This past week I had the honor of delivering a keynote presentation in San Diego at the California Center for Sustainable Energy (CCSE) as part of their continuing education and community outreach and education, workshop and seminar series. The theme of the well attended event was Next Generation Data Center Solutions of which my talk centered around leveraging Green and Virtual Data Centers for enabling efficiencey and effectiveness. In addition to my keynote, included a panel discussion that I moderated with representatives of the events sponsor Compucom, along with their special guests APC, HP, Intel and VMware. The CCSE has a focus around Climate Change, Energy Efficienecey, Green Buildings, Renewable Energy, Transportation, Home and Business. Their services and focus includes awareness and outreach, education programs, library and tools, consultant and associated services. Speaking of their library, there is even a signed copy of my book The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC) now at the CCSE library that can be checked out along with their other resources.
The CCSE staff and facilities were fantastic with hosts Mike Bigelow (an energy engineer) and Marlene King (program manager) orchestrating a great event.
If you are in the San Diego area, check out the CCSE located at 8690 Balboa Ave., Suite 100. They have a great library, cool demonstrations and tools that you can check out to assist with optimization IT data centers from an energy efficicinecy standpoint. Learn more about the CCSE here.
Following are some relevant links to the keynote along with panel discussion from the CCSE event:
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:
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).
All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved
I just received an email in my inbox from Voltaire along with a pile of other advertisements, advisories, alerts and announcements from other folks.
What caught my eye on the email was that it is announcing a new survey results that you can read here as well as below.
The question that this survey announcements prompts for me and hence why I am posting it here is how dominant will InfiniBand be on a go forward basis, the answer I think is it depends…
It depends on the target market or audience, what their applications and technology preferences are along with other service requirements.
I think that there is and will remain a place for Infiniband, the question is where and for what types of environments as well as why have both InfiniBand and Ethernet including Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) in support of unified or converged I/O and data networking.
So here is the note that I received from Voltaire:
Hello,
A new survey by Voltaire (NASDAQ: VOLT) reveals that IT executives plan to use InfiniBand and Ethernet technologies together as they refresh or build new data centers. They’re choosing a converged network strategy to improve fabric performance which in turn furthers their infrastructure consolidation and efficiency objectives.
The full press release is below. Please contact me if you would like to speak with a Voltaire executive for further commentary.
Regards, Christy
____________________________________________________________ Christy Lynch| 978.439.5407(o) |617.794.1362(m) Director, Corporate Communications Voltaire – The Leader in Scale-Out Data Center Fabrics christyl@voltaire.com |www.voltaire.com Follow us on Twitter: www.twitter.com/voltaireltd
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
IT Survey Finds Executives Planning Converged Network Strategy: Using Both InfiniBand and Ethernet
Fabric Performance Key to Making Data Centers Operate More Efficiently
CHELMSFORD, Mass. and ANANA, Israel January 12, 2010 – A new survey by Voltaire (NASDAQ: VOLT) reveals that IT executives plan to use InfiniBand and Ethernet technologies together as they refresh or build new data centers. They’re choosing a converged network strategy to improve fabric performance which in turn furthers their infrastructure consolidation and efficiency objectives.
Voltaire queried more than 120 members of the Global CIO & Executive IT Group, which includes CIOs, senior IT executives, and others in the field that attended the 2009 MIT Sloan CIO Symposium. The survey explored their data center networking needs, their choice of interconnect technologies (fabrics) for the enterprise, and criteria for making technology purchasing decisions.
“Increasingly, InfiniBand and Ethernet share the ability to address key networking requirements of virtualized, scale-out data centers, such as performance, efficiency, and scalability,” noted Asaf Somekh, vice president of marketing, Voltaire. “By adopting a converged network strategy, IT executives can build on their pre-existing investments, and leverage the best of both technologies.”
When asked about their fabric choices, 45 percent of the respondents said they planned to implement both InfiniBand with Ethernet as they made future data center enhancements. Another 54 percent intended to rely on Ethernet alone.
Among additional survey results:
When asked to rank the most important characteristics for their data center fabric, the largest number (31 percent) cited high bandwidth. Twenty-two percent cited low latency, and 17 percent said scalability.
When asked about their top data center networking priorities for the next two years, 34 percent again cited performance. Twenty-seven percent mentioned reducing costs, and 16 percent cited improving service levels.
