Chapter 5.3.3 of the DS4000 Redbook. See it here:

http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redbooks/SG247010/wwhelp/wwhimpl/js/html/wwhelp.htm

I *really* should be going to bed now, but this can’t wait. Here we were having a civilized discussion, and you had to go and throw the “s” word at me! Trust me – I have spent MANY more years deploying this stuff than I have spent selling it (in a pre-sales technical role…I’m still DEFINITELY not a “s”ales guy). I pride myself on never letting sales guys get away with half the crap that comes out of their mouths. So let’s keep the polemics out of the discussion please. (grin)

Now…with all due respect to you as well, considering your time working for an IBM business partner, and having managed “every IBM array to date”, your lack of knowledge on the basics of the systems is pretty astounding.

I don’t mean for that to sound rude or to convey a sense of disbelief that you’ve managed these systems before….you clearly have! It’s just that your level of experience is probably not as extensive as you seem to believe….or you’ve been drinking the EMC cool-aid long enough to seriously affect your memory. =)

Before I start responding to your points, I want to make it clear that I completely reject the notion that I can’t compare IBM’s entire midrange line (including the SVC and N Series) to EMC’s line. Customers care about SOLUTIONS…not products. Point products are meaningless. The fact that IBM has a much more complete line of products with which to create solutions is a strength. Even so, I’ll do my best to play by your arbitrarily limited rules, just for the sport of it…even though it’s not “real-world.” I’ll answer your questions using only the LSI products, but will offer side points using other products where applicable. I’ll also interject a few questions of my own…..fair?

I’ll just respond to your points in order:

First, I did not know that PP was open source. Cool. But that doesn’t make it free…(yes, I know there is a free crippled version…is that the open source version?). RDAC and SDD are free…not some crippled version…and they don’t get more expensive as the number of processors in my hosts increase. I grant that encryption capability is cool, just not really relevant.

1. I grant this. No, the reporting is not good without purchasing another tool. Same goes for the Clarriion.

2. Partially true. Real-time performance monitoring is built right in and easy to use. The boxes are also capable of collecting good historical performance metrics…and it’s trivial to enable them. The limiting factor is the fact that customers don’t have access to a software tool to interpret the historical data. I agree that this is dumb. But any business partner worth their salt would do this for free for their customers…they all have access to the free tool. Surely you used it in your past…?

However, your characterization of TPC purchasing requirements is completely false. TPC is a modular product, so if all you want to manage and report on is disk, you only need to purchase “TPC for Disk.” No need to purchase “TPC for Fabric” or “TPC for Data” (the 3 of which, combined, make up TPC Standard Edition). It would be interesting to compare the costs of TPC for Disk vs Navisphere Analyzer, keeping in mind that the capabilities of TPC for Disk are more comparable to a subset of ECC. These products just don’t line up properly for a good comparison.

3. It is true that IBM charges for Storage Partitions (host connections) on the DS3/4/5000 products.
* I never said the cost of PP vs Storage Partitions was a wash. But since you mentioned it….yes, the costs of Storage Partitions are usually much cheaper than the total cost of PP.
* 33rd host would require the next license increment, which is 33-64 hosts. How much would it cost to license PP for a single new 16-way AIX host? How much does that increase my yearly software maintenance? With IBM, the answer is $0 to both questions.
* EMC may not charge per host to connect, but they do charge per host for the Navisphere Manager Suite…and it ain’t cheap. The tiered pricing structure is also somewhat inconvenient – similar to the way you tried to mischaracterize TPC.
* Note that the number of included Storage Partitions varies by model….it is not “1″ as you state.
* Also note that the SVC completely eliminates the need for these licenses.
* Is it true that EMC charges for additional software just to manage replication?

4. Interesting question. How well does it work on the Clarriion? =) How many Clarriion customers actually turn it on?
* Note that QOS works extremely well on the SVC and N Series….I’d put them up against the Clarriion any day of the week. Further note that rate limiting, etc, can be accomplished elsewhere in the solution (Cisco MDS).

