Storage protocols (FC / iSCSI)

LSI updates Engenio 7900, talks FCoE *Updated*

LSI Corp. has updated its Engenio 7900 storage system sold by IBM and others with new support for 8 Gbps FC, boosted capacity, and Seagate’s full-disk encryption  encryption services that include key management and firmware features to take advantage of FDE drives from Seagate.

LSI, along with Seagate and IBM, has been talking about FDE for a couple of years now, but this is the first product LSI will ship that has the feature. The encryption is done in memory a specialized chip attached to the hard disk drive itself. Encryption can be used with a subset of drives within the array, which can also mix in FC and SATA disks. Up to 448 disk can now be attached to the controller, double the previous capacity limit.

Before encrypted disk arrays are widely deployed, key management will probably need to be developed a little further. With this release, users have to supply their own key management program; LSI is supplying key management through its SANtricity GUI. Every encrypted disk in this release would have the same key. Work is still being done to bring key management standards together so users can manage keys centrally within the data center.

Meanwhile, LSI has yet to add support for 10 GbE or FCoE to this array, but host interface cards can be swapped out of the 7900 without changing out the whole box. LSI director of product marketing Steve Gardner says FCoE won’t be ready for prime time until next year. “I think technological immaturity coupled with the economic downturn will slow adoption,” he said. He echoed Symantec CEO Enrique Salem in wondering aloud what the economic downturn will do to financial institutions which are normally early adopters for new technology.

“About a year ago, we started seeing interest in InfiniBand storage outside high-performance computing [HPC],” Gardner said. “Unfortunately, many of those interested were financial institutions with requirements for ‘enterprise HPC’,” he said.

As long as we were discussing FCoE, I was also reminded of my discussion with Brocade CTO David Stevens about the technical differences (or relative lack thereof) between the value proposition of InfiniBand vs. FCoE. Engenio’s 7900 already supports InfiniBand natively, so I asked Gardner as well.

“If FCoE has a better chance to succeed, it’ll be because of the [vendors] behind it, Cisco especially,” he said. “I don’t think it’s a technology question.”

IBM sells the LSI Engenio 7900 as the DS5000. Sun and SGI — recent acquisition targets — also sell the system under their brands.

Cisco pushes into servers; storage’s role undefined

Cisco execs led by CEO John Chambers spent 90 minutes today on a webcast telling groups spread around the world what most of the IT world already knew – it is getting into the server business. But to Cisco’s way of spinning it, it is going beyond servers to a new data center architecture that will include networking, virtualization, a unified fabric, the cloud, and storage.

Nobody spent much time talking about individual products during the webcast, which included partners from EMC, VMware, Intel, Microsoft, BMC Software, and Accenture. Cisco has a diagram of the main pieces of its Unified Computing System on its web site, although details such as general availability and pricing are still to come.

We still don’t know the role storage will play in Cisco’s new world either, although EMC CEO Joe Tucci appeared on the webcast to give his blessing and EMC blogger Chuck Hollis today applauded Cisco’s bravery. Cisco also listed NetApp, Emulex, and QLogic among its partners. Considering those vendors along with EMC are also Cisco’s core Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) allies, it seems as if FCoE is as far as Cisco’s storage plans go for now.

Chambers and other Cisco execs said today’s session was mainly about describing an architecture and partner ecosystem with more product details to follow. And Tucci hinted that EMC will work more closely with Cisco’s unified computing products than it does with Cisco’s MDS Fibre Channel switches. “We will make sure our storage systems are not only qualified with, but really tuned to bring value to this Unified Computing System,” he said.

It’s also important to consider those missing from Cisco’s ecosystem – server vendors Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Dell and Sun, and storage/networking connectivity rival Brocade. For Cisco to succeed with its new unified architecture, it must successfully compete with those vendors who also partner with most of Cisco’s unified computing allies. And in the case of the server vendors, Cisco is going head-to-head with its own Ethernet partners.

So Cisco’s unified computing may play a divisive role with other key technology players. While Cisco customers may be eager to sign on, how will those who prefer open interfaces and standards react?

