These requests came in over the transom in the last couple of days. Maybe some StorageMojo readers have wisdom to share.

I have a question I hope you can help me with. My boss asked me . . . to research HP Left-hand SANs and Dell Equallogic SANs. Do you have any special knowledge of these products and, if so, would you make an informal recommendation?

What say you, StorageMojo readers? If you evaluated both, why did you make the choice you did? Vendors welcome to comment, but please identify yourself as such.

The StorageMojo take
AFAIK, both products are good iSCSI systems. Both are backed by major corporations. EqualLogic may be stronger in the channel today, but HP has channel chops as well. HP’s blade servers may be a more expandable platform, but EqualLogic’s software portfolio may be more affordable.

Translation: you could do worse than either of these.

Part II
Another customer perplexity: service.

We have a pair of HP disk arrays, EVA 8000 and 6000 and I am looking for a consultant to help up with storage planning. Do you do such work or could you recommend someone to me. I am looking for someone who goes beyond just being a seller, I have plenty of potential sellers already.

The writer is in a small city in the Mountain West, so you should be used to working remotely with clients. No, not in Arizona.

The StorageMojo take
HP folks may be wondering: why doesn’t he call HP? My guess: not big enough for a direct engagement.

Courteous comments welcome, of course.

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Imagine cloud storage that didn’t cost much more than bare drives. High density storage with RAID 6 protection, reasonable bandwidth and web-friendly HTTPS access.

And really, really cheap.

Raw disk cost is only 5-10% of a RAID systems cost. The rest goes for corporate jets, sales commissions, 3 martini lunches, tradeshows, sheetmetal, 2 Intel x86 mobos, obscene profits and a few pale and blinking engineers in a windowless lab who make the whole thing work.

Storage for ascetics
But let’s say you didn’t want the 3 martini lunch or the barely-clad booth babes. All you want is really cheap economical, reasonably reliable storage.

You aren’t running the global financial system – what’s left of it anyway – and you don’t have a 2500 person call center hammering on a few dozen Oracle databases 7 x 24. No, you’re thinking a quiet cloud storage business for SMB’s, maybe backup and some light file sharing, that will give you a nifty little revenue stream with annual renewals so you can see trouble coming 12 months in advance.

Enough redundancy so when something breaks you can wait until morning to fix it instead of an 0300 pajama run to the data center. Easy connectivity so you aren’t blowing the savings on Cisco switches.

Bliss
Well, you aren’t the only one. Backblaze, a new online backup provider, designed the Storage Pod for their own use and are sharing it with everyone. They aren’t in the hardware business and I think they figured sharing it would be a nice little attention-getting device.

It worked for me. Here’s the box – which they are using in production.

Here’s an exploded diagram with a simplified BOM:

And then there’s the (free) software. 64-bit Debian Linux, IBM’s open source JFS file system and HTTPS access. Put a stateless webserving front end on it and you’re good to go. Scale out the webserver and add storagepods to grow the system.

The StorageMojo take
This isn’t general purpose or high-performance storage. Nor is it backed by global network of 7 x 24 service professionals. But there are a lot of applications out there that just need a big bit bucket. This is it.

No one is manufacturing this for you either – which is a good thing. If you don’t know what you’re doing you can get in a lot of trouble with a lot of data real fast. Want to be the Bernie Madoff of cloud storage?

But the density is good, the performance is reasonable, the availability is decent and the price is right. This is a DC-3, not a 747. It is all you need for the right application.

Courteous comments welcome, of course. See the plans and get the box model in the paper Backblaze put together.

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The video folks have an interesting set of problems: large needs; major bandwidth; time-critical collaboration; lots of metadata; and more. Like budgets. I do some video production myself and empathize.

They are today where most of us will be in 10 years: lots of large files; local and remote sharing; processor and bandwidth intensive operations; large archives of wanted and rarely accessed files. Today high-end video folks are working at 2k, 4k and, sometimes, 8k video resolutions – and 10 years from now I wouldn’t be surprised if home users weren’t too.

What prompts this is a note I received from, well, I’ll let him introduce himself.

