Last week, Rickatron and I had the privilege of having Dr Garth Gibson, the co-inventor of RAID technology, on the Deep Dive podcast.

To say that Garth is a legend of the technology world is an understatement. 

I’m posting this here in case anybody reading this site doesn’t know about the podcasts that I do over at http://infosmackpodcasts.com.  Hopefully the show is a great listen and may be something that you can listen to on a drive/flight/train home for the Christmas holidays (for those of us who celebrate Christmas).

I’ve not had a chance to listen to the show myself yet, but we touched on some cracking technology topics when recording.  Garth’s insight is tremendous.  This guy is thinking way way ahead and is extremely switched on.

Some of the topics we covered included -

• Future of RAID (obviously)
• Future of solid state storage
• Future of magnetic recording media – rotating rust
• Sub-LUN tiering
• Commodity Hardware with all of the smarts in software
• The rise of less and less reliable technology
• Parallel NFS (pNFS)
• Securing storage
• Technology predictions for 2012

The show is about 55 minutes long, and Rick and I did our best to raid this guys massive brain.  No small task.

Enjoy listening.

DON'T MISS AN EPISODE – SUBSCRIBE FOR FREE!

• Subscribe through iTunes
• Subscribe through Google (Android users should also install Listen)

…or click to download this podcast

Setting the Scene

I’m not a fan of taking a legacy array technologies and shoe-horning them full of SSD. Frankenstorage springs to mind!

I am, however, slightly more of a fan of technologies like Violin Memory and Kaminario (to name just a couple). 

However, what I’ve seen at HP Discover has the potential, in my opinion, to make even the likes of todays Violin Memory and Kaminario arrays look legacy, very soon.

Let me take a really quick minute to set the scene…… it wont take long….

In many ways I like Violin Memory.  It’s been designed, almost from the ground up with SSD in mind – definitely not a technology designed for rotating rust and then fudged or butchered for SSD.  Take the lid off one and you’ll see exactly what I mean. 

It looks like a lot of thought and design effort has gone in to it.  And the technologist inside of me likes that.  However,………. I wonder if it’s too custom and too proprietary to live and thrive in todays market?  Todays market demanding commodity and all that jazz!

On the other hand there is Kaminario.  These guys take standard off-the-shelf Dell blade systems, off-the-shelf Fusion-io cards, layer some clever software on the top and out pops a high performance SSD array.  Ticks the commodity-is-king and software-is-everything checkboxes, but has its drawbacks.  Servicing the Fusion-io cards is clunky and requires you to crack the lid of the blade server open (never good in Tier 1 production data centres).

Doing things properly

So what I saw at HP Discover could well be the future of SSD and SSD arrays, and it goes by the name of SCSI Express.

SCSI Express is a protocol that is currently being independently standardised under part of INCITS T10 by the SOP-PQI Working Group and the SCSI Trade Association, with involvement from SFF Committee and PCI-SIG.  Quite a crew and quite a project, but it was suggested to me that it might be standardised in six or so months.

SCSI Express enables SCSI over PCIe (SOP), and under the hood it is a SCSI initiator talking to a SCSI target over PCIe via PQI. 

PQI stands for PCIe architecture Queueing Interface which is a flexible and extensible transport layer that is very fast and lightweight.  I’m told that it leverages the best from some of the existing proprietary SCSI over PCIe solutions available from companies such as PMC, LSI, Marvell and even HP.  The difference being that PQI and SCSI Express are being developed as open standards rather than being proprietary to the above mentioned companies.  Existing SCSI over PCI protocols such as MPI from PMC are found in silicon in most of the array controllers we see in the world today including EMC, NetApp, Hitachi…

Blah blah blah…. but what does this all mean?

Well, here we have a protocol and interface that is being designed especially for high speed SSD, not spinning rust!

Might not sound much, but when you look at some of the legacy architectures that we are currently bolting SSD drives to (it’s not uncommon to stick an SSD capable of 40,000 IOPs in an array with a backend that can support only a fraction of that) it starts to bring this into perspective.  Todays SSD drives are severely hamstrung by the legacy architectures we bolt them to and it verges on a crime to do such.

SCSI Express will release the shackles.  It will allow you to take a hot-plug 2.5-inch form factor SSD and install it into a 2.5-inch form factor drive bay on the front of an industry standard server, just like we do with hot-plug drives today.  The major difference being that the SSD won’t be hamstrung by SAS or SATA.  The drive will mate with a specially designed, but industry standard, interface that will talk a specially designed, but again industry standard, protocol (the protocol enhances the SCSI command set for SSD) with standard drivers that will ship with future versions of major Operating Systems like Windows, Linux and ESXi.

On the topic of hot-pluggable, I’m led to believe that this is not very robust on PCIe as we know it today.  However, it’s doable and the guys at HP Discover told me that this should be standardised and available by the time this is productised (somewhere around the end of 2012.

The Future of SSD Arrays

So, again, in my humble opinion, the future of SSD arrays is unlikely to look like a VMAX, VNX or even VSP……  Nor is it going to look like a Violin Memory array. 

In my opinion it is going to look like an HP Proliant, Cisco UCS…. name your industry standard off the shelf x86 server, crammed full of industry standard form-factor hot-pluggable SSD drives, running SCSI over PCIe with all of the smarts and clevers in software on top o VMware (sorry couldn’t resist throwing the VMware comment in). 

Seriously though, I can see it.  While I love SSD and some of the SSD arrays out there, I’ve has always felt like there is something not quite right about them.  I think SCSI Express/SOP is the missing magic!

And when these products ship and change the world, I plan on putting my feet up and retiring, as this will clearly solve every problem that the storage world has or ever will have!

Prototype at HP Discover

The concept box on display at Discover is an early prototype, but was an HP ProLiant server with an early Fusion-io 2.5-inch SSD drive connected to the PCIe bus (I know its not really a bus) via an SFF 8639 backplane connector (PCIe 12Gbps 6 lane).  However, this is also doable over PCIe cable implementations. 

In the prototype unit at HP Discover, the SCSI Express drives connected to the PCIe bus and bypassed the HP RAID controller similar to the picture below. 

This kind of implementation leaves a at least a couple of options when it comes to RAID - 

1. Have RAID implemented higher up the stack and utilising CPU cycles (the dreaded software RAID).
2. develop newer RAID controllers with SCSI Express and SCSI over PCIe in mind

RAID………….. now there’s another technology that could do with being brought in to the 21st Century!  but that’s another conversation.

The plug for mating with the server is SFF 8639 and the current board connects to the server via the SAS cables.

Footnote: To SCSI or not to SCSI

Interestingly, the somewhat competing standard of NVM Express is looking to do its magic without SCSI.  A bit bolder, but I have to wonder how much harder?

Half of me would love to get rid of SCSI and the legacy that it brings.  But then again three quarters of me would have liked to see Ethernet replaced with something like Infiniband.  Ethernet clearly isn’t going anywhere and I my head tells me SCSI isn’t either.  Too deeply entrenched.

On the positive side though, SCSI is battle hardened and well understood.

Footnote: Competing Standard NVM Express and EMC

No storage futures story is complete without mentioning EMC. Sorry HP and the rest of the storage industry but I like to be honest.

Interestingly EMC are not on the list of companies behind SCSI Express.  But they are on the list of those behind NVMe!

As we know, EMC are one of the biggest families in the storage Mafia, and they have significant influence over VMware, one of the biggest families in the technology Mafia.  Now, in mind (where 2+2=33) having the daddy of the storage industry behind NVMe, coupled with the interesting noises that VMware has been making about the future of storage, I can’t stop my mind running wild with what they might be up to…. I would it even put it beyond then to be planning the death of SCSI!

