StorageRap

All things come to an end

marc farley — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 11:05:19 -0700

This is the final post on StorageRap. It was a lot of fun producing the blog and interacting with fans, customers, competitors and storage industry members. I want to say thanks to everybody who contributed to it's success, especially Craig Nunes and David Scott who gave me the creative license to do the things we did on StorageRap. We are giving the blog a long sunset and it will continue to be available, without additional content or comments through the end of 2011.

I've been putting off this inevitable, final blog post for several weeks, but it is time to get started with something fresh and different. I am extremely stoked by the concepts we've been developing for a new multi-media oriented storage blog here at HP, which will start very soon, so stay tuned....

See you around the next corner!

Until I have a link for the new blog, please visit our other storage blogs, especially Calvin Zito's Around the Storage Block.

Lee Johns (the apparition) explains HP's StoreOnce technology

marc farley — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 10:08:35 -0800

Lee Johns is one of my new co-workers at HP and he gets himself into all sorts of interesting things - like the upper left corner of this video, where he talks about data sprawl, dedupe and HP's StoreOnce technology.

He does an excellent job highlighting how StoreOnce technology is portable and can be located in any location in the infrastructure with the ability to transfer deduped data without the necessity of rehydrating and deduping it.

Remaking Storage with Jay Livens

marc farley — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 08:30:33 -0800

Jay Livens and I were both in Boulder, CO last week for an HP worldwide storage marketing meeting where he spoke about HP's broad portfolio of data protection products.

The link (above the video) will take you to an ESG Lab Report on HP's Data Protector and Deduplication Solutions. Here is a taste of what you will find in that report:

A growing number of organizations are struggling to protect information assets residing in remote and branch offices. Most are alarmed at the rate of data growth in these locations. Many lack the IT staff and expertise needed to manage traditional tape-based protection methods. Many more are frustrated with the cost and complexity of managing tape media at remote offices. Disk-based backup and replication to a corporate data center reduces the complexity and risk, but, until recently, it’s been too expensive to justify due to the cost of remote office disk capacity and the WAN connectivity required.

At the time of testing, the street price started at $4,499 for a 2 TB system. This included dynamic deduplication and low bandwidth replication—ESG Lab found the HP Storageworks D2D to be an affordable, simple, and effective solution for the protection of valuable information assets residing in remote and branch offices. Data protector provides a single point of management and catalog for local and replicated backup data that reduces complexity and cost for distributed environments.

EMC's announcement folderol breaks records for inanity

marc farley — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 04:11:19 -0800

EMC made their big announcement for 2011 yesterday. The company has a track record of elaborate, showy announcements that are designed to make a big impression on the audience. This time, the effort ran amok, turning into an awkward variety infomercial.

Weeks before the announcement, EMC tired to make sure storage industry followers were aware that the theme for the announcement was "record breaking". They even went so far as to send analysts and bloggers packages of broken audio records. From what I could tell, most people who received them were slightly bemused by the gesture, but not necessarily impressed.

Unable to resist the urge to flog the theme, CEO Joe Tucci started his presentation explaining unconvincingly why the announcement was record breaking. He then went into the EMC cloud computing story, this time including concepts ripped straight out of 3PAR's message book, including using the word "autonomic" a couple times. I hope my good buddy Barry Burke (EMC's Storage Anarchist blogger) heard that so he can start learning how to pronounce it. Mark my word, before the end of the year, he's going to be saying it as if he had invented it, even though it tickles his gag reflex right now.

Tucci also copped the 3PAR messages of selling technology that is less complex and doesn't require support from 3rd party service provider companies. However, he stopped short of mentioning EMC's own professional services. Hmmm.... I guess this means he wants to sell even more expensive EMC services to their customers.

Pat Gelsinger came next and presided over an series of interesting, but pointless motoring stunts and videos. IMHO, he should seriously consider using the nickname, "Chips", seeing as how he repeatedly mentioned his background from Intel.

After a few compulsory cloud comments, Gelsinger asked the crowd what words came to mind when they thought of EMC. I give him credit for having the guts to ask that one - and I was surprised to hear him say "expensive". Just when it seemed that a reality show was going to break out, he then went on to make the claim that their new "baby VNXe" system will be cheaper than similar-class products from other vendors. Yeah sure.

It was kind of funny when Gelsinger announced the VNXe, it was accompanied by a fast and cheesy synthesizer sound and a smattering of applause. For those in the audience, it must have seemed slightly strange considering the VNXe is very small in stature (it looked like it was 4u high) - much smaller than the miniature Stonehenge model in Spinal Tap.

Somebody at EMC must really like Audi automobiles as they were featured prominently in several video segments. It was the perfect opportunity for EMC to have made some excellent steering wheel cam videos, but that was not in the offing.

One of the stranger things they did was cram 26 lithe dancers into a Mini Cooper to set a record for the Guiness Book of Records. I'm not really sure why they felt compelled to do this - maybe because they realized there wasn't any legitimacy to their record breaking claims, but it was a bizarre and slightly entertaining part of the show. I thought it was interesting that they turned to a professional services provider of sorts, the Pilobolus Dance Theatre to get the contortionist-like flexibility they needed to accomplish the act. As far as I know, no EMC employees actively participated in breaking the record, yet EMC wanted to share in the accomplishment. That's like publicising that they sold to some famous customer when they actually didn't.

Gelsinger suggested that EMC storage was similarly efficient in the use of storage space as Pilobolus had been in filling the mini. Strange, I don't ever recall telling admins to get their fingers and toes out of the way so I could shut the door on a storage system. In general, there was a lot of lip service given to EMC's storage efficiency in the presentations, but nothing to back it up besides a modern dance company. Perfect!

Gelsinger liked to use the word "unquestionable" when discussing efficiency and performance. Since the theme of the event involved records, I'll go on the record saying that we will very gladly compare our capacity and energy efficiency with EMC's. And speaking of records, with EMC's history of not going on the record by participating in standard industry benchmarks, like the SPC, next time Gelsinger might want to use the word "unproven" instead of unquestionable.

A lot of competitive claims were made that clearly didn't consider all their competitors, but that's normal for these types of things. But it was hardly a string of industry-leading achievements, the way it was portrayed. While EMC claimed they made 41 new product announcements, some of them were just repackaged software and licensing and some of the items had actually been available previously - but it's fairly common to delay announcing products in order to align with an event such as this.

The rest of the show was a smattering of platitudes and spin along with bits of information about what was actually announced and the occasional car/motorcycle stunt. In what had to be one of the strangest marketing ideas of all time, for the Grand Finale of the event, EMC hired a professional motorcycle named Bubba Blackwell to jump across a good sized number of Symmetrix cabinets. They never really tied this one into any product features, but it was sort of fun watching Bubba do his thing. Still I couldn't help but wonder what the difference would have been had he jumped over 3PAR systems - he probably would have only had to jump half the distance, given our efficiency advantages.

Leo and the cloud vision at HP

marc farley — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 17:47:09 -0800

I made this steering wheel cam after watching Leo address the company today in a world wide broadcast to all employees. I was glad to see him speak intelligently about the enterprise storage, server and networking business and I was very interested to hear him speak about the intersection of our end of the business with the personal products and imaging/printing parts of the business. He showed a lot of class, humor and aggressiveness and I think I'm going to like his leadership style.

What was surprising about EMC's bid for Isilon

marc farley — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 15:41:25 -0800

A screencast discussing the bid EMC is making for Isilon. Covers the topics EMC highlighted in their announcement, including "big data", Atmos integration and the EMC effect. Contrasts the differences between EMC's divergent NAS strategies and HP's Converged Infrastructure NAS strategy with the X9000 platform.

What HP sees in 3PAR

marc farley — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 21:25:14 -0800

A lot has been written about HP's acquisition of 3PAR. I see it as a real game changer in our industry. This screencast explains why.

My introduction to HP's Converged Infrastructure

marc farley — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 07:52:07 -0700

As 3PAR is integrated into HP, there is a lot of new stuff to for us to figure out. One of the most important concepts at HP is Converged Infrastructure (CI). The basic idea of CI is to maximize a customer's investement in technology by consolidating resources in common, modular building blocks. 3PAR customers are already accustomed to the idea from with our InServ storage systems, but CI goes far beyond 3PAR's storage vision by including server and network technologies. It's a big idea with huge implications for product engineering, manufacturing, maintenance and support - and it raises the importance of software in data center solutions.

Predictable Scaling with the HP X9000 (built on Ibrix software)

marc farley — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 13:15:57 -0700

I'm only about 6 months behind many of the world's leading independent storage bloggers on learning about HP's storage products, so I've been eager to catch up to them. Imagine my delight this morning when I picked up Greg Knieriemen's tweet on the most recent report from ESG on our X9000 Scale-Out NAS systems. Thanks to Brian Garret and Vinny Choinski of ESG for their straightforward analysis.

I was somewhat familiar with Ibrix as a software product that powered NAS clusters, but the new ESG Labs report helped me grasp HP's vision for the X9000 storage appliances much better.

Interested readers should view the report to see the results as well as the methodology that was used. There were three test beds covering throughput, content delivery and file creation metrics culled from a mix of X9000 configurations. The X9320 is a storage appliance with internal disks and the X9300 is a gateway version of the product that connects to external SAN storage. Another model, the 9720, which is the super-sized version of the 9320 (full 42u rack) not used in the tests.

3PAR customers will be familiar with the processing architecture of the X9000. The granular "head unit" of the X9000 system is called a couplet, and is a pair of fault-tolerant NAS heads. This is similar to 3PAR's storage system architecture where nodes are added in pairs.

But the surprising thing about scalability for the x9000 is not necessarily how large it can grow, but how effectively it can also be employed in much smaller environments. As the ESG Labs report concludes:

Who would have guessed that companies overwhelmed by Word and PowerPoint archives could benefit from the same solution as those burdened by 100-TB annual growth of genome sequencing data? Who knew that a NAS file system developed for high-performance computing could evolve into a graceful, cost-effective scale-out solution with predictable and near-linear performance for small and large files and exotic and everyday applications? The challenges that scale-out NAS solves are much more “everyday” than “lunatic fringe,” and the X9000 makes it consumable by almost anyone. If you are facing file system growth and complexity challenges, you should consider the X9000. It’s affordable, includes commercial features like snapshots and replication, and lets NFS and CIFS work on the same file system. You can buy a scale-out architecture that will grow with you and meet the needs of your business without interruption. The Fusion segmented file system, combined with HP’s servers and storage (not to mention HP’s buying power and supply-chain advantage), brings what started as a niche solution to the masses.

Virtual wired-dude demo of 3PAR management

marc farley — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 11:00:08 -0700

My friend JR, an SE at 3PAR (now HP) , made this demo showing our autonomic management capabilities. It was a bit long, so I scrunchified it and now it makes him sound like he was completely caffeined out when he made it. That's what friends are for, right JR?