SNW – Silverton Consulting

Fall SNWUSA 2013

Posted on October 19, 2013 by Ray in Cloud services, Crowdsourcing, Data grid, File Storage, Object storage, Software Defined Network, Storage, Storage architecture, Strategic Inflection Points, Strategy, System effectiveness, Systems, Visionary leadershp

Here’s my thoughts on SNWUSA which occurred this past week in the Long Beach Convention Center.

First, it was a great location. I saw a number of users I haven’t seen at SNWUSA ever before, some of which I have known for years from other (non-storage) venues.

Second, the exhibit hall was scantly populated. There were no major storage vendors at the show at all. Gold sponsors included NEC, Riverbed, & Sepaton, representing the largest exhibiters presenn. Making up the next (Contributing) tier were Western Digital, Toshiba, Active Archive Alliance, and LTO consortium with a smattering of smaller companies. Finally, there were another 12 vendors with kiosks around the floor, with the largest there being Veeam Software.

I suspect VMWorld Europe happening the same time in Barcelona might have had something to do with the sparse exhibit floor but the trend has been present for the past few shows.

That being said there were still a few surprises in store, at least for me. Two of the most interesting ones were:

Coho Data who came out of stealth with a scale out, RAIN (Redundant array of independent nodes) based storage cluster, with distributed, mirrored customer data across nodes and software defined networking. They currently support NFS for VMware with a management UI reminiscent of IOS 7 sans touch support. The product comes as a series of nodes with SSDs, disk storage and SDN. The SDN allows Coho Data to relocate front-end (client) connections to where the customer data lies. The distributed, mirrored backend storage provides redundancy in the case of a node/disk failure, at which time the system understands what data is now at risk and rebuilds the now-mirorless data onto other nodes. It reminds me a lot of Bycast/Archivas like architectures, with SDN and NFS support. I suppose the reason they are supporting VMware VMDKs is that the files are fairly large and thus easier to supply.
Cloud Physics was not exhibiting but they sponsored a break. As such, they were there talking with analysts and the press about their product. Their product installs as a VMware VM service and propagates VMware management agents to ESX servers which then pipe information back to their app about how your VMware environment is running, how VMs are performing, how your network and storage are performing for the VMs running, etc. This data is then sent to the cloud, where it’s anonymized. In the cloud, customers can use apps (called Cards) to analyze this data in the cloud, which can help them understand problem areas, predict what configuration changes can do for them, show them how VMs are performing, etc. It essentially is logging all this information to the cloud and providing ways to analyze the data to optimize your VMware environment.

Coming in just behind these two was Jeda Networks with their Software Defined Storage Network (SDSN). They use commodity (OpenFlow compatible) 10GbE switches to support a software FCoE storage SAN. Jeda Networks say that over the past two years, most 10GbE switch hardware have started to support DCB in hardware and with that in place, plus OpenFlow compatibility, they can provide a SDSN on top of them just by emulating a control layer for FCoE switches. Of course one would still need FCoE storage and CNAs but with that in place one could use much cheaper switches to support FCoE.

CloudPhysics has a subscription based pricing model which offers three tiers:

Free where you get their Vapp, the management agents and a defined set of Free Card Apps for no cost;
Standard level where you get all the above plus a set of Card Apps which provide more VMware managability for $50/ESX server/Month; and
Enterprise level where you get all the above plus all the Card Apps presently available for $150/ESX server/Month.

Jeda networks and Coho Data are still developing their pricing and had none they were willing to disclose.

One of the CloudPhysics Card apps could predict how certain VMs would benefit from host based (PCIe or SSD) IO caching. They had a chart which showed working set inflection points for (I think) one VM running an OLTP application. I have asked for this chart to discuss further in a future post. But although CloudPhysics has the data to produce such a chart, the application shows three potential break points where say adding 500MB, 2000MB or 10000MB of SSD cache can speed up application performance by 10%, 30% or 50% (numbers here made up for example purposes and not off the chart they showed me).

A few other companies made announcements at the show. For example, Sepaton announced their new VirtuoSO, scale out hybrid reduplication appliance.

That’s about it. I would have to say that SNW needs to rethink their business model, frequency of stows or what they are trying to do at their conferences. However, on the plust side, most of the users I talked with came away with a lot of information and thought the show was worthwhile and I came away with a few surprises.

