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?

When you look at the fact that IBM has industry knowledge and studies that disk can't grow at the rate it did in the late 90's and keep costs low, you need optimization technology to help you maximize disk capacities.  Combine this with the fact that Dell doesn't invent anything but acquires it, and if we take a look at how long it took for Dell to deliver a "compression" product from their acquisition, it leads us to believe that there will be a long time before Dell is ready to be a formidable player in the storage business when it comes to delivering products or technology that move customers past the commodity infrastructure plays to the advanced solutions that deliver capacity at the right price.  If it took over a year for Dell to get the Ocarina stuff to the market in a technology that is really "old school" technology, what are we expecting for the future of Dell storage?

My opinion is Dell will always be the low cost supplier of commodity hardware to risk adverse small businesses.  Integrating next generation technology will not be their forte.

Two solid days at VMworld 2011 and I got to do and see a lot.  Here is a breakdown of the top 5 things I saw at VMworld.

#1 The SiliconAngle / Wikibon Cube

You couldn’t miss it.  You walk into the show floor and there they were, larger than life.  The SiliconAngle / Wikibon Cube broadcasting live from VMworld2011.  Guests that were on the cube included, Tom Georgens (NTAP), Pat Gelsinger (EMC), David Scott (HP), Rick Jackson (VMware) as well as many more.  The Cube also had 12 Industry Spotlights.  The most interesting spotlight had to do with Storage Optimization, especially for VMware.

Oh the times they are a changing.  Now that you can deliver HD TV live over the internet, the Cube has broadcast from a number industry shows and user conferences.  The great part about this, it is like the ability to watch a sporting event being covered by ESPN but for tech.  The Cube brings all of the highlights of these events right into your computer screen.  Now if you can’t make an event, no problem, you can catch all the most important messages from the Cube.  The Cube is now the new mechanism for delivering content to users in the way they want to receive the content, TV.  For more, check out www.siliconangle.tv

#2 Storage Optimization – Industry Spotlight

In the Storage Optimization industry spotlight, the first 15 minutes Dave Vellante and his co-host John Furrier tee up the concept.  They discussed storage optimization, where it has come and were it is going, especially in VMware environments.  We are hearing more and more about storage efficiency technologies.  During the next 15 minutes Dave and I discussed the 5 essential storage efficiency technologies including:

• Tiering
• Thin Provisioning
• Virtualization
• Compression
• Deduplication

We also discussed the fact that the IBM Real-time Compression technology is not only the most efficient and effective compression technology in the industry; we also learned that IBM really acquired not just a real-time “compression” technology but a platform that can do a number of things in real time.  In fact, the 5 IBM storage efficiency technologies all operate in real time which is the most effective for customers.

We have been hearing a great deal about storage optimization in a VMware environment due to the fact that virtualizing servers was successful for the server side of the house but it didn’t do all it set out to do, it didn’t fix the overall IT budget.

Virtualizing servers only pushed the financial problem to the storage side of the house.  Users have told us that when they virtualize their servers, storage grows as much as 4x.  By leveraging the right storage optimization technologies together, users can get their budgets back under control and also deliver the promise that server virtualization set out to do.

#3 More Free Time for “Real-life”

While on the Cube as a panelist with my good friend Marc Farley (HPsisyphus, formally @3ParFarley) Dave asked us what was the most interesting thing we saw on the show floor while walking around.  I didn’t hesitate in my response.  There were two in my mind.  First, it couldn’t be any more obvious at how fast data is growing.  Over 50% of the 19,000 people there had cameras taking pictures and taking video.  That data is going to be stored somewhere.  Additionally, they had these cameras for a reason.  Either we have more bloggers and tweeters than we know about, more marketing people are going to these events or more people are using social media to inform and educate others.  The way in which users want to receive data is always changing and evolving, and at least at VMworld 2011 we were delivering content in a number of ways especially photos and video.  All that data will end up in the “cloud” somewhere.

