Data-driven

I ended my last blog post with "Integrate and prosper." Little did I know that Cisco, EMC, and VMware were about to unveil a Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) early the following week, the biggest cross-vendor integration project yet seen in the world of computing. Yes there were rumors about a Cisco/EMC joint venture that would sell Cisco servers packaged with EMC storage, but none that I heard captured the boldness and scope of VCE.

The core VCE compute platform is called a "Vblock," an integrated, pre-packaged IT solution consisting of server and networking resources from Cisco; storage, security, and software-based management tools from EMC; and an OS platform (vSphere) from VMware. To market and support Vblocks, the coalition has created two separate entities: a Solution Support Team staffed and funded by the coalition partners that will do presales and provide other marketing resources, and Acadia chartered to build and, if needed, operate Vblocks on premises for a customer. Who will you buy Vblocks from? Just about everyone except HP, IBM, and OracleSun.

Not to be outdone, the day following the VCE announcement, HP announced Converged Infrastructure (CI). CI is integrated server, networking, and storage resources too, but doesn't need a coalition. It takes most of what it needs from HP's own product lines. I say most because HP doesn't own a server virtualization platform--a key ingredient. Not to worry. Despite the fact that VMware is invested in Vblocks and Acadia, it likes CI too. And then of course there's the HyperV alternative out there...somewhere...

Its decidedly unclear at this point how successful these integrated compute stacks will be in an IT marketplace that's undergoing multiple transitions--from physical to virtual, from stove pipe to cloud, from decentralized to consolidated. The purveyors of integrated compute stacks are driven by a central belief: that your CIO wants to make the transition to virtual/cloud/consolidated simpler by wrapping up servers, switches, and storage arrays into one neat, pre-integrated package.

As storage pro, you may find that ironic. You may be old enough to remember when many of these same vendors were selling decentralized client server computing as the better, simpler way. Now the Three Musketeers--consolidation, centralization, and virtualization--are here to vanquish the complexity created by the-network-is-the-computer computing. Please shoot me if I even suggest that integrated compute stacks are the new mainframe.

So, as a storage professional slaving away within the bowels of corporate IT infrastructure, is the integrated compute stack about to change your life? I'd say yes if the powers that be like the Vblock concept. And if they like Vblocks then your choice of storage is EMC's. If CI wins, you get HP's flavor of the month array. Simple, right? And life could get simpler still when the IT operations group reorganizes around Vblocks. You may get to know the people in the server and network administration groups much better than you know them now as they start doing some of the things you do.

On the other hand, Vblocks and CIs may well be a tough sell in your organization. Cisco has yet to make its mark in the server world and buying a million-dollar anything from a coalition of vendors that want to run your critical applications on their collaborative platform is untried to say the least. But the biggest hurdle standing in the way of the integrated compute stack as it approaches your IT operations group may well be the following retort: "We just don't do things that way here."

Given that the phrase "our current economy" has such a negative connotation, EMC's third-quarter earnings report last week was downright upbeat.

EMC surpassed its own optimistic guidance for the fiscal quarter just ended by 4 percent. Wow. Other phrases like "increasing confidence among customer in spending their IT budgets" and "very weak first quarter progressing to more normal third and fourth quarters (of 2009)" were heard on the conference call with analysts. Cool. Happy days are here again for the storage industry, right? Well, it depends.

EMC is still regarded as a bellwether for the rest of the storage industry. Indeed, Information Storage as a line item in EMC's third-quarter 2009 financial report accounted for 65 percent of EMC's Information Infrastructure revenues. Upbeat forecasts are often extrapolated to other publicly and privately held storage companies. But EMC is changing. While it's still "where information lives," strategic initiatives include cloud computing, security, broader IT services, and of course, virtualization. It's a very different storage company than the rest of the pack in that all of these initiatives now contribute directly and indirectly to the growth of its Information Storage division. No other storage company operates under EMC's model.

Additionally, there are forces currently at work in the marketplace that tend to mitigate against either raw storage growth or profit margins. Data deduplication technologies are now in the mainstream of IT operational processes. Reducing physical storage requirements by a factor of 20:1 for a growing number of data types is increasingly commonplace, reducing the demand for raw physical storage. And while cloud storage is the latest craze, it's a tough place to generate profit dollars. Cloud storage buyers like commodity hardware, open-source software, and a DIY attitude.

