Sun’s campus in Burlington, Mass. Photo by Beth Pariseau.

Today found me at Sun’s campus in Burlington, Mass., one of three cities across the world where Sun was holding “virtualization chalk talks” with press–the others were San Francisco and London.

Why this big fanfare? Sun’s coming out with its own version of a server virtualization hypervisor based on open-source code from Xen and its LDOM “container” offering for UltraSparc servers. Rumors have been circulating about it recently and Sun wanted to clarify its vision.

So what does this have to do with storage? My question exactly. The answer: at this point, probably something, but Sun’s a little light on the details. ZFS was mentioned, of course, as the underlying filesystem for virtual machines running on its xVM Server.

One of the VPs presenting today, Sun’s Connected Systems group leader Steve Wilson, also pointed to the example of the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), which is running a 4000-node IBM blade server farm attached to Sun’s big honkin’ Magnum InfiniBand switch (3456 ports) and a grid of (guess what) “Thumper” SunFire X4500 servers for storage.

This all ties in–vaguely, at this point–with the announcement from Sun on Monday that it’s melding its server and storage groups. Sun’s futuristic vision is that  server processors and Ethernet pipes are catching up to traditional storage subsystems and Fibre Channel fabrics in terms of performance and scalability. It’s essentially a different twist on Sun’s “the network is the computer” mantra that suggests “the server is the SAN.”

Meanwhile, Sun is announcing a software product to go along with xVM called Operations Center, which will manage both physical and virtual server systems in one console. Eventually, when the lion lies down with the lamb, and grid data centers run in server / storage peace and harmony, said software (theoretically) will also manage the Thumper grids everybody’s going to be using for storage.

That’s the idea, anyway. The roadmap is, to put it mildly, unclear. Sun spent most of its time today talking about its new server virtualization technology, and aside from ZFS and Thumper, no specific storage products or services were mentioned, nor was any time frame given for the extension of Operations Center to storage systems, or when or if Sun’s virtualization vision will extend to incorporate traditional storage subsystems.

As always, when it comes to Sun and storage, ZFS is the glue, the linchpin, the centerpiece and the mantra. ZFS is what makes Thumper tick, it’ll be the file system underpinnings for Sun’s virtual servers, and it apparently will also be key to this “data center of the future” Sun is planning out.

But there’s an elephant in the room. “What happens,” asked this reporter of Sun’s officials in Burlington, “if NetApp wins its lawsuit?” (For those of you unaware, NetApp has filed a cease-and-desist lawsuit against Sun claiming ZFS violates NetApp’s NAS patents. The two may eventually drop their posturing and come to some sort of cross-licensing agreement, but as things stand right now, a NetApp win means not a licensing deal but a mandate to stop distributing ZFS altogether, period.)

You could’ve heard a pin drop when the question was asked today. Finally, the response was, ”We are not going to talk about ongoing litigation.”

Reading between the lines, though, it appears that the rest of Sun is following along with Jonathan Schwartz’s somewhat nonchalant attitude toward the lawsuit–the message that seems to be coming from all this is that Sun’s confidence in its legal position is such that it doesn’t feel compelled to hold off one bit with ZFS. But at the same time, it does beg the question of what could happen as they move forward with a storage product strategy that is so heavily dependent on a disputed piece of IP.

In case you haven’t heard, NetApp has filed suit against Sun, saying Sun’s ZFS violates its patents. And it’s clear we’ve reached a new age in media when one high-profile company sues another, and a good portion of the sniping and posturing back and forth is coming from CEOs writing on corporate blogs, while having their words propagated and dissected via other Web 2.0 sources.

Dave Hitz, co-founder of NetApp, got things kicked off with his blog post Sept. 5, which was posted two minutes after NetApp’s official conference call began. Hitz’s blog post was also referenced in NetApp’s press call and in NetApp’s supporting materials for the announcement of the suit, and in many cases goes into greater detail than any of NetApp’s supporting documents save for the official copy of the complaints it filed in court. Hitz is also in a unique position to write about the case since he is a co-founder of the company, and one of the actual holders of some of the patents in question.   

After NetApp’s initial splash, though, Sun set tongues wagging anew late Wednesday when it responded to NetApp’s announcement with a counterattack of its own. Once again, there was a formal statement released through the usual channels, but CEO Jonathan Schwartz also posted at length on his blog, providing color similar to that submitted by Hitz.

Of course you know what’s coming next: the rebuttal by Hitz to Sun’s counterclaims.

At some point, the legal wrangling and public posturing go beyond what we in the tech-focused world can or really should puzzle out. Clearly, there are two mutually exclusive sides to the story here, or there wouldn’t be a court case.

