Tag: "Storwize"

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

Real-time Compression “Meets Minimum”


IBM's Ed Walsh, Director of Storage Efficiency sits down with Steve Duplessie, Founder of ESG to talk about how IBM Real-time Compression sets the bar for doing storage optimization in NAS. At the end of the day, if you can do compression in real time, without sacrificing performance and the transparency of the implementation, then why wouldn't you - given the savings you can get over traditional compression.

We all know compression is not new and it is coming as a standard feature in a number of storage systems. The issue is, each of these technologies has a significant impact on performance - both primary storage performance as well as the performance on all of the back end operations such as backups, replication etc...

IBM's Real-time Compression doesn't have any of these limitations - listen to Ed to hear more.

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Jan 19, 2011 | 0 comments View Post

Trident Micro Has Success with IBM Real-time Compression


As with any new technology there is a hurdle to get over before putting it into production, but once in, it can add a TON of value.

Trident Micro mentioned on runningDATA with Steve and Dave


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Jan 14, 2011 | 0 comments View Post

Linked In Storage Discussion on Storage Efficiency


Great conversation on Linked In about deduplication and compression for storage efficiency in the Data Storage Professionals Group.  Help the storage community answer this question:

Does anyone has any experience in NAS de-duplication at filesystem level, like NetApps. Does it really work? I concerns/limitations?

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Jan 04, 2011 | 2 comments View Post

Snowball VFX Keeps the Avalanche Under Control


What a great name, Snowball.  And much like information can behave like a "snowball" turning into an "avalanche", Snowball VFX has been able to control the avalanche of data utilizing the IBM Real-time Compression technology.  Here in this video customer case study, Yoni Cohen, Founder of Snowball talks about the value of Real-time Compression in his environment.

Additionally, we have captured from all of our Media & Entertainment customers what they think about the Real-time Compression technology.  To see the value proposition, check out our Media & Entertainment Portal through our good friends at TechValidate.

By the way, we couldn't have captured this amazing video without the help of the folks at Snowball for all of their footage they let us use as well as the folks at MediaBoss TV who helped us create this video.

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Dec 20, 2010 | 0 comments View Post

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.

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Dec 15, 2010 | 0 comments View Post

Storwize – What is in a Name, Really?


Today IBM is making one of the most significant storage announcements in the last 10 years.  (Steve Duplessie is quoted as saying “…last 20 years.” but announcing that they were basically getting out of the storage business in 2000 by selling their Mylex division was pretty significant.)

Today IBM has made it abundantly clear that they are back in the storage business.  It makes a lot of sense actually.  Servers have been commoditized to about 3% margins and services is a body business (to make more money you need more bodies).  Storage is the only place these days to add significant ‘value’ to the infrastructure eco-system.

Storage software – or as I like to refer to them, storage services allow vendors to add more value to commodity hardware by providing very useful capabilities such as thin provisioning, virtualization, snapshots, replication, and optimization solutions such as real-time compression.

However this story is as much about the naming of the product as it is the product itself.

Let’s rewind a bit.  It is September 1st in Tel-Aviv.  IBM has just completed the Storwize acquisition and we are having our leadership meetings discussing the integration when the new management team informs us that: “You know, we really like the Storwize name a lot.”  “We like the name so much that we decided we want to use it for a totally separate and new product.”

As new employees we two choices:

  1. Complain and argue about how this will confuse the market
  2. Salute the flag and move on

Having branded products and technology before, I didn’t really see this as an issue.  Sales of course didn’t care for it.  My feeling was, that even though the new Storwize V7000 doesn’t support the new IBM Real-time Compression (which now you have it, our new name – not flashy but does describe exactly what we do), it is the most modular storage architecture designed today and I am quite sure, that because the value in this ‘platform’ is really about storage services (software), IBM Real-time Compression could eventually make it on to this platform.  That being said, the amount of noise IBM is going to make regarding the new Storwize will drive the old Storwize sales team to a number of new opportunities.  Sure, we will have to work harder to vet them as the new V7000 is a block device and IBM Real-time Compression is an appliance for NAS today but that is okay.  We will now have exposure to a great deal of customers to tell our story.

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Oct 07, 2010 | 0 comments View Post

The Storage Network


With the impending name change to the "Storwize" product, the marketing folks at the old "Storwize" are at it again with their "viral video" campaign.  Not sure how many of you have seen the movie or even the trailer to "The Social Network" that grossed $23M in the US brining it to #1 in the box office last week .  Its a story of a guy that started in college with an idea and turned it into something big.  Much like Storwize - an idea that started with only a few in Israel and has now been acquired by IBM for multi millions of dollars and will become a key part to IBM's overall "Storage Efficiency" strategy.  This new trailer "The Storage Network" highlights too may realities of today's data management issues.  Hope you enjoy it.

Video created by MediaBoss Studios

(BTW: In case you didn't get it Storwize is now IBM Real-time Compression)!

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Oct 07, 2010 | 0 comments 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
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