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January 14, 2010December 24, 2020

2010 and 2011 Trends, Perspectives and Predictions: More of the same?

2011 is not a typo, I figured that since Im getting caught up on some things, why not get a jump as well.

Since 2009 went by so fast, and that Im finally getting around to doing an obligatory 2010 predictions post, lets take a look at both 2010 and 2011.

Actually Im getting around to doing a post here having already done interviews and articles for others soon to be released.

Based on prior trends and looking at forecasts, a simple predictions is that some of the items for 2010 will apply for 2011 as well given some of this years items may have been predicted by some in 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005 or, well ok, you get the picture. :)

Predictions are fun and funny in that for some, they are taken very seriously, while for others, at best they are taken with a grain of salt depending on where you sit. This applies both for the reader as well as who is making the predictions along with various motives or incentives.

Some are serious, some not so much…

For some, predictions are a great way of touting or promoting favorite wares (hard, soft or services) or getting yet another plug (YAP is a TLA BTW) in to meet coverage or exposure quota.

Meanwhile for others, predictions are a chance to brush up on new terms for the upcoming season of buzzword bingo games (did you pick up on YAP).

In honor of the Vancouver winter games, Im expecting some cool Olympic sized buzzword bingo games with a new slippery fast one being federation. Some buzzwords will take a break in 2010 as well as 2011 having been worked pretty hard the past few years, while others that have been on break, will reappear well rested, rejuvenated, and ready for duty.

Lets also clarify something regarding predictions and this is that they can be from at least two different perspectives. One view is that from a trend of what will be talked about or discussed in the industry. The other is in terms of what will actually be bought, deployed and used.

What can be confusing is sometimes the two perspectives are intermixed or assumed to be one and the same and for 2010 I see that trend continuing. In other words, there is adoption in terms of customers asking and investigating technologies vs. deployment where they are buying, installing and using those technologies in primary situations.

It is safe to say that there is still no such thing as an information, data or processing recession. Ok, surprise surprise; my dogs could have probably made that prediction during a nap. However what this means is more data will need to be moved, processed and stored for longer periods of time and at a lower cost without degrading performance or availability.

This means, denser technologies that enable a lower per unit cost of service without negatively impacting performance, availability, capacity or energy efficiency will be needed. In other words, watch for an expanded virtualization discussion around life beyond consolidation for servers, storage, desktops and networks with a theme around productivity and virtualization for agility and management enablement.

Certainly there will be continued merger and acquisitions on both a small as well as large scale ranging from liquidation sales or bargain hunting, to large and a mega block buster or two. Im thinking in terms of outside of the box, the type that will have people wondering perhaps confused as to why such a deal would be done until the whole picture is reveled and thought out.

In other words, outside of perhaps IBM, HP, Oracle, Intel or Microsoft among a few others, no vendor is too large not to be acquired, merged with, or even involved in a reverse merger. Im also thinking in terms of vendors filling in niche areas as well as building out their larger portfolio and IT stacks for integrated solutions.

Ok, lets take a look at some easy ones, lay ups or slam dunks:

More cluster, cloud conversations and confusion (public vs. private, service vs. product vs. architecture)
More server, desktop, IO and storage consolidation (excuse me, server virtualization)
Data footprint impact reduction ranging from deletion to archive to compress to dedupe among others
SSD and in particular flash continues to evolve with more conversations around PCM
Growing awareness of social media as yet another tool for customer relations management (CRM)
Security, data loss/leap prevention, digital forensics, PCI (payment card industry) and compliance
Focus expands from gaming/digital surveillance /security and energy to healthcare
Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) mainstream in discussions with some initial deployments
Continued confusion of Green IT and carbon reduction vs. economic and productivity (Green Gap)
No such thing as an information, data or processing recession, granted budgets are strained
Server, Storage or Systems Resource Analysis (SRA) with event correlation
SRA tools that provide and enable automation along with situational awareness

The green gap of confusion will continue with carbon or environment centric stories and messages continue to second back stage while people realize the other dimension of green being productivity.

As previously mentioned, virtualization of servers and storage continues to be popular with an expanding focus from just consolidation to one around agility, flexibility and enabling production, high performance or for other systems that do not lend themselves to consolidation to be virtualized.

6GB SAS interfaces as well as more SAS disk drives continue to gain popularity. I have said in the past there was a long shot that 8GFC disk drives might appear. We might very well see those in higher end systems while SAS drives continue to pick up the high performance spinning disk role in mid range systems.

