As expected from conference schedule, Google conference turned out to be a technical event primarily focused on parallel programming and infrastructure scalability. At last minute, Google decided to merge two tracks in to one. Though, I got to attend all the sessions, they felt time-compressed and rushed. I was surprised to see lot of attendees who came from outside Seattle. I met quite a few people from Bay area, Canada and Europe. I enjoyed the sessions though some audience members commented about very technical nature of the conference compared to previous year. As Brian Bershad, Google commented in his welcome speech, the challenge is to find technologies and solutions to scale handling search queries from 600 million to 6 billion. And, I came away better informed on different challenges and potential solutions we may see down the road.
I also sat down and chatted with Robin Harris. We decided to forego making a video of our conversation. I am not a big fan of talking head videos or podcasts unless they leverage the unique values of these methods not available through written words or pictures. And who wants to listen to two storage bloggers chatting about nothing. I find them miserable myself so why put others through the same misery.
In my opinion, three sessions: CARMEN: a Scalable Science Cloud [PDF], GIGA+: Scalable Directories for Shared File Systems [PDF] and maidsafe stood out at the conference from infrastructure scalability perspective. Communicating Like Nemo was very entertaining. The common theme in audience questions on most infrastructure presentations was reliability, availability, scalability, and security of the offered solution. It is a good indication of what is on the mind of people when evaluating new infrastructure offerings. With the popularity of hashing in storage of data, speeding up hash lookup is becoming an interesting problem for scalability.
David Irvine's session on maidsafe was the only session where a speaker white-boarded most of the presentation. His confidence and knowledge was commendable. Not many speakers can pull off white-boarding 80% of presentation with 100s in audience. Comparing maidsafe with ant colony was an interesting way to show scalability and simplicity of solution. Maidsafe solution seems to be in same category as RevStor, Seanodes, Cleversafe, Oceanstor, Farsite and several others that are trying to leverage storage across 100s and 1,000s of distributed nodes in a peer-to-peer or quid pro quo network, a solution most likely attractive to players in cloud and web distribution market.
Showing posts with label Innovation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Innovation. Show all posts
Monday, June 16, 2008
Thursday, June 12, 2008
Heading to Google Scalability Conference
Like Robin Harris, I am also attending Google Scalability Conference in Seattle Friday and Saturday. Hopefully, I will see him at the event. All sessions at Google conference look good. Unfortunately, I will miss half of them as two tracks are running in parallel. I am looking forward to hearing about maidsafe, CARMEN, GIGA+, and Google Maps scale down.
Recently, several readers inquired whether I lost interest in blogging as I am posting very irregularly. Nothing can be further from the truth. I am still as excited about blogging as I was almost five years ago when I first delve into blogs. The lack of frequent updates is due to my attention being somewhere else (new dig, rig and gig). Will elaborate some other time.
BTW, checkout Storage Optimization blog by Carter George. His startup Ocarina got interesting story with their data footprint reduction technology. I am looking forward to learning more once I refocus on new exciting stuff in storage. Hopefully, Ocarina can change the KPCB's luck in storage space.
Recently, several readers inquired whether I lost interest in blogging as I am posting very irregularly. Nothing can be further from the truth. I am still as excited about blogging as I was almost five years ago when I first delve into blogs. The lack of frequent updates is due to my attention being somewhere else (new dig, rig and gig). Will elaborate some other time.
BTW, checkout Storage Optimization blog by Carter George. His startup Ocarina got interesting story with their data footprint reduction technology. I am looking forward to learning more once I refocus on new exciting stuff in storage. Hopefully, Ocarina can change the KPCB's luck in storage space.
Sunday, March 23, 2008
Is number of objects true indicator of Amazon S3 growth?
In my last blog post, I estimated the data stored on Amazon S3 in exabyte range using 18 billion objects stored reported by Amazon CTO, Werner Vogels in his blog post.
In retrospect, it was an over-estimation by several order of magnitude (my bad) that was promptly corrected by MikeDoug using another data point AWS revenue. MikeDoug estimated (comment excerpts below) the data stored to be in 20PB (petabyte) range, way short of my estimates and may be more closer to reality.
No, doubt, it is still a significantly large number for a service that is only few years old. But, S3 growing up fast may not be as obvious from growth in stored objects as Vogels would like us to believe.
On average, each object is only storing about a megabyte of data. This number seems quite low so either deleted objects are being included in the published number of objects or developers are keeping object size low to prevent transfer timeouts.
On average, each developer is only storing 54GB of data. Considering some services like SmugMug are storing terabytes of data on S3, most probably there are lot of registered developers either not using S3 actively for storing data or have services under development.
In retrospect, it was an over-estimation by several order of magnitude (my bad) that was promptly corrected by MikeDoug using another data point AWS revenue. MikeDoug estimated (comment excerpts below) the data stored to be in 20PB (petabyte) range, way short of my estimates and may be more closer to reality.
No, doubt, it is still a significantly large number for a service that is only few years old. But, S3 growing up fast may not be as obvious from growth in stored objects as Vogels would like us to believe.
A recent report puts ALL of AWS at the 50 to 70 million in revenue for the year.Other interesting tidbits if S3 has 20PB of stored data, 18 billion objects and 330,000 registered developers:
Let us pretend that, of the 70 million, 40 million in revenue was attributed to S3 alone for last year. That would be $3,333,333 a month for S3. This converts to 22,222,222 gigabytes, or 0.02 exabytes.
On average, each object is only storing about a megabyte of data. This number seems quite low so either deleted objects are being included in the published number of objects or developers are keeping object size low to prevent transfer timeouts.
On average, each developer is only storing 54GB of data. Considering some services like SmugMug are storing terabytes of data on S3, most probably there are lot of registered developers either not using S3 actively for storing data or have services under development.
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
How much data is in Amazon S3?
Today, Werner Vogels mentioned in his blog post Happy Birthday, Amazon S3! about the second birthday of Amazon S3 and also shared that by Jan 2008, S3 is storing 14 billion objects. I am not sure why Werner and others at Amazon are so cagey about sharing actual storage capacity used in AWS. In the past, I also have met with either silence or "trade secret" or "competitive advantage" response to my inquiries.
In my opinion, it only creates room for speculation as I am going to do with this post. So, how much data is stored on S3?
My initial guesstimate for stored data volume is between 14 and 70EB (Yes, EB is Exabyte) based on the published information about the size of individual object being one to five GB. Doesn't it seem very high? At first, it did to me. I have been trying to come up with alternate methods to estimate stored data volume like the typical size and type of data being stored by various services that are using S3. Even with an average value of 100MB per object, the stored data volume comes out to be 1.4 Exabyte, still a huge number for such a young service.
What is your estimate? Any suggestions on estimation method to arrive at more accurate number for data volume stored on S3.
Considering that S3 may be hosting Exabyte or more of data with in two years of existence, no wonder all established vendors EMC, IBM, HP and Dell are salivating on getting a piece of the "Cloud Storage" pie.
In my opinion, it only creates room for speculation as I am going to do with this post. So, how much data is stored on S3?
