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
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]
Imation knows how to treat its customers
Yesterday I was fortunate enough to speak at Imation's 15th Annual End User Council (EUC) Symposium along with IBM, HP, some of Imation's larger customers and industry storage guru Fred Moore.
Imation is the leading removable data storage developer and supplier - offering magnetic tape, optical, flash and removable hard disk storage to the consumer and enterprise markets. Imation is a co-developer and supplier of Sun StorageTek 9840 and Sun StorageTek 9940 1/2 inch enterprise tape cartridges - and the product management and sales folks at Imation and Sun have done an excellent job growing this business over the past year.
Customers at the event include Bank of America, Citigroup, FedEx, JPMorgan Chase and Wachovia. The event is at the Hyatt Regency in Bonita Springs, Florida - a beautiful place (despite the multiple mosquito bites I left with).
What I said at the venue
My topic was "IT Trends Impacting Sun Storage Investment" - download my presentation here.
There was one important question that I heard in several 1:1 customer conversations. These customers were large tape users - which means their business is dependent on enterprise tape, fast-access tape drives and most (if not all) work in mainframe shops. There were several customers that wanted to know about Sun's commitment to tape and Sun's commitment to the mainframe. This is a fair question, as Sun's core operating system is an open platform - Solaris.
But I was also saddened to hear that a Sun storage competitor had been telling some customers that "Sun is not committed to tape and does not have future tape roadmaps." This is simply a falsehood. Below is what I told these customers and what I said during my presentation about Sun's current commitment to tape and mainframe storage:
- Fact: Sun has Tape roadmaps for every tape product. If a customer wants to see them, they can under NDA. I make this offer to any customer with a concern.
- Fact: StorageTek was a mainframe tape company and Sun acquired StorageTek for ~$4B. Why would Sun (or any company) spend that much on an acquisition to discontinue that company's products?
- Fact (and the most impressive fact to me): Sun StorageTek has launched the following Open Systems and/or Mainframe products JUST THIS YEAR (1H CY08). I'm from StorageTek - and can't remember this many tape announcements in the first half of a year:
- Sun StorageTek SL3000: Brand new Mainframe & Open Systems Library. 200-3000 slots, up to 50% the footprint and 1/3 power improvement over competitive products. Supports LTO, T10000 and T9840 drives & media.
- T9840D Tape Drive & Media: 4th generation drives that re-use the same media. Backward compatible over 4 generations - now that's investment protection. 2x capacity increase with built-in data encryption. <20 second access time to the 1st byte.
- Crypto KMS 2.0: Policy-based encryption key management station that now supports T10000A, T9840D and HP LTO4 drives.
- Sun StorageTek VTL Prime: Open systems VTL now with de-duplication!
Sun can be criticized for a lot of things - but Sun should be credited for its new investments in mainframe storage and tape systems. Between the recent SL8500, SL3000, T10000 + Encryption and the new T9840D products, Sun StorageTek has the newest and most comprehensive line of enterprise tape systems in the industry - over IBM. And most of the above items were announced AFTER the StorageTek acquisition.
About the venue
The event was well run - and there was a closeness and loyalty between Imation and its top customers that had to be admired. People had fun, there was a stacked agenda and great networking opportunities. Imation treated its customers (and speakers) right. Kudos to Imation for thanking its customers in this way - especially at a time where everyone's budgets are tight. The customers I spoke to were the people who did the real storage work as well - storage managers, administrators, etc. There were no execs or VPs (that I saw) but Imation treated their core users like they were top-level execs.
My Nature Walk
The hotel and grounds were amazing too - I didn't get to stay long, but I got to walk the grounds before I jumped on my flight. I am a bit of a nature person, so here is what I saw: The hotel is located in Southwest Florida - on the edge of a great Florida Mangrove Forrest. To get to the ocean you have to walk on a pathway that cuts through the Mangroves (picture at left). On the path, I saw thousands of Fiddler Crabs scurry to their holes as I walked. I saw the shell to a horseshoe crab - but not a live one unfortunately. There were a ton of orb spider webs among the trees and I came upon a very large and beautiful "Crab-Like Spiny Orb Weaver" in the middle of its web. Amazing if you like spiders - scary if you don't.
You are awarded at the end of your walk by a pier that jets out into the ocean (picture at right). There was a beautiful White Egret standing at the edge of the pier. But one of the coolest things I saw was when I looked into the water off the pier. I saw several green reeds that looked like floating grass and Mangrove leaves - until I walked by and the "reeds" started to swim away. Turns out I was standing over a school of Alligator Pipefish - pretty amazing...
Thanks Imation!
