Tag: the green and virtual data center

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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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Storage Magazine in a Virtual World

Despite some internet chatter the other day that the TechTarget Storage magazine (not to be confused with a different Dutch magazine that I happen to have recently appeared in) had ceased to exist, the reality is that the print version like so many other publications is giving way to an on-line, digital only version as has been the trend recently.

Printed magazines, whether weekly, monthly or quarterly for general interest or industry specific have all been under going a transformation over the past decade with examples including the Sears catalog giving way to new mediums and venues on the internet.

For the most part, those printed magazines that still exist keep getting smaller and thinner with less and less content to correspond to the decrease in advertising dollars that keeps the publications in existence in many cases. Personally I like and have adjusted to having virtual magazines in the form of on-line HTML or PDF or some other form as part of an on-line, downloadable virtual desktop. However, I still enjoyed being able to take a pile of magazines onto an airplane to read especially when you have to turn off your electronics and before nap time.

Magazines are not the only publications going to on-line, in addition to catalogs that have given way to the likes of Amazon.com among others, more books are also being published on-line either in PDF or secure download as well as emerging kindle versions. My book Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier) is currently available at Amazon.com in both print as well as Kindle versions and while initially my new book The Green and Virtual Data Center (Auerbach) which can be ordered now at Amazon (and other venues) will be in print, rest assured, there will also be a digital version very soon.

Books have been an interesting scenario talking with other authors who have seen an increase in digital versions being sold, there is still a preference for readers to get a physical version that they can carry with them and make notes or use as a desktop paper weight or what suits your preference.

Back to TechTarget Storage magazine, what’s interesting is that TechTarget had only a hand full of printed publications with the bulk of their content being on-line at sites like SearchStorage and other sibling sites as well as their conferences, seminars and other custom events.

While I have not been involved Storage magazine as long as early contributors like Steve Foskett who has a nice posting on his blog, I have been involved with Storage magazine among many other TechTarget as well as most of the other industry related publications (print and on-line).

My involvement with Storage magazine for many years has included writing some articles (Scaling SANs, Bridging the Gap, and Automate Data Recovery), doing tips, ask the experts (ATE) as well as appearing in other authors articles providing commentary and industry trends and perspectives quotes not to mention always looking forward to getting my monthly hard copy version to take with and read on airplanes or trains when traveling. Storage magazine and many of the people involved with producing the publication from what I understand will continue to produce a publication inconjunction with SearchStorage and sibling sites such as SearchSMBstorage among others where you can find various articles, tips, podcasts and other material from myself and others in the industry.

Storage Magazine
December 2008 Storage Magzine

The final printed version is the December 2008 version and while I do not have any articles in this edition, I am honored to appear via interviews and providing quotes in a couple of articles including How you SAN will evolve by Alan Radding as well as Next Year’s hot technologies by Ellen O’Brien.

So here’s to one more printed version of a publication going to the archives, and look forward to the future of the on-line version as well as all of the other on-line venues that are doing what they need to do to remain viable in a changing world.

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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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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EPA Draft 3 of Energy Star for Computer Server Specification

Storage I/O trends

Today is the 2008 USA general election today pitting democratic senator Barack Obama vs. republican senator John McCain as well as several other lesser known party candidates who have made comments about the environment and going green as well as the economy, all of which have an impact on IT spending not to mention green IT and green computing.

Today is also the day that the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) sent out notification that Draft 3 of Energy Star for computer server specifications are available for comment (See here).

Energy Star is not a new program for IT equipment having been around for some time on PCs and other commodity products as well as many consumer goods. The EPA has been working on several Energy Star programs pertaining to IT data centers in addition to the Server specification working with industry groups covering servers, storage, networking and facilities among others, all of which to help enable the green and virtual data center on a go forward basis.

If you have not done so, check out the EPA Energy Star for data center programs.

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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Thank you Gartner for generating green awareness for my new book: The Green and Virtual Data Center!

Storage I/O trends

The other day Gartner issued a press release about their new findings that Users Are Becoming Increasingly Confused About the Issues and Solutions Surrounding Green IT.

This however what is missing from the Gartner report and action steps is to also say to read my new book “The Green and Virtual Data Center” (Auerbach).

However in all fairness, since Gartner has not yet seen it, I would seriously doubt that they would endorse anything other than one of their own publications.

Regardless, its great to see Gartner among others joining in and helping to transition industry awareness from Green Hype and help to close the Green gap (read more here and here) and begin addressing core issues that IT organizations can and are addressing to improve efficiency, address costs and enable sustainable business growth in an economic and environmental friendly way.