I have a boutique post-production company and I’m a filmmaker. We are small, under a dozen, but swell to a few times that size with freelancers on a project-by-project basis. Because we work with very high resolution media, we need a lot of space, and very high throughput to each user. . . . [W]e’re all working with 2K and 4K media (300 and 1200MBps respectively to EACH user) and 3D animation rendering. . . . We use a mix of Linux, Windows, and OS X clients. In total, we could easily make use of 100TB+ right now, and prefer to stop archiving everything to tape and deleting it, but rather migrate to another tier of storage but keep in one global namespace with the tape just for disaster recovery. We also need security administration.

I can’t find a storage system that does all this. DataDirect Networks seems to be the du jour high-end storage for my industry, and supposing I’m willing to finance that big-ticket brand, they still don’t have a filing system answer. They’re suggesting StorNext or CXFS, and I know the multi-user scalability and expansion limitations well (can anybody say “forklift”?).

The closest I’ve come is Lustre. It seems like it would fit the bill nicely, especially since we’re savvy to integrate in-house, except that it is Linux only, and NFS/CIFS gateways don’t seem like a great idea. I keep hearing they’re working on at least a Windows client, but who knows when it will be ready?

Can you help at all? What have I overlooked? Doesn’t anyone make what I’m looking for?

Short answer to last question:
No.

Longer answer:
No. But there are workarounds.

For those new to video, here’s an abbreviated chart of some video rates in megabytes per second:
[Adapted from Integrity Data Systems which offers the whole chart. Aspect ratios and frame rates left out.]
Update: Larry Jordan, a writer and trainer in video editing, graciously wrote to let me know that the above data rates are uncompressed – and that most production houses would use compressed data. The amount of compression varies based on the codec as Larry explains in this informative post. End update.

Issue 1: Interconnects
GigE won’t even handle 32-bit RGB standard def video. And when you get into HD video it gets hairier fast. Trunk multiple GigE’s? 10GbE? 4x Infiniband? FC? eSATA or PCI-e direct attached storage?

Issue 2: Virtualization
A single address space is a wonderful thing. You’ll need a software layer that clusters multiple boxes. You’ll also probably want to build an archive infrastructure that is distinct from your higher performance working set storage, but some vendors will disagree.

Likely software suspects include IBRIX, Parascale, Caringo, MatrixStore, Bycast and Permabit.

On the combined HW/SW side there’s Panasas and Isilon. Something tells me there are some other options, like HP’s Extreme Data Storage 9100, that are also applicable.

Lustre is not a product I would recommend since it was designed for HPC, a market where PhDs work as sysadmins. Sun may have tamed it since they bought it, but it is a non-trivial piece of software.

Come one, come all
StorageMojo readers are invited to offer their 2¢ worth. Architecting is non-trivial, especially if money is an object.

Update:
Our interlocutor wrote in to add some detail:

thanks for the response. Here’s some answers:

– We can manage expensive interfaces like 10GigE and Infiniband QDR. We’ve been paying for dual-channel 4Gb FC for the past few years, after all. I just want to also allow standard Gigabit connections to the cheap seats without a lot of complexity. So I guess the jargon for that would be “multiprotocol” switching?

– The large naming space might be a luxury. The fact is that jobs come in one of three general sizes, and we could have volumes of that size waiting to take on new jobs as they come in, so at least there is one namespace per job. As you said, capacity is cheap…

– Truth is I am pretty savvy, but other than that we have a lot of power desktop users but not sysadmin types. I contract some people with steady part-time work, but it has been our business model to try to keep as many of our full-time people on the creative and producing side as possible, and not in support/administration.

The one thing I don’t understand is what you say about Infiniband not being so great when there’s lots of node churn?

I know what you mean about DAS, but I think I’ve ruled out distributing the data through push/pull from a central repository. The fact is jobs just move to fast through here for that, and we often have about two seconds notice that we need to bring a certain job’s data to System X, Y or Z to do work on it. It’s very dynamic.

I see some brands in your blog post I haven’t checked on yet.

What turned me onto Lustre is that Frantic Films in London has deployed it. They’re the only ones AFAIK.
End update.

