Category: IT Infrastructure Topics

Items and topics, techniques and technologies pertaining to IT infrastructure and resources including their management across various technology domains areas including servers, storage, network and facilities hardware, software and practices.

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Getting Caught Up and Holiday Shopping

Its a busy time of the year as things wind down and wrap up, including holiday shopping and applicable gift wrapping unless you outsource the wrapping to the likes of Amazon.com when shopping on-line in a cloud enabled world.

For me this was a busy week with a quick trip out to New York City (NYC) for some meetings and to do another dinner keynote event, in addition to wrapping up some other projects as well as getting a jump on some up-coming projects and adding some additional events to the 2009 calendar (more on those soon).

Speaking of holiday shopping, Beth Pariseau over at SearchStorage has put out her annual what to get a geek for the holidays piece with this edition titled "Jingle bell storage: What to buy a geek for the holidays".

In addition to Beth’s great list, here are some additional considerations.

  • For those who might forget their heads if not attached to their shoulders, or late for their own wake, how about a wrist watch with USB flash drive built in (encrypted preferred)
  • Speaking of encryption, to support increased data growth, replace that too small 8GB encrypted USB flash with a new 16GB encrypted version (My 8GB version I bought a while ago works great).
  • Oh, and upgrade the DVR (add more and bigger disk drives) to support more editions of “Friday Night Lights“, “How its Made”, “Worlds Toughest Fixes”, “Sunday Night Football”, "Factory Floor" and anything on “HDnet” or “HDnet Movies”, a larger capacity external SAS or SATA attached disk with software to copy what I already have saved.
  • For those who enjoy Wine and I/O, check out the Vinturi Essential Wine Aerator (Bought one of these after seeing them in Sonoma on a recent trip)
  • For those who like removable storage media and want to compliment their EMC Retrospect (I have been a Retrospect since well before EMC bought them, I guess that makes me an EMC customer?) or other backups, the Imation Odyssey portable USB adapter (I bought an Odyssey over a year ago) is great for larger backups (beyond a flash drive) when traveling.
  • In order to track those lost tapes to avoid getting on next years Santa naughty or nice list, how about FujiFind (FujiFilm) Tape tracker
  • On the software and tools front, Xobni (a form of eDiscovery and search for Microsoft Outlook) along with OutTwit (twitter interface where you can also find myself) if you are using Microsoft Outlook (have been using both of these, great productivity tools).
  • Still not sure, how about my new book "The Green and Virtual Data Center" (Auerbach) or my other book "Resilient Storage Networks" (Elseiver) both available at Amazon.com and other fine venues around the world (I bought a copy of both to see how on-line sale worked ;).

    • That’s it for now as I need to get a few more things done including more holiday shopping and chores not to mention get ready for the snowstorm that is forecasted to dump several inches of new snow tomorrow here in the Stillwater area.

    Ok, nuff said.

    Cheers gs

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

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

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    Server Storage I/O Network Virtualization Whats Next?

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

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

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

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

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

    Where To Learn More

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

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

    Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials Book SDDC

    What This All Means

    Ok, nuff said, for now.

    Gs

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

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

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    Remember The Alamo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Now lets put travel into perspective here a bit.

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

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

    Cheers gs

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

    twitter @storageio

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

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    Data Migration Tips

    Storage I/O trends

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

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

    Ok, nuff said.

    Cheers gs

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

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

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    Industry Trend: Five year HDD (hard disk drive) warranties

    Storage I/O trends

    I received a note from Seagate the other day (they requested that this be embargoed until today) about changes to their warranty program for their various disk drive products.

    Now I get a ton of updates, press releases, briefing notes and other news from vendors, resellers, industry trade groups and public relations folks among others every day (and thats in addition to the spam), all of which help to fill up my hard disk drives and backups stored on removable hard disk drives faster than the hard disk drive on my HD-DVR fills up from HD programming.

    However this note from Seagate stood out and I want to share with you my industry trends and perspective. That is, this IMHO signals the realities of how long different storage technologies are used before being discarded (e.g. lifecycle or useful life) as much as what the reliability and endurance of the products is which I explain a bit further down in this post.

