Category: Education

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Protecting and Storing Personal Digital Documents

Storage I/O trends

Cindy Waxer recently wrote a great article over at Bankrate.com that also appeared on CNBC.Com among other venues titled 5 digital ways to store money documents that includes commentary and industry perspectives by yours truly Greg Schulz.

Why the concern about safely and securing personal digital documents? Digital created or stored data ranges from income tax, social security, mortgage and fiance, on-line and electronic bill payments, credit cards as well as banking and retirement information that is being stored on personal computers in place of, or in addition to printed hardcopy forms.

Many organizations are encouraging consumers as well as business to shift from printed hardcopy invoices and bills towards using electronic and paperless bill payments. In some instances, organizations offer discounts for switching to electronic bill payment or transactions while others apply service fees for using traditional non electronic payment methods.

So again, why the concern about storing safely and securely your digital receipts, invoices and payment records, after all, since they are on-line, why not simply rely on whom ever you are dealing with to maintain those records? The answers are many ranging from simple availability of having ready access to your documents similar to why you would have copies of important hardcopy documents available in addition to being in a safe place. Another answer is for compliance, long thought to only the realm and area of focus for large financial institutions.

So what is one to do? Simple, protect important electronic documents as you would protect important hardcopy documents by making copies and storing them in safe secure places including off-site archives in a different location.

Some general tips, technologies and techniques for safely storing digital documents include:

  • Make multiple copies of important data files, documents, photos or other important items
  • Store copies of important files and data on encrypted removable media including placing copies off-site
  • Protect encryption keys and passwords in a safe place to unlock protected data when needed
  • Leverage removable media including disk drives, USB FLASH thumb drives, CD/DVD or magnetic tape
  • Utilize on-line web or cloud based managed service providers offering internet document storage
  • Talk to your bank to see what they offer for digital safe deposit boxes also known as cloud or managed storage services
  • Perform regular backups of computers data files as well as have a disaster recovery kit and CD (or disk drive) stored in a safe place

    • Of course there is the question of how do you know what is important and what is not important, again, what has value to you either from a financial or legal perspective as well as soft value for example priceless digital or scanned photographs, video and recordings among other sentimental documents.

    Check out Cindy’s article here and learn more at www.storageio.com.

    Ok, nuff said.

    Cheers gs

    Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
    twitter @storageio

    All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved

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    Tiered Communication and Media Venues

    Storage I/O trends

    Someone recently ask me what have I been doing as they had not seen or heard anything from me in a longtime on the web which had me a bit puzzled. Then it dawned on me, perhaps the person was focused on reading or following just one of the many different venues that I’m involved with around the world ranging from print, to web to live-in person to social networking and perhaps a site that I have not been doing much with as of late. On the flip side, I hear from others about how much they see and hear, good bad or indifferent and of all the different venues I’m involved with wondering how its all done or possible and how big of an army do I have to support all the content and venues.

    Well, that got me to thinking a bit about how people have various preferences for how they get or share information. Pondering all the different mediums available for disseminating, receiving and sharing information and discussion, do you have a preferred medium, perhaps vetted via a traditional publisher or publication or un-vetted via the rapid fire quick pace world of Twitter, IM, personal blogs and social networking?

    Do Webs, Blogs, Twitter, IM, Email, Articles, Books, Conferences, Podcasts, Magazines and other communication mediums fall under the class of tiered media and communications? IMHO sure, to each their own or many preferences.

    What do these have to do with servers, storage, I/O networks and associated data management technologies and techniques? Simple, they are all forms of communications and information exchange that different people have preferences for getting or sharing information, news and opinions.

    Now what does any of this have to do with myself and StorageIO? Simple, I realize that people have their own preferences on how they get or share information and thus give and take part in different venues and using various mediums around the world. How is StorageIO using and participating in these various mediums and venues? Read-on and see some examples. So here’s my take and what I’m doing with StorageIO to take part with different people using several diverse forms or mediums.

    For some, its via web sites such as the main StorageIO web site (www.storageio.com) where information is added with regards to news, events, books, tips and articles, white papers and reports, services and experience among other content material or information.

    StorageIO website www.storageio.com

    Some people prefer traditionally published, printed and vetted content such as "Resilient Storage Networks" (Elsevier) ISBN-10: 1555583113 or ISBN-13: 978-1555583118 or "The Green and Virtual Data Center" (Auerbach) ISBN-10: 1420086669 or ISBN-13: 978-1420086669 as well as digital versions of published books like those on Kindle.

    Books by StorageIO at www.storageio.com/books.html

    Yet another venue are events such as conferences, seminars, custom events or other live in person meetings such as those found on the StorageIO events page.

    Events at www.storageio.com/events.html

    Some people like reading blogs such as Gregs’ StorageIO Blog (www.storageioblog.com) which can also be accessed via the main StorageIO web site (www.storageio.com).

