The Green and Virtual Data Center plus Server and StorageIO blog (www.storageioblog.com)

August 2010 StorageIO Newsletter

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 08:29:45

August 2010 Newsletter

Welcome to the August Summer Wrap Up 2010 edition of the Server and StorageIO Group (StorageIO) newsletter. This follows the June 2010 edition building on the great feedback received from recipients.
Items that are new in this expanded edition include:

Out and About Update
Industry Trends and Perspectives (ITP)
Featured Article

You can access this news letter via various social media venues (some are shown below) in addition to StorageIO web sites and subscriptions. Click on the following links to view the August 2010 edition as an HTML or PDF or, to go to the newsletter page to view previous editions.

Follow via Goggle Feedburner here or via email subscription here.

You can also subscribe to the news letter by simply sending an email to newsletter@storageio.com

Enjoy this edition of the StorageIO newsletter, let me know your comments and feedback.

Cheers gs

While HP and Dell make counter bids, exclusive interview with 3PAR CEO David Scott

Fri, 27 Aug 2010 05:43:21

Last week Dell announced (read previous and related posts here) that they were buying 3PARb for $1.15B USD, then HP offered a counter bid, this morning Dell countered with a $1.6B USD bid only to be followed by HPs counter counter counter bid of $1.8B which almost seems like an Ebay autobid raising the question of what is the buy it now price.

Meanwhile, I was asked today to be the guest co host of the Storage Monkeys Infosmack Podcast with regular host Greg Knieriemen filling in for the regular co host Marc Farley who happens to be a 3PAR employee while we interviewed special guest CEO David Scott.

Click here to listen to this exclusive interview with 3PAR CEO David Scott during the midst of the bidding between HP and Dell for some insight into 3PAR, their technology as well as get an inside insight discussion with the man who is the current Belle of the Ball in this current IT industry merger and acquisition bidding battle along with related industry trends and perspective insight commentary.

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz - Author The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

My Favorite Late Summer Reading Material

Fri, 20 Aug 2010 16:15:14

No it is not the Tape Times, or the Oracle Sun times, or IBM Magic Moments, or EMC Money Magazine, nor is it the Oracle Law Journal review. Sorry to say that it is not the Dedupe Discovery Debate Diaries, nor is it the Virtual Vanity Fair or NetApp Networking News.

My favorite late summer reading is not the eDiscovery Entertainment this week, or Mens Metadata Monthly and it is not the Cisco Chronicles let alone the HP national inquirer Pages.

No my favorite late summer reading is not Business Barons, NFL weekly wrap up nor Virtualization Hyperventilation Health tips. Neither is it the editorials, advertisements or cheerleading sections in the Cloud Crowd Confusion Chronicles, its not million miler monthly and it is not Green IT Eggs and Spam. While all good reads, it is not Wine Snob Weekly, or the Great Grape Gazette or Beer Brewers News, Minnesota DNR news, Virtual Motor head Monthly, or Freshwater Dock Yachting Yearly review, Aviation Leak and Space Technology nor Rolling Stone.

It is also not one of the local news papers or national ones for that matter although the Singapore Shipping Times is a good diversion read that reminds me of my past visits there.

While I would like to say it is one of the many popular blogs (industry or other), let alone one of the many great books out there in print or kindle, no, it is something completely different.

Granted all of the above or their virtual reality physical variant are in fact great reading material that I enjoy and do recommend (or their reasonable facsimile).

However, there is one that stands out above all others and it is called Cooks Illustrated (FTC disclosure, my wife gave me a subscription).

Is there a point to all of the above which if you could not tell, includes some tongue in cheek humor, perhaps what some might see as, skepticism or snarkyness while others might have a good laugh (to each your own)?

Yes the point is this.

Take a break from your normal wide world of work routine, stop typing or talking for a bit, sit back, maybe put some tunes on and read something to stimulate (as well as relax) the brain for a bit.

Find and enjoy some recreational or diversion reading material no matter how light or heavy, humor or serious, perhaps listen to some music and enjoy a cold (or warm) beverage perhaps even drifting into a drool producing nap. Enjoy the balance of your summer (or winter for friends down under) and take some time to read something to stimulate that gray matter between the ears located slightly behind your eyes.

Ok, now Im hungry have to go.

BTW: What is your favorite late summer reading material (and/or relaxation activity, music, food or beverage)?

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz - Author The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

Dell Will Buy Someone, However Not Brocade (At least for now)

Thu, 19 Aug 2010 03:44:55

Earlier this week Dell announced that they were buying 3APR for $1.15B USD

As a follow up to this, this and this recent posts, I keep getting asked in different forums, venues, via email, telephone calls and in person who will or should Dell buy next, and will Dell buy Brocade, who will buy Brocade or anyone else for that matter.

Ok, first let me say that everything in this post is just a perspective based on openly (e.g. publicly) available information along with some common sense. Thus there is no NDA or confidential insight or tips from some anonymous source named blue horseshoe (remember the movie wall street?).

However I did used to work for a SAN, MAN and WAN company called INRANGE that was a supplier to server and storage vendors as well as partnered with Emulex, Qlogic as well as Adva among others. INRANGE which became OUT of RANGE (that is some SAN humor btw) when it was sold to CNT was then bought by EMC spin off McData (I left before then) which in turn was bought by Brocade. Now does any of that make more qualified than any other arm chair quarterback pundit with a keyboard and pulse to jump into the whom Dell will buy next sweepstakes to I say no.

However, let me use some experience to analyze a few things, then connect some dots. From there, I will leave it up to you to agree, disagree, bet, guess, speculate or wish upon a falling star as to whom Dell might buy, or for that matter, what others may or may not do.

First, since Brocade keeps coming up in conversations, here is a previous post I did on the topic of them being for sale or who might buy them.

I still think that Brocade can survive on their own, granted they need to kick it into gear on the switch (Ethernet, Fibre Channel and FCoE), distance extension, HBA or CNA if you prefer as well as management tools front. Brocade built their business with OEM partnerships via Dell, EMC, HP, HDS, IBM, NetApp and Oracle/Sun among many others not to mention their channel distribution programs.

Thus Brocade needs to leverage those OEMs on a go forward basis. However, that model and channel partner model also gets in the way of Brocade being bought by one of their OEMs. Keep in mind that EMC once owned McData and made a nice profit on that spin off (or spin out) while IBM sold off their networking division to Cisco, now both do good business with their OEM suppliers. Likewise, both leverage multiple suppliers as that is what their partners and customers want (e.g. choice of suppliers).

Now, keep in mind that HP has had their procurve low end Ethernet switches for some time and historically flipped some business (excuse me, partnered) to Cisco for high end Ethernet LAN networking technology. Lets also not forget about HPs recent acquisition of 3COM (read about it here).

Now with Cisco tip toeing into the server market trying to flex its muscles in the small server pool (no offense Cisco or to your faithful followers) HP and other server vendors might be wanting to flip something else at Cisco besides business. Oh oh, I think I hear the Cisco UCS truth squads knocking at the door with large amounts of truth serum (Ok, Im just kidding folks).

Lets get back to HP and 3COM.

IMHO that was partly an opportunity to pick up some additional revenue, partly to grab a brand name that also has ties into the Chinese market. Keep Huawei (here and here) in mind, you know, that sometimes Cisco nemeses networking company who had 2009 revenues of RMB149.1B or $21.8B USD. Now back to H and 3COM, that was also IMHO play to gain access to additional SMB, SOHO, ROBO and consumer market channels for a bargain price. HP is not alone as others have done similar acquisitions in part or in whole to pick up a brand name that also hade partners, channels, products and revenues. For example among many others, EMC and Iomega, Seagate and Maxtor, Symantec and Norton, CA buying, well, I think or hope you get the picture.

Now back to Brocade and Dell.

Why would Dell need Brocade for which they would have to a pay a premium price of $6-7B USD (assume 3 to 3.5x multiplier on revenue) which would get them just under $900M in debt and a couple of billion in annual revenue. Keep in mind that Dell has somewhere in the neighborhood of $9-10B in cash although while Im not an accountant, the financial people tell me they need to maintain their strategic reserves of which such a deal would put a big dent into.

However, there is more to the story which is that revenue would be in jeopardy if the other server and or storage vendors (e.g. EMC, Fujitsu, HP, HDS, IBM, NEC, NetApp, and Oracle/Sun etc) did not like Dell owning one of their suppliers. In other words, unless Cisco really upsets the server vendors which they have been doing to a lesser degree already, why would Dell want to risk a Texas size pile of cash to get a revenue stream that could blow away in a Texas size hurricane or dust storm?

Granted if Dell could talk Michael Klayko (Brocades CEO) and board as well as other investors into a low ball offer the math might virtually work. However that is also doubtful knowing that Klayko also knows Joe Tucci of EMC who knows how to drive a deal or bargain. Thus, I do not see Brocade rolling over in desperation to sell them at a discount as much as some might want you to believe that they need to do.

Thus, while anything is possible, I do not see Dell buying Brocade except for one possible scenario which could result in a bidding war not to mention utter industry chaos.

That scenario is what I refer to as MAD which is a Mutual Assured Destruction situation. In other words, an all out war or ensuing instability that throws existing OEMs, partners and business into chaos (keep in mind however in chaos or confusion there is opportunity). The MAD scenario could be triggered by Cisco finally getting truly and really serious about servers. Granted Cisco is doing their best to test their partners, OEMs and even customers as too how much they will tolerate in terms of entering the server market.

Im not convinced they are ready to be number one, two or three let alone four or five. After all, my numbers may be off, however best I can tell the number of Cisco blade servers is measured in thousands or best case a few ten thousand since its launch. By comparison, how many thousands of servers do Cisco OEMs Dell, HP, IBM, Oracle among others ship per week or month? In other words, Cisco to really get serious would need to ramp up that server business by several factors of ten, a move that would not sit well (even worse than now) with their major OEM partners.

Thus, if Cisco were to get serious and want to move up into the top two or three spot of the server market, something people always tell me that Cisco feels they have to be in a top market spot, they step all over their OEMs. This in turn would set off the MAD scenario mentioned above, kind of like a scene out of war games, perhaps what you are seeing with some of the early Cisco posturing. Sure Cisco made some moves with their UCS and their EMC alliances as well as dancing with whoever buys them a drink and sure HP bought 3COM which I guess could be seen as a warning shot if you like. Sure Cisco is the 800 lb guerrilla when compared to the networking vendors except do not forget about Huawei (read more here).

Thus for the time being, I expect Cisco to keep making noise, testing the waters, pushing its OEMs and partners. Perhaps Cisco also does some arms treaties in the form of marketing alliances as it continues to push its FCoE and unified compute initiatives. Sure they will keep pushing Virtual Desktop Initiatives (VDI) and anything else that can generate network traffic so they can support those needs. However, also keep in mind that VMwares biggest platform deployment (e.g. servers) customers or partners are HP and Dell in no particular order (I will let you rank them depending on whose data you choose).

Oh no, I have to stop now as I wanted this to be a short post.

So what does this have to do with Dell and Brocade?

Simple, why would Dell want to go down that path if they do not have to?

As to who Dell should buy, real quickly, how about a data protection (security, backup, restore, BC, DR) company or a data management or a desktop management company, how about one that fits all of those like Symantec which from a revenue standpoint is about three times that of Brocade.

Heck, if you think Dell could afford Brocade, then why not a Symantec which might actually be worth more in pieces than as a whole. Dell could sell off what they do not need or want or make that part of a deal or keep it all! As for others, how Dell buying a low end consumer, prosumer, SOHO storage play like Drobo or Snap among others.

Ok, I have to wrap up for now.

Talk to you all soon either here, or in one of the many other different venues or social media as well as traditional mediums as this story is far from being done.

Whats is your take?

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz - Author The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

Here are some links to read more about the above topics and themes

Back to school shopping: Dude, Dell Digests 3PAR Disk storage

Mon, 16 Aug 2010 22:33:44

No sooner has the dust settled from Dells other recent acquisitions, its back to school shopping time and the latest bargain for the Round Rock Texas folks is bay (San Francisco) area storage vendor 3PAR for $1.15B. As a refresh, some of Dells more recent acquisitions including a few years ago $1.4B for EqualLogic, $3.9B for Perot systems not to mention Exanet, Kace and Ocarina earlier this year. For those interested, as of April 2010 reporting figures found here, Dell showed about $10B USD in cash and here is financial information on publicly held 3PAR (PAR).

Who is 3PAR
3PAR is a publicly traded company (PAR) that makes a scalable or clustered storage system with many built in advanced features typically associated with high end EMC DMX and VMAX as well as CLARiiON, in addition to Hitachi or HP or IBM enterprise class solutions. The Inserv (3PARs storage solution) combines hardware and software providing a very scalable solution that can be configured for smaller environments or larger enterprise by varying the number of controllers or processing nodes, connectivity (server attachment) ports, cache and disk drives.

Unlike EqualLogic which is more of a mid market iSCSI only storage system, the 3PAR Inserv is capable of going head to head with the EMC CLARiiON as well as DMC or VMAX systems that support a mix of iSCSI and Fibre Channel or NAS via gateway or appliances. Thus while there were occasional competitive situations between 3PAR and Dell EqualLogic, they for the most part were targeted at different market sectors or customers deployment scenarios.

What does Dell get with 3PAR?

A good deal if not a bargain on one of the last new storage startup pure plays
A public company that is actually generating revenue with a large and growing installed base
A seasoned sales force who knows how to sell into the enterprise storage space against EMC, HP, IBM, Oracle/SUN, Netapp and others
A solution that can scale in terms of functionality, connectivity, performance, availability, capacity and energy efficiency (PACE)
Potential route to new markets where 3PAR has had success, or to bridge gaps where both have played and competed in the past
Did I say a company with an established footprint of installed 3PAR Inserv storage systems and good list of marquee customers
Ability to sell a solution that they own the intellectual property (IP) instead of that of partner EMC
Plenty of IP that can be leveraged within other Dell solutions, not to mention combine 3PAR with other recently acquired technologies or companies.

On a lighter note, Dell picks up once again Marc Farley who was with them briefly after the EqualLogic acquisition who then departed to 3PAR where he became director of social media including launch of Infosmack on Storage Monkeys with co host Greg Knieriemen (@Knieriemen). Of course the twitter world and traditional coconut wires are now speculating where Farley will go next that Dell may end up buying in the future.

What does this mean for Dell and their data storage portfolio?
While in no ways all inclusive or comprehensive, table 1 provides a rough framework of different price bands, categories, tiers and market or application segments requiring various types of storage solutions where Dell can sell into.

	HP	Dell	EMC	IBM	Oracle/Sun
Servers	Blade systems, rack mount, towers to desktop	Blade systems, rack mount, towers to desktop	Virtual servers with VMware, servers via vBlock servers via Cisco	Blade systems, rack mount, towers to desktop	Blade systems, rack mount, towers to desktop
Services	HP managed services, consulting and hosting supplemented by EDS acquisition	Bought Perot systems (an EDS spin off/out)	Partnered with various organizations and services	Has been doing smaller acquisitions adding tools and capabilities to IBM global services	Large internal consulting and services as well as Software as a Service (SaaS) hosting, partnered with others
Enterprise storage	XP (FC, iSCSI, FICON for mainframe and NAS with gateway) which is OEMed from Hitachi Japan parent of HDS	3PAR (iSCSI and FICON or NAS with gateway) replaces EMC CLARiiON or perhaps rare DMX/VMAX at high end?	DMX and VMAX	DS8000	Sun resold HDS version of XP/USP however Oracle has since dropped it from lineup
Data footprint impact reduction	Dedupe on VTL via Sepaton plus HP developed technology or OEMed products	Dedupe in OEM or partner software or hardware solutions, recently acquired Ocarina	Dedupe in Avamar, Datadomain, Networker, Celerra, Centera, Atmos. CLARiiON and Celerra compression	Dedupe in various hardware and software solutions, source and target, compression with Storwize	Dedupe via OEM VTLs and other sun solutions
Data preservation	Database and other archive tools, archive storage	OEM solutions from EMC and others	Centera and other solutions	Various hardware and software solutions	Various hardware and software solutions
General data protection (excluding logical or physical security and DLP)	Internal Data Protector software plus OEM, partners with other software, various VTL, TL and target solutions as well as services	OEM and resell partner tools as well as Dell target devices and those of partners. Could this be a future acquisition target area?	Networker and Avamar software, Datadomain and other targets, DPA management tools and Mozy services	Tivoli suite of software and various hardware targets, management tools and cloud services	Various software and partners tools, tape libraries, VTLs and online storage solutions
Scale out, bulk, or clustered NAS	eXtreme scale out, bulk and clustered storage for unstructured data applications	Exanet on Dell servers with shared SAS, iSCSI or FC storage	Celerra and ATMOS	IBM SONAS or N series (OEM from NetApp)	ZFS based solutions including 7000 series
General purpose NAS	Various gateways for EVA or MSA or XP, HP IBRIX or Polyserve based as well as Microsoft WSS solutions	EMC Celerra, Dell Exanet, Microsoft WSS based. Acquisition or partner target area?	Celerra	N Series OEMed from Netapp as well as growing awareness of SONAS	ZFS based solutions. Whatever happened to Procom?
Mid market multi protocol block	EVA (FC with iSCSI or NAS gateways), LeftHand (P Series iSCSI) for lowered of this market	3PAR (FC and iSCSI, NAS with gateway) for mid to upper end of this market, EqualLogic (iSCSI) for the lower end of the market, some residual EMC CX activity phases out over time?	CLARiiON (FC and iSCSI with NAS via gateway), Some smaller DMX or VMAX configurations for mid to upper end of this market	DS5000, DS4000 (FC and iSCSI with NAS via a gateway) both OEMed from LSI, XIV and N series (Netapp)	7000 series (ZFS and Sun storage software running on Sun server with internal storage, optional external storage) 6000 series
Scalable SMB iSCSI	LeftHand (P Series)	EqualLogic	Celerra NX, CLARiiON AX/CX	XIV, DS3000, N Series	2000 7000
Entry level shared block	MSA2000 (iSCSI, FC, SAS)	MD3000 (iSCSI, FC, SAS)	AX (iSCSI, FC)	DS3000 (iSCSI, FC, SAS), N Series (iSCSI, FC, NAS)	2000 7000
Entry level unified multi function	X (not to be confused with eXtreme series) HP servers with Windows Storage Software	Dell servers with Windows Storage Software or EMC Celerra	Celerra NX, Iomega	xSeries servers with Microsoft or other software installed	ZFS based solutions running on Sun servers
Low end SOHO	X (not to be confused with eXtreme series) HP servers with Windows Storage Software	Dell servers with storage and Windows Storage Software. Future acqustion area perhaps?	Iomega

Table 1: Sampling of various tiers, architectures, functionality and storage solution options

Clarifying some of the above categories in table 1:

Servers: Application servers or computers running Windows, Linux, HyperV, VMware or other applications, operating systems and hypervisors.

Services: Professional and consulting services, installation, break fix repair, call center, hosting, managed services or cloud solutions

Enterprise storage: Large scale (hundreds to thousands of drives, many front end as well as back ports, multiple controllers or storage processing engines (nodes), large amount of cache and equally strong performance, feature rich functionality, resilient and scalable.

Data footprint impact reduction: Archive, data management, compression, dedupe, thin provision among other techniques. Read more here and here.

Data preservation: Archiving for compliance and non regulatory applications or data including software, hardware, services.

General data protection: Excluding physical or logical data security (firewalls, dlp, etc), this would be backup/restore with encryption, replication, snapshots, hardware and software to support BC, DR and normal business operations. Read more about data protection options for virtual and physical storage here.

Scale out NAS: Clustered NAS, bulk unstructured storage, cloud storage system or file system. Read more about clustered storage here. HP has their eXtreme X series of scale out and bulk storage systems as well as gateways. These leverage IBRIX and Polyserve which were bought by HP as software, or as a solution (HP servers, storage and software), perhaps with optional data reduction software such as Ocarina OEMed by Dell. Dell now has Exanet which they bought recently as software, or as a solution running on Dell servers, with either SAS, iSCSI or FC back end storage plus optional data footprint reduction software such as Ocarina. IBM has GPFS as a software solution running on IBM or other vendors servers with attached storage, or as a solution such as SONAS with IBM servers running software with IBM DS mid range storage. IBM also OEMs Netapp as the N series.

General purpose NAS: NAS (NFS and CIFS or optional AFP and pNFS) for everyday enterprise (or SME/SMB) file serving and sharing

Mid market multi protocol block: For SMB to SME environments that need scalable shared (SAN) scalable block storage using iSCSI, FC or FCoE

Scalable SMB iSCSI: For SMB to SME environments that need scalable iSCSI storage with feature rich functionality including built in virtualization

Entry level shared block: Block storage with flexibility to support iSCSI, SAS or Fibre Channel with optional NAS support built in or available via a gateway. For example external SAS RAID shared storage between 2 or more servers configured in a HyeprV or VMware clustered that do not need or can afford higher cost of iSCSI. Another example would be shared SAS (or iSCSI or Fibre Channel) storage attached to a server running storage software such as clustered file system (e.g. Exanet) or VTL, Dedupe, Backup, Archiving or data footprint reduction tools or perhaps database software where higher cost or complexity of an iSCSI or Fibre Channel SAN is not needed. Read more about external shared SAS here.

Entry level unified multifunction: This is storage that can do block and file yet is scaled down to meet ease of acquisition, ease of sale, channel friendly, simplified deployment and installation yet affordable for SMBs or larger SOHOs as well as ROBOs.

Low end SOHO: Storage that can scale down to consumer, prosumer or lower end of SMB (e.g. SOHO) providing mix of block and file, yet priced and positioned below higher price multifunction systems.

Wait a minute, are that too many different categories or types of storage?

Perhaps, however it also enables multiple tools (tiers of technologies) to be in a vendors tool box, or, in an IT professionals tool bin to address different challenges. Lets come back to this in a few moments.

Some Industry trends and perspectives (ITP) thoughts:

How can Dell with 3PAR be an enterprise play without IBM mainframe FICON support?
Some would say forget about it, mainframes are dead thus not a Dell objective even though EMC, HDS and IBM sell a ton of storage into those environments. However, fair enough argument and one that 3PAR has faced for years while competing with EMC, HDS, HP, IBM and Fujitsu thus they are versed in how to handle that discussion. Thus the 3PAR teams can help the Dell folks determine where to hunt and farm for business something that many of the Dell folks already know how to do. After all, today they have to flip the business to EMC or worse.

If truly pressured and in need, Dell could continue reference sales with EMC for DMX and VMAX. Likewise they could also go to Bustech and/or Luminex who have open systems to mainframe gateways (including VTL support) under a custom or special solution sale. Ironically EMC has OEMed in the past Bustech to transform their high end storage into Mainframe VTLs (not to be confused with Falconstor or Quantum for open system) as well as Datadomain partnered with Luminex.

BTW, did you know that Dell has had for several years a group or team that handles specialized storage solutions addressing needs outside the usual product portfolio?

Thus IMHO Dells enterprise class focus will be that for open systems large scale out where they will compete with EMC DMX and VMAX, HDS USP or their soon to be announced enhancements, HP and their Hitachi Japan OEMed XP, IBM and the DS8000 as well as the seldom heard about yet equally scalable Fujitsu Eternus systems.

Why only 1.15B, after all they paid 1.4B for EqualLogic?
IMHO, had this deal occurred a couple of years ago when some valuations were still flying higher than today, and 3PAR were at their current sales run rate, customer deployment situations, it is possible the amount would have been higher, either way, this is still a great value for both Dell and 3PAR investors, customers, employees and partners.

Does this mean Dell dumps EMC?
Near term I do not think Dell dumps the EMC dudes (or dudettes) as there is still plenty of business in the mid market for the two companies. However, over time, I would expect that Dell will unleash the 3PAR folks into the space where normally a CLARiiON CX would have been positioned such as deals just above where EqualLogic plays, or where Fibre Channel is preferred. Likewise, I would expect Dell to empower the 3PAR team to go after additional higher end deals where a DMX or VMAX would have been the previous option not to mention where 3PAR has had success.

This would also mean extending into sales against HP EVA and XPs, IBM DS5000 and DS8000 as well as XIV, Oracle/Sun 6000 and 7000s to name a few. In other words there will be some spin around coopition, however longer term you can read the writing on the wall. Oh, btw, lest you forget, Dell is first and foremost a server company who now is getting into storage in a much bigger way and EMC is first and foremost a storage company who is getting into severs via VMware as well as their Cisco partnerships.

Are shots being fired across each other bows? I will leave that up to you to speculate.

Does this mean Dell MD1000/MD3000 iSCSI, SAS and FC disappears?
I do not think so as they have had a specific role for entry level below where the EqualLogic iSCSI only solution fits providing mixed iSCSI, SAS and Fibre Channel capabilities to compete with the HP MSA2000 (OEMed by Dothill) and IBM DS3000 (OEMed from LSI). While 3PAR could be taken down into some of these markets, which would also potentially dilute the brand and thus premium margin of those solutions.

Likewise, there is a play with server vendors to attach shared SAS external storage to small 2 and 4 node clusters for VMware, HyperV, Exchange, SQL, SharePoint and other applications where iSCSI or Fibre Channel are to expensive or not needed or where NAS is not a fit. Another play for the shared external SAS attached is for attaching low cost storage to scale out clustered NAS or bulk storage where software such as Exanet runs on a Dell server. Take a closer look at how HP is supporting their scale out as well as IBM and Oracle among others. Sure you can find iSCSI or Fibre Channel or even NAS back end to file servers. However growing trend of using shared SAS.

Does Dell now have too many different storage systems and solutions in their portfolio?
Possibly depending upon how you look at it and certainly the potential is there for revenue prevention teams to get in the way of each other instead of competing with external competitors. However if you compare the Dell lineup with those of EMC, HP, IBM and Oracle/Sun among others, it is not all that different. Note that HP, IBM and Oracle also have something in common with Dell in that they are general IT resource providers (servers, storage, networks, services, hardware and software) as compared to other traditional storage vendors.

Consequently if you look at these vendors in terms of their different markets from consumer to prosumer to SOHO at the low end of the SMB to SME that sits between SMB and enterprise, they have diverse customer needs. Likewise, if you look at these vendors server offerings, they too are diverse ranging from desktops to floor standing towers to racks, high density racks and blade servers that also need various tiers, architectures, price bands and purposed storage functionality.

What will be key for Dell to make this all work?
The key for Dell will be similar to that of their competitors which is to clearly communicate the value proposition of the various products or solutions, where, who and what their target markets are and then execute on those plans. There will be overlap and conflict despite the best spin as is always the case with diverse portfolios by vendors.

However if Dell can keep their teams focused on expanding their customer footprints at the expense of their external competition vs. cannibalizing their own internal product lines, not to mention creating or extending into new markets or applications. Consequently Dell now has many tools in their tool box and thus need to educate their solution teams on what to use or sell when, where, why and how instead of just having one tool or a singular focus. In other words, while a great solution, Dell no longer has to respond with the solution to everything is iSCSI based EqualLogic.

Likewise Dell can leverage the same emotion and momentum behind the EqualLogic teams to invigorate and unleash the best with 3PAR teams and solution into or onto the higher end of the SMB, SME and enterprise environments.

Im still thinking that Exanet is a diamond in the rough for Dell where they can install the clustered scalable NAS software onto their servers and use either lower end shared SAS RAID (e.g. MD3000), or iSCSI (MD3000, EqualLogic or 3PAR) or higher end Fibre Channel with 3PAR) for scale out, cloud and other bulk solutions competing with HP, Oracle and IBM. Dell still has the Windows based storage server for entry level multi protocol block and file capabilities as well as what they OEM from EMC.

Is Dell done shopping?
IMHO I do not think so as there are still areas where Dell can extend their portfolio and not just in storage. Likewise there are still some opportunities or perhaps bargains out there for fall and beyond acquisitions.

Does this mean that Dell is not happy with EqualLogic and iSCSI
Simply put from my perspective talking with Dell customers, prospects, and partners and seeing them all in action nothing could be further from Dell not being happy with iSCSI or EqualLogic. Look at this as being a way to extend the Dell story and capabilities into new markets, granted the EqualLogic folks now have a new sibling to compete with internal marketing and management for love and attention.

Isnt Dell just an iSCSI focused company?
A couple of years I was quoted in one of the financial analysis reports as saying that Dell needed to remain open to various forms of storage instead of becoming singularly focused on just iSCSI as a result of the EqualLogic deal. I standby that statement in that Dell to be a strong enterprise contender needs to have a balanced portfolio across different price or market bands, from block to file, from shared SAS to iSCSI to Fibre Channel and emerging FCoE.

