Storage Sprawl Podcast

Storage Sprawl Podcast

InfoWorld Storage Sprawl Podcast

Diskeeper 10

Emulex opens to fabric routers

I am not raising any flag here: considering that in January Emulex was celebrating the shipment of more than 10 million ports of InSpeed embedded storage switches, it's safe to assume that its customers are not intrigued just by fancy product names.

The 725 and the 735 look pretty much the same because these two 1U routers share the same chassis and have the same line up of connections.

However, you would use the 725 to connect servers to the fabric without installing expensive FC HBAs: a GbE port or two, built in in most machines is all what's needed after you install the router.

Isn't the 725 a self defeating strategy for a company like Emulex that sells also FC HBAs? Perhaps, but other vendors are selling similar routers already (check out for example this week's Storage Insider), so proposing the 725 Emulex is reclaiming its market share in that segment.

By contrast, the 735, which is an FCIP (FC over IP) router, brings Emulex products into the all new segment of connecting remote fabrics. Using built in hardware-based compression the 735 should easily saturate a T3, according to Emulex.

Virtualization, N-port ID virtualization or NPIV to be accurate, is another new frontier that Emulex has been patrolling for about a year, I believe.

In plain English, NPIV means creating a virtual HBA for a virtual machine in environment such as VMWare ESX or Xen 3. In fact, at the recent CeBIT in Hannover, Emulex and Novell put up a demo of NPIV involving the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, LightPulse HBAs and Xen 3.

However interesting, that technology is still work in progress, I learned during a recent conversation with director of product marketing John Chevalier, which is not a surprise considering that systems' virtualization is struggling to acquire a well deserved but still controversial space in the enterprise.

But I am digressing: This is a topic for perhaps another place, another time.

Can a tape drive be sexy?

Here is what the T10000 looks like but the photo doesn't tell how impressive its specs are.

A complete data sheet is here but don't overlook that the T10000 can store 500 GB on single cartridge without compression, which, even though surpassed by other tape drives is still a remarkable capacity. However, its transfer rate, 120MB per second without compression is first class.

You can buy one now for $37,000, I hear from Sun, but a mainframe version should be available later this year.

Amazon to sell a Web of storage

The charter of Amazon Web Services is to provide developers with building block technologies that help them innovate.

The new storage service, S3, which stands for Simple Storage Services, is the logical extension to the services that Amazon is already providing.

What makes S3 different from any other storage service I know of, is that you can only store or retrieve data via API, using REST or SOAP interfaces.

You can store objects of up to 5GB in a single operation, but Amazon puts no limit to the total amount of storage you can use.

The cost involves a transfer fee and a monthly storage fee. For example, moving 100GB to S3 would cost a one time fee of $20, plus a storage fee of $15 per month.

Obviously a dedicated local drive on your server would cost less, but not if you try to emulate the reliability and the ubiquitous nature of data stored on S3.

I asked Selipsky if it's possible that users will in the future exceed the overall capacity of the systems supporting S3 but he doesn't seem concerned.

"We think that developers are going to build all sorts of application on S3" says Selipsky. "The only thing I am sure of is that we will be surprised by the way people innovate".

Moving beyond NAS

Indeed you should. According to a recent study conducted by ESG, 58 percent of all new data created by corporations or government agencies is unstructured or file based, tells me Goodwin.

Moreover, the same study estimates that by 2010 the increase in digital archiving capacity will tower at more than 27 exabytes, a ten fold increase over 2005.

If your company's data will increase in a similar way, you will probably outgrow the capacity and performance limits of your file systems, and will have to give your NAS an early retirement.

Could this be the reason why some large storage vendors purchased companies with a different perspective on file serving? The EMC-Rainfinity, and NetApp-Spinnaker acquisitions are good examples.

Probably, but Goodwin doesn't seem concerned by those acquisitions. " Our OneFS is the world most advanced distributed file system" - he explains - " and combines three traditionally separate layers, file system, volume manager and RAID into one".

A diagram should help clarifying how the Isilon IQ system would fit in your datacenter.

View image

Goodwin adds that the IQ system is an easy to manage cluster of peer units connected by Infiniband or GbE and that files are striped across all nodes, which improves performance, reliability and ensure fast rebuilds of failed drives.

Adding a new unit triggers an automatic restriping of existing files, which quickly brings more performance and resilience to the whole storage system.

My conversation with Isilon was to learn about some new products their are announcing, which includes a new version of their file system, OneFS 4.0, a performance booster appliance and a capacity expansion module.

