Two small vendors trying to make their way in markets dominated by storage giants made incremental yet interesting offerings this week.  

Mosso, a division of Rackspace,  rolled out a cloud computing platform called the Hosting Cloud in February and followed with the release of MailTrust email hosting. Those first two services are intended for users who run websites. The Hosting Cloud includes storage space, backup, patching and security that developers can execute Web code on top of. MailTrust is meant to provide messaging in that website context.

This week, Mosso disclosed that it will branch out a bit later this year with CloudFS, a cloud-based storage-only service more like Amazon’s S3 than not. As with Amazon’s service, CloudFS will provide a place for users to put files and objects on the Web and will require developers to come up with their own interfaces. According to Mosso’s co-founder Jonathan Bryce, one distinction with CloudFS is that it will have packages of supported coding libraries for each major language including .Net, Java, PHP, Ruby and Python.

The company is “committed to fanatical support” and consistency for developers, according to Bryce, and is hoping that some ISVs will write a hosted online backup interface for it the way they have with S3. Target pricing for the service will be about 15 cents per GB per month, plus bandwidth costs for non-Rackspace customers (existing Rackspace hosting customers pay no bandwidth fees for CloudFS). The service is in private beta now.

Meanwhile, Monosphere launched version 3.7 of its StorageHorizon SRM software. This version will allow customers to make fine-grained maps of their storage capacity against VMware deployment–i.e. “the storage relationships between array LUNs, the ESX server, VMware file systems (VMFS), VMware virtual disks (VMDK), guest OSs, and guest OS file systems/raw devices” according to Monosphere’s press materials.

But what’s really getting some play in the market lately is Monosphere’s claims that it can identify not just resource allocations but actual resource utilization, to a fine degree–identifying “dark” storage, which is free for use but unmapped. Monosphere has been making this claim since at least last year (I remember them talking about it with me in briefings long before this week) but it seems they’re getting more attention for it now. Among the blogs commenting on this “dark” approach to SRM is Jon Toigo’s DrunkenData:

I am not sure whether Monosphere came up with this term, but I like it.  Dark Storage refers to storage that is unmapped, unclaimed or unassigned. I am not sure whether Monosphere came up with this term, but I like it.  Dark Storage refers to storage that is unmapped, unclaimed or unassigned…According to [Monosphere], between 15 and 40 percent of the capacity in the corporate storage infrastructures that they have inspected with their software can be characterized as dark storage.

Could you be sitting on capacity that you didn’t know you had?

Monosphere reports that it’s doing one new installation per week and is looking to make that two in the next few months. Among their claimed customer wins are large companies in networking, insurance, automobiles and business outsourcing, though none of those can be publicly named or interviewed at this point. While there have been some SRM products that have caught on - Novus, for example, which was bought by IBM earlier this year - it’s been a tough market for startups. “Nobody’s making any money on SRM right now,” is what Forrester analyst Andrew Reichman tells me, even though his expertise is SRM. When people do buy SRM, it often comes  their storage hardware vendor. It’s still not clear that even the best independent SRM tools will garner much attention from users - we’ll have to watch Monosphere and see.

Comments by CEO H.K. Desai on QLogic’s last week raised questions about the future of QLogic’s SANbox 9000 Fibre Channel director switch.

Several times on the company’s earnings conference call, Desai said QLogic was changing the focus on its switching business to edge and blade switches. That would seem to leave out the director switch that QLogic launched 2006 as a low-cost alternative to directors from Brocade and Cisco.

“We continue to gain traction with our Fiber Channel edge and blade switches, which is our primary area of focus,” Desai said. Later he said QLogic is refocusing its switch investments on InfiniBand and blade switches.

To financial analysts on the call, that meant QLogic would leave the SANbox 9000 behind as it begins rolling out 8-Gbit/s HBAs and switches and starts development on 16-gig technology. SANbox 9000 sales have been hurt by lack of any OEM deals with major storage system vendors such as EMC, IBM, and Hewlett-Packard that sell Brocade and Cisco switches under their brand. QLogic’s SANbox 5000 edge switches already support 8-gig connectivity.

