storage virtualization

Sanrad to add QoS to storage virtualization products

Sanrad, maker of the iSCSI storage virtualization gateway V-Switch and virtual server HA storage subsystem V-Stor, is adding a new quality of service feature to both its products.

Sanrad VP of product management Allon Cohen, “Storage-intensive I/O can be a barrier to virtualization of some applications.” The company’s quality of service aims to overcome that by letting users throttle and reserve bandwidth for the most performance-intensive applications. This is similar to features offered by array vendors such as EMC and Pillar Data Systems.

However, unlike those storage arrays, Sanrad’s first QoS release will allow for two levels of service only, according to type of disk. A SATA disk pool will have one quality of service and SAS another (arguably the difference in speed between these drives also provides service differences). In the next release, expected in a month or so, Cohen said, Sanrad will add the ability to prioritize LUN by LUN. Sanrad is also releasing an API so users can set policies and thresholds for dynamic monitoring systems. 

The product is currently in beta with partners and will become available at the end of the quarter. Sanrad is formally announcing it in a couple of weeks. QoS will be a free feature included with Sanrad products and a free upgrade for existing users.

NetApp V-Series supports Texas Memory SSDs; users yawn

NetApp blogger and chief technical architect Val Bercovici, leaked the news yesterday that NetApp’s V-Series storage gateways can now front Texas Memory Systems’ RamSan-500 solid-state storage arrays.

This is the follow-on to NetApp’s announcement last month that it planned to offer Flash-as-disk to go along with its Flash-as-Cache and DRAM-based Performance Acceleration Module (PAM).

A common issue with deploying solid state drives, analysts have said since EMC first announced support for STEC Inc. SSDs in Symmetrix last year, is integrating them with storage management software tools. Until recently, provisioning SSDs could be like provisioning hard disks used to be before storage virtualization–complex, slow and fairly rigid.

According to Bercovici, while the RamSan acts as the high IOPS storage behind the V-Series, the V-Series gives it storage management features through NetApp’s WAFL operating system:

WAFL’s log-structured architecture implements native load-balancing of write operations via write-aggregation to solid state NVRAM. This includes an innovative data layout engine which enables WAFL to “write anywhere” in order to optimize the placement of data across the appropriate media. For flash, that means native built-in wear-leveling optimized to spread writes over as many flash cells as possible in parallel, with minimum wear to each individual flash cell.

According to NetApp chief marketing officer Jay Kidd:

[The V-Series and RamSan] effectively [create] the industry’s only Enterprise Flash storage system that supports thin provisioning, fast snapshots, remote mirroring, and data deduplication

So far, though, this approach to Flash-as-disk isn’t really flying with storage admins. “This would be the most expensive way of doing SSD,” Tom Becchetti, storage admin for a manufacturing company and NetApp customer, wrote SearchStorage.com today in an email. “What I would like to see is just how EMC implemented their SSD. They have SSD that is physical and logically the same form factor of the hard drive. It would give you the most flexibility and as more SSD vendors show up on the scene, the cost will dramatically fall.”

Denizens of the storage blogosphere were even more outspoken. “Is that it??” was the title of a post on U.K. storage end user Martin Glassborow’s blog, Storagebod. “I expected more, I expected something which was going to force EMC to raise the bar on their SSD implementation.”

VMware vs. Partners: chatter about conflict increases

Our friends at Homeland Security are known to use the term “chatter” to refer to the level of terrorist communications they’re intercepting at any given time. Any large consortium of humans will have its own chatter, with its own quirky patterns and trends, and the storage market is no exception.

Right now, in the wake of VMworld Europe, there’s quite a bit of chatter going on about developing conflicts between VMware and its partners, especially in storage.

Hmm, now where have I heard that idea before?

Still, where earlier discussions on this blog have been purely speculative, some new articles and posts have surfaced that push the observation further toward reality. There are those who continue to pooh-pooh the idea, but Burton Group analyst Chris Wolf, whom I interviewed for the post linked above, came away from discussions with partners at VMworld Europe seeing Storage VMotion as more disruptive to VMware’s alliances than ever:

…it did not take long for me to realize that storage vendors were not exactly singing Storage VMotion’s praises. Instead, many storage vendors were still feeling Storage VMotion’s sting. Why should they care about a new storage value-add in ESX 3.5? Vendors that offer storage virtualization as an integral part of their products have seen one of their key value-adds move to the ESX hypervisor and as a result see Storage VMotion as a threat to their bottom line.

Then, our SearchITChannelcom sister site published an article today about how channel partners, too, are feeling conflicted over VMware:

Some VMware partners are blaming the company’s rapid ascent and aggressive strategy in the server virtualization market for creating channel conflict.

