{"id":643,"date":"2012-09-18T11:57:40","date_gmt":"2012-09-18T17:57:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/benincosa.com\/blog\/?p=643"},"modified":"2014-11-19T11:24:33","modified_gmt":"2014-11-19T17:24:33","slug":"storage-the-new-sexy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/benincosa.com\/?p=643","title":{"rendered":"Storage: The new sexy"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was fortunate enough to attend VMworld 2012 in San Francisco this year! \u00a0It is indeed a great\u00a0privilege\u00a0and I can’t thank Cisco enough for sending me. \u00a0There were lots of announcements that were pretty cool from a UCS standpoint like UCS Central and the vCenter plugin<\/a>. (These were demoed in the Cisco booth) There were cool announcements from VMware about Horizon<\/a> and the Cloud Suite<\/a>. \u00a0etc. \u00a0 The sessions were great and the after hours events always entertaining (Although the food at the VMware party sucked compared to 2010). \u00a0But among the madness of the myriad of messages there was one that stood out to me more than anything else: \u00a0Flash Storage.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Remember when storage was boring? \u00a0EMC, NetApp, blah blah blah. \u00a0Well those days are gone. \u00a0Its not so simple anymore. \u00a0The shear number of storage vendors on the showroom floor was a clear illustration that storage is still an open frontier like the wild west, or even like a new season of American Idol… (OK, maybe that last one was a bad analogy)<\/p>\n

Sure EMC still leads in market share and NetApp is the fastest growing, but there is plenty of room for disruption. \u00a0There were several really good sessions on best practices for storage. \u00a0One of my favorite quotes came from Duncan Epping<\/a> (of YellowBricks<\/a> and Clustering Deep dive author<\/a> fame):<\/p>\n

“We always blame the network for our problems but its usually the storage that is at fault<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

Indeed we see this in practice quite a lot. \u00a0People can’t buy more UCS because they’re constrained by their storage. \u00a0The network seems easy enough to blame but as server administrators are getting more comfortable with networking (mostly because they have to since the network access layer is now inside the server at the vSwitch) they’re starting to get that right much more often than the storage.<\/p>\n

One of my favorite sessions was a Gartner Storage Best Practices session. \u00a0They had the following great messages:<\/p>\n

“IOPS resolution is a multi dimensional problem that may not best addressed in the storage array”<\/strong><\/p>\n

This is why putting Fusion-io cards in a server may help with a tiered approach. \u00a0(BTW, these were announced to be inside UCS Blades<\/a> now and should be available before the end of 2012). \u00a0It also explains why companies like Atlantis Computing<\/a> with their ILIO product can offer big performance gains by offloading some of the work the storage array has to do as well as saving space.<\/p>\n

This brings up another point from the Gartner session when talking about VDI (aka SHVD: server hosted virtual desktop)<\/p>\n

“Storage costs present the #1 barrier to entry”<\/strong><\/p>\n

If you’re wondering when the year of the virtual desktop will come its when the organization has to buy new storage. \u00a0Over 40% of data center budget for new equipment goes into storage. \u00a0It pretty much pushes server and network equipment to the fringes. \u00a0That’s why I don’t ever think there will be a ‘year’ of the virtual desktop. \u00a0Instead, we’re in the beginning of the ‘decade of the virtual desktop’<\/p>\n

The Tiered approach works as follows: \u00a0You have fast disks ( SSDs), slower disks (FC, SAS) and then the slowest disks: \u00a0SATA spinning at 7200 RPMS. \u00a0Ideally you want the data you use the most (the master copy of a windows VM) sitting on the fast storage, swap files on the mid tier, and lesser used workloads sitting down at the bottom.<\/p>\n

The issue with the tiered approach (which NetApp doesn’t really have except for maybe the flash cache which is read only) is that you have to put the workloads where you think they will be. \u00a0And there’s a good chance you’ll get it wrong.<\/p>\n

And that’s one reason there’s such a huge market out there for storage products that solve the issues of how to store and manage virtual machine files. \u00a0It used to be the OS sat on the server and the local disk was the best you could do. \u00a0Now with all of those VMs contending for IOPS, the storage is the bottleneck. \u00a0The new sexy bottleneck. \u00a0Sexy because there’s a lot of money to be made if you can convince people your solution is the best.<\/p>\n