Anyway, enough for now.  Thoughts and comments mandatory

With that in mind, the Infosmack Deep Dive team have worked extremely hard to put together 1 hour and 15 minutes of no nonsense deep dive podcasting with some of the most recognised experts on the topics.  We’ve done our best to cut through the crap and deliver technical content that you will find hard to find anywhere else.

If you want to know the craic with vSphere 5, this is the best place to find it…

In the show we cover what we feel are the hottest topics, and we spend time on them.  Topics such as -

• Virtual Hardware version 8
• Storage DRS
• The new HA engine
• VMFS 5
• 64TB LUNs
• ESXi
• Virtual Center 5

Joining us on the show this week we have some of most recognised professionals and experts on the topics -

Frank Denneman – Consultant Architect at VMware

Duncan Epping – Principal Architect at VMware

It’s fair to say that Duncan and Frank wrote the bible on VMware HA, DRS and Clustering.  There first book VMware vSphere 4.1 HA and DRS Technical Deepdive is honestly one of the best tech books I own.  And I’ve ordered my copy of their new book – VMware vSphere 5 Clustering Technical Deepdive.

Michael Heffernan – Chief Technologist at HDS.  Heff is responsible for HDS integration with hypervisor products and has some deep hooks in to VMware.

Add to the above, Rick Vanover and myself and we have a team of people doing our absolute best to give the information that you want!

I hope you enjoy the show and learn something. I did.

Listen to the show via the player below, or visit Infosmackpodcasts.com

If you enjoy the show, we have plenty more planned and plenty more already on the shelf an waiting to be listened to.  Go see for yourself at Infosmackpodcasts.com.

As you might expect, the HP guys were top notch engineers, the type I could spend all day talking to.  While we were chatting, they were obviously passionate about the involvement HP engineers and architects in the design of the XP/P9500 (HDS VSP).  However, they also threw out some shots at EMC.  And not wanting to simply swallow what they feed me, I thought I’d open up the debate on here in case anybody has any opinions…..

First up, a quick picture of the P9500 that HP had on display on the show floor –

EMC FAST is Apparently Based on a an HP Research Paper

Ayman Abouelwafa, Array Lead Architect for the XP and P9000 system at HP Storage told me about a paper he wrote and published back in 2007.  The paper was posted on Research Disclosure website in 2008 and outlines at a high level what we generally refer to as sub-LUN tiering today.  Such technologies can be found in most major storage arrays on the market today, but not back then. 

NOTE: Apparently all major technology companies have free logins to this website, I don’t but I have managed to obtain a copy of the paper, it is titled Thin Provisioning with Native Hierarchical Storage Management and the link to a copy I’m hosting on my website can be found here. 

Apparently due to some political reasons within HP at the time (cutting back on R&D and investment in such things etc) HP never did anything with the work.  However, and this is the interesting part…… Ayman firmly believes that EMC took this paper and based their FAST/FAST VP technology on it.  A bold claim I know, but Ayman is adamant.  And anyone who knows Ayman knows that while he is technically as sharp as just about anyone, he is also passionate and doesn’t hold back with his opinions.

Now I personally have no idea if this happened, however, the paper is a short but interesting read, and I would recommend it to anyone specialising in the HP XP/P9500 or HDS VSP.

After finishing up at HP Discover (which by the way was an excellent event) it was time to grab a taxi and head to the airport to fly home.

Taxi!

This is a ~10 minute off the cuff audio podcast hosted on Chris’s website – Click here to jump to Chris’s site where you can listen to the podcast.

With this in mind I’ve put myself about as much as possible, including gate crashing David Scott’s (SVP of HP Storage) lunch table and firing every question I could think of at him…

NOTE: In the interests of disclosure, HP have paid for my travel, hotel and some of my food while attending HP Discover. However, the cheapscates only paid for me to fly in economy class. Something tells me Dave Donatelli and David Scott dont fly such distances in economy class!  Anyway….

