“Think” Event in NY – Pretty Amazing
If you get to NY city, check out the Think Event at the Lincoln Center sponsored by IBM to commemorate their 100th Anniversary.
Tag: "marketing"
5 Golden Rules of IT
Last week I was briefing Dan Kusnetzky, storage analyst from the Kusnetzky Group. I was briefing him on the value proposition of Real-time Compression and it's value proposition to all down stream processes, especially backup. Specifically I told him that there is NO technology available today that can have even 50% of the effect on the existing backup process that Real-time Compression could have without changing any architecture in the backup process.
Dan agreed, in fact, he told me that the Real-time Compression technology meets the "Golden Rules of IT". I asked Dan, "What are the Golden Rules of IT?" and he enlightened me. I didn't make these up so I can't take credit but thought they were definitely worth sharing, and a good rule of thumb to follow for IT. Here they are:
- If its not broke, don't fix it.
- Don't touch it, you'll break it.
- If you touched it, you broke it.
- Good enough, is good enough.
- Accept your "jerkdom" (Everybody is an Monday morning quarterback)
I have to agree, these are good rules to follow and a great complement to the Real-time Compression technology. The fact that this technology fits into any storage environment, transparently and can optimize storage up to 5x without any performance impact, is very simple and one of the only ways to have a significant, compounding budgetary affect for very little dough.
May 17, 2011 | 5 comments
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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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Storage Alchemist Video Update
Hey, as most of you know, IBM purchased Storwize and changed the name. I have updated all of my previous videos that talked about the technology from saying "Storwize" to "Real-time Compression" - and added some more technical details. Also, with the help of Media Boss, I have updated the intro - pretty cool stuff! Have a look and tell me what you think!
Jan 03, 2011 | 0 comments
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Top 10 Reasons Real-time Compression Provides Extraordinary Storage Efficiency
Over the past few weeks I have witnessed the proverbial mudslinging that takes place in the blogosphere when marketing feathers are ruffled. Most recently I was reading Rich Anderson of The StorageSavvy Blog. The article was "Compression better than Dedup? NetApp Confirms!"
I have to agree with Rich on many fronts. First, "When all you have is a hammer, everything is a nail." Rich points out vendors have to sell "what's in the bag" so it is conceivable that all problems look like they can be solved with their solution. If you look back over the last few years NTAP has always had a "me too" reputation. Whatever the industry has, they have one too and its better. For the last few years, while competing against Storwize, they have pulled the EMC tactic of trying to stall a market by saying, "We have optimization for primary storage with deduplication." The reality is, you can't use it in real time, it is a resource hog, and again Rich mentions, the only use case it works well on in primary storage is VMware (and that is ONLY IF the customer stores their data outside the .vmdk file otherwise compression is much better). Now that NTAP has compression their story has changed saying that compression on primary storage is better for most use cases. Duh! The folks at Storwize (now IBM Real-time Compression) have been saying that for years. Why, deduplication is great for repetitive data sets, i.e. backup, not primary storage. There just isn't that much repetitive data in primary storage. Again, NTAP is trying to stall the market saying they have "in-line" compression for primary storage. Sorry guys, not good enough. In-line is NOT Real-time. Rich also points out that the key characteristics of storage for customers are capacity and performance. Patrick Rogers of NTAP has said publically that compression WILL indeed impact performance and that they even have a tool that will tell you how much performance will be impacted. While NTAP may say compression is "free", we all know nothing worth having in life is free, you get what you pay for. If you need the performance to do compression you are going to have to perform a major upgrade to your filer in order to just be able to perform compression let alone try to do compression in real time. No real savings there.
Dec 15, 2010 | 0 comments
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Business Outcomes are what Matters
I spent last week in London meeting with IBM Real-time Compression customers and partners and supporting the launch of the new IBM Storwize V7000 (not to be confused with the company IBM purchased a month ago).
While on this trip I met with a great colleague . Matthew is one of the leading technologists working for ComputaCenter in the UK. We spent a couple of hours discussing how the IT business was changing. Once revered and dressed in shirt and tie, the IT manager now is plumber / electrician of the company. The first to get yelled at when systems / applications / devices aren’t working, always lacking resources and always being asked to do more with less. While the plumbing matters, everyone just expects it to work. Like plugging in a phone to a phone jack, users expect a dial tone.
The shift in technology within IT is moving from “What does it cost?”, to “What is the business value I can achieve with this technology?” More and more, especially as we are moving out of this recession, albeit slowly, customers are trying to figure out how to spend less in IT (as a percentage of overall revenue) but increase their business outcome.
If you read the blog post I did last week about Allianz. The goals set forth in IT were to cut spending by 10% each year but increase overall efficiency. How do you do that? New technology is how you do that but it is not sold under the premise of a vendor brining in a new technology that they have developed or acquired, it is about identifying a problem: ‘Our storage growth and management of that growth is costing us too much money’, and then solving that problem with new technology that fits into the business.
Oct 18, 2010 | 0 comments
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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. .
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 . 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.)