metrics Archives

July 1, 2009December 24, 2020

Green Storage is Alive and Well: ENERGY STAR Enterprise Storage Stakeholder Meeting Details

While Green hype and green washing may be on the endangered species list if not already extinct, there are many things taking place to shift the focus from talking about being green to enabling and leveraging efficiency and optimization to boost productivity and enable business sustainability.

The industry has seen and is seeing the shift from the initial green hype cycle of a few years ago to the more recent trough of disillusionment (or here) typically found with a post technology or trend hangover, to the current re-emergence, and growing awareness of the many different faces and facets of being green.

Granted there has been some recent activity by the U.S. government to add new climate control legislation (e.g. HR2454 – Waxman/Markey) to build on previous clean air acts of the 1990s as well as those dating back to the 1970s and earlier.

While the green gap (or here) still exists with confusion by IT organizations that Green is only Green if and only if it is about reducing Carbon footprints as opposed to the realization that there are many different faces or facets of being Green and efficient. For example, there is also a growing awareness that addressing power, cooling, floor-space or footprint to enable sustained business growth as well as enabling next generation virtual, cloud as well as traditional forms of IT service ennablement has both economic and business benefits. That is, determining energy usage, shifting from energy avoidance to expanding and supporting energy efficiency initiatives along with boosting productivity, doing more with what you have, fitting into and growing within current or future constraints on available power, cooling, footprint/floorpsace, budget or manpower constraints while improving on service delivery to remain competitive. (Learn more in "The Green and Virtual Data Center" (CRC) )

Regardless of if you are a eco-tech warrior or not, learning about and then closing the Green gap and how shifting a focus towards efficiency has both business economic and environmental benefits and helps to break down some of the perceptions about what Green is or is not.

One such activity is the U.S. EPA Energy Star program which is about as much energy avoidance as it is about energy efficiency You might be familiar with Energy Star logos on various consumer products around your home or office as well as for laptops, notebooks, desktop and workstations. Recently EPA released a new standard specification for Energy Star for Servers and is now currently working on one for enterprise storage. As part of the initiative, stakeholders or those with an interest in data storage are invited to participate in upcoming EPA working sessions to provide feedback and input on what is important to you.

Here’s the message received from the EPA via their mailing list this past week (in italics below):

Dear Enterprise Storage Stakeholder or Other Interested Party:

Provided below are additional details regarding the ENERGY STAR® Enterprise Storage Stakeholder Meeting scheduled for Monday, July 20, 2009 in San Jose, CA. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) plans to use this opportunity to review feedback on the ENERGY STAR Specification Framework document and discuss initial plans for a Draft 1 specification. A conference call line will be provided to stakeholders who are unable to participate in person.

Date: Monday, July 20, 2009
Time: 11:00 AM to 4:00 PM Pacific Time (lunch will be provided)
Location: The Sainte Claire Hotel, 302 South Market St., San Jose, CA 95113, 408.295.2000, www.thesainteclaire.com
Conference Call Phone: Provided with meeting registration

EPA would like to thank the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) for providing lunch, refreshments, and logistical support for the ENERGY STAR stakeholder meeting.

For the convenience of meeting attendees, this event is being held in conjunction with the SNIA Technical Symposium being held July 20-23, 2009.

For more information on this event visit: ;

The Sainte Claire Hotel is offering a special room rate of $149/night for participants in the ENERGY STAR Stakeholder Meeting. Rooms can be booked by following the link to the SNIA Technical Symposium Web site.

Please note: Whether you plan to attend in person or via conference call, you must RSVP to storage@energystar.gov no later than Monday, July 13, 2009. Conference call information and a copy of presentation materials will be distributed to all registered attendees in advance of the meeting.

As a reminder, stakeholders are encouraged to submit feedback on the ENERGY STAR Enterprise Storage Specification Framework to storage@energystar.gov no later than this Friday, July 3, 2009.

The latest program documentation is available for download at www.energystar.gov/newspecs.

If you have any questions please contact Steve Pantano, ICF International, at spantano@icfi.com or Andrew Fanara, US EPA, at fanara.andrew@epa.gov.

Thank you for your continued support of ENERGY STAR!