Why I’m Sceptical about HP and Storage

Experience has led me to the point where I don’t trust HP with storage.  For as long as I can remember, storage been to be a very poor relation in the HP family.  I have also been pretty unimpressed with the way HP handled EVA after the Compaq acquisition/merge.  EVA is a great technology that was way ahead of its time, but HP’s handling of it was nothing short of a train wreck.

  5th Gen EVA in all her glory

Where HP Storage is Today

There is little doubt that HP have modern and innovative storage technologies – not least among these are the technologies they have acquired – LeftHand, IBRIX and 3PAR.  And personally I feel that some of these are best of breed.  But even those that I don’t consider best of breed are still noteworthy technologies with a ton of potential.

Modern architectures matter.  They enable faster speed to market for new features and tend to better address today’s modern business workloads and demands

Best of breed matters.  You’d have to be crazy not to deploy on best of breed.

So that’s a tick in the technology box.

But they need a lot more than just the technology….

HP StorageWorks becomes HP Storage

David Scott, former CEO of 3PAR, now heads up the HP Storage business.  And I can vouch that there are no flies on him, he understands technology and storage, oh and business.

As a side note, HP have retired the StorageWorks brand in favour of simply HP Storage.  A good move, considering it has not had the reputation its engineers deserved for a very long tim.  However, it will take a hell of a lot more than a simple name change.

Having David Scott at the helm of the good ship HP Storage is a good thing and HP will do well to keep him.  He came across as hugely passionate about the 3PAR product and its future, and seemed genuinely excited about the future for HP Storage.  And importantly, In his own words, he is “calling the shots in HP Storage”.  After the conversation with David I felt reassured that HP plan on exploiting the full potential of the 3PAR technology.

David talked of plans for native peer based federation.  This is already available on LeftHand  and is being worked on in 3PAR.  At a high level (and no details were revealed) it sounds like this will be co-operation/teaming of peer arrays, without the need for an additional appliance such as VPLEX (the last bit about VPLEX was confirmed by David Scott).  This type of technology promises to be huge! 

Talk is cheap, but it sounds like HP are committed to keeping 3PAR best of breed, building on its best in class extent/page based architecture and leading Thin Provisioning technology, and adding peer based federation..

HP Storage Leadership Team

David also mentioned that following the acquisition of 3PAR, HP have managed to hang on to most of the original 3PAR engineering team.  This is crucial as well as a sign that the passionate 3PAR engineering team believe that HP will do the right thing with their creation.  This apparently did not happen with the EVA engineers and is one of many reasons EVA stalled while under HP’s command.

Sticking to the people theme, David reports in to Dave Donatelli, former Chief Sitting Bull of all things Symmetrix at EMC. Donatelli’s storage pedigree is clearly not in question. Nor is his reputation as a ruthless task master and man who gets results.  He has a reputation of getting results and that’s a good thing for HP Storage.

People and Good leaders matter. HP Storage has the right people at the top and leading from the front.

Scott also talked about important changes that have been made to the sales structure within HP.  Changes that mean key people report in to Donatelli, allowing Donatelli to keep the sales folks focussed.  While boring and not technical, things like this are crucial, especially to massive organisations like HP.  If the sales force aren’t on song then it doesn’t matter how good your tech or your strategy is, you will fail.

Marketing

I don’t think HP has good marketing, and marketing is important.  It pains me to say it, but in today’s world good marketing is as important, if not more important, than good engineering.

Like it or not, this matter A LOT!  I’m not convinced that HP has good marketing, so this will need to be addressed.

In Summary

Talk is cheap and everything looks good on PowerPoint.  But I came here to see what HP are doing to sharpen up their storage act.  I can honestly say that I am coming away from the event really impressed.

HP have the technology, the leadership, the engineers, the focus, the vision.  And they sure as hell have the wonga! 

However, executing in the field is hard,  and it takes a lot of effort to turn a big tanker like HP. But the ship appears to be turning, and oh my goodness….. if they start executing, they could shake this market up like nobody else!

On the other hand, they could stutter on as they have in the past and remain an also-ran in the high margin storage business.

Thoughts and comments welcome.

