Taylor's Take on Sun Storage

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]

Game-changing Storage Economics

In the open systems VTL space, EMC is the leader in market share.  (Sun leads in the Mainframe space btw).  How can Sun compete?  Answer - By changing the Economics at the infrastructure level.  See below: 

This is an example I use because both EMC and Sun (and IBM for that matter) use the same software - FalconStor. 

So, wouldn't you take a closer look at a product that offers similar functionality at 16% less power consumption in 73% less space? 

Posted at 08:12AM Mar 10, 2008 by Taylor Allis in Storage Intelligence  |  Comments[1]

Sun's Open Archive Announcement

If you've been walking the halls of Sun StorageTek of late, you would have heard a lot of talk about the "Archive Launch" and changing IT and storage economics...

Today, Sun made a large announcement in the Archive storage space.

First a word on messaging:  Internally, Sun Systems recently went through a healthy reality check on how we message our products and solutions.  We looked at where we are in the industry and where we can, and should, differentiate.  It's no secret that Sun's core assets reside at the infrastructure level - storage, servers, processors, O/S.  These segments are the backbone of IT infrastructure - on which applications are deployed to meet business requirements and goals.  We have come to a single conclusion in which today's (and tomorrow's) messaging will focus on - the Economics of IT needs to change.  With data sprawl, longer retention periods and a paradigm shift happening in how data is generated (more and more by individuals) - traditional IT infrastructures are becoming too expensive or too inflexible...

What we announced today:  So, you will hear an overall message of changing Economics through open IT architectures and infrastructures coming from Sun.  And you will hear us announce categories of the market in which we aim to change the economics in- today's happens to be archive.  What we announced:  

• Brand new product:  Sun StorageTek SL3000 Tape Library
  
• New product to existing family:  Sun StorageTek T9840D Tape Drives
  
• Product enhancements:  Sun Crypto Key Management System (KMS) 2.0 & Sun Customer Ready Infinite Archive System (aka Sun CIS)
• Open sourced digital archive: We donated the source code for the Sun StorageTek 5800 (aka HoneyComb)
  

Since I have personal experience with the SL3000 library and CIS - I'll paint some color on these products and their history :

Sun StorageTek SL3000 Tape Library:
10x the power savings and 50% footprint advantage vs. Quantum & IBM

How the SL3000 came to be was a Product Manager's dream:  A) We saw a gap in our tape portfolio between entry and enterprise libraries; B) we did extensive customer research and focus groups to get customer requirements; C) we flew customers in to see and comment on the prototype D) we announce it today.

No sloppy welds:  My team was fortunate enough to conduct the research for SL3000.  When we were in Asia focus groups, customers told us something that took us by surprise.  Our customers would actually look at the inside edges of a tape library to see how it was welded together.  If the weld was "sloppy" - put together hastily - they'd notice.  In a culture of quality - the little stuff is an indicator of overall quality.  Suffice to say, we've been poking our heads inside libraries looking for sloppy welds ever since.  A good indication on how customer feedback drove this product to market (and our quality focus at Sun StorageTek).  

Some quick stats on the library itself:

• SL3000 scales from around 200TB to 3PB (200 - 3,000 slots)
  
• Supports open and mainframe environments and mixed media
  
• Fully redundant robotics & non-disruptive capacity upgrades
  
• Up to 10x power savings and 50% footprint advantage vs. Quantum Scalar i2000 and IBM TS3500 (Economics!)
  

 Sun Customer Ready Infinite Archive System (aka CIS)
Costs 46% less and consumes 1/3 the power of a 2PB EMC Centera Solution

Skunk Works?  I just learned that the origin of the term "Skunk Works" came from Lockheed Martin when they were developing one of my favorite WWII fighter planes - the P-38 Lightning.  In tech, Skunk Works can have positive and negative connotations - I personally think a lot of innovation has come from working around the process, but you need a healthy balance.   Sun's X4500 (aka Thumper) came straight from engineering and by all measures its turning out to be a huge success.   I'm supporting a Skunk Works project in fact, and I'd love to see it get off the ground one of these days (perhaps more in a later blog, but its open source Systems Managed Storage software brought out of the mainframe world into open systems, available over SourceForge). 