    StorageIO Blog

    For other people, the preference is reading about information, industry trends and perspectives, quotes and interviews via traditional news sources, both IT industry related as well as market verticals such as those among others at the StorageIO in the News page.

    StorageIO in the news at www.storageio.com/news.html

    Another preference is to get information via pod cast, web cast or videos including those found here, here, here, and here among others.

    Podcasts with StorageIO

    Then the new and emerging mediums including Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, Plaxo, Technorati, and Linkedin, among others.

    StorageIO on twitter at www.twitter/storageio

    While the number of print based industry specific publications is on the decline, there are still some venues that print monthly, bi-monthly or quarterly venues of their pubs also digital versions to compliment web-based content such as searchstorage, enterprise storage forum and many others.

    StorageIO in Print (physical and virtual)

    Did I answer the question of how StorageIO is using and participating in different venues? If not, check out those mentioned above to learn and see more. However in a nutshell, there is a mix of working with existing venues ranging from books, to articles in journals, tips and commentary in news and other venues. There are also industry trends and perspectives white papers and solution briefs, web casts, pod casts and videos. There are live in person participating at conferences, seminars and custom events as well as regular updates on the web site and blogsite. For those who are into real-time, even more so than a blog, then there are the social sites including twitter or networking sites including Linkedin among others not to mention RSS feeds.

    Do you prefer to get news and information as it happens, or, perhaps even before it happens as the story is still un-folding, or, perhaps to wait and get the story with insight and perspectives along with the story behind the story?

    Do you have a preferred venue and medium for getting and enhancing information, or perhaps some combination of the above or others including Instant Messaging such as AOL (storageio), or email (info at storageio dot com), RSS, POTS or Plain Old Telephone System or Skype or Snail mail among many others venues, tools or aggregators and so what is it?

    Needless to say, there are plenty of changes and options for getting and giving information and the one thing we can count on being constant is change it self.

    Ok, nuff said.

    Cheers gs

    Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
    twitter @storageio

    All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved

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    Server Storage I/O Network Virtualization Whats Next?

    Server Storage I/O Network Virtualization Whats Next?
    Server Storage I/O Network Virtualization Whats Next?
    Updated 9/28/18

    There are many faces and thus functionalities of virtualization beyond the one most commonly discussed which is consolidation or aggregation. Other common forms of virtualization include emulation (which is part of enabling consolidation) which can be in the form of a virtual tape library for storage to bridge new disk technology to old software technology, processes, procedures and skill sets. Other forms of virtualization functionality for life beyond consolidation include abstraction for transparent movement of applications or operating systems on servers, or data on storage to support planned and un-planned maintenance, upgrades, BC/DR and other activities.

    So the gist is that there are many forms of virtualization technologies and techniques for servers, storage and even I/O networks to address different issues including life beyond consolidation. However the next wave of consolidation could and should be that of reducing the number of logical images, or, the impact of the multiple operating systems and application images, along with their associated management costs.

    This may be easier said than done, however, for those looking to cut costs even further than from what can be realized by reducing physical footprints (e.g. going from 10 to 1 or from 250 to 25 physical servers), there could be upside however it will come at a cost. The cost is like that of reducing data and storage footprint impacts with such as data management and archiving.

    Savings can be realized by archiving and deleting data via data management however that is easier said than done given the cost in terms of people time and ability to decide what to archive, even for non-compliance data along with associated business rules and policies to be defined (for automation) along with hardware, software and services (managed services, consulting and/or cloud and SaaS).

    Where To Learn More

    View additional NAS, NVMe, SSD, NVM, SCM, Data Infrastructure and HDD related topics via the following links.

    Additional learning experiences along with common questions (and answers), as well as tips can be found in Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials book.

    Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials Book SDDC

    What This All Means

    Ok, nuff said, for now.

    Gs

    Greg Schulz – Microsoft MVP Cloud and Data Center Management, VMware vExpert 2010-2018. Author of Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press), as well as Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press), Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier) and twitter @storageio. Courteous comments are welcome for consideration. First published on https://storageioblog.com any reproduction in whole, in part, with changes to content, without source attribution under title or without permission is forbidden.

    All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO. All Rights Reserved. StorageIO is a registered Trade Mark (TM) of Server StorageIO.

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    Remember The Alamo

    Yesterday I made a quick trip down to San Antonio Texas (SAT) to do a keynote talk about "BC/DR and Virtual Environments" along with a sprinkling of IT effieincy aka Green; consolidation, power, cooling, footprint, data management and cloud topics mixed in the discussion. The dinner event was put on by TechTarget with the local host being Mobius (not to be confused with Moby, the artist). Mobius is a Texas value added reseller (VAR) and the event took place at Morton’s near the river walk in downtown SAT. This was my second trip to SAT in about two months have done a morning seminar talk about the "Wide World of Archiving – Life beyond Compliance" back in October, also downtown SAT.