“Cisco has to get an entire ecosystem participating for its technology to really go into next phase,” StorageIO Group analyst Greg Schulz says. “To go into that market full tilt, they have to step all over IBM, Sun, HP, and potentially Intel white box customers. Are they really serious about wanting to take market share from their key partners? And how will the others respond?”

Storage vendors put together ESX iSCSI cookbook

Just came across a pretty interesting resource on EMC’er Chad Sakac’s Virtual Geek blog (first brought to my attention by Stephen Foskett). It’s a guide to ESX and iSCSI co-developed by, among others, Andy Banta of VMware, Vaughn Stewart of NetApp, Eric Schott of Dell/EqualLogic, Adam Carter of HP/Lefthand, and David Black of EMC.

The post gets into nitty-gritty details and even includes what look like scanned-in napkin drawings to illustrate some of the complexities of performance management using ESX 3.x server with iSCSI. There are multiple links to futher resources on everything from the fundamentals of link aggregation to the full iSCSI spec.

But the bottom line for storage users is that “the ESX 3.x software initiator only supports a single iSCSI session with a single TCP connection for each iSCSI target…So, no matter what MPIO setup you have in ESX, it doesn’t matter how many paths show up in the storage multipathing GUI for multipathing to a single iSCSI Target, because there’s only one iSCSI initiator port.”

There are ways around it–in short, the post states, “Use the ESX iSCSI software initiator. Use multiple iSCSI targets. Use MPIO at the ESX layer. Add Ethernet links and iSCSI targets to increase overall throughput. Ser your expectation for no more than ~160MBps for a single iSCSI target.”

There’s also a workaround for single LUNs needing more than 160 MBps, using an iSCSI initiator in the guest along with MPIO, though the post acknowledges, “It has a big downside…you need to manually configure the storage inside each guest, which doesn’t scale particularly well from a configuration standpoint – so for most customers [say] they stick with the ‘keep it simple’ method.”

The best news out of this post for VMware and iSCSI users, though, is probably the pre-announcement that this behavior will be changing in future ESX releases.

Dell prepares for converged networks, FCoE and iSCSI

During a conference call with storage reporters today to discuss the future for data center networking, Dell senior storage manager Eric Endebrock pointed to the convergence of Ethernet and Fibre Channel as inevitable. ”Change is afoot,” he said. “FCoE is a more straightforward management infrastructure–the next generation of intercommunication for Fibre Channel.”

No suprise there. Practically every FC storage vendor is saying that. But where it gets tricky with Dell is, it dropped $1.4 billion in iSCSI SAN vendor EqualLogic less than a year ago. And where EqualLogic’s PS Series iSCSI SAN arrays fit into the converged picture isn’t clear yet.

“Protocols will not necessarily be the top factor in choosing the next storage system for customers,” Endebrock said. “We get caught up in the latest cool technology trend on [the vendor and press] side, but customers don’t necessarily care about that.” He added that lossless Ethernet “will float all storage boats” and that “customers see a place for all protocols.”

Also, “linking EqualLogic to iSCSI is probably not the best way to think about it–we also provide a scaling architecture and solve higher customer needs–it’s far more than just a protocol discussion.”

So far, Dell spokespeople aren’t willing to go into further detail about what its exact plan is for EqualLogic. “We continue to investigate our options and will support 10 Gigabit Ethernet as well as Data Center Ethernet with EqualLogic. We’re going to watch our customers’ needs and what the customers want,” Endebrock said.

A presentation at Storage Networking World titled “Yes, Fibre Channel and iSCSI Can Coexist” by director of global storage and network marketing Praveen Asthana, offered some clues about how Dell sees it all fitting together. “Mixed is in,” Dell’s Asthana said.  But he identified Ethernet as the glue–whether it’s providing the base layer of the unified network or providing a simple management and monitoring interface for all endpoints on an IP network.

While traditional Fibre Channel offers better performance for business applications than traditional iSCSI, it also offers better performance for streaming applications and high-performance computing (HPC) workloads, Asthana pointed out. But he also projected scale-out iSCSI, especially with 10 GbE, will surpass the performance offered by both earlier protocols.

