By: Charles King, President, Pund-IT Posted: 28th March 2013 Copyright Pund-IT © 2013

Conventional wisdom considers Moore’s Law to be IT’s primary governing force but data storage evolution has an equal if not more profound impact on the ways that consumers and businesses use technology. That’s because storage advances more quickly than microprocessors (doubling in performance every 12–14 months, compared to 18 months for CPUs) and growth in storage capacity runs at a fairly steady 60% YOY.

That last factoid points to storage’s intimate connection to the subject of big data. Why is that the case? Partly because attention to the subject of big data began to coalesce as reports like “The Expanding Digital Universe” study (2007, updated in 2011 by IDC, the University of California and EMC) explored the challenges and opportunities organizations faced in capturing full value from their ever-growing storage infrastructures and investments.

In fact, many big data solutions leverage large capacity SATA and other high-volume drives and array technologies to support core analytics features. Additionally, non-mechanical storage technologies, including capacious solid state drives (SSD) and Flash memory often have roles in high performance analytics and data warehouse offerings that play in or near to the big data market.

Overall, without the benefits of 'big' storage technologies the performance of many of these solutions would likely be small potatoes. So is big storage an absolutely necessary part of big data? Actually, no. For example, consider stream computing solutions which are capable of supporting a variety of often highly complex real time analytics processes by means of modest commodity and even generic storage and other hardware components.

This might seem contradictory but it simply underscores the multi-dimensional nature of big data strategies and offerings. Just as no one tool can be used to complete every job, no single big data technology can address every challenge or answer every question.

However, that itself is a critical point. It is the rare craftsperson who only requires a modicum of tools and the lucky company that faces few and simple challenges. These are good points to remember when considering which big data vendors and which solutions best fit the needs of your organization.

By: Peter Williams, Practice Leader - IT Infrastructure Mgmt., Bloor Research Posted: 30th January 2013 Copyright Bloor Research © 2013

Nexsan Technologies has launched a range of high density storage systems, offering a five-fold increase in storage capacity up to 5PB and halved costs for its FASTier SSD cache capacity (also increased) by switching to enterprise multi-level cache (eMLC).

Its well-trailed hybrid NST5000 Series has three new models, the 5100, 5300 and 5500, all offering enhanced management capabilities and VMware vSphere server offloading through VMware's VAAI API. It is hybrid because it unifies NAS and SAN, and CIFS, NFS and iSCSI protocols are able to run side by side; FASTier is also hybrid with volatile DRAM plus NVRAM solid state flash drives.

Nexsan estimates that, when fully populated with SATA drives alongside FASTier SSD, it will cost no more than $0.40 (40 cents) per GB. A top-end 5PB 5500 will achieve 54,000 IOPS. SAS, SATA and FASTier SSD can be mixed as needed, with Nexsan offering 4TB SATA drives for the first time.

Nexsan has focused primarily on the SMB/SME market, but the feature-functionality of its solutions have driven departmental and secondary data centres within medium and large enterprises, all attracted by low CAPEX and OPEX with ease of management - both further improved with this release. The company estimates that up to a third can be saved overall versus previous offerings.

The release follows hard on the heels of the announcement (January 2nd) of Nexsan's acquisition by Imation, valuing the privately-held company at around $120m. For its part, Imation had revenues of $1.23bn in 2011 (a majority earned outside the US in 100 countries). Known especially for its consumer media, it has more recently increased SMB storage and data protection focus with its DataGuard and InfiniVault appliances and Assureon secure archive in particular. Having set a new direction, it has also reorganised into two divisions - consumer storage and accessories and tiered storage and security solutions.

Nexsan boosts the latter division and will help Imation speed up its transformation roadmap (and it would not surprise me if Imation soon made another purchase to further fill out its offering). Imation's partners and customers should applaud a strengthened tiered storage and security solutions portfolio and the added Nexsan and channel partner skills, while Imation offers greater global coverage and channel strength and greater resources that should accelerate product development.

The low-end NST5100 has 8 Xeon CPU cores, 24GB DRAM and up to 31 NL-SAS and/or SATA drives (max 93TB); the NST5300 has 8 or 16 cores, 48 or 96GB DRAM and up to 360 drives (1440TB); the NST5500 has 24 cores, 96 or 192GB DRAM and 1260 drives (5040TB/5.04PB). So all kinds of workloads can be accommodated (with 2½" 10K or 15K SAS also offered).

FASTier cache includes 8GB NVRAM, 200 or 400GB (except 5100) eMLC and choices of MLC and SLC flash. I-O support includes 1 and 10Gb Ethernet ports front-end and bus bandwidth supports 4, 8 or 12 24Gb SASx4 connections depending on model or 8Gb Fibre Channel (FC) (not on the 5100).

Part of Nexsan's OPEX-saving capability also comes through its now well-established AutoMAID (automatic massive array of idle disks) solution; this is policy-based so can drastically reduce disk power consumption without user intervention and not necessarily degrade performance.

Enhanced administration and management includes an SNMP agent, a dedicated management interface (eNet port) and a new look "single pane" GUI (with "gesture" technology) and a CLI for advanced users. Enhanced data protection includes higher capacity asynchronous replication between NST5000s. Nexsan estimates that offloading vSphere servers to an NST5000 will improve server performance by 40-50%; it incorporates smart copy and VMware thin provisioning with dead space reclamation.

This looks like an attractive SMB/SME package but there may be a tension between Nexsan and Imation over how fast to advance further up the enterprise food-chain. For instance, I understand that clustering is on the roadmap, giving another big boost to total capacity, and inclusion of FC support suggests that Nexsan, at least, favours greater enterprise encroachment. (For now both companies continue to use their own names.)

By: Peter Williams, Practice Leader - IT Infrastructure Mgmt., Bloor Research Posted: 2nd January 2013 Copyright Bloor Research © 2013

At this time of year analysts often predict the technologies to watch and trends for the next year, but I am taking a slightly different slant concerning data storage in 2013, putting another perspective to show how things may not pan out as most expect.

Solid State Disk (SSD) technology will still move on apace in 2013 (with, for instance, multi-level cell (MLC) cache pushing up capacities); no surprise there. For now, SSD (flash) arrays will continue to be accessed as though they are spinning disk, purchased for tier 0/1 performance; the decision to buy will be based on up-front price (still high), running costs and space (lower than spinning disk). Yet this is a short-term phenomenon. The real SSD prize is flash being widely accessed as 'memory' (which in truth it is) bypassing multiple layers of superfluous and complex disk access. It will be simpler to manage and inherently faster. (If you see the name 'server-side cache' it refers to this way of storing data.) Be aware that the best varieties of flash for 'pretend' disk storage may not be best for use as 'memory' so cannot be migrated.

Big Data concerns how data is accessed for analytical purposes but is a response to the data explosion in recent times; now, comparatively small enterprises may need to use access techniques previously available only to the largest multi-nationals. This broadens the market for analytics software and new access techniques are also being introduced. Yet, a dichotomy remains which will probably mean Big Data fails to fulfil its 2013 expectations. Enterprises want more flexible access to their main data as part of becoming more agile so as to react to business changes, but they need this data in a different format to that required for analytics (as has always been true). So data still needs to be extracted, translated and loaded (ETL) into some variety of data warehouse or mart before meaningful analysis takes place. I dream of the day when Big Data deals in real time with a single agile dataset.

Cloud storage usage is growing but adoption is not great; the main reason is companies' concerns at the risks surrounding losing control of their data storage - and this will persist in 2013. The biggest take-up is in-house or private cloud storage (for this reason), yet clouds controlled in-house are not much more than virtualised storage and often complicated by the variety of legacy storage hardware that has to be accessed under the covers. Public clouds, of necessity, need stringent firewall-type technology to isolate each firm's own data - but are less-burdened by legacy equipment. They can also offer backup, remote replication and disaster recovery (DR) services - the latter obviating the costly need for firms to have their own DR sites. (Cloud providers should also be well-placed to exploit SSD memory.) So public clouds should grow faster in 2013, but the test for providers will be to better demonstrate that an enterprise's data is at least as secure as it is in-house.

Backup and recovery advances have been many and not least to keep pace with data growth versus shrinking or non-existent backup windows. Yet, the picture is confused and solutions invariably piecemeal: a) changes made to existing backup solutions handle the typical mix of physical and virtual storage, b) snapshots in some cases now substitute for main data to speed the process, c) de-duplication solutions massively shrink the backup data footprint (with de-duping of primary data as received not yet widely adopted), d) this enables tape to be relegated to deep archive, and e) WAN optimisation greatly assists remote data transmission speeds. Yet this is complicated, expensive and involves multiple vendors - which users do not like. Moreover, it tackles the symptom rather than the underlying problem: that 90% of the data being backed up (and recovered) has no benefit to the business (albeit identifying which 90% is hard). It's high time someone tackled the underlying cause and, unless and until they do, backup vendors can expect only low-value 'point' solution sales to keep the enterprises ticking over.

This last item highlights a fundamental difference between servers and storage. The number of physical servers needs only to expand in line with business expansion, but storage capacity is still skyrocketing out of control. For years I have suggested that resources need re-directing to software that examines and removes unwanted data at every stage from when received to achieve a similar equilibrium - that the amount of data newly stored becomes matched by the amount being removed (at the very least to off-line archive "just in case"); this would interface with policy management software which sets the rules for data removal and archiving. By this means storage costs would plummet and stay low, energy costs would be kept under control, capacity planning would become a doddle, and risky "emergency" technology purchase decisions would become a thing of the past.

I do not expect anyone to truly crack this for the benefit of business the world in 2013 - but if any company does they deserve to make a killing.

Here's to 2013 being a year of pleasant surprises for storage users.

By: Bob Tarzey, Service Director, Quocirca Posted: 28th November 2012 Copyright Quocirca © 2012

Two back to back events last week saw Quocirca talking to veterans of the software industry; CA and Symantec. The high level message from both is pretty much to same; we help to secure and manage your data and IT infrastructure. Yet, it is rare to find these two head-to-head; because in reality they are more different than they are alike.

True, they are both US headquartered (more or less) pure software companies with annual revenues of a similar order (CA circa $5B, Symantec circa $7B) and both with profits of around $1B. Their current share price and market-cap are similar and their stock market history has followed similar ups and down over the last decade. Both are now 30-something; CA founded in 1976 and Symantec in 1982. Symantec’s higher revenue is reflected in its head count, 20K employees opposed to CA’s 14K, but that gives them remarkably similar productivity of about $350K per head.

Furthermore, both sit on similar piles of cash of about $13B. This ability to accumulate cash has been key to the way each has grown, through aggressive acquisition; both have acquired tens of companies over the years; in Symantec’s case almost doubling its size when it merged with Veritas in 2004 to move into the storage market.

So, for two companies appearing so similar what are the differences that allow them to operate side by side in the IT industry without too many dogfights? The most obvious is their legacy; CA comes from a background of providing software for mainframes (the ultimate in enterprise computing), whilst Symantec’s origin lies in its consumer focussed Norton anti-virus technology (probably still a more recognised brand than Symantec itself). The main target market shared by both vendors is supplying software for mid-market and enterprise businesses to manage and secure Windows and Linux based systems.

Even here, whilst they may still sound similar, their products have historically not overlapped much. When it comes to management, Symantec’s main focus is end-points (via its 2007 Altiris acquisition) and storage, whilst CA is listed as one of the big 4 systems management companies (along with BMC, IBM and HP—or 5 if you include Microsoft), focussed on broad management of enterprise IT (in CA’s case including those mainframes).

In security, historically the overlap has also been limited. Many still think of Symantec as primarily a security company, but over the years its acquisitions have taken it beyond its roots in anti-virus to included email security, web security, data loss prevention (DLP) and so on. Few think of CA in the first instance as a security company but it also always operated in this space, more focussed on identity and access management (IAM), despite also having its own anti-virus.

However, that is changing—CA has been acquiring more and more security assets. For example, it moved in to DLP in 2009 when it acquired Orchestria. And Symantec is now moving into IAM with its O3 platform that includes single sign on (SSO) via a partnership with Symplified, secure web access and compliance enforcement/reporting. Whilst Symantec remains by far the bigger of the two in IT security, it can expect to see more and more of CA going forwards.