I agree with EMC's executives, who are predicting that the storage industry can expect to see purchasing activity returning to somewhat normal levels in the coming quarter and extending into 2010. But I don't think we'll see a rising tide that automatically floats all boats. Rather, positioning and an ability to integrate with other things--platforms, applications, processes--will be key predictors of success.

Again, let's look at EMC. No doubt, VMware is now an indirect growth contributor to EMC's Information Storage division. The same is true for 3Par, Dell/EqualLogic, HP/LeftHand, and NetApp. It should by now be clear that integration with server virtualization is goodness if you're a storage vendor.

Positioning in the storage cloud is chic but risky at the moment. Nevertheless, if you as a storage vendor can survive the harsh profit environment, your reward will come in due course. Cloud service providers are getting away with the data center equivalent of murder right now. Security is all but nonexistent and incidents of data loss are increasing. Yet providers are still able to sign-up customers who ignore the fine print in the service agreement that absolves them of all liability. That will change. And when it does, the demand for infrastructure that supports a higher quality of service will rise.

Then there are the "stack" vendors--those who are now pursuing an end-to-end, application-to-disk and everything-in-between product integration strategy. These include IBM, HP, Oracle/Sun (yes the deal gets done), and Cisco/EMC. The move by enterprise IT to virtualization and by inference, the cloud, drives this integration. And one interesting and perhaps intended consequence is this: In the world of the integrated processing stack, all becomes visible. A vendor like Cisco supplying new data center network infrastructure to a customer (Data Center Ethernet for example) can also see and respond to needs for upgraded storage (from partner EMC), new server connection devices like NICs and HBAs, upgraded management software (again from partner EMC). Virtualization gives stack vendors a sales opportunity vantage point that plays directly to the integrated stack strategy. Should smaller point-product vendors be pursuing an integration strategy with them? You bet.

There once was a point in time when the storage industry stood proud, broad-shouldered, and fiercely independent. Remember when storage mavens scoffed at Scott McNealy's "storage is a mere feature of the server" pronouncement? Sorry, but those days are gone. Integrate and prosper.

For the last two decades, RAID (redundant array of inexpensive disks) controllers have ruled the storage world. RAID has been required for data protection in disk arrays. RAID schemes (RAID 0,1,6 10, etc.) reside on RAID controllers baked into disk arrays with many billions sold to date. But perhaps more important from the standpoint of making money, the RAID controller has also delivered differentiated value for storage vendors. Data copy and migration, snap shot, deduplication, and the list of controller-based functions goes on--all have been loaded on to the RAID controller.

It's becoming increasingly clear that the traditional RAID controller is coming to the end of its life cycle, at least within the enterprise data center. Types of applications now common to the Web 2.0 community are now populating the enterprise data center--applications that require scalability into the petabyte range. Traditional RAID controllers start to show their shortcomings at this scale level. Drive rebuild times elongate to the point where RAID data protection is no longer protection.

We can argue (and I have) over how much longer the RAID controller will survive. For sure, it's nowhere near dead and will continue on as the workhorse of the storage industry for some time. But its shortcomings are becoming increasingly obvious and are driving the creation of the next generation of storage devices. Indeed one of those devices is no "device" at all. Rather, it's software running on a collection of commodity servers and server-attached disk, both traditional and solid state disk. Think of this new "device" as software-defined storage where all of the functionality is defined and delivered in software. So as a user, when you buy a software-defined storage device, you're simply buying code. What you run it on is up to you.

MaxiScale is an interesting example of software-defined storage. MaxiScale's FLEX storage platform runs on standard servers with SATA disk, and uses standard Ethernet interconnections. It is implemented as clustered nodes--servers plus disk. I/O performance and capacity scales linearly as processing nodes and disk drives are added to the cluster.

So the storage value-delivery model is decidedly different here. You as the user buy software and essentially roll you own array. But what else is different here? First, while the RAID controller is gone, the absolute requirement to preserve data is not. Data protection is also implemented in software.

Second, the system assumes that individual nodes within the cluster will go off line or fail for one reason or another. That's OK. The FLEX storage cluster continues to function, perhaps at some degraded state for some period of time until the full cluster is restored. But the point is that once you power up the cluster, you can keep it running for years--decades if you want. Hardware is added and replaced without disruption. Software is upgraded without disruption. It's perpetual storage.

