Tag: "Storage"

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 | 0 comments View Post

So Easy a CIO can Do It!


You have all seen the Geico commercial – “So Easy a Caveman can Do It!” now its time for high tech to jump into another viral-video marketing frenzy with this funny video.

The reality is Storwize is just that simple, plug it in and start saving 50% to 90% of your storage capacity, transparently without changing your applications, your servers, networks or storage.  The technology is so easy to implement even  your CIO can do it!

Hope you like it!

This video was created in conjunction with Media Boss Studios!

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Aug 11, 2010 | 0 comments View Post

IBM to Acquire Storwize


As most of you have seen by now, IBM has entered into an agreement to acquire Storwize.  Being an ‘insider’ I obviously can’t disclose anything about the transaction or the roadmap of the technology inside IBM but what I can tell you is that the Storwize technology will be transforming the data storage industry.

In a webex performed by Storwize and IBM a few months ago, John Power discussed how the trend in the disk drive business, the $/GB being cut in half every 18 months, is not possible to sustain, at least for the foreseeable future.  Even the folks in Almaden labs haven’t been able to crack the code.  Disk drive can’t spin any faster, and you can’t put any more drive heads on disk actuator arm to get more data on a disk drive.

The storage industry evolves such that when internal technology can’t evolve any further, external forces need to come into play.  External forces (appliances) allow vendors to test theories in an effort to prove which new technologies are most effective and give vendors time to figure out how to integrate the new technology into the device.  This IS Storwize.  Bloggers have written that Storwize doesn’t stop the deluge of data at the source, the users or applications that create it.  Bu t until there is no longer a need for data, then we will keep on having a need for primary storage.  Bloggers have also said that by having an appliance that sits in front of your data, the only way to get it back is by having the appliance there to decompress the data.  I have news for all of you, if you want to optimize your data, no matter what you choose ,you are going to need the keys to the castle at some point to open the front gate.  The difference with the Storwize appliance is we don’t care what storage (CIFS / NFS) sits behind appliance, we are storage (vendor agnostic).

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Aug 02, 2010 | 0 comments View Post

6 Ways to Tell Your Boss You’re Saving Him Money


Ever had this situation.  You know you know the right thing to do but convincing the non-techie that you need to move forward on a project tough.  Try some of these techniques!

More funny, viral video, shameless advertising.

For more information on how 15 minutes can save you 50% or more of your storage go to www.storwize.com

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Jul 26, 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

A Blueprint for Primary Storage Optimization


During the past three to four months the storage industry has seen a spike in the number of reports, white papers and news articles surrounding the evolution of primary storage technology, capacity optimization (it is 2010’s Hottest Storage Technology).

The reason this technology is getting a lot of ‘air play’ these days is due to the fact that this technology is so critical to help control the growth and costs of storage.  In 2010 the EMC sponsored IDC Report “The Digital Universe Decade – Are You Ready?” was release and stated that:

  • In 2009, amid the “Great Recession,” the amount of digital information grew 62% over 2008 to 800 billion gigabytes (0.8 Zettabytes).
  • The amount of digital information created annually will grow by a factor of 44 from 2009 to 2020…

The folks at Wikibon also released an info graph that exposes the true explosion of data.

Information Explosion & Cloud Storage
Via: Wikibon

When you combine storage capacity (and the foot print it takes up) along with the power it takes to run it and cool it as well as the human resource it takes to manage it, you soon realize we cannot keep ‘just adding more cheap disk’ in an effort to manage the storage demands.  High Tech companies with high tech labs are also telling IT that ‘they are out of tricks’ when it comes to the ability to continue deliver disk drive that double capacity every 18 months.  It is for these reasons that primary storage optimization technologies have stepped into the ‘lime light’ as it serves as a means to help control the growth of primary storage including the foot print, power, cooling and man power required to manage it.

However, as we all know in IT, no two environments are the same and what may be good for one may not be good for another.  When looking at primary storage optimization there seem to be a number of available technologies and ways to deploy these technologies and the key question is what is right for ‘my’ environment.

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Jul 01, 2010 | 2 comments View Post

Marketing, FUD and Doing What You Do Best


Rather than leave a lengthy comment on Tom Cook’s blog post from Friday Compression and Dedupe: Business Value and Data Safety (and from a marketing perspective, Friday’s are bad days to post blogs – especially in the summer) – I thought I would respond here (this may get lengthy as Tom made a number of points which I need comment on).