But that hasn’t stopped the court of public opinion from swinging into action, and for good reason: the ultimate outcome for this case, while currently beyond anyone’s prediction, has implications for the storage industry from who owns snapshot technology to which product you, the storage user, will choose to deploy in your shop–ZFS, or a NetApp filer?You know what they say about opinions. And what’s most interesting about this fight’s transfer to the blogosphere is the freedom users, industry experts and even interested parties have to weigh in on the situation, either because it’s a less formal forum or because they can hide behind a pseudonym online.

A sampling of the debate begins, of course, with the commentary on the blog posts. “Why can’t you and Dave Hitz just sit down across a table with a couple of beers (and/or lawyers) and hash this out?” a commenter on Schwartz’s post asks. “Sniping at each other via your blogs isn’t going to impress any customers.”

Other observers are doubtful about Schwartz’s claims that he didn’t know about the suit until after NetApp made its announcement. “You cannot expect anyone to believe that, in your position, you were unaware of NetApp’s suit until a shareholder pointed it out during questioning at today’s analyst event…if it is true, it doesn’t speak well for communication within Sun. I’d hate to think you’d play us all for fools,” wrote Joseph Martins, analyst with the Data Mobility Group, also on Schwartz’s post.

Then there are the comments, largely taking place on other forums like Slashdot, which sketch out the primary positions on this case, since the claims by each company are so contradictory it’s not possible to find a middle view. “It seems as though NetApp was rather nice about this whole patent thing from the get go,” wrote a NetApp supporter on the Slashdot comment thread. “It wasn’t until Sun threatened them that they acted and again acted fairly preferring a cross licensing deal rather than any cash payout in either direction.”

“Sun guy [sic] contradicts himself,” writes another armchair litigant. ”‘Never demanded anything’  and ‘always been willing to license’ do not fit together. Licensing means demanding fee. NetApp says they do not use technology covered in Sun patents, still Sun is ‘always willing to license’ it.”

Other readers, however, side with Sun. “In England,” writes another Slashdot user, ”What NetApp appears to be doing is called shouting Get Your Tanks Off My Lawn.”

As the initial discussions died down, however, new ideas about the suit, the agendas on both sides, and its effect on the market have emerged. Questions being raised include: How can open source technologies be regulated? What is the ultimate relationship between proprietary and open source products in the industry? Is a patent suit the best way to address them? The result of these discussions has been the beginning of a backlash against both companies.

“The only people that get hurt [are] the consumer[s], who [have] to pay all these pathetic lawyers and their pathetic clients gazillions, either in protection money against this racket, or in court battles over ridiculous things like linked-list file systems and outrageously vague one-click patents,” writes one poster who calling themselves MightyMartian.

Another responds, ” I’ve been looking at NAS/SAN boxes, mainly the StoreVault S500, or the higher-end NetApp 270, or a lower end Sun StorageTek 52xx for my work…I hate patents, love ZFS, but not sure which one to order now! Guess I’ll have to give Equallogic another call…”

Now that the initial excitement has died down, I’ve begun to wonder if, for all the bluster, the end result will be a cross-licensing agreement between the two companies. Some previous alliances have been forged out of two companies lining up against one another, realizing what they have in common (including common enemies) and reaching an agreement.  The parties involved here certainly sound sincere, and it seems unlikely that if there were a way to resolve this privately that they wouldn’t have taken it public after 18 months of negotiation.

But the skeptical side of me definitely wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the end result of all this pomp and circumstance is that it has drummed up attention for the eventual partnership or even acquisition of IP between the companies. Whether or not that was the plan all along will only ever be known to a few people, and otherwise will be, like the rest of this case, in the eye of the beholder.

First, a disclaimer: no one here has personally evaluated this product, tested its features, or been able to talk to someone who has (yet). But at face value, an announcement recently came across our desk that could easily get lost in all the sturm und drang of storage news this week, that we thought was at least worth a closer look.

MicroNet’s Fantom Drives G-Force MegaDisk NAS appliance is a 1 TB desktop USB disk enclosure with USB expansion ports for two additional disks. For the $350 starting price, it comes with 1 TB capacity in either RAID-0, RAID-1 or JBOD, and MicroNet’s management software, which allows the MegaDisk to act as an iTunes server (an update also recently added to its higher-end PlatinumNAS product line) or a print server. The software also has a feature that allows the product to work as an unattended download manager for BitTorrent and other large Web-based content management services. Finally, MicroNet is bundling in NTI’s Shadow backup software, which crawls the system looking for file changes in the background without user intervention.

Sound too good to be true? We thought so, too, especially at that price tag.  According to Joe Trupiano, VP of marketing for MicroNet, if you want up to 3 TB capacity (with 1 TB SATA expansion disks, that is), it’ll be between $600 and $900.

