Storage conferences

VMWorld 2009: Reporter’s Notebook and photos

View of the Moscone Center where VMWorld 2009 was held.

Speculation swirls about EMC / Cisco joint venture
According to widespread reports, most recently an anonymously sourced report in the Wall Street Journal, Cisco and EMC Corp. are brewing up a joint venture to more easily bundle up EMC storage with Cisco’s UCS.

Judging by the amount of buzz, there probably is something happening; EMC storage was also exhibited as part of Cisco’s gigantic UCS demo at the show. According to one of my sources, who also requested anonymity, a joint venture would be a way for the companies to jointly market UCS with EMC storage without doubling up on the commission paid to separate sales forces.

If this deal happens, I think it would probably put the kibosh on the longstanding Cisco/EMC merger rumors, which date back at least as long as I’ve been in the storage market. Should they spin off a joint venture, I think it would be an indication that both organizations have gotten too large and complex to fully merge.

It would also be part of a general trend of alignment between companies whose products live at the top of the data center stack – apps, networking, and servers – and middleware/networking/storage counterparts, whether through acquisition a la Sun/Oracle or partnership as with Dell/Brocade.

Cisco and EMC have declined comment.

Always amazed at the scale of this show…Exhibit A

 
Exhibit B: the “feed lot” for meals, in a space remeniscent of an airplane hangar.

Exhibit C: Hands-on labs were jumping at all hours. This is first thing in the morning, and the line has already stretched out the door…

Asigra on the difference between cloud and online backup
And yes, there is a difference, at least according to Asigra executive vice president Eran Farajun—portability of data.

“Online backup is the closest thing to the cloud, but it still has one foot in the distributed-computing era,” he said. If users want to switch service providers, they pretty much have to orphan data or receive it back in raw format that can be labor-intensive to reassimilate behind the firewall. Asigra had been focused on service providers for years before the cloud computing buzzword became hot, and Farajun said that because Asigra is already set up for multi-tenancy and virtualizes the media server on the service-provider end (the customer has a backup “master” server that collects new data on-site), customer workloads can be shifted directly from one partner to another. It’s an interesting and helpful distinction to make, the kind of thing we need more discussion about as the cloud phenomenon gains steam.

VMware CEO Paul Maritz gives a keynote speech on Monday morning.

VMware acquires SpringSource
I was curious about this acquisition since the description of SpringSource’s rapid-deployment capabilities for new servers and virtualized applications sounded somewhat similar to the company EMC acquired earlier in the week, FastScale. But according to VMware CEO Paul Maritz in a Q&A session on Tuesday, “the two are only loosly in the same space. SpringSource is a level above [FastScale], thinking in terms of applications, rather than how they’re deployed in the infrastructure. They are complementary.”

Entering the keynote hall

Seanodes says it’s buddying up with IBM in Europe
Seanodes CEO Frank Gana says the iSCSI SAN vendor is in the midst of deployment with European customers on IBM’s BladeCenter servers. Keep an eye on this pairing – IBM has some iSCSI offerings, but nothing to directly compete with HP/LeftHand running on HP BladeSystem, which HP began offering this week as a VDI reference architecture.

Some analysts I ran into on the show floor noted with interest that this was Sun’s only presence at the show…

Xsigo usurps Cisco in VMworld show floor demos?
An interesting new addition to demo hardware this year was “What’s under my hood?” signs next to the roaring machines in show floor booths. The one at VMware’s booth consisted of EMC storage, MDS servers, and…Xsigo I/O virtualization interconnects, rather than the more-hyped VCE approach. Cisco was hardly inconspicous, though. Massive UCS racks greeted attendees as soon as they came down the Moscone Center escalators to get to breakout and general sessions (photo below).

NetApp offers $1 million storage challenge
Building off their 50% storage reduction guarantee for VMware environment (see full story, including fine print), NetApp was offering customers $1 million worth of storage equipment in exchange for a chance to prove they can achieve the 50% reduction. NetApp Chief Marketing Officer Jay Kidd said in this case, the customer agrees to be a public reference for NetApp if the deal works out.