Perhaps the most attention-getting new features of OneFS 4.0 are increasing the total capacity to over 500TB and reaching an aggregate throughput of 7GB per second.

I can't refrain from asking Goodwin if the Isilon IQ architecture can speed up also database access. Not at the moment, he answers, but in the future, with faster connectivity, clustered systems could offer better transactional performance than traditional flat SANs.

So, don't put on eBay your SAN quite yet, but if your NAS system is becoming a straight jacket for your business, the new Isilon IQ products' layout is worth considering.

Think you have backup problems?

I purchased an HP SDLT 320 drive in Sept 2005. I put the drive into operation in Nov 2005. Since that time, I have replaced the drive 6 times. Several HP engineers have visited my site to install the drive. HP has sent HP tapes for me to use. The longest I have had a drive working is about 3 weeks. The tape solution I use is, 1 full tape and 1 tape for incremental per week, which means I change 2 tapes a week, not a lot of work for a tape drive.

says Mark Rose in a message that was copied to several publications and HP employees.

I couldn't believe it at first so I asked for more details, hoping that Mark would respond that his problem had been solved.

That's Mark's answer:

No such like, HP has assigned a person in Mission Control (Costa Rica) and an engineer. I have talked to the engineer today and he is sending me pictures of the tape cartridges. Also suggests using a different power connector in the rack mount. But I still do not have another replacement drive heading my way.

The drive fails during tape pickup. The leader appears to get stripped from the cartridge and spools in the drive. It happens as soon as you load the tape. We have gone through combinations of new and used tapes from HP and Quantum. An HP engineer has been on site to install 1 of the drives and witness our process. After the first couple of replacements, I found out from HP that the drives they are sending as replacements are refurbs. After they continued to fail, I escalated the ticket to Mission Control and they issued a new tape drive. This drive has [also] failed.

HP looked over our environment and did not have any problems. Dedicated computer, protected power, isolated AC.

Feel free to publish, I am just looking for some help to resolve this issue. It's clear to me, this is a manufacturing/quality problem and nobody wants to admit it.

Thank you , Mark. I have to say that nothing or very little about your ordeal with that tape is clear or makes sense to me for now. Hope someone will figure that out soon. Good luck.

WD gives consumer's storage a new dress

You can read the whole specs sheet of My Book here but I suggest to take also a good look at the "no geek" version here.

Did you notice the difference? Seems to me that WD is not only giving a new customer-friendly enclosure to My Book, but is also adjusting the language of its marketing spiel to suit a consumer audience.

If you're too busy to follow the two links here is an excerpt from the no geek page:

Dropping, jarring, jostling - the usual bumps of everyday life- may leave no marks or obvious damage on an external drive, but damage can happen where you can't see it, and over time this damage can cause data loss

I'll concede that this verbiage is less efficient than the technical jargon, but WD is speaking to a much larger audience and one that usually rejects what cannot be easily understood.

WD is not the first nor the only storage company to realize that in the future consumers' products will convey a significant share of revenues, possibly bearing a larger profit margin than enterprise products.

LSI Logic is the latest example of that opening to the consumer market by a large storage company. I listened through LSI yesterday's press conference and a simplistic but accurate summary could be: " ... we are doing good, but we'll focus only on storage and consumers' products from now on."

I expect to hear a similar statement from more storage companies, but I'll follow with interest also how they will execute on that.

Judging from the launch of My Book, WD seems to have made a serious effort to dress up its products for the new audience. Others will follow that example, I am sure.

Microsoft gets on target with iSCSI

What will Microsoft gain from adding WinTarget technology to WSS? In essence, the ability to serve both blocks and files to its clients over an iSCSI network.

I tried WinTarget long time ago, and more recently Neterion and String Bean Software published some interesting benchmark results measured on machines equipped with 10Gb Ethernet adapters and WinTarget.

Back to Microsoft, adding iSCSI target capabilities to WSS will open some interesting opportunities for server vendors that will be able to add more spice and more value, not to mention a few revenue dollars, to their machines.

WinTarget makes a perfect complement to other Microsoft technologies including of course the iSCSI initiator and the NAS capabilities of WSS.

I would be surprised if server vendors would not jump on that opportunity to differentiate their products from competitors' and to lure customers with the promise of a fast and affordable iSCSI SAN.

To quote Mickey McIntire, CEO of String Bean Software and esteemed contributor to this blog:

iSCSI SANs have crawled a long way up the evolutionary ladder in a short period of time and are now encroaching on the previously unchallenged domain of Fibre Channel.