This blog is for the open exchange of ideas relating to storage and storage networking hardware, software and services.
Tony Pearson is a Senior Storage Consultant for the IBM System Storage product line, has been working in IBM storage for over 20 years, and is
author of the blook
Inside System Storage: Volume I.
Thursday May 08, 2008
More exploration into Vendor Lock-In
My theme this week was to focus on "Do-it-Yourself" solutions, such as the "open storage" concept presented
by Sun Microsystems, but it has morphed into a discussion on vendor lock-in. Both deserve a bit of further
exploration.
There were several reasons offered on why someone might pursue a "Do-it-Yourself" course of action.
Building up skills
In my post
[Simply Dinners and Open Storage], I suggested that building a server-as-storage solution based on Sun's
OpenSolaris operating system could serve to learn more about
[OpenSolaris], and by extension, the Solaris operating system.
Like Linux, OpenSolaris is open source and has distributions that run on a variety of chipsets, from Sun's own
SPARC, to commodity x86 and x86-64 hardware.
And as I mentioned in my post
[Getting off the island], a version of OpenSolaris was even shown to run successfully on the IBM System z mainframe.
"Learning by Doing" is a strong part of the
[Constructivism] movement in education. The
One Laptop Per Child [OLPC] uses this approach. IBM volunteers in Tucson and 40
other sites
[help young students build robots]
constructed from [Lego Mindstorms]
building blocks.
Edward De Bono uses the term [operacy] to refer to the
"skills of doing", preferred over just "knowing" facts and figures.
However, I feel OpenSolaris is late to the game. Linux, Windows and MacOS are all well-established x86-based operating systems that most home office/small office users would be familiar with, and OpenSolaris is positioning itself as
"the fourth choice".
Familiarity
In my post
[Washington
Gets e-Discovery Wakeup Call], I suggested that the primary motivation for the White House to switch from Lotus Notes over to Microsoft Outlook
was familiarity with Microsoft's offerings. Unfortunately, that also meant abandoning a fully-operational automated email archive system, for
a manual do-it-yourself approach copying PST files from journal folders.
Familiarity also explains why other government employees might print out their emails and archive them on paper
in filing cabinets. They are familiar with this process, it allows them to treat email in the same manner as they
have treated paper documents in the past.
Cost, Control and Unique Requirements
The last category of reasons can often result if what you want is smaller or bigger than what is available
commercially. There are minimum entry-points for many vendors. If you want something so small that it is not
profitable, you may end up doing it yourself. On the other end of the scale, both Yahoo and Google ended up
building their data centers with a do-it-yourself approach, because no commercial solutions were available at
the time. (IBM now offers
[iDataPlex], so that has changed!)
While you could hire a vendor to build a customized solution to meet your unique requirements, it might turn out
to be less costly to do-it-yourself. This might also provide some added control over the technologies and components employed. However, as EMC blogger Chuck Hollis correctly pointed out for
[Do-it-yourself storage],
your solution may not be less costly than existing
off-the-shelf solutions from existing storage vendors, when you factor in scalability and support costs.
Of course, this all assumes that storage admins building the do-it-yourself storage have enough spare time to do so. When was the last time your storage admins had spare time of any kind?
Will your storage admins provide the 24x7 support you could get from established storage vendors? Will they
be able to fix the problem fast enough to keep your business running?
From this, I would gather that if you have storage admins more familiar with Solaris than Linux, Windows or MacOS,
and select commodity x86 servers from IBM, Sun, HP, or Dell, they could build a solution that has less vendor lock-in than something off-the-shelf from Sun. Let's explore the fears of vendor lock-in further.
The storage vendor goes out of business
Sun has not been doing so well, so perhaps "open storage" was a way to warn existing Sun storage customers that
building your own may be the next alternative.
The New York Times title of their article says it all:
["Sun Microsystems Posts Loss and Plans to Reduce Jobs"]. Sun is a big company, so I don't expect them to close their doors entirely this year,
but certainly fear of being locked-in to any storage vendor's solution gets worse if you fear the vendor might go out of business.
The storage vendor will get acquired by a vendor you don't like
We've seen this before. You don't like vendor A, so you buy kit from vendor B, only to have vendor A acquire vendor
B after your purchase. Surprise!
The storage vendor will not support new applications, operating systems, or other new equipment
Here the fear is that the decisions you make today might prevent you from choices you want to make in the future.
You might want to upgrade to the latest level of your operating system, but your storage vendor doesn't support
it yet. Or maybe you want to upgrade your SAN to a faster bandwidth speed, like 8 Gbps, but your storage vendor
doesn't support it yet. Or perhaps that change would require re-writing lots of scripts using the existing
command line interfaces (CLI). Or perhaps your admins would require new training for the new configuration.
The storage vendor will raise prices or charge you more than you expect on follow-on upgrades
For most monolithic storage arrays, adding additional disk capacity means buying it from the same vendor as the
controller. I heard of one company recently who tried to order entry-level disk expansion drawer, at a lower price, solely to move the individual disk drives into a higher-end disk system. Guess what? It didn't work. Most storage vendors would not support such mixed configurations.
If you are going to purchase additional storage capacity to an existing disk system, it should cost no more than
the capacity price rate of your original purchase. IBM offers upgrades at the going market rate, but not all
competitors are this nice. Some take advantage of the vendor lock-in, charging more for upgrades and pocketing
the difference as profit.
Vendor lock-in represents the obstacles in switching vendors in the event the vendor goes out of business, fails
to support new software or hardware in the data center, or charges more than you are comfortable with.
These obstacles can make it difficult to switch storage vendors, upgrade your applications, or meet other
business obligations. IBM SAN
Volume Controller and TotalStorage Productivity Center can help reduce or eliminate many of these concerns. IBM
Global Services can help you, as much or as little, as you want in this transformation. Here are the four levels
of the do-it-yourself continuum:
Let me figure it out myself
Tell me what to do
Help me do it
Do it for me
This is the self-service approach. Go to our website, download an
[IBM Redbook],
figure out what
you need, and order the parts to do-it-yourself.
