Tag: Cloud

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Green Storage is Alive and Well: ENERGY STAR Enterprise Storage Stakeholder Meeting Details

While Green hype and green washing may be on the endangered species list if not already extinct, there are many things taking place to shift the focus from talking about being green to enabling and leveraging efficiency and optimization to boost productivity and enable business sustainability.

The industry has seen and is seeing the shift from the initial green hype cycle of a few years ago to the more recent trough of disillusionment (or here) typically found with a post technology or trend hangover, to the current re-emergence, and growing awareness of the many different faces and facets of being green.

Granted there has been some recent activity by the U.S. government to add new climate control legislation (e.g. HR2454 – Waxman/Markey) to build on previous clean air acts of the 1990s as well as those dating back to the 1970s and earlier.

While the green gap (or here) still exists with confusion by IT organizations that Green is only Green if and only if it is about reducing Carbon footprints as opposed to the realization that there are many different faces or facets of being Green and efficient. For example, there is also a growing awareness that addressing power, cooling, floor-space or footprint to enable sustained business growth as well as enabling next generation virtual, cloud as well as traditional forms of IT service ennablement has both economic and business benefits. That is, determining energy usage, shifting from energy avoidance to expanding and supporting energy efficiency initiatives along with boosting productivity, doing more with what you have, fitting into and growing within current or future constraints on available power, cooling, footprint/floorpsace, budget or manpower constraints while improving on service delivery to remain competitive. (Learn more in "The Green and Virtual Data Center" (CRC) )
The Green and Virtual Data Center Book

Regardless of if you are a eco-tech warrior or not, learning about and then closing the Green gap and how shifting a focus towards efficiency has both business economic and environmental benefits and helps to break down some of the perceptions about what Green is or is not.

One such activity is the U.S. EPA Energy Star program which is about as much energy avoidance as it is about energy efficiency You might be familiar with Energy Star logos on various consumer products around your home or office as well as for laptops, notebooks, desktop and workstations. Recently EPA released a new standard specification for Energy Star for Servers and is now currently working on one for enterprise storage. As part of the initiative, stakeholders or those with an interest in data storage are invited to participate in upcoming EPA working sessions to provide feedback and input on what is important to you.

US EPA Energy Star wants and needs you!US EPA Energy Star Logo

Here’s the message received from the EPA via their mailing list this past week (in italics below):

Dear Enterprise Storage Stakeholder or Other Interested Party:

Provided below are additional details regarding the ENERGY STAR® Enterprise Storage Stakeholder Meeting scheduled for Monday, July 20, 2009 in San Jose, CA.  The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) plans to use this opportunity to review feedback on the ENERGY STAR Specification Framework document and discuss initial plans for a Draft 1 specification. A conference call line will be provided to stakeholders who are unable to participate in person.

Date: Monday, July 20, 2009
Time: 11:00 AM to 4:00 PM Pacific Time (lunch will be provided)
Location: The Sainte Claire Hotel, 302 South Market St., San Jose, CA 95113, 408.295.2000, www.thesainteclaire.com
Conference Call Phone: Provided with meeting registration

EPA would like to thank the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) for providing lunch, refreshments, and logistical support for the ENERGY STAR stakeholder meeting.

For the convenience of meeting attendees, this event is being held in conjunction with the SNIA Technical Symposium being held July 20-23, 2009.

For more information on this event visit: ;

The Sainte Claire Hotel is offering a special room rate of $149/night for participants in the ENERGY STAR Stakeholder Meeting.  Rooms can be booked by following the link to the SNIA Technical Symposium Web site.

Please note: Whether you plan to attend in person or via conference call, you must RSVP to storage@energystar.gov no later than Monday, July 13, 2009. Conference call information and a copy of presentation materials will be distributed to all registered attendees in advance of the meeting.

As a reminder, stakeholders are encouraged to submit feedback on the ENERGY STAR Enterprise Storage Specification Framework to storage@energystar.gov no later than this Friday, July 3, 2009.

The latest program documentation is available for download at www.energystar.gov/newspecs.

If you have any questions please contact Steve Pantano, ICF International, at spantano@icfi.com or Andrew Fanara, US EPA, at fanara.andrew@epa.gov.

Thank you for your continued support of ENERGY STAR!

Learn more at www.energystar.gov

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

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Catch of the day or post of the day!

