 by Taylor Allis in Storage Intelligence | Comments[0]
Friday's Storage Links: Week of June 9, 2008
Posted at 10:52AM Jun 16, 2008 by Taylor Allis in Storage News Links | Comments[0]
Open Storage: Size & Growth
Both EMC and IBM have chimed in on what their thoughts are on Open Storage's future. Tony's analogy made me think about a simple way to explain what I think Open Storage's future will be like:
Open Storage & Builders Square: Let's rewind to the 1990's. At that time I knew very little about home improvement. In my mind, the only option was to save up to hire an expensive contractor to update my kitchen/bathroom/bedroom, etc. But then a new store opened up close to my home - Builders Square. That shop was subsequently replaced by a new store called Home Depot. I was intimidated when I first walked in - there were only serious contractors around and I couldn't believe the amount of stuff they had.
Well the time came to update our bathroom - and as I was looking up contractors and plumbers in the phone book my wife said, "why don't you see how much it would cost to do it yourself by going to that new home store down the street?" Fast forward to today and the people at our local Home Depot and Lowe's know me by name. I have installed bathrooms, kitchens and built our basement. I had help from store employees, instruction guides and affordable house "components" to do everything. And when I walk into a store today; I see families make up the majority of customers - not contractors. The simple fact is this - I could not have done what I wanted to do with my house if it wasn't for the introduction of these new DIY home stores. Open storage will help users do more with less - and reference architectures, solution blueprints, online communities and consultant services will help customers deploy open storage.
Open Storage & Stay-at-Home Moms: Let's go back to the 90's. I was also an early Web developer back then. In fact, a quick Google search of my name will find a question I posted to a developer's help desk in 1996 where I ask, "Do you know when Netscape 2.0 for mac will be able to pick up Java applets?" Pretty funny; and a testament to the longevity to open standards like HTML. But my point is this - back then my wife was working in consumer PR and had absolutely no idea what I was doing for a living in high tech. The Internet? The WWW?
Today my wife has taken on the full-time job of raising our kids. And I am happy to report that she is looking into starting her own blog - and she is looking at a blog from another stay-at-home mom as an example. Now, if I told my wife she would be "developing" her own WWW journal back in the 90's she would have thought me crazy (which happens often) or the task impossible. But Internet tools have evolved in away that let's anyone self-publish on the web for little to no cost.
I believe open storage will find its way in early markets; and the support resources and tools around it will evolve over time, bringing open storage to more traditional, mature markets.
Open Storage Size & Growth: (From the Open Storage Adoption White Paper)
How do we know this short of getting out our crystal ball? Well, we don't - we need to estimate - and this is how we did it: We took multiple IDC forecasts and rolled them into an internal Sun model - forecasts which included revenue from industry standard storage (JBOD, SSD, etc.) and open source software. Then we made our own assumptions on how the market will behave - for example, we believe the fastest open storage adoption rates will appear in the entry and midrange NAS, unified storage (iSCSI, FC, etc.) and object-based storage markets. We assume adoption will be slower in more traditional, higher-end markets. So, this is NOT an IDC model - but an internal Sun model based on IDC and industry data (to be clear). And this is an industry/market revenue estimate - it includes ALL vendor revenue from industry-standard hardware + open source software used in ANY storage system and does not give ANY info on Sun revenue or performance (to be clear again).
So...we estimate open storage products and services will represent just under 12% percent of the total storage market in 2011. With IDC estimating the total storage market (hardware, software and services) generating approximately $90B in 2011, the open storage portion could be just over $10.6 billion.
We also predict that open storage will represent more than 20% of the external disk market by 2011. At $5.2 billion, hardware represents the largest portion of the open storage market. Tape storage and storage networking products are not included in the open storage forecast (although one could argue that LTO is industry standard hardware).
Next Blog: Sun Open Storage vs. Other Vendor Efforts
Posted at 05:00PM Jun 12, 2008 by Taylor Allis in Storage Intelligence | Comments[1]
Open Storage: Early Markets
As promised, below is a second White Paper on Open Storage. This second one addresses Open Storage market drivers and growth and is titled Open Storage Adoption. It can be downloaded here:
Again, I would like to thank Bruce Norikane, our Sr. Analyst, for
his help as well as our market research manager, Chris Ilg, for his forecasting work. And again, I'll use this blog to post the CliffsNotes for those short on time. Below I will cover the need for a new storage architectures and early target markets. In subsequent blogs I'll cover the Open Storage future market forecast, other vendor initiatives and customer case studies - early adopters who have used Open Storage to solve their critical business needs...
The Need for a New Storage Architecture
Bruce, mentioned above, made a profound statement during our Open Storage planning that ended up in the White Paper. He said, "Google and Amazon would not exist if they hadn’t built their own storage infrastructures." They certainly wouldn't exist in their current state. When they started, traditional storage architectures were too expensive and inflexible to support the business model they had in mind. So what did they do? They had to buy commodity components and developed their own software like the Google File System (GFS).
Certainly not everyone can build their own file system today. But the requirements that drove Google to build their own file system have done nothing but increased. Consider the following facts:
- IDC’s report “The Expanding Digital Universe" states that new digital data will grow 6X between 2006 and 2010 (Emerging market data is growing up to 40% faster)
- 70% of this data will be created by individuals (me, on this blog for example)
- Enterprises will be responsible for storing 85% of this new digital data (Sun's IT dept has to manage the data I create)
- YouTube was founded in February 2005, and by May 2006, 50,000 videos were being added every day
- A YouTube search today can return about 72.1 million videos and 2.89 million user channels
A new, more economic and scalable storage architecture is desperately needed - enter Open Storage...
Open Storage Growth Markets
Open Storage can (and will) compete with traditional storage architectures. But Open Storage won't "take over the world" overnight. Most likely the data center mix of open storage architectures vs. closed storage architectures will change over time and vary data center to data center (if history is our guide). But what markets will adopt sooner? What are the Open Storage "sweet spots"?
Web 2.0: I count Web 2.0 apps as applications delivered via the Web. Apps like blogs, wikis, podcasts, RSS feeds, mashups, and social-networking sites like MySpace, Facebook or SmugMug. Consider this:
- Technorati stated in March 2008 that there were 112.8 million blogs
- Bloggers update their content with 1.6 million posts EVERY day (or more than 18 updates per second!)
- There are currently 3,115 mashup applications on the Internet
And Web 2.0 apps are not just for up starts - Forrester surveyed 2,200 IT decision makers from traditional enterprises and found that 33% were planning on investing in Web 2.0 applications. Web 2.0 storage requirements differ from traditional storage requirements as well. They need massively scalable but low-cost systems. Web 2.0 users are even willing to trade high availability for lower costs. Everyone needs high scalability at lower costs - but the need in the Web 2.0 space is acute. Thus, Web 2.0 will be the key driver for Open Storage architectures.
HPC Storage: IDC estimates that HPC storage systems added about $3.9 billion to the 2006 server revenue total and will undergo faster annual growth than HPC servers. Maximizing I/O bandwidth and minimizing latency while scaling storage capacity is the top priority for HPC storage users. Because of this, data locality is an issue for many HPC implementations. What's data locality? HPC services provider Instrumental, Inc.explains:
Data locality is a big issue in some architectures. Sometimes you need to know where data is in memory to get the best performance. Locality issues are compounded by the enormous amount of software ‘in the middle (OS, file system, volume management, failover, host bus adapters, and so on)’.
To manage issues such as data locality, an open storage architecture is needed. The one thing that HPC storage deployments have in common is that they are all custom built. HPC users need direct access to their storage components and software along with the flexibility to swap components and customize software to optimize their storage. This is difficult to do with closed storage systems.
Additionally, parallel, shared or clustered file systems that leverage global namespace technologies are used in most HPC storage environments. This includes the HPC open source file systems Sun offers - like Lustre. In fact, Lustre is used in 15% of the top 500 supercomputers in the world and in six of the top 10 supercomputers.
Lastly, an additional top storage requirement in HPC is Hierarchal Storage Management (HSM) software (moving data from disk to tape). 