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SNWUSA Spring 2013 summary

Posted on April 4, 2013June 4, 2013 by Ray in Block Storage, DAS, Disk storage, Ethernet, FC, File Storage, iSCSI, Networking, R&D measures, SSD storage, Storage, Storage performance

For starters the parties were a bit more subdued this year although I heard Wayne’s suite was hopping to 4am last night (not that I would ever be there that late).

And a trend seen the past couple of years was even more evident this year, many large vendors and vendor spokespeople went missing. I heard that there were a lot more analyst presentations this SNW than prior ones although it was hard to quantify. But it did seem that the analyst community was pulling double duty in presentations.

I would say that SNW still provides a good venue for storage marketing across all verticals. But these days many large vendors find success elsewhere, leaving SNW Expo mostly to smaller vendors and niche products. Nonetheless, there were a\ a few big vendors (Dell, Oracle and HP) still in evidence. But EMC, HDS, IBM and NetApp were not showing on the floor.

I would have to say the theme for this years SNW was hybrid storage. It seemed last fall the products that impressed me were either cloud storage gateways or all flash arrays but this year there weren’t as many of these at the show but hybrid storage certainly has arrived.

Best hybrid storage array of the show

It’s hard to pick just one hybrid storage vendor as my top pick, especially since there were at least 3 others talking to me under NDA, but from my perspective the Hybrid vendor of the show had to be Tegile (pronounced I think, as te’-jile). They seemed to have a fully functional system with snapshot, thin provisioning, deduplication and pretty good VMware support (only time I have heard a vendor talk about VASA “stun” support for thin provisioned volumes).

They made the statement that SSD in their system is used as a cache, not a tier. This use is similar to NetApp’s FlashCache and has proven to be a particularly well performing approach to use of hybrid storage. (For more information on that take a look at some of my NFS and recent SPC-1 benchmark review dispatches. How well this is integrated with their home grown dedupe logic is another question.

On the negative side, they seem to be lacking a true HA/dual controller version but could use two separate systems with synch (I think) replication between them to cover this ground?? They also claimed their dedupe had no performance penalty, a pretty bold claim that cries out for some serious lab validation and/or benchmarking to prove. They also offer an all flash version of their storage (but then how can it be used as a cache?).

The marketing team seemed pretty knowledgeable about the market space and they seem to be going after mid-range storage space.

The product supports file (NFS and CIFS/SMB), iSCSI and FC with GigE, 10GbE and 8Gbps FC. They quote “effective” capacities with dedupe enabled but it can be disabled on a volume basis.

Overall, I was impressed by their marketing and the product (what little I saw).

Best storage tool of the show

Moving onto other product categories, it was hard to see anything that caught my eye. Perhaps I have just been to too many storage conferences but I did get somewhat excited when I looked at SwiftTest. Essentially they offer a application profiling, storage modeling, workload generating tool set.

The team seems to be branching out of their traditional vendor market focus and going after large service providers and F100 companies with large storage requirements.

Way back, when I was in Engineering, we were always looking for some information as to how customers actually used storage products. Well what SwiftTest has, is an appliance to instrument your application environment (through network taps/hardware port connections) to monitor your storage IO and create a statistical operational profile of your I/O environment. Then take that profile and play it against a storage configuration model to show how well it’s likely to perform. And if that’s not enough the same appliance can be used to drive a simulated version of the operational profile back onto a storage system.

It offers NFS (v2,v3, v4) CIFS/SMB (SMB1, SMB2, SMB3) FC, iSCSI, and HTTP/REST (what no FCoe?). They mentioned an $8oK price tag for the base appliance (one protocol?) but grows up pretty fast, if you want all of them. They also seem to have three levels of appliances (my guess more performance and more protocols come with the bigger boxes).

Not sure where they top out but simulating an operational profile can be quite complex especially when you have to be able to control data patterns to match deduplication potential in customer data, drive markov chains with probability representations of operational profiles, and actually execute IO operations. They said something about their ports have dedicated CPU cores to insure adequate performance or something similar but still it seems to little to hit high IO workloads.

Like I said, when I was in engineering were searching for this type of solution back in the late 90s and we would have probably bought it in a moment, if it was available.

GoDaddy.com, the domain/web site services provider was one of their customers that used the appliance to test storage configurations. They presented at SNW on some of their results but I missed their session (the case study is available on SwiftTests website).

