disk arrays

Pillar insists it’s not putting Intel SSDs ‘in the ditch’

A Pillar executive responding to a Computerworld report that the vendor is ”kicking Intel’s SSD to the curb” says Pillar is still considering Intel as an SSD supplier for future releases, while confirming it switched to STEC drives for its Axiom SSD bricks.

Bob Maness, Pillar’s VP of worldwide marketing and channel sales, says Pillar pitted Intel and STEC drives against one another in a qualification process, and “STEC finished first.” In March, Pillar said it would ship Intel SSDs with its Axiom systems but Maness says Intel’s X25-E SSD caused timeout errors with the Axiom controller during multiple concurrent write operations. He said two companies are still working on fixing.

Earlier this year, Intel issued a firmware update to its X25-M consumer SSDs for performance issues due to data fragmentation. Intel executives said at the time that the glitch did not apply to the X25-E.

Pillar also recently swapped out its storage controller processors from Intel to AMD, which Maness said was the result of a similar “first come, first serve” process of qualification. “For most vendors, this is the way they operate with components suppliers,” he said.

Maness said Pillar has used Intel processors in earlier iterations of Axiom and will continue to keep up with its products. “We have had an ongoing relationship with them,” he said. “We’re not putting Intel in the ditch.”

A bigger question for Pillar as it refreshes Axiom with 2 TB drives as well as the SSDs, is whether it will be PIllar’s or Sun’s midmarket storage product lines left in the proverbial ditch by Oracle, whose CEO Larry Ellison is Pillar’s primary investor.

Maness, not surprisingly, says Oracle will pick Pillar. “If you look at the Sun storage product line, you can assume, in my opinion, they probably won’t continue the OEM relationships based on margin,” he said.

He was referring to Sun’s 9000 product line, a rebranding of Hitachi Data Systems (HDS)’s USP high-end disk arrays, as well as the 6000 and 5000 series it rebrands from LSI.

That leaves the Sun 7000 series, or Amber Road, in Pillar’s competitive sights. “Sun servers are already being put in the midst of the Oracle stack,” Maness said, referring to this week’s announcement of Exadata 2. “But they haven’t talked much about storage. Maybe that’s because Pillar is a superior storage product.”

EMC makes virtual provisioning free

Call it a Lutheran Reformation for the 21st century. This time, instead of 95 theses nailed to a church door to challenge the Catholic Church, EMC customer and blogger Martin Glassborow posted one thesis on his blog to challenge EMC on the cost of virtual provisioning, also known as thin provisioning.

Even as storage vendors have been touting the cost savings of thin provisioning, it has cost customers extra to deploy the feature. Wrote Glassborow:

HDS and EMC are both extremely guilty in this regard, both Virtual Provisioning and Dynamic Provisioning cost me extra as an end-user to license. But this is the technology upon which all future block-based storage arrays will be built. If you guys want to improve the TCO and show that you are serious about reducing the complexity to manage your arrays, you will license for free. You will encourage the end-user to break free from the shackles of complexity and you will improve the image of Tier-1 storage in the enterprise.

(HDS might have some quibble with this - another blogger, storage consultant Chris M. Evans, points out that HDS’ Switch It On promotion offers free UVM, Dynamic Provisioning (first 10TB only) and Tiered Storage Manager on existing USP-V deployments. Evans also notes HDS’s promo is for existing as well as new deployments; EMC told me today existing Symm deployments will also be eligible, but there appears to be some confusion about that.)

Glassborow’s wish was granted. In response, EMC blogger Barry Burke, also chief strategy officer for Symmetrix, wrote:

In his post, Martin insists that the current pricing strategies for thin provisioning from both HDS and EMC are a disincentive to the adoption of the otherwise compelling feature that makes enterprise arrays easier and more cost-effective to manage and deploy.

These very conversations have been going on within the walls of EMC, and it has been decided that Virtual Provisioning will in fact be included at no charge and with no capacity limitations for all Symmetrix V-Max and DMX 4 orders beginning this quarter.  As a result, all Symmetrix V-Max and DMX 4 customers will be able to leverage the speed and ease of storage provisioning, improved capacity utilization and the inherent benefits of wide striping afforded by Virtual Provisioning, all at no extra charge.

We’ll see if others follow suit.

We shall, and if it happens soon, call me cynical, but I will wonder about the timing of this decision on EMC’s part. As Burke notes, this isn’t the first time Glassborow has come knocking with his pricing protest (though I think he deserves credit for his good points and persistence). Should we be anticipating another vendor to be heard from when it comes to free thin provisioning?

And what about Clariion? EMC added thin provisioning to the CX4 last year, but the free thin provisioning is only available for Symmetrix so far.

Xiotech resizes Emprise self-healing disk array, says SSDs on roadmap

Xiotech has rolled out a smaller entry-level configuration of its Emprise 7000 array, targeting branch offices and the midmarket. The single-controller Emprise 7000 Edge supports up to 10 of what Xiotech calls Intelligent Storage Elements (ISE), for a total maximum capacity of 160 TB.

