Tag: NAS

HDS buys BlueArc

Posted on by Ray in data access, File Storage, R&D measures, Storage, Storage performance, System effectiveness
wall o' storage (fisheye) by ChrisDag (cc) (From Flickr)
wall o' storage (fisheye) by ChrisDag (cc) (From Flickr)

Yesterday, HDS announced that they had closed on the purchase of BlueArc their NAS supplier for the past 5 years or so.  Many commentators mentioned that this was a logical evolution of their ongoing OEM agreement, how the timing was right and speculated on what the purchase price might have been.   If you are interested in these aspects of the acquisition, I would refer you to the excellent post by David Vellante from Wikibon on the HDS BlueArc deal.

Hardware as a key differentiator

In contrast, I would like to concentrate here on another view of the purchase, specifically on how HDS and Hitachi, Ltd. have both been working to increase their product differentiation through advanced and specialized hardware (see my post on Hitachi’s VSP vs VMAX and for more on hardware vs. software check out Commodity hardware always loses).

Similarly, BlueArc shared this philosophy and was one of the few NAS vendors to develop special purpose hardware for their Titan and Mercury systems to specifically speedup NFS and CIFS processing.  Most other NAS systems use more general purpose hardware and as a result,  a majority of their R&D investment focuses on software functionality.

But not BlueArc, their performance advantage was highly dependent on specifically designed FPGAs and other hardware.  As such, they have a significant hardware R&D budget to continue their maintain and leverage their unique hardware advantage.

From my perspective, this follows what HDS and Hitachi, Ltd., have been doing all along with the USP, USP-V,  and now their latest entrant the VSP.  If you look under the covers at these products you find a plethora of many special purpose ASICs, FPGAs and other hardware that help accelerate IO performance.

BlueArc and HDS/Hitachi, Ltd. seem to be some of the last vendors standing that still believe that hardware specialization can bring value to data storage. From that standpoint, it makes an awful lot of sense to me to have HDS purchase them.

But others aren’t standing still

In the mean time, scale out NAS products continue to move forward on a number of fronts.  As readers of my newsletter know, currently the SPECsfs2008 overall performance winner is a scale out NAS solution using 144 nodes from EMC Isilon (newsletter signup is above right or can also be found here).

The fact that now HDS/Hitachi, Ltd. can bring their considerable hardware development skills and resources to bear on helping BlueArc develop and deploy their next generation of hardware is a good sign.

Another interesting tidbit was HDS’s previous purchase of ParaScale which seems to have some scale out NAS capabilities of its own.  How this all gets pulled together within HDS’s product line will need to be seen.

In any event, all this means that the battle for NAS isn’t over and is just moving to a higher level.

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Comments?

One platform to rule them all – Compellent&EqualLogic&Exanet from Dell

Posted on by Ray in Block Storage, File Storage, Storage, Storage Features, System effectiveness, Systems
Compellent drive enclosure (c) 2010 Compellent (from Compellent.com)
Compellent drive enclosure (c) 2010 Compellent (from Compellent.com)

Dell and Compellent may be a great match because Compellent uses commodity hardware combined with specialized software to create their storage subsystem. If there’s any company out there that can take advantage of commodity hardware it’s probably Dell. (Of course Commodity hardware always loses in the end, but that’s another story).

Similarly, Dell’s EqualLogic iSCSI storage system uses commodity hardware to provide its iSCSI storage services.  It doesn’t take a big leap of imagination to have one storage system that combines the functionality of EqualLogic’s iSCSI and Compellent’s FC storage capabilities.  Of course there are others already doing this including Compellent themselves which have their own iSCSI support already built into their FC storage system.

Which way to integrate?

Does EqualLogic survive such a merger?  I think so.  It’s easy to imagine that Equal Logic may have the bigger market share today. If that’s so, the right thing might be  to merge Compellent FC functionality into EqualLogic.  If Compellent has the larger market, the correct approach is the opposite. The answer lies probably with a little of both.  It seems easiest to add iSCSI functionality to a FC storage system than the converse but the FC to iSCSI approach may be the optimum path for Dell, because of the popularity of their EqualLogic storage.

What about NAS?

The only thing missing from this storage system is NAS.  Of course the Compellent storage offers a NAS option through the use of a separate Windows Storage Server (WSS) front end.  Dell’s EqualLogic does the much the same to offer NAS protocols for their iSCSI system.  Neither of these are bad solutions but they are not a fully integrated NAS offering such as available from NetApp and others.

However, there is a little discussed part, the Dell-Exanet acquisition which happened earlier this year. Perhaps the right approach is to integrate Exanet with Compellent first and target this at the high end enterprise/HPC market place, keeping Equal Logic at the SMB end of the marketplace.  It’s been a while since I have heard about Exanet, and nothing since the acquisition earlier this year.  Does it make sense to backend a clustered NAS solution with FC storage – probably.