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In short, SNW had a diverse mixture of end user customers but lacked a full complement of vendors to show off to them. The ratio of vendors to customers has definitely shifted to end-users the last couple of years and if anything has gotten more skewed to end-users, (which paradoxically should appeal to more storage vendors?!).

I talked with lots of end-users, from companies like FedEx, Northrop Grumman and AOL to name just a few big ones. But there were plenty of smaller ones as well.

The show lasted three days and had sessions scheduled all the way to the end. I was surprised at the length and the fact that it started on Tuesday rather than Monday as in years past. Apparently, SNIA and Computerworld are still tweaking the formula.

It seemed to me there were more cancelled sessions than in years past but again this was hard to quantify.

Some of the customers I talked with thought SNW should go to a once a year and can’t understand why it’s still twice a year. Many mentioned VMworld as having taken the place of SNW in being a showplace for storage vendors of all sizes and styles. That and the vendor specific shows from EMC, IBM, Dell and others.

The fall show is moving to Long Beach, CA. Probably, a further experiment to find a formula that works. Let’s hope they succeed.

Comments?

Enterprise file synch

Posted on January 22, 2013March 8, 2013 by Ray in Cloud services, Cloud storage, data access, Disaster Recovery, File Storage, Information economy, Mobile computing, Storage, Strategy, Systems

Strange Clouds by michaelroper (cc) (from Flickr)

Last fall at SNW in San Jose there were a few vendors touting enterprise file synchronization services each having a slightly different version of the requirements. The one that comes most readily to mind was Egnyte which supported file synchronization across a hybrid cloud (public cloud and network storage) which we discussed in our Fall SNWUSA wrap up post last year.

The problem with BYOD

With bring your own devices (BYOD) corporate end users are quickly abandoning any pretense of IT control and turning consumer class file synchronization services to help synch files across desktop, laptop and all mobile devices they haul around. But the problem with these solutions such as DropBox, Box, OxygenCloud and others are that they are really outside of IT’s control.

Which is why there’s a real need today for enterprise class file synchronization solutions that exhibit the ease of use and set up available from consumer file synch systems but offer IT security, compliance and control over the data that’s being moved into the cloud and across corporate and end user devices.

EMC Syncplicity and EMC on premises storage

Last week EMC announced an enterprise version of their recently acquired Syncplicity software that supports on-premises Isilon or Atmos storage, EMC’s own cloud storage offering.

In previous versions of Syncplicity storage was based in the cloud and used Amazon Web Services (AWS) for cloud orchestration and AWS S3 for cloud storage. With the latest release, EMC adds on premises storage to host user file synchronization services that can span mobile devices, laptops and end user desktops.

New Syncplicity users must download desktop client software to support file synchronization or mobile apps for mobile device synchronization. After that it’s a simple matter of identifying which if any directories and/or files are to be synchronized with the cloud and/or shared with others.

However, with the Business (read enterprise) edition one also gets the Security and Compliance console which supports access control to define users and devices that can synchronize or share data, enforce data retention policies, remote wipe corporate data, and native support for single sign services. In addition, one also gets centralized user and group management services to grant, change, revoke user and group access to data. Also, one now obtains enterprise security with AES-256 data-at-rest encryption, separate key manager data centers and data storage data centers, quadruple replication of data for high disaster fault tolerance and SAS70 Type II compliant data centers.

If the client wants to use on premises storage, they would also need to deploy a VM virtual appliance somewhere in the data center to act as the gateway to file synchronization service requests. The file synch server would also presumably need access to the on premises storage and it’s unclear if the virtual appliance is in-band or out-of-band (see discussion on Egnyte’s solution options below).

Egnyte’s solution

Egnyte comes as a software only solution building a file server in the cloud for end user storage. It also includes an Egnyte app for mobile hardware and the ever present web file browser. Desktop file access is provided via mapped drives which access the Egnyte cloud file server gateway running as a virtual appliance.

One major difference between Syncplicity and Egnyte is that Egnyte offers a combination of both cloud and on premises storage but you cannot have just on premises storage. Syncplicity only offers one or the other storage for file data, i.e., file synchronization data can only be in the cloud or on local on premises storage but cannot be in both locations.

