“What will it take to make you scream?” asks Milo, the bad guy in The Last Boyscout.
“Play some rap music,” responds Bruce Willis in the lead role of private investigator Joseph Hallenbeck.
A couple of posts back, I noted that StorageRap had taken it upon himself to decide who was a storage blogger wannabe. I was chided in his blog, then he reiterated his pronouncement that Compellent’s blogger was a wannabe for “not engaging the rest of the storage blogosphere.”
Engaging with the rest of the blogosphere seems to be code for responding to Farley’s posts, I guess. Seems pretty pointless to me, so I will happily join the world of the wannabes going forward. So long, Mr. Farley. Keep doing whatever it is that you do. Rap makes me scream.
I completely disagree with most of the vendor subsidized bloggers out there who claim that on-array tiering provides value. Farley and others claim that it reduces cost. Maybe that is true in the short run, but I kind of doubt it. Have you seen what the price mark-up is on those big capacity drives being used in tier 2? And does the movement of data in a non-granular way to bigger, slower drives do anything at all to address the root cause of storage inefficiency that the pro-tierers like to cite: the mismanagement of data itself? I think not.
This is just a way to make the junk drawer bigger. It does not solve the problem.
Yesterday, and this is a bit off topic, I chatted with some folks from Interlock Technology in Cambridge, MA. I did the interview because I was intrigued by this company’s value prop. They are using XAM — you know, that SNIA thing designed to create a way to place data in whatever SNIA certifieds as a XAM-compliant archive repository (modeled of course on EMC Centera) — not to place data on Centera, but to migrate it off the box. I doubt that is what EMC had in mind when they participated in the development of XAM. According to the CEO and CTO (the latter a former member of the Centera team who is now trying to buy back his soul before he dies), EMC boasts 5,500 Centera customers with about 600 PB of stored data. EMC, said the CEO, did everyone the favor of raising awareness about content addressable storage (CAS). True enough. But they also delivered one of the worst products ever thunk up by man to host the data. That’s my opinion, of course, since I don’t like proprietary rigs that turn storage into data roach motels. There were so many other foibles in that product that I stopped tracking them, but customers were hamstrung because the only way to pull data out once you had committed it to Centera was to buy tens of thousands of dollars of EMC software.
That’s the problem that Interlock tackles. They can extract 6TB of data per day from a Centera rig, which you can then migrate to Joe’s JBODs if you want. Moreover, they work with the software you originally used to park your data on Centera, so you don’t lose connections to your data when you move it — or extra metadata you are storing with the data, such as retention/deletion markers.
I like what I’m hearing. Interlock doesn’t reverse engineer the EMC API (something other vendors were able to do a while back, but were afraid to promote for fear of incurring the Wrath of Tucci), these guys are using XAM. Hah! I guess SNIA was good for something after all.
What really amazed me were the reports that Interlock’s software was able to provide on Centera. They offer an assessment service where you get to see how the data is laid out in the Centeras you have and how all that retention, integrity and data loss prevention is working out for you. They showed me one report from a customer who was growing Centera like crazy because the SE who installed it and set it up didn’t implement a retention/deletion policy. The box was chock full of data that was supposed to be deleted years ago. (Maybe that’s what causes the need to tier storage. Whaddaya think, Mark?)
The CTO gave me some skinny on Centera issues, which I will follow up on later. It was difficult to get a straight answer, however, to the question of what a Centera actually costs. I have often been told that it is a drag-along, added to many a Sym or VMax purchase for less than list. The units top out at a relatively small capacity for what you pay for, though EMC has added a Centera Virtual Archiver to the mix now that is essentially a redirector that lets you “federate” multiple heads. The performance hit in a federated system is legend, perhaps accounting for why such a small number have sold.
There are about 200 to 300 Centera API compliant archive apps out there, I’m told. Interlock is slowly but surely working with each one to ensure that apps will know how to read their data when it is migrated by their stuff from Centera to another platform. We talked about the transformation process that your data must go through at some length, and I look forward to learning more.
I’m not in love with Interlock’s use of VMware as a hosting platform for their software, but I understand their reasoning. You can buy their migration engine either as software preconfigured on a 1u rack server running VMware, or you can just buy the VMs themselves to install in your existing VMware setup.
Last note: Gartner now says that VMware ain’t as shiny happy as everyone expected. They place market penetration at 20%, which is well below what VMware expected after spending all that money on marketing and evangelizing over the past few years. (IDC puts it lower, at around 15%.) So much for that revolution…
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Interlock reminds me of Seven10, another Mass company but with a much, much longer history. I wonder if you might take a look at them and let us all know what you think?
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