New established tier
SSD (Solid State Drive) is the semiconductor based alternative to HDD (rotating hard disks) connecting in the disk array or directly on the server. It is attractive since it is much faster than magnetic HDDs and prices are coming down. IT professionals exploit SSD by enhancing workload performance by placing hyper active files on an SSD tier. This is why all disk system vendors have introduced these SSD tiers on their disk systems. Most data centre IT professionals will by now have acquainted themselves with their current suppliers’ offerings. But there is still plenty of education to undertake regarding how to exploit SSD and not least understanding the potential issues with SSD.

United in criticising

It is interesting to observe how the SSD industry players are zig zagging between promoting the general endorsement of SSD and then pointing fingers at their competitors’ solutions. This is the sign of a relatively immature market, but also that there are some real issues with the technology. Those issues may well be fixed when the current semiconductor technology gets replaced. Until then, flash does not offer unlimited re-writes and the industry refers to a 2-3 year life cycle based on frequent access. There are plenty of use cases which can affect performance adversely which customers and the industry are busy discussing.

Many vendors
A number of vendors offer their own arrays: Violin Memory, Texas Memory Systems, Nimbus, Whiptail, SolidFire, Pure Storage. Recently EMC announced that it would acquire XtremIO. Then there are the OEM suppliers who sell their SSD drives to be embedded by the array vendors. There are also suppliers that produce PCI based SSD cards such as Fusion-io.

Many customers are adding an SSD tier to their storage pool in order to boost throughput and performance, typically when they upgrade to a new disk array. Eventually most data centres will have this SSD tier and this will apply to enterprises as well as SMEs. Some vendors have full size footprint products based on SSD, but only the most demanding workloads will justify those.

Scope for disruption
There is scope for vendor consolidation in the market which will have a calming effect, but there is also scope for disruption as rumours circulate about the replacement of flash. But flash has actually had longevity as it was invented as far back as in 1980 at Toshiba. So despite its flaws, coming up with an alternative that is price competitive has proven difficult. This means that customers should currently do their homework in understanding exactly how different the SSD offerings will support their workloads. And by the time today’s storage purchase gets faced out in 4-5 years’ time, we may well no longer be discussing flash.
Image credit: Manzzan

Last week we had the opportunity to present at the Virtualization theatre in IP EXPO’s Stockholm event. We were able to discuss IT marketing trends in Sweden with the event management team, review motivation for participation with delegates who came to the presentations, and review expected return-on-investment with sponsors. As analysts who have been tracking IT industry developments for almost 30 years, it was fascinating to reflect on what has stayed the same, and what has changed.

The genesis of trade fairs and conference was to satisfy demand by vendors for a platform to showcase their technologies and to make contact with new potential customers. Fair visitors were made up of professionals who were mostly looking for new technology suppliers to add to their evaluation, while conference delegates were more often looking for new ideas. Over time, sponsor budget constraints, availability of experienced internal resources and the competitive landscape for events has led to a blending of fairs and conferences as well as the addition of online channels such as IP EXPO online.

Attendees at IP EXPO in Stockholm ranged from procurement specialists who were looking for alternative suppliers to satisfy compliance requirements, infrastructure management professionals who were trying to solve specific technical issues around performance, interoperability, reporting and reliability, and IT managers who were looking for new ideas and better resources, including co-location and hosting providers, to help them meet internal SLAs. It was a diverse group across job functions, age groups and expectations.

Sponsors too ranged from networking, storage and systems vendors, content, search and analytics tools publishers and services providers. Some were focused on driving meetings and demos at their booth, while others prioritised running more seminar sessions. Three vendors allocated their space to their channel partners, presumably tapping into co-marketing funds. But the most striking discovery was that the busier booths had orchestrated their presence at the event with a highly co-ordinated campaign of pre-arranged meetings. A glance at their stand diaries revealed no fewer than 10 meetings per person for each day, and there were up to four representatives on the stand. That’s intense by any standard, especially as these looked to be qualified conversations.