My initial guesstimate for stored data volume is between 14 and 70EB (Yes, EB is Exabyte) based on the published information about the size of individual object being one to five GB. Doesn't it seem very high? At first, it did to me. I have been trying to come up with alternate methods to estimate stored data volume like the typical size and type of data being stored by various services that are using S3. Even with an average value of 100MB per object, the stored data volume comes out to be 1.4 Exabyte, still a huge number for such a young service.
What is your estimate? Any suggestions on estimation method to arrive at more accurate number for data volume stored on S3.
Considering that S3 may be hosting Exabyte or more of data with in two years of existence, no wonder all established vendors EMC, IBM, HP and Dell are salivating on getting a piece of the "Cloud Storage" pie.
Sunday, March 16, 2008
Bandwidth, one hurdle in adopting Cloud Storage
This weekend, I read NY Times article Video Road Hogs Stir Fear of Internet Traffic Jam.
If you review the introduction and growth of various Amazon Web Services (AWS), a comparatively established cloud player, you will notice very limited use cases of Simple Storage Service (S3) on its own with clients outside the cloud. Most S3 usage is fronted by another AWS in the cloud such as Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Such combinations overcome the challenge of transferring large amount of data between storage cloud and an application/server outside the cloud over Internet. For cloud storage to be successful, it need to be in the same cloud with application/server or connected to application/server cloud with high speed link.
Any technology that can reduce the data transfer between the cloud services and clients outside the cloud will be the big beneficiary in this trend. Caching, Compression, and Data De-duplication will most likely benefit in the near term. And, the future seems to be very much like the past aka mainframe - Desktop Virtualization, Streaming, and On-the-Fly Visualization.
So, how will new cloud players like Nirvanix, EMC Mozy and Rackspace differentiate?
Last year, by one estimate, the video site YouTube, owned by Google, consumed as much bandwidth as the entire Internet did in 2000. …While reading the article, it occurred to me that isn't bandwidth going to be the main hurdle in adoption of storage in the cloud. When clients are not happy with 10/100/1000Mbps connection with application/server/data center, how can they be happy with DSL/Cable/T1/T3 connection to the cloud? I am sure everyone has felt the pain of trying to transfer large datasets over the Internet.
In a widely cited report published last November, a research firm projected that user demand for the Internet could outpace network capacity by 2011. …
Moving images, far more than words or sounds, are hefty rivers of digital bits as they traverse the Internet’s pipes and gateways, requiring, in industry parlance, more bandwidth.
If you review the introduction and growth of various Amazon Web Services (AWS), a comparatively established cloud player, you will notice very limited use cases of Simple Storage Service (S3) on its own with clients outside the cloud. Most S3 usage is fronted by another AWS in the cloud such as Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Such combinations overcome the challenge of transferring large amount of data between storage cloud and an application/server outside the cloud over Internet. For cloud storage to be successful, it need to be in the same cloud with application/server or connected to application/server cloud with high speed link.
Any technology that can reduce the data transfer between the cloud services and clients outside the cloud will be the big beneficiary in this trend. Caching, Compression, and Data De-duplication will most likely benefit in the near term. And, the future seems to be very much like the past aka mainframe - Desktop Virtualization, Streaming, and On-the-Fly Visualization.
So, how will new cloud players like Nirvanix, EMC Mozy and Rackspace differentiate?
Sunday, July 01, 2007
3PAR: The Follow-up
Sometime, a blog post touches the nerves and that was the case with my last blog post 3PAR: Reversal of Fortune. I heard from numerous readers including people from Bluearc and 3PAR. Craig Nunes, VP Marketing at 3PAR sent me a detailed email highlighting the reasons why customers are choosing 3PAR.
The success of our products, as you mentioned hearing from several customers, has a lot to do with ease of use. Those who have chosen 3PAR have been able to provision capacity in seconds without preplanning. They have been able to eliminate performance tuning activities because all volumes have access to all resources within this massively parallel system. They have also been able to move data from one storage tier to another or redistribute existing volumes across new resources as they are added to the system in a single command, completely non-disruptively.Another reader put things more succinctly.
That being said, ease of use is only part of it -- efficiency is a also a big part of why customers have deployed 3PAR in their data centers. As you mentioned, Thin Provisioning is getting a great deal of attention and is now moving into large-scale deployments within very conservative companies. But efficient local and remote copy capabilities -- both built on thin copy technology -- are another major reason customers have chosen 3PAR. Organizations have taken substantial advantage of these products, deploying hourly (writeable) snapshots for granular and rapid recovery, and cost-effective tier one remote data replication solutions without the need for vendor professional services.
Finally, our customers have taken great advantage of the scalability of the array. The clustered, modular architecture eliminates the price premiums of the monolithic arrays and scaling complexity of modular array architectures. Our customers start small, with as few as two controllers, yet grow non-disruptively and massively within a single, fully-tiered system. Organizations, especially those with high growth requirements, have chosen to grown within their 3PAR array instead of facing the complexity of managing 5 or 10 or more arrays from other vendors.
Thin provisioning is great, and is definitely a killer feature, but it's not THE killer feature. I'd say it's one of four things that 3PAR does really well. The combination of those four things in one box, is what differentiates 3PAR from other vendors in the market.The key claims, Craig made were:
- Ease of use - Provision capacity without preplanning. Eliminate performance tuning.
- Efficiency - Thin provisioning. Efficient local and remote copy capabilities.
- Scalability of array - Clustered modular architecture. Grow non-disruptively and massively within a single fully-tiered system.
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
Gear6 trailblazing Network Caching
Earlier this week, I had great conversation with Gary Orenstien and Jack O’Brien at Gear6. Here are the excerpts from our conversation.
How is Gear6 doing?
Gear6 seems to be doing well. Several units are currently in field being evaluated by various customers. No specific number of units provided, just a wide range between 10 and 100. Company has over thirty employees and financially all set in the near term. Company has started to focus CACHEfx on financial analytics, energy and animation segments and will expand focus by the end of the year.
What are the benefits of network based caching?
Network caching enables increased cache utilization, flexibility and scalability. Caching is moving from end devices to network and becoming a network resource.
What one factor is attracting customers to your caching solution?
By nature of caching, the obvious benefit to customer is performance. Most customers who come to Gear6 have performance problems, variable workload and demand certain Quality of Service. The success rate is very good with evaluations by customers as CACHEfx appliance doesn’t require forklift replacement.
How is Gear6 doing caching?
CACHEfx appliance doesn’t use any conventional mechanical disk storage internally, 100% RAM cache and is pass through to persistent storage. Robust single purpose appliance designed to do one job and do that job very well.
The caching is performed intelligently. The intelligence focus on how and where data is placed within the appliance. There are extensive built-in statistics. Most customers are impressed by network sniffer like capability.
In the past, cache was a constrained resource. Now, focus is on right-sizing cache. CACHEfx expands from quarter TB to multi-TB, can be preloaded with data from persistent storage and adjust to variable I/O profile.
What are the reliability, availability and scalability features of CACHEfx appliance?