Xiotech product management director Eric Lomascolo says the 7000 Edge also has a direct upgrade path to the dual-controller enterprise Emprise 7000, which supports up to 64 ISE for up to 1024 TB.

Xiotech also sells the Emprise 5000, a direct-attached storage (DAS) box, which users can stack to expand capacity. However, according to Lomascolo, the 7000 series includes software features not found in the 5000, including replication, which can be applied to the entire SAN from a single management point. Each 5000 unit has to be managed separately.

Xiotech has yet to add solid-state drive support to Emprise, but Lomascolo said it’s on the roadmap and Xiotech will consider hybrid as well as purely solid-state offerings. Another trend among disk array vendors has been the development of software for automatic placement of data on SSDs according to performance needs, but Lomascolo said it’s low on the priority list for Xiotech users. “It’s absolutely something we’ll make available, and today you can move data around with integration through our Web services interface,” Lomascolo said. “But what we’ve seen so far from feature functionality surveys is that’s at the bottom of what users really care about.”

3Par braces for V-Max

3Par CEO Dave Scott spent a lot of time on his company’s earnings call Tuesday evening talking about EMC’s new Symmetrix V-Max. That makes sense, considering 3Par probably has the most to lose of all EMC rivals if V-Max is a hit with customers.

The V-Max EMC launched a month ago is a nod in some ways to 3Par’s modular cluster-node architecture, and a move away from the giant monolith enterprise system. 3Par had success while people were waiting for the new Symmetrix – Tuesday it reported revenue of $48.5 million last quarter, an increase of 37% from last year and 1% from the fourth quarter of last year. That’s compared to declines in EMC’s Symmetrix and Clariion midrange systems of 18% year-over-year and 25% from the previous quarter. But what happens to 3Par’s InServ business if EMC’s sales spike from V-Max?

Scott came to his company’s earnings call prepared to talk about V-Max, and launched into a lengthy answer when asked about it. He laid out what he considers V-Max’s failings – no improved RAID management or ASIC-assisted workload, poor thin provisioning and limited support for wide striping, the system is an untested “version one” of a new architecture, and so on. “In other words,” Scott concluded, “it does not have the agility or efficiency necessary for utility computing and virtual data centers. It seems to have missed the mark in much the same was the [IBM] XIV did.”

Of course, EMC has already made its own case for the V-Max contradicting many of Scott’s points, and will continue to try and press its case to 3Par customers. One feature where EMC is unquestionably ahead is in its support of solid state drives (SSDs). 3Par is the last major storage system vendor to add SSDs to the mix, and Scott says it’s in no hurry to jump on the bandwagon.

“We believe that solid state disk will have a kind of meaningful place in data storage, but the price performance characteristics of it have to change,” he said. “You should expect to see us include solid state disk maybe around the turn of the year, but the major benefit that solid state disk provides is something we achieve through autonomic wide striping, which is not necessarily available to many of the legacy incumbents’ architectures. So our need for solid state disk is not nearly as significant as theirs.”

EMC V-Max: V stands for bigger

Long before today’s official launch, just about anybody who cares about enterprise storage knew EMC would roll out its new Symmetrix system today during a series of webcasts. Yet EMC never used the word Symmetrix in all its hype about the launch. According to EMC, it was all about the “virtual data center of the future.”

So now we know the new Symmetrix is the V-Max – or virtual matrix – and not the DMX-5. But what makes this a system for the virtual world and the DMX-4 for the “physical world” as EMC’s storage division president Dave Donatelli puts it?

EMC CEO Joe Tucci likens the new Sym to a block-storage version of the objet-based Atmos system EMC rolled out last year. In other words, it’s an internal cloud storage system, which is a new way of saying virtualized storage.

According to EMC, V-Max is a storage virtualization system because it makes all its storage look like one pool, it can automatically migrate data between systems and arrays, and simplifies management with features such as thin provisioning and clustered nodes.

But the biggest difference between V-Max and other systems is really size and scale.
The virtualization features in V-Max aren’t new to the industry. 3PAR’s InServ systems support clustering of eight controllers. Compellent Technologies has software for moving data between solid state and hard drives, and Atrato will have it in a few weeks. Hitachi Data Systems has supported pooled storage in its arrays – and other vendors’ arrays – for years. But EMC says none of those systems scale to the level of V-Max or perform as fast. And that goes for the DMX-4, too.

When asked how it would be positioned against the DMX-4, Donatelli said the V-Max “has up to three times the capacity of DMX-4, and up to three times the performance. Clearly this will take over the high end of the product line.”

So, if you’re considering a V-Max, ask yourself if you need a bigger faster system with a bigger price tag. That’s easier than trying to decide if your data center resides in the virtual or physical world.

EMC launches Symmetrix V-Max, may add spin-down

EMC Corp. had a virtual press conference this morning to announce the new Symmetrix V-Max high-end disk array. DMX-4 will remain on the market, but the new distributed architecture and software updates have EMC claiming V-Max is faster and more scalable.

The president of EMC’s storage division, Dave Donatelli, said during a conference call with press this morning that the vendor is “contemplating spin-down” for the new Symmetrix, though he did not commit to a time frame.