Learn more at www.energystar.gov

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

June 14, 2009November 26, 2023

Shifting from energy avoidance to energy efficiency

I’m continually amazed at the number of people in the IT industry from customers to vendors, vars to media and even analysts who associate Green IT with and only with reducing carbon footprints. I guess I should not be surprised given the amount of rhetoric around Green and carbon both in the IT industry as well as in general resulting in a Green Gap.

The reality as I have discussed in the past is that Green IT while addressing carbon footprint topics, is really more about efficiency and optimization for business economic benefits that also help the environment. From a near-term tactical perspective, Green IT is about boosting productivity and enabling business sustainability during tough economic times, doing more with less, or, doing more with what you have. On a strategic basis, Green IT is about continued sustainability while also improving top and bottom line economics and repositioning IT as a competitive advantage resource.

There is a lot of focus on energy avoidance, as it is relatively easy to understand and it is also easy to implement. Turning off the lights, turning off devices when they are not in use, enabling low-power, energy-savings or Energy Star® (now implemented for servers with storage being a new focus) modes are all means to saving or reducing energy consumption, emissions, and energy bills.

Ideal candidates for powering down when not in use or inactive include desktop workstations, PCs, laptops, and associated video monitors and printers. Turning lights off or implementing motion detectors to turn lights off automatically, along with powering off or enabling energy-saving modes on general-purpose and consumer products has a significant benefit. New generations of processors such as the Intel Xeon 5xxx or 7xxx series (formerly known as Nehalem) provide the ability to boost performance when needed, or, go into various energy conservation modes when possible to balance performance, availability and energy needs to applicable service requirements, a form of intelligent power management.

In Figure 1 are shown four basic approaches (in addition to doing nothing) to energy efficiency. One approach is to avoid energy usage, similar to following a rationing model, but this approach will affect the amount of work that can be accomplished. Another approach is to do more work using the same amount of energy, boosting energy efficiency, or the complement—do the same work using less energy.

Figure 1 the Many Faces of Energy Efficiency (Source: “The Green and Virtual Data Center” (CRC)

The energy efficiency gap is the difference between the amount of work accomplished or information stored in a given footprint and the energy consumed. In other words, the bigger the energy efficiency gap, the better, as seen in the fourth scenario, doing more work or storing more information in a smaller footprint using less energy.

Given the shared nature of their use along with various intersystem dependencies, not all data center resources can be powered off completely. Some forms of storage devices can be powered off when they are not in use, such as offline storage devices or mediums for backups and archiving. Technologies such as magnetic tape or removable hard disk drives that do not need power when they are not in use can be used for storing inactive and dormant data.

Avoiding energy use can be part of an approach to address power, cooling, floor space and environmental (PCFE) challenges, particularly for servers, storage, and networks that do not need to be used or accessible at all times. However, not all applications, data or workloads can be consolidated, or, powered down due to performance, availability, capacity, security, compatibility, politics, financial and many other reasons. For those applications that cannot be consolidated, the trick is to support them in a more efficient and effective means.

Simply put, when work needs to be done or information needs to be stored or retrieved or data moved, it should be done so in the most energy-efficient manner aligned to a given level of service which can mean leveraging faster, higher performing resources (servers, storage and networks) to get the job done fast resulting in improved productivity and efficiency.

Tiering is an approach that applies to servers, storage, and networks as well as data protection. For example, tiered servers include large frame or mainframes, rack mount as well as blades with various amounts of memory, I/O or expansion slots and number of processor cores at different speeds. Tiered storage includes different types of mediums and storage system architectures such as those shown in figure 2. Tiered networking or tiered access includes 10Gb and 1Gb Ethernet, 2/4/8 Gb Fibre Channel, Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), iSCSI, NAS and shared SAS among others. Tiered data protection includes various technologies to meet various recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO) such as real-time synchronous mirroring with snapshots, to periodic backup to disk or tape among other approaches, techniques and technologies.

Technology alignment (Figure 2), that is aligning the applicable type of storage or server resource and devices to the task at hand to meet application service requirements is essential to archiving an optimized and efficient IT environment. For example, for very I/O intensive active data as shown in figure 2, leveraging ultra fast tier-0 high-performance SSD (FLASH or RAM) storage, or for high I/O active data, tier-1 fast 15.5K SAS and Fibre Channel storage based systems would be applicable.