Why? Just look at the massive amounts of data HPC applications generate. The San Diego Supercomputer Center states their earthquake simulations alone generate 47TB every week! By 2011, they expect archived data to grow to more than 100PB. HPC centers must leverage the economics of tape to store such massive amounts of data. Sun offers tape as well as open-source HSM software for disk-to-tape data migration - Sun's Storage Archive Manager (SAM) software.
To see the real-world benefits an open storage architecture can offer HPC customers, see the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) implementation of Sun Constellation - aka Ranger.
Server Virtualization: Open storage introduces more flexibility and consolidation benefits to the server-virtualization market. This added functionality can be realized in two ways:
- By running open storage software inside a virtual machine (VM)
- By running any vendor’s storage software on an open storage server
Storage users can now consolidate three servers and a storage appliance onto a single server. In a closed architecture, storage software cannot be separated from the hardware.
In the second scenario, users can use an open storage server, such as the Sun Fire X4500, as a storage target or shared appliance. What’s unique is that users can repurpose their storage appliance as their needs change. For example, customers can repurpose the same Sun Fire X4500 into a NAS device, a Virtual Tape Library (VTL) or a data replication appliance without buying more hardware. Now that's investment protection!
In the following diagram, a customer has taken a Sun Fire X4500 server running Linux-based VTL software and has repurposed it into a remote replication appliance by leveraging server virtualization and open source Sun StorageTek Availability Suite software.
Sever Virtualization and Open Storage can deliver better investment protection and significant cost and consolidation advantages ...
Next Blog...
What we predict the size and growth of the Open Storage will be
Posted at 04:06PM Jun 10, 2008 by Taylor Allis in Storage Intelligence | Comments[1]
Flash! Ahhh, Ahhhh...
Looks like 2008 is the year Flash has moved from its home planet in the consumer space and has entered Enterprise IT.
EMC announced its Flash-based Solid State Drives (SSD) for its enterprise disk arrays in January; and today I can talk about some (not all) of Sun's plans with Flash - or to be more accurate - our plans for an entire systems product line of Flash-based technologies for the enterprise...
Read today's announcement here...
First of all - is Flash part of Sun's Open Storage plans? Yes - not only part; but a critical part. Remember Open Storage is industry standard hardware + open source software. Having the option between HDD and SSD storage platforms will give Sun Open Storage customers a HUGE advantage in designing their storage systems.
We have also been designing our open source storage platform, OpenSolaris, and our storage file system, ZFS, to manage volumes or data pools based on SSD OR HDD storage platforms. (Let's also not exclude the economic tape tier with our media management and HSM open source projects!)
Read more about Flash in Open Storage here...
As you can read in today's announcement, our Flash-based server and storage product lines will be delivered in the second half of 2008 - at that time I can blog more on the detailed product lines and specs; but all I can say now is that they are pretty darn cool and innovative. What also separates our Flash-based efforts from other competitors is that we are simply not announcing Flash as part of one product or as a product feature - we are introducing a new product line with multiple options that span storage and server systems.
Lastly, our Sr. Disk analyst Bruce Norikane gives an excellent example of Flash benefits when he is educating internal audiences on the advantage of Flash in the enterprise. The example is excellent because it is so simple. We all know that Flash's largest benefits are efficiency (Eco) and speed. But just how big is Flash's performance advantage? When you put yourself in an application's shoes, their is a HUGE response time gap when you are saving your data to Volatile storage like L1 Cache and RAM vs. saving data to Non-Volatile storage like disk, tape and optical. SSD is Non-Volatile storage that can offer an application a response time more than 1,000x faster than HDD disk!
Now applications think in nanoseconds, which can be a little abstract in human terms. So let's take a look at the tables below - but instead of looking at nanoseconds; we'll look at seconds.
