Very little is known about the Symmetrix File System largely known as SFS. Symmetrix File System is an EMC IP and practically only used within the Symmetrix environment for housekeeping, security, access control, stats collection, performance data, algorithm selection, etc.

If there are any facts about SFS that are known to you, please feel free to leave a comment. This post talks about the effects of SFS and not really the underlying file system architecture.

Some facts about the Symmetrix File System are highlighted below.

• Symmetrix File System (SFS) resides on volumes that have specially been created for this purpose on the Symmetrix
• SFS volumes are created during the initial Enginuity Operating Environment load (Initial install)
• 4 Volumes (2 Mirrored Pairs) are created during this process
• SFS volumes were introduced with Symmetrix Series 8000, Enginuity 5567 and 5568

Characteristics

• 4 SFS volumes are spread across multiple Disk Directors (Backend Ports) for redundancy
• SFS volumes are considered as reserved space and not available to use by the host
• Symmetrix 8000 Series: 4 SFS volumes, 3GB each (cylinder size 6140). Reserved space is 3GB x 4 vols = 12 GB total
• Symmetrix DMX/DMX-2: 4 SFS volumes, 3GB each (cylinder size 6140). Reserved space is 3GB x 4 vols = 12 GB total
• Symmetrix DMX-3/DMX-4: 4 SFS volumes, 6GB each (cylinder size 6140). Reserved space is 6GB x 4 vols = 24 GB total, (It’s different how the GB is calculated based on cylinder size on a DMX/DMX-2 vs a DMX-3/DMX-4)
• Symmetrix V-Max: 4 SFS volumes, 16GB each, Reserved space is 16GB x 4 vols = 64GB total
• SFS volumes cannot reside on EFD (Enterprise Flash Drives)
• SFS volumes cannot be moved using FAST v1 and/or FAST v2
• SFS volumes cannot be moved using Symmetrix Optimizer
• SFS volumes cannot reside on Vault Drives or Save Volumes
• SFS volumes are specific to a Symmetrix (Serial Number) and do not need migration
• SFS volumes are managed through Disk Directors (Backend Ports) only
• SFS volumes cannot be mapped to Fiber Directors (now FE – Frontend Ports)

Effects

• SFS volumes are write enabled but can only be interfaced and managed through the Disk directors (Backend Ports).
• SFS volumes can go write disabled, which could cause issues around VCM DB. VCM DB issues can cause host path and disk access issues.
• SFS volume corruption can cause hosts to lose access to disk volumes.
• If SFS volumes get un-mounted on a Fiber Director (Frontend Port), can result into DU (Data Unavailable) situations.

Fixes

• Since the SFS volumes are only interfaced through the Disk Directors (Backend Ports), the PSE lab will need to be involved in fixing any issues.
• SFS volumes can be VTOC’ed (formatted) and some key information below will need to be restored upon completion. Again this function can only be performed by PSE lab.
• SFS volumes can be formatted while the Symmetrix is running, but in a SCSI-3 PGR reservation environment it will cause a cluster outage and/or a split brain.
• No Symmetrix software (Timefinder, SYMCLI, ECC, etc) will be able to interface the system while the SFS volumes are being formatted.
• The security auditing / access control feature is disabled during the format of SFS volumes, causing any Symmetrix internal or external software to stop functioning.
• Access Control Database and SRDF host components / group settings will need to be restored after the SFS format

Access / Use case

• Any BIN file changes to map SFS volumes to host will fail.
• SFS volumes cannot be managed through SYMCLI or the Service Processor without PSE help.
• SYMAPI (infrastructure) works along with SYMMWIN and SFS volumes to obtain locks, etc during any SYMCLI / SYMMWIN / ECC activity (eg. Bin Changes).
• Since FAST v1 and FAST v2 reside as a policy engine outside the Symmetrix, it uses the underlying SFS volumes for changes (locks, etc).
• Performance data relating to FAST would be collected within the SFS volumes, which FAST policy engine uses to gauge performance.
• Performance data relating to Symmetrix Optimizer would be collected within the SFS volumes, which Optimizer uses to gauge performance.
• Other performance data collected for the DMSP (Dynamic Mirror Service Policy).
• All Audit logs, security logs, access control database, ACL’s etc is all stored within the SFS volumes.
• All SYMCLI, SYMAPI, Solutions enabler, host, interface, devices, access control related data is gathered on the SFS volumes.
• With the DMX-4 and the V-Max, all service process access, service processor initiated actions, denied attempts; RSA logs, etc are all stored on SFS volumes.