IBM Global Business Services can help understand your business requirements
and tell you what you need to meet them.
IBM Global Technology Services can help design, assemble and deploy a
solution, working with your staff to ensure skill and knowledge transfer.
IBM Managed Storage Services can manage your storage,
on-site at your location, or at an IBM facility. IBM provides a variety
of cloud computing and managed hosting services.
So, if you are currently a Sun server or storage customer concerned about these latest Sun announcements, give IBM a call, we'll help you switch over!
While HDS blogger Hu Yoshida and IBM blogger Barry Whyte make a
[great case for why you should buy IBM SAN Volume Controller], my favorite arch-nemesis and fellow blogger BarryB on
his Storage Anarchist blog feels the SVC is "blue spray paint".
He feels I was unfair to accuse EMC of "proprietary interfaces" without spelling out what I was referring to. Here are
just two, along with the whines we hear from customers that relate to them.
EMC Powerpath multipathing driver
Typical whine: "I just paid a gazillion dollars to renew my annual EMC Powerpath license, so you will have to come back in 12 months with your SVC proposal. I just can't see explaining to my boss that an SVC eliminates the need for EMC Powerpath, throwing away all the good money we just spent on it, or to explain that EMC chooses not to support SVC as one of Powerpath's many supported devices."
EMC SRDF command line interface
Typical whine: "My storage admins have written tons of scripts that all invoke EMC SRDF command line interfaces
to manage my disk mirroring environment, and I would hate for them to re-write this to use IBM's (also proprietary) command line interfaces instead."
Certainly BarryB is correct that IBM still has a few remaining "proprietary" items of its own. IBM has been in business over 80 years, but it was only the last 10-15 years that IBM made a strategic shift away from proprietary and over to open standards and interfaces. The transformation to "openness" is not yet complete, but we have made great progress. Take these examples:
The System z mainframe - IBM had opened the interfaces so that both Amdahl and Fujitsu made compatible machines.
Unlike Apple which forbids cloning of this nature, IBM is now the single source for mainframes because the other two
competitors could not keep up with IBM's progress and advancements in technology. Since IBM published the interfaces,
some clever x86-server vendors tried to sell IBM-compatible systems based on the
[Hercules] emulator, but were closed down because
they were unwilling to pay IBM for the z/OS operating system. You can run Linux on System z on these clones, but that is
more expensive than just running Linux natively on x86 chipset!
The z/OS operating system - While it is possible to run Linux on the mainframe, most people associate the z/OS
operating system with the mainframe. This was opened up with UNIX System Services to satisfy requests from various
governments. It is now a full-fledged UNIX operating system, recognized by the
[Open Group] that certifies it as such.
As BarryB alludes, the unique interfaces for disk attachment to System z known as Count-Key-Data (CKD) was published so that both EMC and HDS can offer disk systems to compete with IBM's high-end disk offerings. Linux on System z
supports standard Fibre Channel, allowing you to attach an IBM SVC and anyone's storage. Both z/OS and Linux on
System z support NAS storage, so IBM N series, NetApp, even EMC Celerra could be used in that case.
The System i itself is still
proprietary, but recently IBM announced that it will now support standard block size (512 bytes) instead of the
awkward 528 byte blocks that only IBM and EMC support today. That means that any storage vendor will be able
to sell disk to the System i environment.
Advanced copy services, like FlashCopy and Metro Mirror, are as proprietary as the similar offerings from EMC
and HDS, with the exception that IBM has licensed them to both EMC and HDS. Thanks to cross-licensing, you can do
[FlashCopy on EMC] equipment. Getting all the storage vendors to agree to open standards for these copy services is still work
in progress under [SNIA], but at least people who have coded z/OS JCL batch
jobs that invoke FlashCopy utilities can work the same between IBM and EMC equipment.
So for those out there who thought that my comment about EMC's proprietary interfaces in any way implied that
IBM did not have any of its own, the proverbial
["pot calling the kettle black"] so to speak, I apologize.
BarryB shows off his
[PhotoShop skills] with the graphic below. I take it as a compliment to be compared to an
All-American icon of business success.
TonyP and Monopoly's Mr. Pennybags Separated at Birth?
However, BarryB meant it as a reference back to long time ago when IBM
was a monopoly of the IT industry, which according to
[IBM's History], ended in 1973. In other words, IBM
stopped being a monopoly before EMC ever existed as a company, and long before I started working for IBM myself.
The anti-trust lawsuit that BarryB mentions happened in 1969, which forced IBM to separate some of the software from its hardware offerings, and prevented IBM from making various acquisitions for years to follow, forcing IBM instead into technology partnerships. I'm glad that's all behind us now!
Continuing my week's theme on how bad things can get following the "Do-it-yourself" plan, I start with
James Rogers' piece in Byte and Switch, titled
[Washington Gets E-Discovery Wakeup Call]. Here's an excerpt:
"A court filing today reveals there may be gaps in the backup tapes the White House IT shop used to store email. It appears that messages from the crucial early stages of the Iraq War, between March 1 and May 22, 2003, can't be found on tape. So, far from exonerating the White House staffers, the latest turn of events casts an even harsher light on their email policies.
Things are not exactly perfect elsewhere in the federal government, either. A recent
[report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO)] identified glaring holes in agencies’ antiquated email preservation techniques. Case in point: printing out emails and storing them in physical files."
You might think that laws requiring email archives are fairly recent. For corporations, they began with laws like Sarbanes-Oxley that the second President Bush signed into law back in 2002. However, it appears that laws for US Presidents to keep their emails were in force since 1993, back when the first President Clinton was in office. (we might as all get used to saying this in case we have a "second" President Clinton next January!)
"The Federal Record Act requires the head of each federal agency to ensure that documents related to that agency's official business be preserved for federal archives. The Watergate-era Presidential Records Act augmented the FRA framework by specifically requiring the president to preserve documents related to the performance of his official duties. A
[1993 court decision] held that these laws applied to electronic records, including e-mails, which means that the president has an obligation to ensure that the e-mails of senior executive branch officials are preserved.
