EMC's CX4; Purgatory or Purgative?

EMC's midrange SAN business seems to have caused Joe Tucci constipation, so no doubt he's hoping that the new CLARiiON CX4, launched today, can clear the blockage.

My jaded eye (and ear; I'm listening to the launch right now) fell on a couple of enhancements that the CX4 offers over the CLARiiON CX3; one or two not yet available, but no doubt they'll be announced again. And again.

Here's my take and translation from the EMC hoopla.

Virtual Provisioning

Whoa, hold on, this sounds cool! The secret sauce must be in the V word! Like the sound of that! No-one else has Virtual Provisioning!

Aw, how disappointing. It's EMC's version of thin provisioning in a party frock. 

EMC haven't always liked the word virtual, when applied to storage at least. The storage anarchist, an EMC blogger, got all wound up back in May 2007 about what he considered to be inappropriate use of the word; specifically, he doesn't like the phrase "storage virtualisation". 

Who can blame the guy? It's an EMC disease; they still can't get their heads round storage virtualisation, although they don't seem to have any problems with getting their heads in the clouds. 

He doesn't like the phrase thin provisioning either.

The anarchist's take: (my additions are in [ ] for clarification, if you're not wanting to wade through the blog for context);

maybe we got [the name of] "thin provisioning" wrong, too.

Oddly enough, the technologies that DO provide a perception of storage that doesn't really exist DOESN'T use any derivatives of "virtual" - when in fact, it probably should.

Think about it, "thin provisioning" actually belongs with [server virtualisation, virtual memory, virtual reality] - it gives hosts the impression they have access to far more storage than has been physically allocated.

Maybe we got the name wrong? Who's the "we"?

NetApp, 3Par, Dell/EqualLogic and a whole host of others got it wrong because EMC says you can't do storage virtualisation? Well, no thanks for the clarification.

Every time I hear EMC use the words "Virtual Provisioning", I get a vision of putting stuff in a knapsack before you go hiking in Second Life. Best of luck to EMC with making this one stick. Re-labeling ideas that have been around for a while is pretty difficult.

[Aside; HP don't have thin provisioning on the EVA. They have "dynamic provisioning", which they attempted to present as the thin variety. But 3Par's CTO called it, in a stroke of genius, "chubby provisioning". I seriously hope that one sticks; it's brilliant!]

Spin Down

Another odd-ball. Why provide spin-down on a block based SAN? The primary target for the CX is block based; Exchange, Oracle, VMware (although the latter two work equally well over NFS). This has to be a feature (inherited from EMC's DL backup systems) that has more to do with NAS than SAN, surely.

And without deduplication, it seems a tad pointless occupying huge acres of disk in the first place, spun down or otherwise.

I suspect we'll see a fanfare when the Celerra (a NAS gateway) starts using the feature, but as its management is completely divorced from the CX as a backend, it'll be interesting to see if it's as tortuous process as I imagine it will be.

Then throw in Avamar for file based off -array deduplication, and the chances of spinning anything down? Close to zero I reckon. 

SSD

Solid state disks are neat -- if you can afford them. The CX4 needs SSD because the cache is fixed by model.

Much cheaper is the flexible cache solution; our Performance Acceleration Module (PAM) can dramatically improve the kind of workloads targeted by SSD devices, at considerably less cost. And as it works on deduplicated volumes by avoiding reads of already deduplicated blocks, it makes a huge difference to apps like VMware.

Is the CX4 the right platform for SSD? I can't help thinking it's serious overkill. EMC seem to recognise the problem; only the two high end models, the CX4-480 and CX4-960 get them.

Still All Bunged Up

Late to market with thin provisioning and with that strange spin down feature, EMC really aren't providing any innovation in the mid-range at all. With the possible exception of SSD -- I'm sure it will provoke innovation from the storage industry, but I'm not sure that it's a good fit on the CX.

But the rest? Still no deduplication. The advantages of deduplication for virtualised servers are huge. Still no storage virtualisation. No 10GbE for iSCSI. No SAN and NAS unified storage, just the bolted together, Celerra based NS. Frankensteins.  

The CX4 is still not smart.

But you can still purchase that terrible snapshot performance. I wonder what the high-end CX4 will perform like up against our FAS3100 series? We'll probably have to do the SPC benchmarks for them. Again..

No relief for Joe with this one I'm afraid. 

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Comments

[NETAPP CUSTOMER]

I have to diagree.I did a poc to compare NETAPP PERF WITH CX 4 AND NETAPP PERFORMANCE SUCKS...IT ACTUALLY GET WORSE AS YOU PUT MORE DATA...I WOULD ADVISE YOU NOT TO WRITE CRAPPY MISLEADING ARTICLES.Please validate your data

[Jeff dahan]

Wwe just returned a FAS 3100 series back to NETAPP due to poor performance for Exchange.As we increased the simulation of JETSTRESS it performed poorly compared to the MSA we have inhouse.

Is there a reason why the FAS Series is not able to keep up with medium intensive application.No support for RAID 10 is a big issue for us as Microsoft has recomended going with MSA over NETAPP.Accroding to the Microsoft TAM they prefer HP and EMC over NETAPP and have recommended us staying away from NETAPP

[Alex McDonald]

I'm surprised on two counts;

First, our ESRP Exchange best practices and results and the experience of Avanade disagrees with your experience, as do many NetApp customers. Avanade conclude

The outcome is clear: The NetApp FAS3050c storage array and its accompanying software passed all tests, many with outstanding results. NetApp’s products are viable options for Exchange Server deployments, and are likely interchangeable with those of other vendors in most scenarios.

Without any more detail than you give, I can only guess that it was configured incorrectly, or perhaps underspecced for the number and type of mailboxes you wished to support.

Second, the only two comments posted on this blog entry share an identical IP address. The first prefers a CX4 and an abundance of capitals; the second suggests MSA. Are you two posters or one?

[Jbomm]

We just upgraded to the CX4, from the CX3, and we are very pleased. We have been looking at NetApp in the past but we just can't get past the reliability issues. Yea, EMC might not have all f the bells and whistles companies like NetApp and DotHill, and the like, but you can not over look the reliability of an EMC Array.

And to the comment about the first two posts, it is pretty funny that instead of trying to work with the person to see if they really did have it configured wrong, or maybe it just didn't perform right, you just assumed it WAS configured incorrectly.

Sounds like a confidence problem. They do make little blue SAN pills for that...

[Alex McDonald]

@Jbomm

I'm pleased you're pleased!

A couple of questions. What reliability issues exactly did you have with NetApp? And Dothill -- I'd be interested in the bells and whistles they have that attracted your attention. I've dropped you an email so you can get back to me.

As to the first two comments, I can work with just about anyone, but the commenter (and it was only one person, not two) didn't leave enough information for me; no valid email address, and no further contact. I can only work with what I'm given, and I did say -- it was just a guess.

Thanks for commenting, and enjoy the CX4.