Storagezilla

Footbullet Man

Flip flopping like a circus clown on crystal meth Alex McDonald takes a moment to load both barrels and discharge the contents into his own feet.

He writes an entire blog post trying to justify the fact that NetApp's VTL only offers single parity protection (Every EMC Disk Library shipping and which has shipped for god knows how long runs RAID 6 by default), while still trying to sing the corporate song about how evil single parity protection is.

We've read him say Single Parity protection is deadly for your data but now it's suddenly okay for the data used for operational backup and recovery.

Operational backup and recovery matters. If anyone disagrees they should ask the State of Texas which fined IBM $900,000 for not having backup data available for recovery.

Instead of wasting two years trying to get De-Dup on the VTL you might have taken your own advice and got RAID-DP running on it first. Converging GX and OnTap Classic is obviously burning through development resources. Something had to give, the NetApp VTL appears to be one of the non-critical products and has suffered for it. We'll see what else has been starved of development resources as time passes.

Now if NetApp offered RAID 1 or RAID 1/0 (They don't) I'm sure he'd be justifying those in certain situations too but we all play the cards we're dealt now don't we?

This is why NetApp will be the last vendor to add double parity protection to their VTL product so expect the hand waving and double talk to continue for a while yet.

Alex, dragging me into this was an amateur hour move. I'd gladly have done my laundry while yourself and Waterhouse went at it but having been travelling for the past two weeks I plan on working from home for the near future so that means I'll make time for you. Count on it.

I dub thee Footbullet Man, it goes a long way to explain all those holes in your socks which you were lamenting earlier. :-D

SPC is dead.

TSA is at the EMEA Customer Council and has offered to sponsor EMCs participation in an enterprise class benchmark.

He has the juice to make this happen.

So how many of you other vendors are willing to get out from under the SPC marketing umbrella and do some real work becuase I will ensure that EMC will never get behind a press release toolkit like SPC.

Read that again.

NEVER.

Stop whining about it and accept it. I don't want to hear about independent this and that while configs are being submitted so twisted they look like balloon animals.

Even out here in the stor-o-sphere SPC members have taken to sniping at each other about how blatantly detached from reality their latest press release driven submissions are.

The paper party is over, time to do some real work grounded in engineering and not in headline writing.

So who's up for it?

EMC is. 

Lets go generate facts customers can use instead of borked configurations which they won't.

Too much travel too little time..

It's a sign of the times that so many of us have been in transit to somewhere else recently.

While I was on a plane back from Frankfurt Gilda was in the air and heading home to San Francisco. Storagebod was off to Barcelona the Storage Anarchist having arrived just before him and Marc Farley hit pause on the steering wheel cam to hop a flight to D.C.

Between all of us I think we've transferred Six Trillion Dollars to OPEC and I've clocked up over six thousand travel miles in the past 12 days between my driving adventures in MA and my speechifying in Frankfurt.

Still not home yet but I got off the plane in Dublin today to find it was snowing.

Fortunately my hotel room is painted in warm colors.

SNW: Europe came and went. I had lunch with Val and Gilda who appear to have been touring the world as a technical double act, (Gilda is the smart one, Val coasts by on his looks) and then I delivered my session to attendees. None of whom asked any questions which I found disturbing but was expecting.

I didn't sneeze on any of them though so I consider that to be a win.

I'd attach my slides if Office 2003 actually exported to PDF but of course it doesn't so that's going to have to wait until I get home and in front of a Mac. Or you could have them now wrapped in EMC Information Rights Management but then you wouldn't be able to view them.

Lets wait.

SNW: Europe is pretty much a German focused show at this stage. I can't shake the feeling it needs to move around the place a bit to give it a true European flavor.

Besides all the money vanishing out from under all of us has anything interesting happened in the industry during the past couple of weeks? We're kind of talking about technologies which have been shipping for a while these days.

That's a change but probably not a bad thing.

In this environment as the strong get stronger and the weak die quicker we could be doing a lot of that for the next few years.

Oh, and I've decided I'm buying a ScreenPlay Pro HD. It's not like I need more storage but this decodes movie files which means I can hook it up to my HDTV. 

By the numbers

I didn't get a chance to comment on EMCs results for the past quarter as this week was an absolute whirlwind of too much going on all at once but a couple of points.

From my side of things we blew the hell out of the Avamar number.

Again.

When you buy any startup there are always questions as to if it's worth the price you've paid but Avamar paid for itself quickly and has gone well beyond that. Corporate keep raising the bar and to date Avamar keeps vaulting over it. I'm not going to forecast forward as to how that product line is going to do but I'm talking to more parties interested in Avamar today than I ever have been.

The DELL relationship doesn't worry me. Yes they bought EQL so they have their own objectives but that appears to have resulted in EMC focusing even more on the channel.

There's a lot more business to be done with DELL, they say the same thing, but regardless of what comes down the road EMC isn't going to be in a position where that revenue just dries and and blows away. If it declines it'll be replaced and grown from other sources.

Make no mistake there's definite self interest at work from all sides here and all parties are aware of that. Coopertition and is a healthy aspect of the industry.

With $8.4B in cash and investments EMC is in a good position at a time when "cash is king". I'm looking at that number and I'm getting itchy feet about when, not if, the EMC Board will move on the next large acquisition.

Legato & Documentum closed in 2003. RSA in 2006.

2009 might be an auspicious year.

Day Two: Steve Todd wins (Again)

Our own Steve Todd took second prize at the Innovation Conference for his entry beating out 28 finalists and 900-odd other entries. Of course now he's set the bar so high that he has to come first next year in order to keep his winning streak going.

No pressure Steve!

A team from RSA came third while Manu Fontaine came a well deserved first. There were some great ideas there and a lot of them are probably going to be investigated in greater detail.

