Tag: storage decisions

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Storage Effiency and Optimizaiton – Balancing Time and Space

Storage I/O trends

Here’s a link to the presentation I recently delivered at the Spring 2009 Minneapolis/St. Paul area CMG (Computer Measurement Group – CMG) March 20th, 2009 hosted by Nexus Information Systems and organized by Tom Becchetti. The theme of the event was "Is your storage efficient? There are many ways to rate your storage, how does yours stack up?". Tom organized a great event as usual with a diverse set of speakers for the well attended event graciously hosted by Keith Norbie of Nexus at their Minnetonka facility. The title of my presentation was "Storage Efficiency: Mirror Mirror On The Wall, Who or What is The Most Efficient of Them All? Finding the Correct Balance" that looked at balancing the need to reduce (or maximize) space (utilization) with time (performance) to meet different requirements including maintaining quality of service, response time and availability.

Keeping in mind that there is no such thing as a data or I/O performance recession, there is a common myth that storage optimization or efficiency is all about driving up storage space capacity utilization which can be true for some environments, applications, data or storage types. However there is also the need to maintain or boost performance, reduce response time and latency, doing more work in a more productive and efficieny manner. Not all data or storage can be consolidated to boost utilization without concern for degrading or in any other way penalizing performance, response time or availability.

Thus it is about time and space, that is, balancing data movement and processing rates with storage space capacity utilization and that sometimes, more is not better for performance when it comes to ratios or the number of components in a solution.

Likewise there is the need to balance energy avoidance with energy efficient, balancing the need to store more data in a smaller footprint using less energy and the need to process more data in less time efficiently for productivity.

These and other related themes are expanded on in more detail in my book "The Green and Virtual Data Center" (CRC). These and other related themes will covered in one of my upcoming presentations (The Other Green — Storage Efficiency and Optimization) at StorageDecisions in Chicago the week of June 1st, 2009, as well as in various seminars and events that I will be involved in the coming weeks and months.

Thanks to all those who helped organize, support, sponsored, presented and attended the recent CMG event, look forward to seeing or hearing from you all again soon.

Ok, nuff said.

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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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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SNW (And other conferences) Want and Need You!

Not to worry, its not yet time for phrases such as “Ask not what a conference can do for you, ask what you can do for a conference…”, at least I hope until some clever marketer tries that theme to stimulate conference participation short of an IT conference bailout package.

Uncle Conference wants you!

Conferences Want and Need You

Last week I received as did many other IT industry analyst, bloggers, consultants, media and press an invitation to apply and be considered for free admission (they waive the $1,000+ registration fee) to attend and cover the upcoming Computerworld/IDG and SNIA co-produced Storage Networking World (SNW) event in Orlando April 2009. Ok, nothing out of the ordinary here, as there are several events that do the same thing where you are sent out an invite to apply and attend and if accepted to attend, your registration fee is waived. Meanwhile other venues simply send you the pre-accepted invite and thanks for prior participating forgoing the whole apply, register and be accepted game.

What I find interesting here is that out of all the usual conference, expos, seminars and so forth that I get invited to attend, or to keynote and speak at, two stood out this past week. Those being SNW and the other being upstart The Business Development (BD) Event to be held in Boston in June 2009. Big vendor centric shows like EMCworld and VMworld among others will probably continue albeit with some fine tuning. While some vendors are cutting back or postponing their customer, or media and analyst events, as well as some of the large mega analyst firms like Gartner among others are cutting back or canceling their conferences due to tough economic times, events like the TechTarget Storage Decisions which are IT customer/user focused events are being fine tuned to be more effective as well as taking the message to the people who are under travel and time restrictions via custom local events and seminars.

Likewise, traditional big industry vertical shows like SNW are having to get more aggressive to get both their paying customers (e.g. vendor sponsors, media sponsors, people who pay the registration fee) to show up and participate as well as to get the industry analysts, bloggers, consultants, media and press to show up and cover the event. I’m guessing Jon Toigo over at Drunkendata must be salivating given some of his past posts that SNW is issuing announcements on MSNBC and other venues via Marketwire inviting industry media and analyst to attend the spring SNW. I wonder if Jon Toigo will be issuing similar announcements to all industry media and analyst or if his upcoming C4 conference in May will be an exclusive and by invitation only event?

In the face of all of these changes, there’s also a new upstart event for business development and networking amongst vendors, vars, press, media, analyst, customers, consultants and others, something that SNW used to be known for the storage industry as the place to go. In June 2009, a new event, "The BD Event" will be held in Boston with a simple value proposition, avoid the high costs and restrictions of some other venues, for a relatively small fee to basically cover cost, show up and meet and do some business.

What does this all mean and what will I be doing in 2009 regarding industry activities, seminars, shows, conferences and events?

I’m pleased to announce (don’t worry, I wont be issuing a press release as I did that this past week for my new book) that I have been accepted to attend SNW in Orlando, now I need to decide if I’m actually going to attend or not. I may end up doing what I did last fall which is fly in for a day for some meetings and tie into some other activities in the area.

I like the theme of the BD event in June and have it penciled in however have not committed with the Duplessie’s yet. Storage Decisions will be on the calendar as its a great place for meeting with and hearing what’s on the mind of the IT professionals as opposed to hearing it second or third hand from others. As for other venues and events, there will be more posted on the StorageIO events page through out the year.