This also means supporting traditional NAS across those different price band or market sectors as well as support for emerging and fast growing unstructured data markets where there is a need for scale out and bulk storage. Thus it is great to see Dell remaining open minded and not becoming singularly focused on just iSCSI instead providing the right solution to meet their diverse customer as well as prospect needs or opportunities.

While EqualLogic was and is a very successfully iSCSI focused storage solution not to mention one that Dell continues to leverage, Dell is more than just iSCSI. Take a look at Dells current storage line up as well as up in table 1 and there is a lot of existing diversity. Granted some of that current diversity is via partners which the 3PAR deal helps to address. What this means is that iSCSI continues to grow in popularity however there are other needs where shared SAS or Fibre Channel or FCoE will be needed opening new markets to Dell.

Bottom line and wrap up (for now)
This is a great move for Dell (as well as 3PAR) to move up market in the storage space with less reliance on EMC. Assuming that Dell can communicate the what to use when, where, why and how to both their internal teams, partners as well as industry and customers not to mention then execute on, they should have themselves a winner.

Will this deal end up being an even better bargain than when Dell paid $1.4B for EqualLogic?

Not sure yet, it certainly has potential if Dell can execute on their plans without losing momentum in any other their other areas (products).

Whats your take?

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz - Author The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

Here are some related links to read more

Kudos to HP CEO Mark Hurd for dignity to step down from his post

Sat, 7 Aug 2010 13:45:43

Yesterday (Friday) late afternoon, HP announced (or read here) that their CEO Mark Hurd was resigning due to improprieties uncovered during an internal investigation.

HP is far from being alone in the corporate world involving investigations, lawsuits by governments or allegations of bribes and impropriety.

However what stands out is that of the CEO stepping down.

While not unique, after all remember the former CA CEO Sanjay Kumar who was locked up, or former Brocade CEO Greg Reyes now stepping into new government provided accommodations due to illegal activities, not to mention those from Enron among others. Granted in those situations there were legal ramifications outside of the companies prompting the courts to get involved, something that looks like for now is not the case at HP. However, having the courts get involved with corporate activity is almost becoming a pattern of how business is done. For example, there is a whos who list (e.g.Cisco, Dell, EMC, IBM, Intel, or Oracle among others) of IT companies involved in (or recently settled) various government or financial dealing cases associated with bribes, kickbacks or other business improprieties reminiscent of Rodney Dangerfield character Thornton Melon explaining how business is conducted in the real world during Dr Phillip Barbay business class in Back to School.

Lets get back to and focus on the individual, that is Mr Hurd and what I think is something rare these days. That is a CEO or leader of a company or organization seriously taking responsibility for their actions or those that they are responsible for instead of lip service and spin doctoring.

I do not know whether Mr Hurd decided on his own or it was suggested to him that he step down from his post. However what I do know simply based on the story that has been put out by HP is that Mr Hurd either has, or is being portrayed as taking the high road of stepping down. That is, as the head of the HP organization, he is taking responsibility for actions, not looking for special status or exceptions and stepping down from his post instead of trying to sweep the dust or dirt under the rug. Thus Kudos to Mr Hurd for taking responsibility, not hiding, spinning or throwing someone else under the proverbial corporate politics bus to save his own hide.As the CEO of a major corporation the buck stops with him and he should not be above the law or polices of his own organizations that other employees would be expected to follow.

Too often today we hear stories of company or organization or government leaders getting or expecting special treatment in some cases not taking full and complete responsibility for their actions other than for a photo opportunity.

On a different yet related note, perhaps my thinking will change as more comes out on the story as well as they story behind the story, however this is an interesting example of how crisis management can be dealt with. Sure the story was released on a Friday afternoon which is typically when bad news is put out after the financial markets have closed. On the other hand, given the nature of HP being a tech company and with web, blogs, twitter, face book and other social media the chatter was significant for a late Friday afternoon.

Lets see how this plays out and if HP along with their PR crisis team played the right cards by getting the story out, CEO Mark Hurd stepping down to avoid prolonging the situations as well as how wall street will react short term and over the long haul.

This leaves me with a closing thought of if politicians from all sides (or across both sides of aisle or parties) did what HP CEO Mark Hurd did (resign) due to impropriety, we would have fewer elected officials. Thus I do not think Mr Hurd has a future in government politics not because of what he did that caused his stepping down at HP.

No, rather because either on his own or under advice of others he decided not to look for or seek special favor or cover up of what was done as well as try not to spin the story thus saving both him and his company (HP) for the long term.

Nuff said for now.

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz - Author The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

Data footprint reduction (Part 1): Life beyond dedupe and changing data lifecycles

Tue, 3 Aug 2010 23:45:54

Over the past couple of weeks there has been a flurry of IT industry activity around data footprint impact reduction with Dell buying Ocarina and IBM acquiring Storwize. For those who want the quick (compacted, reduced) synopsis of what Dell buying Ocarina as well as IBM acquiring Storwize means read this post here along with some of my comments here and here.

Now, before any Drs or Divas of Dedupe get concerned and feel the need to debate dedupes expanding role, success or applicability, relax, take a deep breath, then read on and take another breath before responding if so inclined.

The reason I mention this is that some may mistake this as a piece against or not in favor of dedupe as it talks about life beyond dedupe which could be mistaken as indicating dedupes diminished role which is not the case (read ahead and see figure 5 to see the bigger picture).

Likewise some might feel that since this piece talks about archiving for compliance and non regulatory situations along with compression, data management and other forms of data footprint reduction they may be compelled to defend dedupes honor and future role.

Again, relax, take a deep breath and read on, this is not about the death of dedupe.

Now for others, you might wonder why the dedupe tongue in check humor mentioned above (which is what it is) and the answer is quite simple. The industry in general is drunk on dedupe and in some cases thus having numbed its senses not to mention having blurred its vision of the even bigger opportunities for the business benefits of data footprint reduction beyond todays backup centric or vmware server virtualization dedupe discussions.

Likewise, it is time for the industry to wake (or sober) up and instead of trying to stuff everything under or into the narrowly focused dedupe bottle. Instead, realize that there is a broader umbrella called data footprint impact reduction which includes among other techniques, dedupe, archive, compression, data management, data deletion and thin provisioning across all types of data and applications. What this means is a broader opportunity or market than what exists or being discussed today leveraging different techniques, technologies and best practices.

Consequently this piece is about expanding the discussion to the larger opportunity for vendors or vars to extend their focus to the bigger world of overall data footprint impact reduction beyond where currently focused. Likewise, this is about IT customers realizing that there are more opportunities to address data and storage optimization across your entire organization using various techniques instead of just focusing on backup.

In other words, there is a very bright future for dedupe as well as other techniques and technologies that fall under the data footprint reduction umbrella including data stored online, offline, near line, primary, secondary, tertiary, virtual and in a public or private cloud..

Before going further however lets take a step back and look at some business along with IT issues, challenges and opportunities.

What is the business and IT issue or challenge?
Given that there is no such thing as a data or information recession shown in figure 1, IT organizations of all size are faced with the constant demand to store more data, including multiple copies of the same or similar data, for longer periods of time.

Figure 1: IT resource demand growth continues

The result is an expanding data footprint, increased IT expenses, both capital and operational, due to additional Infrastructure Resource Management (IRM) activities to sustain given levels of application Quality of Service (QoS) delivery shown in figure 2.

Some common IT costs associated with supporting an increased data footprint include among others:

Data storage hardware and management software tools acquisition
Associated networking or IO connectivity hardware, software and services
Recurring maintenance and software renewal fees
Facilities fees for floor space, power and cooling along with IT staffing
Physical and logical security for data and IT resources
Data protection for HA, BC or DR including backup, replication and archiving

Figure 2: IT Resources and cost balancing conflicts and opportunities

Figure 2 shows the result is that IT organizations of all size are faced with having to do more with what they have or with less including maximizing available resources. In addition, IT organizations often have to overcome common footprint constraints (available power, cooling, floor space, server, storage and networking resources, management, budgets, and IT staffing) while supporting business growth.

Figure 2 also shows that to support demand, more resources are needed (real or virtual) in a denser footprint, while maintaining or enhancing QoS plus lowering per unit resource cost. The trick is improving on available resources while maintaining QoS in a cost effective manner. By comparison, traditionally if costs are reduced, one of the other curves (amount of resources or QoS) are often negatively impacted and vice versa. Meanwhile in other situations the result can be moving problems around that later resurface elsewhere. Instead, find, identify, diagnose and prescribe the applicable treatment or form of data footprint reduction or other IT IRM technology, technique or best practices to cure the ailment.

What is driving the expanding data footprint?
Granted more data can be stored in the same or smaller physical footprint than in the past, thus requiring less power and cooling per Gbyte, Tbyte or PByte. Data growth rates necessary to sustain business activity, enhanced IT service delivery and enable new applications are placing continued demands to move, protect, preserve, store and serve data for longer periods of time.

The popularity of rich media and Internet based applications has resulted in explosive growth of unstructured file data requiring new and more scalable storage solutions. Unstructured data includes spreadsheets, Power Point, slide decks, Adobe PDF and word documents, web pages, video and audio JPEG, MP3 and MP4 files. This trend towards increasing data storage requirements does not appear to be slowing anytime soon for organizations of all sizes.

After all, there is no such thing as a data or information recession!

Changing data access lifecycles
Many strategies or marketing stories are built around the premise that shortly after data is created data is seldom, if ever accessed again. The traditional transactional model lends itself to what has become known as information lifecycle management (ILM) where data can and should be archived or moved to lower cost, lower performing, and high density storage or even deleted where possible.

Figure 3 shows as an example on the left side of the diagram the traditional transactional data lifecycle with data being created and then going dormant. The amount of dormant data will vary by the type and size of an organization along with application mix.

Figure 3: Changing access and data lifecycle patterns

However, unlike the transactional data lifecycle models where data can be removed after a period of time, Web 2.0 and related data needs to remain online and readily accessible. Unlike traditional data lifecycles where data goes dormant after a period of time, on the right side of figure 3, data is created and then accessed on an intermittent basis with variable frequency. The frequency between periods of inactivity could be hours, days, weeks or months and, in some cases, there may be sustained periods of activity.

A common example is a video or some other content that gets created and posted to a web site or social networking site such as Face book, Linked in, or You Tube among others. Once the content is discussed, while it may not change, additional comment and collaborative data can be wrapped around the data as additional viewers discover and comment on the content. Solution approaches for the new category and data lifecycle model include low cost, relative good performing high capacity storage such as clustered bulk storage as well as leveraging different forms of data footprint reduction techniques.

Given that a large (and growing) percentage of new data is unstructured, NAS based storage solutions including clustered, bulk, cloud and managed service offerings with file based access are gaining in popularity. To reduce cost along with support increased business demands (figure 2), a growing trend is to utilize clustered, scale out and bulk NAS file systems that support NFS, CIFS for concurrent large and small IOs as well as optionally pNFS for large parallel access of files. These solutions are also increasingly being deployed with either built in or add on accessorized data footprint reduction techniques including archive, policy management, dedupe and compression among others.

What is your data footprint impact?
Your data footprint impact is the total data storage needed to support your various business application and information needs. Your data footprint may be larger than how much actual data storage you have as seen in figure 4. In Figure 4, an example is an organization that has 20TBytes of storage space allocated and being used for databases, email, home directories, shared documents, engineering documents, financial and other data in different formats (structured and unstructured) not to mention varying access patterns.

Figure 4: Expanding data footprint due to data proliferation and copies being retained

Of the 20TBytes of data allocated and used, it is very likely that the consumed storage space is not 100 percent used. Database tables may be sparsely (empty or not fully) allocated and there is likely duplicate data in email and other shared documents or folders. Additionally, of the 20TBytes, 10TBytes are duplicated to three different areas on a regular basis for application testing, training and business analysis and reporting purposes.

The overall data footprint is the total amount of data including all copies plus the additional storage required for supporting that data such as extra disks for Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID) protection or remote mirroring.

In this overly simplified example, the data footprint and subsequent storage requirement are several times that of the 20TBytes of data. Consequently, the larger the data footprint the more data storage capacity and performance bandwidth needed, not to mention being managed, protected and housed (powered, cooled, situated in a rack or cabinet on a floor somewhere).

Data footprint reduction techniques
While data storage capacity has become less expensive on a relative basis, as data footprint continue to expand in order to support business requirements, more IT resources will be needed to be made available in a cost effective, yet QoS satisfying manner (again, refer back to figure 2). What this means is that more IT resources including server, storage and networking capacity, management tools along with associated software licensing and IT staff time will be required to protect, preserve and serve information.

By more effectively managing the data footprint across different applications and tiers of storage, it is possible to enhance application service delivery and responsiveness as well as facilitate more timely data protection to meet compliance and business objectives. To realize the full benefits of data footprint reduction, look beyond backup and offline data improvements to include online and active data using various techniques such as those in table 1 among others.

There are several methods (shown in table 1) that can be used to address data footprint proliferation without compromising data protection or negatively impacting application and business service levels. These approaches include archiving of structured (database), semi structured (email) and unstructured (general files and documents), data compression (real time and offline) and data deduplication.

	Archiving	Compression	Deduplication
When to use	Structured (database), email and unstructured	Online (database, email, file sharing), backup or archive	Backup or archiving or recurring and similar data
Characteristic	Software to identify and remove unused data from active storage devices	Reduce amount of data to be moved (transmitted) or stored on disk or tape.	Eliminate duplicate files or file content observed over a period of time to reduce data footprint
Examples	Database, email, unstructured file solutions with archive storage	Host software, disk or tape, (network routers) and compression appliances or software as well as appearing in some primary storage system solutions	Backup and archive target devices and Virtual Tape Libraries (VTLs), specialized appliances
Caveats	Time and knowledge to know what and when to archive and delete, data and application aware	Software based solutions require host CPU cycles impacting application performance	Works well in background mode for backup data to avoid performance impact during data ingestion

Table 1: Data footprint reduction approaches and techniques

Archiving for compliance and general data retention
Data archiving is often perceived as a solution for compliance, however, archiving can be used for many other non compliance purposes. These include general data footprint reduction, to boost performance and enhance routine data maintenance and data protection. Archiving can be applied to structured databases data, semi structured email data and attachments and unstructured file data.

A key to deploying an archiving solution is having insight into what data exists along with applicable rules and policies to determine what can be archived, for how long, how many copies and how data ultimately may be finally retired or deleted. Archiving requires a combination of hardware, software and people to implement business rules.

A challenge with archiving is having the time and tools available to identify what data should be archived and what data can be securely destroyed when no longer needed. Further complicating archiving is that knowledge of the data value is also needed; this may well include legal issues as to who is responsible for making decisions on what data to keep or discard.

If a business can invest in the time and software tools, as well as identify which data to archive to support an effective archive strategy, the returns can be very positive towards reducing the data footprint without limiting the amount of information available for use.

Data compression (real time and offline)
Data compression is a commonly used technique for reducing the size of data being stored or transmitted to improve network performance or reduce the amount of storage capacity needed for storing data. If you have used a traditional or TCP/IP based telephone or cell phone, watched either a DVD or HDTV, listened to an MP3, transferred data over the internet or used email you have most likely relied on some form of compression technology that is transparent to you. Some forms of compression are time delayed, such as using PKZIP to zip files, while others are real time or on the fly based such as when using a network, cell phone or listening to an MP3.

Two different approaches to data compression that vary in time delay or impact on application performance along with the amount of compression and loss of data are loss less (no data loss) and lossy (some data loss for higher compression ratio). In addition to these approaches, there are also different implementations of including real time for no performance impact to applications and time delayed where there is a performance impact to applications.

In contrast to traditional ZIP or offline, time delayed compression approaches that require complete decompression of data prior to modification, online compression allows for reading from, or writing to, any location within a compressed file without full file decompression and resulting application or time delay. Real time appliance or target based compression capabilities are well suited for supporting online applications including databases, OLTP, email, home directories, web sites and video streaming among others without consuming host server CPU or memory resources or degrading storage system performance.

Note that with the increase of CPU server processing performance along with multiple cores, server based compression running in applications such as database, email, file systems or operating systems can be a viable option for some environments.

A scenario for using real time data compression is for time sensitive applications that require large amounts of data such as online databases, video and audio media servers, web and analytic tools. For example, databases such as Oracle support NFS3 Direct IO (DIO) and Concurrent IO (CIO) capabilities to enable random and direct addressing of data within an NFS based file. This differs from traditional NFS operations where a file would be sequential read or written.

Another example of using real time compression is to combine a NAS file server configured with 300GB or 600GB high performance 15.5K Fibre Channel or SAS HDDs in addition to flash based SSDs to boost the effective storage capacity of active data without introducing a performance bottleneck associated with using larger capacity HDDs. Of course, compression would vary with the type of solution being deployed and type of data being stored just as dedupe ratios will differ depending on algorithm along with if text or video or object based among other factors.

Deduplication (Dedupe)
Data deduplication (also known as single instance storage, commonalty factoring, data difference or normalization) is a data footprint reduction technique that eliminates the occurrence of the same data. Deduplication works by normalizing the data being backed up or stored by eliminating recurring or duplicate copies of files or data blocks depending on the implementation.

Some data deduplication solutions boast spectacular ratios for data reduction given specific scenarios, such as backup of repetitive and similar files, while providing little value over a broader range of applications.

This is in contrast with traditional data compression approaches that provide lower, yet more predictable and consistent data reduction ratios over more types of data and application, including online and primary storage scenarios. For example, in environments where there is little to no common or repetitive data files, data deduplication will have little to no impact while data compression generally will yield some amount of data footprint reduction across almost all types of data.

Some data deduplication solution providers have either already added, or have announced plans to add, compression techniques to compliment and increase the data footprint effectiveness of their solutions across a broader range of applications and storage scenarios, attesting to the value and importance of data compression to reduce data footprint.

When looking at deduplication solutions, determine if the solution is designed to scale in terms of performance, capacity and availability over a large amount of data along with how restoration of data will be impacted by scaling for growth. Other items to consider include how data is reduplicated, such as real time using inline or some form of time delayed post processing, and the ability to select the mode of operation.

For example, a dedupe solution may be able to process data at a specific ingest rate inline until a certain threshold is hit and then processing reverts to post processing so as to not cause a performance degradation to the application writing data to the deduplication solution. The downside of post processing is that more storage is needed as a buffer. It can, however, also enable solutions to scale without becoming a bottleneck during data ingestion.

However, there is life beyond dedupe which is to in no way diminish dedupe or its very strong and bright future, one that Im increasingly convinced of having talked with hundreds of IT professionals (e.g. the customers) is that only the surface is being scratched for dedupe, not to mention larger data footprint impact opportunity seen in figure 5.

Figure 5: Dedupe adoption and deployment waves over time

While dedupe is a popular technology from a discussion standpoint and has good deployment traction, it is far from reaching mass customer adoption or even broad coverage in environments where it is being used. StorageIO research shows broadest adoption of dedupe centered around backup in smaller or SMB environments (dedupe deployment wave one in figure 5) with some deployment in Remote Office Branch Office (ROBO) work groups as well as departmental environments.

StorageIO research also shows that complete adoption in many of those SMB, ROBO, work group or smaller environments has yet to reach 100 percent. This means that there remains a large population that has yet to deploy dedupe as well as further opportunities to increase the level of dedupe deployment by those already doing so.

There has also been some early adoption in larger core IT environments where dedupe coexists with complimenting existing data protection and preservation practices. Another current deployment scenario for dedupe has been for supporting core edge deployments in larger environments that provide support for backup and data protection of ROBO, work group and departmental systems.

Note that figure 5 simply shows the general types of environments in which dedupe is being adopted and not any sort of indicators as to the degree of deployment by a given customer or IT environment.

What to do about your expanding data footprint impact?
Develop an overall data foot reduction strategy that leverages different techniques and technologies addressing online primary, secondary and offline data. Assess and discover what data exists and how it is used in order to effectively manage storage needs.

Determine policies and rules for retention and deletion of data combining archiving, compression (online and offline) and dedupe in a comprehensive data footprint strategy. The benefit of a broader, more holistic, data footprint reduction strategy is the ability to address the overall environment, including all applications that generate and use data as well as IRM or overhead functions that compound and impact the data footprint.

Data footprint reduction: life beyond (and complimenting) dedupe
The good news is that the Drs. and Divas of dedupe marketing (the ones who also are good at the disco dedupe dance debates) have targeted backup as an initial market sweet (and success) spot shown in figure 5 given the high degree of duplicate data.

Figure 6: Leverage multiple data footprint reduction techniques and technologies

However that same good news is bad news in that there is now a stigma that dedupe is only for backup, similar to how archive was hijacked by the compliance marketing folks in the post Y2K era. There are several techniques that can be used individually to address specific data footprint reduction issues or in combination as seen in figure 7 to implement a more cohesive and effective data footprint reduction strategy.

Figure 7: How various data footprint reduction techniques are complimentary

What this means is that both archive, dedupe as well as other forms of data footprint reduction can and should be used beyond where they have been target marketed using the applicable tool for the task at hand. For example, a common industry rule of thumb is that on average, ten percent of data changes per day (your mileage and rate of change will certainly vary given applications, environment and other factors).

Now assuming that you have 100TB (feel free to subtract a zero or two, or add as many as needed) of data (note I did not say storage capacity or percent utilized), ten percent change would be 10TB that needs to be backed up, replicated and so forth. Now with basic 2 to 1 streaming tape compression (2.5 to 1 in upcoming LTO enhancements) would reduce the daily backup footprint from 10TB to 5TB.

Using dedupe with 10 to 1 would get that from 10TB down to 1TB or about the size of a large capacity disk drive. With 20 to 1 that cuts the daily backup down to 500GB and so forth. The net effect is that more daily backups can be stored in the same footprint which in turn helps expedite individual file recover by having more options to choose from off of the disk based cache, buffer or storage pool.

On the other hand, if your objective is to reduce and eliminate storage capacity, then the same amount of backups can be stored on less disk freeing up resources. Now take the savings times the number of days in your backup retention and you should see the numbers start to add up.

Now what about the other 90 percent of the data that may not have changed, or, that did change and exists on higher performance storage?

Can its footprint impact be reduced?

The answer should be perhaps or it depends as well as prompts the question of what tool would be best. There is a popular thinking as is often the case with industry buzzwords or technologies to use it everywhere. After all goes the thinking, if it is a good thing why not use and deploy more of it everywhere?

Keep in mind that dedupe trades time to perform thinking and apply intelligence to further reduce data in exchange for space capacity. Thus trading time for space capacity can have a negative impact on applications that need lower response time, higher performance where the focus is on rates vs ratios. For example, the other 90 to 100 percent of the data in the above example may have to be on a mix of high and medium performance storage to meet QoS or service level agreement (SLA) objectives. While it would fun or perhaps cool to try and achieve a high data reduction ratio on the entire 100TB of active data with dedupe (e.g. trying to achieve primary dedupe), the performance impacts could have a negative impact.

The option is to apply a mix of different data footprint reduction techniques across the entire 100TB. That is, use dedupe where applicable and higher reduction ratios can be achieved while balancing performance, compression used for streaming data to tape for retention or archive as well as in databases or other applications software not to mention in networks. Likewise, use real time compression or what some refer to as primary dedupe for online active changing data along with online static read only data.

Deploy a comprehensive data footprint reduction strategy combining various techniques and technologies to address point solution needs as well as the overall environment, including online, near line for backup, and offline for archive data.

Lets not forget about archiving, thin provisioning, space saving snapshots, commonsense data management among other techniques across the entire environment. In other words, if your focus is just on dedupe for backup to achieve an optimized and efficient storage environment, you are also missing out on a larger opportunity. However, this also means having multiple tools or technologies in your IT IRM toolbox as well as understanding what to use when, where and why.

Data transfer rates is a key metric for performance (time) optimization such as meeting backup or restore or other data protection windows. Data reduction ratios is a key metric for capacity (space) optimization where the focus is on storing as much data in a given footprint

Some additional take away points:

Develop a data footprint reduction strategy for online and offline data
Energy avoidance can be accomplished by powering down storage
Energy efficiency can be accomplished by using tiered storage to meet different needs
Measure and compare storage based on idle and active workload conditions
Storage efficiency metrics include IOPS or bandwidth per watt for active data
Storage capacity per watt per footprint and cost is a measure for in active data
Small percentage reductions on a large scale have big benefits
Align the applicable form of virtualization for the given task at hand

Some links for additional reading on the above and related topics

Wrap up (for now, read part II here)
For some applications reduction ratios are an important focus on the tools or modes of operations that achieve those results.

Likewise for other applications where the focus is on performance with some data reduction benefit, tools are optimized for performance first and reduction secondary.

Thus I expect messaging from some vendors to adjust (expand) to those capabilities that they have in their toolboxes (product portfolios) offerings

Consequently, IMHO some of the backup centric dedupe solutions may find themselves in niche roles in the future unless they can diversity. Vendors with multiple data footprint reduction tools will also do better than those with only a single function or focused tool.

However for those who only have a single or perhaps a couple of tools, well, guess what the approach and messaging will be.

After all, if all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail, if all you have is a screw driver, well, you get the picture.

On the other hand, if you are still not clear on what all this means, send me a note, give a call, post a comment or a tweet and will be happy to discuss with you.

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz - Author The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

Data footprint reduction (Part 2): Dell, IBM, Ocarina and Storwize

Tue, 3 Aug 2010 23:45:54

Over the past couple of weeks there has been a flurry of IT industry activity around data footprint impact reduction with Dell buying Ocarina and IBM acquiring Storwize. For those who want the quick (compacted, reduced) synopsis of what Dell buying Ocarina as well as IBM acquiring Storwize means read the first post in this two part series as well as some of my comments here and here.

This piece and it companion in part I of this two part series is about expanding the discussion to the much larger opportunity for vendors or vars of overall data footprint impact reduction beyond where they are currently focused. Likewise, this is about IT customers realizing that there are more opportunities to address data and storage optimization across your entire organization using various techniques instead of just focusing on backup or vmware virtual servers.

Who is Ocarina and Storwize?
Ocarina is a data and storage management software startup focused on data footprint reduction using a variety of approaches, techniques and algorithms. They differ from the traditional data dedupers (e.g. Asigra, Bakbone, Commvault, EMC Avamar, Datadomain and Networker, Exagrid, Falconstor, HP, IBM Protectier and TSM, Quantum, Sepaton and Symantec among others) by looking at data footprint reduction beyond just backup.

This means looking at how to reduce data footprint across different types of data including videos, image as well as text based documents among others. As a result, the market sweet spot for Ocarina is for general data footprint reduction including static along with active data including entertainment, video surveillance or gaming, reference data, web 2.0 and other bulk storage application data needs (this should compliment Dells recent Exanet acquisition).

What this means is that Ocarina is very well suited to address the rapidly growing amount of unstructured data that may not otherwise be handled as efficiently with by dedupe alone.

Storwize is a data and storage management startup focused on data footprint reduction using inline compression with an emphasis on maintaining performance for reads as well as writes of unstructured as well as structured database data. Consequently the market sweet spot for Storwize is around boosting the capacity of existing NAS storage systems from different vendors without negatively impacting performance. The trade off of the Storwize approach is that you do not get the spectacular data reduction ratios associated with backup centric or focused dedupe, however, you maintain performance associated with online storage that some dedupers dream of.

Both Dell and IBM have existing dedupe solutions for general purpose as well as backup along with other data footprint impact reduction tools (either owned or via partners). Now they are both expanding their focus and reach similar to what others such as EMC, HP, NetApp, Oracle and Symantec among others are doing. What this means is that someone at Dell and IBM see that there is much more to data footprint impact reduction than just a focus on dedupe for backup.

Wait, what does all of this discussion (or read here for background issues, challenges and opportunities) about unstructured data and changing access lifecycles have to do with dedupe, Ocarina and Storwize?

Continue reading on as this is about the expanding opportunity for data footprint reduction across entire organizations. That is, more data is being kept online and expanding data footprint impact needs to be addressed to meet business objectives using various techniques balancing performance, availability, capacity and energy or economics (PACE).

What does all of this have to do with IBM buying Storwize and Dell acquiring Ocarina?
If you have not pieced this together yet, let me net it out.

This is about the opportunity to address the organization wide expanding data footprint impact across all applications, types of data as well as tiers of storage to support business growth (more data to store) while maintaining QoS yet reduce per unit costs including management.