Unknowns

• SFS structure is unknown
• SFS architecture is unknown
• SFS garbage collection  and discard policy is unknown
• SFS records stored, indexing, etc is unknown
• SFS inode structures, function calls, security settings, etc is unknown

As more information gets available, I will try to update this post. Hope this is useful with your research on SFS volumes…

Cheers

@storagenerve

© Devang for Gestalt IT, 2010. | Symmetrix File System (SFS)
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It’s been a long, strange trip for Overland Storage (NASDAQ: OVRL). Best known in recent years for the tape backup libraries it sold through Hewlett-Packard, Overland is in the midst of an iSCSI-focused renovation at the hands of former Snap Appliance and Data Robotics execs. Could this reboot breathe new life into Overland as well as the SMB storage market it is focused on?

Snap and Overland – Hot Potato on a Sinking Ship?

The future of Overland is tied to Snap Appliance, makers of entry-level network-attached storage (NAS) systems. Current Overland CEO, Eric Kelly, snapped up the company in 2002 for just $10 million, quickly flipping it to Adaptec for $100 million. But the storage system market wasn’t right for the controller maker, so Kelly stepped up and directed Overland to repurchase Snap in 2008.

With Overland running a reported 70% of its business through Hewlett-Packard, that company’s decision to switch suppliers represented a potentially life-threatening challenge. Losses rang up and the company’s stock was pummeled. Shares of OVRL traded over $20 in 2006, but had slipped below $3 in 2008. Earnings declined, slipping into the red in the fourth quarter of 2005. The company hasn’t reported a profit since 2006 and the 2009 balance sheet shows a net negative total equity.

Control-Alt-Delete

The situation at Overland apparently does not appear quite as bleak to insiders. Eric Kelly stepped up to the helm as CEO in January of 2009 and quickly set about assembling a new management team. He brought in former Snap and Data Robotics marketing whiz Jillian Mansolf in July, presumably to focus on the Snap Appliance storage systems.

Overland NEO 4000E

Now Overland has taken another step, appointing BlueArc and Data Robotics founder Geoff Barrall as CTO and VP of Engineering. Kelly, Barrall, and Mansolf are a formidable team, lending the company the credibility it needs to steer Overland out of trouble.

Overland is in the process of expanding its Snap operations and moving it from Milpitas to San Jose. This month, the company revamped its NEO tape libraries and launched a new line of Snap appliances featuring enhanced support for VMware and Hyper-V. Overland also outsourced product manufacturing to Foxconn, improving gross product profitability.

On the financial front, Overland shored up its finances with $12 million in private equity funding on February 22.

Overland REO 9100 VTL

A Full-Line Storage Company?

Although known primarily for its NEO line of tape libraries, Overland has a much broader product portfolio. The company sells a line of virtual tape libraries that once used IBM’s Diligent deduplication technology but this relationship is long over.

The Snap line has expanded into both NAS and iSCSI SAN primary storage arrays as well. Although the low-end 2-drive SnapServer 110 might not look like much, the rack-mount SnapServer 600 series can be expanded over 100 TB. This is accomplished by adding storage expansion chassis behind the slim 1U SnapServer head, but we suspect I/O capacity and reliability will be limited when daisy chaining seven expansion units on a single SAS port.

Overland Snap Server 210

Overland’s storage lineup puts it squarely into the exploding small- and medium-sized business storage market. With server virtualization and database applications demanding ever more capacity and performance, many smaller IT operations are looking to add networked storage. But even the entry-level products of storage titans like EMC and NetApp are out of reach for these small shops, leaving a hole in the market. Companies like Overland are rushing to take advantage of this market with devices like the SnapServer, Data Robotics’ Drobo Elite, and EMC’s Iomega ix4 line. Those that offer low cost, ease of use, and integration with Windows and VMware are likely to be very successful over the next few years.

