StorageMojo

Last year’s Google and CMU papers on disk failure rates (see Everything you know about disks is wrong and Google’s Disk Failure Experience) made the points that a) annual disk failure rates are significantly higher than manufacturers admit and b) that enterprise drives aren’t more reliable than consumer drives.

But in An Analysis of Latent Sector Errors in Disk Drives Lakshmi N. Bairavasundaram, Garth R. Goodson, Shankar Pasupathy and Jiri Schindler analyzed the error logs on over 50,000 arrays covering 1.53 million enterprise and consumer drives disks. It looks like the largest such study ever published.

Lakshmi was with the U of Wisconsin-Madison while the latter 3 work at NetApp. They published at the Sigmetrics ‘07 conference last June.

A different kind of latency
Unreported or latent disk errors are real. That’s why vendors have stopped recommending RAID 5 on SATA drives.

Disks have a lot of errors, most of them transient. This study focused on Latent Sector Errors (LSE), defined as:

. . . when a particular disk sector cannot be read or written, or when there is an uncorrectable ECC error. Any data previously stored in the sector is lost.

They don’t say so explicitly, but these are surely NetApp arrays. They also comment on the effectiveness of media and disk scrubbing, a feature of high-end arrays.

Results

• Yes, there are “bad” disks: 0.2% of the drives had more than 1000 errors.
• 3.45% of the entire population had LSE over the 32 month study period.
• 8.5% of the consumer disks had LSE
• 1.9% of the enterprise disks had LSE
• In their first 12 months 3.15% of consumer and 1.46% develop at least one LSE

Causation
The team found several factors that contribute to LSE.

• Size matters. As disk size increases, so does the fraction of disks with LSE.
• Age matters. LSE rates climbed with age. 20% of some - but not all - consumer disks had LSE after 24 months. Rates climbed faster for consumer drives than for enterprise drives.
• Vendor matters. They also found that some vendors had much higher LSE than others. Due to the industry omerta they don’t rat out the offenders.
• Errors matter. A drive that develops one error is much more likely to develop a second. The second error is likely to be close to the first error. Once a drive develops an error, both enterprise and consumer drives are equally likely to develop a 2nd error.

Annual sector error rates
This figure from the paper indicates the variability in age-related error rates

The caption states:

For each disk model that has been in the field for at least two years, the first bar represents Year 1 and the second represents Year 2. The NL and ES bars represent weighted averages for nearline and enterprise class drives respectively.

Consumer/SOHO users with large, cheap, old disks will see LSE. Another reason Desktop RAID is a bad idea. Not many consumers replace their drives every 24 months.

File system implications
File systems rely on disk-based data structures to keep track of your stuff. One of the key findings of the team is that disk errors tend to congregate near each other, like congressmen and lobbyists.

Therefore, file systems that replicate critical data across the disk are much less likely to lose your data than those, like ReiserFS, place critical structures in one contiguous area. Related issue: since disks virtualize the block structure, how do FS designers know where their data structures actually go on disk?

Media and data scrubbing
What’s the difference?

Media scrubs use a SCSI Verify command to validate a disk sector’s integrity. This command performs an ECC check of the sector’s content from within the disk without transferring data to the storage layer. On failure, the command returns a latent sector error.

While

A data scrub is primarily used to detect data corruption. This scrub issues read operations for each disk sector, computes a checksum over its data, compares the checksum to the on-disk 8-byte checksum, and reconstructs the sector from other disks in the RAID group if the checksum comparison fails. Latent sector errors discovered by data scrubs appear as read errors.

In the analyzed drives over 60% of LSE were found by scrubbing. Scrubbing is a high-end feature that works.

The StorageMojo take
The consistency of LSE as disk capacity increased suggests that there is a constant head/media issue. Since consumer drives are larger than enterprise drives, part of the higher LSE rate is explicable.

The higher LSE rate increase for aging consumer drives suggests that enterprise drives are higher quality. Or maybe their error correction is better.

