Moshe Joins The Blogosphere

Moshe Yanai of EMC, XIV and now IBM fame (I'm sure I don't need to fill in the details) is now blogging. You can catch up with him here.

As previously requested, I'm going to start posting my RSS blog feeds, starting with IBM.

• Tony Pearson - Inside System Storage Blog - Homepage - RSS - Rating: *****
• Barry Whyte - Storage Virtualisation - Homepage - RSS - Rating: *****
• Moshe Yanai - Think Storage - Homepage - RSS - Rating: N/A

The Rating figure is an indication of how often and how useful I find this blog - it is *not* any comment on the quality of the writing or author, before I start to get comments on any sort of bias!

Does XIV spell the end for the IBM/Netapp relationship?

There's been a lot of talk recently about the position in the market for Nextra, IBMs disk storage product, acquired with the purchase of XIV at the beginning of the year. I've been mulling it over and I have to say it creates a dichotomy for me.

On the one hand I see some of the technology benefits like the ability to write across all disks in a storage array so that no one disk is the hot spot for write I/O [didn't StorageTek effectively do this with the Iceberg system and in a RAID-5 configuration to boot?]. There's no doubting the performance benefits of distributing writes across as many spindles as possible, but at the expense of only providing RAID-1? I can only assume that either a new RAID paradigm from IBM is imminent or there's going to be some other magic which tells us why we don't need to write two full blocks of data.

That leads to the second part of my cogitation; what exactly is the business benefit of the Nextra? How will IBM pitch it against EMC/HDS/3par/Pillar and most relevant, Netapp?

Tony Pearson's blog entry from 2nd January, he states:

"However, this box was designed for unstructured content, like medical images, music, videos, Web pages, and other discrete files"

Does that mean Nextra's market positioning is in direct competition to Netapp? Surely not! If so, how will IBM determine which product (N-series or Nextra) should be pitched at a customer looking to provide infrastructure to support unstructured data? Netapp would win every time as it holds all the feature cards in its hand.

I'm sure I'm missing something that IBM have spotted with XIV. A little birdie tells me that there will be official product announcements imminently. Perhaps then there will be some light at the end of the tunnel.

Off The Grid

I've been on holiday for the last week (sunning myself and the family in Cyprus). I had no Internet access - not even TV! Although I had no laptop (or Blackberry this time) I did take my iPod Touch, now configured with the mobile version of NewsGator. As I've mentioned previously, I have a 100+ RSS feeds (which I'll publish once I get around to it) on storage and others. My backlog was about 2500 entries, so I decided to challenge myself to get up to date and read as much as possible. Clearly I didn't read them all (there were plenty that could be skipped) but I read most and it provides for an interesting cross section...

EMC - blogs are run like a military machine; co-ordinating the news relating to new product releases and mercilessly hammering the competition. EMC have more storage bloggers than any other storage company and there are some good ones out there - one of my favourites is Information Playground by Steve Todd, where he discusses the design of Clariion.

Netapp - follows a close second to EMC with lots of bloggers and lots of competitor bashing. I particularly like Alex McDonald's postings.

IBM - doing a great job running the "resistance", fighting back against the continual onslaught of Barry (A Burke). Check out Barry (Whyte) and Tony Pearson. I'd like to see more from IBM though, especially their product developers working on DS arrays and XIV.

HDS - A jolly good bloke, but not really a player in the blogosphere. Only Hu contributes regularly, but doesn't engage in any serious debate.

Sun - quite literally on another planet with their storage strategy!

Dell - bought some toys, but doesn't know how to play with them. Unfortunately the older boy who could help them play with them has left...

Now there are more companies out there and I don't think I have any blog links from Brocade, 3Par, Compellent, Emulex, Qlogic, Pillar and others although I may be wrong (it is getting late). Any RSS link offerings gladly welcome - although I might not get around to reading them before my next holiday!

Two for the price of one

The holidays are over and it's back to work for me. In fact I returned yesterday; the break was good however it is also good to be back.

It seems that I've returned to a flurry of acquisitions. Yesterday there was the heavily reported (on the blogosphere) purchase of XiV by IBM. Tony Pearson gives a summary of the features on his post. One thing that interests me is the use of distributed writes across an entire array by creating 1MB blocks from (presumably) LUNs and filesystems. If a drive fails, then the data is still available on other disks in the system and spread across a great number rather than a single drive (RAID-1) or potentially a small number of drives (RAID5/6).

I've been trying to get my head around what this means. On the one hand it sounds like a real problem, as a double drive failure could impact a wide number of hosts; it all depends on how well the 1MB chunks are distributed. However maybe it isn't that much of a problem as the issue only arises when both of the chunks that mirror a 1MB block both occur on failing drives. I would expect that as the number of physical drives increases then the impact of double failure reduces, as does the number of 1MB blocks affected. In addition, a drive may fail only in one area rather than on the whole device, so the affected blocks could be quite small; the remainder could be perfectly readable and be quickly moved. No doubt Moshe and the team have done the maths to know what the risk is and compared it to that of standard arrays and wouldn't be selling the product if it was not inherently more safe.

The only other issue I can see is what market the product will slot into; Tony mentions that the product is not for structured data (although I guess it supports it) but was designed for unstructured data of large binary file types. So, why use RAID-1 compared to say a 14+2 RAID-6 configuration which would be much cheaper in terms of the disk cost? Presumably another selling point is performance, but I would expect the target data profile (medical, large binary objects) to be more sequential than random access and not be that impacted by using SATA.

I guess only time will tell. I look forward to seeing how things go.

The other purchase announced today was that of Onaro by Netapp. Onaro sell SANScreen, a tool to collect and analyse fibre channel SANs and to highlight configuration issues. Whilst I think it is a good product, I don't see the fit with Netapp's business in the NAS market (in fact I'm sure SANScreen doesn't currently support NAS), so where's the benefit here other than buying up a company which must be close to or is making money.

I wonder who will be bought tomorrow?