EMC Announces Hulk/Maui (well almost)

Yes, it's almost here folks. The blogosphere tells us so. First of all, there's Chuck Hollis' latest post pondering the issue of how the storage cloud works and why it's really difficult to pick up data quickly in geographically dispersed areas. He leaves us with the cliffhanger;

"The magic isn't in the hardware, it's in the software ..."

So, Hulk/Maui's a software product then...

Next there's StorageZilla, with his viral marketing approach. No technical details here, just cryptic comments relating to trendy cultural references - Dr Who - and some bloke in a space helmet. Clearly I'm not worthy as I didn't understand the second one at all.

This morning we have 'Zilla's full disclosure with his latest post.

All of this is prior to an official annoucement - nothing on EMC's press release site yet.

What's next? So, expect Barry Burke to post a technical assassination of the opposition over at the Storage Anarchist. Then we can have other bloggers putting their spin on it too. I can't be bothered to list them all; I'm sure you know who they are.

But wait - have I not just fallen into the viral marketing trap too by helping out EMC? D'oh, perhaps those folks at Hopkinton Towers are more clever than we think....

The Right Way to do Vendor Comparisons

Good old Chuck Hollis has stirred up the vendor vitriol over the last week with two posts comparing the capacity efficiency of EMC's CX4, Netapp's FAS and HP's EVA products. See "Your Usable Capacity May Vary" and "Updates to Capacity Post".

Unsurprisingly, Chuck's conclusion is that EMC comes out on top (if it hadn't, would he still have posted - I think not). Now, not content with the statements Chuck made, HP have responded in kind. Check out the blog here (HP). There have also been plenty of comments on Chuck's posts, many of them non-too positive.

Whilst the opposing sides continue to score points off each other by highlighting the merits of their own technology, my mind drifts to the subject of exactly how vendor comparisons can be made. In some of my previous roles, I've had to help bring quotes for storage and SAN switches into line to make them as equivalent as possible in terms of their capacity. The trouble is, it isn't that simple.

Think of the difference between the switch vendors. Until recently, some vendors had full line speed blades in their hardware, however others followed the over-subscription model, sharing bandwidth between physical ports. If you're being charged by the port, then there's a clear difference in what you are getting for your money with these two technologies. My view was to work out the bandwidth per port as another comparison and to break down the cost of individual components, creating a more detailed cost model.

The same thing applies to arrays, whether enterprise or modular. Inevitably, most users don't follow the vendor best practices, choosing to use their own design (whether tested in their labs) or using a customised best practice model. There are also those who don't follow any model at all. :-)

Why do users do this? Easy - they all have different requirements and customise their hardware to match this.

Back to testing. We need some real world independent testing. So rather than vendors submitting their hardware to SPC tests in which they set the configuration, the independent testers need to set the hardware specification based on common sense configurations. Now you may say common sense isn't that common and this would allow "interpretations" of configurations but I disagree. I think common sense configurations would more likely get user approval and any vendor who believes their hardware is best would have no reason not to take part.

So, vendors out there - got any hardware you want to loan out?

Multi-vendor Storage

Reading Chuck’s blog during my vacation, I stopped on his comment that multi-vendor environments are on the decline due to their complexity and the hassle of dealing with multiple vendors.

I have to say that firstly, I don’t believe this and secondly and companies with large storage environments would be mad not to consider a multi-vendor setup.

The reasons people have problems with multi-vendor environments are because they don’t spend time turning their storage into a commodity. EMC and HDS both recommend their own LUN sizes; each will sell you their management solutions; each will have their own support matrices.

But these things can and should be standardised. It is a simple task to define and migrate to consistent LUN sizes, regardless of vendor hardware. Software tools can be simplified; most people choose use command line or the basic configuration tools rather than the bloated EMC tools, so no problem there. In addition, scripting can be developed for failover and PIT/Snapshot management, making their use generic across vendors. Finally, driver/firmware/HBA/fabric standards can all be established to converge on a common set across all storage vendors.

Once storage has been established as a commodity, any new purchases can come from any of the vendors in your multi-vendor strategy.

Oh and one last thought; do you really believe HDS, IBM and EMC would give you the absolute best price if they know you can only use their product on most of your server farm environment? Competition within the storage market is a false premise; moving to another hardware platform to replace an existing one takes months (in some cases years). Vendors know that customers’ threats to move everything to another platform are only hollow unless you have a true multi-vendor strategy.