Feedback from the event sponsors suggests the market in Sweden is stirring after about a decade of modest growth. They found leveraging the strength of an existing event brand to be useful, and sponsors and delegates were keen to explore a new experience. Judging by the strength of attendance, we have no doubt this will be a recurring event. We came away with several questions that beg further exploration:

1. how does a sponsor compare ROI from an industry event to RPI from an in-house event?
2. established IT industry players were not visible at this particular event, but Google, Splunk, Riverbed, Telecity and a number of local services companies were in force. Is budget allocation at industry events across a geography a lead indicator of future market share growth?
3. budget holders were focused and eager to exchange views. For analysts like us, will these events become a better platform for engagement and discussion?

Do you attend or sponsor events, and if so, what changes have you seen since the downturn of 2008?

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Disclosure: Raimakers work with IP EXPO on several initiatives, including the Spotlight Series

Together with IP EXPO Online, we are delighted to announce the IP EXPO Rainmakers Spotlight series. This series will profile promising pre-IPO technology vendors across the virtualization, storage, security, networking, wireless and cloud computing segments. Our analysis will be published on IP EXPO Online, accessed by 15,000 IT buyers in the UK. These companies will also be included in the Rainmaker Index.

So if you are an unlisted company addressing one of the six segments listed above, with a compelling technology proposition, contact us.

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The first transition relates to its consulting business. For most customers, perceived utility from a technology is enhanced by the availability of experienced professionals to guide them before implementation and during the lifecycle of the technology in their production environment. Two years ago, Symantec shifted its priority from delivering consulting directly to enabling partners to be the main source of consulting services. This is a logical shift, as partners need to build larger knowledge teams as Symantec’s technology portfolio broadens. However, it takes time for partners to invest and adapt their business model to embrace revenue opportunities from consulting. And for Symantec, this transition requires investment in partner training and channel management. The joint portfolio today comprises Information Management, Security, Storage and Availability and Mobile Security Assessments.

The second transition relates to the move from license to as-a-service sales. Branded Symantec Cloud, the portfolio today includes Endpoint Protection, Enterprise Vault, Email Continuity, Encryption and MessageLabs Web Security. The company boasts ten million end users at more than 31,000 organisations for these services as of May 2012. This is a necessary transition, even if investors’ expectations do not keep pace with the shift in top-line dynamics from up-front license revenues to deferred services revenues.

The challenge for Symantec will be to sustain momentum. It plays in diverse markets: the consumer segment with Norton technologies, the SME space as well as targeting enterprise customers. Routes to market in each of these segments is different. However, as markets converge, we should see Symantec leverage its experience across segments. Arguably, as consumerization of enterprise IT becomes more pervasive, Symantec should be well positioned as it understands consumer preferences better than its immediate competitors.

Staying the course with its approach to services is likely to be just as challenging. In June, we plan to take a closer look at the growth story around Symantec’s Business Critical Services. Its pursuit of deferred revenue services directly while enabling partners to address consulting services will need more time in the market to be understood. And as we saw in earlier analysis of Dell, VMware and Quest, raising services visibility is no easy matter, regardless of route to market.

Image credit: Another brick in the wall, Chicago. by Darren Ryan

• Make Technologies – application modernization software and services
• Clerity Solutions – application modernization and legacy system re-hosting solutions and software
• Wyse Technology – thin client computing devices and software
• SonicWALL – network and content security, secure remote access and business continuity solutions
• AppAssure – ‘backup anywhere, optimize everywhere, recover always’
• Force10 Networks – high-performance data centre networking
• SecureWorks – information security services
• Compellent – storage systems
• Insite One – cloud-based medical archiving for healthcare

Its change from being a reseller of other vendors’ offerings – or its own built from industry standard components – to being a supplier with a strategy built on its own intellectual property is a clear example of the change from a horizontally to vertically integrated market. Integration is also on the agenda of rivals such as IBM, HP and Fujitsu and arguably the raison d’etre for VCE.