Granted some types of disk drives will give way over time to others, for example high performance 3.5” 15.5K Fibre Channel disks will give way to 2.5” 15.5K SAS boosting densities, energy efficiency while maintaining performance. SSD will help to offload hot spots as they have in the past enabling disks to be more effectively used in their applicable roles or tiers with a net result of enhanced optimization, productivity and economics all of which have environmental benefits (e.g. the other Green IT closing the Green Gap).

What I dont see occurring, or at least in 2010

An information or data recession requiring less server, storage, I/O networking or software resources
OSD (object based disk storage without a gateway) at least in the context of T10
Mainframes, magnetic tape, disk drives, PCs, or Windows going away (at least physically)
Cisco cracking top 3, no wait, top 5, no make that top 10 server vendor ranking
More respect for growing and diverse SOHO market space
iSCSI taking over for all I/O connectivity, however I do see iSCSI expand its footprint
FCoE and flash based SSD reaching tipping point in terms of actual customer deployments
Large increases in IT Budgets and subsequent wild spending rivaling the dot com era
Backup, security, data loss prevention (DLP), data availability or protection issues going away
Brett Favre and the Minnesota Vikings winning the super bowl

What will be predicted at end of 2010 for 2011 (some of these will be DejaVU)

Many items that were predicted this year, last year, the year before that and so on…
Dedupe moving into primary and online active storage, rekindling of dedupe debates
Demise of cloud in terms of hype and confusion being replaced by federation
Clustered, grid, bulk and other forms of scale out storage grow in adoption
Disk, Tape, RAID, Mainframe, Fibre Channel, PCs, Windows being declared dead (again)
2011 will be the year of Holographic storage and T10 OSD (an annual prediction by some)
FCoE kicks into broad and mainstream deployment adoption reaching tipping point
16Gb (16GFC) Fibre Channel gets more attention stirring FCoE vs. FC vs. iSCSI debates
100GbE gets more attention along with 4G adoption in order to move more data
Demise of iSCSI at the hands of SAS at low end, FCoE at high end and NAS from all angles

Gaining ground in 2010 however not yet in full stride (at least from customer deployment)

On the connectivity front, iSCSI, 6Gb SAS, 8Gb Fibre Channel, FCoE and 100GbE
SSD/flash based storage everywhere, however continued expansion
Dedupe everywhere including primary storage – its still far from its full potential
Public and private clouds along with pNFS as well as scale out or clustered storage
Policy based automated storage tiering and transparent data movement or migration
Microsoft HyperV and Oracle based server virtualization technologies
Open source based technologies along with heterogeneous encryption
Virtualization life beyond consolidation addressing agility, flexibility and ease of management
Desktop virtualization using Citrix, Microsoft and VMware along with Microsoft Windows 7

Buzzword bingo hot topics and themes (in no particular order) include:

2009 and previous year carry over items including cloud, iSCSI, HyperV, Dedupe, open source
Federation takes over some of the work of cloud, virtualization, clusters and grids
E2E, End to End management preferably across different technologies
SAS, Serial Attached SCSI for server to storage systems and as disk to storage interface
SRA, E23, Event correlation and other situational awareness related IRM tools
Virtualization, Life beyond consolidation enabling agility, flexibility for desktop, server and storage
Green IT, Transitions from carbon focus to economic with efficiency enabling productivity
FCoE, Continues to evolve and mature with more deployments however still not at tipping point
SSD, Flash based mediums continue to evolve however tipping point is still over the horizon
IOV, I/O Virtualization for both virtual and non virtual servers
Other new or recycled buzzword bingo candidates include PCoIP, 4G,

RAID will again be pronounced as being dead no longer relevant yet being found in more diverse deployments from consumer to the enterprise. In other words, RAID may be boring and thus no longer relevant to talk about, yet it is being used everywhere and enhanced in evolutionary ways, perhaps for some even revolutionary.

Tape remains being declared dead (e.g. on the Zombie technology list) yet being enhanced, purchased and utilized at higher rates with more data stored than in past history. Instead of being killed off by the disk drive, tape is being kept around for both traditional uses as well as taking on new roles where it is best suited such as long term or bulk off-line storage of data in ultra dense and energy efficient not to mention economical manners.

What I am seeing and hearing is that customers using tape are able to reduce the number of drives or transports, yet due to leveraging disk buffers or caches including from VTL and dedupe devices, they are able to operate their devices at higher utilization, thus requiring fewer devices with more data stored on media than in the past.

Likewise, even though I have been a fan of SSD for about 20 years and am bullish on its continued adoption, I do not see SSD killing off the spinning disk drive anytime soon. Disk drives are helping tape take on this new role by being a buffer or cache in the form of VTLs, disk based backup and bulk storage enhanced with compression, dedupe, thin provision and replication among other functionality.

