Storage Efficiency Spotlight at VMworld
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Tag: "Compression"
Virtual Disk Storage
History truly does repeat itself. We are talking about the history of data storage. Every once and a while a new technology comes along that requires a new way to think about infrastructure. Notice I said “infrastructure”. I’d like to paint two analogies:
Analogy 1: RAID – Prior to RAID users stored their data on disk and if they could afford it, they backed that data up to have a protected copy of their data. When RAID came out, users were able to store their data on multiple disks appearing as one device. The benefits to this were, increased data reliability, better performance. This new technology however, fundamentally changed how disk was sold, but the questions were the same:
- How much capacity do you need?
- What type of performance does your application require?
The sales reps point of view changed. There were a number of new considerations that needed to be taken into account. First, the age old question, “Will I sell less storage “stuff?” Remember the person, at the time, selling the disk was probably also selling the backup tape and software to protect that information. If the disks are more reliable, maybe the customer won’t need as much tape? Second, when the capacity question came up, the seller also needed to know what type of RAID the customer wanted to ensure they sold them enough drives. It was no longer as simple as asking the capacity requirements and dividing it by the drive capacity at the time. Now depending upon RAID levels there was a new set of math that needed to be done. Third was the notion of performance and more spindles meant more performance so now that the capacity equation was solved for, you also needed to know the I/O requirements in order to make sure the right number of drives were sold to solve for the capacity as well as the performance.
Jul 06, 2011 | 3 comments
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Efficiency vs. Optimization
“Storage Efficiency” has become a big topic over the past 12 months. There are a number of new technologies that have come out in the last few years that are helping to deal with storage growth. We all know that data is the root of the decisions that drive business today. The more data you have, hopefully, the better decisions you can make to drive your business to success. The question is, “what is the value (and hence the cost) of the infrastructure to create that success?” What we do know is that the ability to put more data in a highly efficient footprint can give your company a competitive edge. There are five technologies that can help an IT organization create an efficient storage infrastructure. These are:
1) Tiering
2) Virtualization
3) Thin Provisioning
4) Compression
5) Deduplication
It is also important to point out that there are some semantics when talking about storage efficiency, specifically between efficiency and optimization technologies. I think it is useful to attempt to define these as they lead us to picking the right solutions for what we are trying to accomplish. For the purpose of this post, efficiency will relate to making existing capacity more useful and optimization will mean making more capacity out of existing capacity.
Using these definitions, technologies such as Tiering, Virtualization and Thin Provisioning are efficiency technologies. These technologies help to utilize the existing capacity that you have.
Tiering is technology that is used on about 10% of your data or less. It is used to move data that requires higher performance to flash storage. Good tiering technology analyzes data access patterns and moves the most active data to the highest performing disk. It doesn’t really change the amount of physical capacity that is required; it just changes what type of capacity is required and allows IT to make sure data is operating as fast and efficiently as possible.
Data Protection, Retention and Archive Starts with Data Value
It feels good to open up the blogging again to new topics, especially ones I am intimately familiar with. (But have no fear, there will be references to primary storage optimization / compression.)
This weekend I had an interesting conversation with my Dad. We were discussing backup. My dad basically runs IT for the State of Maine. The State of Maine uses CommVault backup software. So I posed the question to him, “What would it take for you to rip out CommVault and replace it with another solution. He thought about it for a moment and replied “I wouldn’t”. His answer came down to a couple of reasons.
First was the expense. It’s not just about buying the new software, it would be training people to run the new software and it would be about throwing away the massive investment they have in their existing product as well as converting all the years of backup takes created with one software to the new software. This is one of the biggest things vendors forget when trying to sell a customer on their backup software.
Second was the fact that, feature for feature, the top 5 traditional backup software products are not really that different from one another. Sure, I do agree that some products have features that others don’t, and others products have features that work better than others, but in reality, the delta is so small and the workarounds are so simple it doesn’t really matter. Unless your replacing traditional backup software with an evolutionary source based data deduplication software (which is only applicable for some environments) there is no advantage to switching software.
The challenge is if Data Protection is still one of the biggest and most expensive pain points within IT, how do the problems get resolved if replacing the software controlling it all is too costly to change?
Language Weaver – RtC – Total Transparency
See how Language Weaver has utilized IBM Real-time Compression and are getting 3 to 1 compression and the solution was totally transparent to their infrastructure.
Feb 18, 2011 | 2 comments
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Shopzilla – IBM Real-time Compression is Transparent
Shopzilla has been a customer of the IBM Real-time Compression technology for over 2 years. Here they describe the benefits of the technology.
Feb 15, 2011 | 0 comments
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Polycom Saves Big with IBM Real-time Compression
Amit Bar-On, Manager of IT at Polycom in Israel shares his story with us about not only does IBM Real-time Compression save him storage space, that space can actually now be used for people instead of equipment. As Polycom continues it success in the telepresence business, they have grown in the last five years to having over 120 developers in Israel. Office space anywhere is expensive, in Tel-Aviv it is VERY expensive. Polycom is taking data storage and data management to a whole new level.