Third, FLEX is an expression of the state of the art in single or global namespace file system technology. It's this core technology that delivers the value-added storage services rather than the RAID controller.

MaxiScale is not alone in this emerging space. Other software-defined storage solutions include ParaScale's cloud storage software and Symantec's FileStore. Other traditional hardware and software players will follow with software-defined storage offerings in the coming months. Include database vendors in this space as well. Some will position their solutions as cloud storage, others as data protection and archival storage.

Will software defined storage replace traditional RAID storage? Not immediately. Not dramatically. But to me a new model is emerging. Scalability, hardware independence, and system longevity are the more compelling features when compared to traditional RAID-based storage arrays. But perhaps the most compelling feature will be an ability to buy big array performance and scalability at a fraction of the cost of big array RAID.

Earlier this week, EMC revealed that it has attracted longtime Intel executive Pat Gelsinger to run its storage business.

Gelsinger is set to become president and chief operating officer of EMC's Information Infrastructure Products (virtually all in EMC's product group except VMware), including the Enterprise Storage Division, RSA Information Security, Content Management and Archiving, and Ionix IT Management. His direct reports will be Frank Hauck, who now leads ESD, Mark Lewis of CMA, Art Coviello of RSA, and Jay Mastaj of Ionix.

A Wall Street Journal blog post quotes Gelsinger as ultimately wanting to be Intel's president, but that wasn't something that was going to happen anytime soon. In that the move is effective immediately, Gelsinger will likely not be a keynote speaker at the Intel Developer Forum, as originally planned.

Gelsinger is an interesting acquisition for EMC, as it diversifies its way toward encompassing more and more traditional IT infrastructure products and services, as well as IT virtualization and emerging cloud-computing models. His chip geek credentials are solid. He wrote the book on programming the 80386, and he designed the original 486 processor. At EMC, he will move to bring to market products based on a tighter integration between existing product lines, as well as those from VMware and some key partners (read Cisco Systems).

While Gelsinger is a hard-driving executive, he reveals an actively spiritual side of himself in his book "The Juggling Act: Bringing Balance to your Faith, Family, and Work."

While the Gelsinger move seems to have attracted the most media attention, there's way more to this story. As part of the executive personnel announcement, Howard Elias was promoted to president and chief operating officer of information infrastructure and cloud services at EMC.

Previously, Elias was president of EMC Global Services and EMC's Ionix IT management group. He will now be responsible for all of EMC's service groups, including those attached to the products groups. Elias also gets to champion EMC's moves into cloud services.

For me, the hidden word here is "services." IBM spawned IGS. HP bought EDS. There's a void here that I think Elias has to fill. Can Elias give EMC a services powerhouse? Can he successfully blend the more traditional IT services with the newly emerging cloud-computing models? As I see it, those are Elias' challenges.

What's going on at the top? First, Tucci believes that the current executive management structure needs to be enhanced and expended, as it progresses from $14 billion in annual revenue to a $20 billion to $25 billion IT infrastructure company capable of competing with the likes of IBM and Hewlett-Packard. Hence the division of responsibility along the line of products vs. services.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Tucci has, with this new management structure, set up something of a three-way, three-year competition to become his successor, as Tucci also announced that he plans to remain president and CEO through 2012. Now in the running, according to the Journal report, are Gelsinger, Elias, and David Goulden, EMC's current executive vice president and chief financial officer.

Tucci is certainly laying his cards on the table for Wall Street to see, and Wall Street appears to like the move, pushing EMC shares upward over the last week. His latest moves help discourage rumors that EMC is in play as a takeover candidate.

For a storage guy, last week's VMworld 2009 in San Francisco was a great show. All the familiar storage vendors were there and then some. Walking the show floor, I found them to be uniformly positive about traffic and the response they were getting from attendees.

Digging a bit deeper I found that storage vendors were getting attention from a broad range of IT specialists including server, network, architecture, and of course, storage administrators.

Wait a minute. VMworld isn't supposed to be a storage show. And yet storage vendors were, in general, more positively impressed with VMworld 2009 than many of the previously attended storage-focused shows they have been to in the recent past.