Posted at 11:09AM Apr 15, 2008 by Taylor Allis in Storage Intelligence | Comments[1]
The Internet is the Medium
My best friend and 'ol college roomie Hari Sreenivasan is a CBS News Correspondent (see his handsome mugshot here). 
Hari just did a pretty cool story on 3D sidewalk chalk drawings by artist Julian Beever. See Hari's CBS News Video.
About ten years ago I remember brainstorming about the future of the Internet - the thought was that the Internet will be less like a new communications channel and more like an actual medium for new content and services.
That's what makes Hari's story so cool - look at about 4:40 into the video. Hari asks about Julian's art lasting past the next rainfall. Here is Julian's answer:
"It doesn't worry me at all - the fact the drawing will disappear after a couple of days in the rain. Because the final product is the photograph, and if that photograph goes on the Internet then thousands of people will see it and it will be there forever."
You can see Julian Beever's canvas by just searching for his name on YouTube...
Posted at 12:09PM Mar 03, 2008 by Taylor Allis in Storage Intelligence | Comments[1]
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]
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]
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.
| Traditional Storage Application Needs | Web 2.0 Storage Application Needs |
|
|
| Customer Types: Business & IT Management | Customer Types: Developers & IT Management |
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]
Storage Trends Take 2: IDC's 2008 Storage Predictions
IDC recently released their 2008 Top 10 Storage Predictions (Doc #209796, Worldwide Storage 2008 Top 10 Predictions: New Paradigms.) In my previous post I listed our Top 10 predictions, let's look at IDC's take...
IDC's 2008 Storage Predictions:
1. Storage as a Service (SaaS): See our Trend #10, looks like this may be the year for SaaS. The best thing that SaaS does is this: It lowers the barrier of entry for start ups. Want a perfect example? 
SmugMug.com stores approx. 205,000,000 photos for its customers using Amazon S3 and estimates they will save around $2M in storage costs just this year.
2. Role-based Storage Systems: I had to read deeper into the report to see what IDC is talking about here. Their summary describes it as storage solutions that will target a specific issue (backup/restore, archive, etc.) and one that will leverage "standard server architectures" and add value through "advanced software." Hmmm, sounds an awful lot like Sun's Open Storage Platform (see trend #1) - 
Standard server architecture: check. Advanced software features: ZFS? - check. Role-based: well, add VTL software to Sun's X4500 and you have a backup/restore device, add IPconfigure software and you have a Digital Video Recorder (DVR), add Greenplum software and you have a Data Warehouse application - check!
3. Object-based Storage Systems: See our trend #7. IDC makes an excellent distinction in their report that I must highlight...a lot of storage applications classify data (moving it to the appropriate storage tier) by looking at data workloads. But several different types of workloads can be used by a single application. The type of data + the application it is tied to may be a better way to classify it.
4. Solid-State Disk (SSD): See our trend #9. IDC states that SSD will enter into the data center as storage tier 0 and I agree. Flash promoters and disk vendors are already starting to pull up benchmarks against each other, but an integrated approach will probably prevail. For a fun SSD RAID implementation see the "Battleship Mtron." StorageMojo has a balanced take on SSD.
5. Virtual Servers (e.g. VMware) will be killer app for iSCSI: IDC predicts that just under half of virtualized servers connected to SANs will be connected to iSCSI. They state that manufactures selling iSCSI systems will find the servers they are connected to will be running server virtualization. (As virtual server admins are more comfortable with IP & Ethernet technology).
6. Value-Added Storage Services Will Begin to Be Divorced from Storage Subsystems, Resulting in Further Commoditization of Storage Subsystems: Quite a mouthful - but if you want an example, check out Sun's ZFS and its point-in-time-copy, volume management, administration, Copy-on-write and RAID Storage Services!
7. Disk Encryption: See our trend #5. We did it for tape, disk is a logical next step. Key Management continues to be the key part of encryption solutions, whether they are tape or disk based...
8. Vendors Will Create More Attractive "All In One" Solutions Using an Integrated Storage and Server Approach: Look no further than the SunFire X4500 (aka "Thumper")
9. "Green" Initiatives Will Spark Some Hardware Refreshes: IDC predicts that Eco messaging will evolve to vendors helping users connect business practices to green storage, as well as IT focusing on how to address the environmental impacts of manufacturing and disposing of older storage equipment.
10. De-Dup, VTL & Thin Provisioning become standard options: See our #3 and #4 trends. What were emerging technologies in 2007, will become "rights to play" in 2008...
Posted at 02:46PM Jan 09, 2008 by Taylor Allis in Storage Intelligence | Comments[0]
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]
Is Thumper worth a Billion?