There you have it, my predictions, observations and perspectives for 2010 and 2011. It is a broad and diverse list however I also get asked about and see a lot of different technologies, techniques and trends tied to IT resources (servers, storage, I/O and networks, hardware, software and services).

Lets see how they play out.

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

September 12, 2009March 7, 2022

Storage Efficiency and Optimization – The Other Green

For those of you in the New York City area, I will be presenting live in person at Storage Decisions September 23, 2009 conference The Other Green, Storage Efficiency and Optimization.

Throw out the "green“: buzzword, and you’re still left with the task of saving or maximizing use of space, power, and cooling while stretching available IT dollars to support growth and business sustainability. For some environments the solution may be consolation while others need to maintain quality of service response time, performance and availability necessitating faster, energy efficient technologies to achieve optimization objectives.

To accomplish these and other related issues, you can turn to the cloud, virtualization, intelligent power management, data footprint reduction and data management not to mention various types of tiered storage and performance optimization techniques. The session will look at various techniques and strategies to optimize either on-line active or primary as well as near-line or secondary storage environment during tough economic times, as well as to position for future growth, after all, there is no such thing as a data recession!

Topics, technologies and techniques that will be discussed include among others:

Energy efficiency (strategic) vs. energy avoidance (tactical), whats different between them
Optimization and the need for speed vs. the need for capacity, finding the right balance
Metrics & measurements for management insight, what the industry is doing (or not doing)
Tiered storage and tiered access including SSD, FC, SAS, tape, clouds and more
Data footprint reduction (archive, compress, dedupe) and thin provision among others
Best practices, financial incentives and what you can do today

This is a free event for IT professionals, however space I hear is limited, learn more and register here.

For those interested in broader IT data center and infrastructure optimization, check out the on-going seminar series The Infrastructure Optimization and Planning Best Practices (V2.009) – Doing more with less without sacrificing storage, system or network capabilities Seminar series continues September 22, 2009 with a stop in Chicago. This is also a free Seminar, register and learn more here or here.

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

July 18, 2009November 26, 2023

Summer Weddings: EMC+Datadomain and HP+IBRIX

Storage I/O trends

Are you friend or family of the bride or groom?

Here’s comes the bride! (Audio)

That’s a question me and Mrs. Schulz were asked recently when we attended a wedding.

Summer months particularly June and August are known as wedding months (Hmmm, more merger & acquisition activity to come?). Summer is a nice time of the year for marriages at least in the U.S. and how ironic that we have already seen two well publicized IT data storage industry unions in the past couple of weeks, not to mention other smaller less publicized ones.

In one case, the California based bride (Datadomain-DDUP) had two courtiers (Massachusetts based EMC and California based NetApp, plus rumors of others). Fortunately one of those had a prenuptial that earned them a cool $57 million for their efforts (NetApp-NTAP) when EMC won the bride. Read more including some of my comments and perspectives among others about EMC, NTAP and DDUP here and here.

Yesterday, on a mid-July Friday, when things are normally quiet, in true wedding industry forum, news was released (here and here) that California based HP announced that it had bought Massachusetts based data and storage management software vendor IBRIX.

That’s a lot of activity involving California and Massachusetts in the past couple of weeks, not to mention the tornado sightings in the vicinity of EMCs Hopington Massachusetts headquarters coincidently around the same time the marriage to DDUP was formerly announced! What’s’ next, Aerosmith is out on tour, perhaps the Del Fuegos or Boston will perform at one of these wedding parties?

Within the data storage industry, publicly traded Datadomain (DDUP) is fairly well known to many for their role in helping to popularize the data footprint impact reduction technique refereed to as de-duplication (e.g. normalization, commonality factoring, intelligent compression, etc.). Adding to the awareness of DDUP was the recent highly public courtship with EMC eventually out-bidding NTAP with a dowry of about $2.1B USD. That type of press coverage and monetary amounts might normally be expected for the likes of a Madonna, Brittney Spears, Michael Jackson-RIP, Paris Hilton, Elizabeth Taylor or other celebrity unions covered by paparazzi with a similar number of attorneys involved.

On the other hand, IBRIX while known to some, is a lessor known entity compared to DDUP having taken a lower profile than even some of their close competitors. However for those who have been following and covering the clustered storage market (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here ), IBRIX is a well known entity.