This week I’m in Vegas for HP’s premier showcase event.

Why have I bothered to travel half way around the world in coach class, messed up my body clock and had my luggage go missing……?

I’m not a gambler, so it certainly isn’t to try and make a penny or two on the tables.

Storage

If I thought I was coming for deep technical storage sessions I’d be disappointed.  Of the million sessions available there is not a single session that meets the search criteria of “Storage + Technical Advanced” :-S  A bit gutted, but I’ll live.

From a storage perspective I’m here to find out what is different NOW about HP and HP StoreageWorks that means they will be more than a storage “also ran”.

I want tot know what has changed that means they won’t do what they did to the EVA with technologies like 3PAR, IBRIX and LeftHand.

In my personal opinion, EVA was years ahead of its time.  Native disk pooling and wide-striping.  Advanced core virtual RAID engine.  Native backend re-balancing…..  HP should have wiped the floor with the competition, but clearly did not.  Damn shame, but hopefully lessons have been learned.

In my heart of hearts I’d like to see HP turn up the heat in the storage space like they have in the networking space!  We’ll see.

So just a few questions:

What the heck do HP have to do to be leader in storage?  Is it people, is it technology, is it focus, is it price, is it services, is it integration….?  Or….. do they have no hope?  I'm interested in your thoughts, feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments.

Networking

That brings me nicely on to networking.

I have to say I’m impressed with how HP are shifting through the gears in the networking space.  The networking market has needed some genuine competition for a long time and HP are starting to provide that.

I’m hear to learn HP’s vision and goals for networking and how they are going to be a significant player in the future. 

I’m specifically interested in things like HP FlexFabric and network convergence.

Servers

HP pretty much own the server market, both rack mounts and blades. That’s all well and good, but that’s a hard position to maintain.  I want to know what HP are innovating in this space to maintain that market share and to keep ahead of the competition.

Other Stuff

To be honest, the above are that major reasons I’m here.  Anything else is a bonus.

I will say that one thing I have zero interest in is their webOS and mobile device story.  I open to being convinced, but I have registered zero interest in any webOS related sessions.

Anything technical and interesting, I will post about.  Everything else will be zeroed out and the extents in my head reclaimed and added back to the free space pool.  So……. will I come back from HP DISCOVER with a lot more cool stuff in my head, or will my background cleanup process that runs in the background while I’m sleeping on the flight home just clear out a load of rubbish?????

Oh and finally a little bit of HP storage porn to feast your eyes on -

And I wonder which array is missing in action here?  Is it a late arrival, or has it been shifted to the stage for a big announcement?

For the record I was there for about 1 year

As part of the on-boarding process we were shown a PowerPoint presentation with a picture of the CEO of Hitachi Ltd.  Alongside the picture was a quote from him, to the effect that within 10 years Hitachi would be the global leader in storage.  The presenter stressed that this was no cowboy American spouting hot air, this was a serious business man with the entire war chest of Hitachi Ltd at his disposal…..

Then and Now

At that time the HDS Lightning 9980V (the great grandfather of today’s VSP) was the HDS flagship product and the USP was well in to development.  They had some pretty cool and disruptive technologies in their arsenal.  They were kind of the new boys, gunning for a slice of the pie that EMC were gluttoning on. 

Many of us will remember the days when HDS riled nonstop on the Symmetrix for it’s 20 year-old architecture and cumbersome BIN files, while at the same time extolling the virtues of their own internal crossbar switch architecture.

However, that was then.  Now, it could even be argued that they have joined EMC with architectures and approaches that look somewhat old. 

The disruptive new-boys are now the likes of Compellent and 3PAR – both of whom now have huge companies behind them gunning for a slice of the high margin storage pie.

Things are Changing

Hitachi have traditionally had some pretty safe markets, markets that they have always sold well in to.

The Domestic Japanese Market

The Japanese market is a world galaxy apart from Western markets. 

When in Japan last year to celebrate the 100th Anniversary of Hitachi Ltd I was absolutely amazed to see that Hitachi has their own Networking and Server business. 