The other major difference is that Egnyte operates with just about anybody’s NAS storage such as EMC, IBM, and HDS for the on premises file storage. It operates as an in-band, software appliance solution that traps file activity going to your on premises storage. In this case, one would need to start using a new location or directory for data to be synchronized or shared.

But for NetApp storage only (today), they utilize ONTAP APIs to offer out-of-band file synchronization solutions. This means that you can keep NetApp data where it resides and just enable synchronization/shareability services for the NetApp file data in current directory locations.

Egnyte promises enterprise class data security with AD, LDAP and/or SSO user authentication, AES-256 data encryption and their own secure data centers. No mention of separate key security in their literature.

As for cloud backend storage, Egnyte has it’s own public cloud or supports other cloud storage providers such as AWS S3, Microsoft Azure, NetApp Storage Grid and HP Public Cloud.

There’s more to Egnyte’s solution than just file synchronization and sharing but that’s the subject of today’s post. Perhaps we can cover them at more length in a future post if their interest.

File synchronization, cloud storage’s killer app?

The nice thing about these capabilities is that now IT staff can re-gain control over what is and isn’t synched and shared across multiple devices. Up until now all this was happening outside the data center and external to IT control.

From Egnyte’s perspective, they are seeing more and more enterprises wanting data both on premises for performance and compliance as well as in the cloud storage for ubiquitous access. They feel its both a sharability demand between an enterprise’s far flung team members and potentially client/customer personnel as well as a need to access, edit and propagate silo’d corporate information using new mobile devices that everyone has these days.

In any event, Enterprise file synchronization and sharing is emerging as one of the killer apps for cloud storage. Up to this point cloud gateways made sense for SME backup or disaster recovery solutions but IMO, didn’t really take off beyond that space. But if you can package a robust and secure file sharing and synchronization solution around cloud storage then you just might have something that enterprise customers are clamoring for.

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New cloud storage and Hadoop managed service offering from Spring SNW

Posted on April 13, 2012April 16, 2012 by Ray in Cloud services, Cloud storage, Crowdsourcing, Distributed computing, Strategic Inflection Points, System effectiveness

Last week I posted my thoughts on Spring SNW in Dallas, but there were two more items that keep coming back to me (aside from the tornados). The first was a new startup called Symform in cloud storage and the other was an announcement from SunGard about their new Hadoop managed services offering.

Symform

Symform offers an interesting alternative on cloud storage that avoids the build up of large multi-site data centers and uses your desktop storage as a sort of crowd-sourced storage cloud, sort of bit-torrent cloud storage.

You may recall I discussed such a Peer-to-Peer cloud storage and computing services in a posting a couple of years ago. It seems Symform has taken this task on, at least for storage.

A customer downloads (Windows or Mac) software which is installed and executes on your desktop. The first thing you have to do after providing security credentials is to identify which directories will be moved to the cloud and the second is to tell whether you wish to contribute to Symform’s cloud storage and where this storage is located. Symform maintains a cloud management data center which records all the metadata about your cloud resident data and everyone’s contributed storage space.

Symform cloud data is split up into 64MB blocks and encrypted (AES-256) using a randomly generated key (known only to Symform). Then this block is broken up into 64 fragments with 32 parity fragments (using erasure coding) added to the stream which is then written to 96 different locations. With this arrangement, the system could potentially lose 31 fragments out of the 96 and still reconstitute your 64MB of data. The metadata supporting all this activity sits in Symform’s data center.

Unclear to me what you have to provide as far as ongoing access to your contributed storage. I would guess you would need to provide 7X24 access to this storage but the 32 parity fragments are there for possible network/power failures outside your control.

Cloud storage performance is an outcome of the many fragments that are disbursed throughout their storage cloud world. It’s similar to a bit torrent stream with all 96 locations participating in reconstituting your 64MB of data. Of course, not all 96 locations have to be active just some > 64 fragment subset but it’s still cloud storage so data access latency is on the order of internet time (many seconds). Nonetheless, once data transfer begins, throughput performance can be pretty high, which means your data should arrive shortly thereafter.

Pricing seemed comparable to other cloud storage services with a monthly base access fee and a storage amount fee over that. But, you can receive significant discounts if you contribute storage and your first 200GB is free as long as you contribute 200GB of storage space to the Symform cloud.