Overland may just surprise us all with a serious resurgence. CEO Kelly has lined up a great management team, brought in extra cash, and refocused the company on a nascent market opportunity. Not bad for a company many had long written off!

Listen to Overland CEO Eric Kelly on the InfoSmack podcast

© Stephen for Gestalt IT, 2010. | The Rebirth of Overland Storage
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I had a conversation last week with a PR company doing research for Netapp.  This followed just after Netapp released their Q4 results, with revenue exceeding expectations at just over $1 billion.  It’s amazing how in the space of less than 20 years they have developed from nothing to a company selling a single $4 billon product.

Lots of people will be quick to point out to me that Netapp sell lots of products.  Well, yes they do and the majority of those relate to a single core product – Data ONTAP running on some kind of bespoke hardware.  There are a few other bits and pieces out there – DataFort and SANScreen for example, but most software and hardware products still revolve around the core function of providing Networked Attached Storage.

Two thoughts intrigue me:

• Despite Netapp’s “reputation”, people still continue to buy from them.  By “reputation” I mean, complexity and price – I won’t even mention the sales culture.
• Competition in the sector must surely mean that growth in the single NAS product can’t continue forever, when newer products that have been developed with the benefit of hindsight are available in the marketplace and those vendors become more established.

It’s the second of these points that probably concerns me most.  Data ONTAP has some technical issues in performance and scalability.  The time taken to develop Data ONTAP 8 has demonstrated that integrating new features into the existing code base is a time consuming and presumably expensive exercise.  Netapp have no other product line to rely on and aren’t introducing new hardware/software as successors to the existing product line.

Compare Netapp to other vendors, specifically their arch-nemesis EMC.  EMC have fundamentally re-invented storage array technology with the introduction of V-Max.  Over the years they invested in technology other than their main Symmetrix range; CLARiiON, Centera, Celerra, Iomega, RecoverPoint are only a few that spring to mind.  There are many more.  The software portfolio of technology unrelated to Symmetrix is even greater.  Netapp remain fixed on their core product platform and the Data ONTAP architecture, attempting to make one hardware device fit all flavours of storage.

Despite the apparent flaws in Netapp’s technology, customers continue to buy and that is reflected in continued growth.  But surely it’s just a matter of time before their market share begins to erode.  Perhaps rather than acquiring technology that further expands features of their current platform (like Data Domain) they should branch out and buy into technology in other areas by acquiring 3Par, Compellent or Pillar perhaps.  Of course the only problem with following this direction is that it admits defeat in using the existing Data ONTAP platform as an all-protocol encompassing storage platform.  When you’ve spend years criticising the competition, you’ve pretty much painted yourself into a corner that becomes very difficult to get out of.

© Chris for Gestalt IT, 2010. | NetApp: The $4 Billion Product
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I’ve recently been implementing a vSphere deployment and have been looking at the new features introduced as part of Virtual Machine Hardware 7.  Obviously one of the major new components is the new Para Virtualised SCSI (PVSCSI) adapter which I wrote about way back in May 2009.  When it first came out there were a number of posts regarding the much improved I/O Performance and latency reduction this new adapter delivered, such as Chad Sakac’s I/O vSphere performance test post.

So the other day I stumbled across a tweet from Scott Drummond who works in the VMware Performance Engineering team. Following a little reading and a bit of digging around it appears that the use of PVSCSI comes with a small caveat.  It would appear that if you use the PVSCSI adapter with low I/O workloads you can actually get higher latency than you get with the LSI Logic SCSI adapter (see the quote below)

The test results show that PVSCSI is better than LSI Logic, except under one condition–the virtual machine is performing less than 2,000 IOPS and issuing greater than 4 outstanding I/Os.

This particular caveat has come to light following some more in-depth testing of the PVSCSI adapter performance.  The full whitepaper can be found at the following link.

