Xiotech Unveils Disruptive Storage Technology

Lxy writes "After Xiotech purchased Seagate's Advanced Storage Architecture division, rumors circulated around what they were planning to do with their next-generation SAN. Today at Storage Network World, Xiotech answered the question. The result is quite impressive, a SAN that can practically heal itself, as well as prevent common failures. There's already hype in the media, with much more to come. The official announcement is on Xiotech's site."

Looks like it's next-gen primary disk...

[Xaedalus (1192463)]

Okay, so at a brief glance it's looking like next-gen primary disk storage. I didn't see any mention of which RAID it is (although I'm thinking they're probably going RAID 10??? Maybe 6?). What's cool though (at least by my opinion) is that it's going to cut down on SAN errors through self-diagnosis. Interesting, will have to check through the white paper.

Re:Looks like it's next-gen primary disk...

[maharg (182366)]

not only self-diagnosis, but onboard disk remanufacturing ffs

100 or so engineers involved in the project have replicated Seagate's own processes for drive telemetry monitoring and error detection -- and drive re-manufacturing -- in firmware on the Linux-based ISE. ISE automatically performs preventive and remedial processes. It can reset disks, power cycle disks, implement head-sparing operations, recalibrate and optimize servos and heads, perform reformats on operating drives, and rewrite entire media surfaces if needed. Everything that Seagate would do if you returned a drive for service.

Re:

[hackus (159037)]

Exactly what we do not need.

Next generation hardware that is patent encumbered and will require a lawyer and several court proceedings for anyone and everyone to get their data back.

I mean come on, when is the industry going to figure out we do not need proprietary, closed storage solutions that are a rehash of the old IBM AS/400 days when you could only buy super expensive IBM gear.

No thanks I will take my open code and commodity hardware and build solutions that will kick this patented solutions arse at 1

Re:

[gweihir (88907)]

Quite true. LLinux software RAID also offers all this stuff today. Thus story is nothing byt badly researched hype.

Unclarity

[Eudial (590661)]

The unclarity!

These are just some of the questions popping into my head:
What is SAN?
What does it do?
How is it disruptive?
Who does it disrupt?
What does it store?

Can't say skimming through TFA makes it a lot clearer either.

Also, two obscure articles is media buzz?

Re:

[Yetihehe (971185)]

Not every article is adressed to people which are not in field of storage...

Re:Unclarity

[by Anonymous Coward]

Let's see now... ah! I've got it. Here's an exact link for you: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=san [google.com]

Re:Unclarity

[TubeSteak (669689)]

What is SAN?
What does it do?
How is it disruptive?
Who does it disrupt?
What does it store?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storage_area_network [wikipedia.org]
It's remote storage.
Their new tech saves you the trouble of swapping HDs.
It disrupts the people offering maintanence contracts.
It stores whatever you want.

http://www.xiotech.com/images/Reliability-Pyramid.gif [xiotech.com]
My question:
What is "Failing only one surface"

Re:Unclarity

[gnick (1211984)]

It stores whatever you want.

I'd like mine to store beer and bacon. Any idea on the capacity or replication capabilities?

Failing only one surface (was: Unclarity)

[jwgoerlich (661687)]

What is "Failing only one surface"

A hard drive can fail in many ways: sector, track, platter, head. ISE can fail just the one surface -- say, a platter -- and keep writing to the remaining device. The broken platter is removed from service while the remaining disk storage continues to be used until end of life.

This is all done automatically and transparently. What they are trying to eliminate is the time it takes for someone to physically swap out a disk.

J Wolfgang Goerlich

Re:Unclarity

[ILuvRamen (1026668)]

the less they tell you, the more hype it gets regardless of how good it is. Remember Vista? It was supposed to be the end all OS sent straight down from heaven but they didn't release any specifics. And now look what happened. I doubt a magical storage system that can heal itself and never fails or loses data is a bit of an exaggeration too.

Re:

[Xaedalus (1192463)]

Assuming you're being literal with your confusion... A SAN is a Storage Area Network that organizations use to back-up up data off their main networks. A lay explanation: think of your normal network and how it's connected. A SAN network (usually composed of fibre channel or SCSI connections) underlays that existing standard network and moves all the data you want to back up to disk or tape, without eating up the bandwidth you have on your normal network. It's usually driven by a back-up server, or sometime

Re:Unclarity

[by Anonymous Coward]

Just to clarify, SANs generally aren't used primarily for backups - they're just used for server storage to have a centralized and more thoroughly redundant setup than local disks (i.e. put your 40TB document repository on the SAN and connect it over fiber to the server, or have your server boot off the SAN instead of local disks, etc). They're treated like local disks by the OS, but are in a different location connected via fiber or nowadays via iscsi.

While you can sometimes do some neat tricks with backups and a good SAN infrastructure, it's by no means its primary purpose in life.

Re:Unclarity

[DJProtoss (589443)]

You could use it for that, but thats not the main use.
It *is* a network like your ethernet network (with switches, adaptors, etc), but usually its a FC (fibre channel) rather than ethernet. You use a SAN to put your servers disks in another box to the server.
But why would I do that? heat, consolidation, redundancy.
A typical setup is to have a few 1u or 2u (rack heights are measured in u, which iirc is about 2") servers attached to a 3u storage controller.
This is a box with lots (typically 14 in a 3u box) of drives. There will be a small computer controller in there too as well as some raid chips.
Typically in a 14 drive box you might configure it as a pair of 5+1 raid 5 arrays and a couple of hot spares (5+1 means 5 drives of data and one parity drive). Effectively your 6 drives appear as one with 5x the capacity of 1 of the component drives. You can survive the loss of one drive without losing data. If you do have a drive go offline, the controller should transparantly start rebuilding the failed disk on one of the hot spares (and presumably raise a note via email or snmp that it needs a new disk).
The controller is then configured to present these arrays (called volumes in storage speak) to specific servers (called hosts).
The host will see each array as a single drive (/dev/sdX) that it uses as per normal, oblivious to the fact that its in a different box.
Now to revisit the why we do this:
1. heat - by putting all the hot bits (drives) together we can concentrate where the cooling goes
2. reliability - any server using the above setup can have a disk fail and it simply won't notice. With the hot spare setup, you can potentially lose several drives between maintainance (as long as they don't happen at once).
3. cost - you can buy bigger drives, then partition your array into smaller volumes (just like you partition your desktop machine's drive) and give different chunks to different hosts, reducing per GB cost (which when you are potentially talking about tera and peta bytes worth of disk space is rather important).
as for what these guys are up to, I've not had a chance to look yet. I might post back.

Re:Unclarity

[DJProtoss (589443)]

Ok, Have now rtfa'd. Basically, they have built a shiny controller/enclosure (the enclosure is the frame that contains the drives and the controller the circuit that interfaces, although to be confusing controllers often are built into enclosures (especially on the lower end) and still referred to as a controller)
This controller is a sealed unit (read: better heat/vibration support, but not a user servicable component) with excess disks inside (multiple hot-spares, so even if several drives fail over time it keeps going), combined with the knowledge san techs across the globe know: most errors are transient, and if you pull the disk out and stick it back in, it will probably work again. They have just built a controller that does that for you automatically. Definately on the evolution rather than revolution side of things, and I have to admit I fail to see the disruption here, although I could well be missing something ( the whitepaper is somewhat light on details shall we say ).

Re:

[jwgoerlich (661687)]

better heat/vibration support, but not a user servicable component

Heat is key here. Have you ever stood next to a petabyte of storage? Or even a few terabytes? Most Sans kick off a lot of heat from all those disks. When looking San to Hvac, 1 TB to 1 ton is typical.

Xiotech's ISE mounts the disks on a very large aluminum alloy heat sink. The heat is wicked away from the drives. This makes for better heat dissipation and less heat on the disks, thus improving cooling and extending lifespan.

Xiotech had

You MUST be new to storage technology.

[crovira (10242)]

I'm not going to educate you except to tell you to Google for it.

The disruptive part is that it seems to be much more reliable which would mean that you can wave the tech goodbye for a while, instead of having to lose access to a sting of drives RAIDed together while they have to rebuild a drive which failed and needed replacement.

Think of running XFS without having to worry about the drives' physical reliability because they're really reliable. (If you've got 5PB online it usually "which drive just failed"

Re:

[Phishcast (673016)]

I'm not going to educate you except to tell you to Google for it. The disruptive part is that it seems to be much more reliable which would mean that you can wave the tech goodbye for a while, instead of having to lose access to a sting of drives RAIDed together while they have to rebuild a drive which failed and needed replacement.

Umm...I think you forgot what the "R" in RAID stands for. You may have somewhat degraded performance during a rebuild when you spare in for a drive which has failed, but you don't lose access to any data because of a single disk failure (Save for RAID 0, which isn't really RAID to begin with).

I wouldn't call this disruptive. It sounds like they've done some smart things to bring disks back to life when other hardware would call them failed, but you can bet that they're packaging more spares in these n

Disruptive?

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF (813746)]

The result is quite impressive, a SAN that can practically heal itself, as well as prevent common failures.

Maybe I'm missing something. I read their announcement and one of the articles on this new product. As near as I can tell they're selling SAN systems where instead of plugging in individual drives, you plug in a box with two drives in it. They paired this with some nice software for working around failed sectors and rewriting correctable drive problems. I guess I'm just not all that impressed. Is this really "disruptive" technology? It looks like evolutionary improvements and some nice automation to take some of the grunt work out of managing SAN.

I'm, admittedly, not an expert on network storage. So what do people think? Is this really the best thing since sliced bread or just another slashvertisement someone hyped to sound like news for nerds and rehashing a lot of marketing weasel words?

Re:

[cdrudge (68377)]

Actually, I think instead of a a box with one drive...or two...you will have 10 3.5" or 20 2.5". So you have one big RAID-like cluster with a big "gas gauge" like dial on the front that tells you how much performance you have left...whatever that means. Whoopdedo. But I think that since they use an acronym every other word in the ESJ article that we should be very impressed.

Re:

[timeOday (582209)]

So you have one big RAID-like cluster with a big "gas gauge" like dial on the front that tells you how much performance you have left...whatever that means. Whoopdedo.

I would call that a great thing. I've never understood why I couldn't just have a bank of a dozen drives with another 10 empty slots, and have it move data around automatically to increase performance and maintain redundancy. When enough data is stored or enough drives break that I'm close to losing redundancy, a light turns on, and I pop

Re:

[mochan_s (536939)]

I would call that a great thing. I've never understood why I couldn't just have a bank of a dozen drives with another 10 empty slots, and have it move data around automatically to increase performance and maintain redundancy. When enough data is stored or enough drives break that I'm close to losing redundancy, a light turns on, and I pop in another few drives and it keeps chugging.

One reason I can think of is because there is a high correlation of drive failures to the power supply and equipment that it'

Re:

[swb (14022)]

I've never understood why they don't do this. I went and looked at a Xiotech Magnitude in 2002 at their offices here in the Twin Cities. They gave me the big dog and pony show (my current boss had bought two a year before at a different company) and when they were demoing the unit, I asked if you put new drives in if it restriped the existing data to include the new drives to make adding new LUNs more flexible. They looked sheepish and said no, the new drives had to be created as a new drive group.

The SA

Re:

[igjeff (15314)]

You would think the idea would be to chuck in drives (with some minimum, like 8 or 12) and have the physical data storage be totally abstracted from the user, with N+2 redundancy and hotspare functionality totally guaranteed, and then allow the user to create LUNs without concern for underlying physical storage.

When you need more space, you add more drives and the system manages the striping, re-striping as necessary for optimum throughput and maximum redundancy, rebuilding failed drives as necessary.

There are systems out there that do this sort of thing, but they're *expensive*.

Take a look at HP's EVA line. They're really quite good at this.

I'd be careful about using the terms "optimum" and "maximum" in that last paragraph, but they get quite close to that mark.

Other vendors have equipment that performs about as well...IMO, the HP EVA line is the best at it, however.

Jeff (only affiliated with HP as a mostly happy customer)

This exists, and has for a while

[Phishcast (673016)]

Off the top of my head, all of the following companies have storage arrays which basically do exactly what you're asking for. When you create a LUN it's across all available spindles and data will re-balance across all available disks as you add more, all with RAID redundancy. I'm not sure about N+2 at this point, but RAID-6 is becoming ubiquitous in the storage industry.

HP (EVA)
3Par
Dell/Equallogic
Compellent
Pillar
HDS (USP)

I'd be shocked if Xiotech doesn't do this today.

Re:Disruptive?

[kaiser423 (828989)]

well, RTFA. For mod points, it's disruptive because it runs Linux!

The second article describes this very well. One big extra is that this system can perform all of the standard drive-repair operations that typically only OEMs can. This helps to keep you from replacing drives that aren't bad, but had a hiccup.

It's also not just two drives in an ISE, but more like 10-20 (3.5" and 2.5" respectively) with a bunch of Linux software to give each ISE a pretty robust feature-set in itself. Then they also up the block size to 520 bytes, leaving space for data validity checks in order to keep the silent corruption problem from sneaking into the system.

In the end, it's probably not wholly revolutionary. It does seem like an evolutionary jump though; with great performance, great feature set, and a very well thought out system that brings new technology and ideas to bear.

Evolutionary, but on multiple fronts.

[khasim (1285)]

They've added the OEM services to THE DEVICE ITSELF. (evolution)

They've made those OEM services on the device AUTOMATICALLY kick in. (evolution step 2)

They've sealed the units. (evolution)

Which, in effect, means that most of the SAN expertise that FORMERLY required an experienced tech is now incorporated and these SAN's can be installed and "maintained" by less technically skilled personnel.

Which will make these devices VERY easy to sell. You pay ONCE for the tech and save on the cost of the technician's sa

Re:

[Amouth (879122)]

I already requested a price sheet - the sales rep I talked to didn't know what it was and is going to give me a call back..

we shall see if they are affordable

Sweet...

[steppin_razor_LA (236684)]

The disk healing features are very interesting.

We have a Xiotech Magnitude that we paid ~$150K for in 2003 that is sitting around like a giant paper weight. Any takers? $3,000? $2,000? going once... going twice... :)

Re:

[schklerg (1130369)]

I've got 3 collecting dust! And based on my experience with that SAN, I will never entertain the slightest sales pitch from any Xiotech rep. I'm sure they've gotten better, but rebooting after changing the contact info in the system is a bit absurd. Not to mention that the management / configuration was on a single IDE hard drive running MS-DOS. Since a reboot cleared all logs, tech support's stock answer for odd issues was, 'it was in a bad state'. Had it moved to Arkansas? BAH!

Move along, nothing to see here

[Spazmania (174582)]

They've integrated the controller and drive into devices that consume 3U of space in a rackmount computer cabinet. So now you can't upgrade a drive, you can only replace a module. Brilliant.

The only thing this is likely to disrupt is Xiotech's cashflow.

Re:

[Chas (5144)]

If (big IF), the units eat drives (as in kill them in a non-repairable way), yeah, it's a bold and stupid move.

If (another big IF) the unit keeps soft-failed drives (which weren't really bad to begin with) in play longer because it can recover them from *burps* in the system, then it's entirely possible that the unit could potentially be a money-saver.

Re:

[Spazmania (174582)]

The odds of the soft fail savings catching up to the difference in economy of scale are not good.

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[ErMaC (131019)]

You don't need to replace a module, because it doesn't break. See the failure rates/service event numbers from their presentations.

People are so used to disks failing. Disks shouldn't fail as often as they do, and most of the time they don't fail at all - the storage controller is at fault because the drive and the controller have such a limited language (SCSI) to talk to each other with. ISEs do away with this limitation.

Re:

[MadMorf (118601)]

You don't need to replace a module, because it doesn't break. See the failure rates/service event numbers from their presentations.

Lab failure rates mean very little.

Didn't Google just blow the lid off of the disk manufacturers MTBF numbers, by reporting their own failure rates as being an order of magnitude higher?

Wait till they have a few thousands of these deployed. They we'll kknow how good they really are...
And, that's when companies with big money to spend will take notice.

Re:Move along, nothing to see here

[Spazmania (174582)]

Thing is, I spent the last couple years playing this game. I started with a dozen 36-gig scsi disks that had bad sectors on them. I did thorough tests abandoned the whole gigabyte where the bad sectors were found and software-raid-5'd partitions from multiple drives, skipping those bad parts.

Guess what? It didn't work out. The bad zones spread and they spread faster than the the raid software could detect the new failure and rebuild onto the spare.

I quite enjoyed the experiment, but these were on my home servers. I wouldn't dream of doing this in a production environment. When the raid controller kicks the drive for -any- reason, it's back to the manufacturer for warranty replacement. The data is far to valuable to play games with it.

Re:

[tppublic (899574)]

Honestly, there isn't much cash flow to disrupt. This isn't EMC, HP, IBM or Hitachi.

The purpose of this product isn't to penetrate large data centers... of if Xiotech thinks it is, then they need new marketing employees (and quickly). Large data centers HAVE the expertise on site to do individual disk replacements, and those large enterprise data centers will demand the feature sets that exist in the much larger equipment from the larger vendors named above.

This is targeted at much smaller data center

astroturfing

[nguy (1207026)]

I don't see anything particularly "disruptive" about this. Lots of storage systems are "self healing" and based on hot-swappable elements.

The whole thing sounds like astroturfing.

Re:

[K. S. Kyosuke (729550)]

How is hot-swapping a drive self healing?

The engineer swapping the disks is chained to the unit, has no name, sleeps in a doghouse and was a part of the delivery.

Tired of overused buzzwords

[93 Escort Wagon (326346)]

Why do people keep referring to incremental improvements to existing technology as "disruptive"? It's pretty obvious people don't understand the phrase "disruptive technology".

My favorite misuse was when a marketing droid referred to Intel moving from a .65nm fab to .45nm as "disruptive". It's not just marketing folks, however - I've heard engineers and even my own college professors (usually if they're trying to turn their research into something commercially advantageous) do this.

Re:Tired of overused buzzwords

[melted (227442)]

>> referred to Intel moving from a .65nm fab to .45nm as "disruptive"

Disrupted AMD pretty good, from what I can see.

Re:

[Idiomatick (976696)]

Its pretty obvious you don't understand how resistant markets are to change. Anything new and not garbage that escapes past the board of directors is shocking and disruptive.
 
Sorry about the pessimism(its exam week)

Just marketing redefining words.

[Ungrounded Lightning (62228)]

It's pretty obvious people don't understand the phrase "disruptive technology".

Hey!

- If Microsoft's marketing department can redefine "Wizard" from "Human computer expert acknowledged as exceptionally skilled by his peers" to "only moderately brain-damaged menu-driven installation/configuration tool",

- why can't Xiotech's marketing department redefine "disruptive technology" from "quantum leap in price/performance ratio of a competing technology based on a massively different architecture th

Compellent

[by Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure why this announcement is really news...somewhat interesting though, is that many of the founders and former employees of Xiotech have left to start a company called Compellent http://www.compellent.com/ [compellent.com]. Compellent's disk technology, imo, is a lot slicker than Xiotech's, particularly their "automated tiered storage".

Re:

[medelliadegray (705137)]

I admin a compellent san, and i find their "automated tiered storage" to be great in concept, marketed superbly, yet highly expensive and highly lacking in configurability.

If you want data automatically moved down to a slower tier, but it gets touched just once a day. Good luck in getting it to move down automatically.

I anxiously await the day when the SAN market is acknowledged as the scam it is (a glorified raid controller), and the various SAN companies die off in droves or become an everyday appliance

Hypocritical Reluctance

[by Anonymous Coward]

On the Xiotech site:

"#1 Lowest cost per disk IOPS
#1 Lowest cost per MB/sec"

Looking around, I don't see any quoted prices on the page.

It's funny how it's always a project in itself to find the price tag for products. When companies run on "the bottom line" why are they so reluctant to tell us what the consumer's "bottom line" is straight forward and upfront?

It should become law; that to advertise a product, you must post clearly what the price tag (range) is either at the top or bottom. Especially if you are

"a SAN that can practically heal itself"

[SwashbucklingCowboy (727629)]

Well, no. It's an array that can practically heal itself (at least in theory). BIG difference...

Wrong metaphor

[bperkins (12056)]

Each datapac in the ISE presents a gas-gauge-like monitor showing you how much performance is being used [...]

If you can use your gas gauge to measure how fast you're going, you're probably driving too fast.

Nothing to see here, move along...

[MadMorf (118601)]

Nothing really new here, except the box is sealed, which means when they have bought a batch of disks with an undiscovered flaw, there's no way to fix or replace them...

Seagate Tomcats anyone?

Also, would you trust your enterprise storage to laptop drives? Running 24/7/36...

How long will those last?

Hell, most SATA disks are unsuitable for anything but nearline storage, and even then, they're iffy...Keep plenty of spares!

Re:

[Ungrounded Lightning (62228)]

Too bad the marketers who wrote it don't know how to speak English. Otherwise, we'd be able to understand and be excited about this.

They speak great management buzzword. But not tech - buzzword or otherwise.