So while SL3000 has its origins in traditional product management, CIS (er... "Customer Ready Infinite Archive System") got its origins more on the Skunk Works side of the house - from the Field Sales and Engineering side specifically.   I don't know the full story, but I am guessing it went something like this....a Sun systems engineer is at a customer site deploying a tiered storage architecture (disk, tape, server, HSM)  for the umpteenth time and thinks, "what if we did this integration BEFORE we shipped this to customers???"  And CIS was born (or something like that...)

Call it a tiered storage platform, or ILM-in-a box, or whatever - but this is what it is (and it can be used for more than just archive btw):

• Pre-configured and integrated
  
• Server, Disk & Tape in a single rack
• Sun X4200 or T5220 Server
• Sun StorageTek 2540 SAS or SATA disk
• Sun StorageTek SL500 Tape Library, supports LTO-4 tape drives
  
• Comes with HSM software (SAM) - fully automated backup and data migration
• Highly scalable - scales to petabytes by stringing multiple racks together under a single file system (QFS)
• Ready to run - just hook it up to the network - cool stuff...

So, since we are talking archive, we compared this integrated architecture to another popular archive appliance in the market.  In a 2PB configuration, Sun's Customer Ready Infinite Archive System costs 46% less and consumes 1/3 the power of a 2PB EMC Centera solution.  Additionally, data migration cost extra for Centera customers while it comes part of Sun's solution. 

So, the industry is looking at IT economics closer than it ever has before.  Sun is innovating here at the infrastructure level - adding functionality and performance while reducing cost through open source software, integrated systems, Eco-efficient hardware and leveraging the economics of tape...

---- Update ---

Other Sun blogs discussing Open Archive:

• Storage Stop
• Management Monogatari
• Bob Porras 
• QuickStick 
• Analyze This
• Georg's Weblog
• 数据管理
  

Posted at 01:48PM Feb 28, 2008 by Taylor Allis in Storage Intelligence  |  Comments[1]

EMC's Big Bet

So EMC just announced an all-cash acquisition of a small startup as well as a new "Cloud Infrastructure and Services" division.  And while they do A LOT of acquisitions - EMC's Chuck Hollis doesn't think this is your everyday acquisition. 

I agree with him...

As we know, Sun and others in the industry believe the future will hold utility-like "Information Data Centers" - where customers can buy/rent/lease CPUs and GBs.  An emerging buzz term for this is Cloud Computing or Storage.  Sun is building next-gen technology (another buzz word, thank you) that can be leveraged by these emerging mega-data centers - for more on this, see Greg Papadopoulos' SAS 2008 Keynote on building network-scale computing.   

So, while Sun is providing  the technology for future "Information Data Centers" - EMC is trying to become one.

Let's look at what EMC has been up to these past couple years in this space (dates are close but not exact): 

• 2/21/08:  EMC announces new Cloud Infrastructure and Services division to be run by ex-Microsoft exec Paul Maritz
  
• 2/21/08: EMC announces all-cash acquisition of Pi Corporation, developer of Personal Information Management Technology
  
• 1/22/08: EMC announces EMC Fortress SaaS infrastructure &  Mozy online backup service 
• 10/1/07:  EMC acquires online storage provider Berkeley Data Systems (Mozy) for $76M
• 11/1/06:  EMC acquires online storage provider Avamar Technologies for $165M (Avamar is a de-dup technology, but it sits behind online storage service offerings like Arsenal's)
  
• 6/30/06:  EMC buys RSA Security for $2.1B - they have security and authentication software, key in providing storage services
  

So, EMC's big bet looks like it is to become a "Utility Information Data Center" (for lack of a better term). 

More power to them if they can pull it off.  And while EMC may have already made its investments in storage infrastructure, software, server virtualization and security for this - they are going to need some pretty innovative server and networking technology to pull it off.  I think I may know a company ;-)

Posted at 01:11PM Feb 22, 2008 by Taylor Allis in Storage Intelligence  |  Comments[0]

Wow! NetApp posts EMC SPC benchmark

In a gutsy move, NetApp just posted a Storage Performance Council (SPC) Benchmark....on the EMC CLARiiON! 

Now EMC has made clear statements that they "don't participate in performance benchmarking" - EMCer Chuck Hollis blogs about this in detail.  But this is not entirely true - as EMC is an active member in SPEC NAS performance benchmarks.  So the real issue is that EMC does not participate in SPC disk array performance benchmarks.  They have been pressured to do so, but it is ultimately their choice (until now it seems).  

