This is a great deal for HP. It gives HP a high-performance scale-out NAS file system that scales to thousands of nodes. IBRIX’s segmented file systems and distributed metadata structure make it very complimentary to the Lefthand scale-out block storage platform. ESG Lab has done several tests with IBRIX and seen near linear scale with almost no performance degradation as the file system grows, excellent performance for both large and small files, and the systems is fairly easy to set up and manage. Complexity was an adoption inhibitor for IBRIX prior to 2008, but IBRIX tackled the issue taking the only major inhibitor off the table. The challenge for IBRIX is (was) routes to market. IBRIX is resold by EMC, HP and Dell, and has an install base of over 175 customers, but as a third party add on it didn’t get a lot of attention from any of the sales forces; the HP acquisition gives it a clean route to market and the full power of HP to continue to invest and grow the install base. Despite the route to market challenges, IBRIX has some excellent reference customers and claims to have installations supporting sustained IOPS of over a million, and clusters over 8PB and 40 billion files.
You may remember that HP bought scale-out NAS vendor PolyServe back in 2007, and has been trumpeting PolyServe as its scale-out NAS solution for HPC, media and entertainment, and cloud. The challenge with PolyServe is that it is very complex to configure and manage at scale (though with the appliancized ExDS 9100, which ESG Labs has also tested, HP has done a good job of simplifying setup, management and administration), while it can scale pretty high it caps out at 820TB (raw) and 16 nodes, it does not quite meet the multi-PB scale and performance requirements and diverse data types for HPC, media and entertainment, and cloud. So the new PolyServe position is to meet NAS requirements for capacity-optimized bulk storage – a better fit. The HP NAS portfolio now has gateways, Windows Storage Server, PolyServe for “capacity-optimized NAS” and IBRIX for performance (fast access to lots of files, massive scale, diverse data types/file sizes).
While I think this a great deal and highly complementary to HP’s strategy of building a converged infrastructure with layered applications, software and data services, it is inevitable that there will continue to be many questions about the future of PolyServe and how it is being positioned. IBRIX can do everything PolyServe can, and a lot more. The price tag, while undisclosed, is most likely not material enough to make this big issue, but I would not be surprised if PolyServe eventually went away and those functions rolled in to the IBRIX base. In the meantime, it doesn’t really matter all that much. No matter what, HP now has some very compelling file system functionality at its disposal that is proven to add-value across a broad spectrum of their offerings.
Scale-out NAS is the future. ESG research from late 2008 showed that 75% of those surveyed – enterprise data center types – were either planning to implement scale-out NAS within twelve months or investigating the technology, and 11% had already implemented. That’s 86% with scale-out on the radar – a big opportunity for scale-out vendors. Operational savings is key – and that’s what scale-out brings to the table. And there is no scale-out incumbent to unseat – the market is wide open and a number of vendors are chasing it. This acquisition puts HP in a strong position to take advantage of the coming scale-out wave.
For more on IBRIX:
Briefs:
Lab Reports:
Dell EqualLogic and IBRIX: Simply Scalable Enterprise-class File Serving
ESG Lab Validation Report: IBRIX Fusion – Simple Scalable File System
