Odds And Ends

Well, my travel calendar is definitely getting a bit lighter this time of the year -- that's a good thing.

Had a few moments to dig back through all the stuff I missed, and put together a post or two on some of the flotsam I found interesting.

Warning: this might be a time-waster of a post -- you've been warned!

Best Storage Stories

Since the end of the year is upon us, it's time for predictions and roundups. 

Chris Preimesberger over at eWeek has published his top ten stories of 2008.  BTW, Chris is a great read if you're looking for good blog feeds.

EMC gets a good mention in 5 or 6 of them -- not bad.

If You Can't Beat'em, Join'em

HDS finally (re)announced that they would be doing enterprise flash drives in their high-end arrays before too much longer.  They threw out a date of Q1 2009 (would that be March 35th?), so someone there thinks this must be an important topic.

Not in their smaller modular arrays, though.  Funny, that -- since we've seen healthy demand for these EFDs in CLARiiON since we announced it a while back. 

Just in case you're keeping score, EMC made these available in the DMX almost 11 months ago.  Most of the spring was spent by competitors FUDding the whole topic (some of which continues to this day). 

NetApp has said that they'd be using flash as both a cache and persistent storage, announced an upgrade of their array that they postioned as "flash capable" but -- no clear timeline from them yet.

HP spend an enormous amount on marketing to people that they'd be doing an "end-to-end strategy" around flash, but -- if one just looks at storage devices -- none from them either, and no idea when their storage products will support it -- although they do resell the HDS array, as does Sun.

Might want to work on their processes, though ... :-)

IBM showed a science experiment earlier this year with a variant of the SVC stuffed full of flash drives, claimed a mill-yun IOPs, and we haven't heard much from them since.  No idea when that's showing up from them either.

Right now, it looks like HDS will be the first to follow EMC with shipping product -- albeit a year later.  No real news or timeline on the other vendors, though -- anybody heard different?

Meanwhile, happy DMX customer stories keep rolling in -- a small amount of flash can make a huge difference in application performance.  Make your business users happy this holiday season, won't you? 

Get them what they really want -- a smokin' fast application!

I think this stuff needs to be available on every modern array -- sooner or later.  It's just too important a tool not to have in your toolkit.

Being First With FCoE?

If you'll remember back to this fall's SNW, FCoE was very much out in force.  The first day of SNW, EMC announced immediate availability of an end-to-end FCoE environment -- HBAs, drivers, Nexus switch, eLab qual, etc. so people could get started evaluating it.

The very next day, NetApp announced that they were going to do native FCoE.  No product to show, but at the time they told the world that they'd be shipping something by the end of the year.  Predictably, I took them to task again for (yet another) cheap marketing stunt.

Well, it's Dec 15th.  Anyone want to bet as to whether we'll see it this year as promised?

Ugly Centera Rumors

Sad news: we announced that we have to close one of our R+D centers in Belgium -- this one the historical birthplace of FilePool, the predecessor technology to Centera.  Some very good people there -- it's never a good thing when you have to close one of these facilities.

But -- somehow -- the rumor-mongers jumped on this as clear and obvious evidence that -- yes! -- EMC was canceling the Centera product.  As they tried to do when we announced Atmos, which might appear as a similar product to the uninitiated.

Not true. Not even remotely true.

EMC now does R+D on a global basis in dozens of centers around the world. -- it's often the case that a product line has two, three or four geographic locations working on a given technology.  As a result, every R+D location has to justify itself on a slightly different basis than in the past.

Centera continues to be successful, and was the recipient of major upgrades earlier this year.  Why would EMC ever walk away from a product so successful, and one for which there is visibly increasing demand?  Wishful thinking on the part of competitors I think.

Multivendor Replication Isn't What It's Cracked Up To Be

I'm not going to pick on NetApp for canceling the Topio-based products. 

I knew this was going to be really tough for them to make this work when they acquired the product.  Actually, I give them credit for wrapping things up, and moving on to something else.

Martin over at Storagebod lamented the fact that there are oh-so-few multivendor offerings in the marketplace for things like replication and storage management.

I tried to explain via a comment that it's a tough space -- everyone says they want multivendor, but then turn around and deploy things in (usually) a single vendor environment.  Put differently, multivendor is a feature, not a marketplace.  Really tough for anyone to make a go at the pure multivendor market -- it's just too damn small, IMHO.

Just look at what happened to SMI-S.  All very well intentioned, but anyone reading this actually manage their storage farm with SMI-S? 