It is a clustered appliance, scalable from quarter TB to multi-TB. The appliance can be expanded on the fly. Also, appliance only acknowledges writes only when persistent storage sends acknowledgment.
Is the CACHEfx installed at D.E. Shaw working with Solaris cluster?
Gary declined to comment on infrastructure details of customer. He claimed customer pleased with the solution.
Any plans to introduce network caching for block-level traffic? The present product seems to focus on NFS only.
The present focus is on NFS, market is large enough. The sweet spot is where customer is using 100+ concurrent clients accessing single dataset, most tend to be NFS. No firm plans for addressing CIFS or block level traffic. The primary industry focus on financial analytic, energy and exploration, electronic design, animation, biotechnology, and media, primarily HPC oriented tasks.
How does network caching stack up with parallel file systems and clustered storage?
Caching addresses I/O constrained systems rather than processing constrained. Parallel file systems and clustered storage solutions are capacity centric not performance centric, providing global namespace for ever expanding storage capacity. They are not low latency solution. Network caching is a complementary solution, capacity complemented by performance. Gear6 solution complements Netapp OnTAP GX, IBRIX, Isilon and Acopia.
Do you have any thoughts on potential application of CACHEfx in a Wide Area Filer Network environment?
The CACHEfx has enormous potential in variety of environment. But we are currently very focused on solving customer problems within the data center. We are open to partnerships in other areas.
How is Gear6 doing?
Gear6 seems to be doing well. Several units are currently in field being evaluated by various customers. No specific number of units provided, just a wide range between 10 and 100. Company has over thirty employees and financially all set in the near term. Company has started to focus CACHEfx on financial analytics, energy and animation segments and will expand focus by the end of the year.
What are the benefits of network based caching?
Network caching enables increased cache utilization, flexibility and scalability. Caching is moving from end devices to network and becoming a network resource.
What one factor is attracting customers to your caching solution?
By nature of caching, the obvious benefit to customer is performance. Most customers who come to Gear6 have performance problems, variable workload and demand certain Quality of Service. The success rate is very good with evaluations by customers as CACHEfx appliance doesn’t require forklift replacement.
How is Gear6 doing caching?
CACHEfx appliance doesn’t use any conventional mechanical disk storage internally, 100% RAM cache and is pass through to persistent storage. Robust single purpose appliance designed to do one job and do that job very well.
The caching is performed intelligently. The intelligence focus on how and where data is placed within the appliance. There are extensive built-in statistics. Most customers are impressed by network sniffer like capability.
In the past, cache was a constrained resource. Now, focus is on right-sizing cache. CACHEfx expands from quarter TB to multi-TB, can be preloaded with data from persistent storage and adjust to variable I/O profile.
What are the reliability, availability and scalability features of CACHEfx appliance?
It is a clustered appliance, scalable from quarter TB to multi-TB. The appliance can be expanded on the fly. Also, appliance only acknowledges writes only when persistent storage sends acknowledgment.
Is the CACHEfx installed at D.E. Shaw working with Solaris cluster?
Gary declined to comment on infrastructure details of customer. He claimed customer pleased with the solution.
Any plans to introduce network caching for block-level traffic? The present product seems to focus on NFS only.
The present focus is on NFS, market is large enough. The sweet spot is where customer is using 100+ concurrent clients accessing single dataset, most tend to be NFS. No firm plans for addressing CIFS or block level traffic. The primary industry focus on financial analytic, energy and exploration, electronic design, animation, biotechnology, and media, primarily HPC oriented tasks.
How does network caching stack up with parallel file systems and clustered storage?
Caching addresses I/O constrained systems rather than processing constrained. Parallel file systems and clustered storage solutions are capacity centric not performance centric, providing global namespace for ever expanding storage capacity. They are not low latency solution. Network caching is a complementary solution, capacity complemented by performance. Gear6 solution complements Netapp OnTAP GX, IBRIX, Isilon and Acopia.
Do you have any thoughts on potential application of CACHEfx in a Wide Area Filer Network environment?
The CACHEfx has enormous potential in variety of environment. But we are currently very focused on solving customer problems within the data center. We are open to partnerships in other areas.
Wednesday, June 06, 2007
Wikibon, The Improvements Needed
As I mentioned previously, Wikibon project is very interesting and schedule permitting, I plan to monitor its progress. I see the value of collective intelligence and bringing down the barriers in market research and industry analysis segment. If the approach succeeds, it will revolutionize this industry, the way Wikipedia did to Encyclopedia business.
The intent of this post is not to dismiss the initiative as another hype of social networking era. All new experiments go through a phase of trial-and-error before finding their footing and niche. I feel Wikibon is currently in that early phase where Dave and his team are trying various things to see what sticks, what not and what will make them realize their vision.
The objective of this post is to help them during this early phase by making two very specific suggestions for improvements.
Lead with Content
Overall, Wikibon started with a good web presence. Only design suggestion will be to lead the presence with content and cleaner interface otherwise it just take away the community and participatory feel of the initiative. Some annoyances:
Do you really need Wiki format?
It is great to see 340 articles on variety of topics already posted on Wikibon. Most articles seem to be "independent" in nature, written by individual authors containing only their opinion with very little scope to modify content by others. I found content to be more fitting for blog format instead of wiki.
This is a typical challenge in most wiki projects. Is the topic and content conducive to modifications by others? If content is more conducive to be commented by readers instead of modification then it is more fitting in a blog format. I am sure you will also be able to see the content that is likely to be modified and added with new information and the content that is likely to receive comments.
Compare the Wikipedia Backup page with following Wikibon pages for Backup articles. It doesn’t take long to identify pages that are more likely to be modified or content added by someone other than the original author/creator.
Time permitting, I may review Wikibon further.
The intent of this post is not to dismiss the initiative as another hype of social networking era. All new experiments go through a phase of trial-and-error before finding their footing and niche. I feel Wikibon is currently in that early phase where Dave and his team are trying various things to see what sticks, what not and what will make them realize their vision.
The objective of this post is to help them during this early phase by making two very specific suggestions for improvements.
Lead with Content
Overall, Wikibon started with a good web presence. Only design suggestion will be to lead the presence with content and cleaner interface otherwise it just take away the community and participatory feel of the initiative. Some annoyances:
- Too many choices and information crammed in to home page.
- Unnecessary and excessive use of text boxes, fonts with different colors and sizes and slide style boxes and graphics.
Do you really need Wiki format?
It is great to see 340 articles on variety of topics already posted on Wikibon. Most articles seem to be "independent" in nature, written by individual authors containing only their opinion with very little scope to modify content by others. I found content to be more fitting for blog format instead of wiki.
This is a typical challenge in most wiki projects. Is the topic and content conducive to modifications by others? If content is more conducive to be commented by readers instead of modification then it is more fitting in a blog format. I am sure you will also be able to see the content that is likely to be modified and added with new information and the content that is likely to receive comments.
Compare the Wikipedia Backup page with following Wikibon pages for Backup articles. It doesn’t take long to identify pages that are more likely to be modified or content added by someone other than the original author/creator.
