Category: Data

Defining Cloud


A decade or so ago, service providers made a valiant attempt trying to change the way IT managed there applications and their data.  There were a few issues that played a significant role in the demise of service provides back then however.  First, there was a distinct lack of understanding of the velocity at which IT can and does change.  Quite often I see infrastructure sales people proposing solutions to customer problems that require more of a “rip and replace” of existing infrastructure rather than complement it.  Businesses don’t slow down.  As new infrastructure is required to grow the business, the business still needs to keep moving.  It’s a lot like trying to change the tires on a moving car.

Second, the network connectivity tended to preclude applications to connect to their data in a timely manner rendering the number of applications that could leverage the service provider less useful.

Finally, service provider sellers had a very difficult time talking to IT about the value proposition the service provider could bring to traditional IT as a complement to their existing business.  This flimsy story, as well as concerns customers about security, data accessibility and other companies using their CPU cycles, customers we not motivated to bet their business on the “cloud”.  Additionally, having dedicated hardware (server or storage) at a service provider actually provided no cost savings and was proven, over time, to actually cost more than managing it internally.

A decade later we have evolved quite a bit.  The SSP’s of the past are now called “Cloud” providers.  Cloud providers can now offer a set of offerings that span both servers as well as storage.  Additionally the world’s internet connectivity is much more robust.  Also cloud providers aren’t trying to boil the ocean.  Cloud providers have a much better understanding of the type of applications they can service with a reasonable service levels.  Multi-tenant technolgoy has also evolved such that it makes providing infrastructure as a service much more secure to clients making it more cost effective.  VMware allows users to have dedicated servers, while virtual, to run their applications as well as keep costs low.   Virtual servers lower the cost of high availability and make it easy to move servers throughout the infrastructure.

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Feb 06, 2012 | 2 comments View Post

Defining Big Data


Tuesday night I attended an event – storagefest II 2012, which was hosted by Valhalla Partners.  The event was a dinner with a group of storage experts from all vectors of the storage industry.  There were customers of storage technologies, VCs with investments in storage, entrepreneurs (folks from storage startups), industry insiders (analysts) and folks from storage companies who have been acquired into large companies.  The goal of the event also had multiple vectors, specific to each "group" that attended.

VCs attend to hear what customers have to say about the state of the storage industry and what they should be investing in or if the storage startups they have invested in are doing the right things.  They also listen to people who have had successful exits and the advice they may have for running a successful storage business.

Customers attend to hear what is new in the storage business and to share their experiences and challenges within their infrastructure, and what they are looking for from their storage technologies and new companies.

Entrepreneurs attend to lend their advice, to see what is new and share ideas.

Industry insiders attend to learn more about customer challenges, who has the best chance at solving these challenges, how the industry is shaping up and to report on the event.

Large company attendees, people who have had successful exits into the large company, are typically in influential roles in their new company and go to learn about how the industry is evolving and what new technologies are out there that they may want to add to the portfolio of the larger company.  It is also a good chance to listen to customers discuss what they are looking for from the next generation of storage technologies.

I set all of that up so you can understand the players and the mix of people at the event.

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Jan 13, 2012 | 1 comment View Post

Flood Affects Storage Industry


There was a great post a couple of weeks ago, with Tom Coughlin as a contributing editor, on Forbes’ news site about the floods that hit Thailand and how it will affect the disk drive market.  The great thing about the article is it truly highlights that necessity is the mother of invention.  What do I mean by that?  Over the past few “storage efficiency” has been a big topic with vendors.  Helping customers “do more with less”, especially in these stringent economic times, is key to the vitality of a number of businesses.  Technologies such as storage virtualization and thin provisioning have helped customers to slow their storage spend and get better utilization out of their existing storage.  Once customers have moved their utilization rates from 35% to 65% or 70%, time comes when new storage needs to be acquired to keep up with the growth of data.  The issue comes when there are no more disk drives to be acquired.  Due to the floods in Thailand, analysts predict that the storage industry could be 50 to 60 million units shy of the demand this quarter.  This does two things:

1)      Drives the price of disk higher, at a time when the expectation is to spend less for disk

2)      Has IT getting more creative on how they use and deploy their storage

It is the later that I want to focus on as paying more for disk is not necessarily the best option.  It is important to note that data grows for one reason, business does not stop, it needs to keep going and it is what is driving the demand on the data.