The StorageMojo take
Some thoughts on the infrastructure issues.

Capacity is cheap, network bandwidth is expensive. Raw SATA disk is less than $0.10/GB. 10GbE switch ports are over a grand apiece. Infiniband is better from a price/performance perspective, but not as friendly for networks where there is much node churn – unless that’s been fixed in the last few years.

Direct attached storage will give you the best performance – especially with 4k. The new PCI-e attached arrays from JMR and others can offer up to 4,000 MB/sec bandwidth. Stripe across 4 of those and you’ll be able to handle 8k.

Transaction processing is well on its way to niche status, like mainframes and hierarchical databases that once ruled the earth. It is a big file world out there and the files are getting bigger every year.

Courteous comments welcome, of course. I’ve done work for many of these folks – but not all – at one time or another.

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Hewlett-Packard’s acquisition of the LeftHand Networks shows how cluster storage is going mainstream – and how HP plans to be right in the middle of it. First PolyServe and now LeftHand.

This is about commodity-based clusters
Not iSCSI or GigE or 10 GigE as a storage interconnect. Fibre Channel’s failure to move downmarket – and Infiniband’s similar problem – means GigE is the only game in town.

Reaching the huge, not currently imploding, SMB market requires meeting people where they live. SMBs don’t live in Fibre Channel glass houses. GigE isn’t ideal, but it’s cheap and it works.

Did HP overpay?
$360 million isn’t pocket change, but it is only about 4x the $86 million investors put in. The investors get some nice coin, but it isn’t the 10-bagger they were hoping for.

Once the Lefties go through the interminable internal HP meat grinder, sales will grow rapidly. I suspect they weren’t up to Isilon’s $100M in sales – maybe $70M – but LeftHand was much closer to profitability. Net net: the price looks fair for a market leader in a high-growth market.

HP vs EMC
Battle of the competing cluster storage visions. Polyserve handles files; LeftHand blocks. EMC’s Maui is aimed at large-scale distributed file storage, a utility that ISP’s might resell to SMBs, but nothing an SMB would implement on their own.

Which will win – and there’s room for both – rests on the answer to the question Are there economies of scale in storage?. If there are, small-scale clusters sales will suffer and Maui should win.

The StorageMojo take
This is cluster storage market skirmishing, not a pitched battle. That will come but right now everyone is feeling their way, coming into the market from different directions, waiting to see what clicks.

Right now though, HP seems to have the strongest position. XIV is too new; Maui even newer; Lustre too complex; Isilon is digging out of a big hole. HP has the pole position with implementable products today and the services to back them up. Should be a powerful combination.

Courteous comments welcome, of course. Disclosure: I’ve done some work for HP, Isilon and Sun.

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StorageMojo has long held the view that our storage workloads are changing: more file storage, less block storage; larger file sizes; and cooler data. While all the indicators said this was happening it’s good to find a study that confirmed this intuition.

In the Measurement And Analysis Of Large-Scale Network File System Workloads (pdf) researchers Andrew W. Leung and Ethan L. Miller from UC Santa Cruz and Shankar Pasupathy and Garth Goodson of Netapp measured 2 large file servers for 4 months. Their results are worth reviewing, since so many of the optimizations in storage infrastructures rely on workload assumptions.

Unstudied CIFS
The authors point out that there have been no major studies of the CIFS protocol, odd since it is the default on Windows systems. Furthermore, the last major study of network file loads was performed in 2001 – seven years ago – an interval in which average this drive sizes have gone from 20 GB to 500 and network speeds from 100 MB to 1 GB.

Most surprising, however is that no published study has ever analyzed large-scale enterprise file system workloads. Researchers have studied workloads closer to home: university and engineering workloads.

Enterprise workloads
One was a midrange file server with 3 TB of capacity with almost 3 TB used by over 1000 marketing sales and finance employees. The second server was a high end Netapp filer with 28 TB capacity – 19 TB used – supporting 500 engineering employees.

Yes, marketers, engineers get the good toys. You can cry about it over your next 3 martini lunch.

