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I’ve often told people that I’d love to be able to scale storage the way Google does.
Data storage architectures don’t get the kind of recognition they should by information architects. Storage really serves as the foundation for every application service — email, video streaming, data warehousing, or twittering. The challenge with building a storage architecture is that at some point you know you are going to outgrow it. Most storage vendors ask you to perform a forklift upgrade of your storage devices in order to scale your growth.
I’ve been alpha testing a promising storage technology by a company called Parascale. Their technology lets you take commodity servers connected to storage and form them into a cloud architecture. I like what I see so far and I have been impressed by my interactions with their development team. This technology is not designed to replace high-performance SANs. But it is perfectly suitable for tier-2 data storage applications. Stay tuned…
Amazon’s S3 storage service was down for almost 6 hours this past weekend. Just imagine you were running a SaaS company which used S3 for all its storage. Ouch! On the other hand is this level of uptime any worse than what you would expect from any mid or low-tier storage vendor? You get what you pay for.
During the conference yesterday I asked Phil Soran, CEO of Compellent, if the up-and-coming crop of Internet storage services like Amazon S3 are a competitive threat to his business.
His answer was two parts: 1) Compellent sees storage services like S3 as potential customers, and 2) Compellent focuses mainly on customers that need higher-end storage.
I understand his response but I respectfully disagree with some of his thinking.
First, storage services probably are not going to buy Compellent storage. It’s simply too expensive on a $/GB basis. It scales vertically pretty efficiently (by adding disk shelves) but not horizontally. If I were building a storage service I would look for the cheapest disk I could find. Then I would find a way to make it scale (virtualization, load balancing, mirrored storage, etc).
Second, it’s true that many companies need the storage performance that a company like Compellent can provide. Sadly services like S3 will still eat into Compellent’s growth — and their own story proves it. Compellent’s big product claim is their automated tiered storage. Basically a customer can install fast fiber-channel drives and slower sata drives in the same SAN. The SAN will then migrate less frequently accessed data blocks to the slower drives — keeping the faster drives free to store more high-performance data. It’s a smart concept. The problem is what happens when companies start replacing those sata drives with S3. Or, what if S3 becomes the third, and lowest, tier of storage. People just won’t need to buy as many new drives and shelves.
Sure, but companies will always need faster storage right? Well, not if the SaaS companies have something to say about it. My customers aren’t buying storage for Microsoft Exchange and Sharepoint anymore because I provide it at my datacenter. My customers aren’t going to buy storage for Microsoft CRM. Eventually they will be outsourcing their ERP and business intelligence applications to SaaS providers. And guess what? Some of those young SaaS providers are starting to build their platforms on top of the online storage services.
Phil made a good point that many companies don’t want to store confidential information on “shared” storage services. I agree that this is an impediment to the growth of the Internet storage platforms. But this is definitely starting to change — especially with SMB. The larger companies will follow suit as they outsource more of their applications to SaaS providers.
The data storage business is amazing.
It sort of reminds me of Churchill’s quote… how did that go… “never was so much owed by so many to so few”. We keep giving our blood sweat and tears to a handful of enterprise storage vendors. We are served the same old commodity hardware and complicated software. Let’s face it. Almost everyone is selling the same disks on the same chassis and touting the same features.
The storage sales guys by-and-large are marketing droids that don’t understand a damn thing about what I need and probably wouldn’t care if they did. Oh, I’m not saying they are bad people. They have to earn a living like everyone else. My beef is that they always have an agenda that includes finding my wallet and removing my money. When they tell me that they want to meet to better understand my infrastructure it feels like they are just snooping around for more business. If I have a real storage project believe me — I’ll find you.
My company primarily buys netapp storage. Most of the netapp sales guys are okay — certainly a little better than some vendors I’ve dealt with. The gear works. That’s certainly a positive. On the other hand it is really expensive. It is a limiting factor for growth in our business. It harms our competitiveness. Netapp wants to license every cock-a-mamy protocol and service separately. Need iscsi? cha-ching. Dedup? cha-ching. Oh, now you need replication? cha-ching cha-ching. You won’t know the true cost of your netapp infrastructure until a year down the road when you need to start adding expensive features. And here’s the real rub. You end up paying about 20% annually for service and maintenance on the hardware. So basically over five years you have just paid 2X for your storage. It’s such a great scam I’m kicking myself for not inventing a storage company.
I want google storage. No, not some kind of remote data storage service like Amazon S3. I need more performance than those storage services can offer. I want storage that scales like building blocks. I want to be able to plug in storage blocks and gain more space and more performance. I want the storage scaling to be automatic and dummy-proof. I don’t want a solution that simply mirrors raid10 disk on vaultA to raid10 disk on vaultB. That’s trivial and a waste of resources. I want true distributed storage with outstanding performance. I want redundancy if building block nodes fail. I want to replicate data to multiple datacenters. I don’t want to license separate features. Give me the whole enchilada. Netapp, if someone else steps up to the plate and is able to provide me with this type of storage solution, it’s… buh-bye.