Both vendors are keen to be seen as innovators (or keeping up depending on your viewpoint) with the key IT trends; cloud, mobile, social media, big data etc. However, this week they were both as keen to talk about people as products and solutions. Symantec has recently replaced its CEO of the last 3 years, Enrico Salem (whose blood was said to flow yellow, the vendor’s corporate colour) with Steve Bennett who joined the board from Intuit in 2010. In a session on strategy, Symantec had little to say except the new CEO’s pronouncements could be expected in January 2013. John Brigden, Symantec’s head of Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) for the last 7 years will be keen to see what that means for his organisation.

CA has already shaken up its EMEA operations bringing a new head, Marco Comastri, just over a year ago from Poste Italiane (he has also worked at IBM and Microsoft). Comastri is bringing new faces and trying to get CA EMEA more focussed on solution selling than technology.

Whether it is at the global or European level, these two software juggernauts have a momentum all of their own and management may find it is frustrating to change direction. They should not try too hard; both have huge legacy customer bases and healthy finances, shareholders will not be happy to see either compromised.

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 20th November 2012 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2012

Idera wants to make it practical to back up every server on the planet. With the release of its Server Backup 5.0 and new pricing structure, the company believes it can change the minds of enterprises that may have viewed backing up all their servers as too expensive and complicated.

Server sprawl is a serious concern in enterprises today. With the advent of commodity and virtual servers, there's been a massive growth in server deployment across organizations. Using traditional back up, solutions becomes untenable when these offerings are priced at $1,000 or more per server.

And the way enterprises use servers today has changed. Before the data stored on servers changed periodically; now, the information stored on web servers and in databases changes nearly in real time. Scheduling weekly or after-hour back ups no longer cuts it when crucial corporate data is constantly changing.

"We're hearing from customers that traditional back-up products don't fit because the expense is becoming prohibitive," says Rick Pleczko, CEO of Idera. "And in environments where servers appear and disappear overnight, the rate with which the data changes means that it must be backed up more frequently than nightly or weekly."

Idera knows a little something about backing up large quantities of dynamic servers. The company gained Server Backup when it acquired R1Soft, which had more than 1,000 cloud/hosted data center customers. Today the software backs up more than 275,000 servers worldwide. With additional platform support and what Pleczko calls "disruptive" pricing, Server Backup 5.0 is well-suited for use by enterprises as well.

Continuous data protection

Server Backup 5.0 works with Windows and Linux physical servers and VMware, Hyper-V and Xen virtual servers. The software performs backups in minutes with continuous data protection, block-level backup technology that identifies exactly which portions of a hard disk need to be read for an incremental backup. And the offering can backup frequently -- every hour or less. Recovery is rapid, be it of single files or full, bare-metal restores.

Priced at $20 or less per virtual server and $200 or less per physical server, Idera believes organizations that previously only backed up a few strategic servers with expensive backup software will be able to do so on all servers in a way that's affordable, reliable and scalable.

What's more, because customers can download the software directly from Idera's site and don't have to wade through complicated software add-ons to get the functionality they need, installing Server Backup 5.0 is streamlined and simple.

To download a free trial visit http://r1soft.idera.com. For more information visit http://www.idera.com/.

(BriefingsDirect contributor Cara Garretson provided editorial assistance and research on this post. She can be reached on LinkedIn at http://linkd.in/T6trhH.)

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By: Peter Williams, Practice Leader - IT Infrastructure Mgmt., Bloor Research Posted: 29th October 2012 Copyright Bloor Research © 2012

IP Expo was a chance for me to get a broad if brief snapshot of the business IT climate in 2012. On the surface, things looked fairly healthy - and record numbers apparently came through the door - but I sensed uneasiness among vendors and concern among their potential clients.

I was there, more than anything, to get the latest on storage and data protection, but over the years I have worked in many IT disciplines; so my interest is in the interplay between these and the genuine innovation that can result from lateral thinking.

For instance, a big noise this year was big data, for many only a curiosity so far: "I have a lot of data and it's growing fast (whose isn't?). But does that mean I must now classify it as big data?" Hadoop, that goes with it, is a great piece of open source software; but most end-users may have higher priorities regarding their stored data right now. So, by the end of my visit I felt: "I had had Hadoop oop to here" (but remember that we oldies can get a little jaded at the end of a long day).

I noticed a move away from purpose-built storage hardware (for which read "premium pricing") towards bolt-on commodity boxes - belatedly following the trend for servers. That brings opportunities for more versatile software to achieve the greater scale-out and scale-up capacity and performance needed to match the ever-growing virtualised storage cloud market (about which there was also much noise). This approach featured in a debate involving Fusion-io founder and CEO David A. Flynn and is a trend likely to be good news for business customers hoping for a drop in hardware costs.

Fusion-io is also pushing the 'commodity' architecture boundaries by treating NAND flash as memory rather than a spinning disk substitute - and at a stroke eliminating most layers of logic including I-O scheduler logic for storage access (albeit introducing a new device type to recognise). Less radical is Nimble's use of MLC flash and its Cache Accelerated Sequential Layout (CASL) to achieve turbo-charged storage performance.

Otherwise, there was less noise this year on flash/solid state disk (SSD) in general; Fusion-io arguably excepted, SSD is now part of the disk mix and has all but replaced 15k rpm spinning disk. The speed at which it replaces lower-spec drives is now down to cost- factoring in the much lower SSD running costs - a few years yet I think.

At the other end of the spectrum, tape seems destined to last forever. It is a frightening thought that, when (in my late teens in 1965!) I began working on mainframes, reel-to-reel tape drives were already well established for backup; disk hadn't even appeared (but I bet some remember the C.R.A.M. random access device that I used back then). Sequential backup involved a rotation of tapes called "grandfather, father and son" (while, in the intervening years, I've progressed from son to father to grandfather!).

There was a major tape forum and I spoke to Brian Grainger, VP of Worldwide Sales at Spectra Logic, a long-established tape systems provider. He was very bullish about LTO's future - a fifth generation coming with new density levels and speeds - and his company's own modular and scalable systems approach. Tape will now support 10GbE transmission and, of course, it remains "green" as it needs no power when not in use.

Historically, many are heavily invested in proprietary vendor solutions. To extricate themselves, "helped" by their incumbent vendors, could itself prove costly and anyway carries an inevitable transition risk. Companies now also wrestle with the implications of workers deploying their own mobile devices - adding complexity to company IT security and data protection. Plenty of stands were offering solutions here (but I stayed focused on my core area so by-passed these).

Yet, any company committed to achieving a truly agile server-storage environment must eventually bite the bullet of this type of change or its infrastructure will end up tired and creaky (like me?). The message is, as ever was: do thorough research and plan your strategy carefully before you commit to the latest fashion. An event like IP Expo is good for picking up ideas to start your research (but not sign contracts).

I continue to enthuse over ATA over Ethernet (AoE) as a means of transporting data (arguably a protocol), about which I have already written a couple times; it's in the public domain and also available in the Linux kernel. Yet, so far, only Coraid (the NAS server provider from where it emanated) is really exploiting its speed and simplicity for PB scale-out expansion capabilities. I spoke to Carl Wright, executive VP of worldwide sales, who recounted Coraid's rocket-like growth right now (which is no coincidence). He also briefly discussed Coraid's plans for policy-based automated orchestration of the whole virtualised cloud storage (using its Yunteq full stack orchestration acquired last year); this is also interesting stuff and I suspect Coraid is again ahead of the game.

Finally, whatever underlying storage technologies a company deploys, controlling the environment is often a headache. Here I'll give a mention to Aptare. (I did Latin at school so think you should pronounce the "E" at the end - but moving swiftly on…) I met Nigel Houghton, Aptare's EMEA regional sales manager, who described Aptare's heterogeneous storage console that gives an end-to-end vision of the storage capacity for forecasting, auditing, compliance, and the ability to offer charge-back - for which expect increasing demand from cost-conscious executives. This type of software is surely handy if not a must for enterprises with mixed storage, and I am guessing it quickly pays for itself. Aptare includes agentless data collection from hosts, produces a logical and physical connection map, shows data space allocated but unused and high and low volume usage; how many businesses have that information at their fingertips right now?

I learnt much more at IP EXPO 2012 (for another day perhaps) and it was well worth a visit. So now, slippers on and feet up (I'm semi-retired you know); a little less noise now please.

By: Peter Williams, Practice Leader - IT Infrastructure Mgmt., Bloor Research Posted: 3rd October 2012 Copyright Bloor Research © 2012

Storage analysis software developer Storage Fusion today launched (Storage Fusion) Virtualize to extend the scope of its infrastructure from virtual servers to their storage. Virtualize complements its flagship Storage Resource Analysis product, which is now re-branded as Analyze.

Operations Director Peter White told me the move was partly a response to customer requests. It reflects the changing landscape in which more and more users use VMware server virtualisation and/or access their resources from the cloud. Analyze is also enhanced, with seven new dashboards.

The young UK-based company has been making a marketing push during 2012. Fruits of this include a major company re-branding, with a new website appearance (royal blue replaced by purple) and a new strap-line "insight delivered". White painted a rosy picture of a growing company that was recruiting new staff and signing up new partners - with the existing software well received (but was not yet able to quote firm figures or offer client success stories to back this up).

The Virtualize and Analyze "Z" spellings hint at the company's aim for stronger US and global penetration. They are stand-alone with neither dependent on the other but to achieve a full virtual machine (VM) to heterogeneous SAN storage analysis picture, both should be deployed. Currently, Virtualize is entirely for VMware users (with storage scripts using vSphere APIs). White confirmed that there were no current plans for Microsoft or other virtualisation environments.

Both solutions are agentless and there is no software to install as it uses SaaS delivery through a single web interface; this provides a scripted data collection which is non-disruptive and runs in a few minutes. Importantly for many, no training is needed to run this. However, the software's greatest asset is probably its ability to produce meaningful assessment results in next to no time (e.g. within an hour) without operational disruption or the need for an expensive IT expert. Then, as it is priced according to infrastructure size, there is value to be had by all sizes of business.

Amongst the high-level data displayed by Virtualize are the host systems with all the guest VMs and the operating system each is running - linking to the storage resources deployed. Indeed, White said this was tied back right to the storage LUN, which he believed was a unique feature.

Storage Fusion perceives a major benefit as the ability to identify storage (and VM) wastage (including where tier 1 and high availability storage is unnecessary). This is used for reclaiming storage, justifying the cost of thin provisioning by the savings it will achieve, and better assessment of storage protection levels; trend analysis that can identify the speed of capacity expansion will also help in planning for future hardware purchases.

White described the primary problem the software addressed: historically, larger enterprises separately deployed application specialists who requested servers and also more storage, a server team who provisioned servers and requested storage, and a storage team who provisioned storage - each team using its own tools to assess needs. This produced huge inefficiencies hurting operational performance and profitability; virtualisation and the cloud made this structure even less tenable.

For storage consultants and SIs who already use Analyze, Virtualize will extend the scope and value of their storage assessments, providing information supporting all such disparate teams. (Both solutions are offered in Enterprise and Consultant editions.)

Finally, I have not referred to this as Storage Resource Management (SRM) software because White stressed that Analyze and Virtualize were "complementary to SRM tools for higher-level management" so not actually SRM. Despite this, he said Gartner had included it in its SRM magic quadrant as a "visionary" (and Storage Fusion must have paid for the privilege of being there).

By: Peter Williams, Practice Leader - IT Infrastructure Mgmt., Bloor Research Posted: 8th August 2012 Copyright Bloor Research © 2012

Fast-growing mid-market storage provider Nimble Storage has today announced a clustered scale-out capability which it describes as "scale-to-fit".

Scale-out storage tends to be expensive if it avoids performance degradation (for instance, extra storage controllers may need to be added), but every organisation's mix is different. So Nimble is now offering flexibility through offering system clustering complementing simple disk capacity or performance increases. Data can now be mapped (striped) across multiple arrays. Automatic load balancing is applied as an upgrade is made on the fly without stopping live operation.

Nimble designed its storage solution from scratch to achieve cost-effective storage capacity and performance (not "either/or" as is usually to be expected), together with ease of use. Its design deploys flash at the front end to process the data very fast as well as compress it on the fly to reduce capacity needs. Then, typically, lower cost but higher capacity disks (SAS or SATA) are used for bulk storage - although flash may replace some of these if desired.

By varying these parameters, an individual user can choose the type of upgrade which he thinks will best suit his company; this may involve an in-house upgrade or a new unit from the factory. This also accommodates more VDI deployments and, for instance, those organisations which use a mix of MS Exchange, SQL Server, SharePoint or Oracle - where capacity or performance may be more critical. However, it may be he is not too sure of the effect of such a change before he tries it. So, software to predict his need is also being developed - promised in around two months - and, in the meantime, assistance will be offered by reference to other real-life deployments as a guide.

