HDS

Apr 21 2009   10:59PM GMT

Oracle + Sun: Who’s happy and who’s not…

Posted by: Taylor Allis
sun, Oracle, HDS, LSI, Java, Solaris, OpenSolaris, OpenStorage, ibm, cisco, Microsoft, hp, NetApp, MySQL, VMware, EMC, Linux, UCS

Full Disclosure: First of all, I was a Sun employee just 8 months ago.  While I am not currently a Sun employee, myself and/or my company does consulting work for Sun from time to time.  I also work with other storage vendors as well, including significant work with EMC.  Suffice to say, this blog consists of my own opinions based on public record, and do not represent the views of any of my former employers or current clients.

I resisted a blog on the IBM/Sun acquisition due to my recent busy schedule, but this news is just too big and exciting to pass by.

A comment on acquisitions: I know a lot about IT industry acquisitions; I have been through 6 of them!  I also did the due diligence on the Sun/StorageTek acquisition (as an employee of StorageTek), and lived through that 2005 $4B merger.  By rule, acquisition integrations (of this size) are always harder and longer than expected or desired.  They will benefit and challenge companies, partners, and end users in ways that are difficult to predict.

With that said, I thought I would take a different tact than other chatter out there and comment on who I *assume* is happy about this deal, who is not happy, and who is neutral on the matter…

Oracle + Sun:  Who’s happy

Sun: While Sun’s plan was to stand on its own, a purchase by Oracle must make Sun much happier than a purchase by IBM (and the higher price tag makes shareholders happy).  IBM and Sun had significant software and hardware overlap, and while IGS would have been a boon to Sun technology – the overlap consolidation would have been painful to Sun, IBM, and end users.  With Oracle, there is more innovative opportunity than there is overlap.  Sun engineers are already excited about getting their DTrace hooks into Oracle’s applications.  Oracle is interested in and/or has already invested in Java, Solaris, and ZFS.  Sun has also invested in ensuring some of its newest OpenStorage and server platforms support Oracle apps.  And while Oracle has dabbled in storage with Exadata and funding part of Pillar, they now get Sun’s total portfolio.

I think this is a win for Sun’s install base as well.  Sun customer’s won’t have to live through the product and service overlaps that would have happened with IBM.  Customers can also get better platform and application integration benefits with a complete stack under one roof.  Some of Sun’s open source communities may not be too happy about joining a “proprietary” software vendor, but they should be happy that Sun’s technology and innovation will continue to be funded.

The services opportunity for Oracle/Sun is also huge, as there is a lot of new green field opportunities that can be monetized.  From Oracle Apps + ZFS/DTrace solutions to integration services all along the disk-middleware-application stack.

The one aspect of Sun’s business that is the most questionable is their desktop and mobile efforts with OpenSolaris for desktops, desktop virtualization, JavaFX, OpenOffice, etc.  Most of these offerings are open source, and Oracle is an enterprise player with an eye on revenue and profit.

Oracle: With this move Oracle has jumped into the systems market with other big systems players like IBM, HP, and Dell.  I have heard bloggers and tweeters voice concerns about Oracle’s ability to sell hardware – but while Sun’s largest criticisms to date have been “good vision, but inability to execute” - I have not heard anyone complain about Oracle’s business acumen and execution.  And while clearly Oracle is more interested in Sun’s software side, all (I believe) Sun needs on the hardware side is solid sales, marketing, portfolio, and fiscal management.  This will be a challenge, but I think Oracle has the opportunity to push innovation while growing Sun’s traditional/legacy business.  Lastly, Oracle could sell off Sun’s hardware business as some speculate, but as long as the new owner has solid business acumen and execution, they have an excellent portfolio of technology to work with.

Java Users:  Java and Java users have more future security with Oracle.  Oracle is one of the largest Java users and will continue Java’s investment in enterprise applications. This is good news for most Java users.  The future of JavaFX and Java for desktop or mobile platforms is not as clear.  Oracle may not see much revenue potential from client-side Java.

Solaris users: Oracle has invested in “Unbreakable Linux“, but commercial Solaris can be much more robust and a perfect fit for Oracle’s enterprise customers.  In addition to commercial Solaris, Oracle gets OpenSolaris.  The opportunities for Solaris users just got much larger on the database and application side.

HDS: Sun OEMs HDS’ bread and butter USP disk array with its Sun StorageTek 9000 series.  If Sun went into IBM, HDS’s revenue stream through Sun would be challenged by IBM’s products in the high-end disk array category – the DS series and XIV.  With Oracle, HDS can continue its relationship with Sun and even have more access to Oracle’s install base.  This looks like good news to me.  Consequently, users who have bought Sun’s 9000 products have a more secure roadmap with Oracle than they would have had with IBM.