Vertical integration – supplier push and user pull according to Michael
At its recent analyst conference I got to ask Michael about his views on whether Dell’s increasing vertical integration was symptomatic of vendor change or customer push. In his view it’s a bit of both:

• Dell is acquiring a number of smaller companies which have developed deep expertise, allowing them to have more detailed conversations
• Customers are looking to simplify their supplier relationships, looking for ‘one throat to choke’

He noted that there’s a mixed need for specialisation in technology and generalisation in purchasing.
Dell’s change is continuous and we had a chance to preview tightly integrated systems incorporating servers, storage and networking and hear from the head of its software division – so we expect that to be split out from peripherals in its quarterly financial statements soon. Spending on R&D will no doubt increase as well as Dell makes more of its acquired technology.

Vertical integration makes heterogeneous hypervising different in 2012
Inside v outside the box issues are important for customers’ implementation of various forms of virtualisation – in our studies of storage hypervising for instance, whether or not you can attach multiple suppliers’ arrays is a vital issue of choice. VMware’s introduction of ESX a decade ago turned out to be a ‘great leveller’ for server vendors, but this was at the height of the horizontally integrated market. For something similar to happen in storage (or even networking eventually) will be different and harder, due to the vertical integration strategies of Dell and others. Iconoclastic competitors will need to demonstrate ease-of-deployment and dramatically lower total cost of ownership for the systems in which they’re used to prevail.
Image Credit: Martin Hingley

In this research note we look at Dell’s version of storage hypervisors with a general re-cap on Dell storage.

2010 – Dell goes it alone

Dell’s storage business changed course in 2010 when it became blatantly obvious that it desired to control its own storage IP. One disruptive consequence was that it spelled the end of re-selling EMC’s products. But it was also the natural consequence of a wider strategy that Dell wanted to be reckoned as a system vendors like IBM or HP. This also meant that Dell’s behaviour needed to change in order to operate as a proper storage IP proprietor and ensure that customers were presented with a comprehensive end-to-end Dell storage portfolio. Interestingly, Dell had already signalled its potential intentions as far back as January 2008 when it acquired EqualLogic. This was followed by more acquisitions up such as Ocarina Networks which became a key part of the Dell storage OS, and Compellent in late 2010 which became the high-end Dell disk array.

So from 2010 onwards Dell not only needed a storage engineering strategy, but also a cohesive message why customers only needed to consider Dell for their storage purchases. As we approach the second year anniversary of Dell’s reinforced storage group the company has made significant progress. Dell has maintained its operational bases of the acquired companies which was good for continuity as well as retaining engineering talent. But it has also brought the engineering teams together to port the best pieces of its storage IP from one product to another.

Its disk array portfolio still refers to the EqualLogic and Compellent original product line names and both offer scale and many options. EqualLogic is the mid-range offering based on iSCSI SANs and Compellent is the enterprise SAN solution. Both lines share common elements in their storage OSs in order to give storage admins the same look and feel of their Dell storage.

Storage Hypervisor

The Compellent range is promoting the storage hypervisor concept through its Live Volume feature. This enables a grid of Compellent arrays between which volumes can be moved non-disruptively. That is not yet a common feature on other vendor’s arrays although some vendors articulate this function as storage federation. We have written about storage hypervisors where HDS and
NetApp use their array controllers as storage hypervisors. Ie. they both attach heterogeneous disk arrays, and so do the other implementations of what we call storage hypervisors.

The current Compellent implementation is therefore homogenous. If Dell however was to progress with heterogeneous support of other vendor arrays behind a Compellent controller, then that would put a powerful tool in the Dell toolbox. This would not only fit customers with multi-vendor environments, but it would also make it easier for those who want any easy way to migrate onto the Compellent platform. Without full storage hypervisor capabilities we believe Dell will have to consider alternatives such as federated storage, in order to prove its high-end enterprise storage credentials.