The second thing I noticed was the amount of free time VMware has given back to the IT user.  I heard, on more than one occasion, end users talking about family, vacations and travel instead of the usual banter about how challenging their jobs are and the issues they have with their vendors which is the normal think I hear at these shows.  This was not an anomaly.  I am chalking it up to the fact that VMware makes people’s lives easier.

#4 Proximal Data

These “most interesting things” are not in any particular order.  I say this because I believe that Proximal Data is THE most interesting thing I saw at the show.  Now Proximal Data just came out of “stealth” in early August.  They didn’t have a booth at VMworld but they did have a “whisper suite”.  So, I have to confess, since I used to be an analyst, sometimes people will ask me to come take a look at their technology and their message to see if it is in line with what is going on in the industry so I got to hear the pitch.

Proximal Data’s message is right on.  It hits a very important and growing topic with VMware these days, the I/O bottle neck on virtual servers, and they solve this problem in a very unique and intelligent way.

First, the problem.  One of the issues facing VMware today is the number of virtual machines that can be hosted by one physical machine.  The more users can get on one system, the more efficient they can be.  The problem is, today systems are running into I/O workload bottlenecks that are causing a limitation in the number of virtual machines one system can run.

One way to solve this problem is add more memory to the host but that could be very very expensive.  You can add more HBA’s or NIC cards but that can be expensive and also difficult to manage.  You can add more flash cache to your storage to improve the I/O bottleneck but doing that only solves ½ the problem, you still need to solve the challenge on the host side, again with memory or host adaptors.

The solution: Proximal Data.  With some advanced I/O management software capabilities combined with PCI flash cards on the host, for a very reasonable price per host.  The software combined with the card is 100% transparent to both the virtual servers and to the storage, which to me is one of the most important features of the implementation.  Transparency is the key to any new technology.  IT has a ton of challenges and has done a great deal of work to get their environment to where it is today.  To implement a technology that causes all of that work to be undone is very painful.  Remember, the hardest thing to change in IT is process, not technology.  It’s important to preserve the process.  That is what Proximal Data does.  Proximal Data can increase the I/O capability of a VMware server with just a 5 minute installation of the PCI card and their software.  This technology can double and even triple the number of virtual machines on any physical server and that is a tremendous ROI.  A new win for efficiency.

There are a number of folks entering this market these days; however Proximal does it transparently with no agents making it the most user friendly implementation.  While these guys won’t have product until 2012, when it hits the market, I am sure it will be very successful.

#5 Convergence to the Cloud

Are we seeing the coming of the “God Box”?  A number of vendors are talking more and more as well as investing in public / private cloud.  There are more systems popping up that have servers, networks, high availability and storage all in one floor tile.  These systems are designed to integrate, scale, manage VM’s simply, increase productivity and ease the management of all possible application deployments in any business.  Additionally these boxes help you to connect to the cloud to ease the cost burden.  Is the pendulum swinging back to the “open systems” main frame?  Only time will tell.

Bonus

One more for fun.  The first meeting I had at VMworld was with a potential OEM prospect of the IBM Real-time Compression IP.  I have always said that this technology could revolutionize the data storage business much like VxVM did for Veritas many years ago.  Creating a standard way to do compression across a number of system can help users with implementation as well as ease the storage cost burden.  I hope this moves forward and I hope more folks step up who want to OEM the technology.

Today I begin a 12 day trip to Easter Europe to talk about IBM Storage.

The trip will take me to:

• Moscow, Russia
• Warsaw, Poland
• Prague, Czech Republic
• Ljubljana, Slovenia
• Umag, Croatia

In Russia, on September 6, I will be at the Information Infrastructure Conference and the following day meeting with customers to discuss storage and storage efficiency.

In Poland on September 8, I will be presenting IBM’s Real-time Compression at Storage University.

In Prague I will be meeting with the press as well as speaking with customers.  Additionally, I will be spending the weekend in Prague, a city I have always wanted to visit.