Without Flash:
In Human terms; if 1 nanosecond = 1 second.
| Storage Device |
Storage Wait Time |
| L1 Cache (Volatile) |
1 Second |
| RAM (Volatile) | 1 Minute |
| HDD Disk (Non-Volatile) | 58 Days |
With Flash:
In Human terms; if 1 nanosecond = 1 second.
| Storage Device |
Storage Wait Time |
| L1 Cache (Volatile) |
1 Second |
| RAM (Volatile) | 1 Minute |
| Flash / SSD (Non-Volatile) | 20 Hours |
| HDD Disk (Non-Volatile) | 58 Days |
Long live Flash!
------------------------------------------------ Updates-----------------------------------------------------
Great info in Johnathon Schwartz's blog: Anything But a Flash in the Pan
Posted at 12:25PM Jun 04, 2008 by Taylor Allis in Storage Intelligence | Comments[0]
Today's Page Hits: 6
I like the "Google like approach to storage" comment (and the fact that a disk + ZFS system replaced an EMC DMX and Celerra system for this particular customer!) I also had a customer post these comments to my blog - they just deployed a 2TB OpenSolaris ZFS + COMSTAR storage system for a VMWare Cluster with off the shelf components saving €2,000 in the process. Cool stuff.
Open Storage Customers: Not surprisingly, a lot of these early adopters use open source to compete in their respective businesses. You may also expect that early Open Storage adopters would come from Sun's Solaris install base - while true, many new customers do NOT come from Sun's current base. In fact, a lot are Linux users. They have chosen Sun because of...Storage. (Open Storage to be precise).
DigiTar
DigiTar provides messaging security and processing services over the Internet (antivirus, antispam, antiphishing, firewall, and archiving). DigiTar is using Open Storage to improve the performance and efficiency of their database servers. They are using Sun's X4500 storage servers and ZFS to automate database storage administration - with ZFS they have reduced the identification and fixing of database corruption by days and/or weeks. They are also an active member of Sun's OpenSolaris community and use the OpenSolaris community and SunSpectrum for tech support.
What I personally love about DigiTar's story is that they were (still are) a Linux shop. So what made them a Sun OpenSolaris customer??? Storage!
Why? Read their CEO/CTO's blog: Democratizing Storage. He basically states that OpenSolaris was brought into the company because it made for a superior storage platform. The clencher (and essence of Open Storage) for me is when he compares deploying Open Storage vs. a traditional storage architecture:
Want do do more with less? DigiTar is with Open Storage...
Nexenta
Nexenta is unique in that they are an Open Storage customer - but they are using Open Storage to build and sell storage products of their own. They bill their product as “Enterprise-class data storage for everyone!” Nexenta has built its NexentaOS and NexentaStor software appliance from OpenSolaris and ZFS; and they can deploy it over the Sun Fire X4500 as well as other HW.
Like DigiTar, Nexenta was founded by Linux gurus. In fact, the Nexenta team developed the iSCSI stack that was adopted by the Linux community. So what platform did these experts in storage and open-source software choose to build a new storage offering? OpenSolaris & ZFS - due to its advanced storage functionality and long history in enterprise environments.
So now the company offers NexentaStor - a software-based NAS and iSCSI solution with unlimited incremental backups, snapshot mirroring and the inherent virtualization, performance, thin provisioning and ease of use benefits of ZFS.
Sapotek Inc.
Sapotek Inc. is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) provider that offers online desktop services to (currently) 200,000 users worldwide. This SaaS provider had a classic Web 2.0 storage problem - how to massively scale, efficiently and affordably?
Sapotek was running Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Dell servers and had been maxing out at five concurrent threads per server. So they migrated to Sun Fire X4200 servers and the Sun Fire X4500 storage server running ZFS. They replaced four (4) Dell/EMC storage systems with one (1) Sun Fire X4500. Sapotek also used Sun's ZFS snapshot feature, and reported that it had reduced backup and recovery times by 99%! (From hours/days to minutes). Here is what their cheif tech officer, Oscar Mondragon, said about Sun Open Storage:
Above is just a sampling of early customers that have deployed components of Sun's hardware and software Open Storage portfolio. Read the Open Storage Adoption White Paper for more case studies or my previous blog post. Additionally, take a look at these customer testimonials (Some have bought commercial versions of Sun's storage offerings and some have deployed open source offerings)