Storage Architecture and Access Archives

October 16, 2008January 23, 2019

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

Storage I/O trends

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

Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) FAQs

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

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

Along with several other topics found here.

Ok, nuff said.

Cheers gs

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

October 16, 2008May 24, 2020

Cisco wins FCoE Pre-Season and Primaries – Now for the Main Event!

Storage I/O trends

Ok, unless you have turned off all of your news feeds, RSS feeds, discontinued all printed industry and trade related publications and stopped visiting blogs and other on-line venues, you may not have heard that Cisco, NetApp, EMC, Emulex and Qlogic have made a series of announcements signaling proof of life for the emerging Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) based on the Cisco Data Center Ethernet (DCE) or on the emerging more general Converged Enhanced Ethernet (CEE).

Now if you have not heard, check out the various industry news and information venues and blogs. Likewise if you are a Brocadian, dont worry and do not get upset by the early poll or exit poll results from the primaries, the real and broad adoption game has not started yet, however, get your game faces on.

At this point given the newness of the technology and early adopter status, its safe to say that Cisco has won the pre-season or primaries for the first FCoE battle. However, despite the hype and proof of life activity which can be gauged by the counter claims from the iSCSI camps, the main event or real market adoption and deployment will start ramping up in 2009 and with broader adoption occurring in the 2010 to 2011 timeframes.

This is not to say that there will not be any adoption of FCoE between now and the next 12-18 months, quite the opposite, there will be plenty of early adopters, test and pilot cases as well as Cisco faithful who chose to go the FCoE route vs. another round of Fibre Channel at 8Gb, or, for those who want to go to FCoE at 10Gb instead of iSCSI or NAS at 10GbE for what ever reasons. However the core target market for FCoE is the higher-end, risk adverse environments that shy away from bleeding edge technology unless there is an adjacent and fully redundant blood bank located next door if not on-site.

Consequently similar how Fibre Channel and FICON were slow to ramp-up taking a couple of years from first product and components availability, FCoE will continue to gain ground and as the complete and open ecosystem comes into place including adapters, switches and directors, routers, bridges and gateways, storage systems as well as management tools and associated training and skills development.

Watch for vendors to ratchet up discussions about how many FCoE or FCoE enabled systems are shipped with an eye on the keyword, FCoE enabled which means that the systems may or may not actually be deployed in FCoE mode, rather that they are ready for it, sound familiar to early iSCSI or event FC product shipments?

Rest assured, FCoE has a very bright future (see here and here) at the mid to high-end of the market while iSCSI will continue to grow and gain in adoption in the mid-market down to the lower reaches of the SMB market. Of course there will be border skirmishes as iSCSI tries to move up market and FCoE tries to move down market and of course there will be those that stay the course for another round of Fibre Channel beyond 8Gb while NAS continues to gain ground in all market segments and SAS at the very low-end where even iSCSI is to expensive. Learn more over at the Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA) or FCoE Portal sites as well as at Brocade, Cisco, EMC, Emulex, NetApp and Qlogic sites among others.

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

October 14, 2008May 24, 2020

SAS Disk Drives Appearing in Larger Mid-Range Arrays

Storage I/O trends

2.5″ and 3.5″ 10,000RPM (10K) and 15,000RPM (15K) SAS disk drives have been available for entry level and SMB solutions from the likes of Dell, EMC, HP, IBM, Infotrend, LSI, NetApp, Promise, Sun and Xyratex among others for some time now. HDS recently introduced a new mid-range solution the AMS 2000 that supports up to 480 3G SAS drives in place of traditional 2G or 4G Fibre Channel disk drives.

The benefit of supporting SAS disk drives moving forward is that as volume production and adoption increases, price will decline making the drives more affordable not to mention that the controller and interface chip sets and internal adapters support both SAS and SATA disk drives removing additional cost and complexity from storage systems. Similar to how Fibre Channel disk drives replaced parallel SCSI, SSA or other propriety disk drives, and how SATA replaced parallel ATA (PATA) drives, dual ported SAS disk drives continue the cycle of replacing Fibre Channel disk drives at the entry level and mid-range and eventually finding their way into high-end and ultra-high-end storage arrays over the next couple of years as 6G SAS drives begin to appear.

