Category: Replication

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

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

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

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.

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Sep 04, 2011 | 0 comments View Post

Storage Efficiency Spotlight at VMworld


VMworld Live 2011
Via: Wikibon

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Aug 29, 2011 | 0 comments View Post

Data Protection, Retention and Archive Starts with Data Value


It feels good to open up the blogging again to new topics, especially ones I am intimately familiar with.  (But have no fear, there will be references to primary storage optimization / compression.)

This weekend I had an interesting conversation with my Dad.  We were discussing backup.  My dad basically runs IT for the State of Maine.  The State of Maine uses CommVault backup software.  So I posed the question to him, “What would it take for you to rip out CommVault and replace it with another solution.  He thought about it for a moment and replied “I wouldn’t”.  His answer came down to a couple of reasons.

First was the expense.  It’s not just about buying the new software, it would be training people to run the new software and it would be about throwing away the massive investment they have in their existing product as well as converting all the years of backup takes created with one software to the new software.  This is one of the biggest things vendors forget when trying to sell a customer on their backup software.

Second was the fact that, feature for feature, the top 5 traditional backup software products are not really that different from one another.  Sure, I do agree that some products have features that others don’t, and others products have features that work better than others, but in reality, the delta is so small and the workarounds are so simple it doesn’t really matter.  Unless your replacing traditional backup software with an evolutionary source based data deduplication software (which is only applicable for some environments) there is no advantage to switching software.

The challenge is if Data Protection is still one of the biggest and most expensive pain points within IT, how do the problems get resolved if replacing the software controlling it all is too costly to change?

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May 09, 2011 | 1 comment View Post

Real-time Compression “Meets Minimum”


IBM's Ed Walsh, Director of Storage Efficiency sits down with Steve Duplessie, Founder of ESG to talk about how IBM Real-time Compression sets the bar for doing storage optimization in NAS. At the end of the day, if you can do compression in real time, without sacrificing performance and the transparency of the implementation, then why wouldn't you - given the savings you can get over traditional compression.

We all know compression is not new and it is coming as a standard feature in a number of storage systems. The issue is, each of these technologies has a significant impact on performance - both primary storage performance as well as the performance on all of the back end operations such as backups, replication etc...

IBM's Real-time Compression doesn't have any of these limitations - listen to Ed to hear more.

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Jan 19, 2011 | 0 comments View Post

Disk Elasticity and Storage Efficiency


Storage is elastic.  How do I know you ask?  Yesterday I visited a customer who is using the Storwize product to do Real-time Compression on their primary storage.  The customer is Allianz and has been using the product for over a year.  They see 75% compression on their users home directory data.  To give you an idea, Allianz is an insurance company and generates TONS of spreadsheets, 14TB worth of spreadsheets (okay, not all 14TB is spreadsheets but you get the picture).

Prior to Allianz purchasing the Storwize technology, Allianz didn’t have great data management practices.  Users store data in their home directories and there is really no discipline around deleting or cleaning up files so data just grows.  Additionally, storage isn’t really budgeted for.  Overall IT is but at a storage level, they just purchase some when the need some.

Again, prior to the Storwize technology, Allianz had their primary storage and a backup to tape at their local site.  They then replicated the data to their remote site and also performed a backup to tape.

Allianz has an overall IT mission to reduce spend by 10% per year.  The thing to think about is that this 10% could come from a lot of places including data management.

Once the Storwize technology was installed the first things they saw were:

  • 75% capacity optimization
  • Better data management capabilities through Storwize reporting
  • The ability to keep more data on line and available for faster recoveries
  • No change in any of their existing storage processes
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Oct 05, 2010 | 2 comments View Post
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