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
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]
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]
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]
Open Storage Support
I've received a lot of questions about the support for Open Storage from customers and competitors. And for good reason - if something isn't working the way you want it to, you need to know there is someone to count on for support. This is true for traditional products; and is even more critical when it comes to products that incorporate open source software.
I'll briefly explain Sun's support model around open source and Open Storage. This model is also evolving over time and will only get better...
Professional Services: Sun offers
architecture, development, implementation and management services for
Open Storage. Instead of writing about them here, I'll send you to this link.
Appliance & Hardware Support: Sun offers commercial versions of its Open Storage products, like the Sun Fire X4500, which comes with traditional support AND better storage economics. You can also purchase Sun hardware for Open Storage. These obviously come with the expected Sun support and service offerings. (Remember that in Open Storage, users can essentially build a storage controller out of a standard server to save cost and improve flexibility.)
Solaris Support: Sun's commercially available enterprise server O/S can be used as a storage platform in an Open Storage implementation. It is also critical to point out that Solaris and ZFS offer advanced storage services like point-in-time-copy, volume management, storage administration and data integrity features like copy-on-write, end-to-end checksumming and RAID. These are storage software features that typically reside in a storage controller or as an independent software application that has to be purchased separately. So it is important to note that when we are talking about Solaris (and OpenSolaris) - we are also talking about all the storage software features and services that come with it.
According to the Whitepaper, "OS Subscription Support Services: A Comparison of Sun and Red Hat" by the Crimson Consulting Group, Solaris support is comparable but better than Red Hat Enterprise Linux support. Read the paper for the detail; below are the high-level findings when comparing Solaris vs. Red Hat Linux support:
- Sun has a lower average price for annual support subscriptions - 16% lower per year, list.
- Sun has longer product lifecycle support - 7 years of support vs. 3 years for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (see diagram below)
- Sun has a larger support organization - 18x the support staff compared to Red Hat.
- Sun had a 27% lower total cost compared to Red Hat Enterprise Linux over a three-year period.
- Sun offers a commercial OS (Solaris) and an open source OS (OpenSolaris)
Customers who buy a Sun Server also get a free commercial Solaris RTU (right to use). So customers get integrated support for Sun hardware and software comparable to support from other enterprise server vendors like HP or
IBM.
OpenSolaris Support: Sun is leading the way in offering support for the open source version of its storage platform - OpenSolaris. OpenSolaris support also covers the storage applications embedded in the OS or file system. Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is similar to commercial software in that the community does not update the distribution directly (but instead provides input via feedback, bug fixes or contributions). Fedora is Red Hat's community-lead distribution of Linux. So it is important to note that while Red Hat offers RHEL support, it currently does not offer traditional support for Fedora (beyond community support). By contrast, Sun offers Solaris AND OpenSolaris support. This is truly unique.
Currently there are two OpenSolaris support subscriptions available - buy them here. These subscriptions support OpenSolaris running on Sun Servers AND multiple 3rd-party x64/x86 systems. OpenSolaris Subscription services include the:
- OpenSolaris Essentials Subscription: 24x7 telephone support, online technical support and bug escalation services
- OpenSolaris Production Subscription: 8x5 business hour and online technical support
If you are already a SunSpectrum System Plan customer, then OpenSolaris support is included with your System Service Plan. Also, if you have a Solaris Subscription you are automatically entitled to the OpenSolaris Essentials service - pretty good deal if you ask me...
OpenSolaris Community Support: So what about storage applications on OpenSolaris that are not part of the current OpenSolaris distribution/code base? What if I am a developer and create a NEW storage application from the open storage offerings available to me? This is where the Sun Developer Network (SDN) offers great support. Sign up to the Sun Developer Expert Assistance program for online support, technical assistance, code support, programming questions and diagnostic advice. (You can even learn fun stuff like how to build an OpenSolaris NAS box in 5 easy steps!)
So, Sun has more than 7,000 employees dedicated to service and support - not all dedicated to Open Storage of course (I wish), but dedicated to storage, servers, software (commercial and open source!) and everything in between. Sun's enterprise support offerings now cover open source software; and Sun has a strong and growing open source community that supports its open source initiatives worldwide. Sun offers direct services in 55 countries and services in 160 countries either directly or through partners.
So hopefully some support questions were answered above - if not, pls comment and we'll see if we can find an answer...
Posted at 12:36PM May 28, 2008 by Taylor Allis in Storage Intelligence | Comments[0]
What is Open Storage? White Paper
Our Open Storage announcement drummed up interest in the industry - and for good reason...
- Tony Pearson at IBM related Open Storage to "Simply Dinners" - which is not a bad analogy. I was thinking of the analogy of going to Home Depot or Lowe's vs. hiring a contractor for your house project - but Simply Dinners will do.
- Marc Farley at Dell asked if Sun was giving up or changing the game? I can assure you that we aren't giving up (storage is a pretty big market after all), but he nails it with his changing the game remarks - that's exactly what we are trying to do.