This is about expanding the story to the broader data footprint impact reduction from the more narrowly focused backup and dedupe discussion which are still in their infancy on a relative basis to their full market potential (read more here).

Now are you seeing where this is going and fits?

Does this mean IBM and Dell defocus on their existing Dedupe product lines or partners?
I do not believe so, at least as long as their respective revenue prevention departments are kept on the sidelines and off of the field of play. What I mean by this is that the challenge for IBM and Dell is similar to that of what others such as EMC are faced with having diverse portfolios or technology toolboxes. The challenge is messaging to the bigger issues, then aligning the right tool to the task at hand to address given issues and opportunities instead of singularly focused on a specific product causing revenue prevention elsewhere.

As an example, for backup, I would expect Dell to continue to work with its existing dedupe backup centric partners and technologies however find new opportunities to leverage their Ocarina solution. Likewise, IBM I would expect to continue to show customers where Tivoli software based dedupe or Protectier (aka the deduper formerly known as Diligent) or other target based dedupe fits and expand into other data footprint impact areas with Storewize.

Does this change the playing field?
IMHO these moves as well as some previous moves by the likes of EMC and NetApp among others are examples of expanding the scope and dimension of the playing field. That is, the focus is much more than just dedupe for backup or of virtual machines (e.g. VMware vSphere or Microsoft HyperV).

This signals a growing awareness around the much larger and broader opportunity around organization wide data footprint impact reduction. In the broader context some applications or data gets compressed either in application software such as databases, file systems, operating systems or even hypervisors as well as in networks using protocol or bandwidth optimizers as well as inline compression or post processing techniques as has been the case with streaming tape devices for some time.

This also means that where with dedupe the primary focus or marketing angle up until recently has been around reduction ratios, to meet the needs of time or performance sensitive applications data transfer rates also become important.

Hence the role of policy based data footprint reduction where the right tool or technique to meet specific service requirements is applied. For those vendors with a diverse data footprint impact reduction tool kit including archive, compression, dedupe, thin provision among other techniques, I would expect to hear expanded messaging around the theme of applying the right tool to the task at hand.

Does this mean Dell bought Ocarina to accessorize EqualLogic?
Perhaps, however that would then beg the question of why EqualLogic needs accessorizing. Granted there are many EqualLogic along with other Dell sold storage systems attached to Dell and other vendors servers operating as NFS or Windows CIFS file servers that are candidates for Ocarina. However there are also many environments that do not yet include Dell EqualLogic solutions where Ocarina is a means for Dell to extend their reach enabling those organizations to do more with what they have while supporting growth.

In other words, Ocarina can be used to accessorize, or, it can be used to generate and create pull through for various Dell products. I also see a very strong affinity and opportunity for Dell to combine their recent Exanet NAS storage clustering software with Dell servers, storage to create bulk or scale out solutions similar to what HP and other vendors have done. Of course what Dell does with the Ocarina software over time, where they integrate it into their own products as well as OEM to others should be interesting to watch or speculate upon.

Does this mean IBM bought Storwize to accessorize XIV?
Well, I guess if you put a gateway (or software on a server which is the same thing) in front of XIV to transform it into a NAS system, sure, then Storwize could be used to increase the net usable capacity of the XIV installed base. However that is a lot of work and cost for what is on a relative basis a small footprint, yet it is a viable option never the less.

IMHO IBM has much more of a play, perhaps a home run by walking before they run by placing Storwize in front of their existing large installed base of NetApp N series (not to mention targeting NetApps own install base) as well as complimenting their SONAS solutions. From there as IBM gets their legs and mojo, they could go on the attack by going after other vendors NAS solutions with an efficiency story similar to how IBM server groups target other vendors server business for takeout opportunities except in a complimenting manner.

Longer term I would not be surprised to see IBM continue development of the block based IP (as well as file) in the storwize product for deployment in solutions ranging from SVC to their own or OEM based products along with articulating their comprehensive data footprint reduction solution portfolio. What will be important for IBM to do is articulating what solution to use when, where, why and how without confusing their customers, partners and rest of the industry (something that Dell will also have to do).

Some links for additional reading on the above and related topics

Wrap up (for now)

Organizations of all shape and size are encountering some form of growing data footprint impact that currently, or soon will need to be addressed. Given that different applications and types of data along with associated storage mediums or tiers have various performance, availability, capacity, energy as well as economic characteristics multiple data footprint impact reduction tools or techniques are needed. What this all means is that the focus of data footprint reduction is expanding beyond that of just dedupe for backup or other early deployment scenarios.

Note what this means is that dedupe has an even brighter future than where it currently is focused which is still only scratching the surface of potential market adoption as was discussed in part 1 of this series.

However this also means that dedupe is not the only solution to all data footprint reduction scenarios. Other techniques including archiving, compression, data management, thin provisioning, data deletion, tiered storage and consolidation will start to gain respect, coverage discussions and debates.

Bottom line, use the most applicable technologies or combinations along with best practice for the task and activity at hand.

For some applications reduction ratios are an important focus on the tools or modes of operations that achieve those results.

Likewise for other applications where the focus is on performance with some data reduction benefit, tools are optimized for performance first and reduction secondary.

Thus I expect messaging from some vendors to adjust (expand) to those capabilities that they have in their toolboxes (product portfolios) offerings

However for those who only have a single or perhaps a couple of tools, well, guess what the approach and messaging will be. After all, if all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail, if all you have is a screw driver, well, you get the picture.

On the other hand, if you are still not clear on what all this means, send me a note, give a call, post a comment or a tweet and will be happy to discuss with you.

Oh, FWIW, if interested, disclosure: Storwize was a client a couple of years ago.

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz - Author The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

Availability or lack there of: Lessons From Our Frail Aging Infrastructure

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 20:20:20

I have a new blog post over at Enterprise Efficiency about aging infrastructures including those involved with IT, Telcom and related ones.

As a society, we face growing problems repairing and maintaining the vital infrastructure we once took for granted.

Most of these incidents involve aging, worn-out physical infrastructure desperately in need of repair or replacement. But infrastructure doesn't have to be old or even physical to cause problems when it fails.

The IT systems and applications all around us form a digital infrastructure that most enterprises take for granted until it's not there. Bottom line, there really isn't much choice.

You can either pay up front now to update aging infrastructures, or, wait and pay more later. Either way, there will be a price to pay and you can not realize a cost savings until you actually embark on that endeavor.

Here is the link to the full blog post over at Enterprise Efficiency.

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz - Author The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

July 2010 Odds and Ends: Perspectives, Tips and Articles

Sun, 18 Jul 2010 22:33:44

Here are some items that have been added to the main StorageIO website news, tips and articles, video podcast related pages that pertain to a variety of topics ranging from data storage, IO, networking, data centers, virtualization, Green IT, performance, metrics and more.

These content items include various odds and end pieces such as industry or technology commentary, articles, tips, ATEs (See additional ask the expert tips here) or FAQs as well as some video and podcasts for your mid summer (if in the northern hemisphere) enjoyment.

The New Green IT: Productivity, supporting growth, doing more with what you have

Energy efficient and money saving Green IT or storage optimization are often associated to mean things like MAID, Intelligent Power Management (IPM) for servers and storage disk drive spin down or data deduplication. In other words, technologies and techniques to minimize or avoid power consumption as well as subsequent cooling requirements which for some data, applications or environments can be the case. However there is also shifting from energy avoidance to that of being efficient, effective, productive not to mention profitable as forms of optimization. Collectively these various techniques and technologies help address or close the Green Gap and can reduce the amount of Green IT confusion in the form of boosting productivity (same goes for servers or networks) in terms of more work, IOPS, bandwidth, data moved, frames or packets, transactions, videos or email processed per watt per second (or other unit of time).

Click here to read and listen to my comments about boosting IOPs per watt, or here to learn more about the many facets of energy efficient storage and here on different aspects of storage optimization. Want to read more about the next major wave of server, storage, desktop and networking virtualization? Then click here to read more about virtualization life beyond consolidation where the emphasis or focus expands to abstraction, transparency, enablement in addition to consolidation for servers, storage, networks. If you are interested in metrics and measurements, Storage Resource Management (SRM) not to mention discussion about various macro data center metrics including PUE among others, click on the preceding links.

NAS and Shared Storage, iSCSI, DAS, SAS and more

Shifting gears to general industry trends and commentary, here are some comments on consumer and SOHO storage sharing, the role and importance Value Added Resellers (VARs) serve for SMB environments, as well as the top storage technologies that are in use and remain relevant. Here are some comments on iSCSI which continues to gain in popularity as well as storage options for small businesses.

Are you looking to buy or upgrade a new server? Here are some vendor and technology neutral tips to help determine needs along with requirements to help be a more effective informed buyer. Interested or do you want to know more about Serial Attached SCSI (6Gb/s SAS) including for use as external shared direct attached storage (DAS) for Exchange, Sharepoint, Oracle, VMware or HyperV clusters among other usage scenarios, check out this FAQ as well as podcast. Here are some other items including a podcast about using storage partitions in your data storage infrastructure, an ATE about what type of 1.5TB centralized storage to support multiple locations, and a video on scaling with clustered storage.

That is all for now, hope all is well and enjoy the content.

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz - Author The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

A Storage I/O Momentus Moment

Mon, 12 Jul 2010 03:44:55

I recently asked for and received from Seagate (See recent post about them moving their paper head quarters to Ireland here) a Momentus XT 500GB 7200 RPM 2.5 Hybrid Hard Disk Drive (HHDD) to use in an upcoming project. That project is not to test a bunch of different Hard Disk Drives (HDDs), HHDDs, Removable HDD (RHDDs) or Solid State Devices (read more about SSDs here and here or storage optimization here) in order to produce results for someone for a fee or some other consideration.

Do not worry, I am not jumping on the bandwagon of calling my office collection of computers, storage, networks and software the StorageIO Independent hands on test lab. Instead, my objective is to actually use the Momentus XT in conjunction with other storage I/O devices ranging from notebook or laptop, desktop or server, NAS and cloud based storage in conjunction with regular projects that Im working on both in the office as well as while traveling to various out and about activities.

More often than not these days, common thinking or perception is that if anybody is talking about a product or technology it must be a paid for activity as why would anyone write or talk about something without getting or expecting something in exchange (granted there are some exceptions). Given this era of transparency talk, lets walk the talk and here is my disclosure which for those who have read my content before hopefully you will realize that disclosures should be simple, straight forward, easy, fun and common sense based instead of having to dance around or hide what may be being done.

Disclosure moment:
This is not a paid for or sponsored blog (read my disclosure statement here) and in fact is no way connected to in conjunction with, endorsed, sanctioned or approved by Seagate for that matter nor have they been and currently are not a client. I did however ask them for and they offered to send to me a single 500GB Momentus XT Hybrid Hard Disk Drive (HHDD) with no enclosure, accessories, adapter, cables, software or other packaging to be used for a project I am working on. However I did buy from Amazon.com a Seagate GoFlex USB 3.0 to SATA 3 connection cable kit that I had been eyeing for some other projects. Nuff said about that.

What am I doing with a Seagate Momentus XT
As to the project I am working on, it has nothing to do with Seagate or any other vendors or clients for that matter as it is a new book that I will tell you more about in future posts. What I can share with you for now is that it is a follow on to my most previous books ( The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier) ). The new book will also be published by CRC Taylor and Francis.

Now for those who are interested in why would I request a Momentus XT Hybrid Hard Disk Drive (HHDD) from Seagate while turning down others offers of free hardware, software, services, trips and the like it is many fold. First I already own some Momentus (as perhaps you do and may not realize it) HDDs thus thought it would be fun and relatively straight forward to make some general comparisons. I needed some additional storage and I/O improvements to compliment and coexist with what I already have.

Does this mean that the book is going to be about flash Solid State Devices (SSD) since I am using a Momentus XT HHDD? The short answer is NO, it will be much more broadly focused however certainly various types of storage I/O control, public and private clouds, management, gaining control, networking, virtualization as well as other hardware, software, services techniques and technologies will be discussed building on my two previous books.

In addition, I want to see how compatible and useful in every day activities the HHDDs are as opposed to running a couple of standard iometer or other so called lab bench tests. After all, when you buy storage or any IT solutions, do you buy them to be used in your lab to run tests, or, do you buy them to do actual day to day tasks?

I also have been a fan of the HHDD as well as flash and DRAM based SSDs for many years (make that decades for SSDs) and see the opportunity to increase how I am actually using HDDs, HHDDs, SSDs as well as Removable Hard Disk Drives (RHDD) in conjunction with NAS, DAS and other storage to support my book writing as well as other projects that I have bought in the past.

What is the Seagate Momentus XT
The Seagate Momentus series of HDDs are positioned as desktop, notebook and laptop devices that vary in rotational speed (RPM), physical form factor, storage capacity as well as price. The XT is a Hybrid Hard Disk Drive (HHDD) that is essentially a best of breed (hence Hybrid) type device incorporating the high capacity and low cost of a traditional 2.5 7200 RPM HDD with performance boost of flash SSD memory. For example some initial testing of working with very large files have found that the XT can in some instances be as fast as a SSD while holding 10x the capacity with a favorable price.

In other words, an effective balance of cost per GByte capacity, cost per IOP and energy efficiency per IOP. This does not mean however that an XT should be used everywhere or for a replacement to DRAM or flash SSD quite to the contrary as those devices are good tools for specific needs or applications. Instead, the XT provides a good balance of performance and capacity to bridge the gap between traditional spinning HDDs price per capacity and performance per cost of SSD. (For those interested, here is a link to what Seagate is doing with SSD e.g. Pulsar in addition to HHDD and HDD).

Value proposition and business (or consumer) benefits moment
What is the benefit, why not just go all flash?

Simple and that is price unless your specific needs fit into the capacity space of an SSD and you need both the higher performance and lower energy draw (with subsequent heat generation). Note that I did not say heat elimination as during a recent quick test of copying 6GB of data to a flash based SSD it was warm just as the XT device was, however also a bit cooler than a comparable 7200 RPM 2.5 drive. If you can afford the full SSD flash or dram based device as well as it fits your needs and compatibility, go for it. However also make sure that you will see the full expected benefit of adding a SSD to your specific solutions as not all implementations are the same (e.g. do your homework).

Why not just go all HDD?

Simple, economics and performance which is why as I said back in 2005 that HHDDs had a very bright future and will IMHO drive a wedge between the traditional HDD and emerging flash based SSD markets at least for non consumer devices on a near term basis given their compatibility capabilities.

In other words, you could think of it as a compromise, or as a best of breed. For example I can see where for compatible not to mention cost and customer comfort ability of a known entity HHDD will gain some popularity in desktops, laptops, notebooks as well as other devices where a performance boost is needed however not at the expense of throwing out capacity or tight economic budgets.

I can also see some interesting scenarios for hosting virtual machines (VMs) to support server Virtualization with VMware, HyperV or Xen based solutions among others. Another scenario is for bulk storage or archive and backup solutions where the HHDD with their extended cache in the form of flash can help to boost performance of read or write operations on VTLs and dedupe devices, archive platforms, backup or other similar functions. Sure the Momentus XT is positioned as a desktop, notebook type device however has that ever stopped vendors or solution providers from using those types of devices in different roles other than what they were designed for? I am just sayin.

Speeds, feeds and buzzword bingo moment
Seagate has many different types of disk drives that can be found here. In general, the Momentus XT is a 2.5 small form factor (SFF) Hybrid Hard Disk Drive (HHDD) available in 500GB, 320GB and 250GB capacity (I have the 500GB model ST95005620AS) with 4GB SLC NAND (flash) SSD memory, 32MB of drive level cache, an underlying 7200RPM disk drive with SATA 3Gb/s interface including as well as Native Command Queuing (NCQ). Now if you want to say that the XT implements tiered storage in a single device (DRAM, flash and HDD) go ahead. Following are a couple of links of where you can learn more.

Seagate Seatools disk drive diagnostic software (free here)

Seagate FreeAgent Goflex Upgrade Cable (USB 3.0 to SATA 3 STAE104) (Seagate site and Amazon)

Seagate Momentus XT site with general information, product overview and data sheets as well as on Amazon

What does a Momentus XT have to do with writing a book?
If you have ever written a book, or for that matter, done a large development project of any type then things should be a bit familiar. These types of projects include the needs to keep organized as well as protected multiple copies of documents (a dedupers dream) including text, graphics or figures, spreadsheets not to mention project tracking material among others. Likewise as is the case with other authors who work for a living, much of these books are written, edited, proofed or thought about while traveling to different vents, client sites, conferences, meetings or on vacation for that matter. Hence the need to have multiple copies of data on different devices to help guard against when something happens (note that I did not say if).

This is nothing new as each of my last two solo book projects as well as when I was a coauthor contributing content to other books including The Resilient Enterprise (Veritas/Symantec). Much of the content was created while traveling relying on portable storage and backup while on the road. Something someone pointed out to me recently is that this is an example of eating your own dog food or eliminating the shoe makers children syndrome (where the shoe maker creates shoes for others however not for his own children).

Initial moments and general observations
From time to time I will post some notes and observations about how the Momentus XT is performing or behaving which if all goes as planned and so far has, it should be very transparent coexisting with some of my Removable Hard Disk Drives (RHDD) such as the Imation Odyssey which I bought several years ago for offsite bulk removable storage of data that goes to a secure vault somewhere.

Initial deployment other than a stupid mistake on my part has been smooth. What was the stupid mistake you ask? Simple, when I attached the drive via a USB 3.0 cable to SATA 3 connector to one of my XP SP3 systems, Windows saw the device however it did not show up in the list of available devices. Ok, I know I know, it was late in the evening however that is no excuse for realizing that the disk had not yet been initialized let alone formatted. A quick check using Seatools (free here) showed all was well. I then launched Windows Disk Manager, did the initialize, followed by format and all was good from that point on. Wow, wonder how much credibility I will lose over that gaff with the techno elite (that is a joke and a bit of humor btw).

I have already done some initial familiarization and compatibility testing with some of my other drives including a 2.5 64GB SATA flash SSD as well as a 2.5 7200RPM HDD both that I use for bulk data movement activities. At some point I also plan on attaching the XT to my Iomega IX4 NAS to try various things as I have done with other external devices in the past.

Granted these were not ideal conditions as I was in hurry and wanted to get some quick info. Given the probably less than ideal configuration as the format after the HDD was first initialized took about an hour using a FAT32 plug and play configuration. With NTFS and other optimizations I assume it can be better however this was again just to get an initial glimpse of the device in use.

Given that it is a HHDD that uses flash as a big buffer with a 500GB HDD plus 32MB of cache as a backing store, it was interesting attaching it to the computer, then waiting a few minutes, then launching a file copy. Where a normal HDD would start slightly vibrating due to rotation, it was a few moments before any vibration or noise was detected on the Momentus XT which should be of no surprise as the flash was doing its job acting as a buffer until the HDD spun up for work.

I did some initial file copying back and forth between different computers while LAN and NAS were busy doing other things including backups to the Mozy cloud. No discrete time or performance benchmarks to talk about yet, however overall, the XT not surprisingly does seem to be a bit faster than another external 7200 RPM 2.5 drive I use for bulk data moves both on reads and writes. Likewise, given that it is a hybrid HDD leveraging flash as an extended cache with an underlying HDD plus 32MB of cache, it may not always be as fast as my external 2.5 64GB flash SSD, however that is also a common apples to oranges comparison mistake (more on that in a future post).

For example, copying over 6GBytes of data (5 large files of various size) from a 7200 RPM 2.5 160GB Momentus drive in a laptop to the HHDD XT and a flash SSD both took about 8 to 9 minutes where as the normal copy to a 2.5 5400 RPM HDD takes at least 14 to 15 minutes if not longer. Note that these are very rough and far from accurate or reflective comparisons rather a quick gauge of benefits (e.g. getting data moved faster). When I get around to it, will do some more accurate comparisons and put into a follow up post. However I can see already where the XT has the performance similar to the SSD however with almost 10x the capacity which means it could possibly have an interesting role in supporting disk to disk (D2D) backups which I will give a try.

Eventually I will be removing the USB connector kit and actually installing the Momentus into a computer or two (not at the same time) however I am currently walking before running. Im still up in the air as to if I would install the XT into a computer with Windows XP SP3, or simply do a new install of Windows 7 on it to which Im open to thoughts, comments, feedback or applicable suggestions (besides switching to a Macbook or iPad).

Wrap up and fun moment

In the above photo, there is the Seagate Momentus (ST95005620AS), a Goflex USB 3.0 to SATA conversion attachment cable (docking device), a fortune cookie, couple of US quarters and Canadian two dollar coins (See out and about update), paper clips and fishing bobber on a note pad. Why the coins to show relative size and diversity across different geographies as this device will be traveling (it missed out on recent European trip to Holland).

Why the paper clips? Simple, why not, you never know when you will need one for something such as a MacGyver moment, or for pushing the tiny reset button on a device among other activities.

How about the fortune cookie? For good luck and I might need a quick snack while having a cup of coffee not to mention Chinese as well as Asian in general is one of my favorites cuisines to prepare or cook not to mention eat.

Oh, what about the fishing bobber? Why not, it was just laying around and you could also that Im fishing for information to see how the device fits into normal use or that it is there for fun or to add color to the photo.

Oh, and the note pad? Hmm, well, if you cannot figure that one out besides being a back drop, lets just say that the Momentus line in general as well as XT specifically are targeted for notebook, desktop, laptop or other deployment scenarios. If you still dont see the connection, ok fine, feel free to post a comment and I will happily clarify it for you.

That is all for the moment, however I will be following up with more soon.

In the meantime, enjoy your summer if in the northern hemisphere (or winter if in the south).

Take lots of photos, videos and make audio recordings to fill up those USB flash thumb drives (consumer SSD), SD memory cards, computer hard drives, cloud and online web hosting sites so that have you something to remember your special out and about moments by.

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz - Author The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

Two companies on parallel tracks moving like trains offset by time: EMC and NetApp

Thu, 1 Jul 2010 22:33:44

I see some similarities and parallels between two competing companies. Those companies happen to be in the same sector (e.g. IT data storage) however offset by time (about a decade or) subject to continued execution by both.

Those two companies are EMC and NetApp.

Some people might assert that these two companies are complete opposites. Perhaps claiming that one is on the up swing while the other on the down path (have heard claims and counter claims of both being on the other path). I will leave the discussion or debate of which is on the up and which is on the down path to the twittervile and blogsphere ultimate tag team mud wrestling arena or You Tube video rooms.

I see EMC and NetApp a bit differently which you can take it for what that is, simply an opinion or perspective having been the competitor and partner of both when I was on the vendor side of the table and later covering the two as an industry analyst.

Without going too far down the memory lane route, in a nut shell, I recall when EMC was still a fledgling startup who wanted to sell me (I was on the customer side at the time) rebranded Fujitsu disk drives to attach to my VAX/VMS systems and memory for our mainframes. Come to think about it, Emulex was also selling disk drives back then before reinventing themselves later as an HBA and hub vendor.

Later as a vendor, around late 94 or early 95, it was the up and coming small little bay area NAS filer appliance vendor (e.g. the toaster era) that we partnered with including a very brief OEM deal involving repackaging their product which was NetApp or Network Appliance as they were formerly known then. Once that ended after a year or so NetApp become a competitor as was EMC who at the time had as the main act the Symmetrix and about to do the EPOCH backup and McData acquisitions as well as landing the HP OEM deal for open systems.

Ironically NetApp was out to knock off Auspex which happened fairly quickly while EMC was struggling to get its NAS act together with the early DART behemoth while successfully knocking out IBM and other entrenched high end solutions. In a twist of fate, the company I was working for ended up selling off all of their RAID (initially a few, then later all of them) patents to EMC for some cash and later transitioned out of the hardware business becoming simply a VAR of EMC (that was MTI).

While at INRANGE which later merged into CNT before acquired by McData (I left before that) and then Brocade, both EMC and NetApp were partners across different product lines.

What they have in common
Ok, enough of the memory lane stuff; lets get back to where the similarities exist.

Back in the mid 90s, EMC was essentially a one trick pony with a very software feature function rich large storage system that sold for a premium generating lots of cash from its use of cache. Likewise, NetApp is currently a vendor that while it has many product offerings and has some acquisitions, still relies very much on their flagship NAS storage systems that are also feature function (e.g. software) rich that leverage cache to generate cash.

FTC Disclosure: I have in the past done projects with, for or in conjunction with via direct or third party involving both EMC, NetApp as well as some of their acquired companies however none are currently engaged as clients (nor as sponsors, underwriters, subscribers, contributors, endowments or other common means of masking renumeration). Likewise, nor did EMC sponsor or in any way cover my expenses to attend the recent EMCworld event (other than a group analyst hugs and chugs dinner) nor did I attend the recent NetApp Analyst hugs and chugs event. BTW, some of you will find the tongue in cheek humor in the above disclaimer, others who do not probably should.

Both companies are growing in terms of revenues, installed base, partners/OEMs and product diversity. Likewise each company needs to continue expansion into those as well as other adjacent areas.

Can NetApp catch EMC? Maybe, maybe not, however IMHO the question should be are there other areas that NetApp can extend its reach into causing EMC to react to those, similar to how EMC took advantage of opportunities causing IBM and others to react.

Here are some other similarities I see of and for EMC and NetApp:

Both have great outreach programs where information is provided without having to ask or dig in a proactive manner, yet when something is needed, they provide it without fanfare
Both are engaging at multiple levels, from customer, to financial and investors, to var, to partner, trade groups, to trade and other media, to analysts to social networking and beyond
Both are passionate about their companies, cultures, products, solutions and customers
Both can walk the talk, however both also like to talk and see the other balk
Both lead by example and not afraid to tell you what they think about something
Both embrace social media in connection with traditional mediums for communication with people as opposed to a giant megaphone for talking at or spamming people (when will other vendors figure that out?)

Both also are willing to hear what you have to say even if they do not agree with it
Neither is scared of the other (or at least not in public)
Both cause the other to play and execute a stronger game
Both are not above throwing a mud ball or fire cracker at the other
Both are not above burying the hatchet and getting along when or where needed
Both compete vigorously on some fronts, yet partner (publicly or privately) on other fronts
Both have been direct focused with some vars and some OEMs
Both started somewhere else and now going and moving to different places and in some ways returning to their roots or at least making sure they are not forgotten
Both are synonymous with their core focus products and background
One comes from a open systems focus working to establish itself in the enterprise
One comes from the enterprise establishing itself in SOHO, SMB and other spaces
Both have many solutions, some would say long in the tooth, others would say revolutionary
Both are growing via organic growth as well as acquisition and partnering
Both have developed leadership along with rank and file employees internal
Both have gone outside and brought in leadership and skilled players to expand their employee ranks
Both have celebrity leaders and team role players to support and back then up
Both also have deep benches and technical folks in the trenches to get things done
Both are very much involved with server virtualization (Microsoft and VMware)
Both are very much involved in storage virtualization and associated management
Both are involved with cloud solutions for enabling public or private storage
Both are independent storage vendors not part of a larger server organization
Both have interoperability programs with other vendors servers and software and networks
Both also get beat up about their pricing models for extensive software feature function portfolios associated with respective storage solutions
Both get criticized by customers or the industry as is often the case of market leaders

What I see EMC needing to do

Articulate where their multiple products and services fit and play into their different target market opportunities while worrying less about the color hue of logos or video backgrounds
Avoiding competing with itself or becoming its own major or main competitor
Clarify cloud (public and private) cloud confusion transitioning into cloud cash and opportunity
Minimize or eliminate channel contention and confusion internally and across partners
Remember where they came from and core competences however avoid a death grip on them
Look to the future, leverage lessons learned that helped EMC succeed where others failed
EMC needs NetApp as a strong NAS competitor as each plays stronger when against the other. This is similar to watching world class athletes, artists or musicians that step up their games or works when paired with another

What I see NTAP needing to do

Doing an acquisition in an adjacent space, perhaps even a reverse merger of sorts to move up and out into a broader space that compliments their core offerings. For example, something outside of the normal comfort zone which arguably Datadomain would have been close to their comfort zone. Likewise acquiring a software player such as Commvault would be similar to EMC having acquired Legato, Documentum and so forth. That is NetApp would have to do a series of those. So why not something really big like a reverse merger or partial acquisition of say Symantecs data protection and management group (aka the old Veritas suite including backup, management tools, clustered file server software, volume managers etc).
In addition to adjacent acquisition, opportunities plays such as the recent Bycast move makes sense however then those need to be integrated and rolled out similar to what EMC has done with so many of their purchases.
Minimize or eliminate channel contention and confusion both internal across products and with partners.
NetApp started at the lower end SMB, grew into the SME and now enterprise place, however they tried with the StorVault and backed out of that market leaving it to EMC Iomega, Cisco, HP, Dell and others. Maybe they do not need a low end play, however I rather liked the low end StorVault story as well as where it was going. Oh well, needless to say I ended up buying an EMC Iomega IX4 as the StorVault left the market. Hmm, does that mean NetApp should acquire SNAP or Drobo or some other low end SOHO play? Only if the price is right and there is a existing customer base and channel in place otherwise it would be a distraction from the core business. BTW, did I mention EMC Legato, oh excuse me, Networker came from the desktop and SMB environment however grew to the enterprise (yes I know, that is debatable) however now is difficult to put into SOHO environments.
Does NetApp need a stronger block storage play, perhaps a 3PAR acquisition? Maybe, perhaps not depending on if they are competing for todays market or tomorrows.
Does NetApp need to be acquired? I think they can stay independent; however they need to expand their presence and footprint from a product, partner and customer perspective.
NetApp needs a strong NAS competitor in the likes of an EMC as the competition IMHO makes each stronger as well as providing competition which should play well for customers. Not to mention the back and forth mud ball and fire cracker tossing can be entertaining for some.