PVSCSI whitepaper – http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vsp_4_pvscsi_perf.pdf

For those who don’t want to read the technical whitepaper, a summary of the issue can be found in the following VMware KB article.

VMware KB 1017652 – http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/1017652

So basically, as opposed to just using the PVSCSI adapter as default with VMs running version 7 of the virtual hardware have a think about it’s I/O profile and whether the PVSCSI or LSI logic adapter would be best.

© Craig for Gestalt IT, 2010. | VMware PVSCSI Adapter performance and low I/O Workloads
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What a hornet’s nest I stirred up with my blog; firstly it was good to see a lot of the NetApp guys coming out swinging in defence of their company, you should have passion for the company you work for but…..and there’s always a but, it was not suprising to see that most missed the point! I was not attacking the Filer product, it is actually a great product for most people. However it is a single great product which you have built a business on but it is just a single product.

There comes a time I think that once a company gets to certain size and I think that NetApp are at that size; that a company needs to start to diversify. NetApp’s performance on acquistion has quite frankly been terrible; perhaps Georgen’s can turn this round and they can acquire and integrate well. NetApp for too long have traded on being ‘not EMC’; I am not convinced that this is any longer a credible strategy which brings me on nicely to EMC..you didn’t actually think I was going to let EMC off the hook?

EMC have exactly the opposite problem to NetApp; they actually have too many products and the ‘Cloud’ strategy actually sums them up! Their strategy is made of cloud, it’s large, all encompassing and when you try to get hold of it; well….Put it like this, the average sales-man cannot articulate it, they don’t even get to arm-waving bit, there’s a blank look and then they try to sell you some storage. But at least you have Chuck’s Blog!

So it’s about time EMC started to make their sale-guy’s lives a bit easier and shrunk their product catalogue. Clariion and Celerra need to become the same product line; yep, you need to copy NetApp and have a truly unified storage platform. You’ve got some bright guys who understand file-systems, containers etc; just admit the NetApp were right in the mid-range space and launch the Celariion. If you were feeling really brave, you could keep the gateway product and virtualise other vendor’s disk.

Next have a look at the CMA area; what exactly does Documentum do for you?  And when you start to drill down into the Documentum product set, there’s some real cruft in there. Does anyone actually use your Digital Asset Management tools for example? The whole CMA area needs looking at and streamlining.

Ionix? A rebranding exercise at the moment. The whole product set needs integrating and you need to sit down with the people who use this stuff on a day-to-day basis, you could streamline and much improve this product set. And as your friends at NetApp seem to be asleep at the wheel with SanScreen; you could actually catch up and go past them.

Like Ionix, your BURA product set needs integrating and streamlining; the Avamar/Data Domain story is confusing customers everywhere, it makes us go cross-eyed at times. For example, we were looking deduplication last year prior to your Data Domain acquisition and you were trying to sell us Avamar against Data Domain; now you want to sell us Data Domain. Confused and we aren’t the only ones!

EMC Consulting would be a good idea, not EMC paid-for PreSales which unfortunately it currently often turns into. You do have some good guys but stop brainwashing them and allow them independance of thought. I won’t rant about EMC-UK but it’s broken; if you want more information, contact me directly.

I think that like NetApp, you are in no-man’s land as an organisation and there’s a wonderful British expression ‘eyes too big for your belly’ which sums you up nicely at the moment!  And like NetApp, you have some interesting challenges ahead and some interesting challengers but quietly and privately, you appear to acknowledge that.

I do want EMC, NetApp and all the other storage companies to succeed and grow; in IT infrastructure, it’s the only place where there’s any kind of product differentiation. The server market is quite frankly, boring and the network market suffers from the big kid in the playground syndrome.

© Martin for Gestalt IT, 2010. | More Vendor Bashing!
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NetApp worry me as a company; despite their record revenues this quarter, they strike me as a company in trouble. And as an end-user who wants/needs a competive storage market, this is a little concerning.

Now obviously, you are now thinking that ‘Bod has gone mad, so I better explain my reasoning.

