IBM Storage UK Has Codified Stupidity

cod·i·fy  (kd-f, kd-)

tr.v. cod·i·fied, cod·i·fy·ing, cod·i·fies

1. To reduce to a code: codify laws.

2. To arrange or systematize.

Pay attention to number 2 there. Chris Mellor of The Register got some words from Steve Legg, IBM UK’s Chief Technology Officer for Storage.

These words made it quite clear that it there's an intent to codify stupidity within IBM Storage UK. He said simplify, but this is me, and I don’t like lies and obfuscation. What he actually meant is “collapse the offerings, and then make some patently ridiculous and arguably false statements to the press.” The word choices he made were exceptionally poor, but the choices made in "collapsing" are far worse. 

And here comes the hatemail because me, Mister I-Love-SVC and I-Love-DS8K is calling IBM Storage “stupid” and “ridiculous” and thus I must now be a shill for $MostHatedVendor or whatever. Except I’m STILL not employed or representing anybody but myself. Seriously, if I was shilling, I would have built myself a Dragon 20w with dual 5970’s. Or I would have at least put 16GB in my ESXi box instead of 8GB.

Anyways, let’s be honest and start with the good. I like honest, and I like good. Who doesn’t? SONAS – forget IBM’s acronym of Scale-Out NAS. I demand they change the acronym to Seriously Ossum NAS. It’s a brilliant design in its overall simplicity, combined with absolutely ridiculous density. If anyone’s going to get this right, it’s not Sun – I mean Oracle, it’s going to be IBM. They have the budget and resources. And SONAS delivers, if the order is NAS. I am a little dubious of some aspects of SONAS, but these are software issues and not hardware issues. Software issues should be able to be fixed without needing to forklift the hardware.

What software issues am I concerned about? SONAS is going up against not just Oracle, but NetApp, EMC, HP, Dell and so on inevitably. In that regard, it’s lacking in the snapshot to application integration NetApp and others have. At the price points IBM’s talking on SONAS? Integrating with applications for snapshots is pretty much expected. There are a lot of other software integration and capability questions that IBM has so far left unanswered (without NDA,) so it’s very much a wait and see. The hardware has the potential, it’s up to the software to execute. But at least they’ve solved the back end portion already with GPFS.

The good while being less than brilliant; “VDS.” This ‘offering’ is almost insulting to the capabilities of the IBM SVC. The VDS product cripples the SVC by chaining it to IBM’s low and midrange storage, the DS3k and DS5k. Look, you’re not likely to sell any business who’s had a DS5k another DS5k. The architecture is positively ancient, and is still incapable of anything beyond the most basic of maintenance being performed online. Any firmware maintenance absolutely requires hours of downtime. The DS3k doesn’t even attempt to fake online maintenance capabilities – it just can’t, and it’s not meant to.

But this is a channel play. Why? Beats me – IBM could certainly use more solutions as opposed to just products. My opinion is that it would be a lot smarter to keep VDS close to the chest, and offer it with DS3k, DS5k and DS8k. Seriously folks, the DS3k and DS5k can produce great performance numbers, but they have not been and will not be true enterprise arrays. You have a minimum 2 hours of downtime per year – that’s minimum, not typical – for mandatory firmware upgrades. Why? DS3k and DS5k require stopping all IO to do controller, ESM and disk firmware. So the SVC’s high availability ends up somewhat wasted here. Only the DS8k is on par with the SVC for high availability while servicing.

And the patently ridiculous and arguably false, otherwise known as codifying stupidity. I’m going to give you a quote, and you’re not going to believe it, but it’s a very real quote.

"XIV can reach up quite a long way and run parallel to the DS8000.” –Steve Legg, IBM UK Storage CTO

Yes, that’s Steve Legg of IBM UK saying that the XIV is the equal to the DS8000. Now Steve, the horse is out of the barn, and you can damn well believe I’m going to call IBM out on this load of manure. That statement has absolutely no basis in fact by IBM's own published case studies and reference sites, and even a cursory review of specifications between the two arrays reveal it to be obviously disingenuous at best.

But let’s have a refresher of those spec sheet contents, shall we?

XIV is comprised of 15 modules totaling 180 1TB 7200RPM SATA disks with 120GB of cache and over 7kAVA of power draw at idle and a peak of 8.5kAVA at 29000BTU/hr. The only RAID type is mirroring, reducing actual capacity to 79TB before snapshot – this is also the maximum capacity of the XIV, 79TB – it is not possible to span frames except to mirror them. You cannot grow past 79TB and there is no intent to move to 2TB disks in the next generation XIV hardware. Disk interface is 12xSATA over Gigabit Ethernet, changing to SATA over InfiniBand in the next hardware release (forklift upgrade required.) Protocols spoken are Fiber Channel 1/2/4Gbit and iSCSI over Gigabit Ethernet with a maximum number of 24 FC ports and 6 iSCSI ports, with host ports removed for Mirroring HA (the only HA method available.) Major component maintenance is limited and customers may perform absolutely no service on XIV whatsoever. And I do mean NONE; even a simple disk replacement must be performed by a specially trained CE. IBM shipped the 1000^th XIV in November of 2009.