In 1994, the Clinton administration reacted to the previous year's court decision by rolling out an automated e-mail-archiving system to work with the Lotus-Notes-based e-mail software that was in use at the time. The system automatically categorized e-mails based on the requirements of the FRA and PRA, and it included safeguards to ensure that e-mails were not deliberately or unintentionally altered or deleted.
When the Bush administration took office, it decided to replace the Lotus Notes-based e-mail system used under the Clinton Administration with Microsoft Outlook and Exchange. The transition broke compatibility with the old archiving system, and the White House IT shop did not immediately have a new one to put in its place.
Instead, the White House has instituted a comically primitive system called "journaling," in which (to quote from a
[recent Congressional report]) "a White House staffer or contractor would collect from a 'journal' e-mail folder in the Microsoft Exchange system copies of e-mails sent and received by White House employees." These would be manually named and saved as ".pst" files on White House servers.
One of the more vocal critics of the White House's e-mail-retention policies is Steven McDevitt, who was a senior official in the White House IT shop from September 2002 until he left in disgust in October 2006. He points out what would be obvious to anyone with IT experience: the system wasn't especially reliable or tamper-proof."
So we have White House staffers manually creating PST files, and other government agencies printing out their emails and storing them in file cabinets. When I first started at IBM in 1986, before Notes or Exchange existed, we used PROFS on VM on the mainframe, and some of my colleagues printed out their emails and filed them in cabinets. I can understand how government employees, who might have grown up using mainframe systems like PROFS, might have just continued the practice
when they switched to Personal Computers.
Perhaps the new incoming White House staff hired by George W. Bush were more familiar with Outlook and Exchange, and rather
than learning to use IBM Lotus Notes and Domino, found it easier just to switch over. I am not going to debate
the pros and cons of "Lotus Notes/Domino" versus "Microsoft Outlook/Exchange" as IBM has automated email archiving systems that work great for both of these, as well as also for Novell Groupwise. So, taking the benefit of the doubt,
when President Bush took over, he tossed out the previous administration's staff, and brought in his own people, and
let them choose the office productivity tools they were most comfortable with.
Fair enough, happens every time a new President takes office. No big surprise there.
However, doing this without a clear plan on how to continue to comply with the email archive laws already on the books, and that it continues to be bad several years later, is appalling. I can understand why business are
upset in deploying mandated archiving solutions when their own government doesn't have similar automation in place.
I had a great weekend, participating in this year's
["World Laughter Day"] yesterday, and preparing
for tonight's festivities, found me pulling out the various packages from "Simply Dinners" from my freezer.
A Tucson-based company,
[Simply Dinners] offers an alternative to restaurant eating.
My sister went there, assembled a set of freezer-proof plastic bags containing
all the right ingredients based on specific recipes, and gave them to me for my birthday, and they have been sitting
in my freezer ever since... until last weekend.
My sister was careful to choose items that fit my
[Paleolithic Diet] that my nutritionist has me on. However, I was skeptical
that any plastic bag full of frozen groceries would be any better than anything I could assemble on my own.
I did, after all, attend "chef school" and do know how to cook well. Each package was intended to be a "dinner for two" but since I am single, was two meals each for me.
So, I decided to try them out, which would also give me more room in my freezer for incoming items, and they
came out very well. The outside of each plastic bag was a label that explained all the steps required to heat
the food. Partially-cooked vegetables were wrapped in foil, and went in for the last 10 minutes of cooking the meat.
The process was straightforward, and the meals were delicious, but nothing I could not have done on my own with
a recipe and a trip to the grocery store.
The question is whether someone with little or no skills could achieve similar, or acceptable results. I have
friends who are limited to assembling sandwiches from luncheon meats and cheese slices, as anything involving
heat other than simply boiling water is beyond their skills.
The key difference between "cooking for yourself" and "building your own storage" is that you aren't building
storage for just yourself. Unless you are a one-person SMB company, you are building storage that all of your
employees and managers count on to do their jobs, and by extension your customers and stockholders count on.
Of course I had to read responses from others before jumping in with my thoughts.
Dave Raffo from Storage Soup writes
[Sun going down in storage],
feeling this is yet another indication that Sun has lost their mind, recounting previous events that support
that theory.
EMC blogger Mark Twomey in his StorageZilla posts
[When Open Isn't] felt a little
bit guilty kicking a competitor when down. EMC blogger Chuck Hollis questions the reasons people
might be tempted to even try this in his post
[Do-it-Yourself Storage]. Here's
an excerpt:
"Vendor Lock-In?
I really, really struggle with this concept, I do. Here's why:
Anything I use and get comfortable with -- well, I'm "locked in" to a certain degree. If I use a lot of storage software X; well, I'm sorta locked in, aren't I? Or, if I put my servers-as-storage on a three-year lease, I'm kind of locked in, aren't I?"
(For EMC, vendor lock-in is great when customers are using and comfortable with EMC products, and awful when they use and
are comfortable with storage from someone else. But nobody who is "comfortable" with what they have ever complain about
"vendor lock-in" do they? It's the ones who are growing uncomfortable and feel trapped in changing. How
involved a company's use of EMC's proprietary interfaces are can greatly determine the obstacles in switching to
a different vendor.
Of course, if you count yourself as someone growing uncomfortable with your existing storage vendor,
IBM can help you fix that problem, but that is a subject for another post.)
Worried about "vendor lock-in"? Try "admin lock-in" where you must keep a storage admin around because he or she
was the one that put your storage together. I've seen several companies held hostage by their system admins
for home-grown scripts that serve as "duct tape for the enterprise".
The other issue is whether you have storage admins who have the necessary hardware and software engineering skills
to put suitable storage together. There are some very smart storage admins I know who could, and others that would
have a difficult time with this.
No doubt this is promising for the home office. I myself have taken several PCs that were running older versions of Windows,
but not powerful enough to upgrade to Windows Vista, wiped them clean, loaded Linux, and configured them from everything
from simple browser workstations to full LAMP application server configurations.
