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
Server Virtualization's Impact on Storage
Today Sun announced it entered
into a stock purchase agreement to acquire innotek.
In a nutshell, innotek develops VirtualBox, an open source desktop
virtualization platform. On the server virtualization side, Sun has
had an alliance with VMware for 2.5 years now, and Sun has also
delivered its own Sun's xVM
platform
with some pretty unique self-healing and management capabilities. (Get OpenxVM here). innotek will add to
Sun's xVM platform, it allows laptops or desktops running Windows, Mac,
Linux or Solaris to run multiple OSes side-by-side. Cool stuff. To
learn more on innotek see the Weblogs of Steve
Wilson and Joe
Bonasera or download
VirtualBox here.
So all this server virtualization talk got us to thinking...
What is server virtualization's impact on Storage?
I admit, my team and I have discussed this and we believe that the true impact is yet to be determined - this is new stuff after all. This is what we do know:
Server Virtualization's link to storage: The most important link b/w server virtualization and storage is application mobility. In server virtualization, customers can ultimately move applications from box-to-box and system-to-system much easier than ever before. But as applications move to different systems, customers need to maintain the links to storage. If customers have to maintain links to storage as they move their applications around, it would make sense for virtualized environments to leverage networked storage - maintaining the links through the network.
Which storage network benefits the most from Server
Virtualization? SAN, iSCSI or NAS? All of the prominent storage networks, FC, iSCSI and NAS, are fighting
for virtual server market share. After reading several IDC briefs, all
three show signs of growth. In one brief, IDC claimed that Server
Virtualization contributed to the increase of industry FC SAN sales in
2007. IDC also predicts that ~50% of virtualized servers will be
attached to iSCSI in the future - citing that server admins are
generally more comfortable with IP-based storage and networks. NAS
vendors are also pushing file server networking to support virtual
servers.
Server Virtualization has the potential to dramatically impact Storage customer requirements: Server Virtualization is still emerging and maturing, but it will impact storage purchase patterns. This will (or should) impact how storage is marketed and sold and will most likely disrupt analyst's long-term forecasts of the storage market. The amount and type of impact to vendors and customers should be interesting to watch.
I'd love to hear any comments on how others think server virtualization will impact storage....
Posted at 03:36PM Feb 12, 2008 by Taylor Allis in Storage Intelligence | Comments[3]
Top 10 Storage Technology Trends
1. Open Storage Platform (aka general purpose storage, open source storage): Trend #1 is a term we coined, so it may not sound familiar. It is a combination of market trends as well as a direction Sun is taking with its newer products. The concept of a common platform is not new – several vendors have tried to build one platform that can run multiple storage applications, saving users time and money. “Open” is a relatively new concept for storage, but not for software or servers. There are generally three components that make up an Open Storage Platform:
- General Purpose Components: General-purpose servers, processors, storage and operating systems are now being deployed in enterprise-class storage devices. Previously, storage vendors had built proprietary operating systems, ASIC chips and other custom-built components. As commodity chips, components and software have matured, storage vendors are now using general purpose components in their systems. The cost savings are significant - however, most vendors' prices remain the same (contributing to vendor margin). Sun's philosophy is to pass these savings to the consumer. Enterprise-class systems based on general purpose components give customers higher-value systems at a fraction of the cost (see graphic below). They are also much more flexible, as they can be re-purposed for other uses.
- OS/File System Storage Services: Traditional appliances charge customers extra in software licensing costs for data management services like administration, replication or volume management. What if this functionality came already embedded in the storage system itself? Sun's newest file system, ZFS, has started to incorporate these services at the File System level. ZFS deploys point-in-time-copy, volume management, administration and data integrity features like Copy-on-write and RAID. Storage services deployed at the OS-level have several benefits, including efficiency, performance, reliability and affordability (no more licenses for extra software needed). And before we think this is a new concept, mainframe has been doing it for years. The new concept is doing this in the open systems space – and Sun Solaris ZFS is leading the charge.
- Open Source Storage Software: The ability to download software, test it and add features to it is critical to developers building new applications – we’ve seen this in the OS market. But what about storage? This has been an investment area of Sun’s - Sun actually offers one of the most complete open source storage software stacks (from protocols to drivers to data management software). Developers can build their own storage solutions and sell them by leveraging Sun’s open source software (see the Nexenta Storage Appliance for a perfect example). Open source has an added benefit to customers with in-house development resources - customers can deploy new software features by searching for it in the open source community or even developing it themselves (why wait for vendor roadmaps?). This is not possible with a proprietary appliance.