Photos from VCE Distance VMotion session
VMware senior staff engineer Shudong Zhou, EMC VP of VMware technology alliance Chad Sakac, and Cisco manager of product marketing Balaji Sivasubramanian fill attendees in on the finer points of VMotion support.

Chad Sakac, aka Virtual Geek, previews EMC’s active-active storage plans

Just part of the VCE distance VMotion test bed config.

Read the news story here.

A must-see T-shirt was a big hit at the show: newScale’s WILL PROVISION FOR FOOD. The full story behind it was blogged here. More pics available on Flickr.

More storage news from VMWorld 2009:

• VMWorld 2009: storage vendors continue vSphere 4 product updates
• VMWorld 2009: VMware and Cisco support distance VMotion
• VMware CTO drops storage hints in futures keynote
• VMworld 2009: Storage admins grapple with growing VMware deployments
• VMware Site Recovery Manager to add support for NFS, multi-site failover
• EMC acquires FastScale, deepens connection with VMware
• VMworld 2009: Storage vendors showcase new vSphere 4 products

Full VMworld 2009 coverage from Tech Target

VMware CTO drops storage hints in futures keynote

VMware Inc. CTO Steve Herrod (above) dropped hints about what’s to come from VMware’s vSphere and VMware Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) products in a keynote that opened VMworld’s Wednesday sessions.

Among the storage-related items:

• VMware is working with storage vendors to put virtual desktop root disks into high-speed cache on storage arrays for faster boot-up times.
• Based on a new OEM relationship with RTO Software announced today, virtual desktops can be given individual personalities while their operating systems are managed centrally. This will simplify patching, since each virtual desktop OS doesn’t need to be separately patched, while saving storage space by using a “golden” OS copy. Without the ability to have patches proliferate from the golden copy (which is the case when using space-efficient snapshot environments within storage arrays), users face a choice between patching each copy, potentially exploding storage capacity requirements, or redeploying virtual desktops.
• VMware and Visa demonstrated mobile device virtualization during the keynote. VMware is developing products that can let mobile devices run applications with data centralized at the corporate data center rather than residing on each endpoint device.
• VMware’s Distributed Resource Scheduler, which today VMotions virtual machines between physical servers based on power consumption and processing load, will also take into account disk and network I/O. “DRS will combine with tiering algorithms on the storage side to match the application with hardware,” Herrod said.
• Similarly, VMware’s vApp, which encapsulates multi-tier applications with policy information, will include disaster recovery recovery time objective (RTO) information as well as availability requirements in policy profiles.

Another topic getting a lot of buzz at the show this year is distance VMotion–stay tuned for more on that front.

VCs and IT execs discuss IT’s brave new world in Boston

Panel moderator Andrew Williamson of Alexander Dunham Capital Group Inc.
leads a discussion about IT industry consolidation and innovation at The BD Event
on Monday afternoon.

Venture capitalists and business development types of all stripes met in downtown Boston today for the first BD Event, a new networking conference for vendors in the storage, security and virtualization markets. According to a panel discussion this afternoon, the IT market can expect further consolidation along the lines of Sun/Oracle and NetApp/ or EMC/Data Domain, but VCs said that will make room for new, more innovative companies, especially in cloud storage.

The panel included two executives from storage vendors with M&A experience: John O’Brien, senior director of corporate development at EMC; and Peter Levine, senior vice president and general manager at Citrix, and reps from three venture capitalist firms: Mark Rostick, director of Intel Capital,; Ash Ashutosh, partner with Greylock Partners (Ashutosh also sold AppIQ to HP a few years ago); and Charles Curran, general partner at Valhalla Partners, a VC firm that backed Nirvanix, LeftHand Networks, and Sepaton.

According to Levine, the IT industry can expect more heavy consolidation throughout this year, “but that consolidation is more financially driven than customer-driven,” he said. “I don’t think IT buyers really want one virtual integrated stack - the last thing customers want is IT lock-in.”

Nonetheless, he added, “Consolidation absolutely will happen. The big survivors, to grow, have to start getting into areas they weren’t in before, and without question that verticalizes the market.”

