Tag: "Data Protection"

Fixed Input vs. Variable Input Compression


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.

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Nov 03, 2011 | 0 comments View Post

The Storage Alchemist in Prague


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.

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Sep 12, 2011 | 0 comments View Post

Storage in Eastern Europe


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.

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Sep 04, 2011 | 0 comments 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

Storage Efficiency Spotlight at VMworld


VMworld Live 2011
Via: Wikibon

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Aug 29, 2011 | 0 comments View Post

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?

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May 09, 2011 | 1 comment View Post

Disk Elasticity and Storage Efficiency


Storage is elastic.  How do I know you ask?  Yesterday I visited a customer who is using the Storwize product to do Real-time Compression on their primary storage.  The customer is Allianz and has been using the product for over a year.  They see 75% compression on their users home directory data.  To give you an idea, Allianz is an insurance company and generates TONS of spreadsheets, 14TB worth of spreadsheets (okay, not all 14TB is spreadsheets but you get the picture).

Prior to Allianz purchasing the Storwize technology, Allianz didn’t have great data management practices.  Users store data in their home directories and there is really no discipline around deleting or cleaning up files so data just grows.  Additionally, storage isn’t really budgeted for.  Overall IT is but at a storage level, they just purchase some when the need some.

Again, prior to the Storwize technology, Allianz had their primary storage and a backup to tape at their local site.  They then replicated the data to their remote site and also performed a backup to tape.

Allianz has an overall IT mission to reduce spend by 10% per year.  The thing to think about is that this 10% could come from a lot of places including data management.

Once the Storwize technology was installed the first things they saw were:

  • 75% capacity optimization
  • Better data management capabilities through Storwize reporting
  • The ability to keep more data on line and available for faster recoveries
  • No change in any of their existing storage processes
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Oct 05, 2010 | 2 comments View Post

IBM Day 1 – It’s Official


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.)

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Aug 30, 2010 | 1 comment View Post

Setting the Record Straight on Backup


Or should I say, ‘Setting the Record Straight on Backing Up Optimized Data’?  Carter discusses on this blog they myriad of ways to perform backups on optimized data.  (His blog actually reads more like a white paper explaining how backup needs to be configured to work with his product.)  One of the ways Carter describes to do backup is via NDMP and says “… is the most complicated.” The funny thing is that this is the way that 90% of enterprises backup their NAS data.  The other scenarios are not quite stated correctly or are again designed to lead users to believe their solution is ‘simple’ when they really add complexity (however, I’ll let the backup community debate that – I have been in backup for 10+ years and I know this won’t go over on them, nor do I want to waste too much blog space).  Finally the last scenario they discuss isn’t backup – its replication, but I’ll address that too. Let’s address these one at a time.  First, Carter mentions that in some scenarios there is a need to rehydrate data in order to back it up.  The process of rehydrating data may not require that the array have the physical capacity to store the data before it is backed up, but the array will require the CPU resources, I/O resources, bandwidth and time to rehydrate to data to back it up.  George goes on to say that this situation is “ugly, but not that ugly”.  I will tell you any time you put more resource requirements on systems that do backups, your running the risk that backups won’t get done.  One of the greatest challenges in IT is backup.  Backup administrators are running into backup window problems all the time.  Data is growing not shrinking; having to do more work on more data in order to protect it is a recipe for failure.  In my previous comments I may have incorrectly stated you need more disk space to do the backups, but I did correctly state that the array will require more system resources.  And where do these resources come from?  When the system is idle?  When is your storage array idle? Now, what if all you had to do was – well nothing.  Storwize sits in front of primary storage and stores your data, compressed, in real-time with no performance impact and preserving the envelope of the data file.  Then when it comes time to backup, the backup administrator does absolutely nothing different that he/she did yesterday.  Same shares are backed up, same clients, and all the work is done by the Storwize appliance, there is no load on the filer.  The next question is can Storwize keep up with the backup stream and the answer is YES.  As you saw in the Wikibon CORE blog, our time to compress is on the order of magnitude of milliseconds – the time to decompress is even less.  (I should also mention one thing Carter failed to mention, in order for backups to come off their system ‘transparently’ you need a software agent on the client – who wants to manage more clients?

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May 11, 2010 | 0 comments View Post

Compressed Thoughts – Compression and Deduplication


This video doesn't talk about the merits of one versus the other but how when compression (or capacity optimization is done right) it should enhance data deduplication, not impact it.  Enjoy and for more videos like this one go to the StorwizeChannel.

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May 06, 2010 | 0 comments View Post
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