March 2016

It's been a great and long journey - but it comes to an end!
I had started that blog in mid 2007 - which seems ages ago, but only yesterday at the same time.
One of my topics back then was "the comeback of solid-state-storage" - and I'm kind of proud to realize, that I was not too far off in summer 2007, considering all the buzz around flash today and the fact, that IDC just declared that "..the adoption of flash was remarkably quick during the year, with flash systems, both HFA and AFA, overtaking HDD-only systems and representing 51% of total value shipped in 2015 versus 40% in 2014"!

Now, LinkedIn was initially launched in 2003,  Twitter started off in 2006 and these two are the main reason why I feel that investing time to write up my blog does no longer make sense.
And make no mistake: the area of storage and networking is more exciting than ever and our industry is changing by the day, so there would be no lack of news to report!
But typically, by the time I get to summarize my thoughts here, these news nowadays are common knowledge and almost outdated.

So if you are interested to follow my view and ideas on storage and the technologies related to it, please look me up in LinkedIn or Twitter ( @MattWernerCH )

Best regards
Matthias Werner

September

A hot summer season comes to an end - with temperatures in Zurich below 10C for the first time since probably May.

Only a few quick updates today, mostly around hyper-converged infrastructures and Software-defined datacenter. Two trends that obviously go hand in hand. Plus some hot Flash-memory news at the end.

That very topic is discussed in this great overview by George Crump of Storage Switzerland: "A core component of a HCA is SDS. Most HCA solutions are scale-out SDS solutions that run on each node in a hypervisor cluster. They then aggregate the storage in each node to create a shared storage pool accessible by all the virtual machines in the cluster. The value of HCA is that it eliminates a specialized storage network and significantly reduces the cost of storage, since a dedicated shared storage system is not needed. Like any other SDS solution, these HCA solutions then provide most of the necessary storage services like snapshots and cloning but many are missing key services like data protection and replication. For small organizations, a HCA may be all the business needs."

Read the details here!
And for short video to put things into perspective and make sure hype does not go thru the roof, watch this Toigo-clip here!

SDDC also was one of the major topics during the recent VMworld conference which took place in San Francisco: actually VMware renamed their previously discussed EVO:Rack product into EVO SDDC - to my knowledge the first real product being released under that name.
The related marketing lingo sounds as follows: "With our vision for SDDC, VMware has led the way to the next-generation data center architecture. We believe the SDDC is the best architecture for the cloud. By adopting a software-driven, automated approach to data center design and management, organizations gain the IT efficiency, agility and control they need to compete and innovate while achieving tremendous savings — IT organizations can slash CAPEX by as much as 49 percent. (1)
The value of an SDDC-based private cloud has been well recognized by our customers who are asking us for way to accelerate their journey. With EVO SDDC, we are taking a major step forward in providing a turnkey solution that will help our customers to stand up a complete SDDC in a matter of hours and more efficiently manage it at data center scale."

Lastly: the race and journey to "storage after spinning rust" is in full swing. The Flash Memory Summit -which takes place in August- currently is the storage event to be and got a lot of attention from the industry and customers.

As you can read in this press release from HGST, much of the R&D investments go into research focusing on non-volatile memory ""post NAND-flash: "In-memory computing is one of today's hottest data center trends. Gartner Group projects that software revenue alone for this market will exceed US $9B by the end of 2018³. In-memory computing enables organizations to gain business value from real-time insights by offering faster performance and greater scalability than legacy architectures."

And to conclude today's news on a local note: IBM Zurich Research made an important step to eliminate "drift" in PCM (phase change memory) devices: "Phase change memory (PCM) devices have been investigated since the early 1970s and in the past 12 months IBM scientists have made tremendous progress with this technology publishing a number of milestone papers which demonstrate multiple bits per cell, making the technology extremely competitive with Flash.
But PCM doesn’t come without some drawbacks —  a primary culprit being resistance drift. Drift is the change in resistance of the stored levels over time. Essentially the data moves causing your text document or your photo to eventually become corrupted and unusable — a very bad characteristic for a storage technology."

