Storage Networking World 2008 Dallas News

SNW product highlights, Day 1

SNW product highlights, Day 2

SNW product highlights, Day 3

SNW product highlights, Day 4

Vmware Datacenter OS

Vmware 2008; VMware has extended Virtual Infrastructure into a Virtual Datacenter Operating System

The virtual datacenter OS addresses customers’ needs for flexibility, speed, resiliency and efficiency by transforming the datacenter into an “internal cloud” – an elastic, shared, self- managing and self-healing utility that can federate with external clouds of computing capacity freeing IT from the constraints of static hardware-mapped applications.

VmDOS (Back to DOS days) delivers the virtual datacenter OS through the following essential components:

Application vServices guarantee the appropriate levels of availability, security and scalability to all applications independent of hardware and location.
Infrastructure vServices subtract, aggregate and allocate on-premise servers, storage and network for maximum infrastructure efficiency.
Cloud vServices federate the on-premise infrastructure with third party cloud infrastructure.
Management vServices allow you to proactively manage the virtual datacenter OS and the applications running on it.


All I can say is WOW!!!

Welcome to the Cloud Computing ERA!

ESXi FREE

You’ll still need VirtualCenter and VI3 Enterprise licenses for all the cool enterprise-level features like VMotion, DRS, HA, SRM.

ESXi can either be installed or run from an embedded device available in certain servers.

The 32MB footprint gives small businesses an easy way to get into the virtualization world with easy upgrade paths to enterprise-level features.

Great call by someone at Vmware!

Now with all the virtualization going on these days, it's becomming harder to find a spare "real" server to try out ESXi on :(

NetApp 2007 NetApp Innovation Awards Honors Dan Pancamo and Marcus Bui

Myself and Marcus Bui are the proud recipients of the 2007 Netapp Enterprise Infrastructure Innovation award!

In August 2006 we convinced our Vmware teams to switch from a SAN Vmware environment to a Netapp NFS Vmware environment as we quickly realized the potential value that Netapp could play in a Vmware environment.

I truly believe that even Netapp didn't even see their potential role until we proved the value of Netapp's snapshot and replication technology in a vmware environment. Today we run over 1000 VMs on 35 ESX host in two locations all using Netapp filers over NFS.



The NetApp Innovation Awards recognize NetApp customers who have helped their companies, customers, or communities through innovative deployment of NetApp products and solutions.

The Enterprise Infrastructure award distinguishes customers worldwide who have deployed NetApp systems to power data center, workgroup, department, collaborative, or HPC applications that are specifically not Oracle, SAP, SQL Server, or Exchange and who demonstrate innovation with NetApp products. This year’s winner was Invesco, a leading independent global investment management company. By delivering the combined power of its distinctive worldwide investment management capabilities, including AIM, Atlantic Trust, Invesco, Perpetual, PowerShares, Trimark, and WL Ross, Invesco provides a comprehensive array of enduring investment solutions for retail, institutional, and private wealth management clients around the world. Activision, a leading international publisher of interactive entertainment software products, and Reliance Communications Limited, which is rated among “Asia's Top 5 Most Valuable Telecom Companies” and is India's foremost and truly integrated telecommunications service provider, were finalists.

HP Single Filesystem Cluster ExDS9100

HP anounces a highly scalable storage system named ExDS9100 (Extreme Data Storage System). ExDS9100 can scale to 246 petabytes using HP’s C-Class 16 Blades 12.8 cores per unit for an 3.2 GB/second of raw performance all managed with a single management interface.

HP's PolyServe software (acquired in February 2007) is at the heart of the single filesystem.

HP predicts it will cost less than US$2 per gigabyte in a typical configuration.

