Around the Storage Block Blog : EMC

Response to comments from EMC on podcast

CalvinZ — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 17:57:00 GMT

On the latest StorageMonkeys.com podcast, the hosts Greg Knieriemen and Marc Farley had Greg Shultz of StorageIO and Chad Sakac, VP of VMware Technology Alliance at EMC as their guests to talk about the Acadia announcement. In that podcast, around the 34 minute mark, Greg asked Chad a question about Dave Donatelli, EVP of Enterprise Servers and Networking, and that launched a 10 minute discussion about HP and what Chad described as a lack of integration between HP StorageWorks and VMware. Those chararacterizations were completely inaacuate and in today's podcast, I respond to those inaccurate statements. Here's the podcast:

If you browser doesn't play the embedded player, click here to listen to the podcast or right-click here and save the MP3 file.

My thoughts on Dave Donatelli coming to HP

CalvinZ — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 17:03:00 GMT

By Calvin Zito

As I was about to log off last night, I saw a message on Twitter from Steve Duplessie (founder of the Enterprise Strategy Group) that caught my attention. He said that Dave Donatelli from EMC's Storage Division was coming to HP. All I could say was "Wow". Within the next hour, EMC put a press release out saying that Dave left EMC and then HP announced that Dave was coming to HP to manage our Enterprise Storage and Server (ESS) business as Scott Stallard is retiring. It's in ESS where HP's server and storage divisions fit as well as some storage/server software (e.g. virtualization and management) and now HP ProCurve too. So I wanted to share a few of my thoughts on this (and note these are my thoughts and not the opinions of HP):

I think this is a great move for HP and for HP storage. I love the idea of having leadership in ESS that have a deep background in the storage industry. Now don't misunderstand what I mean here - our ESS management team gets the importance of storage to our business and to our customers. The focus of ESS has been to bring together this powerful combination of products into a system - our Adaptive Infrastructure portfolio. And they "get it" now more than ever as storage is a growing market opportunty. But none of our ESS management cut their teeth in storage. Having a long time veteran of the storage industry is just a total win for HP. Of course, Dave Roberson joined HP a couple of years ago to run StorageWorks with a deep storage industry background too but having Dave Donatelli running ESS where it all comes together just makes me giddy.

I have no idea why Dave is leaving EMC. I am surprised to see an executive from EMC coming to HP - not because HP isn't a great company because it is. I've been in HP Storage since 1990 and can't ever remember an EMC exec leaving for a competitor (and yes I know there are many ex EMCers who have come to HP - I'm talking executive management). There have been a few executives in HP StorageWorks that have gone to EMC - some very notable names that I don't hear much about any more.

I have high expectations with Dave joining HP. There's been a great transformation of HP StorageWorks over the last several years. We had been losing market share for a few years and with the latest IDC quarterly numbers, we've started to grow faster than the market. Having another storage industry veteran on the team will certainly have a postive impact and will help HP StorageWorks to accelerate our growth.

Steve Duplessie posted a blog with some of his thoughts on the news. Steve talks about HP getting a star, that Dave will be missed at EMC but that it won't hurt EMC. I agree with everything except that last bit. How can you lose someone like Dave to a competitor and not have it hurt?

As I'm watching Twitter comments from EMC employees, they clearly have a lot of respect for Dave and they wish the best for him at HP. I sure that at some time in the future I'll read about how they wish he had never come to HP.

Lastly, I don't know Scott Stallard personally but I have talked to him briefly at various events in the past. He has had an unbelievable career at HP - I wish him all the best as he retires.

EVA Simplicity Challenge

CalvinZ — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 22:05:00 GMT

Back in early March, I talked about our storage virtualization announcement and pointed you to a video we did on the EVA. Well, I think I finally figured out how to embedded video in the blog (at least from YouTube), so I wanted to mention it it again and embedded the video. But first, here's a bit about the video.