DS8000 is now four generations old, comprised of the DS8100, DS8300, DS8300 Turbo and recently introduced DS8700. Based on the IBM POWER architecture as a controller and using custom ASICs, the DS8000 family doesn’t just hold but absolutely owns the SPC1 and SPC2 benchmarks. Two processor complexes provide from 32GB to 384GB of combined cache and NVS. The DS8700 ranges from 16 to 1024 disks using any combination of 73/146GB SSD, 146/300/450GB 15K RPM, and 1TB 7200RPM disks in packs of four or sixteen with a maximum capacity of 1024TB. RAID levels supported are 5, 6 and 10. Disk interface is FC-AL via multiple GX2 connected IO Complexes. The frame ranges from a single wide cabinet to 5 frames (base plus four expansions) with minimum power draw of 3.9kAVA base, 2.2kAVA per expansion and maximum of 7.8kAVA and 6.5kAVA respectively. The thermal min/max is 13400/26500BTU/hr and 7540/22200BTU/hr respectively. Protocols spoken are Fiber Channel 1/2/4Gbit and FICON 4Gbit with a maximum host port count of 128 in any combination of FC and FICON. Almost all major component maintenance can be performed without needing to shut down the DS8000, and all prior models can be field upgraded to the current DS8700 941/94E. Customers may opt to perform most DS8000 maintenance tasks themselves and some hardware repair, including disk replacement.

As you can see, these two systems are not even remotely similar or comparable. The absolute maximum disk IOPS an XIV is capable of, being as generous as we can be at 180 IOPS per disk, is 32,400 IOPS. The DS8700 using FC disks and the same 180 IOPS per disk as a conservative number, is capable of 184,320 IOPS. This is ignoring all buffering, caching and advanced queuing. The DS8700 is proven to be capable of well over 200,000 IOPS with a high number of hosts. IBM refuses to submit XIV to an audited benchmark and their most detailed case study with Gerber Scientific shows XIV only handling a total of 6 systems (claiming 26 LPARs, that's still ridiculously tiny) and using less than 50% of its available capacity.

For IBM to even insinuate that the XIV is “parallel” to even the DS8100 first generation hardware is to basically call their customers idiots; it is the same as telling MotorTrend that your 1985 Yugo 45 can keep pace with a 2004 Ferrari Enzo. It’s only true as long as they’re both doing 25MPH and you’re willfully ignoring everything other than the fact that they both can do 25MPH. Anybody who spends more than 10 seconds reviewing the specification sheets for these two systems or cars will immediately be able to tell that they are not in the same class. Yet IBM would very much like you to believe that their Yugo 45 is just as fast as their Ferrari Enzo. Perhaps a more apt comparison would be that Steve is currently telling you that IBM's Renault Twingo can totally hold at least as many people as their London Double Decker Bus.

Am I calling Steve Legg an idiot? Absolutely not. Steve just made an amazingly bad word choice. Steve Legg is a well respected guy, and not someone who's going to call you daft, especially not customers. But he’s basically said that IBM’s organizational stance is that customers aren't smart enough to spend a few moments reviewing a spec sheet, and seeing the obvious disparity between the two arrays. He’s saying that IBM believes customers are too stupid to see the inefficiency of the XIV as compared to its “green” claims, too stupid to see the raw horsepower of the DS8700, too stupid to tell the difference between 7200RPM and 15000RPM, too stupid to understand that 3.9+2.2/7.8+6.5 kAVA is more efficient than 7+7/8.5+8.5 kAVA. The problem with this is that the special XIV people will latch onto these words, yet again, and continue to use them while they do treat customers like idiots. (Those who claim they don't, I had them telling me to my face that the numbers they were putting up on the screen as gospel, didn't mean anything. Among other things.)

Yet again, this does not mean XIV does not meet some needs. What it does mean is that XIV is still not equal to nor does it offer performance comparable to the DS8000. 

His statements show that IBM’s offerings have codified stupidity; “we now sell on the basis that customers are too stupid to read or question us.” When customers push back on the high cost of DS8000, just whip out the significantly cheaper and far less capable XIV without mentioning anything other than "it can run parallel to the DS8000!" Which only goes to further support my arguments that you should be questioning your vendor at length, demanding hands on testing, and refusing to take their word for it on any statements of suitability or performance. The choice is yours – you can challenge your vendor, or you can enjoy the challenge of finding new employment. And you should be really extra careful about what exactly you say to the press, especially when you have a fiefdom that doesn't answer to you itching to abuse it.

Update:
I'm sorry about the VERY poor wording on my own part, and I want to extend my sincerest apologies to Steve Legg if I caused any offense. (I should not be writing so late, obviously.) Steve is by all accounts a great guy, and I'm sure that it wasn't his intent to imply that customers are idiots. The problem is that he made a bad choice of words and phrasing, and that's how it came out. I'm quite positive he knows better, especially since IBM UK is the home of the SVC.
The problem is that's how the words went and how the offerings are now aligned, and what it says to me as a customer. But they're also not decisions that are made by just one person at IBM, and Steve is just the messenger in this case. He certainly isn't deserving of, and I certainly would not rain my wrath down upon Steve specifically. If you ever get a chance to meet Steve Legg, be sure to shake his hand and thank him for SVC. ;)