For active and on-line data, that’s where energy efficiency in the form of fast disk drives including RAM SSD or FLASH SSD (for reads, writes are another story) and in particular fast 15.5K or 10K FC and SAS energy efficient disks and their associated storage systems come into play. The focus for active data and storage systems should be around more useful work per unit of energy consumed in a given footprint. For example, more IOPS per watt, more transactions per watt, more bandwidth or video streams per watt, more files or emails processed per watt.

Figure 2 Tiered Storage: Balancing Performance, Availability, Capacity and Energy to QoS (Source: “The Green and Virtual Data Center” (CRC)

For low-performance, low activity applications where the focus is around storing as much data as possible with the lowest cost including for disk to disk based backup, slower high capacity SATA based storage systems are the fit (lower right in figure 2). For long-term bulk storage to meet archiving, data retention or other retention needs as well as storing large monthly full backups or long term data preservation, tape remains the ticket for large environments with the best combination of performance, availability capacity and energy efficiency and cost per footprint.

General approaches to boost energy efficiency include:

Do more work using the same or less amount of power and subsequently cooling
Leverage faster processors/controllers that use the same or less power
Apply applicable RAID level to application and data QoS requirements
Consolidate slower storage or servers to a faster, more energy-efficient solution
Use faster disk drives with capacity boost and that draw less power
Upgrade to newer, faster, denser, more energy-efficient technologies
Look beyond capacity utilization; keep response time and availability in mind
Leverage IPM, AVS, and other techniques to vary performance and energy usage
Manage data both locally and remote; gain control and insight before moving problems
Leverage a data footprint reduction strategy across all data and storage tiers
Utilize multiple data footprint techniques including archive, compression and de-dupe
Reduce data footprint impact, enabling higher densities of stored on-line data

Find a balance between energy avoidance and energy efficiency, consolidation and business enablement for sustainably, hardware and software, best practices including policy and producers, as well as leveraging available financial rebates and incentives. Addressing green and PCFE issues is a process; there is no one single solution or magic formula.

Figure 3 Wheel of Opportunity – Various Techniques and Technologies for Infrastructure Optimization (Source: “The Green and Virtual Data Center” (CRC)

Instead, leverage a combination of technologies, techniques, and best practices to address various issues and requirements is needed (Figure 3). Some technologies and techniques include among others infrastructure resource management (IRM), data management, archiving (including for non-compliance), and compression (on-line and off-line, primary and secondary) as well as de-dupe for backups, space saving snapshots, and effective use of applicable raid levels.

Green washing and green hype may fade away, however power, cooling, footprint, energy (PCFE) and related issues and initiatives that enable IT infrastructure optimization and business sustainability will not fade away. Addressing IT infrastructure optimization and efficiency is thus essential to IT and business sustainability and growth in an environmentally friendly manner which enables shifting from talking about green to being green and efficient.

Learn more on the tips, tools, articles, videos and reports page as well as in “Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking” (CRC) pages, “The Green and Virtual Data Center” (CRC) pages at 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

June 12, 2009March 7, 2022

Catch of the day or post of the day!

Ok, I know, its been a couple of weeks since my last post. Sure I have been tweeting now and then, attending several briefings with new emerging as well as existing vendors for up-coming announcements, not to mention getting some other content out from webcasts, to podcasts, or videos, interviews, articles, tips and presentations at various events, pertaining to Green IT, virtualization, cloud storage and computing, backup, data protection, performance, capacity planning among other topics.

Anyway, for now a quick post as I have many others that I have been wanting to do and will be doing soon, however wanted to get a few things out sooner vs. later, and after all, all work and no play makes for a dull day right?

Well, last week after spending a couple of days in Chicago at Storage Decisions where I presented a couple of sessions and recorded several videos, I had a chance to get out and do some fishing and catching. Fishing is always great, however catching (and release) is even more fun, especially when you can catch some, toss some, and keep some for dinner which is what occurred last week when my friend Rob and me ventured out for a couple of hours and found where the fish were (see picture) on the St. Croix river.

Catch of the Day

Rob on left (Bruins warm up jacket for Bass fishing), Greg on the right (Mustang PFD Jacket)

Catch of the day line-up
From right to left, bottle bass (caught at the dock ;) ), stripped bass, northern pike (swamp shark), more stripped bass, and another bottle bass (also caught at the dock).

Ok, nuff fish talk for now, back to work, get a few things done, and then maybe this weekend, get another blog post done, maybe some fishing, and enjoying the summer weather before heading off to Toronto on Monday for Storage Decisions on Tuesday, then a couple of webcasts and web radio events on Wednesday among other activities.