What is your take?

Are EMC and NetApp two companies on parallel tracks offset by time and perhaps execution?

Click here to read more as well as cast your vote on if they are similar paths or not.

Nuff said about this for now.

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz - Author The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

Gregs StorageIO Out and About Update: June 2010

Tue, 29 Jun 2010 00:33:44

With the 2010 summer solstice having occurred in the northern hemisphere that means it is time for a quick out and about update. It has been a busy winter and spring in the office, on the road as well as at home.

Some results of this recent activity have appeared in blog, on my web site as well as via other sites and venues. For example, activity or content ranges from Industry Trends and Perspectives white papers, reports, blogs, newsletter commentary, interviews, Internet TV, videos, web cast, pod casts (including several appearances on StorageMonkeys Infosmack as well as Rich Brambleys Virtumania), ask the expert (ATE) questions, twitter tweets, tips and columns. Then there were the many in person presentations, key note and seminar events, conferences, briefing sessions along with virtual conferencing and advisory consulting sessions (read and see more here).

Regarding having new content appearing in different or new venues, Silicon Angle (including a video), Newstex and Enterprise Efficiencies join the long list of industry and vertical, traditional along with new world venues that my content as well as industry trends and perspective commentary appear in. Read more about events and activities here, content here or commentary here.

Speaking of books, there is also some news in that The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC) is now available on Amazon Kindle (click on links below) as well as having been translated and published in China not to mention having undergone another round of printing keeping up with demand to make more copies available via global venues.

As for what am I seeing and hearing, check out the new series of Industry Trends and Perspective (ITP) short blog posts that compliment other posts as well as content found on the main web site. These ITP pieces capture what I am hearing and seeing (that is of those what I can talk about that are not under NDA of course) while out and about.

Some of the cities that I have been at while out and about doing keynote speaking and seminar events as well as for other meetings have included Minneapolis, Miami, San Diego, Beverly Hills, San Jose, San Diego (again), Hollywood (again), Austin, Miami (again), New York City, Reston, Minneapolis (again), Irvine, New York City (again), Boston, Toronto, Atlanta, Chicago, Columbus, Philadelphia, Mountain View, Mahtomedia (Minneapolis area), Boston (again) and Indianapolis, Calgary, Jasper (Alberta), Vancouver in Canada as well as Nijkerk (Netherlands) for a one day seminar covering Industry Trends and Perspectives in addition to changing planes in Atlanta, Detroit, Memphis and Las Vegas.

The Planes should be obvious, however what about automobiles you ask? How about the following taken from my rental car while driving north of LAX on the 405 after a January storm during my trip from San Diego after a morning event to Beverly Hills to do an evening keynote.

Driving north of LAX on the 405 with a rainbow after rain storm

Another car trip a few weeks later after a different event in San Diego I had a driver from a service behind the wheel so that I could get some work done before an evening meeting. Also on the car front, after flying into Indianapolis there was a car ride to Indianapolis Motor Speedway (IMS) to do a keynote for a CDW sponsored event in gasoline alley a few days before the big race there. While we are on the topic of automobiles and technology, if you have not seen it, check out a post I did about what NAS, NASA and NASCAR have in common.

What about trains you ask?

Besides the normal airport trams or trains, there was a fun Amtrak Acela ride from New York City Penn station after a morning event in the city up to Boston so as to be in place for a morning event the next day. Other train activity besides airport, subway or commuter light rail in the US and Europe (Holland), there was also an overnight trip on VIA Rail Canada the Canadian from Jasper Alberta to Vancouver (some business tied into a long weekend). If you have never been to the Canadian Rockies, let alone traveled via train, check this one, it was a blast and I highly recommend it.

Lake Louise and Jasper area bear family in Alberta Canada

It just dawned on me, what about any out and about via boats?

Other than the Boston water taxi to Logan Airport from the convention center where EMCworld was held and that I did an Internet TV interview along with @Stu and @Scott_Lowe, boat activity has been so far relegated to relaxation.

However, as all work and no play could make for a dull boy (or girl), I can update you that the out and about via boat fishing and sightseeing activity has been very good so far this fall even with high (then low, then high) water on the scenic St. Croix river way.

Here are some scenes from out and about on the St. Croix river including an eagle in its nest tending to its young who can not be seen in this photo as well as fishing (and catching and releasing).

In between travels (as well as during on planes, trains and in hotel rooms) as well as relaxation breaks, I have been also working on several other projects. Some of these can be seen on the news or tips and articles as well as video and pod cast pages in addition to custom research as well as advisory consulting services. I have also been working on some other projects some of which will become visible over the next weeks and months, others not for a longer period of time yet and yet others that fall under the NDA category so that is all I have to say about that.

If you are not receiving or have seen them, the inaugural issue of the Server and StorageIO newsletter appeared in late February followed by the second edition (Spring 2010) this past week. Both can be found here and here as well as at www.storageio.com/newsletter or subscribing via newsletter@storageio.com.

A question I often get asked is what am I hearing or seeing particularly with regards to IT customers as well as with vars during my travels. Here are some photos covering some of the things that I have seen so far this year while out and about.

Super TV or Visualization device at Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) in Austin
Note all of the dell servers side by side under the screens required to drive the image.

Taking a walk inside a supercomputer (left) and Texas Supercomputer (Note the horns)

Microsoft Technology Center (MTC)

View from the back of the plane (left), Airplane long haul essentials: water, food, ipod, coffee, eye shades

Boats in Holland taken after dinner before recent seminar I did in Nijkerk

Dutch Soccer (Pub) food and snacks being enjoyed after a recent seminar in Nijkerk

Airport waiting for planes in AMS (left), more airplane snacks and a map (right)

As to what am I seeing and hearing pertaining to IT, storage, networking and server trends or issues they include among others (see the newsletter):

Whats on deck and and that I am working on?

Having had a busy fun winter and spring Im going to get some relaxation time in during a couple of week period of no travel, however there is plenty to do and get ready for. The summer months will slow down a bit on the out and about travel events scene, however not to a complete stop. In between preparing for upcoming events, advisory and consulting activities as well as researching new material and topics not to mention working on some projects that you will see or hear more about in the weeks and months to come.

For example I will be a guest on a webcast sponsored by Viridity discussing the importance of data center metrics, measurement and insight for effective management to enable energy efficient and effective data centers on July 8th. In addition, I will also be doing another five city storage virtualization series in Stamford, Cleveland, Miami, Tampa and Louisville during mid to late July among other upcoming activities including VMworld in San Francisco.

Check out the events page for more details, specific dates and venues.

What about you?

What have you been doing or have planned for your summer?

Let me know what you are seeing or hearing as well as have been doing.

In the meantime however keep these hints and tips in mind:

Have plenty of reading material (real physical books or magazines) or virtual (Kindle or other) as well as via Internet or online to read while at the beach (make sure your computer or PDA is backed up), pool side, in the backyard or elsewhere
Remember your eye shades (sun glasses or eye wear), hat and sun screen and if applicable, inspect or bug repellant (e.g. RAID is still useful)

Drink plenty of liquid fluids while outside in the summer heat including non alcoholic ones that do not have umbrellas or other interesting garnish
Have a place to backup and protect all those summer photos, videos and audio clips that you record while on your out and about adventure. However, keep in mind privacy concerns when uploading them to various social mediums. After all, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas and what happens on the web stays on the web!

Thanks to everyone involved in the recent events which can be seen here, as well for those who will be participating in upcoming ones I look forward to meeting and talking with you.

Until next time have a fun, safe and relaxing summer if you are in the northern hemisphere and for those down under, not to worry, spring is on the way soon for you as well.

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz - Author The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

Follow via Google Feedburner here or via email subscription here.

Supreme Court Rules Sarbox intact, Oversight Board Changes

Mon, 28 Jun 2010 15:43:21

Today the US Supreme Court ruled on a Nevada case involving constitutionality of the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley (Sarbox) accounting regulations pertaining to appointments to the independent public company accounting oversight board.

The Supreme Court ruled that the Sarbox regulations or law remains intact, however the process or controls around the oversight board must change.

My interpretation and perspective from reading a few different reports is that Sarbox as you know and love (or hate) it is essentially still intact. However what has changed or will be is that individual board members can now be removed or at least in an easier manner.Instead of the request to strike down the Sarbox regulations, the Supreme Court instead appears to have left the regulations intact instead ruling that board members can be changed or removed.

What does this all mean?

Perhaps not much other than firms who have been making money on Sarbox now having something else to talk or consult about (Hmmm, a Sarbox stimulus?).

On the other hand, with the ability to have Sarbox board members more easily removed, perhaps we will see a new board installed that could influence the thinking and thus applicability of Sarbox activity.

Near term, I can see this as being non news for some, and for others, confusion and lets not forget that in chaos or confusion there is opportunity.

Here are some links to read more

US Supreme Court website and other news

Supreme Court to Hear Challenge to Accounting Board

Court Strikes Down Part of Sarbanes-Oxley

Nuff said about this for now, whats your take?

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz - Author The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

Initial Virtumania Appearance (Episode 14) with fellow vExperts

Thu, 10 Jun 2010 20:12:34

This past week I was invited to join some fellow vExperts as a first time guest on Rich Brambleys (@rbrambley and VMETC) podcast show called Virtumania.

Episode 14 (Virtualization and Networking Turf Wars) had as a theme as you can guest themes around physical, logical and virtual networking for virtual servers along with some of the politics and turf battles associated with managing those entities.

Also on the show were cohost Marc Farley (@3parfarley) of 3Par and StorageRap.com as well as regular guest Rick Vanover (@rickvanover) of RickVanover.com and other special guest David Davis (@davidmdavis) vmwarevideos.com in addition to myself.

For some fun, there is even some reference to rival gangs dancing for superiority in the Michael Jackson music video "Bad" which was produced by Greg Knieriemen (@knieriemen) of Chi Corporation for this Infosmack Production.

Check out the show here or here.

BTW: Is it just me or does Rich Brambley sound a little bit like Tom Petty without the accent?

Thanks guys, enjoyed being a guest on the show as well as talking with you all, hope to be able to do it again sometime soon.

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz - Author The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

VMware vExpert 2010: Thank You, Im Honored to be named a Member

Thu, 10 Jun 2010 20:12:34

This week while traveling I received an email note from John Troyer of VMware informing me that I have been nominated and selected as a VMware vExpert for 2010.

To say that I was surprised and honored would be an understatement.

Thus, I would like to thank all those involved in the nominations, evaluation and selection process for being named to this esteemed group.

I would also like to say congratulations, best wishes and hello to all of the other 2010 vExperts. Im Looking forward to being involved and participating in the VMware vExpert community.

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz - Author The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

June 2010 StorageIO Newsletter

Tue, 1 Jun 2010 01:23:45

June 2010 Newsletter

Welcome to the June 2010 edition of the Server and StorageIO Group (StorageIO) newsletter. This follows the Spring 2010 edition building on the great feedback received from recipients.
Items that are new in this expanded edition include:

Out and About Update
Industry Trends and Perspectives (ITP)
Featured Article

You can access this news letter via various social media venues (some are shown below) in addition to StorageIO web sites and subscriptions. Click on the following links to view the June 2010 edition as an HTML or PDF or, to go to the newsletter page to view previous editions.

Follow via Goggle Feedburner here or via email subscription here.

You can also subscribe to the news letter by simply sending an email to newsletter@storageio.com

Enjoy this edition of the StorageIO newsletter, let me know your comments and feedback.

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz - Author The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

Industry Trends and Perspectives Blog Series

Thu, 27 May 2010 04:30:20

This is the first in a series of ongoing short industry trends and perspectives blog post briefs. These short posts compliment other longer posts along with traditional industry trends and perspective white papers, research reports, solution brief content found at www.storageio.com/reports.

I often get asked by people what Im seeing or hearing new (aka what is the Buzz).

Sometimes when I tell those who ask about new things or what they have not read or heard about yet, I get interesting as well as varied sometimes even funny reactions. In most cases unless the person does not agree or like the trend, the reaction shifts to one of wanting to know more including what is driving or causing the activity, its impact along with what can be done.

As some are new or emerging they may not yet be being covered in other venues, research, surveys, studies or reports. Thus do not be surprised or alarmed if there is something listed here or in one of the subsequent series post that you have not seen or read elsewhere yet while others may already be familiar. Some are emerging trends perhaps even being short lived while others will have longer legs to evolve.

Some general trends that I am seeing and hearing from IT professionals include:

Click on the above links to read more about these the first in a series of quick Industry Trends and Perspectives posts as well as watch for more in the coming weeks and months.

That is all for now. I hope you find these ongoing series of current or emerging Industry Trends and Perspectives interesting.

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz - Author The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

Industry Trends and Perspectives: 6Gb SAS

Thu, 27 May 2010 04:30:20

Blog: Industry Trends and Perspectives: 6GB SAS and DAS are not Dumb A$$ Storage

This is part of an ongoing series of short industry trends and perspectives blog posts briefs.

These short posts compliment other longer posts along with traditional industry trends and perspective white papers, research reports, solution brief content found at www.storageio.com/reports.

With 6G that increases performance as well as connectivity flexibility, more servers are supporting SAS natively while storage system continue to add support for 3.5" and 2.5" small form factor high performance and large capacity SAS drives. Shared SAS DAS storage systems are being deployed for consolidation attached to two or more servers as well as for clustered solutions.

Another area where shared SAS DAS storage is being deployed is in cloud, scale out NAS and bulk storage environments as a price performance alternative to iSCSI or Fibre Channel solutions.

Keep an eye on these and other trends including converged systems, server, storage and networking management along with associated tools.

Related and companion material:
Article: Green and SASy = Energy and Economic, Effective Storage
Article: The Many Faces of SAS: Beyond the DAS Factor

That is all for now, hope you find this ongoing series of current and emerging Industry Trends and Perspectives interesting.

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz - Author The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

Industry Trends and Perspectives: Tiered Hypervisors and Microsoft HyperV

Thu, 27 May 2010 04:30:20

Blog: Industry Trends and Perspectives: 6GB SAS and DAS are not Dumb A$$ Storage

This is part of an ongoing series of short industry trends and perspectives blog posts briefs.

These short posts compliment other longer posts along with traditional industry trends and perspective white papers, research reports, solution brief content found at www.storageio.com/reports.

The topic of this post is a trend that I am seeing and hearing about during discussions with IT professionals pertaining to the use of two or more server virtualization hypervisors or what is known as tiered Hypervisors.

A trends tied to server virtualization that I am seeing more of are that IT organizations are increasingly deploying or using two or more different hypervisors (e.g. Citrix/Xen, Microsoft/HyperV, VMware vSphere) in their environment (on separate physical server or blades).

Tiered hypervisors is a concept similar to what many IT organizations already have in terms of different types of servers for various use cases, multiple operating systems as well as several kinds of storage mediums or devices.

What Im seeing is that IT pros are using different hypervisors to meet various cost, management and vendor control objectives aligning the applicable technology to the business or application service category.

Of course this brings up the discussion of how to manage multiple hypervisors and thus the real battle is or will be not about hypervisors, rather that of End to End (E2E) management.

A question that I often ask VARs and IT customers if they see Microsoft on the offensive or defensive with HyperV vs. VMware and vice versa, that is if VMware is on the defense or offense against Microsoft.

Not surprisingly the VMware and Microsoft faithful will say that the other is clearly on the defensive.

Meanwhile from other people, the feelings are rather mixed with many feeling that Microsoft is increasingly on the offensive with VMware being seen by some as playing a strong defense with a ferocious offense.

Related and companion material:
Video: Beyond Virtualization Basics (Free: May require registration)
Blog: Server and Storage Virtualization: Life beyond Consolidation
Blog: Should Everything Be Virtualized?

That is all for now, hope you find this ongoing series of current and emerging Industry Trends and Perspectives interesting.

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz - Author The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

Industry Trends and Perspectives: Storage Virtualization and Virtual Storage

Thu, May 27 2010 04:30:20

This is part of an ongoing series of short industry trends and perspectives blog posts briefs.

These short posts compliment other longer posts along with traditional industry trends and perspective white papers, research reports, solution brief content found at www.storageio.com/reports.

The topic of this post is a trend server virtualization and recent EMC virtual storage announcements.

Virtual storage or storage virtualization has been as a technology and topic around for some time now. Some would argue that storage virtualization is several years old while others would say many decades depending on your view or definition which will vary by preferences, product, vendor, open or closed, hardware, network, software not to mention feature and functionality.

Consequently there are many different views and definitions of storage virtualization some tied to that of product specifications often leading to apples and oranges comparison.

Back in the early to mid 2000s, there was plenty of talk around storage virtualization which then gave way to a relative quiet period before seeing adoption pickup in terms of deployment later in the decade (at least for block based).

More recently there has a been a renewed flurry of storage virtualization activity with many vendors now shipping their latest versions of tools and functionality, EMC announcing VPLEX as well as the file virtualization vendors continuing to try and create a market for their wares (give it time, like block based, it will evolve).

One of the trends around storage virtualization and part of the play on words EMC is using is to change the order of the words. That is where storage virtualization is often aligned with product implementation (e.g. software on an appliance or switch or in a storage system) used primarily for aggregation of heterogeneous storage, with VPLEX EMC is referring to it as virtual storage.

What is interesting here is the play on life beyond consolidation a trend that is also occurring with servers or using virtualization for agility, flexibility and ease of management for upgrades, add, move and changes as opposed to simply pooling of LUNs and underlying storage devices. Stay tuned and watch for more in this space as well as read the blog post below about VPLEX for more on this topic.

Related and companion material:
Blog: EMC VPLEX: Virtual Storage Redefined or Respun?

That is all for now, hope you find this ongoing series of current and emerging Industry Trends and Perspectives interesting.

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz - Author The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

Industry Trends and Perspectives: Converged Networking and IO Virtualization (IOV)

Thu, 27 May 2010 04:30:20

This is part of an ongoing series of short industry trends and perspectives blog posts briefs.

These short posts compliment other longer posts along with traditional industry trends and perspective white papers, research reports, solution brief content found at www.storageio.com/reports.

The trends that I am seeing with converged networking and I/O fall into a couple of categories. One being converged networking including unified communications, FCoE/DCB along with InfiniBand based discussions while the other being around I/O virtualization (IOV) including PCIe server based multi root IO virtualization (MRIOV).

As is often the case with new technologies the trend of some saying these are the next great things thus drop everything and adopt them now as they are working and ready for prime time mission critical deployment. Then there are those who say no, stop, do not waste your time on these as they are temporary, they will die and go away anyway. In between, there is reality which takes a bit of balancing the old with the new, look before you leap, do your homework, and do not be scared however have a strategy and a plan on how to achieve it.

Thus is FCoE a temporal or temporary technology? Well, in the scope that all technologies are temporary however it is their temporal timeframe that should be of interest. Thus given that FCoE will probably have at least a ten to fifteen year temporal timeline, I would say in technology terms it has a relative long life for supporting coexistence on the continued road to convergence which appears to be Ethernet.

That is all for now, hope you find this ongoing series of current and emerging Industry Trends and Perspectives interesting.

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz - Author The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

Industry Trends and Perspectives: Tape, Disk and Dedupe Coexistence

Thu, May 27 2010 04:30:20

This is part of an ongoing series of short industry trends and perspectives blog posts briefs.

These short posts compliment other longer posts along with traditional industry trends and perspective white papers, research reports, solution brief content found at www.storageio.com/reports.

The topic of this post is a trend that I am seeing and hearing about during discussions with IT professionals pertaining to how tape is still alive despite common industry FUD.

Not only is tape still very much alive with recent enhancements including LTO5 with an extended range roadmap, it is also finding new roles. In addition to being deployed in new roles, tape is coexisting and complimenting dedupe or other disk based backup and data protection approaches and vice versa.

Hearing tape is alive in the same sentence as dedupe deployments continuing may sound counter intuitive if you only listen to some vendor pitches.

However if you talk with IT customers particularly those in larger environments or with VARs that provide complete solution offering focus you will hear a different tune than tape is dead and dedupe rules. Tape is still alive however its roll is changing. Watch for more on this and related topics.

That is all for now, hope you find this ongoing series of current and emerging Industry Trends and Perspectives interesting.

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz - Author The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

Industry Trends and Perspectives: RAID Rebuild Rates

Thu, 27 May 2010 04:30:20

This is part of an ongoing series of short industry trends and perspectives blog posts briefs.

These short posts compliment other longer posts along with traditional industry trends and perspective white papers, research reports, solution brief content found at www.storageio.com/reports.

There is continued concern about how long large capacity disk drives take to be rebuilt in RAID sets particularly as the continued shift from 1TB to 2TB occurs. It should not be a surprise that a disk with more capacity will take longer to rebuild or copy as well as with more drives; the likely hood of one failing statistically increases.

Not to diminish the issue, however also to avoid saying the sky is falling, we have been here before! In the late 90s and early 2000s there was a similar concern with the then large 9GB, 18GB let alone emerging 36GB and 72GB drives. There have been improvements in RAID as well as rebuild algorithms along with other storage system software or firmware enhancements not to mention boost in processor or IO bus performance.

However not all storage systems are equal even if they use the same underlying processors, IO busses, adapters or disk drives. Some vendors have made significant improvements in their rebuild times where each generation of software or firmware can reconstruct a failed drive faster. Yet for others, each subsequent iteration of larger capacity disk drives brings increased rebuild times.

If disk drive rebuild times are a concern, ask your vendor or solution provider what they are doing as well as have done over the past several years to boost their performance. Look for signs of continued improvement in rebuild and reconstruction performance as well as decrease in error rates or false drive rebuilds.

Related and companion material:
Blog: RAID data protection remains relevant
Blog: Optimize Data Storage for Performance and Capacity Efficiency

That is all for now, hope you find this ongoing series of current and emerging Industry Trends and Perspectives interesting.

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz - Author The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

Industry Trends and Perspectives: Tiered Storage, Systems and Mediums

Thu, May 27 2010 04:30:20

This is part of an ongoing series of short industry trends and perspectives blog posts briefs.

These short posts compliment other longer posts along with traditional industry trends and perspective white papers, research reports, solution brief content found at www.storageio.com/reports.

Two years ago we read about how the magnetic disk drive would be dead in a couple of years at the hand of flash SSD. Guess what, it is a couple of years later and the magnetic disk drive is far from being dead. Granted high performance Fibre Channel disks will continue to be replaced by high performance, small form factor 2.5" SAS drives along with continued adoption of high capacity SAS and SATA devices.

Likewise, SSD or flash drives continue to be deployed, however outside of iPhone, iPod and other consumer or low end devices, nowhere near the projected or perhaps hoped for level. Rest assured the trend Im seeing and hearing from IT customers is that some will continue to look for places to strategically deploy SSD where possible, practical and affordable, there will continue to be a roll for disk and even tape devices on a go forward basis.

Also watch for more coverage and discussion around the emergence of the Hybrid Hard Disk Drive (HHDD) that was discussed about four to five years ago. The HHDD made an appearance and then quietly went away for some time, perhaps more R and D time in the labs while flash SSD garnered the spotlight.

There could be a good opportunity for HHDD technology leveraging the best of both worlds that is continued pricing decreases for disk with larger capacity using smaller yet more affordable amounts of flash in a solution that is transparent to the server or storage controller making for easier integration.

That is all for now, hope you find this ongoing series of current and emerging Industry Trends and Perspectives interesting.

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz - Author The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

Industry Trends and Perspectives: Public and Private IT Clouds

Thu, 27 May 2010 04:30:20

This is part of an ongoing series of short industry trends and perspectives blog posts briefs.

These short posts compliment other longer posts along with traditional industry trends and perspective white papers, research reports, solution brief content found at www.storageio.com/reports.

Are you clear on cloud conversation issues, topics and trends? Or, are you confused and looking for clarification of what is (or not) a public vs. private cloud? If you are part of the second group, welcome to the majority of IT professionals that includes customers as well as some VARs and vendors not to mention press, media or bloggers as well as analysts and other industry pundits.

A couple of customer trends that Im seeing are that public clouds in terms of backup as a service (BaaS), Backup Service Provider (BSP), Managed Service Provider (MSP), Cloud Backup Service (CBS) or hosted backup among other terms or acronyms continues to be popular for smaller consumer, SOHO and SMB as well as ROBO environments with some larger scale adoption. Likewise there continues to be some early adoption of cloud archive however this is mainly as a storage target or medium where data goes.

Some vendors or VARs are touting cloud archive as the silver bullet for cloud adoption however unless they can address the fundamental archive challenge all they are doing is competing on price to shift the location of where data gets parked. The real archive challenge is not necessarily the hardware where data is housed or its subsequent management, nor is the real cost or barrier archiving software for databases, email or file systems.

The real or more common barrier is that of someone identifying and approving not to mention indemnifying those involved of what can be moved when, where as well as for how long. This means that professional services and business buy in for establishment of policies along with tools for classifying applications and data are needed. Thus before automated movement and migration tools to leverage various tiers of local and remote including cloud archive storage can be used, the fundamental barriers to archive need to be addressed.

Im also seeing continued skepticism in addition to confusion around clouds in general, however there is also curiosity wanting to know or learn more about clouds and traditional IT coexisting. Consequently Im seeing while still low, more interest in private clouds by IT professionals as it is closer to their real world.

The common theme around interest in private clouds is that of enhancing IT efficient and effectiveness along with service delivery. Thus there is a growing interest in identifying costs of providing a given level of service that meets various RTO, RPO, QoS and other SLA objectives.

Likewise, Im seeing more interest around public clouds by vendors, investors or some business where the focus is more around near term monetization or addressing an opportunity when seen. Public clouds tend to be more fun for the industry to talk about or speculate upon compared to legacy boring IT (at least in the minds of those outside of core IT).

There are many different types as well as definition of clouds based on various products, initiatives and viewpoints. By their nature and how clouds have been used as a metaphor or symbol for abstracting complex items in IT for decades. Consequently, similar to virtualization which also has multiple meanings it should be no surprise that there is cloud confusion. After all, in chaos and confusion there is opportunity for the industry at large to develop and provide services or products that need to be promoted and marketed which require coverage and discussion along with advice or consultation as well as implementation.

With all of the conversations around cloud as a metaphor for describing IT services, products and functions, that could beg the question of if these different approaches are a Stairway to Heaven, Hotel California (you can check in however never leave), Road to Hell or Highway to Hell or perhaps a journey to Yellow Brick Road.

My general thinking and perception of both public and private IT clouds continues to be that of dont be scared, however look before you leap. Look at how cloud IT are not a replacement, rather are a compliment to your existing environment as another tier of resource (server, storage, network, software or other service) used to address various needs or issues. Likewise is private cloud another name for in sourcing of IT?

That is all for now, hope you find this ongoing series of current and emerging Industry Trends and Perspectives interesting.

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz - Author The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

EMC VPLEX: Virtual Storage Redefined or Respun?

Mon, 10 May 2010 15:43:21

In a flurry of announcements that coincide with EMCworld occurring in Boston this week of May 10 2010 EMC officially unveiled the Virtual Storage vision initiative (aka twitter hash tag of #emcvs) and initial VPLEX product. The Virtual Storage initiative was virtually previewed back in March (See my previous post here along with one from Stu Miniman (twitter @stu) of EMC here or here) and according to EMC the VPLEX product was made generally available (GA) back in April.