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Much of this seems doable to me, but it all depends on taking the right moves once the purchase is closed.   But if I look at where Dell is weakest (baring their OEM agreement with EMC), it’s in the highend storage space.  Compellent probably didn’t have much of a foot print there as possible due to their limited distribution and support channel.  A Dell acquisition could easily eliminate these problems and open up this space without having to do much other than start to marketing, selling and supporting Compellent.

In the end, a storage solution supporting clustered NAS, FC, and iSCSI that combined functionality equivalent to Exanet, Compellent and EqualLogic based on commodity hardware (ouch!) could make a formidable competitor to what’s out there today if done properly. Whether Dell could actually pull this off and in a timely manner even if they purchase Compellent, is another question.

Comments?

Latest SPECsfs2008 CIFS performance – chart of the month

Posted on by Ray in CIFS/SMB throughput, File Storage, SPECsfs, SPECsfs2008, Storage, Storage performance

Above we reproduce a chart from our latest newsletter StorInttm Dispatch on SPECsfs(R) 2008 benchmark results.  This chart shows the top 10 CIFS throughput benchmark results as of the end of last year.  As observed in the chart Apple’s Xserve running Snow Leopard took top performance with over 40K CIFS throughput operations per second.  My problem with this chart is that there are no enterprise class systems represented in the top 10 or for that matter (not shown in the above) in any CIFS result.

Now some would say it’s still early yet in the life of the 2008 benchmark but it has been out now for 18 months and still has not a single enterprise class system submission reported.  Possibly, CIFS is not considered an enterprise class protocol but I can’t believe that given the proliferation of Windows.  So what’s the problem?

I have to believe it’s part tradition, part not wanting to look bad, and part just lack of awareness on the part of CIFS users.

  • Traditionally, NFS benchmarks were supplied by SPECsfs and CIFS benchmarks were supplied elsewhere, i.e., NetBenc. However, there never was a central repository for NetBench results so comparing system performance was cumbersome at best.  I believe that’s one reason for SPECsfs’s CIFS benchmark.  Seeing the lack of a central repository for a popular protocol, SPECsfs created their own CIFS benchmark.
  • Performance on system benchmarks are always a mixed bag.  No-one wants to look bad and any top performing result is temporary until the next vendor comes along.  So most vendors won’t release a benchmark result unless it shows well for them.  Not clear if Apple’s 40K CIFS ops is a hard number to beat, but it’s been up there for quite awhile now, and has to tell us something.
  • CIFS users seem to be aware and understand NetBench but don’t have similar awareness on SPECsfs CIFS benchmark yet.  So, given today’s economic climate, any vendor wanting to impress CIFS customers would probably choose to ignore SPECsfs and spend their $s on NetBench.  The fact that comparing results was neigh impossible, could be considered an advantage for many vendors.

So SPECsfs CIFS just keeps going on.  One way to change this dynamic is to raise awareness.  So as more IT staff/consultants/vendors discuss SPECsfs CIFS results, its awareness will increase.  I realize some of  my analysis on CIFS and NFS performance results doesn’t always agree with the SPECsfs party line, but we all agree that this benchmark needs wider adoption.  Anything that can be done to facilitate that deserves my (and their) support.

So for all my storage admins, CIOs and other influencers of NAS system purchases friends out there, you need to start asking to about SPECsfs CIFS benchmark results.  All my peers out their in the consultant community, get on the bandwagon.  As for my friends in the vendor community, SPECsfs CIFS benchmark results should be part of any new product introduction.  Whether you want to release results is and always will be, a marketing question but you all should be willing to spend the time and effort to see how well new systems perform on this and other benchmarks.

Now if I could just get somebody to define an iSCSI benchmark, …

Our full report on the latest SPECsfs 2008 results including both NFS and CIFS performance, will be up on our website later this month.  However, you can get this information now and subscribe to future newsletters to receive the full report even earlier, just email us at SubscribeNews@SilvertonConsulting.com?Subject=Subscribe_to_Newsletter.

BlueArc introduces Mercury

Posted on by Ray in Storage

Tomorrow, BlueArc will open up a new front in their battle with the rest of the NAS vendors by introducing the Mercury 50 NAS head. This product is slated to address the more mid-range enterprise market that historically shunned the relatively higher priced Titan series.

Mercury 50 is only the first product in this series and other products to be released in the future will help fill out the top end of this series. Priced similar to the NetApp 3140 this product has all the support of standard BlueArc file system while only limiting the Max storage capacity to 1PB. Its NFS throughput is a little better than half the current Titan 3100.

Mercury 50 will eventually be offered by BlueArc’s OEM partner HDS. However, immediately the Mercury 50 will be sold by the BlueArc’s direct sales force as well as many new channel partners that BlueArc has acquired over this past year.

This marks a departure for BlueArc into the more mainstream enterprise storage space. Historically, BlueArc has been successful in the high performance market but the real volumes and commensurate revenue are in the standard enterprise space. The problem in the past has been the high price of the BlueArc Titan systems but now with Mercury this should no longer be an issue.

That being said, the competition is much more intense as you move down market. EMC and NetApp will not stand still while their market share is eroded. And both of these company’s have the wherewithal to compete on performance, pricing and features.

Exciting times ahead for the NAS users out there.