(As for who the likely candidates are for further consolidation - no one I talked to at the event had heard anything about actual talks, but there was a lot of chatter at the conference about IBM/Brocade and Cisco/NetApp acquisitions).

Levine and O’Brien said smaller acquisitions at their own companies are being scrutinized more and more carefully these days. Smaller companies take longer to add to an acquiring company’s bottom line and tend to raise operational costs during integration, Levine said. Instead, Citrix will probably focus more on new partnerships with promising small companies. EMC’s O’Brien said that EMC has done just two small asset deals so far this year (aside from its $1.8 billion bid for Data Domain).

Panel moderator Andrew Williamson of Alexander Dunham Capital Group Inc. said the percentage of asset sales among new acquisitions has risen in the last six months to 30%. That type of deal represented 16 to 20% of M&A activity in 2008. Meanwhile, the number of VC firms funding startups has declined since 2007 as has their average investment in new companies, along with the revenue multiples they can expect as a return when their portfolio companies are sold or go public.

In other words, get ready for a world in which the number of major vendors will shrink, but there will be less funding for the types of companies that popped up between 2000 and 2003 with a burst of innovation that led to a flurry of IPOs and acquisitions over the last few years.

However, the old rule still applies - “Big companies can’t innovate at the level of startups,” said Valhalla’s Curran. The VCs assured the audience that new storage and security products would still be coming down the pike.

Cloud storage and software will be king

The VCs on the panel agreed about where the money’s going in storage these days. They all indicated they were doing few if any deals involving hardware systems. “It’s less capital-intensive,” said Curran, adding that the shift towards IP networking in the enterprise data center and virtualization would be the biggest trends going forward. Ashutosh also said he was most interested in software companies. “The trend is shifting away from boxes and to the disruptive nature of virtualization and the cloud,” he said. Intel’s Rostick said his company would invest in at least one more security and one more storage company this year, and would also be focused on the cloud, virtualization and what he called “I/O complexity.”

EMC’s O’Brien said he’d been “well coached to stick to [EMC CEO] Joe [Tucci]’s script” when it comes to Data Domain, and he wouldn’t get specific about what other areas EMC may be eyeing for acquisitions this year. He did say EMC also would focus on virtualization and the cloud going forward.

Some of the cloud technologies that come out in the next year or so may look familiar to IT users, but optimizing technologies for cloud deployment will become its own area of expertise, according to Ashutosh. “There’s an emerging trend of innovation around delivery and business model - not just new ideas in technology, but also business,” he said.

Photos from EMC World

The decor theme at the Welcome Reception Sunday night seemed to be “art-deco tropical.”

View of the Gin Blossoms concert from behind the VIP Lounge.

The Gin Blossoms perform on a screen (top / foreground) and onstage (bottom / background).

Attendees take in the Gin Blossoms concert at the Welcome Reception Sunday night.

The Gin Blossoms’ lead singer, Robin Wilson, stands on the drum kit (center-right) during the band’s performance.

It’s just not a tech trade show without blinking LED trinkets. This year, they were at the bottom of Brocade-themed beer glasses.

The Gin Blossoms’ Robin Wilson performs.

Monday morning - a stampede for the show floor just after it opened.

Hard at work inside the Bloggers’ Lounge.

View of the funky exterior of the Bloggers’ Lounge.

Orlando, I discovered on this trip, is not a walking city. Technically, the Orange County Convention Center was across the street from our hotel, but ‘across the street’ means something different in Orlando than Boston or New York - in this case the street was a six-lane divided highway. Also, the fact that we could see part of the OCCC from the hotel didn’t mean the conference was necessarily close by - the structure (or group of structures) is so enormous we had to be bussed a few blocks to get to the right concourse. Once inside, the scale didn’t seem to get much smaller. Needless to say, by this time Monday afternoon I was pretty jealous of the OCCC staff who were jetting around on Segways.

EMC directors’ chairs, ready for executives’ closeups.

EMC’s Rich Napolitano, Mark Sorenson and Brian Gallagher at a panel session with press Monday afternoon. 

Dual controllers: VMware CEO Paul Maritz (left) and EMC CEO Joe Tucci (right) field questions from press on Monday.

