Hairy Canary over SSD with 64 Bits of NFS

Chuck’s latest hairy canary against NetApp deserves correction. I thought about commenting on his blog, but there are so many points to make, I decided to address his “complaint” in a little more depth over here.

64 Bit – Over A Decade Ago

What’s the deal with x64 multicore technology? Just what might qualify NetApp to "lead the 64 bit discussion"? Here’s what.

Data ONTAP is 64 bit and endian clean. In fact, we were running on 64 bit systems with the NetApp F540 in 1996.

With the CX4 just recently getting a 64 bit OS – October 2008, just this year – EMC is playing catch up; they’re over a decade behind.

That’s why NetApp, and not EMC, is leading.

Solid State Storage

NetApp are getting criticized by Chuck (again!), this time for making public our SSD roadmap. A roadmap that’s freely available to every customer of NetApp could be considered more of a public commitment than those given under NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement). Where’s the downside? Do customers want to know or not? I think they do.

That leads on to another Chuck complaint. Just what might qualify NetApp to "lead the SSD discussion"? Here’s what.

Dr. Jon Elerath, reliability engineer at NetApp, will represent the International Disk Drive Equipment and Materials Association (IDEMA) and present at the JEDEC Board of Directors Meeting on November 3, 2008. His presentation is titled “How IDEMA Can Help the Development of Reliability Standards for Solid-State Storage.”

Elerath is the chairman of the IDEMA Reliability Standards Committee, which is comprised of members from all the top storage producers (including Seagate, Hitachi GST, Western Digital, SanDisk, and STEC) and users (including NetApp, HP, Sun, Intel, SanDisk, IBM, and SNIA).

We did much the same in May 2008 too.

And NetApp is a Founding Member of the SNIA Solid State Storage Initiative. Val Bercovici, Office of the CTO, NetApp, was also elected as the inaugural vice-chair of the SSSI‘s Governing Board.

That’s why NetApp, and not EMC, is leading.

NFS Industry Leadership

Capping it off, Chuck complains about our leadership of pNFS. Just what might qualify NetApp to "lead the NFS discussion"? Here’s what.

NetApp has extensive participation in the IETF, particularly with regard to NFSv4. More specifically NetApp representatives participate as:

• Co-chair the NFSv4 working group
• Co-author of the NFSv4 specification
• Document editors for the NFSv4.1 specification
• Spec writers for NFSv4.1 (including pNFS)

Brian Pawlowski, NetApp’s CTO, co-authored RFC1813 (the NFSv3 specification) in 1994 and is co-chair of the NFSv4 working group.

Michael Eisler. Co-authored RFC3530 (the NFSv4 specification) along with Dave Noveck, another NetApp employee, and Michael is currently an editor for the NFSv4.1 specification. Take a look at his blog and his biography; it’s wall to wall pNFS.

Trond Myklebust of NetApp is the Linux NFS maintainer (including pNFS), with a hugely significant contribution over the years,

I’ve probably missed out several other major NetApp contributions and contributors to NFS. My apologies to everyone; there’s so much that we do.

NFS has been a pretty pivotal standard for the industry for decades. NetApp is deeply committed to it, and has been for over 14 years.

That’s why NetApp, and not EMC, is leading.

.

Comments

[Chuck Hollis]

Alex

Sorry about the 64-bit thing -- I was fed wrong information. EMC's Symmetrix was 64-bit a while back in 1990s as well, so maybe we're about even there.

So, just to make absolutely sure, you're saying the current FAS products are 64-bit CPUs and 64-bit clean?

The premise for the rest of your argument is relatively suspect though.

Sure, it's nice to have all these people on all these standard committees. That's a good thing, so please don't get me wrong here.

But actually DOING something rather than TALKING ABOUT DOING something has to qualify as well, no?

For example, at the last EMC World event, there were multiple sessions on real-world experiences with BOTH enterprise flash and pre-standard pNFS (e.g. MPFS).

And, understandably, you weren't the one who wrote the breathless press release that made us all choke on our coffee ...

Finally, with regard to the roadmap claims, go read your own press releases, will you?

This wasn't a "roadmap release", it looked more like a pre-announcement designed to close the gap between what the market wants today, and what you've got in your price book.

BTW, by what standard are you claiming "leadership"?

Market share? Nope.
Technical innovation? Debatable.

Revenue? Growth? Units? Maybe margin?

You'll have to slice the baloney very thinly indeed to make any sort of case.

Aggressive posturing?

Yep, I'll grant you that one.

