Emulex Blog: Emulex Labs

Why Flash Storage is Here to Stay – Unlike Fisker or DeLorean

Posted May 24th, 2013 by Sonny Singh

I’ll never forget the first time I laid my eyes on the gorgeous Fisker Karma. Up until that point, the public was relegated to sterile hybrid, electric plug-in automobiles like the Toyota Prius or Nissan Leaf which had about as much sex appeal as Martha Stewart gracing the cover of the next Victoria’s Secret catalog. The Fisker Karma promised the aesthetics and performance of a luxurious automobile out of Modena built upon green technology that would help lessen the impact to our environment. Think of it this way, now Leonardo DiCaprio could invest in a company whose automobile would look just as attractive as the supermodel he brought to the last red carpet event and all the while, maintaining the good graces of his indigenous tribe buddies in the Amazon rainforest. The world was smitten as were private investors and our own government who poured in $171 million of taxpayer money and about $1.1 billion of venture capital (VC) cash.

Unfortunately, Fisker is heading down the same path as the Delorean (the beloved icon of the 80’s), so don’t be surprised if you see it make a cameo in Back to the Future 5. Fisker should be announcing bankruptcy any day considering it still owes the government around $192 million in loans and hasn’t made a car in more than a year. All told, Fisker attracted $1.1 billion in private investment, the vast majority of which took place after it got the first Department of Energy loan.

So why did Fisker fail? It depends who you ask and I want to avoid a political discourse, so let’s stick to the most tangible explanations¹:

Fisker’s claimed the Karma would get 67.2 MPG and 50 miles of electric range. If fell significantly short of that claim.
The money spent by Fisker compared to the amount of cars produced was approximately $660,000 per vehicle
The production goal for 2011 was 7,000…Fisker only shipped 1,500
The sole supplier of lithium-ion batteries for the Karma went bankrupt
Fisker received one of Consumer Reports’ worst ratings ever for a passenger car
Fisker recalled the first 239 Karma plug-in hybrids there were numerous incidents of them catching on fire
During a Consumer Reports test drive, the Fisker Karma broke down
During Hurricane Sandy, Fisker lost about 300 Karmas

The final nail in the coffin for Fisker was when Justin Bieber reportedly gave his Fisker Karma to a friend while he was on tour because he was sick of it breaking down when trying to run from the paparazzi.

Flash Storage – It is sexy, eco-friendly and here to stay

Being the pseudo tree hugger that I am, I haven’t given up on green technology quite yet, especially in the IT industry. Flash storage is a perfect example of disruptive technology that is innovative, efficient and eco-friendly. Flash storage should be familiar to anyone who has ever used a USB thumb drive and uses electricity, has no mechanical parts and typically only consumes 20% of the power and reads more than 100 times faster than traditional mechanical hard drives (check out this excellent blog by Mike Jochimsen on why solid state disks (SSDs) are the wave of the future). Furthermore, data center managers looking for ways to address the energy drain represented by hard drives are implementing flash storage in their data centers as a way to achieve green computing or green data center benchmarks.

Businesses with I/O-intensive applications have found flash storage to be efficient and cost-effective and that’s why enterprise storage providers like EMC, chip makers like Samsung and server manufacturers like Oracle have all entered the flash storage market. Like the Fisker Karma that retailed at more than $100K, the higher cost of flash technology compared to traditional disk storage warranted a price premium but more favorable flash economics are spurring broader adoption (unlike the Fisker Karma). The good news is the price of SSDs falling so flash storage is becomes more attractive by the day and much more accessible to not just the enterprise, but also small-to-medium sized business-level IT organizations.

Key benefits of flash technology²:

Flash based storage is faster than hard drives because they handle storage chores electronically, while their traditional counterparts rely on moving parts — specifically a spindle motor that rotates disks and a mechanical arm that reads and writes the data.
Flash’s lack of moving parts delivers another benefit: lower energy consumption which equates to better environments footprints.
A flash drive-equipped array that provides a 10-speed performance boost is more cost-effective than conventional technology on a cost per input/output operations per second.
Aggregating flash as a shared resource on a storage-area network also makes the technology more affordable.

Like any mature technology, the cost of flash memory is coming down, and since storage requirements are always increasing, it isn’t surprising more and more organizations are using flash to store, transport, carry or access data quickly and reliably, whether on the move, in the office or at home. At the same time, flash storage appeals to the environmentally conscious IT organization looking to reduce their impact to the environment.

Emulex – we understand flash technology³

At Emulex, we are beginning to see the adoption of all flash appliances in the market increase as the waves of large databases and increasingly dense virtual environments demand larger data stores with higher I/O operations per second (IOPS) and lower latency. Organizations including GreenBytes with their IO Offload Engine providing an accelerated virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), and Fusion-io’s ION Software Defined Storage, which can either present itself as fabric-based cache or primary storage are perfect examples. On the extreme end of the scale, companies like PureStorage and Violin Memory provide all flash arrays capable of handling very robust and demanding application environments.

Emulex is right in the middle of this evolution. Our ever-evolving Fibre Channel and Ethernet I/O connectivity solutions continue to provide the high IOPS and low latency that customers need to keep pace with the abilities of today’s high end servers and storage. Also, as SSDs, flash and cache continue to appear at new points in the I/O path, Emulex is on the leading edge of understanding how to optimize I/O architectures and provide the solutions that will keep pace with the endpoints.

