Category: IBM

IBM Day 1 – It’s Official


Between time off with the family this summer and all the work required to get done between ‘signing’ a deal to be acquired and ‘closing’ a deal to get acquired, the blog has been a bit slow.  But I am here now to tell you it is official.  Storwize is now Storwize, an IBM company.

As for myself, I am looking forward to the work of integrating the Storwize Technology into the IBM Storage portfolio.  The Storwize group will live under the STG organization under Brian Truskowski.  There is a new ground swell taking head at IBM these days all around storage efficiency.  To get a better understanding, please have a look at my new colleague, Tony Pearson’s blog discussing storage efficiency.  My job will be now to evangelize how IT now needs to take a look at all of the available storage “services” (clones, snapshots, thin provisioning, replication, compression, deduplication, etc…) can help to create an overall storage solution that allows them to reduce their over all $/TB on not only capital expense, but also on operational expense.

Lets face it, data growth isn’t slowing down and there is never a one size fits all solution for storage.  The great part about being a part of IBM now is that we have all the tools to pick from to architect a data storage solution, end to end, that allows customers to reduce their overall $/TB for both primary as well as secondary storage and make that storage much more efficient and work for the end user.

This is going to be an exciting time.  I am also anxious to continue the Storage Alchemist blog.  EMC, under the guise of Polly Pearson and Chuck Hollis taught me that social media is great, but social media done right, in a collaborative and thoughtful way can drive influence.  I join some of the best bloggers around from IBM.  (I have added Tony’s “Inside System Storage” – It is a great read.)

This is a preview of IBM Day 1 – It’s Official. Read the full post
PDF Download article as PDF
Aug 30, 2010 | 0 comments View Post

IBM to Acquire Storwize


As most of you have seen by now, IBM has entered into an agreement to acquire Storwize.  Being an ‘insider’ I obviously can’t disclose anything about the transaction or the roadmap of the technology inside IBM but what I can tell you is that the Storwize technology will be transforming the data storage industry.

In a webex performed by Storwize and IBM a few months ago, John Power discussed how the trend in the disk drive business, the $/GB being cut in half every 18 months, is not possible to sustain, at least for the foreseeable future.  Even the folks in Almaden labs haven’t been able to crack the code.  Disk drive can’t spin any faster, and you can’t put any more drive heads on disk actuator arm to get more data on a disk drive.

The storage industry evolves such that when internal technology can’t evolve any further, external forces need to come into play.  External forces (appliances) allow vendors to test theories in an effort to prove which new technologies are most effective and give vendors time to figure out how to integrate the new technology into the device.  This IS Storwize.  Bloggers have written that Storwize doesn’t stop the deluge of data at the source, the users or applications that create it.  Bu t until there is no longer a need for data, then we will keep on having a need for primary storage.  Bloggers have also said that by having an appliance that sits in front of your data, the only way to get it back is by having the appliance there to decompress the data.  I have news for all of you, if you want to optimize your data, no matter what you choose ,you are going to need the keys to the castle at some point to open the front gate.  The difference with the Storwize appliance is we don’t care what storage (CIFS / NFS) sits behind appliance, we are storage (vendor agnostic).

This is a preview of IBM to Acquire Storwize. Read the full post
Create PDF Download article as PDF
Aug 02, 2010 | 0 comments View Post

High Tech Marketing – Part Duo


It looks like the this while ‘viral video’ thing just wont die.  I am a big fan of 1938 media and their blog.  Lots of video on the blog, funny, hits home and is entertaining.  I check it out a couple times a day.  Loren Feldman is pretty funny.

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.

Post to Twitter

Permanent link to this post (266 words, 1 image, estimated 1:04 mins reading time)
PDF Download article as PDF
Jul 30, 2010 | 0 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.

This is a preview of Marketing, FUD and Doing What You Do Best. Read the full post
PDF Download Download article as PDF
Jun 21, 2010 | 10 comments View Post