In a pretty bold move - NetApp looks to have acquired an EMC CLARiiON disk array and posted some benchmarks for them.  NetApp even issued a press release on it.  Now to stay above the fray (I expect a pretty heated battle over this), I won't offer any opinions or judgments.  What I will do is post commentary from EMC and non-EMC bloggers below; as well as the public SPC results...

(For the record, I do consider the SPC Council to be a good and fair 3rd-party benchmark organization that tries to replicate real customer workload behavior accurately.  They are supported by Sun, IBM, HP, NetApp, Hitachi, Fujitsu, LSI Logic and Dell...)

Relevant Blogs:  

• NetApp's Dave Hitz shares why NetApp did it...
  
• EMC's Chuck Hollis says NetApp has taken benchmarks to a new level   
• ESG's Steve Duplessie's take
• IBM's Tony Pearson chimes in
• IBM's Barry Whyte can't wait for the excuses (be sure to read the EMC commentary)   

  
The SPC results (Submitted by Network Appliance and posted to SPC 1/29)

 EMC CLARiiON CX3 Model 40 pictured at right (no SnapView):
 http://www.storageperformance.org/results/benchmark_results_all#a00059
 http://www.storageperformance.org/results/benchmark_results_spc1#a00059

   SPC-1 Submission Identifier:  A00059
   SPC-1 IOPS(tm):               24,997.49
   SPC-1 Price-Performance(tm):  $20.72/SPC-1 IOPS(tm)
   Total ASU Capacity:           8,465.016 GB
   Data Protection Level:        Mirroring
   Total Price:                  $517,851


 EMC CLARiiON CX3 Model 40 (SnapView enabled):
 http://www.storageperformance.org/results/benchmark_results_all#a00060
 http://www.storageperformance.org/results/benchmark_results_spc1#a00060

   SPC-1 Submission Identifier:  A00060
   SPC-1 IOPS(tm):               8,997.17
   SPC-1 Price-Performance(tm):  $59.49/SPC-1 IOPS(tm)
   Total ASU Capacity:           7,054.148 GB
   Data Protection Level:        Mirroring
   Total Price:                  $535,251

One stat that industry insiders are pointing out is that the EMC CLARiiON took a 2.7x hit in performance with snapshots enabled (~25,000 IOPS down to ~9,000 IOPS).  This looks to be a pretty high performance penalty and may be something EMC needs to address. 

What of Sun StorageTek SPC results?   

As stated above, we're big SPC Benchmark supporters.  It is just another good tool that gives customers more intel into choosing the best storage system for their business.  You can find a ton of Sun benchmarks on SPC, two notable ones in this midrange disk array space are:

• Sun StorageTek 6140 (Submission # A00048): We posted 17,396 IOPS in a Mirrored RAID configuration with an industry leading Price/Performance metric of $4.91/IOPS. 
  
• Sun StorageTek 6540 (Submission #A00051): We posted 46,492 IOPS in a Mirrored RAID configuration with an industry leading Price/Performance metric of $6.62/IOPS.      
  

Posted at 05:09PM Jan 30, 2008 by Taylor Allis in Storage Intelligence  |  Comments[1]

Web 2.0 Needs Good Backup Too

To backup or not to backup, that is the question; Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous downtimes, Or to protect data against a sea of troubles, and by opposing, end them...

Five years ago I was managing StorageTek's Advanced Technology Research department in RD&E (we were the "R").  One of our research probes was "Grid Storage."  At the time we used Grid Storage to describe an emerging storage architecture.  We also researched "Utility Storage" - or paying for only the storage you use as a type of service.   Even at StorageTek, where tape was king, we were talking about how "Grid Storage" could get rid of backups forever!  Imagine, multiple cheap nodes on the network, data striped across all of them - a whole section of the "Grid" goes down and you have redundancy across other sections. 

No more need for data backup and all the admin/management pains that go with it...

Today we have new innovations on the service and infrastructure side.   When talking about SaaS, I have used Amazon S3 as a prime example.  EMC just entered this space with their announcement of an online backup service available through EMC Fortress - their storage service infrastructure/platform.  On the infrastructure side, companies (and, more importantly, end users) are building grid-like enterprise storage nodes with volume components and clustered/parallel/virtualized file systems.  Sun is one vendor leading the charge here.  And Web 2.0 companies have emerged as the primary consumers and developers of these systems. 