    So here’s what Seagate is doing and draw your own conclusion and see my additional perspectives and opinions below.

    Seagate Warranty Change

    Overview
    Seagate’s leadership in product quality and reliability has given it an edge in offering customers better value when they need it. Seagate’s current 5-year limited warranty will remain in place for consumer retail products as well as for enterprise-class hard drives, and we will now provide our distributor customers with a 3-year limited warranty for all other hard drives. Based on our data, we know that 95% of all returns take place during the first three years, so by offering a 3-year warranty (which Seagate believes is more in line with the rest of the industry), we can make other aspects of our customer support and warranty programs more attractive with negligible impact to customer product return needs. The 3-year limited warranty on notebook, desktop and consumer electronics bare drives offers new advantages and enhancements to the business proposition for our channel customers while improving cost efficiencies for Seagate. We expect little, if any change for consumers since hard drives used in computer systems other devices are covered by the individual manufacturer’s warranty.

    Warranty at a high level:
    3-year warranty – Seagate Desktop, Notebook & Consumer Electronics drives sold to customers
    5-year warranty – Seagate enterprise drives and certain Seagate and Maxtor branded retail products (both consumer solutions and HDD retail kits)

    Q&A

    Q. Does this change effect products sold to OEMs?
    A. No, there are no changes to our OEM standard warranties in these classes of products

    Q. When does this change go into effect?
    A. It will begin January 3, 2009

    Q. What about products purchased before Jan. 3, 2009? Will Seagate still honor the warranty in place at time of time of original purchase?
    A. Yes, any customers who purchase products prior to Jan. 3 will be covered by the warranty in place at the time of purchase.

    Q. Why is this change being made now?
    A. We have identified the opportunity to offer our customers warranty terms that we believe are in line with industry standard warranty offerings, and that better align to the requirements of our partners and customers.

    Q. You say that by moving to a 3-year warranty you can make other aspects of customer and warranty support more attractive. Can you be more specific?
    A. Seagate believes that enhancing the declining credit scale in the second year from 75% to 100% will provide customers better value on returns. This means that if a customer returns a drive in the second year, they are eligible to receive a credit, equal to the drive’s price at the time the drive is returned, applied to their replacement drive.

    Q. Why are Enterprise-class hard drives still receiving a 5-year warranty?
    A. Seagate believes the standard industry warranty for enterprise-class products is 5 years.

    Q. Will customers in other countries receive different warranty periods?
    A. Customers located in India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Thailand will continue to receive a 5 year limited warranty for selected products.

    Q. Why will customers located in these countries still receive a 5-year warranty?
    A. In these markets we have determined that business conditions support offering a 5-year warranty period.

    Q. Isn’t this a step backward in terms of demonstrating your confidence in the quality of your products?
    A. Absolutely not. Our product quality remains excellent, and, as the worldwide leader in drive storage, Seagate is committed to providing our customers with the most reliable storage solutions available anywhere. We know that 95% of all returns take place during the first three years, so by going to a 3-year warranty (which is more in line with the rest of the industry) we can make other aspects of our customer support and warranty programs more attractive with negligible impact to customer product return needs.

    Q. Are there exceptions to the 3-year warranty?
    A. If a customer believes there is a competitive business case for an exception, they can present their business case to Seagate for review.

    Q. What will happen to the inventory authorized distributors currently have?
    A. On-hand inventory located at the sites of Seagate distributors will keep the warranty in place at the time of original purchase. The 3-year warranty will apply to products shipped starting Jan 3rd, 2009.

    Q. Does this change affect Seagate and Maxtor retail products?
    A. Retail drive products will continue with their current 3 or 5 year limited warranty

    So what does this all mean?

    IMHO, this signals that Seagate is aligning their warranties for different products to the market realities including the life cycle of the product or solution before replacement for what ever reasons. For example, an enterprise class disk drive deployed in an enterprise class storage system may be deployed for a period of from 3 to 5 years, perhaps initially being deployed as primary storage for a couple of years, then being redeployed in a secondary or hand me down role.

    Or, in the case of an archive or secondary near-line role, being used for a longer life cycle than would be the case with more traditional storage. It can also signal that many organizations are acquiring and holding on to in general technologies for longer periods of time to maximize ROI and minimize the occurrence of timely and expensive data movement/migration to support technology replacements.