Our world class monitoring solutions, OneCommand Vision and EndaceVision can ensure that the I/O channel is performing optimally and securely. The combination of these two products gives us this ability across both Fibre Channel and Ethernet fabrics. We continue to evolve these solutions in conjunction with our ecosystem partners to ensure that as databases, hypervisors, big data analytics and cloud computing evolve with technologies such as SSD and flash memory, we can continue to ensure this optimal performance.

Honey…I just bought a used Fisker Karma!

Like most luxurious cars I have lusted after, I’ve usually had to settle for the version made by Hot Wheels or Hasbro. However, things may change. As of this writing, there were about 28 separate ads for Fisker Karmas on eBay alone. It gets even better…the once $110,000 Karma has dropped in most cases by more than half and the lowest bids I’ve come across on eBay start at $40,000, with most purchases ending up between $60-$70K. Sure it wont have a warranty, my wife would leave me and I cant put three baby seats in it, but it would look great in my driveway (car exploding and catching on fire in my driveway be damned).

I want one.

1. The Washington Examiner,47 depressing facts about Fisker’s epic electric car failure, April 2013

2. FCW,Storage optimization: Flash finds some government niches,May 2013

3. Emulex Labs blog, May 2013

Tags: Emulex, flash storage, solid state disk, SSDs
Posted in Performance, Technology | No Comments

Happy Birthday, Ethernet!

Posted May 22nd, 2013 by Emulex

Today’s Labs blog comes from Joe Gervais, senior director of product management. He brings us his thoughts on the 40th anniversary of Ethernet today, and draws from his own experience using Ethernet for the past two decades. Take it away, Joe!

Today, at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), the networking industry is celebrating the 40^th anniversary of Bob Metcalfe’s invention of Ethernet. In the early 1980s, when Ethernet was first commercialized, it ran at 10 million bits per second. In comparison, the emerging 40Gb Ethernet (40GbE) standard can send an entire frame on the wire in the time the first byte of a frame could be sent with the original Ethernet.

The fascinating part of Ethernet is how it’s fulfilled Metcalfe’s Law – the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system. In the early days, you might have a department network with 20 users sharing computing resources or files. These Local Area Networks (LANs) would then be connected and become more valuable, and services like email would crop up. Then we saw widespread use of the Internet, and the World Wide Web.

I look at the way my home network is used now versus 20 years ago. In the 1990s, it was connecting my computer to my children’s computers so we could share a dial-up Internet connection or a printer. Today, it’s using my iPhone over Wi-Fi to my Wi-Fi router as the remote for my Ethernet connected stereo and Blu-ray player, with my Internet connection being a fiber optic passive optical network connection. It’s watching a Netflix movie on the television, then pausing the show and changing over to a tablet elsewhere in the house to finish watching the show. It’s my wife, a technophobe, using FaceTime to videoconference with her granddaughter across the country and using Facebook to keep up with far-flung friends.

A number of years ago, Sun Microsystems had a slogan: the Network Is the Computer. In today’s world, the network is central to many aspects of life. Over the past several years I’ve been working with a non-profit supporting Bible translation for the 2000 languages yet to receive a word of the Bible in their own language. One of the non-profit’s technology initiatives is supplying translation acceleration kits. This is a battery and solar panel, to power a netbook that is connected over Ethernet to a satellite terminal. This allows the translation team to communicate instantly with their translation consultants, saving days of treacherous travel and speeding the translation task by years – all through the use of Ethernet and the Internet.

What does all of this have to do with business computing? Much of this home networking is driving the build-out of massively scalable data centers – services like Amazon’s Web Services (AWS) that provide the infrastructure used by Netflix to stream content to consumers. Google and Microsoft have some of the world’s largest data centers around the planet. This segment is consuming a new class of multinode rack servers that grew nearly 100% between 2011 and 2012 and already make up about 15% of total server shipments¹. Much of this infrastructure is using 10GbE today for server connectivity, and is the fastest interconnect available for Internet connectivity, with 100G transceiver shipments tripling in 2012². This is pushing the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 802.3 working group to begin work on the next group of standards for Ethernet beyond 100GbE. Projections indicate that today’s social media and mobile devices will drive the need for ten terabit Ethernet by the end of the decade³.

What does the future hold for Ethernet? We’ve seen Ethernet evolve from the early days of being a party line – half duplex using CSMA/CD – carrier sense, multiple access with collision detection (where an Ethernet endpoint attempts to send a packet and if it collides with another packet, backs off and tries again) – to today’s full duplex, point-to-point switched topology. We’ve seen the evolution from coaxial backbones to twisted pair. It’s likely the future holds more mainstream usage of optical interconnect as speeds increase. The optics vendors today are building high volume, low power, lower cost embedded optical solutions called active optical cables that provide optical transceivers connected with a pre-terminated optical cable. Silicon photonics holds promise for optical solutions at 100GbE and faster, where a fixed light is injected into a silicon-based optical switch. Honestly, I’ve been following Ethernet as a user and producer for nearly 30 years, and it’s hard to project what the next networking technology will look like, but it will most certainly be named Ethernet. Happy Birthday, Ethernet.

