Taylor's Take on Sun Storage

Open Storage: Vendor Landscape

Ok - chapter 5 in the Open Storage Adoption White Paper talks about the vendor landscape.  We'll start with Sun.  

Sun's Open Storage Differentiation
There are three areas that position Sun as the best partner for Open Storage solutions:

1. Innovative HW systems: Sun’s hardware differentiation lies in design innovation.  Three examples of this are the Sun Fire X4500 (Thumper) which combines a four-way x64 server with 48 TB of SATA disk in a 4U rack space - one of the most efficient and dense storage servers on the planet (and there is more to come).  Sun's unique ST5800 (Honeycomb) archive platform scored perfect 10s in reliability and scalability with InfoWorld.  On the server side, Sun's Blade 6000 is the most open blade platform in the industry - delivering Solaris, Linux, Windows or VMware on single and multicore processors by Sun, AMD, and Intel in one chassis.
   
2. OpenSolaris as a storage platform:  One of the most robust and reliable OSes in IT.  Sun also offers advanced open-source file systems including NFS, the upcoming Parallel NFS (pNFS) and ZFS.  ZFS can manage zettabytes of storage and offers data services including volume management, data integrity and software RAID.  
3. Open-source storage applications: Sun has now open-sourced more high-level storage application software than any other storage vendor.  Applications like remote-mirror-copy and point-in-time-copy.  Take a look at Sun's complete open-source, end-to-end storage portfolio (a storage developer's dream):
• Traffic management, disk, and tape drivers
• Volume snapshot and replication applications
• Media management and data migration applications
• Volume management and HSM software
• Fixed-content, archive applications
• Storage file systems
• FC, iSCSI, OSD, and object-based targets and initiators

Other "Open Storage" Efforts

In keeping with the definition of open source software + industry standard HW = Open Storage (aka a more scalable, economic storage architecture) let's look at what other vendors are doing with open source software and industry-standard hardware.  But remember, several vendors use open source software and industry standard hardware - but still limit customer choice and charge higher rates in their implementations...

IBM: In terms of industry-standard hardware, IBM sells Intel and AMD servers as well as SAS- and SATA-based disk and JBOD systems. IBM does see value in open source as it is a large Linux supporter. (However, Sun has more than 3,000 members and 30 open-source storage projects in development for OpenSolaris AND has even open-sourced its commercial applications like the Sun StorageTek Availability Suite - giving its customers full and affordable access to its own IP).  IBM’s recent investment in the storage market has been its recent acquisition of XIV - see IBM buys XIV - good move or bad?  XIV NEXTRA does use industry-standard hardware, but its software is proprietary (not open source).  XIV shows IBM has realized customers need more than what traditional disk products offer today - the design points of the XIV architecture are low cost and massive scalability.  However, the technology is new and IBM’s claims of low cost are yet to be determined.

HP: HP also sells Intel and AMD processor-based servers; as well as SAS, SATA and SCSI JBOD arrays.  HP sells ProLiant servers or industry-standard servers running Windows Storage Server (Not open source, but obviously a high-volume OS).  HP acquired PolyServe in 2007 to cluster its storage and server systems.  HP recently announced its HP StorageWorks 9100 Extreme Data Storage System (ExDS9100) - a large NAS appliance with an entry configuration of a whopping 246TB of standard disk.  HP also broke away from Windows in its implementation - using open-source Linux as the platform for this higher-capacity platform.   HP says it will ship the ExDS9100 by year's end, but without some features like CIFS support.  (And by the time the ExDS9100 ships, Sun's X4500 will have been on the market for over 2 years with over 250 petabytes installed.)

EMC: EMC primarily offers closed systems today - custom components and software that are available only through EMC.  But EMC can identify business/IT trends and adapt to them. In January 2008, EMC announced its first Storage as a Service (SaaS) or “Cloud” storage offering.  EMC is also investing in two products code-named “HULK” and “MAUI.”  MAUI is software that will provide what EMC calls a “global repository” - but not much in known at the time of this blog.   According to this blogger, HULK's official name is EMC InfiniFlex and a single system consists of a full 44U rack with up to 300 drives (10 disk trays x 30 disks).  They fit these 30 drives in 3U it looks like (and does the front-to-back cooling suggest they stick the extra disk behind the front-end disk?)  It also uses 12 dual core, 1U servers as well as 2 ethernet switches.   So, it essentially looks like industry-standard HW (storage & servers) with TBD software.  HULK and MAUI may be EMC’s first venture into the open-storage space - especially if the systems are able to work with other, third-party, industry-standard components. But the benefits to EMC’s new offerings, and just how “open” they are, are yet to be announced...

NetApp: NetApp sells their own proprietary hardware and also develops their own custom operating system called Data OnTap (while others in the industry have been moving to an open or high-volume operating system for storage - like Solaris, Linux or Windows.)  NetApp does not open-source its storage operating system software.

Dell: Dell has built its business on industry-standard, volume-based products.  Dell lets customers configure servers with industry-standard Intel and AMD processors, SATA disk drives and various Linux distributions. Dell can be credited for its online configuration and ordering services; but Open Storage customers really require enterprise-class software, services and tech support from their Open Storage vendors - like Sun offers. 

