NetApp - The Missing Shade of Blue

NetApp's $1Million Essay

I don't get paid by the word for what I write, and you probably don't either. Here's a rewarding way to change all that; pick up your pen and in 500 words or so you could be getting the equivalent of $2000 a word.

Yes, it's back; NetApp's $1 million dollar virtualization challenge. (You might remember the original challenge, and what we saw as a need to call out the exceptional advantages of NetApp's guarantee.)

And we're not looking for a Shakespeare.

In no fewer than 500 words, describe your current storage infrastructure and how it supports your VMware environment. Please include as many details as possible to differentiate your submission, such as: number of servers and VMs deployed, type of current storage connected to your virtual servers, your desired business metrics, ROI and timeframe for a new storage deployment in your virtualized environment.

My colleague Vaughn Stewart has made a couple of observations on his latest blog about the program, which is based on our virtualization guarantee. Vaughn makes a point about RAID-10 vs RAID-DP in the guarantee;

As many of you may know, this program has never been without its share of criticism by other storage vendors. In my opinion, I believe this criticism has been fair as a component of the guarantee program compares RAID-10 and RAID-DP on the merits of storage efficiency. While both technologies are near equals in terms of performance and data protection it is unfair to compare the 50% utilization of RAID-10 to the 87.5% provided by RAID-DP

I beg to differ (and did so in my original blog). I believe it's valid to compare the two, because the alternative -- RAID-5 -- just isn't up to the job of protecting your data.

I said back then; so why not compare to RAID-6?  The truth is, we could and would, but we still don’t find our competition selling it. It’s there on the spec sheet as a solution from some vendors – not all have the capability -- but it’s rarely put forward as a viable solution.

And that's the extent of our disagreement. The rest of his blog is spot on; and with public disclosure of the results, I too think we'll see high rates of savings without including RAID-DP.

Get scribbling!

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Pay More Tax and Retire at 70

The last time I felt overwhelmed by big numbers was when UK's Chancellor of the Exchequer Alastair Darling made his last budget announcement, and he declared that there was a borrowing requirement of some 175 billion for the public sector economy. That's an eye-wateringly large number, much, much larger than any previous government's borrowing requirement.

As Senator Everett Dirkson once noted, "A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon it adds up to real money." We're in real money territory now.

And we (at least us poor unfortunates resident in the UK) will be paying for this debt for years; some estimate until 2020 or beyond. Others reckon the debt is so large, it needs higher taxes now and we'll not be retiring until we're much older.

If you live in the UK, Darling's budget means you've no choice. Pay more tax and plan on retiring at 70. Either that, or it's emigrate somewhere a little less financially punishing.

EMC have exactly the same attitude to budgeting as the UK government.

In his latest blog on the Symmetrix V-Max, Chuck Hollis is in big numbers mood, Dirkson- and Darling-sized big numbers. Go take a look and report back here on how you feel. I was surprised -- nay, shocked, I tell you -- at the bazillions of zeroes required to tell us what EMC did in developing the V-Max.

Having your eyeballs seared by all these digits makes it difficult to get at the detail, but one number did catch my eye, because Chuck beats on it. The amount of money spent on developing the V-Max.

A cool $200 million in staff costs alone, never mind the 1.5 acres of air conditioned machine room, or the 135,000 disks, or the total electrical output of a small country  required to bring this project to fruition. I suspect the real costs were nearer $400 or even $500 million if that's the staffing figure alone.

Gadzooks, but that's a lot of money. So who pays? 

The sales of the Symmetrix DMX have been on a steep downward trajectory for some time. That's because consumers aren't buying it in the same volumes because they don't have the need (their business has shrunk) or the money isn't there (they used to be a bank). The lack of growth is generally true of the entire IT industry, but the "big iron" has taken more than it's fair share of the beating. And the V-Max is big iron -- just look at all those numbers!

So my bet is on anyone that buys anything from EMC -- CLARiiON, Celerra, Centera, DMX, or even V-Max, Documentum, RSA, maintenance, support etc -- will pay the premium of getting EMC some of their money back, given EMC's less than stellar financial performance recently. Because the C in EMC doesn't stand for Charity, that's for sure. And the E doesn't look like it stands for Economical.

If you bought into EMC, the V-Max budget means you've no choice. Pay more tax and plan on retiring at 70. Either that, or you might want to consider migrating to something a little less financially punishing.

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Add Lightness

My regular readers (5 or so) will now know that I'm the proud possessor of a Caterham 7, a direct descendant of Colin Chapman's iconic flying machine, the 50 year old Lotus 7.

Constructed from a tubular space frame chassis, clad in as little bodywork as is possible, and with small and light engines, the fundamentals of a car that was said to be “too fast to race” hasn’t changed in half a century. Chapman held that:

"Adding power makes you faster on the straights. Subtracting weight makes you faster everywhere."

He was one of the great engineering geniuses of the race and motor industry.

While doing a bit of research on cloud architectures, I stumbled across an email archived on an internal engineering wiki, sent by Dave Hitz way back in 1997. The discussion was about adding a specific feature to a NetApp product, and the upsides and the downsides of doing so. (I've edited Dave's missive for brevity.)

Hey -- I love philosophical controversies, so I'm going to dive right in!

... One of the most important questions you can ask about an appliance is: Should we add this feature?

... The potential drawbacks include:

• The feature decreases one or more of "fast, simple, reliable."
• Testing the feature (in every new release FOREVER) slows down our release cycle and hurts time-to-market.
• Documenting the new feature makes the manual thicker and harder to use.
• The feature has disadvantages that are hard to explain, and customers who try to use the feature may get burned.
• Very few customers actually need the feature, reducing benefit.
• The feature is expensive to implement...

So how are my little car's design and Hitz's email connected?

I'm not a engineer of either motor or software variety, but I see the similarities. What Hitz is identifying are the same engineering principles as espoused by Chapman, applied here to NetApp's software. As Einstein said (yes, it's rent-a-quote week here at ShadeOfBlue Towers);

"Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction."

When I look around at the creeping featuritis that rival storage systems employ, the scale and size of the moving parts, and the horrendous complexity of the solutions they sell, I'm sure that the competition are employing intelligent fools. They certainly show little appetite to move in the opposite direction. I'll not bore you with examples, as I'm sure you know who they are and what systems and solutions they sell.

That's what struck me about NetApp when I joined NetApp some 4 or so years ago, and strikes me now. Our solutions are no more complex than they need to be; fast, simple, reliable are still the hallmarks.

But there is one item I'd like to add to Dave's email; I believe there's an extra quality that shines thorough in all our solutions and proposals. Colin Chapman, in possibly his most famous quote, said; 

"Simplify. Then add lightness."

That's the feature I think we have in abundance; added lightness. So when you're buying storage solutions -- heck, if you're buying anything -- keep Dave's list in mind for your next RFP/RFQ/RFI, And then add in this; 

In the proposed solution, please identify where you added lightness.

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Update 8May: Steve Klinkner has an excellent series of posts on adding lightness. I've just read them (sorry Steve, I sometimes don't have enough time to keep up!), and this is one of the proofs that we take this "fast, simple, reliable" goal very seriously indeed. Well worth a read to see the kind of thinking that goes into the development of our software.

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