VMware EVO SDDC (previously code named VMware EVO: RACK™), will be a fully automated software suite for delivering the software-defined data center as an integrated system. Enterprises and service providers will be able to use VMware EVO SDDC to deploy a software-defined data center at scale. With VMware EVO SDDC, IT organizations can meet key data center scale initiatives, ranging from application and infrastructure delivery automation to business mobility to high availability and resilient infrastructure, without compromising security, control or choice. - See more at: http://www.vmware.com/company/news/releases/vmw-newsfeed/VMware-Unveils-the-Easiest-Way-to-Deploy-and-Operate-the-Software-Defined-Data-Center-at-Scale/1984725#sf40638508

VMware EVO SDDC (previously code named VMware EVO: RACK™), will be a fully automated software suite for delivering the software-defined data center as an integrated system. Enterprises and service providers will be able to use VMware EVO SDDC to deploy a software-defined data center at scale. With VMware EVO SDDC, IT organizations can meet key data center scale initiatives, ranging from application and infrastructure delivery automation to business mobility to high availability and resilient infrastructure, without compromising security, control or choice. - See more at: http://www.vmware.com/company/news/releases/vmw-newsfeed/VMware-Unveils-the-Easiest-Way-to-Deploy-and-Operate-the-Software-Defined-Data-Center-at-Scale/1984725#sf40638508

VMware EVO SDDC (previously code named VMware EVO: RACK™), will be a fully automated software suite for delivering the software-defined data center as an integrated system. Enterprises and service providers will be able to use VMware EVO SDDC to deploy a software-defined data center at scale. With VMware EVO SDDC, IT organizations can meet key data center scale initiatives, ranging from application and infrastructure delivery automation to business mobility to high availability and resilient infrastructure, without compromising security, control or choice. - See more at: http://www.vmware.com/company/news/releases/vmw-newsfeed/VMware-Unveils-the-Easiest-Way-to-Deploy-and-Operate-the-Software-Defined-Data-Center-at-Scale/1984725#sf40638508

VMware EVO SDDC (previously code named VMware EVO: RACK™), will be a fully automated software suite for delivering the software-defined data center as an integrated system. Enterprises and service providers will be able to use VMware EVO SDDC to deploy a software-defined data center at scale. With VMware EVO SDDC, IT organizations can meet key data center scale initiatives, ranging from application and infrastructure delivery automation to business mobility to high availability and resilient infrastructure, without compromising security, control or choice. - See more at: http://www.vmware.com/company/news/releases/vmw-newsfeed/VMware-Unveils-the-Easiest-Way-to-Deploy-and-Operate-the-Software-Defined-Data-Center-at-Scale/1984725#sf40638508

VMware EVO SDDC (previously code named VMware EVO: RACK™), will be a fully automated software suite for delivering the software-defined data center as an integrated system. Enterprises and service providers will be able to use VMware EVO SDDC to deploy a software-defined data center at scale. With VMware EVO SDDC, IT organizations can meet key data center scale initiatives, ranging from application and infrastructure delivery automation to business mobility to high availability and resilient infrastructure, without compromising security, control or choice. - See more at: http://www.vmware.com/company/news/releases/vmw-newsfeed/VMware-Unveils-the-Easiest-Way-to-Deploy-and-Operate-the-Software-Defined-Data-Center-at-Scale/1984725#sf40638508

July

The first heat wave is on us this week with temperature forecasts of up to 37C in Zurich - and with it starts Summer vacation time! So if you are headed for the beach or the mountains: Enjoy and don't worry about business during these lazy days of Summer!

If you, like myself, enjoy reading, I can recommend "No Ordinary Disruption" by Dobbs, Manyika, and Woetzel - a team of McKinsey researchers. It summarizes and explains the four major disruptive trends for the early 21st century which are:

1. Urbanization
2. Accelerating Technology Change
3. An Aging World (changing demographics)
4. Global Connections
   

As you can guess, at least two of them have a very close relationship to our industry (Technology Change and Global Connections) and the authors provide a clear and sometimes scary view of how these disruptions will change our world in the years to come.

