Quick question - do you believe the whoever you elected is smart enough economically to represent your personal interests effectively? Do you think that the gang in Washington DC will help you get to better times?
Just curious.
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Saturday, June 20, 2009
Update
Well, it's been too long since I've used this blog. A lot has happened in the last year and blogging fell by the wayside. But, time to get things going again since I've had a little break from last years intensity.
I've joined Chesapeake Advisory Partners, LLC as Chief Exec - a boutique hands on investment company focused on storage networking and other related technology ventures. We are specifically interested in pre-revenue early stage companies that have great, innovative ideas, perhaps a prototype or design and are looking for help and guidance in getting to revenue.
At the moment, we are involved in 4 small companies like this - 3 of which already have modest levels of revenue due to the acquisition of IP and customers or association with another development agency.
We are really interested in solid state storage and object based management of flash at the controller level. One of our fledgling companies has an early prototype hybrid storage system that uses a combination of SSD and conventional drives in a clever, optimized way to get superior performance at system list prices below $0.75 per GB (and it's very quiet!) Stay tuned...
I've joined Chesapeake Advisory Partners, LLC as Chief Exec - a boutique hands on investment company focused on storage networking and other related technology ventures. We are specifically interested in pre-revenue early stage companies that have great, innovative ideas, perhaps a prototype or design and are looking for help and guidance in getting to revenue.
At the moment, we are involved in 4 small companies like this - 3 of which already have modest levels of revenue due to the acquisition of IP and customers or association with another development agency.
We are really interested in solid state storage and object based management of flash at the controller level. One of our fledgling companies has an early prototype hybrid storage system that uses a combination of SSD and conventional drives in a clever, optimized way to get superior performance at system list prices below $0.75 per GB (and it's very quiet!) Stay tuned...
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
Seagate ES.2 - SAS or SATA?
Seagate recently announced a SAS interface version of the 7,200 RPM ES.2 500GB and 1TB drives. Although they are based upon the same internal drive components as the SATA drives, they have a SAS interface. But, I have not seen many companies referring to them in their storage products yet. Looking at the specs, the SAS version shows better stated performance at 116MB/sec max sustained transfer rate compared to 105MB/sec max for the SATA version with both interface types rated at 3Gb/sec. Other differences are that the SAS version is dual-ported, consumes slightly more power and has 16MB cache instead of 32MB in the SATA. The remaining specs are identical and Seagate positions them both as “high-capacity, business-critical Tier 2 enterprise drives.
Wasabi just completed benchmarking otherwise identical VMX appliances with both drive variants. Bottom line – we were able to achieve sustained 800MB/s with a 12 drive RAID 6 array compared to 550MB/s with the equivalent 12 drive SATA version. Conclusion – these are great drives for enterprise high capacity storage applications. Much less expensive than the 15k RPM SAS drives, but up to 30% better performance in actual applications compared to the SATA version at the same TB size. Wasabi offers both variants in its VMX iSCSI SAN products.
My contacts at Seagate refer to them as “SAS drives” by the way.
Wasabi just completed benchmarking otherwise identical VMX appliances with both drive variants. Bottom line – we were able to achieve sustained 800MB/s with a 12 drive RAID 6 array compared to 550MB/s with the equivalent 12 drive SATA version. Conclusion – these are great drives for enterprise high capacity storage applications. Much less expensive than the 15k RPM SAS drives, but up to 30% better performance in actual applications compared to the SATA version at the same TB size. Wasabi offers both variants in its VMX iSCSI SAN products.
My contacts at Seagate refer to them as “SAS drives” by the way.
Saturday, September 6, 2008
Well, summer is over and it’s back to school time. I can tell that because trade show planning has started and the September tropical storms and hurricanes are upon us. In fact, I just came back from doubling all the lines on my sailboat as the eye of Hanna passes over us. Obviously, I took a break from blogging over the summer but it’s back to work time now. I’m operating from battery power at the moment since the storm knocked out our power as it started – a good reminder of the vulnerability of our power grid and our dependence upon it. No email, no football, no news…
Next week Wasabi will announce and demonstrate an upgraded series of VMX iSCSI SAN appliances at VMworld. This includes our new high end VMX 2000sx platform in a robust 10GbE “Data Center in a Crate”. This portable Data Center contains 2 12TB VMX iSCSI arrays in a RAID6 configuration, “thinly provisioned” to 100TB with snapshots and VSS. The iSCSI SANs are connected to 2 VMware ESX3.5 servers and a third VMotion server all over 10GbE plugged into a Fujitsu 10GbE switch! We will be showing VMotion and Storage VMotion with a suite of common Web2.0 applications. All of this in a rugged shock mount shippable crate.