Some significant differences from prior studies:

• Workloads more write oriented. Read/write byte ratios and are now only 2 to 1 compared to the 4-1 or higher ratios reported earlier.
• Workloads less read-centric. Read/write workloads are now 30x more common.
• Most bytes transferred sequentially. These runs are 10x the length found in the old studies.
• Files 10x bigger.
• Files live 10x longer. Less than half are deleted within a day of creation.

Cool new findings

• Files rarely re-opened. Over 66% are re-opened once and 95% fewer than 5 times.
• Over 60% of file re-opens are within a minute of the first open.
• Less than 1% of clients account for 50% of requests.
• Infrequent file sharing. Over 76% of files are opened by just 1 client.
• Concurrent file sharing very rare. As the prior point suggests, only 5% of files are opened by multiple clients and 90% of those are read only.
• Most file types have no common access pattern.

And there’s this: over 90% of the active storage was untouched during the study. That makes it official: data is getting cooler.

Another interesting finding: 91% of VMWare Virtual Disk (vmdk) files accesses were small sequential reads – not the larger sequential accesses I’d expect.

The StorageMojo take
The writers rightly suggest that given the rarity of file reads after creation it makes sense to migrate files to cheap storage sooner than later.

Perhaps primary file storage should be thought of as a large FIFO buffer – tossing 3 month old files to an archive for long-term storage. A data flow architecture instead of a series ever-larger buckets.

Kudos to NetApp and UCSC for this work. It seems like NetApp has been doing the best job of leveraging academic researchers lately. I’d like to see them get more marketing mileage out of their good work.

Courteous comments welcome, of course.

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I wrote a short piece on ZDnet about Los Alamos National Labs new Cell Broadband Engine based supercomputer, Roadrunner. With ~14k v.3 Cell processors – an earlier version powers the PS3 game console – and another ~7k dual core Opterons, the Roadrunner’s ~3,250 compute nodes pack a lot of compute cycles.

The key compute element is the new version of the PS3 chip – called a PowerXCell 8i Processor – features 8x faster double-precision floating point and over 25 GB/sec of memory bandwidth. And it can address 64 GB RAM. There are 4 8i’s per compute node.

Nothing I read mentioned the disk storage – until the friendly Panasas PR person suggested I talk to Larry Jones, VP Product Marketing. Panasas is providing the back end storage for Roadrunner.

I did, and here’s what I learned.

LANL storage infrastructure
LANL’s 6 supercomputers + Roadrunner share the Panasas storage through LANL-developed IO nodes. While Roadrunner itself uses dual-data-rate 4x Infiniband for internode communication, the I/O nodes attach to Panasas through trunked GigE.

The advantage of the I/O nodes is that the entire Panasas storage pool is available to each supercomputer. Lots of bandwidth.

Roadrunner currently has about 80TB of RAM, roughly 24 GB per compute node. That works out to about 4 GB RAM per processor.

The jobs these machines run are huge. A simulation can run 6 months or more. Depending on criticality a job gets checkpointed every hour or maybe once a day.

The Panasas installation at LANL, begun in 2003, is currently 2 PB. Assuming an average of 500 GB drives, that means 4,000 disk drives.

Panasas uses 5 trunked GigE links to each of the 8 controllers in a single rack. They are now in beta for 10 GigE, which reduce link count from 40 to 8 per rack while doubling bandwidth.

The hot rodders at LANL should like that.

The StorageMojo take
Roadrunner’s 80 TB RAM is a sizable storage infrastructure in its own right. Keeping it fed and backed up is a major job.

Consumerization of IT is a common concept – but what we see here is the consumerization of HPC: Playstation CPUs; SATA drives; Linux OS; air cooling. The old model of highly customized kit for HPC is dead.

Which is a good thing for the rest of us. We get some of the smartest people in computing working on platforms that we might also use, developing applications that otherwise would never be available to the consumer market.

I’ll never run molecular dynamics codes, but maybe my kids will. After all, I can now edit feature length movies on my desktop. Who would have believed that just 20 years ago?

Comments welcome, of course. Disclosure: I did some work for Panasas last year and – who knows? – might do some more in the future. I like the team and the way they are pushing pNFS.