LSI: LSI OEMs its midrange products to IBM and Sun.  In fact, LSI’s midrange storage products contribute significant growth and revenue to Sun’s storage business (Sun Storage 6000 Modular Arrays).  If the IBM/Sun merger happened, LSI would have two vendors consolidate into one.  Now, LSI still gets IBM and Sun as partners, and better access to Oracle and Oracle’s customer base.  Good news for the great folks over at LSI, as well as Sun Storage 6000 users who will avoid the product/services overlap issues that IBM would have posed.

Oracle + Sun:  Who’s not happy

IBM: Oracle caught IBM, and the industry, by surprise with their bold move.  The Sun acquisition would have given IBM even more market share dominance in the UNIX, server, storage (disk and tape), software, and services markets.  Sun’s install base, although not as large as years past, in addition to Sun’s newest open source communities would have been the prized possession for IBM (in addition to some cool Sun technology).  Now, IBM has a partner than has become more of a competitor.  Regardless of this Oracle news, I think IBM will fare well as they always do.

MySQL: MySQL prided themselves on offering an open source offering that has been disrupting Oracle’s closed, proprietary database market share for a while now.  Sun’s open source strategy was a perfect fit for MySQL’s strategy.  They didn’t expect to be owned by Oracle in the end. However, while they are not thrilled about this news, MySQL will do well regardless for these three primary reasons:

1. They have a good product.
2. They have a ton of support and they are an integral part of the LAMP stack.
3. They are under the GPL.
   

So, Oracle can try to monetize MySQL and the MyAQL community can still run an truly open source fork of the software.

Microsoft: Microsoft just got a larger competitor with Oracle and Sun.  Microsoft now has a combined competitor against its NT platform, SQL server, .NET Framework, and even desktop software (although OpenOffice’s appeal to Oracle is hard to call.)  What’s more, Oracle now has commercial and open source versions of these products which puts it in an excellent strategic position.  Additionally, Oracle and Sun’s mix of commercial and open source technology combined with industry standard hardware gives Oracle the components of an excellent Cloud platform which can compete with Microsoft’s efforts in this space.

NetApp: NetApp and Oracle are partners, but now Oracle will own its own storage devices including Sun’s network and storage file systems - NFS and ZFS.  Additionally, the Sun/NetApp patent litigation between Sun’s ZFS file system and NetApp’s WAFL file system is still in play.  Having ZFS and Sun’s Amber Road NAS platform (the Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System) in the hands of one of the world’s largest software companies isn’t the best news for NetApp.  Regardless, NetApp continues to prove it can innovate, challenge, and play with the large systems vendors like the rest of them - and their partnerships with Cisco and VMware will serve them well.

HP: HP can be too happy about this merger.  Oracle’s Exadata storage platform is based on HP hardware, but now Oracle will have hardware of its own.  Additionally, Oracle will now compete with HP in the systems vendor space.  HP will continue to do well, but having long-time partners tuned server competitors (Cisco and now Oracle) isn’t the best of news for the company.

Oracle + Sun:  Who’s neutral

Linux users: Linux is a significant partner to Oracle.  While the prospect of bringing in another open source platform into Oracle is not the best of news, Linux support will remain strong in the market and inside Oracle (Oracle made a point to say in their press release that they are “committed as ever to Linux and other open platforms”).  What’s more, even though Sun offers an open source OS like Linux, Sun has been an avid Linux supporter, and more importantly, supporter of open standards with Linux.  It looks like Oracle will follow Sun and Linux’s lead in this space - to build the best open source OS you can and let the users decide which one to deploy.

VMWare: VMWare continues to lead one of the fastest growing and disruptive IT trends to hit the data center in decades - server virtualization.  And their recent VMware vSphere 4 announcement shows just how innovative they continue to be in systems and storage .  But VMWare has a competitor in the making with the Oracle/Sun announcement. First of all, Oracle took a run at the server virtualization market with Oracle VM, and secondly they are about to acquire Sun’s new xVM server virtualization products.  With both Oracle and Sun eyeing VMWare’s market prior to the merger, you can bet they will target VMWare post merger.  And Oracle will have something VMWare does not - physical servers.

EMC: EMC is well positioned in the storage market and I don’t see any near-term significant impact.  A significant amount of Oracle users and Solaris users will still use EMC as their storage platform of choice.  The Oracle/Sun deal may pose some future competition to the company - Oracle may try to push users to use their storage offerings (but they won’t rock the boat too much on a hardware sale).  Sun’s OpenStorage offerings could be more competitive in the hands of Oracle, but EMC has proved it can keep up to date with recent software and storage commoditization trends.  Oracle and Sun’s new open source technology mixed with industry standard hardware will give Oracle the components of a good Cloud platform, and this can compete with EMC’s future Cloud Storage efforts.  Overall, EMC may see a better/stronger competitor out of this - but EMC tends to do well against competitors, large and small.