Finally, drive vendors need to re-think their ECC strategies. As capacities increase so will LSE. Higher quality ECC comes at the cost of capacity. It is time to start paying that price.

Comments welcome, of course. Download the article pdf here.

I wrote a first pass on the Microsoft/Yahoo for ZDnet yesterday morning. Short version: are they nuts?

The silliest comment
Ray Ozzie was quoted saying:

Our lives, our businesses, and even our society have been progressively transformed by the Web, and Yahoo! has played a pioneering role by building compelling, high-scale services and infrastructure,” said Ray Ozzie, chief software architect at Microsoft. “The combination of these two great teams would enable us to jointly deliver a broad range of new experiences to our customers that neither of us would have achieved on our own.

I agree about the compelling services. Yahoo has a number of market-leading services, starting with mail.

High-scale infrastructure?
I don’t think so. Very conservatively Yahoo’s infrastructure costs are 3x Google’s. Probably 8-10x.

By all accounts Mr. Ozzie is a brilliant fellow. So why the silly comment? A few possibilities come to mind:

• PR flacks wrote the comment for him and he was too busy to review it.
• MS investor relations wrote the comment to try to paper over the fact that there is no technology synergy in the acquisition, figuring that Wall St. analysts wouldn’t know the difference.
• He actually believes it. They are so-o doomed!

Other than IBM, Microsoft Research probably has the most brilliant CompSci group in the industry - and that includes Google. They can’t solve problems?

What is the real problem?
BillG and Steve Ballmer were out of new ideas - or good ideas they could easily copy - after Windows 3.1 and Office. The illegal strangulation of Netscape has cost Msoft billions in penalties and still, 10 years after, IE is losing market share. Gee, maybe the browser wasn’t important after all!

It also looks like Microsoft avoids the kind of clean sheet design that gave Google its cost advantage. You must use Windows. You must use Dell. You must use CIFS. Who knows what self-sabotaging corporate injunctions are stifling Microsoft developers? Because they sure have the smarts. And the money.

The StorageMojo take
Microsoft has to stop chasing the latest Big New Thing - be it game consoles, music players, web portals or Internet advertising - and start focusing on new opportunities that they are uniquely positioned to exploit.

For example, how about migrating web-scale technology down to the enterprise? Storage companies are using Linux to create commercial storage clusters like Google’s. Why isn’t Microsoft building Boxwood-style cluster software to help enterprises lower their storage TCO? Take advantage of the Microsoft army of admins and resellers to move the concept and further entrench Windows.

And that’s far from the only opportunity.

Instead Ballmer et. al. seem obsessed with fighting wars they’ve already lost against Apple, Google and Linux (see Farewell, Bill. Yo, Ballmer, now it’s your turn! on ZDnet). Even the richest and most powerful nation software company on earth has limits and should pick its fights.

Comments welcome, of course.

What could be more appropriate?
HP’s lackluster showing in The Info Pro’s survey - see yesterday’s post - reminded me that I’d written about HP shortly after after I’d started blogging (see HP’s Storage Grid-lock: panic-stricken execs promise fix in four years).

Here’s a quote from the September 2004 post:

HP’s storage shortfall this past quarter has Carly pulling out the stops to save one of HP’s few high-margin non-printer businesses. Firing executives, check. Inspirational speech to resellers, check. Roll out ambitious product roadmap for delivery in 2008, check.

2008!?! Why not just put out a press release titled ” HP execs panic over storage shortfall, have no clue how to fix business in less than four years”? Then, at least, they could start facing up to their real problems.

Issuing long-range roadmaps is always a move of pure desperation, so the HP storage business must be considerably weaker than they have let on.

So what were they going to deliver this year?
Get this wacky idea: a storage grid. As an HP whitepaper described it:

The HP StorageWorks Grid will be built from intelligent building blocks called smart cells. These elements will incorporate commodity hardware. In addition to the expected control and storage hardware, smart cells will incorporate a flexible operating environment that allows storage functions to be downloaded as needed—and allows smart cells to be repurposed if necessary.