The degree of scalability, currently to less than 170TBs, means that Nimble will for now remain firmly in the mid-market (i.e. even if it adds more bells and whistles to its offering). Its CS range of models individually offer 8-36TB (x up to four shelves) raw capacity and 160GB-2.4TB of flash. (It is surely little more than a marketing decision to hold capacity at these levels, so this could very easily change if demanded by users.)

The company is less than two years old but already boasts around 600 users and over 1000 installations. (Last year I described Nimble's system architecture and, about six months ago, reported on its very rapid growth path, which shows no sign of slowing.)

Nimble's head of solutions and alliances, Radhika Krishnan, told me that some of the company's main competitors were EMC, (Dell) Equallogic and NetApp - but that Nimble was winning a majority of these bids. She said that concerns over the maturity, availability and support of its products were answered by the positive experiences of existing users.

In this regard, she said nearly all users were remotely connected to Nimble for support and that Nimble did a "heartbeat" check every five minutes as well as analysing comprehensive statistics daily. "This means that 70% of support cases are opened by Nimble" said Krishnan, who added that overall statistics were showing five 9s (99.999%) availability was being achieved among its users.

Watch for more partner agreement announcements in the next few weeks and months. Nimble sells entirely through the channel.

By: Peter Williams, Practice Leader - IT Infrastructure Mgmt., Bloor Research Posted: 19th July 2012 Copyright Bloor Research © 2012

Coraid has today released its new ZX-Series family of NAS servers which integrate with its existing EtherDrive SAN to create a high performance unified (NAS/SAN) storage solution supporting block and file data. It is powered by Oracle Solaris ZFS file system.

At the same time, the company, which began by focusing on SMBs, is pushing up the food chain on the back of massive storage scale-out capability (currently to a theoretical limit of 65,000 racks representing many petabytes (PBs)). This means it is now starting to attack the big data market, for instance, through appropriate channel partners. The need to capture, store and analyse ever-increasing sets of data challenges the scalability limits of legacy NAS systems - and the Coraid architecture offers a way out.

A major plus point is Coraid's use of using ATA over Ethernet (AoE) for data delivery (which I explained when I previously wrote on Coraid last year). This uses Ethernet's own frames and results in flat, connectionless and massively parallel transmission without bottlenecks with 10GbE supported. This is low-cost as well as very simple to manage and, for instance, add more capacity - not least because the total capacity appears to the system as a single disk of direct-attached storage (or V-DAS).Performance is also enhanced by separate read- and write-optimised flash caches.

This is complemented by advanced data protection and capacity efficiency from features such as triple-parity RAID, redundant array of independent nodes (RAIN), active-active clustering option, unlimited snapshots, with clones and replication for data protection, and de-duplication and compression to minimise total capacity.

More interesting going forward (to me at least), is that it sweeps away most of the now superfluous accumulated storage access complexity built into most legacy storage systems, so the company claims a 50% or more reduction in cost versus some of the big vendors.

"V-DAS is easy to grow and reconfigure," CEO Kevin Brown told me last week. "This is diametrically opposed to old storage which was [originally] designed for a couple of big apps; it is well-engineered but over-complicated and expensive. We use 'lego' building blocks."

Not that the company plans to directly take on the big six storage vendors who have 80% of the $30bn market. It has enough on its plate coping with rapidly increasing demand in the rest. (It is anyway likely is that some existing big six users will approach Coraid, initially to try out the technology, and it will make inroads that way.)

Although a fairly recent VC start-up, Coraid now has some 1,500 customers worldwide (about 300 in EMEA) including big names such as Sony, GE, Ford and Samsung. It has grown 10-fold in 2.5 years and added 150 jobs.

Brown was fairly dismissive of some recent solid state disk (SSD)-only start-ups. "Every vendor now has lots of flash. That's not the next big thing. The trick is to take advantage of democratisation. It is not only 'how do you scale incrementally but how do you scale like Amazon does?'" he said - a reference to the flexibility and agility that this lego-block approach provides.

Other applications involving large data sets and massive throughput, which the company sees as appropriate to the ZX-Series, include editing for HD and 3D video formats and consumer behaviour analysis.

In practice, it is now suited to almost every type of workload that uses either block or file data in Windows or Linux - and for clouds in VMware - although there are a few bells and whistles to add (especially for block).

Other Coraid system features include real-time analysis and diagnosis of performance (to help enforce service levels for instance) and automated storage hierarchy with hybrid storage pools (containing DRAM, flash cache, and hard disks). Particularly attractive to mixed system customers, there is multiprotocol integration with secure data sharing between Windows, Linux, and UNIX environments - which the company says is seamless.

Coraid's recent purchase of Yunteq indicates that policy-based automation may be coming down the line. Be assured that the company knows exactly where it's going and why it has every chance of continuing to make great strides.

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 15th June 2012 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2012

Hadoop remains a difficult platform for most enterprises to master. For now skills are still hard to come by – both for data architect or engineer, and especially for data scientists. It still takes too much skill, tape, and baling wire to get a Hadoop cluster together. Not every enterprise is Google or Facebook, with armies of software engineers that they can throw at a problem. With some exceptions, most enterprises don’t deal with data on the scale of Google or Facebook either – but the bar is rising.

If 2011 was the year that the big IT data warehouse and analytic platform brand names discovered Hadoop, 2012 becomes the year where a tooling ecosystem starts emerging to make Hadoop more consumable for the enterprise. Let’s amend that – along with tools, Hadoop must also become a first-class citizen with enterprise IT infrastructure. Hadoop won’t cross over to the enterprise if it has to be treated as some special island. That means meshing with the practices and technology approaches that enterprises are using to manage their data centers or cloud deployments. Like SQL, data integration, virtualization, storage strategy, and so on.

Admittedly, much of this cuts against the grain of early Hadoop deployment that stressed open source and commodity infrastructure. Early adopters did so out of necessity as commercial software ran out of gas for Facebook when its data warehouse daily refreshes were breaking terabyte range, not to mention that the cost of commercial licenses for such scaled out analytic platforms wouldn’t have been trivial. Anyway, Hadoop’s linearity leverages scale out of commodity blades and direct attached disk as far as the eye can see, enabling such an almost pure noncommercial approach. At the time, Google’s, Yahoo’s, and Facebook’s issues were considered rather unique – most enterprise don’t run global search engines – not to mention that their business was built on armies of software engineers.

Something's got to give
As we’ve previously noted, something’s got to give on the skills front. Hadoop in the enterprise faces limits – the data problems are getting bigger and more complex for sure, but resources and skills are far more finite. So we envision tools and solutions addressing two areas:

1. Products that address “clusterophobia” – organizations that seeks the scalable analytics of Hadoop but lack the appetite to erect infinite data centers out in the fields or hire the necessary skillsets. Obviously, using the cloud is one option – but the questions there revolve around whether corporate policies allow maintenance of data off premises, and also, as data store size grows, whether the cloud is still economical.
2. The other side of the coin is consummability – tools that simplify access to and manipulation of the data.

In the run-up to this year’s Hadoop Summit, a number of tooling announcements addressing clusterophobia and consumption are pouring out.

On the fear of clusters side, players like Oracle, EMC Greenplum, and Teradata Aster are already offering appliances that simplify deployment of Hadoop, typically in conjunction with an Advanced SQL analytic platform. While most vendors position this as a way for Hadoop to “extend’ your data warehouse so you perform exploration in Hadoop, but the serious analytics in SQL, we view appliances as more than transitional strategy. The workloads are going to get more equitably distributed, and in the long run, we wouldn’t be surprised to see more Hadoop-only appliances, sort of like Oracle’s (for the record, they also bundle another NoSQL database).

Also addressing the same constituency are storage and virtualization – facts of life in the data center. For Hadoop to cross over to the enterprise, it, too, must get virtualization-friendly. Storage is an open question. The need for virtualization becomes even more apparent because (1) the exploratory nature of Hadoop analytics demands the ability to try out queries offline without having to disrupt or physically build a new cluster; and (2) the variable nature of Hadoop processing suggests that workloads are likely to be elastic. So we’ve been waiting for VMware to make their move. VMware – also part of EMC – has announced a pair of initiatives. First, they are working with the Apache Hadoop project to make the core pieces (HDFS and MapReduce) virtualization-aware, and separately, they are hosting their own open source project (Serengeti) for virtualizing Hadoop clusters. While Project Serengeti is not VM-specific, there’s little doubt that this will be a VMware project (we’d be shocked if the Xen folks were to buy in).

Storage follows
Where there’s virtualized servers, storage often closely follows. A few months back, EMC dropped the other shoe, finally unveiling a strategy for leveraging Isilon with the Greenplum HD platform, the closest thing in NAS that replicates the scale-out model storage model popularized with Hadoop. This opens an argument of whether the scales of data in Hadoop make premium products such as Isilon unaffordable. The flip side however is the “open source tax,” where you hire the skills in your IT organization to manage and deploy scale-out storage, or pay consultants to do it for you.

In the spirit of making Hadoop more consummable, we expect a lot of vibes from new players that are simplifying navigation of Hadoop and building SQL bridges. Datameer is bringing down the pricing of its uber Hadoop spreadsheet to personal and workgroup levels courtesy of entry level pricing from $299 to $2999. Teradata Aster, which already offers a patented framework that translates SQL to MapReduce (there are also others out there) is now taking an early bet on the incubating Apache HCatalog metadata spec so that you could write SQL statements that go up against Hadoop. It joins approaches such as those from Hadapt, which hangs SQL tables from HDFS file nodes, and mainstream BI players such as Jaspersoft, that already provide translators that can grab reports directly from Hadoop.

This doesn’t take away from the evolution of the Hadoop platform itself. Cloudera and Hortonworks are among those releasing new distributions that bundle their own mix of recent and current Apache Hadoop modules. While the Apache project has addressed the NameNode HA issue, it is still early in the game with bringing enterprise-grade manageability to MapReduce. That’s largely an academic issue as the bulk of enterprises have yet to implement Hadoop. By the time enterprises are ready, many of the core issues should resolve — although there will always be questions about the uptake of peripheral Hadoop projects.

What’s more important – and where the action will be – is in tools that allow enterprises to run and, more importantly, consume Hadoop. A chicken and egg situation, enterprises won’t implement before tools are available and vice versa.

This guest post comes courtesy of Tony Baer's OnStrategies blog. Tony is senior analyst at Ovum.

By: Clive Longbottom, Head of Research, Quocirca Posted: 11th June 2012 Copyright Quocirca © 2012

Wind back a couple of years and look at how EMC presented itself to the world at large. It tended to be product-focused and was more interested in touting bigger storage densities rather than much else.

Even though new market entrants were nibbling at its ankles, it tended to be arrogant enough to fall back on an assumption that its customers were locked in to its products. Those who had already bought EMC Symmetrix were more than likely to just buy more of it as space ran out. Buying anything else would lead to too many problems in storage management.

Now look at the recent EMC World 2012 event. Some 15,000 people descending on Las Vegas to listen to Joe Tucci and Pat Gelsinger give voice to what EMC is now and where it is going. Sure, there was lots about product. Apparently EMC launched 42 “new” products—in fact, most were evolutions of existing offerings. However, more interesting was how the overlying messaging is changing.

EMC has been an acquisitive company for many years. Besides hardware acquisitions such as Data General in 1999, it started its software spree in 2003 with Legato, and since then there have been other major acquisitions including Documentum, RSA and VMware.

From a storage point of view, a series of excellent acquisitions—if you want fully managed, secure storage of fully searchable assets across a virtual base, it all makes excellent sense. So then to watch EMC continue with Documentum as a separate division, pretty much to lose Legato for a period of time, to keep RSA as a specialised security company and to spin VMware out from the mothership seemed strange to say the least.

EMC acquisitions bearing fruit
However, now things seem to be coming together at last. The creation of the information intelligence group (IIG) in 2011 is bearing fruit as the RSA and Documentum product lines are united with greater focus on general information management and governance, risk and compliance, and storage management is extended to cover highly virtualised systems more effectively and also to include non-EMC equipment.

But, the biggest change is in the high-level messaging. EMC is, unsurprisingly, a major advocate of the need to be able to deal with big data. However, unlike many vendors who see big data as just a very large database, EMC is looking hard at the aspect of data variety—the different types of data that need to be dealt with, such as semi-structured and unstructured data including document files, voice, and video.

