Not letting the Wookie Win

Body

I'm following theadvice of Tim Sanders, who reminds us ["Don't let the Wookie always win"].

In this case, it is not chess pieces, but FUD being slung around like mud between vendors. EMC blogger Chuck Hollis' post [Products vs. Features] correctly pointsout that IBM has invented most nearly everything useful in IT, and sadly a few things we wish we hadn't.Gene Amdahl, who left IBM to start his own company, is credited for coining the phrase describing IBM'sinnovative sales techniques. Wikipedia has a nice write up on the history of[Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt(FUD)].

Nowadays, when you hear "FUD" most storage administrators immediately think of EMC, who have taken this method to anew level of art-form. Take for example two EMC entries from fellow blogger BarryB, on his Storage Anarchist blog:[Not Dead Yet, andPushing Daisies].The first is a reference to a funny scene from a Monty Python movie, and the second one is referring to a terriblenew television program called "Pushing Daisies". (In this show, the main character can bring a dead personback to life for sixty seconds, just long enough to ask a few questions on behalf of his detective friend. He must touch the person again within 60 seconds, or someone else randomly dies instead. I amnot a fan of this concept, and found it a bit morbid and creepy. But I digress.)

It is true I was on vacation the past two weeks, but this was group travel I booked over six months ago before we had the exact dates lined up for our various announcements, and not a last-minute celebration of my recent new job assignment. I got all my assignments for this announcement turned in before leaving for my trip. I never thought of checking with fellow IBM blogger BarryW to make sure that we don't have overlapping vacation schedules, leaving the "blogosphere" unmanned, so to speak, but it is not a bad idea. Fortunately, our IBM PR team was able to make their rebuttal through other means. You can read the recap on Techworld [Marketing Wars by Proxy].

Several astute readers on my blog, however, requested that I add my two cents. Let's take a look at some of BarryB's comments:

...most DS8300's are to this day most frequently bundled as "free" storage with IBM mainframe and server sales.

We just shipped our 15,000th box, so for this absurd statement to be true, more than half would have to be given away as part of a server-and-storage deal?Actually, about a third of our DS8000 sales are sold with servers in the same bundle, and while we do provide discounts from the official list price, that is not the same as "free". The other two thirds are sold into accounts to be used with the existing servers already deployed. So BarryB, your math doesn't work out. (Perhaps you've been taking Hitachi math lessons???)

It is interesting however, that when we do a 4-year TCO comparison, between a normally-discounted DS8000 versus free EMC DMX4 hardware, IBM still has the lower cost, given that most of the price-gouging from EMC happens after the initial sale, through software features, annual Powerpath renewals and MES upgrades. If you are an EMC customer, and you are planning to add more capacity to your DMX, ask EMC to charge you no more than what you originally paid on a dollar-per-GB basis for the initial capacity. That's only fair, right?

...No thin provisioning, or even a commitment to thin provisioning. Just crickets. (Celerra support since Jan 2006...

EMC DMX does not have thin provisioning available today either, so BarryB brings up Celerra, their NAS box? IBM System Storage N series NAS box also has thin provisioning, so if you want thin provisioning you can buy a NAS box from EMC or IBM. Thin provisioning makes sense using NAS protocols, as there are actual commands to "delete a file" that can then free up the related blocks in a thin-provisioned environment. The only way to do this with block-oriented protocols is to get the OS to notify the storage device that blocks can be freed up. As it turns out, IBM's z/OS has such support, which we developed specifically for our thin-provisioning support in our IBM RAMAC Virtual Array disk systems back in the 1990s.For block-oriented devices on most other operating systems, thin provisioning may not be all that it is cracked up to be.

No SATA drives (only DMX-4 supports native SATA-II drives, since Aug’07)

A few people are confused on this. IBM DS8000 has supported FATA for quite some time now, same slower speeds and higher capacities as SATA, but are technically NOT the same as SATA. FATA are designed to provide better protection against vibrational shock, to improve reliability of the drives. IBM felt that if the data was important enough to put on a high-end system, it should get better-than-SATA treatment. If you really want SATA, try our IBM System Storage N series, DS4000 or DS3000 models.

No RAID 6 (DMX-3 has supported multi-dimensional RAID since Q1’07, DMX-4 since Aug'07, ...

IBM N series supports RAID6, but we called it RAID-DP and that confused some people. Same thing, DP stands for Dual Parity, protecting against a double-disk failure. We also just announced RAID6 on our DS4000 series, by the way.

