Today marks the first day of the two day GestaltIT Techfieldday 2009. As described on previous blog posts, this is a very unique event and will be an industry trendsetter. A very nice blog post by John Troyer from Vmware describing GestaltIT #Techfieldday and the wave it is creating in the industry, here

We had an action filled day today, 18 hours of non-stop techno-geek talk so far.

Vmware

The day started early morning today at 7 AM, we all left to go to Vmware first, where Xsigo Systems and MDS Micro were presenting. Expectations with both these presentations were very high, and they absolutely managed to deliver on it.

Met up with John Troyer first at Vmware headquarters in Palo Alto, CA. The bus took us from the hotel to Vmware and will be the means of transportation throughout the event. After a great breakfast this morning, they gave us a tour of the Vmworld DataCenter -- Lab (hundreds of VM’s running within a single cabinet with Clariion, Xsigo, MDS running as a Converged Infrastructure).

Then we went for a walk around the Vmware campus to another building where the event was being hosted. Walking there, we ended up taking some funny pictures…

Simon Seagrave

Greg Knieriemen

Then Stephen Foskett took the stage to present us on the concept of GestaltIT TechFieldday 2009. He then passed on the mic to John Toor from Xsigo Systems who explained us the agenda for the rest of the morning.

MDS Micro

MDS Micro took the stage and went through the entire set of technical marketing presentation on the MDS Micro set of products and how the blocks compete in a converged infrastructure. Quite a compelling story from MDS.

Then Vmware took the stage next, the group called GETO (Global Engineering Technical Operations). These are the guys that worked on designing the Datacenter at Vmworld 2009. On a dinner table in Florida, they created the concept of the next datacenter at Vmworld 2009. Amazing 45 min technology talk.

Xsigo

Then Xsigo took the stage. Wow…..what a presentation, Cam Ford from Xsigo was on the stage, this guy has a passion and believed in what he was presenting. I was really really impressed.

At times its just not only walking up to the stage and presenting on a technology, believing in something and presenting the technology is completely different. That is exactly what we saw with this presentation. Tons of questions were asked and Cam Ford was able to answer each one of them……..Loved the techno talk. I am now believing that Xsigo will in a short duration be a take over target. They have a great technology in their hands.

3Par

Had lunch at Vmware and then we all headed to 3Par. Now after the Xsigo presentation, we were expecting a lot from 3Par.

Craig Nunes, Marc Farley and John D’Avolio were at the 3Par lobby to receive us as we reached to their headquarters.

We were looking for the famous Pooja Desai -- the “Check it out Girl” from the StorageRap Videos and the joke @edsai made on the Infosmack -- Storage Monkeys -- Vmware Wrap up Podcast.

3Par brought in Siamak Nazari on the stage to talk about various 3Par technologies.

This guy was amazing!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

One thing I would like to emphasize again, please make sure all the presenters for the GestaltIT #techfieldday are technology experts. We need to talk to “the best of the breed”, I have typically seen based on all the presentations at GestaltIT Techfieldday and HPTechday so far that the engineering / technical marketing folks have been very well received amongst the audience. There are aways people in the group ready to chew the presenter if they are not aware of the technology they are presenting on.

Siamak Nazari started the presentation and within a few mins, had questions from the audience, but he started going into details, white boarding, diagrams, explaining chunklets, buses, clusters, software, architecture and he won everyone in the room. This presentation was scheduled for about 45 mins, but by the time the presentation was done, we were well over 90 mins.

Its hard to write about the technology in one blog post and will not be fair to 3Par and its technology. So what i will do is provide you all with a detailed architectural overview of the 3Par technology over next couple of weeks, showing a video of the presentation and the architecture around the 3Par clusters.

Siamak Nazari wanted to go into a lot of details, but i believe since this was a non NDA session, the folks in the room had to stop him going into architecture and futures.

Then Craig Nunes along with Marc Farley presented on the 3Par Thin Technology and Zero Page reclaimation. I truly believe they have a great team of people there that are driving the product.

We then went to the 3Par Test and Development labs. This lab has to at least be warehousing about 200 to 300 3Par systems. At times it is great breathing the data center air…..

Symantec

Then Symantec took the stage with its Storage Foundations suite. Some nice technical chat around filesystems, how Symantec integrates with 3Par for Zero page reclaimation, how customers can drive the storage they already have in data centers with the use of Storage Foundations suite. There were quite a few questions asked and contradictions made in this presentation, where the GestaltIT Bloggers didn’t understand the complete strategy of Symantec in relation to Storage Foundations product. Though from my perspective I felt it was a complete solution but not a lot of market applicability.