The Virtual Storage vision and associated announcements consisted of:

Virtual Storage vision Big picture initiative view of what and how to enable private clouds
VPLEX architecture Big picture view of federated data storage management and access
First VPLEX based product Local and campus (Metro to about 100km) solutions
Glimpses of how the architecture will evolve with future products and enhancements

Figure 1: EMC Virtual Storage and Virtual Server Vision and Big Pictures

The Big Picture
The EMC Virtual Storage vision (Figure 1) is the foundation of a private IT cloud which should enable characteristics including transparency, agility, flexibility, efficient, always on, resiliency, security, on demand and scalable. Think of it this way, EMC wants to enable and facilitate for storage what is being done by server virtualization hypervisor vendors including VMware (which happens to be owned by EMC), Microsoft HyperV and Citrix/Zen among others. That is, break down the physical barriers or constraints around storage similar to how virtual servers release applications and their operating systems from being tied to a physical server.

While the current focus of desktop, server and storage virtualization has been focused on consolidation and cost avoidance, the next big wave or phase is life beyond consolidation where the emphasis expands to agility, flexibility, ease of use, transparency, and portability (Figure 2). In the next phase which puts an emphasis around enablement and doing more with what you have while enhancing business agility focus extends from how much can be consolidated or the number of virtual machines per physical machine to that of using virtualization for flexibility, transparency (read more here and here or watch here).

Figure 2: Virtual Storage Big Picture

That same trend will be happening with storage where the emphasis also expands from how much data can be squeezed or consolidated onto a given device to that of enabling flexibility and agility for load balancing, BC/DR, technology upgrades, maintenance and other routine Infrastructure Resource Management (IRM) tasks.

For EMC, achieving this vision (both directly for storage, and indirectly for servers via their VMware subsidiary) is via local and distributed (metro and wide area) federation management of physical resources to support virtual data center operations. EMC building blocks for delivering this vision including VPLEX, data and storage management federation across EMC and third party products, FAST (fully automated storage tiering), SSD, data protection and data footprint reduction and data protection management products among others.

Buzzword bingo aside (e.g. LAN, SAN, MAN, WAN, Pots and Pans) along with Automation, DWDM, Asynchronous, BC, BE or Back End, Cache coherency, Cache consistency, Chargeback, Cluster, db loss, DCB, Director, Distributed, DLM or Distributed Lock Management, DR, Foe or Fibre Channel over Ethernet, FE or Front End, Federated, FAST, Fibre Channel, Grid, HyperV, Hypervisor, IRM or Infrastructure Resource Management, I/O redirection, I/O shipping, Latency, Look aside, Metadata, Metrics, Public/Private Cloud, Read ahead, Replication, SAS, Shipping off to Boston, SRA, SRM, SSD, Stale Reads, Storage virtualization, Synchronization, Synchronous, Tiering, Virtual storage, VMware and Write through among many other possible candidates the big picture here is about enabling flexibility, agility, ease of deployment and management along with boosting resource usage effectiveness and presumably productivity on a local, metro and future global basis.

Figure 3: EMC Storage Federation and Enabling Technology Big Picture

The VPLEX Big Picture
Some of the tenants of the VPLEX architecture (Figure 3) include a scale out cluster or grid design for local and distributed (metro and wide area) access where you can start small and evolve as needed in a predictable and deterministic manner.

Figure 4: Generic Virtual Storage (Local SAN and MAN/WAN) and where VPLEX fits

The VPLEX architecture is targeted towards enabling next generation data centers including private clouds where ease and transparency of data movement, access and agility are essential. VPLEX sits atop existing EMC and third party storage as a virtualization layer between physical or virtual servers and in theory, other storage systems that rely on underlying block storage. For example in theory a NAS (NFS, CIFS, and AFS) gateway, CAS content archiving or Object based storage system or purpose specific database machine could sit between actual application servers and VPLEX enabling multiple layers of flexibility and agility for larger environments.

At the heart of the architecture is an engine running a highly distributed data caching algorithm that uses an approach where a minimal amount of data is sent to other nodes or members in the VPLEX environment to reduce overhead and latency (in theory boosting performance). For data consistency and integrity, a distributed cache coherency model is employed to protect against stale reads and writes along with load balancing, resource sharing and failover for high availability. A VPLEX environment consists of a federated management view across multiple VPLEX clusters including the ability to create a stretch volume that is accessible across multiple VPLEX clusters (Figure 5).

Figure 5: EMC VPLEX Big Picture

Figure 6: EMC VPLEX Local with 1 to 4 Engines

Each VPLEX local cluster (Figure 6) is made up of 1 to 4 engines (Figure 7) per rack with each engine consisting of two directors each having 64GByte of cache, localized compute Intel processors, 16 Front End (FE) and 16 Back End (BE) Fibre Channel ports configured in a high availability (HA). Communications between the directors and engines is Fibre Channel based. Meta data is moved between the directors and engines in 4K blocks to maintain consistency and coherency. Components are fully redundant and include phone home support.

Figure 7: EMC VPLEX Engine with redundant directors

VPLEX initially host servers supported include VMware, Cisco UCS, Windows, Solaris, IBM AIX, HPUX and Linux along with EMC PowerPath and Windows multipath management drivers. Local server clusters supported include Symantec VCS, Microsoft MSCS and Oracle RAC along with various volume mangers. SAN fabric connectivity supported includes Brocade and Cisco as well as Legacy McData based products.

VPLEX also supports cache (Figure 8 ) write thru to preserve underlying array based functionality and performance with 8,000 total virtualized LUNs per system. Note that underlying LUNs can be aggregated or simply passed through the VPLEX. Storage that attaches to the BE Fibre Channel ports include EMC Symmetrix VMAX and DMX along with CLARiiON CX and CX4. Third party storage supported includes HDS9000 and USPV/VM along with IBM DS8000 and others to be added as they are certified. In theory given that the VPLEX presents block based storage to hosts; one would also expect that NAS, CAS or other object based gateways and servers that rely on underlying block storage to also be supported in the future.

Figure 8: VPLEX Architecture and Distributed Cache Overview

Functionality that can be performed between the cluster nodes and engines with VPLEX include data migration and workload movement across different physical storage systems or sites along with shared access with read caching on a local and distributed basis. LUNS can also be pooled across different vendors underlying storage solutions that also retain their native feature functionality via VPLEX write thru caching.

Reads from various servers can be resolved by any node or engine that checks their cache tables (Figure 8 ) to determine where to resolve the actual I/O operation from. Data integrity checks are also maintained to prevent stale reads or write operations from occurring. Actual meta data communications between nodes is very small to enable state fullness while reducing overhead and maximizing performance. When a change to cache data occurs, meta information is sent to other nodes to maintain the distributed cache management index schema. Note that only pointers to where data and fresh cache entries reside are what is stored and communicated in the meta data via the distributed caching algorithm.

Figure 9: EMC VPLEX Metro Today

For metro deployments, two clusters (Figure 9) are utilized with distances supported up to about 100km or about 5ms of latency in a synchronous manner utilizing long distance Fibre Channel optics and transceivers including Dense Wave Division Multiplexing (DWDM) technologies (See Chapter 6: Metropolitan and Wide Area Storage Networking in Resilient Storage Networking (Elsevier) for additional details on LAN, MAN and WAN topics).

Initially EMC is supporting local or Metro including Campus based VPLEX deployments requiring synchronous communications however asynchronous (WAN) Geo and Global based solutions are planned for the future (Figure 10).

Figure 10: EMC VPLEX Future Wide Area and Global

Online Workload Migration across Systems and Sites
Online workload or data movement and migration across storage systems or sites is not new with solutions available from different vendors including Brocade, Cisco, Datacore, EMC, Fujitsu, HDS, HP, IBM, LSI and NetApp among others.

For synchronization and data mobility operations such as a VMware Vmotion or Microsoft HyperV Live migration over distance, information is written to separate LUNs in different locations across what are known as stretch volumes to enable non disruptive workload relocation across different storage systems (arrays) from various vendors. Once synchronization is completed, the original source can be disconnected or taken offline for maintenance or other common IRM tasks. Note that at least two LUNs are required, or put another way, for every stretch volume, two LUNs are subtracted from the total number of available LUNs similar to how RAID 1 mirroring requires at least two disk drives.

Unlike other approaches that for coherency and performance rely on either no cached data, or, extensive amounts of cached data along with subsequent overhead for maintaining state fullness (consistency and coherency) including avoiding stale reads or writes, VPLEX relies on a combination of distributed cache lookup tables along with pass thru access to underlying storage when or where needed. Consequently large amounts of data does not need to be cached as well as shipped between VPLEX devices to maintain data consistency, coherency or performance which should also help to keep costs affordable.

Approach is not unique, it is the implementation
Some storage virtualization solutions that have been software based running on an appliance or network switch as well as hardware system based have had a focus of emulating or providing competing capabilities with those of mid to high end storage systems. The premise has been to use lower cost, less feature enabled storage systems aggregated behind the appliance, switch or hardware based system to provide advanced data and storage management capabilities found in traditional higher end storage products.

VPLEX while like any tool or technology could be and probably will be made to do other things than what it is intended for is really focused on, flexibility, transparency and agility as opposed to being used as a means of replacing underlying storage system functionality. What this means is that while there is data movement and migration capabilities including ability to synchronize data across sites or locations, VPLEX by itself is not a replacement for the underlying functionality present in both EMC and third party (e.g. HDS, HP, IBM, NetApp, Oracle/Sun or others) storage systems.

This will make for some interesting discussions, debates and applies to oranges comparisons in particular with those vendors whose products are focused around replacing or providing functionality not found in underlying storage system products.

In a nut shell summary, VPLEX and the Virtual Storage story (vision) is about enabling agility, resiliency, flexibility, data and resource mobility to simply IT Infrastructure Resource Management (IRM). One of the key themes of global storage federation is anywhere access on a local, metro, wide area and global basis across both EMC and heterogeneous third party vendor hardware.

Lets Put it Together: When and Where to use a VPLEX
While many storage virtualization solutions are focused around consolidation or pooling, similar to first wave server and desktop virtualization, the next general broad wave of virtualization is life beyond consolidation. That means expanding the focus of virtualization from consolidation, pooling or LUN aggregation to that of enabling transparency for agility, flexibility, data or system movement, technology refresh and other common time consuming IRM tasks.

Some applications or usage scenarios in the future should include in addition to VMware Vmotion, Microsoft HypverV and Microsoft Clustering along with other host server closuring solutions.

Figure 11: EMC VPLEX Usage Scenarios

Thoughts and Industry Trends Perspectives:
The following are various thoughts, comments, perspectives and questions pertaining to this and storage, virtualization and IT in general.

Is this truly unique as is being claimed?

Interestingly, the message Im hearing out of EMC is not the claim that this is unique, revolutionary or the industries first as is so often the case by vendors, rather that it is their implementation and ability to deploy on a broad perspective basis that is unique. Now granted you will probably hear as is often the case with any vendor or fan boy/fan girl spins of it being unique and Im sure this will also serve up plenty of fodder for mudslinging in the blogsphere, YouTube galleries, twitter land and beyond.

What is the DejaVu factor here?

For some it will be nonexistent, yet for others there is certainly a DejaVu depending on your experience or what you have seen and heard in the past. In some ways this is the manifestation of many vision and initiatives from the late 90s and early 2000s when storage virtualization or virtual storage in an open context jumped into the limelight coinciding with SAN activity. There have been products rolled out along with proof of concept technology demonstrators, some of which are still in the market, others including companies have fallen by the way side for a variety of reasons.

Consequently if you were part of or read or listened to any of the discussions and initiatives from Brocade (Rhapsody), Cisco (SVC, VxVM and others), INRANGE (Tempest) or its successor CNT UMD not to mention IBM SVC, StorAge (now LSI), Incipient (now part of Texas Memory) or Troika among others you should have some DejaVu.

I guess that also begs the question of what is VPLEX, in band, out of band or hybrid fast path control path? From what I have seen it appears to be a fast path approach combined with distributed caching as opposed to a cache centric inband approaches such as IBM SVC (either on a server or as was tried on the Cisco special service blade) among others.

Likewise if you are familiar with IBM Mainframe GDPS or even EMC GDDR as well as OpenVMS Local and Metro clusters with distributed lock management you should also have DejaVu. Similarly if you had looked at or are familiar with any of the YottaYotta products or presentations, this should also be familiar as EMC acquired the assets of that now defunct company.

Is this a way for EMC to sell more hardware along with software products?

By removing barriers enabling IT staffs to support more data on more storage in a denser and more agile footprint the answer should be yes, something that we may see other vendors emulate, or, make noise about what they can or have been doing already.

How is this virtual storage spin different from the storage virtualization story?

That all depends on your view or definition as well as belief systems and preferences for what is or what is not virtual storage vs. storage virtualization. For some who believe that storage virtualization is only virtualization if and only if it involves software running on some hardware appliance or vendors storage system for aggregation and common functionality than you probably wont see this as virtual storage let alone storage virtualization. However for others, it will be confusing hence EMC introducing terms such as federation and avoiding terms including grid to minimize confusion yet play off of cloud crowd commotion.

Is VPLEX a replacement for storage system based tiering and replication?

I do not believe so and even though some vendors are making claims that tiered storage is dead, just like some vendors declared a couple of years ago that disk drives were going to be dead this year at the hands of SSD, neither has come to life so to speak pun intended. What this means for VPLEX is that it leverages underlying automated or manual tiering found in storage systems such as EMC FAST enabled or similar policy and manual functions in third party products.

What VPLEX brings to the table is the ability to transparently present a LUN or volume locally or over distance with shared access while maintaining cache and data coherency. This means that if a LUN or volume moves the applications or file system or volume managers expecting to access that storage will not be surprised, panic or encounter failover problems. Of course there will be plenty of details to be dug into and seen how it all actually works as is the case with any new technology.

Who is this for?

I see this as for environments that need flexibility and agility across multiple storage systems either from one or multiple vendors on a local or metro or wide area basis. This is for those environments that need ability to move workloads, applications and data between different storage systems and sites for maintenance, upgrades, technology refresh, BC/DR, load balancing or other IRM functions similar to how they would use virtual server migration such as VMotion or Live migration among others.

Do VPLEX and Virtual Storage eliminate need for Storage System functionality?

I see some storage virtualization solutions or appliances that have a focus of replacing underlying storage system functionality instead of coexisting or complementing. A way to test for this approach is to listen or read if the vendor or provider says anything along the lines of eliminating vendor lock in or control of the underlying storage system. That can be a sign of the golden rule of virtualization of whoever controls the virtualization functionality (at the server hypervisor or storage) controls the gold! This is why on the server side of things we are starting to see tiered hypervisors similar to tiered servers and storage where mixed hypervisors are being used for different purposes. Will we see tiered storage hypervisors or virtual storage solutions the answer could be perhaps or it depends.

Was Invista a failure not going into production and this a second attempt at virtualization?

There is a popular myth in the industry that Invista never saw the light of day outside of trade show expo or other demos however the reality is that there are actual customer deployments. Invista unlike other storage virtualization products had a different focus which was that around enabling agility and flexibility for common IRM tasks, similar the expanded focus of VPLEX. Consequently Invista has often been in apples to oranges comparison with other virtualization appliances that have as focus pooling along with other functions or in some cases serving as an appliance based storage system.

The focus around Invista and usage by those customers who have deployed it that I have talked with is around enabling agility for maintenance, facilitating upgrades, moves or reconfiguration and other common IRM tasks vs using it for pooling of storage for consolidation purposes. Thus I see VPLEX extending on the vision of Invista in a role of complimenting and leveraging underlying storage system functionality instead of trying to replace those capabilities with that of the storage virtualizer.

Is this a replacement for EMC Invista?

According to EMC the answer is no and that customers using Invista (Yes, there are customers that I have actually talked to) will continue to be supported. However I suspect that over time Invista will either become a low end entry for VPLEX, or, an entry level VPLEX solution will appear sometime in the future.

How does this stack up or compare with what others are doing?

If you are looking to compare to cache centric platforms such as IBMs SVC that adds extensive functionality and capabilities within the storage virtualization framework this is an apples to oranges comparison. VPLEX is providing cache pointers on a local and global basis functioning in a compliment to underlying storage system model where SVC caches at the specific cluster basis and enhancing functionality of underlying storage system. Rest assured there will be other apples to oranges comparisons made between these platforms.

How will this be priced?

When I asked EMC about pricing, they would not commit to a specific price prior to the announcement other than indicating that there will be options for on demand or consumption (e.g. cloud pricing) as well as pricing per engine capacity as well as subscription models (pay as you go).

What is the overhead of VPLEX?

While EMC runs various workload simulations (including benchmarks) internally as well as some publicly (e.g. Microsoft ESRP among others) they have been opposed to some storage simulation benchmarks such as SPC. The EMC opposition to simulations such as SPC have been varied however this could be a good and interesting opportunity for them to silence the industry (including myself) who continue ask them (along with a couple of other vendors including IBM and their XIV) when they will release public results.

What the interesting opportunity I think is for EMC is that they do not even have to benchmark one of their own storage systems such as a CLARiiON or VMAX, instead simply show the performance of some third party product that already is tested on the SPC website and then a submission with that product running attached to a VPLEX.

If the performance or low latency forecasts are as good as they have been described, EMC can accomplish a couple of things by:

Demonstrating the low latency and minimal to no overhead of VPLEX
Show VPLEX with a third party product comparing latency before and after
Provide a comparison to other virtualization platforms including IBM SVC

As for EMC submitting a VMAX or CLARiiON SPC test in general, Im not going to hold my breath for that, instead, will continue to look at the other public workload tests such as ESRP.

Additional related reading material and links:

Resilient Storage Networks: Designing Flexible Scalable Data Infrastructures (Elsevier)
Chapter 3: Networking Your Storage
Chapter 4: Storage and IO Networking
Chapter 6: Metropolitan and Wide Area Storage Networking
Chapter 11: Storage Management
Chapter 16: Metropolitan and Wide Area Examples

The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC)
Chapter 3: (see also here) What Defines a Next-Generation and Virtual Data Center
Chapter 4: IT Infrastructure Resource Management (IRM)
Chapter 5: Measurement, Metrics, and Management of IT Resources
Chapter 7: Server: Physical, Virtual, and Software
Chapter 9: Networking with your Servers and Storage

Also see these:

Virtual Storage and Social Media: What did EMC not Announce?
Server and Storage Virtualization Life beyond Consolidation
Should Everything Be Virtualized?
Was today the proverbial day that he!! Froze over?
Moving Beyond the Benchmark Brouhaha

Closing comments (For now):
As with any new vision, initiative, architecture and initial product there will be plenty of questions to ask, items to investigate, early adopter customers or users to talk with and determine what is real, what is future, what is usable and practical along with what is nice to have. Likewise there will be plenty of mud ball throwing and slinging between competitors, fans and foes which for those who enjoy watching or reading those you should be well entertained.

In general, the EMC vision and story builds on and presumably delivers on past industry hype, buzz and vision with solutions that can be put into environments as productivity tool that works for the customer, instead of the customer working for the tool.

Remember the golden rule of virtualization which is in play here is that whoever controls the virtualization or associated management controls the gold. Likewise keep in mind that aggregation can cause aggravation. So do not be scared, however look before you leap meaning do your homework and due diligence with appropriate levels of expectations, aligning applicable technology to the task at hand.

Also, if you have seen or experienced something in the past, you are more likely to have DejaVu as opposed to seeing things as revolutionary. However it is also important to leverage lessons learned for future success. YottaYotta was a lot of NaddaNadda, lets see if EMC can leverage their past experiences to make this a LottaLotta.

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz - Author The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

Apple iPad: Is it a Business iTool or iToy?

Tue, 4 May 2010 16:54:32

Apple iPad via www.apple.com

With the formal release and availability of the Apple iPad (See previous post here) along with networking capabilities including 3G and WiFi, needless to say there has been plenty of buzz in the tech sphere and beyond on both what you can do, as well as what you can not do with the new Apple iProduct. Similarly, there has been buzz from Apple co-founder and chairman Steve Jobs defending why there is no Adobe flash capabilities on the iPad or perhaps a different way, attaching flash as a non standard which is ironic for those who see many Apple products as being non standard.

What has also been getting some buzz and discussions is if the iPad is a business iTool or iToy including a recent discussion on the StorageMonkeys Infosmack 48 podcast with hosts Greg Knieriemen @Knieriemen, Marc Farley @3parfarley, guest emeritus Mark Twomey @Storagezilla and Chris Weil LeBlanc @c_weil .

Also check out the StorageMonkeys weekly Tuesday Tech Fight for May 4, 2010 (May require registration which is free)

Granted like any other desktop, portable or handheld display device with a real or virtual keyboard and some type of networking interface combined with creative programming or hacks, almost anything can be used as a monitor or display or management tool interface to a variety of technologies.

That also begs the question along with others mentioned in a post a few months ago of what is the real value for the iPad today?

Certainly there are some business or organizations that simply need a very thin client for accessing public or private cloud applications, entertainment or other web content in addition to being a personal information device or digital assistant along the lines of a traditional iPod or similar device where a PC or Mac is not needed.

Likewise down the road as pointed out here, there could be other use cases (e.g. build it and they will come).

However today for business, the question remains, is the Apple iPad a business iTool or iToy or do you simply iDont Care?

Here is a link to a related post along with poll where you can cast your vote as well as see what others are thinking about the iPad.

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz - Author The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

Happy Earth Day 2010!

Thu, 22 Apr 2010 18:55:44

Here in the northern hemisphere it is late April and thus mid spring time.

That means the trees sprouting their buds, leaves and flowering while other plants and things come to life.

In Minnesota where I live, there is not a cloud in the sky today, the sun is out and its going to be another warm day in the 60s, a nice day to not be flying or traveling and thus enjoy the fine weather.

Among other things of note on this earth day 2010 include:

Minnesota Twins new home Target Field was just named the most Green Major League Baseball (MLB) stadium as well as greenest in the US with its LEED (or see here) certification.
Icelands Eyjafjallajokull volcano continues to spew water vapor steam, CO2 and ash at a slower rate than last week when it first erupted with some speculating that there could be impending activity from other Icelandic volcanos. Some estimates placed the initial eruption CO2 impact and subsequent flight cancellations to be neutral, essentially canceling each other out, however Im sure we will be hearing many different stories in the weeks to come.

Image of Iceland Eyjafjallajokull Volcano Eruption via Boston.com

Flights to/from and within Europe and the UK are returning to normal
Toyota continues to deal with recalls on some of their US built automobiles including the energy efficient Prius, some of which may have been purchased during the recent US cash for clunkers (CFC) program (hmm, is that ironic or what?)
Greenpeace in addition to using a Facebook page to protest Facebook data center practices is now targeting cloud IT in general including just before the Apple iPad launch (Heres some comments from Microsoft).
Vendors in all industries are lining up for the second coming of Green marketing or perhaps Green Washing 2.0

The new Green IT, moving beyond Green wash and hype

Speaking of Green IT including Green Computing, Green Storage, Virtualization, Cloud, Federation and more, here is a link to a post that I did back in February discussing how the Green Gap continues to exist.

The green gap exists and centers around the confusion of what Green means along with the common disconnects between core IT issues or barriers to becoming more efficient, effective, flexible and optimized from both an economic as well as environmental basis to those commonly messaged to under the green umbrella (read more here).

Regardless of where you stand on Green, Green washing, Green hype, environmentalism, eco-tech and other related themes, for at least a moment, set aside the politics and science debates and think in terms of practicality and economics.

That is, look for simple, recurring things that can be done to stretch your dollar or spending ability in order to support demand (See figure below) in a more effective manner along with reducing waste. For example to meet growing demand requirements in the face of shrinking or stagnate budgets, the action is to stretch available resources to do more work when needed, or retain more where applicable with the same or less footprint. What this means is that while common messaging is around reducing costs, look at the inverse which is to do more with available budgets or resources. The result is green in terms of economic and environmental benefits.

Increasing IT Resource Demand

Green IT enablement techniques and technologies

Look at and understand the broader aspects of being green which has both economical and environmental benefits without compromising on productivity or functionality. There are many aspects or facets of being green beyond those commonly discussed or perceived to be so (See Green IT enablement techniques and technologies figure above).

Certainly recycling of paper, water, aluminum, plastics and other items including technology equipment are important to reduce waste and are things to consider. Another aspect of reducing waste particularly in IT is to avoid rework that can range from finding network bottlenecks or problems that result in continuous retransmission of data for failed backup, replication or data transfers that cause lost opportunity or resource consumption. Likewise programming errors (bugs) or miss configuration that results in rework or lost productivity also are forms of waste among others.

Another theme is that of shifting from energy avoidance to energy efficiency and effectiveness which are often thought to the same. However the expanded focus is also about getting more work done when needed with the same or less resources (See figure below) for example increasing activity (IOPS, transactions, emails or video served, bandwidth or messages) per watt of energy consumed.

Shifting from energy avoidance to effectiveness

One of the many techniques and approaches for addressing energy including stretching resources and being green include intelligent power management (IPM). With IPM, the focus is not strictly centered around energy avoidance, instead about inteligently adapting to different workloads or activity balancing performance and energy. Thus when there is work to be done, get the work done quickly with as little energy as possible (IOP or activity per watt), when there is less work, provide lower performance and thus smaller energy requirements, or when no work to be done, going into additional energy saving modes. Thus power management does not have to be exclusively about turrning off the lights or IT equipment in order to be green.

The following two figures look at Green IT past, present and future with an expanding focus around optimization and effectiveness meaning getting more work done, storing more data for longer periods of time, meeting growth demands with what appears to be additional resources however at a lower per unit cost without compromising on performance, availability or economics.

Green IT: Past, present and future shift from avoidance to efficiency and effectiveness

The new Green IT: Boosting business effectiveness, maximize ROI while helping the environment

If you think about going green as simply doing or using things more effectively, reducing waste, working more intelligently or effectively the benefits are both economical and environmentally positive (See the two figures above).

Instead of finding ways to fund green initiatives, shift the focus to how you can enable enhanced productivity, stretching resources further, doing more in the same or smaller footprint (floor space, power, cooling, energy, personal, licensing, budgets) for business economic and environmental sustainability with the result being environmental encampments.

Also keep in mind that small percentage changes on a large or recurring basis have significant benefits. For example a small change in cooling temperatures while staying within vendor guideline recommendations can result in big savings for large environments.

Bottom line

If you are a business and discounting green as simply a fad, or perhaps as a public relations (PR) initiative or activity tied to reducing carbon footprints and recycling then you are missing out on economic (top and bottom line) enhancement opportunities.

Likewise if you think that going green is only about the environment, then there is a missed opportunity to boost economic opportunities to help fund those inititiaves.

Going green means many different things to various people and is often more broad and common sense based than most realize.

That is all for now, happy earth day 2010

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz - Author The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

Seagate to say goodbye to Cayman Islands, Hello Ireland

Sun, 11 Apr 2010 18:18:18

Seagate (NASDQ: STX) corporation, the parent of the company many people in IT and data storage in particular know as Seagate the disk drive manufacturer is moving their paper headquarters from the Cayman Islands where they have been based since 2000 to Ireland.

Let me rephrase that as Seagate is not moving their Scotts Valley California headquarters of operations or any design, manufacturing or marketing to Ireland that is not already there. Rather, Seagate as a manufacturing company is moving where it is incorporated (paper corporate headquarters) from the Cayman Islands to the Emerald Island of Ireland.

Confused yet?
Do not worry, it is confusing at first. I ended up having to reread through the Seagate corporate material and remembering back to the late 1990s it all started to make sense. Seagate has over 50,000 employees located at facilities around the world including manufacturing, support, design, research and development, sales and marketing along with corporate administration among others.

Their business while focused on data storage currently is very much centered on magnetic disk drives with a much diversified portfolio including products obtained via their acquisition of Maxtor. The Seagate product portfolio includes among others high end enterprise class Fibre Channel and SAS 15,500 RPM (15.5K) high performance to high capacity SAS and SATA devices, 10K small form factor (SFF) to mid market, SMB, USB based SOHO, prosumer or consumer along with portable and specialized devices among many others including emerging SSD and hybrid devices.

However back in the late 1990s, Seagate ventured off into some other areas for a time being including owning (in part) Veritas (since divested and now part of Symantec), Xiotech (now back on its own under venture ownership including some tied to Seagate) among some other transactions. In a series of moves, merger and acquisition, divestures, restructuring, paper corporate headquarters that reads like something out of a Hollywood movie, Seagate ended up moving its place of incorporation to the Cayman Islands.

