IT Solutions Blog

Pillar Data Systems Blog: Pass the Morton's Salt

This post is taken from Mike Workman's recent blog post, Pass the Morton's Salt.

When I was quite a bit younger some really great folks at IBM gave me the opportunity to help start a Hard Disk Drive OEM business.  I was part of the Storage division in San Jose California. At the time we built proprietary, non-standard products with all custom mechanical and electrical parts.

The writing was on the wall, the future lay in using high volume, and hence lower cost parts. Not only did this amortize engineering costs (NRE), but tooling and test process costs could be amortized over a much larger volume as well. The idea was – use custom parts only where they provided a distinct competitive advantage. Then, build designs that could be sold into many products, not just one.

IBM wasn’t alone in this, the rest of the world was trying to gain leverage by producing standardized components as well. Seagate was building an empire out of providing 5.25” standard form factor drives to everyone, including the IBM PC (AT back then).  But IBM had invented the disk drive, and its leadership was furious about ceding the high volume low cost drives to the likes of Seagate, and Conner Peripherals. Besides, it was clear that before long, the mechanical advantages of smaller form factors and advancing technologies would obsolete the “big drives” that were sold two or four spindles to the refrigerator sized box.

The IBM AS400 group had the same idea: Build smaller drives with advanced IBM technology to sell to internal customers like the AS400 and IBM PC groups. While the AS400 came from the “custom” world, the IBM PC guys new that they needed best of breed cost in all their components, and the thought of being locked in to some over-transfer-priced HDD from another division was repugnant. The Rochester team made an “almost standard” product: Little things like non-standard mounting holes were rendering their drives incompatible for PCs inside or outside of IBM.

I was asked by “The Chairman” and a few San Jose execs to build an entrepreneurial program inside IBM – the goal of which was a) To build a standard form-factor and interface HDD, and b) Build one packed with enough technology like MR heads to allow even the high-end storage guys to incorporate it into a modular version of the product.  Unfortunately the IBM Rochester team was heading in a similar direction, so a political battle ensued in which after a squabble, I landed in Rochester, Minnesota. As my California friends said at the time “He really must have pissed someone off to be sent to Minnesota”. From Rochester (home of the Mayo clinic) I managed what I named Allicat – an enterprise class drive in reliability and performance that fit Industry standard electrical and mechanical specifications.  The “Alli” in Allicat came from the Alliance of San Jose and Rochester. At 2GB, 5400 RPM, SCSI and IPI-2 interfaces, the drive was the beginning of the OEM HDD storage team within IBM. We went from about $0 top-line revenue to about $4.6B in the next 11 years. 

Disk drives today are indeed labeled as a commodity. Lots of definitions of a commodity exist including simply something that is bought or sold. I maintain that when most of us think commodity, we think about a product that has minor differentiation against others that are adequate substitutes. Table salt for example: Nobody says “Please pass the Morton’s Table Salt”.  Instead, salt is salt, and rarely is anything but “Please pass the salt” heard at any table. Likewise, gold is gold, wheat is wheat, etc.  Differentiation of one commodity over another is usually at the fringes -- fringes which are desperately held on to by manufactures (But when it rains, this salt still pours!).

Moving up the food chain buyers of PCs and Servers that incorporate HDDs always make sure that their commodities include two or more sources. Same for muffin fans, chassis, cables and connectors.

What about storage arrays? Well the more complicated the system, and the smaller the volume requirements are for a system, the less easily it is commoditized. After all, the how many Golden Gate bridges are needed in the world and how standard is the interface between the bridge and the terra firma it sits on? So the truth is, while buyers try and push arrays toward the commodity spectrum, it is difficult to substitute one array for another at some level. Training, management, interoperability, application APIs are all different enough that one vendor is much easier than three, and disparate types of arrays at some level cost the buyer money by shear reason of their differences.

What are some of the consequences of commoditization in the storage business? Here are a few, I am sure that many of you can add to this list:

1. Disk will continue as a commodity.
2. SSD will become a commodity. Manufacturers will struggle valiantly but much like the HDD business, that large OEMs will drive toward standardization and multiple sources as volumes increase. One might argue that we are nearly there already, but firmware maturity is still disparate amongst manufacturers. 
3. The number of manufacturers of SSDs will grow for awhile, and eventually decline as margins force consolidation.
4. Flash memory used in SSDs will become a commodity. Today there are still some differences but there will be a convergence.
5. Plug-in Cache modules (PCIe based Flash Memory) will converge into a commodity. Right now many players are striving to differentiate themselves, but the pace will be fast and furious and largely decided by large volume OEM’s wins.
6. As SSDs reduce in price and increase in capacity, there will be larger and larger a substitution of SSDs for HDDs. 
7. A trend toward SSDs over HDDs will cause all storage arrays to be re-architected. Today’s arrays are not built properly for maximum utilization of the performance benefits of SSD. This will affect everybody in the business. Pillar’s advanced Axiom architecture is already under development. This will be fun.

Oh, and I like Minnesota, really. Sure it is cold, but that wasn’t the real problem. Rather, it was how long it was cold. And thank goodness for the commoditization of salt, because they use a heck of a lot of it.

- Mike Workman, Chairman & CEO, Pillar Data Systems

 

Enterprise Class Storage Requirements from Mike Workman

In case you haven't read Mike Workman's (CEO of Pillar Data) blog,take a look at this latest post "Homey don't play dat."