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

May 8, 2009May 24, 2020

Determining Computer or Server Energy Use

Recently I posted a response to a question over at IT Knowledge Exchange (e.g. ITKE) about how to determine power or energy use.

In a nutshell:

Depending on what you are looking for, or trying to accomplish, you may, or may not need a formula per say.

For example, if all you need to know is how many volts, amps, watts, kva, or btu’s are used by a particular computer or other IT device for that matter, first things first check the “tag” or “label” on the device as well as included documentation, or, on-line spec sheets and documentation.

There are also some measuring devices including among others Kill A Watt that you can plug a device into and see volts, amps, watts, and so forth.

Ok, that might have been the obvious and easy part, now on to the next step.

Often a name plate may give kva however not watts, or perhaps amps and volts however not kva or some other metric. This is where the various conversion formulas come into play.

For example, if you know volts and amps, you can get watts, if you know kva along with watts, amps or volts, you can derive the others, or, if you have btus, you can watts, or if you know watts you can get btus and so forth.

Btu/Hour = watts * 3.413
Watts = Btu/Hour * 0.293
Watts = Amps * Volts
Volts = Watts / Amps
Amps = Watts / Volts
VoltAmps (Va) = Volts * amps
KVA = (Volts * Amps) / 1000

Here’s a link to some additional conversions and formulas that along with many others are found in my new book “The Green and Virtual Data Center” (CRC).

www.thegreenandvirtualdatacenter.com/greenmetrics.html

In “The Green and Virtual Data Center” (CRC). book, there is an entire chapter on metrics, where and how to find them, formulas, conversions as well as other related items including determining energy costs, carbon footprints, cooling and more across servers, storage, networks, facilities along with associated management tools.

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

April 26, 2009January 23, 2019

U.S. EPA Looking for Industry Input on Energy Star for Storage

Following up on previous blog posts, here is some information that the U.S. EPA is looking for comments from industry on an Energy Start for enterprise storage program following on the heels of the Energy Star for Server program.

U.S. EPA Energy Star Wants and Needs You!

Here’s the message received from the EPA via their mailing list this past week (in italics below):

Dear Enterprise Storage Equipment Manufacturers and Other Interested Parties:

Please see the attached letter from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announcing their intent to pursue development of an ENERGY STAR specification for Enterprise Storage equipment. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact Andrew Fanara, EPA, at fanara.andrew@epa.gov or Stephen Pantano, ICF International, at spantano@icfi.com.

Thank you for your support of ENERGY STAR.

Here’s the intro letter excerpted from the above email notification (in italics below):

April 23, 2009

Dear Enterprise Storage Equipment Manufacturers and Other Interested Parties:

This letter is intended to inform all stakeholders that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) intends to continue its efforts towards the development of an ENERGY STAR® specification for enterprise data storage equipment. Following is an outline of EPA’s general goals and next steps.

ENERGY STAR is a voluntary partnership between government, businesses, and purchasers designed to encourage the manufacture, purchase, and use of efficient products to help protect the environment. Products that earn the ENERGY STAR prevent greenhouse gas emissions by meeting strict energy efficiency guidelines. Manufacturers that qualify their products to meet ENERGY STAR requirements may use the label as a tool to educate their customers about the enhanced value of these products.

To date:
•More than 2,000 manufacturers are partnering with ENERGY STAR,
•More than 40,000 product models carry the ENERGY STAR label across more than 50 product categories,
•More than 70% of Americans recognize the ENERGY STAR label,
•Consumers have purchased more than 2.5 billion ENERGY STAR qualified products, and
•Americans, with the help of ENERGY STAR, saved enough energy in 2008 to avoid greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to those from 29 million cars — while saving $19 billion on utility bills.

In the last several years, the energy saving opportunities in data centers have been well documented. However, barriers to energy efficiency still persist and need to be addressed. EPA is pursuing a dual strategy to overcome these challenges by helping purchasers more easily identify energy efficient IT equipment with the use of the ENERGY STAR designation, and by encouraging organizations to benchmark the energy performance of their data centers.