Under an umbrella of object, file and block, EMC is taking these three different types of data storage and pushing the need for different storage engines to create an information-optimised platform for the business.

This approach then brings together what would otherwise be a rather complex portfolio. With a complexity that would stress most people, EMC now offers VMAX, VNX/VNXe, Atmos, Isilon, Centera and Iomega as different storage products, alongside its partner build-your-own accredited approach of VPLEX.

EMC’s portfolio sale
As a portfolio sale, EMC would seem to have a major problem: just what mix of products would be required to meet a given organisation’s requirements?

On top of all of its hardware acquisitions, EMC’s more recent software acquisitions have also been brought to bear. Tools such as Avamar and Data Domain can help with controlling the amount of data under management through data deduplication, as well as Greenplum for big data analytics—along with EMC’s acceptance of the open-source Hadoop platform for unstructured information manipulation.

However, I still worry about how well, and how fast, EMC can move its direct sales force, and particularly its channel, away from a product sell towards a complex solutions sell.

It looks as if EMC will focus on the part of the channel it believes can make the transition fairly easily, but will allow others to continue with a hardware-led sell. This approach could lead to customers being sold the wrong product and to EMC being blamed for the outcome. EMC will have to be very careful.

EMC’s cloud ambition
EMC also wants to be the major storage force in the cloud. This ambition means far more than just being able to present a cost-effective scale-out storage platform.

As cloud storage evolves, it will require greater levels of intelligence, with the right data being presented to the right cloud function from the right storage engine at the right time.

Achieving this goal will involve software that can predict usage effectively—and can move data across high latency connections to meet requirements in real time. EMC seems to understand this need and is working hard to provide tools that will be able to meet these requirements.

EMC is moving away from being just a storage vendor. It has a large software portfolio aimed at providing better management of the data and information held across the storage hardware.

Judging by EMC World 2012, EMC is trying to position itself as a different company. It remains to be seen whether its channel and, more importantly, its customers, understand the change and see EMC as the vendor of choice for their information management needs—and not just storage.

By: Peter Williams, Practice Leader - IT Infrastructure Mgmt., Bloor Research Posted: 31st May 2012 Copyright Bloor Research © 2012

Virsto's software-only solution to tackle storage problems in virtual environments must work. Had it not performed, investing in a XenDesktop version would not make sense, because virtual desktop infrastructures (VDIs) pose greater performance challenges even than virtual servers.

When I first reviewed Virsto last autumn I saw a promising "up-start" proving its solution on Microsoft Hyper-V with a VMware ESX implementation due a couple of months later (since released). Last week, barely six months on, I talked to a company with around 100 customers and now a XenDesktop version.

The Virsto deploy wizard supports XenDesktop 5.5 on VMware ESX/ESXi 4.1 and ESXi 5.0. (Virsto already supports vSphere VDI and Hyper-V VDI.)

So what are the VDI performance issues? First, VDIs tend to generate more write contention than virtual servers through having many more virtual machines (VMs) per host. Then, there is a much greater fluctuation between normal and peak traffic because of simultaneous boot, login, application loading and logout situations at the start and end of the day ("boot storms"). Add to this a greater difficulty in provisioning correct capacity per desktop and, for Windows virtual desktops, the need for a dedicated local disk.

Virsto installs on VMware as a virtual appliance that looks like a virtual machine disk (VMDK); this produces fixed performance and thin-provisioned VMs, with each VM having a Virsto virtual disk (vDisk). This process bypasses the native VMFS. Virsto's VP of marketing, Gregg Holzrichter, politely described VMFS as "not optimal" and said that the space-efficient Virsto vClones use up to 90% less storage capacity with best performance. "Virsto achieves the highest performance bar none", Holzrichter claimed. (I previous described some of the other technology aimed at fast throughput and easy deployment.)

The proof is in the pudding of course. As the number and size of users grows, figures will prove that either way versus the competition and the extent to which that is true for each hypervisor Virsto now supports. I also expect implementation of its first seven-figure order (a so far unnamed client) to provide some telling performance figures.

Related performance claims for Virsto on XenDesktop include an expected doubling of the number of desktops per host, an increase to 90% storage utilisation, Virsto snapshots and clones using native workflows to make provisioning and backup easily scale, and all with transparent VDI management.

So why the VDI market push, as the VDI market is smaller than that for servers? Holzrichter agreed that the VMware server storage market remained its biggest opportunity, but pointed to some user research that showed 67% of organisations asked planning to go for VDI usage in the coming year. In other words, he saw 2012 as the real take-off year for VDI. Virsto is now well placed to exploit this.

A lot of this is about saving money (CAPEX and OPEX) - for instance through minimising admin staff and investment in new hardware, which is what Virsto is about. So far, Virsto's expansion has been overwhelmingly in the US, as development took priority over widening its markets. Now Virsto is beginning a European push - and potential cost-savings will surely be a high priority here. 

By: Peter Williams, Practice Leader - IT Infrastructure Mgmt., Bloor Research Posted: 21st May 2012 Copyright Bloor Research © 2012

Each of the many new storage start-ups has a different angle on performance and capacity plus virtualisation support - and where in the food-chain to pitch its solutions - which can be confusing to potential buyers. Some approaches are smarter than others - and I think VC start-up Tegile Systems deserves a mention.

Data protection companies typically offer comparatively expensive SSDs to assist super-fast data access and leave spinning disk to handle high storage capacity. They also store the data and the metadata that describes it together (which tends to fragment as data is changed or moved).Tegile (think "technology" plus "agile") organises things very differently for its Zebi storage arrays.

It has deeply embedded its SSDs to extend the cache to a massive 800-1200GB (1.2TB) while retaining 2TB SAS (7200RPM) disk. Storage data is auto-tiered. An ASIC is used to separate the metadata so it can be stored separately, while a RAM-based metadata engine makes data access much faster. The icing on the cake is that Tegile has developed technology to de-duplicate and (optionally) compresses the data in-line as received; this cache-based process achieves a massively reduced storage footprint for live data without performance loss.

So Tegile claims it can achieve seven times the performance of more traditional storage solutions at the same time as reducing the storage footprint by 75% (also obviating the need for de-dupe during backup). However, this prompted my obvious question about system crash data risks.

The answer from Tegile Systems' VP of marketing Rob Commins exposed further design features: "The system mirrors the data, through dual active-active controllers, and there is an asynchronous copy written to spinning disk; so there are always three copies of data."

That part sounds a little expensive, but Commins said that the Zebi arrays were performance competitive with high-end arrays with low latency and thin provisioning (from vendors such as HP 3PAR), yet typically cost about 10% of these. Referring to the "traditional NAS/SAN market" (competing with EMC, NetAPP and HP for instance) he said, "We are replacing them every day."

There is also flexibility. The Zebi arrays support NAS and SAN together, block protocols on Fibre Channel and iSCSI, and NFS and CIFS file protocols in NAS environments. This enables Tegile to compete in several mid-market segments - and not least to assist organisations using a mix of these who want to remove their storage silos.

Also integrated are snapshot and remote replication functionality, the latter only transmitting data changes to minimise WAN traffic. This obviates the need for separate backup software or backup windows. This combination of features  also makes storage array management a doddle versus many legacy solutions.

Commins said Tegile Systems beat the new "all-flash" storage vendors on price and could be twice as fast as smaller peer storage vendor solutions who typically provided only a passive second controller.

The Zebi arrays are now going through VMware vCenter approval, which Commins recognises is vitally important. "VMware on NFS is very expensive, but we can plug in as NFS now" he said. He admitted that there was still work to do on snapshot integration in virtualised environments, primarily VMware (probably to be completed as part of the vCenter approval), MS Exchange and Oracle - to be done this year. Conversely, the architecture will allow SAS to be replaced by SSD very easily if (or when) SSD pricing reduces sufficiently.

I was less convinced by the company's approach as it begins marketing internationally, including here in the UK, but using a mix of direct and channel. However, I think I now understand why investors felt able to stump up $10m in extra VC funding just last month. I shall be watching Tegile with interest.

[There are three Zebi array packages: 1) Entry level, usually only as a test box (only one controller so a single point of failure) 10TB raw capacity but 30-50TB of data (de-duped), 2) 30TB raw achieving 30-50K IOPs - used especially in server virtualisation to enhance performance, 3) 20TB raw but achieving 75K IOPs - used more for VDI as higher performance is typically needed.]

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 11th May 2012 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2012

The speed of business has never been faster, and leaders will continue to need to be ever-more responsive, ever-more able to react to customers before and better than the competition.

Data centers—the information engines behind modern businesses—must do whatever it takes to make businesses lean, agile and intelligent as they innovate and excel in their fast-changing markets.

Modern support services therefore need to be able to empower the workers and IT personnel alike to maintain peak control over data centers, and to keep the systems and processes performing reliably at lowest cost.

Live discussion
On May 15 in a free, online, live multimedia "Expert Chat," I'll be interviewing Tommaso Esmanech, Director of Automation Strategies at HP Technology Services. We'll also be taking live questions from the online audience. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

In this free discussion (registration required), hear recommendations from Esmanech on improving support, the new spectrum of support options and details on how HP is revolutionizing support to offer new innovations in support automation.

View a video on what to expect during the event.

Moreover, throughout the presentation, the live audience will pose questions on IT support services, automated support and remote support for an on-hand live panel to respond to.

Register now as seats are limited for this free HP Expert Chat

By: Clive Longbottom, Head of Research, Quocirca Posted: 9th May 2012 Copyright Quocirca © 2012

As the financial climate cooled, Quocirca came across more and more organisations that sang the same song – do more with less, and batten down the hatches of expenditure to ride out the crisis.

Part of the response back from IT on this was to keep assets for longer that they would normally do; “sweating” them to try and gain more value from them before assigning them to the great scrapheap in the sky.

However, older assets can have multiple problems.  They may lack the raw power to meet the needs of the business’ workload requirements.  There may be more failures at the equipment level and a lack of spares with which to replace the failed parts.  Energy usage may be many times more than modern equipment.

Yet, the cost of forklift upgrading hardware is still perceived as being too high – and then there is the cost of equipment disposal to take into account as well.  Securely disposing of IT equipment can be a complex task.  Most pieces of IT equipment – from servers and storage systems, through networking routers and edge of network appliances to individual end points, as well as printers and multi-function devices – will have some form of data storage built in.  This may be via nicely accessibly disk drives, may be in reasonably easily identifiable flash storage cards, or could be hidden within the systems as flash or on-chip memory stores.  Ensuring that all the data stored on different types of devices is securely disposed of can be a task that seems overwhelming and so puts off replacement.  Even when a device has reached a complete end of life, many organisations do a bad job of ensuring that what is thrown out (or disposed of via the waste electronic and electrical equipment (WEEE) directive) is truly done in a secure manner.

To the rescue comes IT lifecycle management, or ITLM.  Although this has been talked about in the past, the main thrust has just been on managing the lifecycle of IT equipment from acquisition through to end of life on a provide and disposal basis.  Now, however, there is a different way of looking at ITLM, taking into account that IT equipment has a curve of inherent value that can be used to an organisation’s benefit.

For example, for the sake of argument, assume that a piece of IT equipment costs £10,000 brand new.  The organisation may write the piece of equipment off over 4 years, using a straight line model.  Therefore, after 12 months, it will have a book value of £7,500, after two year, £5,000 and so on down to zero after 5 years.

But this does not reflect the real actual value of the equipment.  Taking it out of the box, putting it back in the box and selling it on as second hand would probably lower the “inherent value” to, say, £7,000.  As the equipment ages, the inherent value will then drop away in a curve similar to many other goods, such as a car.  In the early days, it is likely to see a relatively fast drop in inherent value which then begins to level out over time.  However, the introduction of new models of the equipment may introduce step changes in the value of the equipment as buyers stop looking to buy this equipment, instead looking to the new model.

As can be seen, this more realistic inherent value model is completely at odds with the book value model.

Now look at this in relation to trying to sweat assets.  The longer you hold an asset, the less its value will be – both at the book and inherent levels.  By being able to intelligently identify the moment at which the inherent value and the incremental business value of new equipment cross over, the costs of maintaining an optimised business IT platform are lowered to the best possible point.

A good ITLM partner should be able to identify this sweet spot for your organisation.  Not only this, but they should also be able to optimise the inherent value through helping to identify the best options for disposal – this may be to hold them for further use, or it could be to directly repurpose the item for resale, or to strip down for parts.  The partner should also be able to offer a range of services for secure data disposal – from over-writing through to maceration of disk drives to the point where data restoration is impossible.  Even where this is carried out, the cost of such secure disposal should be able to be offset somewhat through the scrap value of macerated disk drives – each contains a fair amount of precious and rare earth metals that have considerable value in the market.

