Category: Travel

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SNOW Fun and Information Technology – They Do Mix

In the spirit of the holidays (which ever holidays you prefer), here’s a bit lighter posting (rest assured, there are plenty of upcoming more technology focused postings in the works) about what many folks in the northern hemisphere are either dreading and dealing with, or, enjoying this time of the year and that is SNOW.

From the deserts of Las Vegas NV to New England, from Canada to Texas and most points in between and that’s just in the U.S., its that time of the year for SNOW (while friends from Oz remind me its summer down under this time of the year).

Holiday HoundsGreg snow sleedingNetworking in the SnowLittle Leo having a SNOW snackGreg walking on "Frozen" waterGreg and Friends Sleeding and Riding on Snowplow

With that in mind and knowing how IT or other tech savvy folks enjoy or depend on the use of acronyms, buzzwords and so forth, here are some reworked terms in the spirit of the northern hemisphere winter season. You might want to down load "Valley Winter Song" (e.g. the song from the LL Bean commercials) rom Fountains Of Wayne via Amazon.com or some other venue if you have not done so to enjoy with your snow or working on your holiday shopping list.

Some acronyms include among others:

  • Backup Target – Where a lot of shoppers are waiting in line or stuck in traffic
  • Backup – Getting out of a snow bank, stuck in traffic, what the snow plows do sometimes
  • Battery backup – Spare or extra batteries to put into all of those new toys and gadgets
  • BC – Before Cold sets in
  • Best practices – How to use the snow removable equipment
  • Bus driver – person driving the metric transit bus full of holiday shoppers and revelers
  • Capacity planning – figuring out where to pile up the snow
  • Chain of events – Car driver on cell phone, Car hits ice, car slides into another car, chain reaction accident
  • Cloud – where the snow comes from
  • Cluster – Many cars piled up together stuck in traffic, nothing moving, see gridlock
  • Compress – Pile the snow up, let it settle
  • DAS – Direct Attached Snowplow
  • DR – Doctor to go see for your cold or back ache from shoveling snow or too much holiday cheer
  • Fibre Channel – How to get the weather channel on local cable
  • Global warming – What those dealing with snow might like to see a bit of right now
  • Generator – Essential equipment for geek’s and techno folks
  • Green – What the snow is now covering on the golf courses in much of the northern hemisphere colder areas
  • Grid – how the traffic highways are plugged with stopped cars and holiday shoppers
  • Grid lock – Encryption and security for grids or traffic jams
  • Hardware- Snow removable equipment
  • ILM – iPhone Loves Multimedia
  • InfiniBand – Giant bow around holiday presents
  • iPhone – I will call you latter
  • iSCSI – What some are referring to the slippery and dirty roads today
  • MSP – Managed snow removal professionals, or the Minneapolis / St. Paul Airport where holiday travelers may be stranded
  • Need Another Shovel (NAS)
  • Networking – Talking with your neighbors
  • NFS – Nevada Fresh Snow
  • North pole – Future location for Google to keep their storage and reduce cooling costs
  • Offline – Power outage or, snow plow gets stuck
  • Offsite – where the snow gets moved too
  • Online – where most snow bound holiday shoppers should be shopping instead of being stuck in the snow
  • Optics – Evening light shows during holiday parades
  • Outsourcing – Have someone else remove the snow
  • PC ? Payment Card
  • PCI – Payment card industry that is busy this time of the year processing credit card transactions
  • POS – Point of sale, plain old shovel
  • Provisioning – going to the store and stocking up on food, fuel and other essentials
  • RAID – Remove All Ice Daily
  • RAIN – Snow before it freezes
  • Removable Media – Chasing the news crew off your property after the nightly light show
  • Replication – Repeated snow storms in a row
  • ROI – Remove old Ice
  • SAS = Sleds and Snow
  • SANd = Stuff at the beach in the summer, stuff on the road in the winter time
  • SPAM – Hormel product
  • SATA – Santa without an "n"
  • Shipping tapes – How 3M gets tape from their factories to you for gift wrapping
  • Single instance – Rare snowstorm like what happened in Las Vegas
  • SLED – snow sled with a disk Dedupe – Let the snow piles shrink
  • Slide ware – Picture on the wall of a nice tropical warm place while the snowstorm is outside
  • Snapshot – Picture of the snow on a tree Restore – When the power comes back on
  • SNOW – Storage Networking Organizations West or, Storage Networking outsource World
  • Software – What goes in the Wii or play station during a snowstorm (if you have power)
  • Spanning tree – very big tree with lots of snow on it
  • SRM – Snow removable management, or, Sunday Rolls into Monday
  • Standby power – Waiting on the phone for the power company to answer during an outage
  • Tape – What 3M makes to wrap presents with
  • Tiered servers – Wait staff at a restraunt
  • Tiered storage – How snow is piled to maximize space
  • Tweet – What takes place on twitter or perhaps from eating too much sweets
  • UPS – The people in the brown trucks bringing things from Amazon and others