Implementing fail proof backup and recoveryCheckout the storage market prediction trading feature at Wikibon. It is an excellent feature that has potential to leverage the power and knowledge of the community.
Backup and recovery options
Backup and recovery techniques
Sizing up backup and recovery options
Data de-duplication and the low-end backup/restore choice
Time permitting, I may review Wikibon further.
Tuesday, June 05, 2007
Wikibon, An experiment in Collective Intelligence
Few weeks ago, David Vellante contacted me about his new project, Wikibon and invited me to attend Peer Incite research meetings. Wikibon is a project where he is trying to harvest and share the collective intelligence of IT community for market research, industry analysis and insights. Having previously founded the storage research group at IDC, it was no surprise that Dave picked enterprise storage as the first industry segment to target with Wikibon project.
What piqued my interest?
Considering industry analyst world being a walled garden with entry only allowed to chosen few who can pay hefty entrance fee, Wikibon is an interesting experiment. Any cracks in garden walls are a welcoming change for Average Joe like me. But my interest in Wikibon extend beyond just an open source experiment in IT market research. I am more excited about the harvesting and sharing collective intelligence aspects of this 'public' experiment.
How beneficial will it be for an organization to make decisions based on this collective intelligence instead of listening to chosen few with loudest voice or political connections? Unfortunately, considering the competitive advantage such approach offers, few organizations who experimented with collective intelligence internally willing to share and discuss their methods and findings publicly. I believe that blogs and wikis are not just external facing marketing communication tools for enterprises. They also make excellent methods for harvesting the collective intelligence of everyone with in an organization especially those operating in knowledge-intensive industry.
Unfortunately, Dave couldn't make me get up early enough in the morning to attend a meeting at 9:00am ET (6:00am on my coast), later turned out to be just a typo and time zone confusion. Finally, this morning I attended the Peer Incite research meeting on Data De-duplication topic. Even though, this topic doesn't excite me anymore [More in a later post. I have moved on to other exciting and new topics.], the affiliation of vocal participants and dynamics among the participants was interesting to observe.
So, what is my impression and feedback on Wikibon project, community web presence and Peer Incite meeting?
As mentioned before, Wikibon project definitely has piqued my interest irrespective of reasons aligning with Dave's vision or not. I am planning to monitor its progress, share my opinions, and participate and report as time permits.
[Too late in the night] I will try to continue my feedback on this project in another post.
What piqued my interest?
Considering industry analyst world being a walled garden with entry only allowed to chosen few who can pay hefty entrance fee, Wikibon is an interesting experiment. Any cracks in garden walls are a welcoming change for Average Joe like me. But my interest in Wikibon extend beyond just an open source experiment in IT market research. I am more excited about the harvesting and sharing collective intelligence aspects of this 'public' experiment.
How beneficial will it be for an organization to make decisions based on this collective intelligence instead of listening to chosen few with loudest voice or political connections? Unfortunately, considering the competitive advantage such approach offers, few organizations who experimented with collective intelligence internally willing to share and discuss their methods and findings publicly. I believe that blogs and wikis are not just external facing marketing communication tools for enterprises. They also make excellent methods for harvesting the collective intelligence of everyone with in an organization especially those operating in knowledge-intensive industry.
Unfortunately, Dave couldn't make me get up early enough in the morning to attend a meeting at 9:00am ET (6:00am on my coast), later turned out to be just a typo and time zone confusion. Finally, this morning I attended the Peer Incite research meeting on Data De-duplication topic. Even though, this topic doesn't excite me anymore [More in a later post. I have moved on to other exciting and new topics.], the affiliation of vocal participants and dynamics among the participants was interesting to observe.
So, what is my impression and feedback on Wikibon project, community web presence and Peer Incite meeting?
As mentioned before, Wikibon project definitely has piqued my interest irrespective of reasons aligning with Dave's vision or not. I am planning to monitor its progress, share my opinions, and participate and report as time permits.
[Too late in the night] I will try to continue my feedback on this project in another post.
Saturday, May 19, 2007
SaaS Panel Discussion Recap
As mentioned before, last Wednesday I moderated a panel discussion on Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) for IIT-PNW at Google Kirkland campus, an amazing experience. Our panel guests represented broad spectrum of SaaS ecosystem and the audience liberally peppered them with questions on wide variety of topics.
Interestingly, only consensus we had between panelists and audience was that SaaS will grow further and will have significant impact on various business and consumer activities.
Panelists believed that SaaS margins will not be as high as SaaP and potentially declining, contrary to McKinsey's expectation of profitability improving as market grows.
Overall a great panel discussion event, thanks to great panelists and engaging audience.
Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) is being considered a trailblazer and in an enviable position in infrastructure SaaS market. EMC/Unisys initiative shows product vendors caught off-guard with S3 growth.
How will SaaP vendors adopt to SaaS?
Interestingly, only consensus we had between panelists and audience was that SaaS will grow further and will have significant impact on various business and consumer activities.
- Defining SaaS. Web 2.0 vs. SaaS. Consumer vs. business focus. SaaS meant different things to different panelists and audience members.
- Start small. Target small. Improve quickly and frequently. Generate demand quickly. Scale as you grow. Enable experimentation.
- SaaS strengthens and grows further as web access becomes ubiquitous and available on various devices, specifically growth with internet access through mobile devices.
- Migration from Software-as-a-Product (SaaP) to SaaS. Benefits of frequent feature enhancements and quick customer feedback. Concerns about accessing data and services offline. Migration from pure web complemented by desktop client option.
- Most SaaS growth in application area and little in infrastructure area. But greater and quicker adoption in infrastructure area.
- Main benefit of application SaaS in collaborative namespace. Main benefit of infrastructure SaaS in someone else responsible for muck.
- Tools and platforms for SaaS development. Doubts about reaching a stage where operating system as SaaS in near future. Concerns on how the evolution in API access will impact the existing integrations in place.
- Concerns about Security, scalability and vendor lock-in. High switching cost with infrastructure SaaS.
- Business model - subscription vs. ad supported. Differentiation through service, experience and collaboration.
Panelists believed that SaaS margins will not be as high as SaaP and potentially declining, contrary to McKinsey's expectation of profitability improving as market grows.
Overall a great panel discussion event, thanks to great panelists and engaging audience.
Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) is being considered a trailblazer and in an enviable position in infrastructure SaaS market. EMC/Unisys initiative shows product vendors caught off-guard with S3 growth.
How will SaaP vendors adopt to SaaS?
Sunday, May 13, 2007
SaaS, Opportunity for Innovation
I will be moderating a panel discussion SaaS, Opportunity for Innovation at Google campus Kirkland, Wednesday, May 16th. The panel discussion is part of May monthly meeting of our alumni organization IIT-PNW. I am looking forward to facilitating a great discussion among our panel guests and audience. Our esteemed panel hails from wide spectrum of SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) ecosystem.
Would you like to be the "mystery" panelist? If you are opinionated, hail from SaaS ecosystem, don't belong to organizations already represented on the panel, send me an email with your contact info, interest, background and introduction.