Next Blog...
Open Storage Case Studies

Posted at 03:10PM Jun 17, 2008 by Taylor Allis in Storage Intelligence  |  Comments[0]

Open Storage: Size & Growth

Both EMC and IBM have chimed in on what their thoughts are on Open Storage's future.  Tony's analogy made me think about a simple way to explain what I think Open Storage's future will be like: 

Open Storage & Builders Square: Let's rewind to the 1990's.  At that time I knew very little about home improvement.  In my mind, the only option was to save up to hire an expensive contractor to update my kitchen/bathroom/bedroom, etc.  But then a new store opened up close to my home - Builders Square.  That shop was subsequently replaced by a new store called Home Depot.  I was intimidated when I first walked in - there were only serious contractors around and I couldn't believe the amount of stuff they had.

Well the time came to update our bathroom - and as I was looking up contractors and plumbers in the phone book my wife said, "why don't you see how much it would cost to do it yourself by going to that new home store down the street?"  Fast forward to today and the people at our local Home Depot and Lowe's know me by name.  I have installed bathrooms, kitchens and built our basement.  I had help from store employees, instruction guides and affordable house "components" to do everything.  And when I walk into a store today; I see families make up the majority of customers - not contractors.   The simple fact is this - I could  not have done what I wanted to do with my house if it wasn't for the introduction of these new DIY home stores.   Open storage will help users do more with less - and reference architectures, solution blueprints, online communities and consultant services will help customers deploy open storage.

Open Storage & Stay-at-Home Moms:  Let's go back to the 90's.  I was also an early Web developer back then.  In fact, a quick Google search of my name will find a question I posted to a developer's help desk in 1996 where I ask, "Do you know when Netscape 2.0 for mac will be able to pick up Java applets?"  Pretty funny; and a testament to the longevity to open standards like HTML.  But my point is this - back then my wife was working in consumer PR and had absolutely no idea what I was doing for a living in high tech.  The Internet? The WWW? 

Today my wife has taken on the full-time job of raising our kids.  And I am happy to report that she is looking into starting her own blog - and she is looking at a blog from another stay-at-home mom as an example.  Now, if I told my wife she would be "developing" her own WWW journal back in the 90's she would have thought me crazy (which happens often) or the task impossible.   But Internet tools have evolved in away that let's anyone self-publish on the web for little to no cost.

I believe open storage will find its way in early markets; and the support resources and tools around it will evolve over time, bringing open storage to more traditional, mature markets.

Open Storage Size & Growth: (From the Open Storage Adoption White Paper)
How do we know this short of getting out our crystal ball?  Well, we don't - we need to estimate - and this is how we did it:  We took multiple IDC forecasts and rolled them into an internal Sun model - forecasts which included revenue from industry standard storage (JBOD, SSD, etc.) and open source software.  Then we made our own assumptions on how the market will behave - for example, we believe the fastest open storage adoption rates will appear in the entry and midrange NAS, unified storage (iSCSI, FC, etc.) and object-based storage markets.  We assume adoption will be slower in more traditional, higher-end markets.  So, this is NOT an IDC model - but an internal Sun model based on IDC and industry data (to be clear).  And this is an industry/market revenue estimate - it includes ALL vendor revenue from industry-standard hardware + open source software used in ANY storage system and does not give ANY info on Sun revenue or performance (to be clear again). 

So...we estimate open storage products and services will represent just under 12% percent of the total storage market in 2011. With IDC estimating the total storage market (hardware, software and services) generating approximately $90B in 2011, the open storage portion could be just over $10.6 billion.

We also predict that open storage will represent more than 20% of the external disk market by 2011.  At $5.2 billion, hardware represents the largest portion of the open storage market.  Tape storage and storage networking products are not included in the open storage forecast (although one could argue that LTO is industry standard hardware).

Next Blog: Sun Open Storage vs. Other Vendor Efforts

Posted at 05:00PM Jun 12, 2008 by Taylor Allis in Storage Intelligence  |  Comments[1]

Open Storage: Early Markets

As promised, below is a second White Paper on Open Storage. This second one addresses Open Storage market drivers and growth and is titled Open Storage Adoption.  It can be downloaded here:

• Open Storage Adoption White Paper

Again, I would like to thank Bruce Norikane, our Sr. Analyst, for his help as well as our market research manager, Chris Ilg, for his forecasting work. And again, I'll use this blog to post the CliffsNotes for those short on time.  Below I will cover the need for a new storage architectures and early target markets.   In subsequent blogs I'll cover the Open Storage future market forecast, other vendor initiatives and customer case studies - early adopters who have used Open Storage to solve their critical business needs...

The Need for a New Storage Architecture

Bruce, mentioned above, made a profound statement during our Open Storage planning that ended up in the White Paper.  He said, "Google and Amazon would not exist if they hadn’t built their own storage infrastructures."  They certainly wouldn't exist in their current state.  When they started, traditional storage architectures were too expensive and inflexible to support the business model they had in mind.  So what did they do?  They had to buy commodity components and developed their own software like the Google File System (GFS). 

Certainly not everyone can build their own file system today.  But the requirements that drove Google to build their own file system have done nothing but increased.   Consider the following facts:

• IDC’s report “The Expanding Digital Universe" states that new digital data will grow 6X between 2006 and 2010 (Emerging market data is growing up to 40% faster)
• 70% of this data will be created by individuals (me, on this blog for example)
• Enterprises will be responsible for storing 85% of this new digital data (Sun's IT dept has to manage the data I create)
• YouTube was founded in February 2005, and by May 2006, 50,000 videos were being added every day
• A YouTube search today can return about 72.1 million videos and 2.89 million user channels

A new, more economic and scalable storage architecture is desperately needed - enter Open Storage...

