Category: Storage

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 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
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 Creator Download article as PDF
Jul 30, 2010 | 0 comments View Post

6 Ways to Tell Your Boss You’re Saving Him Money


Ever had this situation.  You know you know the right thing to do but convincing the non-techie that you need to move forward on a project tough.  Try some of these techniques!

More funny, viral video, shameless advertising.

For more information on how 15 minutes can save you 50% or more of your storage go to www.storwize.com

Post to Twitter

Permanent link to this post (59 words, 1 image, estimated 14 secs reading time)
PDF Printer Download article as PDF
Jul 26, 2010 | 1 comment View Post

Sever + Storage Optimization = Datacenter Utopia


Matt Prigge had a really great article on his InfoWorld Data Explosion blog called “VMware vSphere raises the bar — again“.  In the piece Matt makes two really important points.

1.  VMware has taken the world by storm over the past few years.  A technology that can lower both CapEx and OpEx costs and ease the burden of administration is a great thing for the data center.  And,

2.  With all the advantages of virtual server optimization, storage administration, is a big issue.

VSphere has done a lot to help the issues of storage administration (specifically storage performance for virtual servers) but that is only a part of the challenge.  Customers consistently tell us that by developing a virtualized server environment, their storage requirements have grown by as much as 4x.  The savings that have been realized by server virtualization are soon eclipsed by the need for more storage.  This  is one of the reasons it has taken a while for server virtualization to really take off in production.  In talking to customers, virtualizing a lab or test environment where data can be deleted once it is ‘used’ without worry is one thing, but in production, where the production data needs to be kept for a long time starts to cause issues.

Now, with all the hype around primary storage optimization, end users can couple the benefits of server virtualization with primary storage optimization to maximize their ROI in the datacenter.  The important thing to remember, just like server virtualization didn’t force customers to sacrifice anything in terms of performance, availability, process and supportability, you need to look for the same thing from a storage optimization solution.

The valuable features added to vSphere around SIOC combined with the optimization capabilities from Storwize can allow IT to maximize storage performance, maximize their existing storage resources and not affect data integrity or data availability.  There is a new white paper on the combined solution of VMware and Storwize that outlines how VMware and Storwize can provide customers with the maximum ROI in the datacenter.

This is a preview of Sever + Storage Optimization = Datacenter Utopia. Read the full post
PDF Creator Download article as PDF
Jul 22, 2010 | 0 comments View Post

A Bright New Day – Part Duo


I am not sure how many of you have seen the ABC show ‘V’ but it looks like they have it looks like they have two things in common with Storwize.

First, if you are unfamiliar with the show V – the description from their website is as follows:

The Visitors spread their message quickly and clearly: They come in peace, bearing gifts of medical miracles and technological breakthroughs far beyond our wildest imaginations.

Very similar to Storwize.  We visit customers in peace bearing gifts of miracles and technology breakthroughs beyond their wildest imaginations.  Storwize is the only company to do real-time data storage compression without performance degradation.  As the growth of data exceeding 487M TB (IDC 2008 study) something has to be done to control this growth and end users are quickly turning to capacity optimization technologies to control this growth and more  specifically to Storwize Real-time compression.

With another banner quarter under the belt, I had an opportunity to meet with a number of existing customers as well as customers to be.  One of the more interesting meetings came when I met with a large manufacture in the mid-west.  We were sitting with the storage architecture team and the finance team.  We were going through our usual presentation, showing the finance folks the savings they were able to achieve with Storwize.  Storwize was able to compress their data 66% giving them back more than half of their storage capacity that they could continue to grow into.  We also showed them how there was no impact to their production environment with the Storwize appliances in line.  The finance folks were VERY impressed.  At that moment one of the storage architects jumped out of his seat and said, “But wait, your forgetting the most important point.”  To which we all looked at each other a bit perplexed and said, “Oh, what is that?” And he replied, “Storwize is Butt Simple!”.  He went on to say that the deployment (during their POC) caused no down time (they were in an HA environment) and once in place, they just started compressing – no change to their filers, no change to their networks, no change to their applications and the end users never even knew anything different.  He said, “Storwize makes my job simple and look like a hero to my boss!”.

This is a preview of A Bright New Day – Part Duo. Read the full post
PDF Download Download article as PDF
Jul 09, 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 article as PDF
Jun 21, 2010 | 10 comments View Post

A Blog with no Comments?


Today I read a very well written blog by The SANMan.  The only issue is, you can’t comment on his blog.  This is the first technology blog I have seen like this.  So, I will have to post my thought here.

In his post “NetApp Takes the “Primary” Lead for Data Reduction” – which seems more like theory and a commercial for NTAP than reality (see comments @ The Register) the SANMan states:

“Yes, Ocarina and Storwize have appliances that compress and uncompress data as it’s alternatively stored and read but what performance overhead do such technologies have when hundreds of end users concurrently access the same email attachment? As for Oracle’s Solaris ZFS file system sub level deduplication which is yet to see the light of day one wonders how much hot water it will get Oracle into should it turn out to be a direct rip off of the NetApp model.”

