NAS

NetApp passes CEO torch from Warmenhoven to Georgens

After 15 years as CEO – practically an eternity in the storage business – NetApp’s Dan Warmenhoven stepped down today and named Tom Georgens his successor.

The move was anticipated since NetApp promoted Georgens to COO and president in February 2008, yet Warmenhoven had given no timeframe for his retirement. He will stay on as executive chairman “to help build and expand relationships with certain strategic partners around the world, including service providers and key technology partners,” according to NetApp’s news release.

“I am honored to follow in Dan’s footsteps,” Georgens said in the release. “In just 15 years, NetApp has grown from a $14 million startup with 45 employees into a recognized market leader in networked storage and data management with $3.4 billion in annual revenues and approximately 8,000 employees around the world. Dan also helped to cultivate a unique corporate culture, which has resulted in NetApp consistently being recognized as a great place to work.”

Warmenhoven’s final months were a bit rocky, as NetApp got outbid by its chief rival EMC for data deduplication backup specialist Data Domain. NetApp said it would buy Data Domain last May for $1.5 billion, but EMC eventually acquired Data Domain for $2.1 billion. NetApp did rally from a sales perspective at the end for Warmenhoven, though, and today reported better than expected $838 million in revenue last quarter during rough financial times.

Georgens joined NetApp as head of its Enterprise Storage Systems group in Oct. 2005. He was previously CEO of LSI’s Engenio storage systems division for two years and spent 11 years at EMC.

SGI releases first post-acquisition product

SGI has launched its first enterprise data storage product since Rackable bought Silcon Graphics Inc. for $42.5 million and changed its name to SGI following the acquisition.

The new product, CloudRack X2, is a scaled-down version of its CloudRack C2, which is shipped already racked. CloudRack X2 holds up to nine TR2000 trays, which contain CPU as well as up to eight 3.5-inch SATA hard disk drives. C2, by contrast, holds up to 20 drives. X2 can be deployed as a cabinet or slotted into an existing rack.

SGI says it can customize the hardware it ships in either product, offering a range of Intel Xeon and AMD processors and user-configurable CPU/ memory/capacity combination. The goal is to sell this product into Internet service providers as well as HPC and digital graphics shops such as post-production editing. SGI is the latest in a list of HPC scale-out vendors to bring their high-end products downmarket, although unlike Isilon and BlueArc, SGI is not targeting mainstream enterprises with new software.

“The hardware design has been tailored for cloud computing,” SGI senior product marketing director Geoffrey Noer said. “Most of those service providres have their own custom software — one of our big value propositions is that we can tune our hardware to their specific apps.”

Ah, there’s that word again: “cloud.” We reported Thursday on some new plans brewing behind the scenes at NetApp and Emulex in the cloud storage space, as well as the commentary from several industry analysts about how, well, cloudy this buzzword has become. Just look at these three companies alone — one, NetApp, is focused on delivering IT as a service within enterprise data centers through a virtual infrastructure; another, Emulex, is focusing on connectivity between internal enterprise infrastructure and external service provider data centers; a third, SGI is offering little in the way of virtualization or software integration and cites the hardware design in defining its system as suitable for the cloud.

“It’s like trying to bag smoke right now,” Illuminata analyst John Webster said of pinning down a technical definition for the “cloud” buzzword.

However, one thing is abundantly clear: whatever the cloud turns out to be, vendors are gung-ho about it leading into fall. Expect further developments, particularly from NetApp. Then we’ll have to see whether end users follow.

Analyst: SMB NAS products should cozy up to the TV

If you’ve been paying attention to recent storage product news, you may detect a distinctly consumer-ish flavor. Several vendors have recently redoubled efforts to reach the ever-elusive small business, home office and tech-savvy consumer. So far this year, the wave of new products has included EMC’s Iomega StorCenter ix4 product, Fabrik Inc. systems that were acquired by Hitachi GST, Seagate Technology’s BlackArmor NAS, and various ReadyNAS systems from NetGear.

One analyst who follows the consumer space closely says these products may be hitting the market at just the right time, but vendors still may need to tweak their approach to get the attention of shoppers at Best Buy.