GestaltIT Party

We then left there to head to the Computer history Museum in San Jose for the GestaltIT Party. What a crowd of people there. This event was sponsored by TechValidate (Brad O’Neil’s new venture). Tons of people from various Tech PR companies, HP, Nirvanix, 3Par, Vmware, Data Robotics, Ocarina Networks, Bhava Communications, MDS Micro and many more were present.

Met up with Murli, CEO from Ocarina Networks, he is just a magnificent personality. Very humble and approachable. Met up with Brad O’Neil and many others from the Storage industry.

Then was the video presentation by Sunshine Mugrabi and Marc Farley as a tribute to Stephen Foskett. This is a great video.

The Bar

We then headed back to the hotel…..the night was just beginning. At the bar, people were just dissecting everything that they had heard today and putting it into perspective.

Around 2 AM in the morning the night finally finishes (at least for me) and looking forward for a new day tomorrow, more TECHNO-GEEK talk to continue…..

My eyes are barely staying up now, All I can say is Goodnight!!!!!!!

Today marks the 1^st anniversary of the StorageNerve Blog.

I never thought blogging would come so far. Lots of persistence, reading, writing, vision, sacrifice of those nice weekends all combined together is the end result.

Major topics over the past year

The StorageNerve blog is primarily focused on Storage Technology. Major discussions have been around EMC Clariion, Symmetrix, Celerra, layered Software, management, RAID-6 technology as it relates to EMC, HDS, NetApp, HP, lots of writing on Symmetrix V-Max and a 9 series blog post on Storage Resource Analysis as it fits within Storage Economics. A total of post about 140 blog post.

Core Values

The Core value of StorageNerve blog has been around technology. Also this blog favors technology and not manufacturers.

StorageNerve Brand

So over the past year, with tons of writing, reading it has been a great learning experience for me, which does help promote the StorageNerve Brand. As life progresses, people move on to new positions and new challenges and I sure would like to position this brand in a similar way.

Why do you Blog?

Well this is a question I get asked a lot from my co-workers, other people I know in the industry.

Truly and Truly, I have enjoyed every moment of it and that is why the commitment for future post stays very high.

The StorageNerve brand and blog has allowed me to build new industry contacts, meet new people, accessibility to tons of industry experts and analyst, contacts with fellow bloggers, manufacturers, the list is non ending. In this past year, through the StorageNerve blog, I have been able to talk one on one with atleast 5 different CEO’s of Storage related companies. Quite a few one on one meetings with industry leaders and technologist with similar background.

Then came along GestaltIT.com and it is a great pleasure to work with folks highly recognized in the industry to collaborate on post and understand views related to other technologies. Then later this year I was approached by Huliq.com to write news articles for them as it relates to Storage Technology, though I haven’t written anything for them yet, I do plan to try something out.

Another opportunity came along to have one on one sessions with investment firms.  Focus of these sessions are towards Storage, Storage products, Storage technologies, Storage manufacturers and a Storage vision, that they take back to their end users.

I am truly waiting for the next big opportunity to happen through the StorageNerve blog.

The Stats

I know this means nothing, but being a technology-focused blog, I see tons of advantages as it relates to storage keywords searches.

The hits on the StorageNerve Blog have surpassed my expectations; I never thought it would go so far in the first year.

Topics over the next year

So year 2 is important rather very important. You will see some HDS technology posts, NetApp technology posts and Emerging technology posts. Users will get to read some post on Virtualization, Cloud Computing and Storage Economics.

Conclusion

Hope you enjoyed reading StorageNerve blog over the past year. Hope you keep reading it for the next year and find the articles interesting.

On the StorageNerve blog, I have been posting new articles for the past 5 days and for the next 5 days to come. Stay tuned for the next blog post to see some additional changes and some invitations forthcoming.

Please feel free to leave comments or email me at devang @ storagenerve.com

Cheers, @storagenerve

It has been an exciting month, some new details are emerging related to automated storage tiering, workload distributions, workflow automation, SLA’s, QoS and how Policy based storage management can help solve these challenges. “Policy” as we all know in the “business world”, “advanced algorithms” as known in “scientific community” is used to solve complex storage challenges. This has been one of the favorite topics of discussion in the storage blogosphere these days.

Though there are two distinct groups of people, one favoring automation and the other half possibly thinking this technology brings no value-add in terms of how storage is utilized and managed today. This game was initially started by Compellent (Compellent Data Progression technology) about 4 years ago, then joined by Pillar Data Systems and now other OEM’s (including EMC, HDS, IBM) are starting to catchup on policy based automated storage tiering.

With private clouds in the near future and then hybrid clouds (a mesh of private and public clouds) in the horizon, automation, workload distribution, SLA’s, QoS will need to be monitored and managed to optimally run IT Infrastructures. Policy based management will create a new wave of storage management, automation and will act as a principle ingredient of hybrid clouds.

