Storage Horizons: Steve Sicola has a new Blog!

Steve Sicola is a GIANT in storage and someone you should know if  you don’t already.  I just found out he is posting to a new blog called Storage Horizons:  http://stevesicola.com/

 

FLASH UPDATE: Wikibon Repost

Wikibon has just published an updated Flash Report — comprehensive — the usual great work we get from Dave Vellante et al.

Read more here:  WIKIBON FLASH UPDATE

FIO Analytics for Monday November 14th

The following chart was created by Barry Bergman courtesy The Blue Collar Investor:

NOTES:

Looking slightly bearish but could change based on news coming from Europe.   

However, the reasons that I’m slightly bearish:

• Possible Head & Shoulders forming (very bearish)
  • Left shoulder and head in green circle
  • Possible right shoulder could form in vicinity of red circle
• Trend line broken over last two days…close below trend line (red)
• MACD, a momentum indicator, is showing bearish (histogram below zero line)
• Stochastics showing a bearish trend (below 50)
• Decreasing volume 

Potential near term targets:

• Next upside target – $35-$36
• Next downside target – $28-$29…the gap area due to Barron’s article

Something about XIO (formerly Xiotech)

I just need to say that there is a ton of IP buried in this company and many of the brightest minds in storage.  Someday this will make a classic HBR article  – but in the meantime it’s just sad.

I invite your comment.

Steve

Steve Sicola: SUPERSTAR!!

 

CRN unveiled its 2010 class of Storage Superstars spotlighting 10 “individuals and groups that made the modern storage industry what it is today.” And among the visionaries honored was Xiotech CTO Steve Sicola.

The “driving force on several generations of storage arrays and architectures,” Steve was recognized for his nearly 40 patents, tenure at Compaq and DEC, and as VP of Seagate’s Advanced Storage Architecture (ASA) Group. Informally known as the “Skunk Works” – an homage to Lockheed Martin’s legendary engineering team – the ASA Group was acquired by Xiotech in 2007 and architected ISE.

“Steve embodies the passion, commitment and innovative thinking – all hallmarks of Xiotech – that serve as the foundation of this company and have fueled the revolution that is ISE,” said Xiotech President and CEO Alan Atkinson. “With Steve overseeing our Storage Fellows Program, we look forward to his (and others’) continued contributions to the industry and Xiotech – including the next-generation of ISE.”

Congratulations Steve!

Too good to be true? Make me prove it…

  

Taking disruptive technology to early adoption is in my DNA — the very fabric of who I am.  I’ve had the privilege to engage with great technologists — many of whom remain colleagues today.  As many of you know, I am recently on board at Xiotech, some of which was part of Seagate until a few years ago and is still an integral part of our ownership and our IP.  The messaging in the storage space can be confusing — here are some ideas that may help break through the noise.  So here’s your challenge:

 

Q:  What do IBM, HP, Dell, EMC, NetApp, 3Par, Compellent and Xiotech have in common?

A:  We all use disk drives manufactured by Seagate.

No matter which storage vendor you deploy, Seagate drives are at the heart of the technology.  Now let me share with you Xiotech’s Integrated Storage Element (ISE).  We take the very same Seagate technology to the next level — after all, we know these drives better than any other storage vendor.

Example:

PLAN #1:  Deploy 100 $20k storage subsystems of [INSERT YOUR BRAND HERE] each costing  15% to keep under maintenance in years 4 & 5 (assuming 3 year warranty) = $600,000. 

PLAN #2:  Acquire xiotech ISE @ 30% less initial acquistion cost/space/energy to produce the same performance (or better) and pay $0 in hardware maintenance over 5 years. 

          or – use the comparable acquisition cost to get 30% more performance from the start

          or – use the NPV of the maintenance to get more performance/density

If you’re a former client from FileTek, Agilis, Sensar, Verity, Immersion or Fusion-io, you’ve seen what I’ve seen:  disruptive technology making a significant difference – and Xiotech ISE is no different.

Don’t believe me?  MAKE ME PROVE IT!

 

Gartner: IT Spending to Grow 5.3% in 2010

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Worldwide computing hardware spending is forecast to reach $353 billion in 2010, a 5.7 percent increase from 2009 (see Table 1). Robust consumer spending on mobile PCs will drive hardware spending in 2010. Enterprise hardware spending will grow again in 2010, but it will remain below its 2008 level through 2014. Spending on storage will enjoy the fastest growth in terms of enterprise spending as the volume of enterprise data that needs to be stored continues to increase. Near-term spending on servers will be concentrated on lower-end servers; longer-term, server spending will be curtailed by virtualization, consolidation and, potentially, cloud computing.

 

http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1339013

The Era of Application-Based Storage Begins Today

 

This emerging category of Intelligent Application Storage is predicated on storage solutions that enable business applications to manage, scale and seize control of IT environments and deliver unprecedented performance, efficiency, reliability and business agility. Xiotech has broken through in this area with our Intelligent Application Storage architecture, which is built upon three central pillars:

· Application-based, scale-out storage building blocks – This is our Intelligent Storage Element (ISE), which brings industry-leading performance, scalability and reliability to the table

· An application-centric management platform – This is our ICON Manager user interface, which provides single-console provisioning and management of physical and virtual storage

· An integrated application/storage API – This will enable multiple ISE to be treated as one, unlocking infinite system scalability and full application/OS/hypervisor/storage integration and interoperability

This architecture is the product of several years of work from our entire company, yet it’s just the beginning for Intelligent Application Storage. This is why I’m so excited to be here at Xiotech – we have the technology, vision and team to lead the industry forward into this new age where storage adds more value to IT environments than ever before and consumers are the big winners. Please continue to check back here for more on this story in the weeks and months to come.

If you’d like to read more about Intelligent Application Storage, please click here: http://xiotech.com/press-release.php?id=177.

2.5″ Drives in the Enterprise? And the winner is…

Xiotech ISE was designed with the 2.5″ drives fully in mind. Today, one can have 40 enterprise 2.5″ drives in a 3U container, with full managed reliability and self-healing. The benefits to performance-starved applications are many – but perhaps the best benefit of all is the lack of having to, as a human, deal with herding and managing all these small creatures. This is why no enterprise array vendor except Xiotech has architected the 2.5″ drives into a fully-baked architecture. For others, like the pod people, they are just impossible to control, especially in arbitrated loops.

see Rob Peglar’s blog:  http://blog.xiotech.com/blog/

Performance Anxiety: Notes from Rob Peglar

Performance (Still) Matters

Posted by Rob Peglar

At the start of each year, many companies – Xiotech included – have national meetings with their public-facing employees.  These meetings are colloquially referred to as ‘kickoff’ events, which implies something new, a fresh start, the beginning of another game.  While there is certainly a lot of truth in that, kickoff is also a good time to revisit topics which may have faded from memory but are in truth even more relevant today.  One such topic is storage performance.

The last decade – football game, if you like – was dominated by one ‘team’, that being capacity.  Growth of capacity, management of that growing capacity, backup of that capacity, replication and protection of that capacity, all things capacity.  Enterprises couldn’t get enough storage, quickly enough, to meet their data growth needs.  They were constantly running out of storage.  So, they grew and grew and grew, and spent and spent and spent.  Towards the end of the decade, predictably enough, some enterprises turned their focus towards data reduction after many years of data growth.

The other team – performance – took many hits over the years as capacity dominated.  Performance made a few yards every now and then, but mostly, had to punt, as capacity won the day-to-day battle.  However, in this decade, performance has the ball and is driving, as capacity is reduced.  I personally believe performance – once the dominant criteria for storage, when datasets were small – is making a big comeback.

Performance learned many lessons over the last decade.  Today, performance is not merely about IOPS, throughput or response time – the traditional three aspects.  It’s about ratios: the three aspects of performance per unit of input.  Now, what’s “input”, you say?  To an enterprise, in particular IT, inputs are simple:  money, time, space, power, cooling, and humans (which require money), bringing us full circle.

So, it’s not about IOPS, it’s about IOPS/$, IOPS/watt, (IOPS * TB)/watt, and other ratios.  Measuring storage performance using ratios turns out to be the most useful technique for enterprises to evaluate their storage; after all, CFOs measure business performance using ratios.  I believe CIOs should measure IT performance in general and storage performance in particular using ratios.  On the compute side, we often refer to servers not by how many virtual machines they can merely hold, but how many they can run efficiently and meet a given SLA.  There is a direct business translation between that and what a cloud compute provider would measure, for example.  The same should be true for storage.

Storage devices (including arrays) perform only three essential functions; they store data, move data, and protect data.  Inherent in all these essential functions is efficiency.  We now know how to store efficiently, as seen by the increasing use of data reduction techniques.  Protecting data efficiently is also a well-understood realm, both in terms of data at rest (such as the new RAGS method) and data in flight (using a variety of new and efficient encryption methods).  But what of moving data?  The ball is now in the red zone – can we move the ball (data) into the end zone, or will we be distracted by the cute cheerleader on the sideline (features that are licensed by the TB) who looks nice but doesn’t play?

Moving data to applications is the entire game now.  The more efficiently data is moved, the more efficiently enterprises can run their workloads.  Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus, and his name is performance.  But not the old performance, i.e. ‘my array gets more IOPS than your array’ – but the new performance, measured in ratios.  It’s quite straightforward.  Place the attributes where more is better, such as IOPS, GB/sec (yes, I said GB, not MB; MB is old-school), petabytes (yes, I said petabytes; the 2010 decade is the decade of the petabyte in the enterprise) and length of warranty (e.g. at least 5 years) in the numerator, and place attributes where less is better, such as $, rack U, floor tiles, watts, BTUs, and human costs in the denominator.  For example, IOPS* TB / $.  This particular metric measures cost efficiency over a given surface with a given workload.

Yes, it’s a new year, and we have a new kickoff.  Performance has the ball, and is driving.  Pay attention to it – because like most things in IT, it’s an old idea, an old notion, an old concept made new again.  Performance still matters, because time is still money, and efficiency is the way to save time.  After all, there’s only 24 hours in a day, and that is the inexorable limit we all battle.

Peglar Bio

Rob Peglar is Treasurer of SNIA and VP Technology of Xiotech.  He  is a 32-year storage industry veteran, published author and sought-after speaker and panelist at leading storage and networking-related seminars and conferences worldwide. At Xiotech he helps shape strategic vision and emerging technologies, defines future offering portfolios, plays a key role in product planning and serves as an industry/customer liaison. He has served as chair of the SNIA Tutorials, on the boards of the Green Storage Initiative and the Solid State Storage Initiative and as secretary/treasurer of the Blade Systems Alliance. He has won numerous awards for his efforts and expertise, including being one of 30 senior executives worldwide selected for the Network Products Guide 2008 MVP Award.