Our Senior Disk Analyst, Bruce Norikane, just walked into my office and asked this very interesting question: "If the following is true, how much is Thumper (aka The SunFire X4500) worth?"
Data Domain: Deduplication Storage System
- Annual Revenue = $96.62M
- Market Cap = $1.66B
EqualLogic: iSCSI SAN System
- Annual Revenue (YTD) = $91M
- Dell's Announced Acquisition Price = $1.4B
SunFire X4500 (Thumper): Storage Server System
- Annual Run Rate: $100M
- Worth a Billion???
We think so...
Posted at 02:57PM Nov 09, 2007 by Taylor Allis in Storage Intelligence | Comments[1]
Broken arms & the Rockies...
So the Colorado Rockies are playing in the World Series tonight - being a native Coloradian, I'd never put World Series and Colorado in the same sentence before. I have to admit, I have been more of a football and lacrosse fan - but I have Rockies fever and am pretty excited about the series. I also have to give a shout out to my fellow blogger and former boss (one of the best) - AmyO - a big-time Sox fan. We'll see how our Colorado boys do against the classic Sox...
I was thinking of the baseball/storage tie in of course - and came up with something better....a systems/baseball tie in! For as most know, Sun combined its storage and server division into one Systems group, which makes a lot of sense. The tie in is MLB.com - a perfect example of a customer that is leveraging all Sun has to offer - our servers, storage, software and services. Here are some business results MLB.com has seen after choosing Sun as their systems provider:
- Delivering up to 15 live games daily and more than 6,000 audio-streamed games during season
- Delivering more than one billion minutes of streaming media and over 2,430 full-length games to over one billion visitors
- Average 6 million visitors daily with record-breaking 15 million visitors in a single day
- 10 million page views per day with record-breaking 90 million views delivered in a single day
- No application downtime in two years of operation
I'd say Sun has what it takes....
And speaking of Rockies fever, I spent the morning in the hospital with my 6-year-old son. He climbed up one of those 15-foot tall inflatable castle-slides and apparently thought it would be more fun to jump off the side - bypassing the slide altogether. Well...he got a thrill and a radial neck fracture (broke his arm).
See the medical image to the right - the radial bone head is touching the elbow joint and is fractured. I should also note that the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) requires images like these to be archived, securely, for quite some time. So in a way, my boy contributed to his Dad's paycheck :-)
While in the hospital, the doctor asked him what color he wanted the cast to be - he choose black and purple - go Rockies!
If we win the Series, he may have to wear that cast every year...
Posted at 05:38PM Oct 24, 2007 by Taylor Allis in Storage Intelligence | Comments[2]
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]
If SL8500 were an iPod...
...it could store 14 billion songs!
We get asked for "fun or interesting facts" about the Storage Market
and our Products quite often. Facts that can be used in Presos, as ice
breakers, or simply show how fast data is growing. So, I thought I'd share some "Fun Storage
Facts" we found:
- 5 TBs of new digital content is created, stored or replicated every second!
- Just 1 Sun StorageTek SL8500 can backup all original TV
Programming for 1 Year...773 times?!?!
- The Sun StorageTek 9900 can store more than 1.7 million digital
photos
- The ST5320 NAS appliance can store 18 million e-mails
- It is faster to send a petabyte of data from San Francisco to Hong Kong by sailboat, than by the internet
- Or how about this...~12 exabytes of archived data reside on Sun StorageTek solutions (disk and tape). If this amount of data was stored on all EMC disk, it would consume 11.5 billion KWH/year - enough to power the entire city of San Jose!
Data Sources: IDC's The Expanding Digital Universe, Sun StorageTek, EMC, Wikibon, Freeman Reports, Horison Information Strategies, Moving a Petabyte of Data
Find more facts inside Sun on our internal Wiki: (http://wikihome.sfbay.sun.com/Storage-Intelligence/)
Posted at 11:08AM Sep 18, 2007 by Taylor Allis in Storage Intelligence | Comments[0]
Working smarter with Wikis
I attended a Manager's Meeting where the theme was "Work smarter, not harder." So I have to put my plug in for how Web 2.0 technology is helping my team work smarter.
One division I manage is Competitive Intelligence. But don't let the term "division" fool you to its size - for we only have 2.5 senior analysts in it (one is shared with another line of business).
So, these 2.5 analysts have to support Sun's entire WW sales force (thousands) on competitive deals against all of Sun's storage products (hundreds). Yet most of us get to go home after 5/6pm. How is this possible???
Three ways:
- Hire smart people: I'd bet my entire salary that Mike Brown, Chris Ilg and Bruce Norikane are the smartest competitive analysts in the industry. They can support deals and talk storage strategy in their sleep.