VCE reps Chuck Hollis of EMC, Ed Bugnion of Cisco and Parag Patal of VMware host a roundtable discussion with press Tuesday morning.

EMC World Reporter’s Notebook

A bear economy and drenching rainstorms raged on outside the Orange County Convention Center during EMC world this week. Inside, though, there were lively conversations in the hallways of the sprawling convention center, most looking forward to the future despite this year’s fiscal headwinds.

EMC to add cloud options for Networker, Avamar and RecoverPoint

One more EMC storage product roadmap nugget before we conclude our coverage of the show - senior vice president of storage software Mark Sorenson said Tuesday afternoon that EMC is planning cloud integration for at least three of its backup and replication software products: NetWorker, Avamar and RecoverPoint.

Sorenson said he expects enterprise customers will want a hybrid approach to storing data in the cloud, with some data left on-site. NetWorker will offer backup to EMC’s cloud data center as a media option. Customers without their own DR site will be able to replicate Avamar Data Stores or storage arrays using RecoverPoint to the cloud as a secondary data center. The NetWorker and Avamar integrations will come first, with RecoverPoint integration expected next year.

EMC eyeing Axxana?

Speaking of RecoverPoint, startup Axxana demonstrated its Phoenix DR appliance with RecoverPoint integration on the show floor. Axxana describes its product as a “black box” resistant to fire, earthquake, power failures and flood. It performs replication using cellular signals.

It intrigued me when Sorenson, unprompted, pointed to Axxana among all the others on the show floor. He also said EMC has already made a $1 million investment in the Israel-based company. He wouldn’t say anything about whether an acquisition is likely, of course, but it’ll be worth watching out for.

EMC product convergence, revisited

For a few years now, I’ve been harboring a sneaking suspicion about EMC’s hardware products. Ever since I saw an executive at a customer event talk about a unified backup and archiving appliance, I’ve been noticing more and more similarities among EMC’s other products as well. There are the common disk array enclosures (DAE) between Symmetrix, Clariion and Atmos; the disclosure here at the show that the fully automated storage tiering (FAST) feature already added to Celerra and Symm will be ported to Clariion by the end of this year; the use of the same Intel processors within Clariion and Symmetrix V-Max.

Because of these developments, it’s been easy to imagine future arrays that would work like the fabled unified backup appliance - standardized commodity hardware that’s given personality by software. I’m not the only one who’s gotten that impression, either.

But if that’s EMC’s ultimate strategy, they spent some time at this show trying to steer people off that trail. Joe Tucci said in a press Q&A Monday that while Clariion and Symmetrix will be able to “talk to each other” sometime next year, and despite the common processors, the two remain distinctly different in hardware as well as software. Even though they have the same kind of processor, they have different quantities of processors inside the system. In the midrange Clariion system, dual controllers mean 50% performance degradation if one fails; with more “engines” in the Symmetrix, it can take more of a licking and keep on ticking.

And what ever happened to that unified backup appliance? Back in Sept. 2007, the timeframe set for the release of the product was within 12 to 24 months. I asked an EMC spokesperson about it, and received this statement in return:

We don’t have plans for a combined backup and archive appliance.

Since [the] presentation [in 2007] we have delivered Avamar appliances and continue to deliver Disk Library appliances for backup. We also continue to provide Centera as our primary platform for archive.

Integrated management is central to EMC’s data protection strategy for its customers and we’ve already executed off that strategy with a number of our announcements including those announced today. Much has changed over the last two years around next-generation infrastructures and based on the feedback we’ve received from our customers, we feel we are making the right integrations to help our customers reduce complexity, increase storage efficiency and cut costs.

Now that I’ve seen V-Max and Atmos, I can understand how my guesses at the future of EMC hardware were close, but I don’t expect full convergence as described with the backup and archive appliance.

VMware, Cisco, EMC host press panel

EMC’s Chuck Hollis, Cisco’s Ed Bugnion and VMware’s Parag Patal held a panel discussion with press Tuesday morning to emphasize the coziness of what they’re calling the VCE alliance.