I liked Rich Napolitanos description of how he wants us to approach innovation. No Ivory Towers dotted across the landscape but an Army of Innovators.

There was a lot went on today, some questions I did get to ask others I didn't, but what was most enjoyable was when a bunch of us went to a bar for a post conference bite to eat and a thirst quencher.

It was a good finish to a good couple of days with great conversations.

Innovation: Day One.

The Innovation Conference has been interesting for a number of different reasons. Getting into the same room as a lot of people I usually only have email conversations with is just one of them.

Within the first few hours I had spoken to Stuart Miniman had lunch with TSA and Backup Platforms CTO Mike Fishman. Grilled Steve Todd on his idea before grilling Peter Quirk on his. Introduced Steve to Craig Randall. Caught up with Charles Fan. Had a light bulb moment while speaking to Cornelia Davis, which isn't that unusual but she introduced mathematics into the conversation and I usually daydream about the land of chocolate when that happens. But not this time. Met Sorin (Who wants to fight everybody and that's fine by me) and Kartik. (Who's still alive but claims "work" is getting in the way of his blogging. You owe me months of entries K.) Did the usual verbal jousting with David Black, who later waved me off when I needled him on his entry but that was the plan. Spoke with SNIA Chairman Wayne Adams. (Congrats Wayne) Cracked a joke Burt Kaliski just didn't get. Spoke with Gina Minks. Appeared behind Polly Pearson with such stealth that a glass of EMCs finest nearly hit the ceiling. Introduced Cloud Infrastructure development godhead Patrick Eaton to a few people and generally asked whatever questions popped into my head.

There's more people I was speaking to who I've left out but it's 3:00am here.

The session of the day award goes to Harry You. It was the first time I had seen Harry in person or heard him speak I was expecting a dry number cruncher or one of the usual blow dried corporate Napoleons which are so frequently found in the upper management of large corporations, but what I got was an open approachable strategist who didn't avoid a single question he was asked and volunteered insight which expanded the topics of conversation.

At the end of his session I was like "I'd play in your band.."

Iomega + LifeLine does not reduce my carbon footprint

Iomega with added LifeLine. And not one mention of the phrase "disaster recovery".

iSCSI on the other hand...

Since I'm blogging it means I'm sitting in yet another airport (Belfast) waiting for yet another flight but this month my carbon footprint explodes.

Next week my crazy driving and I am off to the EMC Innovation Conference in Massachusetts to ask the tough questions and get lost a lot while driving.

The question?

How would I explain your idea to our customers?

That's my silver bullet question.

Since attendance is limited to 350 employees by design, and I said this before but just like Foo Camp one should not expect to be invited back, I'll be one of a scarce few people at the conference who might have to explain that which has been derived from the ideas presented to EMC customers later on.   

Assuming I survive the conference and get the car back to the airport in one piece I fly home to empty all my laundry so I can replace it with fresh clothing before getting on another plane to fly to Frankfurt to give a session at Storage Networking World Europe.

Then it's a flight back to Dublin to do try and close some business and pay the bills, (Well someone has to), before flying home to Cork.

So I can get up the next day to deal with all the emails flagged with a red exclamation point in Outlook and return 50 million voicemails to people in multiple countries.

Onward!

We live in exponential times

Yesterday I made an error. My sleepless brain, about 36 hours worth when I made the error, ignored the fact we live in exponential times.

It started over at Storage Monkeys when I said.

The de-duplication ratios being thrown around are ridiculous and bank on people not understanding what’s going on.

2:1 is a 50% reduction

10:1 is a 90% reduction

40:1 is what? 97.5%

Yeah the jump from 2:1 to 10:1 is interesting but from 10:1 to 40:1?

This was an epically dumb statement on my part. The numbers are correct but the statement doesn't factor in exponential growth and is a gross oversimplification.

Which is common everywhere you look in this business, but we should all strive to do better.

It continued when I repeated this internally only to have someone point out to me while I was sitting in Heathrow waiting for a plane home that I wasn't thinking about this exponentially.

Lets take that mystical 100TB backup dataset as an example.

A 10:1 ratio leaves me with a 10TB storage requirement while a 40:1 ratio leaves me with a 2.5TB storage requirement. The numbers are solid but that difference of 7.5TB of de-dup storage between the two can be expensive.

To expand this conversation even further de-dup ratios of backup data are heavily dependent on the number of full backups you take and the retention time involved.

So what is a 10:1 ratio for backup data?

It's not that you can backup the contents of a 10TB file system to 1TB of storage. It's that you can backup the contents of a 1TB file system to 1TB of storage 10 times.

So if you perform full backups for a month and factor in compression a de-dup ratio in the order of 30 to 40:1 should be easily achievable so long as you're not generating large amounts of new unique data with every backup and you're not being aggressive with retention times.

And that's the comment I should have left, many paragraphs longer and all.

Guarantee

Marc Farley wants a guarantee so I'm going to give him one.

Enterprise Storage. Guaranteed to be a better wingman than Porkins.

"I'm right with you Red 3.."

Well look who's back..

In what must be a new experience for him Kostadis, (Who this time goes an entire post without telling us how technical he is. Probably as the point of his entry was to do some marketing), doesn't spend numerous pages explaining why you should use de-dup with low change rate VM images..

Like this was some piece of divine inspiration handed down to him from upon high. 

..and decides to quote me so he can flog RAID-DP.

What he doesn't say of course is the other option to RAID-DP is RAID 4 and if your storage workload is backup to a NetApp VTL you can ignore his entry entirely and spend more time thinking about what a double disk failure is going to do to the contents of that VTL.

And none of your usual whining K, you provided the stones and stood in the glass house.