The first thing I do want to say is that when doing technical marketing; the proper strategy would be to not be on defense but rather take an offensive approach.  However, given the amount of FUD that Tom put in his latest blog post, I have to defend compression to some degree.

Now, I think we can all agree that data compression and data deduplication are two technologies that can complement one another very well.  Avamar (EMC) deduplicates the data at the source and then compresses the data before sending it to the Avamar Data Store gaining tremendous efficiency in network utilization.  ProtecTIER (IBM) compresses the data once it is deduplicated at the target device before it stores the data.  Other solutions also combine compression and data deduplication.

I’d like to comment on some key point Tom made in his piece where he is just blatantly wrong:

1)      Compression identifies redundant data across a very small window, usually 64 KB. – While this may be true for other compression technologies, this is not true for Storwize.  Storwize performs compression where the initial window is not fixed in size at all; it is the resultant write that is fixed in size.  This size is also specifically mapped to the I/O patter of the data being written.  The goal is such that in 1 I/O Storwize can do all the work it needs to on a particular file or LUN and it is for this reason Storwize has no performance penalty.

2)      Compression produces data reduction rates at most 2X for most data types. – Seems Tom needs a lesson in the most common answer in IT – “IT DEPENDS”.  Data compression ratios are 100% tied to the data type.  For a true indication of data compression ratios see Figure 1.

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Jun 21, 2010 | 10 comments View Post

Gravity Applies to Everyone!


There was an interesting announcement today regarding Permabit who is now providing primary storage optimization through OEMs and having their solution embedded into the storage system.  This further drives home the point of where capacity optimization should live.  I do have a couple of questions however:

1)      What is the performance like?  I see phrases such as “High Performance Data Optimization Software” but don’t see any performance metrics – such as ‘no performance degradation’ for customers utilizing the solution.  Or testing metrics from their ‘partners’ (as it probably isn’t in production yet) – which brings up another question:

2)      Why were none of the ‘design win’ partners quoted in this announcement?

3)      Rehydration – Mr. Floyd states:

Permabit’s Floyd claims Albireo can maintain data integrity because data written to disk isn’t altered, and the reduction takes place out of the data path. When parallel processing is used, deduped data doesn’t have to be rehydrated when it’s accessed.

The question is – if it doesn’t need to be rehydrated, then how does the application read it?  I can only assume that Mr. Floyd means the data doesn’t have to be rehydrated on disk, which is fine, the question become: a) how does the application know what the data is? (Ocarina uses an agent to help them understand the data, but this is another thing to manage) and b) What is the performance of the system looking up all of the hash keys to reassemble the data on the fly, so how much more storage resources will this consume?

4)      Back to performance – Permabit states:

When done inline, data will flow to the Albireo library before going to disk. Post-process deduplication will write data to disk first, then scan and eliminate duplicated data. The parallel option sends data to disk while still in memory, and applies updates the same way as post-processing without having to read data off disk. Each method has different amounts of latency and reduction efficiencies.

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Jun 07, 2010 | 2 comments View Post

A Blog with no Comments?


Today I read a very well written blog by The SANMan.  The only issue is, you can’t comment on his blog.  This is the first technology blog I have seen like this.  So, I will have to post my thought here.

In his post “NetApp Takes the “Primary” Lead for Data Reduction” – which seems more like theory and a commercial for NTAP than reality (see comments @ The Register) the SANMan states:

“Yes, Ocarina and Storwize have appliances that compress and uncompress data as it’s alternatively stored and read but what performance overhead do such technologies have when hundreds of end users concurrently access the same email attachment? As for Oracle’s Solaris ZFS file system sub level deduplication which is yet to see the light of day one wonders how much hot water it will get Oracle into should it turn out to be a direct rip off of the NetApp model.”

I have two comments:

1) You are right – you CAN’T do deduplicaiton on primary if you affect performance.  All indications for customers are that they cannot use NTAP deduplicaiton or even compression ‘in-line’ as the performance is just too terrible so all processes must be done post-process.

2) I direct your attention to the Wikibon Blog on CORE - “Dedupe Rates Matter…Just Not as Much as You Think” – Storwize can do in-line data optimization without any performance degradation.  So the question is – if customers can ‘Optimize without Compromise’ – why wouldn’t they?

Updated 6/7/2010 – Oh, quick question – how does the SANMan get away with the graphics he uses?  I would think that Walt Disney & Pixar would get a bit upset with the use of the character Carl Fredricksen, no?

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Jun 04, 2010 | 0 comments View Post
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