Given the disconnect between EMC’s rhapsodizing about an automated virtual future and the inherent conservatism of the storage audience, I asked the panelists when they thought this “new paradigm” they’re talking about would come to fruition.

“I still talk to some people who see iSCSI as newfangled,” Hollis said. “We won’t see majority adoption for many, many years.”

Server virtualization, which lays the groundwork for the new virtual data center we heard so much about at the show, “has already passed its tipping point,” Patal pointed out.

Cisco talks FCoE adoption

Also on the adoption-trends front, I had a pretty interesting conversation over lunch Tuesday with Bill Marozas, senior manager of business development and partner management in the data center unit for Cisco. We were talking about how the economic downturn might affect adoption for FCoE, because financial services firms were seen as the most likely early adopters and that sector is struggling. Marozas said this would probably impact adoption, but that many companies are already “planning for the upturn.”

The problem, I said, is that any upturn in our economy will probably involve fundamental changes to who and what drives it – we might see overall economic revitalization, but in sectors like Web 2.0 rather than financial services. I don’t think financial services will return to where they were earlier this decade at all, after the consolidation or collapse of so many firms in the last year.

The most likely place for FCoE to find a home given the state of the financial services industry is probably in either the healthcare or energy sector, both of which are undergoing massive digitization efforts right now.

But after the economy, there are also plenty of questions to be answered about the technology. It needs to be more clearly explained, for example, exactly how Cisco’s MDS FC director switches — which Marozas said will remain available even as Cisco pushes its Nexus switches into the market — fit into the FCoE picture. And if you’re keeping your FC director while adding new top-of-rack switches for FCoE, where do the infrastructure savings and consolidation come from? Stay tuned for more follow-up here.

Attendance down, economy to blame

According to CEO Joe Tucci’s keynote, there were 9,000 total attendees – including EMC staff, partners, press and analysts as well as end users - at EMC World 2008. This year EMC claimed more than 7,000 attendees. A decline, to be sure, and I spoke with several users prior to the show who had attended in previous years but were sitting this one out because of travel budget restrictions. However, the show seemed livelier and much bigger than Storage Networking World, also held in Orlando last month. The fact that the show still went on was a victory in the current climate; competitors NetApp and Symantec both called off their user conferences earlier this year.

Complete EMC World 2009 coverage.

Sights and bites from SNW

A band entertains at the SNW welcome reception Monday night.

SNW Orlando 2009 wraps up today, and the economic downturn was the elephant in practically every room at the show. It was the main topic of discussion, a factor in debates over technology trends, and a subliminal part of the background as the vendor presence dropped dramatically compared to previous shows. It was difficult to get a handle on exactly how many attendees there were–a wide range of numbers was floating around– but many of the vendor reps and analysts I ran into at the show exclaimed over how quiet it seemed compared to past years. 

Most striking to me was the noise (or lack thereof) around the press room, in previous years a bustling hub of activity as armies of vendor marketing directors and PR reps briefed an equally large cadre of analysts and press. The room was smaller than usual this year, and empty at times.

However, there were still some interesting discussions going on around the show, including sneak previews of interesting upcoming product announcements.

NEC eyes content-aware dedupe

NEC’s HydraStor backup and archiving grid system will soon put a new twist on its block-level dedupe, according to NEC director of product management and technical marketing Gideon Senderov. He said the vendor is working on content-aware deduplication, believing it can lead to better dedupe ratios for customers. “Backup applications insert their own metadata,” he said. “Depending on how they aggregate files, you may have different metadata within them. Similar chunks can sometimes look different.” Filtering application metadata from files requires integration with multiple backup apps. Sepaton’s DeltaStor VTLs already take this approach.

 
3PAR’s clever marketing campaign for its new InServ F-class arrays. I wonder whether the system name or the slogan came first. 

HP has blade plans for LeftHand

LeftHand Networks’ SANiQ IP SAN software will soon be ported to HP’s blade servers, according to Lee Johns, marketing director for entry storage, HP StorageWorks. It’s part of an overall “converged infrastructure” trend for HP, which envisions storage as a network service centrally managed by software. The company is also preparing a software framework, based on its 2007 acquisition of Opsware Inc., to centrally manage different kinds of storage devices along with servers.