While this might sound easy, I am a professional hardware
and software engineer with Linux skills.
I have no doubt that someone with sufficient engineering and Solaris skills
could put together a storage system for home use.
One area where Sun definitely benefits from this "Open Storage" approach is to develop Solaris skills.
I have no personal experience with OpenSolaris, but assume that if you learn it, you would be able to switch over
to full Solaris quite easily.
Today, most people have Windows, Linux and/or MacOS skills coming into the workforce, and this could be Sun's way of getting new fresh faces who understand Solaris commands to replace retiring "baby boomers". The lack of Solaris-knowledgeable admins is perhaps one reason why companies are switching to IBM AIX, Linux or Windows in their
data center.
Certainly, IBM's strategic choice to support Linux
has been a great success. People learn Linux on their home systems, and at school, and are able to carry those skills
to Linux running on everything from the smallest IBM blade server to IBM's biggest mainframe.
The videos on Sun for the "recipes" on how to put together various "storage configurations in ten minutes" appear simpler
than last summer's "How to hack an Apple iPhone to switch away from AT&T" procedures.
Management Complexity Factor for Media and Entertainment Industry
Continuing this week's theme on "best of breed", some questions arise: How is this calculated or determined?
How is one storage solution "better" than another? Which attributes weigh more heavily in the decision?
Some attributes are directly measurable, like storage performance. For this, gather up a list of
all the storage products you are interested in,
go to the
[Storage Performance Council website],
determine whether SPC-1 or SPC-2
more closely matches your application workload, and then choose the best product from
the benchmarks, discarding any vendors that don't bother to have benchmarks posted.
The new SPC-2 benchmark was created, in part, to address new workloads for the Media and Entertainment
industry. (For a comparison of the two, see my post
[SPC benchmarks for Disk System Performance])
However, other attributes, like "easy to manage", are not as straightforward to measure.
One client compared the complexity of different solutions by counting the number of cables involved to connect the various parts of each solution. Only external cables were considered. All of the cables inside an IBM System
Storage DS8000 would not be counted. By this measure, a single IBM System z10 EC mainframe connected to a single IBM DS8000 disk system over a few FICON cables would therefore be "less complicated" than a thousand x86 servers connected
via FCP SAN switches to dozens of disk systems.
But counting cables only handles the hardware part of the interconnections. You have to also consider
the interconnections between the software, between users, and between IT administrators. It is not always
obvious where those connections are, and how to count them into consideration.
This month, IBM introduced the first "Management Complexity Factor" (MCF) for the Media and
Entertainment industry. IBM MCF a result of IBM's acquisition of NovusCG, and is an essential part of
"Storage Optimization Services" being offered by IBM. Here is an excerpt from the
[IBM Press Release]:
"Media companies are facing a double-edged sword with the exponential rise in digital media storage needs, coupled with concerns about optimizing storage to be more efficient," said Steve Canepa, vice president of Media and Entertainment, IBM. "By quickly and cost-effectively analyzing the interconnected IT and storage environments that increasingly comprise media operations, MCF for Media helps our clients identify opportunities for improvement and align their IT and business strategies."
Since 1995, IBM has invested more than $18 billion on public acquisitions, making it the most acquisitive company in the technology industry, based on volume of transactions.
IBM has a strong global focus on the media and entertainment industry across all of its services and products, serving all the major industry segments -- entertainment, publishing, information providers, media networks and advertising.
In his post on Rough Type titled
["McKinsey surveys the new software landscape"], Nick Carr discusses the growing acceptance in the marketplace for Software-as-a-Service, or SaaS.
He summarizes the results of McKinsey's recent
[Enterprise Software Customer Survey 2008].
IBM is already well established as part of the Web 2.0 Big "5" (the other four are Google, Yahoo, Amazon and Microsoft), so it may not be much surprise that it introduced some new offerings focused on this emerging market.
Managed Hosting
For managed hosting,
[IBM Managed Storage Services] has
been extended to support archive data through its entire lifecycle: supporting access, migration, non-erasable
non-rewriteable (NENR) protection, and expiration/destruction. This offering supports locating the storage on
the customer premises, a hosting center, or an IBM Service Deliver Center. IBM's blended disk and tape approach
provides a better alignment between information value and storage costs.
Application-Led Service
Last December IBM acquired Arsenal Digital, which offers a remote "Enterprise Email Archive" service, supporting retention policies that can apply per user,
per group, or even my message, as needed. This service provides fast user access to email archives, as well as e-discovery search. The search is not just for the email body text, but supports over 370
different attachment types as well. Deduplication technology is used to reduce the actual amount of storage needed by 80
percent. All of this with the security and comfort of knowing that these email archives are encrypted and protected in a disaster recovery class datacenter managed by IBM.
Blocks and Files presents their thoughts on this in the article
["IBM storing data and mail in the cloud"].
The Radicati Group has published some interesting statistics about email archive in
[Volume 4, Issue 3]. Here's an excerpt:
"In 2007, a typical corporate email account receives about 18 MB of data per day. This number is expected to grow to over 28 MB by 2011. Today, there is no way to effectively manage these messages, but with the help of an archiving solution.
Today, the worldwide percentage of corporate mailboxes protected by archiving solutions is estimated to be around 14%, however it is growing at a fast pace, and is expected to reach over 70% by 2011.
A survey of 102 corporate organizations worldwide, showed that 68% of large businesses view compliance as their top security concern in 2007."
Cloud Computing
For those who are actually providing these services to others, over the cloud, then you might want to
use the new
[IBM System x iDataPlex].
Compared to traditional server environments, the iDataPlex provides five times the computing power by
doubling the number of servers per rack, but with 40 percent less energy consumption. Thanks to clever
cooling technology, the system can run in standard office "room temperature" environments. You can
customize with a mix of compute, network and storage nodes to meet your application requirements.
