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
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:
- Brand new product: Sun StorageTek SL3000 Tape Library
- New product to existing family: Sun StorageTek T9840D Tape Drives
- Product enhancements: Sun Crypto Key Management System (KMS) 2.0 & Sun Customer Ready Infinite Archive System (aka Sun CIS)
- Open sourced digital archive: We donated the source code for the Sun StorageTek 5800 (aka HoneyComb)
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]
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[6]
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]
Tape's Dead? Heard that one before...
This article was e-mailed around Sun Storage just the other day: And tape walked quietly from the spotlight (applause)
I worked for a founder of StorageTek who said he first heard the
"Tape is Dead" argument in 1987. I understand the argument, especially with disk
prices dropping, recent VTL growth and the entrance of data
de-duplication.
But I don't agree with it - it's far too short sided, and usually the person saying it has not done their homework. The best approach is not to pit Tape vs. Disk - they should be used together to accomplish storage goals. Makes perfect sense to me. To see why certain vendors like pitching "Tape is Dead" articles - see Randy Chalfant's Blog.
But to those who say tape will be exiting the data center, we have
this to say: Tape's value proposition remains maturity, longevity,
volumetric density, declining costs, removeability and scalability
(and this is from someone who supports tape AND disk systems at Sun).
But for those still pitting Tape vs. Disk, I'll put forth these comparisons calculated by our disk analyst Bruce Norikane and tape analyst Chris Ilg (calculations made from public website info and do not include software costs):
Which solution would you recommend for a petabyte archive?
| Tape cost for Storing 1PB of data | Disk cost for Storing 1PB of data |
|
|
| Tape environment cost to store that petabyte | Disk environment cost to store that petabyte |
|
|
To further illustrate this point:
- According to Freeman Report's Whitepaper, "The Growing Importance of Archive"...37.1% of all archived data reside on Sun StorageTek solutions
- This equals 11.924 exabytes (to be exact)
- Storing just 1 exabyte of data on EMC's Symmetrix DMX-3 disk
array consumes around .97 billion kilowatt hours (KWH) per year
(according to their website)
- So, if 11.924 exabytes of data were stored on EMC disk:
- It would consume 11.5 billion KWH per year (enough to power the city of San Jose)
- This would cost over $1B ($1,488,000 to be exact)
- And you would have to burn 3,768,885 tons of coal per year to generate enough power
An insider's view: For my last point, I'd like to share an insider's view as to how a vendor can use market data to tell a story they want to tell. (credit goes to Chris Ilg for this great insight) This is particularly relevant to the "Tape is Dead" presentations lingering out there. Take a look at the below graphic from a customer presentation. Both charts are based on IDC data - but the first chart is one you would see from a disk-only vendor, telling you that disk is converging on tape costs. The second chart is closer to reality - the rate of price erosion for disk and tape is about the same. The only difference in charts is the scale, the X axis - the first chart gives an absolute view, the second a relative view.
So, as long as we need to store more data at lower system and power costs - Tape (along with cheap disk) has a life.
Lastly, I love Randy Chalfant's take on Sun's approach to the disk vs. tape debate posted in his blog linked above:
"Part of our approach to this, is to lead with a business value
assessment, where we can look at the operational needs and practices of
you business, and then map the technology into a supporting foundation
for the demands of your business."
You can't do that if you don't have tape and disk (not to mention software, services and servers) in your portfolio...
(Note: If you are a Sun employee, you can find more in the Market Fact Book section on our Storage Intelligence Wiki)
------- Update --------
Another disk-only salesman brings up the old argument, see:
- Marc Farley's blog & video: Is tape dead? What do you use it for?
- StorageStop picks it up at: Tape is dead, long live tape
[Read More]
Posted at 03:57PM May 30, 2007 by Taylor Allis in Storage Intelligence | Comments[0]
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