Couple news around storage base technologies - HDD and SDD:

IDC just released the Q1 2015 worldwide storage revenue numbers. As every quarter since Carter was president of the U.S., the capacity sold grew double digit: "Total capacity shipments were up 41.1% year over year to 28.3 exabytes during the quarter."
Somewhat hidden in the charts is the fact that "ODM" (which IDC defines as ".. storage systems sales by original design manufacturers (ODM's) selling directly to hyperscale datacenter customers) accounted for 12.6% of global spending during the quarter - an increase of 23% compared to Q1 2014. Which means in my own terms that "the cloud" is the 3rd biggest storage vendor in Q1 2015! Agree?

Capacity-wise, the first 10TB disk drives are on the horizon: HGST announced a helium-based SMR drive (shingled magnetic recording) to be available later this year. As you may know, SMR drives lend themselves to "write-once type" of usage patterns. Read the above article for the detailed technical reasons for that behavior!

"SSDs are expected to eventually dominate HDDs in laptops and desktops, but that isn't expected to happen for years. At the end of last year, SSDs were only in about 15% of new notebooks.
And, prices for SSDs are many times higher than that of HDDs.
For example, a data center-class HDD with 6TB of capacity sells for $185 today and will drop to about $165 by the end of the year -- about 3 cents per gigabyte, according to market research firm Gartner. A 4TB HDD for a laptop sells for $95 to computer manufacturers or about 2 cents per gigabyte"
Read this great summary (Computerworld) on the race for capacity and price between the various HDD and SSD technologies!

Lastly, switching to the topic of hyperconverged: Nutanix has made some waves about an upcoming new solution: "Nutanix is working on a scale-out file server and thinks it will set the cat among the pigeons in array-land, especially NetApp's filer business."
They are positioning themselves for an upcoming IPO as you can see from these comments in the finance industry, so obviously try to dress up for Wall St. these days!

My company Avnet, by the way, is greatly positioned to help our clients and partners to grow into the era of "Converged" or "Hyperconverged" and take advantage of the cost, ease of use and flexibility benefits of these solutions. Watch this short video here to see what Avnet can do for you!

June

Errandum - talking about the perceived demise of Fibre Channel in my last post: meanwhile CISCO just quietly announced a new, compact 96-port 16 Gbps SAN switch , the MDS 9396S (in CISCO speak the "S" stands for 16 Gbps). Base configuration starts at 48 ports with SW/license upgrades in 12-port increments up to 96 ports.

Read the details here and here and find the product home here!

At the other end of the San Jose networking-neighborhood, at "130 Holger Way" (where Brocade is located), an almost flat SAN revenue was reported for their Q2 of FY2015: "SAN product revenue was $314 million, down 2% year over year. The decline was primarily the result of softer storage demand and operational issues at certain OEM partners.".

May II

Today, I have a bunch of networking news for you and try to give you some insight on where the industry is moving in terms of SDN (software defined networking).

But make no mistake: while marketing slides and vendor presentations suggest that everything "SD" is magic and easy, this is certainly not the case! "SD" at its best may enhance flexibility (customer choice of common hardware building blocks) and provide lower TCO, but the underlying mechanics and infrastructure still needs to provide the functions and performance levels of today's specialized products! So -as always- there's no free lunch here!
Point in case: read this article about the claimed TCO's for the CISCO ACI solution!

Good old Ethernet -as a protocol- is currently undergoing a major boost in terms of standardized speeds and -as a result- increased number of use cases. One of them is the new segment of "Ethernet disk drives". A very promising way of providing access to HDDs directly attached to standard Ethernet (thus no SATA, SAS, ...) as "The Register" writes in this article about a recent Seagate announcement here: "Kinetic is the object storage platform Seagate has built to make it possible to so useful work with its Ethernet-equipped disk drives. Seagate's ambition is to cut arrays out of the loop, allowing software to talk directly to disks. By cutting arrays and file systems out of the loop, Seagate reckons it can save users some cash and also speed things up."
To accommodate the increasing performance requirements of today's networks, the Ethernet Alliance has recently issued an updated roadmap including native 25 Gb/s which is supposed to be productized as early as 2015!
"The Ethernet Alliance recently released its 2015 roadmap, which outlines Ethernet’s response to the ongoing desire for more bandwidth in data centers by adding new speeds for both in-rack and backbone connections. The roadmap calls for some eye-popping speeds in the future, but also charts out a plan for the low end of the market, representing an unprecedented level of activity for Ethernet." 
Read the complete article here!