A majority (nearly 60 percent) favored a fabric/network that is supported or backed by a global server manufacturer.
InfiniBand and Ethernet interconnect technologies are widely used in today’s data centers to speed up and make the most of computing applications, and to enable faster sharing of data among storage and server networks. Voltaire’s server and storage fabric switches leverage both technologies for optimum efficiency. The company provides InfiniBand products used in supercomputers, high-performance computing, and enterprise environments, as well as its Ethernet products to help a broad array of enterprise data centers meet their performance requirements and consolidation plans.
About Voltaire Voltaire (NASDAQ: VOLT) is a leading provider of scale-out computing fabrics for data centers, high performance computing and cloud environments. Voltaire’s family of server and storage fabric switches and advanced management software improve performance of mission-critical applications, increase efficiency and reduce costs through infrastructure consolidation and lower power consumption. Used by more than 30 percent of the Fortune 100 and other premier organizations across many industries, including many of the TOP500 supercomputers, Voltaire products are included in server and blade offerings from Bull, HP, IBM, NEC and Sun. Founded in 1997, Voltaire is headquartered in Ra’anana, Israel and Chelmsford, Massachusetts. More information is available at www.voltaire.com or by calling 1-800-865-8247.
Forward Looking Statements Information provided in this press release may contain statements relating to current expectations, estimates, forecasts and projections about future events that are "forward-looking statements" as defined in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements generally relate to Voltaire’s plans, objectives and expectations for future operations and are based upon management’s current estimates and projections of future results or trends. They also include third-party projections regarding expected industry growth rates. Actual future results may differ materially from those projected as a result of certain risks and uncertainties. These factors include, but are not limited to, those discussed under the heading "Risk Factors" in Voltaire’s annual report on Form 20-F for the year ended December 31, 2008. These forward-looking statements are made only as of the date hereof, and we undertake no obligation to update or revise the forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.
###
All product and company names mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.
End of Voltaire transmission:
I/O, storage and networking interface wars come and go similar to other technology debates of what is the best or that will be supreme.
Some recent debates have been around Fibre Channel vs. iSCSI or iSCSI vs. Fibre Channel (depends on your perspective), SAN vs. NAS, NAS vs. SAS, SAS vs. iSCSI or Fibre Channel, Fibre Channel vs. Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) vs. iSCSI vs. InfiniBand, xWDM vs. SONET or MPLS, IP vs UDP or other IP based services, not to mention the whole LAN, SAN, MAN, WAN POTS and PAN speed games of 1G, 2G, 4G, 8G, 10G, 40G or 100G. Of course there are also the I/O virtualization (IOV) discussions including PCIe Single Root (SR) and Multi Root (MR) for attachment of SAS/SATA, Ethernet, Fibre Channel or other adapters vs. other approaches.
Thus when I routinely get asked about what is the best, my answer usually is a qualified it depends based on what you are doing, trying to accomplish, your environment, preferences among others. In other words, Im not hung up or tied to anyone particular networking transport, protocol, network or interface, rather, the ones that work and are most applicable to the task at hand
Now getting back to Voltaire and InfiniBand which I think has a future for some environments, however I dont see it being the be all end all it was once promoted to be. And outside of the InfiniBand faithful (there are also iSCSI, SAS, Fibre Channel, FCoE, CEE and DCE among other devotees), I suspect that the results would be mixed.
I suspect that the Voltaire survey reflects that as well as if I surveyed an Ethernet dominate environment I can take a pretty good guess at the results, likewise for a Fibre Channel, or FCoE influenced environment. Not to mention the composition of the environment, focus and business or applications being supported. One would also expect a slightly different survey results from the likes of Aprius, Broadcom, Brocade, Cisco, Emulex, Mellanox (they also are involved with InfiniBand), NextIO, Qlogic (they actually do some Infiniband activity as well), Virtensys or Xsigo (actually, they support convergence of Fibre Channel and Ethernet via Infiniband) among others.
Ok, so what is your take?
Whats your preffered network interface for convergence?
For additional reading, here are some related links:
Also check out what others including Scott Lowe have to say about IOV here or, Stuart Miniman about FCoE here, or of Greg Ferro here.
Oh, and for what its worth for those concerned about FTC disclosure, Voltaire is not nor have they been a client of StorageIO, however, I did used to work for a Fibre Channel, iSCSI, IP storage, LAN, SAN, MAN, WAN vendor and wrote a book on the topics :).