    It was a great event with a lively and interesting audience who provide good feedback and conversation sharing their experiences, concerns, issues and what they are looking at or for.

    Some general take away’s that I have from talking with the IT folks who were in attendance at the event include:

  • Do you homework and due diligence with regard to using VCBs for VMware backups
  • Pay attenion to the details when re-architecting and updating data protection for virtual environments
  • iSCSI and FC as well as FCoE all have different roles and places now and into the future for virtual environments
  • Concern about clouds, they are interesting, are a tiered resource to compliment other resources
  • Cloud services need to be part of BC/DR including in plans to isolate against disruptions such what occurred with Amazon and others
  • Not all servers can be consolidated due to different reasons and issues
  • Virtualization platforms (software and appliance or storage system based) can be used for replication, migration and consolidation
  • Virtual tape libraries are being adopted while tape usage continues
  • Discussion around different tiers of storage, tiered access (e.g. iSCSI, FC, FCoE, IBA, NAS, etc) and tiered data protection
  • A common theme is doing more with less, maintaining service levels and support business growth

    • Now on a different note, from technology and trends to travel.

    If you travel enough for business like I have had, you know that its not all jet set lifestyle like people think or assume, in fact many times what I get to see of a city or venue is the view from window of a car or train on the way from an airport to a venue, a hotel and sometimes a dinner event. However now and then, even on quick trips like yesterdays where I was in SAT for 15 hours, opportunities exist to get out even if its for just a moment and take in a site or two, see some of the city or area. Last night was an example of getting a chance to see something interesting when I walked the 7-8 blocks from the venue (I had gone directly from the airport to Mortons).

    Walking back to my hotel (it was a nice evening for a walk) last night, I walked around and near the river walk and low and behold, I stopped, turned and looked and there it was, the Alamo (see photo below taken from my cell phone) in all its splendor. It actually looks a lot smaller than what I thought it would look like, however it was fun to do some inadvertent site seeing before an early morning flight home.

    The Alamo
    Remember the Alamo via Greg’s Cell Phone Camera 12/10/08

    Now lets put travel into perspective here a bit.

    When I woke up yesterday morning it was 3F at home in Stillwater, by time I got to the airport it was a balmy 9F, by mid afternoon when I arrived in SAT and stood in the taxi line, it was a down right tropical in the mid 50s F. This morning when I woke up around 5:30AM for my early morning flight home, it was a cool 35F in SAT with a forecast of getting back up into the 50s (F) today while it was a pleasant 13F when I arrived back at my office early afternoon, the fun of traveling!

    Thanks to everyone who came out to last nights event and it was great to have had a chance to meet and visit with you, hopefully next time we will have more time for follow-up questions, however feel free to drop me a note. Also thanks too the Techtarget, Mobius and Mortons folks for putting a great event together, and, remember the Alamo and if you have not been there, check it and the river walk out!

    Cheers gs

    Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press, 2011), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press, 2009), and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier, 2004)

    twitter @storageio

    All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2012 StorageIO and UnlimitedIO All Rights Reserved

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    Data Migration Tips

    Storage I/O trends

    Data migration and movement, whether to support technology upgrades or replacements, tiered storage, ILM, consolidation, BC/DR and load balancing among other things is something that most if not all IT environments do at some point in time. Some organizations based on size or other criteria may be more involved with data migration on a more routine basis using host software, appliances or migration tools, storage system as well as migration services.

    Robert (Bob) Scheier has a new article over on SearchStorage about Eight data migration tips” that provides a good basis or starting point for learning more about issues, options and general items to consider with regard to data movement and migration. Read more what Robert and those he talks with including me in his new article here.

    Ok, nuff said.

    Cheers gs

    Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
    twitter @storageio

    All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved

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    Downloads for fall 2008 San Francisco Storage Decisions now available

    The TechTarget Storage Media Group has posted on Bitpipe the session presentations from the recent fall (November 17-19th) 2008 San Francisco Storage Decisions event. If you have never been to a Storage Decisions event, it?s a great venue for meeting with IT and storage professionals as well as vendors who also show up to show their wares and meet with the attendees. Make no mistake about it, Storage Decisions is not a vendor to vendor meet and industry network event like SNW or a vendor sponsored user group like VMworld or EMCworld, rather, its focused on the IT and storage professional and encourages speakers to be frank and candid in their discussions of technologies, techniques and even of vendors and their solutions.

    In addition to doing a keynote session Wednesday evening November 19th on ?Hot Storage Topics for Channel Professionals? at the Storage Strategies for Channel Professionals Dinner event, I also did two presentations at Storage Decisions one in the management and executive track Management and Executive Track on Green and Efficient Storage , an (updated version from what was covered in September 2008 at New York) timely theme given my new book ?The Green and Virtual Data Center? (Auerbach) along with another session in the Storage and capacity management track of  ?Clustered and Grid Storage — From SMB, to Scientific, to Social Networking and Web 2.0? (also updated from September 2008)

    View the entire list of all Storage Decisions sessions here.