IBRIX also has had ties to EMC having been involved in a pre-mari age affair with an reseller arrangement along with being "rumored" ;) to have been involved with ATMOS cloud or policy based storage solution formerly known as "Hulk". IBRIX has also quietly been involved with others like Dell as well as HP in similar to EMC reseller arrangements. Where IBRIX has been positioned is to address high performance, scale out parallel or concurrent clustered file system needs, both big and small I/O, sequential and random data storage and access. For example, in the media/entertainment and other industries along with enabling large Internet providers a bulk (low cost, high capacity) scale-out NAS (NFS & CIFS) option.

One of the reasons that IBRIX has been involved with the likes of EMC, Dell and HP among others is that unlike other vendors such as BlueArc, the once high-flying Isilon, NetApp, Onstor or Panasas, not to mention EMC Cellera NAS , is that those solutions are all bundled with proprietary hardware while IBRIX is software based. Where IBRIX Fusion fits is to enable NAS storage solutions using industry standard hardware (servers and storage) that are capable of being configured for both high performance compute (HPC) along with for low-cost general purpose bulk storage to support Web 2.0, social networking, home directories or on-line archives.

Consequently, and HP or Dell who just happen to sell servers, have had the ability of meeting large scale out and scale up NAS file serving applications by re-selling IBRIX installed on their servers or blade servers with either their own entry to mid-range lower cost, high performance and high capacity storage along with that of 3rd party vendors.

Ironically one of IBRIX’s competitors in the software NAS solution market was and remains PolyServe, software that HP acquired a couple of years ago to create their own scale out NAS solution (e.g. EFS). Other software based solutions include among others Lustre (Sun), CXFS (SGI), EMC ATMOS (I’m sure some will argue this is not scale out or NAS, will leave it at that for now) ;) not to mention those from IBM, Microsoft, Quantum (also re-sold by HP) or Symantec.

What does HP get with IBRIX?

Simple, the ability to own the IP (intellectual proprietary) that one of their competitors had been "rumored" to have been working with at one point, IP that their competitors had been reselling like themselves.

Thus HP gets more software IP that can and has been sold along with their hardware such as the Proliant servers and blade servers giving their customers choice, similar to what HP and other vendors do with their open servers. For example, HP had the ExDS9000 extreme storage system built on a blade server with high density, low cost, high capacity HP storage (e.g. HP Modular Disk System 600, HP MSA or even EVA).

This makes for a nice solution for bulk on-line and near-line storage applications where the emphasis is not as much on performance, rather massive scalability for storing on-line documents, archives, videos, images and other unstructured content which is where there is a lot of growth activity. The challenge is that the ExDS9x00 has only been available with the HP PolyServe software which works good for some environments, yet, for others, the clustered file system scale out capabilities of IBRIX were deployed.

With the addition of IBRIX, HP now should be able to provide their customers and prospects the choice of software to meet specific needs while maintaining an HP footprint, that is both hardware, software and services. HP has several different storage software stacks that they now own (e.g. Lefthand for clustered iSCSI, PolyServe for NFS/CIFS NAS, IBRIX for Clustered File system scale out NAS) not to mention those that it OEMS including among others Bycast (Medical Archive System) that is also OEM’d by IBM as their Medical Grid combined with IBM SOFS, Quantum StorNext and Microsoft Windows Storage Server and Sepaton (VTL and Dedupe) to name a few.

Do I think this was a good move by HP?

Yes as it gives them control over IP that they had been reselling as had some of their competitors who left IBRIX to HP to grab up. HP now has the IP which they can package with their hardware similar to how they have been doing, and giving customers choices to align the right hardware and software technology to the task at hand.

Whether it be Bycast for medical archiving, PolyServe or IBRIX for scale out NAS, Lefthand for clustered iSCSI, Sepaton for VTL and dedupe, Microsoft, Quantum StorNext for shared block storage serving or any of the other software packages HP offers with their industry standard servers, the customer has options.

For IBRIX customers and prospects, this move will give them a boost in a confidence that their decisions and investments are safe.

Ironically, vendors like Symantec with their Scaleable File Serving (SFS) clustered NAS solution that is also software based and runs on anyone’s open servers including those from HP gets a potential shot in the arm with HP validating the model and approach for bulk-storage and clustered NAS (Oh Mr. Salem, Mr. Dell is holding on Line 1, Mr. Chambers is on line 2 and Mr. Ellison on line 3 ;) )

Who’s going to be at the alter next? IMHO, I would keep an eye on (and this all just pure speculation) Bycast, Symantec, EMLX (Broadcom was a wake up call), Quantum, Sepaton, STEC, StorMagic, or ACS, maybe even 3PAR among other possibilities (think outside of the lines). I would not rule out a major game changer such as someone buying NetApp or the likes of an HP buying an EMC or Oracle buying a CSC, maybe even a CSCO buying someone like NTAP, how about Oracle buying NTAP and putting some attorneys out of work, not to mention, who will MSFT hook up with? Anything is possible as we have seen and traditional M&A wisdom is out the window.