StorageIO is regularly quoted and interviewed in various industry and vertical market venues and publications both on-line and in print on a global basis.
The following are some coverage, perspectives and commentary by StorageIO on IT industry trends including servers, storage, I/O networking, hardware, software, services, virtualization, cloud, cluster, grid, SSD, data protection, Green IT and more since the last update.
Realizing that some preferblogs to webs to twitter 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:
SearchSMBStorage: Comments on EMC Iomega v.Clone for PC data syncronization – Jan 2010
Computerworld: Comments on leveraging cloud or online backup – Jan 2010
ChannelProSMB: Comments on NAS vs SAN Storage for SMBs – Dec 2009
ChannelProSMB: Comments on Affordable SMB Storage Solutions – Dec 2009
SearchStorage: Comments on What to buy a geek for the holidays, 2009 edition – Dec 2009
SearchStorage: Comments on EMC VMAX storage and 8GFC enhancements – Dec 2009
SearchStorage: Comments on Data Footprint Reduction – Dec 2009
SearchStorage: Comments on Building a private storage cloud – Dec 2009
SearchStorage: Comments on SSD in storage systems – Dec 2009
SearchStorage: Comments on slow adoption of file virtualization – Dec 2009
IT World: Comments on maximizing data security investments – Nov 2009
SearchCIO: Comments on storage virtualization for your organisation – Nov 2009
Processor: Comments on how to win approval for hardware upgrades – Nov 2009
Processor: Comments on the Future of Servers – Nov 2009
SearchITChannel: Comments on Energy-efficient technology sales depend on pitch – Nov 2009
SearchStorage: Comments on how to get from Fibre Channel to FCoE – Nov 2009
Minneapolis Star Tribune: Comments on Google Wave and Clouds – Nov 2009
SearchStorage: Comments on EMC and Cisco alliance – Nov 2009
SearchStorage: Comments on HP virtualizaiton enhancements – Nov 2009
SearchStorage: Comments on Apple canceling ZFS project – Oct 2009
Processor: Comments on EPA Energy Star for Server and Storage Ratings – Oct 2009
IT World Canada: Cloud computing, dot be scared, look before you leap – Oct 2009
IT World: Comments on stretching your data protection and security dollar – Oct 2009
Enterprise Storage Forum: Comments about Fragmentation and Performance? – Oct 2009
SearchStorage: Comments about data migration – Oct 2009
SearchStorage: Comments about What’s inside internal storage clouds? – Oct 2009
Enterprise Storage Forum: Comments about T-Mobile and Clouds? – Oct 2009
Storage Monkeys: Podcast comments about Sun and Oracle- Sep 2009
Enterprise Storage Forum: Comments on Maxiscale clustered, cloud NAS – Sep 2009
SearchStorage: Comments on Maxiscale clustered NAS for web hosting – Sep 2009
Enterprise Storage Forum: Comments on whos hot in data storage industry – Sep 2009
Drew Rob has another good article over at Processor.com about various tips and strategies on how to gain approval for hardware (or software) purchases with some comments by yours truly.
My tips and advice that are quoted in the story include to link technology resources to business needs impact which may be common sense, however still a time tested effective technique.
Instead of speaking tech talk such as Performance, capacity, availability, IOPS, bandwidth, GHz, frames or packets per second, VMs to PM or dedupe ratio, map them to business speak, that is things that finance, accountants, MBAs or other management personal understand.
For example, how many transactions at a given response time can be supported by a given type of server, storage or networking device.
Or, put a different way, with a given device, how much work can be done and what is the associated monetary or business benefit.
Likewise, if you do not have a capacity plan for servers, storage, I/O and networking along with software and facilities covering performance, availability, capacity and energy demands now is the time to put one in place.
All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved
The other day, HP continued its early holiday shopping by plucking down $2.7B USD and bought 3COM, one of the networking seven dwarfs (e.g. when compared to networking giant Cisco).
Some of the other so called networking dwarfs when compared to Cisco include Brocade, Ciena and Juniper among others.
Why is 3COM a bargain at $2.7B
Sure HP paid a slight multiplier premium on 3COM trailing revenues or a slight small multiplier on their market cap.
Sure HP gets to acquire one of the networking seven dwarfs at a time when Cisco is flexing its muscles to move into the server space.