Hitachi are major players in the networking and server markets of Japan, yet I doubt anyone has ever seen a Hitachi ethernet switch or x86 server outside of Japan. 

So, historically Hitachi have been able to rely on the domestic Japanese market.  However, going forward there is little doubt that the western technology giants of HP, DELL, IBM, Cisco etc will start eating into that once safe market.  When this happens, what will happen to the Hitachi Networking and Server businesses?

One answer to this dilemma would be to make up the loss by ramping oversees sales of their Networking and Server kit.  However, I see little chance of this happening.  Even the mighty Cisco, with all the kings horses and all the kings men, are struggling to win a share of the server market.

Enterprise Storage Market

The enterprise storage market is another market that has traditionally been good for Hitachi.  However, this market is changing too. 

Technologies like 3PAR and Compellent look destined to disrupt this market.  Such will be accelerated when technologies to federate such arrays arrive – allowing multiple arrays to work together as a team, enhancing mobility and flexibility, scalability etc.

Over and above the competition from 3PAR and CML, let’s add to the mix the new breed of so-called unified arrays as well as the rise of protocols such as NFS, pNFS and SMB.

Interestingly I recently read a blog post by Jose Barreto on the topic of Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 over CIFS (SMB2).  This is exciting stuff as I’m a big fan if NAS/file technologies and think Microsoft are doing a cracking job with the development of the SMB protocol!  I’d love to see more from Microsoft relative to Hyper-V over CIFS similar to way that VMware works with NFS.

I see NFS and CIFS (SMB) eating away at many of the markets that Hitachi currently competes well in.

HCP: A Ray of Light

There is however, a technology that HDS has in it’s arsenal that I never fail to get excited about – the Hitachi Content Platform, or HCP for short.

It would be remiss of me not to point out that the HCP technology was an acquisition – something which is all to rare for HDS in my opinion.  Take note Hitachi, your most exciting technology, in my humble opinion, is one that you acquired.  There are a bunch of other technologies out there that you might also want to acquire.

In my opinion, HCP is key to the future for Hitachi storage.  Made for the cloud, HCP is an object based platform with the usual cloudy REST and HTTP interfaces.  It looks good and exciting, and comes with the Hitachi seal of top class engineering.  What is there not to like about it.

However, having a great technology is not enough, you need to get out there and evangelise and sell it.  Something that Hitachi have struggled to do in the past.

I am sad to say that in today’s world, good marketing is more important than good engineering!

Conclusion

Hitachi are an absolutely awesome company.  100 years old and still going strong.  I have huge respect for them! 

However…….. the world is changing and Hitachi will have to change with it.  In my opinion, they will need to -

1. Prepare for their share of the Japanese market to eventually shrink  If planned for and factored in, this could be a good thing and does not need to be feared.
2. Have more westerners on the Board.
3. Have more women in senior positions
4. Get their act together over HCP.  They have a winner on their hands of they do.
5. Acquire more complimentary technologies.  I could list a bunch, but list is getting shorter and shorter every day.
6. Get a File Story.  OEMing BlueArc isn’t good enough.  The competition is unifying their SAN and NAS offerings in the SMB space.
7. Overhaul the AMS line.  This product has nothing to differentiate it over and above its peers.
8. Invest in Michael Heffernan.  I appreciate that it’s a bit strange of me to mention an individual, but Heff has the ability to be a real industry legend and they will do well to leverage him.

It is my gut feeling that the Hitachi Server and Networking kit will never make it in the western markets and Hitachi will eventually kill off those products, consolidating their IT portfolio and focussing on storage.  However, in todays and tomorrows world of integrated stacks, they will need to up their game and get some good and strong partnerships.

Opinions expressed on this site are my own and not those of any of my employers, past present or future.

Granted, this is old news now, but my wife just gave birth so I feel I have an excuse to be a little behind the times.  Anyway, this is a word or two on a concern I have over these two deals…

With the above acquisitions, we will be left with two and a half drive vendors –

1. Western Digital, with ~50% market share
2. Seagate, with ~40% market share
3. Toshiba, with scraps that are left over

Generally speaking, while there are 3 or 4 major players in an industry, competition can work its magic – driving innovation up and prices down.  But when it gets down to just two giants in an industry it often becomes all too easy for them to become slack.  Think drastically reduced R&D budgets leading to slowed innovation.  And at worst, things like unofficial pricing cartels.  Lack of competition is rarely a good thing.

It is looking inevitable that we will soon be down to two players in this space.  Will Toshiba be able to sell in large enough volumes to keep production costs economically viable?  Samsung certainly struggled.

Addicted to Storage

In today’s world we are addicted to oil.  It seemed to creep up on us, like the appearing of the morning dew.  But sure enough, we are addicted to oil.  We can’t (or aren’t prepared to) live without it.

The same pattern seems to be happening with storage.  We are slowly becoming addicted, and I propose that by tomorrow we will be well and truly addicted!

Not convinced?  Ask yourself the following – which of the following do you find harder –

1. Deleting old data, be it family photos and movies, or corporate data that you are responsible for.
2. To stop filling your car up.

Every business I have ever worked for has felt it’s data, every single bit of it, far too important to delete. 

On a personal level I was recently forced to delete some photos and videos from my Android phone.  Wow, it was like pulling my own teeth out!

And I don’t see any signs that our addiction to storage will go away any time soon.

The Storage Barons and Drug Dealers

As soon as storage becomes like other necessities of life such as oil and air, we will find that we are at the mercy of those that control the supply – the Storage Barons.

Let’s consider ourselves fortunate that the powers that be haven’t figured out how to charge us for the air we breathe, or to effectively turn it off for those who don’t pay

In tomorrow’s world, The EMC’s, HP’s, NetApp’s and even the cloud storage providers become the guys who own the petrol stations (gas stations for my friends on the other side of the Atlantic).  They supply the taps that satisfy our cravings and provide value-add, and add their mark-up, but they don’t ultimately control the price.  Thinking of it another way, these guys are the drug dealers.

The Western Digitals and Seagates become the oil companies of today.  They do the exploration (R&D) and the drilling (manufacturing), and it is they who ultimately control the price!  With such power and control come challenges.  The challenge is not to become drug gangs, exploiting their addicted buyers.

Conclusion

All just my penny’s worth.  And I’m sure that WD and Seagate are benevolent corporations that would never slip in to such a trap despite the pressure of shareholders.

Sadly I see no way for storage practitioners like myself, and no doubt many of you, to rise to power on the back of this wave and live out the rest of our lives filthy rich and powerful

Comments welcome.  Opinions expressed are my own, not my employers. 

Oh and because I’m not satisfied talking about technology in my day job, I talk about it on Twitter too.  Feel free to sign up and talk to me @nigelpoulton Sorry but Im addicted to talking about technology

Let me quote a few lines from Steve’s blog and compare them to IBM XIV.

“Before VCE came along with their Vblock product, it was really hard, slow and expensive to deploy converged infrastructure.

Why is it different at VCE?

Sit down with me and we can create a bill of materials from your requirements in less than 15 minutes.  If you press the Buy Now button then thirty days later it will be shipped to your datacenter loading bay on one or more pallets……

Then a VCE guy turns up in a taxi and in one day will have the whole thing running for you.  The day after that you can do your testing and launch your services and start making money.  Time to value and time to cash after making these kind of investments is what keeps the senior managers awake at night.”

Comparing IBM XIV to the above statement is as simple as substituting a few words in the text above.  Seriously.  Replace the following words –

VCE –> IBM

Vblock –> XIV

Converged Infrastructure –> Storage

Stay with me on this….

