Taylor's Take on Sun Storage : Weblog

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


amazon disk eco emc honeycomb ibm open opensolaris openstorage saas solaris storage storagetek sun sunstorage tape thumper virtualization vtl web2.0 x4500 zfs
Monday Mar 03, 2008

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]

Thursday Feb 28, 2008

Sun's Open Archive Announcement

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

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

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

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

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

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

First of all, there has been plenty of FUD thrown around about Sun's commitment to Tape after the StorageTek merger.  Nothing shows more vendor commitment than developing and launching a new product in that space - and we've announced two today.  In this Eco-focused world, tape becomes more relevant - not less.  Data sitting on a tape cartridge consumes 0 power and gives off 0 carbon emissions after all - tough to argue those numbers.  So Sun brings a full storage portfolio to the archive space - customers can leverage the performance of disk AND the economics of tape.

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

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

Some quick stats on the library itself:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---- Update ---

Other Sun blogs discussing Open Archive:

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

Tuesday Feb 12, 2008

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]

Wednesday Feb 06, 2008

Sun Talks Strategy at SAS 2008

Yesterday, Feb 5, we had Sun's annual SAS event.  And no, SAS doesn't stand for Serial Attached SCSI in this case - it stands for Sun Analyst Summit.  We techies like our acronyms....

SAS 2008 invites industry and financial analysts to hear how Sun is doing and what it's outlook and strategy is moving forward.   Sun Keynotes were Jonathan Swartz, CFO Mike Lehman, Sales & Services EVP Don Grantham and CTO Greg Papadopoulos. 

After watching 9 sessions and viewing 11 presentations (whew!), my key takeaways are below - as well as the graphics that spelled it out for me.  SAS 2008 Cliff Notes if you will.  If you wish to view any of these sessions or presentations download them at our SAS 2008 website. 

Sun's Strategy

I grimace when talking strategy even though it is part of my job. Why?  People have different ideas of what a "strategy" is or should be - are you talking financial strategy, business strategy, technology strategy, sales strategy, marketing strategy? A lot of people who "talk strategy" usually have a strong opinion and ultimately think their take is the best (including me sometimes I'm sorry to admit).  With that said - I like Wikipedia's simple definition of strategy:

A strategy is a long term plan of action designed to achieve a particular goal,  most often "winning".

What's the goal (i.e. winning) for Sun?  Growth - profitable revenue growth.  What's Sun's long term plan designed to achieve growth?  Let's take a look at some SAS slides, starting with the markets we wish to grow:      

This slide shows the customers we are focused on: Developers, Consumers and Communities.   They can be found in markets Sun is focusing on:

  • Enterprise Infrastructure:  Customers here include GE, American Express, GM - i.e. traditional datacenters.   But we also have "Web 2.0" customers that need to build enterprise infrastructures to support their customers and communities, customers like eBay, SugarCRM and Salesforce.com.  
  • High Performance Computing (HPC):   This ties into Greg Papadopoulos' Redshift observations - these are companies whose computing and storage needs are not being met by today's systems.  Sun's expertise and IP lies in massively scalable, efficient and high-preforming systems - so finance, manufacturing, Oil & Gas, Life Sciences and Government organizations needing high performance computing for their modeling and analysis applications are a great fit.  Customers here include TACC, Tokyo Institute of Technology and KiSTi.  In addition, some traditional and Web 2.0 customers of ours also have HPC needs, like Exxon Mobil, FedEx and even facebook.  
  • Web Buildout:  Our market is in the middle of another great web infrastructure buildout.  Traditional systems and architectures don't support these customers, so they are looking for more open, flexible, scalable and affordable systems.  Classic customer examples include Fotolog, LinkedIn and facebook.   But traditional companies are also building out web infrastructures to support content, communities and services over the web - customers like Bank of America, Virgin Atlantic and China Mobile. 

So these are our markets - what is Sun's long term plan to grow them?  One graphic used by our Systems and Storage VPs John Fowler and Jon Benson at SAS sums it up, and also happens to be one of Johnathan's favorite venn diagrams: 

Their are two important points to this slide - the outside of the Venn and the inside of the Venn:  

Outside the Venn diagram (Empowering Sun's Practices):  This has been a mini revolution inside Sun and I have to credit Mr Swartz for his leadership and vision here.  One thing that contributes to the brilliance of great engineers is their passion and singular focus.   Sun did this as a company and it hurt them in the past.   In IT there is an ecosystem of other partners that one has to work with in order to be successful.   In the past, Sun built Solaris and microprocessors for Sun servers and Sun servers for Solaris and microprocessors.  Lines of business within Sun were limited in their market reach.

This has changed...the simple fact that Microsoft, Intel and AMD are on the above slide is evidence of this.  Sun has recently announced major deals with Microsoft, Dell and IBM.  What this means is that each line of business within Sun is encouraged and empowered to grow their business through the sales, marketing and partnership programs they deem appropriate.   The software group can grow Solaris business on Sun, IBM or Dell platforms.  The server and storage groups can grow their business though partnerships with Intel, AMD and Microsoft.  Storage can serve the open systems and mainframe markets. 

Another slide that exemplifies this change was presented by our Sales & Services EVP Don Grantham.  Just a couple years ago, the only things this slide would have on it would be Solaris, Java, Sun Servers and SPARC...