    A big thanks to all who came out last week in San Francisco at Storage Decisions and who attended the sessions enabling great discussion and insight both during the sessions, as well as during lunches, breaks and exhibition hours.

    Cheers gs

    Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press, 2011), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press, 2009), and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier, 2004)

    twitter @storageio

    All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2012 StorageIO and UnlimitedIO All Rights Reserved

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    Time In and Around Clouds

    This past week I spent some time in, around and above the clouds literally and figutively. I was in the Netherlands the past few days doing a seminar with Brouwer Storage as well as key note presentation on Wednesday at the Dutch StorageExpo in Utrecht (a fabulous event with lots of buzz and activity, nice job Marloes!) before flying home today from my favorite airport (Amsterdam Schiphol).

    (Following photo’s were taken this past summer on an early morning flight from my phone camera)
    View of morning clouds from the air
    Getting ready to land on a morning flight going through some clouds

    Another view of morning clouds from the air just before landing
    More morning clouds

    Looking out at the wing of an Northwest Airlines Airbus A320 while in the clouds
    Low visibility as you can barely see the wingtip

    In addition to flying above the clouds over the Atlantic (not the above photos), the fall clouds at home where it was snowing when I left and then raining when I returned, with wind and clouds (some occasional sun) while in Holland, and then the industry buzz around EMC’s cloud and clustered storage solution announcement (also here and here and here and here) called Atmos (aka the solution code named hulk and maui), this week had a strong cloud theme along with a dose of policy management.

    Meeting regularly with IT professionals from organizations of all size as well as various vendors and vars around the world, is a great way to avoid having your thinking end up to much in the clouds, instead, staying rooted as to where IT issues and pain points are vs. where they are perceived to be.

    However, the long plane ride with no cell phone or email or web access also made for some great time to relax and watch the clouds go by. In a few days I?m back in the air again as next week I will be in San Francisco presenting at Storage Decisions. Next weeks topics will include a session updated with new content looking at “Clustered Storage: From SMB, to Scientific, to File Serving, to Commercial, Social Networking and Web 2.0” and grids among other topics.

    If you are in the area, stop by and say hello next Monday and Tuesday at the San Francisco Hilton.

    Ok, nuff said.

    Cheers gs

    Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
    twitter @storageio

    All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved

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    Vendors Who Dont’ Want to Be Virtualized?

    Storage I/O trends

    This past week I did a couple of keynote and round table discussions in Plano (Dallas) at Jaspers and in Boston at Smith and Wollensky with a theme of BC/DR for Virtualized environments. In both locations, where we had great participate involvement and discussions, audience members discussed the various merits and their experiences with server virtualization, and one of the many common themes was vendors whose do not support their vertical applications in virtualized environments.

    Say it so Joe (or Jane), especially with so many vendors tripping over themselves to show how their software can be stuffed into a VM in order to jump on the VM bandwagon. How could it be so that some vendors dont’ want to be virtualized?

    It’s true, there are some independent software vendors (ISV) whose vertical packages are commonly deployed in environments of all size who do not for various reasons want nor support their software running in a virtualized environment.

    The reasons some vendors of vertical specific applications do not support their software in virtualized environments can vary from quality of service (QoS), performance, contention and response time or availability concerns, desire to continue selling physical servers and other hardware with their applications, to the desire to keep their application on a server platform that they can control the QoS by insuring that no other applications or changes are made to the server and associated operating system environment.

    Yet another example can be that the vendor has simply not had a chance to test or, to test in various permutations and thus take the route of not supporting their solutions in a virtualized, or, what they may perceive as in a consolidated environment.

    This is in no way a new trend as for decades vendors of vertical software have often take a stance of not allowing other applications to be installed on a server where their software is installed in order for them to maintain QoS and service level agreement (SLA) levels and support guarantees.

    In some cases such as specialized applications including hospital patient care or related systems, this can make sense as well as perhaps complying with regulatory requirements. However there are plenty of other applications where vendors drag their feet or resist supporting virtualized environments without realizing that not all virtualized environments need to be consolidated. That is, a stepping stone or baby step can be to 1st install their software on a VM that has a dedicate physical machine (PM) to validate that their are no instabilities or QoS impacts of running in a VM.

    After some period of time and comfort levels, then the application and its associated VM could be placed along side some other number of VMs in an incremental and methodical manner to determine what if any impacts occur.

    The bottom line is this, not all applications and servers lend themselves to being consolidated for various reasons, however, many of those applications and servers can be virtualized to enable management transparency including facilitating movement to other servers during upgrades or maintenance as well as BC/DR (e.g. life beyond consolidation), a topic that I cover in more detail in my new book “The Green and Virtual Data Center” (Auerbach).