Ok, I know, its been a couple of weeks since my last post. Sure I have been tweeting now and then, attending several briefings with new emerging as well as existing vendors for up-coming announcements, not to mention getting some other content out from webcasts, to podcasts, or videos, interviews, articles, tips and presentations at various events, pertaining to Green IT, virtualization, cloud storage and computing, backup, data protection, performance, capacity planning among other topics.

Anyway, for now a quick post as I have many others that I have been wanting to do and will be doing soon, however wanted to get a few things out sooner vs. later, and after all, all work and no play makes for a dull day right?

Well, last week after spending a couple of days in Chicago at Storage Decisions where I presented a couple of sessions and recorded several videos, I had a chance to get out and do some fishing and catching. Fishing is always great, however catching (and release) is even more fun, especially when you can catch some, toss some, and keep some for dinner which is what occurred last week when my friend Rob and me ventured out for a couple of hours and found where the fish were (see picture) on the St. Croix river.

Catch of the Day

Rob on left (Bruins warm up jacket for Bass fishing), Greg on the right (Mustang PFD Jacket)

Catch of the day line-up
From right to left, bottle bass (caught at the dock ;) ), stripped bass, northern pike (swamp shark), more stripped bass, and another bottle bass (also caught at the dock).

Ok, nuff fish talk for now, back to work, get a few things done, and then maybe this weekend, get another blog post done, maybe some fishing, and enjoying the summer weather before heading off to Toronto on Monday for Storage Decisions on Tuesday, then a couple of webcasts and web radio events on Wednesday among other activities.

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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Storage Decisions Spring 2009 Sessions Update

StorageDecisions Logo

The conference lineup and details for the Spring 2009 Storage Decisions event (June 1st and 2nd) in Chicago is coming together including two talks/presentations that I will be doing. One will be in Track 2 (Disaster Recovery) titled "Server Virtualization, Business Continuance and Disaster Recovery" and the other in Track 6 (Management/Executive) titled "The Other Green — Storage Efficiency and Optimization" with both sessions leveraging themes and topics from my new book "The Green and Virtual Data Center" (CRC).

Track 2: Disaster Recovery
Server Virtualization, Business Continuance and Disaster Recovery
Presented by Greg Schulz, Founder and Senior Analyst, StorageIO
Server virtualization has the potential to bring sophisticated business continuance (BC) and disaster recovery (DR) techniques to organizations that previously didn’t have the means to adopt them. Likewise, virtualized as well as cloud environments need to be included in a BC/DR plan to enable application and data availability. Learn tips and tricks on building an accessible BC/DR strategy and plan using server virtualization and the storage products that enable efficient, flexible green and virtual data centers.

Topics include:
* Cross technology domain data protection management
* Tiered data protection to stretch your IT budget dollar
* What’s needed to enable BC/DR for virtualized environments
* How virtualization can enable BC/DR for non-virtualized environments
* General HA, BC/DR and data protection tips for virtual environments

Track 6: Management/Executive
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 include:
* Energy efficiency (strategic) vs. energy avoidance (tactical)
* Optimization and the need for speed vs. the need for capacity
* Metrics and measurements for management insight
* Tiered storage and tiered access including SSD, FC, SAS and clouds
* Data footprint reduction (archive, compress, dedupe) and thin provision
* Best practices, financial incentives and what you can do today

See you in Chicago in June if not before then. Learn more about other upcoming events and activities on the StorageIO events page.

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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March and Mileage Mania Wrap-up

Today’s flight to Santa Ana (SNA) Orange County California for an 18 hour visit marks my 3rd trip to the left coast in the past four weeks that started out with a trip to Los Angeles. The purpose of today’s trip is to deliver a talk around Business Continuance (BC) and Disaster recovery (DR) topics for virtual server and storage environments along with related data transformation topics themes, part of a series of on-going events.

Planned flight path from MSP to SNA, note upper midwest snow storms. Thanks to Northwest Airlines, now part of Delta!
Planned flight path from MSP to SNA courtesy of Northwest Airlines, now part of Delta

This is a short trip to southern California in that I have to be back in Minneapolis for a Wednesday afternoon meeting followed by keynoting at an IT Infrastructure Optimization Seminar downtown Minneapolis Thursday morning. Right after Thursday morning session, its off to the other coast for some Friday morning and early afternoon sessions in the Boston area, the results of which I hope to be able to share with you in a not so distant future posting.