A full and proper ITLM approach allows a business to manage its total IT platform to provide the best platform for the business’ use.  It is not about sweating assets, but it is about ensuring that the right equipment is in the right place at the right time – and at the right cost.

Quocirca has a free report that provides a model for organisations to adopt when looking at applying ITLM for their business.  The report can be downloaded free of charge here.

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 1st May 2012 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2012

This guest post comes courtesy of Tony Baer's OnStrategies blog. Tony is senior analyst at Ovum.

Of the 3 “V’s” of Big Data – volume, variety, velocity (we’d add “Value” as the 4th V) – velocity has been the unsung ‘V.’ With the spotlight on Hadoop, the popular image of Big Data is large petabyte data stores of unstructured data (which are the first two V’s). While Big Data has been thought of as large stores of data at rest, it can also be about data in motion.

“Fast Data” refers to processes that require lower latencies than would otherwise be possible with optimized disk-based storage. Fast Data is not a single technology, but a spectrum of approaches that process data that might or might not be stored. It could encompass event processing, in-memory databases, or hybrid data stores that optimize cache with disk.

Fast Data is nothing new, but because of the cost of memory, was traditionally restricted to a handful of extremely high-value use cases. For instance:

• Wall Street firms routinely analyze live market feeds, and in many cases, run sophisticated complex event processing (CEP) programs on event streams (often in real time) to make operational decisions.
• Telcos have handled such data in optimizing network operations while leading logistics firms have used CEP to optimize their transport networks.
• In-memory databases, used as a faster alternative to disk, have similarly been around for well over a decade, having been employed for program stock trading, telecommunications equipment, airline schedulers, and large destination online retail (e.g., Amazon).

Hybrid in-memory and disk have also become commonplace, especially amongst data warehousing systems (e.g., Teradata, Kognitio), and more recently among the emergent class of advanced SQL analytic platforms (e.g., Greenplum, Teradata Aster, IBM Netezza, HP Vertica, ParAccel) that employ smart caching in conjunction with a number of other bells and whistles to juice SQL performance and scaling (e.g., flatter indexes, extensive use of various data compression schemes, columnar table structures, etc.).

Many of these systems are in turn packaged as appliances that come with specially tuned, high-performance backplanes and direct attached disk.

Finally, caching is hardly unknown to the database world. Hot spots of data that are frequently accessed are often placed in cache, as are snapshots of database configurations that are often stored to support restore processes, and so on.

So what’s changed?
The usual factors: the same data explosion that created the urgency for Big Data is also generating demand for making the data instantly actionable. Bandwidth, commodity hardware and, of course, declining memory prices, are further forcing the issue: Fast Data is no longer limited to specialized, premium use cases for enterprises with infinite budgets.

Not surprisingly, pure in-memory databases are now going mainstream: Oracle and SAP are choosing in-memory as one of the next places where they are establishing competitive stakes: SAP HANA vs. Oracle Exalytics.

Both Oracle and SAP for now are targeting analytic processing, including OLAP (by raising the size limits on OLAP cubes) and more complex, multi-stage analytic problems that traditionally would have required batch runs (such as multivariate pricing) or would not have been run at all (too complex, too much delay).

More to the point, SAP is counting on HANA as a major pillar of its stretch goal to become the #2 database player by 2015, which means expanding HANA’s target to include next generation enterprise transactional applications with embedded analytics.

Potential use cases for Fast Data could encompass:

• A homeland security agency monitoring the borders requiring the ability to parse, decipher, and act on complex occurrences in real time to prevent suspicious people from entering the country
• Capital markets trading firms requiring real-time analytics and sophisticated event processing to conduct algorithmic or high-frequency trades
• Entities managing smart infrastructure which must digest torrents of sensory data to make real-time decisions that optimize use of transportation or public utility infrastructure
• B2B consumer products firms monitoring social networks may require real-time response to understand sudden swings in customer sentiment

For such organizations, Fast Data is no longer a luxury, but a necessity.

More specialized use cases are similarly emerging now that the core in-memory technology is becoming more affordable. YarcData, a startup from venerable HPC player Cray Computer, is targeting graph data, which represents data with many-to-many relationships. Graph computing is extremely process-intensive, and as such, has traditionally been run in batch when involving Internet-size sets of data. YarcData adopts a classic hybrid approach that pipelines computations in memory, but persisting data to disk. YarcData is the tip of the iceberg – we expect to see more specialized applications that utilize hybrid caching that combine speed with scale.

Memory’s not the new disk
The movement – or tiering – of data to faster or slower media is also nothing new. What is new is that data in memory may no longer be such a transient thing, and if memory is relied upon for in situ processing of data in motion or rapid processing of data at rest, memory cannot simply be treated as the new disk. Excluding specialized forms of memory such as ROM, by nature anything that’s solid state is volatile: there goes your power… and there goes your data.

Not surprisingly, in-memory systems such as HANA still replicate to disk to reduce volatility. For conventional disk data stores that increasingly leverage memory, Storage Switzerland’s George Crump makes the case that caching practices must become smarter to avoid misses (where data gets mistakenly swapped out).

There are also balance of system considerations: memory may be fast, but is its processing speed well matched with the processor? Maybe solid state overcomes I/O issues associated with disk, but may still be vulnerable to coupling issues if processors get bottlenecked or MapReduce jobs are not optimized.

Declining memory process are putting Fast Data on the fast lane to mainstream. But as the technology is now becoming affordable, we’re still early in the learning curve for how to design for it.

By: Peter Williams, Practice Leader - IT Infrastructure Mgmt., Bloor Research Posted: 30th April 2012 Copyright Bloor Research © 2012

Bocada has announced vpConnect, a data protection service management (DPSM) solution which integrates virtual and physical environments - the industry's first.

It achieves this by bringing together Bocada Prism with its recently released Bocada Vision. Prism provides in-depth physical backup and recovery reporting and analysis while Vision correlates information in VMware vCenter virtual environments with backup application activity. vpConnect correlates its data protection activities in both environments, providing visibility and analysis of both together through a single display.

Why this matters is that storage virtualisation plays alongside server virtualisation as enterprises move towards achieving greater business agility. However, enterprises cannot and do not virtualise all environments at once. This means they introduce an extra complexity as they must now manage a mix of physical and virtual data protection. The bigger the enterprise the greater is the potential problem.

Bocada cites a recent survey finding from Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) that 62% of organisations implement separate applications to protect physical and virtual environments. This is unsurprising. Widespread adoption of storage virtualisation is a recent phenomenon and virtualised data protection solutions required separate development from the long-entrenched physical backup and recovery software.

When virtual and physical environments are managed by unconnected solutions, this adds to administration time and costs. It also creates difficulties in trying to ensure full protection and in identifying from where to recover in the event of a fault - and there is an increased risk of not meeting SLA and other compliance requirements.

However, and if done well, combining these two functions should reduce overall administration and troubleshooting time for the backup and storage environment.

To simplify administrator operation and analysis, vpConnect includes navigation between dashboards that correlate virtual and physical backup results in various reports. Executive-level overviews are also available for presenting to customers and management. The software is also agentless, making it quick and easy to deploy.

In a partial VMware environment, Bocada Vision correlates information from vCenter with backup application activity to provide a detailed view of virtual machine (VM) data protection. This will, for instance, confirm whether the VMs are fully protected, capacity is being utilised efficiently and that backups are not interfering with VM throughput.

Existing customers can upgrade from Bocada Vision or Prism through a simple licence key change.

I understand that the range of data protection solutions monitored by vpConnect includes: Backup Exec, NetBackup and PureDisk (Symantec), Avamar and Networker (EMC), Data Protector (HP), TSM (IBM), SnapVault and SnapMirror (Netapp), Backup & Replication (Veeam), vRanger Pro (Quest), vCenter, Data Recovery (VMware).

Bocada, which claims to be the world's leading provider of data protection management software, also created DPSM.

By: Peter Williams, Practice Leader - IT Infrastructure Mgmt., Bloor Research Posted: 23rd April 2012 Copyright Bloor Research © 2012

Condusiv Technologies has today announced Diskeeper 12, the Windows-based storage performance software for servers and operating systems including for desktops and laptops.

Condusiv, until March 2012 known as Diskeeper Corporation, has some 40 million licences worldwide for its flagship Diskeeper software which prevents and removes de-fragmentation. So version 12 presents a very large upgrade revenue opportunity for the channel partners! Moreover, there are arguably no direct competitors for this software which can be installed then left to run in the background with minimal overhead.

Diskeeper's Intelliwrite software is unique in that it intercepts and thereby prevents fragmentation at the Windows level, so applications and storage systems read and write at peak performance from the outset; this also extends disk drive life. (Files get ever more fragmented when modified, slowing down retrieval and output and putting a greater burden on the operating system and storage devices.)

Diskeeper technology also helps reclaim free space from thin provisioned volumes to maximise storage utilisation. This can improve database performance, speed backups, and maximise efficiency for all storage including solid state disks (SSDs) and SANs.

Other defragmentation solutions (including Windows' own one) don't offer an intercept capability and lack other features. Windows 8 will, reportedly, reduce fragmentation; but Condusiv's EMEA marketing and channel alliance director Scott Thomas recently assured me that Diskeeper would still boost performance - and this will anyway occur through a host of new features in version 12.

These include: an advanced new user interface with simplified navigation and drill-down architecture, new HyperBoot to improve system boot time, enhanced HyperFast with TRIM to improve SSD performance and longevity, and CogniSAN that detects and optimises resource usage in a shared storage system (e.g. a SAN) by obviating competition for resources.

Also new is System Monitoring that collects system environment activity and reports statistical information on system I/O usage, disk state - and Diskeeper's own effectiveness which, assuming this looks good, provides a visual record of the ongoing value to the user! A statistical summary is also gathered for system performance monitoring.

The re-branding brought with it a new slogan "Think faster" (one up on IBM's famous "Think"). The above features help explain what we can expect in future products and releases - boosting personal productivity as well as system performance. More new products are promised for later this year - and expect a new, easier-to-use, version of its Undelete software imminently.  

Thomas also said that Condusiv's direction was also towards more support for virtualisation and the cloud. This is reflected in its recently-released V-locity 3, which monitors otherwise unused resources that sit between individual virtual machines (VMs). Agentless, it can optimise this resource usage to, for instance, eliminate unnecessary I-O queues and achieve faster reads, backups and scans - automatically enhancing VMware and Hyper-V platform performance. As such it is complementary to Diskeeper for virtual machine environments.

Diskeeper Versions… 

Diskeeper Server Edition is for application performance in Windows server operating systems (WinServer 2008 R2, 2003 and Windows Small Business Server 2011); Diskeeper Professional Edition optimises application and storage performance on business desktops and laptops (Windows 7, Vista and XP); Diskeeper Administrator Edition provides centralised management of Diskeeper operations on all machines in a network - installing, configuring, monitoring and updating, with email reports and alerts produced. They use 100MB of available hard drive space. There is also Diskeeper Home supporting Windows 7 (Home Premium, Ultimate), Vista (Home Basic, Home Premium, Ultimate), XP (Home, Professional).

By: Peter Williams, Practice Leader - IT Infrastructure Mgmt., Bloor Research Posted: 30th March 2012 Copyright Bloor Research © 2012

Every now and then technology advances allow us to re-think how we do things - and Fusion-io is building a business by taking a radically new approach to high-speed data access using NAND flash.

We are now used to solid state disk (SSD) typically utilising DRAM for extra fast "tier zero" storage access; it pretends to the software that it is another spinning disk drive so can be integrated into existing systems fairly seamlessly. But Fusion-io - and especially co-founder Rick White,  Steve Wozniak (now chief scientist) and CEO David Flynn - saw this as highly inefficient.

"We are different from everyone else," Flynn told me. "They see NAND as a disk drive substitute whereas we see it as memory." The background is that Wozniak once identified five layers of logic for storage access, then realised that four out of the five could be removed by treating flash chips as memory instead.

For instance, the I-O scheduler and the software for it can be removed, with no SCSI or ATA interface. There is then less complexity, less cost and more reliability - and the ability to program the chip.

Conversely, there is new complexity because the system has to recognise and drive a different type of device; but the proof of the pudding has come in staggering throughput. Fusion-io's ioDrive2 product and its "auto-commit memory system" was demonstrated early this year executing a billion inputs-outputs per second (IOPS) using a rack of just eight servers!

