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
NetApp's David Hitz Declaration
I have made it a point to not comment or offer opinion on the ongoing NetApp litigation for obvious reasons - I'll leave that task up to Sun's lawyers and our Chief General Counsel.
Fortunately, the court recently unsealed a document in the ongoing litigation. So for anyone interested in details; a copy of a declaration from NetApp's co-founder and EVP, Dave Hitz, can be viewed below:
Below are some quotes taken directly from the document:
On patents being discussed that revolve around Sun ZFS and NetApp's WAFL technology:
"Sun's ZFS technology appears to be a conscious reimplementation of NetApp's innovative WAFL filesystem, as admitted by the creators of ZFS: 'The fie system that has come closest to our design principles, other than ZFS itself, is WAFL...the first commercial file system to use the copy-on-write tree of blocks approach to file system consistency.'"
On Sun open sourcing ZFS software:
"Irreparable harm to NetApp through Sun's open sourcing of ZFS:
Sun has open-sourced ZFS and thereby given away for free NetApp's patented technology to anyone that wants to download a copy. That means Sun has created infringing computer code and made it easy for software users and software companies everywhere to infringe, instead of having users compensate NetApp for its technology through normal product purchases. This is not much different from the problems caused when an entity builds a business by distributing for free infringing copies of music. In both cases, there are practical problems in any attempt to recover the infringing copies or to enforce rights against everyone that has downloaded copies of the infringing software. One difference is that adoption of ZFS requires time because it is a software program and not just a song. The next two or three years are very significant for the proliferation of ZFS and it is vital to shut down Sun's distribution promptly."
Mike Dillon updates us that Sun submitted 6 reexamination requests on the patents asserted by NetApp to the US Patent Office (PTO); asking that it reconsider whether those patents should have ever been issued. According to Mr. Dillon, the PTO has already issued a first action rejecting all the claims of one patent - no 6,857,001. Sun has also asserted 22 patents in response against NetApp's product line.
On Sun freely licensing ZFS to other companies:
"Sun is not the only company that could potentially hurt NetApp's market position. Because Sun freely licenses ZFS to other companies, it is possible that the entire competitive profile of the data storage market might change within the next 3-5 years.
REDACTED
Moreover, because ZFS is open-sourced, it lowers the barier to entry for startup companies to bring products incorporating ZFS technology to market and start competing with NetApp. Indeed, because Sun is distributing ZFS at no cost, it dramatically lowers the product development costs for any company, not just startups."
I encourage anyone to read the document in its full context. For any legal updates, be sure to bookmark Mike's Blog.
Posted at 02:11PM Jul 01, 2008 by Taylor Allis in Storage Intelligence | Comments[0]
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]
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[3]
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