Jeff Boles's Blog Archive

I'm attending Networld+Interop this year in Las Vegas on behalf of my employer.  Just a few weeks ago, I attended Storage Networking World in San Diego.  While I intend to summarize some of the events and products here at Interop later on, attending both conferences in close proximity gives me an interesting chance to compare - maybe this will be useful for anyone lining up conferences for attendance down the road.

So Interop is an interesting contrast to SNW.  On the good side - the conference is big, and I've always liked the size of it.  There's really more stuff here than you can ever hope to get your mind around, and I'm looking forward, again, to the challenge.  I arrived here Saturday, and I'm sitting in tutorials today, and the conference is already impressively large, before it even really gets started.

Intelligent Enterprise (which I'll call IE), a CMP Media publication, has a great listing of BI products in the marketplace in their May, 2006 issue which just arrived in my mailbox (link to article here). 

This is a hard field to engage if you're an IT practitioner outside of specialization within the BI field itself, and the leader list that IE put together is a great overview of some of the capabilities and feature sets within the field.  This listing to me, is a great way to get an overview of the field if you haven't been paying attention to it.  I have been paying attention to it on the periphery of other activities, and even so, IE pulled a bunch of companies into their listing with which I wasn't all that familiar or which had fallen of the top of my mind.

It has been good to see in the past few years the re-emergence of the concept of IT Governance and associated controls, and the development of fairly sophisticated frameworks for assessing, applying and managing IT Governance.  Especially as these systems have been more successful in becoming common throughout my country of residence (the U.S.), and making headway across the board into new business sectors throughout the public and private sectors.  This has been no doubt driven in part by new dispositions toward the accountability of business entities and government entities driven by various scandals over the past few years.

HP, I keep having wishful thoughts about you and your product lineup, and I'm going to talk about it right here.  Maybe talking about it right here will help me figure out how to work with you better across your entire product line, and step outside the boundaries of our point solutions with you as only a hardware vendor.

HP keeps talking about ILM solutions, cranking out new products, and trying to make forays into being more of a solution provider than just a hardware provider, but the thing I need from HP is the information to be able to engage HP solution sets beyond the level of a hardware manufacturer. But I can't seem to do this without multiple vendor visits and lots of talking. That's not good enough for me -- why can't you present your ILM solutions in detailed and comprehensive information that's readily accessible? In some ways, maybe Cisco has proved to be one of the experts at doing this. Why can't HP?

Somebody point me in the right direction please.  HP announced an HP StorageWorks 200 Virtualization solution yesterday (SVS200) which promises to virtualize vendor agnostic hardware behind a controller unit (with some caveats - the vendor agnostic part is limited to a few vendors, and I suspect new hardware is slowly being qualified where it is SMI-S compliant and the SVS200 can use SMI-S for provisioning and management).  I'm personally excited to see this happening, because I think further maturation of this type of solution offers tremendous benefits, even though Hu Yoshida over at HDS might deserve recognition as one of the earliest proponents of this approach (granted, his direction might turn out to be more proprietary, but proprietary in nature and the capabilities sometimes go hand-in-hand, especially at points of solution emergence or early adoption). 

There's talk afoot about IBM rolling out a storage solution 'weapon' against competitors in the form of a cutting edge storage compression technology called Venom.  The concept is just about novel enough for general press coverage, but it falls a fair bit short of being what I'd really call an innovative storage solution, and beyond creating some buzz, it seems unlikely to have much traction against competitors in shops which aren't already 100% IBM shops.

I don't want to disparage the work of intelligent people on what might be a capable solution, but the application is all wrong in this approach.  Indiscriminate compression has never been a strategic solution for data storage, but has usually come into play once you're looking at tactical moves to save yourself in a crisis.  Where we are, storage is just considered too temporary and data is too transient to generate any benefit from compression in one place, unless that place is a long term retention place such as tape or archival disk, where packing it in buys you a lot more in capability or reduced cost.  

After the initial R2 hoopla, and in the context of storage, Win2k3 R2 really has some interesting features that seem to me to indicate some of Microsoft's struggle to maintain their engagement of the marketplace with the traditional Windows filer approach.  The more I look at the features in R2, the more I think there's some obvious statement Microsoft is making about competitive pressure in this area.

I think R2 in a lot of ways was a major disappointment to folks because of features gradually removed on the way through beta.  In my opinion, some of the best features remaining in R2 are the out of the box filer optimization associated with Storage Services, and also the Single Instance Storage (SIS), so why are those features there, out of everything initially promised in R2?  Those features seem to say a little bit about MS's position on storage.  The further work on DFS might be worth a bit, but DFS still seems to fall a bit short of the mark for many of the needs it seems geared toward (think branch office replication).

SAN design has some pretty straightforward basics for most mid-sized environments where you're not dealing with a lot of ports, even while a variety of switch and host choices and configurations exist.  But as we're executing a storage implementation project, we have a real need today to identify long term expansion strategies, and a view into a much larger environment would assist our design and growth projection activities today. 

So Cisco, where's my blueprint for SAN design?

I haven't found it yet if it's out there, maybe someone can point me to it if I'm missing it.  I know the design expertise is there, and a webcast by Dan Hershey from Cisco over on Search Storage has some excellent overview material (Look for the session titled "How to Design the Fastest, Most Scaleable Enterprise SAN Architecture").  Maybe the best captured overview of the MDS and SAN design I've seen.  Now where's my blueprint Dan?

Looking through my posts here probably makes anyone looking wonder if I have an obsession with Virtual Tape Libraries. Ultimately I think the market is just emerging and I can't find my perfect product. There seems to be some real disparity between vendors in the solution approaches they offer, although I do think they'll largely converge over the next year or so. So here it is, my wishlist for VTL. While I know this wishlist is unrealistic, this would be an ideal solution.

An ideal VTL

1. Present the commonly seen VTL solution front end which emulates tape drives of the user's choice.
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I'll admit, I'm a bit removed from Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) concerns - I have enough problems upfront just addressing capacity and infrastructure, and ILM is a couple of steps removed. But with that in mind, I keep trying to get my finger on the pulse of the market to lock down some plans for a longer term strategy. From my perspective, it seems like we've ended up in a data hole with no good way to dig ourselves out.

I'm about as tired of hearing the ILM acronym as the next guy, and on the surface the need is real, and the solution seems simple. You got a bunch of stuff right? Step 1, figure out what you've got, step 2, take some action on it. Hey, we're used to moving data around all the time, right?

I've seen a lot of interesting file services solutions here at SNW, and they've ended up making me really question our overall approach to file services and how we got here.

I ran into the neopath solution for the first time at SNW. Cool product, but it pretty much creates a redundant service in your data path, by managing multiple CIFS/NFS servers behind a pool of CIFS/NFS neopath heads. The product allows you to do a bunch of stuff, but relevant to me is some pretty neat data migration and HSM type stuff, if you have multiple CIFS servers attached to multiple performance or capacity levels of storage. But I'm struggling with adding another level of CIFS servers, and still having to manage wintel infrastructure behind it. Not to mention actually needing to add more wintel servers attached to different levels of storage. So for me, I have to question whether it's worth the complexity, and question what the roadmap when the product changes or disappears over time.

So the LSI guys look like they rock. And that's hard to do for a company that on the surface makes cards and components (although there's a lot more to them if you look into it further). I'll admit to being a bit of a hardware geek at heart, if I can touch it, feel it, overclock it, whatever, I like it a little better. So some of my enthusiasm might be a little biased. LSI is here with two products that speak to the hardware geek in me.

First, LSI Logic is doing some nice looking SAS drive controllers, with what was previously SATA/IDE raid feature sets in a controller card probably appropriate for small server / workstation use. Similar to what you find in the Promise and 3Ware type controller cards. Not bad, I wasn't aware anyone had product here yet, and it's nice to see the development happening. Looks like these can take about 10 devices and support a variety of striping/mirroring or a system that LSI calls RAID 1E/10E which is a funky kind of interleaved striping to allow the controller to support some protection on odd numbers of disks while still seeing benefits of striping. The explanation was enough to make me have to think, so I'll have to run through the description in my mind a bit more before it makes perfect sense (sounded like shifting the mirror of each stripe to the next disk, i.e. given N disk stripe, N disk stripe's mirror is on N+1 disk).

I spent a bit of time talking with Avamar this a.m.. In an earlier post, I mentioned that I actually deferred making a VTL/D2D commitment from this year's budget cycle and elected to acquire other functionality instead, as I couldn't get comfortable with a VTL/D2D solution set. Avamar Axion seems to have some real promise here, and I suspect I'll be talking with them further in the future. They offer the best combination of a couple of key factors that are important to me:

1. They are software only, and can run on any server hardware or storage. (For the record, our 3.5TB of file services that would reap primary benefit from this are on the Windows platform, so I haven't looked into multi-platform support)
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So I was surprised by Rob Pelgar's sessions on virtualization and how good they were, and pleased with the first grid session from HP, but it seems like the Hitachi Data guy must be doing the second grid session, and it's more principles and practices oriented and I'm not real engaged. I was hoping more for future directions and how they might directly impact the enterprise, as some talk in this area was really what pushed me over toward the HP EVA solution and some of the complications inherent in running multiple storage chassis/controllers and the SAN islands they tend to operationally create. HP has some ambitions I think for virtualizing their storage more seemlessly across controllers as a part of their grid computing initiative. I think that's a key area in which grids can deliver value to the enterprise.

So, as a further update on SNW 06 in San Diego, some of the best sessions I've seen so far have been Xiotech's Rob Peglar's product agnostic SNIA sessions on virtualization and the following sessions from HP's Abbot Schindler on Storage Grids which Rob himself seemed pretty keen on. In fact, as I sit here in the session Rob is sitting in the chair right in front of me attentively listening to Abbot's second session on grids (in fact, I bet I'm bugging him with my keyboard chatter). These sessions together have raised some more interesting questions on where in the network virtualization and management intelligence should be.