In Slovenia on September 14, I will be presenting at IBM’s Innovation Center at an IBM Solutions Event.

Finally in Croatia on September 15, I will be at the IBM Forum, the largest IBM even in Croatia.

In each location, I will be speaking with partners and customer on IBM’s innovation in storage, storage efficiency and Real-time Compression.  I am looking forward to learning what the largest storage challenges are across Eastern Europe and users go about solving their challenges.  Additionally, I will be doing some local enablement for our partners and sellers.

I will blog from each location.  I will talk about the professional part of my travels as well as, hopefully, one personal event.  I have tried to make sure that in each city I have time to do one interesting thing.  I don’t know when, if ever, I’ll be back to these cities and these are some places I have always hoped to go.  Too often we travel and its all business.

Also stay tuned, when I land I will have an update from my trip to VMworld.  It was fantastic.  Truly the best end user show around.  I learned a great deal and can’t wait to share some of what I saw.  As always – comments are always welcome.

IBM @ VMworld 2011

After a full first day at VMworld, I started to think more about IBM and their technology solutions that help customers in a VMware environment.  Here is a top ten list of things to consider when looking at a VMware implementation and how IBM can help.

#1 Integration

VMware is playing Switzerland and ensuring all vendors are on a level playing field, so when other vendors state that they have “better” or “closer” technology integration than other vendors its probably not true.  Some vendors may not choose to integrate with certain things, but rest assured, all of   VMware’s APIs are open to all vendors.  Take a look and see how IBM is providing plug-ins for vSphere, SRM, and VAAI in XIV as well as other storage platforms.

#2 Ease of Use

IBM has seen, firsthand, a number of our customers switch from different competitive platforms to XIV because of the simplicity of the XIV solution.  A large manufacturer is one example of a customer who is provisioning new VMware instances in less than five minutes with XIV. 

Another XIV customer, who is a very experienced storage administrator, saw the XIV GUI and quoted "I don't get it (XIV GUI).  It can't be that easy.  Either I'm missing something or they are not showing me everything."  Well, the reality is, it is that easy and that interface is prolific throughout the IBM storage portfolio including the Storwize V7000 and SVC.

#3 Storage Efficiency

Probably one of the most important topics this year is Storage Efficiency and IBM is a leader in this department.  The N-Series with the Real-time Compression appliance can reduce the VMware storage footprint up to 75%.  Users tell us that by implementing VMware, their storage footprint has grown by as much as 4x.  Therefore their overall IT budgets didn’t get better, the dollars just shifted from servers to storage.  IBM’s Real-time Compression users can save up to 75% without any performance impact.  Additionally, Real-time Compression is the only compression technology that works in conjunction with deduplication, compressing the data before it is dedplicated, giving an added benefit to the technology.

Now users have the opportunity to get their overall IT budget back under control.

#4 Data Protection

The reality here is that many enterprises are waiting for the war to be fought out between the vendors in this space, or looking to embedded snapshots and disk based technologies with mirroring to cut out all of the host based challenges with data protection. 

A report by Taneja Group, sponsored by multiple clients, suggests that the biggest issue in virtual environment is data protection as many enterprise do not know what they need to do and they are looking at their current vendors to provide solutions.  So work closely with the IBM team and leverage all of the work that IBM has done with Tivoli and VMware to help solve your data protection challenges. 

A lot of folks like to talk about deduplication when it comes to VMware, just make sure it is implemented properly and at the right place.  ProtecTIER has great deduplication ratios and great  performance. 

#5 Flexibility

I am not sure how you get more flexible then working with IBM.  From hardware to software to services to partners, IBM offers solutions across a wide spectrum.  Whether it be hardware solutions that can meet a range of performance requirements and application types, to software that can help users analyze their data more effectively.  IBM can also deliver all of these solutions through our relationships with or ISVs as well as partners offering superior flexibility. 

