storage vendors

Xiotech looks to ‘crank it up a few notches’ with ex-IBM exec

Another industry executive has defected to Xiotech Corp., this time from IBM, a little over a month after the company hired a former EMC executive as CEO.

Xiotech issued a press release today announcing the appointment of Brian Reagan as senior vice president of marketing and business development. Reagan spent eight years at EMC before his time at Arsenal Digital and then IBM:

Reagan comes to Xiotech from IBM, where he served as global strategy and portfolio executive for the company’s $1 billion Business Continuity and Resiliency Services division. In this role, he was a primary voice in IBM’s cloud strategy and was responsible for accelerating sales of the global portfolio, aligning investments and resources to strategic business goals and collaborating with other corporate leaders worldwide. Reagan joined IBM as part of its acquisition of Arsenal Digital Solutions, where he served for three years as executive vice president and chief marketing officer. Reagan led all marketing functions at Arsenal, and is credited with transforming the company’s position in the industry in that time.

Xiotech CEO Alan Atkinson has now hired two top exectuives with EMC backgrounds. Atkinson brought aboard Jim McDonald as chief strategy officer in October. McDonald joined EMC with Atkinson from WysDM Software, where he was chieft technical officer. He also served in a CTO capacity with EMC. Atkinson’s and McDonald’s resumes also include jobs at StorageNetworks and Goldman Sachs before WysDM.

Reagan is quoted in the press release saying the company is setting up a marketing blitz around its ISE self-healing disk array. “”We’re going to crank it up a few notches and make some noise out there.” You can read more on this strategy in our Q&A with Atkinson when he was hired as CEO in September.

HP looks to entice SMBs, hypes Hyper-V bundles

HP made some storage updates today as part of a larger announcement aimed at SMBs looking to cut costs, including new Hyper-V bundles.

Storage-related updates include:

• New application-integrated snapshot option for LeftHand iSCSI SANs. LeftHand already had application-integrated snapshots that supported VSS for snapping the LeftHand SAN, but not with the ability to run inside and quiesce an application. This update fills that gap; competitors like Dell EqualLogic and NetApp already offer this capability.
• New NAS interface for D2D data deduplication products. SMBs no longer need to license virtual tape drives to use HP’s low-end data deduplication product.
• New DAT 320 tape drive. SMBs still using tape, on the other hand, have the option of doubling the capacity on DAT tape drives to 320GB. HP claims the new drives also offer up to a 75% performance increase with a 50% lower power draw. Tape, especially for SMBs, is frequently declared dead, but there are still pockets of tape use in this market, particularly in remote and branch offices.
• Six new HP Virtualization Smart Bundles for Microsoft Hyper-V. Full specs on the bundles, which range from an entry-level tower server form factor to rackmount servers with networked storage, are available at HP’s website. These bundles are similar to the ones HP previously rolled out this year for VMware environments.

LeftHand product marketing manager Chris McCall says the Hyper-V bundles are not a counter strike against the new joint venture between VMware, Cisco and EMC. He says HP is supporting both hypervisors, even though VMware is deeply aligned wiht HP HP competitors Cisco and EMC. ”We’ve done bundles for VMware already because we’ve targeted market size — we did VMware first because they’re the market leader,” he said. “If Microsoft was, we would’ve done Hyper-V first. There’s nothing to read into there.”

CommVault fires back at EMC’s Slootman

Former Data Domain CEO Frank Slootman, now president of EMC’s data backup and recovery division, sat down for a Q&A with SearchDataBackup.com that’s been getting some attention from the industry, particularly other deduplication competitors.

Among those competitors, one with a contentious relationship with EMC/Data Domain is former partner CommVault, with whom Data Domain had a messy breakup after CommVault introduced its own deduplication with Simpana 8.

Here’s what Slootman had to say about them:

SearchDataBackup: Will you continue to work closely with Symantec Corp.’s OpenStorage (OST) API now that you’re EMC?

Slootman: Yes. I’m not throwing my partners under the bus. We’ll compete, but we’re all competitors and partners these days. We won’t screw them. We’ll screw other companies, like CommVault. We {Data Domain] treated them as a good partner and they came after us.