Server virtualization is now reordering the IT landscape, and the ground storage vendors have stood on for years is moving under their feet.

At varying levels, storage vendors feel the motion. They know the server virtualization thing is huge opportunity.

At varying levels, storage vendors feel the motion. They know the server virtualization thing is huge opportunity. Said another way, they fear that they could eventually disappear if they don't position themselves properly in the eyes of IT buyers now driving toward near complete if not total virtualization of the enterprise IT function.

Decades ago, storage was a mere peripheral, a feature of the server as Scott McNealy once famously quipped. But as he made that pronouncement, storage was getting connected to its own network and creeping out from behind the shadow of the server into a limelight all its own. EMC perhaps said it best: Storage--Where Information Lives.

Now that networked storage is mature, the ground is moving once again. Data and storage management is heading back toward the server running VMware. Data replication and storage provisioning functions are now features of the VMware server with more to come.

Beyond IT architecture, the architecture of the virtualized IT operations department is undergoing perhaps an even more profound change. The boundaries that once defined operational "silos"--server, network, and storage administration--are breaking down as vCenter becomes the focal point for VMware-managed IT. Hence, storage vendors here at VMworld 2009 get visitors from all walks of VMware operational life.

What am I taking away from VMworld 2009?

1. VMware needs to resist playing favorites with storage vendors, especially the one that owns them. To VMware's credit, I saw much evidence that they get this imperative. VMware is democratically exposing APIs and vCenter plug-in opportunities to any storage vendor that wants to use them.

2. VMware administrators will be increasingly challenged to choose between data and storage management functions that reside on the VMware platform or live within the storage environment. Larger IT environments will likely settle on a combination of both. Smaller shops may well opt to manage data and storage from the vantage point of the VMware platform.

3. Storage-focused shows may no longer be able to support themselves. The nature of the storage buyer is changing. The nature of the storage environment is changing. Both are becoming more diverse and less narrowly focused on issues that only pertain to storage.

VMworld 2010 will likely be another great storage show.

I responded recently to an e-mail from a good friend who works for one of the big database applications vendors. He wrote me expressing discomfort and dismay over hype that swirls around cloud computing. He pointed out that no one vendor had yet put forth a full-scale vision for a shared-responsibility, open-access "cloud." He went on further to say that vendors wouldn't know how they would make money if a true open-access cloud were to come along.

My response was that the appeal of the "plug in, turn on, get IT service" mantra is compelling in an economy that forces companies to look away from capital acquisition in favor of off-balance sheet methods like leasing and the cloud "pay-as-you-go" model. Users will be drawn to both compute and storage clouds and vendors will want to sell them clouds and/or cloud infrastructure stuff. Concern over whether they are "open" has yet to put the brakes on this accelerating force. But there is growing concern among users about cloud vendor lock-in.

Amazon S3's application programming interface is the defacto standard for storage clouds--a fact that neither Amazon nor storage cloud user communities seem to mind much at the moment. Nonetheless, there is now a collaborative effort dedicated to furthering the adoption of cloud standards, storage and otherwise.

Openness aside, there are a number of assumptions floating around about storage clouds that have yet to be tested. These are assumptions like infinite scalability, unlimited availability, and increased responsiveness. Nothing in computing is infinitely scalable. There have been and will continue to be storage cloud outages. Response times are not deterministic. And nobody seems to be really talking about security all that much, let alone legal issues surrounding personal data in the cloud, SEC and other compliance issues, and potential chain of custody issues.

The biggest concern I have right now is for independent cloud storage vendors, particularly some of the small but rapidly growing start-ups. At CloudCamp Boston, someone provocatively mentioned that compute clouds commoditize IT operations. Interesting observation. One could argue that IT operational commoditization at least started when the help desk went overseas. But let's push that thought forward a bit more with regard to the storage cloud.

Amazon's S3 service was carved out of an existing IT operation that supports a different core business--retail. In essence what Amazon did originally was to monetize both spare capacity and the operational support staff which presumably was already being paid for by the retail side of the house. Is Amazon the sole owner of a secret formula that turns internal storage into cloud storage gold? No. Any reasonably large IT shop with an entrepreneurial bent could do the same.