In addition to Web 2.0 and SaaS workloads, the iDataPlex can be useful for financial risk analysis,
high performance computing, and even batch processing.
Whether you are looking to contract out for SaaS, or to provide a service to others over the cloud, IBM can help!
"Our survey data shows that over the past 12 months, more firms have bought their storage from a single vendor. While this might not be for everyone, it's worth serious consideration for your environment. Maybe you won't get the best price per gigabyte every time, but you'll probably save money in the long run because of simpler management, increased staff specialization, increased capacity utilization, and better customer service."
A Forrester survey of 170 companies ranging from SMBs to large enterprises in North America and Europe found that more than 80 percent bought their primary storage from one vendor over the last year. That includes 64 percent of the companies with more than 500 TB of raw storage.
The report, written by analyst Andrew Reichman, says using more than one primary storage vendor can make it more complex to manage, provision and support the storage environment. And while using multiple vendors can often bring better pricing, buying from one vendor can result in volume discounts.
“You may have tried to contain costs by forcing multiple incumbent vendors to continuously compete against each other, with price as the primary differentiator,” Reichman writes. “This strategy can reduce prices and limit vendor lock-in, but it can also lead to management complexity and poor capacity utilization.”
The report recommends keeping things simple by and using fewer vendors when possible. However, that advice comes with several caveats: buying all storage from one vendor means taking the bad with the good, and some vendors’ product families differ so much “they may as well come from different vendors.”
As if by coincidence, fellow blogger from EMC Chuck Hollis gives his reflections on this same topic. Here's an excerpt:
When it comes to buying storage (or any infrastructure technology, for that matter), there seem to be two camps:
Best-of-breed (i.e. multivendor): -- buy what's best, get the best price, keep all the vendors on their toes, etc. etc.
Single vendor: primarily use one vendor's offerings, and hold them accountable for the outcome.
If Chuck had said "multivendor" versus "single vendor", then that would have been a true dichotomy, but interestingly
he equates best-of-breed with a multivendor approach. Let's consider two examples:
Disk from one vendor, Tape from another
Here is a multivendor strategy, and if you have a clear idea of what best-of-breed means to you, then you could
pick the best disk in the market, and the best tape in the market. However, I don't think this keeps either vendor
"on their toes", or helps you negotiate lower prices by threatening to switch to the other vendor. In shops like
this, the staffing usually matches, so there are disk administration and tape operations, with little or no overlap, and
little or no interest in retraining to use a new set of gear. It is true that disk-based VTL could be used where real tape libraries are used, but this may not be enough to threaten your existing vendors that you will switch all your disk to tape, or all your tape to disk.
One could argue that the vendor that sells the best
tape could be the exact same vendor that sells the best disk. In this case, your multivendor strategy would actually
work against you, forcing you away from one of your best-of-breed choices.
Disk and Tape from one vendor for some workloads, Disk and Tape from another vendor for other workloads
Here is a different multivendor strategy. Having disk and tape for the same vendor allows you to take advantage
of possible synergies. The IT staff knows how to use the products from both vendors. This strategy does let you keep your vendors "on their toes". You can legitimately threaten to shift your budget from one vendor over another.
However, whatever your definition of best-of-breed is, chances are the product from one vendor is, and the other vendor is not. Both meet some lowest common denominator, meeting some minimum set of requirements, which would allow you
to swap out one for the other.
I guess I look at it differently.
The equipment in your data center should be thought of as a team. Do your servers, storage and software work well together?
While Americans like to celebrate the accomplishments of individual musicians, athletes or executives, it is actually bands that compete against other bands, sports teams that compete against other sport teams, and companies that compete against other companies. Teamwork in the data center is not just for the people who work there, but also for the IT equipment. Just as a new incoming athlete may not get along well with teammates, shiny new equipment may not get along with your existing gear. Conversely, your existing infrastructure may not let the talents or features of your new equipment shine through.
Putting together the best parts from different teams might serve as a great diversion for those who enjoy
["fantasy football"], it may not be
the best approach for the data center. Instead, focus on managing your data center as a team, perhaps with the
use of IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center to minimize the heterogeneity of your different equipment. Pick an IT
vendor that sells "team players" for your servers, storage and software, with broad support for interoperability and compatibility.
The "Storage Symposium Mexico - 2008" conference was a great success this week!
Day 1 - The plan was for me to arrive for the Wednesday night reception. Each
attendee was given a copy of my latest book
[Inside System Storage: Volume I] and I was planning to sign them. I thought perhaps we should have a "book signing" table
like all of the other published authors have.
Things didn't go according to plan. Thunderstorms at the Mexico City airport forced our pilot
to find an alternate airport. Nearby Acapulco airport was the logical choice, but was full from all the other
flights, so the plane ended up in a tiny town called McAllen, Texas. I did not arrive until the morning of Day 2,
so ended up signing the books throughout Thursday and Friday, during breaks and meals, wherever they could
find me!
Special thanks to fellow IBMer Ian Henderson who picked me up from the airport at such an awkward hour and
drive me all the way to Cuernavaca!
Day 2 - The event venue is the beautiful Japanese-theme
[Camino Real Sumiya Hotel] in Cuernavaca, Mexico.
All of us, IBMers, Business Partners and clients alike, all donned black tee-shirts
with a white eightbar logo for a group photo with one of those "wide lens" cameras. While we were
being assembled onto the bleachers, I took this quick snapshot of myself and some of the guys behind me.
I was original scheduled to be first to speak, but with my flight delays, was moved to a time slot after lunch.
After a big Mexican lunch, the conference coordinators were afraid the attendees might fall asleep,
a Mexican tradition called
[siesta],
so I was
instructed to WAKE THEM UP! Fortunately, my topic was Information Lifecycle Management, a topic
I am very passionate about, since my days working on DFSMS on the mainframe. With 30
percent reduction in hardware capital expenditures, 30 percent reduction in operational costs, and typical payback periods between 15 to 24 months, the presentation got everyone's attention.