Open Storage Growth Markets

Open Storage can (and will) compete with traditional storage architectures.  But Open Storage won't "take over the world" overnight.  Most likely the data center mix of open storage architectures vs. closed storage architectures will change over time and vary data center to data center (if history is our guide).  But what markets will adopt sooner?  What are the Open Storage "sweet spots"?

Web 2.0:  I count Web 2.0 apps as applications delivered via the Web.  Apps like blogs, wikis, podcasts, RSS feeds, mashups, and social-networking sites like MySpace, Facebook or SmugMug.  Consider this:

• Technorati stated in March 2008 that there were 112.8 million blogs
• Bloggers update their content with 1.6 million posts EVERY day (or more than 18 updates per second!)
• There are currently 3,115 mashup applications on the Internet

And Web 2.0 apps are not just for up starts - Forrester surveyed 2,200 IT decision makers from traditional enterprises and found that 33% were planning on investing in Web 2.0 applications.  Web 2.0 storage requirements differ from traditional storage requirements as well. They need massively scalable but low-cost systems. Web 2.0 users are even willing to trade high availability for lower costs.  Everyone needs high scalability at lower costs - but the need in the Web 2.0 space is acute.   Thus, Web 2.0 will be the key driver for Open Storage architectures. 

HPC Storage:  IDC estimates that HPC storage systems added about $3.9 billion to the 2006 server revenue total and will undergo faster annual growth than HPC servers.  Maximizing I/O bandwidth and minimizing latency while scaling storage capacity is the top priority for HPC storage users. Because of this, data locality is an issue for many HPC implementations.  What's data locality?  HPC services provider Instrumental, Inc.explains:

To manage issues such as data locality, an open storage architecture is needed. The one thing that HPC storage deployments have in common is that they are all custom built. HPC users need direct access to their storage components and software along with the flexibility to swap components and customize software to optimize their storage.  This is difficult to do with closed storage systems.

Additionally, parallel, shared or clustered file systems that leverage global namespace technologies are used in most HPC storage environments. This includes the HPC open source file systems Sun offers - like Lustre.  In fact, Lustre is used in 15% of the top 500 supercomputers in the world and in six of the top 10 supercomputers.

Lastly, an additional top storage requirement in HPC is Hierarchal Storage Management (HSM) software (moving data from disk to tape).  Why?  Just look at the massive amounts of data HPC applications generate. The San Diego Supercomputer Center states their earthquake simulations alone generate 47TB every week!  By 2011, they expect archived data to grow to more than 100PB. HPC centers must leverage the economics of tape to store such massive amounts of data.  Sun offers tape as well as open-source HSM software for disk-to-tape data migration - Sun's Storage Archive Manager (SAM) software.  

To see the real-world benefits an open storage architecture can offer HPC customers, see the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) implementation of Sun Constellation - aka Ranger.   

Server Virtualization:  Open storage introduces more flexibility and consolidation benefits to the server-virtualization market. This added functionality can be realized in two ways:

1. By running open storage software inside a virtual machine (VM)
2. By running any vendor’s storage software on an open storage server
   

Storage users can now consolidate three servers and a storage appliance onto a single server. In a closed architecture, storage software cannot be separated from the hardware.

In the second scenario, users can use an open storage server, such as the Sun Fire X4500, as a storage target or shared appliance. What’s unique is that users can repurpose their storage appliance as their needs change. For example, customers can repurpose the same Sun Fire X4500 into a NAS device, a Virtual Tape Library (VTL) or a data replication appliance without buying more hardware. Now that's investment protection!

In the following diagram, a customer has taken a Sun Fire X4500 server running Linux-based VTL software and has repurposed it into a remote replication appliance by leveraging server virtualization and open source Sun StorageTek Availability Suite software. 

Sever Virtualization and Open Storage can deliver better investment protection and significant cost and consolidation advantages ...

Next Blog...

 What we predict the size and growth of the Open Storage will be

Posted at 04:06PM Jun 10, 2008 by Taylor Allis in Storage Intelligence  |  Comments[1]

Open Storage Support

I've received a lot of questions about the support for Open Storage from customers and competitors.  And for good reason - if something isn't working the way you want it to, you need to know there is someone to count on for support.  This is true for traditional products; and is even more critical when it comes to products that incorporate open source software.     

I'll briefly explain Sun's support model around open source and Open Storage.  This model is also evolving over time and will only get better...

Professional Services: Sun offers architecture, development, implementation and management services for Open Storage.  Instead of writing about them here, I'll send you to this link.  

Appliance & Hardware Support:   Sun offers commercial versions of its Open Storage products, like the Sun Fire X4500, which comes with traditional support AND better storage economics.  You can also purchase Sun hardware for Open Storage.  These obviously come with the expected Sun support and service offerings.  (Remember that in Open Storage, users can essentially build a storage controller out of a standard server to save cost and improve flexibility.)   

Solaris Support: Sun's commercially available enterprise server O/S can be used as a storage platform in an Open Storage implementation.  It is also critical to point out that Solaris and ZFS offer advanced storage services like point-in-time-copy, volume management, storage administration and data integrity features like copy-on-write, end-to-end checksumming and RAID.  These are storage software features that typically reside in a storage controller or as an independent software application that has to be purchased separately.   So it is important to note that when we are talking about Solaris (and OpenSolaris) - we are also talking about all the storage software features and services that come with it. 