Sure HP gets to extend their networking groups capabilities including additional offerings for HPs broad SMB and lower-end SOHO and even consumer markets not to mention enterprise ROBO or workgroups.
Sure HP gets to extend their security and Voice over IP (VoIP) via 3COM and their US Robotics brand perhaps to better compete with Cisco at the consumer, prosumer, SOHO or low-end of SMB markets.
Sure HP gets access to H3C as a means of further its reach into China and the growing Asian market, perhaps even getting closer to Huawei as a future possible partner.
Sure HP could have bought Brocade however IMHO that would have cost a few more deceased presidents (aka very large dollar bills) and assumed over a billion dollars in debt, however lets leave the Brocadians and that discussion on the back burner for a different discussion on another day.
Sure HP gets to signal to the world that they are alive, they have a ton of money in their war chest, and last I checked, actually more cash in the 11B range (minus about 2.7B being spent on 3COM) that exceeds the $5B USD cash position of Cisco.
Sure HP could have done and perhaps will still do some smaller networking related deals in couple of hundreds of million dollar type range to beef up product offerings such as a Riverbed or others, or, perhaps wait for some fire sales or price shop on those shopping themselves around.
ROI is the bargin IMHO, not to mention other pieces including H3C!
3COM was and is a bargain for all of the above, plus given the revenues of about 1.3B, HP CEO Mark Hurd stands to reap a better return on cash investment than having it sitting in a bank account earning a few points. Plus, HP still has around 8-9B in cash leaving room for some other opportunistic holiday shopping, who knows, maybe adopt yet another networking or storage or server related dwarf!
Stay tuned, this game is far from being over as there are plenty of days left in the 2009 holiday shopping season!
All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved
Its been a busy year so far and there is still plenty more to do. Taking advantage of a short summer break, I’m getting caught up on some items including putting up a link to some of the recent articles, tips, reports, webcasts, videos and more that I have eluded to in recent posts. Realizing that some preferblogs to webs to tweets to other venues, here are some links to recent articles, tips, videos, podcasts, webcasts, white papers and more that can be found on the StorageIO Tips, tools and White Papers pages.
Recent articles, columns, tips, white papers and reports:
ITworld: The new green data center: From energy avoidance to energy efficiency August 2009
Late last year , I did a post (see here) countering the notion that there is a lack of innovation in IT and specifically around data storage. Recently I did a post about a Funeral for Friend, not to mention yesterdays post about Summer marriages.
For those who are concerned about lack of innovation, or, that consolidation will result in just a few big vendors, here’s some food for thought. Those big vendors in addition to growing via internal organic growth, also grow by buying or merging with other vendors. Those other vendors emerge as startups, some grow, blossom and are bought, some make a decent business on their own, some are looking to be bought, some need to be bought, some will see fire sales, liquidation or simply closing their doors and perhaps re-launching as a new company.
With all the M&A activity currently that has taken place, and I’m sure (speculation only ;) ) that there will be plenty more, here’s a short and far from comprehensive list of some startups or companies you may not have heard of yet. There are additional ones who are still in deep stealth, some on the list are still in stealth, yet talking and letting information trickle out, thus only non-NDA information is being shown here. In other words, you can find out about these via publicly available information and sources.
Something that I have noticed and talked with others in the industry about is that this generation of startups, at least for now are taking a far more low-key approach to their launches than in the past. Gone at least for now are the Dot COM era over the top announcements in some cases before there was even a product or shipping for actual customer production deployment scenario. This crop or corps of startups are taking their time leveraging the current economic situation to further incubate their technologies and go to market strategies, not to mention minimizing the amount of over the top VC funding we have seen in the past. Some of these may not appear to be storage related and that would be correct. This list includes those associated with data infrastructure technolgies from servers, to storage to networking, hardware, software and services among othes as a common theme.
Disclosure Notice: None of these companies mentioned are nor have ever been clients of StorageIO. Why do I mention this, why not!