Steve goes on to say –

“What would the business prefer?  To be earning revenue from your new infrastructure in sixty days, or be still sitting in a room looking at a whiteboard and still doing the low level design and still working out which product firmware is compatible?  Been there, done that, now it’s up there with ITIL for me.  It is of value only to the professional services teams that charge customers for it.  It’s boring.  It’s dead, dead, dead.”

You could say the same about XIV. 

I for one used to love designing storage arrays.  In fact in some respects I still do.  RAID Groups, RAID configurations, drive geometries and rotational velocities, port groupings, number of ports per CPU, cache partitions, cache write-through vs write-back, cache slot sizes, backend loop isolation, short stroking, concat or striped LUNs, is the LDEV from the inner or outer tracks of a disk…. whiteboarding… Mmmm donuts!!!

If I’m honest, as a contractor, my higher rates were often on the more complicated configurations.  Complicated storage configurations made me a lot of money.

But to use Steve’s words, are these days dead dead dead?

XIV and Vblock – Making the Case

Last time I checked, Vblock comes in certain pre-defined configurations.  Think of them as small medium and large (I’m somewhat oversimplifying but the principle remains) and there is precious little you can flex within the Vblock.  Same goes for XIV, it effectively comes in  a small choice of pre-canned configurations, small medium and large.

With such limited configuration options, be it Vblock or XIV, there are pro’s and cons.

Pros

Simplicity.  And simplicity is king these days.  With any given XIV, it is relatively easy to know what it can and cannot do.  Capacity is probably the simplest.  XIV grows to a certain size and that’s it.  Need more capacity?  Buy another one. 

Similar story for IOPs and MB/sec.  XIV will do so many and no more.  Need more?  Buy another one.  Simple, reliable, predictable.

No hours of whiteboarding, or days of PS consultancy to decide between RAID This or RAID That.  No guessing the mix of SATA, SAS and SSD, how much cache to buy, how many front end ports, which licenses, matching business hours with data movement windows, aggresiveness of data movements. 

Life is terribly simple –

1. Choose which one you want, small medium or large. 
2. Make the order. 
3. Several days later it arrives shrink wrapped
4. Take a stanley knife to it, plug it in to the power and your SAN and an hour or so later you are provisioning from it.

Simples!

Cons

As with Vblock, XIV and the cookie cutter approach has its drawbacks too.

You can easily end up with stranded capacity or IOPs if your workload doesn’t fit nicely within what an XIV can do (all equally sized SATA drives with a common protection level).  While this is true, this is also true of the vast majority of storage I’ve ever seen.  As storage arrays grow, despite of the efforts of highly skilled storage admins and architects, the arrays tend to become unbalanced, both on the backend and on the front end.  So this is arguable as a drawback in many cases.

Thin Provisioning, or more correctly overprovisioning, on the other hand is definitely a strange one with XIV, and one you must be careful with.  If you buy the biggest model, overprovision it and then have a subsequent bank-run on your storage you can be in a world of hurt.  This is because you cannot simply add more shelves to it, there is no easy central bank ready to print you more storage and bail you out.  So be careful.

If you have a huge environment, then you could easily end up with XIV-sprawl – lots of islands of XIV storage each requiring you to log on locally and manage it.  Again though, while this is clearly a drawback in many scenarios, many people are cautious about how big they want their storage arrays to grow.  The more capacity and IOPs you array has, the more of each you will use.  This naturally leads to having more and more customers and business units relying on it.  Which in turn makes scheduling firmware upgrades and hardware upgrade more challenging, not to mention the impact should the service ever go down :-S

Oh and if you like deep diving, whiteboarding and having lots of buttons to press, then XIV is downright boring

Just my thoughts.  I can see the pros and cons of both approaches and Im not advocating either.  I just thought the comparison of fundamental principles between Vblock and XIV was interesting.

Courteous comments welcome, and please disclose if you work for a vendor.

You can follow me on Twitter and talk to me about technology semi-realtime – @nigelpoulton

Oh and finally, let’s all be grown up about this. These are my personal opinions and observations, and not the opinions of any of my employers, past present or future.  So please don’t get upset and spit your dummy out.