Using flash storage seems to be the sexy way to entice your customers. \u00a0SSD arrays were all the rage at VMworld. \u00a0Tiered solutions that allowed SSDs with FC\/SAS\/SATA were also quite popular. \u00a0 I thought I’d go through some of the storage solutions I had a chance to visit with at VMworld. \u00a0Most of these are lesser known so it will be interesting to watch and see how the space changes in the next year:<\/p>\n

Violin Memory<\/h3>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The Violin 6000 Series flash memory array<\/a> can do 1 million IOPS with 4Gbps of bandwidth in a 3RU space. \u00a0The secret sauce is that they build their own flash memory controllers instead of using the standard SSDs that most flash array vendors use. \u00a0This probably isn’t the cheapest but its hard to beat in terms of speed. \u00a0This is the storage you buy when money is no object and you just want fast. \u00a0Just imagining this connected to some Nexus 5000s and a UCS full of B200 M3s makes me all tingling inside.<\/p>\n

Whiptail<\/h3>\n

I didn’t see Whiptail<\/a> on the floor but I have helped 2 UCS customers configure this and get it running. \u00a0Its cheaper and wicked fast, but offers little intelligence as to what is happening. \u00a0Just cram a bunch of SSD drives into the array and lets you go to town. \u00a0For some people, speed is all you need and they don’t care about fancy dashboards.<\/p>\n

Tintri<\/h3>\n

I had a great conversation with a great guy at\u00a0Tintri<\/a> at the vFlipCup<\/a> event on Monday night… Wish I could remember his name. \u00a0(BTW, I represented Team JBOD with @CiscoServerGeek and we apparently wrote checks that our team could not cache). \u00a0 …But I digress… Tintri seemed to be a mix of Atlantis Computing and Whiptail. \u00a0Instead of having a VM do the block caching like ILIO does, you instead have that intelligence take place on the controller. \u00a0Couple that with an array of SSDs and life looks pretty good. \u00a0This seems better than Atlantis in that your chance of VM going down is greater than your chance of the storage array going down.<\/p>\n

Pure Storage<\/h3>\n

Two of the bigger booths of storage companies that I hadn’t heard of were Pure Storage and Tegile.<\/p>\n

Pure Storage <\/a>is a flash array vendor that seemed to have the most sophisticated protocol support including iSCSI (BTW: for the record I really don’t like iSCSI. \u00a0When you have UCS, Fibre Channel is so easy and with the UCS Del Mar release later this year you have all the components you need for FCoE without buying any separate equipment)<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Tegile<\/h3>\n

Tegile<\/a> is a hybrid array that supports tiered storage. \u00a0The value is the deep integration with SSDs. \u00a0I would look at this offering as a less confusing EMC offering. \u00a0It offers SAN and NAS capabilities as well as data deduplication. \u00a0Pretty sweet system.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Summary<\/h3>\n

It seems like all the providers have some great niches and I think most people would be happy with any of these storage solutions. \u00a0I’d hate to leave this post without tipping my hat to EMC and NetApp who I work with and do a tremendous job. \u00a0There’s a reason they both have so many customers: \u00a0They build great products. \u00a0I should also call out Hitachi Storage. \u00a0Their own team admits they suck at marketing, but in terms of performance and reliability for mission critical apps, its hard to beat their rock solid solutions. \u00a0Its truly a company built and run by engineers. \u00a0That’s one reason their customers and me like them so much.<\/p>\n

So if this post makes you feel all warm inside, that’s because storage is the new sexy and it is good for you to look at on company time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was fortunate enough to attend VMworld 2012 in San Francisco this year! \u00a0It is indeed a great\u00a0privilege\u00a0and I can’t thank Cisco enough for sending me. \u00a0There were lots of announcements that were pretty cool from a UCS standpoint like UCS Central and the vCenter plugin. (These were demoed in the Cisco booth) There were…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[153,997,151,39,118],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/benincosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/643"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/benincosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/benincosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benincosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benincosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=643"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/benincosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/643\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2767,"href":"https:\/\/benincosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/643\/revisions\/2767"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/benincosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=643"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benincosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=643"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benincosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=643"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}