In pursuit of this strategy, EPA will introduce an ENERGY STAR Computer Server specification in the coming weeks. In addition, EPA recently conducted a scoping effort to evaluate enterprise storage products for inclusion in the ENERGY STAR program. EPA reviewed available market research and facilitated discussions with product manufacturers, industry associations, and other interested parties. EPA concluded that IT purchasers would benefit from access to standardized information about the energy performance of storage equipment made available through the ENERGY STAR program. As a result, EPA intends to begin the specification development process. Details on this process will be forthcoming in the next several weeks.

To be added to the enterprise storage e-mail distribution list, please send your full contact information to Stephen Pantano at spantano@icfi.com. To stay informed about the ENERGY STAR specification development process for computer servers and other EPA data center initiatives please visit: www.energystar.gov/datacenters.

Thank you for your continued support of ENERGY STAR and please direct additional questions to Andrew Fanara at fanara.andrew@epa.gov or Stephen Pantano of ICF International, at spantano@icfi.com.

Sincerely,

Andrew Fanara
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Climate Protection Partnerships Division ENERGY STAR Program Manager

My take on the Energy Star programs is that as long as they add value including reflecting how energy is effectively used both when IT equipment such as servers and storage are in use, as well as in energy saving or avoidance modes are reflected, they can and should be a good thing.

However industry will need to work together across different trade and focus groups as well as factor in how supporting metrics will be applicable and reflective thus accepted by IT data center environments. This means metrics and measurements for both active or working while in use energy efficiency modes such as IOPS, bandwidth, messages or transactions, files or videos per watt of energy, as well as metrics for in-active or dormant data such as capacity per watt per usable footprint. Check out Chapter 5 (Measurements and Metrics) in "The Green and Virtual Data Center" (CRC) to learn more.

Various industry trade and focus groups including Storage Performance Council (SPC), SNIA GSI, Green Grid, SPEC and others are working on various metrics and aligning themselves to work with EPA. If you are in an IT data center involved with servers or storage, consider getting involved with one or more of these groups to help influence and shape what these programs will look like or affect your organization in the future.

Ok, nuff said.

Cheers gs

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

April 5, 2009March 7, 2022

Storage Effiency and Optimizaiton – Balancing Time and Space

Storage I/O trends

Here’s a link to the presentation I recently delivered at the Spring 2009 Minneapolis/St. Paul area CMG (Computer Measurement Group – CMG) March 20th, 2009 hosted by Nexus Information Systems and organized by Tom Becchetti. The theme of the event was "Is your storage efficient? There are many ways to rate your storage, how does yours stack up?". Tom organized a great event as usual with a diverse set of speakers for the well attended event graciously hosted by Keith Norbie of Nexus at their Minnetonka facility. The title of my presentation was "Storage Efficiency: Mirror Mirror On The Wall, Who or What is The Most Efficient of Them All? Finding the Correct Balance" that looked at balancing the need to reduce (or maximize) space (utilization) with time (performance) to meet different requirements including maintaining quality of service, response time and availability.

Keeping in mind that there is no such thing as a data or I/O performance recession, there is a common myth that storage optimization or efficiency is all about driving up storage space capacity utilization which can be true for some environments, applications, data or storage types. However there is also the need to maintain or boost performance, reduce response time and latency, doing more work in a more productive and efficieny manner. Not all data or storage can be consolidated to boost utilization without concern for degrading or in any other way penalizing performance, response time or availability.

Thus it is about time and space, that is, balancing data movement and processing rates with storage space capacity utilization and that sometimes, more is not better for performance when it comes to ratios or the number of components in a solution.

Likewise there is the need to balance energy avoidance with energy efficient, balancing the need to store more data in a smaller footprint using less energy and the need to process more data in less time efficiently for productivity.

These and other related themes are expanded on in more detail in my book "The Green and Virtual Data Center" (CRC). These and other related themes will covered in one of my upcoming presentations (The Other Green — Storage Efficiency and Optimization) at StorageDecisions in Chicago the week of June 1st, 2009, as well as in various seminars and events that I will be involved in the coming weeks and months.

Thanks to all those who helped organize, support, sponsored, presented and attended the recent CMG event, look forward to seeing or hearing from you all again 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

February 28, 2009March 7, 2022

Odds and Ends – Getting Caught Up, News and Other Updates

This post is a collection of various odds and ends, news and updates as Im getting caught up on some things.