FCoE is still  a topic that remains in the eye of the beholder. An attempt by FC vendors to stay relevant against 10 GbE? Or Ethernet taking over the data center? Depends on who you talk to.

Bottom line: Dell will support FC as long as it supports Clariion. Endebrock was mostly mum when it came to the relationship with EMC, as addressed by EMC CEO Joe Tucci in the company’s third-quarter earnings call on Wednesday. “Joe actually laid out that we have a great relationship and we’re actively working together on how to go to market on the best way possible, working on fitting our product lines together. We’re going back to basics and at the ground level refocusing on where we’ve seen success in the past.”

Brocade increases revenue, market share

Brocade’s earnings report today made it clear it is gaining market share in the Fibre Channel switch competition against Cisco.

No surprise there. Cisco’s earnings last week disclosed its SAN director and switch revenue dropped 14 percent year over year. Brocade today said its switch revenue grew 5 percent and director revenue was up 3 percent over last year.

Why is Brocade picking up steam? Is it because it beat Cisco to the market with 8Gbps directors and switches? Do customers prefer Brocade’s next-gen data center DCX Backbone over Cisco’s Nexus switches? Or are storage vendors - perhaps stung by perceptions that Nexus is not OEM-friendly - pushing Brocade over Cisco?

A case can be made for all three, although it’s probably too early in the DCX and Nexus product cycles to know how much any of them come into play. Brocade will have 8-gig products out for close to a year before Cisco pushes out its first 8-gig MDS directors late this year. Even Cisco’s data center solutions marketing manager Deepak Munjal told my colleague Beth Pariseau this week that Cisco lost some business from “users who absolutely need 8 Gigabit Fibre Channel” and got it from Brocade.

Brocade execs say 8-gig products are still a small minority of its sales, although its data center infrastructure division GM Ian Whiting said 8-gig is showing up more with customers building new data centers around the DCX Backbone. Brocade’s strong services results - up 43 percent year over year - are also due in large part to customers designing new data centers around the DCX, Whiting said.

Analysts asked Brocade CEO Mike Klayko on today’s earnings call about storage vendors preferring Brocade over Cisco now. He downplayed that notion, saying “I don’t think there’s a concerted effort of OEMs to go one way or other. I think we have best solution in the marketplace.”

But not everybody is sure. In a note to clients earlier this week, analyst Kaushik Roy of Pacific Growth Equities wrote that Brocade is gaining market share and “we believe that is partly because of Cisco’s lack of 8-gig blades and possibly because EMC is favoring Brocade over Cisco at this time.”

Whiting said Brocade is less likely to compete with storage vendors than Cisco. “Our role in the industry is enabling solutions like virtualization, encryption and other services,” he said. “Cisco’s vision is they expect to deliver those solutions themselves. That creates conflict among major players like the IBMs and Hewlett-Packards of the world.”

Brocade said it saw little revenue last quarter from its HBAs, which are still being qualified by storage vendors.

Overall, Brocade’s $365.7 million revenue last quarter increased 12 percent from last year.

QLogic boss says he’s too busy to quit

 QLogic CEO H.K. Desai had planned to step down this year, but says there is too much going on in the storage industry for him to leave now.

That’s why his heir apparent left QLogic in March, and QLogic isn’t looking for a replacement. “I’ll be hanging around for awhile,” Desai, who has been QLogic’s CEO since 1995 and its chairman since 1999, told me.

He wouldn’t have said that a year ago. QLogic hired Jeff Benck from IBM as COO and President in April 2007 with the understanding that he would replace Desai in a year. But Desai stayed put and Benck left QLogic - eventually signing on with its HBA rival Emulex as COO.

Desai says QLogic isn’t trying to replace Benck, because it doesn’t need to replace the CEO. “The whole plan was for us to have a long-term transition, and it didn’t work out,” Desai said. “I’ve been fully engaged the last few months and I expect to be fully engaged for awhile. I won’t even talk to the board [about a COO] unless we plan a transition, which I don’t expect to do.”