Of course, a lot happens outside of the formal meetings. We had a Japanese theme dinner, where we wore
Japanese Hachimaki [headbands]
with the eightbar logo. For those not familiar with Japanese culture,
hachimaki are worn today not so much for the practical purpose to catch the perspiration but rather for mental stimulation to express one's determination. Some students wear hachimaki when they study to put themselves in the
right spirit and frame of mind.
Shown here are presenters Mike Griese (Infrastructure Management with IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center),
Dave Larimer (Backup and Storage Management with IBM Tivoli Storage Manager), myself, and John Hamano
(Unified Storage with IBM System Storage N series).
Day 3 - Wrapping up the week, I presented two more times.
First, I covered IBM Disk Virtualization with
IBM SAN Volume Controller. One interesting question was if the SAN Volume Controller could be made to look
like a Virtual Tape Library. I explained that this was never part of the original design, but that if you want
to combine SVC with a VTL into a combined disk-and-tape blended solution, consider using the
IBM product called Scale-Out File Services
[SoFS] which I covered in my post
[More
details about IBM clustered scalable NAS].
During one of the breaks, I took a picture of the behind-the-scenes staff that put this together. They
had created these huge blocks representing puzzle pieces, emphasizing how IBM is one of the few IT
vendors that can bring all the pieces together for a complete solution.
Shown here
are Mike Griese (presenter), Cyntia Martinez, Claudia Aviles, Cesar Campos (IBM Business Unit Executive for
System Storage in Mexico), and Claudia Lopez. Each day the staff wore matching shirts so that it was easy
to find them.
Later, I covered Archive and Compliance Solutions to highlight our complete end-to-end set of solutions.
When asked to compare and contrast the architectures of the IBM System Storage DR550 with EMC Centera, I explained
that the DR550 optimizes the use of online disk access for the most recent data. For example, if you are
going to keep data for 10 years, maybe you keep the most recent 12 months on disk, and the rest is moved,
using policy-based automation, to a tape library for the remaining nine years. This means that the disk inside
the DR550 is always being used to read and write the most recent data, the data you are most likely to retrieve
from an archive system. Data older than a year is still accessible, but might take a minute or two for the tape
library robot to fetch.
The EMC Centera, on the other hand, is a disk-only solution. It offers no option to move older data to tape,
nor the option to spin-down the drives to conserve power.
It fills up after the same 12 months or so, and then you get to
watch it the remaining nine years, consuming electricity and heating your data center.
I don't know about you, but
I have never seen anyone purposely put in "space heaters" into their data center, but certainly a full EMC Centera
does little else. Both devices use SATA drives and support disk mirroring between locations, but IBM DR550 offers dual-parity RAID-6, and supports encryption of the data on both the disk and the tape in the DR550. EMC Centera
still uses only RAID-5, and has not yet, as far as I know, offered any level of encryption. IBM System Storage
DR550 was clocked at about three times faster than Centera at ingesting new archive objects over a 1GbE Ethernet connection.
This last photo is me and fellow IBMer Adriana Mondragón. She was one of my students in the
[System Storage Portfolio Top Gun class],
last February in Guadalajara, Mexico.
She graduated in the top 10 percent of her group, earning her the prestigious title
of "Top Gun" storage sales specialist.
The conference wrapped up with a Mexican lunch with a traditional Mariachi band. I took pictures, but figured you all
already know what [Mariachi players] look like, and I didn't want
to detract from the otherwise serious tone of this blog post! This was the first System Storage Symposium in Mexico, but
based on its success, we might continue these annually.
Last week's focus was on tape libraries, both virtual and real, leading up to our IBM announcement of
acquiring Diligent Technologies. I was focused on HDS blogger Hu Yoshida's post about his conversation with Mark,
who was on an expert panel about these topics. Mark discovered that of the top energy consumers
in his datacenter, his tape library was in the top five, a surprising result.
Hu suggested that switching to a VTL with deduplication
technology was a potential alternative, and I pointed to a whitepaper from the Clipper Group that suggested otherwise.
My response was that perhaps Highmark's choice of backup software was poorly written, or that they had set it up with the
wrong parameters, and just changing hardware might not be the right answer. I went too far given that I didn't know which software they had, which parameters they
were using, or which tape technology was involved. This came across wrong. I meant to poke fun at Hu's response.
I did not mean to imply that Mark and his staff had
made poor choices, or that they should automatically reject Hu's advice to consider other hardware alternatives.
I have discussed the situation with Mark, and agree that I should know his situation better before offering
suggestions of my own.
I made it a point NOT to be in an airplane on "Earth Day" yesterday.
Today, I am posting this from the Houston Airport
on my way down to Cuernavaca, Mexico to participate in the Storage Symposium 2008 Mexico, April 24-25, 2008.
We have a list of speakers presenting on various topics. I will be covering IBM's leadership in the
following areas:
And, it's not too late to sign up for IBM Tivoli's
[Pulse 2008] conference that will be held
in Orlando, Florida, May 18-22, 2008. I'll be there Sunday and Monday only, in the Tivoli Storage track, so if you are planning to attend and wish to meet up with me while I am there, please send me a note!
[Earth Day] is celebrated in many countries on April 22, which
marks the anniversary of the birth of the modern environmental movement in 1970. Others celebrate this on the
March equinox.
IBM has finally aggregated everything that we are doing around "Green" initiatives onto a single
[IBM Green] landing page. This has everything from IBM's own activities as well as what we sell to our clients.
Also, to mark this occasion, IBM held an internal contest for employees to make videos about Earth Day,
the environment, and IT's role in making the situation better. The grand prize winner, and 10 second
prize winners, are available on this
[IBM Green Contest - YouTube channel].
Of these, I liked "New Life for Old Silicon" (shown here on the left).
IBM also developed [Power Up, the Game], which is the
Earth Day Network's "official" game for today's festivities.
It's a 3-D game created by IBM Research to help save a fictitious planet - the goal being to help students learn about ecology and climate change. This game is also hoped to motivate young students to get interested in math, science
and technology.