While the 4 year timeline was laughable the actual proposal was smart and forward-looking. The technology was there. But the paper didn’t address the business dynamics that would enable HP to bring the project to fruition. In other words, the marketing problem.

Clearly no one else did either.

The StorageMojo take
Today clustered storage is the obvious successor to big-iron arrays. When HP wrote the paper it wasn’t. If they’d followed through they’d be the thought leaders in the industry and well-positioned to take commercial leadership as well.

As I noted then,

But HP’s roots as a device company have always made the systems approach [. . .] difficult to execute. Even though HP bought a strong storage business with Compaq (which won it when they bought DEC) and the StorageWorks line, the feckless storage mavens in Palo Alto (best idea ever: “Let’s introduce EMC into all our top corporate accounts! It’s cheap, easy and with no engineering its all profit!”) have managed to run it into the ground.

HP should take a leaf from Sun’s storage strategy: move storage software from tin-wrapped boxes into the OS group where commodity servers and networks can provide cost-effective infrastructure.

HP had a great idea 4 years ago. Now it’s time to deliver.

Comments welcome, of course.

A recent study by The Info Pro research firm suggests that some seismic shifts are underway. Is EMC losing top-of-mind recognition in the data center? Are mid-size enterprises more likely to embrace new technology?

In an article in Data Storage Connection, TIP talks about some of its findings from a series of interviews with a couple of hundred data center denizens. TIP runs the series about every 6 months. About 150 were F1000 types and another 85 were mid-size enterprise.

Naturally, the article and the accompanying slide presentation are designed to sell the report, but it is worth watching for marketing mavens. They focus on what people consider “exciting” technologies.

Random comments
In no particular order:

• EMC’s unaided top-of-mind seems to be on a steady downward slide. One might have thought the hype around VMware would have changed that. Of course the stock market seems to forgotten that too.
• Newbies 3Par, Data Domain, F5, Compellent, and Isilon are trending up.
• Biggest surprise: HP is in the weeds behind behind Data Domain, Sun and F5.

The StorageMojo take
EMC may be paying the price for all of its not-terribly-storage-related acquisitions like RSA and VMware. Or maybe its aging architectures are taking their toll. Whatever it is, the upcoming Hulk/Maui launch is a chance to burnish the corporate image. But not too brightly since the v1 software will be weak.

HP is clearly in trouble. I’m biased - I shipped the very first StorageWorks product back around ‘91 - but for an organization that used to have bright and creative developers and good marketing, their top-of-mind stinks. Time to shake up HP storage marketing: there’s an art to marketing to and through a large direct sales force. Megatons of brochures don’t sell products - people do.

The newbies seem to be doing well in mid-size enterprises where they can more easily migrate to a new vendor. But while the glass house grinds slowly, entrenched vendors can be displaced. Time to rethink the value proposition.

Comments welcome, of course.

No, this isn’t about pork bellies
In just the last few weeks EMC and IBM have announced their intentions to offer commodity server-based storage. EMC with Hulk/Maui and IBM with XIV.

Sun already offers its Thumper product, a high-density server and storage chassis with 48 disk drives, at prices competitive with commodity servers from a GB perspective. You can put OpenSolaris on anything you choose.

A few more shoes will be dropping
So EMC, IBM and Sun have commodity-hardware based storage. HDS, HP LSI and NetApp don’t. How long will they choose to hold out?

HP is part way there. Polyserve runs on HPs popular blade servers. But if density isn’t your goal and scalability is important, you may lean to another solution.

Pressure on the margin
It is a simple question, really. How will expensive hardware compete with cheap hardware? After the FUD and hand waving are said and done, customers of enterprise storage will have a new choice with a lower cost structure.

If HDS and NetApp aren’t in the new game, where exactly will they be?

The StorageMojo take
HDS is not nimble, so I’d be pleasantly surprised if they did anything in 08. NetApp also has some breathing room as none of the big boys are offering commodity cluster NAS. But that could change in a week.