Cisco: Cisco must be upset that the Sun/IBM and then Sun/Oracle news took some attention away from the launch of their impressive Unified Computing System (UCS).  Cisco will continue to partner with Oracle, but the two have now become something no one in the industry could have predicted last year - they are now server competitors.  Oracle now has all the compomnents to build a “unified computing system”, but Cisco is ahead of the game here and seems to have a brilliantly integrated system.  Time will tell as the Cisco UCS and Oracle announcements are still very new.

Please let me know if I have missed anyone or any point….

Dec 21 2008   5:14PM GMT

This Week in Storage (12-19-08)

Posted by: Taylor Allis
Storage, DataCenter, DataManagement, srm, Storage Vendors, HDS, storagemanagement

Jingle bell storage: What to buy a geek
A great list for the geek in your life. Best gift idea? Kiva.org! I’m the geek Beth mentions in the last paragraph. My buddy who gave me the gift? CBS news’ Hari Sreenivasan.

Economic Downturn Hits Storage Spending
Ok – so I think we all know that our IT budgets will be flat or cut next year. We also know that data will continue to grow (and grow fast) regardless of what we do with our budgets. So what to do? Optimize, optimize, optimize. If you haven’t run a formal efficiency and optimization program in your storage infrastructure environment, then you are overlooking a huge chuck of wasted capacity and space. The storage utilization and allocation rates are far worse than most vendors are telling us (I know b/c I came from one!) It’s not in their best interested to sell less storage, but it is in yours to buy less…

The state of data backup in 2009, Part 3
Good reading in Beth’s Data Backup series – this issue covers disaster recovery and the emergence of Cloud backup. Amazon was first to market with S3, EMC came out with Mozy, and Beth writes about Symantec’s offering…

Symantec adds change management to SRM
Symamtec mentions making agentless options available too. When I work with IT admins this is top of their list – they don’t like agents crawling all over their environment. I understand – but agents will still be around, maybe minimized. ESG says that SRM tools aren’t viewed as a must-have – this is unfortunate. There is HUGE value in them – but you need to know (or have a partner that knows) how to deploy them, interpret them, and ACT upon the data. If you don’t take this step, you just bought shelf-ware. You do this, and you can free between 30% - 70% of your capacity – I’ve seen this done with multiple infrastructures and count THAT as a must have.

Brocade Buys Foundry Networks for $3B
Brocade drops $3B to pick up Foundry – a good move on the surface. This will make them more competitive with Cisco – offering LAN and WAN equip. 10GbE still looks to be a great bet, and networking companies are investing in it. See Stephen Foskett’s blog.

HDS embraces SSDs
HDS is a little late to the party (EMC led the charge, followed by Sun and others). But USP is a great disk system, and SSD will make it better. STEC is making out as the SSD partner to have. Again – if you have any apps that live or die by latency times, you need to be researching SSD options.

“Despereaux” uses clustered storage
For you HPC junkies, the movie “Despereaux” had to chunk through 1,700 shots and 90 million images. They did it the way most do, Linux clusters running an HPC filesystem – this one Lustre. They stored 200TB of generated data on Infortrend’s EonStor RAID system (comment if you know anything about EonStor – I don’t). I’ll probably take my boy to the movie and bore him on the details on how it was made…

Dec 19 2008   6:32AM GMT

Do you need a SAN anymore?

Posted by: Taylor Allis
Database, Virtualization, EMC, SAN, DataManagement, Storage Vendors, Exchange, HDS, Application-Centric Storage

Andrew Reichman has written a Forrester report titled “Do You Really Need A SAN Anymore?”

The title itself has generated some industry buzz for obvious reasons, and several blog posts from SAN providers. Check out Chuck Hollis’ (EMC), Hu Yoshida’s (HDS), Tony Asaro’s, and Chris Evans’.

My partner-in-crime Randy Chalfant has also commented on the report and blogs – but I’ll give you fair warning that my friend’s storage knowledge is only surpassed by his passion - and he holds no punches!

 

The premise:

In a nutshell, Andrew discusses the benefits and challenges of SANs. He concludes that SANs have not lived up to their expectations, and a new approach should be evaluated. This new alternative is “Application-Centric Storage” in which he defines as storage infrastructure managed by applications like mail, database, or hypervisor apps. If data management functionality (snapshots, replication, provisioning, de-dup, etc.) lives in the application layer – then you only need commodity disk (JBOD or RAID) on the backend. (This is not unlike Sun’s “Open Storage” message of which I used to blog often on when I was with them.)

What’s wrong with SAN?

