Data storage management

EMC acquires FastScale, deepens connection with VMware

It’s strange to think of a parent company finding new ways to grow closer with a subsidiary — after all, an ownership relationship seems about as deep as it gets.

But for years now, VMware and EMC have walked a tightrope between EMC’s ownership of the server virtualization company and VMware’s cooperation with EMC’s competitors. VMware has been careful not to favor EMC storage integrations, for example, over competitors like NetApp.

However, analysts see that picture beginning to shift after two pieces of news from EMC to kick off VMworld. The first was pre-released last week that EMC is now an official reseller of VMware’s AppSpeed application as part of its Ionix data center management portfolio. That’s a part of a wider emphasis at this year’s show on improving virtualized application performance and reliability using reporting and monitoring tools. Virtualization has clearly moved beyond “why” and “how” into “now what?”

This morning at the show, EMC took a step further into VMware’s world by dislosing its acquisition of FastScale, a privately held Santa Clara, Calif. firm which makes software for application image management (AIM).

Taneja Group senior analyst Jeff Boles said he’s intruiged that EMC — rather than VMware — acquired a company with technology that lets you run more virtual machines on your hardware.

“EMC has kept its distance in some ways from VMWare, but I’m under the impression that tide is changing,” Boles said.

FastScale is not a storage product, but Bob Quillin, senior director of product marketing for EMC’s resource management group, wrote in his Infrastructure 2.0 blog of FastScale’s impact on the storage infrastructure: “FastScale increases the relevance to and alignment with VMware by maximizing the density of VM’s that can be run on an ESX (up to 3X the VMs), decreasing memory and disk usage, and thus enabling the most optimal platform for tier-one application delivery,” Quillin wrote.

Another EMC blogger, Chuck Hollis, put it this way: “From a storage perspective, maybe we ought to call it ‘pre-dupe’ rather than ‘de-dupe’?  Compared against what can be done with ordinary disk-based deduplication, we’re now able to go so much farther in terms of footprint reduction — not only on disk, but in memory where it ‘really’ counts.”

Said Boles, “this is a key space to watch — this kind of optimization can have significant implications for the storage infrastructure.”

Akorri boosts VMware support, adds SAN performance analysis

Akorri’s cross-domain reporting software, BalancePoint, is getting deeper into VMware analytics with version 3.0, which also contains some storage updates including support for more vendors and SAN switch performance analysis.

The version launched today includes virtual-machine level granularity for identifying resource contention, CPU and memory utilization, and CPU efficiency within the physical host; previously, analytics were performed by Akorri according by physical server rather than VM.

On the storage front, this new release adds support for 3PAR storage arrays to existing support for HDS and NetApp. BalancePoint can also now map storage switch infrastructures made up of Brocade and Cisco switches, analyze storage switch performance, and identify overutilized and underutilized SAN switch ports.

The most comparable product to Akorri that storage users would be familiar with would be NetApp’s Onaro, which is also software deployed without host agents, and also contains SAN switch performance analysis, as well as mapping virtual-machine level relationships to the underlying storage infrastructure. However, Akorri also includes more server-specific analytics while Onaro focuses on the storage infrastructure. Another storage-focused monitoring tool, Symantec’s CommandCentral Storage, also offers virtual-machine level analytics, but requires host agents. CommandCentral Storage, while also storage-focused, can be rolled up into Symantec’s overall data center management framework for cross-domain support.

In recent years, widespread VMware deployment has called for better analytics in IT to help smooth out performance bottlenecks and resource contention within the physical infrastructure. Until recently, however, deployment of storage resource management (SRM) tools been sluggish, although recent analyst research this year suggests that the economic downturn has more users looking to analyze and improve existing assets for better storage efficiency using these tools. This research also suggests that storage teams are increasingly cooperating with other IT departments, especially networking, to better optimize data center performance.

Bocada resurfaces, plans backup reporting updates

I’m still digesting all the vendor meetings I had last week at the BD Event. One of the company executives I met with last week was Nancy Hurley, CEO of Bocada Inc. for a little over a year now.

Hurley told me she spent most of her time since becoming CEO last May trying to get the Bocada’s house in order. “We went through our recession already,” she said, adding the vendor rebounded to reach profitability by the end of last year. Hurley said that was mostly the result of improving internal business processes.