NetApp appears to be the most vulnerable. Their largest customers are ripe for conversion to a more scalable architecture and lower costs. No matter how much NetApp discounts, their costs are higher than commodity hardware. They can fight for a while, but not forever. They have to be competitive and their big customers have to believe they will be competitive.

Expect to see NetApp make a cluster storage software acquisition in 2008.

Comments welcome. Is Polyserve going to meet HP’s needs going forward, or are they too going to have to buy or create a new cluster storage product?

About time
I’m in Silicon Valley for a few days. So I’ll keep this brief.

EMC is pulling out the stops. First Hulk/Maui clusters and now putting flash SSDs in the Symm. They are positioning it as technology leadership, which it isn’t, but it is marketing leadership. I’m impressed.

SSDs have been around for decades. Symms have been around for over 15 years, so why now?

I suspect the rising chorus of customers complaining about 30% capacity utilization rates coupled with Wall Street’s economic woes - I wouldn’t want to be EMC’s Citibank account manager - helped them make the decision. Plus the rise of cluster block storage - XIV the latest case in point - means that if you want to own the high-performance array crown it is time to stake out the territory.

Plus the margins are great!
I haven’t seen any pricing yet, but knowing EMCs general strategy I suspect they are charging their usual 6x markup over cost for the SSDs. Despite that it should be an easy business case for a CFO to approve.

But if you are going to spend big bucks on an SSD, is putting it inside a single storage array the right way to go? The wide-awake folks at Texas Memory Systems think not. They provided me with this table comparing their SSD to the STEC ZeusIOPS drive EMC is using.

Make an entire SAN go faster instead of a single array? Sounds good to me.

The StorageMojo take
Will SSDs finally get some data center love? EMC’s endorsement of SSDs should provide an opening for the long-suffering SSD companies to get more attention from the enterprise. If it’s good enough for EMC . . . .

Comments welcome, as always. Moderation may be slightly more intermittent than usual, but moderate I shall. When I’m not enjoying the convertible I rented.

Enough of Google’s bathtub brew
IBM’s purchase of XIV makes it official: cluster storage is on a roll.

XIV’s website could have been ripped from the webpages of StorageMojo:

. . . enterprise-class storage systems typically comprise proprietary, special-purpose hardware, such as backplanes, shared memory architecture, and disk shelves. Huge amounts of resources are spent on developing and testing these products — with the associated costs passed on to the user. Moreover, special-purpose hardware quickly becomes obsolete, with a long wait time until new-generation processors, switches, and other components are integrated.

It also appears that the Nextra product has done away with RAID 5:

The Nextra system uses innovative RAID-X design, in which each disk is split into small pieces, and each piece is mirrored on a different disk. As a result, when a disk does fail, all disks in the system participate in the rebuild.

They don’t like ILM:

The ILM concept is rendered redundant, saving on ILM-related software license costs, administration efforts, and management attention, and sparing users migration-related downtime and other service issues related to ILM

Payback time?
Moshe Yanai, the executive chairman of XIV, was the chief engineer for the original Symmetrix that EMC used - along with raging incompetence at IBM - to destroy IBM’s lock on enterprise storage. Not only was he the engineer, he also got a percentage of the sales price of each Symm sold, making him a wealthy man.

But when EMC bought Data General to acquire the Clariion storage division, Moshe didn’t like it. After a long fight, CEO Joe Tucci pushed Moshe out of EMC and continued the successful Clariion product line. Moshe went back to Israel and eventually developed the Nextra product for XIV.

Gee, do you think his tie-up with IBM might be aimed at his former employer? A little?