- Lastly, EMC blogger Chuck Hollis aired his thoughts on Do-It-Yourself Storage, and we had a good discussion in the comments I thought. (Until Chuck said I had turned from simply disagreeing to becoming disagreeable when I answered his questions on Open Storage - that ended that discussion! Oh well, I guess he was trying to be rhetorical...)
With that said - there is still a lot more to discuss about Open Storage. We will have announcements upcoming, and we will also be publishing some White Papers on the subject.
This first one is appropriately titled, What is Open Storage? And it can be downloaded here:
I'll post the CliffsNotes below. I would also like to thank Bruce Norikane, our Sr. Analyst, for his help in writing these papers - his intellect on storage infrastructures, past and present, is astounding. I'd like to also thank or intelligence manager, Chris Ilg, for his forecasting work; as well as Graham Lovell, Jason Schaffer and our army of developers/engineers for their direction and edits (and leading the way to Open Storage...)
What is Open Storage? (The short version)
Open Storage refers to open systems storage products based on industry-standard hardware and open source software. Also, in an open storage architecture, customers can select the best hardware and software components for their individual needs. By contrast, almost all modern disk arrays and NAS storage offerings are closed systems.
To see the evolution of disk architectures and benefits to Open Storage, see the blog post, "Sun is on to something"
Open Storage Versus Traditional Storage
The following chart compares vendor products, first ship dates, and storage system components. Red items are system components that are closed, proprietary, and available through a single vendor. Yellow items are built from industry-standard components yet sold as part of a closed, proprietary system. Green items are truly open components. They are industry-standard or open-source software, giving customers choice over how their systems are built.
Of significance, since 1992, storage systems have started to utilize open-source, commodity, or industry-standard technologies. FreeBSD and Linux are used in several systems from vendors such as IBM, EMC, NetApp, and HP. However, these open technologies are deployed in a closed-system approach.
Storage software is the last major storage infrastructure software to become open source, and Sun’s OpenSolaris Storage community has been leading the change.
Sun Open Storage Value Proposition
The market shift to open storage systems and Sun’s open storage approach offer four distinct advantages:
- A global development community working to make storage more innovative, functional and affordable
- Breakthrough economics that can save storage users up to 90% over closed, proprietary storage
- Enterprise-class quality storage systems that are reliable and offer some of the highest data integrity in the industry
- The ability to easily and dynamically scale IT infrastructures to meet changing business needs
Sun Open Storage Offerings.
- Sun Open Storage Servers: The Sun Fire X4500 server leverages industry-standard hardware and software. It is a Dual-Core AMD Opteron processor-based server with 48 hot-swappable SATA drives in a single 4 U chassis that can achieve 48 TB of raw capacity with 1 TB SATA drives.
- Sun Open Storage Archive: The Sun StorageTek 5800 system also leverages industry standard components. It is the first integrated, fixed content archiving system built using open-source software. In a recent InfoWorld product review, it scored perfect 10s in reliability and scalability.
- Sun Open Storage HPC: The Sun Constellation System builds on cost-effective, off-the-shelf components
and state-of-the-art technologies to deliver an open, petascale architecture capable of up to 1.7 petaFLOPS of
computing power. - Lustre file system: Lustre is Sun’s open-source shared disk file system that is generally used for largescale
cluster computing. The Lustre file system is currently used in 15% of the top 500 supercomputers in the world, and six of the top 10 supercomputers. - Sun Open Storage Software: OpenSolaris is the cornerstone of Sun Open Storage offerings and provides a solid foundation as an open storage platform. It includes:
- Solaris ZFS: ZFS can address 256 quadrillion zettabytes of storage and handle a maximum
file size of 16 exabytes. - Solaris DTrace: DTrace enables users to ask arbitrary diagnostic questions of the storage subsystem
- Solaris Fault Management Architecture: Solaris Fault Management Architecture provides automatic monitoring and diagnosis of I/O subsystems and hardware faults
- Sun StorageTek Availability Suite: Sun AVS delivers open-source remote-mirror-copy and point-in-time-copy applications as well as a collection of supporting software and utilities.
Posted at 01:00PM May 15, 2008 by Taylor Allis in Storage Intelligence | Comments[4]
An Easier Storage Platform - OpenSolaris
With data growth, higher energy costs and the emergence of Web 2.0 applications that demand scalable storage at low costs - vendors, end users and market analysts are focusing more on storage architectures. Storage economics need to change - a fundamental change that can only happen at the infrastructure level.
Key to any system is the operating system or platform. OSes obviously hold tremendous importance when evaluating servers - what type of OS and applications are supported? Historically, the underlying OS has not mattered as much in storage. Or at least compatibility and interoperability has mattered more. As long as my storage supports a Mainframe/Unix/Linux/Windows environment, what do I care about the OS?