According to the Whitepaper, "OS Subscription Support Services: A Comparison of Sun and Red Hat" by the Crimson Consulting Group, Solaris support is comparable but better than Red Hat Enterprise Linux support.  Read the paper for the detail; below are the high-level findings when comparing Solaris vs. Red Hat Linux support:     

• Sun has a lower average price for annual support subscriptions - 16% lower per year, list.
• Sun has longer product lifecycle support - 7 years of support vs. 3 years for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (see diagram below)
  
• Sun has a larger support organization - 18x the support staff compared to Red Hat.
• Sun had a 27% lower total cost compared to Red Hat Enterprise Linux over a three-year period.
• Sun offers a commercial OS (Solaris) and an open source OS (OpenSolaris)

Customers who buy a Sun Server also get a free commercial Solaris RTU (right to use).  So customers get integrated support for Sun hardware and software comparable to support from other enterprise server vendors like HP or IBM.

OpenSolaris Support:  Sun is leading the way in offering support for the open source version of its storage platform - OpenSolaris.  OpenSolaris support also covers the storage applications embedded in the OS or file system.  Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is similar to commercial software in that the community does not update the distribution directly (but instead provides input via feedback, bug fixes or contributions).  Fedora is Red Hat's community-lead distribution of Linux.  So it is important to note that while Red Hat offers RHEL support, it currently does not offer traditional support for Fedora (beyond community support).   By contrast, Sun offers Solaris AND OpenSolaris support.  This is truly unique. 

Currently there are two OpenSolaris support subscriptions available - buy them here.  These subscriptions support OpenSolaris running on Sun Servers AND multiple 3rd-party x64/x86 systems.  OpenSolaris Subscription services include the:

1. OpenSolaris Essentials Subscription: 24x7 telephone support, online technical support and bug escalation services
   
2. OpenSolaris Production Subscription: 8x5 business hour and online technical support

If you are already a SunSpectrum System Plan customer, then OpenSolaris support is included with your System Service Plan.  Also, if you have a Solaris Subscription you are automatically entitled to the OpenSolaris Essentials service - pretty good deal if you ask me...

OpenSolaris Community Support:  So what about storage applications on OpenSolaris that are not part of the current OpenSolaris distribution/code base?  What if I am a developer and create a NEW storage application from the open storage offerings available to me?  This is where the Sun Developer Network (SDN) offers great support. Sign up to the Sun Developer Expert Assistance program for online support, technical assistance, code support, programming questions and diagnostic advice.  (You can even learn fun stuff like how to build an OpenSolaris NAS box in 5 easy steps!)

So, Sun has more than 7,000 employees dedicated to service and support - not all dedicated to Open Storage of course (I wish), but dedicated to storage, servers, software (commercial and open source!) and everything in between.  Sun's enterprise support offerings now cover open source software; and Sun has a strong and growing open source community that supports its open source initiatives worldwide.  Sun offers direct services in 55 countries and services in 160 countries either directly or through partners.    

 So hopefully some support questions were answered above - if not, pls comment and we'll see if we can find an answer...

Posted at 12:36PM May 28, 2008 by Taylor Allis in Storage Intelligence  |  Comments[0]

What is Open Storage? White Paper

Our Open Storage announcement drummed up interest in the industry - and for good reason...

• Tony Pearson at IBM related Open Storage to "Simply Dinners" - which is not a bad analogy.  I was thinking of the analogy of going to Home Depot or Lowe's vs. hiring a contractor for your house project - but Simply Dinners will do.  
  
• Marc Farley at Dell asked if Sun was giving up or changing the game?  I can assure you that we aren't giving up (storage is a pretty big market after all), but he nails it with his changing the game remarks - that's exactly what we are trying to do. 
  
• Lastly, EMC blogger Chuck Hollis aired his thoughts on Do-It-Yourself Storage, and we had a good discussion in the comments I thought.  (Until Chuck said I had turned from simply disagreeing to becoming disagreeable when I answered his questions on Open Storage - that ended that discussion!  Oh well, I guess he was trying to be rhetorical...) 

With that said - there is still a lot more to discuss about Open Storage.   We will have announcements upcoming, and we will also be publishing some White Papers on the subject. 

This first one is appropriately titled, What is Open Storage?  And it can be downloaded here:

• What is Open Storage? White Paper

I'll post the CliffsNotes below.  I would also like to thank Bruce Norikane, our Sr. Analyst, for his help in writing these papers - his intellect on storage infrastructures, past and present, is astounding.  I'd like to also thank or intelligence manager, Chris Ilg, for his forecasting work; as well as Graham Lovell, Jason Schaffer and our army of developers/engineers for their direction and edits (and leading the way to Open Storage...)

What is Open Storage?   (The short version)
Open Storage refers to open systems storage products based on industry-standard hardware and open source software.  Also, in an open storage architecture, customers can select the best hardware and software components for their individual needs.  By contrast, almost all modern disk arrays and NAS storage offerings are closed systems.