The StorageMojo take
EMC’s Hulk/Maui and IBM’s XIV products are aimed at different parts of the market. IBM doesn’t have a large high-end array business to protect so the Nextra’s positioning as

A winning new storage paradigm for the enterprise
XIV Ltd., creator of Nextra™, has undertaken to design and produce the next generation of enterprise-class SAN (Storage Area Networks) systems. Nextra was created based on the principle of providing a simple solution for meeting the herculean IT challenges of today and tomorrow.

isn’t the problem for IBM that it is for EMC, desperate to protect the margins and revenue of the Symm line.

But both products are built on (quality) commodity hardware, so if one or the other needs to make mid-course corrections they can do it in software. Positioning Nextra as enterprise storage puts the heat on EMC and the Symm.

It will be interesting to see who gets to a boil first.

Comments welcome, of course.

Darn! It looks like I screwed up. I’m sorry. While Microsoft did disable a number of early Word and other file formats, it wasn’t as long a list as I thought.

Textual analysis
I take a text-heavy approach to the content on StorageMojo. I prefer to go to original source material, unpack the meaning and the context, and then give my take on it.

That usually works pretty well. But in this case it didn’t.

What happened?
I read a lot of technical documents. Most never get written about. But the Microsoft knowledge base article was an exception. Since Microsoft was the topic it also got a lot of attention from me and others

There is a lot of emotion around Microsoft. They are a big, powerful, immensely profitable and sometimes clueless corporation whose desktop monopoly is a fact of life for computer users and IT professionals.

I try to stay with the facts as best I can determine them. In this case I got confused by the KB article. That other people made the same mistake is small comfort and no excuse (see a Microsoft take here).

Lessons learned
Other than resolving to analyze content from Microsoft more carefully, I’m not sure what else I would do differently. I didn’t question their motives for the change, only the way it was handled.

However, I do have some suggestions for Microsoft.

• Reducing functionality on an already purchased product is a problem. You should notify users that you are limiting product functionality and give them the opportunity to decline the update. Even if it is for their own good.
• Suggesting that editing the registry or using esoteric admin tools to solve the problem is OK for the tech savvy. But what about my 85 year old neighbor Dorothy, whose computer is a lifeline to her great-grandchildren? Her late husband was an engineer, so she has files that go back quite a few years. Microsoft, you are both an enterprise and a consumer company. Own it.
• Communication is worth spending money on. Tech writers tell me that Microsoft doesn’t pay very well and, as a result, it doesn’t get very good tech writing. Maybe MCSEs are used to the style, but it sure didn’t work for this reasonably tech-savvy consumer.

The StorageMojo take
Tech is complicated and sometimes people - like I just did - get it wrong. Listening to criticism and learning from mistakes is how we all get better, even Microsoft. I hope you’ll keep coming back to StorageMojo and I’ll keep doing my level best to make it worth your time.

Comments welcome, as always.

“They trusted us with their data? Will the fools never learn?”
The Service Pack 3 update to Office 2003 blocks over a dozen old file formats, effectively rendering the data inaccessible. Unless you are adept at the registry editing Microsoft cautions you against.

And they don’t warn you that you won’t be able to access the old files. Whee!

Check out my ZDnet article for the gory details. It isn’t pretty.

Update: While the SP3 does block opening a number of old file formats, the formats in question are older: all Word pre-6.0; PowerPoint pre-97; Excel 4.0 charts; dBASE II .dbf; Lotus and Quattro files; Corel Draw .cdr. See my mea culpa. End update.

Clueless droids?
How does the world’s largest software company make this kind of wrong-on-so-many-levels decision? Is there ANY adult supervision in Redmond?

The decision bespeaks a corporate culture that is painfully clueless about its customers. Gee, why would anyone want to access 5 year old Word documents?

Medical products marketing
Redmond’s blindness echoes that of Detroit’s for the last 50 years. “Safety doesn’t sell.” “Bigger is better.” “Good enough quality is good enough.” “Americans will never buy Japanese cars.”

Microsoft clearly doesn’t get the fact that their products are an intimate part of consumer’s lives, much as medicines are. When 8 bottles of Tylenol capsules were poisoned with cyanide in 1982, Johnson & Johnson quickly recalled 31 million bottles and spent on the order of $100 million dollars to restore consumer confidence in the Tylenol brand.

