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High Tech Marketing


Does anyone know what the first ‘viral video’ really was?  I am going to guess it was the dancing baby.  At the end of the day, it was funny and you just wanted to watch, you had no idea but it made you laugh.  Was it offensive?  Perhaps to some MADBIDOTI “Mothers Against Dancing Baby’s in Diapers on the Internet” but not sure they really count as the ‘target audience’ for this.

Over the past few years, the internet, its viralness, and marketing have evolved.  Primarily because:

1) The tools have evolved.  Just as everyone had a Photoshop 10 years ago to make funny pictures to use for marketing, today people have video cameras.  And if a picture can paint a 1,000 words, how may words can 10 frames a second for 2 minutes paint?  Video is the next wave in marketing now that the masses can afford to do it.

2) Sorry but the folks working in the data center today grew up on cheat notes and a ‘did you watch the movie’ mentality.  The times of reading the industry ‘fish wrap’ are gone.  Today’s IT people grew up on The Justice League, Gilligan’s Island, Seinfeld, and commercials.  Reading is a distant second.  (Not saying IT folks can’t read, they just prefer not to.)

Marketing MUST and WILL evolve to include videos, get ready for it and get used to it.  I know if I want to get smart on a topic, say how to do funny, smart, viral videos (Mark Farley @ StorageRap) I watch videos for ideas.  And if I want to learn how to make creative blog content I watch videos (Mark Farley @ StorageRap).  (BTW, if it’s not obvious, I credit @3ParFarley with the innovation in todays high tech blogging with creative videos – I don’t care what that Storage Monkey’s survey says !)  Mark knew early on that the traditional ‘write a bunch of content and they will come’ mentality wasn’t working and it didn’t matter that you were a published author and had ‘storage street cred’ or not.  (Think about that Mr. Preston.)

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Jul 27, 2010 | 0 comments View Post

6 Ways to Tell Your Boss You’re Saving Him Money


Ever had this situation.  You know you know the right thing to do but convincing the non-techie that you need to move forward on a project tough.  Try some of these techniques!

More funny, viral video, shameless advertising.

For more information on how 15 minutes can save you 50% or more of your storage go to www.storwize.com

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Jul 26, 2010 | 0 comments View Post

Sever + Storage Optimization = Datacenter Utopia


Matt Prigge had a really great article on his InfoWorld Data Explosion blog called “VMware vSphere raises the bar — again“.  In the piece Matt makes two really important points.

1.  VMware has taken the world by storm over the past few years.  A technology that can lower both CapEx and OpEx costs and ease the burden of administration is a great thing for the data center.  And,

2.  With all the advantages of virtual server optimization, storage administration, is a big issue.

VSphere has done a lot to help the issues of storage administration (specifically storage performance for virtual servers) but that is only a part of the challenge.  Customers consistently tell us that by developing a virtualized server environment, their storage requirements have grown by as much as 4x.  The savings that have been realized by server virtualization are soon eclipsed by the need for more storage.  This  is one of the reasons it has taken a while for server virtualization to really take off in production.  In talking to customers, virtualizing a lab or test environment where data can be deleted once it is ‘used’ without worry is one thing, but in production, where the production data needs to be kept for a long time starts to cause issues.

Now, with all the hype around primary storage optimization, end users can couple the benefits of server virtualization with primary storage optimization to maximize their ROI in the datacenter.  The important thing to remember, just like server virtualization didn’t force customers to sacrifice anything in terms of performance, availability, process and supportability, you need to look for the same thing from a storage optimization solution.

The valuable features added to vSphere around SIOC combined with the optimization capabilities from Storwize can allow IT to maximize storage performance, maximize their existing storage resources and not affect data integrity or data availability.  There is a new white paper on the combined solution of VMware and Storwize that outlines how VMware and Storwize can provide customers with the maximum ROI in the datacenter.

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Jul 22, 2010 | 0 comments View Post

Is Your Storage “Out of Control”?


The new IDC report that came out in May stated that the “…amount of information in the digital universe would grow by a factor of 44 and the number of containers or files would grow by a factor of 67 from 2009 to 2020, the number of IT professionals in the world will only grow by a factor of 1.4″.  There can’t be a more clear indication that it is time to get your storage under control.

Video created in conjunction with Media Boss Studios!

15 Minutes Can Save You 50% or More of Your Storage Capacity! Learn How with Storwize!

Click here to learn how Storwize can help you get your storage back under control!

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Jul 13, 2010 | 0 comments View Post

A Bright New Day – Part Duo


I am not sure how many of you have seen the ABC show ‘V’ but it looks like they have it looks like they have two things in common with Storwize.

First, if you are unfamiliar with the show V – the description from their website is as follows:

The Visitors spread their message quickly and clearly: They come in peace, bearing gifts of medical miracles and technological breakthroughs far beyond our wildest imaginations.

