Storage @ Work

3Par deserves credit for having the vision to develop thin provisioning and bring it to the market. Its almost unthinkable that a startup would be able to make it in the most conservative market in all of IT (enterprise storage), which proves the incredible value that thin provisioning has for customers. People wouldn't have purchased from 3Par if thin provisioning hadn't made such a large economic difference. They broke through the "new guy" barrier with thin provisioning and are here to stay as a mainstream enterprise storage vendor. Hitachi's introduction of thin provisioning is a major endorement of the technology and it puts a lot of pressure on EMC and IBM to come up with a response for enterprise customers.

Meanwhile, the midrange storage market has been getting comfortable with the technology with several vendors providing products supporting thin provisioning. The fact that EqualLogic now has thin provisioning might not be the biggest news to everybody, but the features that EqualLogic incorporated should raise eyebrows for the quality of the design and implementation.

David Scott, 3Par CEO, wrote today in an article in Techworld about the requirements for thin provisioning. In this article he discusses four main "gotchas" that have to be considered. In a nutshell they are:

1. Failsafes for running out of physical capacity
2. Automated provisioning of new storage that is added to thinly provisioned volumes
3. Support for remote replication with thinly provisioned volumes
4. Performance that is consistent with normal volumes

EqualLogic's engineering team covered all those bases and then some, including the ability to turn a thinly provisioned volume back into a normal volume. Sometimes we are such a conservative New England company that it almost kills me. Our team is tight and they are smart. Thanks, David for helping me say that better than I could. By the way, if you see this, please say hello to Craig Nunez, one of the best people in this business.

Tony Asaro at ESG and I are in almost total agreement on thin provisioning. I suppose I should defer to him on the topic because he was talking about it before I was thinking about it, so he has first mover rights. We've been blogging back and forth about the benefits of storage provisioning. It's kind of funny, his list is slightly longer than mine - and I work for a vendor. Go figure. Anyway, there is this analogy of credit that we've been using and we both agree that its not perfect, but its not too bad.

In his last post Tony explains that it isn't like a normal debt because you might never have to pay it back. Of course he's right about that. However, the problem is that you really don't know for certain if your debt is forgiven - at some point a sleepy thinly provisioned volume could get busy and require management. And that's one of the reasons EqualLogic's implementation gives administrators the ability to convert a thinly provisioned volume into a normal one, which is effectively the same as retiring the debt on a thinly provisioned volume.

So when would it make sense to convert from thin to normal? When the application stabilizes and capacity growth slows to something small and predictable. Or when you decide that you don't want to use thin provisioning anymore. Or any other reason - we don't want to tell people they have to use it or that they are stuck using it. Its up to them.

They always do things a bit differently in the UK. This page from the UK's Storage Magazine web site shows storage people carrying on as if they were "normal people". I think Storage Magazine UK deserves an award for pulling that off. EqualLogic was awarded the Storage Virtualization Product of the Year for the PS3900XV. Its not clear to me why this particular product was singled out because all our storage systems have the exact same storage virtualization software. But that's OK, we're happy for the recognition.

We also recently won the top prize in e-Week's Excellence Awards for Enterprise Storage Hardware. for our PS-3800VX . I don't know how long the link will be good, but here is the page on eWeek's site. Again, we appreciate the recognition. Thanks to the customers, readers, writers and publishers who contribute to our success.

I can't remember how it started, but somewhere along the line,

Chuck Wrote: "Does Anyone Take the SPC Seriously?

And a week later, Tony Wrote: "Getting Under EMC Skin"

Within a couple days, Dave Wrote: "Lies, Damned Lies and Benchmark Results"

Then Tony jumped back in with a sequence of writs from Asia, ending with: "Why Not Miles Per Hour?"

To which The Storage Anarchist responded with: "The case against standardized (performance) testing"

To me, this was the storage blogosphere at its best! A battle royale of wits, writs and Hitz! (sorry Dave, it was a rhyming thing....)

In bike racing, riders do weird things to their bodies in an attempt to get an unfair advantage. Testing labs try to catch them with sophisticated testing procedures. In the storage business, contestants do sophisticated, weird things to the tests in order to get an unfair advantage.

In both cases, it can be very difficult to tell how much of an unfair advantage is being perpetrated, but at least in bike racing, a cheater still has to ride to the finish before everybody else. In contrast, with storage, the customer has to figure out for themselves which vendor's exaggerations are closest to the truth.

The good news for storage is that there are no temporary performance boosters like steroids, blood doping or EPO. The system configuration can only do what it is engineered for, nothing more. Customers who want to know the truth can test their own applications and data on the competing storage systems. All they have to do is get the various storage vendors to agree to participate in the "bake off." Get the systems out, load 'em up with data and applications, connect 'em to systems and let 'em crank. Then watch the application numbers. That's a real contest - but without the "con".

It can be a bit complicated though - sometimes customers have difficulty getting systems to test and if they do, they can run into delays getting the systems configured. After all, some storage systems actually can't be configured properly by the customer until they complete a couple weeks of training. In the meantime, customers can make themselves familiar with those systems that don't require pre-installation training or configuration-tuning. That's not an unfair advantage - it's a completely fair advantage called cost of ownership.

Earlier today Chuck Hollis from EMC wrote on his blog about the advantage of using service providers for things like storage. While I agree with him about a number of things such as taxes, I tend to think that outsourcing your own job is a bit of a career limiter.

In the video below, I ask IT professionals why they would abdicate storage management when it is relatively easy to get the satisfaction and accolades of having done it themselves. Like any type of work, the tools employed for storage management make a huge difference. iSCSI SAN storage tools from EqualLogic are true storage power tools.

Click To Play

Jerome Wendt is a pretty sharp guy and an amazing writer. The guy can crank like there is no tomorrow and keeps the quality up. Here is an article he wrote for Compterworld today that mentions EqualLogic. The point of the article is simple - the cost of business continutity is going down all the time - sometimes in big leaps and bounds due to increased integration of advanced software features such as snapshot and replication and through integration with Microsoft-enabled data protection services.

Justin (of cmsJustin) writes about his company's purchase of an EqualLogic iSCSI SAN array. He's been documenting his evaluation process on his blog and we're very happy to have Justin as a customer. Thanks Justin for spelling things out on your blog and you made a good move with the 400 GB drives.

Read to the bottom of his blog entry: he's looking for help with dynamic VLAN configuration linked to MAC addresses. If anyone reading this has any insights for him, please jump on his site and let him know.

After attending several User Group meetings in the last few weeks it has become obvious to me that we haven't done a very good job telling our customers about our AutoSnapshot Manager for SQL Server software.

One problem is our no-charge software model. Once you own an EqualLogic product you get all software updates through free downloads, even if the software updates are something people are used to spending lots of money for. There are no beat-the-drum new product announcements, no new SKUs, no new licenses to figure out and no big marketing splash to draw interest to it and sell it. There is no revenue coming to us and so there is no big push attempting to increase sales. Analysts and the trade press tend to ignore it because its not a new product, just an upgrade. It's weird; we come out with something valuable at the best deal possible (free) that a lot of people are interested in, and we have a hard time telling people about it.

Another problem appears to be how we make information like this available on our web site. In writing this blog post, I went to find a link on our site for our SQL AutoSnapshot Manager and couldn't really find one. There were a couple links that I needed to register for and I didn't want to use one of those for the blog. I don't want you to have to register to get information linked to from the blog. It shouldn't be like this.

Our Host Integration Toolkit includes VSS-based SQL Server snapshots. It significantly improves data protection for SQL Server. SQL Server backups go faster and restores are much simpler. If you are interested in finding out more send me an email or comment here.

There's been some babble about storage clustering lately. Its a great opportunity to get confused so I thought take a stab at clarifying a couple things.

Clustering is a way to take two or more computers that are not inherently fault tolerant and turn them into a high availability system. Its also great for making certain applications run faster. Clustering has inherent complexity with figuring out which system is in control of the work. If everything works as expected its great, but when things go wrong, its a serious problem. Clustering overcomes the problems of a single motherboard, memory, memory bus, I/O bus and all the other things that are part of an industry standard server. Running storage on an industry standard server pretty much requires some type of clustering because there are so many points of failure. In other words, if you figure your boat is going to spring a leak sometime on the trip, just tow a spare along.

Business class storage systems have the HA (high availability) built in through redundant components. There is no need to connect them in clusters because they are already hardened against component failure.

The question is then, what is EqualLogic doing and what is EMC planning on doing to make multiple storage system storage work together? Is it a cluster or something else?

Storagezilla indicates that EMC's new Maui isn't clustered storage. Made sense to me when I read it because there isn't a need for clustering in storage. Instead, storage systems need to give administrators the ability to expand and move storage resources as needed. Systems and applications change all the time. That's one of the reasons VMWare became an overnight sensation. Storage needs to be able to respond to those dynamics.

Of course, EqualLogic already did it. Our iSCSI SAN storage systems are designed for HA and for amazing administrative flexibility and ease of use. We just never figured out what to call them because they aren't clustered and they aren't a grid. We just don't have a marketing-ID for the technology. Yes - for shame, but at least we didn't create something stupid (something 2.0). Maybe someday we'll succumb to calling them one of those things but for now I'd suggest that they be called the best value in storage today.

One of our SE's yesterday asked me; "When have you ever seen a product you could just leave at a customer's without setting it up for them, knowing that everything would be OK and that the support department wouldn't kill you for it? We do it all the time.

Jason Kwiatkowski, our SE manager on the west coast is talking about how to demonstrate our EqualLogic iSCSI SAN products. It was created for our channel team it occurs to me that others might be interested in seeing what our product's interface looks like, so I'm posting it here on the blog.

Click To Play

Dell's acquisition of EqualLogic has completed. This is a real big deal for a lot of obvious reasons: Dell is a powerful company and they (we) now own one of the most dynamic storage technologies to come along in years. I joined EqualLogic back in October 2006 because I couldn't stand to be on the sidelines watching this new iSCSI storage company that I know was going to make a big play in the industry. I suppose I could jack myself up and say I had the talent to see it coming, but the fact is, the talent was and still is inside EqualLogic - and now Dell too. The thing I didn't know before joining the company was how talented it was. Yeah, so I think Dell got themselves a real jewel.

And what of the price paid? $1.4 Billion is a lot and I think it was an excellent mutual decision. I had my greedy IPO-bound doubts for a while, but it was definitely the right thing to do - just look at the tight rope wire new companies have to walk ( how can VMware's stock price get hammered so badly yesterday for posting great growth - just not enough to meet investment expectations?)

The dynamics of the storage industry are going to start changing much faster over the next year as Dell figures out how to make the most of their EqualLogic purchase. This is as clear to me as EqualLogic's success was to me two years ago. The biggest splashes are yet to come.

A big thanks to everybody who made this happen - especially the EqualLogic SAN customers who helped us every step of the way, by taking risks on purchasing mission critical infrastructure equipment from a startup. As of yesterday, Dell is selling superb EqualLogic iSCSI SAN products without the new company risks. That is very cool for our new customers. We look forward to working together with all of our customers.

Intensity isn't always pleasant, but it can be real effective. Just ask the New England Patriots who found their heartache Sunday at the hands of the incredibly intense NY Giants.

There something amazingly powerful about having something to prove and putting the bit between your teeth. That's what's still going on with the EqualLogic people who are now working for Dell. I don't know why, but I didn't expect the Dell team to have the same level of intensity, but they do. How else could they have put together a product roll out of new Dell EqualLogic products mere a week after the acquisition closed?

To net it out, all of EqualLogic's existing SATA products are being superceded by the new Dell EqualLogic PS5000 series products, which have a new form factor and expanded capacity. All old and new products can be used together in an interoperable iSCSI SAN. The same world beating ease of installation and scalability. The same no-charge, fully-featured software model. The same super-competent support organization. The same underdog intensity with something to prove to the world. Just a lot more people with the affliction sharing a common goal.

Thought I'd post links to comments on yesterday's announcement.

ComputerWorld
Network World
SearchStorage
ITPro (UK)
Infostor
Internetnews
Techtaxi
Informationweek
The Register (UK)
eWeek
scaledatacom blog
bmighty.com blog
Computer Cosmos blog
infiniteadmin blog
itbusiness (Canada)

Just saw this article on SearchStorage's Australia/New Zealand site. The customer in the article, Austcorp, talks about the advantages of going with an Equallogic iSCSI SAN. They also describe how it facilitated the adoption of server virtualization (VMware) too.

The article ends with this quote:

"Utilisation of the SAN improves through virtualisation, "We are using 70% the of SAN's capacity and the ROI from these two projects is initially all coming from the SAN."

Josh Caster writes the InfiniteAdmin blog and has been exploring the business and technology involved in Dell's acquisition of EqualLogic. His most recent posting explores storage tiering and Josh asks a number of good questions related to mixing drive types within an array. I thought I'd address them here.

EqualLogic's design goals are driven by ease of use/administration. Our iSCSI SAN storage systems have a high degree of automation, including such things as dynamic relocation of data for load balancing and tiering. They also have a high level of virtualization, which makes it very easy for customers to provision storage. Keeping the drive type uniform (not mixing different types) within an array provides the simplest administrative environment by eliminating most volume management decisions. We stripe data across all the drives (except hot spares), which provides the best overall throughput. Customers don't create future problems by establishing RAID sub groups that might trap or lock-in storage capacity. When drive types can be mixed freely inside an array, it forces the customer to make volume management decisions that they might not have adequate knowledge or foresight to make. Sparing is easier too if drive types aren't mixed. At the end of the day, it's easier for customers, our support engineers and our development team to not allow drive mixing within a cabinet.

Of course, this means that our customers can't get tiering within a single cabinet, as Josh points out but he also acknowledges that tiering works with two or more of our arrays. Using the same core technology that drives our load balancing capabilities, our iSCSI SAN storage arrays automatically and dynamically locate data on the most appropriate array. In other words, customers don't have to guess where to locate data and don't have to manually move data. It's a lot more than basic disk-level tiering where customers have to provide their own load balancing expertise because Dell Equallogic arrays constantly analyze and update their data locations and tier mappings.

Finally, there are network and controller variables to consider. Storage tiers that are located within different systems use different network connections and different controllers, which means there is more network and processor overhead and less chance that I/O bottlenecks will occur.

Lots of people have questions about the networking elements needed for iSCSI SANs. We are hosting a webinar on Tuesdsay Feb 26th at 12 noon Eastern to discuss network issues surrounding iSCSI.

Covered topics include:

• Key criteria in selecting an appropriate network switch
  
• Flow control, a definition and the benefits for iSCSI networks
  
• Pros and cons of jumbo frames
  
• Application of trunking and stacking of multiple switches
  
• Connection of servers and arrays for maximum network fault tolerance
  

Click here to register.

In an interview with Uberpulse earlier this month following the announcement of the Dell EqualLogic PS5000 storage arrays, Eric Schott our Director of Product Management talked about the differences between server and storage virtualization. He does an excellent job here explaining why the virtualization in Dell EqualLogic arrays is complimentary - not competitive with server virtualization.

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John Tourloukis in Houston runs a web, co-location company called Fast PC Networks. He recently wrote in his blog about how easy it was to set up two EqualLogic iSCSI SAN systems: one in Houston and the other in Columbus and make snapshots and data replication work.

Here's a brief quote: "I take a snap shot of my exchange database every 20 minutes in case of corrupution or a virus I'll only lose 20 minutes of work and I can just reque email if needed. I have the SANS replicating between each other our most critical data. For systems admin this will make your life so much easier."

One of the things that has stoked EqualLogic's rapid rise was it's business model of embedding all software with the hardware as part of the product. I like to think of it as "priceless", because there is no separate price for software - even if it sounds a little silly to say "priceless" out loud. The "catch", if there is one, is that customers must be on maintenance in order to get priceless software updates when they become available.

People don't like paying for upgrades to storage software and some see the line-item software pricing that some of our competitors have as an exercise in nickeling and diming. Nonetheless, line-item software pricing has its fans, who perceive it as a way to get tighter control of the IT budget and to avoid paying for functionality they don't need.

But the notion of bundled software shouldn't imply that everything in the bundle has a determined, embedded price. Sure, there are costs associated with every software project, but that doesn't mean there is line-item accounting for each development project in the system price. Our products get cheaper over time, even though the software feature set is expanded significantly. At the end of the day, we make our money selling integrated iSCSI SAN storage arrays, not their various hardware and software components.

It's easier developing core functionality without the byzantine distractions that come with software for serialization, stratification, licensing, packaging, distribution and promotion. If you throw out the licensing-related crap, software development is a lot more efficient, and that is a very good thing. I'm not 100% sure, but I think EqualLogic came to its priceless software model because its engineering founders didn't want to screw around with any code that didn't deliver core functionality.

An unexpected outcome of a priceless software model is the difficulty in drawing attention to new functionality when it is delivered. As a no-charge upgrade, our priceless software tends to be devalued. One of those strange but true things - people want the best - and "the best" usually means paying more, not less.

At this point the die is set at EqualLogic. We're not going to start adding licensing "features" to call attention to our software's capabilities. But for people to take advantage of it, they first need to realize that it can solve their problems and that it is extremely competitive and fully-featured. Maybe we should rename our maintenance programs to something like "the annual fee paid to get priceless software and great support".

There are competitors that sell on their strengths and merits.

There are competitors that exploit their products advantages over disadvantages in competitive products.

Then there are competitors that make up any story as long as they think they can get away with it.

Here are some of the stories that have been circulated about Dell EqualLogic recently.

