Tag: "Flash"

Storage Efficiency Panel – SNW 2011 Fall


Yesterday I was on a panel at SNW in Orlando Florida.  The panel was hosted by Dave Vellente, Founder of Wikibon and always a great host for these kinds of things.  On the panel was Larry Freeman of NetApp, Craig Nunes of HP (formally 3Par), Jarred Floyed CTO / Founder at Permabit and myself, IBM (formally Storwize).

Some interesting data came out of this panel.  There were probably over 150 people in the audience.  It was a well-attended session.  Also, Dave is VERY good about asking the audience questions.  Let me start by making sure we all know where everyone sits at the “storage efficiency table” that was on the panel.

  • Larry Freeman is from NetApp – they claim, and I believe them, that they have 10 storage efficiency technologies that are embedded into WAFL
  • Craig Nunes main focus on the panel was ‘zero reclamation’ to optimize storage
  • I have a Real-time Compression drum I am beating
  • Jarred Floyed focuses on data deduplication

Here are some questions and answers Dave got when speaking to the audience:

Dave’s Question

Audience Response (in close estimated %)
How many people use deduplication / compression in their storage? 60% responded they did use one or both of these technologies in their environment
How do users use these technologies - embedded or appliance? 100% of the 60% said "embedded"
Who is your storage vendor was that provided these technologies? 100% of the 60% said NTAP
What is the number 1 issue was with the embedded solution and making it not more widely adopted? Performance was the answer.  They all believed that for 70% of their applications, the embedded solution was “good enough” but for 30% where performance is critical – it couldn’t do the job.
Why are not more appliances deployed to solve the performance issues? The response was that customers didn’t want to have to manage multiple solutions in their environment doing the same thing.
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Oct 11, 2011 | 0 comments View Post

Storage Tiers – Take 3


I find myself in a true quandary.  First, I have true admiration for my good friend and fellow blogger 3Par Farley and never feel comfortable being on the other side of the coin from him.  Second, I find myself agreeing, to a degree, with Jon Toigo (who still uses crazy permalinks and considers Novell a serious storage player.  What is up with that?).

I’m sure by now most of you all have read the fury lately over Tom Georgens’ comments about the future of storage tiering.  A number of folks who have ‘tiering’ technology reacted with disdain (see a list on Storagerap).  Some wondered how a storage visionary like Tom could turn his back on technology that helps people save money in storage.  Some even suggested that this is just marketing to overcome deficiency in the NetApp product line.  However, one applauded Tom for understanding how the real world deploys storage.  All good points, but I have my own theory on storage teiring...

I want to come right out and say I think that storage tiering is an incredibly smart concept.  (Now that that is off the table…) I would also say that much like the prediction that tape is ‘dead’ (I guess Data Domain didn’t get that memo), storage tiering, while it can’t be dead, because in reality, it never actually was, nor do I think it will be for a very long time.  Let’s look at the facts:

First, HSM never really went anywhere.  There is not mass adoption of HSM technology.  Second, tiering is not a technology issue.  Humans are lazy.  What do I mean?  HSM / Tiering or whatever you want to call it depends on policy.  IT can’t get any two groups in a company to decide on anything other than storage is too expensive.  When I speak to well respected people in IT the ‘real world’ (my dad), they tell me it is too difficult to get organizations to agree on when data can be archived in order to save money (and that is what this is all about really).  Finally, IT processes get in the way of a good tiering strategy.  Getting data to go one way is easy – move data to cheaper and cheaper tiers of storage until it vanishes.  Try getting it back.  That takes a lot of management tools and integration and costs just as much as doing nothing.

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Mar 07, 2010 | 15 comments View Post