- Midrange Disk = $10.39/GB
- Open Storage Platform = $1.50/GB
(7x less than Midrange and 13x less than
- Server Virtualization: The ability to host Windows, Linux and Solaris operating systems on one platform has literally taken the market by storm. A huge boon to IT managers and developers alike. VMWare led the charge with some start-ups and open source initiatives in tow. On October 5, 2007 Sun entered the race with Sun xVM. (And if virtualization has hit the systems world, expect to see it hit the desktop market soon…)
- File
Virtualization (a.k.a Clustering,
Global Namespace, Unified Namespace, NAS Virtualization): A few years ago we were talking about
Grid Storage – a bunch of storage nodes acting as one, single system. File virtualization is shaping up to be the
technology that will take us there. In
2005 & 2006 we saw EMC buy Rainfinity, NetApp buy Spinnaker and Brocade buy NuView. In recent years we we have seen EMC announce Rainfinity,
NetApp announce a rough start to Data OnTap GX (based on Spinnaker technology)
and file virtualization start ups Ibrix, Isilon and LeftHand Networks continue
to grow. Expect this market to heat up,
and consolidate as start ups are either bought, or simply run out of
runway.
- Virtual Tape: A disk system that emulates a tape library. Virtual Tape has been in the mainframe market for years, and Sun is the market leader here. Virtual Tape Libraries (VTL) in the open systems market are relatively new – disk prices have eroded to a point where backup administrators can now take advantage of disk’s access speeds without replacing their exiting backup infrastructure. IDC pegs this market as small, but growing at 16.2% (2006-2011 CAGR).
- Virtual Disk (aka Storage Virtualization): A disk system that aggregates 3rd-party disk and offers disk partitioning. A necessity for anyone that needs to consolidate their environment and/or make data migration between independent systems easier. Virtual Disk Systems include IBM’s San Volume Controller (SVC), FalconStor’s IPStor and Sun’s award-winning StorageTek 9000 arrays.
3. Thin Provisioning: Better system utilization is the name of
the game. Most admins know that the
utilization rates on their disk systems are not where they need to be. Thin Provisioning allows admins to allocate
or provision space to specific applications, making full use of their system’s
capacity. 3PAR spearheaded open systems
Thin Provisioning and NetApp offers it as a part of Data OnTap. Sun announced Thin Provisioning on its
StorageTek 9990V system in May – meaning consumers can have the world’s fastest
enterprise array, Virtual Disk AND Thin Provisioning all on
one platform.
Pretty cool…
4. Data Deduplication
(aka De-dup, Single-instance storage): In a world where there is more data coming
into a company than can possibly be managed – data compression ratios ranging
from 10:1 to 50:1 sound pretty darn nice
(See how De-dup works here). Data
Domain, Diligent, FalconStor and other upstarts get credit for bringing this
new technology to market and larger vendors are quickly following suite. De-dup is still emerging, can have
performance issues and does not work perfectly for every application – but
economics dictate its worth consumers investigating where it can work for them.
There are two emerging de-dup architectures: “Inline” – where the de-dup magic happens in real-time, as data comes into the system, as found in Diligent's ProtecTIER appliance. Or “Post-Processing” where the magic happens as a secondary process after the backup job, as found in FalconStor’s Single Instance Repository (SIR) software. Both have their pros and cons, and deciding which approach to use depends on balancing your performance vs. complexity needs. For the record, Sun sells both….
5. Data Encryption: One need only read the horror stories of lost
tape and disk drives to see the importance of data encryption. While it has been around for a while – the
need has never been greater. Growing
storage capacity has caused another problem – one can store a lot of personnel
records on a single cartridge or drive.
In an age of identify theft, losing one storage device can put a company
out of business. The new trend is not
how to encrypt, but where to encrypt… On the host server? On an appliance in the network? In the storage device itself? Decru (since bought by NetApp) benefited from
this trend with their encryption appliance.
I once worked with a brilliant engineer whose favorite saying was “never put a product where a feature should be.” I’d say this was Sun’s philosophy when we delivered the Sun StorageTek T10000 tape drive. Put simply, Sun put an encryption chip next to the compression chip on the drive – so data is encrypted as it is fed onto the tape. Simple and affordable – no extra appliance needed. Sun also offers the StorageTek Crypto Key Management Station to centrally authorize, secure and manage encryption keys.