This demo proves to me that 10GbE is here and ready and blows away fibre channel. Wasabi has benchmarked the raw network throughput roundtrip between a VMX appliance and Linux / Windows clients at 9.8Gbit/sec – line rate performance while using less than 20% CPU. With Seagate ES.2 1TB SAS drives, the 10GbE VMX appliance achieves sustained read and write throughput of 800MB/Sec with sequential I/O! Oh, our high end VMX has been upgraded to a quad core Xeon too.
Hope to see you at VMworld. Watch for more details in our press releases next week!
Next week Wasabi will announce and demonstrate an upgraded series of VMX iSCSI SAN appliances at VMworld. This includes our new high end VMX 2000sx platform in a robust 10GbE “Data Center in a Crate”. This portable Data Center contains 2 12TB VMX iSCSI arrays in a RAID6 configuration, “thinly provisioned” to 100TB with snapshots and VSS. The iSCSI SANs are connected to 2 VMware ESX3.5 servers and a third VMotion server all over 10GbE plugged into a Fujitsu 10GbE switch! We will be showing VMotion and Storage VMotion with a suite of common Web2.0 applications. All of this in a rugged shock mount shippable crate.
This demo proves to me that 10GbE is here and ready and blows away fibre channel. Wasabi has benchmarked the raw network throughput roundtrip between a VMX appliance and Linux / Windows clients at 9.8Gbit/sec – line rate performance while using less than 20% CPU. With Seagate ES.2 1TB SAS drives, the 10GbE VMX appliance achieves sustained read and write throughput of 800MB/Sec with sequential I/O! Oh, our high end VMX has been upgraded to a quad core Xeon too.
Hope to see you at VMworld. Watch for more details in our press releases next week!
Saturday, April 5, 2008
Forrester Research says Fibre Channel Network Connectivity Costs 3-7 Times More Than iSCSI
Last month (February 7, 2008) Forrester Research published a research report titled “Cost Comparison Of iSCSI Versus Fibre Channel SAN Components” by Andrew Reichman. They provide a detailed and practical overview explaining some often overlooked implementation factors related to installing a SAN. The research focuses on 4 primary factors:
1. Server side connectivity issues
2. Switch costs
3. Array side connectivity
4. Cabling
Key differences in server side connectivity are that an iSCSI SAN can utilize a variety of approaches beginning with utilization of onboard NICs within a server. In some cases, server load impact due to iSCSI traffic can require an upgrade to a TOE or a fully offloaded HBA (though our internal testing shows that modern NICs run just fine in typical SME workload scenarios without imposing excessive overhead). Other incremental costs for Fibre channel come by virtue of having to pay for multi-pathing, both software and incremental hardware, whereas Ethernet/iSCSI multi-pathing comes for free in Windows, BSD and Linux.
Switch costs are higher for Fibre channel on a per port basis due to the fact that they do not enjoy the same economy of scale that we see in enterprise Ethernet switches. A high end Ethernet switch is typically one fifth of the cost per port ($300) compared to a director class FC switch ($1,500). For smaller SANs, the difference is a 50% reduction ($600 per port for a non-director class FC switch).
On the array side, since common server components are used, the cost per Ethernet attach port is also lower. Most iSCSI SANs have two Ethernet ports standard per controller, but can be inexpensively upgraded to 4 or 6 ports (see Wasabi VMX series for example). With 10GbE coming into play at under $1k per port and rapidly dropping, the differential is preserved.
Cabling costs are also often not considered. In the report, Reichman compares 3 meter optical cabling to 6 meter CAT 6 Ethernet and arrives at an average cost of $12 per connection for iSCSI and $50-150 per connection for Fibre Channel.
Putting it all together, Fibre Channel costs 2.5 to 7 times the price of iSCSI connectivity (ignoring the costs of the array and disks). In dollars – compare $400,000 for FC networking to $100,000 for a similar 100-server iSCSI networking.
Beyond the hard cost difference above (which are compelling stand-alone) there are soft costs that further reduce TCO resulting from increased staff efficiency since there is only one network topology to manage. Additional benefits come from having a broader pool of qualified IT professionals capable of managing storage, improved switch utilization due to commonality, more parts sparing, improved SAN security and enhanced virtualization capabilities.
I like the Recommendations section that starts with “Beware of politics and religion” – the main source of objections to iSCSI. Large enterprise Fibre Channel shops want to preserve the status quo and not cede their control and budget to the network IT staff… Managers should be aware of this and look into the cost differences. The report is cheap (less than a single FC port @ $279) and can be purchased here.
A new article in Processor (April 08) cites this research in a very positive way, but attempts to throw some FC FUD at it – good examples of politics and religion mobilized.