5. I don’t understand why you keep saying this….it’s completely false! You can *absolutely* create multiple arrays and logical volumes at once from the GUI. It’s called “Automatic Configuration.” If you really want to read about it, I can find the exact chapter and section in the RedBook for you. Wow – the depths to which you EMCers will go to spread FUD!

6. False, false, and false. It’s called RSM…available since January 2007. How long has it been since you worked for that IBM partner again?

7. You suspect correctly that this is coming….later this year. Interestingly, not a single customer has asked for this yet, but I agree that it is comforting to know that it can be supported if required. For an equally (ir)relevant point – can your Clarriion support disk encryption today?
* Note that the SVC can support flash behind it, and even within the new nodes. The N Series can also support flash behind them.

8. So glad you asked! =) No, the LSI line cannot support 960 drives, thank God. However, you correctly point out the the N Series can scale to MORE than 960 drives…not 840 as I stated. (840 is supported in the 6000 series, not 7000. The 7000 series supports 1,176…so yes indeed, larger than any EMC midrange product.)
* You mention that it’s important to have the scalability to grow that large. Would you agree that its *kind of* important to be able to scale performance right along with that capacity??? I can’t wait to hear your response to this. The CX4-960 only supports that many drives because it puts 120 drives on each loop pair. This is flat out *ridiculous*. If you honestly claim that performance scales even CLOSE to linearly with capacity then we can end this discussion right here. You’re not being reasonable. The Clarriion is so under-architected in the back-end as to make a 960-drive configuration all but laughable. The DS5000 performance scales linearly with the number of drives… How? Because they have enough loop pairs to handle it. A maxed out 5300 has less than half the number of disks per loop! Even the DMX requires a MINIMUM of 4 disk directors and at least 2 channel directors to handle a 960 drive configuration. You’re gonna tell me that the Windows-based CX4 can somehow magically push the same number of disks with substantially fewer back-end resources? I don’t think so man…
* Yes, the DS5300 supports 448 drives now.
* Yes, the SVC is a perfectly reasonable way to scale capacity while also scaling performance! it’s funny that you think there is something wrong with this. The DS line isn’t “unable” to scale to 960 drives…it’s just that the design engineers aren’t yes-men for the marketing department. It’s an enforced limitation (limited by design), not a forced limitation (limited by some other factor).
* Yes, it would take multiple DS systems to get to 960 drives. But I can play this game too… The difference is that the DS boxes could actually push them all. How many Clarriions would it take to get to 1,176 drives? (N7900) And then how many Clarriions would it take to actually push that many drives? =)
* Yes, power/cooling/floor space/rack space are important to customers. And so is performance utilization. Are you going to tell me that a customer is going to be HAPPY that he bought 960 drives, but can only get the performance of half that many?!
* Speaking of rack/floor space – note that the DS disk trays hold 16 disks per 3U, whereas the Clarriion trays only hold 15 disks per 3U.
* Speaking of performance – How much cache is available for actual user data on those Clarriions, anyway? Seems like that Windows OS eats up an awfully large chunk of the cache your customers pay for! When a customer buys 16GB (for example) of cache on a DS, they actually get to use it all… On a Clarriion they would get, what, 9GB? Or is it 6.7GB? Ouch!
* While we’re at it, is the storage processing (heavy lifting) done with a general-purpose processor in those big CX4s? Or high-performance ASICs?
* I can’t seem to stop on this topic of performance… What happens to performance when using snapshots? What about when one of the vault drives fails?

9. Coming soon to the DS5000. New SVC nodes can also do iSCSI. N Series dominates the multi-protocol game….sorry!

10. No. And again, not a single customer of mine asking for it. If we’re playing the “Green” game – Does EMC offer cheaper/greener mediums like tape? Optical?