“You indicated that edge and blades switches are your primary focus now in Fibre Channel,” analyst Clay Sumner of FBR Friedman, Billings, Ramsey & Co., Inc. said to Desai on the call. “Just curious, does that mean you no longer expect the tier one [OEM] win for your 8-gig Fibre Channel director?”

“We never give up on anything,” said Desai, refusing to clarify his position on directors for the curious analyst.

Several analysts expect QLogic to dump the directors. “Our checks indicate that going forward QLGC may not invest further in the FC high end Director-switch space but could continue to develop mid-low end FC switches and blade switches,” Pacific Growth analyst Kaushik Roy wrote in a note to clients. Roy told me he doesn’t expect QLogic to do any more development on the SANbox 9000 or build any other directors. In other words, it is getting out of the director switch business.

Not so, says QLogic marketing VP Frank Berry. “The SANbox 9000 lives on!” Berry wrote to me in an e-mail. “We continue to sell it.”

Berry also said the SANbox 9000 will be upgraded with 8-gig blades that can replace the 4-gig in there now. What’s changing, he said, is its go-to market strategy. Instead of its original target of Global 2000 firms, QLogic now sees the director as a small enterprise product.

“We’ve been successful for several years in the SME market with our
SANbox 500 line of stackable switches,” Berry wrote. “And we have learned the SME space is where we have been successful selling the SANbox 9000.”

QLogic will make more noise about SME products this summer. Then we’ll see which SANbox it expects SMEs to play in.

The term “vendor lock-in” is rarely used in a good way by storage buyers. It usually means you’re stuck with products from one vendor, making it difficult to switch if you’re unhappy or something better comes along.

Still, with probably more options for storage products than ever before, most companies still buy all their primary storage from one vendor. That’s according to a Forrester report, “Consolidate Storage Vendors to Reduce Complexity,” released this week.

A Forrester survey of 170 companies ranging from SMBs to large enterprises in North America and Europe found that more than 80 percent bought their primary storage from one vendor over the last year. That includes 64 percent of the companies with more than 500 TB of raw storage.

The report, written by analyst Andrew Reichman, says using more than one primary storage vendor can make it more complex to manage, provision and support the storage environment. And while using multiple vendors can often bring better pricing, buying from one vendor can result in volume discounts.

“You may have tried to contain costs by forcing multiple incumbent vendors to continuously compete against each other, with price as the primary differentiator,” Reichman writes. “This strategy can reduce prices and limit vendor lock-in, but it can also lead to management complexity and poor capacity utilization.”

The report recommends keeping things simple by and using fewer vendors when possible. However, that advice comes with several caveats: buying all storage from one vendor means taking the bad with the good, and some vendors’ product families differ so much “they may as well come from different vendors.”

Of course, I’m sure there are horror stories out there from organizations that have had bad experience with lock-in as well as those who’ve had incompatibility issues with products from multiple vendors.

In case you’re like me and can’t get enough of the technical nitty-gritty on the new self-healing storage systems from Atrato and Xiotech, here are some tidbits from the cutting room floor so to speak, that didn’t make it into the article I did this week comparing the two systems.

This in particular was a paragraph that could have been fleshed out into a whole separate piece: “Both vendors use various error correction codes to identify potential drive failures, and both said they can work around a bad drive head by storing data on the remaining good sectors of the drive.”

This is where I’m running into each vendor’s unwillingness to expose their IP, which is understandable, and so trying to get to the bottom of this may be a fruitless endeavor. But that’s never stopped me before, so here’s a few more steps down the rabbit hole for those who are interested.

Xiotech’s whitepapers and literature talk a lot about the ANSI T10 DIF (Data Integrity Field), which is part of how its system checks that virtual blocks are written to the right physical disk, and that physical blocks match up with virtual blocks. The standard, which is also used by Seagate, Oracle, LSI and Emulex in their data integrity initiative, adds 8K per 512K block with data integrity information. I asked Xiotech CTO and ISE mastermind Steve Sicola about what kind of overhead that adds to the system, but the only answer I got was that it’s spread out over so many different disk drives working in parallel that it’s not noticeable.