Here is a snippet from the post where he argues the point of exactly what can be considered
"Enterprise Class" Storage: 

Let’s put down a few basic requirements of “Enterprise Class” that I would imagine we could all agree to:

1. I’d say at least 4-9s' of data availability, perhaps in many environments over 5. No single point of failure is necessary to achieve this requirement. Regardless of the failure, it should have limited consequences on performance or LUN access. Nobody claims a machine is Enterprise class when it is sold in single-controller models; This is just silly.
2. Systems should not be designed to assume there is “idle time” in every 24 hour window. Most Enterprises run 24x7, not 24x5, nor even 12x5.  It is clear when rebuilds, “data progression”, LUN layouts are stalled for days behind system load that they are not ready for the Enterprise.
3. Non-disruptive upgrades. This doesn’t usually include upgrades to new machines or new platforms, but code point-releases while system is in operation.
4. Failures during operation do not result in Filesystems or LUNs off –line by design. Not that they don’t ever go offline, but that he usually should not, and when they do it is a defect-not a design attribute.
5. Serviceability from the front or back of the rack.  In other words, field replaceable units do not involve pulling boxes out of racks and opening lids, using a pair of pliers or a soldering iron (see… hyperbole can be fun).
6. Reliability, which means that the quality of components in the system doesn’t necessitate constant intrusion in the data center. Regardless of #1, it is never desirable to have someone pushing a wheelbarrow of full of bad parts through the isles -- especially if it takes days to rebuild and restore the system to an all-normal condition, like in the case of many of our competitors.

A system which stops all I/O on a class of drives for 25 to 60 seconds when one drive fails is not Enterprise class. Yet there is a company out there in which this characteristic is indeed always present by design; a dumb design for the Enterprise to say the least.  The company is Compellent – or as I referred to them in my last post CML (their ticker symbol, this wasn’t a slight any more than people calling Sun “JAVA”).  Here are some of the test results for a Compellent system under I/O load. The figure below is a  plot of IOPs after a drive fails, versus the same thing on a similarly set-up Axiom. The IOPs were normalized to 100% for the no-fault performance on both arrays, and both had a similar number of spindles (both systems are current, not old stuff, and the code revision level of the CML system tested was 4.2.3 ).

 

Personally, while I recognize we all make mistakes, we all have flaws, and none of our systems are perfect, I believe that some of statements and claims in the storage industry are just deceptive, or reckless to say the least.

Read more about Pillar Data including the latests posts by Mike Workman by clicking here. 

The 10 Pillars of the Virtualized Data Center

Virtualization can significantly reduce IT hardware costs and improve data center efficiencies. Combining technologies like VMware and Pillar Axiom provides the benefits of virtualization at both the server and storage level, resulting in a compelling solution. Benefits of such a virtualized infrastructure allow:

1. Consolidation - Optimizing your Infrastructure
   Why build multiple systems with low utilization at high costs? The solution in a server world is virtualization. Consolidating multiple servers that provide different services onto a few high performance boxes can instantly optimize your environment and deliver savings. 
2. Application-Aware Storage - Fulfilling the demands of your services
   In building out the infrastructure to optimize your applications and server, you also need a means of being able to differentiate between the service levels these applications require, thereby focusing more resources to important applications rather than treating all virtualized applications as equal. 
3. Easy to Manage - Simplifying complex infrastructure
   Server virtualization helps simplify the management of large and complex infrastructures, freeing up administrators' time to focus on more proactive or critical tasks. By virtualizing multiple applications onto a single storage architecture you save time, effort, and training costs - and you reduce the possibility of errors by simplifying the environment. 
4. Interoperability - Simplifying the transition to virtualization
   To eliminate the need to reinstall every existing physical server into a virtual environment, there are a number of physical to virtual migration tools at your disposal. This is no different on the storage side. 
5. High Availability - Ensuring a protected infrastructure
   The architecture of virtual machines gives you new options that help you back up and restore systems quickly and easily. It also makes it easier to create high availability solutions than with physical servers. 
6. Quick Recovery - Minimizing downtime
   In virtual infrastructure you can easily recover former states of server systems. Pillar Axiom does the same for storage with CDP, replication, and easy to use snapshots for fast creation of point-in-time images and full copies of data. 
7. Modular Scalability - Ensuring your business does not get ahead of your infrastructure
   A huge benefit of virtual infrastructures is the ability to scale, so adding hosts means adding ground for virtual machines. As you scale the virtualized server infrastructure, Axiom allows you to scale both I/O bandwidth, performance and capacity in a predicable and simple manner. A single system can scale up to over 760 TB of usable capacity. 
8. Future Flexibility - Take away the need for guesswork
   As your oganizational  requirements change, demands on IT change, so it's good to have a flexible infrastructure. Virtualized, hardware-independent server systems with flexible Pillar Axiom storage solutions are an important part of the virtualized enivronement because application changes are not bound to physical servers.
   
9. Automate - Taking the effort out of management
   Virtualization products like VMware are a perfect fit for Axiom. Pillar provides a pwoer command line interface that works with the VMware API to easily perform common tasks like LUN provisioning. There is also an intuitive GUI and Pillar's Dynamic Performance Manager that allow you to create automated policies and reduce the complexity normally associated with storage administration. 
10. Eco-Friendly - Green is the color of the modern data center
    Virtualization, along with consolidation, reduces the amount of physical hardware within a data center which can lead to cost savings in terms of power and cooling- this will help to deliver better utilization of the physical system. You can operate your data center cost effectively and ecologically minded because of the superior utilization of the disk space, the multi-tiering and multi-protocol ability in conjuction with features like thin provisioning. 

Click here to download the white paper from Pillar Data Systems: The Modern Virtualized Data Center.