In an email to Storage Soup this week, CommVault vice president of marketing and business development Dave West had this response:

As I said back in June, I applaud Frank and Data Domain’s ability to create momentum for deduplication and a tremendous return for its shareholders. In the Dave Raffo piece, Frank calls out CommVault simply because we’re giving them a run for their money. Simpana, with built-in dedupe, works really well, and we are winning business. Now, I find it ludicrous to suggest a product vision that forces a customer to deploy 3 or more disparate products to achieve basic data protection. (Pile on more products for replication, encryption, archive and SRM).  At the end of the day, customers want less complexity, improved operational efficiency and ultimately, to spend less money. That means fewer, not more solutions. Less hardware and smarter software. EMC’s product portfolio is both complicated and costly for customers, so buyer beware. Also, in our opinion, this interview should raise some serious flags among the thousands of already nervous NetWorker customers out there looking for reassurance in the wake of the Data Domain acquisition.

I asked West to elaborate on the “red flags” about NetWorker, and he pointed to this statement by Slootman in another part of the interview:

SearchDataBackup: If Avamar is the future of data backup software, where does that leave NetWorker?

Slootman: Well, Avamar is augmenting NetWorker in a lot of places. People are moving a good part of their workload to Avamar, but not all. They’re still running applications like big, fat databases on traditional backup software. NetWorker can support conventional backup on tape and mixed media and people can integrate it with Data Domain.

“Former EMC customers are telling us that there is no real investment or innovation going into the Networker product and they’re tired of it,” West added.

This dedupe feud will get really interesting if CommVault partner Dell Inc. starts selling Data Domain, which is a likely scenario because Dell sells much of EMC’s storage products. CommVault’s Simpana is currently a big piece of Dell’s deduplication strategy.

Notes from IBM Information Infrastructure Analyst Summit

An IBM executive panel discusses the changing IT market at an analyst summit Tuesday.

IBM held a meeting Tuesday at Boston’s Four Seasons Hotel for press and analysts to discuss its new strategy for offering users integrated “stacks” of servers, software, storage and services. The two main products introduced were the new IBM Smart Business Storage Cloud bundle, and Information Archive appliance.

But there were some other tidbits to be gleaned from the announcements and meeting as well:

• VP Barry Rudolph said IBM is “about ready to announce and deliver” solid-state drives (SSD) in its SAN Volume Controller, which Rudolph said will double the performance of the storage virtualization device. IBM previewed the product as Project Quicksilver with Fusion-io last year. Execs wouldn’t give a more specific time frame than “imminent.”
• Scale-out File Services (SOFS) in its first iteration required an ongoing services engagement (as it did when reference customer Kantana Animation first installed it last year). The new Storage Cloud based on SOFS has the option of deployment services only, as well as an ongoing managed service, but IBM also added some consulting services to go along with the new product package, including Strategy and Change Services for Cloud Adoption for end users, Strategy and Change Services for Cloud Providers, and Testing Services for Cloud (helping build a business case for cloud-based test environments).
• Smart Business Storage Cloud is being offered for private cloud deployments right now, but IBM also plans to offer a public cloud based on the package and the CloudBurst product it announced in June, which also features automated provisioning and file-set-level chargeback through Tivoli Services Automation Manager (TSAM).

Analyst reviews of the event were mixed. Wikibon analyst Dave Vellante said he thinks IBM has some work to do on the Information Archive. “I loved the line about ‘The keep everything forever model has failed’ – it’s true,” he wrote to Storage Soup in an email. “Unfortunately, what IBM announced yesterday (IBM Information Archive) is more of the same old same old. New hardware, some decent integration but NO INDEXING AND NO SEARCH. In my mind that is not very useful to customers. Supposedly search and indexing ‘is coming soon’ but I think IBM was rushing to replace the DR550 line.”

He added, “good news for IBM is all the archiving vendors are missing the mark. Systems still don’t scale, nobody does classification right and there’s no good way to defensibly delete un-needed data.”

Evaluator Group analyst John Webster said that after following IBM storage for years, he sees them rationalizing different product lines more effectively these days. “Last year at this time things were more disjointed,” he said. “Now they’re able to rationalize XIV with the DS8000, for example.”

