Storage @ Work

There is a post on the VMWare forum today where an administrator is having problems getting VMotion to work with their iSCSI SAN.

Further down the thread is a post from an EqualLogic customer who has had a much better and more positive experience.

Thanks to VMWare forum member, acr, who posted his comment on this thread in the VMWare forum. Please look at his expertise level on this forum. (Virtuoso, with over 2600 posts). He says iSCSI is "quickest and easiest when we use VMotion."

EqualLogic's frameless, virtual storage architecture works very well with VMWare. Similar to the way the VMotion feature provides complete transparency for systems, EqualLogic storage systems provide transparency for storage where volumes can be transparently spanned and migrated across storage systems.

I just posted on VMotion and iSCSI (and EqualLogic). That got me thinking about this other thread that started before I was writing this blog. People wondering if EqualLogic iSCSI storage could work for their VMware environments might be encouraged by what was witten there.

This thread in the VMWare foums has customers discussing their SAN implementations for ESX servers. The discussion is practically a group endorsement for using iSCSI storage with VMWare. If you are thinking about iSCSI but are unsure if the performance will be adequate, this thread (and others) on the VMWare forum may help build your confidence.

Don't believe the FUD about iSCSI. It's far better than Fibre Channel vendors want you to know. It's a lot better than what a lot of the analysts say it is. The best yardstick for a technology are the opinions of the people who use it.

Here is our schedule for VMworld. Many have asked me about the BOF (birds of a feather) meeting. It's going to be at Terra on Wednesday the 12th from 4:00 to 5:00 followed by a customer appreciation party from 5:00 - 7:00. For those that recall last year's party it was a pretty good time. Definitely a lot of energy and excitement around VMware, consolidation and virtualization. I know - it sounds geeky, but if you are into it, there is nothing better. See You there.

Storage veteran Nik Simpson at the Burton Group writes thought provoking articles for their Data Center Strategies blog. Today he wrote about SSPs (storage service providers) – and why they didn’t succeed several years ago and what his thoughts are about how they could become more successful in the future. He concludes that the best application for SSPs is archiving and I agree with him, perhaps for slightly different reasons.

To me outsourced archiving makes sense as a corporate governance practice. If a company (and their IT organization in particular) wants to remove any implication of tampering with archived data, the best way to do it is through an SSP that provides the functionality. The idea is that once the data is sent to the SSP, the SSP more or less “owns it”, along with the responsibility of keeping it available for legal, audit and corporate reasons. Like WORM, but as a service. No writes, no updates.

It follows that the missing link for this is encryption of the data at the SSP site, which brings into play all sorts of thorny issues surrounding key management. The SSP needs to be able to share its storage resources among its customer base AND guarantee complete privacy of data. It is economically backwards to fence data on along physical storage boundaries, but customers are not keen on trusting logical fencing methods, such as partitioning, for fear of hacking and operator errors. Encryption with logical storage partitions would probably be acceptable and affordable.

I'm pretty stoked about VMworld this week in San Francisco. Going to see lots of interesting stuff and meet with customers and friends from around the industry. I thought VMworld was one of the big highlights of 2006 and expect it will be even bigger this year.

EqualLogic fans might be interested in a few things of note we are doing at the show. The main thing that a lot of people will be interested in is that we are giving away a Harley. Not a stuffed doll of a Harley or a Spinal Tap version of a Harley, but an actual Harley Davidson motorcycle. Next year, you can be in Sturgis in August too!

I am actually a bit torn about this kind of give away. I mean, lot's of our customers tell us that they think our iSCSI SAN products are pretty terrific and I think we should just try to have an event for them (which we are doing - a Birds of Feather and a customer appreciation cocktail party on Wednesday). But I guess if you are going to go beyond the basic feelgood stuff at a major trade show, giving away a Harley isn't so bad. OK, the real problem - truth be told - is that I'm not eligible. Farley on a Harley? The Farley Harley? Farley's gnarly Harley? Videos from the Hogmeister? All these sound pretty good to me, but its not going to come to pass unless I shell out my own money for them. Maybe I'll turn in expense reports for the last year and go get one.