11. Again – completely false. The DS line supports DAE (Dynamic Array Expansion) to increase the size of the RAID array; DVE (Dynamic Volume Expansion) to increase the size of a logical volume…(this is different/better than LUN concatenation!); DRM (Dynamic RAID Level Migration) to change the RAID type/configuration; DSS (Dynamic Segment Size Migration) to change the data stripe size; and even Dynamic Mode Switching for replication. ALL WITHOUT DOWNTIME. ALL FREE. I seriously cannot believe you didn’t know about these, knowing as much about these systems as you are leading me to believe.
* Can Clarriion dynamically change the segment sizes? Dynamically switch from synchronous to asynchronous replication as bandwidth limitations dictate?
* By the way – the DS can do all of these without needing to move/copy the LUN…can Clarriion?
* Can Clarriion non-disruptively expand and use a remote mirrored volume without destroying the mirror, or would you have to completely re-sync the volume after expansion? Of course not…
* When you add more drive trays later, can you then re-arrange the disks in order to provide tray enclosure loss protection, where you didn’t have it before? Nope. I can.
* Don’t even get me started on the additional functionality that the SVC brings to this point…that would get really ugly really fast for EMC.

So, all due respect techfreeze – I don’t think I’ve missed any boat. Let me address your hypothetical scenario of the DS4700 (which is most definitely NOT comparable to the CX4-120 in any respect other than drive count…see point above).

When a customer maxes out the DS4700, they would simply purchase new DS5000 controllers, power down the DS4700, re-cable all the disk trays to the new DS5000 controllers, power up the system, and get back to work. I’m starting to sound like a broken record here, but I REALLY can’t believe you didn’t know this. DACstore keeps all the array information on all of the drives, which enables things like this. No SVC required. Although the SVC is awfully helpful for migrating from a CX4-120 to a much better-performing IBM array! =) If you were selling SVC just to handle an upgrade from a DS4700 to a DS4800 or DS5000, I can see why you no longer work for an IBM partner – that capability is inherently available because of DACstore!!! I now understand why you have so many misconceptions about IBM products…

To take this a step further…what if a customer has an old CX3 that they want to continue to utilize for the time being, but they just purchased a shiny new CX4 for new workloads. What if they want to move an array (or a bunch of them) from the CX3 to the new CX4? With the DS line, you could simply pop out the drives from the old system, and pop them into the new system, and away you go! The DS line is WAY more flexible than the Clarriion for things like this.

You are correct – I mis-stated the 840 drive count. It’s actually 1,176 drives. And I admit that I thought that all Clarriions required at least 5 vault drives (of which you shouldn’t really use, and even if you did, you’d have to accept a bunch of limitations). Which system can accept only 4 drives? Also note that the SVC has no real drive limitation…it’s capacity limitation is 2PB (for now).

I *absolutely* stand by my claim that I can make points in favor of the IBM products that EMC cannot match…even if I stick just to the DS line! EVERY vendor can play that game against ALL OTHER vendors! The point is that it’s a silly game. It’s the *solution* that matters…not the point products.

So – if your goal is to get me to agree that EMC point products have some features that a certain IBM point product doesn’t have, you win. I admit it, but you have to admit the same in reverse if you’re being honest!

You seem to grant that the SVC is a good product, but at the same time you want to artificially limit its applicability to a solution in order to win a feature comparison battle (which you can’t win, btw). You say “virtualization has its place.” What place is that? What place *isn’t* that? I’m interested to hear an EMC perspective on this, given the fact that they’re the only major storage vendor to not “get” storage virtualization.

Consolidation does not equal virtualization. Migrating between tiers in a single box is just not impressive…it’s old news. Migrating non-disruptively between DMX and CX would be impressive. I can do that for you if you can’t…no problem! Migrating non-disruptively from a 5-yr-old box to its replacement box is helpful and a real money-saver. Doing replication between a DMX and a DS4000 is a game-changer. Sorry man, but you just can’t compare the feature sets! You say “we don’t have to virtualize because we can scale (not really) and migrate data between internal tiers.” I say “we don’t need to buy an over-priced midrange array that can pseudo-scale, because I can virtualize and get *real* scalability from midrange disk, etc…!”

