The Storage Architect » EMC World

EMC Plans To Take Flash Forward

Chris M Evans — Tue, 10 May 2011 08:07:11 +0000

It will hardly have escaped anyone’s attention that EMC World is taking place this week in Las Vegas. Although I’m not attending this year I have been following the press releases. Probably the most interesting so far has been that around flash technology, something EMC announced at EMC World 2009 would have huge adoption in the industry. As we now know, for various reasons that adoption has been nowhere near as widespread as forecast (although EMC claim to have shipped 14PB of flash themselves).

EMC World 2009 - Flash Price Erosion

In this image I took from Joe Tucci’s keynote speech at EMC World 2009, you can see the expected price erosion. Despite this, flash still hasn’t been widely used.

So what have EMC said this week? The flash announcement is more of a statement of direction than details on a specific product. EMC will bring MLC flash to their products alongside existing SLC drives. The main differences between these two technologies being cost, performance and reliability. MLC flash tends to get used in consumer devices and so it’s really not up to a 24/7 access profile. EMC are not the first company to do this however; Violin Memory have an MLC based product, the 3140 array.

EMC did make an announcement on a future product, currently codenamed Project Lightning, a PCIe server-based flash card. Many of you will have read (and be aware of) Fusion-IO from this post (http://www.thestoragearchitect.com/2010/10/28/storage-networking-world-europe-ii/). Again, EMC’s offering is not a first for the industry as Fusion-IO have been selling their flash cards (in a variety of formats) for some time.

What’s potentially different about Project Lighting is the integration into the server and virtualisation layer. I’ve only Chad’s rather speculative post to base my thoughts on, but the idea appears to be to use server-based flash in a tiered storage model to improve VMware performance. It helps to own the company of course, as you can direct the host developments towards matching the hardware developments; I can’t imagine many other array vendors have tried to run vSphere in the hardware, for example.

But where does Project Lightning take us to? Well, it reinforces the view that there’s a direct dependency between server virtualisation and storage. It means we’ll see hybrid storage/server solutions that make the best use of resources without having to deploy dedicated (and sometimes slightly siloed) technology towers. There’s also some thinking required around the way this kind of infrastructure is deployed. For example, in a traditional model of data replication, synchronous replication allowed the host data to be duplicated to another site. If the primary site is lost, the remote copy of data can be accessed and appears to be a “crash” copy, which should recover successfully. Virtualisation changed that and made it more difficult to replicate at the array level. What now happens when we’ve a dynamic infrastructure that replicates data between storage/cache in hardware and disk in the server? Where’s my data if any part of that infrastructure crashes? These issues aren’t unsolvable, but do require more thought in terms of architecture design.

Assuming EMC can bring Project Lightning to market quickly, I expect they will see competition from HP, who have already approached the server/storage combination with their P4800 storage blades, their partnership with Violin and their work on memristors. Whether we like it or not, the big vendors are moving us closer towards a converged world.

EMC World 2009 Day 1: Summary

Chris M Evans — Tue, 19 May 2009 12:27:31 +0000

Day 1 at this year’s EMC World is now over. Did we see any game changing new technology or focus? I don’t think so.

So for me the day kicked of with Joe Tucci’s keynote speech. Check it out here. It’s the first time I’ve seen Tucci speak and he doesn’t come across to me as the most charismatic performer. My overall impression of his presentation content was one of consolidation and incremental change. The EMC steamroller is clearly heading towards hardware commoditisation and virtualisation. That message expressed pretty clearly in Tucci’s “next big thing” slide; there are four areas: The Virtual Datacentre, Cloud Computing, Virtual Clients, Virtual Applications. For a storage company, the message is less about storage and more about the VMware platform. Is this a positioning exercise for an acquisition by Cisco?

Paul Maritz then stood up and gave us the future of VMware and vSphere. I heard someone say that the presentation wasn’t new and had been given at a previous VMware shindig. Again, the message is incremental change but leveraging the ability to “federate” resources and have them running in your datacentre (internal cloud) or with an external service provider (external cloud). One thing I find interesting is the idea of a flexible charging model – move processing around and pay for what you use. However the major issue with this idea is the lack of control over what the user can do; is it really a good thing to give your users unbridled access to computing resources? Where are the cost controls?

Later in the day I checked out a V-Max architecture session. There’s lots of new incremental changes to the product; 512 hypers per disk (make 1TB drives more useful), new replication devices (R11/R21/R22) to bring improvements to SRDF/STAR and replication technologies, plus a host of other useful changes too numerous for me to mention. What comes across well in these presentations is EMC’s engineering quality. There’s good reasoning and structure to the changes they announce and they are pretty well customer focused (for example, incremental improvements to invalid track processing to speed up SRDF failbacks). EMC do a good job of getting the message out on these changes (specifically Barry Burke’s blog) and there are precious few others in the industry doing a similar thing with this level of depth (the exception for me being Barry Whyte). HDS and the rest of IBM could do with finding some decent bloggers to get the message out. Most of us don’t want to wade through product manuals to find these new features; new media can be used to get this message across and with Twitter and blogging EMC are still taking the lead. HDS clearly have a lot to learn in this area judging by their poor counter-EMC views posted this week.

Later in the day I wandered around the Solutions Pavilion. I’ll post more on that for Day 2, in the meantime, here’s a link to my Flickr pictures of the event so far.

EMC World 2009 Images

EMC World 2009: Day 0

Chris M Evans — Mon, 18 May 2009 12:18:27 +0000

So EMC World is finally here. Things kicked off Sunday evening with registration, catching up with old and new friends and a mini-concert by the Gin Blossoms (a band, being British, I’d never heard of). Things went pretty much to form; everywhere was crowded, the food and drink queues were huge and a good time was had by all.

Although not officially open, many bloggers congregated around the Bloggers Lounge, which is right in your face as you enter the Solutions Pavilion, including @edsai (Ed Saipetch), @storagenerve (Devang), @davegraham (Dave Graham), @stu (Stu Miniman), @storagezilla (Storagezilla Twomey), @davidkspencer (Dave Spencer), @storageanarchy (Barry Burke) and others who I’ve not included – feel free to comment and berate me if I forgot you.

OK and one last thing (excluding the people actually in the photograph), who can be first to name these three reprobates?

As we go into Day 1, we will be getting down to some real business. I’ll be focusing on where the storage array business is headed – how Atmos, V-Max, CLARiiON and others fit into the architecture. I’ll also be looking at Storage Resource Management tools. Don’t expect me to give EMC an easy ride, my normal cynical principles will be fully applied.

Enterprise Computing: EMC World Is (Almost) Here!

Chris M Evans — Wed, 13 May 2009 11:28:38 +0000

Yes folks, if you’re an EMC customer and unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last few months, you’ll know that EMC World starts next week. I’ll be attending for the first time (under the guise of amateur blogger).

If you’re going, feel free to drop me a mail/voicemail/Twitter DM if you want to chat. I’d be very interested to talk to anyone (especially customers) with views on where EMC is headed with their major platforms, including V-Max and Atmos.