Very similar to Storwize.  We visit customers in peace bearing gifts of miracles and technology breakthroughs beyond their wildest imaginations.  Storwize is the only company to do real-time data storage compression without performance degradation.  As the growth of data exceeding 487M TB (IDC 2008 study) something has to be done to control this growth and end users are quickly turning to capacity optimization technologies to control this growth and more  specifically to Storwize Real-time compression.

With another banner quarter under the belt, I had an opportunity to meet with a number of existing customers as well as customers to be.  One of the more interesting meetings came when I met with a large manufacture in the mid-west.  We were sitting with the storage architecture team and the finance team.  We were going through our usual presentation, showing the finance folks the savings they were able to achieve with Storwize.  Storwize was able to compress their data 66% giving them back more than half of their storage capacity that they could continue to grow into.  We also showed them how there was no impact to their production environment with the Storwize appliances in line.  The finance folks were VERY impressed.  At that moment one of the storage architects jumped out of his seat and said, “But wait, your forgetting the most important point.”  To which we all looked at each other a bit perplexed and said, “Oh, what is that?” And he replied, “Storwize is Butt Simple!”.  He went on to say that the deployment (during their POC) caused no down time (they were in an HA environment) and once in place, they just started compressing – no change to their filers, no change to their networks, no change to their applications and the end users never even knew anything different.  He said, “Storwize makes my job simple and look like a hero to my boss!”.

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Jul 09, 2010 | 0 comments View Post

A Blueprint for Primary Storage Optimization


During the past three to four months the storage industry has seen a spike in the number of reports, white papers and news articles surrounding the evolution of primary storage technology, capacity optimization (it is 2010’s Hottest Storage Technology).

The reason this technology is getting a lot of ‘air play’ these days is due to the fact that this technology is so critical to help control the growth and costs of storage.  In 2010 the EMC sponsored IDC Report “The Digital Universe Decade – Are You Ready?” was release and stated that:

  • In 2009, amid the “Great Recession,” the amount of digital information grew 62% over 2008 to 800 billion gigabytes (0.8 Zettabytes).
  • The amount of digital information created annually will grow by a factor of 44 from 2009 to 2020…

The folks at Wikibon also released an info graph that exposes the true explosion of data.

Information Explosion & Cloud Storage
Via: Wikibon

When you combine storage capacity (and the foot print it takes up) along with the power it takes to run it and cool it as well as the human resource it takes to manage it, you soon realize we cannot keep ‘just adding more cheap disk’ in an effort to manage the storage demands.  High Tech companies with high tech labs are also telling IT that ‘they are out of tricks’ when it comes to the ability to continue deliver disk drive that double capacity every 18 months.  It is for these reasons that primary storage optimization technologies have stepped into the ‘lime light’ as it serves as a means to help control the growth of primary storage including the foot print, power, cooling and man power required to manage it.

However, as we all know in IT, no two environments are the same and what may be good for one may not be good for another.  When looking at primary storage optimization there seem to be a number of available technologies and ways to deploy these technologies and the key question is what is right for ‘my’ environment.

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Jul 01, 2010 | 2 comments View Post

Marketing, FUD and Doing What You Do Best


Rather than leave a lengthy comment on Tom Cook’s blog post from Friday Compression and Dedupe: Business Value and Data Safety (and from a marketing perspective, Friday’s are bad days to post blogs – especially in the summer) – I thought I would respond here (this may get lengthy as Tom made a number of points which I need comment on).

The first thing I do want to say is that when doing technical marketing; the proper strategy would be to not be on defense but rather take an offensive approach.  However, given the amount of FUD that Tom put in his latest blog post, I have to defend compression to some degree.

Now, I think we can all agree that data compression and data deduplication are two technologies that can complement one another very well.  Avamar (EMC) deduplicates the data at the source and then compresses the data before sending it to the Avamar Data Store gaining tremendous efficiency in network utilization.  ProtecTIER (IBM) compresses the data once it is deduplicated at the target device before it stores the data.  Other solutions also combine compression and data deduplication.

I’d like to comment on some key point Tom made in his piece where he is just blatantly wrong:

1)      Compression identifies redundant data across a very small window, usually 64 KB. – While this may be true for other compression technologies, this is not true for Storwize.  Storwize performs compression where the initial window is not fixed in size at all; it is the resultant write that is fixed in size.  This size is also specifically mapped to the I/O patter of the data being written.  The goal is such that in 1 I/O Storwize can do all the work it needs to on a particular file or LUN and it is for this reason Storwize has no performance penalty.