 
The relatively sleepy show was not without its amenities, including air hockey at the welcome reception.

Brocade CTO talks FCoE

Brocade’s big announcement at the show was the rollout of its first Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) products, a top-of-rack switch and a converged network adapter (CNA). The company has taken a less bullish attitude than its rival Cisco to the technology, releasing its top of rack switches several months after Cisco released its Nexus FCoE product line. ,

CTO David Stevens and product manager Pompey Nagra went over the details of the technology with me, as well as its value proposition, which the cynical among us might see as an attempt for FC vendors to stay relevant as 10 GbE threatens to eat their lunch. Stevens pointed out that though FCoE, like 10 GbE, requires a swap-out of switching equipment in the data center, FC storage assets can remain the same. Even though convergence-enhanced Ethernet will bring the protocol more into line with FC as a lossless network with some flow controls, FC offers services like zoning and multipathing that will still be important to storage administrators, Stevens said. He also dismissed the idea that FC will fall out of favor once it’s slower than Ethernet (currently, FC is at 8 Gbps; Ethernet’s looking to move to 10 Gbps). “Maybe long-term,” he said. “But is that big a technology shift for the traditionally risk-averse storage community really worth two more gigs per second?”

Stevens said the focus for FCoE should really be just on cutting down on the number of wires in the data center. “The first-hop technology can all be combined while preserving assets in the infrastructure.”

However, Stevens also admitted this value proposition is similar to what has been promised by InfiniBand technologies, which have yet to see widespread adoption outside of high-performance computing (HPC) niches. Will FCoE be more successful because Ethernet is a more familiar interface than InfiniBand? I asked Stevens. “I don’t have a good answer for you there yet,” he said.

An open bar and darts–always a great combination.

Thales sees converging encryption standards

In February, Thales Group was part of a coalition of vendors that submitted a standard for interoperability between key management systems and encryption devices to the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) called the Key Management Interoperability Protocol (KMIP). If adopted, KMIP would mean users could attach almost any encrypting device to one preferred key management system, regardless of the vendors involved. Meanwhile, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) approved a standard in January 2008 for managing encryption on storage devices. Now the vendors are working on bridging between the two standards, according to Kevin Bocek, director of product marketing for Thales, so that if product developers want to roll the more-detailed IEEE spec into the more general OASIS spec, the two will be compatible. This interoperability will probably be more valuable to developers than end users, he said, as the IEEE spec contains very granular details for developing products down to specificying protocols. If engineers don’t have to re-invent the encryption wheel or ensure interoperability for each of their products, it could get products to market faster or free them to focus on other innovations, he said.

Video screens showing 1000 DVD-quality movie streams being served from one of Fusion-io’s ioDrives, part of SNIA’s exhibits focused on SSD technology.

SNIA SSD initiative finds ‘wide variability’ in SSD performance

The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) had a few booths set up on the show floor focused on its SNIA Solid-State Storage Initiative (SSSI), including a demo of benchmark comparisons between different vendors’ single-level cell (SLC) enterprise SSDs by Calypso Systems. CTO Easen Ho, on hand for the demonstration, walked me through bar graphs of performance results. The specific manufacturers’ names were not listed (no fun!), but it was easy to see the ’stairsteps’ between the different results on the graph. Still, as I peered at the screen it looked like they were all generally in the same ballpark. That’s until Ho pointed out to me that the y axis of the graphs was actually a logarithmic scale. This was initially done to better compare the results against spinning disk drives, which otherwise “wouldn’t even be visible on these graphs,” Ho said.

Data Mobility Group analyst and StorageMojo blogger Robin Harris (left) looks for a ‘man on the street’ interview during a chat on the show floor with BlueArc director of corporate marketing Louis Gray.

Here are the news stories filed from balmy Florida this week:

• Primary storage data reduction takes center stage at SNW
• Data Robotics automates RAID 6, thin provisioning for SMBs with DroboPro
• Storage admins mull SSDs at SNW
• Brocade rolls out FCoE switch, adapters
• SNW: DAS makes a comeback as alternative to SAN, NAS
• New Symantec CEO stresses product integration
• Fusion-io plans to add software, SSD-based storage systems

NetApp cancels user conference, releases dedupe VTL

NetApp was supposed to hold its first-ever user conference, called NetApp Accelerate, in February, but yesterday put out a press release saying the conference has been cancelled.

“We had more customer interest in NetApp Accelerate than we anticipated,” said Elisa Steele, senior vice president, Corporate Marketing, in a statement. “But those same customers told us their travel budgets were being cut and it was difficult to commit to attending in today’s climate of economic uncertainty. For those reasons, we decided to cancel this year’s program.”

Wachovia financial analyst Aaron Rakers wonders if NetApp cancelled the conference to trim its own budget.

“While it is clear that economic conditions are resulting in more stringent expense controls at enterprises, we do find this as interesting; we believe possibly a result of NetApp’s own focus on operating expense control,”Rakers wrote in a note to clients.

NetApp said it will be release technical content that had already been prepared for the show between February and May next year.

Today, NetApp said its long-awaited data deduplication feature for its virtual tape library product has finally arrived. The feature, like NetApp’s primary storage dedupe, will be free for new and existing customers. NetApp has taken a contrarian approach to dedupe. It was the first major storage vendor to offer dedupe for primary data — building the capability into its operating system — but the last of the VTL vendors to add dedupe for backup.

HDS: Something self-healing and disk-based is coming. . .

And if I had to guess, I’d say it’s a new disk array. A self-healing, dynamically performance-optimized disk array.

For one thing, the latest fad is for new disk arrays to be promoted in what public relations pros call a “rolling thunder” fashion, where deliberately mysterious statements are made and glimpses are given of an upcoming product until the moment of its launch. See also: Xiotech’s ISE, Oracle’s Database Machine. HDS’s “to be named” is no exception.

More clues on the HDS preview website: “Hitachi + DLB = agile, no touch, no bottlenecks formula.” My guess is that DLB means dynamic load balancing, especially since, well, everything else on the site is about dynamic load balancing.

For example, click on “View video” and some dude walks up to you, saying:

Get ready. It’s coming. What if you could improve your service level agreements for virtually any storage workload? Like you, I want the perfect formula, minimizing I/O disruption and bottlenecks. But what would that formula be? I believe it includes purchasing the minimum number of required disks to meet the performance criteria of all requests. Automatic workload management and exceptional bandwidth. Now I would like to ask, what if I give you the ability to dynamically shift I/O processing to keep workloads running smoothly? Then, what would your ideal storage environment look like?

At this point three choices appear inside the video screen:

1. Minimal manual intervention required
2. Minimize the risk of degradation when shifting I/O processing
3. Self-healing system to overcome failure of key components

Meanwhile, a countdown clock on the site reads 9 days, 16 hours, 53 minutes, 52 seconds. In other words, Oct. 13 — the first day of Storage Networking World.

Around here, the scuttlebutt has been strong that HDS is prepping a new AMS (Adaptable Modular Storage) midrange array. The high-end USP has already gotten a couple of recent refreshes, including a mini-version, as well as a software update; it would make sense for HDS’s midrange arrays to be up for a revamp next.

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.

***

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]

VMWorld in Pictures

As far as I could tell, they did not actually serve liquid genius here.

A busy - and vast - show floor.

Psst…roadmap stuff over here…

Some of the storage roadmap stuff.

Still undecided whether the giant rotoscoped heads were cool or freaky. Or if those two things are necessarily mutually exclusive.

Members of the Fourth Estate taking in Paul Maritz’s keynote Tuesday.

Paul Maritz keynote

The stampeding herd heads for the casino at the end of sessions. Estimated attendance at the show was 14,000.

View from Ghost Bar at the Palms, where VMware held a reception for press, analysts and partners Tuesday night.

The vastness of the keynote hall cannot be overstated.

Keynote cameramen

New product demos at Wednesday morning keynote.

HP wins my personal Best Swag of the Show award this year for their custom-printed inside-out Oreo cookie.