A Turing Test for Storage

 

Many years ago, near the Dawn of Computing, there was ELIZA. Remember her? A chatterbot; ELIZA acted and sounded like your own personal psycho-analyst, all from a computer terminal (the dumb kind). At the time -- ELIZA was born in 1966 -- this was a pretty impressive program.

ELIZA and others like her owe much to Alan Turing.

A brilliant scientist, Turing is best remembered for the test that carries his name. Here's a philosophical discourse on the Turing Test (which is waaay too deep for me). Wikipedia to the rescue; a bite sized Turing Test for dummies.

The simplified form of the test boils down to the question; can a machine fool a human into thinking that it's intelligent?

Chatting About Sandwiches

Hi, I'm Alex
How long have you been Alex? 
That's my name!
Names don't interest me. 
They interest me. What's your name?
I don't care about names, please go on. 
OK, what about sandwiches?
Are such questions on your mind often? 
You bet. Especially when I'm hungry
Did you come to me because you are hungry?

Times change, and we're more computer savvy. Plus, boredom with having questions answered with more questions soon sets in. ELIZA isn't very convincing, and my delayed lunchtime sandwich (IQ; zero) nearly beat it for intelligent conversation.

ELIZA is just the first in a long line of chatterbots that have attempted to meet the challenge of the Turing test. I fought back the hunger pangs, and discovered that there's an annual prize for the best chatterbot. This is HAL, the 2007 winner, talking sandwiches;

Hi, I'm Alex
Good afternoon, Alex. How's the second part of the day starting out?
Pretty good. Off for some lunch shortly
Maybe voicemail machines could someday talk to each other, and make lunch dates.
Too much! I like my lunch in peace.
All work and no play makes a dull boy ready for an initial public offering.
Do you like sandwiches?
Grilled cheese sandwiches taste good with sliced dill pickles.
I like pickles too
I like firm, juicy pickles.

A bit smarter; smarter than ELIZA. But a full pass on this Turing Test is still a long way off, even though we've had 40-plus years trying. You couldn't class the conversation as intelligent. I guess it's that IPO reference; weird!

So is there a less rigorous test than intelligence? Are there tests for how much smarter one system is compared with another? Specifically, storage?

Customers Demand Smarts

Every Request for [Tender/Proposal/Information/Quotation] I've ever seen sets criteria by which customers judge the overall effectiveness of a proposed solution. Customers set, without exception, some variety of this test for making informed buying decisions.

Better and easier application testing. Simpler backups and restores. Reduced manpower costs. Improved RAS; reliability, availability and serviceability. 

The form of the dialog changes, but every buyer of a storage solution has their own version of a Turing Test for "storage smarts" too.

Customers demand smart storage..

Talking to Smart Storage

You've some servers running your favorite application in full view. You can measure anything and everything up to the point where the cables for your storage disappear into the datacenter, where they're connected to some storage.

But whose storage? Can you tell what system is serving your application needs?

Imagine a conversation down the wire.

Hi, I'm looking for help on my storage decision
You're asking the right storage. What do you want to know?
Well, performance is important
You need low and predictable latency, with high bandwidth. That's me. You can compare my benchmarks with others here and here.

Difficult to tell so far; it could be a number of vendors. This, in general, is the easy part of the Storage Turing Test. It's not that difficult to build systems that are wide and deep.

Smart

What about backups? Recoveries? Are they easy to do?
Not a problem. I can snapshot your data to give you simple point-in-time recovery, and vault your data for use with a range of backup systems.
Some applications are funny about snapshots for recovery...
True. So I have software that understands how to take consistent backups for a wide range of applications; Exchange, Oracle, SAP, VMware and more. 
OK, what about data protection? Disks can fail, you know
Yes, they can and do. I offer double-disk failure protection (RAID-6) and HA systems. I'm available 99.999% of the time. And for site protection, I can synchronously or asynchronously replicate your data to a remote DR site.

The field is narrowing...

Smarter

And capacity! Getting all this sounds like it needs a LOT of disks.
Not really.
- I can thin provision so that I seem bigger today than I might be tomorrow. 
- I can do snapshots that take space for changed data only -- and that don't impact performance.
- I can take capacity-free clones that allow you to test systems without disturbing or copying production data.
- I can deduplicate both primary and secondary storage to save even more on real capacity.

Are we down to one yet?

Smartest

Are you a SAN or a NAS system?
Both. I can do all that I've described on NAS (CIFS and NFS) or SAN (FCP or iSCSI). I'm a unified storage system.

Now that's really smart. There's only one provider of virtualised storage systems as bright as this; NetApp.  

ELIZA, is that you?

Any other examples? Well, here's a quick summary of a "chatterbot session" with this EMC blogger.

Hi, what's the difference between a NetApp system and an EMC CLARiiON?
With the CLARiiON CX-3, the LUN that you see over FCP is a really, live, good, old-fashioned LUN sitting on a RAID group.

Honestly, my sandwich is smarter than this. 

Comments

[Roger]

A bit of a long wait until the punch-line, but simply Brilliant! The best part is, EMC's A.D.D. fanboys will lose patience and never make it to the end to see their arguments against NetApp laid bare and mocked!

[Alex McDonald]

Thanks Roger. I'm afraid sometimes I get carried away, hence the length. The point isn't to mock EMC btw (I could have picked any number of other vendors); it's to highlight where NetApp wins.

Smartest by far!