But for some Web 2.0 companies good backup (and backup practices) is an afterthought.   Afterall, start ups can't afford enterprise protection practices like hot replication.  Oftentimes they have to restore data from backups during a crash or outage - but if their processes are not up to snuff, or their backup/restore system is faulty - they succumb to longer outages and lost data.  Bottom line - the utopia of "Grid Storage" is not here yet so having a good backup and recovery plan in place should be a necessity for Web 2.0 companies too...

NOTE:  While I am using some public examples below, I do need to note a couple of important items:

• First, these companies should be commended for being open w/ their users.  There is something to be said for flat out honesty, and I couldn't link to these examples if these companies weren't honest and open.
• Second, these companies most likely implemented very high quality storage systems with advanced RAID protection - even the best systems fail.  (The odds are against 3 drives failing simultaneously, but unfortunately, it happens) 
  
• The point it that these were GOOD systems that failed - so even advanced systems need some sort of backup...
  

There have been several outages in some social networking/photo sharing sites of late.  PBase as a great example.   Read about their outage here.  Below is an excerpt from their IT dept to their end users on PBase's discussion forum: 

"On Saturday, we lost 3 disks simultaneously in our main storage system which runs on NetApp hardware. This caused an 8 Terabyte volume to have some inconsistencies which have to be analyed and repaired before we can put the volume back online. ... I wish the recovery process could have gone faster, but after a problem with the filesystem, it's important to analyze it carefully so we can be sure everything is healthy."

Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com) posts an update about its recent outage:

"On January 18th 2008 we had a multiple disk RAID failure...The forums are now back up and running again. There are three caveats: firstly that messages posted before 1st January 2008 are still restoring, secondly that it appears that messages posted in the last five days have been lost and that search is disabled..."

Now, let's say as a Web 2.0 company you choose to go with a storage service (SaaS) rather than an internal system.  Most notably, SmugMug uses Amazon S3 for this.  This is a viable option, and while I am a fan of Amazon S3, users need to read Amazon's Terms & Conditions first.  Here is an excerpt from Amazon S3's T&C (bold sections mine for emphasis): 

"7.1. Downtime and Service Suspensions.  In addition to our rights to terminate or suspend Services to you as described in Section 3 above, you acknowledge that: (i) your access to and use of the Services may be suspended for the duration of any unanticipated or unscheduled downtime or unavailability of any portion or all of the Services for any reason, including as a result of power outages, system failures or other interruptions; and (ii) we shall also be entitled, without any liability to you, to suspend access to any portion or all of the Services at any time, on a Service-wide basis: (a) for scheduled downtime to permit us to conduct maintenance or make modifications to any Service; (b) in the event of a denial of service attack or other attack on the Service or other event that we determine, in our sole discretion, may create a risk to the applicable Service, to you or to any of our other customers if the Service were not suspended; or (c) in the event that we determine that any Service is prohibited by law or we otherwise determine that it is necessary or prudent to do so for legal or regulatory reasons (collectively, "Service Suspensions"). Without limitation to Section 11.5, we shall have no liability whatsoever for any damage, liabilities, losses (including any loss of data or profits) or any other consequences that you may incur as a result of any Service Suspension."

So outsourcing storage may be a great option for a lot of companies - but there is also risk here...

Ay, there's the rub...

To backup is clearly the answer - it was years ago, it still is today.  But the rub is this: the time investment and cost between a poor backup process/system and a good one is probably minimal. 

Let me repeat that:  the time investment and cost between a poor backup process/system and a good one is probably minimal.      

I've been doing stuff in storage and IT for 14 years now, and I know that a basic, thought-out data protection plan will give you one of the best returns on investment in IT.  Odds are that every Web 2.0 company has some type of data protection practice in place - but it may be ill defined or largely neglected in lieu of the million other things going on there.   But a little time investment will go a long way in keeping customers confident that they can rely on you safeguarding their data. 

And, if you need to know how to pull together a good backup or data protection plan, Sun StorageTek Service Plans are a good place to start...

Posted at 02:58PM Jan 29, 2008 by Taylor Allis in Storage Intelligence  |  Comments[1]

IBM buys XIV - good move or bad?

Our team wrote an internal analysis for Sun Execs on IBM's XIV buy last week (thanks to Bruce Norikane for his brilliant analysis as usual).  

So, was this a good move for IBM? IMHO, yes.  I don't know if the deal will pan out for IBM (who does), and I don't know how solid the technology is (all I can do it read what is public) - but from one competitor to another, I think it makes strategic sense for IBM (and for the industry). 

