The Storage Architect » Onaro

Enterprise Computing: Is EMC Storage Configuration Advisor A SANScreen Killer?

Chris M Evans — Wed, 13 May 2009 08:00:19 +0000

EMC have just announced a new product – Storage Configuration Advisor (see the press release here). A quick review of the press release and the datasheet shows a remarkable similarity to Netapp’s SANScreen. Both products are pitched as datacentre automation tools – they monitor your configuration and highlight logical inconsistencies as they occur. SANScreen has been expanded to include some reporting but essentially the core product has remained the same since the Onaro days.

So, should Netapp be worried? I think so. EMC have a massive software portfolio and the resources (and desire) to execute on developing and pushing the product into customer sites. They can easily afford to give the software away as part of a bundled array and switch deal. On the other hand, Netapp don’t have a good record on management software. Could they really afford to give SANScreen away, bearing in mind the product manages hardware that isn’t their core competency? Probably not.

Any SANScreen customers heard from EMC yet?

I Stand Corrected

Chris M Evans — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 14:52:00 +0000

In a previous post earlier this year I mentioned the Onaro purchase by Network Appliance. As I said at the time, I wasn’t aware Onaro’s SANScreen product even had a NAS module. It seems I was wrong, and thanks for Deni O’Connor for indirectly pointing it out. In fact, SANScreen now has NAS Insight which provides for NAS monitoring support. However this feature was only made general availability on 31 December 2007, so you can hopefully excuse my oversight for not realising it has been released.

(On a side note, why are large Enterprises such as Onaro still not using RSS to announce product releases? I haven’t got the time or inclination to trawl their websites each day. RSS is so much easier.)

I had a quick look at the NAS Insight press release and details on their website. Although there’s a demo, I couldn’t ascertain what NAS products (other than Netapp filers which are in the demonstration) the product supports. That makes me think it supports nothing BUT Netapp (although I again stand to be corrected). If that’s true then NAS Insight is a pointless feature for many customers who would want to use the product for cross vendor consolidation and certainly doesn’t demonstrate Onaro’s NAS credentials. Compared to the last release of DFM I saw, NAS Insight is pretty poor.

To date my SANScreen exposure has been based on one large “global installation” of the product and presentations from the Onaro marketing team. When an instance of SANScreen was enabled in one location of the global deployment, it created thousands of exceptions which then required manual intervention. When I last had a presentation on the product (in October) there was a large number of SAN scenarios SANScreen wasn’t reporting on, a lot of these relating to non-EMC and replication support. There’s still a long way to go yet.

Up to this point, Onaro may have developed relationships with the vendors which provides for ongoing access to new releases of their management tools in order to extract configuration information. Going forward, will those companies still be as keen to provide that information to Netapp, who may be their direct competitor in the NAS (and non-NAS) marketplace?

Two for the price of one

Chris M Evans — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 18:24:00 +0000

The holidays are over and it’s back to work for me. In fact I returned yesterday; the break was good however it is also good to be back.

It seems that I’ve returned to a flurry of acquisitions. Yesterday there was the heavily reported (on the blogosphere) purchase of XiV by IBM. Tony Pearson gives a summary of the features on his post. One thing that interests me is the use of distributed writes across an entire array by creating 1MB blocks from (presumably) LUNs and filesystems. If a drive fails, then the data is still available on other disks in the system and spread across a great number rather than a single drive (RAID-1) or potentially a small number of drives (RAID5/6).

I’ve been trying to get my head around what this means. On the one hand it sounds like a real problem, as a double drive failure could impact a wide number of hosts; it all depends on how well the 1MB chunks are distributed. However maybe it isn’t that much of a problem as the issue only arises when both of the chunks that mirror a 1MB block both occur on failing drives. I would expect that as the number of physical drives increases then the impact of double failure reduces, as does the number of 1MB blocks affected. In addition, a drive may fail only in one area rather than on the whole device, so the affected blocks could be quite small; the remainder could be perfectly readable and be quickly moved. No doubt Moshe and the team have done the maths to know what the risk is and compared it to that of standard arrays and wouldn’t be selling the product if it was not inherently more safe.

The only other issue I can see is what market the product will slot into; Tony mentions that the product is not for structured data (although I guess it supports it) but was designed for unstructured data of large binary file types. So, why use RAID-1 compared to say a 14+2 RAID-6 configuration which would be much cheaper in terms of the disk cost? Presumably another selling point is performance, but I would expect the target data profile (medical, large binary objects) to be more sequential than random access and not be that impacted by using SATA.

I guess only time will tell. I look forward to seeing how things go.

The other purchase announced today was that of Onaro by Netapp. Onaro sell SANScreen, a tool to collect and analyse fibre channel SANs and to highlight configuration issues. Whilst I think it is a good product, I don’t see the fit with Netapp’s business in the NAS market (in fact I’m sure SANScreen doesn’t currently support NAS), so where’s the benefit here other than buying up a company which must be close to or is making money.

I wonder who will be bought tomorrow?

Certification Nightmare

Chris M Evans — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 19:52:00 +0000

One of the things I’ve always found a real issue in heterogeneous environments is that of certification. By certification I mean confirming that an installation is vendor supported. This is no mean feat in today’s storage world. There are multiple layers – storage array, fabric, HBA, O/S, logical volume manager and multipathing software. There are also issues of virtualisation, product co-existence (e.g mixing switches from the same vendor but different OEM vendors), management tools, replication software and applications.

The stack of products and levels that must be considered is huge, especially if each layer has multiple products. It is also true that certain vendors don’t help this situation (a) when new software is required to support a new array (for example) and it affects all other layers of the stack (b) competing vendors don’t fully support their competitor’s technology until well after the release date.

I’ve not yet seen a suitable solution for tracking certification levels. Firstly, even the vendors can’t document their own products in a consistent fashion. Consider Emulex – querying the driver level on a Windows host returns a string which *contains* the version, but isn’t in a consistent format. The returned string is different for Emulex on Solaris.

I think we’ve reached the point where we need a Certification Authority. Someone needs to take control and get all vendors to map their products to a consistent standard. Actually, I’d like to do it and I’m working on a markup language to help. It wouldn’t be difficult. Probably the most troublesome part would be assigning an index code to each version/product/level that vendors produce – and getting them to use them….

By the way, in case anyone suggests SAN Advisor or Onaro SANScreen, I don’t think either of these products are up to the mark. I’ve seen SAN Advisor demonstrated a number of times and it looked like a generation 1 product. SANScreen was interesting but not a certification tool as such – more like a semantic rather than syntactic storage product.