Quick-Take: Is Your Marriage a Happy One?

I came across a recent post by Chad Sakac (VP, VMware Alliance at EMC) discussing the issue of how vendors drive customer specifications down from broader goals to individual features or implementation sets (I'm sure VCE was not in mind at the time.) When it comes to vendors insist on framing the "client argument" in terms of specific features and proprietary approaches, I have to agree that Chad is spot on. Here's why:

First, it helps when vendors move beyond the "simple thinking" of infrastructure elements as a grid of point solutions and more of an "organic marriage of tools" - often with overlapping qualities. Some marriages begin with specific goals, some develop them along the way and others change course drastically and without much warning. The rigidness of point approaches rarely accommodates growth beyond the set of assumptions that created the it in the first place. Likewise, the "laser focus" on specific features detracts from the overall goal: the present and future value of the solution.

When I married my wife, we both knew we wanted kids. Some of our friends married and "never" wanted kids, only to discover a child on the way and subsequent fulfillment through raising them. Still, others saw a bright future strained with incompatibility and the inevitable divorce. Such is the way with marriages.

Second, it takes vision to solve complex problems. Our church (Church of the Highlands in Birmingham, Alabama) takes a very cautious position on the union between souls: requiring that each new couple seeking a marriage give it the due consideration and compatibility testing necessary to have a real chance at a successful outcome. A lot of "problems" we would encounter were identified before we were married, and when they finally popped-up we knew how to identify and deal with them properly.

Couples that see "counseling" as too obtrusive (or unnecessary) have other options. While the initial investment of money are often equivalent, the return on investment is not so certain. Uncovering incompatibilities "after the sale" provides for difficult and too often a doomed outcome (hence, 50% divorce rate.)

This same drama plays out in IT infrastructures where equally elaborate plans, goals and unexpected changes abound. You date (prospecting and trials), you marry (close) and are either fruitful (happy client), disappointed (unfulfilled promises) or divorce. Often, it's not the plan that failed but the failure to set/manage expectations and address problems that causes the split.

Our pastor could not promise that our marriage would last forever: our success is left to God and the two of us. But he did help us to make decisions that would give us a chance at a fruitful union. Likewise, no vendor can promise a flawless outcome (if they do, get a second opinion), but they can (and should) provide the necessary foundation for a successful marriage of the technology to the business problem.

Third, the value of good advice is not always obvious and never comes without risk. My wife and I were somewhat hesitant on counseling before marriage because we were "in love" and were happy to be blind to the "problems" we might face. Our church made it easy for us: no counseling, no marriage. Businesses can choose to plot a similar course for their clients with respect to their products (especially the complex ones): discuss the potential problems with the solution BEFORE the sale or there is no sale. Sometimes this takes a lot of guts - especially when the competition takes the route of oversimplification. Too often IT sales see identifying initial problems (with their own approach) as too high a risk and too great an obstacle to the sale.

Ultimately, when you give due consideration to the needs of the marriage, you have more options and are better equipped to handle the inevitable trials you will face. Whether it's an unexpected child on the way, or an unexpected up-tick in storage growth, having the tools in-hand to deal with the problem lessens its severity. The point is, being prepared is better than the assumption of perfection.

Finally, the focus has to be what YOUR SOLUTION can bring to the table: not how you think your competition will come-up short. In Chad's story, he's identified vendors disqualifying one another's solutions based on their (institutional) belief (or disbelief) in a particular feature or value proposition. That's all hollow marketing and puffery to me, and I agree completely with his conclusion: vendors need to concentrate on how their solution(s) provide present and future value to the customer and refrain from the "art" of narrowly framing their competitors.

Features don't solve problems: the people using them do. The presence (or absence) of a feature simply changes the approach (i.e. the fallacy of feature parity). As Chad said, it's the TOTALITY of the approach that derives value - and that goes way beyond individual features and products. It's clear to me that a lot of counseling takes place between Sakac's EMC team and their clients to reach those results. Great job, Chad, you've set a great example for your team!

