Storage Software

With today’s post, I’m right at the mid-point of my series of video interviews from Cloud Computing Expo.  Today’s post offers a two-for-one special, Gluster CEO Hitesh Chellani along with Jack O’Brien who heads Gluster’s product management.

Some of the topics Hitesh and Jack tackle:

• Gluster as a general-purpose open source cluster platform that runs on top of commodity hardware like Dell.
• Their goal to transform the storage market the way Red Hat transformed the server market (Gluster employs a subscription model just like Red Hat).
• What would you do after spending time at Lawrence Livermore National Labs putting together the second fastest super computer in the world?  Hitesh thought he’d distill the experience and apply it to the storage space.
• Some of the performance-driven verticals Gluster started out in.
• The new hot area of virtual storage next to virtual servers.

Pau for now…

I never feel like I get enough sleep … fighting to get six to seven solid hours in every night. However, my stresses are NOTHING compared to the noise and pressure IT admins, CIOs and CTOs deal with. Just look at our industry. From what I’ve read and learned so far, it seems Cisco and HP want customers to rip out their current hardware, software and solutions, and start “fresh” with their Unified Computing System (UCS) and BladeSystem Matrix offerings. Correct me if I’m wrong about that, but I still have to ask -- what’s their motivation? Think about it, why would they insist on something so disruptive especially in a time when customers are fighting to thrive with restricted budgets?

The bottom line in my opinion is this: locking your company into an infrastructure means a locked-in revenue stream for the provider and lack of choice and flexibility for you.

This is incredibly frustrating. It shouldn’t be novel to do the right thing for customer FIRST and make money second. Folks are dealing with legacy hardware and limited budgets (in most cases) with an intense desire to virtualize and do something called “the cloud,” whatever that means to them. That’s enough to digest without having to consider that everything they’ve done up to this point might have been a waste of time and money.

Dell thinks there’s another way, a way where you don’t have to eat your own young to thrive and stay competitive.

First, we’re open. We’ve figured out how to get you where you’re going, specifically with virtualization, using most of what you’ve already invested in.

Second, we’re pragmatic. (pause for smirk on overused marketing word) We give you answers to IT problems now, today, just in case you don’t feel like waiting on promises that no one has proven or deployed.

Finally, we’re end-to-end. We already offer first class products at each step of the fully virtualized solution, including servers, storage, networking, desktop and the cloud, instead of specializing in only one part of the data center and trying our hand at new businesses.

This week at VMworld, we announced two new partnerships that strengthen our open, pragmatic and end-to-end approach. Brocade expands its 10-year relationship with the Dell family to provide enhanced leadership of next-generation data center networking with 10/40/100GbE, Security, iSCSI, FCoE and Converged Enhanced DCB Ethernet. These are in addition to our Brocade FC switches.

But we’re covering more than just the networking side of investment protection. We’re also partnering with Scalent Systems to make heterogeneous, virtualized environments portable for easier disaster recovery and higher availability. Now, you’ll no longer have to redefine your physical storage and network connections each time you need to move whole hypervisors, physical applications, workloads or virtual machines (VM). All of this can be done NOW with your existing technologies and future flexibility to purchase and use what you need to customize your infrastructure.

This is just the beginning. Folks like The Register, eWeek and ChannelWeb are already talking, and we’ll hit the streets a few times this fall with more info. In the meantime, ask some hard questions. The next time you find yourself sitting in the big, leather chair being entertained by the “latest and greatest” buzz solution, make sure it doesn’t end up stinging you.

Data deduplication is a topic being asked about by our customers, and being discussed in the media, more and more. Would you like to know Dell’s take on it?

In the video below, Darren Thomas, vice president and general manager of Dell's storage business, discusses Dell’s view on the future of this technology and what we are doing to help deliver solutions to meet your data management needs. (If you'd like to download the slides in this video, they are available on Dell's Slideshare account here.)

We are announcing enhancements to our deduplication portfolio, both in services to help you understand holistically how you might benefit from de-duplication, as well as in products that help address your storage challenges. That's the conversation should be about -- how you can best solve your problems related to data growth, protection and access.

Dell views deduplication as a feature of storage, one that may help you optimize your investments in data management. However, it's not the only one to accomplish this goal. Our view is that deduplication it is not, by itself, a solution.

Deduplication can be implemented in different ways, whether through dedicated appliances or through integration into existing areas, such as in backup software.

Dell's view is that an integrated approach -- a feature of your software -- provides the greatest benefits to you. In this way, deduplication becomes ubiquitous across many aspects of the data path, from applications through operating systems and backup, where it is focused today. We are helping to drive this evolution.

Before you can decide which approach to take to optimize your storage, though, you need to understand your unique needs and environment. Dell deduplication services can help. Our services teams can assess your needs, provide recommendations and implement solutions, whatever they may be – instead of just figuring out how to make a single approach work.

For more information on deduplication, I'd encourage you to take a look at www.dell.com/deduplication.

And if you have a more technical focus or appetite, I invite you to join us next week at Dell TechCenter for a live chat on this topic.

(editor's note - this post comes to us from Tony Ansley of Dell’s storage product group which will be supporting hands-on labs at SNW next week.)

 If you’re interested in what Dell is doing with enterprise storage, make every effort to get to Dallas (OK, Grapevine…) for the Computerworld Storage Networking World conference that is starting on October 13^th.  Please come by and see us in booth #400.

Here's a list of some of the things we'll be doing at the show:

• Agenda Session: Data Infrastructure Track: “Yes, Fibre Channel and iSCSI Can Co-Exist” by Praveen Asthana, Director of Dell Enterprise Storage and Networking (Monday Oct 13, 4:45)
• Hands-on-Labs (running all week), staffed by Dell product management, engineering and user experts
  • Establishing a Virtual Storage Environment – Get to experience the advanced features that make Dell EqualLogic PS Series SANs the best mid-range storage solution providing enterprise class features and true virtualized storage. 
  • Configuring IP SANs – Experience how easy it is to deploy and provision storage with iSCSI SAN solutions.  Both the MD3000i entry-level iSCSI AND the Dell EqualLogic mid-range SAN solution will be available.
  • Protecting and Securing Your Environment – Be the first to experience the PowerVault DL2000 - Dell’s new integrated disk-to-disk data protection solution.

In the Dell Booth#400

• Dell EqualLogic – See the latest PS Series array, the PS5500E that packs 48 TB into only 4U of rack space, and experience new Auto-Snapshot Manager software with VMware and Microsoft Exchange integrations and take a glimpse at technology demonstration of what’s possible in the future with SSD and 10Gig technologies in the EqualLogic family.
• Dell | EMC – check out the new CX4 with unprecedented flexibility in a SAN with UltraFlex Modular I/O which allows you to easily add more ports in both iSCSI and Fibre Channel
• Dell PowerVault MD Series – Find out what makes MD an ideal entry-level iSCSI storage solution
• Dell PowerVault DL2000 – See the latest in data protection from Dell with the new appliances powered by CommVault and Symantec Backup Exec software delivering integrated solutions for de-duplication and faster disk-based backup and recovery.

Also, while you're at the booth don’t forget to enter for your chance at winning a brand new Dell Inspiron Mini-9 laptop!

HP made an interesting move today with the intent to acquire LeftHand Networks. Obviously HP is coming to recognize what Dell did a long time ago – simple, intelligent, automated storage is what the mid-market wants.

That’s why we moved to buy EqualLogic almost a year ago. What really interested us was the ease-of-use, intelligence and automation of EqualLogic’s systems. That was a big advantage that others don’t have.

As an example, let’s look at investment protection: With EqualLogic, you can expand using the latest and greatest hardware regardless of the EqualLogic generation you initially purchased. Load balancing between unequal nodes on LeftHand’s architecture is a much different proposition.

We now offer full integration of EqualLogic into Dell servers – particularly blades - and application solutions, so we can help our customers manage and protect their data center growth.

It’s no secret that Dell is #1 in iSCSI SANS worldwide.

Looks like HP is playing catch up.