    Likewise, there are some applications that truly for security, QoS, availability, politics, software or hardware dependencies or compatibility among other reasons that should be left alone for now. However there are also many applications where vendors need to re-think or look at why they do not support a virtualized server environment and better articulate those issues to their customers, or, start the testing and qualifications as well as put together best practices guides on how to deploy their applications into virtualized environments.

    Thanks for all of those who ventured out this week in Plano and Boston and participating in the discussion, look forward to seeing and hearing from you again in the not so distant future.

    Ok, nuff said.

    Cheers gs

    Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
    twitter @storageio

    All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved

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    DAS, SAS, FCoE, Green Efficient Storage and I/O Podcast & FAQs

    Storage I/O trends

    Here are some links to several recent podcast and FAQs pertaining to various popular technolgies and trends.

    Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) FAQs

    Direct Attached Storage for SMB and other enviromnets that do not need networked (SAN or NAS) storage.

    Green and Energy Efficient Storage as well as FCoE and related topics

    Along with several other topics found here.

    Ok, nuff said.

    Cheers gs

    Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
    twitter @storageio

    All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved

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    CMG, Enabling “The Green and Virtual Data Center”

    Storage I/O trends

    Last week I was invited to by Tom Becchetti and the Minneapolis CMG folks to keynote at their session hosted at the Brocade facity in Minneapolis along with other speakers from Brocade, IBM, Teamquest and Sun.

    The theme of my talk was “The Green and Virtual Data Center and The Importance of Metrics” which can be downloaded here.

    I have been a member of CMG for many years as a former performance and capacity planning analyst when I worked in IT organizations and having presented at many CMG events around the world. While CMG has been around for many decades and has seen its share of ups and downs. With a current focus on boosting use, maximizing resource usage, improving service delivery and performance while using less energy in smaller footprints, now is the perfect opportunity for CMG to re-invent itself and show relevance as the organization that knows how to measure, watch, model and manage resource usage and service delivery effectiveness across different technology domains including servers, storage, networks, applications, operating systems and facilities. There is a golden opportunity for CMG members to step up and leverage their skills across different technology domains working with others to establish metrics, models and baselines.

    In my new book, “The Green and Virtual Data Center” (Auerbach) I include a chapter on metrics and measurement as well as many other topics and themes that tie into the notion of effective and efficient data centers need to carry out Infrastructure Resource Management (IRM) which is also a chapter in the book, that includes performance and capacity planning across technology domains.

    Watch for more on this topic.

    Ok, nuff said.

    Cheers gs

    Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
    twitter @storageio

    All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved

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    Presentation Downloads from Storage Decisions New York 2008

    TechTarget has posted presentations for download from the recent fall 2008 Storage Descisions in New York City. In the Executive and Management Track (Track 5) you can find my presentation ?Green and Environmental Friendly Storage: Practical Ways to Achieve Energy?.

    In the Storage and Capacity Management Track (Track 3) you can find my presentation ?Clustered Storage — From SMB, to Scientific, to Social Networking and Web 2.0?.

    Cheers
    Gs

    Posted on

    Escape From New York – Back from Storage Decisions NY 2008

    Storage I/O trends

    This past week I was in New York City (NYC) presenting at the IT professionals (e.g. customer) focused Storage Decisions event where I presented several sessions (See previous posting) including Green and Energy Efficient Storage Solutions ? Practical Ways to Reduce Power Consumption or Doing More with Less on Tuesday, and Clustered Storage ? From SMB, to Scientific, to Social Networking and Web 2.0 on Wednesday morning (Watch for TechTarget to announce the availability of the slides). In addition to presenting and several briefing meetings, we also recorded several new TechTalks for both IT professionals as well as channel professionals on a wide range of topics from SMB to enterprise.

    In addition to presenting at Storage Decisions, I was also the key note speaker at the Storage Strategies event for channel professionals where I discussed hot and emerging trends, technologies and opportunities for channel professionals. The event put on by TechTargets channel group including Cathy Gagne, Sue Troy and Colin Steele among many others was sponsored by EMC who presented to the channel audience their diverse solution offerings from VMware to storage and all points in between, NEC whom are now expanding their marketing story and messaging to cover their diverse storage line including the D series, servers and blade systems as well as their clustered hydrastor archiving storage system, Nexsan with their second generation MAID intelligent power management for variable performance and energy efficient storage.