To see the evolution of disk architectures and benefits to Open Storage, see the blog post, "Sun is on to something"

Open Storage Versus Traditional Storage
The following chart compares vendor products, first ship dates, and storage system components. Red items are system components that are closed, proprietary, and available through a single vendor. Yellow items are built from industry-standard components yet sold as part of a closed, proprietary system. Green items are truly open components. They are industry-standard or open-source software, giving customers choice over how their systems are built.

Of significance, since 1992, storage systems have started to utilize open-source, commodity, or industry-standard technologies.  FreeBSD and Linux are used in several systems from vendors such as IBM, EMC, NetApp, and HP.  However, these open technologies are deployed in a closed-system approach.

Storage software is the last major storage infrastructure software to become open source, and Sun’s OpenSolaris Storage community has been leading the change.

Sun Open Storage Value Proposition 
The market shift to open storage systems and Sun’s open storage approach offer four distinct advantages:

1. A global development community working to make storage more innovative, functional and affordable
   
2. Breakthrough economics that can save storage users up to 90% over closed, proprietary storage
3. Enterprise-class quality storage systems that are reliable and offer some of the highest data integrity in the industry
4. The ability to easily and dynamically scale IT infrastructures to meet changing business needs
   

Sun Open Storage Offerings.

• Sun Open Storage Servers: The Sun Fire X4500 server leverages industry-standard hardware and software. It is a Dual-Core AMD Opteron processor-based server with 48 hot-swappable SATA drives in a single 4 U chassis that can achieve 48 TB of raw capacity with 1 TB SATA drives.
• Sun Open Storage Archive: The Sun StorageTek 5800 system also leverages industry standard components. It is the first integrated, fixed content archiving system built using open-source software.  In a recent InfoWorld product review, it scored perfect 10s in reliability and scalability.
• Sun Open Storage HPC: The Sun Constellation System builds on cost-effective, off-the-shelf components
  and state-of-the-art technologies to deliver an open, petascale architecture capable of up to 1.7 petaFLOPS of
  computing power.
• Lustre file system: Lustre is Sun’s open-source shared disk file system that is generally used for largescale
  cluster computing. The Lustre file system is currently used in 15% of the top 500 supercomputers in the world, and six of the top 10 supercomputers.
  
• Sun Open Storage Software: OpenSolaris is the cornerstone of Sun Open Storage offerings and provides a solid foundation as an open storage platform.  It includes:
• Solaris ZFS: ZFS can address 256 quadrillion zettabytes of storage and handle a maximum
  file size of 16 exabytes.
• Solaris DTrace: DTrace enables users to ask arbitrary diagnostic questions of the storage subsystem
• Solaris Fault Management Architecture: Solaris Fault Management Architecture provides automatic monitoring and diagnosis of I/O subsystems and hardware faults
• Sun StorageTek Availability Suite: Sun AVS delivers open-source remote-mirror-copy and point-in-time-copy applications as well as a collection of supporting software and utilities.

Posted at 01:00PM May 15, 2008 by Taylor Allis in Storage Intelligence  |  Comments[4]

An Easier Storage Platform - OpenSolaris

With data growth, higher energy costs and the emergence of Web 2.0 applications that demand scalable storage at low costs - vendors, end users and market analysts are focusing more on storage architectures.  Storage economics need to change - a fundamental change that can only happen at the infrastructure level.  

Key to any system is the operating system or platform.  OSes obviously hold tremendous importance when evaluating servers - what type of OS and applications are supported?  Historically, the underlying OS has not mattered as much in storage.  Or at least compatibility and interoperability has mattered more.  As long as my storage supports a Mainframe/Unix/Linux/Windows environment, what do I care about the OS?

Storage Platforms
In the open systems market today, the storage OS matters more than ever before.  Adding data services at the OS level can change storage economics and increase storage performance and efficiency.   Using a common storage platform can save on training and admin costs.  Using an open source OS can speed innovation, increase flexibility and save on software costs.

HP is using Windows Storage Server as a storage platform; EMC is leveraging the economics and flexibility of Linux inside its Centera archive product; and NetApp has built its own storage platform - Data ONTAP (originally leveraging FreeBSD open source code).

Sun offers Solaris and OpenSolaris (to see the difference b/w the two, click here). OpenSolaris is the platform for Sun's Open Storage offerings which provides open access to developers (something the storage platforms or implementations mentioned above do not...)

An Easier OpenSolaris
Today Sun announced an easy-to-use OpenSolaris at the 2008 CommunityOne Developer conference.   There are several benefits to using OpenSolaris and ZFS as a storage platform - built-in data integrity, snapshot software, volume management and software RAID being a few.  But one request the developer community had of OpenSolaris was ease of use - easier to get, install, use, maintain and support.  Especially compared to Linux in the open source realm. 

Today's announcement is just that - it comes from "Project Indiana" which has been underway for the past year after Ian Murdock joined Sun.  Ian is the former Linux Foundation CTO and Debian founder (one of the first Linux distributions.)

So what makes this OpenSolaris distribution easier?  An easier to use environment based on GNU-based utilities that's currently leveraged in the GNOME desktop and other applications (See Disk Usage Analyzer screen shot to right).  ZFS is also the default root file system now - and as mentioned above, ZFS has some pretty innovative features including a "rollback" option where you can essentially do a "Ctrl-Z" if a software installation or update goes bad.  OpenSolaris also includes a new Image Packaging System (IPS) software which enables easier access and downloads to a full suite of additional software.  Software updates have also been made easier.