Ok, nuff said for now

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 2006-2011 StorageIO and UnlimitedIO All Rights Reserved

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Downloads for fall 2008 San Francisco Storage Decisions now available

The TechTarget Storage Media Group has posted on Bitpipe the session presentations from the recent fall (November 17-19th) 2008 San Francisco Storage Decisions event. If you have never been to a Storage Decisions event, it?s a great venue for meeting with IT and storage professionals as well as vendors who also show up to show their wares and meet with the attendees. Make no mistake about it, Storage Decisions is not a vendor to vendor meet and industry network event like SNW or a vendor sponsored user group like VMworld or EMCworld, rather, its focused on the IT and storage professional and encourages speakers to be frank and candid in their discussions of technologies, techniques and even of vendors and their solutions.

In addition to doing a keynote session Wednesday evening November 19th on ?Hot Storage Topics for Channel Professionals? at the Storage Strategies for Channel Professionals Dinner event, I also did two presentations at Storage Decisions one in the management and executive track Management and Executive Track on Green and Efficient Storage , an (updated version from what was covered in September 2008 at New York) timely theme given my new book ?The Green and Virtual Data Center? (Auerbach) along with another session in the Storage and capacity management track of  ?Clustered and Grid Storage — From SMB, to Scientific, to Social Networking and Web 2.0? (also updated from September 2008)

View the entire list of all Storage Decisions sessions here.

A big thanks to all who came out last week in San Francisco at Storage Decisions and who attended the sessions enabling great discussion and insight both during the sessions, as well as during lunches, breaks and exhibition hours.

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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Storage Optimization: Performance, Availability, Capacity, Effectiveness

Storage I/O trends

With the IT and storage industry shying away from green hype, green washing and other green noise, there is also a growing realization that the new green is about effectively boosting efficiency to improve productivity and profitability or to sustain business and IT growth during tough economic times.

This past week while doing some presentations (I’ll post a link soon to the downloads) at the 2008 San Francisco installment of Storage Decisions event focused on storage professionals, as well as a keynote talk at the value added reseller (VAR) channel professional focused storage strategies event, a common theme was boosting productivity, improving on efficiency, stretching budgets and enabling existing personal and resources to do more with the same or less.

During these and other presentations, keynotes, sessions and seminars both here in the U.S. as well as in Europe recently, these common themes of booting efficiency as well as the closing of the green gap, that is, the gap between industry and marketing rhetoric around green hype, green noise, green washing and issues that either do not resonate with, or, can not be funded by IT organizations compared with the disconnect of where many IT organizations issues exist which are around power, cooling, floor space or footprint as well as EH&S (Environmental health and safety) and economics.

The green gap (here, and here, and here) is that many IT organizations around the world have not realized due to green hype around carbon footprints and related themes that in fact, boosting energy efficiency for active and on-line applications, data and workloads (e.g. doing more I/O operations per second-IOPS, transactions, files or messages processed per watt of energy) to address power, cooling, floor space are in fact a form of addressing green issues, both economic and environmental.

Likewise for inactive or idle data, there is a bit more of a linkage that green can mean powering things off, however there is also a disconnect in that many perceive that green storage for example is only green if the storage can be powered off which while true for in-active or idle data and applications, is not true for all data and applications types.

As mentioned already, for active workloads, green means doing more with the same or less power, cooling and floor space impact, this means doing more work per unit of energy. In that theme, for active workload, a slow, large capacity disk may in fact not be energy efficient if it impedes productivity and results in more energy to get the same amount of work done. For example, larger capacity SATA disk drives are also positioned as being the most green or energy efficiency which can be true for idle or in-active or non performance (time) sensitive applications where more data is stored in a denser footprint.

However for active workload, lower capacity 15.5K RPM 300GB and 400GB Fibre Channel (FC) and SAS disk drives that deliver more IOPS or bandwidth per watt of energy can get more work done in the same amount of time.

There is also a perception that FC and SAS disk drives use more power than SATA disk drives which in some cases can be true, however current generations of high performance 10K RPM and 15.5K RPM drives have very similar power draw on a raw spindle or device basis. What differs is the amount of capacity per watt for idle or inactive applications, or, the number of IOPS or amount of performance for active configurations.

On the other hand, while not normally perceived as being green compared to tape or IPM and MAID (1st generation and MAID 2.0) solutions, along with SSD (Flash and RAM), not to mention fast SAS and FC disks or tiered storage systems that can do more IOPS or bandwidth per watt of energy are in fact green and energy efficiency for getting work done. Thus, there are two sides to optimizing storage for energy efficiency, optimizing for when doing work e.g. more miles per gallon per amount of work done, and, how little energy used when not doing work.

Thus, a new form of being green to sustain business growth while boosting productivity is Gaining Realistic Economic Efficiency Now that as a by product helps both business bottom lines as well as the environment by doing more with less. These are themes that are addressed in my new book

“The Green and Virtual Data Center” (Auerbach) that will be formerly launched and released for generally availability just after the 1st of the year (hopefully sooner), however you can beat the rush and order your copy now to beat the rush at Amazon and other fine venues around the world.

Ok, nuff said.

Cheers gs

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

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

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Presentation Downloads from Storage Decisions New York 2008

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

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

Cheers
Gs