    Certainly in general the technologies are much more reliable than previous generations, capacities are increasing as are availability and capacities while power consumption and footprint also improve, not to mention the continued need for more storage and I/O processing capabilities.

    On the flip side, non enterprise storage type solutions for example desktops, laptops or other products tend to have shorter lifecycles and thus make sense to align the warranties with the market economic and buying habits taking place not to mention competitive alignment.

    Needless to say, despite reports that the magnetic disk drive is now dead at the hands of FLASH SSD (here and here among others) after over 50 years of service, its safe to say the magnetic disk drive will be around for several more years to come as FLASH based SSD will actually help to keep disk drives around, similar to how disk drives are helping to keep magnetic tape around by taking over tasks and enabling true tiered storage and technology alignment to occur.

    Heres a link to Seagates Warranty page for more information.

    Ok, nuff said.

    Cheers gs

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

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

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    Technology and Traveling

    It’s been a busy year, not to mention a busy fall traveling around the U.S. and Europe talking with IT professionals including about cloud and data protection. During that time, I have had the chance to meet and talk with thousands of people including IT professionals from companies of all size, vendors, value added resellers and channel professionals as well as media and others about technology issues, trends, current and emerging technologies and other topics from a server, storage, networking, software, facilities and management perspectives. In my travels and conversations, here’s a synopsis of what Im seeing and hearing.

    Trends and Issues:
    There is more data process (e.g. need for more servers), to manage including protect (e.g. need for more tools and people, or, do more work with same people), to move (e.g. more I/O and networking), and to store (e.g. more storage and associated tools) for longer periods of time, more threat risks (e.g. data protection, dlp, security, BC & DR) with degrading quality of service, RTO or RPOs on a shrinking budget. Anyone surprised yet?

    Thus, doing more with less without compromising quality of service, availability, data protection or performance while boosting compliance and retention capabilities and enhancing business survivability while reducing power, cooling, floor space impacts. If these sound like more of the same, you are spot on, it is more of the same which is business sustainment and enabling growth. This is not to say the organizations don’t have other objectives and priorities as they do, however, it comes down to the fundamentals and what might be called the boring basics of keeping the business running while improving on efficiencies to remove cost that are front and center these days.

    Technology and Solution Options:
    What works, what’s beginning to work, what will work in the future including clouds, grids, clusters, converged networks, server and storage performance and capacity optimization are all being talked about. While technologies like de-dupe come up in many conversations, outside of the SOHO and lower end of the SMB market segments, most IT organizations will admit to still using if not relying on tape while the learn more about, and become convinced of, or wait for de-dupe performance issues to enable large scale deployment without introducing bottlenecks to backup and data protection windows to occur. Other topics commonly heard

    Blades to mainframes, data footprint reduction, convergence, automation, data management, direct attached shared SAS storage for small VMware clusters or other specialized applications, , data loss prevention (DLP), SAN vs. NAS, iSCSI vs. FC, InfiniBand, FCoE and when it will be ready for prime time use (consensus is later in 2009 or 2010 if not later), affordable data protection, performance and capacity planning, infrastructure resource management, virtualization for consolation as well as for emulation, abstraction and management transparency of servers, storage, facilities and I/O, tiered resources (servers, storage, networks) and data protection. I know Im forgetting some however suffice to say, the usual buzzwords come up in conversations with the usual, what’s real and what’s future, what’s realistic and what scales and what is everyone else doing.

    Buzzwords
    2008 and looking forward, 2009 look to be both bumper years for buzzwords and proliferation of the Buzzword bingo themed games, that is, product announcements that stuff as many buzzword features that sooner or later someone yells Bingo, there’s match and a possible solution fit. Some of the buzzwords have been around for awhile, some have been on holiday resting up after their last tour of over use, abuse and hype fresh, reinvigorated, cleaned up and ready for a new round of activity while others are a bit tiered and ready to go off for some rest and relaxation (R&R) to get ready for their tour of duty.