Would Microsoft spend a nickel to protect and reassure consumers? I give it a qualified “maybe.”

The StorageMojo take
In case anyone thought that archiving documents in proprietary formats was acceptable, this is your wake-up call. ASCII text and probably PDFs are OK. Everything else, including RTF - which Microsoft controls - is suspect.

With the growing focus on e-discovery, there should be a market for a high-speed “any format to .txt or .pdf” appliance. Producing unreadable softcopies won’t cut much ice in Federal courts.

Comments welcome, as always.

Email is the largest personal database for most people. Easy to search, my gigabyte of email contains contacts, documents, notes and the record of many relationships. I back it up both locally and remotely.

But how do I know it isn’t corrupted?

FastMail’s email data protection
FastMail is, I think [guys, how about a "what is FastMail" paragraph?], an open source email system an email hosting provider. In a recent blog post someone there talks about how FastMail protects user data from data corruption:

. . . we ensure that as soon as an email is delivered to a mailbox, a SHA-1 checksum of that email is generated and stored in the email index.

When the email is replicated, the email content and the checksum are sent separately. We then generate the checksum on the replicated email content and ensure that it matches the original checksum to see that the email was replicated correctly.

We also repeat this procedure when the email is backed up, ensuring that the backup of the email is correct.

We also run a regular check process that takes blocks of emails and recomputes their checksum to see it matches what is in the index. If there’s any issues, we’re alerted and can find which of the master, replica or backup email are correct and can correct the problem.

What do other email systems do?
To my untutored eye, this seems like comprehensive protection against data corruption.

Two questions:

• Is it?
• What do other email systems do?

Gmail presumably relies upon the triple redundancy of GFS to ensure data integrity. What do Exchange and Sendmail do? Are any of them demonstrably better?

The StorageMojo take
Email is looming ever-larger as a personal information management system. As volume and attachment size continue to grow, multi-gigabyte mailboxes will become the norm, if they aren’t already.

Are the data protection measures in email systems up to the task?

Update: Alert reader - more alert than me, anyway - Nathan, found the FastMail “About” page. They are another hosted email provider. I updated the post to reflect that. Thanks, Nathan!

Comments invited, of course.

I’m a judge for the Codie awards this year, so I’m getting to see some storage software that I might not otherwise. Today, Rick Clark, CEO of Aptare, demo’d their Backup Manager and Capacity Manager.

I was impressed.

Oh no, has Robin gone soft?
Maybe. But Aptare has 3 important features:

• Agentless architecture. They go direct to HDS and EMC arrays to get the info they need. More arrays coming.
• Deep reporting. Application databases, LUNs, array, allotted and consumed.
• Flexible GUI. Drag and drop the data you need to create a custom dashboard, like a web 2.0 mashup.

Managed from a browser
Capacity and backup management use Aptare’s StorageConsole Platform. The company plans further modules. Next up, a replication manager.

The StorageMojo take
This is the first backup manager and capacity manager I’ve seen that actually feels easy enough for non-storage geeks to use. That is important because as capacity continues to explode, some storage management tasks need to get pushed out to application owners.

If you are in the market for either backup or capacity management or aren’t fully satisfied with your existing tools, you owe it to yourself to get the Aptare demo.

Comments welcome, as always.

For some reason I volunteered to write something about vendors after the Wikibon con call today. That follows.

Vendors: responding to EMC’s cluster storage initiative

Context:
EMC’s support of cluster storage for archiving and backup will legitimize the technology. Vendors with competitive products have a window of opportunity to position themselves as a superior alternative. Make no mistake: EMC plans to own this market and will commit significant resources to the effort.
EMC’s market entry will be hobbled by several problems that competitors can exploit.