OpenSolaris Support
Of course support is always a large question around anything open source.  Sun offers enterprise support for Solaris; support for its commercial storage products built from open storage components; and now Sun will offer two OpenSolaris subscription support offerings beginning May 13.  OpenSolaris Production Subscription Support will include 24x7 telephone support, online technical support and bug escalation services.   OpenSolaris Essential Subscription Support will include 8x5 business hour online technical support. 

OpenSolaris as a Storage Platform
It seems today there are three viable platforms to base a storage platform on that will stand the test of time - Linux, Windows and Solaris.   Sun and its community have invested heavily in Solaris as a storage platform - and even some die-hard Linux developers are noticing:

DigiTar is a Linux advocate, but when it came to storage they choose Solaris.  In his blog, DigiTar COO/CTO says, "it was storage that brought Solaris into our environment and continues to drive it deeper into our services stack.  Which begs the question: Why?  Isn't DTrace just as cool as ZFS?   Haven't Solaris Containers dramatically changed the way we provision and utilize systems?  Sure...but storage is what drives our business and it doesn't seem to me that we're alone." 

When the Linux developers at Nexenta decided to build "Enterprise Class Storage for Everyone" they choose OpenSolaris as their storage platform.   They could only accomplish their storage goals through Solaris.

The fact that OpenSolaris is getting easier to use is good for developers, the community and ultimately to customers.  Ease-of-use in addition to enterprise quality, data integrity and data services is a powerful combination....

---- Update ----

We announced that OpenSolaris can be run in a virtual computing environment (aka the cloud)!  See Jonathan's blog and the OpenSolaris service offered on Amazon EC2...

Posted at 03:44PM May 05, 2008 by Taylor Allis in Storage Intelligence  |  Comments[3]

Sun is on to something - Open Storage

I freely admit, when Sun announced its open source storage community a year go I was a skeptic.  Sure, open source has its play in software and servers - but storage?  

Well, after a year of watching Sun's open storage investments, industry-standard hardware used in enterprise storage and working within Sun on today's announcement - Sun Extends World's First Open Storage Platform - I think Sun is on to something...

Also read all about Sun Open Storage here.... 

I'll make a brief case for open storage and Sun's leadership in it here.   We have also developed a series of open storage White Papers that give more detail on the below info - I'll post them here.  

What is Open Storage? 

Here is a simple definition:  Open storage is the combination of open source software with industry-standard hardware to create enterprise-class storage systems

Open source software like Linux or OpenSolaris OS.  Open source applications like MySQL database software.  And Sun has been one of the first companies to break the barrier with higher-level open source storage applications which include:

• Volume Management
• Snapshot, Data Mirroring and Replication
• Hierarchal Storage Management (HSM)
• Fixed Content Archive
  
• And one of the most advanced file systems on the planet - ZFS (Which includes advanced software RAID, data integrity, self-healing and storage management services) 
  

Industry-standard hardware is typically available through multiple vendors and is very price-competitive.  Examples include x86 servers and standard FC/SATA/SAS disk drives.  One could also include LTO tape because it is an industry-standard tape technology - but I'll primarily focus on disk systems, as this is the market that will be most impacted by open storage. 

In an open storage architecture, the customer selects the best hardware and software for the job.  In contrast, almost all of today's disk arrays and NAS appliances are closed - customers are locked into using the vendor's disk drives, controllers and proprietary software. 

The irony being that a lot of closed systems are built from open source software and industry-standard hardware - helping vendor margins but not customer budgets     

The Evolution of disk Architectures  

Our brilliant disk analyst, Bruce Norikane, also points out that industry disk systems have been evolving to more open architectures over time and with each new market introduction.  A similar trend has also happened in the server market.  Consider the graphic below:   

Early disk systems were custom, proprietary engineering projects starting with IBM's SLED (Single Large Expensive Disk)  in 1956 where everything was custom.  Then in the 1980's a high-volume disk market emerged thanks to PCs and servers; and in the 1990's Enterprise RAID was adopted.  Enterprise RAID incorporated a custom disk controller and these new market drives.  Modular storage then hit the market, consisting of a separate controller and disk enclosures that fit in a standard rack - more flexible and affordable.  Most recently we have seen the RAIN (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Nodes) architecture emerge - distributed storage based on server technologies offering better scalability at a better price point.  RAIN architectures are largely based on industry-standard servers, operating systems and networks.  However, while RAIN systems leverage open components, they tend to be build as closed systems with locked-in components from traditional vendors.

The next logical step is open storage - industry-standard hardware and open source software that drive down storage economics and spur greater innovation.  Again, this storage systems evolution is not unlike what happened in the server world - where servers were large, proprietary and expensive years ago. Smaller, industry-standard servers and open source software changed the economics in the server market - and they are doing the same thing to storage.

Why Open Storage?   

Four reasons:

1. Enterprise-class storage:  Systems that offer as much or more quality, reliability and data integrity as closed systems.  Sounds like a stretch?  Just see the InfoWorld review of Sun's x86, SATA, open source software-based archive solution.  It scored perfect 10s in reliability and scalability.  Let's also not forget that ZFS offers 19 9s of data integrity with predictive, self-healing features.          

