Tony Pearson is a Master Inventor and Senior IT Architect for the IBM Storage product line at the
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EMC Makes False and Misleading Claims about IBM DS8000 Disk PerformanceHas EMC stooped so low that they have to resort to Hitachi math for their latest performance claims? Readers might remember that just a few months ago, I had a blog post [Is this what HDS tells our mainframe clients?] pointing out the outlandish comparison Hitachi was using in their presentations. Their response was to cover it up, forcing me to follow up with my post [The Cover-up is worse than the original crime]. To their credit, they eventually removed the false and misleading information from their materials. Now an avid reader of my blog has brought this to my attention. Apparently, EMC has been showing customers a presentation [Accelerating Storage Transformation with VMAX and VPLEX] with false and misleading comparison claims between IBM DS8000, HDS VSP and EMC VMAX 40K disk system performance. (FTC Disclosure: This would be a good time to remind my readers that I work for IBM and own IBM stock. I do not endorse any of the EMC or HDS products mentioned in this post, and have no financial affiliation or investments directly with either EMC nor HDS. I am basing my information solely on the presentation posted on the internet and other sources publicly available, and not on any misrepresentations from EMC speakers at the various conferences where these charts might have been shown.)
The problem with misinformation is that it is not always obvious. The EMC presentation is quite pretty and prof 
This first graphic implies that IBM and HDS are nearly tied in performance, but that EMC VMAX 40K has nearly triple that bandwidth. Overall the slide has very little detail. That makes it difficult to determine what exactly is being claimed and whether a fair comparison is being made.
IBM and HDS have both published Storage Performance Council [SPC] industry-standard performance benchmarks. EMC has not published any SPC benchmarks for VMAX systems. If EMC is interested in providing customers with audited, detailed performance information along with detailed configuration information, all based on benchmarks designed to represent real-world workloads, EMC can always publish SPC benchmark results as IBM and other vendors have done. In past blog fights, EMC resorts to the excuse that SPC isn't perfect, but can they really argue that vague and unrealistic claims cited in its presentation are better? 
The second graphic is so absurd, you would think it came directly from Larry Ellison at an Oracle OpenWorld keynote session. EMC is comparing a configuration with VMAX 40K plus an EMC VFCache host-side flash memory cache card to a configuration with an IBM and HDS disk system without host-side flash memory cache also configured. The comparison is clearly apples-to-oranges. Other disk system configuration details are also omitted.
Keep in mind that EMC's VFCache supports only selected x86-based hosts. IBM has published a [Statement of Direction] indicating that it will also offer this for Power systems running AIX and Linux host-side flash memory cache integrated with DS8000 Easy Tier. I feel EMC's claims about IBM DS8000 performance are vague and misleading. EMC appears to lack the kind of technical marketing integrity that IBM strives to attain. Since EMC is not able or willing to publish fair and meaningful performance comparisons, it is up to me to set the record straight and point out EMC's failings in this matter. 
Reminder: It's not to late to register for my Webcast "Solving the Storage Capacity Crisis" on Tuesday, September 25. See my blog post [Upcoming events in September] to register!
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VSPEX: EMC strikes back
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--- Charles Dudley Warner In my September 2007 post [Supermarkets and Specialty Shops], I explain that there are two kinds of clients:
My how the IT landscape for vendors has evolved in just the past five years! Cisco starts to sell servers, and enters a "mini-mall" alliance with EMC and VMware to offer vBlock integrated stack of server, storage and switches with VMware as the software hypervisor. For those not familiar with the concept of mini-malls, these are typically rows of specialty shops. A shopper can park their car once, and do all their shopping from the various shops in the mini-mall. Not quite "one-stop" shopping of a supermarket, but tries to address the same need. ("Who do I call when it breaks?" -- The three companies formed a puppet company, the Virtual Computing Environment company, or VCE, to help answer that question!) Among the many things IBM has learned in its 100+ years of experience, it is that clients want choices. Cisco figured this out also, and partnered with NetApp to offer the aptly-named FlexPod reference architecture. In effect, Cisco has two boyfriends, when she is with EMC, it is called a Vblock, and when she is with NetApp, it is called a FlexPod. I was lucky enough to find this graphic to help explain the three-way love triangle. Did this move put a strain on the relationship between Cisco and EMC? Last month, EMC announced VSPEX, a FlexPod-like approach that provides a choice of servers, and some leeway for resellers to make choices to fit client needs better. Why limit yourself to Cisco servers, when IBM and HP servers are better? Is this an admission that Vblock has failed, and that VSPEX is the new way of doing things? No, I suspect it is just EMC's way to strike back at both Cisco and NetApp in what many are calling the "Stack Wars". (See [The Stack Wars have Begun!], [What is the Enterprise Stack?], or [The Fight for the Fully Virtualized Data Center] for more on this.) (FTC Disclosure: I am both an employee and shareholder of IBM, so the U.S. Federal Trade Commission may consider this post a paid, celebrity endorsement of the IBM PureFlex system. IBM has working relationships with Cisco, NetApp, and Quantum. I was not paid to mention, nor have I any financial interest in, any of the other companies mentioned in this blog post. ) Chris Mellor and Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Register have a great series of posts exploring this new development: [EMC VSPEX storage torpedo could sink FlexPods], [El Reg hurls EMC onto the rack, drills into VSPEX], [We were right: EMC's VSPEX will take on FlexPods], and [How EMC stuffs channel cakeholes with VSPEX recipes]. Last month, IBM announced its new PureSystems family, ushering in a [new era in computing]. I invite you all to check out the many "Paterns of Expertise" available at the [IBM PureSystems Centre]. This is like an "app store" for the data center, and what I feel truly differentiates IBM's offerings from the rest. The trend is obvious. Clients who previously purchased from specialty shops are discovering the cost and complexity of building workable systems from piece-parts from separate vendors has proven expensive and challenging. IBM PureFlex™ systems eliminate a lot of the complexity and effort, but still offer plenty of flexibility, choice of server processor types, choice of server and storage hypervisors, and choice of various operating systems.
