Tag: "Process"

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 Yeager.  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.

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Oct 18, 2010 | 0 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

Sever + Storage Optimization = Datacenter Utopia


Matt Prigge had a really great article on his InfoWorld Data Explosion blog called "VMware vSphere raises the bar -- again".  In the piece Matt makes two really important points.

1.  VMware has taken the world by storm over the past few years.  A technology that can lower both CapEx and OpEx costs and ease the burden of administration is a great thing for the data center.  And,

2.  With all the advantages of virtual server optimization, storage administration, is a big issue.

VSphere has done a lot to help the issues of storage administration (specifically storage performance for virtual servers) but that is only a part of the challenge.  Customers consistently tell us that by developing a virtualized server environment, their storage requirements have grown by as much as 4x.  The savings that have been realized by server virtualization are soon eclipsed by the need for more storage.  This  is one of the reasons it has taken a while for server virtualization to really take off in production.  In talking to customers, virtualizing a lab or test environment where data can be deleted once it is 'used' without worry is one thing, but in production, where the production data needs to be kept for a long time starts to cause issues.

Now, with all the hype around primary storage optimization, end users can couple the benefits of server virtualization with primary storage optimization to maximize their ROI in the datacenter.  The important thing to remember, just like server virtualization didn't force customers to sacrifice anything in terms of performance, availability, process and supportability, you need to look for the same thing from a storage optimization solution.

The valuable features added to vSphere around SIOC combined with the optimization capabilities from Storwize can allow IT to maximize storage performance, maximize their existing storage resources and not affect data integrity or data availability.  There is a new white paper on the combined solution of VMware and Storwize that outlines how VMware and Storwize can provide customers with the maximum ROI in the datacenter.

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Jul 22, 2010 | 0 comments View Post

A Bright New Day – Part Duo


I am not sure how many of you have seen the ABC show 'V' but it looks like they have it looks like they have two things in common with Storwize.

First, if you are unfamiliar with the show V - the description from their website is as follows:

The Visitors spread their message quickly and clearly: They come in peace, bearing gifts of medical miracles and technological breakthroughs far beyond our wildest imaginations.

Very similar to Storwize.  We visit customers in peace bearing gifts of miracles and technology breakthroughs beyond their wildest imaginations.  Storwize is the only company to do real-time data storage compression without performance degradation.  As the growth of data exceeding 487M TB (IDC 2008 study) something has to be done to control this growth and end users are quickly turning to capacity optimization technologies to control this growth and more  specifically to Storwize Real-time compression.

With another banner quarter under the belt, I had an opportunity to meet with a number of existing customers as well as customers to be.  One of the more interesting meetings came when I met with a large manufacture in the mid-west.  We were sitting with the storage architecture team and the finance team.  We were going through our usual presentation, showing the finance folks the savings they were able to achieve with Storwize.  Storwize was able to compress their data 66% giving them back more than half of their storage capacity that they could continue to grow into.  We also showed them how there was no impact to their production environment with the Storwize appliances in line.  The finance folks were VERY impressed.  At that moment one of the storage architects jumped out of his seat and said, "But wait, your forgetting the most important point."  To which we all looked at each other a bit perplexed and said, "Oh, what is that?" And he replied, "Storwize is Butt Simple!".  He went on to say that the deployment (during their POC) caused no down time (they were in an HA environment) and once in place, they just started compressing - no change to their filers, no change to their networks, no change to their applications and the end users never even knew anything different.  He said, "Storwize makes my job simple and look like a hero to my boss!".

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Jul 09, 2010 | 0 comments 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

Comression & Deduplication – Oil & Water or Milk & Cookies


UPDATE

Oil & Water?

Last week Mike Davis from Ocarina Networks published a blog post "Compression and Dedupe like Oil & Water?"  It was a good piece and from what I understand, and I don't know Mike, but he will be taking over blogging as Sunshine has moved on to greener pastures and I wish her the best.  The reason for this piece is because Mike made some interesting statements in his piece and I had some questions.  I know the guys at Wikibon have ideas on this topic and I tried asking my questions via twitter and then on his blog but haven't received any feedback (trust me, I am not nieve, I know we are all very busy) so thought it would be interesting to share my thoughts and try to start some dialog.

Mike stated:

"If you apply a compression-only workflow to a dataset let’s say you get 50%. Now run the same data set through a dedupe-only workflow and you’ll get maybe 20% (remember this is primary storage not backup data). Now take those little chunks and pointers from the dedupe workflow and compress them; you might get an additional 35% for a total of 55%. So compression of deduped data is less effective than on the raw data-set, but the combination (for this example) has eeked out a 5% advantage over the compression-only workflow."

I understand Mike to be saying that if you used deduplicaiton and compression you could potentially get an additional 5% optimization of your storage over standard compression.  My question is, At what cost?  I don't necessarily mean $ cost either, while this is a factor, but at what cost to the end user and the IT administrator.  When I think of capacity optimization for primary storage, here is what I believe the requirements are for IT:

  1. Optimization cannot cause any impact to the performance of the storage array
  2. Optimization cannot cause any change in downstream processes for the systems administrator
  3. Optimization cannot cause any increase in storage management functions
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Apr 04, 2010 | 4 comments View Post

Compressed Thoughts – Transparency & Compression


Anything that upsets IT process is a big deal.  It is important, as IT investigates new technologies for the data center, that to truly add value and provide a true ROI, the new technology must not impact all of the existing processes that are currently in place.

