Dell saw their share price drop by 17% today on weak quarterly figures, as reported by Forbes, with seemingly significant drops in their consumer business.  Could this partly be the Apple effect? Dell are working hard at building their [...] ]]> Just a quick post on news that came over the wire late UK time.

Dell saw their share price drop by 17% today on weak quarterly figures, as reported by Forbes, with seemingly significant drops in their consumer business.  Could this partly be the Apple effect? Dell are working hard at building their storage business although there’s still a way to go in what is an evolving story.

HP have announced they are laying off 27,000 jobs – 8% of the workforce – as they restructure (BBC News article).  This isn’t a surprise as the cuts were pre-announced, but perhaps the scale of the cuts was much higher than expected.  I know quite a few HP’ers and hopefully they will be safe this time around. HP are suffering the aftermath of poor decision making and the Leo effect.  It’s notable that the BBC also reported Mike Lynch (Autonomy founder) is to be replaced within HP.

Netapp saw it’s share price dive by over 17% in after-hours trading, despite publishing good results.  More on the story at MarketWatch.  Netapp need to diversify; something I’ve mentioned on many occasions before if they are to grow as the market demands.

The Architect’s Take

Even though tech seems to be booming, the markets demand significant improvement in profits with every quarter.  One set of weak results or forecasts deals a swift blow to the share price.  Picking the right tech stock doesn’t get any easier – neither does running these businesses.

First of all, let’s take a look at [...] ]]> Today Data Robotics (Drobo) are announcing a new range of storage devices specifically targeted at business customers.  However this is a market that already has many players; what are they offering and how will they fare in this already competitive market?

New Devices

First of all, let’s take a look at the new storage devices.  Nomenclature has been changed over previous models (business people like nice code names) and so we have the following new devices:

• B800fs – 8-bay NAS model
• B800i – 8-bay iSCSI SAN model
• B1200i – 12-bay iSCSI SAN model

It’s a pretty easy guess that the codes mean “B” for business, “fs” for file sharing “i” for iSCSI and the numbers designate the drive count in the chassis.  What’s new here from a hardware perspective is the 12-drive model, specifically designed as a rack-mount device.  Now business-class storage devices are very different from those used in an office environment by (for example) media developers or for local backup.  Consequently Drobo have had to step up to the mark and improve the resiliency of the existing hardware.  Therefore the new B1200i support all hot-swappable components (except the passive backplane) and additional power supplies and Ethernet connections have been added.  Note that the B800 models have not been upgraded in this way and still have a single power supply and dual Ethernet connections.  Images of the new devices are shown in this post.  It’s interesting to see that the B1200i rear view shows four expansion slots for connectivity, of which only two appear to be used.  Presumably the other two are for future expansion.

Software and Features

As mentioned earlier, the small device business market is a competitive place; EMC have just released their VNXe product, HP have the P2000 array; IBM recently released the StorWize v7000.  These storage appliances are fully specified devices offering advanced features for a low cost.  The features and software component could be an issue for Drobo.  The new models offer the excellent BeyondRAID functionality and only an additional tiering  option.

• BeyondRAID is Drobo’s thin provisioning and RAID technology combined.  In essence, data is laid out across the disks using RAID at the block level rather than replicating whole disks.  This methodology enables dis-similar disk capacities to be used in the device and for disks to be replaced or upgraded over time in order to increase capacity.  BeyondRAID provides the customers many advantages; disks can be purchased and added to the system as required, even though a greater logical capacity of storage has been configured.  This logical capacity doesn’t need to be changed as physical capacity increases.  Drives of greater capacity can be added over time, so customers can purchase the most effective price/capacity drive for their needs.  Also a single drive can be replaced without rebuilding the entire RAID set, only copying data that was on any removed drive.
• Data-aware Tiering.  The new Drobo model now support automated tiering of data across different device types, including SATA, SAS and SSD disks.  Tiering uses fixed algorithms to determine the best placement for data based on usage.  My first thoughts were that a fixed tiering algorithm might not be appropriate, however taking a step back and looking at the market this device is targeted for, many customers taking their first steps into SAN technology may not want or need to understand how things work under the covers.

However good the hardware is, ease of management is all about the software.  As a result, Drobo have released a new version of their dashboard, screenshots of which can be seen in the attached images.  Better management software for Drobo was always a requirement.  The existing dashboard doesn’t scale easily with multiple devices and there are a few major flaws within the software that would reduce the appeal to business.  It appears that the scalability issues have been addressed, but only a test-drive will tell how much better the software really is.

Summary

The entry-level SAN array market is becoming increasingly competitive.  There are many companies targeting this space, not including the big storage names I’ve mentioned earlier.  Data Robotics are pitching the new business models from £1409 ($2000) upwards, which presumably is for the B800i rather than the 12-bay model.  Although this does exclude disks, the price does seem competitive, as drives can be purchased by the customer at the lowest cost and added as required.  The competition will cite lack of features, but these are easily added with software releases and will be key to the success of the new devices.  In addition, the management software needs to be business-class or will be a major stumbling block.  Here are just a few features of the existing software that need to be improved:

• Pre-emptive hot-swap - currently a drive replacement is a recovery operation.  When a drive is removed, the Drobo rebuilds RAID from the remaining disks.  It would be better to allow this replacement process to happen pre-emptively, copying data off to a new disk (if slots are available) before the a disk is removed.  This also reduces the impact on performance as RAID rebuilds need to happen as quickly as possible, whereas planned data migrations can be run as background tasks.
• iSCSI Management - the existing iSCSI interface isn’t fully featured.  The dashboard only indicates when a single host has logged into an iSCSI target/LUN but doesn’t indicate the server name or IP address.  This can be frustrating in large environments where, for instance, an over-zealous VMware host acquires all LUNs on a device.  Sharing of LUNs is also not permitted today.
• Capacity Management - although the Drobo understands thin provisioning, it only reports utilised capacity for devices that have a recognised file system and are connected to a host running the Drobo dashboard.  However the device itself must know how much data is being used by each LUN, irrespective of the file format.  That data needs to be presented to the user, otherwise real capacity planning can’t be done.

Overall, I think Drobo are making an exciting move into the business space.  Price sensitivity is an issue in this market and the initial costs are low enough to be attractive to many new customers.  Data Robotics also offer a maintenance contract (DroboCare) for replacement parts, another key business feature.  Key success factors will be the improvement management interface and addition of new features to the device over time.  With 150,000 devices sold to date, Drobo appears to be a force to be reckoned with for the future.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/01/27/hp_and_violin_memory/

In it, Chris Mellor talks about HP producing an Oracle Exadata competitor by integrating the use of Violin Memory’s all-SSD storage array.  Folks may remember that I predicted exactly this set up in the following post:

]]> I found the following article from last week’s “The Register” an interesting one:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/01/27/hp_and_violin_memory/

In it, Chris Mellor talks about HP producing an Oracle Exadata competitor by integrating the use of Violin Memory’s all-SSD storage array.  Folks may remember that I predicted exactly this set up in the following post:

http://www.thestoragearchitect.com/2010/06/17/enterprise-computing-storage-arrays-where-data-goes-to-die/

While attending an HP event last year it became obvious to me that (for some customers at least) the ability to include a solid state array in a virtualised infrastructure would provide the perfect opportunity to deliver high performance virtual machines.  There’s a lot of talk around at the moment about how virtualisation moves on from the 30% of low hanging server fruit that has been virtualised to date.  I think a combination of SSD-based storage and a virtual platform can be one of the catalysts to improve those “hard to virtualise” configurations.

So imagine, in 3U you can provision up to 10TB of storage with 200,000 random write IOPS.  With a decent blade server to match, this could easily start to virtualise those difficult applications.  Now of course the fly in the ointment here will be cost; does the TCO for this kind of a configuration justify the expense?  In addition, would it be acceptable to place many high performance (and presumably high importance) applications on the same infrastructure?

I’d love to see HP producing some TCO materials about these kinds of configurations.  In my opinion, using SSD arrays in this fashion has to be the way forward, rather than placing SSDs into what are currently essentially legacy architectures where the low latency response I/O is inevitably hampered by I/O from traditional disks.

One other thought.  HP definitely have technology based on memristors under development.  Is the use of Violin Memory a stopgap until this technology could be brought to the market?  Even if it is, this announcement could make Violin one of the hottest properties of 2011.

Disclaimer: HP paid for my flights, hotels and meals during this trip.  I was otherwise not remunerated for my time or required to blog about the event.

The event was more a media/press session rather than a technical deep dive, [...] ]]> I’ve just returned from spending two days in Barcelona, attending the HP Converged Infrastructure Event.

Disclaimer: HP paid for my flights, hotels and meals during this trip.  I was otherwise not remunerated for my time or required to blog about the event.

The event was more a media/press session rather than a technical deep dive, although technical product managers were on hand and the assembled bloggers did exercise the product managers’ knowledge.  We were presented to on the new P9500 (the HP model of the HDS VSP) and on new blade systems.

Having seen the P9500 in a different skin only a week before, there weren’t any major surprises in the hardware.  For those of you who are interested in the hardware, Calvin Zito has a video here.  However we were shown a new software feature called APEX (Application Performance Extender) that enables QOS to be applied to servers (and on HP-UX, applications) for I/O on the P9500.  APEX seems like a great idea; a centralised server collects performance statistics on each server (using agents, unfortunately), then makes decisions on workload prioritisation that are then fed to the P9500 array in order to implement the QOS policies.

I do think however that APEX has some issues.  Firstly, response time is measured on the basis of the view of the host of that I/O.  Now I know it’s notoriously difficult (nay, impossible) to measure end-to-end performance in a SAN network and to determine how each component influences the I/O latency.  There could be multiple Fibre Channel switch hops, buffer credit congestion (especially in stretched fabrics), latency introduced by replication and so on.  Consequently the view the host sees of an I/O could be vastly different to the way the array believes it is servicing that I/O.  This could result in skewed I/O balancing, which isn’t good.  Hopefully as more information is made available, I will be able to provide more insight, suffice to say for now, that the concept is good; the proof will be in the detail.

Day 2 of the CI event was a 3Par roadshow.  3PAR is being pushed as the saviour for HP Storage and that can be seen by the fact that Dave Scott, who headed up 3Par, has been appointed General Manager for the StorageWorks business.  I personally believe 3Par is a great product, and with the momentum they’ve achieved so far with their R&D spend, it can only get better as HP publicly committed to significant increased R&D in the platform.  HP stated that only 11% of the external storage market comes their way and they intend to use 3Par to go after the other 89%.

The positioning of 3Par seems like a great move for HP.  The acquisition wasn’t a direct response to the Dell bid, but rather HP had been planning for some time to acquire 3Par and changes in management made that more easy to achieve as part of a Dell counter-offer.  But the confusing part of the day’s presentation was the omission of the P9500 array from the discussion.  A slide was displayed showing the evolution of the platforms for both traditional and service provider customers.  3Par is the only choice for service providers and is the major choice at Enterprise, mid and low-range.  XP (now P9000) is moved to the side and presumably only retained for mainframe or existing/specialist customers.

If 3Par is to become the premier HP storage product, there is going to need to be some serious thinking put in to converting customers.  Management (alerting, provisioning, billing etc) will all be different; there’s a whole set of migration strategies that will need to be developed; business models will change (new ways to calculate ROI/TCO).  Getting this information to customers rather than just discussing the tin will be HP’s greatest challenge and one I look forward to observing.

Meanwhile, here are a few pictures from the event.

HP have been pretty [...] ]]> So there we have it.  A week after Dell announce their intention to acquire 3Par, HP put their cards on the table and trump the Dell bid with an updated offer of $24 a share.  This represents a 1/3 increase over the Dell $18/share offer.

HP have been pretty acquisitive in the storage arena over the last few years, acquiring LeftHand, Ibrix and others.  Why now would they want to acquire 3Par?

• Defensive positioning – 3Par being acquired by any of the major vendors could weaken HP’s position in the mid-to-enterprise market.  EVA is a fading product and unlikely to be the first choice for many organisations when choosing a mid-tier storage array (unless you’re an out and out HP shop of course).  Maybe HP felt they had to protect their existing mid-market position.
• Technology Replacement - As I just mentioned, the EVA looks long in the tooth.  Should HP replace or upgrade it?  Acquiring 3Par could be the answer to that problem – use InServ as the EVA replacement.  Goodbye EVA.  Alternatively, 3Par could be a replacement for the XP range of devices that HP OEM from Hitachi.  HDS are being brought closer to the Hitachi family (and making acquisitions of their own) so perhaps this is another defensive move on HP’s part, in case the Hitachi deal unravels.

Whatever the reason, HP & 3Par would create a large overlapping portfolio of similar products.  I’m not sure where the clear strategy would be, or what the marketing message would say; which product is best for enterprise, mid, SME and so on.

Final thought:  Will Dell rebid at a higher price?  Will anyone else come into the bidding?  Storage is clearly still hot acquisition territory.