“Smart Storage” wouldn’t care.
It would adapt itself to perform in the current environment.

In the automobile world, which is selling best and making the highest profit margins for the manufacturer?
1) entry level “bare-bones” models
2) “Smart” models that can adapt to a drivers profile, road conditions, driver emergency needs, maintenance, etc.

Which would we like to have? BOTH !!!!!
“Smart Storage” adapts its feature/function set to fit the requirements of the Storage environment. Sort of an enhanced or reduced feature/function set.
You pay for what you use. And you pay it forward.
Marketing and Sales should love this if they were clever enough to figure it out.

The cost of the intelligence to enable driver profiling and the cost of the mechanics to adjust the driver’s seat, mirrors, A/C settings, radio, cell phone, TV, etc. are not the show-stoppers.
Lack of creativity and ingenuity are, and not at the engineering level.
Where is the leadership?
Like Scrooge McDuck they are swimming in their money.
The same is true for Storage…

I can’t completely disagree (heck even IBM’s Shark is a set of p series servers) with your premise as commodity at the lowest level (white box servers or what have you). I also agree with NAS being the future as well (lower cost, better standards interop) especially with VMWare and Oracle on NFS gaining traction, but the reason most of these ‘cloud’ and ‘grid’ concepts are a massive failure in the enterprise is they neglect the transition phase support. If I’m a IT Director and I bring in a clustered storage solution, I want to be able to utilize it completely with my current equipment/applications/protocols and not have to re architect my environment to take advantage of the new technology.

Block storage and big-iron arrays aren’t going away any more than MVS has. It is just that the growth is in file storage, not block.

As for Isilon, I don’t know where people get the idea the company is failing or has a tiny target market. They haven’t reported results for 2 quarters due to an independent audit requested by the new CEO and their stock has been hammered for missing targets, but at last report their growth rate was excellent.

Unstructured data is a huge market. IDC is drawing a distinction I like between “performance optimized” and “capacity optimized” storage. Big iron storage, including NetApp’s, can handle pretty much anything that gets thrown at them, for a price. If capacity is more important than performance you can save a lot of money going with a mini-van instead of a Ferrari.

Robin

You all make a good point: everything is built from commodity hardware these days. But it isn’t all sold like commodity hardware.

Most storage today is essentially “tin-wrapped” software on almost-commodity hardware, with 60% gross margins.

Real commodity servers get sold for 20% - or less - GM. The software is another buy that gets made on its merits and, of course, the GM is huge, as is the SG&A.

To be more precise, some vendors are unbundling HW from SW and some don’t seem ready to make that leap. I’m concerned about how the latter will fare.

I believe that clustered storage is the long-term future of enterprise storage, but it must support all the major protocols. Isilon is a perfect example of clustered storage that is falling on its face because their target market is too small. Yes, there are the NFL films and Kodaks of the world, but most enterprises are turned off by their pitch because unstructured (file) data is unimportant to them. Once IBM starts shipping an XIV based product and NetApp moves to the GX platform entirely (bringing all the 7G functionality with it) I think they will really be the only two vendors in the short term offering clustered storage over block.

“I’m surprised you didn’t mention Isilon : commodity hardware, true cluster architecture, etc. An excellent proposition as far as I’m concerned.

Anyway, I agree with your view on NetApp : they’ve completely lost their edge and don’t understand storage needs for digital media. Which is where MASSIVE growth is occuring right now….”

Isilon is nice, but it’s less flexible than NTAP products. Great for throughput with large data sets, but aren’t really all that good for transactional stuff. You still need to buy other storage kit for that. If you doubt me, ask MySpace. You can hardly claim to be Unified or a “true” cluster storage system if I have to go by disk from someone else to handle databases.

As for NTAP not understanding digital media, I would tell that to Laika, Industrial Light and Magic, and the rest of the studios who use them in production.

ON the Topic of Polyserve, while the file system is ok (Still doesn’t support quotas last time i checked though ) it’s interface to other systems for NAS is still the same awful ones that the host OS uses. Windows CIFS and Linux NFS. And Linux was never really good as a NFS server; I once replaced a two node polyserve cluster that had awesome hardware ( dual xeons, 4 GB of ram each with 2Gb/s FC SAN with a 270c (600MHZ mips processors and anemic amounts of memory) that for some reason ended up being twice as fast and orders of magnitude more stable than the polyserve cluster.