Last year when we announced the EVA4400, we were just wrapping up some work with the Edison Group where we measured the time it took to perform specific storage administrative tasks on an EVA, Clariion CX, and NetApp FAS array. As a follow-up to the EVA4400 announcement, we brought some IT administrators to HP and asked them to perform a number of tasks on an EVA and Clariion array. The video was pretty good and was well received. So as we were getting ready to announce the EVA6400 and EVA8400 this year, we wanted to do another video to show just how easy the EVA with it's unique virtualization is to manage compared to competitive traditional arrays.

My original idea was to use either high school or college students; we'd have two groups - one a few football players and the other students taking high-tech classes. I was very confident that if we asked the football players to configure the EVA's and the tech students to work on the competitve arrays, the EVA would win hands down. A few folks on my team thought this could be a bit offensive, suggesting you really don't have to be educated to be an IT administrator. I saw it very differently - if HP StorageWorks can make products that simplify the time it takes to administrate their storage, that's really what our customers need - make it simple! I think the idea we used works just as well - we had three teams of high school students who each were asked to perform the same tasks on an EVA, Clariion CX4, and NetApp FAS array. As you'll see in the video, it appears as though the NetApp results are close but this is a bit misleading as we had to tell the students to skip some tasks on the FAS because no one could figure out how to do them.

With that background, there's the video:

(Please visit the site to view this media)

Oracle to buy Sun - what does it mean?

CalvinZ — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 19:34:00 GMT

By Calvin Zito

What a bad day to do an announcement just prior to our HP Technology@Work event in Berlin this week! We had a lot of interesting news that went out today but it won't get the attention it should because of the Oracle announcement today. Here's a link to our online press kit where you can read more about our HP LeftHand, BladeSystem Matrix, and the StorageWorks MDS600: http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press_kits/2009/convergeeverything2009/index.html.

So what does the announcement today of Oracle's intent to buy Sun mean? My answer is a simple who knows? What I find interesting is all of the speculation that is rampant across the internet. I don't have an opinion yet on what it means because I just don't know what Oracle is trying to achieve beyond what they've said today but I'd like to make a few observations and point you to what's being said:

The presentation that Oracle used on this morning's investor relations call was titled "Oracle Buys Sun". That just seems a bit odd to me. I've been involved in more than a few HP acquisitions and prior to an acquisition closing, we are careful to say that we are announcing our intent to acquire - probably not a big deal but last I heard, the SEC hadn't approved the acquisition yet and neither had Sun and Oracle shareholders. I'm not implying that this all won't happen (what Sun shareholder would say no to this bailout plan) - just seems premature to say that Oracle buys Sun.
I've seen two articles in eWeek, each having a bit different perspective:
- In the first article, Oracle will keep the Sun software business and sell off much of the hardware (though the article says they'll keep the storage business). Oracle wants control of Java and the ability to kill off MySQL. The article went on to say that "the losers in the deal are likely end users who can expect higher prices for software and fewer choices."
- Another eWeek article said that storage and database hardware are key to the deal. Whatever the case, Sun's storage just got a bailout deal from Oracle and better it come from Oracle than the Obama administration. As to whether the GM or Sun bailout is successful, only time will tell.
In a SearchStorage article, John Webster from Illuminata said "People who have been delivering separate pieces are now potential acquisition targets. You could put NetApp and Brocade on that list." Maybe he should put EMC on that list too. I especially wonder what is going on at EMC after Cisco announced their partnership with NetApp within weeks of EMC's claim of "brave new thinking". Also quoted in the article is Brian Babineau from ESG. He said, "EMC and NetApp are going to have to work even harder to convince customers that an integrated application stack isn't the way to go."

I guess we'll have to see how this plays out but what do you think?

Solid State Smack Down

CalvinZ — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 14:35:00 GMT

By Calvin Zito

I always enjoy a good laugh and thought I'd have to share this video clip I found yesterday. But first you need the back story.

If you've read this blog or other storage vendor blogs, you know that many have had issues with the hype EMC was trying to create around solid state drives. In typical EMC fashion, they announced solid state technology well before they could ship them in volume (and BTW they OEM from one of the partners that HP uses for solid state drives) and then tried to claim some great innovation around being first with SSD's. They have gone so far to rename solid state drives which in my opinion was another vain attempt at demonstrating innovation. Chuck over at EMC went on to predict that HP would not have SSD's in the EVA until 2010 if ever (which by the way we announced in our latest announcement). He's tried to use this as a proof point for some whacked out thesis that HP is a server company and not a storage vendor. Chuck's poking at us is all kind of ironic because he knew all along that they had a big issue with the emergence of blade servers and without a server business, EMC was in trouble. They knew they had to to find a partner that is looking to enter the server business but didn't have a storage business (see Lee John's post titled "What constitutes brave new thinking?"). Thanks Chuck for confirming that HP's direction of having storage and servers tightly linked really does make sense.

But I'm a bit of track so let's get back to the solid state video. I am up for a smack down any time a competitor's blog misrepresents HP or what we are doing (which is often the case with Chuck). So with no apologies, I'll point you to this video that Marc Farley over at 3Par created when he saw a post I had left on another blog around the topic of over-hyping SSD's. Here's the URL for Marc's post and be sure to check out the video: http://www.storagerap.com/2009/02/hp-bloggers-go-viral-with-cross-blog-smackups.html. Yesterday was my birthday and seeing this video made my day!

What constitutes brave new thinking?

CalvinZ — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 14:41:00 GMT

By Lee Johns

Yesterday Chuck Hollis of EMC wrote a blog applauding "brave new thinking" in the industry. Interestingly what he was applauding was another vendor entering the blade market pioneered by HP. Over the last few years HP has seen our BladeSystem business grow with quarterly growth rates of 60% or 80% and over a million BladeSystem servers sold. We developed BladeSystem because IT is too complex and costly and we have relentlessly focused on time, cost, change and energy as the big problems customers face. Surely brave new thinking comes from pioneering a market; trying to enter an established market is not brave new thinking. Sitting on the sidelines and applauding someone else is certainly not brave new thinking.

Our platform was built and proven in a step-by-step approach: BladeSystem c-Class, Thermal Logic, Virtual Connect, Insight Dynamics, direct connect storage etc. Rather than proclaim at each step that we've solved all the industry's problems or have sparked a social movement in computing, we'll continue to focus on doing our job to provide solutions that simply work for customers and tackle their biggest business and data center issues. I suspect that any advancements HP brings forward in simplifying storage with HP BladeSystem will not be viewed as brave new thinking by Chuck. But we don't develop our solutions for Chuck. We develop them for you.

(Editor's note: Gary Thome from our BladeSystem team also posted a blog yesterdaythat you might be interested in reading as well)

Come on - is the EVA really that easy to manage?

CalvinZ — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 20:31:00 GMT

By Calvin Zito

As I mentioned in my post titled Storage virtualization and the new EVA, the StorageWorks EVA is proving itself to be far easier to manage than competitive traditional disk arrays. Let me give you some of the back story here.

Last year, we commissioned an analyst team (The Edison Group) to measure the steps, clicks, and time it took to perform the most common array administrative tasks on several midrange arrays. They wrote a paper about those findings called "TCO White Paper: EMC, NetApp, and HP Midrange Storage Arrays". To be blunt, the paper never really measured TCO and in the end I thought it was the wrong title but it was still a good thing to see the time savings that we get with the EVA versus other arrays.

As I discussed in my post titled "Must See TV: EVA, EMC, and NetApp Go Head to Head" we brought customers to Houston to run some testing for us. You can find the video in the Must See TV post but there was also a white paper titled "Competitive Testing of Common Administrative Tasks" that gave more details on what happened through that testing. Again, interesting but still didn't give me what I wanted to see - how much can a customer save.

Fast forward to pulling together our announcement for the new EVA6400 and EVA8400. The thought was to do a survey of storage administrators on how they spend their day - meaning how often do they perform these different administrative tasks on their storage arrays. It seemed to me that if we had that data, we could then get to a time or cost savings when managing an EVA. This approach hit paydirt! Because the Edison Group had done the original testing, we turned to them again to survey administrators and calculate the savings. The paper based on this research is called "Comparative Management Cost Survey" Let me briefing summarize the results:

The total workday savings of an organization using an EVA as compared to EMC is 36 percent. When compared to NetApp, the savings are 50 percent. Workday savings is a term Edison uses to describe the value of an employee's daily work averaged over a year.

So when you hear us say the EVA costs up to 50% less to manage than other competitive traditional disk arrays, you know now why we can confidently say that. If you aren't using EVA's today, can you really afford to spend 2X managing the other guys' arrays, especially in today's economy?

One last point - I'm sure the competition will try to come up with 30 different reasons why our conclusions are wrong. EMC already tried to debunk the original Edison report by having an EMC engineer perform the same tasks on a Clariion and time the results they got. Well, duh! If I have an EVA engineer do the same tasks that Edison did I'm sure they'd complete them faster too. I would love to put all of these products to a joint test - have the best and brighest engineers from each company perform these tasks on their own storage array and everyone posts the results to their website. Somehow I don't get the sense that this is a challenge that either EMC or NetApp will want to touch.

Have a great weekend!

Must see TV: EVA, EMC, and NetApp go head to head

CalvinZ — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 04:03:00 GMT

By Calvin Zito

Last year when we announced the EVA4400, we brought some customers and partners to Houston who were not familiar with the management of either the EVA or EMC Clariion CX array. We gave them a list of tasks to complete and then created a video of that. It was one of the most popular videos of the last year on hp.com. The test showed that for the tasks these customers were asked to accomplish, they clearly thought the EVA was far easier to manage.

As we were preparing to announce the EVA6400 and EVA8400, we wanted to create an interesting video that would again make the point of how easy the EVA is to manage compared to competitive disk arrays. So the idea that we came up with was to have some high school students who are taking technical classes at their local high school (e.i. technology saavy) but not SAN or disk array experts put the EVA and competitive arrays to the test. The result is the HP StorageWorks EVA Simplicity Challenge. I don't want to spoil the fun for you but I'll make one comment about the results - the only reason the NetApp FAS system was even close was because no one could figure out how to do a snapshot on the NetApp system. So while the results look close, I personally thought we should have elimimated them from the results all together but we decided to keep their results in the video and note that doing the snapshots was beyond the scope of the test (in other words, was way too hard to figure out).

By the way, I wonder if my EMC blogger buddies have noticed that the EVA now has SSD drives - about a year a sooner than they predicted because to paraphrase their point of view, HP is a server company and can't innovate in storage. Of course, EMC doesn't have a virtualized storage array so what else can they say!

Don’t Pull on Superman’s Cape? …these storage industry experts do just that!

ColoradoIPAQuser — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 20:28:00 GMT

By Warren Smith

Before the holiday season shutdown last month, Wikibon's David Vellante moderated a roundtable discussion online to aggregate takeaway impressions from EMC's Dec 9 & 10, 2008 Annual Analyst Meeting. And with apologies to Jim Croce's ballad, " You Don't Mess Around With Jim", the following are some of the contributed points made during this Wikibon roundtable that effectively "pulls the mask off that old lone ranger (EMC)".

Against a background of general concern for the recession facing most customers and markets, EMC sought to re-assure investors and analysts at their Analyst Meeting. Nevertheless, these critical observations were expressed by these analysts on the Wikibon call: Gary MacFadden, Dennis Martin, Bill Mottram, Nick Allen, Josh Krischer & David Floyer.

Work to do in the area of energy efficiency.

EMC does have some work to do in the area of energy efficiency. While it is doing good work internally, and this was presented at the meeting, it has not been as forthcoming about reducing energy consumption of its products. In a discussion of whether EMC is a leader or a follower in Green Storage, David Floyer answered: "EMC is definitely a follower. Up until now, I haven't heard Joe Tucci or any of the senior EMC people emphasize Green at all." Bill Mottram concurred: "...little to nothing references with regard to the green approaches, the design approaches to device level energy efficiencies."

Cloud Storage? - Not so fast; don't forget latency.

EMC SVP Mike Feinberg promoted for the analysts the new Atmos technology , which fundamentally represents the EMC version of cloud computing storage. But Nick Allen expressed reservations on how impractical Atmos may be for many corporate customers: " Man, I am turning total skeptic on this one. Even for internal networks, the latencies that build up are immense. ..Conclusion: EMC has to not only control the storage cloud, but also the network of the cloud in order to provide consistent, predictable performance."

Note: In addition to a recording of the audio from the roundtable call, the Wikibon site also includes a written narrative that expands upon these points. Contained in this narrative are comparative test results that Dennis Martin provided. In particular: "Local disk subsystems these days typically deliver data response times of five milliseconds or less. What does the Internet yield(i.e. in the context of Atmos storage performance)? To research this we conducted a few simple tests. To sample typical Internet delays, we pinged 15 of the most popular sites as listed by Alexa, the Web Information Co., once a second for a period of one minute with the following results:

Average Latency 72 ms
Maximum Latency 142 ms
Minimum Latency 25 ms "

This should cast great performance concerns for using Atmos for any application that has transactional or interactive performance requirements.

Black Clouds over EMC core storage business?

Josh Krischer voiced his concerns over EMC's core storage business strength:"There are two black clouds above EMC's core business. One of them is the Dell purchase of EqualLogic. And already the percentage of CLARiiON sales have dropped from 35% to 32 %, which Dell is selling. And the second thing is that Fujitsu-Siemens Computer will be Fujitsu. And the question is: how long will it continue to sell EMC? It is one of the biggest DMX sellers of EMC. ...And so, on the core business (of EMC), I am skeptical."

Note: Fujitsu Siemens has been a joint venture between Fujitsu and Germany's Siemens AG. Last month, Fujitsu agreed with Siemens to purchase Siemens's 50% stake in the joint venture. The deal is expected to close by April 1 pending government approval. No statement has been made about Fujitsu intentions to curtail EMC resales.

Finally, there are many more discussion items in the Wikibon roundtable analysis from the 2008 EMC Analyst Meeting that are less relevant and too numerous for this column. Highlighted here for your reading are just of few of the items that Wikibon experts voiced that pull on the supposed impenetrable cape of EMC. Thanks to Wikibon for these points.

Warren Smith, HP

NetApp Usable Capacity – Going, Going, Gone

CalvinZ — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 17:15:00 GMT

By Jim Haberkorn

I just returned from a business trip to India where I visited various NetApp customers. At one customer the issue of NetApp usable capacity came up and it so reminded me of conversations I'd had with other NetApp customers and resellers that I feel it is worth reporting. A little background: NetApp usable capacity has been a running battle with NetApp for as long as I can remember. And frankly, this long time controversy surprises me because every time I have a conversation with a knowledgeable NetApp customer and am able to develop some rapport, I always hear the same thing (usually said with a chuckle): "yes, of course, NetApp has a usable capacity issue. We all know it." I bring this up because there was an EMC blog a few months back that tackled this issue, and after being hit with a barrage of counter-points from a variety of NetApp sources, the EMC blogger finally said something to the effect, "you can argue against this all you want, but we at EMC sell into a lot of NetApp environments and we hear about NetApp usable capacity issues from customers all the time." Obviously, EMC is hearing the same things from customers that we are.

The Indian NetApp customer first told me that he was running at 56% usable capacity - which seemed high to me because all our tests showed the real NetApp usable capacity to be in the low to mid 40% range or even lower if you follow every default and best practice to the letter. But then the customer went on to explain that to achieve this 56% number he had to violate most NetApp best practices and had to take a noticeable hit on performance as well. He said that he had to set the aggregate and volume space reservations to zero, as well as the LUN space reservation. Also, he had to place the NetApp root volume on his data disks instead of leaving it in its own aggregate. He did all that and still only reached 56% and he was not happy because all those space reservations are put in place by NetApp for a reason - either to protect performance or to protect access to data. But now that he had bought NetApp there wasn't much he could do.

Jim Haberkorn

Further "day 1" thoughts on Atmos / Maui

CalvinZ — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 07:09:00 GMT

By Michael Callahan

As my colleague Calvin Zito mentioned earlier today, I wanted to make a few comments on EMC's announcement of the EMC Atmos (nee Maui).

Since we first started talking publically about the ExDS9100 system in May, I've been struck by the incredible diversity of the software layers that people want to build on top of it. In fact, quite a bit of this has been a surprise. Much of the ExDS design grew out of our many years experience delivering software into environments very much like those which Atmos seems to target: Web 2.0 companies, telcos and service providers. Based on that experience, we put a lot of emphasis on building something that could easily fit into existing environments (with standard racks!), be extremely simple to manage and, of course, be very cost-effective-while still offering a lot of flexibility in both hardware and software. On the hardware front, a single ExDS9100 node scales from four blades to sixteen, and from roughly a quarter petabyte to over three-quarters (in just two floor tiles) -- and a customer can choose whatever combination of performance and capacity is desired, and even change the configuration of a running system by adding blades or capacity blocks.

But, as I said, what's particularly surprising to me is what has been happening on the software front -- how valuable it has been to offer flexibility there. We know that EMC with Atmos is taking a proprietary, monolithic approach to the software layer that provides distributed replication, location services, and so on, on top of the basic building-block of local high-density storage -- but we think that's a mistake, and not what the market is looking for. The last thing our customers want is to be locked in by a proprietary software layer that limits their technical options and ties them to one vendor.

We have a whole set of customers-admittedly, the ones in the vanguard of these next-generation cloud applications -- who already have commitments to existing software that perform functions like these, whether built in-house, open source or commercial third party. But even apart from these leading customers, we're finding that in other verticals, such as bioinformatics, oil and gas, and media, customers see tremendous value in the density, manageability and scalability of the ExDS system but are looking for very specific solutions with software stacks that are customized for their particular application needs.

For example, Calvin mentioned our partner Ocarina Networks. With Ocarina, we've built a media archiving solution for a major film studio that allows it to maintain an online archive of its digital assets, using Ocarina's advanced content compression and optimization algorithms that include specific tuning for the data formats used in the industry. Similarly, we've seen bioinformatics and oil and gas customers looking to bring parts of the software stack down into the storage layer, in ways that provide specific value to their applications.

Now, there are customers looking to adopt something in this space for the first time, and we'll work with them, including offering an HP-provided option -- but the key point is that our approach is based on supporting the customer's desire at once to have a market-leading storage system that provides unparalleled terabyte density, power efficiency and operational and acquisition cost effectiveness and at the same time let them retain the flexibility to build an appropriate software stack on top of that, that doesn't lock them in to one vendor.

We'll be talking more about how other customers are using the ExDS9100 in the coming months, but for now I'll just say that I think this emerging market for capacity-optimized storage is one where there will be more diversity and innovation, rather than less, and where customers will have more ability to customize their environments for their own needs -- and will not have to place all their data into some vendor's opaque cloud.

Michael Callahan, Chief Technologist
HP StorageWorks Scalable NAS Division

Pie in the Sky with Atmos?

CalvinZ — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 19:49:00 GMT

Welcome to the party, EMC (Thanks Chuck for the preannouncement the other day and to all the other Twitter messages that made it clear what was happening). I'm glad after Joe Tucci promised this to be available in May and then again by the end of summer, you are finally announcing your product. But alas, we're still short on details. How much will you charge? We already announced pricing back in May, under $2GB. The HP StorageWorks 9100 Extreme Data Storage System (ExDS9100) will be shipping product around the end of November. EMC claimed general availability in June, but customers tell us it is not ready for prime time. Every single deal we have been in with EMC, we have won.

Now let us explore a few shortcomings in EMC's product (based on the few details we have) compared with the ExDS9100:

To compare with our ExDS9100 Max Config: it takes 3 racks of EMC's WS1 product (see hardware brochure) which includes 20 servers and 840 disks. This totals 6,452 lbs and 21 sq ft of floor space, compared to our 4,442 lbs and 12sqft. Almost double the floor space and 50% heavier. Better set aside some budget for that.
Hardware is: Less storage, less CPU, less dense, fixed server/disk ratios, and in 2 of 3 rack options, EMC is using non-standard oversized cabinets. Can you feel your total cost of ownership increasing?
EMC speaks to scalability, but storage appears to only be packaged in fixed rack increments with fixed CPU ratios. From what is shared the only expansion path is buying another rack. That's not helpful to customers. Pour more money into your TCO budget.
Where is EMC getting the hardware? HP has industry standard components and the leading server/drive vendor in the market. EMC has to cobble together the hardware and software into a nice vendor lock-in proprietary bag of tricks. Cha-ching.
HP has a 3^rd-party partner program. First vendor to announce an offering is Ocarina Networks. They will provide software data reduction (compression and de-duplication). EMC is going down the proprietary software route. (More on this in a follow-up post from my colleague Michael Callahan).
Is Maui shipping? Nothing in the release or on the web site actually says it is available. Details?

EMC is famous for marketing-hype and spin without details. Does anyone else remember their WideSky initiative? I can't help but think this is the same old story. I wonder if the relationship between names is any indication to where EMC's head is at?

We are happy to go toe-to-toe with Atmos (Maui...Hulk...or whatever the name is) and continue to win deals.

Michael Callahan, Chief Technologist from our Enterprise NAS team will add his thoughts about the EMC software in another post later today.

P.S. I noticed a very interesting take on this from Stephen Foskett on his blog - take a look here. His post got me wondering if the positioning conflict between VMware and Maui is why Diane Greene, the former VMware CEO left EMC.

Where is Maui? A follow-up

CalvinZ — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 16:46:00 GMT

I had a couple of previous post asking about EMC's Hulk and Maui and noticed that Chris Mellor, a storage reporter for The Register, has an article asking many of the same questions I asked. Here's a link to his story: http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2008/11/04/emc_maui_another_invista/.

A couple of observations:

The title of Chris' story says a lot: "Is EMC's Maui another Invista? Biting off more than it can chew". I thought about discussing this in my first post but didn't as it wasn't core to the points I wanted to make. However, since Chris brought it up in his story, I'll mention it here. EMC has had a history of turning up the hype meter but not delivering on their promises. As Chris points out, Invista is an example; EMC's claim of being the "ILM company" is another. Another recent example of this is EMC's hyping of solid state technology. They know they will be at a huge disadvantage to HP with our desktop to data center capabilities and took an overselling communications approach with solid state. From their soapbox, they've claimed to be the market leader. When it's all said and done, I think history will bear out that this is another overcommitment and EMC's hype machine turned up the volume on this. They have a soapbox as the leading storage-only vendor and customers listen -- it's unfortuate that customers listen to so much of what EMC promises and their hype. Contrast that with the HP brand - we don't hype, we do our best to not over-promise - we do everything we can to be trustworthy.

Chris concludes his article by saying "...EMC will have undershot terribly the expectations it has set. Without the infrastructure Maui will be in danger of becoming another Invista (EMC's SAN director-hosted storage virtualisation and management software): a worthy idea oversold and under-delivered". My response is so what else is new - not much has changed with EMC over the years.

ExDS9100 is real, we have orders, and it will be shipping soon. That's exactly what we said in May, nothing oversold, no under-delivering. And imagine Chuck, all this from a "server/storage vendor"!