Desai said his change of heart came because the storage networking world is so busy now. The industry is in a transition to 8-Gbps Fibre Channel with Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and 16-gig FC coming up on its heels. QLogic is also trying to make inroads in InfiniBand. “There’s so much activity going on now, I don’t want to disturb anything,” he said. “Our team has been working together for so many years, and I don’t want to bring anybody in from the outside to disturb things. There’s a time to do a transition, and I don’t think this is the time.”

Of course, if Desai is looking for a lull in emerging storage technologies to retire he just might work forever.

Dell moves to top of growing iSCSI SAN market

IDC confirmed Dell’s claim that it has moved into the No. 1 spot in iSCSI SAN market share following its $1.4 billion acquisition of EqualLogic. According to the IDC quarterly storage numbers for the first quarter released today, Dell passed EMC and NetApp to take the lead with 27.7 percent of the iSCSI market. Overall, IDC pegged iSCSI as accounting for 6.1 percent of the overall external disk storage revenue — up from 4.1 percent a year ago and 5.1 percent in the fourth quarter of 2007.

It appears that a good chunk of the market share Dell gained came at the expense of its storage partner EMC. EMC, which co-markets Clariion systems with Dell, slipped from 18.2 percent to 15 percent of iSCSI market share in one quarter. Does that mean Dell customers are buying EqualLogic systems instead of Clariion AX iSCSI boxes? Maybe, although Dell still accounts for about one-third of overall Clariion sales.

NetApp increased its iSCSI share from 18 percent to 20.5 percent to move ahead of EMC while slipping behind Dell. No other major vendor has more than 4.7 percent of the iSCSI market, with the “other” (all vendors except for Dell, EMC, NetApp, HP, IBM, Hitachi, and Sun) category at 29.3 percent - nearly twice as much as “others” have of the Fibre Channel market. The others’ iSCSI share actually came down - it was 40.1 percent in the fourth quarter — reflecting  the shift of EqualLogic’s revenue from others to Dell.

It’s a good bet that LeftHand Networks sits in fourth place overall with a large piece of the others’ share. LeftHand was considered a close second to EqualLogic among private iSCSI vendors before Dell scooped up EqualLogic. LeftHand remains private and we don’t know its financials, but marketing VP Larry Cormier said it is picking up 200 to 300 customers a quarter. . .some of those because EqualLogic is no longer independent. “Some shops just won’t buy Dell,” he said.

In any case, with iSCSI drivers such as server virtualization and the eventual emergence of 10-Gig Ethernet fueling interest and the vendor landscape changing, the iSCSI space will be interesting to watch over the next year. . .just as converged Fibre Channel/Ethernet networks may blunt iSCSI’s encroachment into the enterprise.

Storage Decisions: Questioning the FCoE hype

“Fibre Channel over Ethernet is like a fast car,” said consultant Howard Goldstein of Howard Goldstein Accociates Thursday on his session about FCoE at Storage Decisions Toronto. ”It looks great, but it probably won’t run as well as you thought or be as cheap as they say it’s going to be.”

Goldstein’s point basically boiled down to: if Ethernet’s good enough to be the transport layer, why bother layering an FC protocol on top of it? He dismissed the common answer to that question, which is that mixing FC and Ethernet will allow users to maintain existing investments in FC systems, saying it’s a myth. “You’re going to have to buy brand new HBAs and Fibre Channel switches to support FCoE,” he said. “Is this really the time to reinvest in Fibre Channel infrastructure?”

Instead, Goldstein pointed out that FC services such as log-in, address assignment and name server, to name a few, could be done in software. “Those services don’t have to be in the switch–Fibre Channel allows them in the server,” he said. He also questioned the need for a revamping of the Ethernet specification for “Data Center Ethernet” capabilities. “Is converged Ethernet a real requirement or a theoretical requirement?” he said. He also questioned whether or not storage traffic was really fundamentally different from network traffic.

However, users at the show said FCoE is still so new they weren’t sure whether or not to agree with Goldstein. “It’s too immature to say right now,” said Maple Leaf Foods enterprise support analyst Ricki Biala. He also pointed out an all-too-true fact: in the end, such technology decisions will be based on equal parts politics to technology. “It’s easier to convince management to buy in if you’re going the way the rest of the market’s going,” he said.