Enron (remember Enron, the energy company?) was once a storage service provider (SSP), but not like their many SSP rivals at the time. Enron wanted to create an arbitrage opportunity around the excess capacity held by their SSP contemporaries. They proposed to buy and sell storage capacity in the same way they were buying and selling energy at the time--as a fungible commodity. Yes, Enron believed that storage sitting on a raised floor inside a data center or a co-lo was fungible.

Too bad for the smartest guys in the room. They were about eight years too early. It took an Amazon to prove that storage is indeed fungible. Could other big retailers do an S3 equivalent? Why not? There's nothing really stopping them. And why not financial services firms? Manufacturers? This list goes on. Nothing stopping them either. And I believe we will soon see brokers of cloud services in the same way we saw brokers of time-sharing services back in the day of the mainframe.

Hybrid clouds--ones that are both internal and external to the enterprise--will eventually dominate. There is no reason why a large internal IT services provider couldn't do what Amazon is doing, namely partition-off some idle capacity and offer it up to a cloud-based services consortium (the "open" cloud?) for a fee. Huge investments in computing and communications infrastructure have already been made. We will see an open cloud for example when a group of entrepreneurial IT executives form a consortium that offers utility cloud-computing services. These will not only be open, but their services will be priced to market. I hesitate to say "commodity" but that's where I think utility cloud services are going.

I believe it will happen this way because a historical precedent has already been set. Remember the old mainframe time share days? When IT represents a significant investment to the enterprise, IT executives look to maximizing its efficiency. One of the ways they did this back in the day was to offer up idle mainframe compute cycles for sale. They sold cycles decades ago. Today they can sell compute cycles, storage capacity, and the operations staff to manage it, all delivered over the wire. Amazon isn't the first, nor will they be the one and only.

This economy will force big enterprise IT to look at replicating the Amazon EC2/S3 model for two reasons:

1. Amazon can deliver IT services more cheaply than most large enterprise IT departments so the IT executives managing large IT shops will want some of what Amazon is smoking. They'll imitate the infrastructure. They'll buy cloud services. They'll sell cloud services.

2. Amazon has proven it can make money off its idle compute capacity. Every IT shop runs through computing peaks and valleys. Why not sell the idle capacity during the off-peak times just like Amazon. An "open" cloud would allow them to do this.

In the end, computing vendors make money from clouds by selling the underlying infrastructure. Enterprises make money from clouds by selling access to idle infrastructure offered up to the "open" cloud. Brokers of cloud-computing services make money by inserting themselves in between the buyers and sellers of cloud-computing resources. And, all of the foregoing means that the independent cloud services providers will live in an increasingly commoditized world where the price of the commodity is set not by those selling services as a core business, but by those selling cloud services as an adjunct to their core businesses.

That in my mind is the threat that the smaller independents may or may not see coming. As an independent, having an application wrapped around a cloud infrastructure is one way to forge a more sustainable cloud business model.

During the last two weeks we saw two acquisitions of relatively small purveyors of scalable file systems by big storage players. First, HP finally pulled in its partner IBRIX. Only days later, LSI made a surprise acquisition of ONStor. If both IBRIX and ONStor offer platforms upon which one can build scalable network attached storage (NAS), do these back-to-back deals indicate some sort of emerging trend? Yes and no. Yes it is in that, if you're a major NAS vendor and want to compete with NetApp who is readying GX8, scalability is now a must-have. But IBRIX extends capabilities HP already has whereas for LSI, ONStor represents their first ever venture into the NAS world.

Amazing is the amount of blogosphere and Twitter chatter that was generated by HP's announcement that it intended to acquire IBRIX for an undisclosed sum. No offense IBRIX people (all 53 of you), but you're not exactly a household name. It looks like HP is about to make you one however. And yes, you deserve all the attention you are getting, finally. You had a "next-gen" parallel file system before many knew they would even need one. You knew that Big Data users needed a file system that was system-agnostic and that would scale to the petabyte range. At the time however, they were in a niche-y place called high-performance computing (HPC). Now, Big Data users are cropping up everywhere. You count AOL, Caterpillar, Dreamworks, JP Morgan Chase, and Pixar among your 175 customers. Who knows where this cloud thing will take you.