In the Forbes piece Tom talks about “a surge in new technologies because of this disk shortage” but he doesn’t cover some of the most innovative technologies that are available to help customers.  I would agree with Tom that we “could” see a surge in SSD but that would be short lived do to both supply and cost as well as a surge in tape, but these aren’t really “new technologies”.

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Dec 01, 2011 | 0 comments View Post

Fixed Input vs. Variable Input Compression


As a number of you know, I have been blogging about the merits of Real-time Compression.  It may be of some interest to know that when Ed Walsh, CEO of Storwize, asked me to join and told me the company focused on "compression", I first thought he was joking.  I mean the industry has had compression available for years.  The reality is, there is no other technology like Real-time Compression available from any vendor, and it is today, even more clear, why IBM chose to own this technology.  In the next few blog pieces I plan to talk about a few of the concepts of the IP that make this technology so far advanced than any / all of its competition. Today’s piece is about fixed input versus variable input compression.  This is a very simple concept to understand really.  Traditional compression uses a process called 'fixed input' / 'variable output'.  If we refer to the diagrams below, we start off with the original file on the left and the compressed file on the right.  The way traditional compression works (and you can actually watch this on your home computer if you winzip a file) is the following: The compression algorithm will 'chunk up' the original file into 'manageable' sizes before it compresses the file.  The tradeoff here, and why this process happens, is like with anything in computer science, performance for optimization.  The first diagram shows the large file being 'chunked up', compressed and stuffed into the smaller file.

 

  

Figure 1

There are two significant issues with this. The first issue is that the compression dictionary is not shared across multiple ‘chunks’ when compression is taking place.  The example in Figure 2 shows that the letter “F” in ‘chunk’ 1 does not get compressed with the letter “F” in ‘chunk’ 4.  This means that the compression ratio is simply not optimized across the file.

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Nov 03, 2011 | 0 comments View Post

Dell/Ocarina – Too Little, Too Late


On October 11, 2011, at Dell World, Dell announced a component to their DX6000G object based storage called an “SCN” or Storage Compression Node.  It is interesting that Dell would mention in their blog post that this is “Dell’s first Ocarina based solution…” What makes this interesting is the value proposition behind Ocarina was its ‘content aware’ deduplication, not necessarily compression.  That said, this blog post seems to be the ONLY information on Dell’s web site about the product and there is very little in the press about this product and the technology.

While it is nice to see that Dell, who has committed to their own storage technology, understanding that storage optimization is important, the reality is they are a little to late to the game.  I say this because the announcement that came from Dell around their 6000 is really bizarre.  First, the solution is an object based solution.  Didn't they learn anything from EMC?  The Centera is not gaining a lot of momentum these days, even if they had a lot of ISV partners.  In fact, it is loosing ground.  Object based storage was good before the whole 'Big Data' thing was the 'next big thing' but today, people need a big clustered file system, that is optimized, that can server not only unstructured based data, but also some structured data that allows you to find stuff quickly.  Also, the DX may be a good solution for data types that are of the media / entertainment only segment, but when it comes to running a business, it takes more than just this object based file structure to be successful.

To me, this solution is too little, too late.  Dell, in order to be a true competitor in the space that is highly scale-able, clustered file systems that are optimized, they need to advance their thinking.   This will be difficult for Dell.  First of all they are not known for technology advancement or integration.  Until they announced thier departure from EMC they didn't really have a major focus on storage and now with their acquisitions, the question is, what is their value prop.  Couple that with the fact that IBM has 1000's of patents in storage and Dell doesn't where does that leave the direction of Dell storage?