So, you may then ask, why did they go for NAND flash when raw DRAM speed is actually greater? First, recent development means NAND now holds 100 times DRAM capacity in the same space (translating, for example, to 1.6TB versus 16MB) so it costs far less per MB; secondly, it is non-volatile so that no power is needed to retain the data - reducing running costs and heat output.

A more complex debate is whether NAND also achieves greater reliability than DRAM, but Flynn anyway explained Fusion-io's built-in adaptive flash-back data-loss protection, which compensated for chip failure writing data across the chip.

Notice, however, that I did not say it directly replaces storage (even SSD). Flynn explained Fusion-io's product positioning; of the two purposes to storage - i) to retain it through time (capacity and data management) and ii) delivery to the microprocessor (access performance) - Fusion-io is firmly focused on the second.

The speed of server microprocessors nowadays means that waiting on disk (achieving only 10s of accesses per second) is an age, he said; conversely, NAND allows millionths of a second for access. At such speeds even the operating system gets in the way to slow things down. So the Fusion-io boffins (including core Linux architects for instance) made the NAND storage look like a non-volatile memory add-on but nevertheless mapped it as data. "Now we are restoring data supply speed to match processor speed," Flynn said.

This impacts the way Fusion-io supplies its products. Typically, it supplies solutions based around 'ioMemory' (that uses ioDrive2) and 'ioCache', and software such as 'ioTurbine' (which drops into VMware environments) to OEMs. This can range from creating sizzling multi-terabyte database performance to greater consolidation of virtual servers (because NAND can provide far more capacity in a physical server than DRAM caching). Fusion-io is building a reseller channel, but the resellers will typically sell these pre-built solutions.

The barriers to market-entry for potential competitors are high because of very advanced technical knowhow and skills (not to mention some patents); Flynn explained that the technical problems being addressed were non-trivial and operating system-related.

However the potential market size is huge and Flynn's simplistic summary of the value proposition is: "We get two times the performance at two times less price." When substantiated that is pretty compelling and may be seen as a threat by some big server and storage vendors. The fact is, Fusion-io's solutions can reduce the amount of equipment and the number of software licences used - what some call a "utility multiplier"; so, don't be surprised if they throw in some marketing FUD.

May I be so bold as to suggest that this technological approach points the way forward for computing itself.

By: Peter Williams, Practice Leader - IT Infrastructure Mgmt., Bloor Research Posted: 12th March 2012 Copyright Bloor Research © 2012

Storage Fusion, a small UK-based storage consultancy, has big ambitions based around a useful piece of software. Storage Resource Analysis (SRA) is a tool that automates discovery and assessment of an enterprise's storage infrastructure. Now it has announced its SRA Consultant Edition, providing a SaaS solution which can be used by systems vendors, resellers or systems integrators (SIs) - around the world.

The software creates a set of reports specifically for storage consultants; these include a new topology view of the complete storage infrastructure, which recognises the installed storage and networking provided by most leading equipment vendors.

Storage Fusion will not directly sell this edition of the software. For resellers, it will typically provide the software under a subscription-based agreement whereby Storage Fusion is paid each time the reseller runs the software at a potential client or existing customer site (or it can buy a bundle of, say, 20 licences at a go). By this means, the reseller can use SRA as a tool to help boost its revenues and gain access to new potential clients.

For instance, it can offer a storage health-check as a service to any business (i.e. whether or not charging for its initial assessment). Equally important is that running the software is non-disruptive and agentless, requiring no hardware or software to be installed on-site. The company says the software will, on average, complete its discovery operation in two hours, the rapid results facilitating a quick ROI.

According to Storage Fusion's operations manager Peter White, "There is always something it finds, whether it's capacity issues, the need to expand tiered storage, thin provisioning reclaiming of storage or virtualisation." So a reseller can use it to demonstrate where an infrastructure change would improve performance and/or capacity and reduce running costs.

White acknowledged that there was no such thing as perfect measurement software but stressed that this was very good - and particularly suited to datacentres holding upwards of 50TB of storage that were notoriously hard to assess by manual means. Conversely, as its pricing relates to the size of the storage infrastructure to be assessed, it will be an especially low cost option for assessing much smaller businesses with straightforward networks.

Storage system vendors would likewise typically run the check for potential or existing customers, especially for those not happy with current system performance, to expose the shortcomings. SIs may use the software as a tool in their armoury to help guide their proposed or actual integration process. The software may also be included within a reseller portal for instance.

Some large vendors who also offer enterprise-level network management may dismiss an approach which (for now at least) largely ignores the server part of the infrastructure. Yet administrators concerned with storage want straightforward and fast answers - with the storage focus meaning that reports may be clearer and more appropriate for them. Equally, the software is vendor-independent in its assessment, so some leading vendors may not always like the results it throws up. (White revealed that one leading storage hardware vendor was already using the software internally.)

Storage Fusion provides some "train the trainer" instruction for the resellers and others to get the most out of the software, and telephone hotline support; so it sees no need to set up its own offices around the world. So its R&D can remain heavily focused on adding feature-functionality to the software. This, White told me, was a major factor in ensuring Storage Fusion would continue to offer superior feature-functionality and stay ahead of any potential competitors.

What is fairly certain is that this approach is far more efficient and productive than using long-established storage resource management (SRM) tools. So there is no obvious reason why White's expectation that SRA Consultant Edition will be carried by vendors, SIs and resellers around the world will not come to pass - giving Storage Fusion a presence in every country in which it develops good partner relations. Its immediate challenge now is to get itself better known to make that happen without overstretching its own resources.

By: Peter Williams, Practice Leader - IT Infrastructure Mgmt., Bloor Research Posted: 8th March 2012 Copyright Bloor Research © 2012

Nexsan today launched the next generation of its FASTier storage systems, the NST5000 Series, including SSD cache and processing that it says triples random I-O performance for both SAS and SATA drives. With SAS previously producing three times SATA performance, an upgrade from SATA to SAS could bring nine times the previous data throughput.

Alternatively, as 7200 RPM SATA has five times the capacity of 15,000 RPM SAS (3TB versus 600 MB), an upgraded performance SATA drive could maintain SAS-level performance while multiplying capacity if that is the priority. SSD is also offered for further tier zero performance.

Total capacity in the three NST5000 models ranges from 8TB to over 1PB, and synchronous and asynchronous replication is supported. The NST5100 (8-93TB) uses a 4U high stand-alone unit, while Nexsan's E60X modular 4U chassis housing 60 drives is used by the NST5300 (9-720TB in up to 4 units) and NST5500 (9-1080TB/1.08PB with 360 SATA drives in 6 units).

Its new "unified storage" capability optionally adds simultaneous support for iSCSI and NAS (CIFS/NFS) through one NAS head, also allowing a later upgrade for dedicated iSCSI or NAS users. Notably, fibre channel (FC) plays no part (whereas it is supported on the existing E5000 range); this may reflect the fact that Nexsan is primarily focused on the mid-market where there will be little FC interest going forward.

Nexsan's feature-function-performance advance could stir the likes of EMC, Dell and NetApp to respond. For instance, Vicki Grey, Nexsan's senior VP of marketing, emphasised a disk density advantage, with a 20U high NST5000 system yielding as much capacity as an EMC VNX5500 (22U), Dell EqualLogic (26U), NetApp FAS3240 (43U) or Dell Compellent (also 43U).

Not that these competitors are unaware of Nexsan. The company has now been growing quietly for nearly 13 years, and recently passed 10,000 customers (28,600 systems) across 60 countries. I know it is viewed as solid and reliable; Grey gave me the results of a large user survey which seemed to bear that out, showing a 96% satisfaction level.

So where does the huge random I-O throughput boost come from? It could not only be from caching. A big factor is surely that Nexsan now directs writes into a journal on DDR3 DRAM, from where the data is "drained" as it is applied to the storage. This technique, used by the biggest databases, was recently introduced by another storage vendor with similarly dramatic performance results in a virtualised environment.

Shared storage access through multiple VMs makes reading and writing a much more randomised operation, and disk latency can potentially cripple throughput. So I expect this sort of approach to become the norm before too long.

Grey explained that the high disk density also meant lower costs in cabling (also more reliable), DC floor space and energy usage (power and cooling). This will certainly attract administrators looking to boost performance but not costs.

A greatly expanded iSCSI feature set supports up to 64 iSCSI LUNs in a SAN accelerated by the FASTier cache - with thin provisioning and non-disruptive capacity upgrade while system is in use (no downtime) supported. Other features include application consistent snapshots for Windows servers (Microsoft VSS Hardware Provider), scheduled or manually-controlled snapshots for Linux and UNIX servers, and security features including LUN masking, CHAP and iSNS.

Other NST5000 configuration stats: 4-24 Intel Xeon cores, up to 12 dedicated RAID engines, 12-192GB DDR3 DRAM (running the operating system and the I-O cache), with FASTier main cache held on 16 SSDs on the SAS bus (up to 3TB) accessible by both controllers. US recommended pricing is also competitive - from $16,000 (NST5100), $87,000 (NST5300) and $111,000 (NST5500). Nexsan sells entirely through the channel.

By: Peter Williams, Practice Leader - IT Infrastructure Mgmt., Bloor Research Posted: 28th February 2012 Copyright Bloor Research © 2012

Xsigo Systems, so far the only networking vendor to offer open virtualised connection between servers and storage, has now added Xsigo Performance Manager. Users can now watch traffic flows between physical and virtual servers and storage or other local and remote network-attached devices.

As I indicated in my review of the company last September, my view is that the Xsigo virtual cabling approach covering both fibre channel (FC) and Ethernet is an absolute must if enterprises are to reach the goal of being truly agile. In fact, as long as there are no obvious negatives - and I can't see any for the mid-market upwards - my question is: "Why wouldn't you take this route?"

The new plug-in to Xsigo XMS Management fills an important gap as it allows administrators to watch in detail all I-O traffic across all attached resources. Among its facilities are: a single pane consolidated view of data traffic across all server, virtual machine, storage and networking resources, more granular views ranging from individual ports to entire physical servers, a mix of FC and Ethernet, collection of historical data over a specific time period (hours/days/months) with comparison between older and newer data used to produce trend analyses.

Speaking to CEO Lloyd Carney a few days ago, I asked him why others were not coming in as competitors to Xsigo's "so obvious" approach. He pointed out that the hardware, which included some complex ASICs, had required a high degree of upfront investment - so that, for instance, 48 simultaneous conversations could now be accommodated on one physical cable along with supporting a mix of FC (4/8Gb) and Ethernet (1/10Gb) traffic.

Also, those companies with the needed know-how as well as deep pockets to invest - the big switch and network infrastructure vendors - would undermine their own equipment market if they introduced a Xsigo-type solution that obviated a lot of their devices. So what they were doing for now was providing solutions requiring their own equipment to reside at both ends of the network as well as in the middle; but Carney said they could not compete on cost and flexibility - or, tellingly, even on performance.

These companies also have little incentive to provide traffic monitoring solutions covering a Xsigo virtual network - so Xsigo had little choice but to address this directly for itself. (Xsigo does provide an open API so that, for instance, Tivoli or CA could include monitoring within their own tools.)

Aside from the agility aspect, the biggest reason for a huge increase in sales during last year - tripled revenue and a 300% increase to 260 customers - is the potential for massive capex and opex cost savings among users with a large number of virtual server connections - covering "east-west" (e.g. inter-server) as well as "north-south" (e.g. server to remote storage) transmission. There is the removal of costly physical switch and router equipment and firewalls (replaced by virtual routing and firewalls) and oodles of cabling; the knock-on effect is big energy savings through power and heat output/cooling reductions. Carney estimated about 10W was saved per power cable with an unexpected bonus being that less cabling produced improved airflow.

So, in these cash-strapped times, Xsigo's channel partners can invariably show potential customers a very rapid ROI which is easy to explain. As a start-up, Xsigo initially had challenges getting cooperation in getting certification for equipment provided by competing vendors. Now, according to Carney, users wanting their equipment certified provide the necessary push.

On the horizon this year is a new virtualised server fabric for the Xsigo VP780 I-O director box, with Carney hinting that it would run four times faster (expected in April) plus a further boost to connection links, up from 40 to 56Gb/s (in the summer). Currently one box officially supports 250 simultaneous virtual connections (and up to four boxes can be clustered), although Carney said it had been tested to 300 with one customer running considerably more. So watch these limits rocket this year.