Thanks for the thoughtful reply…although I feel sorry for the people reading this forum for its intended topic! But heck – we’ve gotten away with it so far…

I like a good debate as it is typical for words to be read backwards or not even at all. Let’s go back to exactly what was said and you can help me understand where your interpretations went awry. Apparently you didn’t know PP is open source? It works with all the major vendors. I can’t exactly say every customer requires encryption at the source but those moving into PCI compliance Level 2, need this capability and furthermore an easy transition doesn’t hurt.

I never worked for IBM but I did work for an IBM business partner as well and managed every IBM array to date and I think I am hearing a little more sales then actual deployment here. Absolutely incorrect from a mid-range GUI comparison.

1.)Can you tell me if you think SMGUI has good reporting?
*I would be amazed if you agreed with this. Maybe I have fallen off my rocker but I don’t think so.

2.)Can you confirm that you can get good performance metrics?
*I would love to hear this response. I will answer that from real world experience and this is NO.
*IBM will always push TPC because there is no good reporting. So you start with TPC basic which allows you to discover the IBM array or third party array but if you want performance and reporting, well time to pay again. Let’s get you into TPC standard. I do want to give credit where credit is due and TPC isn’t all that intuitive, but TPC Reporter (free) is probably the best all-inclusive reporting engine I have seen.
*EMC can push you to ECC, but not appropriate in many cases. Navisphere Analyzer can be leveraged for performance metrics. Yes, there is a very small cost for Analyzer so I will state that before you counter. Keeping it honest SRJ

3.)Can you tell me that you don’t charge for Partitions (ie. number of attached hosts 4,8,16,32,64,128)?
*So I guess the cost of PP and the cost of partitions is a wash?
*What if I have 32 host partition license and I need to add 1 more host? In what increment do I buy my next partition license? With the purchase of a mid-range DS array you get 1 partition (default) but you have to purchase with growth in mind. You can license later but 99.999% of the time you have unused partitions because you buy more than what is needed.
*EMC doesn’t charge you for connecting hosts to the CX array
*Just so you know, EMC doesn’t charge for PP in the CX4-120
*You can use MPIO if you so choose.

4.)How well does QOS work on your mid-range DSLine?
*Again the answer is? I will let you respond

5.)How many LUNs can you create at once through the SMGUI?
*Only one at a time, unless you want to use Rlogin and script this. I can provide the script for the viewers but can’t imagine running this every time.
*This is more astetics but I can’t tell you how many times I wanted to knock this out quickly and just sat and clicked over and over. Now, I learned quickly to script this but what about those that aren’t so savy which is a large customer base. Sure weren’t thinking about those consumers!

6).Do you monitor your mid-range DS3000-5000 arrays?
*Again the answer is NO.
*This requires either a CE to come out or you have the customer make a phone call and send over the subsystem profile. If the situation requires more in-depth support, let’s console into the array and launch a series of command line commands and send the output to IBM. In my support days to selling IBM product, I never had 1 customer say that approach was proactive in any manner.

7).Can you support Solid State today?
*Not a need for everyone I know, but shows that you are limited until LSI integrates this into their product line. I suspect it is coming.
*Nice to know this technology can be leverage in the mid-range arrays.

8).Can your mid-range DS Line support 960 drives?
*Again not everyone needs 951TB RAW but if you need to scale to that compacity when you consolidate (that is the key here), it is nice to have the scalability.
*How many DS5300′s do you need to reach 960 drives?
*First IBM will sell you SVC because this fixes the inability to scale the mid-range array to 960 drives.
*Second it will take 4 DS5000 arrays (IBM states initial release supports 256 so perhaps you are stating this now supports 448, we will give IBM the benefit). So then that would be two arrays.
*My math is decent but I would say power/cooling/floor space/rack space might be a premium concern for most consumers in todays market. You agree?

9.)Can the DS Line do FC and iSCSI?