Having completed its internal makeover, Hurley said Bocada will update its Bocada Enterprise software June 30 and again later this year. She hopes the two-phase approach to breaking up the monolithic software into a modular front end will help attract more channel sales and improve workflow within the product.

Bocada Enterprise 5.4 will add “policy mining,” which will allow the software to understand each policy for every backup server client, when that policy changed, and how that has impacted backup job failures or error reports. This version will also begin the modularization process by more clearly delineating the workflow between each of the services it provides, from healthcheck to problem management to change management. “Today we leave the customer to navigate the workflow themselves,” Hurley said. “They have to know where they have to go next. Our next update will move them through to the next step.”

The second update planned for later this year will separate the front-end into sections that can be sold and deployed separately, though the back-end will remain the same. The customers Bocada has in mind for this are service providers who may need to offer a combination of services to customers and issue service level agreements (SLAs) for each service. Advanced modules are also planned for generating SLAs and thresholding, i.e., “If this keeps happening, 30 days from now you might not meet your SLA,” explained Hurley.

Other products that began as backup reporting tools, such as Aptare’s StorageConsole, have broadened their capabilities to include storage resource management (SRM). But Hurley said Bocada plans to stick to its knitting in the data protection space. “To me, even addressing everything in data protection is hard — we don’t want to dilute that value by also having to go and look at how much capacity you have on Clariion,” she said.

Bocada may have picked a good time to re-enter the reporting software market; TheInfoPro’s Wave 12 Storage Study showed that capacity planning and reporting shot to #1 on the list of priorities for storage professionals during the economic downturn.

Storage podcast: SRM CEO sees boon in down economy

As we reported yesterday, Aptare Inc. upgraded and expanded its StorageConsole storage resource management (SRM) suite this week, adding products to manage resources in VMware virtual server and NetApp replication environments.

As a sidebar to that story, though, I also had a pretty interesting conversation with the CEO of Aptare, Rick Clark, about how business has been during the global economic crisis. The consensus among analysts in this market has been that while the need for better capacity management is real, organizations have generally not been willing to pay for it. However, Clark said Aptare has more than 300 customers, and that sales the last three quarters have been the strongest in the company’s history.

For more on this topic, check out our podcast of the interview with Clark about how the company has grown in recent months:

 

 SRM CEO sees boon in down economy: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

NetApp brushes up change management tool

On the heels of the addition of a change management tool to Symantec’s CommandCentral SRM software, NetApp last week released version 5.0 of SANScreen, the change management application it acquired by buying Onaro.

Among the updates, according to an email from Steve Cohen, Product Marketing Manager for SANscreen:

• More Heterogeneous Support - HDS USP, and EMC CLARiiON (performance) and EMC Celerra (discovery). SANscreen was built to provide heterogeneous visibility and this concept remains core to our values
• Data Warehouse and embedded business intelligence engine based on IBM’s Cognos. This allows rollup of multiple SANscreen sites into a single Data Warehouse for global storage infrastructures, and offers a possible interface to SQL-accessible 3rd party apps including change management databases (CMDBs) for the overall data center. New custom reporting from data warehouse includes storage chargeback.
• VMware vCenter Plug-in - SANscreen data is now available within vCenter, so server teams can use one tool to manage their environment.
• iSCSI Support - Single console to monitor multi-protocol environments.

While reporting tools have been steadily adding features and are now available from major vendors, this category of products remains a tough sell, according to analysts. For more on that, see our coverage of Symantec’s CommandCentral announcement.

Shoah Foundation tames 8 PB with tape and automation

Add this as a point in the ‘tape’ column if you’re scoring the ancient debate at home.

The Shoah Foundation, founded by Stephen Spielberg to preserve Holocaust survivors’ narratives after Schindler’s List and now a part of the University of Southern California, has conducted interviews with thousands of survivors in 56 countries. The Foundation has 52,000 interviews that amount to 105,000 hours of footage.