    To say that things were hopping in New York this week would be an understatement with the 63rd UN general assembly taking place with past and current U.S. presidents, current candidates as well as countless foreign dignitaries in town among everyone else. At the Hilton New York City
    , which was the venue for Stg. Desc, as in previous years when its UN week, the place was crawling with not only storage professionals, vendors and industry media, there were also the broader media covering other people at the hotel for meetings including John McCain and foreign dignitaries, as well as celebrities like Ed Burns who was attending a NY FD/PD fund raiser event while across the street, there were the latest movie from Spike Lee ? Miracle at St. Anna?, and then the new release staring Richard Gere & Diane Lane ?Nights in Rodanthe? premieres took place. All that in addition to industry celebrities including Steve Foskett as well as Curtis Preston and many many others.

    Back to Storage Decisions event Once again, the TechTarget folks including Lindsey Mullen, Peter Bochner, Rich Castanga, Nicole Tierney and Carol Sliwa and many others put together an outstanding event with an audience of IT professionals. For a storage focused, non vendor event, Storage Decisions remains the premiere event for non vendor audiences. All sessions were once again very well attended by engaging professionals from a variety of different IT organizations which makes these events fantastic for their interaction with the folks in the trenches compared to some events that are more vendors centric focused.

    My talk about Green and Energy Efficient Storage Solutions solutions addressing how to do more with less including energy avoidance and energy efficiency, technologies and techniques was well attended by an engaging audience. Several different approaches to address various energy efficiency were covered and that will be further expanded on in addition to many other topics pertaining to green IT data centers in my new book ?The Green and Virtual Data Center? (Auerbach).

    For example, one of the topics covered was energy avoidance using 1st generation MAID from vendors such as Copan or second generation MAID 2.0 and inveiglement power management (IPM) or adaptive power management solutions from vendors on a rapidly growing list including Adaptec, DDN, Fujitsu, Greenbytes, HDS, HGST, NEC, Nexsan and Xyratex among others not to mention all of the vendors who have made statements of direction or have upcoming solutions soon to be delivered.

    In addition to IPM and MAID based solutions, tape and other off-line mediums including removable hard disk drives from vendors including EMC/Iomega, Fuji Film, IBM, Imation, Prostor, Quantum, Sony, SpectraLogic and Sun among others where the metric for idle or in-active data and storage is how much capacity per unit of energy per given configuration and footprint.

    Another category coveted was boosting energy efficiency for active applications and data where the metric is doing more IOPS, bandwidth, messages or emails, files or other transactions or activity per watt of energy using either RAM or FLASH SSD, or, using fast energy efficiency disk drives with vendors that include among others 3PAR, BlueArc, Curtis, Dell, DotHill, Infotrend, EMC, Fujitsu, Gear6, HDS, HGST, HP, IBM, Intel, LSI, NEC, NetApp, Samsung, Seagate, Solid Data, STEC, Sun, SGI, TMS and Violin.

    There are also the high capacity storage solutions for bulk storage where the metric is amount of capacity per watt of energy in a given footprint which is basically everyone in the industry that supports high capacity SATA disk drives not to mention the bulk and clustered storage vendors that do more with less.

    Then there is the business benefits of data footprint reduction (archive, compress, dedupe) and space optimization vendors for storage and networking ranging from Asigra, Brocade, Cisco, Datadomain, EMC, Exagrid, Falconstor, HP, NetApp, Ocarina, PKzip, Quantum, Riverbed, Sepaton, Silverpeak and Storwize among others not to mention tiered storage among other related hardware, software and management topics. Also covered where various other infrastructure resource management (IRM) topics including performance and capacity planning, space optimization, configuration and use of tools and techniques including virtualization for emulation, aggregation or consolidation as well as for management abstraction and transparency not to mention the usual thin provisioning and use of different RAID levels to boost energy efficiency themes.

    In addition to my green storage talk, I also presented on Clustered Storage(aka grid if you prefer) solutions for block and file, on-line active primary to secondary or off-line and near-line for backup and archiving solutions as well as emerging bulk storage solutions for web 2.0 or other instances where large amounts of data need to be stored on-line that in the past would have been archived for example fixed content reference data, web and research material, medical records or other images as well as social networking and entertainment media. Some of the vendors covered in this session included 3PAR, Amazon, BlueArc, Dell, EMC, Exagrid, Exanet, HP, IBM, IBRIX, Isilon, Lefthand, NEC, NetApp, Panasas, Permabit, Redhat and SGI among others.

    After a busy couple of days, on the way to the airport the other day while stuck in traffic in busy metropolis of New York City (NYC) where I was flying next to the wide open Midwest spaces of Cedar Rapids Iowa for a key note speaking engagement, a thought that came to mind was, John Carpenters ?Escape from New York? starring Kurt Russell as ?Snake Plissken?.

    Well, like ?Snake Plissken?, I made it to the airport in time for my flight to the wide open expanse of the Midwest and Cedar Rapids Iowa and then finally back home, what a week of diversity, however it was a great week.