The report lists four current-day SAN challenges: On the first issue with SANs (low utilization rates) I give Andrew kudos for because he hits the nail on the head. The second issue he lists (limited workload-sharing) is really not a SAN issue at all. Same with his third issue (vendor heterogeneity) – not a SAN issue, in fact it’s an issue with ANY storage solution. His last point (block storage has limited information context) is also valid.

Poor Utilization: On low SAN utilization rates, a distinction and definition needs to be made clear:

1. Allocation = How efficiently you use what you buy – allocated storage space vs. how much storage you bought. BUT if you over-allocate your storage, or do not allocate space efficiently, this rate can look good. This can be misleading if not measured the right way – you can overlook a significant amount of wasted space.

2. Utilization = How frequently data is re-referenced (i.e. utilized). We have found that up to 40% of a primary disk array’s capacity holds data that is inert – data that has not been referenced in 6 months or more. Does anyone want to spend tier 1, disk/SAN prices on data that is not referenced for over 6 months?

Some storage vendors use the terms incorrectly or interchangeably – so if a storage manufacturer says their arrays offer great utilization rates, make sure they are not just talking about allocation. Mr. Reichman gets this right – and his numbers show utilization rates around 20% to 40%. This is absolutely what we see in the industry.

But I disagree on what he says the root cause is – SANs!?!? You can find utilization challenges on DAS and NAS. Randy rants on the root causes here – but lack of good data management practices, good storage technology implementation, and other process issues are the root cause – not SANs.

Limited workload-sharing: I commented on a good point Chuck Hollis makes – the Forrester report mixes technology issues with people issues. The report says SANs are challenged because individual departments silo their storage infrastructure and applications. Storage silos have to do with data management practices (or lack thereof) and little to nothing to do with SAN technology.

The New Solution?

Another kudos for Forrester – they proposed a solution. A pet peeve of mine is when someone critiques something without offering an alternative approach.

The new approach according to Forrester is Application-Centric Storage: Basically, embed data management software in an application and directly attach cheap RAID or JBOD to it. And if you wanted to get creative you could cluster these systems together at the file system level.

The Benefit: One of the largest benefits to this approach is that applications give data context and support business objectives directly – so they are in a better position to manage and tier data (i.e. ILM). I couldn’t agree more.

The Challenge: I don’t think Application-Centric Storage will disrupt the current SAN model anytime soon and here is why:

Storage as a Feature: First of all, Forrester gives a list of storage software that can make its way into applications like Oracle, Exchange, etc. (snapshots, replication, reporting, thin provisioning, deduplication, etc.). While some applications and file systems are starting to offer this functionality, I have a hard time believing they will offer all of these features at a level that storage manufactures do currently. I came from StorageTek’s RD&E department and have seen my fair share of development roadmaps. The first items to work on are the software’s core value and offering. The first items to go are the ones that are “nice to haves” but don’t significantly enhance the core offering. Storage management technology will always be secondary to most app vendors and receive less resource than other application features. This will also hamper storage innovation…

 

An application vendor didn’t come up with data deduplication, a storage start-up did!

App admins take on storage: A second point made is that application admins can manage storage better than storage admins because they know what the data is being used for. Same problem as above – storage is not their core competency nor do they want it to be (otherwise they’d be storage admins!). One needs to know storage process and technology - even if your storage is directly attached. There is a way to prove my point as well – take all the tasks of an overworked storage admin and give them to an overworked application admin and see what happens…

 

The solution is not to throw out SANs and their storage administrators with them.

 

 

The answer is for application managers and storage managers to work better together. And I put the responsibility on the storage people to do this – storage should support application requirements which support business requirements – so storage departments should be surveying application departments monthly on what their requirements are.

Application-Centric Storage Availability:

So what’s available today? Some approaches mentioned include:

1. Microsoft Exchange: They have a whitepaper on an Exchange + DAS solution.

2. Oracle Exadata: They use an application-based data volume manager. This is a great feature, but only good for your BI and data warehouse needs. What’s more, they use a proprietary Infiniband network which doesn’t show much more cost benefit over FC SAN.

3. VMware: I am getting excited about the new storage features that are popping up here. Another point here was made by a brilliant colleague of mine at Sun:

Several customers have deployed SANs specifically to support growing VMware environments!

 

 

The Bottom Line:

Do You Really Need A SAN Anymore? YES.

If you are running Exchange or Oracle ExaData and want storage solely dedicated to these apps, then check out Application-Centric Storage. For everything else, look at networked storage as a viable option.

With that said, I can almost guarantee that the allocation and utilization rates for your storage systems (including SAN and everything else) are not where they need to be. The solution is NOT to throw out your SAN and deploy something else. The answer is best stated by Randy’s blog on this subject:

 

“The best answer for you is to better manage what you already have against a criterion that actually means something to the business. In other words - not technology for technology’s sake, but infrastructure for business’s sake.”