• Immature software: limitations, bugs and the eval cycle that implies
• Maintaining a bright line positioning between Hulk/Maui and Symms
• 60% gross margin requirement

EMC will be NDA’ing strategic customers starting mid-January to build major sales to reference at announcement. Smart customers will be calling other vendors, including the smaller, innovative ones, for perspective. Luck favors the prepared.

Strategy:
IBM, Hitachi, HP, NetApp IBM Global Services should be open to reselling/integrating suitable substitutes. There are efforts within IBM’s storage group to create a scalable, commodity storage infrastructure, but the chasm between IBM’s brilliant technologists and IBM marketing makes success problematic.

Hitachi doesn’t seem to be doing anything in this area. They will be looking at an acquisition and will take their time.

HP’s Polyserve acquisition may convince them that they have the cluster thing under control, but Polyserve isn’t competitive with EMC’s initiative. HP has a deep well of technology expertise from the DEC cluster products. Expect a cluster acquisition in 2008.

NetApp is vulnerable. ONTAP GX has missed the cluster market and their controller-based architecture has all the cost disadvantages of traditional arrays without the flexibility of clustering. Putting ONTAP 7G on commodity hardware bricks with software “mortar” - as Google does with GFS - would preserve their significant advantages with WAFL at a lower $/GB.

New competitors
Now is the time to get serious about what your product really does and what its appeal is to customers. Focus is critical to building a defensible position that can be used to win F500 business in areas where EMC is less competitive. There is also an opportunity to shift the terms of the customer debate. This market is still fluid and customers don’t have a clear mental map of the terrain. Smart, focused marketing can take advantage of that.

Action Item:
Small/new vendors: if you want to be acquired, now is the time to be shopping yourself to the big guys. If you want to build a big business, get your marketing focused on verticals and business justification.

Big vendors: start shopping now. EMC wants your scalp so you’ll want to be well-armed.

All: there is a lot more to know about Hulk/Maui. A focused competitive analysis effort will pay dividends.

Update: The audio is available here. If you are wondering if I mentioned your company, I probably didn’t.

Comments welcome, of course.

Here’s an invite to a Wikibon Peer Incite discussion I’ll be leading
Tuesday, 11 December. Call in on Skype and listen and ask questions. EMC’s AR and competitive analysts will be there. Shouldn’t you?

If you aren’t hip to Wikibon it is worth checking out.

Here’s the blurb from the invite with the call in number and passcode.

This is a reminder that the next Peer Incite research meeting is scheduled for Tuesday December 11, 2007. The topic for this meeting is: EMC’s Maui and the Future of Clustered Storage.

Google’s development of one of the world’s largest storage infrastructures based on commodity components, without reliance on traditional array technology, was a huge wakeup call for the storage industry in general and EMC in particular. Recent comments by EMC’s CEO Joe Tucci indicate two new products from the company, Hulk and Maui will address the market for so-called ‘Cloud Computing’ and hit the market in mid-2008. It is estimated that 85% of corporate data is unstructured yet organizations continue to spend billions optimizing storage for the 15% of information that is traditional database-oriented. Will this continue to make sense?

Key issues we’ll address on the call include:

• What does it mean to users that EMC is about to legitimize clustered storage?
• What do these advancements mean for user investments in traditional array technology?
• How will the industry likely respond to EMC’s attempt to lead this trend?

Here’s how to participate in the discussion:

• Date: Tuesday December 11, 2007
• Time: 12:00pm EST (9:00am PST)
• Call in #: 218-486-1300 Passcode: 509215

Moderator: Peter Burris (http://www.wikibon.org/User:PBurris)

See you at the meeting.

The StorageMojo take
The IT consulting business - as in Gartner and everybody else - needs a good shaking. Wikibon is a good idea that may be part of the solution. Let me know what you think after you check it out.

Update: If you miss the call check out the Wikibon archive.

Comments welcome, of course

The SF Federal Attorney is 2 and 0 on these backdating prosecutions. Stephanie Jensen, former VP of HR, said she didn’t know what she was doing was wrong, but the prosecution noted that she cautioned staffers not to email about it. The jury took a day to return a verdict. She faces up to 20 years in prison for one count of fraud and one count of falsifying records.

