When Dell Went Whisky Tasting

NetApp names internal software versions after truly terrible American beers, and unfortunately for those with more refined tastes, not the far superior British variety. (I am sure I will pay for this comment, but in my defence, anyone who has tasted both in a single sitting will know it to be true.)

Dell/EqualLogic name theirs after whiskys. Scotch to the uninitiated, and please note the spelling of whisky. No E. And how to pronounce these whisky names before we start. Some are straightforward, but, oh, the mangling some get....

It's a Macallan?

When Dell bought EQL, my surprise wasn't at the purchase itself. It made sense for Dell to get out from under EMC, and its own range of systems were uninspiring. What surprised me was the price; $1.4 billion. 

It's very large indeed when you look at what an EqualLogic PS Array actually does. At first glance it looks like a smart SAN technology -- definitely smarter than the EMC CLARiiONs they sell -- and perhaps that's why Dell got over-excited. 

An EQL box virtualises storage; the LUNs aren't "real" LUNs, to borrow EMC's daft mantra. Then, on top of that, snapshots, clones, async replication and thin provisioning, with a touch of scalability thrown in the mix. Over iSCSI.

I think that's the entire feature list... Unfortunately, it's nowhere near as smart as a NetApp system. Point in case; deduplication. 

Or perhaps a Laphroaig...

There's a buzz about deduplication right now, driven by some very pressing business needs that require companies to retain existing data, and contain the explosive growth of new data that they're generating. (Or having generated for them; the average intertubes user is generating megabytes a day, and there are mbillions of them.)  .

So it seems strange that one of the missing Dell/EQL features is deduplication. With storage virtualisation, you'd think that it would be there -- or at least on the roadmap.

Maybe it's a Dufftown.

Dell/EQL is stuck between the devil and the deep blue sea.

EqualLogic engineers aren't going to introduce deduplication any time soon. There are some very specific technical reasons related to the smallest level of granularity that a PS Array can virtualise.

The unit of management is a tens of megabyte page or chunk, and block deduplicating them (this is a just a block-based SAN, remember) is only going to give results if there are duplicate tens of megabyte chunks. Oh, and across multiple arrays too. I reckon...

It's a Knockando. 

The next Dell/EQL release name? If it's deduplication you're after, Knockando. 

Sliante!

Comments

[Val Bercovici]

Why am I so thirsty after reading this? :)

[Alex McDonald]

Don't slake your thirst with a Glen Kinchie, whatever you do. Just think back to the last time you and I tried it :-)

Alex, looks like you've been inhaling sterno again. I'm sure you meant to say that EqualLogic will have de-dupe about the same time Netapp has a competitive iSCSI product.

[Alex McDonald]

Interesting comment, since NetApp already has iSCSI -- at a competitive 10GbE too.

The problem with the iSCSI figures for market share (which is what I presume you're referring to) is that they don't show that many iSCSI-only systems are bought as back-ends for NAS services. Nearly *three quarters* of EqualLogic systems would appear to be sold for that purpose.

Which begs the question; when is Dell/EqualLogic going to do NAS, if that's the market? Not any time soon, I reckon. It would badly dent Dell's server market.

I may turn off anonymous postings, btw. I really don't see why people want to remain anonymous on blogs like this. I'm not that desperate that I would want to track you down and breath Sterno fumes on you.

[Marc Farley]

Alex, the previous comment was from me, Marc Farley from Dell EqualLogic. The comment above wasn't intended to be anonymous as I had logged in with TypeKey and rec'd the message "You are currently signed in as Marc Farley". You'll have to figure out why the system made me anonymous, it's your blog. I see now that you've sort of fixed things - because after submitting this post, I rec'd an error and am being asked for my credentials, even though my typekey profile provides that stuff on other blogs like Chuck Hollis' and Nicholas Carr's.

I'm pretty sure we aren't selling 75% of our systems as file server front ends - unless you count lots of guest systems running on VMware in that total. Then maybe.

NAS? Really? Why would we need that if we are selling so many systems as "back ends" for file servers? Maybe its Netapp that needs unencumbered block storage instead.

[Alex McDonald]

"The unencumbered Dell/EqualLogic PS Array"

I like it! "Can't deduplicate or do NAS or [long list of things it doesn't do]" I can now explain with the one word.

Thanks for the bug report; I'll pass on to the web admin team. I'm having problems posting comments too.

[Val Bercovici]

Hi Marc, and welcome to NetApp's little blog corner of the storage world.

Please indulge us and elaborate on what exactly "encumbers" our storage arrays today?

[MarcFarley]

Marc here again. By unencumbered I mean the way that block storage is processed through the file system layer of a Netapp filer. I'm sure it was done to ensure consistency with filer snapshots, but it doesn't help performance much.

[Anon]

Netapp are to busy looking at others products and charging silly money for their toys whilst Dell/EMC/Equallogic continue to sell bucket loads of storage, just look in any data centre, I dont see NetApp arrays, actually the last one I saw was...err I have never seen one.

Ibm yes, HP yes, EMC yes, NetApp no..so Alex sorry mate but you can continue writing in your blog as I guess NetApp arent very busy doing much else :)

[Val Bercovici]

Thanks for playing along Marc, and for taking the bait.

The urban legend that NetApp's block storage interface (for FC-SAN's or iSCSI, or soon FCoE) somehow sits on top of a filesystem is merely anecdotal, with no bearing in fact or reality.

Block I/O's are at a peer layer to NAS filesystem semantics on a NetApp FAS/StoreVault array. That means they cut-through right to the virtualization (aka array volume mgr) later with integrated RAID. Snapshot integration happens at that lower layer, and likewise has nothing to do with NAS filesystem semantics.

Ironically, the independent benchmark evidence such as SPC-1 proves how our disk virtualization layer actually accelerates performance rather than encumbering us with any "overhead". And remember, thin provisioning is a native attribute in this implementation and is included in all our performance results - as are snapshots. Sorry to say (for our competitors that is :) we'll be adding dedupe to our performane results soon too!

In fact, you need look no further than the NetworkWorld iSCSI review we won today where our low-end solution handily outperformed your high-end PS series and all other iSCSI comers (see slideshow on their website) for proof NetApp customers can enjoy all our robust features without encumbrances of any kind :)

http://www.networkworld.com/slideshows/2008/072808-test-iscsi.html (See Slide 8 for the performance results)

[Alex McDonald]

Anon;

I've never been to China, so it doesn't exist.