Then along comes Atrato, claiming to base its self-healing technology on a concept from satellite engineering called FDIR, for Fault Detection, Isolation and Recovery. The term was first coined, according to Wikipedia, in relation to the Extended Duration Orbiter in the 90’s.

An Atrato whitepaper reveals three standard codes used for the first step in that process–fault or failure detection. Among them are S.M.A.R.T., which, again according to Wikipedia, “tests all data and all sectors of a drive by using off-line data collection to confirm the drive’s health during periods of inactivity”; SCSI Enclosure Services (SES), which tests non-data characteristics including power and temperature; and the SCSI Request Sense Command, which determines whether drives are SCSI-compliant.

The thing about all of these methods is that they have existed long before either the ISE or Atrato’s Velocity array. There are, of course, key differences between the way the systems are packaged, including the fact that Xiotech puts the controller right next to groups of between 20 and 40 disk drives, and Atrato manages 160 drives at once, but when it comes down to the actual self-healing aspects, the vendors are not disclosing anything about what new codes are being used to supplement those standards.

As Sicola put it to me, “What we’re doing is like S.M.A.R.T., but it goes way beyond that.” How far ‘way beyond that’ actually is, is proprietary. Which is kind of too bad, because it’s hard to tell how much of a hurdle there would be to more entrants in this market.

An analyst I was talking to about these new systems said some are talking about them as a desperation move for Xiotech, which has not exactly been burning down the market in recent years (it reinvented itself once already as an e-Discovery and compliance company after the acquisition of Daticon, which I haven’t heard much about lately).

Then again, others point out, Xiotech has Seagate’s backing (and can start from scratch with clear code on each disk drive, as well as use Seagate’s own drive testing software within the machine. Meanwhile, the ability to adequately market this technology has also been called into question with regards to Atrato. 

But while it’s obviously going to take quite some time to assess the real viability of these particular products, it’s exciting for me as an industry observer to see vendors at least trying to do something fundamentally different with the way storage is managed. I think both of them share the same idea, that the individual disk drive is too small a unit to manage at the capacities today’s storage admins are dealing with.

Even if the products don’t perfectly live up to the claims of zero service events in a full three or five years, as ISE beta tester I was speaking with put it, “anything that will make the SAN more reliable has benefits.” It’s pretty easy to get caught up in all the marketechture noise and miss that forest for the trees.

Even further reading: IBM’s Tony Pearson is less than enthused (but has links to lots of other blogs / writeups on this subject)

The inimitable Robin Harris summarizes his thoughts on ISE, and gets an interesting comment from John Spiers of LeftHand Networks (another storage competitor heard from!).

Wading into bickering between vendors is always fun. My most recent go-round with this has been the AutoCAD compatibility debate between Silver Peak and Riverbed. It began with the difficulties Riverbed users were seeing with optimizing AutoCAD 2007 and 2008 files, and progressed into a weeklong followup process culminating in a conference call between me, Riverbed VP of marketing Alan Saldich, Riverbed chief scientist Mark Day, Silver Peak director of product marketing Jeff Aaron, and Silver Peak CTO David Hughes, which led to this story. 

Don’t think this drama’s over yet, either. While on that rather unusual conference call they seemed to reach a consensus that further testing is necessary on both products, neither company has stopped sending little hints my way since that the other guy’s full of it. Meanwhile, another contact I spoke with for the followup story wrote me late last week to suggest they’re both perhaps piling it higher and deeper.

“After reading the back and forth between Silver Peak and Riverbed, and finding neither firms’ claims especially credible, we’ve put forth a public offer to test in a controlled environment,” wrote James Wedding, an Autodesk consultant who blogs at Civil3D.com. “Shockingly, neither company has responded or replied. We have visitors logged from both firms, so they are reading, but no takers. Color me shocked that neither firm wants independent testing on this problem that will continue for a minimum of another year as Autodesk decides to make a change to accommodate the WAN accelerator market.” The Taneja Group has also offered to carry out testing, also with no discernable response from the vendors.

We’re ready when you are, guys.

Ever since I started covering storage, I’ve been hearing the disk vs. tape debate, usually including proclamations that tape is dead or dying.