Big is a relative term. In the storage world, what is big today will be table stakes tomorrow. The Petabyte-scale file system is becoming a must have for storage vendors. NetApp bought Spinnaker a while back. Sun developed ZFS. IBM has GPFS, and HP bought PolyServe last year two years ago but has chosen to position it in the Windows SQL Server space where it gets the most traction. IBRIX, with its many performance and data management capabilities, represents a much larger market opportunity to HP. And LSI has chosen to enter the NAS market as scalable from the get go.

IBRIX is headquartered in what was once a Honeywell Bull facility in Billerica, Mass. When they appeared in 2000 with a unique parallel file system called Fusion, the question was how to bring this to market? Who buys a parallel, scalable file system when file systems normally come bundled with or embedded in something else? IBRIX answered that question by forming remarketing relationships with big names: Dell, EMC, HP, and IBM who bundled/embedded IBRIX with their servers and storage. Dell and EMC packaged Fusion with PowerEdge servers and Clarrion storage, presenting the package to high-performance computing (HPC) customers. HP embedded Fusion in HP Blade and ProLiant server racks.

So what exactly does HP have planned for IBRIX? According to HP's Paul Perez, "HP will put the U in unified storage." OK, but that's a bit cryptic. Short term, HP will keep on keepin'-on with blade server/blade storage and scalable ProLiant/IBRIX NAS implementations. Longer term we may well see HP use IBRIX to approach cloud computing and archival storage opportunities.

Unified storage with a capitol "U" is a bit more of a challenge to understand. Typically the term has been applied to disk arrays that support fiber channel and Ethernet connectivity. HP likely means that kind of unification plus something more. IBRIX is typically used by its partners to create scale-out NAS subsystems using Fusion as the software engine that powers a NAS platform consisting of industry standard servers as the NAS front end, and SAN or direct-attached (DAS) RAID storage on the backend. As such, the combination presents scalable file storage to applications but uses block-based SAN or DAS storage. NAS is typically characterized as file storage, while SAN is block storage. It's a distinction that traditionally has had many application implications and ramifications. What HP's big U for Unified message may also be signaling is the introduction of a file/block converged storage product bundled with new hardware form factors sometime in the near future. For HP that likely means some combination of HP StorageWorks SANs, ProLiant rack-mount and blade servers, and ProCurve Ethernet switches powered by Fusion.

It's interesting that HP has chosen to announce a marriage now. After all, they've been dating for at least four years. But NetApp, after fussing like forever with the scalable file system it acquired from Spinnaker, is finally ready to go mainstream with it as ONTAP GX8. IBM is making more noise about GPFS. Then there's ZFS and its new owner--Oracle.

Which brings us to LSI and ONStor. LSI's Engenio Storage Group wasn't in NAS until now. It is in RAID arrays and storage virtualization. Now it's in scale-out NAS and NAS/SAN gateways too. Why? LSI/Engenio sells exclusively through original equipment manufacturers. IBM is a major reseller as is (was?) Sun. Dell is also in the mix. IBM's DS3000, 4000, and 5000 series arrays are all originally produced by LSI/Engenio.

But there is much repositioning going on among the big IT vendors these days. The future of Sun's hardware business is still a matter of debate in spite of Larry Ellison's assurance that Oracle will sell hardware too, and Dell is on record as in the hunt for companies worth buying. Is another storage acquisition possible for them? I think so. As a result, the number of large OEMs that LSI/Engenio can sell through is not growing and the future is unclear with regard to OEM sales of traditional RAID arrays via the big names in IT.

So NAS to LSI/Engenio represents new growth and possibly substantial growth if they can compete effectively. HP's acquisition of IBRIX potentially leaves something of a hole in the scale out NAS product lines of Dell, IBM, and EMC that LSI/Engenio. Dell and SGI may also need NAS/SAN gateways. IBM might like to have a second source for the NAS boxes they get from NetApp because ONStor is both scale out and scale up. And let's not count out Sun/Oracle either. Whereas IBRIX had established prominence in HPC computing, ONStor went after more mainstream applications and could be a better fit in that space for the big OEM partners.

So put LSI/Engenio on the list of buyers looking for things to buy as opposed to the other way around. They didn't just suddenly decide to write a $25 million check to the owners of ONStor after learning of HP/IBRIX. Their executives have assured me that they've been looking to add NAS to the portfolio for months. Market conditions and a desire to make a "we're here to stay" statement drove the timing of the ONStor deal.