When it comes to the single vertically-integrated stack concept, analysts say they’ve seen this movie before. “I wonder, to what degree is server virtualization and VMware driving the desire to integrate everything into a box?” Webster said. “It reminds me of a concept people used to talk about years ago called a ‘God box,’ basically a big switch that did everything. But nobody wanted to go there–it was enough to talk about an intelligent switch. I’m not sure it’s progressed much farther, but I don’t know that it matters–Cisco has thrown down the gauntlet and other large players have to cover their bets.”

Everything’s cyclical, pointed out Analytico Tom Trainer. “Consolidation and innovation patterns in the market are like a sine wave,” Trainer said. “We were probably at the height of new companies and innovation in the dotcom era of 1999 to 2000, and as politics and economics come into play, the pendulum looks like it’s swinging back toward consolidation.”

However, consolidation can open up space in the market for new companies to emerge. “I’m talking to startups receiving good funding recently,” Trainer said. New storage startups have begun coming out of stealth in the last week, such as Avere.

When asked about industry consolidation, IBM’s Rudolph saw a similar picture. “I think you’re starting to see major shifts in our competitive framework, but I don’t think there’ll be a lack of new innovation and three or four huge corporations and that’s it,” he said.

10-02-2009 Storage Headlines

 

 10-02-2009 Storage Headlines [11:08m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Stories referenced:

(0:29) Xiotech names Alan Atkinson CEO

(1:12) HP expands Microsoft-based SMB network-attached storage offerings with Data Vault series

(2:57) HP drops roadmap nuggets at StorageWorks TechDay

(4:42) LSI adds solid-state drive, iSCSI support to denser Engenio 7900 disk array

(6:34) Dataram enters solid-state storage market with XcelaSAN

(8:51) Compellent says smaller businesses can dodge forklift upgrades with QuickStart Fibre Channel SAN

HP drops roadmap nuggets at StorageWorks TechDay **Updated**

The storage blog-and Tweet-o-sphere was abuzz with details provided by HP execs at a private forum in Colorado Springs Monday about the direction of their midrange storage roadmap. Among the tidbits flying about online:

• HP has added solid-state drive (SSD) support with its most recent EVA refresh, but is working on automated sub-LUN tiered storage migration, according to attendees. IBM is also reportedly working on something similar, EMC is planning LUN-level automated tiered storage migration later this year, Atrato has announced something similar, and Compellent has always had sub-LUN automated tiered storage migration, which currently also supports SSDs. This seems to be becoming table stakes in the Flash-as-disk market for SSDs. 
• HP is reportedly moving to an x86 / x64 Intel processor architecture for all of its storage arrays below the USP-V. Methinks Jasper Forest may have something to do with that.
• Finally, look for LeftHand Networks’ virtual storage appliance (VSA) to be ported to other hypervisors, including Xen and Hyper-V.
• Update: Tweets out of Day 2 of the TechDay meeting indicate HP officials are talking about offering Ibrix as a clustered NAS gateway in front of block storage, and eventually converging with LeftHand, though what exactly that convergence would look like isn’t clear.

HP is also still executing on roadmap predictions it made last year, adding small-form factor SAS drives across its storage arrays, beginning with the MSA line. The EVA is slated for a refresh with 2.5-inch SAS drives by the end of this year.

HP also expanded its Windows-based NAS products for SMBs today, with the introduction of the small office/home office (SOHO) X500 Data Vault series and new high-availability (HA) options for its X3000 Windows Storage Server 2008 product line.

Dell drops $3.9 billion on new services business

I realize I’m dating myself here, but I get a kick out of seeing H. Ross Perot Jr. surfacing in the news this morning with the announcement that Dell Inc. has bought his IT services company Perot Systems. Perot is the son of onetime US Presidential candidate H. Ross Perot Sr., who was a prominent and colorful character in the first American national elections I was old enough to be aware of at the time, in 1992 and 1996.

This acquisition isn’t directly related to storage — industry observers like Steve Duplessie describe it as analogous to Hewlett-Packard (HP) Co. buying EDS. However, storage is included in the infrastructure services Perot Systems offers. Also relevant to the storage world is the work the two companies have already been doing in the electronic medical records space, an area where storage managers in healthcare IT are struggling right now.