#6 Availability

When it comes to high availability in storage, it is hard to beat the new V7000 or the XIV product.  Innovatively designed specifically around high availability, users can move to a virtualized storage platform such as XIV and users can see the real-world of availability and reliability that does not sacrifice performance in any of their applications. 

#7 Scalability

With IBM XIV, you can simple scale as you need to and automatically and take advantage of new capacity and linear performance improvements as well as managing the entire enterprise from a single, easy to use GUI.

Also, with Real-time Compression, you now have the added benefit of putting more capacity in your existing footprint to do even more analytics while saving on footprint, power and cooling – all in real-time.

#8 Services / Solutions

IBM is the worldwide leader in providing services.  IBM is the largest OEM of VMware solutions on the planet and provides support and services in 170 countries around the globe.   IBM’s Global Services team has architected and installed hundreds, if not thousands of VMware implementations, helping customers go from a non-virtualized to a virtualized world.  IBM, as well as its partners, can help migrate customers to a virtualized environment without a long outage and maintain application and customer production.

#9 TCO / ROI

IBM offers great solutions that reduce the risk, cost, and complexity of the virtualized world.  IBM focuses on the real-world customer challenges.  Customers have been hit hard these last few years when it comes to budgets in order to manage their IT environments.  We keep helping our customers do more with less by enabling a more efficient storage platform than any other vendor.  IBM XIV, V7000, N-Series, SVC and ProtecTIER solutions are great fit for solving difficult VMware challenges and we have real-world references to prove it.

#10 100 Years of Innovation

The bottom line: there is always more to do, IT changes at a rapid pace and it is the vendors job to keep up with the needs of its customers.  IBM has been doing this for 100 years and we will continue to do so.  

For more on IBM and Storage Efficiency at VMworld, see us on SiliconAngle.tv live this week at 3:30 PT.

History truly does repeat itself.  We are talking about the history of data storage.  Every once and a while a new technology comes along that requires a new way to think about infrastructure.  Notice I said “infrastructure”.  I’d like to paint two analogies:

Analogy 1: RAID – Prior to RAID users stored their data on disk and if they could afford it, they backed that data up to have a protected copy of their data.  When RAID came out, users were able to store their data on multiple disks appearing as one device.  The benefits to this were, increased data reliability, better performance.  This new technology however, fundamentally changed how disk was sold, but the questions were the same:

1. How much capacity do you need?
2. What type of performance does your application require?

The sales reps point of view changed.  There were a number of new considerations that needed to be taken into account.  First, the age old question, “Will I sell less storage “stuff?”  Remember the person, at the time, selling the disk was probably also selling the backup tape and software to protect that information.  If the disks are more reliable, maybe the customer won’t need as much tape?  Second, when the capacity question came up, the seller also needed to know what type of RAID the customer wanted to ensure they sold them enough drives.  It was no longer as simple as asking the capacity requirements and dividing it by the drive capacity at the time.  Now depending upon RAID levels there was a new set of math that needed to be done.  Third was the notion of performance and more spindles meant more performance so now that the capacity equation was solved for, you also needed to know the I/O requirements in order to make sure the right number of drives were sold to solve for the capacity as well as the performance.

Guess what, we figured it out and the industry never looked back.  RAID is a defacto standard in all storage subsystems today, I even run RAID in my home.  The business benefits of having RAID far outweighed the costs.  In fact, it is probably one of the first times in storage history that the question of, “how can you afford not to have it”, came up.

Analogy 2: Virtual Machines – When VMware came out the value proposition was, do more work, with less physical infrastructure.  And again, the business benefits far outweighed the technology hurdle of implementing the new solution.

Keeping in mind that it is much harder to change process in IT than it is to change technology, IT decided that this new way of serving up processing power to applications was well worth all of the process changes that it would require.  One example, backup would need to change when implementing virtual server technology.  The data would grow 4x and the processing of that information for backup would take longer, in a world where time was all to valuable.  However the business benefit justified the change.