2. An Open Storage Software Community:   This is important if you are a developer, a company that has developers or a company that is planning on hiring developers to differentiate through IT.  When we launched OpenSolaris Storage last year we had only a handful of open source projects - we now have over 30.  The OpenSolaris community has more than 96,000 registered members in all.  Why is this important?  Customers don't have to wait on a vendor for the features they need - they can find new innovations in the community or develop features themselves.  Innovation is not held back by vendor objectives or limited R&D budgets...  

3. Breakthrough Economics:  Probably the most compelling argument for open storage and why open storage is needed today.   The best way to understand how open storage can impact storage economics is through an overly-simplistic diagram of a closed system:

Now consider an open storage architecture:

In a nutshell, storage applications are free from licensing costs and open to developers.  Open storage users can choose the platform their IT staff is most familiar with.   An industry-standard server with ZFS (which again includes RAID, data management and data integrity features) can take the place on an expensive controller.   And affordable, market-priced disks can be deployed under the system - even fast and cheap JBOD if you leverage ZFS.

To see the real-world impact we compared some closed systems vs. open systems using Ideas International pricing:

In full disclosure, these are US list prices.  We did configure every system to be as close in capacity as possible using affordable SATA drives in most every configuration.  And finally, certain applications, features and environments simply must run higher-end arrays today - I am not implying that everyone throw out their closed storage and go with 100% open.  But at this economic price difference - users will be compelled to determine which applications and which data should migrate to more open storage - and we presume the data center mix of open vs. closed storage will change over time.         

You can also read about the open storage impact in the VTL space here...

4. Dynamic Scalability: Lastly, the ability to dynamically and efficiently scale to meet today's huge data demand has become business critical, especially with emerging Web 2.0 applications.  Sun sells systems that scale from less than 10TB to greater than 100PBs.   And OpenSolaris ZFS is a 128-bit file system that provides 16 billion, billion times (yes you read that right) the capacity of 32-bit or even 64-bit file systems. 

Sun Open Storage 

Sun offers every component of open storage:  A tried-and-tested enterprise platform in OpenSolaris, the leading HPC file system Lustre, and the open source storage applications mentioned above.  Sun also offers a complete portfolio of innovative and efficient industry-standard servers and storage. 

Sun has, and will announce, storage systems built on an open storage platform as well - Sun Fire X4500 and Sun StorageTek 5800 are Sun's first products built on a truly open storage platform. 

Sun also offers open storage services and resources through its community :

• Learn how to build a Storage Server in 10 minutes or less here
• Build a simple NAS appliance using Sun Open Storage components here 

Sun Open Storage Customers

More compelling than anything I can write is what our customers say about Sun and open storage:

DigiTar
DigiTar provides advanced messaging security and processing services over the Internet.  They are using the opensolaris, Solaris ZFS and Sun Fire X4500's.  Jason Williams is DigiTar's COO/CTO and highlights his expereince with Sun open storage in his blogpost Democratizing Storage.  Even though the DigiTar team is self-described as “Linux zealots,” OpenSolaris was brought in because it made a superior storage platform.  Some of my favorite quotes are below:

“That’s the really amazing thing about OpenSolaris as a storage platform. It has all of the features of an expensive array and because it allows you to build reliable storage out of commodity components, you can build the storage architecture you need instead of being held hostage by the one you can afford.”

“When you’ve got rock-solid iSCSI, NFS, and I/O multipathing implementations, as well as a file system (ZFS) that loves cheap disks…and none of it requires licensing…you can suddenly do anything.  Need to handle 3600 non-cached IOPs for under $60K? No problem. Have an existing array but can’t justify $10K for snapshotting? No problem. How ‘bout serving line-rate iSCSI with commodity storage and CPUs? No problemo.” 

“By using X4500s, we get the same reliability and redundancy for about 85% less cost. That kind of savings means we can deploy 6.8x more storage for the same price footprint and do all sorts of cool things..."

Nexenta
Nexenta has built its NexentaOS and NexentaStor software appliance on Sun open storage products – OpenSolaris and ZFS.  This is significant, as the Nexenta team developed an iSCSI stack that was adopted by the Linux community.  Nexenta's team choose OpenSolaris for their storage platform to actually build a new NAS appliance.  Nexenta's NexentaStor offering is a software-based NAS and iSCSI solution - read about it here.  There is also an excellent blog on ZFS and Nexenta here.   

TACC 
Open Storage also has a large play in HPC - consider one of the world's largest supercomputer built from Sun's open storage, servers and traditional storage offerings.  TACC's Ranger system will be used in computational science & technology research.  Ranger runs 3,936 nodes and 62,976 processing cores; has 23TB of memory and 504TFlops at peak performance; and uses 1.73PB of shared disk and 31.4TB of local disk.  Ranger uses Lustre file system running across 72 Sun Fire X4500 servers. For long-term data retention and archive, Ranger runs Sun StorageTek SAM software over six metadata servers - and deploys five Sun StorageTek SL8500 libraries with 48 StorageTek T10000 tape drives.  Ranger will scale to over 3.1PB of online storage and 200PB of near-line storage. 

From a simple NAS appliance to one of the world's largest supercomputers - open storage scales!

You can read more user case studies below: 

• The University of Oxford is storing 19th century works with the ST5800
  
• Gracenote uses Sun Fire X4500's for its mobile music services
• Web 2.0 SaaS provider Sapotek says, "The ZFS file system feature of the Solaris 10 OS is a marvel. It creates a common storage pool where all storage performs as fast as if it were local. Our administrators can grow, add or remove storage on the fly in a single step. Just 2 people administer 24 terabytes.”
  