There are a couple Webinars going on this week. I'm doing one tomorrow (Tuesday) AM at 9:00 PDT with VMware and a customer using both technologies. We'll be talking about the synergy of VMware and EqualLogic iSCSI SANs in SMB accounts. Its very powerful stuff with important cost and uptime benefits. Then on Wednesday (also at 9:00 PDT), Eric Schott, our Director of Product management is doing another live webcast with VMware discussing some of the newest technology for Disaster Recovery in VMware environments. This is incredibly important technology that is going to change the IT landscape for many customers so you will want to check it out if you get a chance.

There are a number of breakout sessions with EqualLogic employees or customers participating: There is a listing of them here:

Come see what all the excitement is about at the EqualLogic booth this year, here is where we are in Moscone Center. On this map look for the blue rectangle (#1021) to the right of VMware's booth, which is the big one in the middle.

I caught up with Chris Fricke, from Clackamas County Oregon and we were talking. I like to say we have the greatest customers in the world and in this video, Chris shows why I say that. Thanks Chris!

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Chris Sims from the Clayton County Water Authority in Georgia was a panelist at VMworld today and he talks about their DR setup, VMware implementation and their EqualLogic iSCSI SAN. Like I always say, we have the best customers and it is a joy to work with customers like Chris.

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I led a webcast last Tuesday at VMworld about using VMware and EqualLogic storage in SMB environments. Ben Matheson from VMware and Arell Chapman - a customer from United Bank and Trust joined me. I had suggested that VMware and EqualLogic were like peaches and cream, but then Ben said he thought it was more like a hamburger with fries. Either way, I'll take it. The best part of all was Arell's discussion of his implementation. People will want to listen to what he has to say. Click this link to view and listen to the webinar recording. (requires Real Player)

Then on Wednesday our director of product management Eric Schott and Vivek Chhabria from VMware presented on DR technologies and techniques on a webcast that has relevance to just about everybody. Click here to view the webinar.

Carmine Iannace is the IT director at the Brattle Group , an economics consulting firm in Cambridge Massachusetts. He was an early implementer of VMware technology at Welch's before bringing his virtualization vision to the Brattle Group, where he has almost completely converted their IT infrastructure to virtual systems and storage. I interviewed Carmine last week when I was in Boston and he spoke about his use of virtualization and the role that EqualLogic iSCSI storage has in it, including its deployment in their European lights-out data centers and its DR role, performing remote data replication.

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The big news this morning is that Dell has struck an agreement to acquire EqualLogic. This is certainly a surprise as we have been hunkering down in preparation for an initial public offering, so it gives the future a much different look than it had over the weekend. The deal will probably complete in three to four months. Let’s get on with it, I say – full speed ahead.

Acquisitions raise lots of questions – most of them I don’t have answers to, such as how will this impact EqualLogic’s business and its customers. People that know me, know that I tend to be skeptical because there are many more ways for things to go wrong than right, but I am fairly bullish on this acquisition. Michael Dell has been making bold moves at Dell since his return to the helm last January and seems to have changed his primary focus from streamlining internal operations to improving the customer experience with Dell products. His vision to Simplify IT is right on course, but difficult to accomplish. The decision to spend $1.4 Billion on EqualLogic shows a very real commitment to executing on that vision. As far as I can tell, Dell has entered this agreement with a vision of building upon EqualLogic’s early successes and plans to grow EqualLogic both as a storage provider and as a channel business entity. If so, that will be a very good thing for EqualLogic’s business, its customers and its channel partners. In doing so, Dell will be making a large number of customers’ IT experiences much simpler.

I’ve received a couple emails already from customers and friends. Most were congratulatory, but one was from one of my favorite customers who suggested that Dell will “now ruin an otherwise good product.” I really don’t think so. I think Dell understands the talent and creativity we have and believes that supporting EqualLogic will be better than extracting the technology and dumping the talent, as sometimes happens with storage acquisitions. Among other things that were discussed in a conference call this morning, Dell representatives told us that nobody will be asked to move to Texas. That's probably a bit premature, but it's also a very good sign of their intentions to increase EqualLogic's capabilities.

Lucas Mearian at Computerworld wrote about Dell's acquisition of EqualLogic and concludes that it will force a split in the Dell/EMC partnership.

I think Lucas is an astute observer of the industry, but my previous opinion posted on the VMTN forums and my agreement with Chuck Hollis' blog posting yesterday weren't swayed by what Lucas had to say.