Inside the Venn diagram (Building an Open Platform):  While growing business through sales and technology partnerships is happening outside the diagram, building an integrated, open platform is what's happening on the inside.  Sun is taking its expertise and technology in microprocessors, operating systems, servers, networking and storage and converging them.   Why?  Better economics for our customers - and what will be touted as the fundamental value proposition of future innovations coming out of Sun.  Less integration, more efficiency, less power, less space - all while getting more computing and storage for your money.  What's happening in Web 2.0?  Developers are buying volume processors, servers and storage - choosing an open platform to develop on like Linux or OpenSolaris - and developing their own software to differentiate their business.  Why not have all the compute, storage, networking and operating system components on one integrated, open platform to build your business on?  Spend less time managing and more time developing.  And I would argue that with all the IP Sun has in all areas of IT - we are one of only 3 systems companies in the world that could pull something like this off. 

So let's take a look at what recent innovations have come from integrating our technologies into one efficient system.   Let's start from our largest system down to our smallest to give an idea of range and scalability.   The slide below is from John Fowler's Systems overview - it's called the "Sun Constellation System" - and is being deployed as a system supporting supercomputing at TACC.   Here are some Constellation specs:

  • Compute Engine Data Cache: Will scale over 72 GB/sec sustained bandwidth with 1.728 Petabytes (PB) of raw capacity
    • Configuration includes 72 Sun Fire X4500s (over 3,000 500 GB drives in 8 racks)
  • Long-Term Retention & Archive: Will scale over 3.1 PB of online storage and 200 PB of near-line storage

 

If this integrated platform is a little too much for you (and it is for 90% of the world), then the Sun Fire X4500 is a better example.  With this one system, users can buy a 4U integrated server, storage and networking platform running Solaris for approximately $1.50/GB - roughly 13x less than enterprise disk arrays and 7x less that midrange arrays (which don't come with server and networking components)!  See my Trends post.  That's changing IT economics.  You can see the X4500s lined up in the rack on the left in the slide above.      

Other innovations coming from the "center of the Venn" include Sun's open Archive System, the Sun StorageTek 5800 (aka "Honeycomb") and now shipping, our complete datacenter in a portable container - the Sun Modular Datacenter S20 (aka "Project Blackbox"). 

So what's Sun's Storage Strategy? 

With the summary above to give it some context, I'll post the last slide from John Fowler and Jon Benson's "The New Value Equation for Storage"  presentation to answer this question:

--------- Update --------

Posted at 04:25PM Feb 06, 2008 by Taylor Allis in Storage Intelligence  |  Comments[0]

Wednesday Jan 30, 2008

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:  


 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:

Read more on the Sun StorageTek 6140 here and on the StorageTek 6540 here...

 

 

 

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

Tuesday Jan 29, 2008

Web 2.0 Needs Good Backup Too

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ay, there's the rub...

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

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

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

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

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

Wednesday Jan 16, 2008

Sun's Latest Web 2.0 Investment - MySQL

For the record, I am not completely attached to the term "Web 2.0" - it has quickly become another buzzword, making its meaning even more ambiguous.  But it does give a general idea of a certain data center application that has vendors investing more and more in it these days.  (Sun's own term for these types of apps is Redshift).  

But I do love that my last blog analyzing the IBM XIV buy touched on the two primary IT markets Sun is investing in - our traditional market (where most of our revenue comes from today - let's not forget) and our Web 2.0/Redshift markets (our emerging customer base).  What has also been nice here at Sun (I came through the StorageTek acquisition - has it really been 2.5 years already???), is that Sun is focused on the entire IT infrastructure - from storage to the server to software to services.    

With that said, Sun has made big news today with its announcement to acquire MySQL (pronounced My S-Q-L by the MySQL folks, but they also don't mind if they are called My "sequel" either).  Links:

So, I stated previously that Web 2.0 apps require massive scalability, high performance, open/flexible platforms, efficiency and lower costs.   Some facts on MySQL:

  • It's the world's second largest independent open source company believe it or not (Red Hat is the largest)
  • It's the leading database for online applications and services, and the world's most popular open source RDBMS (the “M” in LAMP)
  • They have over 400 employees in over 25 countries
  • They get more than 50,000 product downloads daily(!)
  • MySQL reduces database licensing costs by up to 90%
  • MySQL runs on 20+ platforms
  • See some select "Web 2.0" customers at right -->

So, Sun made a big bet in the "Web 2.0" space today - in the software stack, at the database level.  We also continue to invest in the entire IT infrastructure.  In storage, we have one of the most complete portfolios for traditional storage applications, and are making heavy investments on the Web 2.0 side.  

Sun's most recent and significant storage investments in the Web 2.0 market are "Thumper" (Open server, software and 48TB of storage in a 4U rack for only $1/GB!) and Lustre (one of the world's most scalable, high-performance storage cluster file systems).  

 

One innovation built and the other bought - a healthy mix I'd say....

Posted at 12:00PM Jan 16, 2008 by Taylor Allis in Storage Intelligence  |  Comments[0]

Monday Jan 14, 2008

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: 

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
  • Scalability
  • Consolidation
  • TCO
  • Availability
  • Data IntegrityData Protection (BC/DR)
  • Innovation
  • Massive scalability
  • Open/flexible platforms
  • Low cost
  • Efficiency
 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]

Tuesday Oct 02, 2007

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 this is not a position held by the majority of disk storage players mind you - one need only look at the vendors participating on the SPC website, maybe you have heard of a few?  

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]

Tuesday Sep 18, 2007

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]

Wednesday Sep 05, 2007

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:

  1. 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. 
  2. Prioritize:   We do it by tiering products and competitors.  If a tier 1 request comes in - we're on it.
  3. Our Wiki!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
Pretty cool... 

Posted at 03:53PM Sep 05, 2007 by Taylor Allis in Storage Intelligence  |  Comments[3]

Monday Jul 09, 2007

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]

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