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Oct 27, 2011 | 0 comments View Post

Storage Efficiency Panel – SNW 2011 Fall


Yesterday I was on a panel at SNW in Orlando Florida.  The panel was hosted by Dave Vellente, Founder of Wikibon and always a great host for these kinds of things.  On the panel was Larry Freeman of NetApp, Craig Nunes of HP (formally 3Par), Jarred Floyed CTO / Founder at Permabit and myself, IBM (formally Storwize).

Some interesting data came out of this panel.  There were probably over 150 people in the audience.  It was a well-attended session.  Also, Dave is VERY good about asking the audience questions.  Let me start by making sure we all know where everyone sits at the “storage efficiency table” that was on the panel.

  • Larry Freeman is from NetApp – they claim, and I believe them, that they have 10 storage efficiency technologies that are embedded into WAFL
  • Craig Nunes main focus on the panel was ‘zero reclamation’ to optimize storage
  • I have a Real-time Compression drum I am beating
  • Jarred Floyed focuses on data deduplication

Here are some questions and answers Dave got when speaking to the audience:

Dave’s Question

Audience Response (in close estimated %)
How many people use deduplication / compression in their storage? 60% responded they did use one or both of these technologies in their environment
How do users use these technologies - embedded or appliance? 100% of the 60% said "embedded"
Who is your storage vendor was that provided these technologies? 100% of the 60% said NTAP
What is the number 1 issue was with the embedded solution and making it not more widely adopted? Performance was the answer.  They all believed that for 70% of their applications, the embedded solution was “good enough” but for 30% where performance is critical – it couldn’t do the job.
Why are not more appliances deployed to solve the performance issues? The response was that customers didn’t want to have to manage multiple solutions in their environment doing the same thing.
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Oct 11, 2011 | 0 comments View Post

Marketing Gone Awry


Okay, so not many times will you see a blog post from me admitting that, perhaps the marketing and messaging aspect of what I set out to do, probably could have been better thought out.

What am I saying?  Well, after the Storwize acquisition into IBM, and IBM so graciously took the “Storwize” name and put it on another product,  we needed to come up with a name for our technology and hence the name “Real-time Compression” was born.

Here is the problem.  The name really doesn’t do the technology justice, in a nutshell, it is a bad name.  Not because “Real-time Compression” isn’t important for all of the reasons we have talked about in the past, but because compression is not really a part of the overall IP of the platform.  As I have blogged about before, Real-time Compression use industry standard LZ compression to compress the data.  There is nothing really innovative behind that.  The value in Real-time Compression is really to allow the compression to happen in “real-time”, and that is the true innovation.  Thirty-five patents go into making the half a century old zip technology, actually useful in an enterprise environment.  The ability to perform the 5 essential storage efficiency technologies in real-time is now table stakes for storage optimization.

The issue is, by calling the technology “Real-time Compression” is it leaves the too much to the interpretation of the user and with the name “compression” users tend to ignore the “real-time” part, the valuable part, and only talk about the act of “compression”.  The reason why this is unfortunate is because the market has already set a perceived value for the technology called “compression” at free.  EMC and NetApp talk about having “compression for free”.  Well, as my grandfather used to tell me, Steve, “You always get what you pay for.”  The reality is you can’t do compression in real time with either of their technologies, they cause a huge impact to storage performance, they do not seamlessly integrate with backup and cause more of a headache for backup then they are worth, thereby you don’t get the level of storage efficiency out of their “free compression” technology.

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Oct 06, 2011 | 0 comments View Post