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• Smart phones and tablets don’t have wired Ethernet ports – so many organisations need to invest in wireless networking
• Mac OS, iOS are impossible and Android hard to virtualise, so there needs to be a movement away from virtualising PCs and towards streaming applications and ‘apps’
• Security is a nightmare – not only are malcontents targeting new devices (yes – you can get viruses and spam on smart phones), but the mixture of home and business data on the same device creates significant new vulnerabilities

A number of years’ ago there was a move towards more freedom of selection for users, with vendors suggesting that employees could be given a PC allowance akin to a ‘car allowance’ – although views differed on whether purchases should be from an approved list or not. Most PC suppliers today are hedging their bets by adding tablets and smart phones to accommodate the changes in device purchasing. But strong adoption of BYOD strategies will shift purchasing authority from company to user, so business suppliers are also hurriedly adding ‘coolness’ as an essential design feature.
The challenges of BYOD are between freedom and control. Users don’t want their home devices clogged up with their company’s data – still less enjoy having their personal data swiped by their IT department when they leave. IT managers have to deal with a mass of new expectations, measured by the need to exert some control to keep corporate data safe and confidential. It is logical that companies will need to pay something to employees for the renting of the space on their devices and perhaps they will need to be more democratic this time – only paying for the technology of senior managers looks inappropriate as a BYOD strategy.
As more companies say ‘bring your own device’ I hear users reply, ‘then loosen up your network!’ and there are many cultural, technical and financial consequences to consider.

Image Credit: Martin Hingley

The first wave
The first instance was the virtualisation of the disk array some 20+ years ago. It was arguably StorageTek that pioneered the concept of an array that completely liberated or abstracted the link between physical and logical storage. Since then storage industry responded with continual improvements to the disk array. Some of these improvements originated in academia – an example is de-duplication of stored data. However, the original concept of storage layer abstraction is as fundamental to smarter storage today as it was then. It would be unimaginable if customers would have had to continue buying pre-virtualisation arrays. Turnover of billions of dollars created a very healthy and profitable segment in the IT industry. Some disk array super-users told us that a feature such as volume cloning could account for as much a third of the value of a smart array.

Second generation
The current wave of virtualising storage is characterised by two concepts:
• Server virtualisation
• Pan-array virtualisation
Even if customers do not see those as connected, they coincide & resonate and define how IT is deployed. And clearly builds on the most up to date Gen 1 arrays.

Server virtualisation
The ability to deploy many virtual machines each posing their own demands on storage resources is causing problems in the data centres. With workloads and virtual machines being portable across physical servers, the implications on storage become unpredictable. Add to this the desire to orchestrate DR provisioning for virtualised workloads and storage R&D designers are currently faced with new demands from customers.

It is also interesting to note that customers may feel tied into their server hypervisor vendor, but they have total freedom regarding their hardware provider. In contrast, on the storage side most customers are tied in to their hardware provider and the storage virtualisation schemes that come with the arrays.

Pan-array virtualisation
Customers with capacity storage farms preside over numerous powerful array controllers. Increasingly they express that they want to be able to control all storage as a pool of tiered capacity irrespective of vendor make and models. We believe that ideally the authority to control storage lies in what we call a storage hypervisor. Here we examined the storage hypervisor philosophies. However some vendors have articulated alternatives which we think are less powerful because they are not heterogeneous. HP and EMC, are both promoting such an alternative called federated storage which is pegged at high-end enterprises. Nevertheless, even lower-end solutions will evolve such that arrays will share processing across arrays or be aware of other arrays in the same clusters.

The storage virtualisation outlook

Developing smarter array controller clustering is not trivial and the storage vendors arguably have an open field in terms of the architecture philosophies they could adopt. We think that eventually customers will be faced with a choice between homogeneous and heterogeneous propositions. We are also of the opinion that pursuing heterogeneity is the clever way forward both for customers and vendors. Even better will be array control which is tied into server hypervisors in order to provide proper workload orchestration.

We estimate that only 10%-20% of current high-end disk array customers have deployed storage hypervisor control of their arrays. But we believe that more customers would have exploited those capabilities if they were available to them. Over the coming years more vendors will add pan-array virtualisation leading to markedly higher adoption by customers. As is common practice in disk array development, we anticipate that features developed in high-end arrays will subsequently find their way into mid-range arrays. Eventually many businesses will exploit the ability to control their storage pool arrays across distances. This evolution will be accelerated by the ability to deploy capacity hosted by cloud based service providers.