Over the past year or so, NetApp have been quietly dropping products under the guise of focussing more on their core but if you look at things, their core is actually very narrow. Dropping unprofitable lines is obviously generally good business but I don’t see these lines being replaced with anything. Their product range is narrowing, this is not the actions of company confident in their ability to provide solutions to a market-place which will become increasing solution orientated. This is a company who is willing to be a little cog in the grander scheme of things!

The struggle to get OnTap 8 out of the door has in my opinion meant that the company has not really focussed on providing innovative new products. NetApp are currently not innovating and the rest of the market are catching up and some could rocket past them.

Some of the comments I’ve heard from people who have looked in more detail at OnTap 8 are concerning as well. If you are running OnTap 7; it appears that there is little for you, if you merely upgrade. It sounds like that a full re-implementation is required to take advantage of features like 64 bit aggregates.

When EMC announced Atmos, NetApp dropped big hints that they had a RESTful object oriented storage product in the works. This has yet to surface and I’ve not heard anything more than ‘watch this space’ muttering but there’s no product shipping.

Another reason that I am concerned about NetApp are that they are a single product company; if OnTap 8 struggles to gain acceptance, there is little for the company to fall back on. And there seems to be little appetite at the moment to broaden the NetApp product range and as I said earlier, they are indeed shrinking their portfolio.

The failure to take over Data Domain and loosing that battle to EMC, I suspect damaged the company’s confidence internally and I wonder whether they currently have the appetite to embark on an aquisition campaign but surely that is what is needed if they are to grow quickly enough to survive as a company long term?

The clustered NAS vendors could cause them pain going forward, the Isilons of this world are looking to do to NetApp what NetApp did to EMC. In fact NetApp remind me alot of EMC of four or five years ago, which is ironic as much of NetApp’s appeal was that they are not EMC!

And what’s worse, you’ve got some big players who could do immense damage to NetApp; I’m thinking IBM, Oracle and HP. IBM with SONAS could hurt them at the high-end and Oracle with the 7000 series could really hurt them in what has been traditionally their heartland; medium-sized NAS environments. HP could revitalise their storage business under Dave D but that is probably a longer term turn-around as opposed to immediate threat.

Yes NetApp have spent time building some strong partnerships but even this is a bit ‘meh’; not a huge amount of organisational innovation here. Nothing which made us sit up and think, ‘blimey, that was a clever move!’

In fact at the moment, ‘meh’ pretty much sums up NetApp as a company. Lots of companies go through a ‘meh’ period; HDS have been sitting in theirs for some time and need to come out pretty soon. EMC went through their ‘meh’ moment…IBM and HP have managed to have ‘meh’ decades in the past! Can NetApp come out of a ‘meh’ moment fighting and innovating? Lets hope so!

p.s I’ve labelled my own post as FUD…because if a vendor had written this…I might have accused them of writing FUD!

© Martin for Gestalt IT, 2010. | ‘Meh…it’s only a Billion Dollars…’
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It has been nearly a year since Cisco shook up the IT infrastructure world with their unified computing system (UCS) server line. Predictably, although the introduction set the world buzzing, customer uptake has been somewhat slower. Although evaluations are reported to be widespread, production use has lagged. The high-end corporate environments that use devices like these simply don’t turn on a dime. Regardless, UCS is an important infrastructure element and deserves the continuing attention it has received.

Cisco recently reached out to a number of us in the IT infrastructure space, asking for our opinion on UCS as it stands today. Gestalt IT author, Greg Ferro, posted a number of keen thoughts over at his Ethereal Mind blog, and we (Bas Raayman and Stephen Foskett) put our heads together to come up with some additional thoughts. Although clearly directed at Cisco, we look forward to responses from other parties as well!

1. How successful has UCS been in production deployment? What were the expectations of early adopters and have these been met? What do Gestalt IT readers think?
2. What feedback has Cisco received from customers from customers regarding Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE)? What do our readers think of FCoE at this point?
3. Many customers do not require a fully built-up stack, and instead need only a few blades. Are these smaller customers responding to UCS or is the product’s target market exclusively at the high end?
4. Will Cisco introduce a UCS model with multiple blade chassis?
5. What is the added value to a customer comparing a full width UCS blade to a regular 1U server?
6. What is the strategy if a customer needs extra I/O for an individual server within the UCS stack? Are any I/O extensions or upgrades planned?
7. Scalability is one of the key issues. What is the target scale for UCS and what is the biggest UCS deployment currently in use?

The VCE data center partnership resulted in taking the UCS computing system as a basis and integrated a storage unit and VMware to the solution stack. This is a solution that is sold as a “plug and play” virtualization building block and helped to establish UCS as a strategic platform. The Ionix part of the vBlock solution has “overall management” written over it, directed to allow management of all components from a central interface. More questions come to mind regarding VCE and UCS:

1. Are there any plans to provide the option to upgrade to a vBlock solution from a purchased UCS stack? If I currently have a UCS setup, can I add the missing components and have my setup validated so that I can add a storage array and the Ionix management to create my own vBlock?
2. I am putting “all of my eggs in one basket” by solely implementing the UCS solution. Of course I need to plan growth, but what happens if Cisco encounters issues in delivering new hardware? Small and medium enterprise sized companies usually need to have multiple suppliers to avoid such problems, but how does Cisco handle this?
3. How well do the UCS components work with other hardware beyond VCE, and is Cisco also offering a unified management solution for a heterogeneous environment? If not, what interfaces are they offering to implement central management?

We look forward to the response from Cisco and our readers!

© Gestalt for Gestalt IT, 2010. | One Year Later: Questioning Cisco UCS
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Today HP will announce two new storage arrays.  Although taken from different product families, the hardware will be branded in a consistent manner, demonstrating HPs desire to bring together a range of storage technologies they’ve purchased over the last few years.

P2000 G3 MSA (Modular Smart Array) System

I’ve not been a particular fan of the MSA devices, as I’ve worked mainly in large organisations where scalability isn’t delivered by point solutions.  However for SMEs, the new P2000 MSA seems to offer a lot of features for a small price point.  The new device provides 8Gb Fibre Channel, 1Gb iSCSI, up to 64 snapshots plus the option to replicate to another similar P2000 array.  Both 2.5″ and 3.5″ drives are supported, by Small Form Factor and Large Form Factor models respectively.  Arrays can scale up to 57.6TB with SAS drives and 192TB with SATA.

Surely I could replace my existing storage arrays with this kind of scalability I hear you say!  Well yes and no; low cost may appear to mean high value, however it depends on whether this kind of array provides the specific features you require.  Whilst the P2000 offers hardware RAID, and component redundancy, the additional features of the P4000 may be more appropriate. features you care about, for example, component redundancy, RAID, automated drive sparing, multi-pathing and so on. If these options aren’t high on your list, then the P2000 could be for you.

P4000 G2 SAN Solutions

The P4000 devices are rebranded LeftHand networks hardware, technology acquired by HP in October 2008.  Probably the most interesting feature of this release is something called Network RAID.  Rather than offer simply RAID within the controller, multiple controllers can be connected together and offer continuous access in the event of a single device loss.  While this isn’t a new feature, the difference in this release is a move on from simply offering RAID-1 protection to another device to providing RAID-5 availability.  This means if you’ve planned a sensible configuration, loss of a single array wouldn’t be an issue.  However you’ll need to purchase 5 arrays to get you started.

Clearly the P4000 is a step up from the P2000 MSA array, by offering RAID protection and component redundancy.  You get what you pay for in this world, so the P4000 comes in at a higher price point than the MSA device.

It’s good to see some standardisation of the technology HP have acquired over recent years.  Key to this though, is the ability to offer consistent management and where possible keep terminology consistent too.  For those customers purchasing one or two similar devices from the range, then consistent management may not be an issue, however if you’re looking to deploy multiple tiers of storage across your organisation, even the ability to report consistently across all devices is a must.

I look forward to getting a chance to see this technology close-up and to provide more in-depth reviews if possible.