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Cover-Up is Worse than the Original CrimeOn my last blog post [Is this what HDS tells our mainframe clients?], I poked fun at Hu Yoshida's blog post that contained a graphic with questionable results. Suddenly, the blog post disappeared altogether. Poof! Gone! Just so that I am not accused of taking a graph out of context, here is Hu's original post, in its entirety:
At this point, you might be wondering: "If Hu Yoshida deleted his blog post, how did Tony get a copy of it? Did Tony save a copy of the HTML source before Hu deleted it?" No. I should have, in retrospect, in case lawyers got involved. It turns out that deleting a blog post does not clear the various copies in various RSS Feed Reader caches. I was able to dig out the previous version from the vast Google repository. (Many thanks to my friends at Google!!!). The graph itself was hosted separately has been deleted, but it was just taken from slide 10 of the HDS presentation [How to Apply the Latest Advances in Hitachi Mainframe Storage], so it was easy to recreate. (Lesson to all bloggers: If you write a blog post, and later decide to remove it for whatever legal, ethical, moral reasons, it is better to edit the post to remove offending content, and add a comment that the post was edited, and why. Shrinking a 700-word article down to 'Sorry Folks - I decided to remove this blog post because...' would do the trick. This new edited version will then slowly propagate across to all of the RSS Feed Reader caches, eliminating most traces to the original. Of course, the original may have been saved by any number of your readers, but at least if you have an edited version, it can serve as the official or canonical version.) Perhaps there was a reason why HDS did not want to make public the FUD its sales team use in private meetings with IBM mainframe clients. Whatever it was, this appears to be another case where the cover-up is worse than the original crime!
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Is this what HDS tells our mainframe clients?Five years ago, I sprayed coffee all over my screen from something I read on a blog post from fellow blogger Hu Yoshida from HDS. You can read what cased my reaction in my now infamous post [Hu Yoshida should know better]. Subsequently, over the years, I have disagreed with Hu on a variety of of topics, as documented in my 2010 blog post [Hu Yoshida Does It Again]. (Apparently, I am not alone, as the process of spraying one's coffee onto one's computer screen while reading other blog posts has been referred to as "Pulling a Tony" or "Doing a Tony" by other bloggers!) Fortunately, my IBM colleague David Sacks doesn't drink coffee. Last month, David noticed that Hu had posted a graph in a recent blog entry titled [Additional Storage Performance Efficiencies for Mainframes], comparing the performance of HDS's Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) to IBM's DS8000. 
For those not familiar with disk performance graphs, flatter is better, lower response time and larger IOPS are always desired. This graph implies that the HDS disk system is astonishingly faster than IBM's DS8000 series disk system. Certainly, the HDS VSP qualifies as a member of the elite [Super High-End club] with impressive SPC benchmark numbers, and is generally recognized as a device that works in IBM mainframe environments. But this new comparison graph is just ridiculous! (Note: While SPC benchmarks are useful for making purchase decisions, different disk systems respond differently to different workloads. As the former lead architect of DFSMS for z/OS, I am often brought in to consult on mainframe performance issues in complex situations. Several times, we have fixed performance problems for our mainframe clients by replacing their HDS systems with IBM DS8000 series!) Since Hu's blog entry contained very little information about the performance test used to generate the graph, David submitted a comment directly to Hu's blog asking a few simple questions to help IBM and Hu's readers determine whether the test was fair. Here is David's comment as submitted: "Hello, Hu, Unlike my blog on IBM, HDS bloggers like Hu are allowed to reject or deny comments before they appear on his blog post. We were disappointed that HDS never posted David's comment nor responded to it. That certainly raises questions about the quality of the comparison. So, perhaps this is yet another case of [Hitachi Math], a phrase coined by fellow blogger Barry Burke from EMC back in 2007 in reference to outlandish HDS claims. My earliest mention was in my blog post [Not letting the Wookie Win]. By the way, since the test was about z/OS Extended Address Volumes (EAV), it is worth mentioning that IBM's DS8700 and DS8800 support 3390 volume capacities up to 1 TB each, while the HDS VSP is limited to only 223 GB per volume. Larger volume capacities help support ease-of-growth and help reduce the number of volumes storage administrators need to manage; that's just one example of how the DS8000 series continues to provide the best storage system support for z/OS environments. Personally, I am all for running both IBM and HDS boxes side-by-side and publishing the methodology, the workload characteristics, the configuration details, and the results. Sunshine is always the best disinfectant!