Balesio – File compression solutions Box.net – Internet/web/cloud storage service with high availability and backup Cirrustore – Backup data protection tools Dataslide – Hard rectangular disk (HRD) Enclarity – Healthcare CRM and analysis tools Enstratus – Amazon cloud computing management tools Exludas – Multi core optimize Firescope – CMDB data solutions Greenbytes – ZFS based storage management solutions Likewise – Open backup software for macs/linux/windows Liquidcomputing – High density servers Maxiscale – Web infrastructure (Stealth) Metalogix – Archiving solutions Neptuny – Capacity Planning Netronome – Network and I/O optimization technology Newboundary – IT policy management and IRM tools Nexenta ZFS – based storage management solutions Pergamumsystems – Archive solutions (Stealth) Pranah – SMB Storage vendor formerly known as Marner Procedo – Archiving and migration solutions Rebit – Backup and data protection solutions Rightscale – Amazon cloud computing management tools Rmsource – Cloud backup solutions RNAnetworks – Virtual memory management solutions Scale Computing – Clustered storage management software ScaleMP – Multi-core virtualization for scale out SiberSystems – Goodsync data protection solutions Sparebackup – Backup data protection solutions StorageFusion – Storage resource analysis Storspeed – NAS/NFS optimization solutions (Stealth) Sugarsync – Backup and data protection solutions Surgient – Cloud computing solutions Synology – SMB storage solutions TwinStrata – BC/DR analysis and assessment tools Vadium – Security and encryption tools Vembu – Backup data protection tools Versant – Object database management solutions Vipre – Security, data loss, data leak prevention VirtenSys – Virtual I/O and I/O virtualization (IOV) Vizrt – Video management software tools WhipTail – Flash SSD solutions Xenos – Archive and data footprint reduction solutions
I’m continually amazed at the number of people in the IT industry from customers to vendors, vars to media and even analysts who associate Green IT with and only with reducing carbon footprints. I guess I should not be surprised given the amount of rhetoric around Green and carbon both in the IT industry as well as in general resulting in a Green Gap.
The reality as I have discussed in the past is that Green IT while addressing carbon footprint topics, is really more about efficiency and optimization for business economic benefits that also help the environment. From a near-term tactical perspective, Green IT is about boosting productivity and enabling business sustainability during tough economic times, doing more with less, or, doing more with what you have. On a strategic basis, Green IT is about continued sustainability while also improving top and bottom line economics and repositioning IT as a competitive advantage resource.
There is a lot of focus on energy avoidance, as it is relatively easy to understand and it is also easy to implement. Turning off the lights, turning off devices when they are not in use, enabling low-power, energy-savings or Energy Star® (now implemented for servers with storage being a new focus) modes are all means to saving or reducing energy consumption, emissions, and energy bills.
Ideal candidates for powering down when not in use or inactive include desktop workstations, PCs, laptops, and associated video monitors and printers. Turning lights off or implementing motion detectors to turn lights off automatically, along with powering off or enabling energy-saving modes on general-purpose and consumer products has a significant benefit. New generations of processors such as the Intel Xeon 5xxx or 7xxx series (formerly known as Nehalem) provide the ability to boost performance when needed, or, go into various energy conservation modes when possible to balance performance, availability and energy needs to applicable service requirements, a form of intelligent power management.
In Figure 1 are shown four basic approaches (in addition to doing nothing) to energy efficiency. One approach is to avoid energy usage, similar to following a rationing model, but this approach will affect the amount of work that can be accomplished. Another approach is to do more work using the same amount of energy, boosting energy efficiency, or the complement—do the same work using less energy.
The energy efficiency gap is the difference between the amount of work accomplished or information stored in a given footprint and the energy consumed. In other words, the bigger the energy efficiency gap, the better, as seen in the fourth scenario, doing more work or storing more information in a smaller footprint using less energy.
Given the shared nature of their use along with various intersystem dependencies, not all data center resources can be powered off completely. Some forms of storage devices can be powered off when they are not in use, such as offline storage devices or mediums for backups and archiving. Technologies such as magnetic tape or removable hard disk drives that do not need power when they are not in use can be used for storing inactive and dormant data.
Avoiding energy use can be part of an approach to address power, cooling, floor space and environmental (PCFE) challenges, particularly for servers, storage, and networks that do not need to be used or accessible at all times. However, not all applications, data or workloads can be consolidated, or, powered down due to performance, availability, capacity, security, compatibility, politics, financial and many other reasons. For those applications that cannot be consolidated, the trick is to support them in a more efficient and effective means.
Simply put, when work needs to be done or information needs to be stored or retrieved or data moved, it should be done so in the most energy-efficient manner aligned to a given level of service which can mean leveraging faster, higher performing resources (servers, storage and networks) to get the job done fast resulting in improved productivity and efficiency.