Frankly, I cannot see why, in time, any sensible business would fail to follow this simple networking route towards an agile system - with the big network equipment vendors eventually facing up to providing a similarly open solution or watching as their market shares collapse. As for Xsigo, the future surely looks very bright.

By: Peter Williams, Practice Leader - IT Infrastructure Mgmt., Bloor Research Posted: 21st February 2012 Copyright Bloor Research © 2012

Nimble has proven to be an appropriate name for this 2008 storage start-up that must already be annoying companies such as EMC and Dell in the mid-range. Despite these recessionary times, Nimble has posted record growth and revenue and now claims to be the fastest growing computer storage company in history.

Last October, when I was introduced to Nimble Storage, the company's technological innovation impressed me enough that I suggested it would be a game changer for the storage mid-market. So, last month, when I met with Nimble Storage CEO Suresh Vasudevan, we talked less about the technology than about how far the company had come and whether it could fulfil what I saw as major potential in the coming months and years.

I will skip regurgitating how its patented Cache Accelerated Sequential Layout (CASL) architecture works (as you can read the previous article). The one exception is to mention that a then-missing element, scale-out connectivity, is now in beta - which means the ability to group multiple arrays without hardware changes is almost here. This is needed to enable expansion with more flexibility for growing mid-sized businesses pushing into the larger enterprise bracket.

Let me instead give you what I think are reasonably jaw-dropping statistics: Q4 2011 growth was 500% over the same quarter in 2010 and 80% more than the previous quarter - which translates to Nimble adding 100 new customers - spread across verticals including medical, retail, government, financial and legal. Vasudevan told me that Service Providers (SPs) were using Nimble for disaster recovery (DR) services, while Citrix XenServer certification had boosted desktop VDI deployments, which particularly benefited from Nimble's variable length IOPs capabilities. A high percentage of these sales were in EMC environments, he said.

So it is no surprise that its most recent round of VC funding was over-subscribed. This helped fund expansion into new offices in Vancouver and Toronto (Canada), London, Amsterdam and Hamburg, with employee numbers rising from 38 to 150 in a year. Expressed another way, the number of US sales teams went from three to 19 in a year - and Vasudevan told me that the three new sales teams in Europe could likewise expand to 19 in 2012.

Nimble Storage sells entirely through channel partners. So sales partly reflect resellers' positive experience with Nimble, finding the solution simple to buy, install and use - and especially because it automates continuous optimisation of the system even as workloads change; for Nimble Storage, one could read "agile storage" for use by an agile company. According to Vasudevan, Nimble meets resellers' ideal criteria: sales velocity to close deals, growth independence, a good margin profile and ease of doing business including the training aspect. Other things that have rapidly changed include moving beyond a VMware VCenter plug-in to certification for VMware.

The company's challenges include getting its name better known, potential for FUD from competitors, continuing to execute as well as it has done so far as its meteoric growth carries on - and the standard question for VC start-ups: "How do we know you will be around in five years?"

If Nimble does not over-stretch itself, I dare say some of the largest storage vendors will be sniffing around for a possible takeover - maybe more so when it moves to IPO in perhaps three years. In the meantime, Nimble's growth statistics are adding credibility to my apparently over-the-top assessment of a few months ago.

So I will simply reiterate what I said then: prove for yourself whether I am painting a fair picture; mid-market companies should give Nimble and its architecture a close look.

By: Peter Williams, Practice Leader - IT Infrastructure Mgmt., Bloor Research Posted: 26th January 2012 Copyright Bloor Research © 2012

Thanks to x86 and other "commodity" components, users usually get good value for money from their server systems. However, storage subsystems and their connectivity remain stubbornly complex and costly. This has got to change - and for some this has started to happen.

When I wrote about Coraid last summer, I wondered about storage users' familiarity with ATA over Ethernet (AoE), especially when running Windows for which is fairly new. Coraid is belatedly betting its shirt on AoE which can be blisteringly fast. It developed the "protocol/compute layer" as far back as 2004 then donated it as open source to the Linux community, not then realising what it had; AoE has been part of the Linux kernel since 2005.

Coraid's progress in the past year has been solid - a user base of around 1,500 customers compared with 1,000 a year ago - and expansion in Europe from its UK office as well as a small start in APAC. In its storage arrays, it has now added flash to mix and match with SAS and various SATA drives (in a choice of RAID levels or JBOD) in the SAN.

But CEO Kevin Brown has a bigger vision for its AoE approach - which is to drive a commodity pricing revolution for storage. "Storage is like a mainframe when rest of system has become commoditised" Brown told me. This contrasted with servers long commoditised with x86 and, for instance, a 10GbE port could cost under $500. (EMC and NetApp may not take this too seriously but could perhaps be caught short, especially at the low-end.)

Using Coraid's AoE technique, the SAN (theirs or another's), appears to VMware of Hyper-V as a single direct-attached storage (DAS) drive - as a single SCSI controller "except that it has latency under one second" Brown added. Then the Coraid architecture covers the whole network, both initiating and receiving the storage data requests that cross the Ethernet wires. This, he said, removed several layers of complexity and was simple to set up, not least because everyone's server has long provided DAS connectivity.

The potential from this is manifesting itself in several ways that also help define Coraid's roadmap for the coming months. For instance, Brown wants to complement AoE by making everything simple. So Coraid is aiming for an end-user on-screen Q&A to define the storage need without concern for LUNs or HBAs - from which the software automatically tailors all the configuring and manages day-to-day operation. This helps explain the company's purchase of cloud orchestration software vendor Yunteq late last year as, for instance - it brought in a policy engine; the first fruits of this may appear mid-year.

In turn, this reflects another trend Brown told me he was witnessing. More and more internal and external clouds are appearing - and VARs were realising that, as well as reselling AoE, they could also start to offer cloud services of their own. However, that, in turn, put pressure on Coraid to automate its storage tiering management and to make sure security was sufficiently granular and robust (although the VARs can already provide complementary third party solutions). On the positive side, its own operating system and architecture was designed from scratch as distributed and scale-out, allowing very rapid expansion, as may be needed in clouds.

This week, Coraid announced a technology alliance partnership with Veeam. Veeam complements Coraid's EtherDrive and EtherFlash with innovative data protection, recovery, DR and management for virtual data centres - that is designed from the ground up for virtualised server environments. Recovery can be for a whole VM or individual file or application item.

It has also not been lost on Coraid that, by controlling storage data traffic end-to-end across the network, it is well placed to provide useful performance measurement software. That could be another nice little earner (but no date has been set for that yet).

Brown sees little value in chasing after conservative enterprises with wall-to-wall Fibre Channel (FC) storage connectivity but everyone else is ripe for this AoE-based storage commoditisation to cut costs and boost performance. The coming year should be enough to confirm whether AoE is likely to break through to make commoditisation a reality.

By: Peter Williams, Practice Leader - IT Infrastructure Mgmt., Bloor Research Posted: 6th December 2011 Copyright Bloor Research © 2011

Texas Memory Systems (TMS) has launched the first flash storage incorporating hardware high availability (HA) features aimed at taking on large disk subsystems - the RamSan 720.

The SANflash 1U high enclosure includes 6 or 12TB of SSD, a centralised RAID controller, and uses about 3-400W in power. The company says this works out at about $20 per GB - making it price-competitive with the fastest (15,000 rpm) spinning disk subsystems, especially when an ongoing saving in power and cooling is factored in.

The HA features achieve no single point of failure, through a change of design from its previous 710 model. These include: dual port gateway (40 or 80Gb flash chip on each module), 9+1 parity, hot-swap flashcards, ECC error correction, dual RAID controllers as well as two-dimensional variable-stripe RAID 5 (TMS patented) - with dynamic re-striping of data. The backplane has one module as an active spare, so the system can fix data at the lowest level on the board - re-generating the whole board and clock if necessary.

Chip over-capacity (c20%) provides for partial failure recovery, the system continuing to run live with no human intervention needed for maintenance.

While TMS is going for a potential $1Bn market, it knows it will find it hard to displace large OEM incumbents who provide hard disk arrays and back-end support. Even if one of these is willing to incorporate the RamSan 720 as its own, it will undoubtedly place tight controls on pricing and strategy.

So TMS is also focusing heavily on its worldwide third party reseller relationships, also diversifying to add more outside the federal and financial sectors in which it had its major past successes. The low maintenance with HA should strike a chord with mid-market users who have little internal support resource, but need screaming performance at tier 0 or 1. The RamSan 720 size, marginally less than a standard rack-mounted server, allows for a half PB of storage to be held in a single rack.

As of now, the RamSan 720 supports fibre channel (FC) and Infiniband, the company claiming it can achieve aggregated "straight-through" performance through the ports - for instance for 8Gb FC using four ports an aggregate of reads and writes of nearly 6GB/s is practical (Infiniband slightly better).

All in all, this looks like an attractive high performance storage package, which should get some early wins in the mid-market as it gradually makes inroads further up the food chain.

With solid state disks (SSD) reducing in price by around 25% per annum, and reliability techniques built in to achieve usability for as much as 10 years, this type of device is already becoming a strong competitor for the high performance (and price) top-end spinning disk market. It is then a matter of time before the 10K rpm drives are seriously challenged...and so on.

By: Peter Williams, Practice Leader - IT Infrastructure Mgmt., Bloor Research Posted: 13th October 2011 Copyright Bloor Research © 2011

Nimble Storage is not a very familiar name this side of the pond, but that is about to change - and how! Today is its official launch into Europe; it has a new EMEA sales director, Philip Turner, and is about to open offices in London, Germany and Benelux.

This may appear rather fast growth for a small VC start-up that sells entirely through the channel - and seeks European channel partners - until you look at the innovation it offers under the covers. In fact I find it difficult to know where to start. I have not seen this in operation, of course, so I can only report on what the company has told me - and leave others to check it out in practice. However, its US growth-figures from a first release in August 2010 in a crowded and competitive mid-marketplace - over 150 customers - are hard to ignore.

The company started with a blank canvas (but a technical team with storage innovation experience from the likes of NetApp and Data Domain), and came up with something that just does things differently. More importantly, it overcomes the performance OR space dilemma, by getting the best of both.

Its CS (converged storage) Series of arrays incorporate a new 'Cache Accelerated Sequential Layout' architecture that leverages flash memory alongside high capacity SATA drives to produce phenomenally high performance for a low price-tag. The data received is compressed in-line straight away with no performance hit (so, typically, saving 50% storage space); storage is in variable-size blocks with data written out sequentially in full RAID stripes - averaging 100% faster than to fixed layout disk. "Hot" (active) data is duplicated in flash memory for ultra-fast reads - but it is all stored on low-RPM but high-capacity SATA disks.

The CS210 has c8TB disk capacity, 160 or 320GB flash and 4x1GbE ports, the CS220/G 12 or 16TB and 320/640GB flash, the CS240/G 24/32TB and 640/1300GB flash - with both CS220 and CS240 either 6x1GbE ports or 2x10GbE + 2x1GbE (G models). All carry high availability features including dual hot-swappable controllers, power supplies and mirrored NVRAM.

All of this is in a 3U high cabinet, which effectively provides all the functionality, performance and capacity of three primary storage units and a backup device. Thin provisioning is all inherently included - while the GUI is designed for simple operation by IT generalists. Dan Leary, Nimble Storage's VP of marketing, told me that scale-out connectivity, with the ability to group multiple arrays, will be available next year - without hardware changes being needed.

At the risk of boring readers, I will continue to talk technology...

The architecture converges storage, backup and disaster recovery (DR) so that near-instant delta re-direct-on-write snapshots are the backup; DR can be achieved in seconds with WAN-efficient replication as standard. This means longer retention of backups is possible (so, for instance, 30 days retention will cover 90% of recovery requests).

However, the systems are designed more than anything for virtual environments. For instance, Nimble has a close working relationship with VMware and its GUI is available inside vCenter. Instant clones of 'gold' storage configuration images are provided through vCenter plug-ins to help optimise matching storage with the VMs using it. The architecture directly addresses performance contention problems typically experienced when accessing storage between competing VMs.

Prices, unpublished, are said by Nimble to be typically under a third of competition for the same capacity - and twice the throughput, plus backup in seconds and recovery in minutes (instead of hours and even days). For me, such statistics make the Nimble Storage offering a real storage game-changer.

Downsides? I am not yet in a position to judge, but it almost sounds too good to be true for the mid-market at least. So, obviously, you need to prove for yourself whether I am painting a fair picture. Clearly, it has to contend with fierce competition, and not a little "FUD" I suspect. But I will watch with interest to see how this stirs the likes of NetApp, HP and Dell (Equallogic, Compellent) for instance.