Suddenly a somewhat dormant space in the storage world is erupting with activity. Why? The Big Data apps are here and they generate big system opportunities as well as big Unified storage opportunities.

IBM's storage group is now in the habit of making smorgasbord announcements. They'll take a look at their storage lineup--one that includes everything from SSD to tape, storage-related software and services--select the new stuff going on within each product development cycle they think is significant and therefore want to publicize, then bundle all of these separate announcements up in a wrapper ("Information Infrastructure" begets "Smart Planet")--and step up to the microphone.

And so it is with IBM's most recent storage table selection. They're now offering replication and deduplication for ProtecTIER, faster hardware and SSD support SAN Volume Controller, Thin Provisioning for DS8000 arrays, a new version of Tivoli Storage Manager, and numerous enhancements for XIV storage. Don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to belittle what they're doing. I would, however, like to observe that some of the more significant and interesting things can tend to get lost in the shuffle. XIV is a case in point.

XIV could well be a piece of computer history in the making because its guiding light, when at EMC, once took on and beat IBM at its own game. XIV was founded

in 2002 and emerged in 2005 with its first product called Nextra. It is an Israeli-based start-up and the place where Moshe Yanni landed after he left EMC. Yanni, known in the storage industry by just his first name ("mo-shay"), is the father of EMC's Symmetrix/DMX, the longest running disk array product family ever. He and his team created the MOSAIC 2000 storage architecture, which allowed EMC to update Symmetrix' disk, controller, and connectivity technologies more or less independently of one another. MOSAIC 2000 helped in a big way to establish the financial foundation that supported EMC's future expansions into content management, security, and virtualization.

As mentioned, XIV announced its first product, Nextra, four years ago--a next-generation disk array composed of clustered storage nodes. Shortly thereafter, XIV--and Moshe--were acquired by IBM. So here we have the father of Symmetrix, a product that allowed EMC to supplant IBM as the king of enterprise storage, now carrying the banner for the IBM storage team. Could EMC's former benefactor and acknowledged storage maven now become its biggest enterprise storage headache? Quite possibly.

By all accounts, Moshe doesn't kid around. Lore has it that he was once (and may still be) equipped with an Israeli fighter jet, and that after EMC bought the Clariion array along with the rest of Data General, which he saw as an internal competitor, he and his team built a small Symmetrix, stood it up outside his office door, and attached a sign to it that read "Clarrion killer." Lore also has it that his departure from EMC was literally an executive office glass-shattering event. In fact, there is a whole body of Moshe lore known mostly to storage industry cognoscenti--stories traded over beers. Who knows how much of it is fact? But one thing we all agree on: when the world of enterprise storage feels like a snake pit as it often does, you want Moshe on your side. Now he's on IBM's side.

IBM's acquisition of XIV raised more than a few industry eyebrows. A fiercely independent storage genius goes to work for the Big Blue marketing machine known as IBM? A clash of titans could be in the making. Well, so far so good. IBM dropped the Nextra label in favor of calling both the product and the company XIV, but has allowed XIV to field its own salesforce, as well as manage its own R&D budget and product development efforts. IBM is also promoting the XIV brand as an enterprise storage play, in spite of the fact that it also has its own internally-developed enterprise storage array line, the DS8000 series. IBM also allowed XIV to announce that it recently sold its 1,000th array, and that many of its new customers are former EMC Symmetrix/DMX customers.

Now that IBM has two enterprise disk arrays in the product portfolio, and two sales teams selling enterprise arrays to the same big systems customers, one could well wonder how IBM will differentiate going forward. Look to future announcements for clues. When the XIV acquisition was announced to storage analysts, IBM positioned XIV in "Web 2.0 storage"--that is, as something distinct from traditional data center storage where the DS8000 lived.

Well, ahem. Guys, nice try. We know a bit about Moshe and we don't think he's about to confine himself to a market subsegment. We now note that the most recent XIV announcement drops the Web 2.0 distinction and moves the DS8000 closer to the System z mainframe world--a place where XIV doesn't play because it doesn't support CKD disk formatting. It's not that XIV's engineers don't know how to do that. Moshe's Symmetrix started life as a mainframe-attached box. But there have to be some distinctions going forward. IBM mainframe customers get the DS8000 exclusively for now, but maybe not forever. And IBM is rumored to have one more DS8000 model to release later this year.