Eightbar has a great post
[PowerUp - A serious game out in
the wild] discussing this.
Here's also a 3-minute
[the making of "Power Up, the game" video] to get
a behind-the-scenes look.
The game is a downloadable Windows client that then connects to the main servers to run.
If you prefer the real world over virtual worlds, IBMer Harald Fuchs, from IBM Germany, is currently trekking across Greenland's polar ice cap. You can follow along on his blog:
[Greenland Crossing 2008].
Fellow IBM blogger "Turbo" Todd Watson writes about this in his post
[Where on the Greenland Ice Sheet is Harald Fuchs?]
You could buy 10 liters of gasoline in Venezuela
with this coin.
I'm back from South America, and am now in Chicago, Illinois. I'm having breakfast at the Starbucks
downtown, and thought I would make a post before all of my meetings today.
On this trip, I met with IBM Business Partners and sales reps from
Argentina, Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela. While I have visited the
first three countries on past trips, this was my first time to Caracas,
Venezuela. I grew up in La Paz, Bolivia, and speak Spanish fluently, so had no problem
getting around and holding discussions with everyone. While my friends in the US are often
surprised I speak multiple languages, it doesn't surprise anyone I visit in other countries.
If you are going to have worldwide job responsibilities for a global company that does business
in over 180 countries, the least you could do is learn a few additional languages. I suspect the
majority of the 350,000 IBM employees speak at least two languages, the exceptions being mostly the 50,000 or
so employees that live in the United States.
I flew on American Airlines from Tucson to Dallas to Caracas, and was only slightly delayed as a result
of all of the flight cancellations that happened earlier that week.
Some companies designate a single "official airline" for their employees to use. That makes
sense if all of your employees are located in a single city, and that city is the hub for your
designated airline.
IBM is too big, too spread out, and sells technology to nearly every airline to make such
a designation. Instead, IBM tries to spread its business out to multiple carriers, although all of
my colleagues seems to have their own personal favorites. Mine are American Airlines,
Singapore Airlines and Cathay Pacific.
While other people were upset over the delays, I found American Airlines did a great job keeping me informed,
and all their employees I talked to seemed to be handling the situation fairly well. If you
fly on American, I recommend you sign up for "text message" notifications. I did this for every
leg of my trip, and was kept up to date on times, gates and status. Very helpful!
American Airlines even started their own corporate blog:
[AA Conversation] (Special thanks to my friend
[Paul Gillen] for pointing this out)
(I read somewhere that if you are going to travel anywhere, you need to remember to bring
both your sunscreen and your sense of humor, otherwise you are going to get burned. Good
advice! Trust me, you don't even know how bad it can really be until you travel in the third world.)
Anyhoo, last week, IBM Venezuela celebrated its 70th anniversary. That's right, IBM has been doing
business in Venezuela for the past 70 years. Also last week, IBM put out its impressive
[1Q08 quarterly results],
including 10 percent growth for IBM System Storage product line worldwide, comparing what IBM earned this first quarter to what IBM earned the first quarter of last year. For just the Latin American countries,
the growth for IBM System Storage was 20 percent!
There are a lot of oil and gas companies in Venezuela. With a barrel of oil selling at more than
$117 US dollars, these companies are looking to spend their newly earned profits on IBM systems,
software and services.
As for the picture above, that is a one-thousand Bolivares coin, worth about 47 US cents at
this week's official exchange rate.
As with many Latin American countries going through
[years of high inflation], Venezuela was tired of all those zeros on their money. For example, a cheeseburger, freedom fries and a Coke
at McDonald's would set you back 20,000 Bolivares.
This year the Venezuelan government
created a new currency called "Bolivares Fuertes" (VEF), lopping off the last three zeros.
So, the coin above would be replaced by a new coin with a big "1" on it instead, and an old 2000 Bolivares bill
would be replaced by a new 2 Bolivares Fuertes bill. Unfortunately,
I had to give all my new Venezuelan money back at the airport upon leaving, but they let me keep the coin
above, since it is old money, as a souvenir so that I could use it as a ball mark for playing golf.
(The term Bolivares is named after Simon Bolivar who was born in Caracas. He is famous throughout
South America, and was, and I am not making this up, the first president of Colombia, the second
president of Venezuela, the first president of Bolivia, and the sixth president of Peru. Here is
the
[Wikipedia article] to learn more.)
Gasoline costs a mere 100 old Bolivares per liter.
For those who don't do metric, gasoline therefore costs
less than 18 cents per gallon. By comparison, in the USA, the average today was $3.47 US dollars
per gallon, of which 18.4 cents of this is Federal tax. That's right, we pay more just in taxes for
gasoline than los venezolanos pay for it all.
The side effect of cheap gas is bad traffic. Everybody in Venezuela drives their own car, and nobody thinks
about the price of gasoline, carpooling, or taking public transportation, acting much like Americans
used to, up until a few years ago. With some of the gridlock we faced, it might have been faster (but not safer)
to walk there instead.
Which makes me wonder if American Airlines fills up their airplanes with fuel at these lower prices when they
pick up people in Caracas to take them back to the United States. In 2002, fuel represented 10 percent
of the average airline's operating expenses, but today it is now 25 percent. That is a drastic increase!
The same is happening in data centers. In the past, electricity was so cheap, and such a small percent
of the total IT budget, nobody gave it much thought. But as the usage of electricity increased, and
the cost per KWh went up, this has a multiplying effect, and the growth in power and cooling costs is
growing four times faster than the average IT hardware budget increase.
Normally, IBM only makes announcements on Tuesdays, but today, Friday,
IBM announces that it acquired Diligent Technologies. What? I got a lot of
questions about this, so I thought I would start with this...
When I posted in January that
[IBM Acquires XIV],
fellow EMC blogger Mark Twomey of StorageZilla fame, sent me a comment:
"Ah now Tony I wasn't poking fun. Indeed I find it fascinating that Moshe who's been sitting out on the fringes for years having been banished for being an obstructionist to EMC entering the mid-market is now back.
