Category: IT Industry Activity

Posted on

March Metrics and Measuring Social Media

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.

Who Are You and Your Influences
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.

Sample metricsSample Metrics

Customer Collective Metrics and Rankings

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?

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

Posted on

Its US Census time, What about IT Data Centers?

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?

US 2010 Cenus formsUS 2010 Cenus forms
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.

IT Data Center Resources
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.

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

Posted on

March Metric Madness: Fun with Simple Math

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.
Basic Storage Forecast
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.

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

Posted on

Who or what is your sphere of influence?

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 from 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 get 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 attended 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 their 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 filled 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 get 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 pre-screened 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 give perspective on where those groups are going and looking to discuss 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, set up dialogue with others given how easy it is to do with various mediums or venues. For example, if you are a media, financial, research or consulting advisory analyst or self-proclaimed pundit, set up 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, set up some information vendor dialogue as well).

Who Are You and Your Influences
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 set up relationships with various analysts, advisors, consultants, vars, customers and so forth. If you are the customer, likewise set up 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 way 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 prove 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…

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

Posted on

Hard product vs. soft product

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.

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, that is service (or lack there of) being delivered

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.

Example IT hard product (hardware and software) delivering soft product services

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.

Example IT hard product (hardware and software) delivering soft product services
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?

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

Posted on

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

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 @c_weil @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 https://twitter.com in place of the @ sign. For example @storageio = https://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 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 IT, Green Gap, Tiered Energy and Green Myths

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.

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, it’s 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.

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

Posted on

Post Holiday IT Shopping Bargains, Dell Buying Exanet?

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.

Clustered Storage Model: Source The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC)
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.

Dell

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

Technorati tags: Dell

Posted on

Does IBM Power7 processor announcement signal storage upgrades?

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.


IBM Power7 processor wafers (chips)

 

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.


IBM Power7 with up to eight cores per processor (chip)

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.

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 :)

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

Posted on

Technology Tiering, Servers Storage and Snow Removal

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?

Tiered Storage Resources
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 Xen 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).

Tiered IT Resources
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.

Tiered Snow tools
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!

Snow movement
Figure 4: Sometimes the snow light making for fast, low latency migration

Snow movement
Figure 5: And sometimes even snow migration technology goes off line!

Snow movement

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.

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

Posted on

Industry trends and perspectives thoughts on iPad for business

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.

ATT Mobility
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? Cast your vote and see what others are thinking in the following poll.

Cheers gs

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

Technorati tags: iPad

Posted on

California Center for Sustainable Energy (CCSE)



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

Technorati tags: Trends

Posted on

Infosmack Episode 34, VMware, Microsoft and More

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 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

2010 and 2011 Trends, Perspectives and Predictions: More of the same?

2011 is not a typo, I figured that since Im getting caught up on some things, why not get a jump as well.

Since 2009 went by so fast, and that Im finally getting around to doing an obligatory 2010 predictions post, lets take a look at both 2010 and 2011.

Actually Im getting around to doing a post here having already done 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. :)

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.

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