Generation 1 of policy based storage tiering works within a single storage subsystem.
Generation 2 in the near future should work across heterogeneous storage subsystems (by the same manufacturers).
Generation 3 over the next year or two will work across storage platforms irrelevant of the manufacturers.
Generation 3 of policy based management will include the entire stack of management. These products will be capable of not only managing the Storage, but also interact through policies at the Virtualization, Networking, Application, OS, Middleware and other layers in the stack of Infrastructure management..

We should see an up-rise of new emerging technologies that will create these external policy based engines for data movement automation. All infrastructure components including Storage, Virtualization, Networking, Application, OS, Middleware will provide the necessary API’s for these external engines to interact and enable data automation and workflow automation in the hybrid clouds (irrelevant of the manufacturers).

Here are a few articles from the past month related to the topics of Policy, Automated Storage Tiering, Workloads, SLA’s and QoS.

Pillar (OEM)

http://blog.pillardata.com/pillar_data_blog/2009/10/autotiering-of-data.html

EMC (OEM)

http://flickerdown.com/2009/09/why-policy-is-the-future-of-storage/

http://flickerdown.com/2009/10/why-policy-is-the-future-of-storage-part-2/

http://stevetodd.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/10/greenfield-monitoring-of-a-private-cloud.html

http://stevetodd.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/09/federation-and-private-cloud.html

Compellent (Partner Blog)

http://blogs.cinetica.it/cinetica/2009/10/19/dear-mike/

http://blogs.cinetica.it/cinetica/2009/08/25/tiered-storage-and-new-features-for-the-rest-of-us/

HDS (OEM)

http://blogs.hds.com/hu/2009/09/ilm-revisited-intelligent-tiered-storage-for-file-and-content-data.html

Independents

http://www.storagemonkeys.com/index.php?option=com_myblog&show=the-end-of-history-or-just-the-beginning-.html&Itemid=136

http://thestoragearchitect.com/2009/10/18/enterprise-computing-do-we-need-fast-v1-emc/

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/09/22/emc_fast/

http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/storage-soup/hp-drops-roadmap-nuggets-at-storageworks-techday/

http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/storage-soup/spinnaker-founders-bring-avere-out-of-stealth/

http://breathingdata.com/2009/10/18/can-and-when-will-ssds-sata-replace-fcsas/

http://gestaltit.com/featured/top/gestalt/emc-unified-platform-storage-tiering/

http://storagenerve.com/2009/10/14/enhancements-to-emc-symmetrix-v-max-systems/

Your thoughts always welcome!!!

cheers
@storagenerve

Enhancements to EMC Symmetrix V-Max system is possibly around the corner (FY09 Q4).

FAST (Fully Automated Storage Tiering) is due this quarter and will be one of the most awaited software release in the enterprise storage space by EMC.

Bundled together with FAST, possibly a new microcode version the enables FAST (its associated features) and other expected enhancements.

Though this will be a major software release and functionality upgrade, I don’t think this would qualify as a 2nd generation EMC Symmetrix V-Max system.

But fully expect EMC to release its FAST v2 and V-Max G2 somewhere around Mid year 2010.

Here are a few new features to possibly expect on the EMC Symmetrix V-Max Systems this quarter.

1. Introduction of FAST v1, which should allow automated data movement within a single Symmetrix V-Max system. Here are some features of FAST as discussed on GestaltIT and by Barry Burke (TSA) on his blog.

2. FAST v1 data movement should possibly be policy driven around factors like time (how old is the data), SLA (promised SLA’s), Tier (from Tier 0 to Tier 1 to Tier 2) and possibly I/O or IOPS based.

3. FAST v1 should allow automated policy based data movement or prompt a user for manual intervention for data movement.

4. Do not expect FAST v1 to come for free, it will possibly be licensed based on the total number of TB’s in the storage subsystem.

5. Expect some integration between the IONIX platform and FAST v1 and possibly some very tight integration with future releases of FAST and IONIX.

6. Expect FAST and IONIX to integrate very tightly with Atmos through API’s and policies. We should expect to see this with FAST v2 and not with FAST v1.

7. So when does EMC retire Symmetrix Optimizer, with FAST v1 probably not, with FAST v2 probably yes.

8. 2TB SATA II drives will be introduced (According to a Keynote from Joe Tucci in NYC), though Joe Tucci didn’t mention what platforms the 2TB SATA II drives will be available on, it seems the V-Max upgrade would be the most logical platform.

9. The 2TB SATA II drive upgrade should make the V-Max 4 PB total storage (2400 drives x 2TB), possibly the single largest storage subsystem at an enterprise level.

10. RapidIO speed upgrade from 2.5 Gbps to 4 Gbps (interconnects between the engines) upgraded either through MBIE (new processors) and / or through microcode upgrades. Edit 10/15/2009 – 12:50 PM: Not sure currently the technology that EMC uses for RapidIO, since Parallel RapidIO supports 250 Mhz to 1Ghz clocking speeds while Serial RapidIO supports 1.25Ghz to 3Ghz.

11. Drive connect speed upgrade from 4 Gbps to 8 Gbps

12. FC and FICON (Host Connects) port speeds upgrade from 4 Gbps to 8 Gbps

13. Interconnect between two separate Symmetrix V-Max Systems (8 Engines each per system) expanding into possibly 16 or 32 (max) engines. The more I think about this concept, the more it makes me feel that there are no added benefits of this architecture, rather it will add more complexities with data management and higher latency. We may not see anything related to interconnects in this upgrade, but remember how the V-Max was initially marketed with having hundreds of engines and millions of IOPS, the only way to achieve that vision is through interconnects. The longer the distance, the more latency with cache and I/O. If Interconnets end up making in this release, limitation on the distance between two Symmetrix V-Max system bays would be around 100 feet.

14. To the point above, another way of possibly connecting these systems could merely be federation through external policy based engines. Ed Saipetch and myself have speculated that concept on GestaltIT.

15. With the use of larger drive size, possibly expect a cache upgrade. Currently the Symmetrix V-Max supports 1TB total cache (512GB usable), which may get upgraded to 2TB total cache (1024 GB usable).

16. New possible microcode version 5875 that will help bring features like FAST, SATA II drives and additional cache into the Symmetrix V-Max.

17. Processors: 4 x Quad Core Intel processors on V-Max engines may not get an upgrade in this release, it should possibly be with FAST v2 as a midlife enhancement next year.

18. Further enhancements related to FCoE support.

19. Upgrade of iSCSI interface on Symmetrix V-Max engines from 1GB to 10GB (is now available with the Clariion CX4 platforms).

20. Really do not expect this to happen, but imagine RapidIO interconnects change to FCoE. Really not sure what made EMC to go with RapidIO instead of Infiniband 40 Gbps (which most of the storage industry folks think is dead) or FCoE with Engine interconnects, but if the engineers at EMC thought of RapidIO as a means to connect the V-Max engines, there has to be a reason behind it. Edit 10/15/2009 12:50 PM: Enginuity more or less doesn’t care about the underlying switching technology, making a switch from RapidIO to FCoE or Infiniband can be accomplished without a lot of pains. Though for customers already invested into RapidIO technology (with existing V-Max systems), it might be offline time to change the underlying fabric, which in most cases is unacceptable.

21. Virtual Provisioning on Virtual LUNs which is currently not supported with the existing generation of Microcode on V-Max systems.

22. Atmos currently is running as a beta release and we should expect a market release this Quarter. Should we expect to see an integration between V-Max and Atmos. I am not sure of any integration today.

23. A very interesting feature to have in the EMC Symmetrix V-Max would be system partitioning, where you can run half the V-Max engines at a certain Microcode level with a certain set of features and other half can be treated as a completely separate system with its own identity (almost like a Mainframe environment). Shouldn’t this be a feature of a modular storage array.

24. Symmetrix Management Console (SMC) and Vmware integration (like VMware aware Navisphere and Navisphere aware VMware). There is already quite a bit of support related to VMware in SMC for provisioning and allocation.

25. Also a much tighter integration between IONIX, FAST, SMC, Navisphere and Atmos may after all be the secret sauce, which would enable workflow, dataflow and importantly automation. Though do not expect this integration now, something to look forward for the next year.

Summary

Though I am still a bit confused on where FAST will physically sit.

FAST v1 can merely be a feature integrated within the Microcode, configurable & driven through policy within the Symmetrix Management Console.

FAST v2 (Sometime Mid 2010) will support in-box and out-of-box (eg: Symmetrix to Clariion to Celerra to Centera) data movement through policy engine.

Ed Saipetch and myself have speculated on GestaltIT on how that may work. Though after some thoughts, I do believe a policy engine can merely be a VM or a vAPP sitting outside the physical storage system in the Storage environment.

To promote the sales of the EMC Symmetrix V-Max systems, Barry Burke in his blog post talks about Open Replicator, Open Migrator and SRDF / DM (Data mobility) are now available at no cost for customers purchasing a new EMC Symmetrix V-Max system, these are some of the incentives that EMC is offering and further promoting the sales of its latest generation Symmetrix technology.

It remains to be seen the path of success FAST will carve for Symmetrix V-Max systems.