    Buzz words include among others 10 GbE, 100 GbE, 8 Gb Fibre Channel (8GFC), Agent-less, Application Aware, Archiving, Authentication, Automation, Backup Service Provider (BSP or MSP or Cloud Backup), Backup, BC/DR, Benchmarking, Blade systems, Blade servers, Blade storage, Bulk Storage, Capacity optimized, Capacity per watt, Capacity Planning, Carbon Footprint, CAS, CDP, CIFS, Cloud Computing and Cloud Storage, Clustered, CNA, Compliance, CO2, Compression, Converged Enhanced Ethernet (CEE), or Full Disk Encryption (FDE).

    Not to mention Converged Networks, Cross technology domain, D2D2D, D2D2T, Data management, Data migration, DCE, De-dupe debates, De-dupe ratios, De-dupe rates, De-duplication, Distributed RAID, DPM, Economics, Efficiency, eDiscovery, Encryption, Enterprise 2.0 Storage, Environmental Health and Safety (EHS), Event Correlation, eWaste, Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), File management, and FLASH.

    There’s also Global name space, Green, Grid,HA, HSM, I/O Virtualization (IOV), ILM & Data movement, InfiniBand, Infrastructure Resource Management (IRM), IOPS per watt, IPM & MAID 2.0, iSCSI, Key management, Managed Service Provider (MSP), Metrics, MR-IOV, Multi-Protocol Storage, NAS, NFS, NPVID, Optimization, OSD, Partitions, PCI SIG IOV, Performance optimized, Performance, Piroma, pNFS, Policy based management, Policy based dedupe along with data footprint reduction (DFR).

    Power Cooling Floor-space EHS (PCFE), RAID 6, Removable Hard Disk Drive (RHDD), Replication, RoHS, SaaS, SAN, SAS, SATA, Security, Self Healing, Snapshots, Spin down, SR-IOV, SRM, SSD, Tape, Thin Provision, Tier 0, Tiering, Unstructured data, VCB, VDI, Virtualization, Vmotion, VMware, VTL, WAAS, WADM, WADS, WAFS, WDM, Web 2.0 and many more.

    Rest assured, time honored phrases that will be popular in 2009 will include Truly Unique, The Only.., Revolutionary, Industry First and, well, you know the list and so it goes.

    Merger and Acquisition (M&A) activity
    Startups are in the weeds, that is, some that have been around for a while are on borrowed time and increased pressure from their investors to do a deal or chop headcount to survive and exist until a deal can be made or worse. On the other hand, there is a new class of startups that in some cases are still incubating or what is known as in stealth mode to fill the void left by startups that have been acquired, will be acquired or that will simply fade away.

    I would like to tell you about some of these startups, however as Im under NDA, that is, real NDAs (the ones that have teeth and real meaning, not the type that some PR folk want to put you on for a day or two until they leak the announcement of a new customer adoption story). Suffice to say, for several of these new startups, they have the funding they need now and running lean operations with good prospect of making it if they can survive while incubating during the tough current economic times and surface as things improve, not to mention getting their value proposition and go to market strategies correct and then executing on them.

    Needless to say, the year is not quite over yet as I have a few more key note ( See StorageIO events page for others ) to do over the next couple of weeks including in New York City and San Antonio Texas before its time to sit back, put a few logs on an open fire and tip a few back with old St. Nick and improving on my Wii bowling game .

    Ok, nuff said.

    Cheers gs

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

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

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    Downloads for fall 2008 San Francisco Storage Decisions now available

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

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

    View the entire list of all Storage Decisions sessions here.

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

    Cheers gs

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

    twitter @storageio

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

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    Storage Optimization: Performance, Availability, Capacity, Effectiveness

    Storage I/O trends

    With the IT and storage industry shying away from green hype, green washing and other green noise, there is also a growing realization that the new green is about effectively boosting efficiency to improve productivity and profitability or to sustain business and IT growth during tough economic times.

    This past week while doing some presentations (I’ll post a link soon to the downloads) at the 2008 San Francisco installment of Storage Decisions event focused on storage professionals, as well as a keynote talk at the value added reseller (VAR) channel professional focused storage strategies event, a common theme was boosting productivity, improving on efficiency, stretching budgets and enabling existing personal and resources to do more with the same or less.

    During these and other presentations, keynotes, sessions and seminars both here in the U.S. as well as in Europe recently, these common themes of booting efficiency as well as the closing of the green gap, that is, the gap between industry and marketing rhetoric around green hype, green noise, green washing and issues that either do not resonate with, or, can not be funded by IT organizations compared with the disconnect of where many IT organizations issues exist which are around power, cooling, floor space or footprint as well as EH&S (Environmental health and safety) and economics.

    The green gap (here, and here, and here) is that many IT organizations around the world have not realized due to green hype around carbon footprints and related themes that in fact, boosting energy efficiency for active and on-line applications, data and workloads (e.g. doing more I/O operations per second-IOPS, transactions, files or messages processed per watt of energy) to address power, cooling, floor space are in fact a form of addressing green issues, both economic and environmental.

    Likewise for inactive or idle data, there is a bit more of a linkage that green can mean powering things off, however there is also a disconnect in that many perceive that green storage for example is only green if the storage can be powered off which while true for in-active or idle data and applications, is not true for all data and applications types.

    As mentioned already, for active workloads, green means doing more with the same or less power, cooling and floor space impact, this means doing more work per unit of energy. In that theme, for active workload, a slow, large capacity disk may in fact not be energy efficient if it impedes productivity and results in more energy to get the same amount of work done. For example, larger capacity SATA disk drives are also positioned as being the most green or energy efficiency which can be true for idle or in-active or non performance (time) sensitive applications where more data is stored in a denser footprint.

    However for active workload, lower capacity 15.5K RPM 300GB and 400GB Fibre Channel (FC) and SAS disk drives that deliver more IOPS or bandwidth per watt of energy can get more work done in the same amount of time.

    There is also a perception that FC and SAS disk drives use more power than SATA disk drives which in some cases can be true, however current generations of high performance 10K RPM and 15.5K RPM drives have very similar power draw on a raw spindle or device basis. What differs is the amount of capacity per watt for idle or inactive applications, or, the number of IOPS or amount of performance for active configurations.

    On the other hand, while not normally perceived as being green compared to tape or IPM and MAID (1st generation and MAID 2.0) solutions, along with SSD (Flash and RAM), not to mention fast SAS and FC disks or tiered storage systems that can do more IOPS or bandwidth per watt of energy are in fact green and energy efficiency for getting work done. Thus, there are two sides to optimizing storage for energy efficiency, optimizing for when doing work e.g. more miles per gallon per amount of work done, and, how little energy used when not doing work.

    Thus, a new form of being green to sustain business growth while boosting productivity is Gaining Realistic Economic Efficiency Now that as a by product helps both business bottom lines as well as the environment by doing more with less. These are themes that are addressed in my new book

    “The Green and Virtual Data Center” (Auerbach) that will be formerly launched and released for generally availability just after the 1st of the year (hopefully sooner), however you can beat the rush and order your copy now to beat the rush at Amazon and other fine venues around the world.

    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

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    Dutch StorageExpo Recap

    Earlier this week I had the pleasure of presenting a keynote talk (“Storage Industry Trends and Perspectives: Beyond Hype and Green Washing”) at the Dutch StorageExpo (produced by VNU Exhibitions Europe) event in Utrecht the Netherlands which was co-located in the ultra large Jaarbeurs congress center (e.g. convention center) along with concurrent shows for Linux, Security and networking making for a huge show and exhibition, almost a mini scaled down version of cebit or VMworld or EMCworld like event.

    Dutch StorageExpo

    Congratulations and many thanks to Marloes van den Berg of VNU Exhibitions and her team who put together a fantastic and well attended event, not to mention their warm and gracious Dutch hospitality.

    European shows and events are different than those in the U.S. in that at European events, the focus is more on meeting, building and maintaining relationships and less on “Uui Gui” demos or marketing sales pitches involving complex demos and technology displays found at many U.S. events.

    Granted, their are indeed product demos and technology to look at and talk about, and rest assured, the conversations and discussions when involving technology get right to the point and often much more direct. There is also a more relaxed aspect as seen in the many booths or stands as they are called, many of which have bars that serve up coffee in the morning as well as snacks and other beverages (the Hienken in Holland is much better than what is shipped to the U.S.) over which to discuss and have conversations about various topics, issues and technolgies.

