Category: Travel

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

Storage I/O trends

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

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

John Nelson with a small mouth bass caught and released on the St. Croix River During 2008 Beijing Olympics
Fishing while DVR records 2008 Olympics

John Nelson with a northern pike (swamp shark) caught and released on the St. Croix River During 2008 Beijing Olympics
Fishing while DVR records 2008 Olympics

A young bald eagle seen during fishing on the St. Croix river during opening of 2008 Olympic games
A young bald eagle seen during fishing while DVR records 2008 Olympics

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

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

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

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

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

Cheers
gs

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

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Comfort Zones – Stating What Might Be Obvious to Some…

Storage I/O trends

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

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

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

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

Ok, nuff said.

Cheers gs

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

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

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The Differences Between Singapore and Houston in May

Storage I/O trends

In addition to participating at the Techtarget (TT) spring 2008 edition of Storage Decisions (SD) event in Chicago this past week, I was also briefly in Houston Texas this week to do a keynote talk on the Wide World of Archiving Life Beyond Compliance at the Omni Hotel . Between the venue, temperature and humidity, I thought I was in Singapore with a sudden craving for pepper crab at Jumbo’s Seafood in the East Coast Seafood Center. While the Houston venue and those in Singapore were similar as was the temperature and humidity, the real difference was that I remind in the central time zone with a 2.5 hour flight vs. 25 hours of flights and changing planes. Both locales have nice people who speak English and have great food as well. If in Houston, check out the Omni Hotel and for archiving, the Mobius folks are great as well.

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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Spring 2008 Storage Descisions Wrap-Up

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

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

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

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

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

Cheers
GS

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Hot Storage Topics Converge on Chicago Next Week

Storage I/O trends

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

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

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

Cheers
GS

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SNW Spring 2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ok, nuff said, for now…

Cheers gs

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

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

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Wide World of Archiving – Life Beyond Compliance

Earlier this week I did a keynote talk at a TechTarget event in the New York city area titled the “Wide World of Archiving – Life Beyond Compliance” with the basic theme that archiving and data preservation for future or possible future use is not unique or exclusive to SARBOX, HIPPA, CFR, PCI, OHSAS, ISO or other members of the common alphabet soup of governmental or industry regulatory compliance needs.

The basic theme is that archiving can be used to discuss many IT and business pain points and issues from preserving project oriented or seasonal data to off-loading un-used or seldom used data to free up resources to meet power, cooling, floor space and environmental (PCFE) issues
“aka Green” along with boosting performance for on-line access as well as backup, BC and DR.

The challenge however is that archiving while a powerful technique, is also complex in that it requires hardware and mediums to park your data onto, software to find and then execute policies defined by someone to move data to the archive medium and if applicable, delete or cleanup data that has been moved all of which has cost and application specific issues. Then the human side which is more involved than simply throwing head count at the tasks and avoiding the mistakes of the Mythical Man Month.

The human side of archiving is the glue to make it work in that similar to cleaning out your garage, attic, basement or store-room, you can have someone come and do the real work, however do they have the insight to know what to keep and what to discard? Sure that’s an overly simple example, and there are plenty of search and discovery software management tool vendors who will be more than happy to show you a demo of their wares that will discovery and classify and categorize and index what data you have as well as interface with policy managers, data movers and archiving devices.

However who is going to tell the management tools what policies are applicable and the different variances for your different business segments or activities? Consequently the key to making archiving work particularly on a broader basis is to get internal personal familiar with your business, IT personal, as well as external subject matter experts involved all of which leads to a challenge and dilemma of is it cheaper to just buy more energy-efficient, space-saving storage than to pay the fees to find, manage, move and archive data. Talking with one of the attendees who brought up some good points that this all makes sense however there is a scaling challenge and when dealing with 100’s of TBytes or PBytes, the complexity increases.