“Digitization is reaching critical mass” in the home and small-office market, said ABI Research digital home group senior analyst Jason Blackwell in an interview with Storage Soup this week. Blackwell recently authored a market research report declaring that consumers are growing comfortable with home networks and network-attached devices. Products have been refined to offer easier installation and more features, and digital multimedia has become mainstream for users who want to keep music and photos on home networked storage products.

Still, storage vendors and customer may need help finding each other. Retailers don’t always provide that yet.

“There needs to be continued education in this market, of retailers as well as consumers,” Blackwell said. “Usually [home storage systems] end up at Best Buy in the networking section. They really need to be located closer to the TVs” so consumers associate the storage boxes with what they’re good for - streaming multimedia. In the networking section, they’ll be mixed in with routers and other devices.

“Typically stores have really good salespeople for televisions, but the same cannot always be said about the networking section,” he said. “Customers are kind of left on their own.”

The products themselves can get closer to other devices as well, Blackwell said, in more ways than one - through integration and automation of media adapter cards to more easily network with those devices, and through attention to industrial design to look more like them. “Products need to look good, and provide a good overall experience for consumers,” Blackwell said.

Windows Storage Server ‘08 shows up

Remember Windows Storage Server 2008, the OEM product from Microsoft built on its Widows Server 2008 file serving capabilities? Microsoft talked about it a bit last year before going quiet – the official Microsoft Windows Storage Server blog was last updated in June.

But Microsoft sent word today that WSS08 was released to OEM partners, which means you should be seeing products from the likes of Hewlett-Packard, Dell and others based on it over the next few months.

Microsoft has taken what was essentially a NAS platform — Windows Storage Server 2003 – and given it block storage capabilities with an iSCSI software target. WSS08 will also include single instance storage to store duplicate files only once. Microsoft will host a webcast introducing WSS08’s new features on Thursday.

Panasas adds solid state to NAS

Parallel clustered NAS vendor Panasas is the latest vendor to put solid state drives (SSDs) in it storage arrays.

 Panasas will includes SSD in the highest end of the three ActiveStor Series systems it launched today. Series 7 and Series 8 – with no SSD support – are available today, while Series 9 with SSDs are expected in the second half of the year.

Series 9 will have the highest IOPs and lowest latency of Panasas systems, and is aimed at bringing the vendor beyond its high performance computing (HPC) niche into financial services, media and entertainment and life sciences

Panasas Series 9 tiers consist of DRAM cache, SSD, and SATA drives. “We hate Fibre Channel,” Panasas marketing VP Larry Jones says.

Those three non-FC tiers are placed in “turbo” blades on the Panasas Series 9. Each blade has 40 GB of cache, 36 GB of SSDs and 2 TB of SATA. Each shelf holds 11 blades, and Jones says there is no limit on shelves in a system.

Panasas uses Intel X-25E single-level cell (SLC) SSDs. Jones says no pricing is set yet but he expects the SSDs to have a 40% premium over SATA.

ActiveScale 3.4 software includes automatic tiered storage capability to migrate data to the right tier without requiring customers to set policies. “We put data in the right spot automatically,” Jones says.

The Series 9 scales can generate 120,000 IOPS, according to Panasas.

As with Series 9, the Series 8 model supports 10-Gigabit Ethernet and InfiniBand, and up to 440 GB of cache. The entry level Series 7 is GigE only and maxes out at 50 GB cache. The two higher models also include volume snap shots.

Although SSDs are all the rage in storage now, it’s unlikely that SSD support alone will make Panasas more popular outside of the HPC world. Panasas is also counting on the Parallel NFS protocol (pNFS) to make its systems more accessible to the average NAS shop. pNFS, which will likely replace Panasas’s proprietary DirectFlow protocol, isn’t expected in shipping products until 2010.

Isilon cuts staff, switches sales VPs

Isilon Systems finally took Wall Street’s advice about slashing staff today, revealing it would reduce its worldwide workforce by approximately 10%.

Isilon had 394 employees at the end of 2008. The clustered NAS vendor is also changing its chief of sales, brining in NetApp and Quantum veteran George Bennett to replace Steve Fitz as SVP of worldwide field operations.

Financial analysts have called on Isilon to cut staff since founder Sujal Patel took over as CEO in September of 2007. The company hasn’t had a profitable quarter since going public in 2006.

