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
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]
Working smarter with Wikis
I attended a Manager's Meeting where the theme was "Work smarter, not harder." So I have to put my plug in for how Web 2.0 technology is helping my team work smarter.
One division I manage is Competitive Intelligence. But don't let the term "division" fool you to its size - for we only have 2.5 senior analysts in it (one is shared with another line of business).
So, these 2.5 analysts have to support Sun's entire WW sales force (thousands) on competitive deals against all of Sun's storage products (hundreds). Yet most of us get to go home after 5/6pm. How is this possible???
Three ways:
- Hire smart people: I'd bet my entire salary that Mike Brown, Chris Ilg and Bruce Norikane are the smartest competitive analysts in the industry. They can support deals and talk storage strategy in their sleep.
- Prioritize: We do it by tiering products and competitors. If a tier 1 request comes in - we're on it.
- Our Wiki!
Wiki? I bore some people on how I drone on about our Wiki (if you are inside Sun, you can access our Wiki here). We use it to self-publish our sales & marketing
support content.
And we have been successful...the month we launched it we received 1,181 hits. As of this post, we have received 11,859 hits. (That's 904% growth in 5 months!)
But what drove me to write this blog post in the first place was a sales support request that came to my group:
A Sun pre-sales engineer in the U.S. recently asked us for support in
selling Sun StorageTek VTL against a competitive product. Before we could field the request, a sales rep in Sweden responded by forwarding him to our Wiki (which is pictured & had the info he needed to win the deal)
So, here are the stats on this single sales support transaction:
- U.S. pre-sales engineer sends competitive support request
- Request answered in 11 minutes (our SLA with the field is to respond within 24hrs btw)
- 0% of my analyst's time used in the transaction
Posted at 03:53PM Sep 05, 2007 by Taylor Allis in Storage Intelligence | Comments[2]
Redshift Storage...
In astronomy, "redshift" refers to when the Sun's light is reflected off of an object and is shifted towards the red end of the electromagnetic spectrum. Our CTO Greg Papadopoulos described what Redshift means to Sun Microsystems and its customers at the '07 Sun Analyst Summit.
In a nutshell, Redshift refers to a segment of IT users applications whose computing needs far outstrip Moore's Law (i.e. the doubling of transistors every 18 months). While processing power is adequate for some of today's applications, a segment of customer applications need more than what Moore's delivers.
The Redshift segment includes last-mile bandwidth provider applications (BW), high-performance computing (HPC) applications and on-demand Internet application providers (*Prise). Sun is meeting the Redshift need through projects like multiprocessing, crossbow and multithreaded networking cards. The illustration below shows Moore's Law and where our Core customers (Green Line) sit vs. our emerging Redshift Customers (Red Line).
So what about Redshift Storage?
To see the relation between Core and Redshift customers, applications and their Storage needs, we drafted a model "borrowing" Greg's methodology - but using Storage numbers:
Moore's Law for Storage: This has been mapped in terms of Hard Drive Capacity, but let's use the same method as the diagram above. All those 1Ms and 100Ks are actually how many MIPS (million instructions per second) a customer could buy for $1,000 USD at a given point in time.
To determine "Moore's Law for Storage" let's look at how many Gigabytes (GB) customers could buy for $1,000 over time. (And since Tape and RAID storage differ in price and density, let's look at both lines over time):
Core Storage Demand: Now we need the Core customer demand line, the Green line. To best capture demand, let's look at a metric that sums up what our customers deal with every day - "How much storage can a singe IT administrator manage?" Fortunately, Horison Information Strategies tracks such a metric. So below is our new chart - with Moore's law vs. Core demand: (We added the Tape and RAID "blue" lines together for simplicity)
The Information Management Gap: The most interesting difference is that the Core "green" line is below Moore's line in Computing; but the Core line is above Moore's line in Storage. Simply put, Storage technology has not kept up with Core storage demand. This constitutes the Information Management Gap - customers need to manage more storage, but storage technology has not kept pace with the explosive amount of data the world is generating (ever heard that one before?). Also, when you look at our emerging Redshift customer applications - needs are even greater:
So what's the Solution? A great first step for anyone everyone struggling with Information Management would be to simply determine how equipped a "data center" is in managing data.
This current market trend has also brought terms like "virtualization", "partitioning" and "volume management" to the top of IT manager's minds: Storage Virtualization helps grow systems without disrupting operations and Virtual Tape speeds backup and recovery without changing backup infrastructures. Technologies like Thin Provisioning help utilize more in a storage system. In addition, file systems are gaining more and more data management features that help IT admins with Information Management.
But the intersection between Information Management and core storage needs like application support, data protection, business continuance and archive requirements is where customers need the most help - We'll cover what Sun is doing in these areas in later blogs...
(Inside Sun, see our Redshift Storage Wiki)
Posted at 05:54PM Jun 08, 2007 by Taylor Allis in Storage Intelligence | Comments[2]
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