Which reminds me what happens with Diligent? There his as well aren't they or has he packed his stake in that in?"
As you might have guessed, I am privy to a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes at IBM that I can't talk about in this blog, and all these rumors in the blogosphere about IBM acquisition of Diligent was a topic I couldn't officially recognize, defend or deny, until official IBM announcements were made.
In his latest post, Mark wonders about
[the last Tape and Mainframe sales person on earth]. He recounts my interaction with fellow HDS blogger Hu Yoshia about the energy benefits of
Virtual Tape Libraries. Knowing that we were going to announcement IBM's acquisition of Diligent soon, I thought
this would be a worthy exchange, driving up the sales of Diligent boxes (whether you buy them from IBM or HDS).
Diligent already had reselling arrangements with HDS, and IBM plans to continue those
arrangements going forward with HDS. As I have explained before in my post
[Supermarkets
and Specialty Shops], IBM and HDS cater to different customers, so if a customer who wants the best technology
from a specialty shop, they can buy IBM Diligent products from HDS, but if they want one-stop shopping, they can buy
IBM Diligent directly from IBM or its other IBM Business Partners.
(Perhaps a more tricky situation is that Diligent also had an arrangement with Sun Microsystems, which competes
directly against IBM as another IT supermarket vendor, but I have not heard how IBM has decided to handle this
going forward.)
For more on this intricate mess of interconnected companies, alliances and partnerships, read Dave Raffo's article
[Data dedupe dance card
filling up] over at Storage Soup.
So, let's tackle the first question:
Q1. What will happen to IBM's real tape library business?
Come on! IBM is Number one in tape, we've had virtual tape libraries since 1997 (the first in the industry)
and continue to do well in both virtual and real tape libraries. Both provide value to the customer, and both
have their place as part of the overall "information infrastructure". This acquisition provides yet another choice
for clients on our "supermarket" shelf.
(For those following the
["which is greener"] discussion, the robot of the IBM TS3500 real tape library consumes
185W per frame (when moving) and each tape drive consumes 50W (when actively working on a tape). Compared to 13W per SATA disk drive, each 6-drive frame of a TS3500 consumes as much electricity as 37 SATA disk drives. If you are not running backups 24x7, the total KWh per day for your tape library is actually quite less, but as several people have pointed out, there are customers that do run backups 80-90 percent of the time. LTO-4 tapes can hold 800GB uncompressed, and SATA disk are now available in 1TB (1000 GB) size, so you can have fun with your own comparisons.)
Meanwhile, Scott Waterhouse, one of the few people at EMC who understand tape workloads
like backup and archive, takes me to task in his Backup Blog with his post
[I want a Red Ferrari].
For those who are surprised that anyone at EMC might understand backup workloads, EMC did acquire a company called
Legato, and perhaps Scott came from that acquisition. I've never met Scott in person, but based solely only from
his writings, he seems to know his stuff and makes strong arguments for using IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) with deduplication and virtual tape libraries.
While TSM does a good job of "deduplicating" at the client first, backing up only changed data, Scott feels database and email repositories must be backed up entirely each time, which is what happens in many other backup software products. Some clients might have 80 percent database/email and only 20 percent files, while others might have less than 20 percent database/email and 80 percent files, so this might influence whether deduplication will have small or big benefit.
If TSM has to backup the entire database, even though little has changed since the last backup, that is where deduplication on a virtual tape library can come in handy. For IBM DB2 and Oracle databases, IBM TSM application-aware Tivoli Data Protection module interface backs up only changed data, not the entire file. Thanks to IBM's FilesX acquisition-- (also coincidently from Israel) --IBM can extend this support now to SQL Server databases as well.
However, to be fair, Scott is partly correct, TSM does backup some database and email repositories in their entirety, which is why it is a good idea to have BOTH an IBM virtual tape library with deduplication and Tivoli Storage Manager to handle all cases. This brings us to the next question:
Q2. What will happen to IBM's patented "progressive backup" technology?
IBM will continue to use TSM's progressive backup technology. TSM already works great with Diligent virtual tape
libraries. One example is LAN-free backup. In this configuration, the TSM client writes its backups directly to
a virtual or real tape library, over the SAN, and then sends the list of files backed up to the TSM server over the
LAN to record in its database. This can greatly reduce IP traffic on your LAN during peak backup periods. For more about this, see the IBM Redbook titled
["Get More Out of Your SAN with IBM Tivoli Storage Manager"].
Jon Toigo from DrunkenData asks
[Did IBM Do Due Diligence Before Making Diligent Acquisition a Done Deal?] which is probably always a valid question. Unlike XIV, I wasn't part of the Diligent acquisition team,
so I can't provide first hand account of the process. I am told that the IBM team did all the right things to make sure everything is going to turn out right.
Sadly, many companies that make acquisitions in the IT industry fail to make them work. Fortunately, IBM is one
of the few companies that has a great success record, with over 60 acquisitions in the past six years.
In the Xconomy forum, Wade Rousch writes
[IBM and the Art of Acquisitions]
and gives some insight why IBM is different. Jon did not understand why Cindy Grossman, IBM VP of tape and archive solutions, ran the analyst conference call for this announcement, which brings me to the next question:
Q3. What is Diligent virtual tape library going to be categorized as, a disk system or a tape system?
IBM organizes its storage systems based on the host application workloads.
Products to address disk workloads (SVC, DS8000 series, DS6000 series, DS4000 series, DS3000 series, N series, XIV Nextra) are in our disk systems group. Storage that appears to host applications like a tape system to address workloads like backup and archive (tape drives, libraries and tape virtualization) are in our tape and archive group. IBM Diligent has two products, one for big workloads and one for medium workloads. Both look like
tape systems, so our tape and archive team, who understand tape workloads like backup and archive the best, are obviously the best choice to support IBM Diligent in the mix.
Some might remember that IBM already has deduplication in its IBM N series products, called Advanced Single Instance
Storage, or A-SIS. Here is an
[
Inside System Storage -- hosted by Tony Pearson
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