I also asked Donatelli a question I’ve had on my mind for a while with regard to EMC. Back in the fall of 2007, EMC revealed at a customer event that it was developing a universal backup and archiving appliance built on industry-standard components, which would be given a ‘personality’ by EMC’s different software modules. A centralized management GUI for all backup and replication processes was also discussed. The first steps toward this may have come in the form of Avamar / Networker integration; at last year’s EMC World, execs told me they acquired WysDM to make that company’s software a centralized management framework for backup and archiving.

Then came the Clariion CX-4, which added high-availability features and scaled well into Symmetrix range. It wasn’t necessarily cannibalism yet, but it the increasing overlap was notable. As EMC has talked more and more about becoming a software company over the last few years, combined with the backup and archiving appliance plans, and other subtle signs of convergence between the systems like the redesign of disk trays that could fit into either CX or DMX, I began to wonder if EMC wasn’t planning a similar melding and commoditization of primary / secondary storage hardware, with different software to give it different “personalities.”

EMC officials have been on the coy side in talking about this. The picture has gotten a little clearer with the announcement of V-Max, which adds multicore Intel x86 processors, a first, as noted by IDC’s Benjamin Woo, in the high-end disk array space and a first for the Symmetrix line. EMC put a heavy emphasis on the software side of V-Max as well; most of the performance improvements and new features come from a complete reworking of the Enginuity OS software that runs Symmetrix. A software-based approach to pools of devices–i.e. the “VMwareization” of Symm–further commoditizes the hardware, further relies on software to give a machine “personality”…

During today’s Q&A with Donatelli, I asked if that is, in fact, EMC’s plan–if today what we think of as Clariion, Celerra and Symm might one day be distinguished by software rather than different hardware. He said that while CX and V-Max both use x86 processors, they’re different kinds of processors–in fact, different across the different Clariion models as well as different among CX and V-Max. V-Max also uses custom ASICs for its virtual matrix scale-out. “We still see a difference between the high-end world and the midtier world,” he said.

But he didn’t say for how long…

3PAR brings 4 controllers to midrange, skips SSD for now

3PAR’s new F Class midrange systems that launched today look a lot like its T-Class enterprise systems, only smaller. So the F-Class inherits its share of enterprise features as well as the gap in the T-Class platform

The enterprise features includes the ability to scale to four controllers – other midrange systems support two controllers – and what 3PAR calls Mesh-Active controller nodes. Mesh-Active controller architecture provides symmetrical access to all LUNs, instead of connecting a LUN to one controller.

At least one analyst, Evaluator Group managing partner Russ Fellows, gives 3PAR high grades for bringing those features to the midrange.

“By scaling to four controllers, they have twice as many as any midrange class system out there,” he said. “And the system scales literally, with symmetric LUN access. All high-end data center systems support symmetric LUN access across controllers, but pretty much nobody in the midrange does.”

However, 3PAR’s new midrange systems share the same missing feature as its enterprise systems. At a time when just about every new storage system rollout includes solid state drive (SSD) support, 3PAR still has none.

“We will support solid state, but the pressure to do so has been muted compared to what we’ve observed with other storage vendors,” 3PAR VP of markeing Craig Nunes says.

Nunes said when 3PAR gets into SSD, it will be with a SATA interface instead of the pricier FC-attached SSDs.

“If you need higher IOPS, we deliver that today with wide striping,” he said. “Fibre Channel-attached SSDs are premium priced and will never cross over the dollar per IOP line. Wide striping is better. The next wave of SATA-interfaced SSD drives promises to drop that IOP per dollar to the crossover point.”

Although competitors offer SSDs in the midrange as well as the enterprise, Fellows says lack of SSD support hurts 3PAR more with its enterprise systems than with the F-Class. “In the midrange, you add more than six SSDs and you have a million-dollar system, and that’s not a midrange system anymore,” he said. “That will change in a year or two. But it is a bit of a drawback now in the high end.”

Compellent picks STEC solid state drives

Compellent today filled in details about its solid state drive strategy, revealing it will offer 146 GB ZeusIOPS SSDs from STEC for its Storage Center systems.

Compellent will preview the SSD drives at its C-Drive user conference May 3-7, but hasn’t disclosed pricing or availability. Its press release today did say Compellent will package SSDs in a two-drive minimum, which it considers enough for a successful tier 0 approach.

Compellent executives first disclosed plans to include SSD late last year, but talked more about its block-level automated data migration for making solid state more efficient than about the actual hardware until today.

During the company’s earnings conference call last month, CEO Phil Soran predicted Compellent could deliver SSDs at about 10% the cost of competing systems by putting only active blocks of data on solid state while keeping inactive data on spinning disk.

It remains to be seen if Compellent can make good on those claims, but users and analysts say automated data migration will play a major role in helping SSD gain traction in enterprise storage. Compellent appears to have an advantage here, even if it trails EMC, Hitachi Data Systems, Hewlett-Packard and others in shipping SSDs.

All those vendors are also using STEC drives, as are Sun and IBM. EMC, first out with SSDs on enterprise storage, last week added support for 200 GB and 400 GB drives.