Again, the sellers questions were consistent:

1. How many virtual servers do you need? (Capacity)
2. What type of performance do you need for each virtual server?

The answers to these questions allowed a sales rep to configure the right number of physical systems to handle the right number of systems to make the line of business successful.  Additionally, some of the same considerations came up.  “Will I sell less server and make less money?”  Now that there was new server technology (more processors, the ability to handle more memory) systems could be bigger, and more expensive.  Sellers also needed to know a bit more about “capacity”, how many virtual systems could a physical system run successfully?  They also needed to have an understanding of performance.  Now sellers were configuring systems to run the equivalent of 20 to 100 servers on one system.

Today I would suggest that we are at a cross roads in history. New technology has come along that will have a significant impact on the storage world.  First, research from IBM reflects the fact that disk drives can no longer keep getting two times as dense for half the cost as they had been throughout the late 90’s and early 2000’s.  The technology doesn’t exist today to make the drives spin faster, stay cool and not loose data.  Until now.  Real-time compression is a game changing technology that will add significant value to the storage industry without having to change the way IT thinks about the deployment of their storage.

Data is growing at such a significant pace today and with the latest IBM research about disk capacities, something needs to change.  Data centers are just running out of space and more customers want to keep more data on line for reasons such as competitive edge or compliance, but no matter the reason, they want access to their information.  Enter real-time compression.  Now there is a fundamental difference between real-time compression and other compression technologies and compression implementations but I am not going get into it here, but it is safe to say that post process and in-line compression are very different than real-time compression and users can’t get the benefits of improved primary storage capacity, transparently, with no performance impact with anything but real-time compression technology.

Again, real-time compression, like other game changing technology, doesn’t require any new questions; there are just simply a new set of math equations.

1. How much capacity is required?
2. What is the performance requirement?

In time, real-time compression will be as ubiquitous as RAID, and just like users don’t think that much about RAID, users won’t need to think about compression.  Compression will become an expected feature of the array.  It doesn’t matter that it now takes fewer drives to satisfy the original question around capacity and performance.  With data growing as fast as it is and with disks not being able to keep up their growth pace, something needs to change and that something is real-time compression.  Soon, it won’t matter what the physical disk capacity is of a disk drive, it will be about a disks virtual disk capacity, what it has the capability of storing that matters.  It is time we all started thinking this way.

“Storage Efficiency” has become a big topic over the past 12 months.  There are a number of new technologies that have come out in the last few years that are helping to deal with storage growth.  We all know that data is the root of the decisions that drive business today.  The more data you have, hopefully, the better decisions you can make to drive your business to success.  The question is, “what is the value (and hence the cost) of the infrastructure to create that success?”  What we do know is that the ability to put more data in a highly efficient footprint can give your company a competitive edge.  There are five technologies that can help an IT organization create an efficient storage infrastructure.  These are:

1)      Tiering

2)      Virtualization

3)      Thin Provisioning

4)      Compression

5)      Deduplication

It is also important to point out that there are some semantics when talking about storage efficiency, specifically between efficiency and optimization technologies.  I think it is useful to attempt to define these as they lead us to picking the right solutions for what we are trying to accomplish.  For the purpose of this post, efficiency will relate to making existing capacity more useful and optimization will mean making more capacity out of existing capacity.

Using these definitions, technologies such as Tiering, Virtualization and Thin Provisioning are efficiency technologies.  These technologies help to utilize the existing capacity that you have.

Tiering is technology that is used on about 10% of your data or less.  It is used to move data that requires higher performance to flash storage.  Good tiering technology analyzes data access patterns and moves the most active data to the highest performing disk.  It doesn’t really change the amount of physical capacity that is required; it just changes what type of capacity is required and allows IT to make sure data is operating as fast and efficiently as possible.