CTO Sam Gustman says the footage was originally shot on analog video cameras, then converted to digital betacam and MPEGs for distribution online. It currently amounts to 135 TB. However, the Foundation is converting the footage to Motion JPEG 2000, which will create bigger files–about 4 PB of data, Gustman estimated. Each video will be copied twice, bringing the total to 8 PB.

Gustman says the Foundation received a $2 million donation of SL8500 tape libraries, Sun STK  6540 arrays and servers from Sun Microsystems in June. The Foundation has an automated transcoding system running on the servers, and that takes up the 140 TB of 6540 disk capacity for workspace. Sun’s SAM-FS software will automate the migration of data within the system, to the 6540 and then to the SL8500 silo for long-term storage.

We’re hearing a lot in the industry these days about rich content applications such as this one moving to clustered disk systems, but Gustman said disk costs too much for the Foundation’s budget.  He sees the potential for an eventual move to disk storage, but “disk is still too expensive–four to five times the total cost of ownership, mostly for powerand cooling.”

Another advantage to the T10000 tape drives the Foundation plans to use is that they will eliminate having to migrate the entire collection to disk during copying, transcoding and technology refreshes. One T10000 drive can make copies or do conversions directly between drives in the robot, and the virtualization layer with SAM-FS means that can happen transparently.

However, as an organization charged with the historic preservation of records, Gustman agreed with others I’ve talked to about this subject in saying that there’s still no great way to preserve digital information in the long term. “The problem with digital preservation right now is that you have to put energy into it–you can’t just stick it in a box and hope it’s there 100 years from now,” he said. “Maybe there’ll be something eventually that you don’t have to put energy into, but it doesn’t exist yet.”

IBM virtual desktop storage update - sort of

Last week I wrote about some confusion I had regarding IBM’s virtual storage optimizer (VSO) for VMware Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), especially after I was told by a VMware official that the IBM product, credited to an internally-developed algorithm, was based on VMware’s Linked Clone API.

I wrote to one of the researchers involved and got a response through IBM’s PR spokesperson that:

• The IBM-developed algorithm is based on VMware API available in Virtual Infrastructure version 3, not the VMWare LinkedClone API. Specifically, the algorithm uses VMware Infrastructure SDK 2.5.0 as documented at https://secure.techtarget.com/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.vmware.com/support/developer/vc-sdk/ and file system level access on ESX servers.
• We developed the algorithm based on the API that was publicly available and supported at the time that we began development efforts
• VMware can provide detail on the differences between the APIs in Virtual Infrastructure version 3 and VMware LinkedClone API

So far no response from VMware.

Regardless of what API was or was not used, what I am trying to get at is the functional difference between these two products, if any. If there is one, it’s important for users to know about. If there isn’t one, it speaks to the growing convergence between VMware’s virtual infrastructure and storage vendors’ value-add software.

the bottom line right now seems to be that IBM’s product is for existing IBM customers, since it requires professional services through IGS. There are some shops that need the IBM label before they buy, and so VSO could at least be a fit for them.

Appreciate weigh-ins from IBM, VDI, and / or VMware experts.

Further news and reading from VMWorld

A couple of additional storage announcements not captured in our VMWorld preview wrap:

EMC Corp. said EMC Control Center (ECC)  6.1 will now support reporting on thin-provisioned volumes within Symmetrix disk arrays. This was part of a package of update to various management software components in EMC’s portfolio, which also included Infra service desk software and Application Discovery Manager (ADM). ECC will also support thin provisioned volumes when they become available for Clariion arrays.

Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) is now offering the Hitachi Storage Replication Adapter, a heterogeneous replication software plug-in certified with Site Recovery Manager. Xiotech Corp. also announced integration with SRM.

The latest release of DataCore SANmelody storage virtualization software has been certified with the newest release of VMware ESX Server 3.x. The certification covers base iSCSI connectivity as well as  high-availability configurations.

GlassHouse Technologies consultants have joined up with Tek-Tools Software to offer a new managed service for virtualization environments. GlassHouse developed a management interface integrated with Tek-Tools’ Profiler for VMware to provide a single pane view into the virtual environment.