It is going to be a very interactive event, slide-free, prop-free, whiteboard may be. All panel guests will have 5 minutes to introduce SaaS (What, Why, Where, Who, How) from their viewpoints followed by 40 - 60 minutes of audience Q&A.
Do you have a question on SaaS topic for our panel guests? Send me an email. Please indicate if you like your name and affiliation to be withheld. All responses will be posted on this blog.
Our last panel discussion Mobile Advertising - Technical Challenges and Business Opportunities moderated and blogged by Chetan Sharma had overwhelming response and very engaging audience. Unfortunately, being at Storage Networking World (SNW) in San Diego, I missed this great evening.
Look for a recap of the event sometime later in the week.
- Russ Arun, General Manager, Windows Live Communications, Microsoft. His current role includes Mail, Messenger, Manageability, Storage and back-end services for Windows Live.
- Charlie Bell, Vice President, Utility Computing, Amazon. His current role includes the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and the Simple Storage Service (S3).
- Kevin Marcus, Chief Technology Officer, Intelius. His current role includes technology ecosystem of a SaaS offering.
- Peeyush Ranjan, Engineering Manager, Google. His current role includes web search related projects with prime area of interest in building large scalable systems.
Would you like to be the "mystery" panelist? If you are opinionated, hail from SaaS ecosystem, don't belong to organizations already represented on the panel, send me an email with your contact info, interest, background and introduction.
It is going to be a very interactive event, slide-free, prop-free, whiteboard may be. All panel guests will have 5 minutes to introduce SaaS (What, Why, Where, Who, How) from their viewpoints followed by 40 - 60 minutes of audience Q&A.
Do you have a question on SaaS topic for our panel guests? Send me an email. Please indicate if you like your name and affiliation to be withheld. All responses will be posted on this blog.
Our last panel discussion Mobile Advertising - Technical Challenges and Business Opportunities moderated and blogged by Chetan Sharma had overwhelming response and very engaging audience. Unfortunately, being at Storage Networking World (SNW) in San Diego, I missed this great evening.
Look for a recap of the event sometime later in the week.
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
Storage Vendors to Watch: Gear6
Last October, Gear6 came to my attention. But it didn't really hit home until a well-informed end-user talked to me about them at SNW. He was very excited about Gear6 product to address NFS performance issue with transaction databases. Based on what I understand, the product is a caching appliance, conceptually very easy to understand.Excerpts from Gear6 website:
… keeping frequently accessed data in a very large central memory pool … This enables high performance data access by avoiding time-consuming disk operations and accelerates applications due to dramatically decreased response times and increased data throughput.Actually, it was quite amusing at the conference. Most probably, I steered few end-users to Gear6 by suggesting to check out G6 caching appliance. These end users told me that they are using Oracle databases with NFS and performance being one of their pain points. I found three simple questions that can quickly tell whether someone may want to investigate G6 product.
This innovative approach complements existing NAS/NFS deployments and installs transparently in the data center without requiring changes to current applications or infrastructure.
- Are you using transaction databases?
- Do you use NFS mounts?
- Do you have performance issues?
I will categorize Gear6 caching appliance as product that does only one thing but does it very well. With singular focus on NFS performance, Gear6 also made a good choice to attend Collaborate 07 an Oracle Community Event.BTW, you may want to hop over to Thoughtput blog maintained by Gary Orenstein at Gear6 for more caching related information. Also check out these presentations from Gear6.
Share your thoughts on Gear6 and its caching appliance approach.
Sunday, March 25, 2007
Data Deluge - Storage software need to step up!
From EMC sponsored IDC study, The Expanding Digital Universe: A Forecast of Worldwide Information Growth Through 2010 [PDF].
The most telling statement in IDC study, I found, is:
Also, check out my new favorite storage startup Storewiz focusing on compression for primary storage.
In 2006, the amount of digital information created, captured, and replicated was 161 Exabyte (EB) = 161,000 Petabyte (PB) = 161,000,000 Terabyte (TB). Three million times the information ever written in books.From storage perspective, 403 million hard drives of average 400GB capacity each without any RAID protection would have been required to store all the digital data, 93% of all hard drives produced in 2006.
In 2010, the information added annually to the digital universe will increase six folds to 988 EB.To use same number (403 million) of hard drives in 2010 as in 2006, disk capacity will have to increase to average 2.4 TB.
In 2007 the amount of information created will surpass, for the first time, the storage capacity available.This only goes to show that we just cannot rely on capacity of storage media to store all information created. Software has to step up to make sure that we can store all information created on the storage available to us. And that is why I believe technologies like data de-duplication and compression will finally become appealing in primary storage arena. See, my previous post Data De-duplication for Primary Storage.
Also, check out my new favorite storage startup Storewiz focusing on compression for primary storage.
Monday, February 26, 2007
Improving ROI of IT management
Most IT departments are having difficulties in addressing IT infrastructure monitoring and management requirements due to
Incorporating device configuration and control functions to unified management applications is considered the major hurdle in adoption of such applications. But, IT administrators typically prefer to work with feature-rich device-specific configuration and control applications instead of using a generic unified management product. Most device vendors also provide limited functionality beyond monitoring and basic reporting to unified management platforms limiting value delivered through them. Rightly so, it also plays in to lock-in strategy and defense against out-of-sight out-of-mind perception for device vendors.
As more and more devices being installed in customer environment with email capabilities, real-time monitoring and auto-support from vendors, these management functionalities are becoming quite burdensome for the IT administrators, if not potential security risks. Just think aboutseveral dozen devices with frequent out-bound emails, monitoring pings and SNMP alerts in a data center and the management headache these auto-support functions can create.
So, how can the IT management vendors increase the value delivered to the customers with monitoring, reporting and analysis tools and without device configuration and control abilities as well as without creating another layer of management headache? As mentioned in my last post Understanding the Web 2.0 Trends, this was a topic of my conversation with Scot French, VP of Marketing at Klir Technologies, a local startup, for last few weeks.
I particularly liked the Klir solution to IT monitoring, reporting and analysis platform market with scalability of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and collective intelligence of “2.0”. I believe their approach brings the ease of use, perpetual upgrades, contextual content and community approach to IT management that is not available from enterprise IT management software packages.
Your opinions are welcome on IT monitoring, reporting and analysis market, SaaS approach and leveraging “2.0” to enhance ROI of IT management tools.
- Limited resources
- Increasing complexity of infrastructure
- Growing number and type of devices in an environment, and
- Demands for better usage, performance and uptime reporting
Incorporating device configuration and control functions to unified management applications is considered the major hurdle in adoption of such applications. But, IT administrators typically prefer to work with feature-rich device-specific configuration and control applications instead of using a generic unified management product. Most device vendors also provide limited functionality beyond monitoring and basic reporting to unified management platforms limiting value delivered through them. Rightly so, it also plays in to lock-in strategy and defense against out-of-sight out-of-mind perception for device vendors.