Still, Trupiano says that what you see is what you get for the 1 TB/$350 starting price. He explained the price by pointing out that MicroNet is a consumer storage company with many other products in its portfolio, and it ships around 30,000 hard drives per month. That adds up to some deep discounts on disks. “If you went down to the store and wanted a 1 TB disk without all these features, it would run you about $400,” he said. “But disk drive makers practically pay us to ship their product.”

In the grand scheme of things, $300 per TB isn’t the ratio enterprise managers are used to, which along with the 1 TB capacity puts this squarely in the consumer marketplace, especially since it’s difficult to expand the box much further, even with the USB drives (the expansion disks cannot be made into a single volume with the capacity of the main enclosure.)

But, we know how storage admins like to play with gadgets on their own time, and thought this one would be of interest to the gadget geeks among our readership. If you know of any other interesting consumer storage products, fire away in the comments.

You have seen my writings on (and may even have heard me speak about) Cross Correlation (CC) analytics engine as a necessary part of a Data Protection Management (DPM) product. DPM products make your backup and restore environment work more efficiently. Recently, I have seen the application of CC techniques to solve problems on the primary storage side. And much to my pleasure, I have also seen the technique applied to manage application performance.

Several players are delivering products in the DPM market including Aptare, Bocada, Illuminator, Servergraph, Tek-Tools and WysDM, and most recently, Symantec, with their NetBackup Reporter product. These products, as a category, are delivering real value, based on my conversations with many of you. EMC, who resells WysDM as Backup Advisor, is apparently shipping in large quantities. All big data protection vendors have gotten religion on this recently, and they are all scrambling to add DPM functionality via in-house R&D or through a partnership.

To be sure, not all products are created equal in terms of the strength of the CC engine (or even the existence of one), which to me is the essence of the product. Without a sound CC engine, the best a product can do is rudimentary analysis and basically report on changes.

I have seen two new and interesting uses of CC recently. First, WysDM announced WysDM for File Servers. Essentially, that means the same CC engine is being used to look at NetApp filers (primary storage) to determine if the filer is behaving as it should. Much as before, the product gathers data from the application and through all hardware and software layers that reside between it and the filer, and applies analytics to determine if the system is behaving within acceptable boundaries. Are response times to file requests deteriorating? Is capacity being utilized efficiently? Is a file system ready to run out of storage? What needs to be done to solve the problem? Will an additional GE connection make a difference? You get the point.

I know you are probably saying to yourself, “I get some of that information from filer’s integral management tool?” Of course, you do. But, just like on the data protection side, the amount and type of information about the environment that was being delivered before this tool was available was rudimentary and static. Unless one escapes outside of the filer and looks at the entire picture from end-to-end it is hard to determine the root cause of a problem that exists or is in the making. That can only be done with a sophisticated CC tool. And only a sophisticated tool will give you predictive information with a high degree of confidence.

Another company that has applied CC to the primary storage is Illuminator Software, whose DPM product now includes functionality about snapshots and replication. But, the product is still true to its data protection roots. In this case, the product provides information on the readiness of volumes from a data recoverability point of view. Whether the volume is protected using snapshots or replication or secondary disk or tape, its recoverability is established and reported on. The product also offers advice on the actions necessary to improve recoverability.

The third company, Akorri Networks, has applied a CC engine for an entirely different purpose: to provide insight into application performance. Of course, application recoverability is improved when application availability is improved so there is an underlying connection here. But, the overt focus is to provide insight into how storage resources are being used to deliver a certain level of performance at the application level. In other words, given a particular SLA for an application, does one have adequate or inadequate storage resources applied? Would extra resources (higher throughput storage, more storage, another pipe to storage, etc.) help to bring application performance back into SLA boundaries? Or would it be a waste? What would help the most? With this kind of information the right type and quantity of resources can be applied thus saving time and resources.

The progress in these areas has been truly phenomenal in the last three years, and yet, we are still in infancy stages of utilizing these tools. Most of these technologies have become available from smaller companies, whose reach is limited. Given that your environment is only getting more complex it behooves you to check these out! Send me an email if you need any help.

FAN or File Area Network is the latest buzz word for file virtualization, coined by Brad O’Neill, senior analyst at The Taneja Group. (He has some big clients in this space.) In June 2006, O’Neill reported that a Taneja Group survey of global IT decision makers, found that 62% of respondents now identify “file management” as either “the top priority” or “one of their top priorities” requiring immediate attention in their data centers. Meanwhile, Tony Asaro, senior analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group has just posted an interesting blog on the FAN market, or rather what he sees as the lack of one.  So which is it? Where have all the FANs gone?