Gartner: Forecast: Servers by Form Factor, Worldwide, 1Q13 Update, April 11, 2013.
Infonetics: Optical transceiver market bolstered as 100G arrives in force (press release)
IEEE: IEEE Launches Study Group to Explore 400Gb/s Ethernet (press release)

Tags: 40th anniversary of Ethernet, Emulex, Ethernet, Ethernet Alliance, Ethernet anniversary, Xerox
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How Big Data Use is Helping Catch Criminals

Posted May 14th, 2013 by Sonny Singh

In the aftermath of the recent Boston Marathon terrorist attacks, I stumbled across a very interesting article by FCW which provides insight into the latest technology and IT trends being deployed by government agencies. In prior blogs, I’ve mentioned on more than one occasion how the use of “big data” seems to be proliferating more than ever. Big data is defined in simple terms as a means to gather insights from large amounts of data sets and then disseminating those insights into strategic and tactical courses of action. It is actually not surprising that big data practices are being used to help solve crimes simply because in today’s modern age of counter-terrorism, what goes on “behind the firewall” is almost as crucial as what happens at the actual crime scene.

Ultimately, the FBI investigation provided the public a glimpse of how the deployment of big data and data analytics practices is just scratching the surface towards large scale use down the road. Here is a recap of the key takeaways from the article¹

Less than 24 hours after the two explosions killed three people and injured dozens more at the April 15 Boston Marathon, the FBI had compiled 10 terabytes (TB) of data in hopes of finding needles in haystacks of information that might lead to the suspects.

The FBI-led investigation analyzed mountains of cell phone tower call logs, text messages, social media data, photographs and video surveillance footage to quickly pinpoint the suspects.
Facial recognition software was being used to compare faces in photographs and video against visa, passport, driver’s license and other databases.

While the 10TB of data gathered by investigators seems like a drop in the bucket (the Feds usually work with Petabytes of data), the investigation still presented officials with a large amount of data crunch due to the sheer volume, various types of media and overall complexity of information they were dealing with and requiring a tight window period to analyze.

Dealing with multiple terabytes or more of video, digital images, text message and cell phone records is complex enough as it is. Just imagine how much more of a quagmire is created when you bring social media into the fray? What I found most interesting about this article was that investigators utilized the services of a company called Topsy Labs to sift through billions of tweets. Topsy has stored every tweet generated since July of 2010, and in the case of this terrorist investigation, allowed investigators to run big-data analytics of Boston-related tweets against hundreds of billions of past and present messages. Topsy’s database analytic software allowed investigators to search every reference ever made to Twitter of the word “bomb” in a specific region including Boston and its adjoining suburbs.

Ultimately, this type of detailed search turned up deleted bomb references from both suspects’ Twitter accounts. This type of search through public records likely revealed additional clues that proved detrimental to the investigation, including which users re-tweeted the bomb mentions or engaged in incriminating dialogue with the terrorist suspects. Furthermore, Topsy has “geo-inferencing” technology which allowed the investigators to accurately map where specified tweets originated (pretty cool considering only about 1% of Twitter users geo-tag their tweets). According to Topsy, those capabilities make it 20 times more accurate than standard Twitter location data.

How amazing is that?

Emulex – We ‘get’ big data

At Emulex, we believe the heart of big data at the core, lies within the framework of an organizations’ network. There are thousands of servers performing parallel processing to create value and those servers talk to each other over Ethernet and Fibre Channel protocols. As such, the latency and throughput of the network’s traffic is the critical path for fast results in big data deployments. Emulex solves these latency issues and is the chosen vendor by organizations worldwide because we provide the right I/O solution to maximize data clusters and allow for the seamless deployment of big data solutions. For a more in-depth view on Emulex’s big data expertise please reference my earlier blog here.

It is unfortunate that we live in a world of uncertainty, fear and carnage at the behest of a few loathsome individuals. But it’s also refreshing to remember our community is capable of greatness and benevolence in times of need just as the citizens of Boston demonstrated during and after this terrible incident. Even though the deployment of big data practices were crucial towards the investigation, let’s not forget it was ultimately the tip of a citizen that finally led investigators to the two perpetrators. In the end, no technology, no matter how advanced, can replace the fortitude and good-will of mankind.

¹ FCW, APR, 2013

Tags: best practices, big data, Boston Strong
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Is it time for SSD in the data center? You bet your OPEX!

Posted May 3rd, 2013 by Mike Jochimsen

Recently, we published a slideshow on IT Business Edge titled “Five reasons why HDD is dead and SSD is taking over.” Provocative? Sure, but that was the point. Do I really think the hard disk drive (HDD) market is dead? Not that it matters what I think, but no… EMC, IBM, HP and a huge number of storage vendors continue to sell massive quantities of HDDs every day and will continue doing so for the foreseeable future.

However, recently it feels like we are rapidly approaching Gladwell’s tipping point where “ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread like viruses do¹.” Well, the pandemic that is solid state disk (SSD) sure seems to fit that criteria. Come on, would IBM bet one BILLION dollars in something that is just a fad?

In the immortal words of Ron Popeil, “but wait, there’s more,” it seems like every analyst on the planet is now talking as if the use of SSD/flash in servers and storage is becoming a de facto standard.