Virtualization technology allows IT to make sure disk utilization is used as efficiently as possible.   Until recently storage utilization rates were around 50%.  By leveraging virtualization technology, IT can group pools of storage so they don’t need to purchase capacity needlessly.  Virtualization can be used on 50% to 60% of your storage but it doesn’t change your physical capacity infrastructure requirements and at most allows users to take advantage of 20% to 40% of their capacity that they once didn’t access.

Similar to Virtualization technology, thin provisioning technology also can be used on 50% to 60% of your capacity however, thin provisioning technology gives IT about 10% to 40% of their capacity back.  Thin Provisioning helps IT manage their existing capacity and their utilization by being able to make capacity available to users much easier again however it doesn’t change the amount of physical storage infrastructure required.

Optimization technologies help IT to better manage their physical storage footprint.  Optimization technologies optimize existing infrastructure by allowing users to put more capacity in the physical same space.  The two technologies that are currently used today are data deduplication and real-time compression.

Optimization technologies are a bit tricky.  There is a balance that is required between optimization and performance and availability.  At the end of the day, IT chooses the storage it buys with two very important characteristics in mind, performance and availability.  Optimization technologies can not affect these characteristics.  It is for this reason that data deduplication really isn’t ready for “prime time” on primary, active storage.  Data deduplication creates too much of a performance impact on primary, active data.  Today, data deduplication could be used on about 10% to 15% of the primary, less active capacity that is in the data center and only provides about 30% to 50% overall optimization.  In other words deduplication technology can impact the physical infrastructure by as much as 10%, meaning IT may not need to buy as much physical capacity.

Real-time compression, on the other hand, has one of the most dramatic affects on primary storage capacity.  Real-time compression can be used on as much as 85% of the storage footprint and can compress data between 50% and 80%.  That said Real-time compression could have IT purchase as much as 70% less overall storage capacity.  Real-time compression also does not affect the main characteristics for which users buy storage (performance and availability).  IT could have as much as 70% less footprint but keep the same amount of data or more on-line.  Additionally, IT can now purchase storage opportunistically without having to have such a dramatic impact on their infrastructure, process or budgets.  This allows companies to keep more capacity on line and available to help companies do more analytics on more capacity and become more competitive.

When deciding which storage efficiency technology will have a more effective impact on your overall environment and budget, start with optimization technologies and start to get the data growth under control.  Adding value to the line of business that can drive revenue with more data will make you a hero and your business more successful.

See how data deduplication and IBM Real-time Compression work hand in hand.

]]> http://www.thestoragealchemist.com/storage-alchemist-video-update-2/feed/ 0 http://www.thestoragealchemist.com/linked-in-storage-discussion-on-storage-efficiency/ http://www.thestoragealchemist.com/linked-in-storage-discussion-on-storage-efficiency/#comments Tue, 04 Jan 2011 21:21:09 +0000 Steve Kenniston http://www.thestoragealchemist.com/?p=1048

Great conversation on Linked In about deduplication and compression for storage efficiency in the Data Storage Professionals Group.  Help the storage community answer this question:

Does anyone has any experience in NAS de-duplication at filesystem level, like NetApps. Does it really work? I concerns/limitations?

Today he makes a great point about this 'viral video' stuff.  In his post he asks the most direct question we have all been avoiding - perhaps because its too early to tell but non the less - 'Did it Work or Not?" - pretty simple.

(video from www.1938media.com Copyright © 2010 1938 Media - All Rights Reserved.)

For Storwize I can tell you it did.  Why, we didn't pay to have 1,000,000 high school kid click on the video.  Our objective was name recognition and we got our name out there.  How do I know that, because exactly what I had hoped would happen, happened - I got a call from our rep in CA who said she cold called an IT guy who said, "Oh, you guys had that funny video of a guy explaining to his boss how to save him money, that was cool, sure, I'll take a meeting."

We may not have got a million hits and having any type of bragging rights, we may not have got 10,000 people to come to our site to learn about Storwize and register for white papers and use our ROI tool, but we did raise our awareness in the IT world over the last 30 days and that is good enough for me.