    Many of the issues being faced by the Europeans are similar to those being faced by IT organizations in North America as well as elsewhere in the world including limits or issues around power, cooling, floor-space footprints, economics, doing more with less to boost productivity and enhance efficieinecy while sustaining business growth without impacting service delivery or service levels. BC/DR, data proteciton and data security, virtualizaiton were all topics of interest and points of discussions among others.

    I had the opportunity to meet several new people both from IT organizations, vars or resellers, consultants, vendors and media along with putting a face to a name of people I had meet virtually in the past not to mention re-connect with others that I have known from the past whom it was great to have had a chance to re-connect with.

    Thanks to all of those who attended both the key note session on Wednesday afternoon as well as to those who were at Monday’s all day seminar organized by Gert Brouwer or Brouwer consultancy in Nijkerk, I really enjoyed the conversations and perspectives of everyone I had a chance to meet with this past week and look forward to future conversations.

    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)

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    Time In and Around Clouds

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Ok, nuff said.

    Cheers gs

    Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
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    SSD activity continues to go virtually round and round

    Storage I/O trends

    Solid State Disk (SSD) (both FLASH and RAM based) activities and discussions continue to go round and round (pun intended) with announcements (here, here, here, here, here, and here and among others) of various improvements and evolution for technologies focused from the consumer to the small office home office (SOHO) to small medium business (SMB) to enterprise with technologies from vendors including Intel, Sandisk, Seagate and many others.

    Recent innovations are looking to address write performance issues or challenges associated with FLASH based SSD, which while better than magnetic hard disk drives (HDD), are slower than their RAM based counterparts.

    Other activity includes extending the useful life or duration of how many times a FLASH based device can be rewritten or modified before problems arise or performance degrades. Yet another activity is Sandisk introducing “virtual RPM” (vRPM) metrics to provide consumers an indication of relative revolutions per minute (RPM) of a non-rotating SSD device to make comparisons to help with shopping decisions makings. Can you say SSDs going round and round and round at least in a virtual world? Now that should make for some interesting “virtual benchmarking” discussions!

    Meanwhile industry trade groups include the SNIA Solid State Storage Initiative (SSSI) are gathering momentum to address marketing, messaging, awareness, education as well as metrics or benchmarks among things normally done around industry trade group camp fires and camp outs.

    So, as the HDDs spin, so to does the activity in and around SSD based technologies.

    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)
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    HP Storage Virtualization Services Platform (SVSP)

    Storage I/O trends

    HP recently announced announced their new SAN Virtualization Services Platform (SVSP) which is an appliance with software (oh, excuse me, I mean platform) for enabling various (e.g. replication, snapshots, pooling, consolidation, migration, etc) storage virtualization capabilities across different HP (e.g. MSA, EVA and in "theory" XP) or in "theory" as well, 3rd party (e.g. EMC, Dell, HDS, IBM, NetApp, Sun, etc) storage.

    Sure HP has had a similar capability via their XP series which HP OEMs from Hitachi Ltd. (who also supplies the similar/same product to HDS which HP competes with), however what?s different from the XP based solution and the SVSP is that one (SVSP) is via software running on an appliance and the other implemented via software/firmware on dedicated Hitachi based hardware (e.g. the XP). One requires an investment in the XP which for larger organizations may be practical while the other enables smaller organizations to achieve the benefits of virtualization capabilties to enable efficient IT not to mention help transition from different generations of HP MSA, EVAs to newer versions of MSAs and EVAs or even to XPs .Other benefits of solutions like the HP SVSP which also include the IBM SAN Volume Controller (SVC) include cross storage system, or cross storage vendor based replication, snapshots, dynamic (e.g. thin) provisioning among other capabilities for block based storage access.

    While there will be comparisons of HP SVSP to the XP, those in many ways will be apples to oranges, the more applicable apples to apples comparison would be IBM SVC to HP SVSP, or, perhaps HP SVSP to EMC Invista, Fujitsu VS900, Incipient, Falconstor or ?Datacore based solutions.