So, what is the use case? While SSDs began appearing in servers in recent years as local storage, the idea that they could effectively replace storage area networks (SANs) began to fade when users realized that large databases, virtual environments, and big data analytics required lots of servers touching common shared storage. The use case for this local flash storage morphed into server-based caching, which is how companies such as EMC and Fusion-io are now positioning their PCI Express (PCIe)-based flash adapters. Also in recent years, these SSDs began appearing in the storage fabric in at least three use cases – SSD front-ending traditional spinning disks in a storage enclosure (hybrid arrays), SSDs in a fabric-based appliance front-ending a traditional spinning disk array, and all flash arrays as primary storage.

Most of the large storage vendors already offer hybrid arrays, which offer a flash front-end to spinning disks to accelerate performance. This offers a relatively easy way to begin experiencing the benefits of SSD. Although this wasn’t without some angst since the addition of SSD into the array created need for changes to the RAID controllers typically optimized to place data on spinning disks. While some customers see this as an onboarding opportunity into SSD storage, others may find it is their destination, giving “good enough” performance.

We are beginning to see the adoption of all flash appliances in the market increase as the waves of large databases and increasingly dense virtual environments demand larger data stores with higher I/O operations per second (IOPS) and lower latency. Offerings include GreenBytes with their IO Offload Engine providing an accelerated virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), and Fusion-io’s ION Software Defined Storage, which can either present itself as fabric-based cache or primary storage. On the extreme end of the scale, companies like PureStorage and Violin Memory provide all flash arrays capable of handling very robust and demanding application environments.

Again, in the immortal words of Clara Peller “Where’s the beef?”

Much of the resistance to bringing SSD into primary storage has been cost. Generally, HDDs are ten times more cost effective than SSD when measured on a dollar per GB ($/GB) basis (although Steve Mills of IBM claimed the cost differential was less than double in the article mentioned above. Since SSD costs continue to fall, assume the real answer lies somewhere between 2X and 10X.) However, SSDs are at least 100 times more cost-effective than HDDs on a dollar per IOPS ($/IOPS) basis. Given that increased IOPS is such a central value proposition to SSD storage, it makes sense for SSD array vendors to make this argument. But it also makes sense in general. In the HDD world, generations of spinning disk offered modest improvements in performance when compared to the dramatic leap offered by the move from HDD to SSD. For example, from 7K, to 10K, to 15K, HDD IOPS increased in modest increments, like 30-100%. However, the difference in IOPS between a 15K drive and an SSD can be in the range of 2000%!

The other major advantages that SSDs bring to the data center are power and cooling efficiency. An SSD has no moving parts so it requires much less power to run and generates little to no heat, which has a dramatic effect on cooling costs. In our slide show referenced above, we quote Marc Staimer, founder of Dragon Slayer Consulting, who estimates the power and cooling savings of SSD over HDD can be in the 50-80% range. I’ve seen similar estimates from other analysts as well, giving the claims of the flash/SSD community some credence. This becomes a very important factor given the constraints that today’s data centers are facing in power and cooling capacity. Given the overall economic situation in recent years, there has been a slowdown in data center build out, forcing many companies to optimize the use of their current facilities. This provides one more arrow in their quiver of optimization strategies.

So, is HDD technology really dead? Not likely in the near future. However, with the growing capacity, shrinking cost and efficiency benefits that SSD can bring to the data center, it is quite conceivable that the tipping point HAS been reached and the mix of HDD vs. SSD in the data center will soon start to fall in favor of SSD technology. Enterprise customers do need the operational expenditure (OPEX) savings and facilities relief that SSD technology can bring to their “shrink IT while maintaining service level agreement (SLA)” directives.

If you are planning to attend Interop May 7th through 9th in Las Vegas, stop by the Emulex booth #1759 and hear more about what we are doing (or read this blog on what we’re highlighting!).

Malcolm Gladwell “The Tipping Point”, 2000, Little Brown

Tags: 16GFC, caching, Emulex, flash, HDDs, partnerships, SSDs, tech trends
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Emulex @Interop 2013 – partners, demos…and a sweet giveaway

Posted May 2nd, 2013 by John Cedillo

Interop 2013 is upon us and with that, we are excited to officially unveil our new Endace portfolio, which is a key component to our new ‘Connect, Monitor, Manage’ vision for the data center. Now, not only does Emulex provide the highest performance storage and network connectivity products available on in the market, along with industry-leading and seamless management tools, but we now provide the unique ability to provide 100% accurate, high-speed intelligent network recording.

In addition to highlighting our broadened product portfolio, we have a jam-packed booth full of partner ‘pods’ and demonstrations, more than 30 booth theater presentations with partners like Dell, EMC, Fusion-IO and HP, and our biggest giveaway yet of 2013 – a brand new Honda CBR500R road bike! You’ll have plenty of ways to enter to win this awesome prize, by attending one of our booth theater presentations, and weighing in on what you liked most from those presentations and demonstrations, on our Facebook or Twitter pages.