** Note this post has been amended after it was highlighted that the P2000 does in fact offer redundancy and RAID protection as standard.  Thanks to HP and others who pointed this out **

© Chris for Gestalt IT, 2010. | New HP P2000 and P4000 Storage Arrays
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Can Snaps and Replication ever replace traditional back-up applications? It’s an interesting thought and certainly one that we’ve considered in the past. We often find that the answer that you get very much varies from what the favourite technology is with generally the NetApp fans saying yes and the EMC fans saying no.

Now as a storage agnostic, my answer is maybe but it depends on what you use your back-ups for and your internal processes. I can certainly think of a use case where the answer is NO.

One thing which we do and I suspect many other people do is to use our back-ups as source-data for development copies. So we have to get that data into another environment which may sit on different disk technologies and it’s certainly a different environment. Using traditional tape or even VTL based environments, this is relatively easy to do but with a snap-based environment; this will be a lot harder, not impossible but it actually adds complexity.

And if you go down the snaps/replication route; you’ve made your migration path away from your disk supplier infinitely harder. Because not only are you going to be migrating your primary disk environment but you have tightly coupled your back-up environment to your primary disk environment.

So I would still plump for keeping my back-up environment fairly loosely coupled as opposed to tightly integrated.

© Martin for Gestalt IT, 2010. | Death of Backup?
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Dell picked up clustered NAS pro Exanet, finally signing the dotted line after months of speculation. The US $12 million purchase follows reports that the company was going into receivership in December after failing to repay a US $10 million loan from Kreos Capital. Exanet was founded in 2000 and reports claim the company raised US $70 million in funding through four rounds, culminating with a US $18 million C series in 2007 and a further US $10 million injection in 2008.

Like Ibrix, which was acquired by HP under better circumstances last year, and ONstor, similarly scooped up by LSI, Exanet was best known for clustered NAS software. Their ExaStore software, bundled with IBM and Xyratex hardware, put up impressive scalability and performance numbers. Dell will likely leverage this software with their own hardware as a NAS complement to their leading EqualLogic iSCSI line. Exanet’s Xyratex-sourced DX line of Fibre Channel storage devices is unlikely to be at all attractive to Dell.

Rumors of a white knight for Exanet were widespread last year. Fujitsu Siemens Computers was said to be the front-runner in May, and Exanet’s name came up mid-year as HP and LSI made their moves. Dell was apparently willing to put up some money to gain access to Exanet’s NAS technology later in the year but the company’s investors reportedly scuttled that deal. Plan B for the folks in Round Rock seems to have been to wait it out and secure the technology from the now-moribund company. If Dell keeps the doors open, Exanet’s R&D center will become their first such facility in Israel.

The acquisition gives Dell a retort when HP presents their invigorated Ibrix line to enterprise customers. It is likely that Dell will follow HP with a software/hardware NAS bundle possibly featuring their PowerEdge blades. Back-end storage could come from many sources: Dell’s own PowerVault MD line, their EqualLogic PS iSCSI gear, or the Dell/EMC CLARiiON AX and CX lines. Exanet is known as a higher-end scale-out offering (think Isilon or HP’s PolyServe) rather than a general-purpose NAS.

Two key questions arise from Dell-owned NAS software:

1. Would Dell reduce their reliance on Microsoft’s Windows Storage Server, as used in their PowerVault NX300 and NX3000 NAS devices? I suspect not, since Exanet is not a low-end product and Windows-powered NAS has typically sold into a separate market niche. Rival HP has certainly continued pushing Microsoft-powered gear since buying Ibrix.
2. What does this mean for Dell’s relationship with EMC? The company only started selling the EMC Celerra NX4 last year, and a homegrown Exanet/PowerVault solution is not a drop-in replacement. Dell’s relationship with EMC continues getting deeper, and a split is unlikely in the near term.

At this point, this looks like a vote for Exanet’s technology and a reaction to HP’s PolyServe and Ibrix moves, not a statement against EMC or Celerra. Indeed, considering that Dell was merely investigating an OEM relationship before this all fell out, it doesn’t look like a strategic move at all for the company. Exanet will likely become a new line item, but Dell’s storage roster will look largely the same.

© Stephen for Gestalt IT, 2010. | Dell Scoops Up Exanet After All
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