Category: Virtualization

Efficiency vs. Optimization


“Storage Efficiency” has become a big topic over the past 12 months.  There are a number of new technologies that have come out in the last few years that are helping to deal with storage growth.  We all know that data is the root of the decisions that drive business today.  The more data you have, hopefully, the better decisions you can make to drive your business to success.  The question is, “what is the value (and hence the cost) of the infrastructure to create that success?”  What we do know is that the ability to put more data in a highly efficient footprint can give your company a competitive edge.  There are five technologies that can help an IT organization create an efficient storage infrastructure.  These are:

 

1)      Tiering

2)      Virtualization

3)      Thin Provisioning

4)      Compression

5)      Deduplication

It is also important to point out that there are some semantics when talking about storage efficiency, specifically between efficiency and optimization technologies.  I think it is useful to attempt to define these as they lead us to picking the right solutions for what we are trying to accomplish.  For the purpose of this post, efficiency will relate to making existing capacity more useful and optimization will mean making more capacity out of existing capacity.

Using these definitions, technologies such as Tiering, Virtualization and Thin Provisioning are efficiency technologies.  These technologies help to utilize the existing capacity that you have.

Tiering is technology that is used on about 10% of your data or less.  It is used to move data that requires higher performance to flash storage.  Good tiering technology analyzes data access patterns and moves the most active data to the highest performing disk.  It doesn’t really change the amount of physical capacity that is required; it just changes what type of capacity is required and allows IT to make sure data is operating as fast and efficiently as possible.

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Jun 30, 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

A Blueprint for Primary Storage Optimization


During the past three to four months the storage industry has seen a spike in the number of reports, white papers and news articles surrounding the evolution of primary storage technology, capacity optimization (it is 2010’s Hottest Storage Technology).

The reason this technology is getting a lot of ‘air play’ these days is due to the fact that this technology is so critical to help control the growth and costs of storage.  In 2010 the EMC sponsored IDC Report “The Digital Universe Decade - Are You Ready?” was release and stated that:

  • In 2009, amid the “Great Recession,” the amount of digital information grew 62% over 2008 to 800 billion gigabytes (0.8 Zettabytes).
  • The amount of digital information created annually will grow by a factor of 44 from 2009 to 2020…

The folks at Wikibon also released an info graph that exposes the true explosion of data.

Information Explosion & Cloud Storage
Via: Wikibon

When you combine storage capacity (and the foot print it takes up) along with the power it takes to run it and cool it as well as the human resource it takes to manage it, you soon realize we cannot keep ‘just adding more cheap disk’ in an effort to manage the storage demands.  High Tech companies with high tech labs are also telling IT that ‘they are out of tricks’ when it comes to the ability to continue deliver disk drive that double capacity every 18 months.  It is for these reasons that primary storage optimization technologies have stepped into the ‘lime light’ as it serves as a means to help control the growth of primary storage including the foot print, power, cooling and man power required to manage it.

However, as we all know in IT, no two environments are the same and what may be good for one may not be good for another.  When looking at primary storage optimization there seem to be a number of available technologies and ways to deploy these technologies and the key question is what is right for ‘my’ environment.

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Jul 01, 2010 | 3 comments View Post

The Side Effects of Backup on Server Virtualization


Server virtualization has changed the IT landscape dramatically.  It has become a magic potion curing a number of ills in the physical server world such as low individual CPU utilization and excess use of space, power and cooling in the data center.  However, like all potions that cure what ails you, there can be side effects.  You need to be careful of what the Witch Doctor orders.

When I speak with customers who have aggressively implemented a virtual server infrastructure, 9 out of 10 will tell me that they underestimated the affect that virtualization would have on their backups and backup process and how backup might actually make virtualization less of the magic potion they had hoped, when not considered during the virtual server assessment and planning process.  So what is the issue?  Backup is a virtualization bottleneck, and without addressing it, you may not be able to obtain the server consolidation ratios you had been expecting which can have a negative effect on your virtual server TCO and ROI.

This is a timely discussion as VMworld has just concluded.  VMware users flocked to VMworld looking for best practices when it comes to implementing virtual server technology.  Because virtualization allows IT to reduce the overall physical hardware infrastructure, users will be looking at how to maximize their server consolidation ratios (get as many virtual servers on a physical server as they can and still provide good application performance).

I often hear that companies assess their environments by looking at the production applications on their physical server environment, identify their work loads and translating that into some consolidation ratio of physical servers to virtual servers.  I also hear, from these same customers, that backup was never taken into consideration during the assessment phase when trying to identify the best possible consolidation ratios.  These customers implement their new virtual server environments, install the backup agent they had previously been using for physical server backups and attempt to backup their virtual servers and they find that they would only be able to protect 50% to 60% of the new environment.  Why?

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Sep 14, 2009 | 2 comments View Post

EMC World Kicks Off with Clouds and Virtualization


EMC World kicked off this morning first with a presentation from yours truly on Data Deduplication 2.0 - Comprehensive Capacity Optimization.  We discussed how data deduplication 1.0 is morphing into all areas of EMC's storage ecosystem in order to optimize capacity everywhere.  I talked about data deduplication as well as single instancing and compression are technology components that will help EMC achieve this goal.

Next Joe Tucci spoke in his keynote about how data deduplication as well as compression are key technologies for the data center of the future and how these technologies will aid in delivering a more efficient cloud computing strategy.  Not only will these technologies help in building out a cloud infrastructure, they will also help to protect a cloud infrastructure (which is what we are all about here).

Finally, Paul Maritz gave his keynote on how the virtual infrastructure will help to fulfill the goals of a private cloud.  He also discussed that it is time to invest in software and people and not hardware as VMware continues to drive value into their software to help make your data center, better, smarter, stronger and faster for less.

Each of these initiatives will have an impact on how data is stored and ultimately protected but new storage services will enable more efficient storage and protection across the virtual data center and the cloud and ultimately take backup beyond and put you on the road to recovery.

Stay tuned for more updates about the show.

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May 18, 2009 | 0 comments View Post
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