Sungard’s new Apache Hadoop managed service

Hadoop Logo (from http://hadoop.apache.org website)

We are well aware of Sungard’s business continuity/disaster recovery (BC/DR) services, an IT mainstay for decades now. But sometime within the last decade or so Sungard has been expanding outside this space by moving into managed availability services.

Apparently this began when Sungard noticed the number of new web apps being deployed each year exceeded the number of client server apps. Then along came virtualization, which reduced the need for lots of server and storage hardware for BC/DR.

As evident of this trend, last year Sungard announced a new enterprise class computing cloud service. But in last week’s announcement, Sungard has teamed up with EMC Greenplum to supply an enterprise ready Apache Hadoop managed service offering.

Recall, that EMC Greenplum is offering their own Apache Hadoop supported distribution, Greenplum HD. Sungard is basing there service on this distribution. But there’s more.

In conjunction with Hadoop, Sungard adds Greenplum appliances. With this configuration Sungard can load Hadoop processed and structured data into a Greenplum relational database for high performance data analytics. Once there, any standard SQL analytics and queries can be used against to analyze the data.

With these services Sungard is attempting to provide a unified analytics service that spans all structured, semi-structured and unstructured data.

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Probably more to Spring SNW but given my limited time on the exhibition floor and time in vendor discussions these and my previously published post are what I seem of most interest to me.

Thoughts on Spring SNW 2012 in Dallas

Posted on April 3, 2012April 10, 2012 by Ray in Block Storage, Cloud services, Cloud storage, Disk storage, SSD storage, Strategic Inflection Points

Viking Technology NAND/DIMM SSD 32TB/1U demo box

[Updated photo] Well the big news today was the tornado activity in the Dallas area. When the tornado warnings were announced customers were stuck on the exhibit floor and couldn’t leave (which made all the vendors very happy). Meetings with vendors still went on but were held in windowless rooms and took some ingenuity to get to. I offered to meet in the basement but was told I couldn’t go down there.

As for technology at the show, I was pretty impressed with the Viking booth. They had a 512GB MLC NAND flash card placed in spare DIMM slots with MLC or SLC NAND flash storage in them which takes power from the DIMM slot and uses a separate SATA cabling to cable the SSD storage together. It could easily be connected to a MegaRAID card and RAIDed together. The cards are mainly sold to OEMs but they are looking to gain some channel partners willing to sell them directly to end users.

In addition to the MLC NAND/DIMM card, they had a demo box with just a whole bunch of DIMM slots, where they modified the DIMM connections to also support SATA interface through their mother board. They had on display 1U storage box with 32TB of MLC NAND/DIMM cards and a single power supply supporting 6 lanes of SAS connectivity to the storage. Wasn’t clear what they were trying to do with this other than stimulate thought and interest from OEMs. It was a very interesting demo

There a few major vendors including Fujitsu, HDS, HP, and Oracle exhibiting at the show with a slew of minor ones as well. But noticeable by their absence was Dell, EMC, IBM, and NetApp not to mention Brocade, Cisco and Emulex.

Someone noticed that a lot of the smaller SSD startups weren’t here as well, e.g., no PureStorage, NexGen, SolidFire, Whiptail etc. Even FusionIO with their bank of video streams was missing from the show. In times past, smaller startups would use SNWto get vendor and end-user customer attention. I suppose nowadays, they do this at VMworld, Oracle Openworld, Sapphire or other vertical specific conferences.

Marc Farley of StorSimple discussing cloud storage

In the SSD space there was Nimbus Data, TMS, Micron and OCZ where here showing off their latest technology. Also, there were a few standard bearers like FalconStor, Veeam, Sepaton, Ultrium and Qlogic were exhibiting as well. A couple of pure cloud players as well like RackSpace, StorSimple and a new player Symform.

Didn’t get to attend any technical sessions today but made the keynote last night which was pretty good. That talk was all about how the CIO has to start playing offense and getting ahead of where the business is heading rather than playing defense playing catchup to where the business needed to be before.

Super Talent releases a 4-SSD, RAIDDrive PCIe card

Posted on March 9, 2012April 23, 2012 by Ray in SSD storage, Storage, System effectiveness

RAIDDrive UpStream (c) 2012 Super Talent (from their website)

Not exactly sure what is happening, but PCIe cards are coming out containing multiple SSD drives.

