Look, like social networking or not, it has now become an integral part of our lives.  As a test, on the rest of the way home I counted how many times I saw the Twitter and Facebook logos.  At the airports, on billboards, on magazines, at the coffee shop, on my iPhone.  I counted 53 and I started at 1:00pm London time.  Then today, I tried the same thing, reading my favorite blogs, answering email (with the logo’s at the bottom or advertisements), checking out competitive web sites.  I got another 72 in less than 8 hours and I never left my office.  Now I am not saying that privacy policies aren’t difficult to navigate, and they should be easy and protect a person’s right to privacy, but the fact of the matter is, social networks are here to stay and if you want to make things you do in life a little simpler, and be a part of the “in” crowd, you’re going to have to participate.

Now, I am a big Facebook and Twitter user and I find them both very interesting but for other reasons.  I am into social media for two reasons.  Marketing and Technology.  I like to understand how when you have a billion people who all can communicate with one another, make something resonate.  What makes a meme a meme.  What is it that makes the school of fish go one way or another (and by fish I mean groups of people).  When you can figure that out, you can really figure out how to market your products (and by products I mean technology).  It really takes data.

What kind of data?  Big Data.  And this is where I think a lot of folks don’t understand the likes of Google, Facebook, Amazon etc…  A couple of years ago a good friend of mine, Dave Vellante founder of Wikibon started plotting the market capitalization of a number of infrastructure companies (Apple, EMC, Cisco, Symantec, etc..)

We also plotted companies who provide cloud like services (Google, Amazon, Salesforce.com, Rackspace).  In every case, the cloud infrastructure service providers market cap have all gone up.  The infrastructure players who cater to cloud computing, such as VMware, have done well, but I can’t say that about all the infrastructure players.

Here is my theory as to why Facebook, as well as folks like Google and Amazon are set for growth.  They have technology capabilities that others like EMC, NetApp, Cisco don’t have.  If data, or Big Data, is the next big thing in IT, who knows better how to deal with that than Facebook?  So, I don’t have the latest stats but lets just paint a picture here.

1)      Facebook has almost 1B users – that is 1B mailboxes, do you know another company that has 1B mailboxes under management?

2)      Photo’s – In 2009 (remember in 2009 there were 200M users – today they are 4x that

1. They had 10 Billion photos (actually they had 40 Billon, they make 3 copies)
2. 2-3 TB of photos are bing uploaded every day (I hear today that number is more like 20TB)
3. Have over 1PB of photo storage (I am sure it is double that)
4. Serve 15 billion photo images per day
5. Photo traffic peaks at over 300,000 image per second

3)      In 2011 they were running 300,000 servers

4)      As of a stat in 2011 – 28% of people check their phone from their mobile device – so they support BYOD (bring your own device)

5)      There are about 5,000 to 6,000 apps on Facebook so it is a platform you can develop on

Here is what I am saying, they know how to manage data probably better than anyone in the world.  They know Big Data.  They know how to extract information out of every piece of data they have.  How do they know how to do this? They know data and they know IT.  They know how to scale and they know analytics.  They know meta data.  They know things traditional IT is going to need to know how to do and yet the technology that Facebook uses isn’t really available to the general public.  One day when these guys really want to make some money, they will turn their secrets on to the rest of the IT world and help us all to be more successful.  I hope that day happens and that is exactly why I am buying some Facebook stock.

A decade or so ago, service providers made a valiant attempt trying to change the way IT managed there applications and their data.  There were a few issues that played a significant role in the demise of service provides back then however.  First, there was a distinct lack of understanding of the velocity at which IT can and does change.  Quite often I see infrastructure sales people proposing solutions to customer problems that require more of a “rip and replace” of existing infrastructure rather than complement it.  Businesses don’t slow down.  As new infrastructure is required to grow the business, the business still needs to keep moving.  It’s a lot like trying to change the tires on a moving car.

Second, the network connectivity tended to preclude applications to connect to their data in a timely manner rendering the number of applications that could leverage the service provider less useful.

Finally, service provider sellers had a very difficult time talking to IT about the value proposition the service provider could bring to traditional IT as a complement to their existing business.  This flimsy story, as well as concerns customers about security, data accessibility and other companies using their CPU cycles, customers we not motivated to bet their business on the “cloud”.  Additionally, having dedicated hardware (server or storage) at a service provider actually provided no cost savings and was proven, over time, to actually cost more than managing it internally.