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I had a con call with Chris Gladwin and Russ Kennedy of Cleversafe a couple of weeks ago. They’ve come to market with a product line that seeks to deliver:

• Massive scalability to meet growing digital content requirements
• Unprecedented Security and Privacy for critical digital assets
• Survivability against disasters, dishonesty and time
• Extremely cost-effective infrastructure compared to traditional methods

That’s a quote from their pitch.

Cleversafe’s product line
Cleversafe, IIRC, started as a software company, but their announced products come in nice rack-mountable boxes. There are 3 of them:

• CS Slicestor – Dispersed Storage server – $11.3k
• CS Accesser – Dispersed Storage router – $12.3k
• CS Manager – Dispersed Storage network manager – $12.3k

The Slicestor is a 1U storage server containing 4 disks. The Accessor slices up the data and distributes it – think slice router. The Manager works out of band to monitor and manage the storage network components.

I assume the pricing includes some room for volume discounts. There is an open-source version (c. 2006) of the software. The company intends to offer a software-only version as well.

Why hardware?
The Conventional Wisdom in VC circles is that tin-wrapped software ramps revenues faster – hey, you’re selling tin + bits – at the cost of lower margins and loss of focus.

Qualifying hardware is non-trivial; so you tend to stay on one platform longer than you should. At liquidity event time, software companies fetch higher multiples, so it may be a net loss. VCs live by the Golden Rule: he who has the gold makes the rules.

What it does
Cleversafe has an iSCSI or block storage interface. It takes the data, slices it into small pieces using Information Dispersal Algorithms and then ships the slices off to storage either locally or around the world.

In the latest version you can specify how many slices the system makes and how many slices are required to rebuild the data. If you have 11 data centers around the world, you can specify that, say, 6 are required to recreate the data.

You could lose access to 5 data centers and still recover. If the local controlling authority busts into 3 or 4 data centers, they get nothing. Pretty cool if you worry about corrupt government officials getting hold of your company secrets.

The company is planning on adding FTP, CIFS and NFS in the fullness of time.

How well it works
Cleversafe claims that given sufficient low-latency bandwidth the dispersed storage is as fast as a local disk. That’s a tall order, but for now I’ll take their word for it.

Who should buy it?
The company is aiming the Dispersed Storage Network at ISPs to offer as a service and multinationals with round the clock operations and critical data.

How it works
Cleversafe uses Cauchy Reed Solomon erasure codes to slice and dice the data. These codes have several advantages:

• More capacity efficient and failure tolerant than parity codes
• Doesn’t require a license
• Code and decode are faster than other stack operations

If you’d like to play with Cauchy Reed Solomon, check out Dr. Jim Plank’s software page which includes

. . . Reed-Solomon coding, Cauchy Reed-Solomon coding, general bit-matrix coding, Reed-Solomon coding optimized for RAID-6, and Liberation coding. The documentation provides some tutorial material on matrix and bit-matrix based erasure coding.

I met the good doctor at FAST, where he was delighted to find that Clevesafe – also a FAST presenter – was using techniques he’d worked on a decade ago.

The StorageMojo take
I’m impressed with what Cleversafe has done. They will look even smarter after EMC’s Hulk/Maui announcement this spring. I suspect they’ll be bought by year’s end.

Kudos to the Cleversafe team.

Comments welcome, of course.

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They haven’t reported financials for almost 3 quarters. Their stock is trading at about 20% of its peak. They fired their CEO and put founder Sujal Patel in his place. And NetApp was trying to strangle baby Isilon (see NetApp filers for $1/GB?) in its crib.

Are they goners?

I don’t think so.
I’ve been trying to read the tea leaves on the Peter van Oppen’s decision to join the board earlier this month.

Peter led the tape library company ADIC, also based in the Seattle area, for 12 years until its sale to Quantum. ADIC out-innovated Quantum – saddled with a cranky and slow DLT development group – in libraries and software as well.

If you think the folks who buy storage arrays are conservative, you haven’t sold any tape libraries. It is a tough market and ADIC did well.