Where has March gone? Its been a busy and fun month out on the road with in-person seminars, vendor and user group events in Minneapolis, Los Angles, Las Vegas, Milwaukee, Atlanta, St. Louis, Birmingham, Minneapolis for CMG user group, Cincinnati and Orange County not to mention some other meetings and consulting engagements elsewhere including participating in a couple of webcast and virtual conference/seminars while on the road. Coverage and discussion around my new book "The Green and Virtual Data Center" (CRC) continues expand, read here to see what’s being said.

What has made the month fun in addition to traveling around the country is the interaction with the hundreds of IT professionals from organizations of all size hearing what they are encountering, what their challenges are, what they are thinking, and in general what’s on their mind.

Some of the common themes include:

  • There’s no such thing as a data recession, however the result is doing more with less, or, with what you have
  • Confusion abounds around green hype including carbon footprints vs. core IT and business issues
  • There is life beyond consolidation for server and storage virtualization to enable business agility
  • Security and encryption remain popular topic as does heterogeneous and affordable key management
  • End to end IT resource management for virtual environments is needed that is scalable and affordable
  • Performance and quality of service can not be sacrificed in the quest to drive up storage utilization
  • Clouds, SSD (FLASH), Dedupe, FCoE and Thin Provisioning among others are on the watch list
  • Tape continues to be used complimenting disks in tiered storage environments along with VTLs
  • Dedupe continues to be deployed and we are just seeing the very tip of the ice-berg of opportunity
  • Software licensing cost savings or reallocation should be a next step focus for virtual environments

    • Now, for a bit of irony and humor, overheard was a server sales person talking to a storage sales person comparing notes on how they are missing their forecasts as their customers are buying fewer servers and storage now that they are consolidating with virtualization, or using disk dedupe to eliminate disk drives. Doh!!!

    Now if those sales people can get their marketing folks to get them the play book for virtualization for business agility, improving performance and enabling business growth in an optimized, transformed environment, they might be able to talk a different story with their customers for new opportunities…

    What’s on deck for April? More of the same, however also watch and listen for some additional web based content including interviews quotes and perspectives on industry happenings, articles, tips and columns, reports, blogs, videos, podcasts, webcasts and twitter activity as well as appearances at events in Boston, Chicago, New Jersey and Providence among other venues.

    To all of those who came out to the various events in March, thank you very much and look forward to future follow-up conversations as well as seeing you at some of the upcoming future events.

    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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    On The Road Again: An Update

    A while back, I posted about a busy upcoming spring schedule of activity and events, and then a few weeks ago, posted an update, so this can be considered the latest "On The Road Again" update. While the economy continues to be in rough condition and job reductions or layoffs continuing, or, reduction in hours or employees being asked to take time off without pay or to take sabbaticals, not to mention the race to get the economic stimulus bill passed, for many people, business and life goes on.

    Airport parking lots have plenty of cars in them, airplanes while not always full, are not empty (granted there has been some fleet optimization aka aligning capacity to best suited tier of aircraft and other consolidation or capacity improvements). Many organizations cutting back on travel and entertainment (T&E) spending, either to watch the top and bottom line, avoid being perceived or seen on the news as having employees going on junkets when they may in fact being going to conferences, seminars, conventions or other educational and related events to boost skills and seek out ways to improve business productivity.

    One of the reason that I have a busy travel schedule in addition to my normal analyst and consulting activities is that many events and seminars are being scheduled close to, or in the cities where IT professionals are located who might otherwise have T&E restrictions or other constraints from traveling to industry events, some of which are or will be impacted by recent economic and business conditions.

    Last week I was invited to attend and speak at the FujiFilm Executive Seminar, no private jets were used or seen, travel was via scheduled air carriers (coach air-fare). FujiFilm has a nice program for those interested in or involved with tape whether for disk to tape backup, disk to disk to tape, long term archive, bulk storage and other scenarios involving the continued use and changing roles of tape as a green data storage medium for in-active or off-line data. Check out FujiFilm TapePower Center portal.

    This past week I was in the big "D", that’s Dallas Texas to do another TechTarget Dinner event around the theme of BC/DR, Virtualization and IT optimization. The session was well attended by a diverse audience of IT professionals from around the DFW metroplex. Common themes included discussions about business and economic activity as well as the need to keep business and IT running even when budgets are being stretched further and further. Technology conversations included server and storage virtualization, tiered storage including SSD, fast FC and SAS disk drives, lower performance high capacity "fat" disk drives as well as tape not to mention tiered data protection, tiered servers and other related items.