Dell and EMC both have a lot more at stake here than the iSCSI business that EqualLogic brings to the table. They do business with a much broader set of products than iSCSI storage - such as VMware. Dell is a very valuable sales channel for EMC and EMC is a very important technology provider for Dell. There will always be some level of competition among the largest companies in the technology sector. It creates a bit of a mess sometimes, but having interdependencies between companies provides stability and efficiencies that ultimately result in broader solutions at lower costs.

I suspect this deal will actually end up creating additional opportunities to expand the business between Dell and EMC. I'm not always right about these things, but that's what my intuition is telling me.

Here are links to a couple pieces that showed up in the last 24 hours regarding Dell's acquisition of EqualLogic. Both reflect the writer's intent to present fresh, thoughtful perspectives.

The first is by longtime technology editor Bill Snyder in his InfoWorld blog, Tech's Bottom Line, where he combines technology and financial analysis.

The other is from ZDnet Australia, where author Liam Tung provides regional commentary. I always appreciate the candor from down under.

Dave Simpson, Editor at InfoStor is an old friend who has been contributing pearls of wisdom for many years. He recently wrote that server virtualization is the killer app for iSCSI. I have to agree with him, even though server virtualization is more of a platform than an application.

If I had to pick a single killer application for EqualLogic iSCSI SANs, I'd choose Microsoft Exchange. That said, EqualLogic iSCSI storage is used every day for a wide variety of applications.

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a meaningful concept. It establishes new methods for software systems and applications. It is probably the most important step forward in software modularity ever. It is much more than a way to provide web services, its a way to implement software on a completely different scale.

There are many things to consider with SOA, including the abstraction of storage from application processes. As applications evolve towards associated services, the one-to-one relationship between data and software applications evaporates. This will not make things any easier for data stewards who are struggling to meet data management expectations with incomplete and inconsistent tools - and have developed application-centered storage practices.

The way I see it, SOA is all about the data (almost everything in IT is). It's great to have modular services that allow fast deployment of business processes, but those services depend on having data access and management practices that are up to the task. Storage will have a minor role, but most of the heavy lifting will occur at the file/object/metadata level, where most of the "storage" work is going to take place.

Hitachi seems to think their flavor of virtualization is Service Oriented Storage (SOS). The acronym is appropriate insofar as their SOS is obviously a desperate call for help with product positioning. There is nothing about spoofing targets and initiators that makes SOA-style data management problems go away. Sure, virtual storage makes the containers easier to manage - and BTW, I'd gladly put EqualLogic's management model up against Hitachi's any day - but virtual storage doesn't provide file-level functions. Service Oriented Storage is an exercise in Service Oriented Spin. It has no real substance.

The best storage infrastructure for SOA turns out to have the same characteristics as storage for anything else: high availability, effortless scaling of capacity and performance, flexibility to change/move resources when necessary, and low cost of ownership.

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."

Joe Kovar at CRN had this to say today about iSCSI's growth.

VMworld Europe is going on right now in Cannes. I want to be there, but I have to be here. Could I get virtualized?

Not 2nd life. I don't really want a second life in Cannes - I want real life. Yes, I know its winter and the weather is not great. But the VMworld conference is happening and I love the energy at those shows.

Big news from VMworld Europe yesterday - VMware will be embedded in Dell and other vendor's servers.

Virtual storage is a terrific match for virtual server environments. This announcement about embedded VMware is great news, especially for our channel partners who will have more opportunities to help their customers engage/expand their virtual IT environments.

Here is a Youtube video with short customer interviews talking about embedded VMware.

Jerome Wendt posted an excellent synposis of Double Take Software's latest release of their Double Take for VMware Environments.

There are a number of ways to remotely replicate data. Dell EqualLogic arrays have built-in software that customers use, but they can also choose to use Double Take's software if its a better fit. to learn more, download this white paper.

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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Tim Sherbak has always been one of my faves at EqualLogic. A true beast of burden in the marketing department and our VMware champion.

Here he is commenting from VMworld Europe 2008 with John "Homey" Joseph on server and storage virtualization.

The camera angle adds interest. Tim's right hand gets gigantic in a couple places. Yo!, Tim! We always knew you had it in you!