So why would van Oppen join a sinking ship?
That’s why I don’t think Isilon is sinking. An external audit team is reviewing Isilon’s accounting to ensure that any financial dirty laundry – say, hypothetically, channel stuffing – gets cleaned up. They’ve been at it for months and must be about done.

The StorageMojo take
Based on the Isilon press release and pure speculation, here’s what I think is going down:

• Peter exercised some due diligence before accepting the directorship and isn’t terribly worried about the basic health of the company
• After he gets up to speed on company operations, he assumes the CEO role by July
• Sujal happily goes back to one of the best jobs in any company: CTO and Founder while the stock climbs in value

However it goes down, getting Peter on board is a real plus. Storage experience is thin in Seattle. Isilon has lots of smart people, but the storage market has many unique wrinkles that networking or software folks take a long time to learn.

Comments welcome, as always. Disclosure: I met Sujal 7 years ago and I’ve done some work for Isilon. I hope they do well.

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Despite being written off for dead . . .
Isilon’s been putting their IPO money to good use: engineering the next gen of their platform that they’ve named the X-series. In the meantime they’ve been adding customers – over 600 so far – and they have 60 customers running the new kit.

Moving from an aging single-core Xeon to a dual-core Xeon – the second core isn’t turned on yet – with faster busses and more cache speeds things up. They claim up to 60% faster performance, 20% less power and heat and 10 GigE readiness. Once they get their software dual-core aware they’ll have another nice boost to offer.

The StorageMojo take
Turning over the platform more rapidly than traditional array vendors do is a good strategy. It keeps the competition off-balance and gives you something new to tell customers. What good is commodity hardware if you don’t follow Moore’s law?

That said, Isilon’s scale out architecture is the real differentiator vs NetApp and other traditional filers. More bang for the buck just underscores the differences.

Comments welcome.

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Yippie-ki-yi-yay
As we say here in ranch country.

Sun sent out a press release on the NetApp fracas today. I didn’t have time to parse it, so here’s the raw intelligence:

Sun was legally obligated to respond in Texas to the initial suit brought on September 5, 2007 by Network Appliance to forestall competition from the free ZFS technology. Today we filed additional counterclaims in California, and specifically under the Lanham Act and California Business and Professions Code, based on Network Appliance’s false statements to the public about the alleged use of Network Appliance patents in ZFS. In parallel, we will be bringing a motion before the court in California asking that the case filed in Texas be consolidated with the case filed today for trial in the Bay Area, headquarters to both Sun and Network Appliance. Today’s filing includes counterclaims against the entirety of Network Appliance’s product line, including the entire NetApp Enterprise Fabric Attached Storage (FAS) products, V-series products using Data ONTAP software, and NearStore products, seeking both injunction and monetary damages.

Since Sun was forced to litigate, we feel California is a more appropriate venue to do so for several reasons. First, Sun and Network Appliance are both headquartered in Northern California, within 10 miles of each other. Second, most discovery will take place in California, as many of the key inventors on the patents and primary counsel for both parties are based in California. From both a judicial and economic standpoint, it makes much more sense for the case to be in California.

For more information about Sun’s counterclaims, visit our General Counsel’s latest blog posting: http://blogs.sun.com/dillon/entry/the_netapp_litigation_continued. You can view today’s filing on Sun’s website at www.sun.com/news, and you can check out our Open Source Community Support page at www.sun.com/lawsuit/zfs.

The StorageMojo take
Sun is pulling every string they can to win this in the court of public opinion. At least the public that buys storage.

What some commentators miss is that Sun only has to persuade a small percentage of NetApp buyers to reject or stall purchases to have a massive impact on NetApp’s share price. Here’s why.

Most tech companies – and I’ll assume this is true of NetApp – have back loaded quarters. A high percentage of the sales don’t come in until the last week of the quarter. By then, of course, all the expenses are fixed: components ordered; inventory built; 3 martini lunches expensed.

This means that the last few percent of sales make the quarter profitable – or not. If 90% of NetApp customers love them and continue to buy, but 10% decide they hate them and don’t buy, NetApp has a bad quarter.