    The Green Gap continues to manifest itself in that when asked, most people do not have Green IT initiatives, however, when asked they do have power, cooling, floor-space, environmental (PCFE) or business economic sustainability concerns, aka, the rest of the Green story.

    While some attendees have started to use some new technologies including dedupe technology, most I find are still using a combination of disk and tape with some considering dedupe for the future for certain applications. Other technologies and trends being watched, however also ones with concerns as to their stability and viability for enterprise use include FLASH based SSD, Cloud computing and thin provisioning among others. Common themes I hear from IT professionals are that these are technologies and tools to keep an eye on, or, use on a selective basis and are essentially tiered resources to have in a tool box of technologies to apply to different tasks to meet various service requirements. Hopefully the Cowboys can put a fraction of the amount of energy and interest into and improving their environment that the Dallas area IT folks are applying to their environments, especially given the strained IT budgets vs. the budget that the Cowboys have to work with for their player personal.

    I always find it interesting when talking to groups of IT professionals which tend to be enterprise, SME and SMB hearing what they are doing and looking at or considering which often is in stark contrast to some of the survey results on technology adoption trends one commonly reads or hears about. Hummm, nuff said, what say you?

    Hope to see you at one of the many upcoming events perhaps coming to a venue near you.

    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

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    Recent StorageIO Media Coverage and Comments

    BizwireeChannel LineEnterprise Storage ForumMSNBC
    ProcessorSearchStorageFedTechComputer Weekly

    Realizing that some prefer blogs to webs to twitters to other venues, here are some recent links among others to media coverage and comments by me on a different topics that are among others found at www.storageio.com/news.html.

  • Business Wire: Comments on The Green and Virtual Data Center Book – Jan 09
  • Search Storage: Comments on Open Source Storage – Jan 09
  • Search Storage: Comments on Clustered Storage – Jan 09
  • Storage Magazine: Comments on DR/BC Sites – Jan 09
  • SearchStorage: Comments on Fujitsu Eternus Storage – Jan 09
  • Enterprise Storage Forum: Comments on Quest buying Monosphere – Jan 09
  • Processor: Comments on Reducing Storage Costs – Jan 09
  • Enterprise Storage Forum: Comments on Apple Mac storage enhancements – Jan 09
  • Enterprise Storage Forum: Comments on EMC buying Sourcelabs & Opensource – Jan 09
  • SearchStorage Oz/NZ: Comments on Hot Technologies and Hype – Jan 09
  • CNBC: Comments on Storing Digital Documents – Dec 08
  • Enterprise Storage Forum: Comments on pNFS and Data Storage Trends – Dec 08
  • Enterprise Storage Forum: Comments on Symantec shifting hardware spending – Dec 08
  • Search Storage: Comments on DAS being more common than perceived – Dec 08
  • IT World Canada: Comments on Sun seeing lack of Storage Industry Innovation – Dec 08
  • Search Storage: Comments on Data Movement and Migration – Dec 08
  • eChannel Line: Comments on EMC and Dell renewing their vows – Dec 08
  • eChannel Line: Comments on Adaptec and SAS/SATA adapters – Dec 08
  • eChannel Line: Comments on Dell data de-duplication strategy – Nov 08
  • Server Watch: Comments on Server Virtualization Brings Fresh Life to DAS – Nov 08
  • Tech News World: Comments on Samsung Jumbo SSD drives – Nov 08
  • Enterprise Planet: Comments on EMC Cloud Storage (ATMOS) – Nov 08
  • eChannel Line: Comments on HPs new USVP virtualization platform – Nov 08
  • Search Storage: Comments on EMCs cloud and policy based storage – Nov 08
  • Tech News World: Comments on SANdisk SSD – Nov 08
  • Enterprise Storage Forum: Comments on HP adding storage virtualizaiton – Nov 08
  • Mainframe Executive: Comments on Green and Efficient Storage – Nov 08
  • Internet News: Comments – Symantec Trims Enterprise Vault Nov 08
  • Enterprise Storage Forum: Comments on DAS remaining relevant – Nov 08
  • SearchSMBStorage: Comments – NAS attraction for SMBs Nov 08

    • See more at www.storageio.com/news.html

    Cheers gs

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    Server Storage I/O Network Virtualization Whats Next?

