Wikibon Defines the ServerSAN Space

It was with pride and pleasure – and with a delay of a week – that I read Wikibon’s announcement today: Wikibon is initiating ServerSAN as a new category, and defines ServerSAN along the lines of ScaleIO’s original design points from 2010.

As the only ServerSAN vendor with both software-only and bundled/appliance solutions in the market, we sure welcome some competition. Of course I second Stu’s view that competition increases both awareness and adoption.

The only part that I am really missing in Wikibon’s ServerSAN requirements is scalability. Nobody expects any “big bang” deployments – many customers like to start relatively small and then to grow big. However, one of the Dirty Little Secrets of ServerSAN (and any other tech) solutions is that if the product was not designed for scale from scratch, i.e. from day one, it will never really scale.

Enterprises have been consolidating their local datacenters into huge mega-datacenters. Service Providers host a rapidly increasing customer base, each with ever larger number of environments, in their datacenters.

Both enterprises and Service Providers today manage many tens of thousands of servers in their datacenters. Therefore, ServerSAN solutions that only scale to a few tens of nodes may be applicable for small businesses (if those small businesses prefer to manage their own computer-room over hosting their IT at a Service Provider), but cannot be regarded as serious alternatives for any Enterprise or Service Provider datacenter purposes.

After all, nobody expects any datacenter operators that manage thousands of servers to deploy multiple instances of a ServerSan product that scales to ten or twenty nodes only. The management overhead of such an exercise would defeat any potential operational or other gains… Hence Scalability is a big deal. Starting small is fine, and all products support that. Growing big, that is where the challenges lie.

There are several other Dirty Little Secrets of ServerSAN that customers should be aware of besides Scalability. Ensuring true Elasticity, achieving high Performance, Hardware Agnosticism, and the ability to run in hyper-converged architectures are examples of other core functionality that any self-respecting ServerSAN vendor should deliver. ScaleIO is providing today what Wikibon defines as Server SAN Phase 3.

Wikibon’s definition of ServerSAN as a category is an important step in enabling the growth of this space. I am sure, and hopeful, that many new vendors will enter our market in the coming years – offering customers more freedom and choice. ScaleIO’s customers have been enjoying the benefits of the ServerSAN category for the past 24 months. And we are not stopping here. We will continue to build on our strong technology, partner, and customer bases – as well as leverage EMC’s range of storage technologies and unmatched R&D budgets – to further increase our market lead, and to serve even more 100% satisfied customers worldwide.

2014: A new ScaleIO Blog & a new Data Center Architecture

My girlfriend Irith – actually she’s my wife but I just never got used to calling her that – has one of her pretty rare “must-clean-everything-up” moods today and just found these three-years-old plasticized slides.

When we just started ScaleIO, I used to cold-call and meet as many prospects as possible. During those early meetings, I used these slides to sign up our first set of customers. At that time we didn’t know the now widely-recognized term “convergence”, and therefore we used to describe the paradigm-shift that we were enabling as “vertical consolidation of IT tiers in the data center”.

Not much time passed since then, but a lot has happened. We grew the company from just an idea to a robust product that runs production environments of some of the world’s leading enterprises and service providers today.

ScaleIO has been part of a large enterprise now for almost six months. Enough time to establish what to expect from 2014. So, let me tell you what to expect: Expect a lot!

ScaleIO, as an EMC business unit, is growing fast—we combined the agility, innovation- and results-driven DNA of ScaleIO “the startup” with the almost unlimited resources, expertise, and market-reach of EMC/ScaleIO “the enterprise”. We are actively hiring for all our teams, from engineering to sales, SE’s, performance analysis, technical marketing, global services, support, and so forth. We are signing up new customers at a mind-boggling speed, and increasingly deploying ScaleIO with more and larger accounts. ScaleIO as part of EMC is delivering today on an even more comprehensive roadmap than we had as a startup company.

In that spirit, I am proud to have been requested to write EMC/ScaleIO’s first blog. Please come back to read more about our thoughts, experiences, plans, announcements, partners, and customers. And of course to read more about how ScaleIO leads the industry from “Vertical Consolidation” on to IT Convergence, Hyper-Convergence, and Software Defined Storage (SDS).