The Storage Alchemist in Prague


Alright, landed safe in Prague and was picked up by one of my colleagues and whisked away to the IBM office.  There we did an interview with Czech writer Martin Noska from Computerworld for IDG in Czech Republic.  The first Noska informed me was that IBM is the number one in storage sales in Czech Republic (just like Poland!).  He also had some very good questions and he with “What are IBM’s biggest challenges in the storage business”?  I had thought about this for a while and I would have to say it is really about marketing our storage “solutions” to the customer base.  IBM is a double edge sword.  IBM is so big and has so many products it becomes difficult to market or message all of our products without inundating all of our customers and confusing them.  If you think about it, IBM has hundreds of thousands of customers and business partners, if not more.  This is one of our strengths.  When customers have needs or requirements we have very good input into our product portfolio, perhaps the best in the business.  Combine this with the fact that IBM has not only storage solutions but technology across the entire stack from servers to networking.  So when it comes to developing the right technology, that solves real customer problems, I would argue that IBM’s portfolio is the best in the business.  IBM takes an extreme amount of care when developing a solution to ensure that it matches the customer requirements based on the changing needs of IT.  Having an integrated portfolio that works well with our ISV partners, VMware for example, allows us to help customers speed their time to ROI and be very competitive in the market place.  The challenge is, how do we properly message our new solutions to our customers, in a timely manner so that they are well aware of new products without giving them too much information such that it just becomes noise?  It is difficult to say the least.

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Sep 12, 2011 | 0 comments View Post

The Storage Alchemist in Sterdyn (Poland)


After landing in Warsaw, I got into a car with the local sales leader for Poland and we drove to the event location.  It was a 2 hour drive.  First, the roads and the land in Poland reminded me very much of my home time in Maine.  Very scenic and rural but beautiful and peaceful.  We talked storage for 2 hours and I am always festinated at the thirst for knowledge there is when I travel.  It was a great ride followed up by a customer reception and some local Polish brew.

Thursday I spent the day in Sterdyn, Poland for IBM Storage University.  There were 30 customers at the event and it went very very well.  The event was at Palac Ossolinski, today used as an event center but has a very rich history, in fact at one point it was used as a medical facility in WWII.  The photo is of the building where we had the event.  The topics we covered were:

  • Storage Efficiency
  • EasyTier
  • ProtecTIER
  • XIV
  • Real-time Compression
  • V7000

The customers were very interactive and provided a lot of insight to their environments.  Interestingly enough I learned during our customer reception that IBM storage is #1 in Poland with HP second and EMC third.  This is a true testament to the IBM sellers and the customers who use the IBM products every day to drive their business.  I also learned that the data break down in Poland is 90% block, 10% file which I found interesting and would be interested to check back 12 months from today to see how it will be different.

I did learn something very interesting in Poland.  The question was asked “Why XIV”?  What is so special about XIV.  The answer was awesome.  The answer started with 2 questions:

1)      How old is RAID?

2)      How old is your iPhone?

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Sep 09, 2011 | 0 comments View Post

The Storage Alchemist in Moscow


 

The first city on my Eastern European trip was Moscow.  I think the traffic here is worse than the 101 in Silicon Valley during the dot com era.  That said, it was a great visit.  I spoke at the Information Infrastructure Conference at the Swissotel convention center in Moscow.  It was the first time I spoke to a group of people with an interpreter.  It was like being at the UN.  The two main topics were Storage Efficiency and Real-time Compression.

I spoke with a few customers and the press and in dealing with the data growth challenges they wanted to know, “When it comes to big data, what is next, is it ‘huge data’”?  Data growth clearly a concern.  Interesting enough though most of the questions, came around my title of “Evangelist”.  One report told me, “if an Evangelist is ‘preaching the word of storage’ then why not just call yourself an Apostle”?  How do you think that would look on an IBM business card: Global Storage Efficiency Apostle?

The next day I did a day of “sales enablement” in the Moscow office.  We discussed mostly how to sell and position Real-time Compression and what is next for the technology.  I was very impressed with the team.  They were very technical and knew quite a bit about Real-time Compression and really wanted to know in more detail how the technology was invented.  This means they are really talking about the technology and the customers are drilling down into the next level of detail.  There are a lot of good opportunities for the technology in Moscow and I look forward to hearing more about the success of Real-time Compression there.

I didn’t have a lot of time to sight see but I did make it to Red Square.  You can actually buy a beer outside in Red Square and walk around.  So I did.  I took a few photos and then as the US was getting going, I had some work calls to attend to.  That evening I spent on the 34th floor of my hotel having dinner.  It was a great view of Moscow.  I hope to come back.

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Sep 08, 2011 | 0 comments View Post
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