Patel gave up his resistance to the cuts, and estimated the reduction will cost $850,000 this quarter and then save the company $4 million annually.

“It’s clear that persistent global economic weakness and uncertainty has led to contraction in many of our customers’ IT budgets,” Patel said in a press release today announcing the restructuring.

Isilon actually met sales expectations despite suffering wider losses than expected, according to the preliminary results it disclosed today. Isilon expects revenue in the range of $26.5 million to $27 million, up approximately 10% to 12% from the same period last year and down approximately 15% to 17% from the fourth quarter of 2008. Although Isilon did not give a previous forecast for the quarter, financial analysts expected around $26.9 million in revenue and a loss of 12 cents per share. Isilon said it expects to lose 14 cents to 15 cents per share.

The company also took an inventory writedown of around $3.8 million because of the softening economy for its older products in anticipation of customers moving to its new products launched last month.

“That means there was faster adoption of new product, but they were unable to get rid of the old solution, so that’s a mixed bag,” Enterprise Strategy Group analyst Brian Babineau said.

Rackable snaps up SGI in $25 million fire sale

UPDATED

Rackable Systems acquired he assets of high-performance computing (HPC) systems vendor Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI) for just $25 million today, coinciding with SGI’s filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy

According to a press release put out by Rackable:

SGI sells hardware and software targeted at scientific labs and other markets where parallel processing of high volumes of files is required. It offers servers and clusters, visualization applications, and services in addition to high-volume storage clusters it calls InfiniteStorage NAS.

Rackable has yet to indicate this, but I wonder if they are acquiring SGI’s assets specifically for the clustered NAS offering. Last summer, Rackable divested itself of the clustered NAS product it had purchased with Terrascale a year earlier. At the time of the divestiture, Rackable said it would be partnering for storage rather than building it internally, and eventually partnered with NetApp.

Rackable CEO Mark Barrenechea didn’t provide too much detail during a conference call with analysts this afternoon, mainly because the deal hasn’t closed and might not be final for another two months. Barrenechea did say there was little product overlap and hinted that Rackable would keep the bulk of both vendors’ products. He didn’t address the NAS partnership with NetApp, but a Rackable spokesperson sent word that no changes in partnerships are expected.

Overland puts Snap veteran Kelly in charge

It took him awhile, but Eric Kelly is running the Snap Appliance business again.

Kelly today became CEO of Overland Storage, which acquired the Snap business from Adaptec last June. He replaces Vern LoForti, who remains at Overland as president.

Kelly has a long history with Snap. He put together a group of investors to buy Snap from Quantum for $10 million in 2002 and served as its CEO until selling it to Adaptec for $100.4 million in 2004. Kelly worked as GM of Adaptec’s storage business for two years and when Adaptec put the Snap business up for sale, there were rumblings in the storage industry that Kelly tried to put together a group to buy it back. That didn’t work out, but he joined Overland’s board in late 2007 and strongly recommended Overland buy the Snap business.

When that deal was completed, LoForti said Kelly told the Overland board, ‘”If you don’t want [Snap], I’ll buy it myself.”

Kelly told SearchStorage.com today he’s looking forward to working again with other members of the Snap team who remain from his CEO days.

“Some of the same team is here,” he said. “I think we do have a little advantage in terms of understanding what our customers are looking for, and how we position the product and grow the business.”

 So with Overland trying to go from a tape vendor to a storage systems company built around its new NAS products, Kelly seems like the right guy for the job. LoForti has done his best to revitalize Overland after moving CFO to CEO of the troubled company in 2007, but had to spend much of his time looking for financing to keep it afloat.

Overland raised $9 million in financing last Decmeber to keep the doors open but will need to reverse its long history of losing money if it is to survive. The vendor last week said it would reduce its workforce by 17% by cutting 53 employees and slashed the salaries of executives and other salaried employees by 10%. That followed previous layoffs totaling 64 employees since last August.

Kelly said Overland will seek more funding and will obviously strive to become profitable as soon as possible. Overland’s strategy will be to provide end to end data protection across disk and tape,  which involves leveraging Snap’s software with Overland’s other platforms.