I have said it before and I am sure I will say it again, "The hardest thing to change in IT is not technology, it is process."

Learn how real-time, random access compression is the only way to integrate into IT's downstream processes and even enhance them providing a valuable TCO and elevating the ROI.

And for more cool videos on compression check out the Storwize YouTube Channel

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Mar 25, 2010 | 0 comments View Post

No More Tiers / Tears


The great thing about blogging and independence is that we can post things that add value that we want to share as long as we give the proper recognition.  One of my colleagues, Mike Dutch from the CTO office of SSG and long time SNIA member had some thoughts as it pertained to storage tiering that were insightful  so together we decided to share this post.  I hope you enjoy it.

I'm guessing that many people define a storage tier by its particular storage technology (like SATA). While this may be a useful working definition it obscures the essential notion of what a storage tier really is and leads to confusion when a new technology like data deduplication comes around.  A precise definition may also lead to some interesting innovations if we were to take a slightly different path.

Should deduplicated storage be considered a storage tier?  I would say “no” and here's why: because a technology such as deduplication can span, and optimize across all tiers.

A storage tier is storage space that has availability, performance, and cost characteristics different enough from other storage tiers as to economically justify the movement of data between it and other storage tiers based on the importance (value, performance need etc…) of the data. While storage tiers are often thought of as being tied to a particular type of hardware,

e.g.,  Flash, FC, SAS, SATA, VTL, PTL, COM (Computer Output Microfiche), or even paper, this is not necessarily the case. For example, highly available cloud or network-based virtual disks could leverage multiple technologies within their single tier.  Since a variety of technologies can be used to provide a particular storage service level, you should not think of a specific technology as a specific storage tier, but should instead evaluate what technology, or combination of technologies would deliver the availability-performance-cost point that I need for this level tier.  "SATA" is not a storage tier, it just happens to be one "technology-set" that can deliver for a single storage tier.

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Jul 16, 2009 | 2 comments View Post

Process vs. Technology


The hardest thing to change inside IT is not technology, it is process!  I say this because all too often there are technologies available that provide a far superior solution to a complex IT problem, however, this new technology may not fit into your existing business process.  Need proof?  Let's take data protection as an example.  Did you know that VTLs (virtual tape libraries) and data deduplication technologies came out at the exact same point in history, 10 years ago?  Which technology had faster market adoption?  VTLs of course because implementing them didn't cause a major disruption in processes.

Let's take a look at a simple backup environment.  We won't worry about archiving or compliance for the moment, just operational backup and recovery.  Today's backup has a number of complexities.  There are some data sets that have weekly full backups and daily incremental backups.  There are some data sets that sit under applications that, for faster recovery capabilities and simplicity, require daily full backups.  Once the backups are done, in order to ensure true data protection reliability, a process of checking the backup logs to ensure every system was successfully protected begins.  Next, backup tapes are either created (if it is a disk based backup) or tapes are taken from the library and moved to a transportable box, hopefully a secure box.  Finally, a third party vendor comes to pick up the tapes and take them off site for safe-keeping.  Additionally, if the data is backed up using encryption, then the encryption keys are also kept off site for security purposes.

 Customers face these standard backup challenges:

1) Backups take too long and cannot meet backup windows as a result of too much data.

2) Backups fail due to poorly configured (networked) backup environments.

3) Backups at remote offices are 'unreliable'. (Don't follow best practices set in the data center.)

a. No one with the appropriate skill set is available to monitor these backups.

b. No one with the appropriate skill set is available to troubleshoot these backups.

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May 01, 2009 | 1 comment View Post

Lean Six Sigma Your Backups


Last week I took a course offered by EMC entitled ‘Lean Six Sigma' - Yellow Belt. This is a training course that is used to help ‘solve problems' in a given process, typically work related. When I think about where the biggest problem is in IT its in the Backup arena so I thought, what a better place to test it.

backup4

Enterprise Strategy Group 2008

There are two components to Lean Six Sigma. Lean or Leaning a process is about removing excess from a process to make it more efficient. For backup, moving as much data out of the backup stream as possible would increase backup efficiency.  Deleting unnecessary data or archiving static data in the production storage can cut down on as much as 50% of the data in the backup, ‘leaning' the process.

Next, when looking at Six Sigma, we learned about the DMAIC process. That is:

  • Define - Business case, scope, problem statement, goals
  • Measure - Process flow, run charts, Pareto charts
  • Analyze - Cause / Effect, waste identification
  • Improve - Waste removal, improve plan, control charts
  • Control - Monitor to prevent repeat failure, control charts, control plan

First, as I was thinking about this, I kept coming to the measure phase. If you don't currently measure your backup process, unless of course only when there is a recovery failure, then perhaps its time to invest in a tool to help measure the current process.  This measurement will allow you to identify current problems, serving as a benchmark against wich you can measure the success of your 'leaning'.  So, if we apply the steps in the DMAIC process to your typical backup environment, here is what it may look like.

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Mar 25, 2009 | 0 comments View Post