Here is a snapshot of the sessions you’ll hear at the booth theater, every 30 minutes Tuesday-Thursday of the show (go to our buzz site to see the schedule, access collateral and more!):

Prepare for the Inevitable – The Power of Intelligent Network Recording
Emulex OneConnect Network Xceleration Solutions – FastStack VideoPump
EMC Flash Deployments in Today’s Data Center, Avishek Kumar, Product Management, EMC
HP Virtual Connect: Wire-Once, Change-Ready, Kant Deshpande, WW Product Manager, Virtual Connect, HP
LAN & SAN Convergence with Dell Networking S5000, Saleem Muhammad, Product Management, Dell Data Center Networking
Trends and Advancements in 10G NAS, Chris Wang, Product Marketing Manager, QNAP
Emulex & Fusion-io: More Data Faster, Jonathan Flynn, Manager Data Propulsion Labs, Fusion-io

So stop by and visit us at booth #1759 any time during the show to hear one of several booth theater presentations, learn how Emulex is uniquely positioned to help you Connect, Monitor, and Manage your resources, and check out our live InteropNet demonstration where we will show how organizations can diagnose and troubleshoot network, application and security issues using EndaceVision^TM – the world’s only browser-based network traffic search engine.

We look forward to seeing you at the show next week!

Tags: Dell, Emulex, Fusion-io, HP, Interop 2013, QNAP
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Emulex 16GFC HBAs deliver up to 10 times better reliability to keep systems up and running

Posted May 1st, 2013 by Barbara Porter

A detailed reliability study by Emulex Labs shows that based on component selection, the Emulex 16Gb Fibre Channel (16GFC) Host Bus Adapter (HBA) can deliver up to 10x better reliability than QLogic’s newly released QLE2600 series. The LPe16000B was designed with reliability in mind, with a cool running ASIC and fail-proof passive heat sink for heat management within the server.

Emulex leads in reliability with the highest published mean time between failure (MTBF) in the HBA industry—10 million hours MTBF on the LightPulse family of 2G, 4G, 8G and 16GFC HBAs. For more information on why OEMs have deployed more Emulex LPe16000-series HBAs than any other 16GFC HBA, click here.

Tags: 16Gb Fibre Channel, 16GFC technology, Emulex
Posted in Benchmarking, Performance, Technology | No Comments

Are the causes of pesky and serious application performance issues still a big unknown? Stop guessing today and lower time to resolution of I/O issues

Posted April 26th, 2013 by Erick Crowell

It’s more common than you might think. A critical system (say, your ordering system) is exhibiting intermittent slowdowns and users are complaining. There are certainly a lot of teams searching for the solution but the intermittent nature of the problem makes it difficult for any team to provide proof that their component is (or is not) at fault.

In these situations, we see lots of finger pointing, data collection, and waiting around for problems to reproduce. Vendors and IT staff huddled around conference calls, consuming countless hours of productivity, delaying important projects from completing and affecting business agility. The business must wait for the, often slow, process of trial and error issue discovery to unfold; revealing small clues to what could be the source of slowdowns and outages.

These types of pesky and serious application slowdowns have an instant impact on your bottom line, but they don’t have to. Administrators are often missing the information they need to quickly diagnose the source of application performance problems. Many organizations are still using traditional silo based management tools to construct a partial view of performance that can create I/O blind spots that obscure problems and delay resolution.

What’s needed is a shift in perspective provided by application I/O management solutions like OneCommand Vision, that can lower time to resolution (TTR), saving valuable dollars, and freeing up valuable human capital to focus on revenue-generating activities.

How OneCommand Vision can lower the TTR of application performance issues:

Provides the “application view” of I/O performance trends, I/O availability and protocol errors impacting applications
I/O Expert automated slow-down detection process pinpoints the most likely cause of any I/O slowdown
Quickly validates performance impacts/improvements based on configuration changes

Simply put, install Emulex OneCommand® Vision, and within five minutes, you will know:

If the issue is caused by application I/O
If so, the most likely bottleneck within your I/O infrastructure
Which infrastructure devices, including servers, have been affected, letting data center staff focus resources in the right area

In some cases, we helped administrators solve issues that have lingered for 6 months … in a matter of hours. We think that’s pretty powerful, and the customers that have use it agree. Sound interesting? Please try our OneCommand® Vision FREE Edition software for yourself and see the power of perspective.

Tags: Emulex, I/O performance, OneCommand Vision, Vision
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The New World of Storage Area Networks: Visa Black Card and Albert Einstein’s Pre-frontal Cortex no longer required

Posted April 24th, 2013 by Sonny Singh

When Storage Area Networks (SANs) first started making a dent in IT data centers back in the early to mid-90’s, a corporation might as well have sold all their employees’ kidneys on the black market in order to swallow the astronomical costs associated with the implantation of a SAN. The other problem was the sheer complexity of SAN topologies. It wouldn’t have been a far stretch for the scientists at NASA having an easier time deploying a biosphere on Mars for humans to inhabit (in the next year) than deploying a SAN.

The tradeoff was that SANs promised (and delivered) a dedicated network that afforded access to consolidated, high-speed networks providing block level data storage. Another crucial business benefit was that long-term deployment costs would diminish because SANs allowed for the sharing of storage pools and offered simplified storage administration with added flexibility since traditional cables and cumbersome storage devices no longer had to be physically moved to shift storage from one server to another.

SANs were and are still primarily used to make storage devices, such as disk arrays, tape libraries, and optical jukeboxes, accessible to servers so that the devices appear like locally attached devices to the operating system (OS). A SAN typically has its own network of storage devices that are generally not accessible through the Local Area Network (LAN) by other devices. Thus, it was no surprise that the so-called “experts” believed Direct Access Storage (DAS) and LANs, at least in theory, would follow the same dismal fate as other archaic technologies because SANs would render them obsolete.

