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Do Disk based VTLs draw less power than Tape?

The tape is dead debates rage on as they have for a decades which make for good press and discussion or debate during slow times, similar to coverage of what Britney Spears or Paris Hilton are or are not wearing.

In the on-going debates and Greenwashing of what technology or vendor is greener to prevent global warming, some recent tape is dead flare-ups have occurred including one hinting that tape libraries can draw more power than a disk based VTL with de-dupe are discussed over on Tony Pearson of IBM fame blog site as well as Beth Pariseau of TechTarget StorageSoup site.

I posted some comments on those sites along along with a link to a StorageIO Industry Trends and Perspective report titled “Energy Savings without Performance Compromise” as an example (look for an updated version of the comparison charts in the report in the not so distant future). The report looks at how different storage tiers including on-line disk, MAID, MAID 2.0 and tape libraries vary to address different PCFE (power, cooling, floor-space, environment) issues while supporting various service levels including performance, availability, capacity and energy use.

Additional related material can be found at www.storageio.com and www.greendatastorage.com including the Industry Trends and Perspective Report Business “Benefits of Data Footprint Reduction in general covering archiving, compression (on-line and off-line) along with de-duplication

Ok, nuff said.

Cheers gs

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

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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SNW Spring 2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ok, nuff said, for now…

Cheers gs

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

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

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Just When You Thought It Was Safe To Go In The Water Again!

In the shark infested waters where I/O and networking debates often rage, the Fibre Channel vs. iSCSI, or, is that iSCSI vs. Fibre Channel debates continue which is about as surprising as an ice berg melting because it floated into warmer water or hot air in the tropics.

Here’s a link to an article at Processor.com by Kurt Marko “iSCSI vs. Fibre Channel: A Cost Comparison iSCSI Targets the Low-End SAN, But Are The Cost Advantages Worth The Performance Trade-offs?” that looks at a recent iSCSI justification report and some additional commentary about apples to oranges comparisons by me.

Here’s the thing, no one in their right mind would try to refute that iSCSI at 1GbE levering built-in server NICs and standard Ethernet switches and operating system supplied path managers is cheaper than say 4Gb Fibre Channel or even legacy 1Gb and 2Gb Fibre Channel. However that’s hardly an apple to apples comparison.

A more interesting comparison is for example 10GbE iSCSI compared to 1GbE iSCSI (again not a fair comparison), or, look at for example the new solution from HP and Qlogic that for about $8,200 USD, you get a 8Gb FC switch with a bunch of ports for expansion, four (4) PCIe 8Gb FC adapters plus cables plus transceiver optics which while not as cheap as 1GbE ports built into a server or an off the shelf Ethernet switch, is a far cry from the usual apples to oranges no cost Ethernet NICs vs. $1,500 FC adapters and high price FC director ports.

To be fair, put this into comparison with 10GbE adapters (and probably not a real apples to apples comparison at that) which on CDW go from about $600 USD (without no transceivers) to $1,100 to $1,500 for single port with transceivers or about $2,500 to $3,000 or more for dual or multi-port.

So the usual counter argument to trying to make a more apples to apples comparison is that iSCSI deployments do not need the performance of 10GbE or 8GbE Fibre Channel which is very valid, however then a comparison should be iSCSI vs. NAS.

Here’s the bottom line, I like iSCSI for its target markets and see lots of huge upside and growth opportunity just like I see a continued place for Fibre Channel and moving forward FCoE leveraging Ethernet as the common denominator (at least for now) as well as NAS for data sharing and SAS for small deployments requiring shared storage (assuming a shared SAS array that is).

I?m a fan of using the right technology or tool for the task at hand and if that gets me in trouble with the iSCSI purist who wants everything on iSCSI, well, too bad, so be it. Likewise, if the FC police are not happy that I?m not ready and willing to squash out the evil iSCSI, well, too bad, get over it, same with NAS, InfiniBand and SAS and that’s not to mean I don?t take a side or preference, rather, applied to the right task at hand, I?m a huge fan of these and other technologies and hence the discussion about apples to apples comparisons and applicability.

Cheers
GS

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Atrato Part Deux

As a follow-up note to a previous post, Atrato last week came out of stealth mode, well, a little bit more about their solution with some interesting claims, however details remain sketchy if not in-consistent and looking forward to hearing more actual details.

Beth Pariseau over at TechTarget StorageSoup has an assimilation of information regarding Atrato and their recent announcements, Have a read…

Cheers
GS

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Beware of Announcements on April 1st!!!

Normally what is understood shouldn?t have to be discussed, however, sometimes a reminder is in order particularly with April 1st just around the corner which means “April Fools”.

With that in mind, here’s a list of things to watch-out for or be ready to question regarding announcements and news on or about April 1st. Come to think about, this list is probably just as relevant most of the year anyway!

Industry First
Revolutionary
Industry Unique
Industry Leadership
Record Setting
So Easy our CEO can use it
Worlds Fastest
Unlimited Scaling
Best in Class
Greenest Software or storage
Virtual Virtualization (VV)
Grid 2.0
Grid 3.0

Some technologies not to be fooled by:

RAID 69 Based disk storage (It?s a dual parity scheme optimized for distributed parity across both the northern and southern hemispheres using counter rotating SSD) to address your power, cooling, floor space and environmental (PCFE) issues. If it shows up in a green color be very skeptical!