There is plenty of scope for improving the storage array. And we can even imagine some of the ingredients that would constitute the third wave of storage virtualisation. Look forward to new start-ups, scope for market disruption as old and new storage system vendors battle it out.

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Fibre Network

CWW claims the UK’s largest fibre network dedicated to business users of telecoms, with presence in over 400 towns and cities in the UK, with 864 unbundled exchanges covering 56% of the population. Outside the UK, CWW’s network stretches to more than 425,000km, including interests in 60 global cable systems, enabling connectivity to more than 150 countries. For Vodafone, with its long term ambition to widen reach, this fibre network asset provides a relatively cheap way of handling escalating volume of 3G, and eventually 4G, data traffic.

Managed and cloud services

CWW’s next generation network capability, products and applications include a broad range of services that span contact centres, data management, infrastructure services and enterprise voice management. The competences, people and customer contracts will be a valuable addition to any business targeting enterprise spending. CWW will be brought under the Vodafone Global Enterprise (VGE) business, which already has a number of significant enterprise services contracts under its belt. And this is not the first VGE acquisition.

In December 2011, Vodafone acquired Bluefish Communications, a Reading-based consulting firm. Bluefish worked on network design and implementation, with a particular focus on unified communications. It also supplied skilled people and hosted managed services for some clients, but mostly it was a consulting house. Bluefish had around 50 full-time employees and a further 200 associates, and was also tucked under the VGE umbrella, which was already delivering fixed and mobile communications services to multinational companies, and was increasingly targeting convergence and the cloud.

Today, VGE has several cloud services, including Microsoft Office 365 and its mHealth Solutions. While VGE’s organic and acquisition driven cloud portfolio is filling out nicely, we are less confident about revenue growth potential. As Pim Bilderbeek argues in his “Twelve Reasons Why Telcos Will Not Dominate Cloud Computing” essay, the odds are stacked against companies that are not experienced in inventing fast. Pure-play services firms are inherently more agile, and speed is a critical factor in the cloud scene.

Management credibility

Vodafone’s path to finalise its bid was clear only after Tata Communications dropped its bid for CWW. And although Vodafone’s £1 billion offer has been received well, the reception has not been unanimous. Orbis, the biggest shareholder in CWW may still derail proceedings if it can muster an additional 6% of shareholders. Such public and protracted uncertainty cannot be good for employee morale or customer satisfaction.

Image credit: Spring time is swing time, by Shrapnel

The issues of network hypervising are akin, but also radically different from both server and storage ones, not least because there has to be a physical connection between all compute, storage and client nodes in an organisation’s infrastructure.

As in the storage area there are a number of vendors looking to manage networking from multiple vendor sources in a single piece of software, although few of these approaches can be considered as hypervising yet.

HP recently announced its IMC VAN (Intelligent Management Center Virtual Application Networks) Manager Module and APIs, which it will begin shipping in June. It contains pre-defined templates used with server admins to create profiles for designers, policies for servers and will ship with plug-ins for virualisation environments such as VMware’s vCenter. We believe HP may even have discussed using the term ‘network hypervising’ as a description of the software, but chose not to because it considers its functions as far wider.

HP’s management suites are used to help manage both IT and telco networks and it has a lot of telco customers – especially in Europe. As with other hypervisor areas there are potentially major cost savings to be made by moving away from the expertise and specialisation of managing server, storage, networking components separately. HP also manages a lot of Cisco networking internally – especially in the outsourcing contracts brought in with the acquisition of EDS – and for customers, although there have bee some lively decisions about whether or not Cisco will allow HP to include its latest products in its schemes.

Just as with servers and storage, there’s a likely infection point for networks too, when users jump to adopt common management for controllers and devices from multiple suppliers. When that happens we’ll need to start looking for the ‘VMware of networking’ rainmakers, as we’re doing in the storage market right now.

Image Credit: Martin Hingley