Even a NetApp customer who loves them and hates Sun won’t increase their purchases to offset the lost sales. Why would they? The same kit will be cheaper next quarter, especially if the market stays soft.

Will Sun’s gambit work? Stay tuned.

Comments welcome, of course. Marketing is a contact sport.

Update: Since this suit is about ZFS, some of you may be interested in this article A look at MySQL on ZFS that compares the performance and management of MySQL on UFS and ZFS.

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New Product Introduction
As part of my campaign to increase the world’s consumption of disk capacity – see yesterday’s post – I’ve developed a new capacity gobbling product. For lack of a better term I call it a video white paper.

The impetus? No one reads anymore. Especially white papers. We’d much rather watch videos.

Enter Gear6
When I looked around for a launch customer, Gear6 came to mind. Their marketing VP, Gary Orenstein, has one of the few marketing blogs, Thoughtput with real content instead of “aren’t we wonderful” happy talk. He’s done a number of podcasts as well. He’s a new-media, large file size kind of guy.

Happily, he agreed to be the launch customer.

Here’s your part
Gear6 and Gary responded favorably to this new product and now I would like to hear from all of you. I am continuing to enhance the concept with the goal of bringing more value to everyone that views it.

What’d I’d like you to do is to watch the 4.5 minute video and tell me what you think. What works, what doesn’t work. What you’d like to see more of and what you’d like to see less of.

Meet Nisha Talagala, CTO

Nisha is not just really smart – smarter than the average Silicon Valley CTO – she is also a very nice person. I was impressed.

Yes, I was paid for this. And I’d like to be paid to do more of them! But only if they are worthwhile for you. So help me figure out how to make that happen.

Comments welcome – more than ever. My goal is to create something that is genuinely useful for information seekers in a 3-5 minute package. Tell me how well you think it works. How would *you* get more valuable content into 3-5 minutes in a way that people will watch?

Update: I tweaked the wording a bit. Same video.

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Get ‘em while they’re hot!
There is a rumor that NetApp, seeking to strangle baby Isilon in its crib, is giving away product to win deals.

At $1/GB I might buy one
If true, this could reflect continued weakness in NetApp’s results, as noted by analyst Tom Curlin at RBC Capital Markets in late July. They’d be plumping up the top line at the expense of the bottom line.

NetApp’s quarter closes Friday
If you are looking for a deal on a NetApp filer, this is the week to get one. Maybe if you call Isilon you can get an Isilon coffee cup overnighted to you to subtly make the point that you are looking at alternatives. At this late date though, just telling your NetApp rep that you are looking at Isilon and will delay the order for a week might get you the rumored break.

The StorageMojo take
Isilon is vulnerable right now. They’ve disappointed Wall Street for 3 quarters and that has hammered their stock. It is one thing to buy from a startup whose stock is trading at twice the IPO price and quite another to buy from one trading well below the offering price.

Taking advantage of a competitor’s weakness is smart business. And getting fabulous end-of-the-quarter deals is also smart business for storage buyers.

Update: Isilon’s VP of marketing, Brett Goodwin, wrote in to say:

Our core underlying business, technology, value prop—is unchanged. We also have $90M in cash and no debt. While we recognize that the stock price has taken a hit—it doesn’t reflect the market demand for clustered storage and Isilon’s leadership position in the category.

Fair enough. Disclosure: I have no financial relationship with Isilon. Darn!

Update I.V: Brett also said he has 125 nifty Isilon coffee cups in stock and ready to ship. Call for yours today!

Update II: RBC Capital Markets is also saying that EMC is having a tough quarter in the enterprise storage space. Flirting with Isilon will enhance your bargaining position with EMC come December.

Comments welcome, of course. Tell me about your NetApp deals, if any.

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I don’t normally link and run but this is a good article on the Next Big Thing in NFS v4.1.

Written by 3 NetApp engineers, Garth Goodson, Sai Susarla, and Rahul Iyer, Standardizing Storage Clusters offers a good overview of what’s new. It’s on the ACM Queue web site.