What about Sun's other Storage offerings? 

I invariably get this question when we highlight one architecture or approach.  So, to be clear - Sun sells closed systems too...and we sell a lot of them.  We now sell both depending on customer needs.  But we see the need for open storage - and we are investing in it while other vendors are not.  We are also investing in our traditional storage products - our customers deploy a mix of storage architectures depending on their needs - so Sun sells both.  Lastly, you can't claim breakthrough economics without leveraging tape in your portfolio.  If you want to hear about Sun's tape commitments, read about my trip down to Imation. 

But as far as open storage goes, I think Sun is on to something...

---- Updates ---- 

Other Open Storage Blogs: 

• Bob Porras says Open Storage IS the news...
• Lynn Rohrer's Community Perspective 
  
• Jeff interviews Sun Open Storage customers Nexenta and LiveAmmo

Posted at 07:19AM Apr 29, 2008 by Taylor Allis in Storage Intelligence  |  Comments[2]

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]

Honeycomb is sticky sweet (and Open...)

In my last post I illustrated Sun's economic advantage with a system similar to the competition, but consuming 16% less power in 73% less space. (Built from the Sun Fire X4500)

I'm happy to post a recent InfoWorld product review on another Sun product, the ST5800 (aka Honeycomb).  Read it here: Sun's StorageTek Honeycomb is sticky and sweet

Open storage: One thing these two systems have in common is that they are truly "open" storage.  Now there are a lot of different meanings to the term open - so when I use it with storage I primarily think of two items: Industry standard hardware coupled with open source software.  (one could also add open standards to the term). 

Truly open storage systems like the products mentioned above are hitting the storage market.  And for good reason.   Open saves cost - from software licensing fees to the use of volume components.  Open is more flexible - developers can build applications directly in the system itself (which also allows a "product" to be re-built or re-purposed into another "product" as business needs change.)

Web applications: Open storage allows for mass customization as well as massive scalability at economics that make sense for today's "Web 2.0" applications. 

One of the most revealing analyst statistics I have read was from IDC's White Paper titled: The Expanding Digital Universe: A Forecast of Worldwide Information Growth Through 2010.  In it, IDC predicts that 70% of the new digital data (988 exabytes) in the year 2010 will be created by individuals.  But 85% of this data will be managed by enterprises or organizations.   As I write this blog (content generated by me, stored and protected by Sun IT) Technorati cites 112.8 million blogs with 175,000 new blogs added every day...with 1.6 million new posts each day or 18 updates per second! 

Traditional closed storage architectures do well supporting a lot of enterprise IT applications (I  know because Sun sells them).  But new, more open architectures are needed to match the data growth rates and trends the market is currently seeing. 

And that's what Sun is building - and what Honeycomb is.  We launched our open source developer community for storage back in April.  We donated Honeycomb digital content (fixed archiving) code to this community last month.   And now InfoWorld has put this new open storage system to the test. 

Some Honeycomb Review Highlights: 
Honeycomb scored a 9.3 out of 10, with perfect 10s in Reliability and Scalability.  Here was the InfoWorld reviewer, Senior Analyst Mario Apicella's, bottom line:

"...Impressive resilience together with excellent performance and powerful administrative tools make “Honeycomb” one of the most interesting solutions in the emerging fixed-content archiving space. With a foot in the open source community, Honeycomb promises to deliver more software features faster than competing proprietary solutions, and customers that can’t wait have an easy and free alternative with a flexible SDK."

On Honeycomb's differentiation & open architecture:

"Sun has taken a different approach to companion software than vendors such as EMC, Hitachi, and HP, which have married their fixed-content archiving solutions to compliance applications...Sun has not wedded Honeycomb to any specific application, leaving that task to partners and customers. The upside of Honeycomb's openness is that the possibilities are endless. In fact, Honeycomb's powerful, built-in administrative software is complemented by an SDK that allows Java or C developers to define their own metadata schemas consistent with the specifics of their application."

On Honeycomb being a new breed of storage:

"Conventional NAS simply isn't designed for long-term archiving. The typical NAS would choke under the load of storing multiple large objects at the same time, and it would die with its third consecutive drive failure. Honeycomb addresses the performance and resilience requirements of content archiving with a new architecture. Unlike plain NAS solutions -- and fixed-content archiving solutions built on conventional storage systems (think EMC Centera) -- it's made for the job."

Expect more open storage products coming from Sun.  In this new Web 2.0/digital data world,  Sun storage (to quote Mario) will be "made for the job."

Posted at 01:58PM Mar 24, 2008 by Taylor Allis in Storage Intelligence  |  Comments[0]

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]

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
• Configuration includes 5 StorageTek SL8500s (not pictured), 48 StorageTek T10000, 3 ST6540s and 6 Sun Fire Metadata servers running SAM-FS
  

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 --------

• TACC calls Sun's Constellation System "Ranger" and it is up and running.  See Marc Hamilton's Blog for More Ranger Facts and Figures
  

Posted at 04:25PM Feb 06, 2008 by Taylor Allis in Storage Intelligence  |  Comments[1]

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[3]

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:

• MySQL Press Kit
• Johnathan helps dolphin's fly
  
• Simon swims with the Dolphins
  
• MySQL Audiocast
  

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]

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.   

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]