The issues were with Linux, not Polyserve, but it basically boils down to the fact that the whole issue of vendors using “commodity” hardware is a red herring. They *all* use commodity hardware

The real leverage will come from commodity software, something that doesn’t really exist yet for HPC / Grid / Cloud or whatever computing is “Teh Future!!!” NFSv4.1 might show some potential with a standards based pNFS implementation, but no one I know actually uses NFSv4 yet

So, while using a commodity Open Source OS is a good way to get better driver support for the latest and greatest, but it doesn’t actually seem to yield any leverage when it comes to features.

I believe most of the issues with NTAP are pricing related; They’re turning into the new top dog and the arrogance is beginning to show in their sales force. Much like in the good old days of sun, this will piss off some existing customers… but this has little to do with the costs associated with building the products.

I would like to contrast this discussion with another sector of the technology space, I would state that the market that’s low hanging fruit would be your typical software based modular access routers in the data networking space; but last time I checked cisco was still in business and doing fine.

~Max

Insane - I look at the impact of Hulk/Maui from a marketing perspective. When EMC endorses a cluster architecture, a cluster architecture suddenly becomes a lot more respectable for enterprise customers. Presumably it will offer storage for a lower $/GB as well, which will eventually percolate into the CFO’s consciousness.

Storage at 20% of today’s cost will change how people use/waste storage. A lot of other players will be affected as well.

Chris,

The HP guy clearly got the lessons of the Google power paper. Whether blades are the answer remains to be seen.

Wes, Max, Tim, TimC,

NetApp certainly has options and they have some time to figure them out. Multi-billion dollar companies take a long time to die unless they have help. NetApp isn’t alone in building a system that overshoots customer requirements. As long as no one else responded they had no worries. Now that EMC, Sun and IBM are acting, everyone has to respond.

NetApp has a least 2 virtualization products, ONTAP GX and the V-series. GX is positioned for HPC while the V-series virtualizes both NetApp and competitor storage. It looks like a standard FAS head.

While ONTAP GX provides a global name space, the backing store is NetApp filers and arrays that aren’t cost competitive with commodity-based cluster storage. If you need a global name space AND high performance, you should be happy. Otherwise, not so much.

ClusterDude - back to work!

I prefer a big-tent definition of clusters. VAXclusters, Google clusters, Polyserve clusters, Isilon clusters are all clusters to me. I’m interconnect agnostic and open to a variety of file locking schemes. The important thing is that we learn how to build upgradeable in place storage pools for long term preservation of digital data.

Cluster Fan - complete solution vs roll-your-own? I think there is room for both.

you sound like an Isilon commercial. I know Isilon’s product as well as anyone. They have a great product as long as you only want to buy their hardware and you want to scale within the confines of a single cluster. Leveraging their new nodes in an existing cluster is painful and restrictive. True clustering allows you to take advantage of dissimilar hardware without such an enormous penalty. If quad core chips are available, you should be able to leverage them. If 2TB drives come out you should be able to leverage them as well. With Isilon’s model you can leverage 6 months later as long as you add 4 and 5 at a time which is a huge restriction.

I am not saying there is a perfect solution, but I want an open solution that can take advantage of hetereogenous hardware. Trading one proprietary venor for another is not the solution.

Isilon thinks they are the next NetApp. They are building a significant amount of tools that only run on their platform. ILM, Snapshots, Replication, TCP Optimzation, Quotas, Reporting..and the list goes on. I don’t want to trade one proprietary technology for another.

Polyserve has been mentioned on here a few times…almost with a negative conotation. Look out for their new filesystem in 2008, it could change the game and make them a real player. HP already has the DL320 which is essentially an Isilon node. Combine that with Polyserve…and you might have some competition. Also combine the fact that you can run Polyserve on any commodity server or storage without worrying about rules for mixing different sized nodes…etc.. Thumper? Hulk? They could all be nodes for Polyserve or some other clustered vendor without a hardware platform.

Why is IBRIX never mentioned in this discussion? They have similar deployments with the DL320 and Rackable hardware as the nodes. Their feature-set is not as robust, but this bulk storage and not standard home directory storage we are talking about.

I’m surprised you didn’t mention Isilon : commodity hardware, true cluster architecture, etc. An excellent proposition as far as I’m concerned.

Anyway, I agree with your view on NetApp : they’ve completely lost their edge and don’t understand storage needs for digital media. Which is where MASSIVE growth is occuring right now….

Commodity hardware + pNFS + ZFS/Lustre/OneFS : this IS the new breed