6. Eco Storage (aka Green Storage/IT): I freely admit that when I was first approached with “Green Storage” I was a skeptic. I would have also never guessed Al Gore would win the Nobel Peace Prize! But Eco also stands for Economics. If you save power and footprint, and the world while you are at it – who can argue with that? But the challenge for storage customers will be sorting through the vendors who make REAL Eco investments vs. the ones that just add “Eco” or “Green” to their marketing collateral. Sun’s in the “real” category, investing heavily in Eco IT. Sun’s Eco efforts can be seen here...
7. Object Archive
(aka CAS, Application Aware Archive): The dizzying array of regulations,
compliance requirements and influx of data have made the archive market one of
the fastest growing markets in IT and storage.
And customers must continually evaluate which archive approach will work best for them. The trend here is to “build a better mousetrap archive.” The challenge is this, an archive system
must:
- Store a lot of data affordably
- Have WORM functionality so documents show up un-altered in an audit or court of law
- Be easily and quickly accessible
- For more than 100 years…
But do keep in mind for deep archive; Sun’s StorageTek
SL8500 Tape Library is tough to beat – just one library's max raw capacity is
56 Petabytes, and data sitting on tape consumes 0 kilowatts and generates 0 CO2… (see above trend #6)
8. New Interfaces, Protocols & Configurations: There is a lot of change happening in storage systems and how they are configured. The three primary ways storage is attached is Direct Attached Storage (DAS), Storage Area Networks (SAN) and Network Attached Storage (NAS). A disk system can also be configured in a couple different ways. RAID configurations stripe data across multiple drives and impact a system’s reliability and performance. JBOD (Just a Bunch of Disks) is more affordable because it does not require a disk controller, but provides no data redundancy. New interfaces and protocols will impact each of these markets significantly.
- SAS: In DAS, Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) is a newer serial communication protocol that will make data transfer speeds much faster and at a lower cost. SAS drives have replaced parallel SCSI for internal storage, and SAS HBA external host interfaces are just starting to ship in volume. SAS disk arrays started shipping this year and SAS JBOD are starting to ship. To complement the SAS HBA's and SAS arrays, there are new network components called expanders which are basically switches. Generally SAS disk will be cheaper than Fibre Channel (FC) with similar performance and capacity. (Sun has SAS host I/F, disk I/F and SAS disk drives)
- iSCSI: In the SAN market, the iSCSI protocol is making a significant impact by taking the cost out of expensive Fibre Channel SANs. iSCSI allows users to send SCSI commands over their existing IP networks.
- File Virtualization: In the NAS market, file virtualization is making NAS farms much more scalable and manageable (See trend #2)
- Clustered RAID: A new innovation to watch in the RAID market is horizontally scalable RAID or clustered RAID for large applications. Digi-Data is a small storage company pushing this innovation.
- JBOD: Keep your eye on Sun in the JBOD market. JBOD is more affordable than RAID, but does not have RAID’s redundancy and reliability features. But what if you had an infinitely scalable file system with data integrity and RAID features running on JBOD, say, something like ZFS?
- Unified Storage: Another trend in this area are unified or hybrid devices – storage systems that can handle multiple protocols and interfaces, including iSCSI, Fibre Channel, and NAS – all in one unit. Makes sense to users with a dizzying array of choices in the market.
- 10GbE: Lastly, 10 Gigabit Ethernet or 10GbE is the latest and fastest of the Ethernet standards that will re-shape data center networking – offering a fast, common and affordable network technology for IT and Web 2.0 applications from supercomputing to networked storage.
9.
10. Storage as a Service:
Storage as a service offered over the Internet has been talked about for years – but poor performance and implementations have cooled this trend. However, Amazon has given Storage as a Service a power boost with its Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). By leveraging Amazon’s existing e-commerce and storage infrastructure, the company is offering customers storage capacity for $0.15 per GB-Month of storage used – possibly the cheapest $/GB on the planet. And while this may have more play in the consumer market, Amazon could re-invigorate the storage as a service trend. Also keep an eye on Sun’s Internet Service offerings over Network.com...
--- Updates ---
- For more color on Trend #1 and open storage platforms, read about IBM's latest acquisition...
- For more on Trend #9 (SSD) see EMC's SSD announcement
- An update on #10 (SaaS) see EMC's announcement of MozyEnterprise and EMC Fortress
Posted at 12:51PM Nov 30, 2007 by Taylor Allis in Storage Intelligence | Comments[5]
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]
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