StorageFreak.

Enterprise Storage – Dell EMC Merger Could Impact Interconnect Landscape

This is just a short write up, but thought you might want to be aware.

With EMC’s Symmetrix and CLARiiON systems being such huge players in the storage area network (SAN) market, don’t be taken by surprise if you suddenly feel compelled to reconsider your Ethernet SAN interconnect investment strategy.

With the forthcoming acquisition of EMC by Dell (of which I know nothing about other than what’s in the news), you should be aware that there are tremors that are affecting the interconnect world, which SANs so obviously rely on.

This is a good thing. Although it can be very beneficial, if you have already discovered that single vendor interconnect has other, often very significant problems over a multi-vendor approach (which, in my opinion, is equally beneficial if not more so), then you may want to think about what the tech world is saying about the new Dell switch OS in light of the EMC acquisition.

Check out TechTarget’s article on this topic.

Cheers!

The Storage Freak (David Spencer, SCSN-E)
#IWork4Dell

Goodbye CompTIA Storage+, Hello SCSP!

For those of you with a Storage+ Powered by SNIA certification, no need to be alarmed. Your certification is still valid (at least for the next three years) with SNIA– well, just shy of that. It’s good until 31 December 2018.

For those that of you that really don’t like having a plus symbol in your credentials, your consternation about a SNIA certificaiton is over. You can now pursue the SNIA Certified Storage Professional (SCSP) certification. This covers nearly the same topics as the old certification– pretty much the basics of storage knowledge, implementation and management. You can view those details here. For the press release about the SCSP, you can visit SNIA’s site here.

Zero Detect

Recently I have come across some teaching material designed to help students align their experiences with the vocabulary and terms used by the Storage Networking Industry Association’s (SNIA) certification tracks– specifically the SNIA Certified Storage Engineer and Storage Architect.

Inside this content, I ran across a term called “Zero Detect”– the way the material presented it was as if it were an industry standard term, even if it self-defining, and commonly used. After seeing some internal discussions by my company’s sales team regarding this term, I have realized that this really is a great marketing coup by one of my companies competitors– “Zero Detect”, is a very good term, it’s self-defining, and conveys some authority.

However, the term itself is vendor specific, though because it is quite self-defining, some have used it to describe similar features outside of its genesis storage array. In my opinion, since it is definitely not a SNIA term, it should not have been included in the material that was supposed to be vendor neutral without calling it out as so. As mentioned, “Zero Detect” is not found within SNIA’s authoritative dictionary– zilch, zero, and nada (if you’ll pardon the pun).

So what is Zero Detect? It’s a successful marketing term that is vendor specific; it describes how HP 3PAR’s ASIC can detect when incoming writes to a storage array are simply empty zeros and allows them to not consume the space on the array. This is how 3PAR describes the process that their controller performs this function. The funny thing is, this feature adds overhead to the ASIC and is turned off by default.

Without going into too much detail, other vendors can perform the same function, and some do it dynamically within their write engine. The one I am most familiar with is the Dell Storage SC solution– (a.k.a., Dell Compellent). Dell’s SC solution performs the equivalent function during the import process, branded “Thin Import”, and allows for very efficient importation of LUNs when replacing another vendor’s storage solution. The Thin Provisioning engine found within a SC array is very intelligent– and as I understand it, ensures that the writes being performed to the array are the most efficient, thin provisioning wise, and will perform some level of not writing empty data to the array, though the volume itself will still have it referenced by the OS’s LBA table.

So, in my humble opinion, don’t get tied up on the terms that a particular vendor provides, but stay focused on the actual function and the how it is performed. This is true, not just with this particular feature, but all features out there. The storage solution you use should be defined by your current and forecasted needs, not by being enamored by some cool function that you may only use occasionally.

That’s my freaky storage opinion.
— David “Storage Freak” Spencer

NOTE: Your comments and opinions are welcome on this topic. I may not have described everything perfectly, and will gladly revise the article with any corrections that can be referenced. Thank you!

Death and Taxes – Does this spell the end? Federal Taxes Additional Hurdle of Dell's Acquisition of EMC

TechTarget has a lot of material referring to the proposed acquisition of EMC by Dell, Inc. Does the current federal tax structure spell doom for the acquisition? Or just another hurdle to be evaluated and overcome? Take a look by clicking here.

Dell Proposes to Acquire EMC – First Looks

Disclosure first: I work for Dell and have been with the company since 1993. The comments here are my own and are based on publicly available information.

Dell had announced an agreement to acquire EMC in what was, at the time, described as the largest technology acquisition ever proposed.

The strategic implications were substantial. EMC had major positions in enterprise storage, virtualization and related infrastructure technologies, while Dell had an increasingly broad enterprise portfolio spanning servers, networking, storage and services.

Combining the companies therefore had the potential to reshape several areas of the enterprise infrastructure market rather than merely consolidating two storage portfolios.

As with any transaction of this scale, however, the announcement was only the beginning. Financing, organizational structure, product strategy, regulatory approvals and the eventual integration of overlapping and complementary technologies would all matter.

The appropriate response at this early stage was therefore to watch the transaction closely and separate confirmed information from speculation while the deal progressed.

Performance, Cost, Complexity – Fibre Channel vs. Ethernet – Which Is Better?

I just recently finished teaching a SNIA Storage Management and Administration intended to prepare the attendees to take SNIA’s Certified Storage Engineer course, and a topic came up when discussing the two framing technologies that transport SCSI frames– Fibre Channel and Ethernet. Most of the students had quite a bit of iSCSI experience, with minimal FC experience. There seemed to be a bias from some of the students regarding that the FC technology was “long in the tooth” and is not the future. I tend to disagree, as someone who has supported and trained fibre channel solutions over the years, FC is much simpler to manage, and, in my opinion, more reliable and less complex than Ethernet. But then again, once you have something configured the way you want it, you shouldn’t really need to change it.

Here’s a great YouTube video from Storage Switzerland, LLC that has a discussion with Brocade’s Scott Shimomura.

How do I measure an SSD's write endurance? Check the DWPD (and TBW) specification.

So, how can you determine how reliable a prospective SSD drive is, or how long it may last? You already know that SSDs, with all their improvements with wear leveling and what-not, have flash memory that can only be written to a discrete number of times, so if you know what kind of data you will be driving to your disks, how can you forecast how long it will likely last?

Disk (or Diskful) Writes Per Day, or DWPD, tells you how much data you can expect to be able to write to the disk every day throughout the warranty period established by the drive manufacturer and TBW, or Terabytes Written, tells you how many Terabytes you can expect to be able to write to the SSD over its lifetime.

In a nutshell, for DWPD, you need to know the manufacturers warranty period of the SSD drive along with its size. This tells you how much data you can expect to be able to write to the drive, every day, over the life of the drive (the warranty period). For example, if you have a 120GB SSD with a DWPD of .8, you can expect to write 96GB per day (120GB*.8) over the life of the warranty.

TBW does not really concern itself with the warranty, and gives you an expected value for the amount of data that it can write/save to the flash memory within it. This value may be a little harder to find when looking up manufacturer’s SSD drive specifications.

If you want to see an example of a manufacturer’s drive spec, take a look at Samsung’s– it references both Data Center SATA SSDs as well as Enterprise class SSDs. http://www.samsung.com/us/samsungsemiconductor/pdfs/PSG2015_1H_HR_singles.pdf