Depending on the age of the arrays and depending on the software sitting on the arrays and especially if the arrays were out of warranty periods; the maintenance costs are generally so high that it simply does not make economic sense to keep them around.
Wide-striping is now just another feature; it’s a very important feature but just another feature now. 3Par took wide striping and made it useable; EMC’s historic implementation using metas and hypers was painful and with the large arrays of today it becomes a full time job to performance manage an array. 3Par made it easy and much kudos to them for doing so. I think 3Par’s legacy will be the ease of management that they have brought to the Enterprise array (and thin provisioning).
HDS’ Hu makes a point in his latest blog entry in that Storage Virtualisation allows the end-user to turn commodity disk into enterprise disk by sticking it behind a virtualisation appliance; in Hu’s case, he’d deeply love that to be USP.
IBM were always going to go acquisitive this year and it’s no surprise to me that the first target appears to be Sun. As other commentators have already pointed out, this is not a reaction to Cisco’s announcement on Monday but more a strike against HP. This is about being Number 1 again!
Although I give the various players a hard time; the industry doesn’t do everything badly and I try to see the positives as well as the negatives. So I was thinking about the perfect array and what features I would like to see!
We all agree that EFDs have a place in the storage infrastructure of the future but we also have to ask ourselves what is this infrastructure is going to look like? If we look at some of the press releases and comments with regards to Fusion-IO, you would probably believe that the SAN was on the way out or actually shared storage in general would die.
Sometimes I think storage vendors use a special type of man-ruler when measuring the size of their bits and bytes; especially when it comes down to working out how much storage their array can support. Please note, this is not about utilisation; this is about the maximum number of disks that a array can support and actually use.
I’ve just come back from a NetApp training course; good course and recommended for anyone who wants to pick up some storage fundamentals, it covers all the NetApp bases and by the end of it, you should be fairly confident to do pretty much all the day-to-day routine tasks that you might be asked to do as an administrator of a NetApp array.
The Fishworks Simulator has been driving me a bit nuts; I couldn’t get ESXi to reliably use a Fishwork’s iSCSI LUN as a data-store; it would consistently hang whilst installing an Virtual Machine. I coudn’t see anything wrong but it would just die.
Despite a lot of the huffing and puffing by the various vendors, I think that we are about to enter a cycle where most vendors admit that their competitors’ arrays are pretty much good enough for what-ever you want them to do. Of course, there are a few features which differentiate but they are all catching up with each other in this space.
