I asked Chad the question – what happens if customers have heterogeneous environments?  The answer from Chad was “Good luck to them” – a comment I take to mean – you’re on your own.  Now Chad did and will point to the fact that there are vendors out there who provide 3rd party solutions equivalent to UIM in environments that are not pure VCE (VMware, Cisco, EMC), however is that a fair direction for EMC to take?

Personally, I feel that EMC are effectively telling customers that they adopt the Vblock model (and UIM), or they will be left out in the cold.  It’s an example of further moves to lock end users into their proprietary stack of technology.  However although Chad intimates that alternatives to UIM exist, unfortunately they will never be as good as UIM for one simple reason:

VMware, Cisco and EMC own and understand the APIs used to drive their products.  They can (and I suspect probably do) retain certain documentation that enables them to have a competitive advantage over 3rd party vendors attempting to add equivalent functionality.  In addition, they can also make microcode and software changes to those APIs to provide any feature that might be needed to make UIM a better product than their competitors.  This ability always gives them the edge over any other vendor looking to offer similar functionality to UIM.

Of course, why shouldn’t EMC/VMware & Cisco do this?  After all, they have the right to do anything with their products that they choose and far be it from me to tell any vendor what their product & marketing strategies should be.  But it is worth looking back to the attempts by many companies to offer unified storage management tools; no hardware or software vendor has yet provided a single unified storage management tool that works across heterogeneous environments.  Customers still retain multiple products for storage provisioning, in many cases continuing to make use of CLIs rather than graphical interfaces.  So, the chances of there being a successful generic virtualisation orchestration product out there are slim to none.

So what is the solution?  For EMC, their answer would be to take Vblock and UIM.  But what happens if you take that route and build all your processes around UIM, then decide to change your storage vendor?  At that point you have nowhere to go other than to re-engineer your entire orchestration process, creating a very high cost and barrier to change.

Here’s one other point to ponder; in February, EMC sold off a number of the Ionix tools to VMware.  So if these products were intended to be part of vCenter, why is UIM coming from EMC?  There’s one easy answer to this; if VMware sold the product, their other partners (like Netapp) could push for integration of their products into UIM.  By selling UIM as an EMC tool, this support will never happen and so Netapp are forced to either write their own tools or partner with 3rd party vendors.  In this way the VCE coalition can continue to control their market.

So do you think vendor lock-in is a good thing?

This may seem like a bold statement to make, however we need to look forward to where the industry is headed.  First of all, vendors want us to buy their unified hardware stacks; it represents that move back to a consolidated architecture that kept one vendor dominant in the mainframe days – IBM.  “No-one gets fired for buying IBM” the saying goes (or used to go), demonstrating how IBM was seen as the data centre supplier for all things computing in the 70′s and 80′s.  Of course we know that politics within organisations and the cost of IBM hardware eventually broke the monopoly, but the status quo worked well for many companies for many years.

Now, Cisco, EMC, VMware, HP, Oracle and potentially many others want to own your data centre.  They want you bought into their computing stack.  Over time, I suspect many of those same companies want to move you to their cloud infrastructure offerings, even if they don’t offer them today.  This will be both directly and indirectly.  There will be the direct model, where the vendor offers cloud services to you under their name; there will be the indirect model where their technology powers the cloud provider, or is offered as a service.  It’s at this point the 3Par acquisition becomes much more interesting.

3Par already have many customers in the cloud services sector.  In fact they sell their hardware on the virtues of multi-tenancy, reduced cost through thin provisioning, tight integration with virtual hypervisors and so on.  In this growth sector of the industry, cost is a key driver and no end user or company will pay more than they need for storage.  This means Enterprise arrays like those from Hitachi and EMC won’t play a central role in this future, but rather storage devices which provide the highest efficiency will.  Where do all the major players stand?