    Thanks too all those who attended and participated in the various events this past week, it was great to meet so many new people as well as reacquaint with others or put a name and face together for so many others. I look forward to seeing and hearing from you all again soon and remember to keep an eye out for my new book, ?The Green and Virtual Data Center? (Auerbach) that you can beat the holiday shopping rush and order now at Amazon.comas well as many other fine venues around the world.

    Learn more at the TechTarget associated websites as well as at www.storageio.com and www.thegreenandvirtualdatacenter.com aka www.greendatastorage.com.

    Cheers gs

    Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press, 2011), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press, 2009), and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier, 2004)

    twitter @storageio

    All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2012 StorageIO and UnlimitedIO All Rights Reserved

    Posted on

    Green Storage – Practical Ways to Reduce Power Consumption

    Storage I/O trends

    The busy 2008 fall events activities continue, last week was New Orleans at Arnauds and Chicago at Morton’s where the topic was BC/DR in and for virtualized environments in a series of dinner seminar events with IT professionals. This coming week it’s off to New York City and then Ceder Rapids Iowa. In New York City, I will be there to present at Storage Decisions on several topics including Green Storage – Practical Ways to Reduce Power Consumption on Tuesday, Clustered Storage – From SMB, to Scientific, to Social Networking and Web 2.0 on Wednesday morning. For those attending Storage Decisions in New York, stop by and say hello as I will also be in the expo hall during the ask the experts (ATE) sessions on Tuesday late afternoon. For those not attending, Storage Decisions usually posts a link to the slides shortly after the event as well as watch for several new pod casts, videos, tips and related content to appear soon, some of which will be produced next week while Im in New York City.

    Also next week while in New York City, on Monday evening I will be the key-note speaker for the Storage Strategies for channel professionals event also at the New York Hilton.

    Ok, nuff said.

    Cheers gs

    Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
    twitter @storageio

    All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved

    technorati tags: Green Gap, Green Hype, Green IT, PCFE, The Green and Virtual Data Center, Virtualization, StorageIO, Green Washing

    Posted on

    Why XIV is so important to IBMs storage business – Its Not About the Technology or Product!

    Storage I/O trends

    Ok, so I know I’m not taking a popular stance on this one from both camps, the IBMers and their faithful followers as well as the growing legion of XIV followers will take exception I’m sure.

    Likewise, the nay sayers would argue why not take a real swing and knock the ball out of the park as if it were baseball batting practice. No, I’m going a different route as actually, either of the approaches would be too easy and have been pretty well addressed already.

    The IBM XIV product that IBM acquired back in January 2008 is getting a lot of buzz (some good, some not so good) lately in the media and blog sphere (here and here which in turn lead to many others) as well as in various industry and customer discussions.

    How ironic that the 2008 version of storage in an election year in the U.S. pits the IBM and XIV faithful in one camp and the nay sayers and competition in the other camps. To hear both camps go at it with points, counter points, mud-slinging and lipstick slurs should be of no surprise when it comes vendor?s points and counter points. In fact the only thing missing from some of the discussions or excuse me, debates is the impromptu appearance on-stage by either Senators Bidden, Clinton, McCain or Obama or Governor Palin to weigh in on the issues, after all, it is the 2008 edition of storage in an election year here in the United States.

    Rather than jump on the bashing XIV bandwagon which about everyone in the industry is now doing except for, the proponents or, folks taking a step back looking at the bigger non-partisan picture like Steve Duplessie the genesis billionaire founder of ESG and probably the future owner of the New England Patriots (American) Football team whose valuation may have dripped enough for Steve to buy now that their start quarterback Tom Brady is out with a leg injury that will take longer to rebuild than all the RAID 6 configured 1 TByte SATA disk drives in 3PAR, Dell, EMC, HGST, HP, IBM, NetApp, Seagate, Sun and Western Digital as well as many other vendors test labs combined. As for the proponents or faithful, in the spirit of providing freedom of choice and flexible options, the cool-aid comes in both XIV orange as well as traditional IBM XIV blue, nuff said.

    In my opinion, which is just that, an opinion, XIV is going to help and may have already done so for IBMs storage business not from the technical architecture or product capabilities or even in the number of units that IBM might eventually sell bundled or un-bundled. Rather, XIV is getting IBM exposure and coverage to be able to sit at the table with some re-invigorated spirit to tell the customer what IBM is doing and if they pay attention, in-between slide decks, grasp the orders for upgrades, expansion or new installs for the existing IBM storage product line, then continue on with their pitch until the customer asks to place another upgraded or expansion order, then quickly grab that order, then continue on with the presentation while touching lightly on the products IBM customers continue to buy and looking to upgrade including:

    IBM disk
    IBM tape – tape and virtual tape
    DS8000 – Mainframe and open systems storage
    DS5000 – New version of DS4000 to compete with new EMC CLARiiON CX4s
    DS4000 ? aka the Array formerly known as the FastT
    DS3000 – Entry level iSCSI, SAS and FC storage
    NetApp based N-Series – For NAS windows CIFS and NFS file sharing
    DR550 archiving solution
    SAN Volume Controller-SVC

    Not to mention other niche products such as the Data Direct Networks-DDN based DCS9550 or IBM developed DS6000 or recently acquired Diligent VTL and de-duping software.

