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.

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.

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.

The following day, 9/15/2011 I drove to Umag, Croatia for IBM Form there.  There were well over 300 people at this event and this place is one big party.  The people coming always come in a day early and are there for the open reception that starts the night before.  The rumor is that the Forum used to take place on an island off the southern coast of Croatia.  Because of the distance required to travel to the island folks spent the day traveling the night before the event there was always a great welcome reception.  This was a time to meet and greet the people coming.  Sometimes this event was also treated as a reward to hardworking IT staff at different companies in the region so they got to attend.  The presentations don’t start at normal conference hours, I think the first one started at 11am and they did go to about 5pm, but at about 12:30 after lunch the bar was full.  Don’t get me wrong, there were hundreds of presentations going on and I know mine was well attended, but I will say, the Eastern Europeans have it right.

In Croatia I also did a press conference that talked about IBM’s 100 years of innovation in storage.  You know, it’s pretty impressive that almost 100% of customers (globally), if they were to look around their data center, they would be hard pressed to a piece of storage gear that didn’t have an IBM patent in it.  From the invention of disk, RMAC, to Winchester, to RAID, to virtualization to automated tiering, IBM has done quite a bit in the storage industry and it is only getting stronger.  With IBM’s incredibly strong research and development arm and its financial stability and its ability to develop and acquire technology, they are really unmatched in the storage business.

In my travels, a few key things I learned about Central and Eastern Europe:

1)      The distribution between SAN (block) and NAS (file) is about 80% / 20%.  While they all did say that the mix is slowly changing, it is still heavily block focused.

2)      The sellers (at least the storage sellers) are super smart, more so than in the US.  If you think about though, they have to be, they really need to be able to support themselves.

3)      Translation.  If you really want to do business in Eastern Europe, you really need to make your content very easy to understand and translate.  Make your PPT with more pictures and fewer words.  I don’t know if any of you have seen 7 bullets in ppt translated into Russian, but it gets pretty messy pretty fast.  We could all be a bit more efficient at PPT and be cognizant of our friends across the pond

4)      I am amazed at the fact that the people who live in these countries are so knowledgeable about their history.  It is also important to point out, that knowledge translates directly in to “how” to sell to people in that region.  Which says two things:

1. Don’t think you can just put some “feet on the street” in a country and sell stuff
2. Knowledge is power

It was a fantastic trip to Europe.  I am glad to be home but I am glad I got the experience to also see that part of the world.

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.

The interview went very well.  There were questions about tape, where we discussed the advantages of IBM’s LFTS technology for more advanced tape usage, we discussed the direction data deduplication will go as well.  Noska’s view was that there hadn’t been any advancement in data deduplication in the last 5 years.  I told him that for secondary storage, backup, that he is right, I also told him that the real advancement to deduplication will come when it is ready for primary storage.  Today deduplication isn’t ready for primary, but it will be soon.

On Monday the 13^th we traveled to visit Avnet.  They are a great IBM partner.  Like most partners they have a very large SMB install base and also like a lot of SMB feedback I have been getting, they are looking for a building block solution that has all of the software features implemented as a part of the stack.  SMB and Enterprise alike are starting to realize that the value in any array is becoming the software stack that makes the hardware, efficient, optimized, flexible, and dynamic.  IT’s job continues to get more and more challenging with developing strategic initiatives for the business to make them more competitive and it is the job of the vendor to make sure these solutions are as optimized and cost effective as possible.

We also visited DHL.  These guys have one of the greatest datacenters I have ever visited.  They are very advanced and push a lot of data.  The do some very strategic logistics for a number of companies in Europe and Asia.  They, like many others have a number of challenges.  Since my blog post about “The 5 Most Interesting things at VMworld” (#4) I heard something very interesting today.  I asked “What is your most challenging storage issue”?  He told me that storage was not is “most difficult” challenge.  Storage efficiency was important to him in order to keep driving down costs for his organization as they deliver a service to the different groups that make up DHL, but his most difficult challenge was with server I/O in his VMware environment.  If you read #4 in my post, regarding Proximal Data, this is exactly the issue the address.  As VM instances grow on the physical servers, the I/O starts to become the big problem.  DHL runs over 4000 instances of VMware and as the business demands more applications and application resources, they are bound by the I/O of the server, which also causes them to WAY over provision their storage for performance reasons.  This is very time consuming, management intensive and expensive.  The combination of a solution like Proximal Data as well as compression can help them optimize their infrastructure to save money and deliver better, more cost effective services to their lines of business.

On the lighter side, I spend the weekend in Prague.  What an amazing city.  The weather was fantastic and I was able to take a lot of great photos.  I walked around Prague Castle, ate some authentic Czech food, visited the memorial for the Czech hockey players that passed in the Russian plane crash and met some pretty interesting people.  You can check out some of my photos of Prague at www.facebook.com/skenniston.  Coincidentally the photo above shows the "Golden Lane" where the Alchemists worked to turn anything they could find into gold in the city of Prague.

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?