    • Snow plow offlineSnow plowingSnow and cold family

    Have a safe and happy holiday season and enjoy the snow while you can.

    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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    Getting Caught Up and Holiday Shopping

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Ok, nuff said.

    Cheers gs

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

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

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    Just for Fun of Flying

    Ok, so if you have ever traveled, you know what its like to have to sit and wait before taking off, for some it’s a time to converse with the person next to you who either likes to talk more than you, or, is trying to ignore your conversation being polite, or perhaps a time to get a nap or read or get anxiety or what ever it is you do while waiting for a plane to take off.

    So every wonder what’s really going on, what’s the flight crew doing during the wait?

    Not that this happens all the time, however, for anyone who has ever lived in or been in the colder climates and have had to deal with cleaning your windshield or wind screen including jumping out of the car at a stoplight, or, reaching out while driving, you should relate to this photo courtesy of Airliners.net I came across of what a flight crew on a Boeing 757 in Europe (e.g. the UK) did to make use of some time while holding for takeoff.

    Notice in the pictures that the aircraft (A/C) has its engines running at is presumably idle power while the captain and first officer (FO) use the time to do some final cleanup or wipe down of their windscreen. This is not what is normally part of the A/C deicing procedures, however like throwing snow on your cars windshield or cleaning the window while stopped at a red light, it works.

    Something you don’t see everyday!

    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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    Remember The Alamo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Now lets put travel into perspective here a bit.

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

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

    Cheers gs

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

    twitter @storageio

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

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    Technology and Traveling

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Buzz words include among others 10 GbE, 100 GbE, 8 Gb Fibre Channel (8GFC), Agent-less, Application Aware, Archiving, Authentication, Automation, Backup Service Provider (BSP or MSP or Cloud Backup), Backup, BC/DR, Benchmarking, Blade systems, Blade servers, Blade storage, Bulk Storage, Capacity optimized, Capacity per watt, Capacity Planning, Carbon Footprint, CAS, CDP, CIFS, Cloud Computing and Cloud Storage, Clustered, CNA, Compliance, CO2, Compression, Converged Enhanced Ethernet (CEE), Full Disk Encryption (FDE), Converged Networks, Cross technology domain, D2D2D, D2D2T, Data management, Data migration, DCE, De-dupe debates, De-dupe ratios, De-dupe rates, De-duplication, Distributed RAID, DPM, Economics, Efficiency, eDiscovery, Encryption, Enterprise 2.0 Storage, Environmental Health and Safety (EHS), Event Correlation, eWaste, Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), File management, FLASH, Global name space, Green, Grid,HA, HSM, I/O Virtualization (IOV), ILM & Data movement, InfiniBand, Infrastructure Resource Management (IRM), IOPS per watt, IPM & MAID 2.0, iSCSI, Key management, Managed Service Provider (MSP), Metrics, MR-IOV, Multi-Protocol Storage, NAS, NFS, NPVID, Optimization, OSD, Partitions, PCI SIG IOV, Performance optimized, Performance, Piroma, pNFS, Policy based management, Policy based dedupe, Power Cooling Floor-space EHS (PCFE), RAID 6, Removable Hard Disk Drive (RHDD), Replication, RoHS, SaaS, SAN, SAS, SATA, Security, Self Healing, Snapshots, Spin down, SR-IOV, SRM, SSD, Tape, Thin Provision, Tier 0, Tiering, Unstructured data, VCB, VDI, Virtualization, Vmotion, VMware, VTL, WAAS, WADM, WADS, WAFS, WDM, Web 2.0 and many more.

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

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

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

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

    Ok, nuff said.

    Cheers gs

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

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

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    Downloads for fall 2008 San Francisco Storage Decisions now available

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

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

    View the entire list of all Storage Decisions sessions here.

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

    Cheers gs

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

    twitter @storageio

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

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    Dutch StorageExpo Recap

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

    Dutch StorageExpo

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Cheers gs

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

    twitter @storageio

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

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    Time In and Around Clouds

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Ok, nuff said.

    Cheers gs

    Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
    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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    Vendors Who Dont’ Want to Be Virtualized?

    Storage I/O trends

    This past week I did a couple of keynote and round table discussions in Plano (Dallas) at Jaspers and in Boston at Smith and Wollensky with a theme of BC/DR for Virtualized environments. In both locations, where we had great participate involvement and discussions, audience members discussed the various merits and their experiences with server virtualization, and one of the many common themes was vendors whose do not support their vertical applications in virtualized environments.

    Say it so Joe (or Jane), especially with so many vendors tripping over themselves to show how their software can be stuffed into a VM in order to jump on the VM bandwagon. How could it be so that some vendors dont’ want to be virtualized?

    It’s true, there are some independent software vendors (ISV) whose vertical packages are commonly deployed in environments of all size who do not for various reasons want nor support their software running in a virtualized environment.

    The reasons some vendors of vertical specific applications do not support their software in virtualized environments can vary from quality of service (QoS), performance, contention and response time or availability concerns, desire to continue selling physical servers and other hardware with their applications, to the desire to keep their application on a server platform that they can control the QoS by insuring that no other applications or changes are made to the server and associated operating system environment.

    Yet another example can be that the vendor has simply not had a chance to test or, to test in various permutations and thus take the route of not supporting their solutions in a virtualized, or, what they may perceive as in a consolidated environment.

    This is in no way a new trend as for decades vendors of vertical software have often take a stance of not allowing other applications to be installed on a server where their software is installed in order for them to maintain QoS and service level agreement (SLA) levels and support guarantees.

    In some cases such as specialized applications including hospital patient care or related systems, this can make sense as well as perhaps complying with regulatory requirements. However there are plenty of other applications where vendors drag their feet or resist supporting virtualized environments without realizing that not all virtualized environments need to be consolidated. That is, a stepping stone or baby step can be to 1st install their software on a VM that has a dedicate physical machine (PM) to validate that their are no instabilities or QoS impacts of running in a VM.

    After some period of time and comfort levels, then the application and its associated VM could be placed along side some other number of VMs in an incremental and methodical manner to determine what if any impacts occur.

    The bottom line is this, not all applications and servers lend themselves to being consolidated for various reasons, however, many of those applications and servers can be virtualized to enable management transparency including facilitating movement to other servers during upgrades or maintenance as well as BC/DR (e.g. life beyond consolidation), a topic that I cover in more detail in my new book “The Green and Virtual Data Center” (Auerbach).

    Likewise, there are some applications that truly for security, QoS, availability, politics, software or hardware dependencies or compatibility among other reasons that should be left alone for now. However there are also many applications where vendors need to re-think or look at why they do not support a virtualized server environment and better articulate those issues to their customers, or, start the testing and qualifications as well as put together best practices guides on how to deploy their applications into virtualized environments.

    Thanks for all of those who ventured out this week in Plano and Boston and participating in the discussion, look forward to seeing and hearing from you again in the not so distant 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

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

    Posted on

    Back from Fall 2008 SNW in Dallas

    I have flown in and out of Dallas/Ft. Worth International (DFW) airport for many years and it?s a familiar setting, in fact this month alone, I flew through DFW last week to get to and from San Antonio (SAT) to deliver a keynote talk on ?The Wide Wide World of Archiving: Life Beyond Compliance? at a event for IT professionals and customers. Next week I get to fly in and out of DFW again to deliver a keynote talk at a dinner roundtable event on BC/DR and data protection for virtualized environments in Plano. Plano if you are not familiar is the home of EDS, now a division of HP, as well as other large nationally and internationally known firms.