Storage Networking World 2008 Highlights

Storage Networking World April 7-10, 2008 at Rosen Shingle Creek Resort in Orlando, Florida - the world's largest and foremost storage networking event - is where IT management and professionals learn, network and maximize their company's storage capabilities

Broadcom Demos 10-Gig iSCSI/TCPIP HCA Broadcom iSCSI HBA functionality enables on-chip processing of the iSCSI as well as TCP and IP protocols, which frees up host CPU resources at 10 Gbps line rates and enables an impressive 400,000 IOPS

Xiotech announced intelligent Storage Element (ISE) "virtually eliminate the need for service, scale from one terabyte to one petabyte and dramatically boost performance".

Mellanox accounced 10Gbit FCoE CNA w/Host Offload ConnectX EN Dual-Port 10GigE Single-Chip Adapter with FCoE Enables LAN and FC SAN Consolidation over Ethernet Networks.

More to come...

Intel 10Gbit Nic with VMDq doubles Vmware IO performance

In order to help the I/O congestion associated with the additional VMM software switching in a virtualized environment, Intel has implemented a technology called VMDq in their latest 10Gbit Ethernet NICs and silicon. VMDq is a technology specifically designed to offload some of the switching that was done in the VMM to networking hardware specifically designed for this function. This drastically reduces the overhead associated with I/O switching in the VMM which greatly improves throughput and overall system performance.

Without VMDq, the throughput was 4.0 Gbps; with VMDq, the throughput more than doubled to 9.2 Gbps.

Cisco Nexus 7000 Series Switch

Cisco Nexus 7000 Series Switch - purpose built for the Data Center of the future. It is designed to transform data center operations, making the customers experience in the data center more efficient, resilient and lasting. Also, check out the Cisco Nexus 7000 website where you can explore the features and elements of the Nexus 7000 Series in our 3-D Interactive Model and view other videos introducing the Nexus 7000 family.

The Cisco Nexus 7000 Platform is powered by Cisco NX-OS, a state-of-the-art operating system. The Cisco Nexus 7000 Series is purpose-built for the data center and has many unique features and capabilities designed specifically for the most mission-critical place in the network, the data center.

• Zero-Service Disruption Architecture
• Scales beyond 15 Tbps with future support for 40 Gbps and 100 Gbps Ethernet
• Connectivity management processor (CMP) for integrated out-of-band management access
• Graceful system operations to minimize the effect of upgrades and other software operations
• Comprehensive XML API for total platform control
• Built to support the emerging 40 Gbps and 100 Gbps Ethernet standards
• Flexible foundation for unified fabrics and unified I/O Virtual Device Contexts (VDCs) to maximize software and hardware resource utilization while providing strong security and software fault isolation
• Lossless fabric architecture to support the requirements of a unified fabric

VMware I/O Virtualization HBAs and Xsigo Systems I/O Director

A partnership between VMware Inc. and Xsigo Systems Inc. will result in Xsigo's I/O virtualization product being integrated with ESX Server and its management software folded into VMware's Virtual Center GUI.

Xsigo's I/O Director consists of a rack-mounted switch that takes the place of Ethernet NICs and FC HBAs in physical servers, connecting them in turn to the user's network or storage fabric in a consolidated physical footprint. The switch also allows users to change connectivity on the fly.

The I/O Problem

I/O is a growing problem in large data centers. Thousands of interconnects link resources in complex configurations. Every data path must be redundant to guard against failure, and all paths must deliver the bandwidth needed for peak loads.

The resulting infrastructure involves a vast array of physical resources: adapter cards, networking switches, storage switches, and a maze of cables. Issues with large scale server I/O include:

• Inflexibility: Multiple interdependencies limit agility.
• High cost: I/O infrastructure cost (cards, switches) can exceed server cost.
• Management complexity: Multiple teams must coordinate even simple changes.

According to Xsigo the benefits of using their director are:

• Reduce server I/O cabling by 70%
• Cut connectivity capital costs by up to 50%
• Deploy connectivity to any server at any time
• Migrate connectivity among servers transparently
• Deliver 10Gb/s bandwidth to each server
• Integrate with existing management frameworks

Vmware should be well aware that storage is the key a successful virtual infrastructure. By virtualizing storage, they will be able to provide a generic connectivity point for all 3rd party storage systems.