VMware’s strategy, according to these value-added resellers (VARs) and independent software vendors (ISVs), has been to fill gaps in its market coverage by acquiring partners in those specific segments and integrating new technologies into its hypervisor. And the more niche markets the vendor enters, the more competition it creates with its partners.

“They have a go-it-alone approach,” said Erik Josowitz, vice president of product strategy for Surgient Inc., a VMware ISV partner in Austin, Texas. “They’re predatory in a certain sense.”

News writer Colin Steele, who reported that story, has some further tidbits on his blog as well (though he brings up the Patriots’ 18-1 season in that post, which stings a little for yours truly).

It’s still not much more than a matter of opinion and conjecture at this point, but it looks to me like when it comes to VMware and its partners, especially in the storage market, the plot is thickening. 

Slowdown could push VMware into storage market

It seems crazy, and in many ways it is. The company that essentially created the hottest market in IT has said it will grow 50% over the next year, and the company that owns it has projected $15 billion in revenues for 2008. And yet as of this morning, Company #1, VMware, has seen its stock drop 33%. Company #2, storage giant EMC, has seen its stock drop $1.02, to $15.89.

The problem, ESG analyst Brian Babineau points out, is that VMware grew 90% last year–it’s not that 50% growth is bad, it’s that 50% growth is relatively bad. “You’ll get the airbag on that stop,” is the expression I’ve heard used.

Meanwhile, the consensus is that EMC’s poor stock performance is a direct result of the VMware issue–even though EMC has achieved its goals of folding in a dizzying array of acquisitions, balancing its revenue streams across software, services and its core storage hardware business, and bringing its products up to speed with emerging technology trends. . .even getting out ahead of them with the first Tier 1 array, DMX-4, to support flash drives internally. “I don’t know that EMC’s business execution could have been much better,” is how Brian put it to me yesterday in my story on EMC’s earnings call.

And yet these companies both are in trouble on the stock market today, and more alarming is the underlying reason: a dramatic slowdown in revenue predicted for VMware. If this truly comes to pass, it could be the darkest omen yet in the chain-reaction brought about in the market by the subprime mortgage crisis, the culmination of fears about the tech market in general this year that began when Cisco revised predictions downward in November. The general vibe from the financial eggheads seems to be that if the highest-flying tech company on the market is forecasting a slowdown in spending, what’s next?

I’ll admit this scares me a little too. The way I understand it, greedy bankers gave loans to unqualified people, and then those shaky loans in turn were carved up into securities, meaning that when those unqualified debtors couldn’t manufacture money (lo and behold!) the whole house of cards started to tumble down. In a way, it’s satisfying to see the people who played on the dreams of low-income people to own homes by locking them into high-interest-rate deals, with no regard to how they were going to come up with the cash, get their comeuppance. But when it threatens the entire national economy, it’s hardly worth the last word.

But before I could step off the ledge into panic myself, this morning I had a chat with Andrew Reichman of Forrester Research, whose level-headed perspective is one I think will eventually shake out once the initial frenzy is over. Or, at least, I hope.

“This is typical of the financial world–overblown expectations,” he said. “I still see VMware’s product and outlook as very strong.” Even in a recession, Reichman pointed out, VMware still has a value proposition, since server virtualization is a consolidation and cost-cutting play. “They can still demonstrate to companies why they should spend money on their product even as they try to put the brakes on IT spending otherwise.”

Great point. Then there’s just the plain fact that 50% growth ain’t too shabby! Especially as the market braces for a spending slowdown–and especially when analysts say 60% of the market has already purchased and deployed VMware’s product. “It’s rare in the technology world to see such consensus around one piece of technology,” Reichman concurred. “They’ve built up a lot of momentum and there’s still a lot of room for them to take advantage of the ‘network effect’ and expand existing customers’ use of the product.”

However, Reichman had another suggestion about the VMware situation that piqued my interest, especially given my recent post on storage virtualization and VMware and the sometimes tense relationships between the two. “What they need to do to continue their growth is take the money they got in the IPO and they’ve built up in revenue and find the next frontier.”

Reichman’s prediction for that next frontier in the near future is business continuity/disaster recovery, which VMware has already said it’s working on. “There’s a high level of interest at a lot of companies in using VMware for BC/DR,” he said. But he added that the next horizon will probably be primary storage–or storage virtualization.

“The story of storage behind VMware has never been clear,” Reichman said. “There are a lot of issues that remain around storage virtualization, performance and compatibility and a lot of room to improve that picture.”

He continued, “They’ve played Switzerland for a long time. Now they need to get off the dime and make a call about how storage is going to work behind server virtualization.”

Of course, it’s hard to tell what the consequences of that might be. Other analysts such as the Burton Group’s Chris Wolf have pointed out that if hardware vendors don’t support VMware, end users won’t take the risk of using their product. But has VMware’s ascension into a Wall Street bellwether changed that equation? Has its ubiquity in IT shops turned the tables on the storage vendors–so that end users will instead be less inclined to use a storage technology if it’s not certified with VMware? How will this balance-of-power play out?

