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.

So being involved with iSCSI since almost its inception, I’ve seen it go through several stages. When I was introduced to iSCSI back at the end of 2001, StorageTek was working on a product that they had no idea would be on the edge of greatness.

The Echoview400 was a Linux based storage appliance. The purpose of this appliance was CDP (continuous data protection). This was really an industry first both for CDP and for iSCSI. This platform only supported connectivity to Solaris and WindowsNT. This ran mostly in a direct connected mode, and on the host side it required 2 things. An iSCSI hardware HBA, and a software driver created by STK. The HBA was no big deal, other than expensive. The software was slick, it performed a split-write on internal hard-drives/volumes.

That was almost 6 years ago. These days, iSCSI HBAs are almost non-existent, most OS vendors have created iSCSI software initiators that are both easy to install, and low overhead. Back in 2002, the Windows iSCSI software initiator would typically overrun the CPUs on servers. Now they are barely noticed.

Back in 2002, 2GB Fibre Channel was the hot technology. Optical GigE was still popular, but expensive, and most enterprises had by this time deployed GigE core swtich technologies, however, the SMB market was not quite there yet. In 2002, if a company wanted to implement a site-to-site replication at the SAN level, they would have dropped something along the lines of Millions of dollars for storage, servers, and network. In 2007, many newer storage vendors have included the feature of replication into the base product.

Although, few have followed the model that EqualLogic, Inc. has in place where there are NO optional storage service features. Anything that has been released is included, and available to customer under support contracts.

So what does my typical customer look like? It ranges from a 5 server environment running on about 800GB of addressable storage, all the way to a multi-thousand server environment on it’s way to purchasing storage on the order of Petabytes. I have deployments in the largest law firms of our fair country, and the smallest radio stations.

So who uses iSCSI in production? Many many SMB and SME, Fortune 1000, and Fortune 50. What kind of applications are running on iSCSI? I’d have to say that of my customer base, 80% or more are running some level of OS virtualization. The market leader being VMWare, but a rising number are looking to Zen, and Windows Virtual Server. The guest OSs running are everything from Active Directory, Web servers, DNS, to clusters of SQL. It isn’t the virtual OS world that I find interesting. It is the dedicated server environment that has excited me. We have a growing number of customers that are running Oracle Financial, Oracle RAC, clustered file services, etc.

I sent a quick email out to an SE list I use to ask the occasional question. This time I needed Oracle Financial Applications references, within minutes I had dozens. Back in the day, only as far back as 1999 and 2000 I was working on Oracle Financial architectures running on dedicated SUN E10K with direct attached silo storage. Boy have we come a long way.

As always, comments welcome!

Who on earth can keep track of these definitions? Well, I for one, have made it my goal in life to figure out which of these definitions is bogus, and which are truthful, and what each actually means, and who can provide them.

Clustered File Systems – I think this might be one of the most misleading terms in technology. What exactly is a cluster? What exactly allows for a group of storage systems with a file system running on them to be considered a CFS? Well I guess you can technically call every HA deployment of a file system a “clustered file system”. For the purposes of this write up I am only going to consider solutions that tout themselves as Highly Available/High Performance File Systems.

Here is my list: ( In NO particular order)

• Lustre (Originally by Clustered File Systems, Inc, most recently purchased by SUN Microsystems.)
• GPFS (IBM)
• GFS (RedHat, formally Sistina)
• ONTap GX (NetApp, formally Spinakker)
• Polyserve (HP, formally Polyserve)
• PVFS2 (http://www.pvfs.org/)
• Exastor (Exanet)
• StorIQ (Isilon)
• Fusion (IBrix)
• Titan (BlueArc)
• Pantera (OnStor)
• ActiveScale (Panasas)

note: if you have a CFS of some nature and would like it to be considered for the next round of this write up please email me.

Read the rest of this entry »

Al Franken, thank you for giving me the title for this blog entry. For those of you not familiar, Al Franken was a major comedic contributor to SNL (Saturday Night Live for those of you living in the dark ages) and that quote was a title of one of his more recent non-slanted liberal musings. This brings me to my topic of the day, Benchmarks and Benchmarking.

Coming front the world of clustered file systems, specSFS seems to be the standard benchmark that is easily available to access and is the mostly widely abused benchmark of all times. Now before the spec guys get upset with me, the problem isn’t with the specSFS tool-set, the problem is with the vendors who use it (I am guilty of this vendor deception personally).

For those of you not familiar with this benchmark, it is specifically used to test NAS IOPs performance. Some of the best performance ever seen by this benchmark was most recently released by Network Appliance, Inc. They were able to invent a solution that pushed the specSFS benchmark to the next level of performance, the 1,000,000 IOPs solution. Why this is irrelevant I will explain as simply as $. Actually, closer to $,$$$,$$$, please input any 7-8 figure dollar amount you wish, because that is the cost of 1,000,000 IOPs utilizing ONTap GX clustering configurations.

I am going to breakdown the top 5 producing solutions in this entry. This will be broken down into the following categories:

1. The solution being provided.
2. The Posted Result
   1. IOPs
   2. Latency
3. Load generation
   1. Number of Servers Required
   2. IOPs per load server
4. File System(s)
   1. Number of file systems (anything more then 1 is bad)
   2. IOPs per file system
5. Disk
   1. Number of Disk Controllers
   2. Number of Spindles
   3. Speed of Spindles
   4. IOPs per controller
   5. IOPs per Spindle
6. Relative Cost of Solution
   1. List pricing for components
   2. IOPs per $

Before I get going, I’m going to try my best to come up with list pricing costs for these solutions. I haven’t ever ordered these products and everyone of these vendors seem to have pretty complex configuration quoting tools. I’ll do my best!

THE LIST

(This list was based on specSFS results posted prior to 9/01/2007)

1. Network Appliance, Inc. – Data ONTAP GX System (24-node FAS6070)
2. EMC Corp. – Celerra NSX Cluster 8 X-Blade 60 (1 stdby) 2 DMX
3. Panasas, Inc. – ActiveScale storage cluster (60 DirectorBlades)
4. Exanet, Inc. – ExaStore EX600FC
5. BlueArc Corporation – BlueArc Titan 2200, 2-Node Active/Active Cluster

For those of you who aren’t interested in a LONG read, here is the summary in table format.

  Read the rest of this entry »

I am amazed that no matter what national labs or universities do, IBM still owns the Top 500 space. I’ve spent a considerable amount of time walking the aisles of HPC data centers and studying what components people are using, and yet every few months, the HPC Top 500 still has IBM equipment in the Top 10 every time. I know that the Rackable and Terascala folks would love to bust into that group. I look forward to seeing some of the young cluster players come to light in the near future. In the meantime, my hat of to IBM who continues to astound me with continued excellence.

p.s. It was a BlueGene cluster at NCAR in Colorado that was able to predict the path of Katrina, even though no one listened.