- Prioritize: We do it by tiering products and competitors. If a tier 1 request comes in - we're on it.
- Our Wiki!
Wiki? I bore some people on how I drone on about our Wiki (if you are inside Sun, you can access our Wiki here). We use it to self-publish our sales & marketing
support content.
And we have been successful...the month we launched it we received 1,181 hits. As of this post, we have received 11,859 hits. (That's 904% growth in 5 months!)
But what drove me to write this blog post in the first place was a sales support request that came to my group:
A Sun pre-sales engineer in the U.S. recently asked us for support in
selling Sun StorageTek VTL against a competitive product. Before we could field the request, a sales rep in Sweden responded by forwarding him to our Wiki (which is pictured & had the info he needed to win the deal)
So, here are the stats on this single sales support transaction:
- U.S. pre-sales engineer sends competitive support request
- Request answered in 11 minutes (our SLA with the field is to respond within 24hrs btw)
- 0% of my analyst's time used in the transaction
Posted at 03:53PM Sep 05, 2007 by Taylor Allis in Storage Intelligence | Comments[3]
Mapping the DNA of our customers...
The Human Genome Project (HGP) has been credited as one of the great scientific feats in history when it announced it mapped the human genome in April 2003.
We don't have any molecular biologists on staff - but we think we mapped 70.1% of what makes up our Customer's Experience with Sun Storage Products (Give us a couple years to map the rest, it took 50 years to map the genome after DNA was first discovered after all...)
This is important because if you are in the business of trying to make customers happy, then you need to know what makes them happy (or not happy for that matter.)
The person in charge of our "Customer Experience Genome Project" is our Research Manager, Hernando Gonzalez, a Ph.D. in International Development and research statistician at heart. You can read some of his published work in Quirk's Marketing Research Review. In fact, if I were to guess what Hernando is thinking right now - it would probably look something like this: 
How to Map Customer Experience
At the risk of spilling our secret sauce recipe for customer research over the Internet, this is what we did...
First, we sent a survey to more than 40,000 Sun StorageTek customers in 24 countries (and translated that survey into 14 different languages). Then, we asked each customer to pick just one Sun StorageTek Product to review and answer questions about (product features, services, sales surrounding it, delivery, etc.) Finally, rigorous analytics like Factor Analysis were applied to the responses.
Here is what we found (and I think you will quickly see that this can be applied to multiple industries) 
- 19% of our customer's satisfaction or experience is determined by the type of relationship Sun has with a customer account. How well sales anticipates needs, whether customers view Sun as a strategic business partner, etc.
- 10.9% of the experience fell into the product deployment and operations category - how well the product integrates, how easy deployment was, how easy upgrades are.
- 10.5% of our customer's experience is impacted by product RAS (Reliability, Availability, Scalability).
- 9.9% of the product experience is determined by how our sales folks communicate with a customer before and after a sale, as well as how well we do in keeping customers apprised of new technologies.
- 5.8% is impacted by product fulfillment - product delivery and install.
- 5.3% is impacted by ongoing technical support or customer support services.
- 5.1% (and this came as a surprise) is impacted by the invoicing process - order accuracy, clarity, timeliness, etc. (I guess when you are dealing with budgets and cash flow, the invoicing process becomes increasingly important.)
- 3.6% is impacted by how we communicate and deliver our future products - our roadmaps.
And finally, our analysis tells us that there is 29.9% of "something else" that dictates whether a customer has a good or bad experience with us. ~30% unknown is higher than I like it, but mapping about 70% of the DNA of customer experience isn't a bad start...
Measuring (and Improving) Customer Experience
The next logical question is, "If this is what impacts a customer's experience with Sun Storage, then how is Sun Storage doing?" To get this answer, we simply have our customer's rate us on a 0-10 point scale - 10 being great and 0 being not so great. We can then see how Sun is rating with customers on each of the major categories above (by product line AND geographic region).
But here is where my sharing of the secret sauce stops - since this blog is public, and our customer scores are confidential. (But, if you are a Sun employee you can log into SWAN to see how our customers rated us - if you are not with Sun, you will just see a "server not found" page).
Now for the hard part...
If the above work seems like a lot - it was. But we are only half way there. A large step in the right direction is knowing what impacts customer experience, satisfaction and loyalty on a macro scale (nothing replaces a good 1:1 with a customer btw). The next step is to develop and implement plans to maintain the categories we are doing well in; and improve the categories we are not doing well in.
So, as we move into our new fiscal year, you don't have to guess at which areas we'll be focusing on...
Posted at 05:04PM Jul 09, 2007 by Taylor Allis in Storage Intelligence | Comments[0]
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