    Server Storage I/O Network Virtualization Whats Next?
    Server Storage I/O Network Virtualization Whats Next?
    Updated 9/28/18

    There are many faces and thus functionalities of virtualization beyond the one most commonly discussed which is consolidation or aggregation. Other common forms of virtualization include emulation (which is part of enabling consolidation) which can be in the form of a virtual tape library for storage to bridge new disk technology to old software technology, processes, procedures and skill sets. Other forms of virtualization functionality for life beyond consolidation include abstraction for transparent movement of applications or operating systems on servers, or data on storage to support planned and un-planned maintenance, upgrades, BC/DR and other activities.

    So the gist is that there are many forms of virtualization technologies and techniques for servers, storage and even I/O networks to address different issues including life beyond consolidation. However the next wave of consolidation could and should be that of reducing the number of logical images, or, the impact of the multiple operating systems and application images, along with their associated management costs.

    This may be easier said than done, however, for those looking to cut costs even further than from what can be realized by reducing physical footprints (e.g. going from 10 to 1 or from 250 to 25 physical servers), there could be upside however it will come at a cost. The cost is like that of reducing data and storage footprint impacts with such as data management and archiving.

    Savings can be realized by archiving and deleting data via data management however that is easier said than done given the cost in terms of people time and ability to decide what to archive, even for non-compliance data along with associated business rules and policies to be defined (for automation) along with hardware, software and services (managed services, consulting and/or cloud and SaaS).

    Where To Learn More

    View additional NAS, NVMe, SSD, NVM, SCM, Data Infrastructure and HDD related topics via the following links.

    Additional learning experiences along with common questions (and answers), as well as tips can be found in Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials book.

    Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials Book SDDC

    What This All Means

    Ok, nuff said, for now.

    Gs

    Greg Schulz – Microsoft MVP Cloud and Data Center Management, VMware vExpert 2010-2018. Author of Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press), as well as Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press), Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier) and twitter @storageio. Courteous comments are welcome for consideration. First published on https://storageioblog.com any reproduction in whole, in part, with changes to content, without source attribution under title or without permission is forbidden.

    All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO. All Rights Reserved. StorageIO is a registered Trade Mark (TM) of Server StorageIO.

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    Remember The Alamo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Now lets put travel into perspective here a bit.

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

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

    Cheers gs

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

    twitter @storageio

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

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    Time In and Around Clouds

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Ok, nuff said.

    Cheers gs

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

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

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    CMG, Enabling “The Green and Virtual Data Center”

    Storage I/O trends

    Last week I was invited to by Tom Becchetti and the Minneapolis CMG folks to keynote at their session hosted at the Brocade facity in Minneapolis along with other speakers from Brocade, IBM, Teamquest and Sun.

    The theme of my talk was “The Green and Virtual Data Center and The Importance of Metrics” which can be downloaded here.

    I have been a member of CMG for many years as a former performance and capacity planning analyst when I worked in IT organizations and having presented at many CMG events around the world. While CMG has been around for many decades and has seen its share of ups and downs. With a current focus on boosting use, maximizing resource usage, improving service delivery and performance while using less energy in smaller footprints, now is the perfect opportunity for CMG to re-invent itself and show relevance as the organization that knows how to measure, watch, model and manage resource usage and service delivery effectiveness across different technology domains including servers, storage, networks, applications, operating systems and facilities. There is a golden opportunity for CMG members to step up and leverage their skills across different technology domains working with others to establish metrics, models and baselines.

    In my new book, “The Green and Virtual Data Center” (Auerbach) I include a chapter on metrics and measurement as well as many other topics and themes that tie into the notion of effective and efficient data centers need to carry out Infrastructure Resource Management (IRM) which is also a chapter in the book, that includes performance and capacity planning across technology domains.

    Watch for more on this topic.

    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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    Continuing Education and Refresher Time (RAID and LUNs)

    Storage I/O trends

    TechTarget is currently running a refresher and primer series on RAID technology at www.searchstorage.com combining several tips pertaining to RAID basics, what RAID level to use for different applications and more. RAID is around 20 years old depending on how you view it and define it and some are now decrying RAID as being dead which for some implementations may be the case, however the underlying premises still hold, its just time for some new implementation and evolutionary changes. In the meantime, back at planet reality and today-land, check it out for a primer, refresh, or to see if RAID is even still relevant.

    Another Primer and refresh series that is appearing on TechTarget is about LUNs. For those of you new to data storage, or, for those who need a refresh, these are a good source of primer or back ground material. Check out the LUN series 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

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