With my longterm Fibre Channel background, I was wondering of course where this leaves the storage protocol which is still dominating most of the datacenter connectivity between compute and storage: For a number of agreeable reasons, as outlined in this great article here, you may argue that FC has a somehow limited future: "Pundits have long predicted the demise of Fibre Channel, but this time it's real. In fact, the decline has already begun and now that RoCE is routable, this decline will accelerate. The last years Dell’ Oro SAN report highlighted a 3% year over year decline in Fibre Channel revenues, citing the need for “distributed scale-out and object-based storage” and a preference for "Ethernet speeds and converged infrastructure.""
Would you agree?

May I

It's May - which means that global IT flocks to Vegas for their spring pow-wow's. Starting this week is EMC with IBM next week and others to follow.
So for today, let me focus on the most recent EMC announcements and give you a couple hints on where to find the details.

First, read an overview and summary of the Day 1 announcements here and here!
One of the more exciting - but less visible news seems to be the vVNX (read: virtual VNX or software-only entry storage) offer which shows up in the EMC store - check it out here!

A slightly older post by EMC president Jeremy Burton from two weeks ago also helps to position and understand the strategy behind these announcements as well as his take on how and when last year's DSSD acquisition ("..an insane server-attached flash thing..") will start to be visible in products.

Big news also on the VCE side of the EMC federation: they use the EMCworld platform to make noise about the VxRack (based on VMware EVO:Rack) solution to be shipped around Q3 this year.
Read the overview here and some insights by VCE CTO Trey Layton here.
Lastly, for an understanding what's under the hood in terms of VMware technology, you'll have to scroll back to this VMworld blog entry from last year by VMware Fellow Raj Yavatkar here.

Now wait, before we all get too excited about this, let's put this into perspective: "...Thus hyper-convergence is a special class of server SANs where VM workloads run alongside the storage workloads. It was conceived of to be cheaper, denser and more appealing than legacy convergence. Data centre convergence is a special class of hyper-convergence."
And lastly, there is (always) the issue of pricing, as is outlined here.

April

Let's start with base technology today: we are slowly approaching the 10TB capacity point for 3.5" HDDs.
After Western Digital / HGST (which has been selling a helium-based 8Tb drive for a couple months already), Seagate has announced a 8TB drive as well: Not using helium to allow more platters inside the 3.5" form factor - but obviously basing their product on SMR (shingled magnetic recording) to achieve the required density.
This also explains the specific use case outlined in the announcement, described as "backup and objects": SMR disks use track overlay to reduce track width and thus have a limited capability to perform write updates to existing data / tracks. This is explained very well in this Wikipedia article here. Also refer to my previous blog-entry from November 2013!

There was other breaking news regarding storage capacity last week: The teams of IBM Research Zurich and Fujifilm have demonstrated an areal recording density of 123 billion bits of uncompressed data per square inch on low cost, particulate magnetic tape, a breakthrough which represents the equivalent of a 220 terabyte tape cartridge that could fit in the palm of your hand ! Read the details here.

Moving up the solution stack, let's talk about " SAN" and it's younger sibling "VSAN": while SAN's have been around for some twenty years now, the current trend has been reversed and storage seems to move back into the server as a "virtualized" resource to be shared by multiple instances of the virtualized servers (VMware, Hyper-V, ....).
Here's a look back at SAN's and a thorough analysis of the capabilities (and limitations!) of VSAN!
VSAN is also one of the building blocks of VMware EVO:Rail and with the recent wave of EVO:Rail appliances hitting the market (among them the EMC VSPEX Blue) I found the article here to be a great summary and overview of this architecture/technology.

"Converged System circa 1977"

Which brings us to the "converged topic" and related material which is plentiful these days! Let's first look at the Q4 2014 market numbers as presented by IDC. The surprising #2 vendor for EMEA for the integrated infrastructure (with a triple-digit growth compared to Q4 2013!) is HP:

• The EMEA "Integrated Infrastructure and Platform Revenue" report for all of 2014 can be found here.
• The worldwide "Integrated Infrastructure and Platform Revenue" report for Q4 2014 can be found here.

As many of you certainly already figured out, "converged" is nothing new - it's rather the inversion of what started in the late 80ies and early 90ies as "client-server" architecture. Read this amusing story here!