Sometimes I think the only people who read technology blogs are people who write other technology blogs. I have no way to figure out if this is true or not, but it is an interesting topic to ponder. Do IT end users actually read technology blogs? If they are reading, they do not seem to comment very frequently. Much more often comments come from other bloggers or competing vendors.

That said, I am going to talk about an issue that some of the storage bloggers seem to be caught up in at the moment. The issue of ‘emulated FC’ vs ‘real FC.’ Let me start off by sharing a few recent posts from other blogs:

Chuck Hollis at EMC writes about the EMC/Dell relationship and takes the opportunity to compare EMC to NetApp. In this case, he is comparing the EMC NX4 to the NetApp FAS2020. The comment in the post that certainly aggravated NetApp is that EMC does “real deal FC that isn’t emulated.” The obvious implications being that EMC FC is not emulated, NetApp FC is emulated, and FC emulation is bad. (This is not a new debate between EMC and NetApp. Look back through the blogs at both companies and you will find plenty of back and forth on the topic.

Kostadis Russos at NetApp has a post explaining why he, not surprisingly, completely disagrees with Chuck.

Stephen Foskett, a storage consultant, posts what I think is an excellent overview of the issues. He cuts through the marketing spin and asks the right questions. His coverage of the topic is so complete, I almost decided not to write about the topic. I will try not to retrace all the issues he covered. I will hit a couple of his high level points in case you have not had a chance to read his post (I highly recommend it though, it is very good.) In summary:

• All enterprise storage arrays “emulate” Fibre Channel drives to one extent or another
• NetApp is emulating Fibre Channel drives
• All modern storage arrays emulate SCSI drives
• Using the wrong tool for the job will always lead to trouble
• Which is more important to you, integration, performance, or features?

So, why am I writing about it? I am writing about it because Chuck posted a very good blog entry about benchmarking a few days later that, to me, contradicts the importance he gave to ‘real FC’ on 12/9. I have never meet Chuck or Stephen, but they both seem to be very technically adept from their postings.

Without trying to put words in his mouth (text on his blog?), the overall theme of Chuck’s post is to make sure you use meaningful tests if you want meaningful results from a storage product benchmark. He is absolutely correct. I could not agree more. How many times have we seen benchmarks performed that were completely irrelevant to the workload the array would see in production?

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Hierarchical Storage Managementement (HSM), Information Lifecycle Management (ILM), and Data Lifecycle Management (DLM). Everyone wants to manage their data intelligently to reduce their spending on storage infrastructure. The storage vendors and the trade rags would like to convince us that there are magic tools to solve this challenge. The truth is there is no magic tool to manage unstructured data. (I am not talking about the archiving tools that integrate with application here, I am only talking about unstructured data.) I have tried many tools over the years and they are simply not cost effective. Don’t panic though, in most cases, the solution is far simpler and far less expensive than HSM.

File services is a huge consumer of storage capacity. For the purposes of this conversation, let’s consider file services as NFS or CIFS storage whether they be integrated appliances or a servers leveraging back end storage devices. In most environments I visit, the file serving infrastructure is using tier 1 disk drives (fibre channel, SCSI, or SAS). These disk drives are populated with data that is mostly idle and the storage managers want to get that idle data onto a less expensive disk tier. The most common request is to transparently move the idle data to a SATA based devices.

Let’s walk through this the scenarios for an environment with 20TB of unstructured data.

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