• EMC have entered the market with a brand new platform – Atmos.  Although withdrawn as a direct service, Atmos continues to be available from partners.  EMC have chosen to use their own technology as the foundation for cloud.  In addition, VPLEX provides the ability to virtualise the storage layer, including federation features that fit well with VMware.
• HP have a strong blade server offering for their cloud infrastructure.  Matrix provides orchestration for the server, network and some parts of the storage layer, however this work is incomplete and doesn’t fit well with the high end XP arrays.  Slotting 3Par into the storage layer would provide a storage platform well suited to HP Converged  Infrastructure.  It means EVA can be quietly dropped and XP can be retained (in whatever future guise) for high end customers (including mainframe) and if required, gradually dropped.
• Cisco have chosen to partner with EMC rather than acquire storage technology itself.  In fact, looking and both EMC and Cisco, they need each other; EMC have no server platform, Cisco have no storage; it’s a mutually beneficial arrangement, a bit like Jack Sprat and his wife.  At this stage, Cisco could have purchased 3Par and provided and end-to-end solution, but clearly that would be a big step and would require kicking EMC to the kerb, something they obviously don’t want to do (yet).
• Hitachi have server and storage offerings, however Blade Symphony is mainly sold in domestic Japan and not widely advertised globally.  They do have the potential to provide an end-to-end offering as Hitachi also sell networking equipment.  Key for Hitachi will be credibility in a market they don’t currently play in.
• IBM should have all the components of a consolidated infrastructure but there doesn’t appear to be a lot of discussion about their offerings.  They appear to have two strategies – Dynamic Infrastructure and Cloud Computing but their offerings aren’t clear.
• Dell clearly wanted 3Par to fit into their medium to high-end storage offerings.  Today Equallogic has successfully met their SMB requirements, but they OEM technology from EMC (CLARiiON and Symmetrix) for the rest.  Acquiring 3Par would remove that dependency and allow Dell to offer end-to-end technology as their own products.
• Netapp have a self-proclaimed unified architecture that does fit well with virtualisation from VMware.  However they don’t own any other parts of the technology stack and so must partner to deliver unified offerings.  Netapp are covering all bases by offering solutions with VMware, Microsoft and Citrix, but none of these could be described as the unified stack other vendors have.
• Oracle already provide an integrated infrastructure based around their Exadata acquisitions and of course all of the Sun Microsystems technology, however I’m not sure many companies would see the Oracle offerings as other than tied directly to their database platform and not for virtualisation.

Overall, 3Par fit the requirements of HP & Dell to provide integrated technology offerings.  The move to the cloud will require leaner and efficient storage products, plus tight integration and orchestration.  It’s all about positioning today for bigger returns tomorrow.

The IT world has changed since I first encountered Hitachi 7700E, 9900 and the recent USP/USP V ranges of Enterprise storage arrays that typify Hitachi’s hardware portfolio.  Enterprise and Modular storage now take equal billing and many of the features that were once Enterprise-only have migrated to the modular products, blurring the lines between the two platforms.  In addition Hitachi have offerings for NAS and object store.  They also sell servers (believe it or not).

Is this a scenario that has occurred because of customer demand?  Is it more likely that reliability and the virtualisation of everything means that the original premise of the enterprise array is no longer valid?  I believe that we are seeing a gradual move from the network-centric data centre, via the storage-centric data centre to what will become the hypervisor-centric data centre and eventually application-centric cloud.  Storage devices are no longer the place where data functionality is focused and it will be less so as time goes on.  The logical place for data mobility will be in the hypervisor (at least the hypervisor will be the controlling entity) and storage will become a feature as networks are today.  If this is right, then the concept of and need to differentiate Enterprise and Modular arrays will cease to exist.

The “simplification” of storage (and I say it in quotes deliberately, as storage remains complex) means vendors are having to stretch out into other technology areas.  EMC set the trend by demonstrating great foresight in buying VMware.  Cisco & HP have joined the unified computing club.  So now has Hitachi, selling their own servers and promising us their view of unified computing.

This shift away from storage is the interesting highlight of HDS Bloggers Day.  What exactly is the Hitachi offering in Unified Computing?  How have they integrated their server hardware and storage lines?  Most important, how is this all being managed through a harmonised management suite of tools?

Here’s a final thought.  Is the acronym Hitachi Data Systems still valid?  Perhaps the rebranding to just Hitachi is all part of a big plan.

I’m looking forward to catching up with people today (well, much later today) and will post more later.

I can’t help thinking back to my mainframe days and the monopoly held by IBM in the development of the entire System 360/370 & 390 architectures.  Many companies copied (Amdahl, HDS) and EMC effectively broke the grip IBM had on storage hardware.  Now the mainframe is niche and things have moved on, however  EMC seem to be heading full circle by packaging their technology in the triumvirate that is VCE, but is perhaps more a duumvirate than we care to think.  How ironic.

So what is the initial offering?  Well, there are three offerings labelled Vblock2, Vblock1 and Vblock0, covering the support of up to 6000, 3000 and 800 virtual machines respectively.  High end uses V-Max storage, the middle offering uses CLARiiON and the low-end uses “EMC Unified Storage”, which presumably is Celerra.  Ionix rears its ugly head as the management tool of choice, packaged as “Ionix Unified Infrastructure Manager”.