Watch future announcements for subtle shifts in messaging though as IBM will transition from DS8000 to XIV as its flagship enterprise storage array. The DS8000 is now called the "flagship mainframe array," while the XIV array has been promoted the "next generation storage" on IBM's most recent storage smorgasbord.

One more piece of Moshe lore--the name of the company XIV or the Roman numeral fourteen? What's the significance? Ask around and you may get conflicting answers. That's the nature of a legendary figure. The one I've settled on is this one: XIV stands for the fourteenth graduating class of Talpiot, an elite Israeli Defense Forces training program, of which Moshe and three other XIV executives were members.

Warning: This post is larded with acronyms. Sorry, it can't be helped.

Fusion-io recently announced SMLC flash memory. What is SMLC? To understand how Fusion-io coined this acronym (and it is all theirs), you need to first become familiar with two more--SLC for Single Level Cell and MLC for Multi Level Cell. Both refer to types of NAND flash memory, and both are hot items right now, but for different reasons. MLC NAND flash memory is relatively cheap, abundant, and commonly used in PCs, laptops, and mobile messaging devices. SLC is in comparison much more expensive, not as abundant, but is also hot because it is now being used to replace spinning disk in high-performance storage arrays by a growing list of vendors that now includes EMC, HP, and NetApp to name just three.

Fusion-io's SMLC is not actually a new addition to the flash memory family. (Fusion-io doesn't make flash.) SMLC is more like an attribute or feature, if you will, of a new solid-state disk controller that Fusion-io has introduced. What this new controller does is in essence give MLC flash the characteristics of SLC. Hence SMLC stands for Single-mode Multi-Level Cell.

Here's why that's significant. NAND flash has a shortcoming vs. disk as a storage medium in that you can't use it to store new bits of information over the same time period as disk. NAND flash begins to "wear out" faster than disk the more you write new data. This problem is more severe with MLC than SLC. At least one disk drive manufacturer says that this shortcoming plus some others makes NAND flash unsuitable for enterprise data center applications.

Undaunted, enterprise datacenter storage array vendors have gone ahead and implemented NAND flash-based SSDs and data center customers are buying them. These implementations use SLC because its longevity and reliability characteristics are better than those of MLC. However, as mentioned, SLC is more expensive, so the high-end array vendors are trading-off lower-priced SSD components for better performance, reliability, and longevity--a reasonable trade to make given the intended application. That makes SLC-based SSD less attractive. (Sorry, see death-by-acronym disclaimer above.)

Suppose however, that MLC could be given the more data center quality characteristics of SLC. The trade-off then goes away. That's the value proposition supporting Fusion-io's SMLC. The secret sauce here gets poured into Fusion-io's SSD controller. New controller-resident processes add the needed performance, reliability, and longevity to MLC, making it roughly equivalent to SLC in function, but at a far lower price point.

How significant could this introduction be? SSD for the corporate data center has always been hampered by price. In fact, even though data center SSD arrays are blazing fast, they have struggled to compete with disk arrays for decades. Even recently as customers are now looking seriously at the new flash-based SSD implementations from Intel, Texas Memory Systems, and others, price remains a stumbling block limiting SSD to address only the applications needing the best I/O performance. Lowering the price-point significantly, as Fusion-io does with this announcement, allows flash-based SSD to address a broader range of applications and replace disk in greater volume.

Beyond the threat this announcement poses to rotating disk, RAID (redundant array of inexpensive disks) as we know it is also threatened. Fusion-io's controllers can be clustered across physical boundaries to form server-internal storage networks. Data can be quickly mirrored across these boundaries yielding a solid-state storage subsystem with data protection that could compete on price with a RAID array.

To date, Fusion-io has OEM (original equipment manufacturer) relationships with Dell and HP. IBM has announced its Quicksilver project based on Fusion-io technology, but has not as yet delivered product bearing Quicksilver technology. SMLC will be available this quarter for Fusion-io's ioDrive and ioDrive Duo controllers. While these OEMs have yet to announce SMLC support, I expect the announcements to be forthcoming.