tape Archives

March 31, 2009November 26, 2023

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 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

February 14, 2009March 7, 2022

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

November 2, 2008January 23, 2019

Did someone forget to tell Dell that Tape is dead?

Storage I/O trends

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ok, nuff said.

Cheers gs

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

October 11, 2008March 18, 2019

Tape Talk – Changing Role of Tape

Storage I/O trends

Here’s a link to a new article over at Enterprise Storage Forum titled “The Changing Role of Tape” for those of you who still use or care to admit to using magnetic tape as part of your data protection (backup, BC, DR) and data preservation (e.g. archiving and compliance) strategies.

Disk based solutions continue to grow in adoption for data protection, however tape remains relevant taking on different roles, similar to how disk drives are taking on different roles as FLASH and RAM based SSD continue to evolve and grow in terms of customer deployment adoption. Consequently, despite the continued hype that tape is dead, the reality is that tape remains on of if not the most energy-efficient or green storage mediums of in-active, off-line data in a given footprint and cost basis.

Tape is still being used in many environments particularly more so in larger environments with a focus shifting towards supporting ultra-dense large full backups that have been copied from disk to disk based backups as well as for archives.

Disk based data protection particularly with virtual tape libraries (VTLs) that combine data footprint reduction techniques such as compression, de-dupe, replication and migration to tape capabilities continue to gain in popularity as a convenient way to migrate from tape based backups to disk based backup preserving investment in existing people skills, policies, rules and software.

Ok, nuff said.

Cheers gs

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

August 10, 2008January 24, 2023

Links to Upcoming and Recent Webcasts and Videocasts

Here are links to several recent and upcoming Webcast and video casts covering a wide range of topics. Some of these free Webcast and video casts may require registration.

Industry Trends & Perspectives – Data Protection for Virtual Server Environments

Next Generation Data Centers Today: What’s New with Storage and Networking

Hot Storage Trends for 2008

Expanding your Channel Business with Performance and Capacity Planning

Top Ten I/O Strategies for the Green and Virtual Data Center

Cheers
Greg Schulz – StorageIO

February 26, 2008November 22, 2019

Mainframe, CMG, Virtualization, Storage and “Zombie Technologies”

In case you missed the news, IBM today announced a new mainframe the z10, yes, that’s right, the mother of all “Zombie Technologies” (and I say this with all due respect), you know, technologies that are declared dead yet are viable, working and still living thus purchasable. Some other examples of Zombie technologies include magnetic tape which was declared dead at least ten years ago if not longer yet continues to evolve, granted a bit slower and with fewer vendors, yet the technology is still economically viable when paired up with disk to disk based backup as an off-line (read no power required) medium for preserving idle and inactive archive data. Another example of a Zombie technology is the printer as you may recall we were supposed to be completely paperless by now, yeh right.

Then there is Fibre Channel which was declared still born over a decade ago yet shows plenty of signs of life in the form of 8GFC (8Gb Fibre Channel) and emerging FCoE even with iSCSI waging another assault to kill the FC beast. Even the venerable 50 year old magnetic disk drive has been declared a dead technology with the re-emergence of SSD in the form of DRAM and FLASH yet magnetic hard disk drives (HDD) continue to be manufactured and shipped in record numbers making it a member of the Zombie technology club, a club that has some pretty esteemed members and more on the way.

I forget how many decades ago it was now that the IBM mainframe was declared dead and granted we have seen the exodus of Hitachi, Amdahl, NEC and others from the active marketplace developing and selling IBM plug compatible mainframes (PCMs). However the venerable mainframe from IBM like the energizer bunny keeps ticking and finding new roles including leveraging its built-in logical partition (LPAR) capabilities to support virtual machines, something that has been available for at least a few decades to enable being leveraged as a consolidation platform of not only legacy zOS (aka revamped MVS) and zVM (not to be confused with VMware) as well native Linux.

Shifting gears a bit, last week I had the pleasure of key-noting at a local Computer Measurement Group (CMG) event, a group that I have been involved with presenting at their events around the world for over a decade. Last weeks theme at the CMG event was Is Storage and I/O Still Important in a Virtual World? If you are not familiar with the CMG folks and you have an interesting in servers, storage, I/O and networking along with performance, capacity planning and virtualization these are some people to get to know. Granted the organization has its roots back in the mainframe era and thus the organization is a gazillion years old, yet, younger than the mainframe however not by much. Over the past several years with the advent of lower cost hardware and the attitude of hardware is cheap, just throw more hardware at the problem has in part led to the decline of what CMG once was as an organization.

However, given the collective knowledge base and broad background, skills and areas of interest spanning servers, storage, I/O, networking, virtualization, hardware, software, mainframe and open systems among others, given the current focus on addressing IT data center power, cooling, floor space and associated ecological and economic related topics (see www.greendatastorage.com) CMG has an opportunity to revive itself even more so than it has over the past few years. That is, CMG assuming its leaders and members can recognize the opportunity can stand up to take a lead role in tying together the skills and knowledge to implement cross technology domain IT infrastructure resource management including working with facilities personal to insure adequate resources (servers, storage, networking, power, cooling and floor space) are available when and where needed moving forward not to mention help shape and guide the server, storage and networking industry groups and forums on applicable metrics and measurement usage. If you are not familiar with CMG, check them out, it’s a good group with a lot of good subject matter expertise to tap into.

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

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: