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* Posts by Martin Glassborow

9 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Sep 2010

Fujitsu waves 50PB+ monster at hyperscale storage freaks

Martin Glassborow

RAID Rebuilds....

Not having RAID does not magically protect you from disk failures; you are still going to have significant rebuild workloads as the array tries to re-protect you from a failed disk. And once you factor in protection; that 50PB rapidly becomes 25PB or less; depending how many times you store that data.

Ceph is also not the core storage or even the core object store for OpenStack; something that Fujitsu were corrected on at the press launch. Yes, we do see it commonly implemented with OpenStack but it makes it sound like is part of OpenStack.

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Storage management tools SUCK. We're getting what we pay for

Martin Glassborow
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Re: out of interest...

As long as you have EMC Support log-ons (if you are a customer, you should), you should be able to get hold of the virtual Isilon as a download. Internally EMC have virtual versions of about everything including VMAX, although the requirements to run the virtual VMAX are a little heavy.

Over time, I suspect we will see more and more of their products appearing in virtual editions; whether as pure sales/education tools or as fully supported products...time will tell.

Anyway, keep nagging vendors in general to release their products in virtual form...EMC and NetApp have led the way in this.

I'd like to see IBM put out a virtual V7000 for training and testing.

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El Reg drills into IBM: The storage biz's got that sinking feeling

Martin Glassborow

The problem when working with raw capacity shipped is that it only tells a bit of the story; you would need to know what the capacity breakdown is before working out what customers are paying per terabyte. If EMC and IBM are still focusing very much on the high-end as opposed to the mid-ground that NetApp currently tend to operate in; for example EMC, IBM and HDS can sell storage into mainframe outfits, NetApp can't...this is going to skew their price per terabyte downwards.

If the various vendors were to start splitting out revenues and shipped capacity by product line; you could draw more conclusions. For example, what has the impact of the Engenio aquisition had on NetApp's capacity shipped? It's given them a whole load of partners that they didn't have before and has increased their channels to market.

Perhaps vendors should start to detail capacity and IOPs shipped...but that'd only be of real interest to the storage geeks.

I actually think IBM have some very good storage products; the Storwize products are very good, extremely good value and the low-end V3700 is so much better than the old OEMed LSI/Engenio products. If Lenovo do take the IBM storage products; the Storwize products could/should do very well. I think XIV has driven into a cul-de-sac architecturally; spindle-sizes have not done it any favours and the current product's inability to increase spindle-counts which is imperative to keep rebuild times down is a real problem long-term.

The DS8K is going to keep trundling along for as long as IBM sell mainframes....which is unfortunate really, it's the zombie product which needs getting rid of.

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The LUN must DIE. Are you with me, storage bods?

Martin Glassborow
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Re: 150TB Luns no problem except....

Really....we have much larger file-systems than that...and yes on occasion we have to fsck them...it generally takes no longer than a few minutes if that. Of course, we cheat; we run clustered file-systems.

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Easy rip'n'replace storage using cheap kit? Nooooo, wail vendors

Martin Glassborow
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Re: Blame us customers.

I hardly know where to start; yet again, people assume commodity means some random crap that we pull out of the cupboard and install random crap on. Some people might, most corporates won't; we might start looking at ODMs if we are large enough or we might take COTS from Dell, HP or who-ever our preferred server vendor is.

Storage vendors often take advantage of the commoditisation of components themselves; hard-disks being one of the prime examples. NetApp in past have had many slides about the overhead due to making drives from different vendors look the same-size.

But businesses already run on FOSS; more than 50% of the storage vendors out there run their storage software on FOSS. Some of them get clobbered by the same bugs.

To be quite honest; the permutations of hardware actually out there when you start looking at utilising white-box storage servers aren't that large. You have to go some to go really oft-piste. Most storage arrays with a few exceptions are pretty close to being off-the-shelf servers with the vendors badge on them.

I'm not actually expecting many people to build their own servers but there are many who want to use the same servers across their estates; be it for compute or storage nodes.

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IBM storage crew: Why bury your BEST kit at the back of the larder?

Martin Glassborow

DS8000

Oh, I know exactly what the DS8Ks can do; in a previous existence, I worked on them and their ancestors..both ESS and VSS. In fact I have a soft spot for them but they exist for one reason only these days and that is generally to support a mainframe workload.

Yet, architecturally; they are still pretty much bog-stand dual-head array...and if IBM had wanted to, all of the features that you list, could have been incorporated into SVC, if it had started to do so about ten years ago.

If EMC can move from Power-to-Intel; IBM could have done as well. In fact, arguably moving Enginuity from Power to Intel may well have been harder. The problem for IBM is that they have left it far too long to do so and now they are saddled with multiple array families. One of which, although absolutely key to them, probably suffers from low sales due to particular niche market.

The reason for the decision are both due to the conservatism of the mainframe user-base but also I suspect to the politics which IBM's storage has been riven with over the past few years with competing fiefdoms and executive sponsors.

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Quantum lays off fifty – prepping for a sale?

Martin Glassborow
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Re: Why would someone buy Quantum

Lets be fair, FPD and VizRT only really compete with one aspect of Stornext; that is the HSM portion. Stornext is also a clustered file-system; FPD and VizRT could both use Stornext as their clustered file-system. But Stornext is potentially being clobbered by the clustered NAS solutions that are gain more and more of a foot-hold in the market. IBM have also been more aggressive in the media space and pushing GPFS here. And of course, there is a burgeoning number of open-source competitors; some really good.

Stornext is probably Quantum's best product; it is probably the only reason anyone would buy them but who really wants it? IBM don't need it; EMC have clustered NAS products (and they could break OneFS out as a clustered filesystem if they wanted); HP have a plethora of products, this probably wouldn't stop them buying someone tho'; NetApp, well Stornext does play well with their LSI-disk products; Oracle, I don't see it. I guess Apple could go nuts and buy them; remember they probably ship more Stornext than anyone.

It could end-up as an IP fire-sale at some point...It's a hard place to be.

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I've got a super free multi-petabyte storage box for you: /dev/null

Martin Glassborow
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Apologies

But no you can't see them...it's commercially sensitive information. :-(

You'll have to trust me; I have no vendor affiliation; suffice to say, it is not quite as simple as taking the cost of an LTO tape, you have to factor in SAN, Robot, Tape library costs; both capital and operational expenditure.

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Dell Streak causes user fury

Martin Glassborow
WTF?

Microsoft???

With The Register's antipathy towards Apple and the iPhone; and now displaying antipathy towards Google and Android; we are now in the bizarre situation where they are grudgingly praising Microsoft.

What a bizarre world we live in!!

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