A decade later we have evolved quite a bit.  The SSP’s of the past are now called “Cloud” providers.  Cloud providers can now offer a set of offerings that span both servers as well as storage.  Additionally the world’s internet connectivity is much more robust.  Also cloud providers aren’t trying to boil the ocean.  Cloud providers have a much better understanding of the type of applications they can service with a reasonable service levels.  Multi-tenant technolgoy has also evolved such that it makes providing infrastructure as a service much more secure to clients making it more cost effective.  VMware allows users to have dedicated servers, while virtual, to run their applications as well as keep costs low.   Virtual servers lower the cost of high availability and make it easy to move servers throughout the infrastructure.

Physical servers have advanced to allow virtual servers to have their own memory and CPU allocated to them.  The sharing of physical resources is much easier now without giving up service levels.  Storage devices now offer features such as virtualization that allows storage to have much better utilization rates that save money.  Servers as well as storage have better provisioning capabilities, making it easier to allocate and manage easier.  All of these advancements have made cloud computing much easier and more cost effective to deploy.

One challenge IT still contends with within the cloud is application security.  It is for this reason that there is still a bifurcation in the market.  Clouds are now offered as public clouds as well as private clouds.  Private cloud computing is managed by the IT department and usually on the customers premise.  The upside is that IT can control the security and access in a private cloud easier than they can in a public cloud.  Ultimately IT is deploying a flexible architecture that can be deployed that servers a number of purposes.

Cloud computing also seems to be driven by storage and capacity.  There seems to be two types of cloud environments.  There is true cloud computing where the server as well as the storage lives in the cloud.  Users are allowed to log in with the proper credentials and allocate server processing, install an application and allocate storage to perform a task or a job.  The user runs the application and stores the results in the cloud (this is very VDI like).  Conversely there is cloud storage.  In this example, storage is provisioned and allocated but the data is created and sent to the storage cloud, usually from outside the cloud (this is similar to backup to the cloud).

Today a majority of the “cloud’s” being deployed are private clouds.  They are made up of virtual servers, a few physical servers, networking, storage, and security.  These environments are very similar to traditional IT environments but are more flexible for the users.  They are also used for IT applications or servers such as:

• Data protection
• Testing / Development

As IT grows to trust “cloud” more, we would expect to see it expand from “private cloud” to a more public cloud offering.  Additionally, as applications are re-written for could services, we will see more services deployed to the cloud, however, today IT or applications don’t turn on a dime and until these applications are made “cloud ready” we will see a slow progression to the cloud.

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.

After dinner and drinks the floor was opened to have a discussion around “Big Data” (the newest “hot topic” in the data storage industry).  The discussion was started with one question – “What is Big Data”?  After 2 hours of debate, from all of the “industry experts” I never once heard the answer.  A majority of the conversation was around the size or volume of capacity that data is consuming these days.  (One analogy even went as far as saying “It’s similar to a ‘big person’ – when a ‘big person’ can’t fit into conventional clothing, they shop at a Big & Tall shop – so ‘Big Data’ is data that doesn’t fit into conventional storage systems.)  I have to say that none of these are right.

So here it is, the definition of Big Data – Big Data is not defined by size or volume.  Big Data is any data.  Big Data is ALL data.  Big Data is structured data.  Big Data is unstructured data. Big Data is semi-structured data.

The tools we have today for analyzing even the smallest amount of data is very sophisticated and it is getting even smarter.  Think about an application that can analyze every bit of data in say a large store such as Target.  It can analyze and cross reference who buys what at what time of the day and in what geographic areas.  The application can then save the results of that data into a location where it can be further analyzed and even more new data is created.  All of this analytics is done so you can create a much more competitive business.  The data, in all of its forms throughout the process has value, and the more value you can extract from the data, the greater the opportunity is to create a more successful business.

About a year ago I listed to an excellent presentation by Jeff Jonas from IBM on Big Data.  One of the points he made was that big data gives you better predictions and bad data is actually good data because it tells you directions not to go which in turn enables you to get to your destination faster.  Our business objective is to squeeze context out of our data.  The funny thing is, context is, by definition, is to better understand something by taking into account the things around it. So in theory the more data you have, the better off you are.

One of the things we also know is that time is of the essence.  People’s willingness to wait for information to make business decisions has gone from running batch jobs on data sets to real-time answers.  We also know that the better the predictions (due to the ability to analyze more data) the faster folks will want the information.  This is “Big Data”.

Next we will talk about Cloud - this is getting interesting

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”.