10.)Does IBM offer LP ATA (5400rpm)

11.)Can IBM migrate a LUN from a different raid group (in IBM’s terms “array”) or protection type natively without introducing any cost to the consumer?
*Your answer is yes with flashcopy but No on introducing cost.
*This is natively supported by EMC at no cost to the customer.

With all due respect SRJ, I think you are missing the boat on many comparative aspects. Let’s say the customer starts with a DS4700. Equivalent to our CX-120 product line. What is your option when you scale past 112 drives? You buy another DS4700 or 4800 or 5000, whatever your growth requires. My point is once in a CX and your reach 120 drives, you scale out in the same array. You can go from 120 drives all the way to 960 drives without purchasing another array or introducing an SVC to help with migrations. This is a perfect example of what every IBM business partner including myself did. We took a weak architectural point and sold an SVC to get around this flaw. This didn’t solve anything for the customer and really offered up a bandaid to limited scalability/flexibility of which the SVC needed to be introduced.

You mention from 5 drives to 840 drives. That comment is true but you are mixing LSI and NetApp in the mix. This would be your 3000 through the N7000. I didn’t intermix our EMC CX with our EMC NS product line. Let’s stay in the CX to DS product line. The whole Unified Storage Platform is another debate and I am just focusing on CX to DS.

I challenge you on your comment “All due respect, but IBM’s arrays (not mine, I don’t work for IBM and never have) start smaller, scale larger, and can provide more features/functions than clarriions any day of the week. With IBM you have options in the mid-range… DS3/4/5/6, N Series, XIV, and SVC+anything else. You might be able to pick ONE product line from IBM’s line and compare it to EMC in a way that favors EMC, but IBM can always do the same.”

I listed 10 points in which I am comparing apples to apples and you still stand by your comment that IBM can do the same? Perhaps I my past experience escapes me but if I follow that up with IBM data sheets, I still don’t get out it matches up 1 for 1? I see a lot of advantages that would benefit an EMC customer comparatively.

*Scale larger? 840 drives right? How about 960 for the CX and I didn’t even intermix product lines. BTW, our NS-960 scales to 960 drives which is comparable to the N7000.

*start smaller? Our AX line starts with 4 drives (which I don’t know why this really matters sooooo much). Yes there are customers that only want 1TB and this fits the mold but not a huge win for either side.

*provide more features/functionality? Without bringing in another product like the SVC, do you still believe? I listed 10 of them that I would love for you to counter.

I can give credit where credit is due but you are really drinking the IBM koolaid. I think IBM has some great products but it amazes me when comments are made in regards to scalability, flexibility, features, functionality, and then want to go head to head. I like the fire and I share that same hunger but I am a little more cautious by throwing out competitive comparisons when I know where EMC, HDS, IBM, HP, SUN, NetApp might fall short. Each Vendor has shortfalls and it depends if the customer sees risk or concern and if not happy selling.

You wanted an answer to Virtual LUN but not sure how you managed to state that this works across frames. I never stated as such. I talk about consolidation vs. virtualization. My comment was that we don’t have to virtualize because we can scale to almost 1PB in the mid-range array and move data between Tiers online without any downtime. There is a lot you can internal to the array. If I have a host that has a R5 LUN used for Test/Dev and I want to change the protection type, I can do that by a click of a button and the migration to the R1 LUN occurs with no impact to the application and no downtime. I didn’t even have to introduce the SVC into the mix to achieve data mobility.

In short SRJ, I think this is a constructive debate and if we want to go into the bits/bytes this might get even better I know you are a big time IBM VAR but I might get you to agree to some distinct advantages that EMC offers. As I have stated before, virtualization has its place and I think IBM has done some great things with the SVC. I don’t think EMC or any other Vendor would disagree. I know I would love to talk to your customers that purchased a scratch DS3400 as a cost competitive alternative. I am more than confident I can educate them on when it makes sense and the true TCO/ROI. Not sure how the EMC/VAR missed that opportuntiy but I won’t let it happen on my watch

Great Debate and looking for your response.