“Think” Event in NY – Pretty Amazing
If you get to NY city, check out the Think Event at the Lincoln Center sponsored by IBM to commemorate their 100th Anniversary.
Category: Marketing
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. |
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 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.
Oct 06, 2011 | 0 comments
View Post
5 Most Interesting Things at VMworld 2011
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
#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.
Sep 06, 2011 | 0 comments
View Post
Storage in Eastern Europe
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.
Sep 04, 2011 | 0 comments
View Post
Top 10 Reasons to Use IBM for VM Deployments
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.
Aug 30, 2011 | 0 comments
View Post
5 Golden Rules of IT
Last week I was briefing Dan Kusnetzky, storage analyst from the Kusnetzky Group. I was briefing him on the value proposition of Real-time Compression and it's value proposition to all down stream processes, especially backup. Specifically I told him that there is NO technology available today that can have even 50% of the effect on the existing backup process that Real-time Compression could have without changing any architecture in the backup process.
Dan agreed, in fact, he told me that the Real-time Compression technology meets the "Golden Rules of IT". I asked Dan, "What are the Golden Rules of IT?" and he enlightened me. I didn't make these up so I can't take credit but thought they were definitely worth sharing, and a good rule of thumb to follow for IT. Here they are:
- If its not broke, don't fix it.
- Don't touch it, you'll break it.
- If you touched it, you broke it.
- Good enough, is good enough.
- Accept your "jerkdom" (Everybody is an Monday morning quarterback)
I have to agree, these are good rules to follow and a great complement to the Real-time Compression technology. The fact that this technology fits into any storage environment, transparently and can optimize storage up to 5x without any performance impact, is very simple and one of the only ways to have a significant, compounding budgetary affect for very little dough.
May 17, 2011 | 5 comments
View Post
Language Weaver – RtC – Total Transparency
See how Language Weaver has utilized IBM Real-time Compression and are getting 3 to 1 compression and the solution was totally transparent to their infrastructure.
Feb 18, 2011 | 2 comments
View Post
Shopzilla – IBM Real-time Compression is Transparent
Shopzilla has been a customer of the IBM Real-time Compression technology for over 2 years. Here they describe the benefits of the technology.
Feb 15, 2011 | 0 comments
View Post