    IBM will be successful with XIV not by how many systems they sell or give away, oh, excuse me, add value to other solutions. How IBM should be gauging XIV success is based on increased sales of their other storage systems and associated software and networking technologies including the mainframe attachable DS8000, the new high performance midrange DS5000 that builds on the success of the DS4000, all of which should have both Brocade and Cisco salivating given their performance need for more Fibre Channel (and FICON for DS8000) 4GFC and 8GFC Fibre Channel ports, switches, adapters and directors. Then there is the netapp based N series for NAS and file serving to support unstructured data including Web and social networking.

    If I were Brocade, Cisco, NetApp or any of the other many IBM suppliers, I would be putting solution bundles together certainly to ride the XIV wave, however have solution bundles ready to play to the collateral impact of all the other IBM storage products getting coverage. For example sure Brocade and Cisco will want to talk about more Fibre Channel and iSCSI switch ports for the XIV, however, also talk performance to be able to unleash the capabilities of the DS8000 and DS5000, or, file management tools for the N-Series as well as bundles around the archiving DR550 solution.

    The N-Series NAS gateway that could be used in theory to dress up XIV and actually make it usable for NAS file serving, file sharing and Web 2.0 related applications or unstructured data. There is the IBM SAN Volume Controller-SVC that virtualizes almost everything except the kitchen sink which may be in a future release. There is the DR550 archiving and compliance platform that not only provides RAID 6 protected energy-efficient storage, it also supports movement of data to tape, now if IBM could get the story out on that solution which maybe in the course of talking about XIV, IBM DR550 might get discovered as well. Of course there are all the other backup, archiving, data protection management and associated tools that will get pick-up and traction as well.

    You see even if IBM quadruples the XIV footprint of revenue installed in production systems with 400% growth rates year over year, never mind that the nay-sayers that would only be about 1/20 or 1/50th of what Dell/EqualLogic, or LeftHand via HP/Intel or even IBM xseries not to mention all the others using IBRIX, HP/PolyServe, Isilon, 3PAR, Panasas, Permabit, NEC and the list goes on with similar clustered solutions have already done.

    The point is watch for up-tick even if only 10% on the installed DS8000 or DS5000 (new) or DS4000 or DS3000 or N-Series (NetApp) or DR550 (the archive appliance IBM should talk more about), or SVC or the TS series VTLs.

    Even a 1% jump due to IBM folks getting out and in front of customers and business partners, a 10% jump on the installed based of somewhere around 40,000 DS8000 (and earlier ESS versions) is 4,000 new systems, on the combined DS5000/DS4000/DS3000 formerly known as FasT with combined footprint of over 100,000 systems in the field, 10% would be 10,000 new systems. Take the SVC, with about 3,000 instances (or about 11,000 clustered nodes), 10% would mean another new 300 instances and continue this sort of improvement across the rest of the line and IBM will have paid for not only XIV and Moshe?s (former EMCer and founded of XIV and now IBM fellow) retirement fund.

    IBM may be laughing to the big blue bank even after having enough money to finally buy a clustered NAS file system for Web 2.0 and bulk storage such as IBRIX before someone else like Dell, EMC or HP gets their hands on it. So while everyone else continues to bash how bad XIV is performing. Whether this is a by design strategy or one that IBM can simply fall into, it could be brilliant if played out and well executed however only time will tell.

    If those who want to rip on xiv really want to inflict damage, cease and ignore XIV for what it is or is not and find something else to talk about and rest assured, if there are other good stories, they will get covered and xiv will be ignored.

    Instead of ripping on XIV, or listening to more XIV hype, I’m going fishing and maybe will come back with a fish story to rival the XIV hype, in the meantime, look I forward to seeing the IBM success for their storage business as a whole due to the opportunity for IBMers and their partners getting excited to go and talk about storage and being surprised by their customers giving them orders for other IBM products, that is unless the IBM revenue prevention department gets in the way. For example if IBMers or their partners in the excitement of the XIV moment forget to sell to customers what customers want, and will buy today or are ready to buy and grab the low hanging fruit (sales orders for upgrades and new sales) of current and recently enhanced products while trying to reprogram and re-condition customers to the XIV story.

    Congratulations to IBM and their partners as well as OEM suppliers if they can collective pull the ruse off and actually stimulate total storage sales while XIV becomes a decoy and maybe even gets a few more installs and some revenue to help prop it up as a decoy.

    Ok, nuff said.

    Cheers gs

    Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
    twitter @storageio

    All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved