Category: IT Industry Activity

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Links to Upcoming and Recent Webcasts and Videocasts

Here are links to several recent and upcoming Webcast and video casts covering a wide range of topics. Some of these free Webcast and video casts may require registration.

Industry Trends & Perspectives – Data Protection for Virtual Server Environments

Next Generation Data Centers Today: What’s New with Storage and Networking

Hot Storage Trends for 2008

Expanding your Channel Business with Performance and Capacity Planning

Top Ten I/O Strategies for the Green and Virtual Data Center

Cheers
Greg Schulz – StorageIO

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Green, Virtual, Servers, Storage and Networking 2008 Beijing Olympics

Storage I/O trends

How about those opening 2008 Beijing Olympic ceremonies on NBC last night?

If you were like me, I had my DVR capture the event while out enjoying the nice August evening with some friends doing some relaxing and fishing (we did catch and release fish!) on the scenic St. Croix river.

Fishing while DVR records 2008 Olympics

Fishing while DVR records 2008 Olympics

A young bald eagle seen during fishing while DVR records 2008 Olympics

The reason I bring up the Olympics, servers, storage, networking, virtualization and green topics are a couple of themes. One being all the news and content available to keep track of what is happening with the games taking place all of which is being stored on servers, storage and relying on networks to access the rich media and unstructured data via the web or traditional media. The 2008 summer games are also being described as the on-line and virtual olympics. The amount of storage being used to store digital data from the 2008 Olympics for later playback, which then gets recorded on DVRs if not watched in real-time is staggering as are the number of servers and networking capabilities being used. In addition to the video, audio, still photos, text and blogs, then there are the security cameras in Beijing generating massive amounts of digital data.

For those who track or keep an eye or ear open towards data and storage management, the amount of data that continues to grow and number of copies that get created should be a familiar theme. Of course, you would then have heard that the magic elixir is to simply de-dupe everything. That is reduce your data footprint by eliminating all of those extra copies however easier said then done, especially when a copy of the games is being transmitted and saved to millions of DVRs or other forms of data storage servers around the world.

For the time being, I prefer that my DVR support more usable storage capacity and real-time compression so that I can keep more copies of my favorite shows and of course the Olympics all in HDTV, which of course chews up storage space faster than a highly animated PowerPoint slide deck from your favorite vendors most recent, or, upcoming product announcements.

The other theme is in addition to being Olympic time, as well as late summer here in the northern hemisphere or winter for our friends in the summer hemisphere, its also pre-briefing and early product announcement time for the barrage of fall server, storage, networking, I/O, software, virtualization and green related solutions. So far, Im not sure if its the Olympics or what, however the bait line on the upcoming announcements and briefings include the tags “Industry First”, “Industry Unique”, “Only Vendor”, “Only Product”, “Revolutionary”, “First Vendor” or “First Product”, “Fastest”, “Largest”, “Greenest” among other interesting spins and twists that would even make an Olympic gymnast dizzy.

So enjoy the Olympic , keep those hard disk drives in your DVR cool while managing the usable capacity and watch for more gold medal attempts both from Beijing, as well as from your favorite IT vendors coming to a podium to you soon with their upcoming announcements, some of which may be award winning. Also check out www.greendatastorage.com which is now also pointed to by www.thegreenandvirtualdatacenter.com that has a new look and feel as well as some updated content with more on the way.

Cheers
gs

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

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Brocade to Buy Foundry Networks – Prelude to Upcoming Converged Ethernet and FCoE Battle

Storage I/O trends

The emerging and maturing Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and Converged Ethernet, aka Data Center Ethernet, Converged Enhanced Ethernet, Enterprise Ethernet among others marketing names activity is picking up. Today Brocade took a major step to shore up its already announced FCoE and converged Ethernet story which includes new directors and converged host bus adapters
by announcing intentions of buying

Ethernet high performance switching vendor Foundry Networks in a deal valued around $3B USD and some change. Not a bad deal for Foundry, some would say an expensive deal for Brocade, perhaps paying to much, however given some of the recent storage and networking related deals. For example IBM spending around $300M for a startup called XIV who claims to have shipped a few storage systems to a few customers, or, Dell spending about $1.3B to buy EqualLogic who had a few thousand customers (Could be the deal of the century for Dell compared to IBM and XIV, however time will tell), or EMC and some of its recent purchases like RSA, Avamar or bargains like WysDM, Mozy and Iomega not to mention Cisco having not been bashful about dropping some serious coin for standalone companies like Neuspeed (where are they now) for iSCSI as well as Andimao and more recently Nuovo. Regardless of if Mike Klayko (Brocade CEO) paid too much or not, he did what he had to do as part of his continuing activities to re-invent Brocade and leverage their core DNA and business focus of data infrastructures.

Brocade could probably have made a nice business for a few more years like some of the companies they have recently acquired tried to do including McData, CNT, INRANGE and so forth. However the reality is that sooner or later, they too (Brocade) would probably have been acquired by someone perhaps. With the acquisition of Foundry Networks, along with previous announcements for FCoE technologies and their existing products for NAS or file based storage management and iSCSI solutions, Brocade is signaling that they want to fight for survival as opposed to circle the wagons and guard their installed base and wheel house.

With the up-coming Converged Ethernet and FCoE battle royal shaping up to start in about 12 to 18 months, sooner for the early adopters who like to test and kick around technology early, or for those who want to go right to 10GbE today instead of 8Gb Fibre Channel, or, for those who like bleeding edge solutions. The reality even with recent proof of life plug-fest demos and claims of being ready for primetime, core Brocade customers particularly at the high-end of the market tend to be rather risk averse and cautions with their data infrastructure thus moving at a slower pace. For them, upgrading to 8Gb Fibre Channel may be the near term future while watching FCoE and converged Ethernet or converged enhanced Ethernet evolve and being transitioning in a couple of years. For these risk adverse type customers, bleeding edge technology means having a blood bank nearby and on call as downtime and disruption is not an option.

Rest assured, with Ciscopushing hard to stimulate the FCoE market and get people to skip 8Gb FC and switch over to 10GbE, there will be plenty more plug fest and proof of life demos, plenty of trash talking by both sides that will rival some of the best heavy weight match-ups.

Buyers beware, do your home work and if being an early adopter of FCoE and converged networks is right for you, with due diligence do some testing to see how everything really works in your environment from storage systems, to adapters, to switches, to protocol converters and gateways to management and diagnostic software. How does the whole ecosystem that matches your environment work for your scenario. If you are not comfortable with where the FCoE and converged Ethernet technologies and more importantly supporting ecosystem are at, take your time, monitor the situation as it unfolds over the next year or so leading up to the big battle royal between Brocade and Cisco.

Something that I think is interesting is that here we have Brocade and Cisco squaring off in a convergence battle between a general networking vendor (Cisco) and storage centric networking vendor (Brocade), both of whom have been built on organic growth as well as acquisitions. What?s even more interesting is that around 10 years ago back when Brocade was just getting started and Cisco was still trying to figure out Fibre Channel and iSCSI, 3COM had at the time the foresight to put together an alliance of Storage related partners to get into the then emerging SAN market place. The alliance was to include various storage vendors, switch and HBA as well as router or gateway vendors along with data and backup software vendors. Before the program could be officially launched, it was canceled just as all of the promotional material was about to be distributed due to poor finical health of 3COM. With a few exceptions, most of the participants in that early program, which was probably a year or two ahead of its time have either been bought or disappeared altogether. 3COM could have been a major force in a converged LAN and SAN market place instead of now watching Brocade and Cisco form the sidelines.

For now, congratulations to Mike Klayko and crew for demonstrating that they want to put up a fight and provide an alternative for their customers to Cisco and that they are serious about being a serious contender in the data infrastructure solution provider fight. For Cisco, looks like two of your competitors have now become one. Good luck and best wishes to both sides, Brocade and Cisco and I will be watching this battle from ring side as both parties line up and re-align their partner ecosystems.

Cheers
gs

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Missing Dedupe Debate Detail!

Storage I/O trends

The de-dupe vendors like to debate details of their solutions, ranging from compression or de-dupe ratios, to hashing and caching algorithms, to processor vs. disk vs. memory, to in-band vs. out-of-band, pre or post processing among other items. At times the dedupe debates can get more lively than a political debate or even the legendary storage virtualization debates of yester year.

However one item that an IT professional recently mentioned that is not being addressed or talked about during the de-dupe debates is how IT customers will get around vendor lock-in. Never mind the usual lock-in debates of whose back-end storage or disk drives, whose server a de-dupe appliance software runs and so forth.

The real concern is how data in the future will be recoverable from a de-dupe solution similar to how data can be recovered from tape today. Granted this is an apple to oranges comparison at best. The only real similarity is that a backup or archive solution sends a data stream in a tar-ball or backup or archive save set or perhaps in a file format to the tape or de-dupe appliance. Then, the VTL or de-dupe appliance software puts the data into yet another format.

Granted not all tape media can be interchanged between different tape drives given format, generations and of course using the proper backup or archive application to un-pack the data for use. Probably a more applicable apple to oranges comparison would be how will IT personal get data back from a VTL (non de-duping) disk based storage system compared to getting data back from a VTL or de-dupe appliance.

Today and for the foreseeable future the answer is simple, if your pain point is severe and you need the benefits of de-dupe, then the de-dupe software and appliance is your point of vendor lock-in. If vendor lock-in is a main concern, take your time, do your homework and due diligence for solutions that reduce lock-in or at least give a reasonable strategy for data access in the future.

Welcome to the world of virtualized data and virtualized data protection. Here?s the golden rule for de-dupe and that is like virtualization, who ever controls the software and management meta data controls the vendor lock-in, good, bad or in-different, that?s the harsh reality.

For the record, I like de-dupe technology in general as part of an overall data footprint reduction strategy combined with archiving and real-time compression for on-line and off-line data. I see a very bright future for it moving forward. I also see many of the heavy thinking and heavy lifting issues to support large-scale deployments and processing getting addressed over time allowing de-dupe to move from mid markets to large-scale mainstream adoption.

Now, back to your regularly scheduled de-dupe debate drama!

Cheers
gs

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Comfort Zones – Stating What Might Be Obvious to Some…

Storage I/O trends

Over the past couple of weeks I have talked with many IT professionals who work in IT data centers of varying size from different locations around the world. A couple of interesting patterns or trends if you prefer I have noticed are that while IT and storage professionals in general see disk based backup as the future and for some instances, a good tool today, there is still very much a comfort factor with magnetic tape.

The most cited reasons for continued use of tape being affordability, low power requirements, portability (assuming media is encrypted and secure) and familiar or comfort and confidence with the technology. A related trend or pattern is that while many IT professionals see the value and benefit of SSD including FLASH and RAM, there is also a concern or lack of confidence in the first so called enterprise class FLASH based SSD technology.

A related trend should hardly be a surprise in that enterprise customers I talk to who cling to tape as a data retention medium (even when using disk based backups) are also the most likely to have an early adopter aversion towards FLASH based enterprise storage. During discussions, what I also hear is that given time SSD including both RAM and enhanced or next generation FLASH will be adopted and deployed along magnetic hard disk drives (HDDs) and that HDDs will be used more in the future for backups and other data protection tasks.

Thus the consensus is that while HDDs have been declared dead by some with the arrival of FLASH and SSD, HDDs have joined the “Zombie” list of technologies declared dead, yet that continue to be produced and bought by customers. Other “Zombie” technologies include the IBM Mainframe, Fibre Channel, Magnetic Tapes, Copper based Ethernet and Printers among others. So with the magnetic HDD being over 50 years old, its safe to assume that magnetic HDD will be around for many more years, especially now that HDDs are on the “Zombie” technology list, a rather esteemed list I might add!

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 2006-2026 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved

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Spring 2008 Storage Descisions Wrap-Up

Once again the Techtarget (TT) folks put on a great event at the spring 2008 edition of Storage Decisions (SD) event in Chicago, tip of the hat to the whole TT crew. SD is known as an IT consumer/user event as opposed to industry events like SNW that are known as a vendor to vendor networking event. TT has added a new form over the past year that occurs the day/night before SD focused on the channel and var audiences with a dinner networking seminar called StorageStrategies. While SD continues to be focused on the IT consumer aka user, the TT channel program is a means for vendors to get in front of perspective channel partners to tell their story and value proposition of why they should be partnered. It?s a fun and growing event that I have been involved with for over a year now talking with the channel folks about issues and opportunities to address the various needs IT organizations. If you are a vendor looking to expand your channel presence, or, a channel partner var looking for new solutions, technologies and partners, these series are a great way of networking.

The main focus however last week was the SD event which had a great turnout of around 550 IT and storage professionals (not counting vendors, exhibitors, vars, media and analysts). To put the attendance in perspective compared to other events. I guess you could virtualizes the attendance of IT folks at about 65,431 however the reality number quoted by TT and observed (during the sessions, lunch and so forth) was in the mid 500?s (not including vendors, exhibitors, vars, media, analysts, hotel personal, stumping politicians, high school marching bands, tour groups and the homeless). Talking with vendors and exhibitors, the census was that they were either getting a boat load of good leads, or, getting actual appointments and meetings for near term opportunities that might help their sales reps win or buy a new boat, car, home, or cup of coffee.

Having been both a customer and a vendor before becoming an analyst years ago, it?s fun to walk the exhibit area listening and watching the different approaches and pitches by the booth personal. Some are focused on just getting leads, some on showing you?re their demo, some on how well they memorized their buzzword laden sales pitch, some can even give you their elevator value prop pitch in less than 30 seconds to get you to stay for another five minutes prompting a rescheduling to give them another 20 minutes of time. I?m still waiting for some vendor to bring in the carnival midway skills game where participants use a water gun or other item to know that particular vendors competitors logo on a target down, or, to knock down various IT issues.

In between all my meetings, presentations, recording some new video techtalks (Data footprint reduction, hot topics for the channel, clustered storage and NAS for SMBs) and other activity at the recent Storage Decisions event in Chicago this past week, I was able to meet up with some friends and former co-workers for a relaxing dinner at Buddy Guy?s Legends across the street from the event hotel. Performing on stage was Vino Louden who plays the guitar with the sole and feeling of Stevie Ray Vaughn and creative flare of Jimmy Page backed by his three man band. If you have never been to Legends you still have time to go there as the joint is staying open until their new facility is ready.

As soon as TechTarget posts the links to the session presentations including my talks on ?Clustered Storage and NAS? that included Web 2.0 and bulk storage as well as my talk about ?Green and Energy Efficient Storage? I will post them on this blog.

Cheers
GS

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Hot Storage Topics Converge on Chicago Next Week

Storage I/O trends

Next week in Chicago (May 12th) at Storage Strategies, the event for channel professional held the evening before StorageDecisions I will be talking about Hot Storage Topics for 2008 including addressing data protection for virtual environments, power cooling floor space environmental (PCFE) aka green items and the “Green Gap”, data footprint reduction for both on-line active and changing data using real-time data compression, archiving for in-active or dormant data and de-dupe for backup data. Also on the list of hot topics will be clustered NAS and clustered storage for Web 2.0 along with other timely and relevant items.

At the StorageDecisions event, I will be talking about ?Green and Environmental Friendly Storage? Tuesday morning May 13th in the presentation ?Practical Ways to Achieve Energy Efficiency – Power, Cooling, Floor-Space and Environmental (PCFE) Issues and Trends? looking at different issues including the ?Green Gap? or disconnect between messaging and common IT data center issues along with various options to boost efficiency for both active and in-active data and storage resources.

Also while at StorageDecisions next week, on Wednesday the 14th I will be talking about clustered storage including clustered NAS in the session ?Clustered Storage – ?From SMB, to Scientific, to File Serving, to Commercial, Social Networking and Web 2.0?. Given some recent vendor technology announcements and statements of direction, Web 2.0 and unstructured data are gaining popularity as are the confusing options or different types of clustered storage solutions including ?Cluster Wanna Bee?s?. If you are in Chicago next week, stop in and check out the event and if you can attend any of my sessions, stop by and say hello.

Cheers
GS

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More on Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE)

Here’s a link to a new StorageIO Industry Trends and Perspective on the emerging “Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) technology”.

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 2006-2026 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved

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Do Disk based VTLs draw less power than Tape?

The tape is dead debates rage on as they have for a decades which make for good press and discussion or debate during slow times, similar to coverage of what Britney Spears or Paris Hilton are or are not wearing.

In the on-going debates and Greenwashing of what technology or vendor is greener to prevent global warming, some recent tape is dead flare-ups have occurred including one hinting that tape libraries can draw more power than a disk based VTL with de-dupe are discussed over on Tony Pearson of IBM fame blog site as well as Beth Pariseau of TechTarget StorageSoup site.

I posted some comments on those sites along along with a link to a StorageIO Industry Trends and Perspective report titled “Energy Savings without Performance Compromise” as an example (look for an updated version of the comparison charts in the report in the not so distant future). The report looks at how different storage tiers including on-line disk, MAID, MAID 2.0 and tape libraries vary to address different PCFE (power, cooling, floor-space, environment) issues while supporting various service levels including performance, availability, capacity and energy use.

Additional related material can be found at www.storageio.com and www.greendatastorage.com including the Industry Trends and Perspective Report Business “Benefits of Data Footprint Reduction in general covering archiving, compression (on-line and off-line) along with de-duplication

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 2006-2026 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved

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SNW Spring 2008 Audio and Podcasts’

While at SNW in Orlando this past week among other briefings, meetings, interviews and general discussions with vendors, resellers, vars, IT customers, media and other analysts, I had a few minutes to record some sound bytes for some podcasts.

Click Here…

Here…

And here…

Listen to others at

Cheers
GS

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SNW Spring 2008

The Spring 2008 edition of SNW was this past week in Orlando FL and I spent a couple of days there for some briefings as well as give a presentation.

From an attendance standpoint, certainly it did not feel or look like one of the largest SNW events that I have been to over that past several years and yes there were in fact some real IT personal there, however nothing like on the scale of what you would see at a Storage Decisions, VMworld or any of the other customer/IT personal focused show.

However keeping in mind that SNW is first a vendor and SNIA event that just happens to have some IT customers attending. This edition of SNW seemed more sparse given the size of the venue and how spread out things were along with the high degree of over-subscription or number of concurrent sessions (which had from 7 to up to 8 sessions at the same time) that are trying to be squeezed into a small timeframe with a relatively small audience compared to other events.

For me it was time well spent with the great meetings and ad-hoc discussions that I had in the short period while in Orlando even with the decline in attendance compared to past years. There is a shift going on and there are certainly many other large events to compete with SNW for attendees and participants many of which particularly for IT customers seem to be growing in popularity.

IMHO its time for the SNW show organizers to take a good look at the model of SNW Europe for some ideas on how to tweak and tune the US-based event especially if they want to continue to do a twice a year event.

Here’s a link to download a copy of my presentation Beyond Green-wash: Power, Cooling, Floor-space, Environmental (PCFE) and green Issues, Trends and Solutions from SNW.

On the StorageIO website you can find links to industry Trends and Perspective white papers as well as other content addressing PCFE and green related issues including MAID, Intelligent Power Management and MAID 2.0, SSD, Virtualization and Data Footprint Reduction among others.

Drop me a note or comment about what you are encountering or your thoughts or any interesting findings about IT data center PCFE and green issues and check out storageioblog.com if you have not recently done so.

Ok, nuff said, for now…

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 2006-2026 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved

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Just When You Thought It Was Safe To Go In The Water Again!

In the shark infested waters where I/O and networking debates often rage, the Fibre Channel vs. iSCSI, or, is that iSCSI vs. Fibre Channel debates continue which is about as surprising as an ice berg melting because it floated into warmer water or hot air in the tropics.

Here’s a link to an article at Processor.com by Kurt Marko “iSCSI vs. Fibre Channel: A Cost Comparison iSCSI Targets the Low-End SAN, But Are The Cost Advantages Worth The Performance Trade-offs?” that looks at a recent iSCSI justification report and some additional commentary about apples to oranges comparisons by me.

Here’s the thing, no one in their right mind would try to refute that iSCSI at 1GbE levering built-in server NICs and standard Ethernet switches and operating system supplied path managers is cheaper than say 4Gb Fibre Channel or even legacy 1Gb and 2Gb Fibre Channel. However that’s hardly an apple to apples comparison.

A more interesting comparison is for example 10GbE iSCSI compared to 1GbE iSCSI (again not a fair comparison), or, look at for example the new solution from HP and Qlogic that for about $8,200 USD, you get a 8Gb FC switch with a bunch of ports for expansion, four (4) PCIe 8Gb FC adapters plus cables plus transceiver optics which while not as cheap as 1GbE ports built into a server or an off the shelf Ethernet switch, is a far cry from the usual apples to oranges no cost Ethernet NICs vs. $1,500 FC adapters and high price FC director ports.

To be fair, put this into comparison with 10GbE adapters (and probably not a real apples to apples comparison at that) which on CDW go from about $600 USD (without no transceivers) to $1,100 to $1,500 for single port with transceivers or about $2,500 to $3,000 or more for dual or multi-port.

So the usual counter argument to trying to make a more apples to apples comparison is that iSCSI deployments do not need the performance of 10GbE or 8GbE Fibre Channel which is very valid, however then a comparison should be iSCSI vs. NAS.

Here’s the bottom line, I like iSCSI for its target markets and see lots of huge upside and growth opportunity just like I see a continued place for Fibre Channel and moving forward FCoE leveraging Ethernet as the common denominator (at least for now) as well as NAS for data sharing and SAS for small deployments requiring shared storage (assuming a shared SAS array that is).

I?m a fan of using the right technology or tool for the task at hand and if that gets me in trouble with the iSCSI purist who wants everything on iSCSI, well, too bad, so be it. Likewise, if the FC police are not happy that I?m not ready and willing to squash out the evil iSCSI, well, too bad, get over it, same with NAS, InfiniBand and SAS and that’s not to mean I don?t take a side or preference, rather, applied to the right task at hand, I?m a huge fan of these and other technologies and hence the discussion about apples to apples comparisons and applicability.

Cheers
GS

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Moving Beyond the Benchmark Brouhaha

Heres a Link to a new article/column/opinion piece over at Enterprise Storage Forum by me about “Moving Beyond the Benchmark Brouhaha” in the storage industry.

Have a read for yourself.

Cheers
GS

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Atrato Part Deux

As a follow-up note to a previous post, Atrato last week came out of stealth mode, well, a little bit more about their solution with some interesting claims, however details remain sketchy if not in-consistent and looking forward to hearing more actual details.

Beth Pariseau over at TechTarget StorageSoup has an assimilation of information regarding Atrato and their recent announcements, Have a read…

Cheers
GS