Where in the world is Maui or Hulk for that matter? Part 2

CalvinZ — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 19:46:00 GMT

In my previous post, we talked about EMC's Hulk/Maui and its conspicuous absence after early hyping by EMC management. Today I want to focus on the HP StorageWorks 9100 Extreme Data Storage System or ExDS9100. We announced it in May and at that time gave a lot of details about the product, saying it would ship by Q4. You can see the hp.com page that we created for that announcement by clicking here. Unlike EMC, everything is on track and we are delivering ExDS9100 as promised.

The ExDS9100 is a system that includes storage, servers, and software. The easiest way to think about Extreme Data Storage is file serving on steroids. The system starts at 246TB and scales to 820TB. You can scale the performance or storage capacity independently. HP has a distinct advantage over storage only vendors like EMC and here's why:

ExDS9100 uses our industry leading BladeSystem c-Class - we call the increments of performance a performance block. The system starts with 4 performance blocks and can scale up to 16 performance blocks . If you want to increase the file serving performance of ExDS9100, you just add a performance block. EMC doesn't have the systems expertise or the market leadership in server blades to build a system like this. They also don't have the economies of scale that HP does to drive to the lowest possible price. A few years ago, EMC exited the Windows based NAS business for exactly this reason - they could not compete with HP.
Storage capacity is added in what we call a capacity block and each is 82TB of capacity. The base system is three capacity blocks and can scale to 10 capacity blocks.
ExDS9100 is a system with a single management interface. Another advantage of a solution like this from HP is managing it as a system. EMC seems to like to build solutions like this with a Legos mentality -- their building blocks come from many different partners making the management of their solutions very complex. One of the design objectives of the ExDS9100 was to make it easy to manage and easy to deploy. You can't do that with a cobbled together solution.
We developed new technologies to address the customer needs we are addressing with ExDS9100. The new capacity blocks were built using BladeSystem technology and are space efficient by taking the full depth of an industry standard rack.

We're excited to ship ExDS9100 and is proof positive that we have an advantage over storage only vendors -- engineering and delivering solutions that leverage our industry leading portfolio. I'm sure we'll continue to see rants from EMC trying to convince customers that HP isn't a good storage partner because we are not focused on storage. Rubbish. I think EMC sees the huge advantage that we have by leveraging our portfolio and are trying their best to create FUD where they have no response.

Have a great weekend!

Where in the world is Maui or Hulk for that matter?

CalvinZ — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 22:18:00 GMT

Where in the world is Maui? If I was talking geography, that's an easy question to answer. But since we're talking storage, the whereabouts of Maui remains a mystery. Hulk/ Maui were pre-announced by EMC CEO Joe Tucci at last November's Innovation Day. Not a lot of details were given but the audience was told that Hulk/ Maui would be shipping by May 2008. It was a hot topic of discussion by attendees at EMC World but basically all EMC would say publicly is that it would be announced by the summer 2008.

Well, we've already had snow in Boise and my calendar says summer 2008 has come and gone yet still no sign of Hulk/Maui. There was an ever so brief sighting on an EMC blog that "demonstrated" their offering via a video but that post was quickly pulled off the blog with no explanation (see the SearchStorage blog about this here). I find this interesting given the chest thumping we continually hear from EMC about how server/storage vendors don't make good storage vendors.

Enter the HP StorageWorks 9100 Extreme Data Storage System (ExDS9100). HP is actively working with customers that are evaluating both ExDS9100 and Hulk/Maui. I'll let you in on a few details that are coming in from those customers:

HP has not lost an ExDS9100 deal to Hulk/Maui
I know of at least a few customers that have said Maui isn't ready for prime time and have stopped their evaluation
HP is taking orders on the ExDS9100 and it will be shipping VERY soon

In the next post I'll talk more about the ExDS9100 and why it's a solution that a storage only vendor like EMC would struggle to bring to market.

P.S: Chuck, we look forward to your response but not really expecting anything.

See the latest Hulk/Maui rumor de jour from StorageTopics blog: http://www.storagetopics.com/2008/10/notes-from-rumor-mill-infiniflex-10000.html (Advice - don't hold your breath waiting for Hulk & Maui)