Thank you Gartner and let me know when and where you want a copy sent for a formal review and endorsement of my new book. Meanwhile, you can learn more at www.thegreenandvirtualdatacenter.com including a variety of green and related power, cooling, floor-space, environmental health and safety-EHS (PCFE) or green topics along with where to pre-order your advance copy from Amazon.com as well as 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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Closing the Green Gap – Green washing may be endangered, however addressing real green issues is here to stay

Storage I/O trends

Here’s a new article I wrote that just appeared over at Enterprise Storage Forum called Closing the Green Storage Gap.

Not all ‘green’ IT solutions or messages are created equal. Regardless of political views, the reality is that for business and IT sustainability, a focus on ecological issues and more importantly, their economic aspects cannot be ignored.

There are business benefits to using the most energy-efficient IT solutions to meet different data and application requirements. However, vendors are busy promoting ‘green’ stories and solutions that often miss where IT organization challenges and mandates exist. This article examines the growing gap between green messaging, or ‘Green Wash,’ and how to close the gap and enable IT organization issues to be addressed today in a way that sustains business growth in an economic and ecologically friendly way.

Have a read and a good weekend.

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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Green, Virtual, Servers, Storage and Networking 2008 Beijing Olympics

Storage I/O trends

How about those opening 2008 Beijing Olympic ceremonies on NBC last night?

If you were like me, I had my DVR capture the event while out enjoying the nice August evening with some friends doing some relaxing and fishing (we did catch and release fish!) on the scenic St. Croix river.

John Nelson with a small mouth bass caught and released on the St. Croix River During 2008 Beijing Olympics
Fishing while DVR records 2008 Olympics

John Nelson with a northern pike (swamp shark) caught and released on the St. Croix River During 2008 Beijing Olympics
Fishing while DVR records 2008 Olympics

A young bald eagle seen during fishing on the St. Croix river during opening of 2008 Olympic games
A young bald eagle seen during fishing while DVR records 2008 Olympics

The reason I bring up the Olympics, servers, storage, networking, virtualization and green topics are a couple of themes. One being all the news and content available to keep track of what is happening with the games taking place all of which is being stored on servers, storage and relying on networks to access the rich media and unstructured data via the web or traditional media. The 2008 summer games are also being described as the on-line and virtual olympics. The amount of storage being used to store digital data from the 2008 Olympics for later playback, which then gets recorded on DVRs if not watched in real-time is staggering as are the number of servers and networking capabilities being used. In addition to the video, audio, still photos, text and blogs, then there are the security cameras in Beijing generating massive amounts of digital data.

For those who track or keep an eye or ear open towards data and storage management, the amount of data that continues to grow and number of copies that get created should be a familiar theme. Of course, you would then have heard that the magic elixir is to simply de-dupe everything. That is reduce your data footprint by eliminating all of those extra copies however easier said then done, especially when a copy of the games is being transmitted and saved to millions of DVRs or other forms of data storage servers around the world.

For the time being, I prefer that my DVR support more usable storage capacity and real-time compression so that I can keep more copies of my favorite shows and of course the Olympics all in HDTV, which of course chews up storage space faster than a highly animated PowerPoint slide deck from your favorite vendors most recent, or, upcoming product announcements.

The other theme is in addition to being Olympic time, as well as late summer here in the northern hemisphere or winter for our friends in the summer hemisphere, its also pre-briefing and early product announcement time for the barrage of fall server, storage, networking, I/O, software, virtualization and green related solutions. So far, Im not sure if its the Olympics or what, however the bait line on the upcoming announcements and briefings include the tags “Industry First”, “Industry Unique”, “Only Vendor”, “Only Product”, “Revolutionary”, “First Vendor” or “First Product”, “Fastest”, “Largest”, “Greenest” among other interesting spins and twists that would even make an Olympic gymnast dizzy.

So enjoy the Olympic , keep those hard disk drives in your DVR cool while managing the usable capacity and watch for more gold medal attempts both from Beijing, as well as from your favorite IT vendors coming to a podium to you soon with their upcoming announcements, some of which may be award winning. Also check out www.greendatastorage.com which is now also pointed to by www.thegreenandvirtualdatacenter.com that has a new look and feel as well as some updated content with more on the way.

Cheers
gs

technorati tags: Green Gap, Green Hype, Green IT, PCFE, The Green and Virtual Data Center, Virtualization, StorageIO, Green Washing