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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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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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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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StorageBod’s recent post had me falling over, both in it’s clear silliness, but more so in the extremely hidden un-known humor.  

File System: “ In computing, a file system (often also written as filesystem) is a method for storing and organizing computer files and the data they contain to make it easy to find and access them. File systems may use a data storage device such as a hard disk or CD-ROM and involve maintaining the physical location of the files, they might provide access to data on a file server by acting as clients for a network protocol (e.g., NFS, SMB, or 9P clients), or they may be virtual and exist only as an access method for virtual data (e.g., procfs).

 

More formally, a file system is a special-purpose database for the storage, organization, manipulation, and retrieval of data.”

StorageBod wrote the following: 

“I’ve decided that after reading Kostadis’ interesting and well-written series on why WAFL is not a file-system; that it is a platypus! In much that same way that a Platypus is mostly mammalian but does some-things in a distinctly non-mammalian way; WAFL is mostly a file-system! 

 

So from now on; I shall be referring to WAFL as the Platypus Layer!”

Which is much funnier when I recalled and researched the history of the Platypus:

…“Aware of the monstrous impostures which the artful Chinese had so frequently practised on European adventurers,” Knox noted, “the scientific felt inclined to class this rare production of nature with eastern mermaids and other works of art.”

 

It was only when more platypus specimens arrived in England that naturalists finally, grudgingly, granted that the creature was real….

So, clearly WAFL is here to stay, it is most commonly referred to as a filesystem, it clearly shows File System attributes, but…it also have some non-fi1l3 $y$t3m attributes as well. 

note: No Platypus were injured in the writing of this post, nor any WAFL users, nor NetApp employees.  This is a Green Post, no paper was used in its creation. 

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     In 1999, the Billboard TOP 40 had hits like Rodeo Clowns – by G Love & Special Sauce & Higher – by Creed.  Y2K was on the minds of companies and IT folks.  The DOTCOM boom was in full swing, and Bill Clinton was in office.

     In 1999, LeftHand Networks was founded to bring a block level storage protocol over Ethernet to the storage industry.  However, the Advanced Ethernet Block Storage (AEBS), and became a dead protocol around 2003, when LeftHand adopted iSCSI as its protocol.  Back in 2003 iSCSI heavily hit the street.  At the time iSCSI HBAs were very limited, iSCSI Software initiators had HUGE performance penalties, and copper/optical GigE was expensive.  The typical overhead of an iSCSI software initiator back in 2003 was roughly 40% at the CPU and up to 20% of available memory.  We’ve come a LONG way since 2003 with the iSCSI protocol, including additional ratifications of the iSCSI standard with RFC-3720.

     In October of 2008, FCoE is still a “working draft”.  This is why some recent announcements at SNW are comical at best.  Have we forgotten the problems of pre-standard products such as wireless access points?  While the FCoE standard has moved from the development to the review process in recent months, the reality exists that it is still not a formal standard.  Historians say, history repeats itself.  QLogic came out with iSCSI HBAs early on, and so did Intel.  Will the industry make the same mistakes it had with iSCSI in the early days with FCoE?  Based on recent announcements it looks more and more like it will.  I’ve tried to do a search to see if any FCoE software initiators have been benchmarked for memory and CPU utilization, however, I’ve found nothing so far, and haven’t had the time to run my own tests (I’d rather an independent post results anyway).

     So what is the benefit of FCoE?  The benefits of FCP over Ethernet.  The CONs?  This technology will ONLY run on DCE supporting 10GigE.  This means, from my understanding, that all HOSTs, Switches, and Storage will need to support this technology.  So, the real question, and what will be a topic in my next poll, how many customer run 8Gb FC too all SAN attached servers?  The reason iSCSI over GigE has been so popular, is because enterprise customers don’t have 100% of servers on the FC SAN, to has been and will continue to be TOO EXPENSIVE.  They have deployed iSCSI to reach servers that will benefit from the performance and storage consolidation that iSCSI brings to the data center.  Supporting iSCSI over 10GigE is a different proposition.  Since this will still run over TCP/IP, the storage devices can benefit from network consolidation (less cables, less infrastructure), while the majority of clients will still leverage 1GigE, in the few rare cases that throughput requires 10GigE  (note that I said THROUGHPUT, and not PERFORMANCE, because IOPs of iSCSI for small block sizes will be equal to IOPs of 2Gb, 4Gb, and 8Gb FC), then those hosts will run over the much more expensive port and network.

     Flashback, this is very similar to what occurred with standard Ethernet deployments.  Most companies kept 10/100 to servers, and used 1GigE for backup networks, slowly 1GigE became standard on critical servers, then finally on all data center based servers.  MANY companies still run 10/100 to the desktops still today.

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