1. New Dell storage products have lower performance - that's why the price is reduced


2. The firmware was overhauled, resulting in unproven reliability


3. Recent price drop was due to a drop in functionality on the new models


4. Software is no longer all-inclusive


5. EqualLogic screwed their customers dropping the price of the product after customers loaded up on "original" products before the acquisition

1. Nope - the new products have the same great performance that outperforms their stuff


2. Nope, the new products use the same old software, with minor modifications for new array configurations


3. Nope, the new products have the same old deal - all software embedded with no loss in functionality


4. Nope, same all inclusive priceless software


5. We periodically reduce the costs of our products so we can continue to deliver the best value in the storage business. We don't have the customer loyalty we have by being unfair to our customers.

One of the cool things about being at Dell is the number of ways they have to reach out and engage customers. Next week Darren Miller (EQ product manager) and I are going to be on Dell's TechCenter online chat. The general topic is going to be data protection with EqualLogic iSCSI SAN arrays.

Heres the link for the chat page. If you want to chat or lurk, I don't care. If you have a question about something, please feel free to bring it up in this informal environment.

If you are curious about what makes our Dell EqualLogic PS series storage products so popular, you might want to check out one of our online demos. If you have time on Tuesday this week, we have one scheduled for 12:00 noon (Eastern).

The blogosphere buzz about problems with Dell SSDs appears to be overblown, if it's not a case of mistaken identity. Avi Cohen of Avian Securities wrote a report about quality problems with solid state disk drives (SSDs) in laptops where he claims failure rates between 10-20% and a return rate on laptops with SSDs between 20-30%. I've read reports that said he did not name the company, while other reports name Dell in quotes. There's something wrong with that. Whatever, people just assumed from all this that Dell has a quality problem with its SSDs.

So I checked into the situation with the SSD team in Round Rock Texas and asked about our ORT (ongoing reliability testing), pre-installation testing and failure tracking. What I found out made me feel a lot better. Our SSDs are very good products and are showing the kind of reliability that everyone expected of storage with no moving parts. They are just as reliable as rotating disk drives, if not more so.

A lot of things have been written and people have suggested a number of things that don't accurately reflect Dell's implementations. For example, some have written about the reliability of the state of the technology. Our SSDs do not use low cost, consumer multi-layer flash. They use high quality single level flash that has better reliability and performance (that's part of the reason for the perceived high cost). They don't have disastrous end of life failures from wear-out - instead they are designed to convert to read-only devices. As I mentioned, each device is tested for early failure tendencies to weed out weaker devices.

A word about performance: Our flash SSDs continue to get better with each generation and our next generation SSD products will have performance levels that could exceed those of 7200 rpm disk drives.

This post first appeared on Inside IT, a Dell blog.

HP got an early jump on April Fool’s day yesterday when they announced their new blade server, the Proliant BL260c G5, with the claim that it has 64% better energy efficiency than the Dell PowerEdge M600 blade server. The details of this Internet Vaudeville act can be found here: http://h71028.www7.hp.com/enterprise/downloads/HP_ProLiant_BL260_SPECjbb2005_032808a.pdf

Normally, vendors try to establish comparisons using similar configurations, such as those done by Principled Technologies here:

http://www.principledtechnologies.com/Clients/Reports/Dell/Win2K8_blades0208.pdf

Yes, Dell commissioned this work, but if you look at Appendix B of that report, you'll notice that a professional rigor was applied to making sure there was a level playing field. By contrast, the HP report published yesterday makes no attempt at comparing similar configurations. Different processors, running in different power modes with different memory and disk configurations, etc.

If HP had substituted one of their own servers in place of the M600 – one that was actually comparable to the M600, such as the BladeSystem c-Class tested by Principled Technologies, the power savings would probably have been over 75%, instead of the 64% they reported. But they couldn't very well come out and say that their high mileage lab experiment was so much better than an HP product that many of their customers already own.

There's a few excellent live online events in the next couple days you might want to check out.

April 30 (Today) 12:30 PM Eastern: De-dupe for Dell EqualLogic iSCSI arrays - featuring Exagrid's new iSCSI De-dupe gateway product.

April 30 (Today) 1:00 PM Eastern: VMware's Site Recovery Manager and Dell EqualLogic storage. I know a lot of people are going to be interested in this one - integrating intelligence into the recovery side of VMware DR!

May 1st 3:00 PM Eastern: Dell EqualLogic iSCSI SAN array live demonstration

May 2nd 10:00 AM Central European Time: In German: Live Dell EqualLogic PS Series array product demonstration

May 2nd 1:00 PM Eastern: VI3 (VMware Infrastructure 3) and Dell EqualLogic demonstration.

Our online events calendar