New technologies for primary storage optimization can and will play a key role in helping IT be more productive with their existing capacity.  New technology such as Real-time Compression can help customers get back up to 80% of their existing storage capacity without losing any of their current capabilities or changing any of their data management processes.  The technology seamlessly integrates into your storage environment and compresses your data 50% to 80% (depending upon data type).  It also fits into IT’s existing data management practices without having to change anything.  No change is required to any of the applications, snapshots stay the same, replication stays the same even backup works without having to change anything in the environment.  And while some vendors may say “you can’t deduplicate compressed data”, you actually can deduplicate data written with Real-time Compression.

The Real-time Compression technology is truly a “new” technology that can expect to surge in this environment.  IT can deploy this technology and expect:

1)      Up to 80% compression on their primary storage

1. This means they can defer adding new capacity until the HDD market comes back and disk prices stabilize

2)      See up to 80% optimization in each of their downstream processes that use disk

1. Meaning up to 80% less capacity for snapshots
2. Meaning up to 80% less capacity for replication
3. Meaning up to 80% less capacity for backups

(In each of these cases, each process uses disk so there is a tremendous savings by just compressing the primary copy of the data)

3)      The technology will be transparent to their existing infrastructure

In addition, Real-time Compression can cut your cost per TB by a factor of your compression ratio (50% compression is a 2:1 cost reduction in your $/TB cost).  It is also the case, if you are looking to SSD for performance, you can now afford to spend some money on SSD or more money on SSD given the new cost model.

Now, the “new” technology does need to be efficient and fit into a customer’s existing infrastructure seamlessly or it isn’t really useful.  Asking IT to change their processes can be just as costly as purchasing new capacity in the long run.  I mention this because in a related story, NetApp is also fearful about what the HDD shortage will do for their business.  I find this ironic.  On a recent panel I was on at SNW with Larry Freeman of NetApp, he told the audience that NetApp filers have these “new” technologies “built in” to their WAFL file system, in fact they have 10 “storage efficiency” features built in to WAFL.  He went on to say that on a weekly basis they get reports from a number of systems in the field that “report in” on how customers are using their systems.  On average customers use only 3 of the 10 features.  When we polled the audience to ask them why, they said that while the feature may help them save space, they impact other areas of their operation.  Maybe it impacts system performance, maybe it impacts backup so they can’t use the feature.

The moral of the story is that I do believe that new technologies are going to “surge” (as Tom states) in his piece, because IT will need other alternatives to the shortage of disk drive that are available and the higher prices.  In addition, this will force IT to look at their environment to identify how to be more efficient with their storage environment as stuff like the flood could come up again and affect the supply and demand of HDD.  But the right technologies that not only help with storage capacity as well as data growth needs to be the answer to the challenge.  The best technologies fit into IT’s existing infrastructure and makes it more efficient overall.

As a number of you know, I have been blogging about the merits of Real-time Compression.  It may be of some interest to know that when Ed Walsh, CEO of Storwize, asked me to join and told me the company focused on "compression", I first thought he was joking.  I mean the industry has had compression available for years.  The reality is, there is no other technology like Real-time Compression available from any vendor, and it is today, even more clear, why IBM chose to own this technology.  In the next few blog pieces I plan to talk about a few of the concepts of the IP that make this technology so far advanced than any / all of its competition. Today’s piece is about fixed input versus variable input compression.  This is a very simple concept to understand really.  Traditional compression uses a process called 'fixed input' / 'variable output'.  If we refer to the diagrams below, we start off with the original file on the left and the compressed file on the right.  The way traditional compression works (and you can actually watch this on your home computer if you winzip a file) is the following: The compression algorithm will 'chunk up' the original file into 'manageable' sizes before it compresses the file.  The tradeoff here, and why this process happens, is like with anything in computer science, performance for optimization.  The first diagram shows the large file being 'chunked up', compressed and stuffed into the smaller file.

Figure 1

There are two significant issues with this. The first issue is that the compression dictionary is not shared across multiple ‘chunks’ when compression is taking place.  The example in Figure 2 shows that the letter “F” in ‘chunk’ 1 does not get compressed with the letter “F” in ‘chunk’ 4.  This means that the compression ratio is simply not optimized across the file.

Second is that as a file gets modified, and the compression ratio of the modified ‘chunk’ changes, it will cause fragmentation in the compressed file.  Figure 3 shows ‘chunk’ 3 being updated from “1111” to “1100”.  The newly compressed ‘chunk’ 3 is smaller (referred to as 3’).  As the new compressed ‘chunk’ is added to the end of the file, a “hole” is left in the compressed file.