Whilst some customers will find the packaged delivery of the components they may well have already chosen as helpful, what’s not clear is how readily other technologies can be integrated into the Vblock architecture.  For instance, if EMC storage isn’t the preferred option or if Hyper-V is the hypervisor of choice (regardless of how unlikely this may be), how can customers implement their configuration? There’s no incentive for VCE to offer other options and that just reduces customer choice.

How will the existing VMware partners like HP and Netapp feel?  No doubt we’ll see other partnerships and offerings spring up and I don’t think that will take too long, however some vendors will quickly be left behind.

Ultimately, we all know that IT is moving into a new phase where virtualisation of all components is the key strategy.  Networking, servers and storage are all moving to be commodity and consequently there needs to be another approach to making money and achieving high margin from hardware and software sales.  Delivering a consolidated architecture where integration means the sum is greater than the parts is what ACE and Acadia will deliver.

You can read the Cisco press release here.  Scroll down to the “Additional Resources” section for more links.

Has anyone done this recently? More pertinent, is anyone prepared to share their experiences with me (in confidence if necessary)?

I addition, I trashed my PDA by dropping it onto a concrete car park floor so I had no wireless access either. Loss of my PDA was annoying (if not just for the cost of replacement) but for the potential loss of access to data. Fortunately being a good storage guy, I write all my data to an SD card so didn’t lose any access.

Any-hoo, before I went away, I solved my Cisco problem. Turns out it was a bug; upgrading to OS 3.1(1) and above then caused routing issues with FCIP links created after the upgrade. A supervisor swap sorted the problem. The resolution was quite simple but the effort to get there was significant, despite the huge amount of diagnostics built into Cisco equipment. Still, I learned a lot and as usual it showed me that however hard I work, I’ll never know everything (or probably even 10% of the storage world).

Right, back to catching up with my RSS backlog. These days its almost impossible to keep up with the daily posts!

Anyway enough of that, I’ve also had another issue to resolve attempting to link two Cisco fabrics via FCIP. It’s a frustrating problem which has taken up more of my time than I would like and I still haven’t managed to resolve it. Both fabrics already successfully move data via FCIP links, will connect to each other (and the end devices are visible and logged in) but the initiator HBA can’t see any targets in the same zone.

These sorts of problems become annoying to resolve as most vendors take you through the level 1 process of problem determination (which translates to “you are an idiot and have configured it wrong”) then level 2 (“Oh, perhaps there is a problem, send is 300GB of diagnostics, traces, configurations, date of birth, number of previous girlfriends etc”) who get you to “try this command” – usually things you’ve already tried to no avail, because you actually know what you are talking about.

I’m almost at level 3 (“we’ve no idea what’s causing the problem, we will have to pass to the manufacturer”). Hopefully at this stage I will start to get some results. Does anyone out there have a way to bypass all this first level diagnostics nonsense?

The other thing that caught my eye this week was the comment on Netapp and their targets miss. There is lots of speculation on what has occurred; here’s my (two penn’orth/two cents).

Netapp had a great product for the NAS space, there’s no doubting that. They made a great play of expanding into the Enterprise space when NAS-based storage became widely accepted. Some features are great – even something as simple as snapshots, replication and flexclones. However I think they now have some fundamental issues.

1. The Netapp base product is not an Enterprise storage array for NAS/FC/iSCSI. It doesn’t scale to the levels of DMX-4 and USP. I think it is a mistake to continue to sell the Netapp appliance against high end arrays. Those of us who deploy USP/DMX technology regularly know what I mean.
2. The original Netapp technology is hitting a ceiling in terms of its useful life. The latest features customers demand, such as multi-node clustering can’t be achieved with the base technology (hence the Spinnaker acquisition).
3. The product feature set is too complicated. There are dozens of product features which overlap each other and make it very difficult to determine when developing a solution, which is the right to choose (some have fundamental restrictions in the way they work that I found even Netapp weren’t clear about).
4. Netapp developed a culture of the old IBM – that is to say expecting their customers to purchase their products and deriding them if they didn’t choose them, attempting to resurrect the old addage “No-one Ever Got Fired for Buying IBM” to “No-one should get fired for buying Netapp”.

I think I found point 4 most difficult to deal with; Netapp seemed to think they had a right to be No. 1 selection, almost forcing technical people to have to justify why *not* to buy Netapp.

Perhaps a little humility is long overdue.