Well, that wasn’t exactly the case (just ask the guys making a killing on their prolific Network Attached Storage (NAS) and DAS solutions). The good news was that the overall cost and complexity of SANs dropped dramatically in the early 2000s to levels allowing wider adoption across both enterprise and small-to-medium sized business environments. Furthermore, SANs have become far easier to manage and deploy, thanks to seamless interoperability practices and the economies of scale generated by the growing number of installations worldwide.

Introducing the new Cisco MDS 9710 & 9250i Storage Directors

In keeping with the spirit of raising the bar for SANs, Cisco recently announced its next-generation SAN solutions supporting their Unified Data Center strategy to help customers merge networking, compute, and storage functions into one data center “fabric” for more efficient IT and business operations. The new Cisco MDS products allow customers to transform business operations with virtualized and cloud-based architectures that reduce expenses, operate more efficiently, provide better and faster business metrics, and offer new business services for corporate growth.

MDS 9710 Storage Director

24 Tbps switching and 1.536 Tbps per slot capacity for Fibre Channel
N+1 fabric, fully redundant components and fault-tolerant architectural design
Provides a single platform for both high-density Fibre Channel and Fibre Channel over Ethernet while protecting customer investments
Supports multi-protocol environments and enables consistent SAN and LAN networking operations

MDS 9250i Fabric Switch

Improves efficiency by performing important storage services in the SAN fabric
Hosts services for easier SAN management, including Cisco I/O accelerator and Data Mobility Manager
Reduces time and resources required to perform common storage management functions
Simplifies and accelerates data protection for regulatory compliance

Emulex LightPulse 16Gb Fibre Channel Adapters – Maximizing Cisco MDS Storage Director Deployments

Emulex is a long-standing Cisco technology collaborator and we’re pleased to be a part of and to support the launch of the newest Cisco MDS Storage Director and Fabric Switch with Emulex’s industry-leading LighPulse 16Gb Fibre Channel (16GFC) Host Bus Adapter (HBA) technology. The LPe16000 16GFC HBA is the clear choice for the toughest virtualized, cloud and mission critical deployments utilizing Cisco MDS storage directors. The Emulex LightPulse 16GFC HBA features the Emulex bullet-proof driver-stack, backward compatibility to 4GFC and 8GFC HBAs and rock-solid reliability with a heritage that spans back to the first generation of Fibre Channel to today’s 16GFC HBAs.

The Emulex LightPulse 16GFC HBA ‘s advanced management functionality can shave days off installing and managing adapters and complements the MDS 9250i Fabric Switch’s host service capabilities for easier SAN management, including Cisco I/O Accelerator and Data Mobility Manager, which improve SAN efficiency by performing important storage services centrally in the fabric; reducing the time and resources required to perform common storage management functions; and simplifying and accelerating data protection for regulatory compliance.

Go ahead…keep your kidneys

It’s safe to say that traditional SAN technology will continue to be viewed as the de-facto storage protocol to meet storage growth needs for the foreseeable future. But don’t get me wrong, if SANs were easy to deploy and cheap to procure, everyone would be doing it, right? Remember, the costs associated with provisioning, scaling and managing SANs has grown quickly as well, creating an even bigger problem for data center managers struggling to meet growth needs with constrained budgets.

The good news is by appropriating a SAN strategy encompassing Cisco’s new MDS 9710 and 9250i Directors, coupled with Emulex LightPulse 16GFC HBA ‘s, you can manage your data center seamlessly and employ a SAN strategy that’s less painful, more cost effective and doesn’t require your employees to sell their kidneys (or other vital organs for that matter) on the black market.

For more information, check out Cisco’s press release here!

Tags: 16Gb Fibre Channel, Cisco, Emulex, SANs, storage area networks
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Sarbanes Oxley (SOX): Martha Stewart’s Inspiration for Prison-Inspired Decorative License Plates

Posted April 22nd, 2013 by Sonny Singh

What is it about white collar criminals that makes my blood boil? Maybe it’s some perverse notion in my mind that “real criminals” have some semblance of street cred and the latter are basically corrupt inside traders taking an “extended vacation” in a country club… er, I mean federal institution of the penal kind.

You might fondly recall when Martha Stewart (America’s queen of cliché K-Mart furnishings and interior paint lines) got popped for securities fraud after she avoided a loss of $45,673 by selling all 3,928 shares of her ImClone Systems stock in 2001? Yes, she was subsequently found guilty in March 2004 of conspiracy, obstruction of an agency proceeding, and making false statements to federal investigators. When all things were said and done, she was sentenced in July 2004 to serve a paltry five-months in a federal correctional facility and a two-year period of supervised release that included an electronic bracelet, which I’m surprised she didn’t turn into a jewelry line.

Martha was labeled “M. Diddy” by fellow inmates because of the absolute fear she invoked amongst even the most hardened criminals. No one dared cross her as she perfected her moonshine peach lemonade and equally gangster lemon soufflé. When she did end up finishing her hard-time, she merrily returned to her Martha Stewart Living Empire and subjugates us to Martha Stewart branded vitamin supplements, maternity clothing and convection ovens. Justice would have been much better served had she toiled in the prison yard donning her artisan skills on handmade license plates.

