The Empire Strikes Back

I was getting ready to write EMC off, at least in the mid-tier. The Clariion was old-tech, and an old way of doing things. They screamed unified, but it didn’t feel that way. Celerra in the NS/NX felt like a bolt-on. They were expensive, fragmented and difficult to work with.

EMC had been making a number of good buys over the past couple of years. RSA, VMware, Kashya and Data Domain come to mind. Avamar and YottaYotta were lesser-known pieces. When it came to primary storage, however it seemed stale. Then they started showing the cards they were holding.

First came VMAX. They refreshed the Symmetrix line with a modular, scalable architecture. It could grow from something small to something big. But the real changes starting coming with FAST and FAST VP.

I’ve Got The Remote Replication, Single-Storage Image MPIO Blues

There are not a lot of customers I meet that don’t want some form of replication to a disaster recovery/colocation facility. What used to be financially unreachable has come down over 10-15 years to be affordable for most businesses. Remote replication, coupled with VMware or one of the other hypervisors providing server virtualization has made recovery quick, easy and within budget.

So as I look at some of the new storage systems being released lately, I’m scratching my head. Why would an affordable small to medium business mid-tier storage system provide only FibreChannel-based replication – today?

The Storage Evolution Part 2: Deduplication

This is part 2 in the Storage Evolution series.

When we created SANs we stored more and more data retrieved at higher and higher speeds, and it was good. Then we added advanced functionality like creating copies (clones, snapshots, etc.) quickly, and it was good. Then development wanted to have 6 copies of that production database, one for each developer, also test, QA and staging. We needed a daily clone for the data warehouse and business intelligence. We virtualized our servers, we booted from SAN, some of us ditched the desktops and workstations opting for Citrix and VDI. We were making copies of the same data, over and over and over again. And at the 11th hour of the second half of the day, we backed it all up.

And it just got worse.

The Tale of Tape

We had a love/hate relationship with tape. We loved it’s density, it’s streaming speed, we hated its bulk, daily off-site management, library management and load and seek time. But it was cheap, alternatives expensive.

The Storage Evolution Part 1: Virtualization

In order for me to talk about storage virtualization, I feel it’s important to describe what I mean by it. Storage virtualization is introducing a layer of virtualization, or abstraction, when dealing with storage. What I’m not talking about is storage for server virtualization, or storage of VMware, Hyper-V, etc. While server virtualization and storage virtualization are very complimentary, they are not the same thing.

Storage virtualization adds some kind of pointer-based approach abstracting the physical blocks from the logical blocks of a disk, LUN or unit of storage. This approach adds power and benefit to give us more flexibility on how we allocate, move, make recovery points (snapshots, copies, etc.) and replication (mirroring) for business continuity or disaster recovery.

IBM V7000 and SVC 6.1 – What IBM is Getting Right

On Thursday, IBM made some storage announcements: Storwise V7000, SVC 6.1 and DS8800. I’m going to ignore the DS8800 for now; it may be a needed upgrade, but the thunder was stolen in my opinion by the other two areas.

Storwise V7000

IBM has made a big decision introducing the V7000. IBM’s mid-tier lineup has consisted of two main OEM’d players over the last decade, LSI’s IBM DS3/4/5000 lineup, and NetApp’s IBM N-Series. The V7000 is not an OEM product, but an IBM product.

This is a big departure.

While I’m not expecting IBM to immediately ditch LSI or NetApp, IBM is clearly out making their own hardware. They had some well-known pieces DS8000, XIV and SVC; the V7000 joins this homegrown family.

XIV Is Cool, But Not Cool Enough

Now that I’ve gotten your attention, I have to say I love this box. It takes fairly inexpensive components and makes them sing. The real magic comes in two forms, grid computing and the algorithms that power it.

Back in the 90s, I used to install supercomputers across the USA. These were the deep blue variety that played Garry Kasparov in chess and eventually beat him. Supercomputers were being used to do many high performance computing tasks from analyzing road wear and tear to chemistry, data mining, nuclear simulation and weather forecasting. My wife would ask me if they wore capes.

The industry was going along fine, until some people decided to take inexpensive commodity Intel servers and network them together with a high-speed network, and distributing the workload amongst the different processing nodes. This is when grid computing took down the supercomputing heavyweights.

ILM Grows Up

Information lifecycle management (ILM) has long been the holy grail for organizations trying to better put their treasure troves of information and data where it makes the best sense. As well, putting the vast amounts of stuff we keep around and never look at anymore in as inexpensive of a place possible, while still keeping it online. The automated tools have usually been lacking.

Historically, this has been either a manual or intensive process. We’ve had tools to help us identify what’s what and where it is: storage resource management (SRM) tools help us identify aged, duplicate and no longer used junk that’s been packed away on our expensive spinning hard disks. We’ve had add-ons in the form of hierarchical storage management (HSM), that tiers data into gold, silver or bronze, or FC, SATA and tape. We’ve also had appliances, such as Rainfinity to help automate the movement. Most of these tools have focused on the unstructured file data, the network shares, moving that old stuff to cheaper pastures.