Storage pain is often symptomatic and finding the root cause of the problem can be very difficult. I spoke with Paul Kaeley today who runs Dell's global storage services business about the new storage assessment services that were announced earlier this month.

These are short-term engagements that involve installing software that measures the relevant elements of data storage and collects it for analysis. The analytics show pressure points and areas of weakness that need to be addressed. Storage professionals/engineers then make hardware and software recommendations directly targeted at solving the customer's problems. The key is that these are not long term engagements. As my friend Joel Harrison says, it's not a milkman type of business.

There are three practice areas: data management, backup and archiving and storage for virtual servers.

The services team was working on these services when Dell's acquisition of EqualLogic was announced. With lots of things going on everywhere, there wasn't a chance to integrate their efforts with the EqualLogic team and reseller channel. Paul assured me that there is a big interest in getting this done. Not only that, but Dell EqualLogic channel partners will be able to perform these services for their customers too. Its not a traditional consulting business - it has the Dell philosophy of simplifying IT and lowering costs.

Dan Kusnetzky, in his VIRTUALLY SPEAKING blog wrote about EqualLogic's approach to storage virtualization.

He was talking to JJ and they had a senior moment discussing the technology legacy that started many years ago at Digital Equipment Corporation. FWIW, that really is the mojo of the development team and it's nice to see a nod in that direction, so thanks Dan.

But it reminds me, I think it's time to make a short video on how the storage paging works.

John Joseph, our fearless marketing leader at Dell EqualLogic, was interviewed by Carryl Roy at Virtual Strategy Magazine. They talk about the history of the company, its acquisition and integration by Dell, product architecture and features of the PS5000 product line, the customer experience, pooled storage, business plans and a glimpse into our technology futures.

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Will Urban, one of the Dell EqualLogic team members has an amazing pitch around Dell EqualLogic disaster recovery for VMware environments. A video of Will from VMworld was posted on the Direct2Dell site this morning. If you are interested in how site recovery manager (SRM) will work, this is a great video to watch.

Wow, Will, that was some fast talking, but not as fast as this guy. I guess you picked a bad day to give up coffee!

Yesterday, Dell and Egenera announced that Dell would be selling Egenera's PAN software to manage Dell's PowerEdge servers. I've been hearing about Egenera for years (all positive) - and so I'm excited to find out more in the months to come.

Partnering with excellent software companies makes a lot of sense. The Register seems to think it's a good idea too.

This post first appeared on the Inside IT blog (at Dell).

One of my favorite bloggers in Bob Plankers, the Lone Sysadmin. With all the excitement of getting this blog launched on Friday, I missed his post on the OpenManage Server Update Utility (version 5.4.0), which now works on ESX Server 3.5. Bob is always churning up interesting info that I think people that come to this blog would appreciate.

Thanks for passing this along, Bob. (and u haf 2 lik hiz lolkatz tagglin)

This entry was initially posted here on Inside IT.

Dell has sponsored a forum on the Ars Technica site called The Server Room.  This is how it's described on the forum header:  This forum is dedicated to the "bigger picture" topics--high-level
systems that don't easily fit in the other forums. Before you can build
a server room, there must be understanding of the requirements and
technologies. This forum, then, is for the architects, the designers,
and the decision makers for IT systems.

There are a lot of smart people weighing in there on some interesting threads, such as  Interesting Uses of Virtualization. For example, two scenarios discussed in that thread involve using a VM to circumvent corporate security implementations and using a VM as a surrogate when your laptop goes into the shop.

I recommend this forum to any readers who want to compare notes with talented and smart IT professionals. Of course, if you need help from experts at Dell, don't hesitate to visit the forum on the Dell TechCenter.

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

We shot this video during a birds of feather during VMworld in San Francisco last September. Eric Schott (Director of Product Management, EqualLogic) and Kiran Ranabhor (Technical Product Manager for DR, VMware) has presented SRM and were asked what kinds of storage provisioning (or access modes) SRM would support.

In short, the answer is VMFS. Raw device maps and iSCSI software initiators running in virtual systems were not slated for the first release. I assume nothing changed there since September.

I'm not sure what is going on here, but virtualization.info just added a couple Dell EqualLogic arrays to their Rent-a-Lab operation. I don't know who these folks are or what they are doing, so if anybody out there does, please comment and I'll post so we all know.