If paragraphs like

protocol operations

The pNFS protocol adds a total of six operations to NFSv4. Four of them support layouts (i.e., getting, returning, recalling, and committing changes to file metadata). The two other operations aid in the naming of data servers (i.e., translating a data server ID into an address and getting a list of data servers). All the new operations are designed to be independent of the type of layouts and data-server names used. This is key to pNFS’s ability to support diverse back-end storage architectures.

get you interested the article is well worth a read.

The StorageMojo take
pNFS is going to commoditize parallel data access. In 5 years we won’t know how we got along without it.

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I’m always curious about the context of the communications as well as the content. The Bush administration, for example, has been very disciplined in releasing bad news late Friday in the reasonable expectation that most people won’t ever hear about it.

Why some enterprising editor doesn’t have a Monday morning front-page box: “What the White House doesn’t want you to know” is beyond me.

So I get an EMC press release on Friday . . .
Nothing nefarious, since the release actually went out Thursday and didn’t get reported until Friday. The two major bits are:

• “. . . former Dell and Bain executive Louise O’Brien has joined the company as Executive Vice President, Corporate Strategy and Development. O’Brien will report to Joe Tucci, EMC Chairman, President and CEO, and be responsible for overseeing EMC’s corporate strategy, mergers and acquisitions, Office of the Chief Technology Officer (CTO), and New Ventures Group.”
• ” . . . EMC promoted three of its senior executives to President. Mark Lewis, 45, has been named President of EMC’s Content Management and Archiving (CMA) business, after having served most recently as Chief Development Officer (CDO); David Donatelli, 42, has been named President, EMC Storage Division; and Howard Elias, 50, has been named President, EMC Global Services.”

Let’s see, the CTO reports to a sales, marketing and strategy person
Him-m-m? Nothing new for EMC, whose CTO has typically been tasked with making a dog’s breakfast product portfolio look good to customers. EMC has always been a sales company where technology is secondary. Just an observation folks.

No, this is the interesting part
Putting Lewis in charge of Content Management and Archiving. He’s been an internal advocate for storage clusters and grids, which horrifies the Symm folks, but there is no doubt that clusters are coming and EMC has to do something.

So how to thread the needle, i.e. keep up the high-margin Symm sales while slowly introducing scalable storage clusters without inducing a mass migration? Simple. Sell storage clusters as the place where your data goes to die.

Massive, cheap – compared to Symms, but the gross margin remains sacred – capacity with some nifty lock-ins to keep customers coming back for more. Archive meta-data?

ILM rises from the dead
ESG, always a reliable indicator of and cheerleader for EMC thinking, is pushing the model of dynamic data and persistent data. There is a lot more persistent data so you’ll need a lot more capacity but without the performance requirements of database apps.

Enter the grid
EMC has been seeding money among innovative startups for years with a special emphasis on network-based storage. Now it is harvest time. I expect they’ll be buying, under Ms. O’Brien’s watchful eye, some of the grid/cluster/network companies they’ve invested in.

Persistent storage is actually much harder than dynamic storage because it is anti-entropic. And if you can get a customer to buy enough you will have an annuity business for many years.

The StorageMojo take
Yet the competition isn’t standing still. The movement of companies into cluster-based storage isn’t over by a long shot. The line between persistent and dynamic data is drawn by Moore’s Law and the system architects, not by the data itself.

Oracle’s adoption of direct NFS and the coming pNFS standard both point to a world where massive capacity clusters are also capable of massive IOPS with low latency. And archival storage based on open standards will have an intuitive appeal that even EMC’s high-commission sales force won’t have much luck fending off.

Nonetheless, expect EMC to introduce their first cluster product by year-end ’08. They’re hoping to get it out before June but I don’t think they’ll make it. This stuff is always harder than it looks.

Also, I tap Ms. O’Brien as the next CEO of EMC. She may look like a dark horse, but those Bain alums are smooth operators.

Comments welcome, of course. Also, I am formally abandoning my promised Part III of EMC has Ph.D’s Pt I and Part II. Every time I looked at the list of EMC patents I’d have terminal brain cramp. Maybe an ardent EMC’er will do part III instead.

And it’s a bit pointless anyway. EMC buys its innovation if I’ve heard them correctly.

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