-- Chuck

[Martin G]

Actually if there is one thing which really gets my goat, it's vendors crowing about their membership of this standards committee and that standards committee. Why? Because standards are about co-operation, standards are about doing things right; standards should be used as marketing tools and corporate willy waving. They are too important!

All vendors should be sponsoring, supporting and leading standards committees. BTW, if anyone reading this is involved in C++ and C standards, yes...that annoying language lawyer Glassborow is my father. Passion for doing standards right and doing them for the good of the industry runs in the family.

Lets not drag membership of standards bodies etc into the world of marketing. Yes, be proud of what you are doing but breathless press releases...You don't see Microsoft making a huge deal of Herb Sutter's chairmanship of the ISO C++ standards committee.

Rant over...

[Alex McDonald]

Chuck

Re-read your blog entry. You said;

So, will someone please tell me, just what might qualify them to "lead the discussion" on either of these topics?

I claim NetApp leadership to lead the discussion. Big doesn't mean best.

[Stephen Foskett]

Ok, boys, let's go to our corners and take some breaths...

There, does that feel better? NetApp and EMC both deserve credit as leaders in the industry. I don't think "bitness" matters much, but I have to hand it to NetApp on their leadership (with Sun) in the world of NFS. And I have to give EMC credit for shipping enterprise flash drives a year before anyone else.

And I have to pat anyone who gets involved in standards committees with the idea of actually, you know, creating standards rather than just crowing about being on the committee!

[Alex McDonald]

Martin

Here we disagree.

If leadership is to be defined in volume, margin, market share or any other measure, then that's fine and defensible. I have no argument with Chuck on that score.

But to claim that NetApp has no right to lead the discussion on X or Y or Z because it isn't as big as EMC, or doesn't do what EMC does, is fallacious.

I sincerely believe that pointing out our interest in making sure that we not only have standards, but participate in the process, and lead by investing a huge amount of time and effort and brain-power in these committess and standards bodies is more than acceptable in this case.

These are no more nor less than the proof points to refute Chuck's assertion that we have no right to lead.

So, yes, it might be considered "corporate willy waving" :-). We've done some. But we're a technology company, and we want people to know that we're proud of what we do.

Cool dad to have, btw.

[Martin G]

Actually in standards, no-one really has the right to lead. People get asked to lead streams/committees/standards, sometimes these are even the people who came up with the original idea. Sometimes people get upset when it is suggested that they aren't the right people to lead, sometimes they even take their ball away *cough* Sun *cough Java.

I think the headline you put up was ummm, a little too pumped up for my liking. Yes, you should be proud of contributions/supporting standards but without everyone else, they wouldn't be standards.

And as for cool dad; well it kept me out of the programming business!

[Alex McDonald]

Martin

I wasn't claiming that we lead the standard; but, as your dad will tell you, leading a standards effort is like herding cats. And NetApp aren't the first to get torched by an over-pumped press release; check out the toasting EMC got on CMIS. That and XAM were the two examples where Chuck said

Of course, it's great that NetApp is participating in various industry forums and standards groups -- the more the merrier. EMC does the same, but we don't think that sort of thing usually warrants an Official Press Release, unless it's a pretty pivotal standard for the industry (e.g. CMIS and XAM being recent examples).

Now, please appreciate -- just for a moment -- how this sort of hype plays here at EMC.

Here's how the EMC CMIS press release played with the guy that leads the standards effort.

Chuck's blog on CMIS was here; and a very angry Mr Fielding responded to the EMC press release on which Chuck based his blog.

... it is deliberately misleading to portray CMIS as a standard when it has only been proposed for submission to OASIS, as is clearly being done on the EMC product page, EMC whitepaper, and IBM product page. Even the joint press release starts out with the submission status and then devolves into a bunch of quotes about it being a standard. Compare that to the more accurate portrayals of CMIS by Alfresco and Microsoft. IBM and EMC need to reign in their marketing folks.

It made the press via The Register. Probably too technical for Chuck, but he still blogged on it.

That's what really gets me about Chuck; a lack of standards about double standards.

My dad was in business, but I got hooked om programming early. I'm a closet coder, really... Forth. I still code for a hobby. I might blog on it one day.

[eric barlier]

Chuck,

Wherever I read storage blogs on the net I read about you slagging off competition.

Maybe you should at least admit that NetApp is a "leader"
of your worries/concerns given the amount of time you spend on this issue. In doing so you are actually praising NetApp and talking EMC down, too bad you cant see it.

I recommend embracing competition as a means of improvement. Many a great athlete will support me in this, not that I ever was one.

All the best,
Eric Barlier