2)      Compression produces data reduction rates at most 2X for most data types. – Seems Tom needs a lesson in the most common answer in IT – “IT DEPENDS”.  Data compression ratios are 100% tied to the data type.  For a true indication of data compression ratios see Figure 1.

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Jun 21, 2010 | 10 comments View Post

Gravity Applies to Everyone!


There was an interesting announcement today regarding Permabit who is now providing primary storage optimization through OEMs and having their solution embedded into the storage system.  This further drives home the point of where capacity optimization should live.  I do have a couple of questions however:

1)      What is the performance like?  I see phrases such as “High Performance Data Optimization Software” but don’t see any performance metrics – such as ‘no performance degradation’ for customers utilizing the solution.  Or testing metrics from their ‘partners’ (as it probably isn’t in production yet) – which brings up another question:

2)      Why were none of the ‘design win’ partners quoted in this announcement?

3)      Rehydration – Mr. Floyd states:

Permabit’s Floyd claims Albireo can maintain data integrity because data written to disk isn’t altered, and the reduction takes place out of the data path. When parallel processing is used, deduped data doesn’t have to be rehydrated when it’s accessed.

The question is – if it doesn’t need to be rehydrated, then how does the application read it?  I can only assume that Mr. Floyd means the data doesn’t have to be rehydrated on disk, which is fine, the question become: a) how does the application know what the data is? (Ocarina uses an agent to help them understand the data, but this is another thing to manage) and b) What is the performance of the system looking up all of the hash keys to reassemble the data on the fly, so how much more storage resources will this consume?

4)      Back to performance – Permabit states:

When done inline, data will flow to the Albireo library before going to disk. Post-process deduplication will write data to disk first, then scan and eliminate duplicated data. The parallel option sends data to disk while still in memory, and applies updates the same way as post-processing without having to read data off disk. Each method has different amounts of latency and reduction efficiencies.

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Jun 07, 2010 | 2 comments View Post

A Blog with no Comments?


Today I read a very well written blog by The SANMan.  The only issue is, you can’t comment on his blog.  This is the first technology blog I have seen like this.  So, I will have to post my thought here.

In his post “NetApp Takes the “Primary” Lead for Data Reduction” – which seems more like theory and a commercial for NTAP than reality (see comments @ The Register) the SANMan states:

“Yes, Ocarina and Storwize have appliances that compress and uncompress data as it’s alternatively stored and read but what performance overhead do such technologies have when hundreds of end users concurrently access the same email attachment? As for Oracle’s Solaris ZFS file system sub level deduplication which is yet to see the light of day one wonders how much hot water it will get Oracle into should it turn out to be a direct rip off of the NetApp model.”

I have two comments:

1) You are right – you CAN’T do deduplicaiton on primary if you affect performance.  All indications for customers are that they cannot use NTAP deduplicaiton or even compression ‘in-line’ as the performance is just too terrible so all processes must be done post-process.

2) I direct your attention to the Wikibon Blog on CORE - “Dedupe Rates Matter…Just Not as Much as You Think” – Storwize can do in-line data optimization without any performance degradation.  So the question is – if customers can ‘Optimize without Compromise’ – why wouldn’t they?

Updated 6/7/2010 – Oh, quick question – how does the SANMan get away with the graphics he uses?  I would think that Walt Disney & Pixar would get a bit upset with the use of the character Carl Fredricksen, no?

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Jun 04, 2010 | 0 comments View Post

Compression 101 for CFOs


CFOs have an incredibly hard job when it comes to helping IT manage a budget.  Let’s face it, there have been books written (like ‘Does IT Matter, by Carr) that discuss the value of all those blinking lights in the data center.

The reality is that some of those blinking lights do matter and others are a financial sink hole.  Over the past 3 years storage has crept up to be one of the higher cost items in the data center and storage is a lot like death and taxes, it just IS.  It is really the applications that drive revenue for your company and these applications just keep generating data which in 45 days will most likely be obsolete – well as least 90% of it.  The trick is which 90% and because no one can really tell which 90% you have to keep all of it.

Now let’s switch to technology for a moment.  For sure CFO’s have heard all the technology buzz words around IT.  Vendors today realize that they have to meet high ROI / TCO demands in order to effectively sell to customers, especially in the storage world.  One of these technologies is data deduplication.  On the surface (just by nature of its name) it seems like the defacto standard for all storage growth problems – just ‘deduplicate’ your data and all your storage issues go away.  Well, I am here to tell you ‘Don’t Get Duped by Dedupe’.  It may be the new fancy technology word for storage vendors, but when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

What I mean by this is that just because ‘deduplication’ is today’s storage buzz word, it is not a solution for all data growth challenges, especially for primary storage.  Compression, especially when done right – real time and random access, is the best solution for stemming the tide of primary storage growth.

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May 20, 2010 | 0 comments View Post
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