1. Server side connectivity issues
2. Switch costs
3. Array side connectivity
4. Cabling
Key differences in server side connectivity are that an iSCSI SAN can utilize a variety of approaches beginning with utilization of onboard NICs within a server. In some cases, server load impact due to iSCSI traffic can require an upgrade to a TOE or a fully offloaded HBA (though our internal testing shows that modern NICs run just fine in typical SME workload scenarios without imposing excessive overhead). Other incremental costs for Fibre channel come by virtue of having to pay for multi-pathing, both software and incremental hardware, whereas Ethernet/iSCSI multi-pathing comes for free in Windows, BSD and Linux.
Switch costs are higher for Fibre channel on a per port basis due to the fact that they do not enjoy the same economy of scale that we see in enterprise Ethernet switches. A high end Ethernet switch is typically one fifth of the cost per port ($300) compared to a director class FC switch ($1,500). For smaller SANs, the difference is a 50% reduction ($600 per port for a non-director class FC switch).
On the array side, since common server components are used, the cost per Ethernet attach port is also lower. Most iSCSI SANs have two Ethernet ports standard per controller, but can be inexpensively upgraded to 4 or 6 ports (see Wasabi VMX series for example). With 10GbE coming into play at under $1k per port and rapidly dropping, the differential is preserved.
Cabling costs are also often not considered. In the report, Reichman compares 3 meter optical cabling to 6 meter CAT 6 Ethernet and arrives at an average cost of $12 per connection for iSCSI and $50-150 per connection for Fibre Channel.
Putting it all together, Fibre Channel costs 2.5 to 7 times the price of iSCSI connectivity (ignoring the costs of the array and disks). In dollars – compare $400,000 for FC networking to $100,000 for a similar 100-server iSCSI networking.
Beyond the hard cost difference above (which are compelling stand-alone) there are soft costs that further reduce TCO resulting from increased staff efficiency since there is only one network topology to manage. Additional benefits come from having a broader pool of qualified IT professionals capable of managing storage, improved switch utilization due to commonality, more parts sparing, improved SAN security and enhanced virtualization capabilities.
I like the Recommendations section that starts with “Beware of politics and religion” – the main source of objections to iSCSI. Large enterprise Fibre Channel shops want to preserve the status quo and not cede their control and budget to the network IT staff… Managers should be aware of this and look into the cost differences. The report is cheap (less than a single FC port @ $279) and can be purchased here.
A new article in Processor (April 08) cites this research in a very positive way, but attempts to throw some FC FUD at it – good examples of politics and religion mobilized.
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
Users Flocking to iSCSI SANs
Deni Connor just published an article this week in Byte and Switch that cites a number of reasons why IT managers are deploying iSCSI SANs.
Key reasons she reports are:
==> They are easy to configure and install,
==> They are inexpensive compared to “costly Fibre Channel” SANs, and
==> They do not require a specialized skill set to manage.
==> They are inexpensive compared to “costly Fibre Channel” SANs, and
==> They do not require a specialized skill set to manage.
We have known for years that “iSCSI is coming” for these reasons. Ethernet had to win once the performance playing field was leveled. So, finally iSCSI is here to stay – Gartner projects growth to $3B in revenue by 2011.
So what’s the downside? There really isn’t one, other than perhaps some last gasp ridicule from the “big iron” dinosaurs. With 10Gb Ethernet coming into the mainstream this year and next, the reasons for adopting are even more compelling. The old argument that iSCSI has limited performance compared to Fibre Channel is just not grounded in fact.
Friday, March 7, 2008
IDC Says that iSCSI Market Grew 70%
The iSCSI market grew 70% in 2007 according to IDC. This is another solid validation of the technology and it’s growing reach. Key reasons cited by Liz Connor were simplicity, cost and broader application support.
Some other numbers cited: overall growth in fourth quarter for disk systems shipped was up 7.6% to $7.5 billion. Total petabytes shipped was 1,645 petabytes. Doing some quick (arbitrary and only partially scientific) math, assuming average drive size of 500GB, an “average” array size of 12 drives; that means more than 250,000 arrays shipped in the quarter. I may be way off, but it’s an interesting and big number.
Even in a market downturn with fears of imminent recession, demand for data storage keeps moving. As budgets become tighter more people will consider iSCSI SANs to replace their DAS as they seek to consolidate and simplify their storage infrastructure.
Some other numbers cited: overall growth in fourth quarter for disk systems shipped was up 7.6% to $7.5 billion. Total petabytes shipped was 1,645 petabytes. Doing some quick (arbitrary and only partially scientific) math, assuming average drive size of 500GB, an “average” array size of 12 drives; that means more than 250,000 arrays shipped in the quarter. I may be way off, but it’s an interesting and big number.
Even in a market downturn with fears of imminent recession, demand for data storage keeps moving. As budgets become tighter more people will consider iSCSI SANs to replace their DAS as they seek to consolidate and simplify their storage infrastructure.
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