Now in all fairness to M-Diddy, she seems like Mother Theresa when compared to one of the most prolific white collar criminals to date, Tyco’s former chief executive, L. Dennis Kozlowski, who systematically created a corporate culture of greed and excess, secretly authorizing the forgiveness of tens of millions of dollars of loans to dozens of executives to keep their loyalty¹. It gets better. At Mr. Kozlowski’s direction and without board approval, 51 Tyco employees received $56 million in bonuses — and $39 million more to pay the taxes on the bonuses — that offset loans extended by the company.

Kozlowski spent tens of millions of dollars in personal spending with company money including his $16.8 million apartment on Fifth Avenue — along with $3 million in renovations and $11 million in furnishings — and a $7 million apartment on Park Avenue for his former wife. Some of the items below would even make Martha Stewart envious:

$80,000 American Express bill
$72,000 fee to Germán Frers, a yacht maker;
$17,100 traveling toilet box (um…what is a traveling toilet box?)
$15,000 dog umbrella stand (Cat umbrella stands come in at only $7,000)
$6,300 sewing basket
$6,000 shower curtain
$5,960 for two sets of sheets
$2,900 set of coat hangers
$2,200 gilt metal wastebasket
$1,650 notebook
$445 pincushion (How is that even possible?!)

In the end, some semblance of justice prevailed when Kowalski and other nefarious individuals at Tyco received extensive sentencing (Mr. K getting a maximum of 25 years himself).

Watch out white collar criminals, there’s a new sheriff in town!

It was only a matter of time before something had to be enacted to curb and dissuade these types of unethical business practices. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 was created to protect investors by improving the accuracy and reliability of corporate disclosures. The legislation, often referred to as SOX, amends mail and wire fraud infractions with harsher punishments and imposes fines and prison sentences of up to 20 years for anyone who knowingly alters or destroys a record or document with the intent to obstruct an investigation. While most provisions of the act focus on financial records, they were clearly not meant to stop there. For example, during an investigation, discovery requests can be submitted to IT departments. In addition, such requests could require access to all e-mail communication².

The legislation not only affects the financial side of corporations, it also affects the IT departments whose job it is to store a corporation’s electronic records. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act states that all business records, including electronic records and electronic messages, must be saved for “not less than five years.” The consequences for non-compliance are fines, imprisonment, or both. IT departments are increasingly faced with the challenge of creating and maintaining a corporate records archive in a cost-effective fashion that satisfies the requirements put forth by the legislation².

Quick data retrieval is another requirement under Sarbanes-Oxley, which makes perfect sense. In the event a company is subpoenaed, the last thing a corporate legal team wants to do is wait a week for their IT department to pull the right records, which is a detriment to crafting their defense.

Emulex and Quantum – Helping CEOs stay out of prison (legally of course)

Partners and appliance integrators continue to certify and adopt Emulex 16Gb Fibre Channel (16GFC) Host Bus Adapters (HBAs) because we offer the best performing HBA available today, enabling the most compelling application throughput and I/O scalability³. In addition, our superior reliability and extensive interoperability testing allows for seamless deployment across multiple platforms.

Emulex recently announced broad partner adoption of its LightPulse® 16GFC HBAs worldwide. Emulex 16GFC HBAs are the most widely deployed 16GFC HBAs by OEMs, with more than 70 percent of the overall revenue market share for 2012⁴. Quantum, a global expert in data protection and big data management solutions, specifically certified Emulex 16GFC HBAs with their solutions in order to achieve the most scalable solutions for its data archiving and backup solutions. Chiefly, a key requirement was addressing the strict data retrieval access times specified by SOX.

Quantum wanted to take advantage of the Emulex 16GFC adapter’s superior performance and low latency benefits required for their data recovery solutions. In particular, The Quantum LTO6 drives within the Quantum Scalar i500 and i6000 libraries leverage Emulex 16GFC HBAs to deliver increased bandwidth for improved backup and recovery performance. This is important, as applications drive increased storage growth, resulting in the need for robust and rapid backup to minimize both data loss downtime and most importantly, recovery times.

Make no mistake about it, SOX can bite a corporation in the caboose if they aren’t prepared for an audit and that’s why they require a cost-effective, reliable and easy-to-manage solution with options to scale from terabytes up to many petabytes. When coupled with Emulex 16GFC HBAs, Quantum Scalar libraries deliver improved backup and recovery performance to address SOX requirements, now and in the future.

Unfortunately, I am certain we will continue to see unethical business practices that deem the wrath of SOX in the future (e.g. Bernie Madoff). However, for every white collar criminal there are a million white collar good-guys trying to do the right thing. How about starting with Emulex 16GFC adapters? It the surest way to avoid having to knit dog sweaters with Martha Stewart in prison.

1. The New York Times, 2002

2. TechRepublic: Sarbanes Oxley Compliance Regulatory Review, August 2005

3. Demartek: Emulex LPe16000B 16 Gb Fibre Channel HBA Feature Comparison, December 2012

4. Dell’Oro Group: Fibre Channel Adapter Vendor Report 4Q12, February 2013

Tags: 16Gb Fibre Channel, 16GFC, Emulex, Quantum, technology
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What is the value of a partnership in the technology industry or what I learned while sitting on a jury

Posted April 1st, 2013 by Mike Jochimsen

Partner: One associated with another, especially in an action. One of two or more persons who play together in a game against an opposing side.(http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/partner)

I spent the past week on a jury in a felony, first degree burglary trial (yeah, I’ve already been chastised by everyone I know for my inability to get released from jury duty). I’m two for two in my last two attempts – meaning I’ve sat on juries two times in a row. My excuse is that I am just too honest.