Watch for a SAS drive to appear in a storage system or server near you soon.

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

September 30, 2008May 24, 2020

Will 6Gb SAS kill Fibre Channel?

Storage I/O trends

With the advent of 6Gb SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) which doubles the speed from earlier 3Gb along with other enhancements including longer cable distances up to 10m, does this mean that Fibre Channel will be threatened? Well, I’m sure some conspiracy theorist or iSCSI die hards might jump up and down and say yes, finally, even though some of the FCoE cheering section has already arranged a funeral or wake for FC even while Converged enhanced Ethernet based Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and its complete ecosystem completely evolves.

Needless to say, SAS will be in your future, it may not be as a host server to storage system interconnect, however look for SAS high performance drives to appear sometime in the not so distant future. While over time, Fibre Channel based high performance disk drives can be expected to give way to SAS based disks, similar to how Parralel SCSI or even IBM SSA drives gave way to FC disks, SAS as a server to storage system interconnect will at leat for the forseeable future be more for smaller configurations, direct connect storage for blade centers, two server clusters, extremely cost sensitive environments that do not need or can afford a more expensive iSCSI, NAS let alone an FC or FCoE based solution.

So while larger storage systems over time can be expected to support high performance 3.5″ and 2.5″ SAS disks to replace FC disks, those systems will be accessed via FCoE, FC, iSCSI or NAS while mid-range and entry-level systems as they do today will see a mix of SAS, iSCSI, FC, NAS and in the future, some FCoE as well not to mention some InfiniBand based NAS or SRP for block access.

From an I/O virtualization (IOV) standpoint, keep an eye on whats taking place with the PCI SIG and Single Root IOV and multi-root IOV from a server I/O and I/O virtualization standpoint.

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

September 26, 2008March 7, 2022

Escape From New York – Back from Storage Decisions NY 2008

Storage I/O trends

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cheers gs

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

twitter @storageio

September 21, 2008March 7, 2022

Green Storage – Practical Ways to Reduce Power Consumption

Storage I/O trends

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

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

Ok, nuff said.

Cheers gs

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

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

September 14, 2008November 26, 2023

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ok, nuff said.

Cheers gs

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

September 10, 2008January 23, 2019

Optical Storage Oppourtunities or Obsolence?

Storage I/O trends

Is Optical Storage still relevant?

Here’s a piece Alan Earls did for TechTarget on the subject.

I agree with that optical still has a role for preserving compliance and other fixed content data as doe’s magnetic tape. For example optical based CDs and DVDs are great archives for the music and videos that I purchased and transfer to my computer hard drive (or FLASH).

I will leave it to you to be the judge of if optical is still relevant or not.

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

September 3, 2008December 4, 2019

Intelligent Power Management (IPM) and second generation MAID 2.0 on the rise

Storage I/O trends

In case you missed it today, Adaptec announced that they are the 1st vendor “This Week” to add support for Intelligent Power Management (IPM) to their storage systems. Adaptec joins a growing list of vendors who are deploying, or, who are program announcing some variation of IPM and second generation MAID 2.0 ability including support for different types of tiered disk drives including various combinations of Fibre Channel and SAS as well as SATA.

As a quick refresh, Massive or Monolithic Arrays of Idle or Inactive Disks (MAID) was popularized by 1st generation MAID vendor Copan who spins down disk drives to avoid energy usage. One of the challenges with 1st generation MAID is the poor performance by being able to only have at most 25% of the disk drives spinning at any time to transfer data when needed.