Before I get to my thoughts on why, I do have to say this has been a fun analysis to do - primarily because of the Blog battle that broke out between some EMC and IBM bloggers.   There is history here too, which always make things interesting.  For those who are not storage insiders, here is the story (and feel free to use comments to correct anything I get wrong here...)

• XIV was founded in Israel in 2002 by Moshe Yanai who is known as the father of EMC's Symmetrix disk system, one of the most successful storage products in history.
• Moshe left EMC 8 years ago, and EMC focused its M&A money on buying software
• Moshe continued his innovation efforts at the infrastructure level, and has been involved with several startups including Diligent 
• Now IBM picks up XIV, and Moshe, as part of its “on demand” information management strategy
• Moshe's latest infrastructure innovation, NEXTRA, is radically different from the traditional monolithic infrastructure of EMC's Symmetrix and IBM's DS enterprise storage arrays
• Although details are scarce, in a nutshell, Moshe's NEXTRA (pictured at right) implements an asymmetric cluster architecture with 2 types of nodes - interface modules and data modules:
• The Interface modules perform the front-end processing and host interface. They present virtual SCSI LUNS through either FC or iSCSI host ports.
• The Data modules store the data on 15 1TB SATA disks.
• Interface and Data modules use dedicated 1Gb Ethernet switches to pass data and control commands. Both modules use dual 2.6 Ghz Intel processors.
• Customers can add either Interface modules for more front end processing or Data modules to scale storage.

IBM bills its NEXTRA acquisition as a "Web 2.0" storage investment - which it should.  Web 2.0 applications demand open, flexible storage - that are both affordable and can scale massively.  Something expensive and hard to do with proprietary, monolithic architectures - but easier and cheaper to do with volume, general purpose storage "parts" strung together w/ clever software to achieve enterprise levels of capacity and performance.

So, if I may be allowed to speculate (that's what blogs are for right?) - it seems to me that IBM is positioning XIV as a Web 2.0 storage architecture to compliment its traditional DS enterprise array architecture (Sun has already taken this approach - more on this later).  EMC is positioning XIV as an attempt to help/replace IBM's "failed" DS8000 program (IBM Enterprise DS series has had a not so good showing in the enterprise disk array space compared to EMC Symmetrix and Sun's StorageTek 9900 - aka Hitachi TagmaStore, HP XP).  And I bet Moshe would love nothing better than to disrupt the market for IBM's DS series AND EMC's Symmetrix!  

With that background, here are the XIV Blog Wars that broke out last week: 

• IBM's Senior Storage Consultant, Tony Pearson, blog's on the announcement
• EMC blogger, the storage anarchist, criticizes the announcement, stating that EMC Centera is similar to NEXTRA and has been doing that kind of data protection for years.
• EMC blogger Chuck Hollis offers his analysis as well.  He also asks two questions and offerers his own answers: "could this be a replacement for the DS8000?  Yep" and "if you were building a Web-2.0-type storage platform, would you build it this way?  Nope." (But he doesn't explain his answers, and I don't think it is as clear cut as some would like it to be)
• IBM blogger Tony Pearson fires back, accusing EMC of "Electrocuting an Elephant"
• This starts a string of Blogs from EMC heating this up - EMC's storage anarchist posts "the emperor and his new clothes" , "of blind men and an elephant" and "gotta getta life (line)".  And EMC blogger Chuck Hollis thinks It's Not About Web 2.0 Storage...
• But perhaps the most telling blog is the shortest one - from EMC blogger Storagezilla who posts "Twilight of the Gods (Moshe)."  From this post we see that this is a little personal - and when there is a lot of history, facts are sometimes harder to filter out from the perspectives.       

What's really happening here? (and why I think this is a good move for IBM )

What is really going on is this:  A new storage application has emerged in the data center - and it's pretty exciting.   As with any emerging application or technology, every vendor has its own terminology until the industry settles on one it likes.  Obviously I will be using some of Sun's terminology here...

What's the new data center application?  In a nutshell, Web 2.0 applications.   These are applications that store user content including media on web.  Classic application examples include Google, eBay, Amazon.com.  Emerging examples include SmugMug, FaceBook, MLB.com, SalesForce.com and even traditional wireless companies like Verizon who send thousands of games, images and ring tones over the wireless network.

IMPORTANT POINT:  One of the most critical things I can say about this trend, it that a traditional storage application and a "Web 2.0" application can exist at the same company.  If history is our guide, there isn't one application that will overtake the other (or one architecture that will completely overtake another) - a data center will have a mix of these technologies. (The mix % is what will change over time). 