Grid 2.0 Storage – A repackaged USB based storage with two (Grid) processors to manage 1.5TB of data on your desktop with optimal wNFS (NAS over WiFi) support.

SDD Technology – Self Deleting Data ? Not to be confused with some type of virus, the marketing pitch will be “Show me your lost data and we will show you data you did not need” – CAGR expected to be 1,234% with a TAM of quad-zillions over next 3 years with a probability of .88% based on preliminary survey results. Watch for vendors with early proof of concept prototypes to quickly re-label their technology that was previously tagged as lacking data integrity to become industry leaders and industry unique in this new category of data and storage management.

Rest assured there will be many others?
Have a safe and happy April 1st and
Don?t get fooled again.

Cheers
GS

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Wide World of Archiving – Life Beyond Compliance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ok, nuff said.

Cheers gs

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

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

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SPAM of a Different Kind – Introducing SPAM Man V2.008

Recently a good friend who happens to be involved in the data storage and I/O connectivity marketplace turned 50. So in honor of his birthday, and being how he likes the Hormel pork based product aka the “Hawaiian Soul Food”more commonly known as SPAM, also famous from the a Monty Python Skit, what better gift than to SPAM him with SPAM.

I would like to introduce you to “SPAM Man”.
SPAM Man - Guards Your SPAM and Data
SPAM Man – Deters SPAM from your Datacenter

“SPAM Man” happens to be a couple of years younger than the magnetic hard disk drive (HDD) , he also happens to be an infrastructure specialist (IT and other) in his own right. In his new role, “SPAM Man” will join the ranks of other IT data center and infrastructure guardians including the “De-Dupe Diva” and “DCX Man”.

SPAM Man - Guards Your SPAM and Data
SPAM Man – Deters SPAM from your Datacenter and Pantry Closet

Happy Birthday Jim (I mean SPAM Man)…

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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Logo-ology

In case you did not catch it, NetApp (formerly officially known as Network Appliance) who has been known in the industry for years by their nickname ?NetApp? has joined the ranks of companies like FedEx (formerly known as Federal Express) to shorten their name and logo to their more commonly used and referred to name which I think is great.

NetApp is also the latest vendor to as part of their new identify makeover adopt a new logo, now some logos make more sense than others do, some leave you scratching your head as to what it means while others, well, leave it at that.

So in honor of NetApp?s new logo, let?s have a quick look and see what we can interpret or at least leave room for pondering what the logo could mean. For example, looking at the following images, granted the democratic logo has three legs, four feet and a tail showing, and the republican logo has two legs and trunk showing, so what if you transposed the blue part of both parties logo on top of the NetApp new logo?

NetApp Logo ? Neutral and Agnostic???

Ok, how about does the new NetApp logo mean agnostic between block and file, or FC and iSCSI? Or that the middle opening is the door to pass into a new world, a world either of enablement or of what some might say vendor lock-in or is it the data protection vault? Nuff with NetApp, lets have a quick look at some others.

What about the ?E? in the
Dell Logo, what?s up or down with that?
Dell Logo

Then there is the tale of two plumbing and infrastructure vendors, one for IT (Brocade) and one for building and water related applications (Moen), one sold by the International Business Machine ? IBM company and the other represented by the Internal Building Materials trade group.

Ok, nuff fun for now, back to work.

Cheers
GS

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Geek Gadgets: Kill A Watt Meter

For the geek who has or thinks they have all the newest and greatest toys and gadgets add this Kill A Watt Meter available from venues including Amazon to your list if you don’t have one already to see how much electric power your gadgets are consuming.

Kill A Watt Meter via Amazon.com

Mine has already come in handy for sizing and load balancing circuits around the house, sizing an APC battery backed UPS for some home electronics and other uses.

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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Mirror Mirror on the wall, who is the greenest of them all?

GreenerComputing has an article covering Greener Electronics and specfricaly the current

Greenpeace ranking of consumer oritited electronic products

Any surprises? Sony Viao and Sony Ericcson Cellphones are at the top of the list along with Samsung, Lenovo and Dell. Well Apple is no longer at the actual bottom of the list, which is now occupied by the likes of Nintendo (bottom), Philips, Microsoft (xbox) and Sharp. Agree or disagree, take it for what it is, it is what is?

Learn more about power, cooling, floorspace, environmental (PCFE) and associated green topics at www.greendatastorage.com

Cheers
GS

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StorageIO Spring Keynote and Speaking tour V2.008

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cheers
GS

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Chargeback for storage

TechTarget SearchStorage recently put out a piece on chargeback for storage that includes some commentary by myself on the topic including some common myths about chargeback of what it is and how it is done.

A common misperception is that chargeback requires actual invoicing and monetizing of IT resource use including servers, storage and networks where in some cases, charge back is not as much about generating invoices as it is for accounting and resource usage tracking.

Granted, if you are in a services oriented environment, rest assured there is monetization needing to take place, however, informational charge back initiatives are also useful for budgeting, planning and awareness of IT services and usage.Have a read here.

Cheers
GS