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Further Reading

From the Storage sites:

• IBM software guts the virtual desktop data hog
• Cisco brings virtualization to Fibre Channel and Ethernet 
• Users grapple with virtual data protection at VMworld 

From the Server Virtualization group:

• VMware unveils cloud computing vision with new Virtual Datacenter OS
• VMworld 2008 kicks off with address from new CEO Paul Maritz
• VMware CEO fields questions at VMworld 2008
• Best of VMworld 2008 awards announced

Blogs:

• vCloud initiative: Enterprises moving to clouds [Server Farming]
• So, what does vStorage really mean? [Virtual Geek]
• Microsoft attacks VMware with poker chips [Channel Marker]

The great storage chargeback debate

“You need HOW MUCH for storage?!” That question has been heard by many of us currently submitting budgets for the next calendar year, quickly followed by “Are you SURE you need that much disk? Didn’t we just get disk last year? Where did they all go!? I want your house audited. Now!”

Okay, maybe not the audit part, but for most of us, getting the type of disk we need in the quantity we need it is an uphill battle. Add SSD, deduplication, and longer-term retention to the mix, and things are getting a bit hairy with my budgetary requests. I’m at such a point now with a few of my smaller clients, and when they get that “you’re crazy” look, I bring up the chargeback model.

I think I just heard a collective sigh from the interwebs.

I understand both sides of the chargeback dilemma: the accounting side, that has to somehow keep track of all this without keeping track of all this; and the IT side, that is constantly being painted as the cost center only because no one is taking ownership of their parts of the “plumbing.” People (read departments) will request outrageous resources when they don’t have to directly foot the bill. That part I get, but are they so vehemently against accounting for their infrastructure usage?

In my opinion, chargeback would actually lead to better data management habits — at least in the long term — because if you have to pay for everything out of your own budget, then you’ll be more careful about separating what you need from what you want. How many of our managers and accounting folks have processes in place to account for each department’s use of the “utilities” that make up IT and understand that IT isn’t the root of all expenses?

I had an energetic debate with a co-worker about this very issue. I took the stance that chargeback is the way to go. He offered a more community-oriented accounting method. We went back and forth, point and counterpoint, until concluding that it just depends on what your business environment will support and the level of organization that business has in place.

For instance, if you have a well-organized, project-oriented IT environment, and have a project portfolio ready for sizing, you can plan a community budget very well and effectively fund addition to your infrastructure through a single IT budget. The reality from <i>my</I> experience (read, SMB clients) is that most companies are not so well-organized, don’t have a project portfolio for the next 12 months, and will not be able to identify budgetary requirements for infrastructure improvements.

In these cases, chargeback (or, at the very least, departmental accounting) is key to being able to answer my opening question with confidence.

Traditional SAN storage may be easy to bill for, but what of virtualized storage? Take it a step further, how about Softricity/Microsoft’s Softgrid? (Softricity is the company Microsoft acquired not too long ago that allows for application-level virtualization as opposed to host virtualization.) How do you quantify and itemize a streamed, virtualized application?

Then there’s the question floating just below the surface of the chargeback debate: How do I, as a department, know you are giving me what I’m being “billed” for? That question opens a giant can of worms in my mind (and there are already creepy crawlies up there, no need to add worms to the mix).

The crux of what I’m getting at is: Are we as technologists — and storage pros specifically — asking for too much or too little when it comes to chargeback? Are there still companies out there that don’t see the light when it comes to chargeback and departmental accounting. Should we as storage pros be leading the way for other areas of IT to follow our example?

Google Search Appliance bulks up

Google has revamped the hardware and some aspects of the software for the Google Search Appliance, which can now support 10 million files in a single box, up from 3 million in the previous version.

Google has also added new biasing features which allow corporate administrators to weight search results differently for different end users - for example, the marketing and engineering departments might get different documents returned first for the same keyword. This is termed front-end biasing.

Metadata biasing is also new with this release. That lets admins rank metadata such as create date or author on a sliding scale of importance, so that, for example, documents written by the CEO are returned first.

Data growth is making indexing and search necessary, according to Forrester Research analyst Stephanie Balaouras. “I would say, once you can measure your storage in hundreds of TBs,” data indexing will probably be necessary, she said.

“Below 100 TBs, you should have a rough understanding of how that data is broken down between email, unstructured files, and database data,” she added. ”And with some basic policies, the most important information should be ingested into a content management system.”