Tiering is an approach that applies to servers, storage, and networks as well as data protection. For example, tiered servers include large frame or mainframes, rack mount as well as blades with various amounts of memory, I/O or expansion slots and number of processor cores at different speeds. Tiered storage includes different types of mediums and storage system architectures such as those shown in figure 2. Tiered networking or tiered access includes 10Gb and 1Gb Ethernet, 2/4/8 Gb Fibre Channel, Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), iSCSI, NAS and shared SAS among others. Tiered data protection includes various technologies to meet various recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO) such as real-time synchronous mirroring with snapshots, to periodic backup to disk or tape among other approaches, techniques and technologies.
Technology alignment (Figure 2), that is aligning the applicable type of storage or server resource and devices to the task at hand to meet application service requirements is essential to archiving an optimized and efficient IT environment. For example, for very I/O intensive active data as shown in figure 2, leveraging ultra fast tier-0 high-performance SSD (FLASH or RAM) storage, or for high I/O active data, tier-1 fast 15.5K SAS and Fibre Channel storage based systems would be applicable.
For active and on-line data, that’s where energy efficiency in the form of fast disk drives including RAM SSD or FLASH SSD (for reads, writes are another story) and in particular fast 15.5K or 10K FC and SAS energy efficient disks and their associated storage systems come into play. The focus for active data and storage systems should be around more useful work per unit of energy consumed in a given footprint. For example, more IOPS per watt, more transactions per watt, more bandwidth or video streams per watt, more files or emails processed per watt.
Figure 2 Tiered Storage: Balancing Performance, Availability, Capacity and Energy to QoS (Source: “The Green and Virtual Data Center” (CRC)
For low-performance, low activity applications where the focus is around storing as much data as possible with the lowest cost including for disk to disk based backup, slower high capacity SATA based storage systems are the fit (lower right in figure 2). For long-term bulk storage to meet archiving, data retention or other retention needs as well as storing large monthly full backups or long term data preservation, tape remains the ticket for large environments with the best combination of performance, availability capacity and energy efficiency and cost per footprint.
General approaches to boost energy efficiency include:
Do more work using the same or less amount of power and subsequently cooling
Leverage faster processors/controllers that use the same or less power
Apply applicable RAID level to application and data QoS requirements
Consolidate slower storage or servers to a faster, more energy-efficient solution
Use faster disk drives with capacity boost and that draw less power
Upgrade to newer, faster, denser, more energy-efficient technologies
Look beyond capacity utilization; keep response time and availability in mind
Utilize multiple data footprint techniques including archive, compression and de-dupe
Reduce data footprint impact, enabling higher densities of stored on-line data
Find a balance between energy avoidance and energy efficiency, consolidation and business enablement for sustainably, hardware and software, best practices including policy and producers, as well as leveraging available financial rebates and incentives. Addressing green and PCFE issues is a process; there is no one single solution or magic formula.
Figure 3 Wheel of Opportunity – Various Techniques and Technologies for Infrastructure Optimization (Source: “The Green and Virtual Data Center” (CRC)
Instead, leverage a combination of technologies, techniques, and best practices to address various issues and requirements is needed (Figure 3). Some technologies and techniques include among others infrastructure resource management (IRM), data management, archiving (including for non-compliance), and compression (on-line and off-line, primary and secondary) as well as de-dupe for backups, space saving snapshots, and effective use of applicable raid levels.
Green washing and green hype may fade away, however power, cooling, footprint, energy (PCFE) and related issues and initiatives that enable IT infrastructure optimization and business sustainability will not fade away. Addressing IT infrastructure optimization and efficiency is thus essential to IT and business sustainability and growth in an environmentally friendly manner which enables shifting from talking about green to being green and efficient.
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As part of the continuing on the road theme and series, this post is being done while traveling for this weeks adventures and events including stops in Atlanta, St. Louis and wrapping up the week in Minneapolis at the local CMG quarterly meeting event. At both last weeks events in Las Vegas and Milwaukee as well as this weeks events talking with IT professionals from various organizations, a consistent theme is that there is no data or I/O recession, however there is the need to do more with less while enabling business sustainability.
While VMware remains the dominant server virtualization platform, I’m hearing of more organizations using Citrix or other Xensource based technologies along with some Microsoft HyperV adopters in part to leverage lower cost of ownership compared to VMware in instances where not all of the feature functionality of the robust VMware technology is needed. This will be an interesting scenario to keep an eye on in the weeks and months to come to see if there are any shifting patterns on the server virtualization front while trying to stretch IT dollars further to do more.
