Observing weirdness …

I spend a bit of my time showing Adaptec products to people throughout different parts of the world. Our current push is on our iSCSI/IPSAN software-only product called OnTarget. Now that sounds like a plug for a product (which of course I would not do here), but it sets the scene … something new, something you may not have heard of before and something you may not be 100% familiar with.

This is really about looking at how people perceive products, use products, and react to the way other people use products (when it’s different to the way we perceive how a product should be used).

I see people use our high-port-count SAS/SATA cards by direct attaching drives … I mean 24 SATA drives direct-attached to a RAID card … and I cringe. I don’t say anything but I think to myself … what drug is this guy taking? Of course, the usage is perfectly acceptable, and in fact is a cheap way of making massive storage volumes, but it just sits a little outside my comfort zone … I think those disks should be in a JBOD, but that’s my personal opinion and personal experience tainting my view of how something is done.

Just because I think it’s nuts, does that mean it’s wrong? No, but I reserve my right to think it’s nuts. I just shouldn’t say it to anyone.

So how does this fit with OnTarget? Simply that I find many people have a preconceived, set view of where iSCSI/IPSAN fits in what section of the storage market. In other words … it has a place and that is where it should stay. That doesn’t just mean customers. That also goes for industry experts. I constantly read that iSCSI/IPSAN is for entry-level and you need to move to fibre for enterprise.

What a load of (insert your own expletive here). People put iSCSI/IPSAN in the entry-level sphere because that’s where they were told it fits. They don’t bother thinking about novel, or different uses of the product, or the fact that it’s evolving a truck-load faster than it’s competitors, they just pigeonhole the technology straight into ‘entry-level’.

Welcome 10gb ethernet. Does it run at 10gb throughput? No. Is it dramatically cheap right now? No. But put two of these ports together into the storage device and is it fast enough for enterprise? You bet. Is it cheaper than fibre and getting cheaper by the day? Dead right as well.

So if you think a little about iSCSI/IPSAN, and where it fits, you need to take into account it’s changing face. 10gb ethernet will give somewhere around 6-7gb throughput (600-700mb per second). Put that across 2 ports in a teamed connection, and now you have some real performance on your hands. Combine that with dual-mirrored systems and now you have a complete fail-over system running at speeds only previously dreamed of in the expensive fibre world.

Does that sound like ‘entry-level’? It doesn’t sound anything like it to me, but next time you read an industry analyst’s positioning of iSCSI/IPSAN, look for ‘entry-level’ … some people just refuse to look a second time.

See … if you put a single system together with SATA drives, a small amount of system RAM and gigabit ports, then yes, it’s an entry-level system. However if you change that same system to SAS drives, 4gb of system RAM and 2 x 10gb ports then it’s a ball-tearer that fits perfectly in the enterprise space, especially when mirrored into a dual fail-over system. All, of course, at a price that will make the fibre lads weak at the knees.

Case of weirdness in point … I’ve seen people create a Windows RAID array on DAS drives, an iSCSI volume on an external device, then mirror those volumes in the Windows OS. Now I thought that bizarre (and it probably was), but the user’s logic was to be able to take that volume to any system in the network and mount the volume in the case of a disaster. Several years ago I thought that strange … today I’d expect that to be a standard function of an iSCSI/IPSAN storage device. So what was out of my comfort zone has become a norm.

Here endeth my lesson. Take a long hard look at the way people use equipment. It may not be exactly what you need right now, but it may well point you in the right direction. Just because someone (like me) says it’s wrong, look twice and make your own decision. Likewise, when someone pigeonholes a technology into a certain market segment, look twice, and ask yourself whether in fact that is true, or just another editorial hack promulgating the same old same old.

iSCSI/IPSAN fits both entry-level and a fair old chunk of the enterprise … you just have to look past the BS coming from industry experts and take a second look at something you previously believed below your requirements.

Food for thought.