One Wall Street analyst who follows the storage market predicted the deal could have a short-term impact on shares of CommVault Systems Inc., writing in a note to clients this morning,

We believe shares of CommVault, which have been up approximately 109% since the early March lows and approximately 30% over the past three months…have been partially driven by investor sentiment on the thesis that the company would be on a short-list of potential acquisition candidates for Dell.

“While I agree that Dell may be less likely to acquire in general due to this major outlay, I see Perot and Commvault as filling very different needs within the Dell portfolio,” wrote Forrester Research analyst Andrew Reichman in an email to Storage Soup. “If they needed it before Perot, they still need it after, so I disagree that this takes Commvault off the table.”

Added Gartner analyst David Russell, “I think that a counter argument could be made that the Dell/Perot deal could lead to expanded CommVault sales if a backup and archiving practice is established.”

The Taneja Group’s Jeff Boles said this deal raises questions for him about the impact on EqualLogic services. “What does Dell/Perot do for EqualLogic? What do they do with EqualLogic within an increasingly virtual infrastructure? EqualLogic has great scale, and great economics - there might be a tremendous solution set here that gets really energized in the larger scale business through this professional services coupling.”

Dell has announced SaaS services for storage, and Perot’s SaaS expertise was also emphasized in this morning’s announcement. But, as is to be expected this soon after an acquisition agreement, Dell’s not yet revealing its plans.

“We view this acquisition as completely complementary to Dell’s current services business,” said a spokesperson reached today for comment by Storage Soup. “We have begun integration planning and will have more information on it upon closing.”

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.”

Spinnaker founders bring Avere out of stealth …

…but few other details are known yet of the new storage product to be released in three weeks by the original founders of Spinnaker Networks, which now forms the basis of NetApp’s scale-out OnTap GX and OnTap 8 offerings.

Avere CEO Ron Bianchini, who held the same title at Spinnaker, says the new company began in a coffee shop after he and other Spinnaker execs left NetApp in late 2007. “Initially, Spinnaker was a separate group [within NetApp],” he said. “There was a huge process of merging the two technologies, but after that there was less and less for the Spinnaker business unit to do, and the three of us left NetApp.”

The other two former Spinnaker founders now with Avere are CTO Michael Kazar and VP of engineering Daniel Nydick.

The startup today disclosed a $15 million Series A funding round. It’s preparing to roll out what it calls Demand-Driven Storage, which Bianchini described as “looking at an application workload and looking at the types of storage available, then matching the workload to the storage media.” He said the idea sprang from increasing diversity in the types of storage media available, whether SAS and SATA drives or solid-state disks (SSDs.).

So is this going to be something along the lines of EMC Corp.’s Fully Automated Storage Tiering (FAST) and Compellent’s Data Progression? “That’s very good directionally–we go in that direction, but much further,” Bianchini said. “When we finally can talk about the technology in detail, we’ll differentiate against those products with something broader and with more efficiencies.”

Will the product also draw on Spinnaker’s scale-out heritage? What market will it address? Is the product primarily software-focused? “All will become clear in three weeks,” Bianchini said.

Oracle set to make hardware splash with Sun-based Exadata

It began with a full page ad from Oracle in the Wall Street Journal last week, throwing down the gauntlet for server hardware giant IBM, and the first definitive statement from the company in the midst of its $7.4 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems about the fate of Sun’s hardware product lines.

Speculation has been widespread since the acquisition was revealed that Oracle wants Sun for its Java and Solaris software IP and planned to do away with the Sun’s server and storage hardware business. Instead, Oracle followed the WSJ ad with an invitation sent to press earlier today:

Oracle launched a database machine with Hewlett-Packard hardware a year ago. There is no indication about the fate of that partnership in light of this announcement.

Also, while the Sun/Oracle Database Machine will contain storage, as the HP/Oracle version does, the fate of Sun’s data storage-specific product lines — including disk arrays as well as tape libraries acquired with StorageTek — has yet to be settled one way or another. The merger between Sun and Oracle itself remains hung up in European Union regulatory review.

One thing’s for sure–Sun storage hardware competitors aren’t waiting for an answer before they pounce.