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.)

The basics that we know about today with regard to the acquisition is that this is good for Storwize employees as they get to continue working on a great technology that they have matured over the last 5 years and will continue to mature.  This acquisition is great for IBM and Storwize customers as for IBM it adds the ONLY real-time compression technology to their storage portfolio driving storage efficiency.  And for Storwize customers, you now have the backing of a global 2000 company that is committed to continued development of an already great product as well as now have the resources to go after new features and functionality that often comes at the hands of limited budgets in a stratup.

For IBM resellers and partners, hold on to your socks because now you have one of the most competitive technologies in the market that will allow you to 1) provide a great service to your customer through efficient storage and not just sell customers more disk drives (I have talked to over 600 customers in the last 2 years, customers don’t want more disk drives, they want smarter ones) 2) a competitive, value added solution that allows you to be much more competitive in selling your clients better solutions that aren’t wrapped around infrastructure, but around business solutions that allow your customers to be more successful and happier and you to make more margins.

Seems like a win for all.

Over the course of the next few weeks we will be learning more as a collective team on what the roadmap looks like for IBM Storwize but we are all excited.  Stay tuned.

This blog will be taking a turn to more on storage technology can turned into IT Gold!

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The reality is Storwize is just that simple, plug it in and start saving 50% to 90% of your storage capacity, transparently without changing your applications, your servers, networks or storage.  The technology is so easy to implement even  your CIO can do it!

Hope you like it!

This video was created in conjunction with Media Boss Studios!

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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).

As a refresher; Storwize is an appliance that sits in front of primary storage and compresses data before it lands on the storage array.  The unique Storwize IP not only compresses data, it also compresses it such that it preserves the file envelope and all the meta data about the file.  By preserving the file envelope, all data that lives on the other side of the appliance looks like the data as it normally would in the storage cache and file system.  Because of this unique feature, whatever the compression ratio is, is the factor by which the cache is increased.  Imagine 4:1 compression giving you 4x the amount of storage cache.  Cache is one of the key factors in increasing storage performance.  If compressing data can give you better performance, then Storwize is a key that unlocks not only additional capacity, but has the ability to increase performance.  (Compression is how Oracle’s Exadata gets better performance.)   If we all believe that compression (or optimization technology) will be embedded in arrays of the future, in order to gain capacity and performance, then the Storwize appliance is step 1 in the grand scheme of where optimization may one day be.  Until these technologies are embedded, Storwize has the lead in optimizing storage without compromising any of the existing storage characteristics.

The key questions the press / analyst were asking during our call the other day were:

1)        How does the technology work really work?  How is the Storwize compression different?

2)       How does the Storwize technology work with data deduplication?

3)       What is the future of the Storwize ‘block solution’? – As far as this goes, what I can tell you is that the same RACE engine that compresses file data, compresses block data so we have many PB of ‘testing’ done on the engine.  We also have customers who are running the product in Alpha stage today.  As far as the new roadmap, I cannot comment, but needless to say, block compression is just as important as file compression so I am sure it will be a high priority.

Furthermore, Storwize customers and partners will greatly benefit.  Being a part of IBM will unlock all of the potential of the Storwize IP.  By allowing customers today to deploy an appliance and optimize their storage, they are giving customers the ability to optimize their storage, save money, and build a green data center.

The real question is when will “optimized” storage become the norm?  What is on the horizon for making storage even more efficient?  There is a startup out there that has the technology, I can feel it.

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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.

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Over the past few years, the internet, its viralness, and marketing have evolved.  Primarily because:

1) The tools have evolved.  Just as everyone had a Photoshop 10 years ago to make funny pictures to use for marketing, today people have video cameras.  And if a picture can paint a 1,000 words, how may words can 10 frames a second for 2 minutes paint?  Video is the next wave in marketing now that the masses can afford to do it.

2) Sorry but the folks working in the data center today grew up on cheat notes and a ‘did you watch the movie’ mentality.  The times of reading the industry ‘fish wrap’ are gone.  Today’s IT people grew up on The Justice League, Gilligan’s Island, Seinfeld, and commercials.  Reading is a distant second.  (Not saying IT folks can’t read, they just prefer not to.)

Marketing MUST and WILL evolve to include videos, get ready for it and get used to it.  I know if I want to get smart on a topic, say how to do funny, smart, viral videos (Mark Farley @ StorageRap) I watch videos for ideas.  And if I want to learn how to make creative blog content I watch videos (Mark Farley @ StorageRap).  (BTW, if it’s not obvious, I credit @3ParFarley with the innovation in todays high tech blogging with creative videos – I don’t care what that Storage Monkey’s survey says !)  Mark knew early on that the traditional ‘write a bunch of content and they will come’ mentality wasn’t working and it didn’t matter that you were a published author and had ‘storage street cred’ or not.  (Think about that Mr. Preston.)

So what is the real objective behind these ‘viral’ videos (and we will get back to the term ‘viral’ in a minute).  Just like TV commercials are used to drive awareness, I believe so are the videos being created by high-tech companies.  Its additive to marketing.  When was the last time a Geico commercial made you jump up to the web site and see if in 15 minutes you could save 15% on your car insurance?  It doesn’t, well at least no the first time.  But after watching the videos for 3 years, and being board at my computer one day, watching the Geico commercials on YouTube, I decided to see if 15minutes could save 15% off my car insurance.  And you know what, it didn’t.  You know what else, I wasn’t mad about it or think that some how Geico had duped me.  The objective of the commercial worked, and if my videos don’t drive leads to my web site but make Storwize known in some way such that it gives a prospect a reason to have a conversation with a sales rep versus blowing them off, then it did its job.

Now that creating videos is much cheaper today that it was before it just makes sense.   Wikibon talks about the fact that “analysts need to be up on ‘new media’ and be able to create content and deliver it to the ‘watering holes’ where people hang out if you expect to reach them” and I agree.  Videos, Podcast (Infosmack), TV, and blogs are all the next evolution in high tech marketing.

So what is the problem?  Well there seems to be a couple of issues.    First is the methodology used to distribute these videos.  I am of the mindset that spam is spam and I hate it as much as the next person.  I believe that you need to use the tools that are made available to folks to push out your message, just like you do today.  Now, if that means email lists, and my aunts daughter is on that list and gets the message so be it.  Stuff like that happens every day.  And if she does get the message and briefly looks at it and says, “I don’t care about this but my uncle may” and forwards it on, well I guess it did its job, just like a TV commercial.

The second issues is pretty obvious if you ask me.  The old days of an analyst getting $10K to write a white paper and then the media firm getting $15K to post the paper and guarantee 150 leads are dwindling.  A marketing budget that may have had $50K in it for white papers (which was revenue to the analysts) now has $20K for white papers and $30K for videos.  And where vendors use to spend $15K with TechTarget or InfoStor they are now spending it with social media agencies that can get 100,000 of ‘impressions’ to drive awareness.  ’New media’ is taking some money off the table for some of the folks that aren’t or can’t keep up with the times.

I am sure we haven’t seen the last of this conversation and how content (of different kinds), social media and marketing will all collide and may even have an outcome that none of us had considered nor have we seen the end of ‘viral’ videos – which begs me to ask the question,

**UPDATED – For those of you who will continue to do viral videos – here are some good links on ethics and best practices when making things viral.

The Secret Strategies Behind Many “Viral” Videos

Andy Sernovitz: Social Media Ethics Briefing: Staying Out of Trouble — live from BlogWell

BTW: When does a video go viral, is it after 107 or 108 views?

And if that’s not enough for you, watch this really hilarious video on how 15 minutes could save you 50% of your storage capacity.

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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

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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.

Datacenter solutions add value when they not only save capital expense; in the case of VMware, fewer physical servers to purchase and in the case of Storwize, less storage to acquire, but also when they save money on all of the ancillary downstream issues that come with managing a datacenter.  In the server world there are always upgrades that are costly to manage as well as the power, cooling and floorspace it takes to ‘run’ the servers.  On the storage side it is much the same.  When new firmware upgrades come out, equipment needs to be set up for downtime impacting data availability not to mention the time and process it takes to make this happen.  (Not to say that Storwize will relive you of  having to do firmware upgrades, but you’ll just have to do fewer of them.)  Additionally, because Storwize integrates with existing storage processes, it doesn’t take extra set up or configuration time in order to achieve the benefits Storwize compression will yield.  Finally, just as in the server world, the reduction in storage will also allow IT to control costs around power, cooling and datacenter footprint.