For example, the recently announced Super Talent RAIDDrive UpStream card contains 4 SAS embedded SSDs that can push storage capacity up to almost a TB of MLC NAND. They have an optional SLC version but there were no specs provided on this.

It looks like the card uses an LSI RAID controller and SANDforce NAND controller. Unlike the other RAIDDrive cards that support RAID5, the UpStream can be configured with RAID 0, 1 or 1E (sort of RAID 1 only striped across even or odd drive counts) and currently supports capacities of 220GB, 460GB or 960GB total.

Just like the rest of the RAIDDrive product line, the UpStream card is PCIe x8 connected and requires host software (drivers) for Windows, NetWare, Solaris and other OSs but not for “most Linux distributions”. Once the software is up, the RAIDDrive can be configured and then accessed just like any other “super fast” DAS device.

Super Talent’s data sheet states UpStream performance at are 1GB/sec Read and 900MB/Sec writes. However, I didn’t see any SNIA SSD performance test results so it’s unclear how well performance holds up over time and whether these performance levels can be independently verified.

It seems just year ago that I was reviewing Virident’s PCIe SSD along with a few others at Spring SNW. At the time, I thought there were a lot of PCIe NAND cards being shown at the show. Given Super Talent’s and the many other vendors sporting PCIe SSDs today, there’s probably going to be a lot more this time.

No pricing information was available.

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Comments?

Initial impressions on Spring SNW/Santa Clara

Posted on April 6, 2011April 6, 2011 by Ray in Block Storage, Cloud services, Disk storage, File Storage, Storage, Storage architecture, Storage performance, Strategic Inflection Points, System effectiveness, Systems

I heard storage beers last nite was quite the party, sorry I couldn’t make it but I did end up at the HDS customer reception which was standing room only and provided all the food and drink I could consume.

Saw quite a lot of old friends too numerous to mention here but they know who they are.

As for technology on display there was some pretty impressive stuff.

Verident card (c) 2011 Silverton Consulting, Inc.

Lots of great technology on display there.

Virident tachIOn SSD

One product that caught my eye was from Virident, their tachIOn SSD. I called it a storage subsystem on a board. I had never talked with them before but they have been around for a while using NOR storage but now are focused on NAND.

Their product is a fully RAIDed storage device using flash aware RAID 5 parity locations, their own wear leveling and other SSD control software and logic with replaceable NAND modules.

Playing with this device I felt like I was swapping drives of the future. Each NAND module stack has a separate controller and supports high parallelism. Talking with Shridar Subramanian, VP of marketing, he said the product is capable of over 200K IOPS running a fully 70% read:30% write workload at full capacity.

They have a Capacitor backed DRAM buffer which is capable of uploading the memory buffer to NAND after a power failure. It plugs into a PCIe slot and uses less than 25W of power, in capacities of 300-800GB. It requires a software driver, they currently only support Linux and VMware (a Linux varient) but Windows and other O/Ss are on the way

Other SSDs/NAND storage

Their story was a familair refrain throughout the floor, lots of SSD/NAND technology coming out, in various formfactors. I saw one system using SSDs from Viking Modular Systems that fit into a DRAM DIMM slot and supported a number of SSDs behind a SAS like controller. Also requiring a SW driver.

Of course TMS, Fusion-IO, Micron, Pliant and others were touting their latest SSD/Nand based technology showing off their latest solutions and technology. For some reason lots of SSD’s at this show.

Naturally, all the other storage vendors were there Dell, HDS, HP, EMC, NetApp and IBM. IBM was showing off Watson, their new AI engine that won at Jeopardy.

And then there was cloud, …

Cloud was a hot topic as well. Saw one guy in the corner I have talked about before StorSimple which is a cloud gateway provider. They said they are starting to see some traction in the enterprise. Apparently enterprise are starting to adopt cloud – who knew?

Throw in a few storage caching devices, …

Then of course there was the data caching products which ranged from the relaunched DataRAM XcelASAN to Marvel’s new DragonFLY card. DragonFLY provides a cache on a PCI-E card which DataRAM is a FC caching appliance, all pretty interesting.

… and what’s organic storage?