By: Peter Williams, Practice Leader - IT Infrastructure Mgmt., Bloor Research Posted: 11th October 2011 Copyright Bloor Research © 2011

Overland Storage today launches its completely new SnapServer DX Series for SMBs, adding some 'enterprise-level' features, simplified management and, especially, very aggressive pricing.

Its target is SMBs who want features they can't normally afford, such as replication and thin provisioning. One result is that its long-established Guardian OS has been revamped so much in the new version 7.0 that it is no longer backwards-compatible.

In today's release are two models, the 1U high SnapServer DX1 houses four drives, the 2U SnapServer DX2 eight, comprising any mix of SAS and SATA-II enterprise of desktop drives. However, total capacities can grow to 120 or 288TB respectively using its SnapExpansion capability to add more units.

Overland identifies three main challenges for SMBs that these models are addressing: i) budgets insufficient to add capacity and functionality to keep pace with data growth, ii) complexity in storage management and, iii) volume management including continuous monitoring to avoid hitting a capacity limit brick wall. Despite the familiar 'Snap' name, the SnapServer DX Series is a completely new development, with a very distinctive look.

Andy Walsky, Overland's VP for EMEA and APAC Sales, who described this as the start of a "rebrand and refresh" for its systems, said the most disruptive element was the very aggressive pricing. The company was well-placed to achieve this because the hardware and operating system were its own.

So, for instance, a SnapServer DX1 with 4TB (4x1TB drives) has a (US) recommended price $1,999, while a SnapServer DX2 with 36TB (12x3TB) is $7,199. Even at these prices, the channel would get good margins, he said.

The Dynamic RAID capability (an optional alternative to standard RAID), combines RAID with single or dual parity across all units. New capacity can be added, or disk units hot-swapped, without downtime. The total storage within a single DX1 or DX2 can be treated as a common pool.

Overland's own form of thin provisioning means storage usage is maximised, and overall capacity monitoring means system-generated warnings in advance of the need to add more capacity. This removes most of the headache of capacity prediction and constant monitoring.

Other features include Snap Enterprise Data Replicator (SnapEDR) which will replicate data between locations for collaboration and data protection, full integration with either Windows Active Directory or UNIX/Linux Domains, and a unified block and file storage capability. Overland also claims a transfer rate of over 350MB/s on the DX2. Overall, this appears to provide a lot of functionality for little outlay.

The SMB market is very competitive, but Overland has a long-established worldwide reseller channel with over 2,000 partners, with sales and service support in more than 60 countries. Conversely, this might trigger something of a price-war - as everyone from Dell, NetApp and EMC to Iomega and Buffalo has products for SMBs.

Overland itself has been involved in something of a re-launch, and now has a completely new management team and strategy. Walsky told me, "Overand has thrown out its old paradigm. It is now a storage solutions company." It had moved away from its former focus towards tape, and was gearing its products for all of on-line, near-line and off-line storage including archive, he said.

Overland has also ceased to be an OEM provider; it supplies its own systems 100% through the channel.

Overland has struggled with a weak financial position for a few years, but its huge infrastructure helped it achieve revenues of nearly $78m in 2010. Other initiatives, such as stronger action on patent infringement, may create an extra revenue stream. Without firm predictions, the company hopes to reach profitability again very soon. What will happen in the next few months is certainly worth watching.

By: Peter Williams, Practice Leader - IT Infrastructure Mgmt., Bloor Research Posted: 19th September 2011 Copyright Bloor Research © 2011

Virsto has announced the next dimension to its storage virtualisation solution - Virsto for VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure) vSphere (VMware) edition. According to the company, this will typically boost storage performance by 50%, greatly reduce storage and speed deployment by up to three-quarters.

Storage performance problems for virtual desktops, which typically number hundreds per host, are multiplied versus virtual servers that may be no more than, say, 10-20. The randomness caused by multiple VMs writing to shared storage is the principle performance-killing culprit; this is typically worse even for the same number of virtual desktops as servers.

Virsto's approach, writing to a sequential log-file from which it updates the storage in the background, removes this real-time randomisation. The software also deploys automated thin provisioning with capacity reuse after deletion, potentially reducing allocated storage space by 90%. So this is a neat solution to boost performance and reduce storage costs - or to allow higher desktop densities.

Virsto vDisks are handled within the existing vSphere management; a Virsto tab on the vCenter management GUI enables installing, configuring extra wizards that optimise selected VDI workflows (such as bulk rapid provisioning of thousands of desktops needing high performance). Bulk updating can reduce provisioning and deployment time by nearly three-quarters. It also supports vMotion in VDI environments, not so much for failover as being able to move desktops off a host to be patched.

Now in beta, Virsto for VDI will be fully available before year-end, priced at $2,800 per host.

But the bigger picture is even more interesting. This is the third implementation of the Virsto solution, after Virsto for VSI (virtual server infrastructure) and VDI for Hyper-V - with the roadmap adding VSI for vSphere (when vSphere version 5 appears early next year) and Xen also within the 2012 timeframe. So, by the end of 2012, this should achieve near enough hypervisor heterogeneity - with its bonus of easy storage migration between hypervisors.

Speaking to me this week, Virsto's VP of marketing Gregg Holsrichter said, "We want to do for storage what VMware did for servers." He pointed out that VMware started out small (like Virsto) and was initially only used in the techie community. Virsto's basic concept for storage mimics VMware's move to extract the server to a logical layer.

However, Virsto's opportunity right now relates to users experiencing a shared storage performance problem which the VM providers did not foresee or therefore address. Equally, while VMs can be created and removed in seconds, the VM providers could not automate bringing shared storage into line with these VM changes, so it remains a time-consuming headache. Virsto fills these gaps.

It was a shrewd move to start out on Microsoft's Hyper-V. Microsoft saw the advantages in joint deployment while Virsto was proving its technology's capabilities. Yet VMware, with around 70% market share, is the bigger prize. Virsto's heterogeneity will also be attractive to enterprises who fear being locked in to one hypervisor or who already use a mix of them.

This may even have bigger potential than the virtual server revolution, partly because storage costs are now typically five times server costs. Virsto's performance and provisioning approach can lead to storage consolidation and reduction and/or lower-cost commodity storage hardware in virtualised environments - quickly paying for itself. By being software-only, it can be integrated with other vendors' complementary storage hardware and software solutions. It seems to me made for cloud storage environments and especially attractive to SMEs who can't afford to throw storage hardware at the performance problem.

So Virsto's vision is not unrealistic. It is still a VC start-up and privately owned, and I for one hope it can stay independent long enough to drag virtual storage up to the level that server and desktop virtualisation has already achieved, bringing the agile enterprise another step closer.

By: Bob Tarzey, Service Director, Quocirca Posted: 5th September 2011 Copyright Quocirca © 2011

A snippet in Private Eye earlier this year (8 July, 2011) showed how touchy companies can get about the use of their brand names. Following the unfortunate death of a festival goer in a toilet at Glastonbury (who also happened to be a political activist and friend of the UK’s Prime Minister), a number of publications reported that the body has been found in a Portaloo®. Apparently, this was not true; it was not a Portaloo®, but some other brand of “mobile toilet”. Portakabin, who owns the Portaloo® brand, had written to the publications in question complaining at this misrepresentation. This seems an unnecessary quibble, there was no suggestion the toilet had contributed to the death and no maligning of the brand per se. However, other misuses of brand names are not so innocuous.

A growing concern over the past decade or so has been the abuse of brand names online. This includes both the misleading use of domain names and misrepresentation and/or illegal use of brands in other ways. Back in 2000, the UK rock band Jethro Tull won a case against a cyber-squatter who had registered a number of domains including www.jethrotull.com and was trying to sell them on to those with an obvious interest. The World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) found in the band’s favour; ruling that the squatter “had set up the addresses in bad faith and failed to show a legitimate interest in them”.

While most well-known organisations now have control of the high-level domains associated with their brand, the growing number of available domains still makes it relatively easy for someone to mislead through the use of a slightly more obscure domain. This might mean that cyber-squatting is less prevalent but it does mean brand-jacking is easier. There are two reasons for doing this; to benefit by association and, more seriously, to perpetrate fraud. The later involves either selling fake branded products or convincing someone to give up personal information thinking they are visiting a legitimate branded web site, for example, that of a bank (usually attracting them in the first place with phishing emails or messages on social media sites). "It is essential, therefore, to ensure that all uses of a brand online lead to legitimate sources and the potential customers find your organisation and not the bad guys pretending to be you"

Of course, the selling a fake branded goods does not need a spoofed web site, this can just as easily be done via markets such as eBay. So, the need to monitor and protect brands is a far-reaching exercise. To that end, a number of services have been developed to help organisations achieve just that from vendors such as MarkMonitor, Envisional and PICA. Their services range through domain name monitoring, identifying online brand name misuse, spotting sales of counterfeit goods and getting rogue sites associated with phishing campaigns shut down.

MarkMonitor publishes a freely available Brandjacking Index report, which shows the prevalence of brand abuse over the years and focuses in on specific issues, such as diverting genuine enquiries for hotel bookings (spring 2011 edition).  Its customers include manufacturers like Epson and Deckers, where it has helped stem the sale of counterfeit goods, and pharmaceutical giant Novartis, where it consolidated and protected its wide range of domain names.

A strong recognisable brand is an invaluable asset for any organisation; however, misuse can see strong brands rapidly devalued. The exploitation of brands has become much easier as the world has moved online over the last few decades. It is essential, therefore, to ensure that all uses of a brand online lead to legitimate sources and the potential customers find your organisation and not the bad guys pretending to be you. Failing to ensure this will lead to a loss of business and may cause rapid deterioration of your brand's value.

By: Peter Williams, Practice Leader - IT Infrastructure Mgmt., Bloor Research Posted: 1st September 2011 Copyright Bloor Research © 2011

Virtual infrastructures may appear simple on the surface, but there is a lot going between the servers and storage across the network; it's complex. So pity the poor IT or storage manager who knows something is wrong but can't pinpoint it.

Problems need to be identified fast and resolved quickly - or, for instance, SLAs could be violated - and a tool to give a clear infrastructure view in real time is really a must to achieve that.

Virtual Instruments is one company dedicated to addressing this type of problem, at least for fibre channel (FC) SANs. Its latest software, VirtualWisdom 3.0, carries out analysis of SAN I-O traffic in real time - and can do this in relation to individual business critical applications running within a virtualised setup.

VirtualWisdom includes a GUI dashboard that, unusually, visually tracks all functions - servers, networks and storage - in a single display. This cross-domain, vendor-neutral, view facilitates rapid and precise performance tuning and fault diagnosis.

More typical is what Virtual Instruments refers to as "SAN blindness", caused by a lack of appropriate monitoring tools; performance monitoring tools usually focus only on one part of the infrastructure so, even if comprehensive for that, they cannot present a collated view, let alone in real-time.

With the rapid advance of virtual servers and virtual storage, including in the cloud, such tools should be a must. Indeed, the move to a single storage pool servicing multiple virtual server applications frequently results in major performance degradation, and testing with an appropriate application mix should quickly pinpoint what is the bottleneck. So, it is remarkable that so few such performance tools exist today.

This week's release also includes a new 8Gb-capable SAN hardware performance probe that significantly adds to the metrics displayed. It can monitor up to eight FC links at once, looking at each frame in a FC SAN to give stats on storage I-O between a VM and the storage array LUN being accessed. The probe has redundant and hot-swappable power supplies and cooling fans; as some of Virtual Instruments' users have pointed out, if the monitoring devices themselves were to fail, SAN blindness would immediately return.

Also new to VirtualWisdom 3.0 is the RemoteWisdom Access Platform, facilitating remote file access into VirtualWisdom servers by Virtual Instruments' own support personnel. This will help streamline support and minimise disruption if VirtualWisdom monitoring problems occur. It is also a sign of three-year-old US start-up Virtual Instruments' international expansion plans; for instance, it now has 34 staff in UK, France and Germany.

Other data gathering devices include a virtual server probe for VMware vSphere environments, a SAN availability probe to monitor SAN directors and switches, and the SANInsight TAP patch panel system which accesses data passively from the fibre optical physical layer. The system is agentless.

I see this as almost a must have for large FC SAN users (plus FCoE) as many of them already know. My question is: who is out there with this capability for SAN types other than FC in a virtual environment? For them, it seems, SAN blindness will live on for a while yet.