Storage Platforms
In the open systems market today, the storage OS matters more than ever before. Adding data services at the OS level can change storage economics and increase storage performance and efficiency. Using a common storage platform can save on training and admin costs. Using an open source OS can speed innovation, increase flexibility and save on software costs.
HP is using Windows Storage Server as a storage platform; EMC is leveraging the economics and flexibility of Linux inside its Centera archive product; and NetApp has built its own storage platform - Data ONTAP (originally leveraging FreeBSD open source code).
Sun offers Solaris and OpenSolaris (to see the difference b/w the two, click here). OpenSolaris is the platform for Sun's Open Storage offerings which provides open access to developers (something the storage platforms or implementations mentioned above do not...)
An Easier OpenSolaris
Today Sun announced an easy-to-use OpenSolaris at the 2008 CommunityOne Developer conference. There are several benefits to using OpenSolaris and ZFS as a storage platform - built-in data integrity, snapshot software, volume management and software RAID being a few. But one request the developer community had of OpenSolaris was ease of use - easier to get, install, use, maintain and support. Especially compared to Linux in the open source realm.
Today's announcement is just that - it comes from "Project Indiana" which has been underway for the past year after Ian Murdock joined Sun. Ian is the former Linux Foundation CTO and Debian founder (one of the first Linux distributions.)
So what makes this OpenSolaris distribution easier? An easier to use environment based on GNU-based utilities that's currently leveraged in the GNOME desktop and other applications (See Disk Usage Analyzer screen shot to right). ZFS is also the default root file system now - and as mentioned above, ZFS has some pretty innovative features including a "rollback" option where you can essentially do a "Ctrl-Z" if a software installation or update goes bad. OpenSolaris also includes a new Image Packaging System (IPS) software which enables easier access and downloads to a full suite of additional software. Software updates have also been made easier.
OpenSolaris Support
Of course support is always a large question around anything open source. Sun offers enterprise support for Solaris; support for its commercial storage products built from open storage components; and now Sun will offer two OpenSolaris subscription support offerings beginning May 13. OpenSolaris Production Subscription Support will include 24x7 telephone support, online technical support and bug escalation services. OpenSolaris Essential Subscription Support will include 8x5 business hour online technical support.
OpenSolaris as a Storage Platform
It seems today there are three viable platforms to base a storage platform on that will stand the test of time - Linux, Windows and Solaris. Sun and its community have invested heavily in Solaris as a storage platform - and even some die-hard Linux developers are noticing:
DigiTar is a Linux advocate, but when it came to storage they choose Solaris. In his blog, DigiTar COO/CTO says, "it was storage that brought Solaris into our environment and continues to drive it 
deeper into our services stack. Which begs the question: Why? Isn't DTrace just as cool as ZFS? Haven't Solaris Containers dramatically changed the way we provision and utilize systems? Sure...but storage is what drives our business and it doesn't seem to me that we're alone."
When the Linux developers at Nexenta decided to build "Enterprise Class Storage for Everyone" they choose OpenSolaris as their storage platform. They could only accomplish their storage goals through Solaris.
The fact that OpenSolaris is getting easier to use is good for developers, the community and ultimately to customers. Ease-of-use in addition to enterprise quality, data integrity and data services is a powerful combination....
---- Update ----
We announced that OpenSolaris can be run in a virtual computing environment (aka the cloud)! See Jonathan's blog and the OpenSolaris service offered on Amazon EC2...
Posted at 03:44PM May 05, 2008 by Taylor Allis in Storage Intelligence | Comments[3]
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[2]
Lacrosse and the future of storage...
I like storage, strategy and sports - so I really liked Scott Tracy's "Telegraph" Blog. I commented on it, but will elaborate further here. He talks about Storage running on general-purpose Solaris, and shows a nice OpenSolaris Storage Platform diagram. I'll serve up my own sports analogy (and re-live the glory days while I am at it...)
I played Football and Lacrosse in high school and college (yes, I was a UPS Logger) - but I'll stick with the Lacrosse theme.
In high school my team competed in Florida's Cocoa Expo Lacrosse Tournament. We were quickly mocked by all the teams there - they represented the best of east coast lacrosse and we were from cow-town Colorado. We were at first intimidated by their "moves" - quick sticks, behind the back passes, etc. But our coach told us to stick to the basics - two hands on the stick, straight forward passes, etc.
What happened?
We won the tournament that year - first place, #1 (and went on to win State by the way). So what's the storage tie in?
There is an appliance or point-product for everything in storage today - virtualization, data movers, back up, CDP, encryption, etc. A lot of fancy stuff that can solve individual problems, but adds to the overall complexity of IT storage. I like the OpenSolaris Storage Platform approach because it sticks to the basics - data volume management, data services, file systems - open and residing at the heart of any system or solution - its OS.
That's a winning strategy...
Posted at 02:12PM Jun 19, 2007 by Taylor Allis in Storage Intelligence | Comments[0]
Today's Page Hits: 141
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)