UCS and VCE vBlock Type 1 Challenge Top VMmark

[caption id="attachment_1306" align="alignright" width="105" caption="VMmark "Tile" Loads "][/caption]

Last November we reported on the Fujitsu RX300 S5 rack server taking the top VMmark spot for 8-core systems. Yesterday (January 11, 2010) Cisco's UCS B200-M1 using VMware ESX 4.0 (build 164009) came within 0.5% of the top spot with a score of 25.06@17 tiles. While falling only slightly short of the mark set by the brute force RX300/DX80 combo, the UCS system did so with a very different solution, unsurprisingly similar to the vBlock Type 1 architecture described by Chad Sakacc in his blog post about the VMware, Cisco and EMC alliance.

Given that VMmark is a single node test harness, the difference between rack server and blade server architectures is a non-issue. However, more than just rack vs. blade is going on in this comparison. The Cisco UCS system is being fed by a pair of 10GE converged network adapters - used both for host network access and Fiber Channel bus access - and a monolithic storage array in the guise of a CLARiiON CX4-240 complete with a complement of 20, 73GB STEC SSD's - just to sweeten the pot.

[caption id="attachment_1385" align="aligncenter" width="450" caption="VMmark Network Configuration for the UCS B200-M1"][/caption]

While it is clear from past VMmark posts that the network speed (beyond 1Gbps) has little to do with the results, it is nice to see the confidence Cisco has in the CNA approach (Cisco UCS M71KR-Q) to go with the "eggs in a basket" solution. Given the storage demands on the CNA, the VMmark result should remove any doubt about the viability (performance) of high-capacity tandems (we'll leave the physical link security concerns for another day.)

However, where the "rubber meets the road" in this contest is storage I/O and this solution - in our opinion is just plain showing off. With just 41 disks to build from, the CX4-240 has been configured to deliver 37 LUNs - nearly one LUN per unit disk. Before any awards are given out for storage of the year, we need to consider that 36 of those LUNs are RAID0 - yielding a testing platform with no real-world analog (hence "showing off".)

[caption id="attachment_1388" align="aligncenter" width="449" caption="CLARiiON CX4-240 Storage Build-out for UCS B200-M1 VMmark"][/caption]

Given the ease at which RAID0 can be replaced by RAID1+0, it may be safe to assume that the same results could have been obtained by using 77 disks instead of 41 - at which point the CX4-240 would still be less than half the size of the top VMmark's 172-disk solution. The reason is clear: SSD's accelerate I/O loads incredibly well in architectures that support them. If anything, this "runner-up" proves that SSD adoption is on the verge of becoming mainstream.

But what does this test show about UCS? Firstly, it shows that Cisco's platform can compete with the best solutions out there on CPU and I/O performance (what's a half a percentage point across 102 virtual machines?) It's not really a surprise given that the UCS platform was designed to do just that - and within a neatly managed framework. Secondly, it shows that the choice of EMC as a partner was an excellent one. As Martin Glassborow commented on his Storagebod's Blog, EMC's involvement in VMware has energized the storage vendor to take bold and innovative steps towards Cloud Computing solutions that it might not have done otherwise (like the RAID0 SSD array). Thirdly and most importantly, it underscores the importance of predictable performance in a virtualization solution. Given the UCS/vBlock approach to systems organization, it can be very difficult not to draw solid parallels between the benchmarks and expectations for net new builds based on the criterion.

EMC Celerra VSA

Virtual Storage Appliances (VSA) are really picking-up these days. Even the legacy hardware vendors are getting into the fray. They're great in the lab and - assuming tailored performance - can fit some really interesting "embedded" applications.

If you haven't had a chance to look at the EMC Celerra VSA then click over to Chad Sakac's VirtualGeek Blog and have a look at his series on configuration and testing. If you have time, check out some of Chad's more visionary stuff while your there - he has some good information on what's to come in the next few months from EMC and VMware...

For the Celerra VSA, look at these two links