Here’s a link to the first of what will be a series of up-coming short articles appearing at Byte and Switch related to my new book "The Green and Virtual Data Center" (CRC). The first installment appeared recently and is titled "Green IT & the Green Gap" and the theme of the installment is that in going green, you enable a business to grow, diversify, and expand its use of IT, all of which have economic benefits. Learn more about the green gap here.

Also over at Byte and Switch, Paul Travis recently did an article "Going Green & the Economic Downturn" that takes a look the shifting green focus to that around economic and cost cutting opportunities during current finical turmoil. Also on the Green front, Drew Robb has an interesting article talking about server and IT data center "Green IT Myths vs. Realities" appearing in ServerWatch. Another new green and economic sustainability for IT data center article can be found over at Greener Computing with a link here. While on the topic of my new book, writer and blogger, Heather Clancy has some comments about "The Green and Virtual Data Center" (CRC) over at ZDNET. Dave Simpson of InfoStor fame has a blog post as well that mentions my new book, check it out here. Also, check out this posting over at Datacenterlinks blogsite as well as a post over at Green Data Center blog site.

Meanwhile inventory and book availability continue to improve at Amazon.com and other venues around the world as back-logs from pre-orders and initial book sales resulted in some sell-out or initial limited availability. My publisher CRC informs me that plenty of books are flowing out and into the distribution supply chain to meet risking demand including bulk and special promotional and educational sales. Thanks to all of you have obtained copies of my new book, drop me a note with your comments and feedback when you get a chance. Also watch for additional book news, reviews, reports and other programs to be announced over the coming weeks.

For addressing data center bottlenecks, on the tiered storage and Solid State Device (SSD) front, that’s for both RAM and FLASH based, here’s an article over at Processor.com worth a look at. Here are a couple of other recent articles over at Processor.com addressing small form factor servers and refurbished servers, as well as freeing up data center space. Steve Kovosky has an interesting blog post over at Virtualization Conversation about Virtualization: Life Beyond Consolidation building on a previous blog posting I did a few weeks back pertaining to server and storage virtualization trends and directions. Here’s a recent article by Paul Shread over at Enterprise Storage Forum about T10 Object Storage Devices (OSD) and their current status or lack of progress including Sun’s shifting focus.

Speaking of data protection for physical and virtual environments, tape, data protection management, monitoring and managing IT resource effectiveness not to mention stretching your IT budget dollar, here’s a link to an article over at CTR in which yours truly provides some commentary. Also on the data protection theme, Walaika Haskins over at TechNewsWorld has a good article about "Figuring Out the Best Way to Stash Your Data". Data dedupe continues to be a popular topic for discussion and Cindy Waxer recently wrote an article appearing at Inc. Technology pertaining to Dedupe and Disaster Recovery (DR) and Business Continence (BC). Also on the dedupe front, here’s a industry trends and perspective solutions brief over on the EMC site pertaining to policy based data dedupe deployment (don’t worry, its not a data dedupe debate document, however I suppose some of the Drs’ and Divas’ of Dedupe may see it that way which will give them something to debate ;) ) with a focus around when to use which type or mode of dedupe processing to meet different applications requirements (may require registration, however its free, the document that is).

Learn more about the above and other related topics at the StorageIO In the news, tips, events and Industry Trends White Paper as well as Books and Blog pages.

Cheers – gs

Technorati tags: Trends

February 14, 2009March 7, 2022

On The Road Again: An Update

A while back, I posted about a busy upcoming spring schedule of activity and events, and then a few weeks ago, posted an update, so this can be considered the latest "On The Road Again" update. While the economy continues to be in rough condition and job reductions or layoffs continuing, or, reduction in hours or employees being asked to take time off without pay or to take sabbaticals, not to mention the race to get the economic stimulus bill passed, for many people, business and life goes on.

Airport parking lots have plenty of cars in them, airplanes while not always full, are not empty (granted there has been some fleet optimization aka aligning capacity to best suited tier of aircraft and other consolidation or capacity improvements). Many organizations cutting back on travel and entertainment (T&E) spending, either to watch the top and bottom line, avoid being perceived or seen on the news as having employees going on junkets when they may in fact being going to conferences, seminars, conventions or other educational and related events to boost skills and seek out ways to improve business productivity.

One of the reason that I have a busy travel schedule in addition to my normal analyst and consulting activities is that many events and seminars are being scheduled close to, or in the cities where IT professionals are located who might otherwise have T&E restrictions or other constraints from traveling to industry events, some of which are or will be impacted by recent economic and business conditions.