On the Merger & Acquisition (M&A) scene, coverage of on again, off-again and recently rekindled rumored of IBM buying Sun is rampant from the Wall Street Journal to twitter and most points in between. There have been many storm clouds around Sun the past several years from a business and technology perspective, and perhaps the best thing is for Sun and IBM to combine forces and resources, bridging the gap between old physical worlds and new virtual cloud enabled worlds so to speak. Personally, I like the idea for many different reasons and think that some shape or form of an IBM and Sun deal either in entirety, or pieces is far more likely to occur and sooner, than seeing funds returned from either AIG or Bernard Madoff, the other top news items this week, nuf said for now about IBM and Sun.
Also this week, other activity included Cisco announcing that they are testing the waters to enter into the server market space to help jumpstart the converged networking space with some of my initial comments here and here. Check out StorageIO in the news page here for other comments on various IT industry trends, technologies and related activities including a recent piece by Drew Robb about The State of the Data Storage Job Market.
Lets see how this plays out with more to say later, thanks again for everyone who came out for last weeks as well as this weeks events, look forward to seeing and talking with you again soon I hope.
Cheers – gs
Technorati tags: Recession, Sustainability, Wall Street Journal, Data Center Bottlenecks, Performance, Capacity, Networking, Telephone, Data Center, Consolidation, Virtualization, VMware, Server, Storage, Software, Sun, IBM, Las Vegas, Milwaukee, St. Louis, Atlanta, CMG, AIG, Bernard Madoff, Cisco
A week ago I was in St. Petersburg, Tampa and Miami Florida for a mix of work and relaxation along with Karen (Mrs. Schulz), visiting with my cousin and her husband who lives in the St. Pete beach area for a few days before back to work. While in the St. Pete and Tampa area, for fun, we did an afternoon at Busch Garden including a ride on Montu. For those who have not ridden on Montu, here’s a video I found that someone recorded to help give you a perspective of the ride. Other fun activities included stops or time at Billys Stonecrab and Seafood joint, Kayaking, lounging pool-side, shelling at Ft. Desoto and St. Pete Beach as well as a visit to the Hurricane among others.
In Miami, the pool area at the Four Seasons including a nice cabana pool-side spot to escape the cool breeze made for a great relaxing and catch-up on some work spot while Karen relaxed in the sun. Some of the restraunts in Miami we visited when taking a break from work included Gordon Birsch and Rosa for some outstanding, made at the table side fresh Guacamole en Molcajet!.
Speaking of work, the Florida trip involved doing keynotes at events in both Tampa and Miami with a theme of IT Infrastructure Optimization with both events being well attended. Themes included doing more with less, or, doing more with what you have, addressing data footprint and data management to boost productivity, how to address the continued growth in data and need to process, move and store more data and information. A discussion point prompted the thought of if there is a data recession or not (See previous blog post and here). Other topics of discussion and interested included converged networking for voice, data and general networking, security, server and storage virtualization, performance and capacity planning, data protection and BC/DR among others.
This past week involved a lunch and learn Keynote in the Minneapolis area with a local VAR, before a quick trip to the other (left) coast for another IT Infrastructure Optimization session and keynote, this time in Los Angeles. Some common themes heard from IT professionals at this past weeks events echoed those heard in Florida as well as concern about managing encryption keys not to mention securing virtual environments and software licensing models in virtualized server environments. The trip to LA also enabled a quick visit with friend Bruce Rave of Go Deep fame who provided a great tour and sightseeing of the Hollywood music scene.
Hollywood stops included dinner at Genghis Cohens (The duck and cashew chicken were outstanding) followed by visits to the Cat and Fiddle and Infamous Rainbow Bar & Grill next door to legendary Roxy. People watching was great as was the music and ambiance including a Nikki Sixx of Motely Crew sighting at the Rainbow as well as Dr. Sanjay Gupta of CNN seen in hotel lobby minutes after appearing on Larry King Live.
Thanks too everyone who came out and participated in the seminar events in Tampa, Miami, Minneapolis and LA, look forward to seeing and hearing from you again soon. Now its time to get ready to head off too the airport for this weeks events and activities including stops in Las Vegas and Milwaukee among others.
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