Seagate as it was known had essentially become the manufacturing company owned by a paper holding company incorporated off shore for business and tax purposes. Want to learn more, read the companies annual reports and other filings some of which can be found here.

The Business End of the Move
Without getting into the deep details of international finance, tax law or articles of business incorporation, many companies are actually incorporated in a location different from where they actualy have their headquarters. In the United States, that is often Delaware where corporations file their paper work for articles of incorporations and then locate their headquarters or primary place of business elsewhere.

Seagate SEC filing outlining proposed move

Outside of the United States, the Cayman Islands among other locations have been a popular location for companies to file their paper work and have a paper headquarters due to favorable tax rates and other business benefits. Perhaps you have even watched a movie or two where part of the plot involved some business transaction of a paper company located in the Cayman Island as a means of shelter business dealings. In the case of Seagate, in 2000 during a restricting their corporate (paper) headquarters was moved to the Cayman due to its favorable business climate including lower tax structure.

Dive Cayman Islands

Disclosure: While I am a certified and experienced PADI SCUBA Divemaster having visited many different venues, Cayman Island is not one of them. Likewise, while I have distant relatives never meet, I would live to visit Ireland sometime.

Why is Seagate saying goodbye to the nice warm climate of the Cayman Islands heading off to the emerald Isle?

Visit Ireland

Simple, a more favorable business climate that include international business and taxation benefits as well as Ireland is not coming under scrutiny as a tax haven by the U.S. and other governments as have the Cayman Islands (along with other locations). Let me also be clear that Seagate is not new to Ireland having had a presence there for some time (See here).

What does all of this mean?
From a technology perspective pretty much nothing as this appears to be mainly a business and financial move for the shareholders of Seagate. As for impact on shareholders, other than reading through some documents if so inclined, probably not much impact if any at all.

As for IT customers, their solution providers who are customers of Seagate this probably does not mean anything at all as it should be business as usual.

What about others parties, governments, countries or entities?

Tough to say if this is a trend of companies that will begin moving their paper headquarters from the Caymans to elsewhere so as to escape being in the spotlight of U.S. and other governments looking for additional revenues.

Perhaps a boon to Ireland if more companies decide to move their paper as well as actual company operations there as many have done over the past decades. Otherwise for the rest of us, it can make for interesting reading, conversations, speculation, debate and discussion.

And that is all that I have to say about this for now, what say you?

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz - Author The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

Spring 2010 StorageIO Newsletter

Wed, 7 Apr 2010 20:12:34

Welcome to the spring 2010 edition of the Server and StorageIO (StorageIO) news letter.

This edition follows the inaugural issue (Winter 2010) incorporating feedback and suggestions as well as building on the fantastic responses received from recipients.

A couple of enhancements included in this issue (marked as New!) include a Featured Related Site along with Some Interesting Industry Links. Another enhancement based on feedback is to include additional comment that in upcoming issues will expand to include a column article along with industry trends and perspectives.

Spring 2010 Newsletter

You can access this news letter via various social media venues (some are shown below) in addition to StorageIO web sites and subscriptions. Click on the following links to view the spring 2010 newsletter as HTML or PDF or, to go to the newsletter page.

Follow via Goggle Feedburner here or via email subscription here.

You can also subscribe to the news letter by simply sending an email to newsletter@storageio.com

Enjoy this edition of the StorageIO newsletter, let me know your comments and feedback.

Also, a very big thank you to everyone who has helped make StorageIO a success!.

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz - Author The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

March Metrics and Measuring Social Media

Wed, 31 Mar 2010 02:34:54

What metrics matter for social media and networking?

Of course the answer should be it depends.

For example, would that be number of followers or how many posts, tweets or videos you post?

How about the number of page hits, pages read or unique visitors to a site, perhaps time on site?

Or, how about the number of times a visitor returns to a site or shares the link or information with others?

What about click through rates, page impressions, revenue per page and related metrics?

Maybe the metric is your blog ranking or number of points on your favorite community site such as Storage Monkeys or Wikibon among others?

Another metrics could be number of comments received particularly if your venue is more interactive for debate or discussion purposes compared to a site with many viewers who prefer to read (lurk). Almost forgot number of LinkedIn contacts or face book friends along with you tube and other videos or pod casts as well as who is on your blog roll.

Lets not forget how many are following or those being followed along with RSS subscribers as metrics.

To say that there are many different metrics along with reasons or interests around them would be an understatement to say the least.

Why do metrics matter in social networking?

One reason metrics are used (even by those who do not admit it) is to compare status amongst peers or others in your sphere of influence or in adjacent areas.

Some spheres of influence and influences

In additional metrics also matter for those looking to land or obtain advertising sponsors for their sites or perhaps to help gain exposure if looking for a new job or career move. Metrics also matter to gauge the effectiveness or return on investment with social media that could range from how many followers to how far your brands reach extends into other realms and venues.

In the case of twitter, for some the key metric is number of followers (e.g. popularity) or those being followed with other metrics being number of posts or tweets along with re tweets and list inclusions.For blogs and web sites, incoming links along with site activity among other metrics factor into various ranking sites. Web site activity can be measured in several ways including total hits or visits, pages read and unique visitors among others.

Having been involved with social media from a blogging along with twitter perspective for a couple of years not to mention being a former server and storage capacity planner I find metrics to be interesting. In addition to the metrics themselves, what is also interesting is how they are used differently for various purposes including gauging cause and effect or return on social networking investment.

Regardless of your motives or objectives with metrics, here is a quick synopsis of some tools and sites that I have come across that you may already be using, or if not, that you might be interested in.

What are some metrics?

If you are interested in your twitter effectiveness, see your report card at tweet grade. Another twitter site that provides a twitter grade based on numerous factors is Twitter Grader while Klout.com characterizes your activity on four different planes similar to a Gartner Magic quadrant. Over at the customer collective they have an example of a more thorough gauge of effectiveness looking at several different metrics some of which are covered here.

Similar to Technorati, Tekrati, or other directory and index sites, Wefollow is a popular venue for tracking twitter tweeps based on various has tags for example IT or storage among many others. Tweet level provides a composite ranking determined by influence, popularity, engagement and trust. Talkreview.com provides various metrics of blog and websites including unique visitor traffic estimates while Compete.com shows estimated site visitor traffic with option to compare to others. Interested to see how your website or blog is performing in terms of effectiveness and reach in addition to Compete.com, then check out talkreviews.com or Blog grader that looks at and reports on various blog metrics and information.

The sites and tools mentioned are far from an exhaustive listing of sites or metrics for various purposes, rather a sampling of what is available to meet different needs. For example there are Alexa, Goggle and Yahoo rankings among many others.

Wefollow as an example or discussion topic

One of the things that I find interesting is the diversity in the metrics and rankings for example if you were to say look at wefollow for a particularly category in the top 10 or 20, then use one or more of the other tools to see how the various rankings change.

A month or so ago I was curious to see if some of the sites could be gamed beyond running up the number of posts, tweets, followers or followings along with re tweets of which some sites appear to be influenced by. As part of determining what metrics matter and which to ignore or keep in the back pocket for when needed, I looked at and experiment with wefollow.

For those who might have been aware of what I was doing, I went from barely being visible for example in the storage category to jumping into the top 5. Then with some changes, was able to disappear from the top 5 and show up elsewhere and then when all was said and done, return to top rankings.

Does this mean I put a lot of stock or value in wefollow or simply use it as a gauge and metric along with all of the others? The answer is that it is just that, another metric and tool that can be used for gauging effectiveness and reach, or if you prefer, status or what ever your preference and objective are.

How did I change my rankings on wefollow? Simple, experimented with using various tags in different combinations, sometimes only one, sometimes many however keeping them relevant and then waiting several days. Im sure if you are inclined and have plenty of time on your hands, someone can figure out or find out how the actual algorithms work, however for me right now, I have other projects to pursue.

What is the best metric?

That is going to depends on your objectives or what you are trying to accomplish.

As with other measurements and metrics, those for social media provide different points of reference from how many followers to amount of influence.

Depending on your objective, effectiveness may be gauged by number of followers or those being followed, number of posts or the number of times being quoted or referenced by others including in lists.

In some cases rankings that compare with others are based on those sites knowing about you which may mean having to register so that you can be found.

Bottom line, metrics matter however what they mean and their importance will vary depending on objectives, preferences or for accomplishing different things.

One of the interesting things about social networking and media sites is that if you do not like a particularly ranking, list, grade or status then either work to change the influence of those scores, or, come up with your own.

What is your take on metrics that matter, which is of course unless they do not matter to you?

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz - Author The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

Its US Census time, What about IT Data Centers?

Tue, 30 Mar 2010 04:43:21

It is that once a decade activity time this year referred to as the US 2010 Census.

With the 2010 census underway, not to mention also time for completing and submitting your income tax returns, if you are in IT, what about measuring, assessing, taking inventory or analyzing your data and data center resources?

Figure 1: IT US 2010 Census forms

Have you recently taken a census of your data, data storage, servers, networks, hardware, software tools, services providers, media, maintenance agreements and licenses not to mention facilities?

Likewise have you figured out what if any taxes in terms of overhead or burden exists in your IT environment or where opportunities to become more optimized and efficient to get an IT resource refund of sorts are possible?

If not, now is a good time to take a census of your IT data center and associated resources in what might also be called an assessment, review, inventory or survey of what you have, how its being used, where and who is using and when along with associated configuration, performance, availability, security, compliance coverage along with costs and energy impact among other items.

Figure 2: IT Data Center Metrics for Planning and Forecasts

How much storage capacity do you have, how is it allocated along with being used?

What about storage performance, are you meeting response time and QoS objectives?

Lets not forget about availability, that is planned and unplanned downtime, how have your systems been behaving?

From an energy or power and cooling standpoint, what is the consumption along with metrics aligned to productivity and effectiveness. These include IOPS per watt, transactions per watt, videos or email along with web clicks or page views per watt, processor GHz per watt along with data movement bandwidth per watt and capacity stored per watt in a given footprint.

Other items to look into for data centers besides storage include servers, data and I/O networks, hardware, software, tools, services and other supplies along with physical facility with metrics such as PUE. Speaking of optimization, how is your environment doing, that is another advantage of doing a data center census.

For those who have completed and sent in your census material along with your 2009 tax returns, congratulations!

For others in the US who have not done so, now would be a good time to get going on those activities.

Likewise, regardless of what country or region you are in, its always a good time to take a census or inventory of your IT resources instead of waiting every ten years to do so.

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz - Author The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

March Metric Madness: Fun with Simple Math

Wed, 24 Mar 2010 06:54:32

Its March and besides being spring in north America, it also means tournament season including the NCAA basket ball series among others known as March Madness.

Given the office pools and other forms of playing with numbers tied to the tournaments and real or virtual money, here is a quick timeout looking at some fun with math.

The fun is showing how simple math can be used to show relative growth for IT resources such as data storage. For example, say that you have 10Tbytes of storage or data and that it is growing at only 10 percent per year, in five years with simple math yields 14.6Tbytes.

Now lets assume growth rate is 50 percent per year and in the course of five years, instead of having 10Tbytes, that now jumps to 50.6Tbytes. If you have 100Tbytes today and at 50 percent growth rate, that would yield 506.3 Tbytes or about half of a petabyte in 5 years. If by chance you have say 1Pbyte or 1,000Tbytes today, at 25% year of year growth you would have 2.44Pbytes in 5 years.

Figure 1 Fun with simple math and projected growth rates

Granted this is simple math showing basic examples however the point is that depending on your growth rate and amount of either current data or storage, you might be surprised at the forecast or projected needs in only five years.

In a nutshell, these are examples of very basic primitive capacity forecasts that would vary by other factors including if the data is 10Tbytes and your policies is for 25 percent free space, that would require even more storage than the base amount. Go with a different RAID level, some extra space for replication, snapshots, disk to disk backups and replication not to mention test development and those numbers go up even higher.

Sure those amounts can be offset with thin provisioning, dedupe, archiving, compression and other forms of data footprint reduction, however the point here is to realize how simple math can portray a very basic forecast and picture of growth.

Read more about performance and capacity in Chapter 10 Performance and capacity planning for storage networks Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier) as well as at www.cmg.org (Computer Measurement Group).

And that is all I have to say about this for now, enjoy March madness and fun with numbers.

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz - Author The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

Hard product vs. soft product

Sun, 21 Mar 2010 21:23:45

In the IT industry space and data storage or computers and servers particularly so, mention hard product or software product and what comes to mind?

How about physical vs. virtual servers or storage, hardware vs. software solutions, products vs. services?

By contrast, in the aviation and airline industry among others, mention hard vs. soft product and there is a slight variation, which is the difference between one providers service delivery experience.

For example, two or more different airlines or carriers may fly the same aircraft perhaps even with the same engines, instrumentation, navigation electronics and base features, all part of the hard product.

Example of a hard product (Embraer 175)

However, their hard product could vary by type of seats, spacing or pitch along with width, overhead luggage room, Video on Demand (VoD) or In Flight Entertainment (IFE) as well as different cabin treatments (carpeting, wall coverings) and galley configurations. Even in scenarios where carriers have the same equipment and hard product, their soft product can differ.

Example of a Soft Product (Service or lack there of being delivered)

The soft product is the service delivery experience including by the cabin crew (flight attendants and pursers), food (or lack of), beverage, presentation and so forth. Also part of the soft product can be how seats are allocated or available for selection, boarding process and other items that contribute to the overall customer experience.

This all got me thinking on a recent flight where the hard product (e.g. aircraft) of a particular carrier was identical; however given transitions taking place, the soft product still differed as was not fully integrated or merged yet. What the experience got me thinking about is that in IT, customers or solution providers can buy the same technology or hard product (hardware, software, services) from the same suppliers yet present different soft products or service experience to their customers.

IT equipment being used for delivery of different soft products

Im sure that some of the cloud crowd cheerleaders might even jump up and down and claim that is the benefit of using managed service producers or similar services to obtain a different soft product. And while that may be true in some instances, it is also true that different traditional IT organizations are able to craft and deploy various types of soft products to their customers to meet different service requirements, cost or economic objectives using the same technology used by others.

A different example of hard vs soft product is a site I have visited that has mainframes, windows and open systems servers whose business requires a soft product that is highly available, reliable, flexible, fast and affordable. Needless to say, in that environment, some of the open systems including windows platforms can have reliability close to if not equal to the mainframes.

IT equipment being used for delivery of different soft products

What is even more amazing is that no special or different hard products (e.g. servers, storage, networks or software) are being used to achieve those services objectives. Rather it is the soft product that achieves the results in terms of how the techniques are used and managed. Likewise I have heard of other environments that have mixed mainframe and open systems, using common hard products as other organizations yet whose soft product is not as robust or reliable as others. If using the same hard product that is same software, hardware, networks and services, how could the soft product be any less robust?

The answer is that good and reliable technology is important, however the technology is only as good as how it is managed, configured, monitored and deployed centering on processes, procedures and best practices.

Next time you are on an airplane, or, using some other service that leverages common technologies (hardware or software or networks) take a moment to look around at the soft product and how the service experience of a common hard product can vary. That is, using common technology, how can various best practices, policies and operating principals to meet diverse service requirements differ to meet demand as well as economic requirements.

What is your take and experience on different hard vs soft products in or around IT?

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz - Author The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

Who or what is your sphere of influence?

Sun, 21 Mar 2010 21:23:45

Disclosure: I used to be an IT customer working in different organizations, than worked for various vendors, than for an analyst firm before starting StorageIO. Thus I have been at various seats around the proverbial IT table, having listened to as well as being part of various stories from different vantage points, thus my view and sphere or focus or influence may be different than yours.

Who is your sphere or circle of influence?

If you listen to vendors your perceptions will be one thing, if you listen to customers, your perceptions will be different. Or, if you simply read and obtain information and perspectives via the media and depending upon their sources or opinions, guess what!

Taking a step back for a moment.

Recently I have been attending either in person, or via virtual means various vendor briefings and announcements, as well as meeting and talking with IT professionals face to face or via phone and other means. Likewise I see and read various industry related material via printed (yes some still exist), online, web, blogs, podcasts, videos, tweets from different sources ranging from traditional media or journalist organizations using in house staff or a combination of staff and freelance writers as well as upstart new media, to vendors and vars, research analyst among others.

What jumped out at me as a perspective is something that should be as clear as seeing through both pairs of eyes or listening with two ears (assuming no ailments). That is, if all you listen to are vendors guess what your thought and perspective basis will be.

Likewise, if all you do is listen to users guess what the perspective is going to be? Another angle is that if you are in academia or research areas, and those that you associate with are also only in that venue, guess what? Or, how about if all you do is listen to particularly media or blog venues, to vars or specific analysis, or, get your info second or third hand hopefully you start to see the picture here. How about if all you do to get your information is by reading press releases or customer case studies, while providing some information, what about the story behind the story and what it all means?

For example, if all a reporter, blogger, media analyst, journalist or free lance writer does to get their info is from vendors, guess how those discussions might be influenced. Or, if an analyst, advisor, researcher, consultant, var or independent blogger only gets their product and industry trends perspectives from vendors, guess how that might be shaped. Let alone, if your focus is on quantitative vs. qualitative depending upon information sources your view or influence will vary.

While sitting in as well as listening in remotely on some of those vendor briefings it dawned on me how perhaps there are those who only get there information on trends, perspectives and industry challenges let alone on product or competitive positioning from those venues, or, in the after the fact market research accounting numbers. After all, if your time is spent on the traveling media, analyst and blogger briefing circuit going from one big tent to another with little or no time to engage with others in the ecosystem, guess what the perspectives might possible be?

I was also wondering recently in a different venue that was filed with IT customers (e.g. users) along with some vendors and vars a similar thought. That is, if attendees never listened or attended vendor, var or third party produced events and seminars how they would obtain information and dialogue exchange for forming opinions.

Or if bloggers, media, free lance writers our journalist only get their information from vendor briefings or talking with handpicked reference customers or prescreened and scripted pundits, is if they are getting or even asking about the bigger or broader story, the story behind the story for their viewers or readers.

Now this is not saying that any one of those is a negative or inappropriate or non important venue or source, rather, simply point out that views and perspectives eve if formed by yourself can be shaped by your sources of information.

In other words, leverage various forms of information and knowledge exchange including different venues. Form your own perspectives based on different sources and exchanges or discussions leveraging that gray matter (not talking about hair either) that sits behind your eyes, slightly above your mouth and between those ears.

What to do or who to listen to?

I spend my talking with manufactures, vars, service providers, bloggers, consultants, media and financial analysts, and of course, lots and lots of IT customers to gauge what is going on, the issues, challenges, opportunities, who has been naughty and nice. Consequently, my view and sphere of influences tend to be more applied and rooted with what is going on in many IT shops vs being shaped by what others want me to hear, see or think.

Something that I have found over the years is that talking directly with IT customers in real time enables quicker perspectives and feedback on their needs and issues for when I talk with vars or vendors as well as the media.

Likewise, having regular in depth discussions with vendors, vars and service providers helps to provide perspective on where those groups are going and looking to address with their technologies. At times the discussions are under NDA (both on the customer as well as the var, vendor or service provider sides) and other times they are in the open depending upon the conversation or topic sensitivity.

I say leverage all the different resources, views and perspectives that are available and depending on who you are or what you do, establish dialogue with others given how easy it is to do with various mediums or venues. For example, if you are an media, financial, research or consulting advisory analyst or self proclaimed pundit, establish open and two way dialogue with IT customers, vars, public relations, consultants as well as media in addition to traditional vendor controlled analyst relations (while you are at it, establish some information vendor dialogue as well).

Figure 1 Some spheres of influence and influences

So who are you and what are your circles or spheres of influence as well as those that you influence (Figure 1)? If you are a media (e.g. journalist, writer, blogger, freelancer, editor, publisher) than establish relationships with various analysts, advisors, consultants, vars, customers and so forth. If you are the customer, likewise establish relationships with both traditional and new or nontraditional analysts and media venues, other customers and vars. hopefully you start to see the picture which is either hibernate, lurk, or proactively engage with others in a medium or manner that suits your needs or requirements.

If you have only been a vendor or var, learn about the others around the table and likewise, if only have been a media or analyst, learn about the vendors and the customers, the vars and so forth. Expand your horizons and sources of information exchange, debate or discussion. After all, you may still come back to the same premises or perspectives, however at least you can say and justify that thesis on the basis of having discussed or researched it with your broader, diverse network of contacts.

Likewise, when sharing information or knowledge, keep in mind that there are different audiences, some of whom may have seen before what you have found to be new and revolutionary while others will have perhaps a 180 degree view and others on the same page if not same ball park.

Bottom line

Use your brain to read, listen, learn, discuss, ask questions, share information and form your own opinions, thoughts and perspectives. Rest assured, no one medium, venue or source has the complete insight into your specific environment, requirements, issues and challenges and if it does, that would be truly revolutionary!

And that is all that I have to say about that, at least for now

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz - Author The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

Virtual Storage and Social Media: What did EMC not Announce?

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 06:39:56

Synopsis: EMC made a vision statement in a recent multimedia briefing that has a social networking angle as well as storage virtualization, virtual storage, public and private clouds.

Basically EMC provided a vision preview of in a social media networking friendly manner of a vision being refereed to initially as EMC Virtual Storage (aka twitter hash tag #emcvs) which of course sounds similar to a pharmacy chain.

The vision includes stirring up the industry with a new discussion around virtual storage compared to the decade old coverage of storage virtualization.

The underlying theme of this vision is similar to that of virtual serves vs. server virtualization including the ability to move servers around, so to should there be the ability to move data around more freely on a local or global basis and in real or near real time. In other words, breaking the decades long affinity that has existed between data storage and the data that exists on it (Figure 1). Buzzword bingo themes include federated storage, virtual storage, public and private cloud along with global cache coherency among others.

Figure 1: EMC Virtual Storage (EMCVS) Vision

The rest of the story

On Thursday March 11th 2010 Pat Gelsinger (EMC President and COO, Information Infrastructure Products) held an interactive briefing with the global analyst community pertaining to future EMC trajectory or visions. One of the interesting things about this session was that it was not unique to industry analysts nor was it under NDA.

For example, here is a link that if still active, should provide access to the briefing material.

The vision being talked about include those that EMC has talked about in the past such as virtualized data centers, or, putting a spin on the phrase data center virtualization, along with public and private clouds as well as infrastructure resource management virtualization (Figure 2):

Figure 2: Public and Private Clouds along with Virtual Data Centers

Figure 2 is a fairly common slide used in many EMC discussions positing public and private clouds along with virtualized data centers.

Figure 3: Tenants of the EMC Virtual Storage (EMCVS) vision

Figure 4: Enabling mobile data, breaking data and storage affinity

Figure 5: Enabling teleporting and virtual storage

Thus setting up the story for the need and benefit of distributed cache coherency, similar to distributed lock management (DLM) used on local and wide area clustered file systems for maintain data integrity.

Figure 6: Leveraging distributed cache coherency

This discussion around distributed cache coherency should ring Dejavu of IBM GDPS (Global Dispersed Parallel Sysplex) for Mainframe, OpenVMS distributed lock management for VAX and Alpha clusters, Oracle RAC, or other parallel and clustered file systems among others. Likewise for those familiar with technology from Yotta Yotta, this should also ring familiar.

However while many are jumping on the Yotta Yotta familiarity bandwagon given comments made by Pat Gelsinger, something that came to mind is what about EMC GDDR? Do not worry if that is an acronym or product you are not up on as an EMC follower as it stands for EMC Geographically Dispersed Disaster (GDDR) solution that is an alternative to IBMs proprietary GDPS. Perhaps there is none, perhaps this is some, however what role if any including lessons learned will come from EMCs experience with GDDR not to mention other clustered file systems?

Figure 7: The EMC vision as presented

One of the interesting things about the vision announcement and perhaps part of floating it out for discussion was a comment made by Pat Gelsinger. That comment was about enabling the wild Wild West for IT, something that perhaps one generation might enjoy, however a notion another would soon forget. Im sure the EMC marke3ting team including their new chief marketing officer (CMO) Jeremy Burton can fine tune with time.

More on the social networking and non NDA angle

As is often the case with many other vendors, these types of customer, partner, analyst or media briefings (either online or in person) are under some form of NDA or embargo as they contain forward looking, yet to be announced products, solutions, technologies or other business initiatives. Note, these types of NDA discussions are not typically the same as those that portray or pretend to be NDA in order to sound more important a few days before an announcement that has already been leaked to get extra coverage or what are also known as media embargos.

After some amount of time, usually the information is formerly made public that was covered in advanced briefings, along with additional details. Sometimes material covered under NDA is done so in advanced such that third parties can prepare reports, deep dive analysis or assessment and other content that is made available at announcement or shortly there. The material is often prepared partners, vars, media, analysts, consultants, customers or others outside of the announcing company via different venues ranging from print, online columns, blogs, tweets videos and more.

Lately there has been some confusion in the broader IT as well as other industries as to where and how to classify bloggers, tweeters or other social media practionier. After all, is a blogger an analyst, journalist, free lance writer, advisor, vendor, consultant, customer, var, investor, hobbyist, competitor not to mention how does information get feed to them?

Likewise, NDAs and embargo have joined the list of fodder topics that some do not like for various reasons yet like to complain about for others. There is a time and place for real NDAs that cover and address material, discussions and other information that should not be shared. However all to often NDAs get watered down particularly on the press release games where a vendor or public relations firm (PR) will dangle an announcement briefing a couple of days or perhaps a week or two prior to an announcement under the guise that it not be disclosed prior to formal announcement.

Where these NDAs get tricky is that often they are honored by some and ignored by others, thus, those who honor the agreement get left behind by those who break the story. Personally I do not mind real NDA that are tied to real confidential material, discussion or other information that needs to be kept under wraps for various reasons. However the value or issues of NDA is whole different discussion, for now, lets get back to what EMC did not announce in their recent non-NDA briefing.

Different organizations are addressing social media in various ways, some ignoring it, others embracing it regardless of what it is. EMC is an example of a vendor who has embraced social networking and social media along with traditional means of developing and maintaining relations with the media (media or press relations), customers, partners, vars, consultants, investors (e.g. investor relations) as well as analysts (analyst relations).

For example, EMC works with analysts in traditional ways as they do with the media and other groups, however they also recognize that while some analysts (or media or investors or partners or customers or vars etc) blog and tweet (among other social networking mediums), not all do (as is also the case with media, customers, vars and so forth). Likewise EMC from a social media and networking perspective does not appear to define audiences based on the medium or tool that they use, rather, in a matrix or multi dimensional approach.

That is, an analyst with a blog is a blogger, a var or independent consultant with a blog is a blogger, or a media person including free lance writers, journalist, reporters or publisher with a blog is a blogger as are vars, advisors, partners and competitors with blogs also treated as bloggers.

Some of the 2009 EMC Bloggers Lounge Visitors

Thus at their EMCworld event, admission to the bloggers lounge is as simple and non exclusive as having a blog to join regardless of what your role or usage of a blog happens to be. On the other hand, information is communicated via different channels such as for traditional press via public relations folks, investors through investors relations, analysts via analyst relations, partners and customers through their venues and so forth.

When you think about it, makes sense as after all, EMC sells and attaches storage to mainframes, open systems Windows, UNIX, Linux as well as virtual servers that use different tools, protocols, languages and points of interest. Thus it should not be surprising that their approach to communicating with different audiences leverage various mediums for diverse messages at multiple points in time.

What does all of this social media discussion have to do with the March 11 EMC event?

In my opinion, this was an experiment of sorts of EMC to test the waters by floating a new vision to their traditional pre brief audience in advance of talking with media prior to an actual announcement.

That is, EMC did not announce a new product, technology, initiative, business alliance or customer event, rather a vision and trajectory or signaling what they may be doing in the future.

How this ties to social media and networking is that rather than being an event only for those media, bloggers, tweeters, customers, consultants, vars, free lancers, partners or others who agreed to do so under NDA, EMC used the venue as an advance sounding board of sorts.

That is, by sticking to broad vision vs. propriety and confidential or sensitive topics, the discussion has been put out in advance in the open to stimulate discussion in traditional reports, articles, columns or related venues not to mention in temporal real time via twitter not to mention via blogs and beyond.