With that said, customer needs differ whether you are supporting a Web 2.0-type application or traditional storage application.  See the table below.   

What's Sun Storage doing about it? 

So this is where we get to what Sun is doing about this market shift and why I think IBM's acquisition was a good idea...

First of all, Sun has invested in the traditional enterprise disk array market with the Sun StorageTek 9900 disk array - with Storage Virtualization, Thin Provisioning and the fastest performance on the planet, it's giving the market leader in this space (EMC) a run for its money

Second, Sun's development efforts are geared towards investing in open storage innovation in order to change the economics of storage, especially for Web 2.0 applications.  In this sense, Sun has developed an Open Storage Platform (See trend #1 in Top 10 Trends). 

Even more, while some companies are just announcing the acquisition of Web 2.0 infrastructures and other are leaking their development efforts for Web 2.0 infrastructures - Sun is already selling its Storage Server (Sun Fire X4500, aka Thumper) based on its Web 2.0 infrastructure offerings.

Although pricing information is scarce and unreliable around IBM's newest NEXTRA system, preliminary pricing appears to put it in the $5/GB range (about the same as traditional midrange SATA RAID)...and more than 5x Sun products like the Sun Fire X4500 already in the market.

So, the market is demanding traditional AND non-traditional storage infrastructures today for supporting application needs.  Sun can be criticized for a lot of things, but a credit to the company has always been its ability to peg future market trends and innovate.  What's new here, is that Sun is executing in the traditional storage space (with disk and tape - thanks to the StorageTek acquisition) AND the emerging Web 2.0 space...today...

---- Update ---

Read about our latest Web 2.0 investment...

Posted at 11:25AM Jan 14, 2008 by Taylor Allis in Storage Intelligence  |  Comments[3]

Sun breaks World Record - but where's EMC???

Well, the Sun StorageTek 9990V disk system just posted the fastest Storage Performance Council (SPC-1) benchmark in enterprise datacenter history at 200,245.73 IOPS... (SPC-1 simulates the random I/O workloads required to support typical database, OLTP or email server applications)

I do have to say, however, that I brought this up to a colleague of mine who quickly refuted me saying, "but EMC wasn't in the benchmark, so are we really the world's fastest?"

My answer was yes - if someone doesn't show up to a title fight, then they don't get the title.  Why didn't EMC show up to the contest?  You can Google the answer to hear claims like "benchmarks don't translate to real world performance" or that "there is no good independent performance metric for storage."

But the real irony is that EMC is an active participant in SPEC for their NAS products.  So, my question is - why doesn't EMC publish how they test the performance of their systems like Symmetrix?

You see, even if EMC is not a part of the SPC (yet!) - we would like to see them publish how they test their systems performance.  You see, the value in SPC is not only in the benchmark and its results - but the fact that customers can see exactly HOW these systems were tested.  Putting the power of knowledge where it should be - in the hands of the customer.   

So the above vendors and SPC deserve credit for supporting a great philosophy - "free and open exchange of ideas and information to ensure fair and vigorous competition between vendors as a means of improving the products and services available to the general public."  (See About SPC)

In free and open idea exchange, customers win.  They need good, fair competition - and if you are a customer, would you rather make your purchase on information from a vendor spec sheet or a vendor-neutral independent auditor? 

So, congratulations to the Sun StorageTek 9990V (also sold as Hitachi Universal Storage Platform and HP StorageWorks XP24000) for being the fastest monolithic enterprise disk array on the planet!

But also keep in mind that it's not only the fastest - it also offers storage virtualization and thin provisioning so customer's get more utilization out of their products while protecting their infrastructure investments...a pretty good deal if you ask me. 

 
SPC Disclosure statement  
Systems Compared: Sun StorageTek 9990V, IBM DS8300 Turbo, Fujitsu ETERNUS 1100
SPC-1 Submission Identifiers: A00055, A00049,  A00053
SPC-1 IOPS(tm): 200,245.75, 123,033.40, 115,090.06
SPC-1 Price-Performance(tm): $17.31, $18.99, $16.12
Total ASU Capacities GB: 26,000.00, 9,103.36, 10,854.40
Data Protection Level: Mirroring
Total Prices: $3,466,309, $2,336,626, $1,855,100

Posted at 05:27PM Oct 02, 2007 by Taylor Allis in Storage Intelligence  |  Comments[5]