Figure 2

Figure 3

Best practices documentation from the competitors to Real-time Compression will tell users that if a file is frequently modified, that over time, the compressed file can actually be larger than the original file.  This does not help the storage administrator.

1)      Over time the file system can grow rather than shrink which was the premise for using compression in the first place

2)      The I/O performance on the array will be very taxing

3)      The CPU cycles taken up on the array for compressing and decompressing these files will also be taxing on the array and cause a significant performance impact.

The converse to ‘fixed input’ / ‘variable output’ is ‘variable input’ / ‘fixed output’ and this is how Real-time Compression compresses a file.  I should first note that because Real-time Compression operates as an appliance in NAS environments, in the network, we see the data stream into the array.  By looking at the data stream as it enters the array we have the ability to do some very unique things.  First, we are able to compress “like” data together.  In the case where there are two “F”’s in the same file, we are able to leverage the same compression dictionary and obtain additional compression in the file.  This is what is known as time based compression versus location based compression in the other scenario.  This is how Real-time Compression is actually able to get up to 10% better compression ratios than its competitors.

Figure 4

Figure 5

Having fixed segments in the output file also has added benefit.  First, each segment in the output is the equivalent of 1 I/O.  In an NFS environment the ‘chunk’ is 32KB in a CIFS environment the ‘chunk’ is 60KB.  This means that any read from the file can be done in 1 I/O saving significant I/O resources when accessing a file.  By maintaining an index of these segments (one in the cache of the appliance and a copy in the compressed file) Real-time Compression can eliminate fragmentation of the compressed file.  When a file is modified, the modified compressed ‘chunk’ is flagged by the index that it is available for the next write to come in and the newly compressed ‘chunk’ is added to the end of the file.  When the next modification comes in, the hole that was left by the last modification is now re-used.  This means:

1)      The compression ratio is maximized by looking at a stream of data versus chunking it up

2)      The compression ratio for the compressed files stay the same throughout the life of the file saving IT the space they desperately need

3)      Lowering the I/O on the array helps to maintain / improve performance to the application

4)      Removing the CPU cycles and having the appliance do the work means that the array is not overloaded when trying to do compression

This is just one example of the over 35 patents leveraged in Real-time Compression.  In an age where data growth is the single biggest challenge for IT, this technology has tremendous value to any companies business.  Weather it is trying to reduce storage budget costs, reduce utility expense, have more data on line and available for analytics or reduce footprint on primary storage to product backup savings, this technology has many business benefits.

Stay tuned as I talk about another piece of the Real-time Compression IP.

On October 11, 2011, at Dell World, Dell announced a component to their DX6000G object based storage called an “SCN” or Storage Compression Node.  It is interesting that Dell would mention in their blog post that this is “Dell’s first Ocarina based solution…” What makes this interesting is the value proposition behind Ocarina was its ‘content aware’ deduplication, not necessarily compression.  That said, this blog post seems to be the ONLY information on Dell’s web site about the product and there is very little in the press about this product and the technology.

While it is nice to see that Dell, who has committed to their own storage technology, understanding that storage optimization is important, the reality is they are a little to late to the game.  I say this because the announcement that came from Dell around their 6000 is really bizarre.  First, the solution is an object based solution.  Didn't they learn anything from EMC?  The Centera is not gaining a lot of momentum these days, even if they had a lot of ISV partners.  In fact, it is loosing ground.  Object based storage was good before the whole 'Big Data' thing was the 'next big thing' but today, people need a big clustered file system, that is optimized, that can server not only unstructured based data, but also some structured data that allows you to find stuff quickly.  Also, the DX may be a good solution for data types that are of the media / entertainment only segment, but when it comes to running a business, it takes more than just this object based file structure to be successful.

To me, this solution is too little, too late.  Dell, in order to be a true competitor in the space that is highly scale-able, clustered file systems that are optimized, they need to advance their thinking.   This will be difficult for Dell.  First of all they are not known for technology advancement or integration.  Until they announced thier departure from EMC they didn't really have a major focus on storage and now with their acquisitions, the question is, what is their value prop.  Couple that with the fact that IBM has 1000's of patents in storage and Dell doesn't where does that leave the direction of Dell storage?