Give the paper a read and see how Storwize can benefit your VMware storage environment.

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15 Minutes Can Save You 50% or More of Your Storage Capacity! Learn How with Storwize!

Click here to learn how Storwize can help you get your storage back under control!

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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!”.

It was a great testimonial for the real-time, random-access compression technology.  Storwize has between 100 and 200 customers today with over 200 appliances in the field.  The technology is tested in some of the largest enterprises.

Storwize has an east coast customer who is compressing 1.7PB of data to just over 750TB.  The data is SEC archive data.  The customer was able to migrate from 15 filers to 3 (newer) filers and not only reduced the required capacity they needed, but because they are in downtown Boston, reduced the floor space, power and cooling requirements.

Storwize, much like “V” can deliver “A Bright New Day” to your datacenter (and who knows, perhaps our founders aren’t really from Israel – our logo and the “V” logo are very similar )

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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.

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.

The first things to consider are:

1)      What is the primary objective of the storage system(s) in my environment (it may be different for different systems)?

2)      What are the primary characteristics I look at when I purchase a storage system?

3)      What are my current business objectives surrounding my storage?

It is important to remember why you acquired your storage in the first place, and leverage all of the decision making processes that surrounded the acquisition of that storage.  For example, if performance was a key characteristic for acquiring a particular storage system, then it should stand to reason this is something that can’t be sacrificed when looking to add capacity optimization into the mix.

There are also a number of ways to optimize storage capacity.  The two technologies are compression and data deduplication.  The methodologies in which they can be deployed are inline or post-process.

Compression technologies can reduce storage footprint anywhere from 50% to 90% depending upon the data type.  Compression technologies have been around for decades and are trusted technologies.  Compression can be deployed as a post-process (think of WinZip – zipping a file once it has been stored), or it can be deployed as a real-time application that does compression on the fly – this is the Storwize model.

Data deduplication technologies can reduce storage footprint anywhere from 10% to 50% on primary storage except its dependency is really on data usage not type.  In environments where there isn’t a lot of repetitive data the deduplication ratio will be low.  In environments where there is a lot of repetitive data, the optimization ratio will be high.  Today’s data deduplication solutions for primary storage all happen post process.  (This is primarily due to the performance limitations when trying to deduplicate data in real-time on primary storage.)  There have been announcements in the past few weeks that have mentioned data deduplication technologies becoming embedded into storage systems (which is where this technology should be) and this will significantly help with performance.

Now that there is a basic foundation for what these technologies can do, the real question is how do these fit into the overall requirements for specific storage needs.  It is important to take a look at the storage within your environment and what the impact of each of these technologies and their deployment has on that environment.  For example, if you don’t have any system resources left over in a day to perform a post process operation, then a real-time deployment (as long as it does not degrade performance) is the logical solution.  If you have a great deal of repetitive data (VMware .vmdk files – without the data stored in the file) then a deduplication solution is the best fit.  If transparency within your environment is important (not having to rearchitect applications, networks or storage) then a solution that allows you to optimize your capacity without having to change anything of these the right solution.  Conversely if you have plenty of time to compress data once it is written, and no need to worry about human resources to compress or decompress the data (like WinZip) then this is a perfectly viable solution as well.  I could go on, but I think you get the picture.

The other key variable is cost.  As my grandfather once told me “You get what you pay for in life” and “Nothing is free”.  Each of the different technologies outlined above come at different prices.  One thing to keep in mind is that the value of the solution is directly proportional to the cost.  Some solutions may say they are ‘free’ however, when you consider it takes horse power to run these solutions, they aren’t free and if it takes developing a bigger system to handle the optimization work load or reconfiguring your system to enable optimization to work properly or changing a recently acquired backup technology in order to make primary storage optimization be effective throughout the entire process, then the solution really isn’t free.  These are all things to consider when looking at an optimization technology.

Remember, just like data deduplication for backup 5 years ago, it sounded too good to be true and now if you don’t use it for backups your missing out.  Don’t let the same thing happen to you in your primary storage solution.  Get ahead of the curve and if you have any questions – please ask away.

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