Tag: "Cloud"

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

Top 10 Reasons to Use IBM for VM Deployments


 

IBM @ VMworld 2011

After a full first day at VMworld, I started to think more about IBM and their technology solutions that help customers in a VMware environment.  Here is a top ten list of things to consider when looking at a VMware implementation and how IBM can help.

#1 Integration

VMware is playing Switzerland and ensuring all vendors are on a level playing field, so when other vendors state that they have “better” or “closer” technology integration than other vendors its probably not true.  Some vendors may not choose to integrate with certain things, but rest assured, all of   VMware’s APIs are open to all vendors.  Take a look and see how IBM is providing plug-ins for vSphere, SRM, and VAAI in XIV as well as other storage platforms.

#2 Ease of Use

IBM has seen, firsthand, a number of our customers switch from different competitive platforms to XIV because of the simplicity of the XIV solution.  A large manufacturer is one example of a customer who is provisioning new VMware instances in less than five minutes with XIV. 

Another XIV customer, who is a very experienced storage administrator, saw the XIV GUI and quoted "I don't get it (XIV GUI).  It can't be that easy.  Either I'm missing something or they are not showing me everything."  Well, the reality is, it is that easy and that interface is prolific throughout the IBM storage portfolio including the Storwize V7000 and SVC.

#3 Storage Efficiency

Probably one of the most important topics this year is Storage Efficiency and IBM is a leader in this department.  The N-Series with the Real-time Compression appliance can reduce the VMware storage footprint up to 75%.  Users tell us that by implementing VMware, their storage footprint has grown by as much as 4x.  Therefore their overall IT budgets didn’t get better, the dollars just shifted from servers to storage.  IBM’s Real-time Compression users can save up to 75% without any performance impact.  Additionally, Real-time Compression is the only compression technology that works in conjunction with deduplication, compressing the data before it is dedplicated, giving an added benefit to the technology.

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Aug 30, 2011 | 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.

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May 20, 2010 | 0 comments View Post

A Data Protection Reference Architecture – The Final Chapter


The Architecture

This ‘architecture’ diagram, as you can see, is not a typical architecture diagram, but hopefully it can be used to align your business and business objectives with the technologies that are available and can best be applied to solve your issues helping to balance, cost, complexity and compliance.

This diagram can also be used to do a couple of other things.  It can help you begin to classify your data and align your  data to your business objectives.  It also lets you begin to identify what data or data services in your environment that may be more important to you than others and based on this help you to choose areas you may want to outsource or move to the cloud.

As you can tell, there really is not one solution for meeting all your data protection needs.  The challenge comes with managing multiple solutions in an effort to meet your business objectives.  While there are only a few technologies available that allow you to manage your environment across all your RPOs and RTOs, it is important that I point out EMC’s NetWorker is able to do this, centralizing your data protection infrastructure  for ease of management.  It allows you to manage traditional backup, source based deduplicated backup with Avamar, CDP with RecoverPoint, as well as the EMC disk libraries and tape where the data is stored.  Now, I am not saying that NetWorker solves all of your data protection challenges, nor am I suggesting that replacing one traditional backup technology for another is the right answer, but what I am saying is that if you’re looking to have all the feature functionality required to meet all your business objectives and you want easier management, NetWorker is one avenue to get you there.  Additionally, the underlying image of the triangle represents data protection management.  Putting all the new technology in place is one thing, managing it, and ensuring you are now meeting your business needs is another.  EMC's Data Protection Advisor can help here as well.

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Sep 01, 2009 | 2 comments View Post

A Data Protection Reference Architecture – Part 1


This blog will have multiple parts.  I will introduce my view of a data protection reference architecture and the next few blog posts will talk to components of that architecture.

The other day  I had a very interesting conversation with a colleague of mine in Australia.  He was looking for a data protection reference architecture that he could use to speak to his customer.  As you can imagine having this conversation over the phone could pose to be a difficult challenge.  When the conversation began, my fear was he was looking for an ‘architecture’ diagram that included data protection appliances, backup servers, disk libraries, tape libraries and backup agents.  I quickly realized that this is an impossible conversation to have with him without knowing:

A)     the customer’s environment or challenges

B)      the customer’s business objectives

I find that most vendors don’t know A or B when speaking to a customer about their data protection ‘issues’, but they really should.  Having a more thoughtful conversation with customers in a consultative fashion is more relevant to customers in understanding their challenges and helping to align these challenges to the best possible solution.

I started my conversation with the diagram shown below (Figure 1).  A simple triangle divided horizontally into 4 segments and the middle two segments divided vertically in half.  Each segment represents different business objectives within a company.  As you go around the triangle, you can see that there are different technologies and different methodologies for attacking data protection challenges, which is why there is no longer a “one size fits all” approach when it comes to protecting data today. Let’s face it; the two most important commodities in backup are time and capacity.  One of the primary drivers behind the type of protection that is used is the Recovery Point Objective or RPO.  Different technologies provide different RPOs and each has a different price point as well as there are different processes that can be applied to attach RPOs.

Figure 1

Figure 1

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Aug 14, 2009 | 0 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