It’s like that expression about the old Chinese curse. We are living in interesting times.

Storage and VMware walk virtual tightropes

It all started with a pretty run-of-the-mill partnership agreement. FalconStor announced its storage virtualization, snapshot and replication software will support Virtual Iron’s virtual servers last week, and my SearchServerVirtualization.com colleague Alex Barrett and I agreed to take briefings.

FalconStor is walking a s tightrope here, because it’s also partnered with Virtual Iron’s large rival VMware. But FalconStor has to come up with reasons to use Virtual Iron over VMware, (i.e. ways to promote that partnership). This led Alex to begin an  interesting conversation with FalconStor’s vice president of business development Bernie Wu about the pros and cons of virtualizing storage with VMware vs. Virtual Iron. Wu pointed out what he’d later reprise in a separate call with me: that the use case for FalconStor’s IPStor storage virtualization software is in many ways stronger with Virtual Iron, because VI doesn’t have its own file system, like VMware does.

As Burton Group senior analyst Chris Wolf patiently explained to me later, VMware’s file system means that its hypervisor (the software layer that controls the host server, guest OSes, and their interaction with the rest of the network) is handling virtual hard disk mapping on back-end storage systems. You can use VMware with raw device mapping (RDM), but then you turn off many of the features VMware users have come to like about VMware, such as VMotion. (RDM also has a slightly limited “virtual mode” as of 3.0, but that’s a tangential discussion.) This makes virtual hard disk mapping performed by storage virtualization products, whether appliances or software, at least somewhat redundant.

So I asked Wu, “what are users missing out on if they can’t use your storage virtualization software with VMware?”  His first answer was large-scale data migrations.

Up until VMware’s Virtual Infrastructure 3.5, VMware had no ability to move the data it managed in its virtual hard disks on back-end storage; hence storage virtualization devices stepped in to fill the gap. With Storage VMotion in 3.5, that gap was at least partially closed. Storage VMotion is still a difficult way to do a large-scale migration, however, because it migrates data one host at a time. So storage virtualization devices, which perform migrations en masse, still have that advantage. At least, until and unless Storage VMotion adds that capability.

Aside from large-scale migrations, Wu also told me that thin provisioning is another capability IPStor offers that VMware doesn’t. That’s a big deal–VMware’s best practices recommend that users allot twice the amount of disk space they actually plan to write to; the ability to expand capacity on the fly helps everyone avoid buying 2x the amount of storage they need.

The Burton Group’s Wolf pointed out plenty more gaps in VMware’s storage capabilities–heterogeneous array support; heterogeneous multiprotocol support (Storage VMotion doesn’t support iSCSI yet);  I/O caching; and heterogeneous replication support.

Some of these gaps will likely be filled by VMware or the storage industry. For instance, when it comes to multiprotocol support, VMware’s MO with new features has always been to support Fibre Channel first and they usually get around to iSCSI soon after. And what happens to the need for heterogeneous multiprotocol support if FCoE ever takes off? What of I/O caching, when and if everybody’s working with 10 Gigabit Ethernet pipes? And VMware’s launching its own management software for heterogeneous replication support (even if it’s not doing the replication itself).

So it seems that storage virtualization players will have to start coming up with more value-adds for VMware environments as time goes on.

VMware has its own tightrope to walk, too. Take replication for example–VMware supports replication from its partners, saying it doesn’t want to reinvent the wheel. But that’s the kind of thing it said when users were asking for Storage VMotion back in 2006, too.

“Deep down, I believe that VMware isn’t going to push its partners out,” Wolf said. And indeed, VMware did make a good-faith gesture last fall with the announcement of a certification program for storage virtualization partners. Wolf also pointed out, “A lot of organizations are afraid to deploy something in the data path unless their hardware vendors will support and certify it–without the support of their partners, VMware would have a tough time playing ball.”

But that might not be the case as much now as back when EMC first bought VMware in 2003 and everybody in the storage world scrateched their heads and wondered why. Now, VMware has its own muscles to flex as its billion-dollar 2007 IPO for 10 percent of the company proved.

More and more analysts are telling me that the hypervisor will become the data center operating system of the future. Over in the server virtualization world, Wolf says VMware competitors argue that the hypervisor is a commodity, and VMware says it isn’t. “In order to keep the hypervisor from becoming commoditized, they have to keep adding new features,” he said.

Which suggests to me that storage virtualization vendors should probably be working on new features, too.

Reporter’s Notebook: Storage Decisions San Francisco

This was our first Storage Decisions conference in the hilly city built on a fault line, and that meant a fresh crop of Storage Decisions attendees and happenings.