There are good reasons to make that assertion. Disk-based backup is catching on, particularly among SMBs, and data deduplication is evening out the cost-per-GB numbers between disk and tape for many midrange applications. Disk is preferable to tape in many ways, especially because it allows faster restore times for backup and archival data. Once again, people are starting to ask, what’s the point of using tape? Dell/EqualLogic’s Marc Farley posted a funny video on his blog to illustrate the question on Friday.

I’m not so sure we’ll ever really see the end of tape. When it comes to the high end, there’s simply too much data to keep on spinning disk. The cost of disk is often still higher per GB, depending on the type of disk and the type of application accessing it. And that doesn’t include power and cooling costs.

I’ve also heard lots of good reasons to give up tape. And maybe in certain markets, like SMBs, tape will die — if it hasn’t already. But whenever tape is on the ropes, another trend comes along to boost it back into relevance.  When disk took over backup, the data archiving trend kicked in, and tape’s savings in power and cooling and its shelf life for long-term data preservation came to the fore. Now, as data dedupe has disk systems vendors pitching their products for archive, too, along comes “green IT” to buoy tape.

Now, I’d like to ask the same questions Farley did, because I’m just as curious to know, and because he and I may have different audiences with different opinions. Do you think tape is dead? If not, what do you use it for? Let us know the amount of data you’re managing in your shop as well.

The other day I blogged about an update to the ”Digital Universe” report EMC sponsored with IDC, which amended estimates of the size of said digital universe upward.

Today while surfing around I saw EMC blogger Chuck Hollis’s post on the report, which contained an intriguing tidbit:

By the way, there’s some new bling for your PC.  Last year, as part of the study, EMC offered up a “digital clock” that attempted to measure all information produced in aggregate. 

This year, there’s a “personal digital clock” that (after answering a few questions) will estimate just how much digital footprint you’re creating: both directly and indirectly.  It’s a bit humbling.

As an example, the personal clock estimates that I’ve created well over a terabyte of “digital shadow” this year so far.  And that’s not even counting these blog posts!

Just doing my part for the storage industry, I guess…

I was definitely interested in finding out the exact dimensions of my digital shadow (proven fact: self-absorption is a key driver of Internet traffic), so I downloaded the mini-application they’ve put together with IDC to calculate one’s digital footprint.

It asked a series of questions about surfing habits, the amount of minutes you spend on the phone per week, the amount of TV you record on your TiVo, that sort of thing. I was actually a little embarrassed at some of the numbers I put in–some of them were high indeed, especially the ‘hours per week you are actively on the Internet’ one.

Once I’d answered the questionnaire, the applicaton calculated that I generate 6.18 GB of personal digital information per day, meaning that this year I will generate 2.25 TB of digital shadow.

Hollis, meanwhile, writes that he’s already generated over 1 TB this year. Today, March 13, is the 72nd day of 2008, putting him at about 13 GB per day, if my calculations are accurate. Given I spend virtually all of my working hours actively on the internet and estimated around five or so hours per day on the phone if you combine cell and land line usage, plus a hard drive partition bulging with over 8,000 digital photos … I have to wonder just what Hollis is doing to generate such a shadow.

You too can find out how much you’re contributing daily to the storage industry via the mini-app, which is posted for download here.

Last week I was briefed by Internet security software company Trend Micro on its new email archive offering, dubbed the Trend Micro Message Archiver, which was launched Monday.

The product, from a storage geek’s point of view, is about as bleeding-edge as its name. It has the usual checklist items we’ve been hearing about from earlier arrivals to this market, from indexing to .pst import. The product also does MD5 hashing for content-addressed storage, etc. At some points it feels like the email archiving players have all seen a Chinese menu somewhere, and they pick and choose certain features. There’s a superset of common product features so ubiquitous in that market it’s begun to feel commoditized.

What captured my attention when it came to TMMA isn’t the product but who’s offering it. Trend Micro is a 20-year-old, global, $848 million-a-year company. Since 2004, MSN Hotmail has been using Trend Micro to scan messages and attachments in its users’ accounts.