Former CEO Greg Reyes is still awaiting sentencing on his conviction for 10 felony charges. Jensen’s conviction isn’t good news for him.

Brocade’s marketing nailed by the Wall Street Journal’s Law Blog
On a lighter note, the WSJ Law Blog had this comment on Brocade’s marketing:

Law Blog Corporate Self-Description of the Day: So we’ve done a little bit of reporting on backdating at technology companies, and we have to admit: for the most part, we have no understanding of what it is these companies do. We took a look at the Brocade Web site to gain some understanding. Here’s what we learned:

“Brocade provides key building-blocks for architecting and simplifying IT infrastructures to increase resource utilization, improve productivity, and maximize ROI.”

You can bet we’ll be dropping that into our holiday cocktail-party chat ASAP.

Much classier than shouting “party’s over!”

Seriously
What does Brocade do? Yeah, they build FC switches. But with 10 gigE coming in, and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) coming in, that won’t be a growth business. Do you really want to compete with Cisco and Juniper in the Ethernet switch business?

How about storage connectivity? Maybe. Like QLogic, who took an enormous hit when Wall Street realized FC was over, Brocade is grappling with the post-FC world. More on that later.

The problem with Brocade’s self-description is that it could apply to dozens of technology firms - and does. Faster, better, cheaper is what everyone in Silicon Valley does. Working some of the “how” into it makes for a better and more memorable story.

And differentiates you from everyone else who claims the same thing.

Comments welcome. If you start seeing law firm ads here, that is Google’s doing, not mine.

There’s a dark horse coming up on the outside
Isn’t Sun - and Solaris - almost dead? No and they’re showing quite a bit of life in the storage arena. It is amazing what a $12 billion company can do with a unique strategy and deep engineering smarts.

One big change: after winning the 1.6 billion dollar anti-trust settlement against Microsoft, including a 10 year cooperation agreement, the 2 companies have embraced each other in ways - like storage - unthinkable 10 years ago.

CIFS support in the Solaris kernal
Sun’s steadily falling attach rate led me to give up on Sun as a storage vendor. But the new CEO, Jonathan Schwartz, has a new storage strategy: move storage functionality into the operating system. And there is a VP of Solaris storage software, Bob Porras.

The latest piece: CIFS. For years I’ve listened to engineers moan about the pain of implementing CIFS on non-Windows systems. Now I know why.

In a blog post Sun engineer Alan Wright explains:

There is a common misconception that Windows interoperability is just a case of implementing file transfer using the CIFS protocol. Unfortunately, that doesn’t get you very far. Windows interoperability also requires that a server support various Windows services, typically MSRPC services, and it is very sensitive to the way that those services behave: Windows interoperability requires that a CIFS server convince a Windows client or server that it “is Windows”. This is really only possible if the operating system supports those services at a fundamental level.

Solving those issues required 180,000 lines of new code in Solaris.

It gets better
They also made changes to ZFS (see my ZFS: Threat or Menace?) to support CIFS:

• Support for DOS attributes (archive, hidden, read-only and system)
• Case-insensitive file name operations.
• Support for ubiquitous cross-protocol - NFS and CIFS - file sharing.

Check out the storage community at OpenSolaris to see what else is cooking.

The StorageMojo take
OpenSolaris is becoming the finest storage platform out there. Adding CIFS support to the kernal is a Big Deal: OpenSolaris will be industry’s first OSS universal storage platform.

Only a company with nothing to lose in the traditional big iron storage business could be so bold. My hat is off to Jonathan and Bob.

Update: For more detail on other SMB related changes, check out Doug McCallum’s Share Manager blog.

Comments welcome, as always. Yes, I know the Samba guys aren’t happy. One of these days I’m going to tackle the GPL vs CDDL thing and see if I can make any sense of it. I’m also wondering where all the givebacks are from the storage companies using OSS in their products.