    With the HP SVSP announcement, I’m suspecting that we will see the re-emergence of the storage virtualization in-band vs. out-of-band including fast-path control-path aka split path approaches being adopted by HP with the SVSP not to mention hardware vs. software and appliance based approaches as was the case a few years ago.

    This time around as the storage virtualization discussions heat up again, we should see and hear the usual points, counter points and continued talk around consolidation and driving up utilization to save money and avoid costs. However, as part of enabling and transforming into an efficient IT organization (e.g. a ?Green and Virtual Data Center?) that embodies efficient, productivity in an economical and environmental friendly manner, virtualization discussions will also re-focus on using management transparency to enable data movement or migration for load-balancing, maintenance, upgrades and technology replacement, BC/DR and other common functions to enable more work to be done in the same or less anoint of time while supporting more data and storage processing and retention needs.

    Thus similar to servers where not all servers have been, will be or can be consolidated, however most can be virtualized for management transparency for BC/DR and migration, the same holds true for storage, that is, not all storage can be consolidated for different quality of service reasons, however, most storage can be virtualized to assist with and facilatate common management functions.

    Here are some additional resources to learn more about the many faces of Storage Virtualizaiton and related topics and trends:

    Storage Virtualization: Myths, Realities and Other Considerations
    Storage virtualization: How to deploy it
    The Semantics of Storage Virtualization
    Storage Virtualization: It’s More Common Than You Think
    Choosing a storage virtualization approach
    Switch-level storage virtualization: Special report
    Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
    The Green and Virtual Data Center (Auerbach)

    Cheers – gs

    Greg Schulz – Author The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
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    EPA Draft 3 of Energy Star for Computer Server Specification

    Storage I/O trends

    Today is the 2008 USA general election today pitting democratic senator Barack Obama vs. republican senator John McCain as well as several other lesser known party candidates who have made comments about the environment and going green as well as the economy, all of which have an impact on IT spending not to mention green IT and green computing.

    Today is also the day that the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) sent out notification that Draft 3 of Energy Star for computer server specifications are available for comment (See here).

    Energy Star is not a new program for IT equipment having been around for some time on PCs and other commodity products as well as many consumer goods. The EPA has been working on several Energy Star programs pertaining to IT data centers in addition to the Server specification working with industry groups covering servers, storage, networking and facilities among others, all of which to help enable the green and virtual data center on a go forward basis.

    If you have not done so, check out the EPA Energy Star for data center programs.

    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)
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    Did someone forget to tell Dell that Tape is dead?

    Storage I/O trends

    Did someone forget to send a memo to Dell that magnetic tape is dead, or, perhaps pre-occupied with other activities? Maybe no body at Dell read the “virtual” or “fictional” memo that tape is dead?

    Ok, enough with the cynicism and joking around, tape is not dead (See recent Computerworld and Dell story) and Dell is one of several vendors including IBM who still find time to talk about tape as part of a solution to different customer and environment needs.

    Sure, tape might be in or heading into its golden years or what can also be called the plateau of productivity (for customers) or profitability (for some vendors), tape does not get the marketing dollars and media coverage as its been around as a technology for a long time and their are cooler and niftier (techno term) things to discuss including disk based backup and data protection, CDP, VTLs, de-dupe debates, clusters, grids and clouds, FCoE vs. iSCSI, NAS, SAS, virtualization, OSD and pretty much anything except tape.

    However, the reality is that many organizations, particular larger organizations still use and rely on tape based data protection for backup/BC/DR as well as archive for compliance and non-compliance data retention or data preservation activities, in some cases complimenting and co-existing with disk based solutions.

    Disk to disk (D2D) based backups and data protection certainly continue to gain adoption and deployments in both large and small environments, however, the shift to disk based data protection, or, clinging to tape with a death grip does not have to be, nor should it be an all or nothing value proposition, that is, they can and do co-exist for different uses and purposes leveraging the various economics and benefits of the technologies to address various tasks and requirements.

    New and emerging technologies certainly need to be discussed, dissected, developed and deployed as they are the future for maintaining and sustaining business growth via IT service delivery in economical and reliable fashion, that is, apply what technologies makes economic and business sense at a given point in time to minimize risk while maximizing useful benefits to your business.

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