I had a lot of time (I mean a LOT of time) to sit and reflect during this week. For those who haven’t had the pleasure of fulfilling their civic duty by showing up for jury service, may I simply say your time will come – at least I hope it does, so they quit calling me EXACTLY every 18 months.

During these great reflective periods I learned a few things. I learned that while I am sure there are great reasons, the use of a juror’s time seems extremely inefficient, giving them long periods of time to reflect. More importantly, by observing the trial process, I learned two important lessons that apply directly to my job, and yours if you are reading this:

It takes partnerships to prove or disprove charges, assertions and accusations
Every charge, assertion or accusation is false until proven beyond a reasonable doubt

Partnership – In the courtroom it means using all of the resources at your disposal to prove guilt or in defense of your client. In this case, the district attorney used the arresting officer and the crime lab technician to prove his case – he partnered with them to offer compelling evidence. The idea of establishing a partnership in the information technology industry is driven from the fact that very few companies truly provide all of the components of a “solution.” For example, the act of building a reference architecture for a “simple” Oracle database environment can encompasses at least six discrete technologies from different vendors, for example:

Server – HP ProLiant DL380p Gen8
Storage – EMC Symmetrix VMAX 10K
I/O – Emulex LightPulse LPe12002 Host Bus Adapters (HBAs)
Switch – Brocade 6250 switch
Operating System – Windows Server 2012, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.4, Oracle Linux 6.4
Database – Oracle Database 11g Release 2

Now, with various OEM deals, a customer can usually buy many of these components from a single vendor. However, I purposely outlined an architecture above that cannot be purchased from a single vendor to prove a point that the data center remains a “mix and match” environment. This puts the burden on the customer or channel to integrate. To attempt to make the customer’s life easier, vendors such as Emulex create reference architectures or blueprints to show these customers best practices they can use to implement in their environment.

I look around my house at all of the technology we use and I can’t see this same problem existing here. I buy a refrigerator from Sears, and as far as I know, it is all Kenmore. I don’t care that Sears bought fans, cooling units, shelving and other components from different vendors. The end result is a self-contained unit and when I have problems, I call Sears for support.

The IT industry has attempted to solve the above problem by returning to its roots. Oracle with its Exa- machines didn’t invent appliances, but they were on the leading edge of the trend towards resurrecting the mainframe computing concept, which is a monolithic computing stack with every component from a single vendor. However, the recent incarnation of computing appliances is still generally a grouping of different vendor components in a single chassis. While the assembling vendor may offer first level support for all components, I wouldn’t be surprised to see more complex issues end up with the support staff of the component vendor. This stuff is just too complex.

Which brings me full circle to the value of partnering. We, as technology vendors, have a responsibility to our customers to attempt to drive the complexity out of the solutions we are asking you to buy. In other words, we need to prove our assertions or disprove our competitors’ accusations. We do that in many ways. As I mentioned above, creating reference architectures or blueprints is one. At Emulex, we have something called the Implementer’s Lab. We have a small group of very intelligent engineers who work with all of the components of a solution in our lab and then document their experience. Some people call these best practices, or cookbooks. We call them Deployment Guides, Solution Guides and Application Notes.

We can’t do this in a vacuum. Well, we could, but the result might not be optimal for you. We are attempting to reduce the complexity of these installations for you by collaborating with the server, storage, switching, operating system (OS)/virtualization and application vendors to implement a solution in the best possible way and then document it for you. You won’t see a lot of marketing in these guides, but you will get a lot of practical advice and guidelines.

Some of my favorites include Alex Amaya’s “ VMware vSphere 5.1: 16Gb Fibre Channel SANs with HP ProLiant DL380 Gen8 servers and HP 3PAR Storage” and a paper we did with James Morle at Scale Abilities titled “Deploying 8Gb Fibre Channel with Oracle Database.” No hype, “just the facts, ma’am.”

I was extremely impressed when the district attorney repeatedly reminded us that we needed to hold him to a very high standard of proof. We had taken an oath to hold him to this standard of proving the defendant’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. It was brought home to me when, during his closing arguments, the district attorney stated very emphatically that he had provided us with overwhelming evidence that proved the guilt of the defendant. However, if we did not believe his witnesses or evidence we were bound by law to rule “not guilty.” He ended by very confidently stating that he believed we would not do so after simply looking at the facts.

We voted unanimously to convict.

And so I ask you ladies and gentlemen, storage administrators, systems administrators, network administrators, help desk technicians, directors of IT, VPs of IT and CIOs, hold us to that same high standard. If you don’t believe the evidence we provide you by all means don’t buy our stuff. However, I am confident that when you look at the facts you will see that the evidence is overwhelming and we have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that Emulex has great technology and our work with the ecosystem of partners provides you the details you need to confidently deploy these solutions in your environment.

I rest my case.

Tags: best of breed, Emulex, I/O, Implementer's Lab, partnership, technology
Posted in Technology, Tips and Tricks | No Comments

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