And finally, Scality came out of the shadows with what they are calling an organic object storage device. The product reminded me of Bycast (now with NetApp) and Archivas (now with HDS) in that they had a RAIN architecture, with mirrored data in an object store interface. I asked them what makes them different and Jerome Lecat, CEO said they are relentlessly focused on performance and claims they can retrieve an object in under 40msec. My kind of product. I think they deserve a deeper dive sometime later.

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Probably missed a other vendors but these are my initial impressions. For some reason I felt right at home swapping NAND drive modules,…

Comments

Reflections on this week’s SNW

Posted on April 16, 2010 by Ray in Market dynamics, Strategy

The crowd seemed more end-user centric, the exhibit floor seemed less intense, and sigh, the bar less crowded. But mostly what I heard at this week’s SNW was more interest on SSDs and on cloud computing and storage.

Admittedly, I am a different observer than most at SNW. I typically do not attend tutorials/sessions unless I speak at them, I focus my time on the exhibit floor looking for new technology and I go out of my way to talk with strangers.

At past SNWs mostly I would meet other vendor personnel. In contrast, at this SNW, I met many more end-users in these chance encounters. Vendors were still present on the exhibit floor but not as evident at lunch or the reception. Perhaps, there were less auxialliary vendor personnel attending SNW this spring. The economy may be forcing vendors to cut-back. Whether this trend continues will need to wait until the next SNW but it started at least a year and a half ago and has really taken off over the past two SNWs.

As for the exhibit floor, less giveaways, less booth babes, and less gambling/magic/raffles to entice customers. While I was on the exhibit floor there didn’t seem to be any one booth that was drawing all the traffic and as such, all vendors seemed to share show participants equally. Also, the kiosks in the hall were a bit more subdued as well not capturing people as they walked by as in past shows.

I don’t know the final SNW headcount but it would seem to be about the same as last fall’s SNW except for the minimal vendor personnel. But I was especially surprised by the lack of Brocade, Cisco, HDS, and Microsoft on the exhibit floor as well as not having any executives present to talk with analysts. This seems a significant departure from prior SNWs. I am sure the ROI on SNW has changed as it’s audience mix evolves but one would think the higher end-user proportion would drive more pressure to be here not less. Nevertheless, I believe their participation in tutorial sessions was not diminished as much as their presence on the exhibit floor.

I met a customer that has been to every SNW since the beginning. He said that the Symantec Vision conference and NAB occurring during the same week made deciding where to go more of a problem than usual.

Future SNWs

Where SNW goes from here is anyone’s guess. Some people I talked with thought all the information available on the web makes having a place to see equipment and talk to vendors like SNW redundant. However, from a vendor perspective, there is an ongoing need to talk directly with customers and obtain new leads. Something like SNW that concentrates this activity in one place and one time represents a significant advantage. It certainly does for my business.

Email marketing was supposed to be the death of mail solicitation but my mailbox has seen no end to junk mail. Similarly, blogging, facebook, and other social media was going to kill offline marketing but all it did was to create other ways to gain my attention. Perhaps, the marketing spend must adjust for new approaches but old ways never seem to go away entirely. Each company is different, what makes sense for EMC, NetApp, and IBM may make no sense for Cisco, Brocade, HDS, and Microsoft.

One thing present at this SNW more than the last one was social media. More tweets, more blogging, and more pod/videocasts were generated daily. At Monday nites tweetup there was at least one more person there than last SNW’s tweetup and we had at least three different sets of vendors/analysts/customers show up as well. One difference from last fall’s SNW tweetup was that it was held at a bar.

Another thing, I found personally significant, some of my vendor meetings were specifically focused on my role as a blogger versus industry analyst. This seemed to dictate whether vendors discussed NDA material or not with me. But the funny thing is I seem to be treated better as a blogger than as an analyst.

I think something like SNW will be around for a long time to come. Video chats and webcasts have not eliminated meeting face-to-face. Yes information is widely available on the web. But, obtaining such information depends on actively searching for it or something similar. On the other hand, conferences like SNW, generate random, spur of the moment contacts. Such encounters can lead to technology adoption that wasn’t even considered beforehand and potentially start significant sales conversations just by being in the right place at the right time. Such randomness is impossible to replicate today with a purely web-based experience, there is just too much information and noise out there.

So yes, SNW and other conference/bazaars will be around for awhile longer. They will change with the times but their essence will remain, that being providing a venue for customers to meet vendors and see first hand the technology that’s available.