I have two comments:

1) You are right – you CAN’T do deduplicaiton on primary if you affect performance.  All indications for customers are that they cannot use NTAP deduplicaiton or even compression ‘in-line’ as the performance is just too terrible so all processes must be done post-process.

2) I direct your attention to the Wikibon Blog on CORE - “Dedupe Rates Matter…Just Not as Much as You Think” – Storwize can do in-line data optimization without any performance degradation.  So the question is – if customers can ‘Optimize without Compromise’ – why wouldn’t they?

Updated 6/7/2010 – Oh, quick question – how does the SANMan get away with the graphics he uses?  I would think that Walt Disney & Pixar would get a bit upset with the use of the character Carl Fredricksen, no?

Post to Twitter

Permanent link to this post (288 words, 1 image, estimated 1:09 mins reading time)
PDF Download Download article as PDF
Jun 04, 2010 | 0 comments View Post

Compression 101 for CFOs


CFOs have an incredibly hard job when it comes to helping IT manage a budget.  Let’s face it, there have been books written (like ‘Does IT Matter, by Carr) that discuss the value of all those blinking lights in the data center.

The reality is that some of those blinking lights do matter and others are a financial sink hole.  Over the past 3 years storage has crept up to be one of the higher cost items in the data center and storage is a lot like death and taxes, it just IS.  It is really the applications that drive revenue for your company and these applications just keep generating data which in 45 days will most likely be obsolete – well as least 90% of it.  The trick is which 90% and because no one can really tell which 90% you have to keep all of it.

Now let’s switch to technology for a moment.  For sure CFO’s have heard all the technology buzz words around IT.  Vendors today realize that they have to meet high ROI / TCO demands in order to effectively sell to customers, especially in the storage world.  One of these technologies is data deduplication.  On the surface (just by nature of its name) it seems like the defacto standard for all storage growth problems – just ‘deduplicate’ your data and all your storage issues go away.  Well, I am here to tell you ‘Don’t Get Duped by Dedupe’.  It may be the new fancy technology word for storage vendors, but when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

What I mean by this is that just because ‘deduplication’ is today’s storage buzz word, it is not a solution for all data growth challenges, especially for primary storage.  Compression, especially when done right – real time and random access, is the best solution for stemming the tide of primary storage growth.

This is a preview of Compression 101 for CFOs. Read the full post
PDF Download article as PDF
May 20, 2010 | 0 comments View Post

Setting the Record Straight on Backup


Or should I say, ‘Setting the Record Straight on Backing Up Optimized Data’?  Carter discusses on this blog they myriad of ways to perform backups on optimized data.  (His blog actually reads more like a white paper explaining how backup needs to be configured to work with his product.)  One of the ways Carter describes to do backup is via NDMP and says “… is the most complicated.” The funny thing is that this is the way that 90% of enterprises backup their NAS data.  The other scenarios are not quite stated correctly or are again designed to lead users to believe their solution is ‘simple’ when they really add complexity (however, I’ll let the backup community debate that – I have been in backup for 10+ years and I know this won’t go over on them, nor do I want to waste too much blog space).  Finally the last scenario they discuss isn’t backup – its replication, but I’ll address that too. Let’s address these one at a time.  First, Carter mentions that in some scenarios there is a need to rehydrate data in order to back it up.  The process of rehydrating data may not require that the array have the physical capacity to store the data before it is backed up, but the array will require the CPU resources, I/O resources, bandwidth and time to rehydrate to data to back it up.  George goes on to say that this situation is “ugly, but not that ugly”.  I will tell you any time you put more resource requirements on systems that do backups, your running the risk that backups won’t get done.  One of the greatest challenges in IT is backup.  Backup administrators are running into backup window problems all the time.  Data is growing not shrinking; having to do more work on more data in order to protect it is a recipe for failure.  In my previous comments I may have incorrectly stated you need more disk space to do the backups, but I did correctly state that the array will require more system resources.  And where do these resources come from?  When the system is idle?  When is your storage array idle? Now, what if all you had to do was – well nothing.  Storwize sits in front of primary storage and stores your data, compressed, in real-time with no performance impact and preserving the envelope of the data file.  Then when it comes time to backup, the backup administrator does absolutely nothing different that he/she did yesterday.  Same shares are backed up, same clients, and all the work is done by the Storwize appliance, there is no load on the filer.  The next question is can Storwize keep up with the backup stream and the answer is YES.  As you saw in the Wikibon CORE blog, our time to compress is on the order of magnitude of milliseconds – the time to decompress is even less.  (I should also mention one thing Carter failed to mention, in order for backups to come off their system ‘transparently’ you need a software agent on the client – who wants to manage more clients?

This is a preview of Setting the Record Straight on Backup. Read the full post
PDF Printer Download article as PDF
May 11, 2010 | 0 comments View Post
Next Page »