This is where the notion of scaling with stability comes into play in that many solutions exist to address different functionality for example archiving, de-duping, compression, server or storage virtualization, thin-provisioning among many others however how do they scale with stability. That is, how stable or reliable do the solutions remain when scaling from 10s to 100’s to 10,000’s or even 100,000’s users, email boxes, sessions, streams or from 10’s of TBytes to 10’s of PBytes? How does the performance hold up, how does the availability hold up, how does the management and on-going care and feeding change for the better or worse? Concerns around scaling is a common issue I hear from IT organizations pertaining to both hardware and software tools in that what works great during a WebEx demo or PowerPoint or pdf slide show may be different from real-world performance, management, reliability and complexity concerns. After all, have you ever seen a WebEx or live office or PowerPoint or PDF slide deck showing a hardware or software based solution that could not scale or provide transparent interoperability? That would be akin to finding a used car sales rep who gives you a tour of how a car was refurbished inside and out after it was declared totaled by the previous owners insurance company after the last great flood or hurricane.

Getting back to archiving, and not trying to conquer all of your data at one time, take a divide and conquer approach, go for some low hanging fruit where your chances of success go up that you can then build some momentum and perhaps a business case to do a larger project. Also, one solution particularly one archiving software solution may not be applicable to all of your needs in that you may need a tool specialized for email, one for databases and another general purpose tool. Likewise you may need to engage different subject matter experts to help you with policy definition and establishing rules to meet different requirements which is where business partners can come into play with either their in-house staff, partners, or associates that they work with for different issues and needs.

Look beyond the hardware and software, look at the people or human and knowledge side of archiving as well as look beyond archiving for compliance as there is a much bigger wide world of archiving and opportunity. If you remember the ABC sports TV show “Wide World of Sports” you may recall Jim McCay saying “Spanning the globe to bring you the constant variety of sports… the thrill of victory… and the agony of defeat… the human drama of athletic competition… This is “ABC’s Wide World of Sports!”.

From an archiving perspective, keep this in mind in that there is a wide world of opportunities for archiving, the thrill of victory are the benefits, the agony of defeat are the miss-steps, lack of scaling, out of control costs or complexity, the human drama is how to make or break a solution, this is the “Wide World of Archiving”…

Rest assured, some form of archiving structured database, semi-structured email with attachments and un-structured word, PowerPoint, PDF, MP3 and other data is in your future, it’s a matter of when. Archiving is just one of many tools available for effectively managing your data and addressing data footprint sprawl particular for data that you can not simply delete and ignore, if you need it to go forward, you need to keep it. Or, as a friend of mine says You can’t go forward unless you can go back. Likewise, you can’t manage what you don’t know about; you can’t move and delete what you can’t manage.

Look for solution providers who are not looking to simply get you to buy the latest and greatest archiving storage device, or, the slickest archiving management tool with a Uhi Gui that rivals those on an Wii or Xbox, or, that is looking to simply run up billable hours. That’s a balancing act requires investing time with different business solution providers to see where their core business is, how they can scale, where and how they make their money to help you decide where and how they are fit as opposed to simply adding complexity to your environment and existing issues.

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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StorageIO Spring Keynote and Speaking tour V2.008

Several new keynote and speaking engagements involving myself have been added to the StorageIO events page including among others:

April 8th, 2008 – SNW Orlando FL
Beyond Green-Wash:
IT Data Center Power, Cooling, Floor Space and Environmental (PCFE) Topics and Trends V2.008
This talk will move past what are the issues and reasons for going green and get right to the point of what you can do today leveraging various technologies, techniques and best practices to address PCFE and green environmental issues including EHS, low power and economic sustainment in an environmental friendly manner as well as what to include in a long term green strategy for your data center.