Didn't think so.

It's also an interesting discussion as to why EMC with RecoverPoint in the same price book as SRDF, Mirrorview and a bunch of other array replication products is doing well with the approach, and NetApp with Topio and their own array-based replication had to walk away.

Gotta Have One -- Reprised

Our Iomega friends have come up with a product that works for me on two fronts -- it's personal storage, and it's got a great logo!

Just the thing for that information-challenges sports fan in your life.

What -- you don't like the Patriots? :-)

Microsoft Does RSA DLP

Enough on storage, already.

If you track some of the newer information security topics like I do, there was a big piece of news between Microsoft and EMC regarding a tight integration between Microsoft's Active Directory Rights Management Services (RMS), and RSA DLP Suite 6.5 content classification technology.

I've written before about how many of us believe that DLP -- the ability to discover and classify content in context, and drive specific workflows -- is the next big thing in information security.  

We've already done a bunch of integration with one partner -- Cisco -- since a lot of information flows through Cisco infrastructure.  This announcement signifies perhaps the other big pillar that needs to be part of the family -- Microsoft's ecosystem.

Between Cisco and Microsoft, RSA's DLP suite now has some nice integration with some pretty useful control points in the information infrastructure.

Storage Guys Talk About ECM

That's ECM as in Enterprise Content Management, not EMC.

I was pleased to see a good article on the growing importance of ECM appear in Byte&Switch -- that bastion of hard-core storage types.  It's a thoughtful read, and hopefully will share with you why I think this is an important topic for multiple disciplines in IT.

Storage people are always frustrated about how the majority of storage growth is happening in unstructured content, and that they don't have good tools that tell them how to manage this growing source of information, and -- most importantly -- when they can delete things.

I've always thought of enterprise ECM (and Documentum) as a key piece of information infrastructure -- a common mechanism to capture metadata, establish policy and build workflows around big piles of content, regardless of where they actually might live.

Maybe the world is coming around to this point of view? 

I can only hope.

Comments

[Stephen Foskett]

Wow, Chuck, that's some quick bunking and debunking there! The Centera, HDS, and NetApp news just hit the wire today! Not leaving a lot of time for rumors to start, are you?

[Chuck Hollis]

Nope -- working hard to stay ahead of the Twitter crowd :-)

[Mark]

"... but anyone reading this actually manage their storage farm with SMI-S?"

So, Chuck are you saying that Control Center doesn't use SMI-S, or that it doesn't manage storage farms? ;-)

[Chuck Hollis]

Nothing like a snarky blog comment to start the day ...

ControlCenter both uses SMI-S, and manages storage farms, smartypants. ControlCenter's knowledge of storage arrays (and how they're actually used) is a superset of SMI-S functionality.

I would state that no one can effectively manage a substantial storage farm and stay within the bounds of SMI-S.

But you knew that, didn't you?

-- Chuck

[Alex McDonald]

Chuck;

Our customers can buy, right now, the Cisco Nexus 5020 FCoE switch. It’s been available from NetApp since November. The target FCoE card (on the array side) has been available since early December.

And next week (things don’t stop for holidays round here!) we’ll have host configurations qualified with the QLogic and Emulex FCoE network adapters.

Remind me, what was that stuff you were saying about NetApp, FCoE and year end again?

[Chuck Hollis]

Sorry, Alex -- didn't know that you had GA'd the target side FCoE for your arrays -- didn't see any announcement to that effect.

Now, let's see if you finish the Qlogic and Emulex quals by the end of the year :-)

If you make it, congratulations on meeting your commitments!

Have a great holiday season!

-- Chuck

[Brian]

Chuck,

I love the blog and articles, and now to answer your question. I'll buy an IOMega drive when they have the logo of the best team in the AFC.......

The Tennessee Titans.

:)

Happy Holidays chuck!

Brian

[Chuck Hollis]

Yep, the Titans are red hot this season.

But -- the real question -- can they turn it into a dynasty?

[Gianni]

Chuck,

care to comment on the SourceLabs acquisition or how does it fit within your bigger picture?

Oh, MX & HNY

[Chuck Hollis]

Frankly speaking, there's not much to comment on.

From my perspective, it's pretty easy: great tools and technologies, great people, fits nicely into our newest "cloud" division.

I don't know if people know this, but EMC makes small acquisitions like this pretty routinely, especially when we're building a new business. Some get picked up by the community, some don't. This one did.

Oh, BTW, MX and HNY 2U2.