LoForti says because the Snap Guardian OS and the OS for Overland’s REO disk appliances are based on the same Linux kernel, it won’t be difficult to integrate the product lines.

“When you sell and appliance, people look at the hardware, but our value is in the software,” Kelly said.

NFSv4.1 approved as proposed standard

NFS 4.1, which contains the specs for parallel NFS (pNFS), has officially been approved as a proposed standard, according to a blog post by NetApp senior technical director Michael Eisler today.

While products that incorporate the standard are still down the road, pNFS is expected to speed data transfer, eliminate bottlenecks and increase the scalability of clustered NAS products. Parallel NFS provides a specification for placing a metadata server outside the data path of servers attached to a multinode storage system. Storage nodes can be held together with another clustered file system, while pNFS exposes the block mapping of files and objects to the client. The client then receives those blocks through multiple parallel network channels and reassembles them for presentation to the user.

Some storage administrators said they hope VMware will offer a client for pNFS to help overcome storage I/O issues with the server virtualization software.  Eisler also blogged in August with some further clarifications regarding that idea.

IDC: Unstructured data will become the primary task for storage

According to a new IDC Enterprise Disk Storage Consumption Model report released this week, transaction-intensive applications are giving way as the main segment of enterprise data to an expanded range of apps as well as a tendency to create more copies of data and records for business analytics including data mining and e-Discovery.

The report estimates that unstructured data in traditional data centers will eclipse the growth of transaction-based data that until recently has been the bulk of enterprise data processing. While transactional data is still projected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 21.8%, it’s far outpaced by a 61.7% CAGR predicted for unstructured data in traditional data centers.

“In the very near future, the management and organization of file-based information will become the primary task for many storage administrators in corporate datacenters,” the report reads. “And this shift will have a significant impact on how companies assess storage solutions in terms of systems’ performance, operational efficiency, and file services intelligence.”

The IDC report also builds on research first highlighted in an IDC blog last week concerning the cloud. According to the report, the sharpest growth in storage capacity will come from new organizations described as “content depots.” IDC estimates storage consumption from these organizations will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 91.8% through 2012. Examples of content depots  include the usual cloud suspects: Google, Amazon, Flickr, and YouTube.

These content depots have different IT requirements and infrastructures than traditional enterprise data centers. We’re seeing examples of these new  infrastructures pop up in the market, including systems with logical abstraction between the hardware and software elements; the use of commodity servers as a hardware basis for storage platforms; and the use of clustered file systems.

Some in the industry have compared this “serverization” of storage to the transition between proprietary workstations and PCs in the 1980’s. But IDC analyst Rick Villars says this isn’t a zero-sum game. “This isn’t going to replace traditional IT,” he said. “Ninety-five percent of what people are developing and building in the storage industry today is irrelevant to what the cloud is building. You could take that as a negative, but it also translates into opportunity. These are new market spaces and new storage consumers that weren’t around five years ago.”

There’s been a lot of discussion lately about the role the cloud will play as the global economy softens. There is a difference of opinion between those who see a capital-strapped storage market as an even more conservative and risk-averse one and those who argue the opportunity to avoid capital expenditures will nudge traditional IT applications into the cloud. Still others point out the hurdles to cloud computing that remain, including network scalability and bandwidth constraints.

For example, when it comes to storage applications such as archiving, analyst reports from Forrester Research this year cited  latency in accessing off-site archived messages and searching them for e-discovery as major barriers to adoption for archiving software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings.

Cloud computing “definitely exposes weaknesses in networking,” Villars said, but “the closest point to the end user is the cloud, if you want to distribute content to end users spread around the world.”

Other challenges include the growing pains major cloud infrastructures such as Amazon’s S3 have experienced over the last 18 months, and the potential risk of putting more enterprise data eggs in one service provider’s cloud data center basket. Villars points out, “I doubt Amazon has had more problems than a typical large enteprise, and they offer backup with geographic distribution for free.”

However, geographic distribution brings with it its own challenges, such as varying regulations among different countries. “There are regulatory problems with Europe,” Villars said. “Laws there say that if you have data on a European customer, yhou can’t move it out of Europe. If you want your cloud provider to spread copies between the U.S., Asia and Europe for global redundancy, that becomes an issue.”