Category: Virtualization

Defining Big Data


Tuesday night I attended an event – storagefest II 2012, which was hosted by Valhalla Partners.  The event was a dinner with a group of storage experts from all vectors of the storage industry.  There were customers of storage technologies, VCs with investments in storage, entrepreneurs (folks from storage startups), industry insiders (analysts) and folks from storage companies who have been acquired into large companies.  The goal of the event also had multiple vectors, specific to each "group" that attended.

VCs attend to hear what customers have to say about the state of the storage industry and what they should be investing in or if the storage startups they have invested in are doing the right things.  They also listen to people who have had successful exits and the advice they may have for running a successful storage business.

Customers attend to hear what is new in the storage business and to share their experiences and challenges within their infrastructure, and what they are looking for from their storage technologies and new companies.

Entrepreneurs attend to lend their advice, to see what is new and share ideas.

Industry insiders attend to learn more about customer challenges, who has the best chance at solving these challenges, how the industry is shaping up and to report on the event.

Large company attendees, people who have had successful exits into the large company, are typically in influential roles in their new company and go to learn about how the industry is evolving and what new technologies are out there that they may want to add to the portfolio of the larger company.  It is also a good chance to listen to customers discuss what they are looking for from the next generation of storage technologies.

I set all of that up so you can understand the players and the mix of people at the event.

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Jan 13, 2012 | 1 comment View Post

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 Lubianijana, Slovenia and Umag, Croatia


Okay, so I rounded out my trip after leaving Prague to Slovenia and Croatia.  In both locations there was an IBM Storage Forum conference.  In Slovenia, IBM has just moved into a new building this year called Crystal Palace.  It was very beautiful.  The highlights of the Form were Cloud, Big Data and Real-time Compression.  At the IBM Slovenia Form I discussed Real-time Compression.  There were approximately 80 customers and partners at the conference.  They were very enthusiastic about learning about Real-time Compression.  They had all heard about the technology but they wanted to know more.  We talked about how the Real-time Compression technologies core functionality comes from it real-time platform.  The real-time platform is how compression is done in real-time vs. the competition that cannot perform compression in real-time.  The customers and partners saw this as a distinct competitive advantage.One of the most interesting events that I was able to witness this week was kind of reality show for a job.  IBM Slovenia, Ministry of Labour, family and social affairs and Slovenian employment institute got together to host a contest. The contest was to take 15 Slovenian unemployed workers, and give them a challenge.  IBM has just moved into the new premises - Crystal Palace and in June they opened IBM Innovation Center Ljubljana. Candidates competed for are open position of Assistant (to marketing) in IBM Innovation Center (IIC) Ljubljana.The contest was to identify ways to promote and market IIC Ljubljana in the region of southeast Europe.  The contestants came to the IBM office and heard about IBM’s values and to tour the new facility as well as meet some of the employees. The contestants were then given 48 hours to come up with a power point presentation that shows off IBM’s values, the Innovation center inside the new complex and IBM’s commitment to growth in the region.  It was a great contest and they got a number of great presentations.  The winner was Mateja Gorše. I thought this was a great concept and we welcome the new employee to IBM with open arms.

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Sep 21, 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

Virtual Disk Storage


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.

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Jul 06, 2011 | 3 comments View Post
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