No 4Gb back-end (USP-V since May '07, DMX-4 since Aug’07)

I found this one odd, since BarryB himself in an earlier post explained why 4Gbps back-end made no difference to DMX4 performance in this post [DMX-4 and Oh So Much More], which I will put into a different color so you can tell it is from a different post:

You may have noticed that there weren't any specific performance claims attributed to the new 4Gb FC back-end. This wasn't an oversight, it is in fact intentional. The reality is that when it comes to massive-cache storage architectures, there really isn't that much of a difference between 2Gb/s transfer speeds and 4Gb/s. Transmit times are really only a tiny portion of I/O overhead, and just don't make that much difference when a massively-cached system is pre-fetching reads, buffering/delaying writes and reordering I/O requests to minimize seek times. Not that 4Gb/s won't help some applications, but most people just won't see any noticeable difference.

In this case, BarryB is right. The IBM DS8000's 2Gbps back-end is not a performance bottleneck. The DS8000 with a 2Gbps back-end is faster than DMX4 with a 4Gbps back-end for business application workloads. EMC doesn't publish SPC benchmarks to deny this, so you will just have to take our word on this.

Still only 1024 maximum disk drives (DMX-3 & 4 support up to 2400 drives, USP-V supports 1152)

I would be curious to see how many customers have more than 1024 drives on any high-end disk array.As we learned back in [Day 2 Storage Symposium], the average DS8100 has 17.4 TB, and DS8300 has 41.5 TB capacity. Using 500GB drives,that's only 83 spindles. Even with 73GB drives, that's 568 spindles. Plenty of room for growth, so I am notconvinced that higher theoretical upper architectural limits are worth discussing here.

Still only two HARD LPARs (partitions) ..., and even IBM’s mid-tier products support more than 2 storage partitions (in this same announcement)

IBM's two LPARs are TWICE what EMC DMX offers. I don't even know why anyone from EMC would bring this up? While EMC is enjoying their success with VMware, the lack the experience to carry this over to their storage lines. Until EMC offers MORE THAN TWO of any kind of partitions on their high-end offerings, there just is no credibility here. As for our "storage partitions" on our DS4000 line, that is an unfortunate mis-understanding of the press release. On the DS4000, the term "storage partition" is really "LUN masking", dividing up only which disks can be accessed by which hosts, and not dividing up any processor or cache capacity. So this is not the same as any LPAR concept on any other system. For example, a DS4000 with 64 partitions can be attached to 64 hosts, or 64 host-clusters like a Windows MSCS environment or AIX HACMP.

No native Ethernet replication or iSCSI support (Symmetrix has had since 2002)

Again, I found this one odd. On another EMC post, [Vigorous Debates],Chad Sakac mentions that only 2% of Symmetrix are sold with IP ports, not sure if this is for Ethernet replication, iSCSI attachment, or both (Again, I will use a different color):

On the Symm business (a huge part of EMC’s business – the IP ports are included on 2% of deals. That’s a fact.

Just because engineer can put a feature or function on a box, doesn't mean there is business sense to do so. I would hate for IBM to invest millions of dollars on native iSCSI support, only to have 2% of our DS8000 boxes sold with that feature. Customers who have DS8000 on FC SANs already deployed can easily add iSCSI support either through their SAN switches, or by fronting the DS8000 with an N series gateway. Most customers looking for native iSCSI are the smaller no-SAN-deployed SMB customers, and for them, we have both the DS3300 and the various N series models to choose from.

Well that's my two cents. The DS8000 series remains a strategic part of the IBM System Storage offering matrix, with continued investment in the development, as well as on-going research that we can leverage throughout the IBM company. I would like to read your thoughts on this, post me a comment below.

technorati tags: Tim Sanders, Wookie, C3-PO, Star Wars, chess, FUD, Amdahl, Monty Python, Pushing Daisies, BarryB, Storage Anarchist, IBM, disk, systems, DS8000, DS8300, DS8100, TCO, EMC, DMX, DMX4, thin provisioning, Celerra, z/OS, RAMAC Virtual Array, RVA, SATA, FATA, RAID-6, RAID6, RAID-DP, 4Gb, 4Gbps, 2Gbps, back-end, LPAR, LUN masking, MSCS, AIX, HACMP, DS4000, DS3000, Chad Sakac, iSCSI, Ethernet, IP