The Road Not Taken – Robert Frost

TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;
        

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that, the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,
 

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I marked the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way

I doubted if I should ever come back.
 

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.
 

     A well known poem, memorized by myself and my entire 3rd grade English class years ago.  The regularly missed point is that there really was no better choice, no better road, they were equal for different reasons, and only in blind hindsight can someone say one would have been better then the other. 

     Recently I was asked to talk about the reasons a storage start-up would chose to built a custom hardware platform vs. leverage a commodity server platform.  In reality, they both have merits, both, in early consideration, pretty equal. 

Servers as a Platform

     The commodity server platform as an appliance has always been an interesting one.  The benefits for a start-up are many.  Firstly, you get to leverage current technologies easily, toss in a new network card and you’ve got IB or 10GigE.  Secondly, open source Linux gives an instant development baseline, leverage the work others have done before you.  Lastly, your time can be spent on software development and features as a priority.  The complicated part is not getting the solution to work, but to get the most out of a platform not designed for IO, but for general computing.  The mix of software development between user space and kernel space, staying on top of security within a very open OS architecture, and overcoming the inherent single points of failure in today’s common server platforms, all become pain points very quickly.  However, for a cash poor start-up, the initial minimal costs and rapid development typically make up for choosing this road, especially if the exit strategy is change of ownership.  In recent years upstarts like Compellent (OEM’d SuperMicro Servers), LeftHand Networks(Dell, HP and a few other servers, although most recently ONLY HP Servers), Exanet (IBM, Dell, and a few other server vendors), DataCore (pretty much any server), and several others, chose the commodity server route and have had mixed success.

Hardware as a Platform

     The custom hardware road is much more complicated from the get go, but the effort up front can pay out big in the long run.  The upfront pain with custom hardware is running two engineering teams, one for the hardware side and another for the software.  The benefit of custom hardware is that chipsets, real-time operating systems, and form factors allow for HA hardware architectures, system built for performance and reliability, and ownership of every detail of the solution.  However, the effort to support hardware, roll with technology updates, and costs for manufacturing can burden even the most experienced engineering teams.  In mainstream storage the custom hardware route has been the standard of the likes of IBM, HP, EMC, HDS, and SUN STK, who cumulatively own the storage market. 

How to choose?

     In the end, how the technology was implemented is far less important then the impact of the architecture decisions to support the vendors choice.  The things I always pay attention to is the data path, what happens to the data path in normal state, degraded state, and a failed state.  The next area I will tend to look at is how has a company really leveraged either technology, was custom hardware required, or it is not a differentiator.  In the end, there isn’t always a clear winner, and doing a technology bake-off is always a good idea if the vendors will allow for it.

Image via Wikipedia

     Well in light of a filed and I’m pretty sure expired S-1 at this point BlueArc is still churning through the storage upstart stage, and what better way to gain some extra market share, then to hire a VP from NetApp.

SAN JOSE, CA - BlueArc® Corporation, the leader in scalable, high-performance unified network storage, today announced the appointment of Bridget Warwick as Vice President of Marketing. Warwick brings more than a decade of experience in the storage market, including a diversified history of management positions across marketing, engineering and business operations, to BlueArc.

 

Warwick joins the company from her most recent position at NetApp, where she was the vice president of business operations, responsible for the storage systems division’s worldwide technical marketing and product operations. During her time at NetApp, Warwick helped the company establish deep product integration with partners, including Microsoft, and was a chief proponent of the company’s growth in the Windows file services and applications market.

Image via Wikipedia

In the past 10 years RFP (Request for Proposal) has been growing in the mid-Enterprise space.  I actually saw an RFP, written by Glasshouse under contract, for a smaller law firm in Illinois.  This RFP was about 80 pages (25 of witch were detailed technical questions on SAN, NAS, and Backup/Recovery).  This customer wanted the entire solution of the top three chosen vendors set-up for testing in the Vendor’s labs, for a minimum of two weeks for the customer to test performance, features, and functionality.  Additionally, they wanted to fully test replication and application failover during this lab time, they required the full proposal to be built out with the proposed servers, switches, storage, etc.  Now I’m all for bending over backwards for a customer, but to put together a FULL POC(proof of Concept) with NO Conditional Purchase Order in place???  I’m not unreasonable, but this seemed a bit unreasonable.  The reality, budget got pulled away from this IT project for the customer, and the RFP was killed.  However, in the process for responding to the RFP there were several questions that were “crafted” to a specific solution from a specific vendor.

RFP Authors

     So, this leads me to who authors a customer RFP.  In complete disclosure, when I was  Infrastructure Architect many years ago, and I had personally chosen the solution I felt was write for our company, I wrote an RFP (which was required by our purchasing process) that leaned very heavily in features and specifications toward a single vendors product.  I would assume that others have done the same, however, where I drew the line, was letting the vendor help me write the RFP.

     The “consulting firm” is also contracted for RFP creation.  In general, hired contractors are just that, they have a job to do, and they get paid for it.  They typically have relationships with the customer and with vendors.  The problem with a consulting firms, is typically they are also paid for implementation and design work as well, they have a bag of vendors that they know work, and they know enough about to meet the customers requirements.  The problem with this model, it is usually a biased opinion, NOT INTENTIONALLY!!!!

     Lastly, the vendor.  I’ve had several vendors over the years offer to “help” with canned RFP templates,so that “I wouldn’t have to start from scratch”.  Clearly, we know all of the legal, ethical and moral problems with this approach.  This is disgusting behavior on the part of a vendor!

     So, in order to help potential customers and vendors out there I’ve put together the following list of terms and phrases that are RED FLAGS that an RFP has been written for a specific product.  This helps customers, so that they don’t use terms like this causing other vendors the in-ability to compete.  This helps vendors, because it shows if an RFP has been “unintentionally” biased.  This are primarily geared to storage RFPs.

1. Storage Group
   1. Most likely PS-Series, Dell | Equallogic
2. Member(s)
   1. Most likely PS-Series, Dell | Equallogic
3. All Inclusive
   1. PS-Series, Dell | Equallogic
   2. SAN IQ, LeftHand Networks (HP in 2009)
4. Frameless Architecture
   1. PS-Series, Dell | Equallogic
   2. SAN IQ, LeftHand Networks (HP in 2009)
5. Campus SAN
   1. SAN iQ, LeftHand Networks (HP in 2009)
6. Data Progression
   1. Compellent
7. Commodity Architecture
   1. SAN IQ, LeftHand Networks (HP in 200)
   2. Compellent
8. Filer (Clustered Filers)
   1. NetApp
9. Aggregates
   1. NetApp
10. FlexVol
    1. NetApp
11. Primary Volume A-SIS
    1. NetApp
12. High Performance RAID6 (Fast RAID6)
    1. NetApp
13. Meta Volumes
    1. EMC
14. Business Continuance Volumes
    1. EMC
15. Shadowimage
    1. HDS
16. Composite Device
    1. HDS
17. TrueCopy
    1. HDS
18. FlashCopy
    1. IBM
19. Space-Efficient Disks
    1. IBM
20. Global Mirror
    1. IBM
21. Grid Containers
    1. SUN | STK
22. Predictive Self-Healing
    1. SUN | STK

     This list can go on and on, but these are some common ones that I’ve seen in some recent RFPs that have crossed my desk.

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Image by tnarik via Flickr

Joshua: Shall we play a game?
David Lightman: Oh!
Jennifer: I think it missed him.
David Lightman: Yeah. Weird isn’t it? Love to. How about Global Thermonuclear War.
Joshua: Wouldn’t you prefer a nice game of chess?
David Lightman: Later. Right now lets play Global Thermonuclear War.
Joshua: Fine.

     Over the past few weeks/months NetApp and SUN Microsystems have been in a legal battle over patent infringement.  These arguments are about ZFS and WAFL.  There seem to be specifically a little over half a dozen patents that NetApp has filed ZFS is infringing on.  At the end of the day (today), both NetApp and SUN are growing revenues around WAFL and ZFS.  In fact, this publicity, has taken the obscure ZFS and “Open Storage” infused product line from SUN and made it much more public, and it seems to be showing up in more places daily.

     So why the movie reference?  They way these types of legal battles play out, in the end, there is no winner.  Legal fees, the man hours, the courts time, and in the end the only one who suffers will be the customer and share holders.  Customers will absorb the costs of the legal and PR fight, share holders will suffer with every new press release.

     For the most recent reading on this check out Dave Hitz’s blog, he references the recent releases by SUN’s legal team as well.

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Image by akakumo via Flickr

I     n a recent announcement, Dell and Microsoft have a tight condensation going on.  Dell will be providing the hardware for Microsoft new cloud computing initiative.  Windows Azure is Microsoft’s cloud services operating system.  This will compromise a collection of services and hardware from Dell.

   Of course, when there is cloud computing, there are some pretty large storage requirements as well.  i wonder what the storage sub-systems will be behind these hosting center deployments.  Now I know Microsoft isn’t going to deploy and NFS solution!  Only time will tell, it looks like this is pretty early on in the planning stages.  The good part, is it looks like Dell will help make it a “greener” cloud.

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• Who will own the cloud?
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