As more and more devices being installed in customer environment with email capabilities, real-time monitoring and auto-support from vendors, these management functionalities are becoming quite burdensome for the IT administrators, if not potential security risks. Just think aboutseveral dozen devices with frequent out-bound emails, monitoring pings and SNMP alerts in a data center and the management headache these auto-support functions can create.
So, how can the IT management vendors increase the value delivered to the customers with monitoring, reporting and analysis tools and without device configuration and control abilities as well as without creating another layer of management headache? As mentioned in my last post Understanding the Web 2.0 Trends, this was a topic of my conversation with Scot French, VP of Marketing at Klir Technologies, a local startup, for last few weeks.
I particularly liked the Klir solution to IT monitoring, reporting and analysis platform market with scalability of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and collective intelligence of “2.0”. I believe their approach brings the ease of use, perpetual upgrades, contextual content and community approach to IT management that is not available from enterprise IT management software packages.
Your opinions are welcome on IT monitoring, reporting and analysis market, SaaS approach and leveraging “2.0” to enhance ROI of IT management tools.
Sunday, February 25, 2007
Understanding the Web 2.0 Trends
Last week was quite active for me with lot of good discussions and brainstorming sessions in addition to spending an evening at Google office.
The underlying idea loosely connecting all activities appears to be the “2.0” and its influence. And, these observations lead me back to reviewing What is Web 2.0, a 2005 article by Tim O’Reilly on understanding the Web 2.0 trends.
- Challenges of delivering news through search
- Continued obsolescence of current backup and recovery strategies
- Improving ROI from infrastructure and storage monitoring initiatives
- Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 extending beyond applications to infrastructure
The underlying idea loosely connecting all activities appears to be the “2.0” and its influence. And, these observations lead me back to reviewing What is Web 2.0, a 2005 article by Tim O’Reilly on understanding the Web 2.0 trends.
… the core competencies of Web 2.0 companies:Operations must become a core competency. So fundamental is the shift from software as artifact to software as service that the software will cease to perform unless it is maintained on a daily basis. It’s no accident that Google’s system administration, networking, and load balancing techniques are perhaps even more closely guarded secrets that their search algorithms. Google’s success at automating these processes is a key part of their cost advantage over competitors.
- Services, not packaged software, with cost-effective scalability
- Control over unique, hard-to-recreate data sources that get richer as more people use them
- Trusting users as co-developers
- Harnessing collective intelligence
- Leveraging the long tail through customer self-service
- Software above the level of a single device
- Lightweight user interfaces, development models, and business models
Lightweight business models are a natural concomitant of lightweight programming and lightweight connections. When commodity components are abundant, you can create value simply by assembling them in novel or effective ways.
Saturday, February 17, 2007
P2P powered Devices … coming soon?
Last night, I came across PBS's Robert Cringely post Appearances Can Be Deceiving: What's that 40-gig hard drive doing inside my Apple TV? on P2P technology incorporated in future generation of Apple TV.
He may be looking at IPTV with similar business model as Cable TV. Instead, Apple IPTV most likely will be similar to combination of Apple iTunes and Apple TV with delivery between the two managed by someone like Akamai or GridNetworks.
Some may consider P2P for consumer applications only. In my opinion, P2P and Grid have wider applications in enterprise with open source projects like Cleversafe for dispersed storage.
Also see,
Challenges of High Quality Video Delivery
Success Factors for GridNetworks
Success Factors for GridNetworks … contd
Success Factors for GridNetworks … closure
If the Apple TV is plugged in it is turned on. Did you notice that? That means the hard drive will have at least the capability of running 24/7. Now envision a BitTorrent-like file distribution system that is controlled primarily by iTunes, rather than by you or me. A centrally controlled P2P system is VERY powerful because it allows for the pre-positioning of content.His discussion of P2P powered devices is very interesting to me as few months ago, I presented similar thoughts in a series of posts on GridNetworks and what they can do to stand out in overcrowded P2P online video streaming market.
The second method, more likely to work for GridNetworks, is to pre-install or embed the player in to as many devices as possible, preferably the type of devices that are almost always on, almost always connected and publicly available to participate in content distribution without compromising owner-user experience.Cringely's post is echoing same thoughts as I mentioned before about the success factors for GridNetworks, a startup in P2P space. Actually, he also gave a nice prop to GridNetworks in his post.
They need to focus on embedding their player in to any device that has storage capacity and a network port. This may be the differentiation GN needs to stand-out in overcrowded P2P based online video streaming market.
There are products like this already in operation, such as GridNetworks from Seattle or Mike Homer's Kontiki network, now part of VeriSign. It isn't rocket science, but to succeed, networks of this sort need lots of nodes, especially nodes that remain on 24/7.Steve Rubel finds the idea interesting but doesn't think that Apple will have P2P based IPTV because of its focus on consumer products.
He may be looking at IPTV with similar business model as Cable TV. Instead, Apple IPTV most likely will be similar to combination of Apple iTunes and Apple TV with delivery between the two managed by someone like Akamai or GridNetworks.
Some may consider P2P for consumer applications only. In my opinion, P2P and Grid have wider applications in enterprise with open source projects like Cleversafe for dispersed storage.
Also see,
Challenges of High Quality Video Delivery
Success Factors for GridNetworks
Success Factors for GridNetworks … contd
Success Factors for GridNetworks … closure
Sunday, February 11, 2007
Isilon Journey as New Entrant
Last Friday, I had the opportunity to listen to Sujal Patel, founder of Isilon during Northwest Entrepreneur Network (NWEN) breakfast at Bellevue Harbor Club. He talked about the trials and tribulations last six years, he went through in bringing a new idea to mature market with Isilon.
It was an interesting presentation and hopefully, NWEN will post slides, notes or audio of his presentation online as they do with other breakfast meetings. Before discussing the four key factors of Isilon success, he talked about his background and Isilon timeline. This was on amazing story on its own.
Founders with no background in storage industry. He did have background in digital media delivery infrastructure. He started out solving the problem with digital media delivery instead of creating a storage solution.
Surviving when dozens of storage startups started by seasoned storage industry professionals failed. I think there were some inaccuracies in his list of storage startups RIP but the message was quite clear. Industry experience is not a corollary to a disruptive technology, solution or successful startup. It maybe an hindrance than tool to see a real customer problem and produce a solution, customers want.
His clustered storage product focused on solving a very small problem in the larger realm of storage ecosystem but an important problem to a niche digital media segment. Contrast that with technologies like iSCSI and CDP, the solutions still searching for a problem to solve, important enough to someone to pay for it.
Isilon, a case study in lessons of Clayton Christensen's The Innovator's Dilemma and Geoffrey Moore's Crossing the Chasm
More in future posts. Update: John Cook posted a nice summary of Sujal's talk. As comments on his blog reflect, I also thought Sujal presentation was excellent, well-prepared and with right content for the right audience.
BTW, I asked him the last question about organizational changes taking place at Isilon as it is growing. The follow up question, I didn't get to ask would have been, how these changes will impact future innovations at Isilon.
One day, I would like to meet him as well as his product manager, Sam for whom he had very nice things to say.
It was an interesting presentation and hopefully, NWEN will post slides, notes or audio of his presentation online as they do with other breakfast meetings. Before discussing the four key factors of Isilon success, he talked about his background and Isilon timeline. This was on amazing story on its own.
Isilon TimelineEstablishing a storage startup during the height of dotcom crash. Isilon received Series A funding in 2001. He didn't talk about the journey from inception of idea to Series A funding, most probably another interesting talk on its own. But it was clear from his mention of 150+ meetings needed to raise Series A that it was not an easy path from idea to Series A.
2001 - Series A funding $8.5 million
2003 - First customer, Kodak
2004 - NBC and Sports Illustrated using Isilon product for Athens Olympic
2005 - 100th customer
2006 - Initial Public Offering (IPO)
Founders with no background in storage industry. He did have background in digital media delivery infrastructure. He started out solving the problem with digital media delivery instead of creating a storage solution.
Surviving when dozens of storage startups started by seasoned storage industry professionals failed. I think there were some inaccuracies in his list of storage startups RIP but the message was quite clear. Industry experience is not a corollary to a disruptive technology, solution or successful startup. It maybe an hindrance than tool to see a real customer problem and produce a solution, customers want.
His clustered storage product focused on solving a very small problem in the larger realm of storage ecosystem but an important problem to a niche digital media segment. Contrast that with technologies like iSCSI and CDP, the solutions still searching for a problem to solve, important enough to someone to pay for it.
Isilon, a case study in lessons of Clayton Christensen's The Innovator's Dilemma and Geoffrey Moore's Crossing the Chasm
BTW, I asked him the last question about organizational changes taking place at Isilon as it is growing. The follow up question, I didn't get to ask would have been, how these changes will impact future innovations at Isilon.
One day, I would like to meet him as well as his product manager, Sam for whom he had very nice things to say.
Thursday, February 01, 2007
Data De-duplication for Primary Storage
Last night, while reading Steve Duplessie's long travelogue, I noticed a very interesting note referring to data de-duplication for primary storage.
Anyway, I am glad to see that I wasn't the only one theorizing the extension of data de-duplication beyond backup to other storage sub-segments, last year. See Where are you being de-duped?.
We landed on time, and a car was nicely waiting to pick me up to bring me to my first meeting, with Data Domain … I chatted with a bunch of their smart folks theorizing about where other implementations of this technology could really affect change in the world, and found quite a few. What if you could get the performance attributes required by a high percentage of today's applications on a primary store that happened to get 40 to 1 compression rates? Imagine the economic advantages and the consolidation potential.Again tonight, I came across another note referring to data de-duplication for primary storage in Jon Toigo's praise the PR agency post.
What de-duplication doesn’t address is the primary storage issue. The device used for primary storage is not inexpensive and has limited capacity. When you run out of space, you run out of space. You can manually delete and/or move to tape, but this is somewhat time intensive. Or, you can always make a storage vendor’s day by buying more and more hardware. What I believe will be a hot and extremely important technology in 2007 is data compression. The business case for data compression on primary storage is the same as the one used for de-duplication for backup. Compression can cut primary server data to a minimum of one-third its original size. It makes good business sense: by compressing data on primary storage devices you need less hardware less resources to manage, lower power consumption (and power consumption is a big deal), etc., all without a performance hit.Hmm … it may be just my imagination but seems like Data Domain may be planning to enter primary storage market with a data de-duplication product and JPR may be doing guerrilla PR for them.
Anyway, I am glad to see that I wasn't the only one theorizing the extension of data de-duplication beyond backup to other storage sub-segments, last year. See Where are you being de-duped?.
Some of the near-term applications are going to be in the area of backup, archive, wide area data transfer, data caching, primary storage and enterprise data storage grids. In the end, data de-duplication can be applied anywhere where cost of resources freed by eliminating repeating patterns exceed the cost of resources required to remove repeating patterns.
Monday, January 15, 2007
Two Myths about iSCSI Adoption
… Continuation of my opinion from previous post to the expanding iSCSI debate in the storage blogosphere.
Check out opinions of Tony Asaro and Steve Duplessie on debate between Dave Hitz & Chuck Hollis. Beth Pariseau also wrote a nice summary of the debate. Chris Evans is taking on in-depth investigation of iSCSI. I am looking forward to reading about his experiments and analysis.
Since my last post, I received few emails and phone calls with skepticism, typically bestowed on me, after writing an opinion that doesn’t align with storage people with fancy titles and so-called experts. Without going into specific details, I worked with iSCSI time-to-time for over six years in variety of roles on variety of iSCSI projects.
And, if you are just starting to understand the issues with iSCSI adoption explained in Chuck’s post, you have lot to catch up.
Controversial Myths
Chuck expressed some good thoughts about the future trends and driving factors for iSCSI adoption.
In my experience, some of the driving factors may be just red herrings. These are the myths that originate from wishful thinking of people promoting iSCSI instead of realities of the iSCSI adoption impediments in customer environment.
This myth is created when people take the “switching costs can outweigh any benefit of a new technology” lesson too literally. They forget that as long as a technology is not fully entrenched, it is not very difficult to get people to switch. And that is the challenge for smaller Greenfield iSCSI installs. They are not fully entrenched yet thus not difficult to switch to something else like FC.
Two key points to ponder are:
This myth is created when people assume that major hurdle to iSCSI adoption is speed and feeds. If history is telling, a new technology doesn’t replace incumbents just because of incrementally higher performance. Either new technology has to blow the incumbents out of water with several folds increase in performance or offer a value proposition that is not present in incumbents.
Just consider this, nobody would care about data de-duplication if it was offering 2x increase over conventional compression, but a 20x increase gets everyone’s attention. From another perspective, today you will be considered underdog with a Virtual Tape Library (VTL) solution that doesn’t have de-dupe even though VTL with de-dupe is slightly slower performing due to extra de-dupe processing overhead.
Another underlying assumption of this myth is that performance of everything else connected to 10GbE will remain the same as with current 1GbE and data transfer requirements will not grow. Fat chance!
Before 10Gb Ethernet can be considered for underlying iSCSI infrastructure, it also needs to be fully entrenched in customer environment as preferred networking infrastructure technology. There are too many infrastructure and political challenges to kill any 10GbE adoption for iSCSI environment without the Ethernet owners having the first crack at it.
The above observations are based on my past experiences with few expansion projects for small iSCSI installs. One of the project even considered 10GbE. In the end, it was too easy to replace iSCSI install with FC-SAN than expand them.
Controversial Positioning
I close this post with two controversial iSCSI positioning statements that I believe are impeding it’s adoption. No explanation provided at this time and you are welcome to chime in, if you desire.
Position #1 iSCSI is a storage interconnect leveraging Ethernet.
Posiiton #2 iSCSI is a replacement for or complementary with FC.
Check out opinions of Tony Asaro and Steve Duplessie on debate between Dave Hitz & Chuck Hollis. Beth Pariseau also wrote a nice summary of the debate. Chris Evans is taking on in-depth investigation of iSCSI. I am looking forward to reading about his experiments and analysis.
Since my last post, I received few emails and phone calls with skepticism, typically bestowed on me, after writing an opinion that doesn’t align with storage people with fancy titles and so-called experts. Without going into specific details, I worked with iSCSI time-to-time for over six years in variety of roles on variety of iSCSI projects.
And, if you are just starting to understand the issues with iSCSI adoption explained in Chuck’s post, you have lot to catch up.
Controversial Myths
Chuck expressed some good thoughts about the future trends and driving factors for iSCSI adoption.
In my experience, some of the driving factors may be just red herrings. These are the myths that originate from wishful thinking of people promoting iSCSI instead of realities of the iSCSI adoption impediments in customer environment.
First, I think you’ll see more of the same: iSCSI in smaller, greenfield SAN builds where FC isn’t entrenched yet. But from small acorns mighty oak trees grow.Myth #1 The smaller greenfield iSCSI environment will grow without any challenge.
This myth is created when people take the “switching costs can outweigh any benefit of a new technology” lesson too literally. They forget that as long as a technology is not fully entrenched, it is not very difficult to get people to switch. And that is the challenge for smaller Greenfield iSCSI installs. They are not fully entrenched yet thus not difficult to switch to something else like FC.
Two key points to ponder are:
- Why greenfield iSCSI environment came about in the first place?
- What happens when these small installs are considered for expansion?
Going out a bit farther, I believe that further cost reductions in 10Gb ethernet technology will encourage people to take another look at an alternative to FC.Myth #2 10Gb Ethernet will save the day for iSCSI.
This myth is created when people assume that major hurdle to iSCSI adoption is speed and feeds. If history is telling, a new technology doesn’t replace incumbents just because of incrementally higher performance. Either new technology has to blow the incumbents out of water with several folds increase in performance or offer a value proposition that is not present in incumbents.
Just consider this, nobody would care about data de-duplication if it was offering 2x increase over conventional compression, but a 20x increase gets everyone’s attention. From another perspective, today you will be considered underdog with a Virtual Tape Library (VTL) solution that doesn’t have de-dupe even though VTL with de-dupe is slightly slower performing due to extra de-dupe processing overhead.
Another underlying assumption of this myth is that performance of everything else connected to 10GbE will remain the same as with current 1GbE and data transfer requirements will not grow. Fat chance!
Before 10Gb Ethernet can be considered for underlying iSCSI infrastructure, it also needs to be fully entrenched in customer environment as preferred networking infrastructure technology. There are too many infrastructure and political challenges to kill any 10GbE adoption for iSCSI environment without the Ethernet owners having the first crack at it.
The above observations are based on my past experiences with few expansion projects for small iSCSI installs. One of the project even considered 10GbE. In the end, it was too easy to replace iSCSI install with FC-SAN than expand them.
Controversial Positioning
I close this post with two controversial iSCSI positioning statements that I believe are impeding it’s adoption. No explanation provided at this time and you are welcome to chime in, if you desire.
Position #1 iSCSI is a storage interconnect leveraging Ethernet.
Posiiton #2 iSCSI is a replacement for or complementary with FC.
Thursday, January 11, 2007
Year of iSCSI or Languishing iSCSI
There is interesting iSCSI debate brewing between Chuck Hollis of EMC and Dave Hitz of NetApp.
I got my first taste of iSCSI when I laid my hands on newly released Cisco 5420 iSCSI router. The iSCSI standard was barely at draft 0.8.
Initially, I was excited about iSCSI and even got involved in SNIA iSCSI and IP Storage initiatives. But the way iSCSI was being positioned in the market, it didn’t take long to realize that iSCSI will play second-fiddle to Fibre Channel (FC) for a very long time.
T/M/C vs. Company
Dave compares first four years of iSCSI revenue with that of NetApp to convey that it feels like the “Year of iSCSI.”
In my opinion, Dave is thinking about it wrong because he is comparing oranges to apple. iSCSI is a technology/market/category (T/M/C) and NetApp is a company. A comparison between them makes no sense.
First four years of iSCSI revenue are divvied up between several iSCSI vendors with no single vendor dominating the iSCSI category. In contrast, most NAS revenue, not all, went to one company, NetApp. In sixth year of NAS, NetApp was equated to NAS. Can you tell me which company is equated to iSCSI in its sixth year? Nobody.
Whom do you think of when someone mentions NAS, server virtualization, data de-duplication, Fibre Channel, network routers, desktop operating system? Yes, whether it is NetApp, Vmware, Data Domain, Brocade, Cisco, Microsoft or countless others, there was one dominant vendor to born out of each of these “new” T/M/C. They were primarily responsible for defining the “new” T/M/C. And, this is the anathema for iSCSI in my opinion.
There is no single vendor that defines iSCSI category and until there is one, it will continue to languish.
There is another lesson in languishing iSCSI. A T/M/C languishes whenever it goes through standardization before any one vendor has a chance to define it, another successful strategy in the arsenal of established players for killing new T/M/C. This is why SNIA, primarily dominated by established vendors, keep pushing to standardize new T/M/C before they have chance to take root.
I am glad to see that SNIA didn’t get their claws on data de-duplication before Data Domain had a chance to establish roots
More to come ….
I got my first taste of iSCSI when I laid my hands on newly released Cisco 5420 iSCSI router. The iSCSI standard was barely at draft 0.8.
Initially, I was excited about iSCSI and even got involved in SNIA iSCSI and IP Storage initiatives. But the way iSCSI was being positioned in the market, it didn’t take long to realize that iSCSI will play second-fiddle to Fibre Channel (FC) for a very long time.
T/M/C vs. Company
Dave compares first four years of iSCSI revenue with that of NetApp to convey that it feels like the “Year of iSCSI.”
In my opinion, Dave is thinking about it wrong because he is comparing oranges to apple. iSCSI is a technology/market/category (T/M/C) and NetApp is a company. A comparison between them makes no sense.
First four years of iSCSI revenue are divvied up between several iSCSI vendors with no single vendor dominating the iSCSI category. In contrast, most NAS revenue, not all, went to one company, NetApp. In sixth year of NAS, NetApp was equated to NAS. Can you tell me which company is equated to iSCSI in its sixth year? Nobody.
Whom do you think of when someone mentions NAS, server virtualization, data de-duplication, Fibre Channel, network routers, desktop operating system? Yes, whether it is NetApp, Vmware, Data Domain, Brocade, Cisco, Microsoft or countless others, there was one dominant vendor to born out of each of these “new” T/M/C. They were primarily responsible for defining the “new” T/M/C. And, this is the anathema for iSCSI in my opinion.
There is no single vendor that defines iSCSI category and until there is one, it will continue to languish.
There is another lesson in languishing iSCSI. A T/M/C languishes whenever it goes through standardization before any one vendor has a chance to define it, another successful strategy in the arsenal of established players for killing new T/M/C. This is why SNIA, primarily dominated by established vendors, keep pushing to standardize new T/M/C before they have chance to take root.
I am glad to see that SNIA didn’t get their claws on data de-duplication before Data Domain had a chance to establish roots
More to come ….
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)