It’s Christmas time, and I hope that you are spending some well-deserved family-time. If you are sneakily reading this blog while your family is opening presents under the tree, or before your spouse wakes up on Boxing Day, then I can only recommend you to stop reading now. Otherwise, I would like to wish you and your loved ones a Merry Christmas and a healthy, happy, successful 2014.

 

[this blog post originally appeared on http://www.scaleio.com/blog%5D

 

 

Will EMC/ScaleIO Rule the Datacenter? Probably.

Think whatever you want about EMC, but the company knows how to identify and seize market opportunities. How many companies started off selling office furniture and went on to become a $50B leader in the datacenter market?

The way I see it, one of EMC’s main growth drivers in the 1990s was the company’s navigation of the tectonic shift in the infrastructure market during the transition from IDC’s First Platform to the Second Platform.

What Platforms?

IDC defines the development of the IT market by several Platforms. The First Platform was characterized by a few large mainframes serving terminals in close proximity. The leading vendor in the period of the First Platform was of course IBM.

Then came the Second Platform era, characterized by client-server architectures. With the emergence of the Second Platform, many things changed in terms of datacenter components, infrastructure, and operations.

However, many things did not change, and mainframes continued to play an important role in the corporate datacenter despite the meteoric rise of the Second Platform’s client-server market.

EMC Symmetrix to the Rescue

EMC engaged the market transition caused by this paradigm shift in a superb manner, providing a robust Second Platform storage product—Symmetrix—that could serve both Second Platform client-server and First Platform mainframe architectures. It is no secret that companies that successfully manage tectonic market shifts like the transition from the First Platform to Second Platform derive the majority of the new market value created—and thus EMC’s revenue grew to many billions in just a few years.

Convergence, SDS, COTS, and the Third Platform

Today, we are witnessing the emergence of the Third Platform. The Third Platform is built on mobile computing, cloud services, social networking, and big data analytics technologies which drive profound changes in the datacenters and related IT organizations. For example, similarly to web-companies like Google, Amazon, and Facebook, enterprise datacenters are running Third Platform applications on Commodity Off The Shelf (COTS) components. Software-defined storage (SDS) and converged appliances that combine compute and storage in a single COTS server, drive datacenter use cases like Test&Dev, Private Clouds, Public Clouds, OLTP Database, and Virtual Desktop Infrastructures (VDI) to market. IDC expects converged, SDS datacenter technologies that leverage COTS to reach 30-35% penetration in the datacenter by 2016.

What…? 35% datacenter penetration in just 2-3 years?

Indeed, we are witnessing market disruption in process. Similarly to the transition from the First to the Second Platform, 2014-2016 will be characterized by the transition from the Second to the Third Platform.

Does EMC have a product that enables customers to run both Second Platform and Third Platform applications on Third Platform COTS infrastructure components? Yes, ScaleIO.

ScaleIO enables customers to surf the new wave of Third Platform applications and COTS, without having to compromise at all on their legacy investments in Second Platform applications.

EMC ScaleIO to the Rescue

ScaleIO delivers more elasticity, more scalability, and lower TCO than any other datacenter solution—as well as enterprise functionality like snapshots and performance QOS. ScaleIO runs both on bare metal (Linux, Windows) and hypervisor (ESX, HyperV, Xen, KVM, etc.) environments. When running at scale and/or on flash, ScaleIO delivers the best performance in the storage industry today. Visit http://www.cowger.us/ and http://purevirtual.eu/ for some example performance results.

Of course, legacy First Platform environments and products continued to play an important role for many years even as the Second Platform was expanding. Similarly, it would be naive to expect the Second Platform to disappear with the emergence of the Third Platform wave. To lead in the datacenter space, vendors therefore must be able to offer customers a broad set of solutions and freedom of choice for both the Second and Third Platform.

With ScaleIO, EMC is managing the transition from the Second to the Third Platform in a similar manner that Symmetrix helped EMC lead the wave from the First to the Second Platform.

So, will EMC/ScaleIO rule the datacenter? Probably!

Open Letter to ScaleIO Customers and Partners

EMC just acquired our company ScaleIO, Inc. Here is the open letter that was published on our website http://www.scaleio.com.

From Boaz Palgi, CEO

It is with great pleasure that I share with you that EMC has signed a definitive agreement to acquire ScaleIO. We are excited to accelerate our product leadership in this fast-growing server-based storage market.

ScaleIO delivers an innovative and unique software-only approach for server-based storage—that provides unprecedented elasticity, scalability, and performance. As part of the EMC® Xtrem® Flash Family, our powerful technology will be integral to changing the economics, scale and performance of storage.

We are humbled by the rapid adoption of ScaleIO’s ECS by enterprise customers and service providers alike, which has established ScaleIO as the leader in the server-based storage market in just two years. And this is just the beginning. Working together with the professionals at EMC, and leveraging EMC’s best-of-breed technology, will enable us to deliver customers reliable, elastic, high-performance server-based storage solutions, today.

To my team: Thank you for your commitment to, and confidence in ScaleIO. I have great pride in the no-nonsense manner in which we have put ScaleIO on the map, with limited resources and in a highly competitive market. Not only have we engineered and brought to market a robust product, but we’vealso gained the confidence of our customers—and drawn attention from the industry’s largest players.

Most importantly, to our customers and partners: As part of EMC, we continue to be committed to your success. We are dedicated to maintaining and increasing the quality of innovation, support, and service that you have come to expect from ScaleIO–and that you already know and love from EMC.

EMC and Xtrem are either a registered trademark or a trademark of EMC Corporation in the United States and/or other countries.

EMC to Acquire ScaleIO—Strengthens Industry-Leading Flash Portfolio

This was the press release that was published on http://www.EMC.com.

EMC to Acquire ScaleIO—Strengthens Industry-Leading Flash Portfolio

Story Highlights

• EMC Corporation has signed an agreement to acquire privately-held ScaleIO, a pioneer in scalable server-based storage software.
• ScaleIO accelerates EMC’s strategy to deliver Flash across the entire server and storage infrastructure.
• The all-cash transaction is not expected to have a material impact to EMC GAAP or non-GAAP EPS for the full 2013 fiscal year.
• Additional details from EMC and ScaleIO management are located on the EMC Pulse News Blog.

HOPKINTON, MA , July 11, 2013 –

EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC) today announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire privately-held ScaleIO, a pioneer in server-side storage software. The acquisition will further strengthen the EMC ® Flash portfolio by combining ScaleIO’s highly scalable server software with PCIe Flash cards, such as EMC XtremSF™, in Enterprise Private Cloud and Service Provider environments.

Upon closing, ScaleIO will operate within the EMC Flash Product Division. ScaleIO and its Elastic Converged Storage (ECS) software will become an integral part of the EMC XtremSW ™ Suite, which EMC introduced earlier this year with the goal of enabling customers to better utilize and manage server-based PCIe Flash storage. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. The all-cash transaction is not expected to have a material impact to EMC GAAP or non-GAAP EPS for the full 2013 fiscal year.

ScaleIO takes a software-only approach to creating a virtual pool of server-based storage by logically combining SSDs, PCIe Flash cards, HDDs—or any combination of these devices. ScaleIO provides support for both virtualized and non-virtualized environments and scales from tens to thousands of servers.

EMC is committed to enabling customers to deploy Flash across their entire server and storage infrastructures. The EMC Xtrem™ Family of products deliver server-side hardware and software (through XtremSF PCIe cards and XtremSW Suite) and all-Flash arrays (through XtremIO™). EMC also leads the market in Flash-optimized hybrid arrays with EMC VMAX ® and EMC VNX ® storage.

EMC Executive Quote:

David Goulden, President and Chief Operating Officer, EMC

“Flash now permeates every layer of IT—in virtualized and non-virtualized environments. Enterprise workloads are diverse in nature, and EMC is committed to offering our customers and partners choice in their Flash deployments. ScaleIO is a natural extension to our best-of-breed portfolio. It strengthens our product capabilities in the area of server-side storage and brings a world class team that will undoubtedly enable us to innovate more quickly in the future.”

About EMC

EMC Corporation is a global leader in enabling businesses and service providers to transform their operations and deliver  IT as a service. Fundamental to this transformation is  cloud computing.  Through innovative products and services, EMC accelerates the journey to cloud computing, helping IT departments to store, manage, protect and analyze their most valuable asset — information — in a more agile, trusted and cost-efficient way. Additional information about EMC can be found at  www.EMC.com.

Press Contacts

Katryn McGaughey
508-293-7717
Katryn.Mcgaughey@emc.com

EMC, Xtrem, XtremSF, XtremSW, XtremIO, VNX and VMAX are either a registered trademark or a trademark of EMC Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks used are the property of their respective owners.

This release contains “forward-looking statements” as defined under the Federal Securities Laws. Actual results could differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements as a result of certain risk factors, including but not limited to: (i) adverse changes in general economic or market conditions; (ii) delays or reductions in information technology spending; (iii) the relative and varying rates of product price and component cost declines and the volume and mixture of product and services revenues; (iv) competitive factors, including but not limited to pricing pressures and new product introductions; (v) component and product quality and availability; (vi) fluctuations in VMware, Inc.’s operating results and risks associated with trading of VMware stock; (vii) the transition to new products, the uncertainty of customer acceptance of new product offerings and rapid technological and market change; (viii) risks associated with managing the growth of our business, including risks associated with acquisitions and investments and the challenges and costs of integration, restructuring and achieving anticipated synergies; (ix) the ability to attract and retain highly qualified employees; (x) insufficient, excess or obsolete inventory; (xi) fluctuating currency exchange rates; (xii) threats and other disruptions to our secure data centers or networks; (xiii) our ability to protect our proprietary technology; (xiv) war or acts of terrorism; and (xv) other one-time events and other important factors disclosed previously and from time to time in EMC’s filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. EMC disclaims any obligation to update any such forward-looking statements after the date of this release.

VC or no VC, that’s the question

 

‘[..] Interestingly, the people responsible for the next next thing in the circle of IT life (VCs) are noticeably absent from this euphoric state.  I’m not a big fan of the lemming VC mentality, in case you haven’t noticed.  However, in the primordial ooze that is our ecosystem, the VC and their money are necessary catalysts to life in this business.  They (their money) fuel the gestation of the next generation of smart companies.  The problem, as I see it, is that they have been hiding. They haven’t been doing their job. They have been licking their wounds from the last 10 years of moronic investments, and have made it miserable for entrepreneurs in this space.  That’s going to be a problem eventually.

Failed economic policy, like social policy, takes years to manifest itself.  Right now, anyone with a VC fund is looking for anyone that can spell storage to pour money into them–but it will be many years before we see real innovation come out of it.  In the meantime, a ton of great would-be innovators have given up because they couldn’t get funded because Skip Whiteguy, the 27 year old MBA from Wharton, spent 13 months on due diligence to come to a “pass” decision because he “couldn’t get comfortable with the business model.”  Not that he has any idea what a business model is, mind you, since he’s never held an actual job. [..]’.

The above was shamelessly copied and pasted from Steve Duplessie’s blog “The Bigger Truth”.  Steve is not the only one who understands the VC’s challenges, and their impact on technology innovation. His summary is however the most succinct that I have encountered so far.

So what’s should a start-up company’s founder with an innovative data center technology do?

In my view, he should build his company without any reliance on financing from VC’s.

This is hard. Very hard. And it is made even harder by the fact that the technology sector has still not internalized the impact of the VC’s predicament to its full extent. For example, some employees still expect a high salary, secondary benefits, as well as (some) stock options as prerequisites to join a new company. The technology sector is in that respect much like the cartoon figure that ran off the cliff but still continues running in the air, oblivious of gravity that is about to kick in.

I have no idea whether the VC industry will survive in its current state. Our generation has seen larger and stronger industries than this implode and explode…  However, I am pretty sure that – as a minimum – the industry will consolidate and that most smaller players will be eliminated in one way or another. This means that even in a good case scenario, a start-up company that needs financing will have less VC’s to turn to, automatically weakening its negotiation position vis-a-vis the remaining VC’s.

A smart entrepreneur identifies risks, and eliminates any risk that is under his control. Given the uncertainties regarding the future of the VC industry as we know it, relying on VC financing for a company’s survival seems to be a classic example of a risk that one should better avoid.

Yes it’s way nicer to start a company with loads of cash in the bank  (even though handing over a significant percentage of your equity in exchange is less nice). Running a venture that sets out to develop new technology without raising VC financing is not easy. It means that the start-up needs to become self-sufficient, fast, by lowering costs to the absolute minimum, delivering a working product in the shortest period of time, and generating revenues as soon as possible.

For disruptive infrastructure technology ventures, that often need 2-3 years to release a mature product, this is an aggressive challenge. The way to overcome this challenge is to define the customer use cases, and to deliver the bare minimum functionality required to deliver outstanding value to those customers.

Good companies do not need venture capital to validate their idea, they need the market to do this.