Last week I was invited to attend and speak at the FujiFilm Executive Seminar, no private jets were used or seen, travel was via scheduled air carriers (coach air-fare). FujiFilm has a nice program for those interested in or involved with tape whether for disk to tape backup, disk to disk to tape, long term archive, bulk storage and other scenarios involving the continued use and changing roles of tape as a green data storage medium for in-active or off-line data. Check out FujiFilm TapePower Center portal.

This past week I was in the big "D", that’s Dallas Texas to do another TechTarget Dinner event around the theme of BC/DR, Virtualization and IT optimization. The session was well attended by a diverse audience of IT professionals from around the DFW metroplex. Common themes included discussions about business and economic activity as well as the need to keep business and IT running even when budgets are being stretched further and further. Technology conversations included server and storage virtualization, tiered storage including SSD, fast FC and SAS disk drives, lower performance high capacity "fat" disk drives as well as tape not to mention tiered data protection, tiered servers and other related items.

The Green Gap continues to manifest itself in that when asked, most people do not have Green IT initiatives, however, when asked they do have power, cooling, floor-space, environmental (PCFE) or business economic sustainability concerns, aka, the rest of the Green story.

While some attendees have started to use some new technologies including dedupe technology, most I find are still using a combination of disk and tape with some considering dedupe for the future for certain applications. Other technologies and trends being watched, however also ones with concerns as to their stability and viability for enterprise use include FLASH based SSD, Cloud computing and thin provisioning among others. Common themes I hear from IT professionals are that these are technologies and tools to keep an eye on, or, use on a selective basis and are essentially tiered resources to have in a tool box of technologies to apply to different tasks to meet various service requirements. Hopefully the Cowboys can put a fraction of the amount of energy and interest into and improving their environment that the Dallas area IT folks are applying to their environments, especially given the strained IT budgets vs. the budget that the Cowboys have to work with for their player personal.

I always find it interesting when talking to groups of IT professionals which tend to be enterprise, SME and SMB hearing what they are doing and looking at or considering which often is in stark contrast to some of the survey results on technology adoption trends one commonly reads or hears about. Hummm, nuff said, what say you?

Hope to see you at one of the many upcoming events perhaps coming to a venue near you.

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

January 26, 2009March 7, 2022

Do you have your copy of “The Green and Virtual Data Center” yet?

For those not familar with my new book, "The Green and Virtual Data Center" (Auerbach), or, for those who have already ordered your copy (Thank You and look for them to arrive soon) as today marks the offical publication date, or, I guess you could say the birthday for "The Green and Virtual Data Center".

Thus, I am pleased to share with you the news about the formal launch and publication (read the press release) of my new book, “The Green and Virtual Data Center”, which is released today by Auerbach/CRC-Press and is available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Borders, CRC-Press and other venues around the world.

The book focuses on the idea that IT infrastructure resources configured and deployed in a highly virtualized manner can be combined with other techniques and technologies to achieve a simplified and cost-effective delivery of IT services in a clean, green, and profitable manner. ?The Green and Virtual Data Center? covers these technologies and techniques that todays data centers should be considering while trying to maximize resources, such as power, cooling, floor space, storage, server performance, and network capacity.

Some of the topics include:
• Energy and data footprint reductions
• Cloud-based storage and computing
• Intelligent and adaptive power management
• Server, storage, and networking virtualization
• Tiered servers for storage, network, and data centers
• Energy avoidance and energy efficiency

Green Power and Cooling Tools and Calculators

In the course of doing research and consulting work with various IT organizations, VARs, trade groups and vendors over the past couple of years, not to mention in preparing for my new book "The Green and Virtual Data Center" (Auerbach), I have come across (see a list here) several tools, calculators and modeling or sizing utilities pertaining to power, cooling, floor-space, EH&S (PCFE) also known as green topics.

Many vendors and organizations including APC, Dell, EMC, Emerson, IBM, HP and Sun among others have various types of green and related calculators in support of PCFE, performance and related sizing activities. These and other tools differ in what information they provide as well as the level of detail and configuration information, however, the tools are also evolving. As an example, EMC blogger Mark Twomey aka Storagezilla has a new post discussing an updated version of their updated calculator that is now web based tool for PCFE and green sizing.

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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