Chicago, May 13th-15th – StorageDecisions
Clustered Storage:
From SMB, to Scientific, to Social Networking and Web 2.0
The growth of structured and unstructured data continues at an explosive rate in most environments resulting in a constantly expanding data footprint requiring data and storage management resources. Similarly, the relative ease of use of NFS and Windows CIFS file sharing based storage, also known as Network Attached Storage (NAS), has led to a proliferation of NAS and Windows file servers which are not all that different from how the ease of use of personal computers (PCs) resulted in desktop and server sprawl. With the focus of many IT organizations today to do more with less, or, do more with what you have, clustered storage and clustered file serving have become a popular option to support modular, scalable and flexible growth. Clustered storage including clustered file serving, grid and web 2.0 based storage solutions are no longer confined to the specific high performance scientific applications they are commonly associated. Clustered storage serving is commonly being deployed to support a wide diversity of applications including commercial, entertainment or media, Web 2.0 and social networking along with grid, cloud and traditional scientific needs.

This session takes a look at among other topics:
? Look at what different clustered storage vendors are claiming and how their solutions differ
? Fact vs. Fiction, Myths and Realties of clustered storage
o Grid vs. Clusters, Cluster vs. Grid, what?s the differences
o Clustered storage is only for ultra large environments like Google
o Clustered file serving is only for high performance (HPC) environments
o SMBs and bulk storage applications can not benefit from clustered storage
? What are the caveats to be aware of when deploying clustered storage?
? What are some emerging trends and solutions to keep an eye on for clustered storage
? What are some questions that some vendors do not want you to ask about their solutions!

Green and Environmental Friendly Storage:
Practical Ways to Achieve Energy Efficiency
Green is in-and every storage vendor out there has a green story to tell. Despite the vendor and industry hyperbole about the environmental benefits of their products, there are still no standard metrics by which to measure and compare power consumption or energy efficiency claims. The challenge is sorting out and closing the gap between vendor green messaging and IT data center issues including power, cooling, floor space and other environmental topics including RoHS and e-waste disposal. This session looks at several practical techniques and technologies that you can leverage today to achieve an energy efficiency data center to sustain business growth in an economical and ecological friendly manner.

Topics that will be covered include among others:
? How truthful are vendor claims and what is ?Green wash?
? Facts and Fiction, Myths and Realities:
o Storage is cheaper to buy than to power
o Power avoidance vs. energy efficiency
o Are Solid State Devices (SSD) the silver bullet?
o Dedupe vs. Archive vs. Compression vs. Consolidation
? What?s real and achievable today, what are your options?
? Measuring and determining energy efficiency with emerging metrics
? How to do more with what you have and avoid forklift upgrades
? Who is the ?Greenest of them all? and where to learn more

I will also be keynoting at several TechTarget seminar series events around the U.S. including
StorageIO events page located here.

Cheers
GS

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Snow Birds

Don?t ask me why, maybe it was flying through Detroit or Chicago weaving between snowstorms the other day enroute to Florida, a place where many northern ?snow birds? flock towards during the winter months to escape the harsh weather like what most of the northern U.S. is facing this week. Maybe it was the audience and atmosphere of the inaugural Florida Linux Show in Jacksonville Florida where I did a keynote talk the other day, an audience who adorn the penguin.

I?m thinking that it was a combination of too much iPod time, enroute to a conference where penguin fans (and not Pittsburgh hockey fans) convene in a state where many escape to this time of year and how cold it has been, that had a tune in my head ?We come from the land of the ice and snow, from the midnight sun where hot springs blow?? which if you are up on your ?Zeppelin?, you recognize.

Rod Sharp and Don (aka ?The Linux Guy?) Corbet put together a great inaugural event the other day at the University of Northern Florida complete with a ribbon cutting ceremony, several presentations and keynotes along with an exhibit area. What I found interesting about the event was the diversity of the attendees which represented a diverse cross section of interests, focus areas and types of organizations from enterprise to prosumer and pretty much everything in between not to mention the enthusiasm and interest of the attendees to engage and share ideas and information, made for a fun Monday morning before returning back to the cold and frozen tundra.

Thanks Rod and Don for the opportunity to participate and be the key note at your event this week.

Cheers
GS