The first thing this means is that the product will be integrated as it matures with TM’s access controls, anti-spam and anti-virus filters, email certification and encryption features. Trend Micro’s not alone in this kind of integration (Lucid8 and others jump to mind), but they are pretty unique in terms of their size and brand recognition. And the times I’ve stepped out of my little storage-centric cave and spoken with people in adjacent markets–like, say, the e-discovery and legal compliance folks–I’ve heard many of them say that the storage guys aren’t getting it in some areas, like evidentiary standards that may apply to emails in court beyond what most email archivers offer today. It might be that a little expertise from other markets is what these products need.

This also might be where this new wave of non-storage vendors like Trend Micro making forays into the storage market will find a way to add value. For security-concerned customers, the TM product could offer a focus on security integration, delivery from an already-trusted vendor, and the ever-popular ‘one throat to choke’ as well.

But then again, the ultimate purpose of the product is to store and protect email data. The security features are nice, but secondary to the main function of the product. And many storage admins would probably rather go with a vendor that has experience in the core feature of the product, which is data protection.  

I’m also seeing this dichotomy emerge in another hot market–storage SaaS. In that market, there are also new offerings from experienced storage players competing against new ‘one stop shop’ offerings from adjacent players–EMC’s Fortress vs. new backup and hosted storage offerings from data center service providers like The Planet and Savvis.

I, for one, am curious to see which model users will find preferable as overlaps grow between the different disciplines of IT. Which will be more important: focus, as in focus on the existing relationship with the customer and consolidated vendor relationships, or experience, in designing and supporting storage products?

EMC and IDC have published an update to their Digital Universe report, which met with skepticism when it was originally published last March. We’re generally skeptical of vendor-sponsored analyst reports around here, too, but there was one data point that jumped out at me in this report: over the next three years, 70% of information will be created by individuals but 85% of it will be managed by corporations.

Even more interestingly, the report says the majority of that data created by individuals won’t be created consciously. We are sprouting digital “shadows” such as credit card numbers, bank records, health records, etc., which are increasingly used to identify us and conduct business in the modern economy.

So, to review, in the future, 70% of the information EMC makes money storing will be yours, but it probably won’t be controlled or even consciously generated by you.

EMC’s message around this report is that businesses are going to need to be more aware of this personal digital information, because it’s going to put strain on their storage systems, and also because given the statistics above, individuals are going to be counting on businesses to store and manage their information in a way that preserves privacy and the integrity of the data.

Even where corporate storage managers aren’t directly in the business of information retention for consumers, virtually everyone is going to have to worry about data “hygiene” with the increasing blend of business and personal information on portable devices such as laptops and PDAs. This is something my Storage Soup colleague Tory Skyers has thought and spoken a lot about, including some presentations at Storage Decisions, and it’s still a problem without a clear solution for many in corporate IT.  

For users already struggling with that issue, the EMC / IDC report has some further bad news:

• The digital universe in 2007 - at 2.25 x 1021 bits (281 exabytes or 281 billion gigabytes) - was 10% bigger than we thought. The resizing comes as a result of faster growth in cameras, digital TV shipments, and better understanding of information replication.
• By 2011, the digital universe will be 10 times the size it was in 2006.
• As forecast, the amount of information created, captured, or replicated exceeded available storage for the first time in 2007. Not all information created and transmitted gets stored, but by 2011, almost half of the digital universe will not have a permanent home.

After my posts on militant dolphins and black holes, you could be forgiven for taking that headline literally, but this time I’m referring to the software kind of wizard, not the pointy-hat/ Harry Potter kind.

What prompted this post were two stories I saw this week. First, Reldata announced new adaptive software wizards for its storage gateways and I had an in-depth conversation with the company’s CEO, David Hubbard, about that very subject. Second, everyone’s favorite, Storage Magazine, ran a trends story this month headlined “Storage staffing shortage looms.”

Reldata’s adaptive wizards are a little different from some of the others companies like HP have announced for low-end products, in that they’re not just there for setup. Rather, the adaptive wizards are there for several stages of deployment for the gateway’s iSCSI SAN functions (NAS, replication and clustering wizards are still on the to-do list).

We’re hearing a lot about ease of use these days; even I have been guided through setting up volumes on disk arrays from emerging storage companies by way of proving, “See! Anyone can do it!”

But are we headed toward the point where that will literally have to be true?

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