When you look at the fact that IBM has industry knowledge and studies that disk can't grow at the rate it did in the late 90's and keep costs low, you need optimization technology to help you maximize disk capacities.  Combine this with the fact that Dell doesn't invent anything but acquires it, and if we take a look at how long it took for Dell to deliver a "compression" product from their acquisition, it leads us to believe that there will be a long time before Dell is ready to be a formidable player in the storage business when it comes to delivering products or technology that move customers past the commodity infrastructure plays to the advanced solutions that deliver capacity at the right price.  If it took over a year for Dell to get the Ocarina stuff to the market in a technology that is really "old school" technology, what are we expecting for the future of Dell storage?

My opinion is Dell will always be the low cost supplier of commodity hardware to risk adverse small businesses.  Integrating next generation technology will not be their forte.

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:

One last comment too that Larry Freeman stated was that NetApp has 10 storage optimization / efficiency technologies embedded into WAFL.  The interesting thing is that NetApp gets a report from 150,000 systems that "report in" over the weekend and they have collected statistics that users only use 3.2 out of these 10 efficiency technologies on average.

When the question was posed "why" is it that you have technology, that is “free” (more on that later) that can help you better optimize your storage, why they don’t turn it on?  To which the end user response was that they didn't want any change in the infrastructure that could require a change in their processes.  (This means that transparency is another thing that an appliance has to ensure it has.)

I also want to publicly commend Larry for a good deal of his comments and his honesty.  See Larry and I are technologists and sometimes we see the marketing arms of our companies sometimes stretch the truth to get what they want in the market by way of some FUD.  My example is this.  The RtC technology does provide high compression, for the life of the file without performance degradation.  Well, as you can see, this is what customers want give the response from the audience.  However, our friends at NetApp will say “yes, but our compression is free” (like that is supposed to be better).  Anyway, Larry addressed this in the same way I do.  He said that “you don’t get anything for free and there are tradeoffs, specifically in this case around performance”.  Now, I am not saying this to say “see, I told you so” I am saying it because we, as technologists, want to give the user the best answer.  I also admitted that an embedded strategy for technology is the right way to go, IF you can accomplish what the end users’ needs are, performance in this case.

Look, there is a reason why startups exist and why appliances exist.  Storwize didn’t invent compression; they invented a real-time platform that allowed compression to happen in real time.  We do “compression off load”.  We take the work off the array and put it on the appliance – how could that not be faster.  And yes, one day it will be embedded and there will be some other new great optimization technology that will start as an appliance and slowly find its way into the array.  It is the evolution of technology.

At the end of the day, here is what I have to say.  Every end user buys their storage for a reason.  It may be performance; it may be capacity who knows.  What I ask each user to do is to consider their BUSINESS needs for their storage and apply the RIGHT storage optimization technologies for their given environments.  There is not a “one size fits all” approach (this is why NetApp customers don’t choose to turn on all 10 optimization / efficiency technologies) but there are a handful that can help you get the most out of your storage.

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 5 essential storage efficiency technologies 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.

IBM really acquired 35 patents that go into making a real-time platform, and that is the business need that customers have today.  It just so happens that the first “plug-in” to this real time platform was compression.  The original patent set allowed for real-time virus scan, real-time QoS as well as other real-time solutions you would want from your storage.  The reality is if you look at IBM’s 5 essential storage efficiency technologies, you can do them all in real time and IBM is the only ones who can say that.  When you can do storage efficiency in real-time, you become transparent to your existing applications and processes and just make them more efficient without having to change your processes.  This makes storage management and IT much more effective.

A few of the components of the IP that allow the platform to behave in real time are:

• Changing the input and output schema from a fixed to variable schema to a variable to fixed schema
• Performing optimization on a time basis vs. a location basis optimization schema
• Never having to read the data before optimizing the data
• Write grouping – combining data into one I/O for fast effective writes

This is why I say it is unfortunate that we called the technology “Real-time Compression” and lumped it in with the rest of the other “compression” technologies.  We really are a real-time platform that will, over time, have other valuable technologies embedded into it, thereby adding more value to the real-time platform.

The video  below is Dave Vellente from Wikibon and me at VMworld 2011 in the Wikibon Cube talking about the Real-time Platform.

When I think about how much Steve influenced this industry (technology), almost everyone or every family in the world owns an "i" something which has his influence in it.  I wish for the continued success of such innovation that can have an impact at transforming an industry.Before I digress to far, all I'd like to say is that the technology industry will miss Steve tremendously for his contribution.