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Tape Talk – Changing Role of Tape

Storage I/O trends

Here’s a link to a new article over at Enterprise Storage Forum titled “The Changing Role of Tape” for those of you who still use or care to admit to using magnetic tape as part of your data protection (backup, BC, DR) and data preservation (e.g. archiving and compliance) strategies.

Disk based solutions continue to grow in adoption for data protection, however tape remains relevant taking on different roles, similar to how disk drives are taking on different roles as FLASH and RAM based SSD continue to evolve and grow in terms of customer deployment adoption. Consequently, despite the continued hype that tape is dead, the reality is that tape remains on of if not the most energy-efficient or green storage mediums of in-active, off-line data in a given footprint and cost basis.

Tape is still being used in many environments particularly more so in larger environments with a focus shifting towards supporting ultra-dense large full backups that have been copied from disk to disk based backups as well as for archives.

Disk based data protection particularly with virtual tape libraries (VTLs) that combine data footprint reduction techniques such as compression, de-dupe, replication and migration to tape capabilities continue to gain in popularity as a convenient way to migrate from tape based backups to disk based backup preserving investment in existing people skills, policies, rules and software.

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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Presentation Downloads from Storage Decisions New York 2008

TechTarget has posted presentations for download from the recent fall 2008 Storage Descisions in New York City. In the Executive and Management Track (Track 5) you can find my presentation ?Green and Environmental Friendly Storage: Practical Ways to Achieve Energy?.

In the Storage and Capacity Management Track (Track 3) you can find my presentation ?Clustered Storage — From SMB, to Scientific, to Social Networking and Web 2.0?.

Cheers
Gs

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Will 6Gb SAS kill Fibre Channel?

Storage I/O trends

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

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

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

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

Ok, nuff said.

Cheers gs

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

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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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

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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

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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

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

Storage I/O trends

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ok, nuff said.

Cheers gs

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

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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Thank you Gartner for generating green awareness for my new book: The Green and Virtual Data Center!

Storage I/O trends

The other day Gartner issued a press release about their new findings that Users Are Becoming Increasingly Confused About the Issues and Solutions Surrounding Green IT.

This however what is missing from the Gartner report and action steps is to also say to read my new book “The Green and Virtual Data Center” (Auerbach).

However in all fairness, since Gartner has not yet seen it, I would seriously doubt that they would endorse anything other than one of their own publications.

Regardless, its great to see Gartner among others joining in and helping to transition industry awareness from Green Hype and help to close the Green gap (read more here and here) and begin addressing core issues that IT organizations can and are addressing to improve efficiency, address costs and enable sustainable business growth in an economic and environmental friendly way.

Thank you Gartner and let me know when and where you want a copy sent for a formal review and endorsement of my new book. Meanwhile, you can learn more at www.thegreenandvirtualdatacenter.com including a variety of green and related power, cooling, floor-space, environmental health and safety-EHS (PCFE) or green topics along with where to pre-order your advance copy from Amazon.com as well as other fine venues around the world.

Ok, nuff said.

Cheers gs

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

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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Optical Storage Oppourtunities or Obsolence?

Storage I/O trends

Is Optical Storage still relevant?

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

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

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

Ok, nuff said.

Cheers gs

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

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

Storage I/O trends

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ok, nuff said.

Cheers gs

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

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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Green Hype or Reality?

Storage I/O trends

Preston Gralla has a new post that brings up some interesting discussion about Green Hype and Reality for IT. Have a read along with my response and comments.

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

Storage I/O trends

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

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

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

Have a read and a good weekend.

Ok, nuff said.

Cheers gs

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

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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Summer Dog Days

Storage I/O trends

I can tell it’s near the end of summer here in the Northern Hemisphere, its hot and humid outside or what is known as the “Dog Days” of August.

Little Leo relaxing on the boat during summer dog days

Big Babe enjoying and boat ride and looking stylish during summer dog days

It?s also the time of the year when many are on their final summer vacations or getting ready for the fall and back to school shopping. It?s also a busy time of the year with vendors trying to get a jump on their competition by making their major announcements while people are still on vacation in advance of a packed fall show and conference schedule.

For me its been a busy time of the year trying to get some relaxation time (the fishing has slowed down with the summer heat) in between all of the vendor pre-briefings, consultations, speaking and key-noting at events as well as some other projects Im working on that you will be seeing and hearing more about in the months to come.

Some of the vendor announcements have already occurred, some have occurred and perhaps no one made mentioned or covered, or if they did, the response has been where’s the news or where’s the “Beef” as if you showed up for a BBQ and forgot to have something to put on the hot grill, that is assuming you are not vegetarian. Yet other vendors are busily getting their NDA and embargoed pre-briefings completed or scheduled.

Sitting through many of these briefings during the dog days of August can be a real chore particularly the ones that are flash and animation laden while being extremely heavily scripted and practiced extreme is some of the scripting, that should the oppourtunity to ask a question occur other than the obligatory ?Do you have any questions?? at the end of the briefing, should a question be asked, the response all to often is a sales pitch, a canned scripted response that you can get off of a website, or, a request for a follow-up call. Not all of the briefings are drudgery, there are the fun ones where a slide or two are put up or even better, sent out in advance and the time is spent in two-way off-script discussions.

With the recent batch of announcements and pre-briefings, some are under true and real NDA and embargos, the type of embargos or NDAs that are actually honored by all parties concerned. Then there are the all too common requested NDA and embargos that usually end up with the story appearing somewhere on the web or elsewhere well in advance of the actual announcement.

As a standard practice, I honor both signed and verbal NDAs and embargos so I can not tell you what will be announced, when or by who as you can probably find that on some other sites in advance of the announcements. However, what I find most exciting and interesting about this falls line up of news and announcement is how many will be industry firsts or the only one in the industry or revolutionary or best in class. Some of the commonly used phrases for this fall include the time proven:

“Industry First”
“Industry Only”
“Market Leader”
“Revolutionary”
“Best in class”
?Game changer?

While these phrases are always used and in some cases true, there are many that forget to add some clarification or qualification. For example, adding one or more of the following as part of the above statements or phrases:

?As far as we know?
?According to our research?
?For us in the industry?
?For us or our company?
?In our opinion?
?To our knowledge?
?Based on what someone told us?

Enjoy the rest of your summer and enjoy the fall product lunch blitz and I look forward to seeing some of you at the various shows, conferences and other events over the next few months.

Cheers
Gs

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Links to Upcoming and Recent Webcasts and Videocasts

Here are links to several recent and upcoming Webcast and video casts covering a wide range of topics. Some of these free Webcast and video casts may require registration.

Industry Trends & Perspectives – Data Protection for Virtual Server Environments

Next Generation Data Centers Today: What’s New with Storage and Networking

Hot Storage Trends for 2008

Expanding your Channel Business with Performance and Capacity Planning

Top Ten I/O Strategies for the Green and Virtual Data Center

Cheers
Greg Schulz – StorageIO