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Did IBM XIV force EMC's hand to announce VMAXe?Did IBM XIV force EMC's hand to announce VMAXe? Let's take a stroll down memory lane. In 2008, IBM XIV showed the world that it could ship a Tier-1, high-end, enterprise-class system using commodity parts. Technically, prior to its acquisition by IBM, the XIV team had boxes out in production since 2005. EMC incorrectly argued this announcement meant the death of the IBM DS8000. Just because EMC was unable to figure out how to have more than one high-end disk product, doesn't mean IBM or other storage vendors were equally challenged. Both IBM XIV and DS8000 are Tier-1, high-end, enterprise-class storage systems, as are the IBM N series N7900 and the IBM Scale-Out Network Attached Storage (SONAS). In April 2009, EMC followed IBM's lead with their own V-Max system, based on Symmetrix Engenuity code, but on commodity x86 processors. Nobody at EMC suggested that the V-Max meant the death of their other Symmetrix box, the DMX-4, which means that EMC proved to themselves that a storage vendor could offer multiple high-end disk systems. Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) would later offer the VSP, which also includes some commodity hardware as well. In July 2009, analysts at International Technology Group published their TCO findings that IBM XIV was 63 percent less expensive than EMC V-Max, in a whitepaper titled [COST/BENEFIT CASE FOR IBM XIV STORAGE SYSTEM Comparing Costs for IBM XIV and EMC V-Max Systems]. Not surprisingly, EMC cried foul, feeling that EMC V-Max had not yet been successful in the field, it was too soon to compare newly minted EMC gear with a mature product like XIV that had been in production accounts for several years. Big companies like to wait for "Generation 1" of any new product to mature a bit before they purchase. To compete against IBM XIV's very low TCO, EMC was forced to either deeply discount their Symmetrix, or counter-offer with lower-cost CLARiiON, their midrange disk offering. An ex-EMCer that now works for IBM on the XIV sales team put it in EMC terms -- "the IBM XIV provides a Symmetrix-like product at CLARiiON-like prices." (Note: Somewhere in 2010, EMC dropped the hyphen, changing the name from V-Max to VMAX. I didn't see this formally announced anywhere, but it seems that the new spelling is the officially correct usage. A common marketing rule is that you should only rename failed products, so perhaps dropping the hyphen was EMC's way of preventing people from searching older reviews of the V-Max product.) This month, IBM introduced the IBM XIV Gen3 model 114. The analysts at ITG updated their analysis, as there are now more customers that have either or both products, to provide a more thorough comparison. Their latest whitepaper, titled [Cost/Benefit Case for IBM XIV Systems: Comparing Cost Structures for IBM XIV and EMC VMAX Systems], shows that IBM maintains its substantial cost savings advantage, representing 69 percent less Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) than EMC, on average, over the course of three years. 
In response, EMC announced its new VMAXe, following the naming convention EMC established for VNX and VNXe. Customers cannot upgrade VNXe to VNX, nor VMAXe to VMAX, so at least EMC was consistent in that regard. Like the IBM XIV and XIV Gen3, the new EMC VMAXe eliminated "unnecessary distractions" like CKD volumes and FICON attachment needed for the IBM z/OS operating system on IBM System z mainframes. Fellow blogger Barry Burke from EMC explains everything about the VMAXe in his blog post [a big thing in a small package]. So, you have to wonder, did IBM XIV force EMC's hand into offering this new VMAXe storage unit? Surely, EMC sales reps will continue to lead with the more profitable DMX-4 or VMAX, and then only offer the VMAXe when the prospective customer mentions that the IBM XIV Gen3 is 69 percent less expensive. I haven't seen any list or street prices for the VMAXe yet, but I suspect it is less expensive than VMAX, on a dollar-per-GB basis, so that EMC will not have to discount it as much to compete against IBM.
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