Have fun at the next wedding you attend, go easy on the cake and wedding punch, especially if you will be doing any dancing (please, no You tube videos of the chicken dance) and be careful throwing rice or other items.

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

January 3, 2009January 23, 2019

Protecting and Storing Personal Digital Documents

Storage I/O trends

Cindy Waxer recently wrote a great article over at Bankrate.com that also appeared on CNBC.Com among other venues titled 5 digital ways to store money documents that includes commentary and industry perspectives by yours truly Greg Schulz.

Why the concern about safely and securing personal digital documents? Digital created or stored data ranges from income tax, social security, mortgage and fiance, on-line and electronic bill payments, credit cards as well as banking and retirement information that is being stored on personal computers in place of, or in addition to printed hardcopy forms.

Many organizations are encouraging consumers as well as business to shift from printed hardcopy invoices and bills towards using electronic and paperless bill payments. In some instances, organizations offer discounts for switching to electronic bill payment or transactions while others apply service fees for using traditional non electronic payment methods.

So again, why the concern about storing safely and securely your digital receipts, invoices and payment records, after all, since they are on-line, why not simply rely on whom ever you are dealing with to maintain those records? The answers are many ranging from simple availability of having ready access to your documents similar to why you would have copies of important hardcopy documents available in addition to being in a safe place. Another answer is for compliance, long thought to only the realm and area of focus for large financial institutions.

So what is one to do? Simple, protect important electronic documents as you would protect important hardcopy documents by making copies and storing them in safe secure places including off-site archives in a different location.

Some general tips, technologies and techniques for safely storing digital documents include:

Make multiple copies of important data files, documents, photos or other important items

Store copies of important files and data on encrypted removable media including placing copies off-site

Protect encryption keys and passwords in a safe place to unlock protected data when needed

Leverage removable media including disk drives, USB FLASH thumb drives, CD/DVD or magnetic tape

Utilize on-line web or cloud based managed service providers offering internet document storage

Talk to your bank to see what they offer for digital safe deposit boxes also known as cloud or managed storage services

Perform regular backups of computers data files as well as have a disaster recovery kit and CD (or disk drive) stored in a safe place

Of course there is the question of how do you know what is important and what is not important, again, what has value to you either from a financial or legal perspective as well as soft value for example priceless digital or scanned photographs, video and recordings among other sentimental documents.

Check out Cindy’s article here and learn more at 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

November 2, 2008January 23, 2019

Did someone forget to tell Dell that Tape is dead?

Storage I/O trends

Did someone forget to send a memo to Dell that magnetic tape is dead, or, perhaps pre-occupied with other activities? Maybe no body at Dell read the “virtual” or “fictional” memo that tape is dead?

Ok, enough with the cynicism and joking around, tape is not dead (See recent Computerworld and Dell story) and Dell is one of several vendors including IBM who still find time to talk about tape as part of a solution to different customer and environment needs.

Sure, tape might be in or heading into its golden years or what can also be called the plateau of productivity (for customers) or profitability (for some vendors), tape does not get the marketing dollars and media coverage as its been around as a technology for a long time and their are cooler and niftier (techno term) things to discuss including disk based backup and data protection, CDP, VTLs, de-dupe debates, clusters, grids and clouds, FCoE vs. iSCSI, NAS, SAS, virtualization, OSD and pretty much anything except tape.

However, the reality is that many organizations, particular larger organizations still use and rely on tape based data protection for backup/BC/DR as well as archive for compliance and non-compliance data retention or data preservation activities, in some cases complimenting and co-existing with disk based solutions.

Disk to disk (D2D) based backups and data protection certainly continue to gain adoption and deployments in both large and small environments, however, the shift to disk based data protection, or, clinging to tape with a death grip does not have to be, nor should it be an all or nothing value proposition, that is, they can and do co-exist for different uses and purposes leveraging the various economics and benefits of the technologies to address various tasks and requirements.

New and emerging technologies certainly need to be discussed, dissected, developed and deployed as they are the future for maintaining and sustaining business growth via IT service delivery in economical and reliable fashion, that is, apply what technologies makes economic and business sense at a given point in time to minimize risk while maximizing useful benefits to your business.

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

August 10, 2008January 24, 2023

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