The reality is data growth is out pacing what traditional RAID can handle and data profiles are changing as well.  These combined have driven new technologies like Cleversafe, Cloud Computing, Hadoop and XIV.  Just like the iPhone is a new approach to the smart phone based on new things we know about how these smart phones are being used, we know more about how data and storage is being used.  New ways to deliver capacity and performance are needed in order to keep up with the changing times.  I thought it was a very good answer in terms that make customers think.

Thursday evening I traveled back to Warsaw where I got in a bit late and just went to a local pub, Sketch.  Grabbed a small bite and some local mead and then headed back to the hotel.  I did get to see the local Palace of Culture and Science in the middle of Warsaw, very impressive, built as a gift from Russia to Poland.

I have an early flight to Prague.  I am very excited about this part of the journey as I have always wanted to travel to Prague.  Press meeting right when I land.  Stay tuned.

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 34^th floor of my hotel having dinner.  It was a great view of Moscow.  I hope to come back.

Next stop, Warsaw Poland.  Stay tuned.

Two solid days at VMworld 2011 and I got to do and see a lot.  Here is a breakdown of the top 5 things I saw at VMworld.

#1 The SiliconAngle / Wikibon Cube

You couldn’t miss it.  You walk into the show floor and there they were, larger than life.  The SiliconAngle / Wikibon Cube broadcasting live from VMworld2011.  Guests that were on the cube included, Tom Georgens (NTAP), Pat Gelsinger (EMC), David Scott (HP), Rick Jackson (VMware) as well as many more.  The Cube also had 12 Industry Spotlights.  The most interesting spotlight had to do with Storage Optimization, especially for VMware.

Oh the times they are a changing.  Now that you can deliver HD TV live over the internet, the Cube has broadcast from a number industry shows and user conferences.  The great part about this, it is like the ability to watch a sporting event being covered by ESPN but for tech.  The Cube brings all of the highlights of these events right into your computer screen.  Now if you can’t make an event, no problem, you can catch all the most important messages from the Cube.  The Cube is now the new mechanism for delivering content to users in the way they want to receive the content, TV.  For more, check out www.siliconangle.tv

#2 Storage Optimization – Industry Spotlight

In the Storage Optimization industry spotlight, the first 15 minutes Dave Vellante and his co-host John Furrier tee up the concept.  They discussed storage optimization, where it has come and were it is going, especially in VMware environments.  We are hearing more and more about storage efficiency technologies.  During the next 15 minutes Dave and I discussed the 5 essential storage efficiency technologies including:

• Tiering
• Thin Provisioning
• Virtualization
• Compression
• Deduplication

We also discussed the fact that the IBM Real-time Compression technology is not only the most efficient and effective compression technology in the industry; we also learned that IBM really acquired not just a real-time “compression” technology but a platform that can do a number of things in real time.  In fact, the 5 IBM storage efficiency technologies all operate in real time which is the most effective for customers.

We have been hearing a great deal about storage optimization in a VMware environment due to the fact that virtualizing servers was successful for the server side of the house but it didn’t do all it set out to do, it didn’t fix the overall IT budget.

Virtualizing servers only pushed the financial problem to the storage side of the house.  Users have told us that when they virtualize their servers, storage grows as much as 4x.  By leveraging the right storage optimization technologies together, users can get their budgets back under control and also deliver the promise that server virtualization set out to do.

#3 More Free Time for “Real-life”

While on the Cube as a panelist with my good friend Marc Farley (HPsisyphus, formally @3ParFarley) Dave asked us what was the most interesting thing we saw on the show floor while walking around.  I didn’t hesitate in my response.  There were two in my mind.  First, it couldn’t be any more obvious at how fast data is growing.  Over 50% of the 19,000 people there had cameras taking pictures and taking video.  That data is going to be stored somewhere.  Additionally, they had these cameras for a reason.  Either we have more bloggers and tweeters than we know about, more marketing people are going to these events or more people are using social media to inform and educate others.  The way in which users want to receive data is always changing and evolving, and at least at VMworld 2011 we were delivering content in a number of ways especially photos and video.  All that data will end up in the “cloud” somewhere.

The second thing I noticed was the amount of free time VMware has given back to the IT user.  I heard, on more than one occasion, end users talking about family, vacations and travel instead of the usual banter about how challenging their jobs are and the issues they have with their vendors which is the normal think I hear at these shows.  This was not an anomaly.  I am chalking it up to the fact that VMware makes people’s lives easier.

#4 Proximal Data

These “most interesting things” are not in any particular order.  I say this because I believe that Proximal Data is THE most interesting thing I saw at the show.  Now Proximal Data just came out of “stealth” in early August.  They didn’t have a booth at VMworld but they did have a “whisper suite”.  So, I have to confess, since I used to be an analyst, sometimes people will ask me to come take a look at their technology and their message to see if it is in line with what is going on in the industry so I got to hear the pitch.

Proximal Data’s message is right on.  It hits a very important and growing topic with VMware these days, the I/O bottle neck on virtual servers, and they solve this problem in a very unique and intelligent way.

First, the problem.  One of the issues facing VMware today is the number of virtual machines that can be hosted by one physical machine.  The more users can get on one system, the more efficient they can be.  The problem is, today systems are running into I/O workload bottlenecks that are causing a limitation in the number of virtual machines one system can run.