Does this mean EMC will be moving away from NDAs anytime soon? I do not think so as there is still very much a need for advanced (and not a couple of weeks prior to announcement) types of discussion around sensitive information. For example with the trajectory or visionary discussion last week by EMC, the short presentation and discussion, limited slides prompt more questions than they address.

Perhaps what we are seeing is a new approach or technique of how organizations can use and bring social networking mediums into the mainstream business process as opposed to being perceived as niche or experimental mediums.

The reason I think it was an experiment is that EMC practices both traditional analyst/media relations along with emerging social media networking relations that includes practioners that span both audiences. For some the social media bloggers and tweeters are a different audience than traditional media, writers, consultants or analysts, that is, they are a separate and unique audience.

Thus, it is in my opinion and like human knees, elbows, feet, hands, ears as well as, well, you get the picture I think that there are many different views or thoughts not to mention interpretations of social media, social networking, blogging, analysts, consultants, advisors, media or press, customers, partners, and so on with diverse roles, functions and needs.

Where this comes back to the topic of last weeks discussion is that of storage virtualization vs. virtual storage. Rest assured in the time since the EMC briefing and certainly in the weeks or months to come, there will be penalty of knees, elbows, hands and other body parts flying and signaling what is a particular view or definition of storage virtualization vs. virtual storage.

Of course, some of these will be more entertaining than others ranging from well rehearsed, in some cases over the past decade or more to new and perhaps even revolutionary ones of what is and what is not storage virtualization vs. virtual storage, let alone cloud vs. cluster vs. grid vs. federated and beyond.

Additional Comments and thoughts

In general, I like the trajectory vision EMC is rolling out even if it causes confusion between what is virtual storage vs. storage virtualization, after all, we have been hearing about storage virtualization for over a decade now if not longer. Likewise, there has been plenty of talk about public clouds so it is refreshing to see more discussion and less cloud ware or cloud marketecture and how to actually leverage what you have to adopt private cloud practices.

I suspect that as the EMC competition starts to hear or piece together what they think this vision is or is not, we should also start to hear some interesting stories, spins, counter pitches, debates, twitter fights, blog slams and YouTube videos, all of which also happen to consume more storage.

I also like what EMC is doing with social media and networking as a means or medium for building and maintain relationships as well as for information exchange complimenting traditional means and mediums.

In other words, EMC is succeeding with social networking by not using it just as another megaphone to talk at or over people, rather, as a means to engage, to get to know, to challenge, to exchange regardless of if you are a so called independent blogger, twitter, analyst, medial, constant, customer, var, investor, partner among others.

If you are not already doing so, here are some EMC folks who actively participate in two way dialogues across different areas with @lendevanna helping to facilitate and leverage the masses of various people and subject matter experts including @chuckhollis @chrisleblanc @cxi @davegraham @gminks @mike_fishman @stevetodd @storageanarchy @storagezilla @Stu and @vcto among many others.

Note that for you non twitter types, the previous are twitter handles (names or addresses) that can be accessed by putting http://twitter.com in place of the @ sign. For example @storageio = http://twitter.com/storageio

Additional Comments and thoughts:

Some comments and thoughts among others that I posted via twitter last week during the briefing event:

Here are some twitter comments that I posted last week during the event with hash tag #emcvs:

Is what was presented on the #emcvs #it #storage #virtualization call NDA material = Negative
Is what was presented on the #emcvs #it #storage #virtualization call a product announcement = NOpe
Is what was presented on the #emcvs #it #storage #virtualization call a statement of direction = Kind of
Is what was presented on the #emcvs #it #storage #virtualization call a hint of future functionality = probably
Is what was presented on the #emcvs #it #storage #virtualization call going to be shared with general public = R U reading this?
Is what was presented on the #emcvs #it #storage #virtualization call going to be discussed further = Yup
Is what was presented on the #emcvs #it #storage #virtualization call going to confuse the industry = Maybe
Is what was presented on the #emcvs #it #storage #virtualization call going to confuse customers = Depends on story teller
Is what was presented on the #emcvs #it #storage #virtualization call going to confuse competition = probably
Is what was presented on the #emcvs #it #storage #virtualization call going to provide fodder/fuel for bloggers = Yup
Anything else to add about #emcvs #it #storage #virtualization call today = Stay tuned, watch and listen for more!

Some additional questions and my perspectives on those include:

What did EMC announce? Nothing, it was not an announcement; it was a statement of vision.

Why did EMC hold a briefing without an NDA and yet nothing was announced? It is my opinion that EMC has a vision that they want to float an idea or direction, thus, sharing a vision to get discussions going without actually announcing a specific product or technology.

Is this going to be a repackaged version of the Invista storage virtualization platform? I do not believe so.

Is this going to be a repackaged version of the intellectual property (IP) assets that EMC picked up from the defunct startup called Yotta Yotta? Given some references to, along with what some of the themes and discussions center around, it is my guess that there is some Yotta Yotta IP along with other technologies that may be part of any future possible solution.

Who or what is YottaYotta? They were a late dot com startup founded in 2000 that went through various incarnations and value propositions with some solutions that shipped. Some of the late era IP included distributed cache coherency and distance enablement of large scale federated storage on a global basis.

Can the Yotta Yotta (or here) technology really scale? That remains to be seen, Yotta Yotta had some interesting demos, proof of concept, early adopters and big plans, however they also amounted to Nada Nada, perhaps EMC can make a Lotta Lotta out of it!

Other questions are still waiting for answers including among others:

Will EMC Virtual Storage (aka emcvs) become a common cure for typical IT infrastructure ailments?

Will this restart the debate around the golden rule of virtualization being whoever controls the virtualization controls the gold and thus vendors lock in?

Will this be a members only vision where only certain partners can participate?

What will other competitors respond with, technology, and marketecture, FUD or something else?

What are the specific details of when, where and how the vision is implemented?

What will all of this cost, will it work with existing products or is a forklift upgrade needed?

Has EMC bitten off more than they can chew or deliver on or is Pat Gelsinger and his crew racing down a mountain and out in front of their skis, or, is this brilliance beyond what we mere mortals can yet comprehend?

Can global data cache coherency really be deployed with data integrity on a global and large scale without negatively impacting performance?

Can EMC make Lotta Lotta with this vision?

Here is what some of the EMC bloggers have had to say so far:

Chuck Hollis aka @chuckhollis had this to say

Stuart Miniman aka @stu had this to say

Summing it up for now

Lets see how the rest of the industry responds to this as the vision rolls out and perhaps sooner vs. later becomes technology that gets deployed and used.

Im skeptical until more details are understood, however I also like it and intrigued by it if it can actually jump from Yotta Yotta slide ware to Lotta Lotta deployments.

Cheers
Gs

Greg Schulz - Author The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

Green IT, Green Gap, Tiered Energy and Green Myths

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 02:34:56

There are many different aspects of Green IT along with several myths or misperceptions not to mention missed opportunities.

There is a Green Gap or disconnect between environmentally aware, focused messaging and core IT data center issues. For example, when I ask IT professionals whether they have or are under direction to implement green IT initiatives, the number averages in the 10-15% range.

However, when I ask the same audiences who has or sees power, cooling, floor space, supporting growth, or addressing environmental health and safety (EHS) related issues, the average is 75 to 90%. What this means is a disconnect between what is perceived as being green and opportunities for IT organizations to make improvements from an economic and efficiency standpoint including boosting productivity.

Some IT Data Center Green Myths
Is Green IT a convenient or inconvenient truth or a legend?

When it comes to green and virtual environments, there are plenty of myths and realities, some of which vary depending on market or industry focus, price band, and other factors.

For example, there are lines of thinking that only ultra large data centers are subject to PCFE-related issues, or that all data centers need to be built along the Columbia River basin in Washington State, or that virtualization eliminates vendor lock-in, or that hardware is more expensive to power and cool than it is to buy.

The following are some myths and realities as of today, some of which may be subject to change from reality to myth or from myth to reality as time progresses.

Myth: Green and PCFE issues are applicable only to large environments.

Reality: I commonly hear that green IT applies only to the largest of companies. The reality is that PCFE issues or green topics are relevant to environments of all sizes, from the largest of enterprises to the small/medium business, to the remote office branch office, to the small office/home office or virtual office, all the way to the digital home and consumer.

Myth: All computer storage is the same, and powering disks off solves PCFE issues.

Reality: There are many different types of computer storage, with various performance, capacity, power consumption, and cost attributes. Although some storage can be powered off, other storage that is needed for online access does not lend itself to being powered off and on. For storage that needs to be always online and accessible, energy efficiency is achieved by doing more with less, that is, boosting performance and storing more data in a smaller footprint using less power.

Myth: Servers are the main consumer of electrical power in IT data centers.

Reality: In the typical IT data center, on average, 50% of electrical power is consumed by cooling, with the balance used for servers, storage, networking, and other aspects. However, in many environments, particularly processing or computation intensive environments, servers in total (including power for cooling and to power the equipment) can be a major power draw.

Myth: IT data centers produce 2 to 8% of all global Carbon Dioxide (CO2) and carbon emissions.

Reality: Thus might be perhaps true, given some creative accounting and marketing math in order to help build a justification case or to scare you into doing something. However, the reality is that in the United States, for example, IT data centers consume around 2 to 4% of electrical power (depending on when you read this), and less than 80% of all U.S. CO2 emissions are from electrical power generation, so the math does not quite add up. The reality is this, if no action is taken to improve IT data center energy efficiency, continued demand growth will shift IT power-related emissions from myth to reality, not to mention cause constraints on IT and business sustainability from an economic and productivity standpoint.

Myth: Server consolidation with virtualization is a silver bullet to address PCFE issues.

Reality: Server virtualization for consolidation is only part of an overall solution that should be combined with other techniques, including lower power, faster and more energy efficient servers, and improved data and storage management techniques.

Myth: Hardware costs more to power than to purchase.

Reality: Currently, for some low-cost servers, standalone disk storage, or entry level networking switches and desktops, this may be true, particularly where energy costs are excessively high and the devices are kept and used continually for three to five years. A general rule of thumb is that the actual cost of most IT hardware will be a fraction of the price of associated management and software tool costs plus facilities and cooling costs. For the most part, at least as of this writing, small standalone individual hard disk drives or small entry level volume servers can be bought and then used in locations that have very high electrical costs over a three to five year time frame.

Regarding this last myth, for the more commonly deployed external storage systems across all price bands and categories, generally speaking, except for extremely inefficient and hot running legacy equipment, the reality is that it is still cheaper to power the equipment than to buy it. Having said that, there are some qualifiers that should also be used as key indicators to keep the equation balanced. These qualifiers include the acquisition cost if any, for new, expanded, or remodeled habitats or space to house the equipment, the price of energy in a given region, including surcharges, as well as cooling, length of time, and continuous time the device will be used.

For larger businesses, IT equipment in general still costs more to purchase than to power, particularly with newer, more energy efficient devices. However, given rising energy prices, or the need to build new facilities, this could change moving forward, particularly if a move toward energy efficiency is not undertaken.

There are many variables when purchasing hardware, including acquisition cost, the energy efficiency of the device, power and cooling costs for a given location and habitat, and facilities costs. For example, if a new storage solution is purchased for $100,000, yet new habitat or facilities must be built for three to five times the cost of the equipment, those costs must be figured into the purchase cost.

Likewise, if the price of a storage solution decreases dramatically, but the device consumes a lot of electrical power and needs a large cooling capacity while operating in a region with expensive electricity costs, that, too, will change the equation and the potential reality of the myth.

Tiered Energy Sources
Given that IT resources and facilitated require energy to power equipment as well as keep them cool, electricity are popular topics associated with Green IT, economics and efficiency with lots of metrics and numbers tossed around. With that in mind, the U.S. national average CO2 emission is 1.34 lb/kWh of electrical power. Granted, this number will vary depending on the region of the country and the source of fuel for the power-generating station or power plant.

Like IT tiered resources (Servers, storage, I/O networks, virtual machines and facilities) of which there are various tiers or types of technologies to meet various needs, there are also multiple types of energy sources. Different tiers of energy sources vary by their cost, availability and environmental characteristics among others. For example, in the US, there are different types of coal and not all coal is as dirty when combined with emissions air scrubbers as you might be lead to believe however there are other energy sources to consider as well.

Tiered Energy Sources

Coal continues to be a dominant fuel source for electrical power generation both in the United States and abroad, with other fuel sources, including oil, gas, natural gas, liquid propane gas (LPG or propane), nuclear, hydro, thermo or steam, wind and solar. Within a category of fuel, for example, coal, there are different emissions per ton of fuel burned. Eastern U.S. coal is higher in CO2 emissions per kilowatt hour than western U.S. lignite coal. However, eastern coal has more British thermal units (Btu) of energy per ton of coal, enabling less coal to be burned in smaller physical power plants.

If you have ever noticed that coal power plants in the United States seem to be smaller in the eastern states than in the Midwest and western states, its not an optical illusion. Because eastern coal burns hotter, producing more Btu, smaller boilers and stockpiles of coal are needed, making for smaller power plant footprints. On the other hand, as you move into the Midwest and western states of the United States, coal power plants are physically larger, because more coal is needed to generate 1 kWh, resulting in bigger boilers and vent stacks along with larger coal stockpiles.

On average, a gallon of gasoline produces about 20 lb of CO2, depending on usage and efficiency of the engine as well as the nature of the fuel in terms of octane or amount of Btu. Aviation fuel and diesel fuel differ from gasoline, as does natural gas or various types of coal commonly used in the generation of electricity. For example, natural gas is less expensive than LPG but also provides fewer Btu per gallon or pound of fuel. This means that more natural gas is needed as a fuel to generate a given amount of power.

Recently, while researching small, 10 to 12 kWh standby generators for my office, I learned about some of the differences between propane and natural gas. What I found was that with natural gas as fuel, a given generator produced about 10.5 kWh, whereas the same unit attached to a LPG or propane fuel source produced 12 kWh. The trade off was that to get as much power as possible out of the generator, the higher cost LPG was the better choice. To use lower cost fuel but get less power out of the device, the choice would be natural gas. If more power was needed, than a larger generator could be deployed to use natural gas, with the trade off of requiring a larger physical footprint.

Oil and gas are not used as much as fuel sources for electrical power generation in the United States as in other countries such as the United Kingdom. Gasoline, diesel, and other petroleum based fuels are used for some power plants in the United States, including standby or peaking plants. In the electrical power G and T industry as in IT, where different tiers of servers and storage are used for different applications there are different tiers of power plants using different fuels with various costs. Peaking and standby plants are brought online when there is heavy demand for electrical power, during disruptions when a lower cost or more environmentally friendly plant goes offline for planned maintenance, or in the event of a trip or unplanned outage.

CO2 is commonly discussed with respect to green and associated emissions however there are other so called Green Houses Gases including Nitrogen Dioxide (NO2) and water vapors among others. Carbon makes up only a fraction of CO2. To be specific, only about 27% of a pound of CO2 is carbon; the balance is not. Consequently, carbon emissions taxes schemes (ETS), as opposed to CO2 tax schemes, need to account for the amount of carbon per ton of CO2 being put into the atmosphere. In some parts of the world, including the EU and the UK, ETS are either already in place or in initial pilot phases, to provide incentives to improve energy efficiency and use.

Meanwhile, in the United States there are voluntary programs for buying carbon offset credits along with initiatives such as the carbon disclosure project. The Carbon Disclosure Project (www.cdproject.net) is a not for profit organization to facilitate the flow of information pertaining to emissions by organizations for investors to make informed decisions and business assessment from an economic and environmental perspective. Another voluntary program is the United States EPA Climate Leaders initiative where organizations commit to reduce their GHG emissions to a given level or a specific period of time.

Regardless of your stance or perception on green issues, the reality is that for business and IT sustainability, a focus on ecological and, in particular, the corresponding economic aspects cannot be ignored. There are business benefits to aligning the most energy efficient and low power IT solutions combined with best practices to meet different data and application requirements in an economic and ecologically friendly manner.

Green initiatives need to be seen in a different light, as business enables as opposed to ecological cost centers. For example, many local utilities and state energy or environmentally concerned organizations are providing funding, grants, loans, or other incentives to improve energy efficiency. Some of these programs can help offset the costs of doing business and going green. Instead of being seen as the cost to go green, by addressing efficiency, the by products are economic as well as ecological.

Put a different way, a company can spend carbon credits to offset its environmental impact, similar to paying a fine for noncompliance or it can achieve efficiency and obtain incentives. There are many solutions and approaches to address these different issues, which will be looked at in the coming chapters.

What does this all mean?
There are real things that can be done today that can be effective toward achieving a balance of performance, availability, capacity, and energy effectiveness to meet particular application and service needs.

Sustaining for economic and ecological purposes can be achieved by balancing performance, availability, capacity, and energy to applicable application service level and physical floor space constraints along with intelligent power management. Energy economics should be considered as much a strategic resource part of IT data centers as are servers, storage, networks, software, and personnel.

The bottom line is that without electrical power, IT data centers come to a halt. Rising fuel prices, strained generating and transmission facilities for electrical power, and a growing awareness of environmental issues are forcing businesses to look at PCFE issues. IT data centers to support and sustain business growth, including storing and processing more data, need to leverage energy efficiency as a means of addressing PCFE issues. By adopting effective solutions, economic value can be achieved with positive ecological results while sustaining business growth.

Some additional links include:

Want to learn or read more?

Check out Chapter 1 (Green IT and the Green Gap, Real or Virtual?) in my book The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC) here or here.

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz - Author The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

Post Holiday IT Shopping Bargains, Dell Buying Exanet?

Thu, 11 Feb 2010 16:54:32

For consumers, the time leading up to the holiday Christmas season is usually busy including door busters as well as black Friday among other specials for purchasing gifts and other items. However savvy shoppers will wait for after Christmas or the holidays altogether perhaps well into the New Year when some good bargains can become available. IT customers are no different with budgets to use up before the end of the year thus a flurry of acquisitions that should become evident soon as we are entering earnings announcement season.

However there are also bargains for IT organizations looking to take advantage of special vendor promotions trying to stimulate sales, not to mention for IT vendors to do some shopping of their own. Consequently, in addition to the flurry of merger and acquisition (M and A) activity from last summer through the fall, there has been several recent deals, some of which might make Monty Hall blush!

Some recent acquisition activity include among others:

Dell bought Perot systems for $3.9B
DotHill bought Cloverleaf
Texas Memory Systems (TMS) bought Incipient
HP bought IBRIX and 3COM among others
LSI bought Onstor
VMware bought Zimbra
Micron bought Numonyx
Exar bought Neterion

Now the industry is abuzz about Dell, who is perhaps using some of the lose change left over from holiday sales as being in the process of acquiring Israeli clustered storage startup Exanet for about $12M USD. Compared to previous Dell acquisitions including EqualLogic in 2007 for about $1.4B or last years Perot deal in the $3.9B range, $12M is a bargain and would probably not even put a dent in the selling and marketing advertising budget let alone corporate cash coffers which as of their Q3-F10 balance sheet shows about $12.795B in cash.

Who is Exanet and what is their product solution?
Exanet is a small Israeli startup providing a clustered, scale out NAS file serving storage solution (Figure 1) that began shipping in 2003. The Exanet solution (ExaStore) can be either software based, or, as a package solution ExaStore software installed on standard x86 servers with external RAID storage arrays combining as a clustered NAS file server.

Product features include global name space, distributed metadata, expandable file systems, virtual volumes, quotas, snapshots, file migration, replication, and virus scanning, and load balancing, NFS, CIFS and AFP. Exanet scales up to 1 Exabyte of storage capacity along with supporting large files and billions of file per cluster.

The target market that Exanet pursues is large scale out NAS where performance (either small random or large sequential I/Os) along with capacity are required. Consequently, in the scale out, clustered NAS file serving space, competitors include IPM GPFS (SONAS), HP IBRIX or PolyServe, Sun Lustre and Symantec SFS among others.

Figure 1 Generic clustered storage model (Courtesy The Green and Virtual Data Center(CRC)

For a turnkey solution, Exanet packaged their cluster file system software with various vendors storage combined with 3rd party external Fibre Channel or other storage. This should play well for Dell who can package the Exanet software on its own servers as well as leverage either SAS or Fibre Channel MD1000/MD3000 external RAID storage among other options (see more below).

Click here to learn more about clustered storage including clustered NAS, clustered and parallel file systems.

Whats the dell play?

Its an opportunity to acquire some intellectual property (IP)
Its an opportunity to have IP similar to EMC, HP, IBM, NetApp, Oracle and Symantec among others
Its an opportunity to address a market gap or need
Its an opportunity to sell more Dell servers, storage and services
Its an opportunity time for doing acquisitions (bargain shopping)

Note: IBM also this past week announced their new bundled scale out clustered NAS file serving solution based on GPFS called SONAS. HP has IBRIX in addition to their previous PolyServe acquisition, Sun has ZFS and Lustre.

How does Exanet fit into the Dell lineup?

Dell sells Microsoft based NAS as NX series
Dell has an OEM relationship with EMC
Dell was OEMing or reselling IBRIX in the past for certain applications or environments
Dell has needed to expand its NAS story to balance its iSCSI centric storage story as well as compliment its multifunction block storage solutions (e.g. MD3000) and server solutions.

Why Exanet?
Why Exanet, why not one of the other startups or small NAS or cloud file system vendors including BlueArc, Isilon, Panasas, Parascale, Reldata, OpenE or Zetta among others?

My take is that probably because those were either not relevant to what Dell is looking for, lack of seamless technology and business fit, technology tied to non Dell hardware, technology maturity, the investors are still expecting a premium valuation, or, some combination of the preceding.

Additional thoughts on why Exanet
I think that Dell simply saw an opportunity to acquire some intellectual property (IP) probably including a patent or two. The value of the patents could be in the form of current or future product offerings, perhaps a negotiating tool, or if nothing else as marketing tool. As a marketing tool, Dell via their EqualLogic acquisition among others has been able to demonstrate and generate awareness that they actually own some IP vs. OEM or resell those from others. I also think that this is an opportunity to either fill or supplement a solution offering that IBRIX provided to high performance, bulk storage and scale out file serving needs.

NAS and file serving supporting unstructured data are a strong growth market for commercial, high performance, specialized or research as well as small business environments. Thus, where EqualLogic plays to the iSCSI block theme, Dell needs to expand their NAS and file serving solutions to provide product diversity to meet various customer applications needs similar to what they do with block based storage. For example, while iSCSI based EqualLogic PS systems get the bulk of the marketing attention, Dell also has a robust business around the PowerVault MD1000/MD3000 (SAS/iSCSI/FC) and Microsoft multi protocol based PowerVault NX series not to mention their EMC CLARiiON based OEM solutions (E.g. Dell AX, Dell/EMC CX).

Thus, Dell can complement the Microsoft multi protocol (block and NAS file) NX with a packaged (Dell servers and MD (or other affordable block storage) powered with Exanet) solution. While it is possible that Dell will find a way to package Exanet as a NAS gateway in front of the iSCSI based EqualLogic PS systems, which would also make for an expensive scale out NAS solution compared to those from other vendors.

Thats it for now.

Lets see how this all plays out.

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz - Author The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

Does IBM Power7 processor announcement signal storage upgrades?

Wed, 10 Feb 2010 22:33:44

IBM recently announced the Power7 as the latest generation of processors that the company uses in some of its mid range and high end compute servers including the iSeries and pSeries.

What is the Power7 processor?
The Power7 is the latest generation of IBM processors (chips) that are used as the CPUs in IBM mid range and high end open systems (pSeries) for Unix (AIX) and Linux as well as for the iSeries (aka AS400 successor). Building on previous Power series processors, the Power7 increases the performance per core (CPU) along with the number of cores per socket (chip) footprint. For example, each Power7 chip that plugs into a socket on a processor card in a server can have up to 8 cores or CPUs. Note that sometimes cores are also known as micro CPUs as well as virtual CPUs not to be confused with their presented via Hypervisor abstraction.

Sometimes you may also here the term or phrase 2 way, 4 way (not to be confused with a Cincinnati style 4 way chili) or 8 way among others that refers to the number of cores on a chip. Hence, a dual 2 way would be a pair of processor chips each with 2 cores while a quad 8 way would be 4 processors chips each with 8 cores and so on.

In addition to faster and more cores in a denser footprint, there are also energy efficiency enhancements including Energy Star for enterprise servers qualification along with intelligent power management (IPM also see here) implementation. IPM is implanted in what IBM refers to as Intelligent Energy technology for turning on or off various parts of the system along with varying processor clock speeds. The benefit is when there is work to be done, get it down quickly or if there is less work, turn some cores off or slow clock speed down. This is similar to what other industry leaders including Intel have deployed with their Nehalem series of processors that also support IPM.

Additional features of the Power7 include (varies by system solutions):

Energy Star for server qualified providing enhanced performance and efficiency.

IBM Systems Director Express, Standard and Enterprise Editions for simplified management including virtualization capabilities across pools of Power servers as a single entity.

PowerVM (Hypervisor) virtualization for AIX, iSeries and Linux operating systems.

ActiveMemory enables effective memory capacity to be larger than physical memory, similar to how virtual memory works within many operating systems. The benefit is to enable a partition to have access to more memory which is important for virtual machines along with the ability to support more partitions in a given physical memory footprint.

TurboCore and Intelligent Threads enable workload optimization by selecting the applicable mode for the work to be done. For example, single thread per core along with simultaneous threads (2 or 4) modes per core. The trade off is to have more threads per core for concurrent processing, or, fewer threads to boost single stream performance.

IBM has announced several Power7 enabled or based server system models with various numbers of processors and cores along with standalone and clustered configurations including:

IBM Power7 family of server systems

Power 750 Express, 4U server with one to four socket server supporting up to 32 cores (3.0 to 3.5 GHz) and 128 threads (4 threads per core), PowerVM (Hypervisor) along with main memory capacity of 512GB or 1TByte of virtual memory using Active Memory Expansion.

Power 755, 32 3.3Ghz Power7 cores (8 cores per processor) with memory up to 256GB along with AltiVec and VSX SIMD instruction set support. Up to 64 755 nodes each with 32 cores can be clustered together for high performance applications.

Power 770, Up to 64 Power7 cores providing more performance while consuming less energy per core compared to previous Power6 generations. Support for up to 2TB of main memory or RAM using 32GB DIMM when available later in 2010.

Power 780, 64 Power7 cores with TurboCore workload optimization providing performance boost per core. With TurboCore, 64 cores can operate at 3.8 GHz, or, enable up to 32 cores at 4.1 GHz and twice the amount of cache when more speed per thread is needed. Support for up to 2TB of main memory or RAM using 32GB DIMM when available later in 2010.

Additional Power7 specifications and details can be found here.

What is the DS8000?
The DS8000 is the latest generation of a family of high end enterprise class storage systems supporting IBM mainframe (zSeries), Open systems along with mixed workloads. Being high end open systems or mainframe, the DS8000 competes with similar systems from EMC (Symmetrix/DMX/VMAX), Fujitsu (Eternus DX8000), HDS (Hitachi) and HP (XP series OEM from Hitachi). Previous generations of the DS8000 (aka predecessors) include the ESS (Enterprise Storage System) Model 2105 (aka Shark) and VSS (Versatile Storage Server). Current generation family members include the Power5 based DS8100 and DS8300 along with the Power6 based DS8700.

IBM DS8000 Storage System

Learn more about the DS8000 here, here, here and here.

What is the association between the Power7 and DS8000?
Disclosure: Before I go any further, lets be clear on something, what I am about to post on is based entirely on researching, analyzing, correlating (connecting the dots) of what is publicly and freely available from IBM on the Web (e.g. there is no NDA material being disclosed here that I am aware of) along with prior trends and tendency of IBM and their solutions. In other words, you can call it speculation, a prediction, industry analysis perspective, looking into the proverbial crystal ball or educated guess and thus should not be taken as an indicator of what IBM may actually do or be working on. As to what may actually be done or not done, for that you will need to contact one of the IBM truth squad members.

Image via: e-tarocchi.com

As to what is the linkage between Power7 and the DS8000?

The linkage between the Power7 and the DS8000 is just that, the Power processors!

At the heart of the DS8000 are Power series processors coupled or clustered together in pairs for performance and availability that run IBM developed storage systems software. While the spin doctors may not agree, essentially the DS8000 and its predecessors are based on and around Power series processors clustered together with a high speed interconnect that combine to host an operating system and IBM developed storage system application software.

Thus IBM has been able to for over a decade leverage technology improvement curve advantages with faster processors, increased memory and I/O connectivity in denser footprints while enhancing their storage system application software.