Sun held a “trends and innovation” dinner for press and analysts concurrent with the show on Monday night (it wasn’t affiliated). About two dozen Sun execs and their audience sat down to a gourmet repast at San Francisco’s trendy Absinthe restaurant. Execs and Sun reps including Chief Technology Officer and Executive Vice President of Research and Development Greg Papadopoulos, CIO Bob Worrall, Executive Vice President of Systems John Fowler, and distinguished engineer Subodh Bapat.

As always, Sun was articulating grand visions of the future. “The storage marketplace is about to undergo its most rapid set of changes possibly ever–it will change the economic fortunes of a number of companies,” Fowler predicted (Sun is hoping this will hold true in a positive direction for its storage products). Cost per capacity will be “one-tenth of what you see today.”

Like fellow large players IBM and EMC, both of whom have recently acquired storage service-provider companies, and Symantec, which is preparing a software-as-a-service (SaaS) backup offering, Sun is keen on outsourcing as well. Eventually, according to Bapat, there will only be a few “really big computers” in the world run by companies like Microsoft and Google in “mega data centers” like Google’s famed farm of PCs. Sun would also like to become a service provider itself, but their real focus is on selling equipment into those service-provider data centers. Sun was already part of a similar build-out in the telecom industry in past years, though it was also pointed out that companies like Google have already done their build-outs just fine without Sun.

Meanwhile, new “mega data centers” are beginning to spring up, including a new 500,000 square-foot, 50-megawatt behemoth being built for a national lab set to open next year, according to Bapat. “50 megawatts is bigger than a small city would consume,” Bapat said. “Utilities are going to become a real problem.”

Bapat also predicted that within the next year, a major data center failure will “cause major national effects, and bring forward the importance of data centers as national assets.”

Sun loves to look out 15 years, but ask about the next 15 months and it’s a trickier question. Sun’s recently announced partnership with Dell is part of its attempt to position itself better in the market; Sun will also be going after service provider customers such as SmugMug, according to Worrall, and developing server-farm products with its partners at research universities. How that’ll translate into specific products and sales remains largely unclear.

Sun is on to something when it comes to Fowler’s prediction about the pace of change over the next year, according to Taneja Group founder Arun Taneja. “We’re in such a vibrant market right now,” he said. “I have never seen so much change and innovation happening all at once, ever.” 

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Some visuals from the show floor (click to see larger versions, mouseover for descriptions)

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Everybody’s favorite user-blogger Tory Skyers was Mr. Storage Decisions this year, presenting on the storage issues presented by new mobile devices and participating in a user panel on storage management. Skyers warned users not to overlook the trend toward iPhones and home servers. “An executive buys a home server, plugs in his laptop at home, and the home server asks, ‘wanna back it up?’ Then his kid comes home with the Trojan du jour and suddenly your company’s data is in the Eastern bloc somewhere.”

The flow of data leakages happen both ways in the mobile world, he added, with mobile devices blurring the line between personal and corporate data repositories. “So mp3s and AVIs and maybe even that Trojan find their way to the laptop, which finds its way to your data center, which finds its way to your SAN and your network.” Tory gave some how-tos on controlling some of that flow of information on both sides of the equation, including “using social networks in your work environment to enforce policy”–specifically, a “Page of Shame” for violators of company storage policies pertaining to mp3s etc. and strategically placed rumors of “someone getting busted” for violating policies. He recommended tools like Desktop Authority and Powerfuse for content filtering and executable monitoring for contraband files, using open-source and free Microsoft tools to create document templates for data classification, and Surfcontrol Mobile Filter to restrict access to Websites and protocols even when users are off the network and VPN on company machines. Desktop Authority and Powerfuse will also restrict which mobile devices can be plugged in to a corporate machine–a USB mouse will get through but not a thumb drive or iPod.

“This is a better alternative to sealing your USB ports with epoxy,” something Tory said he’d been asked to do before (by an exec who then realized he had no way to plug a mouse in to a $2500 machine).

In the course of his presentation, Tory also referenced the following tidbit from CNN: customs and border guards can confiscate anyone’s laptop without any grounds for suspicion and copy all the information held within it. Terrifying.

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Some more visuals from around the conference:

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On Wednesday users gathered for a peer discussion on virtualization that turned up some interesting things, including–be still our hearts–an actual, living, breathing, Invista user (we wanted to take his picture). Very few of those present have actually deployed storage virtualization and those considering storage virtualization tools were also in the minority among this group. “I’m wondering what the benefits are that other people have seen to virtualization, what the return is,” said one user.

The majority of users saying they’d begun virtualizing are using HDS. Almost all users with storage virtualization in place said they used it to front other arrays from the same vendor, with the exception of migrating data from decommissioned storage. “You just don’t want to get into finger-pointing with the different vendors,” according to one attendee.