This is a balancing act between achieving energy avoidance and associated benefits vs. maintaining performance to move data when needed particularly for large restoration to support BC/DR or other purposes. Granted, 1st generation MAID systems like those from Copan while positioned as alternatives to high-performance disk storage systems to amplify potential energy savings on one hand, or, to put as an alternative to magnetic tape by providing random restore capability. The reality is that 1st generation MAID systems are finding their niche not for on-line primary or even on-line secondary storage, nor as a direct replacement for tape or even disk based libraries to support large-scale BC/DR, rather, in a sweet spot between secondary and near-line disk libraries and virtual tape libraries with a target application of very infrequently accessed of data.

Second generation MAID, aka MAID 2.0 is an evolution of the general technologies and capabilities extending functionality and flexibility while addressing quality of service (QoS), performance, availability, capacity and energy consumption using IPM also known as Adaptive Power Management (APM), dynamic bandwidth switching or scaling (DBS) among other names. The basic premise is to add flexibility building on 1st generation characteristics including data protection, resiliency and pro-active part or drive monitoring. Another basic premise of IPM. and MAID 2.0. solutions is to allow the performance and subsequent energy usage to vary, which is to cut the amount of performance and energy usage during in-active times, yet, when data needs to be accessed, to allow full performance without penalties for energy savings.

Second generation MAID solutions can be characterized by multiple power saving modes as well as flexible performance to adjust to changing workload and application needs. Another characteristic is the ability to work across different types of disk drives including Fibre Channel, SAS and SATA as opposed to only SATA drives found in 1st generation solutions as well as for the IPM or MAID 2.0 functionality to exist in a standard storage system or array instead of in a purpose-built dedicated storage system. Other capabilities include support for more granular power settings down to a RAID group or LUN level instead of across an entire array or storage system as well as support for different RAID levels among other features.

Examples of vendors who have either announced product or made statements of direction with regard to MAID 2.0 and IPM enabled storage systems include:

Adaptec (Today), Datadirect, EMC, Fujitsu, HDS, HGST (Hitachi Disk Drives), NEC, Nexsan, and Xyratex among others on a growing list of solutions.

For applications and data storage needs that need good performance and QoS over a range of changing usage conditions to balance good performance when needed to efficiently get work done to boost productivity, while saving or avoiding energy when little or no work needs to be done, take a look at current and emerging IPM and MAID 2.0 enabled storage systems as part of a tiered storage strategy to discuss power, cooling, floor-space and EHS (PCFE) related issues.

To learn more, check out the StorageIO Industry Trends and Perspective white paper Intelligent Power Management (IPM) and MAID 2.0 and visit www.thegreenandvirtualdatacenter.com well as www.storageio.com.

Ok, nuff said.

Cheers gs

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

August 28, 2008March 18, 2019

Closing the Green Gap – Green washing may be endangered, however addressing real green issues is here to stay

Storage I/O trends

Here’s a new article I wrote that just appeared over at Enterprise Storage Forum called Closing the Green Storage Gap.

Not all ‘green’ IT solutions or messages are created equal. Regardless of political views, the reality is that for business and IT sustainability, a focus on ecological issues and more importantly, their economic aspects cannot be ignored.

There are business benefits to using the most energy-efficient IT solutions to meet different data and application requirements. However, vendors are busy promoting ‘green’ stories and solutions that often miss where IT organization challenges and mandates exist. This article examines the growing gap between green messaging, or ‘Green Wash,’ and how to close the gap and enable IT organization issues to be addressed today in a way that sustains business growth in an economic and ecologically friendly way.

Have a read and a good weekend.

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

August 10, 2008January 24, 2023

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

August 4, 2008May 24, 2020

SMB capacity planning; Focusing on energy conservation

Storage I/O trends

Here’s a link to a new tip I wrote that is posted over at SearchSMBStorage on Capacity Planning and energy conservation.

Here are some added links to other recent tips I wrote and posted at a SearchSMBStorage:

Improve your storage energy efficiency

Data protection for virtual server environments

Data footprint reduction for SMBs

Is clustered NAS for SMBs?

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

July 21, 2008February 3, 2023

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

April 19, 2008July 22, 2021

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

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