Given that the current DS8000 family members utilize 2 way (2 core) or 4 way (4 core) Power5 and Power6 processors, similar to how their predecessors utilized previous generation Power4, Power3 and so forth processors, it only makes sense that IBM might possibly use a Power7 processor in a future DS8000 (or derivative perhaps even with a different name or model number). Again, this is just based all on historical trends and patterns of IBM storage systems group leveraging the latest generation of Power processors; after all, they are a large customer of the Power systems group.

Consequently it would make sense for IBM storage folks to leverage the new Power7 processors and features similar to how EMC is leveraging Intel processor enhances along with what other vendors are doing.

There is certainly room in the DS8000 architecture for growth in terms of supporting additional nodes or complexes or controllers (or whatever your term preference of choice is for describing a server) each equipped with multiple processors (chips or sockets) that have multiple cores. While IBM has only commercially released two complex or dual server versions of the DS8000 with various numbers of cores per server, they have come nowhere close to their architecture limit of nodes. In fact with this release of Power7, as an example, the model 755 can be clustered via InfiniBand with up to 64 nodes, with each node having 4 sockets (e.g. 4 way) with up to 8 cores each. That means on paper, 64 x 4 x 8 = 2048 cores and each core could have up to 4 threads for concurrency, or half as many cores for more cache performance. Now will IBM ever come out with a 64 node DS8000 on steroids?

Tough to say, maybe possibly some day to play specmanship vs EMC VMAX 256 node architectural limit, however Im not holding my breath just yet. Thus with more and faster cores per processor, ability to increase number of processors per server or node, along with architectural capabilities to boost the number of nodes in an instance or cluster, on paper alone, there is lots of head room for the DS8000 or a future derivative.

What about software and functionality, sure IBM could in theory simply turn the crank and use a new hardware platform that is faster, more capacity, denser, better energy efficiency, however what about new features?

Can IBM enhance its storage systems application software that it evolved from the ESS with new features to leverage underlying hardware capabilities including TurboCore, PowerVM, device and I/O sharing, Intelligent Energy efficiency along with threads enhancements?

Can IBM leverage those and other features to support not only scaling of performance, availability, capacity and energy efficiency in an economical manner, however also add features for advanced automated tiering or data movement plus other popular industry buzzword functionality?

Additional thoughts and perspectives
One of the things I find interesting is that some IBM folks along with their channel partners will go to great lengths to explain why and how the DS8000 is not just a pair of Power enabled based servers tightly coupled together. Yet, on the other hand, some of those folks will go to great lengths touting the advantages of leveraging off the shelf or commercial enabled servers based on Intel or AMD based systems such as IBMs own XIV storage solution.

I can understand in the past when the likes of EMC, Hitachi and Fujitsu were all competing with IBM building bigger and more function rich monolithic systems, however that trend is shifting. The trend now as is being seen with EMC and VMAX is to decouple and leverage more off the shelf commercially available technology combined with custom ASICs where and when needed.

Thus at a time where more attention and discussion is around clustered, grid, scalable storage systems, will we see or hear the IBM folks change their tune about the architectural scale up and out capabilities of the Power enabled DS8000 family?

There had been some industry speculation that the DS8000 would be the end of the line if the Power7 had not been released which will now (assuming that IBM leverages the Power7 for storage) shift to if there will be a Power8 or Power9 and so forth.

From a storage perspective, is the DS8K still relevant?

I say yes given its installed base and need for IBM to have an enterprise solution (sorry, IMHO XIV does not fit that bill just yet) of their own, lest they cut an OEM deal with the likes of Hitachi or Fujitsu which while possible, I do not see it as likely near term. Another soft point on its relevance is to gauge reaction from their competitors including EMC and HDS.

From a server perspective, what is the benefit of the new Power7 enabled servers from IBM?

Simple, increase scale of performance for single thread as well as concurrent or parallel application workloads.

In other words, supporting more web sites, partitions for virtual machines and guest operating system instances, databases, compute and other applications that demand performance and economy of scale.

This also means that IBM has a platform to aggressively go after Sun Solaris server customers with a lifeline during the Oracle transition, not to mention being a platform for running Oracle in addition to its own UDB/DB2 database. In addition to being a platform for Unix AIX as well as Linux, the Power7 series also are at the heart of current generation iSeries (the server formerly known as the AS400).

Additional links and resources:

Closing comments (for now):
Given IBMs history of following a Power chip enhancement with a new upgraded version of the DS8000 (or ESS/2105 aka Shark/VSS) and its predecessors by a reasonable amount of time, I would be surprised if we do not see a new DS8000 (perhaps even renamed or renumbered) within the year.

This is similar to how other vendors leverage new processor chip technology evolution to pace their systems upgrades for example how many vendors who leverage Intel processes have done announcements over the past year since the Nehalem series rolled out including EMC among others.

Lets see what the IBM truth squads have to say, or, not have to say :)

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz - Author The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

Technology Tiering, Servers Storage and Snow Removal

Mon, 8 Feb 2010 12:34:56

Granted it is winter in the northern hemisphere and thus snow storms should not be a surprise.

However between December 2009 and early 2010, there has been plenty of record activity from in the U.K. (or here), to the U.S. east coast including New York, Boston and Washington DC, across the midwest and out to California, it made for a white christmas and SANta fun along with snow fun in general in the new year.

2010 Snow Storm via www.star-telegram.com

What does this have to do with Information Factories aka IT resources including public or private clouds, facilities, server, storage, networking along with data management let alone tiering?

What does this have to do with tiered snow removal, or even snow fun?

Simple, different tools are needed for addressing various types of snow from wet and heavy to light powdery or dustings to deep downfalls. Likewise, there are different types of servers, storage, data networks along with operating systems, management tools and even hyper visors to deal with various application needs or requirements.

First, lets look at tiered IT resources (servers, storage, networks, facilities, data protection and hyper visors) to meet various efficiency, optimization and service level needs.

Do you have tiered IT resources?

Let me rephrase that question to do you have different types of servers with various performance, availability, connectivity and software that support various applications and cost levels?

Thus the whole notion of tiered IT resources is to be abe to have different resources that can be aligned to the task at hand in order to meet performance, availability, capacity, energy along with economic along with service level agreement (SLA) requirements.

Computers or servers are targeted for different markets including Small Office Home Office (SOHO), Small Medium Business (SMB), Small Medium Enterprise (SME) and ultra large scale or extreme scaling, including high performance super computing. Servers are also positioned for different price bands and deployment scenarios.

General categories of tiered servers and computers include:

Laptops, desktops and workstations
Small floor standing towers or rack mounted 1U and 2U servers
Medium sizes floor standing towers or larger rack mounted servers
Blade Centers and Blade Servers
Large size floor standing servers, including mainframes
Specialized fault tolerant, rugged and embedded processing or real time servers

Servers have different names email server, database server, application server, web server, and video or file server, network server, security server, backup server or storage server associated with them depending on their use. In each of the previous examples, what defines the type of server is the type of software is being used to deliver a type of service. Sometimes the term appliance will be used for a server; this is indicative of the type of service the combined hardware and software solution are providing. For example, the same physical server running different software could be a general purpose applications server, a database server running for example Oracle, IBM, Microsoft or Teradata among other databases, an email server or a storage server.

This can lead to confusion when looking at servers in that a server may be able to support different types of workloads thus it should be considered a server, storage, networking or application platform. It depends on the type of software being used on the server. If, for example, storage software in the form a clustered and parallel file system is installed on a server to create highly scalable network attached storage (NAS) or cloud based storage service solution, then the server is a storage server. If the server has a general purpose operating system such as Microsoft Windows, Linux or UNIX and a database on it, it is a database server.

While not technically a type of server, some manufacturers use the term tin wrapped software in an attempt to not be classified as an appliance, server or hardware vendor but want their software to be positioned more as a turnkey solution. The idea is to avoid being perceived as a software only solution that requires integration with hardware. The solution is to use off the shelf commercially available general purpose servers with the vendors software technology pre integrated and installed ready for use. Thus, tin wrapped software is a turnkey software solution with some tin, or hardware, wrapped around it.

How about the same with tiered storage?

That is different tiers (Figure 1) of fast high performance disk including RAM or flash based SSD, fast Fibre Channel or SAS disk drives, or high capacity SAS and SATA disk drives along with magnetic tape as well as cloud based backup or archive?

Figure 1: Tiered Storage resources

Tiered storage is also sometimes thought of in terms large enterprise class solutions or midrange, entry level, primary, secondary, near line and offline. Not to be forgotten, there are also tiered networks that support various speeds, convergence, multi tenancy and other capabilities from IO Virtualization (IOV) to traditional LAN, SAN, MAN and WANs including 1Gb Ethernet (1GbE), 10GbE up to emerging 40GbE and 100GbE not to mention various Fibre Channel speeds supporting various protocols.

The notion around tiered networks is like with servers and storage to enable aligning the right technology to be used for the task at hand economically while meeting service needs.

Two other common IT resource tiering techniques include facilities and data protection. Tiered facilities can indicate size, availability, resiliency among other characteristics. Likewise, tiered data protection is aligning the applicable technology to support different RTO and RPO requirements for example using synchronous replication where applicable vs. asynchronous time delayed for longer distance combined with snapshots. Other forms of tiered data protection include traditional backups either to disk, tape or cloud.

There is a new emerging form of tiering in many IT environments and that is tiered virtualization or specifically tiered server hyper visors in virtual data centers with similar objectives to having different server, storage, network, data protection or facilities tiers. Instead of an environment running all VMware, Microsoft HyperV or Zen among other hyper visors may be deployed to meet different application service class requirements. For example, VMware may be used for premium features and functionality on some applications, where others that do not need those features along with requiring lower operating costs leverage HyperV or Zen based solutions. Taking the tiering approach a step further, one could also declare tiered databases for example Oracle legacy vs. MySQL or Microsoft SQLserver among other examples.

What about IT clouds, are those different types of resources, or, essentially an extension of existing IT capabilities for example cloud storage being another tier of data storage?

There is another form of tiering, particularly during the winter months in the northern hemisphere where there is an abundance of snow this time of the year. That is, tiered snow management, removal or movement technologies.

What about tiered snow removal?

Well lets get back to that then.

Like IT resources, there are different technologies that can be used for moving, removing, melting or managing snow.

For example, I cant do much about getting ready of snow other than pushing it all down the hill and into the river, something that would take time and lots of fuel, or, I can manage where I put snow piles to be prepared for next storm, plus, to help put it where the piles of snow will melt and help avoid spring flood. Some technologies can be used for relocating snow elsewhere, kind of like archiving data onto different tiers of storage.

Regardless of if snowstorm or IT clouds (public or private), virtual, managed service provider (MSP), hosted or traditional IT data centers, all require physical servers, storage, I/O and data networks along with software including management tools.

Granted not all servers, storage or networking technology let alone software are the same as they address different needs. IT resources including servers, storage, networks, operating systems and even hyper visors for virtual machines are often categorized and aligned to different tiers corresponding to needs and characteristics (Figure 2).

Figure 2: Tiered IT resources

For example, in figure 3 there is a light weight plastic shovel (Shove 1) for moving small amounts of snow in a wide stripe or pass. Then there is a narrow shovel for digging things out, or breaking up snow piles (Shovel 2). Also shown are a light duty snow blower (snow thrower) capable of dealing with powdery or non wet snow, grooming in tight corners or small areas.

Figure 3: Tiered Snow management and migration tools

For other light dustings, a yard leaf blower does double duty for migrating or moving snow in small or tight corners such as decks, patios or for cleanup. Larger snowfalls, or, where there is a lot of area to clear involves heavier duty tools such as the Kawasaki mule with 5 foot curtis plow. The mule is a multifunction, multi protocol tool capable of being used for hauling items, towing, pulling or recreational tasks.

When all else fails, there is a pickup truck to get or go out and about, not to mention to pull other vehicles out of ditches or piles of snow when they become stuck!

Figure 4: Sometimes the snow light making for fast, low latency migration

Figure 5: And sometimes even snow migration technology goes off line!

And that is it for now!

Enjoy the northern hemisphere winter and snow while it lasts, make the best of it with the right tools to simplify the tasks of movement and management, similar to IT resources.

Keep in mind, its about the tools and when along with how to use them for various tasks for efficiency and effectiveness, and, a bit of snow fun.

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz - Author The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

California Center for Sustainable Energy (CCSE)

Thu, 4 Feb 2010 17:17:17

CCSE Facility and Seminar Series

This past week I had the honor of delivering a keynote presentation in San Diego at the California Center for Sustainable Energy (CCSE) as part of their continuing education and community outreach and education, workshop and seminar series. The theme of the well attended event was Next Generation Data Center Solutions of which my talk centered around leveraging Green and Virtual Data Centers for enabling efficiencey and effectiveness. In addition to my keynote, included a panel discussion that I moderated with representatives of the events sponsor Compucom, along with their special guests APC, HP, Intel and VMware.

The CCSE has a focus around Climate Change, Energy Efficienecey, Green Buildings, Renewable Energy, Transportation, Home and Business. Their services and focus includes awareness and outreach, education programs, library and tools, consultant and associated services. Speaking of their library, there is even a signed copy of my book The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC) now at the CCSE library that can be checked out along with their other resources.

The CCSE staff and facilities were fantastic with hosts Mike Bigelow (an energy engineer) and Marlene King (program manager) orchestrating a great event.

If you are in the San Diego area, check out the CCSE located at 8690 Balboa Ave., Suite 100. They have a great library, cool demonstrations and tools that you can check out to assist with optimization IT data centers from an energy efficicinecy standpoint. Learn more about the CCSE here.

Following are some relevant links to the keynote along with panel discussion from the CCSE event:

Follow these links to view additional videos or podcasts, tips, articles, books, reports and events.

Cheers
gs

Greg Schulz - Author The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

Industry trends and perspectives thoughts on iPad for business

Thu, 4 Feb 2010 17:17:17

In case you did not hear, Apple announced the iTouch on steroids aka iPad last week.

Apple iPad via www.apple.com

Is it a phone? No, its not an iPhone

Is it a PC? Well, not in the context of the traditional PC or Mac book

What is the iPad or more importantly, what is the possible business angle?

First as to what is it, it might be easier to describe what it is not.

As mentioned above, it is not an iPhone, granted you can get an iPad with 3G or WiFi for data access (similar to how iTouch has WiFi). Likewise, the iPad is not a PC in the context of running applications traditionally found on Windows PCs or Mac devices.

Does that mean the iPad is simply an iTouch or iPod for entertainment on steroids? Well, Maybe!

What is it?
As far as what is the iPad, here is a link to its specifications, some of which have resulted in confusion. For example, I have seen many comments about how the iPad does not have a camera. Well, not built in however there is an optional external camera if you need one.

As a side note, Im curious as to the net effect of how many PBytes of storage, TBytes of network bandwidth, and ExaHertz (I made that one up) of processing cycles were consumed via downloads or people watching the news of the iPad launch?

However, Im seeing additional uses for the iPad compared to the iTouch given its larger physical screen size and data access options, even if it is not a phone. For example, I can see scenarios in education where if the publishers get on board, can make a real transition from text books to eBooks to Goggle scanned books, however given the economics involved, and the already Amazon (e.g. Kindle) vs. Apple (iPad) Elephant wars, it will be interesting to watch.

Yet another area where I can see iPads being used closer to business will be as an internet, web or cloud content access on ramps, or, portals to access cloud based applications including office suites, email, calendaring payroll, shopping among others.

Likewise I can see where iPads may have custom applications ported to them, or, made accessible via safe secure connections. In other words, there is a scenario where iPads could catch on as a truly thin lightweight multifunction PC alternative.

For some additional thoughts on possible iPad use cases, I recently did a podcast with Andrew Burton of SearchSMB at TechTarget that can be accessed here or here.

iPad receiving mixed responses
Back to the iPad which is getting mixed responses.

There have also been comments about lack of Blue tooth capabilities for the iPad. Again, there is Blue tooth support on the iPad, however the question is really about what that can be used for, or, not used for. For example, there is an optional external keyboard that is attached via docking port, however, there is still no support for Blue tooth enabled deices like my Stowaway folding keyboard. Another question I have is how would the iPad work in my Sync Blue tooth enabled F150 including for use as a turn by turn, or large screen version of moving maps similar to iPhone?

Other iPad knocks include discussions around lack of a camera, that is, if you do not buy the optional external camera. There is also talk of a lack of an Adobe Flash player (at least initially), not to be confused with some headlines that say iPad lacks flash confusing with a perceived of lack of flash SSD memory or storage (iPad actually relies on flash aka SSD memory for storage).

Yet another knock has been that while it looks like an oversize iPhone, and that it will have an optional version with 3G cell technology for communicating with web or data services, it will not be usable as a phone per say. Hmm, wonder how long it will take for Skype, Vonage or others to appear on the iPad?

One of the questions or discussion points that come up regarding iPhones and now the iPad is the impact on what some already describe as an overloaded wireless network for ATT customers which includes me. Here (and here and here) are a couple of links to recent announcements and news about what ATT has done, and will be doing including investing $2B USD to upgrade their networks.

via www.att.com

General observations:
There appear to be a couple of bandwagons with this announcement:

The usual its Apple or iSomething so its very significant
The its a SNT (Shiny New Toy)
And, then others who are not quite sure where it fits or why.

Of course, there are the cynics along with skeptics (not to be confused with being one and the same). Some are cynics and discount anything from Apple like their counter parts who discount anything from Microsoft or others that are not part of their preference. However there also seems to be some skepticism among traditional Apple or iSomething fans regarding the iPad, needless to say, they are not doing iCartwheels over the announcement.

I think there is an even larger audience out there waiting to see, hear and learn if there is a play for the iPad, or, if new markets and opportunities will evolve around it for example as an alternative to Kindle, as an alternative to PCs for schools, or as a cloud content on-ramp. In other words, for markets where a PC is not needed. I think that there will be custom applications written for it, similar to those seen on custom platforms used by FedEx, UPS and many others.

There is also going to be the giveaway market where vendors will use iPad as a GUI display for their systems to be more hip that the PC or alternative to giving away Kindles.

PC and Mac People Via www.apple.com

Whats the verdict?
I think the jury is still out, Im not going to race out to the first in my neighborhood to have the shiny new toy (SNT), however I see a place for using it down the road as a content access device or running apps currently on iPhones where that platform is too small.

For example, a medical device maker who runs certain apps on iPhones yet their doctors or support staff find the iPhone to be smaller than desirable may like the iPad. However, apple may need to support .NET or other open or pseudo open interfaces for the platform lest they end up with a simple browser platform.

Given that Im going to skip the first generation of iPad waiting for the next version, similar to what I have done with the original Mac, the initial Apple Mac notebook, Newton, iPod and iPhone, its going to be awhile before I have my own iPad.

Whats your take on the iPad?

Click here to cast your vote on the iPad.

Check back soon to see how the results play out...

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz - Author The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

Infosmack Episode 34, VMware, Microsoft and More

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 15:43:21

Following on the heals of several guest appearances late in 2009 ( here, here, here and here) on the Storage Monkeys Infosmack weekly pod cast, I was recently asked to join them again for the inaugural 2010 show (Episode 34).

Along with VMguru Rich Brambley and hosts Greg Knieriemen and Marc Farley we discussed several recent industry topics in this first show of the year which can be accessed here or on iTunes.

Heres a link to the pod cast where you can listen to the discussion including VMware Go, VMware buying Zimbra, Vendor Alliances such as HP and Microsoft HyperV and EMC+Cisco+VMware, along with data protection for virtual servers issues options (or opportunities) among other topics.

I have included the following links that pertain to some of the items we discussed during the show.

Enjoy the show.

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz - Author interviews and articles for others soon to be released.

Based on prior trends and looking at forecasts, a simple predictions is that some of the items for 2010 will apply for 2011 as well given some of this years items may have been predicted by some in 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005 or, well ok, you get the picture. :)

Image via: http://e-tarocchi.com

Predictions are fun and funny in that for some, they are taken very seriously, while for others, at best they are taken with a grain of salt depending on where you sit. This applies both for the reader as well as who is making the predictions along with various motives or incentives.

Some are serious, some not so much...

For some, predictions are a great way of touting or promoting favorite wares (hard, soft or services) or getting yet another plug (YAP is a TLA BTW) in to meet coverage or exposure quota.

Meanwhile for others, predictions are a chance to brush up on new terms for the upcoming season of buzzword bingo games (did you pick up on YAP).

In honor of the Vancouver winter games, Im expecting some cool Olympic sized buzzword bingo games with a new slippery fast one being federation. Some buzzwords will take a break in 2010 as well as 2011 having been worked pretty hard the past few years, while others that have been on break, will reappear well rested, rejuvenated, and ready for duty.

Lets also clarify something regarding predictions and this is that they can be from at least two different perspectives. One view is that from a trend of what will be talked about or discussed in the industry. The other is in terms of what will actually be bought, deployed and used.

What can be confusing is sometimes the two perspectives are intermixed or assumed to be one and the same and for 2010 I see that trend continuing. In other words, there is adoption in terms of customers asking and investigating technologies vs. deployment where they are buying, installing and using those technologies in primary situations.

It is safe to say that there is still no such thing as an information, data or processing recession. Ok, surprise surprise; my dogs could have probably made that prediction during a nap. However what this means is more data will need to be moved, processed and stored for longer periods of time and at a lower cost without degrading performance or availability.

This means, denser technologies that enable a lower per unit cost of service without negatively impacting performance, availability, capacity or energy efficiency will be needed. In other words, watch for an expanded virtualization discussion around life beyond consolidation for servers, storage, desktops and networks with a theme around productivity and virtualization for agility and management enablement.

Certainly there will be continued merger and acquisitions on both a small as well as large scale ranging from liquidation sales or bargain hunting, to large and a mega block buster or two. Im thinking in terms of outside of the box, the type that will have people wondering perhaps confused as to why such a deal would be done until the whole picture is reveled and thought out.

In other words, outside of perhaps IBM, HP, Oracle, Intel or Microsoft among a few others, no vendor is too large not to be acquired, merged with, or even involved in a reverse merger. Im also thinking in terms of vendors filling in niche areas as well as building out their larger portfolio and IT stacks for integrated solutions.

Ok, lets take a look at some easy ones, lay ups or slam dunks:

More cluster, cloud conversations and confusion (public vs. private, service vs. product vs. architecture)
More server, desktop, IO and storage consolidation (excuse me, server virtualization)
Data footprint impact reduction ranging from deletion to archive to compress to dedupe among others
SSD and in particular flash continues to evolve with more conversations around PCM
Growing awareness of social media as yet another tool for customer relations management (CRM)
Security, data loss/leap prevention, digital forensics, PCI (payment card industry) and compliance
Focus expands from gaming/digital surveillance /security and energy to healthcare
Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) mainstream in discussions with some initial deployments
Continued confusion of Green IT and carbon reduction vs. economic and productivity (Green Gap)
No such thing as an information, data or processing recession, granted budgets are strained
Server, Storage or Systems Resource Analysis (SRA) with event correlation
SRA tools that provide and enable automation along with situational awareness

The green gap of confusion will continue with carbon or environment centric stories and messages continue to second back stage while people realize the other dimension of green being productivity.

As previously mentioned, virtualization of servers and storage continues to be popular with an expanding focus from just consolidation to one around agility, flexibility and enabling production, high performance or for other systems that do not lend themselves to consolidation to be virtualized.

6GB SAS interfaces as well as more SAS disk drives continue to gain popularity. I have said in the past there was a long shot that 8GFC disk drives might appear. We might very well see those in higher end systems while SAS drives continue to pick up the high performance spinning disk role in mid range systems.

Granted some types of disk drives will give way over time to others, for example high performance 3.5 15.5K Fibre Channel disks will give way to 2.5 15.5K SAS boosting densities, energy efficiency while maintaining performance. SSD will help to offload hot spots as they have in the past enabling disks to be more effectively used in their applicable roles or tiers with a net result of enhanced optimization, productivity and economics all of which have environmental benefits (e.g. the other Green IT closing the Green Gap).

What I dont see occurring, or at least in 2010

An information or data recession requiring less server, storage, I/O networking or software resources
OSD (object based disk storage without a gateway) at least in the context of T10
Mainframes, magnetic tape, disk drives, PCs, or Windows going away (at least physically)
Cisco cracking top 3, no wait, top 5, no make that top 10 server vendor ranking
More respect for growing and diverse SOHO market space
iSCSI taking over for all I/O connectivity, however I do see iSCSI expand its footprint
FCoE and flash based SSD reaching tipping point in terms of actual customer deployments
Large increases in IT Budgets and subsequent wild spending rivaling the dot com era
Backup, security, data loss prevention (DLP), data availability or protection issues going away
Brett Favre and the Minnesota Vikings winning the super bowl

What will be predicted at end of 2010 for 2011 (some of these will be DejaVU)

Many items that were predicted this year, last year, the year before that and so on
Dedupe moving into primary and online active storage, rekindling of dedupe debates
Demise of cloud in terms of hype and confusion being replaced by federation
Clustered, grid, bulk and other forms of scale out storage grow in adoption
Disk, Tape, RAID, Mainframe, Fibre Channel, PCs, Windows being declared dead (again)
2011 will be the year of Holographic storage and T10 OSD (an annual prediction by some)
FCoE kicks into broad and mainstream deployment adoption reaching tipping point
16Gb (16GFC) Fibre Channel gets more attention stirring FCoE vs. FC vs. iSCSI debates
100GbE gets more attention along with 4G adoption in order to move more data
Demise of iSCSI at the hands of SAS at low end, FCoE at high end and NAS from all angles

Gaining ground in 2010 however not yet in full stride (at least from customer deployment)

On the connectivity front, iSCSI, 6Gb SAS, 8Gb Fibre Channel, FCoE and 100GbE
SSD/flash based storage everywhere, however continued expansion
Dedupe everywhere including primary storage its still far from its full potential
Public and private clouds along with pNFS as well as scale out or clustered storage
Policy based automated storage tiering and transparent data movement or migration
Microsoft HyperV and Oracle based server virtualization technologies
Open source based technologies along with heterogeneous encryption
Virtualization life beyond consolidation addressing agility, flexibility and ease of management
Desktop virtualization using Citrix, Microsoft and VMware along with Microsoft Windows 7

Buzzword bingo hot topics and themes (in no particular order) include:

2009 and previous year carry over items including cloud, iSCSI, HyperV, Dedupe, open source
Federation takes over some of the work of cloud, virtualization, clusters and grids
E2E, End to End management preferably across different technologies
SAS, Serial Attached SCSI for server to storage systems and as disk to storage interface
SRA, E23, Event correlation and other situational awareness related IRM tools
Virtualization, Life beyond consolidation enabling agility, flexibility for desktop, server and storage
Green IT, Transitions from carbon focus to economic with efficiency enabling productivity
FCoE, Continues to evolve and mature with more deployments however still not at tipping point
SSD, Flash based mediums continue to evolve however tipping point is still over the horizon
IOV, I/O Virtualization for both virtual and non virtual servers
Other new or recycled buzzword bingo candidates include PCoIP, 4G,

RAID will again be pronounced as being dead no longer relevant yet being found in more diverse deployments from consumer to the enterprise. In other words, RAID may be boring and thus no longer relevant to talk about, yet it is being used everywhere and enhanced in evolutionary ways, perhaps for some even revolutionary.

Tape remains being declared dead (e.g. on the Zombie technology list) yet being enhanced, purchased and utilized at higher rates with more data stored than in past history. Instead of being killed off by the disk drive, tape is being kept around for both traditional uses as well as taking on new roles where it is best suited such as long term or bulk off-line storage of data in ultra dense and energy efficient not to mention economical manners.

What I am seeing and hearing is that customers using tape are able to reduce the number of drives or transports, yet due to leveraging disk buffers or caches including from VTL and dedupe devices, they are able to operate their devices at higher utilization, thus requiring fewer devices with more data stored on media than in the past.

Likewise, even though I have been a fan of SSD for about 20 years and am bullish on its continued adoption, I do not see SSD killing off the spinning disk drive anytime soon. Disk drives are helping tape take on this new role by being a buffer or cache in the form of VTLs, disk based backup and bulk storage enhanced with compression, dedupe, thin provision and replication among other functionality.

There you have it, my predictions, observations and perspectives for 2010 and 2011. It is a broad and diverse list however I also get asked about and see a lot of different technologies, techniques and trends tied to IT resources (servers, storage, I/O and networks, hardware, software and services).

Lets see how they play out.

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz - Author The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
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