    This week I racked up another trip in and out of DFW to attend the fall 2008 SNW event for the day.

    Flight routing from DFW to MSP - Via www.flightaware.com

    SNW has become a commuter event, that is, an event that can easily be covered in a day, or, depending on the venue and how out of the way for flights, maybe an overnight event as opposed to what it used to be which was usually at least a couple of days and couple of nights. I was able to catch an early morning flight to Dallas that had be in the lobby for coffee and conversations at the Gaylord Hotel before 9AM, was able to meet and visit people until after 6PM before catching my evening flight home.

    Now for those concerned about my carbon footprint for flying down for the day, talking with the pilot who gave me some numbers to work with, the average was about 45.5 miles per gallon per passenger to make the less than 2 hour flight both ways enabling an efficient use of time for the day. Granted, not all destinations or venues are as easy for getting in and out of as DFW depending on where you are coming from or going.

    Contrary to what you might here, there were actually some real IT users/customers in attendance at SNW in Dallas, at least there were on Tuesday when I was there as I talked to several that I know and others that introduced themselves that I did not know before.

    On the flip side, as usual with SNW, vendors and vars out numbered the number of users or IT pro’s at the event which has been the trend for sometime now which should not be a surprise as SNW is 1st and foremost a vendor to vendor, vendor to var, vendor to media and analyst event. It?s interesting to hear vendors who want to get IT or end user leads complain that they pay so much to be at SNW yet get few good qualified leads, or, of the vendors who complain that there are no vendors to talk about partnerships with when they go to Storage Decisions.

    The corollary here is that the vendors who have messages and solutions targeted towards end users as opposed to vars or other vendors, talk about the cost of Storage Decisions, yet also talk about all of the qualified leads and business that they get coming out of the events that covers their costs of participating.

    Likewise the vendors and vars I talk with that are pleased with their investments at SNW comment that they got some end user or IT professional leads for their direct or channel sales or for their partners, however that the number and quality of meetings with other vendors or vars.

    On the flip-side, for a non vendor storage centric event for IT pro’s or what the vendors call users or buyers, Storage Decisions events in Chicago, Toronto, New York and San Francisco have large turnouts or for the mega shows, there are the vendor events including VMworld, Oracle, EMC World and so forth not to mention Super Computing and NAB or in Europe SNW Europe and the Storage Expo series among others. Speaking of Storage Expo, I will be crossing the pond in an energy efficient Airbus A330-300 to do a key note at the Dutch event in Utrecht Netherlands on November 12th, 2008.

    Bottom line is worth going to SNW for the day for some face to face meetings, catching up with those whom I have not seen at any of the other events recently as well as meeting some new people. By leveraging pre- and post-briefings, meetings at other events, effective and efficient use of time and resources made a day trip to SNW worthwhile as a commuter or day event.

    Cheers
    gs

    Posted on

    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

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

    Posted on

    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

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

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

    Posted on

    Data Proteciton for Virtual Environments at VMware VMworld

    Storage I/O trends

    Data protection for virtual environments including protecting virtual servers and virtual storage as well as using virtualization techniques to protect applications and data on non consolidated servers is gaining plenty of attention building on past, recent and this weeks as well as other forthcoming announcements during VMworld 2008 taking place now in Las Vegas. The last month or so has been busy with the usual analyst pre-briefing sessions for some of the items now announced as well as others that are still in the wings.

    Here are a few links, one to a recent webcast (Industry Trends and Perspectives: Data Protection for Virtual Server Environments) along with another to an industry trends and perspective white paper titled “Data Protection Options for Virtual Servers”.

    Now its time to get ready to travel off to New Orleans where I will be speaking about data protection and other related topics for virtual server and storage environments tonight at an event and then later this week in Chicago.

    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