I/O Virtualization will be a major enhancement in upcoming VI releases and will future proof changes in storage going forward. Expect to see a number of specific IO solutions for vmware in the comming year.

EMC DMX-4 Delivers First Solid State Disks

Symmetrix DMX-4 is the first enterprise storage system to provide flash drives that break the performance barriers of traditional disk technology.

EMC plans to offer flash drives in 73 GB and 146 GB capacities for the Symmetrix DMX-4 platform beginning later in Q1 2008.

From the press release:

The flash drives for the Symmetrix DMX-4 system have been purpose built to EMC's exacting specifications and use single-layer cell (SLC) flash technology combined with sophisticated controllers to achieve ultra fast read/write performance, high reliability and data integrity.

This new solid-state storage tier, "tier zero," is fully supported by the Symmetrix software management suite, enabling storage administrators to simplify the provisioning of all of their storage tiers with advanced management tools including Dynamic Cache Partitioning, Virtual LUNs, Quality of Service Manager, and now Virtual Provisioning to simplify overall management and application performance

The Symmetrix DMX-4, with support for flash drives, Fibre Channel disk drives and SATA disk drives, offers the broadest range of 'in the box' storage tiering options to enable the consolidation of all application tiers within a single system.

BiTMICRO 1.6TB Solid State "Soft Drive"

Update 2/5/2008 : E-Disk® Altima™ Ultra320 SCSI SSD combines up to 1.6TB pure solid state storage capacities with 30,000 IOPS and a lightning-speed sustained throughput of up to 230 MB/sec to deliver highly reliable and performance-driven storage solutions for enterprise, military, and industrial applications

Set for an official announcement at CES next week, BiTMICRO's 832GB SSD uses some sort of proprietary technology that they call MLC memory.

BiTMICRO hasn't made any mention regarding pricing at this point, but they do plan for a launch sometime in Q3 2008.

Virtual Optics's vision for 2008 was hot for solid state in 2008, however never this hot.

Netapp Grabs Onaro

Netapp announced today a definitive merger agreement to acquire Onaro, a privately owned company headquartered in Boston, Mass. Onaro's software, deployed in 32% of Fortune 50 companies, allows enterprises to manage storage with the highest possible data availability at a fraction of normal operational costs.



Netapp has been working hard at adding a new software look to it's hardware product line. Onaro not only adds SAN and NAS functionality, but also Vmware functionality. I suspect that Netapp is also looking at the talent pool as a key factory in the agreement. I see a tight integration comming in the future with all the Netapp functionality on the hardware side.

Watch the What's New Onaro Demo (4:00)


It's only January 3rd, and yet another Virtual Optics 2008 predition is on the table.

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IBM Grabs XIV Nextra Clustered SAN

Looks like my #2 predition for 2008 is already comming true. IBM throws down a rumored $350M for clustering startup





XIV is an unknown clustering solution with 40 customers that provides SAN connectivity in a cluster configuration. XIV's Nextra solution provides point in time snapshots and scales to 1 Petabyte





XIV is led by Moshe Yanai, one of the key architects of data storage systems and instrumental in the development of EMC's Symmetrix and DMX product lines throughout the 1990s. XIV was founded in 2002 by five graduates of the Talpiot program, Israel's elite military program for technology leaders. The innovative Nextra technology has been in development since 2002, with first customer installations in 2005.

2008

Well Happy New Year!

I started this Blog on 9/11/2007 and I just tracked my 3069th unique visitor (see above for their locations)

My visions for 2008

1. 10Gbe will become the standard for NAS storage

2. Clustered Storage (such as Isilon) will pick up steam

3. Solid State storage will be the talk of 2008

4. VMware will continue to increase market share

5. Infiniband Storage and VMware will be the 2008 solution

6. Several Storage vendors will consolidate

7. NFS RDMA NFSv4 pNFS over 10Gbe will outperform Fibre Channel for Vmware Datastores

8. FCOE will be limited to few applications

And on a green note, Nanosolar will change the world.

Dan

January 1 2008