One way to solve this problem is add more memory to the host but that could be very very expensive.  You can add more HBA’s or NIC cards but that can be expensive and also difficult to manage.  You can add more flash cache to your storage to improve the I/O bottleneck but doing that only solves ½ the problem, you still need to solve the challenge on the host side, again with memory or host adaptors.

The solution: Proximal Data.  With some advanced I/O management software capabilities combined with PCI flash cards on the host, for a very reasonable price per host.  The software combined with the card is 100% transparent to both the virtual servers and to the storage, which to me is one of the most important features of the implementation.  Transparency is the key to any new technology.  IT has a ton of challenges and has done a great deal of work to get their environment to where it is today.  To implement a technology that causes all of that work to be undone is very painful.  Remember, the hardest thing to change in IT is process, not technology.  It’s important to preserve the process.  That is what Proximal Data does.  Proximal Data can increase the I/O capability of a VMware server with just a 5 minute installation of the PCI card and their software.  This technology can double and even triple the number of virtual machines on any physical server and that is a tremendous ROI.  A new win for efficiency.

There are a number of folks entering this market these days; however Proximal does it transparently with no agents making it the most user friendly implementation.  While these guys won’t have product until 2012, when it hits the market, I am sure it will be very successful.

#5 Convergence to the Cloud

Are we seeing the coming of the “God Box”?  A number of vendors are talking more and more as well as investing in public / private cloud.  There are more systems popping up that have servers, networks, high availability and storage all in one floor tile.  These systems are designed to integrate, scale, manage VM’s simply, increase productivity and ease the management of all possible application deployments in any business.  Additionally these boxes help you to connect to the cloud to ease the cost burden.  Is the pendulum swinging back to the “open systems” main frame?  Only time will tell.

Bonus

One more for fun.  The first meeting I had at VMworld was with a potential OEM prospect of the IBM Real-time Compression IP.  I have always said that this technology could revolutionize the data storage business much like VxVM did for Veritas many years ago.  Creating a standard way to do compression across a number of system can help users with implementation as well as ease the storage cost burden.  I hope this moves forward and I hope more folks step up who want to OEM the technology.

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.

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.

Now users have the opportunity to get their overall IT budget back under control.

#4 Data Protection

The reality here is that many enterprises are waiting for the war to be fought out between the vendors in this space, or looking to embedded snapshots and disk based technologies with mirroring to cut out all of the host based challenges with data protection. 

A report by Taneja Group, sponsored by multiple clients, suggests that the biggest issue in virtual environment is data protection as many enterprise do not know what they need to do and they are looking at their current vendors to provide solutions.  So work closely with the IBM team and leverage all of the work that IBM has done with Tivoli and VMware to help solve your data protection challenges. 

A lot of folks like to talk about deduplication when it comes to VMware, just make sure it is implemented properly and at the right place.  ProtecTIER has great deduplication ratios and great  performance. 

#5 Flexibility

I am not sure how you get more flexible then working with IBM.  From hardware to software to services to partners, IBM offers solutions across a wide spectrum.  Whether it be hardware solutions that can meet a range of performance requirements and application types, to software that can help users analyze their data more effectively.  IBM can also deliver all of these solutions through our relationships with or ISVs as well as partners offering superior flexibility. 

#6 Availability

When it comes to high availability in storage, it is hard to beat the new V7000 or the XIV product.  Innovatively designed specifically around high availability, users can move to a virtualized storage platform such as XIV and users can see the real-world of availability and reliability that does not sacrifice performance in any of their applications. 

#7 Scalability

With IBM XIV, you can simple scale as you need to and automatically and take advantage of new capacity and linear performance improvements as well as managing the entire enterprise from a single, easy to use GUI.

Also, with Real-time Compression, you now have the added benefit of putting more capacity in your existing footprint to do even more analytics while saving on footprint, power and cooling – all in real-time.

#8 Services / Solutions

IBM is the worldwide leader in providing services.  IBM is the largest OEM of VMware solutions on the planet and provides support and services in 170 countries around the globe.   IBM’s Global Services team has architected and installed hundreds, if not thousands of VMware implementations, helping customers go from a non-virtualized to a virtualized world.  IBM, as well as its partners, can help migrate customers to a virtualized environment without a long outage and maintain application and customer production.

#9 TCO / ROI

IBM offers great solutions that reduce the risk, cost, and complexity of the virtualized world.  IBM focuses on the real-world customer challenges.  Customers have been hit hard these last few years when it comes to budgets in order to manage their IT environments.  We keep helping our customers do more with less by enabling a more efficient storage platform than any other vendor.  IBM XIV, V7000, N-Series, SVC and ProtecTIER solutions are great fit for solving difficult VMware challenges and we have real-world references to prove it.

#10 100 Years of Innovation

The bottom line: there is always more to do, IT changes at a rapid pace and it is the vendors job to keep up with the needs of its customers.  IBM has been doing this for 100 years and we will continue to do so.  

For more on IBM and Storage Efficiency at VMworld, see us on SiliconAngle.tv live this week at 3:30 PT.