Your thoughts and quibbles on FCoE are welcome as always in the comments.

Primary storage still means one vendor

The term “vendor lock-in” is rarely used in a good way by storage buyers. It usually means you’re stuck with products from one vendor, making it difficult to switch if you’re unhappy or something better comes along.

Still, with probably more options for storage products than ever before, most companies still buy all their primary storage from one vendor. That’s according to a Forrester report, “Consolidate Storage Vendors to Reduce Complexity,” released this week.

A Forrester survey of 170 companies ranging from SMBs to large enterprises in North America and Europe found that more than 80 percent bought their primary storage from one vendor over the last year. That includes 64 percent of the companies with more than 500 TB of raw storage.

The report, written by analyst Andrew Reichman, says using more than one primary storage vendor can make it more complex to manage, provision and support the storage environment. And while using multiple vendors can often bring better pricing, buying from one vendor can result in volume discounts.

“You may have tried to contain costs by forcing multiple incumbent vendors to continuously compete against each other, with price as the primary differentiator,” Reichman writes. “This strategy can reduce prices and limit vendor lock-in, but it can also lead to management complexity and poor capacity utilization.”

The report recommends keeping things simple by and using fewer vendors when possible. However, that advice comes with several caveats: buying all storage from one vendor means taking the bad with the good, and some vendors’ product families differ so much “they may as well come from different vendors.”

Of course, I’m sure there are horror stories out there from organizations that have had bad experience with lock-in as well as those who’ve had incompatibility issues with products from multiple vendors.

Intel gets inside of FCoE

Fibre Channel vendors aren’t the only ones pushing the new Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) standard designed to help Fibre Channel devices take advantage of 10-gig Ethernet.  Intel is also getting into the game, with an FCoE Linux initiator.

Intel this week released an open source FCoE initiator that it will maintain on http://www.open-fcoe.org/. The FCoE initiator will work the way iSCSI initiators wok on current IP SANs. By going open source instead of developing the initiators for its own products, Intel hopes to accelerate the availability of FCoE by getting feedback from the Linux community. Intel storage planner and technologist Jordan Plawner said the goal is for Linux servers to ship FCoE-ready, just as they ship with iSCSI inititators today.  

“We believe 10-gig Ethernet provides an opportunity to converge SAN and LAN traffic,” Plawner said. “We’ll continue to support iSCSI, but FCoE makes it easier to connect Ethernet into Fibre Channel SANs.”

That’s the party line for Fibre Channel vendors, and one that iSCSI SAN proponents dispute. Like iSCSI vendors, Intel is looking at it from the Ethernet side - but Plawner said FCoE will be better suited than iSCSI to take advantage of the coming Enhanced Ethernet spec. Enhanced Ethernet is a new version in the works that boosts Ethernet’s performance to make it more suitable to run storage.

“It’s much easier to adopt FCoE for Enhanced Ethernet,” Plawner said. “iSCSI is Ethernet end to end, so you would need a completely new subnet because you need Enhanced Ethernet on every node. With FCoE, just the first server and first top-of-the-rack-switch needs Enhanced Ethernet.”

Intel is looking to put FCoE Linux initiators on adapter cards that will work with FCoE switches in 2008. Plawner says he expects FCoE-enabled switches from Brocade and Cisco in the second half of next year, and he thinks companies will deploy FCoE in their networks by the end of 2008.

Plawner’s time frame is even more optimistic than that of some Fibre Channel storage vendors backing FCoE. Brocade execs says they don’t expect adoption until 2009, and they don’t think widescale adoption will arrive before 2010. But Brocade pledges to support FCoE in the DCX backbone director it will launch next year. Cisco’s FCoE switches are expected from Nuova Systems, which is 80 percent owned by Cisco. Nuova has yet to give product details, but industry sources say it will likely have FCoE switches or cards that plug into Cisco MDS switches early next year.

Here is a more detailed explanation of how Fibre Channel and Ethernet can converge.