Storage and device management includes configuring and tuning devices and providing management of the storage space. Sanket Sangwikar leads a team working on some components of IBM's device management software.

Microsoft's $40 billion question

This is not related to Storage management anyway, but i found it really amusing...

Here‘s a question for Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer: Is Yahoo! really worth all this hassle?

After more than two months of waiting to negotiate with Jerry Yang and company, you finally got frustrated over the weekend and sent a strident letter to Yahoo!‘s board members, giving them three more weeks to come to the table before you start replacing them. You backed up your emotions with data and facts: Since Microsoft launched its $44.6 billion unsolicited bid for Yahoo! Jan. 31, the Internet portal has been trying to wrangle deals with News Corp, Google and Time Warner to stay independent, but no such deal has surfaced yet.

Up for debate is whether Yahoo! has gained or lost customers for its search engine and other offers over the past two months. You say Yahoo! is losing customers. Yahoo! chief executive Jerry Yang and chairman Roy Bostock contend Yahoo! is pulling its act together. If $40 billion or so isn‘t enough for Yahoo!, what else could Ballmer spend the money on to bolster Microsoft‘s business? Fact is, $40 billion is a lot of money, no matter the currency.

Here are a few suggestions for what else Microsoft could get for $40 billion:

1. Hire 40,000 engineers, at $100,000 apiece, for a decade
2. Acquire Facebook (estimated to have a market value of $15 billion), along with just about any other meaningful social networking site, including MySpace, Bebo, Hi5 and LinkedIn. There would still be enough money left over to pay some consultants to help with integration.
3. Spend eight times more than Google did last year to acquire traffic--and presumably make traffic more pricey for Google, to boot.
4. Hire 80 million workers in China to do nothing but click on Microsoft properties and related ads for 10 years.
5. Promise a free Big Mac to everyone who clicks on a Microsoft ad--and give away 14 trillion of 'em.

Ref: http://www.rediff.com/money/2008/apr/09forbes.htm

Should we buy two 80GB harddisks instead of one 160GB harddisk?

Have you ever thought that using larger capacity disk could lead to slow access of files and more operational cost? Did you ever think that you should buy two 80GB harddisks instead of one 160GB hard disk? (If you did, you are not Wrong!)

Magnetic disk drive capacities are growing between 35–50% annually, and development roadmaps now outline a clear path to a 10+ terabyte (TB) drive capacity over the next 10 years until 2017. However, disk drive performance capabilities have not kept pace with the continual growth in disk capacities. Disk drive performance improvements are well below 10 percent annually, failing to offset the capacity increases.

Access Density is the ratio of performance, measured in I/Os per second, to the capacity of the drive, currently measured in gigabytes (Access Density = I/Os per second per gigabyte). In reality, the access density has steadily declined as the capacity has increased substantially.

If capacity doubled and performance doubled, the access density would remain unchanged. Unfortunately, this is not happening. Hence larger disks become less beneficial for applications that have a large number of concurrent applications or users. Adding higher capacity disks generally mean lowering your acquisition cost per gigabyte, while increasing your total operational costs per gigabyte.
Look at the details of the article at SNIA Farsighted newsletter article

Architectural Solution to the problem

There is one more article that discusses the architectural solution to this problem. The solution emphasizes use of file cache, RAID and block cache. As the capacity keeps increasing, use of file cache is more and more crucial. As the figure on right suggests, next innovation is a move to hot-file caching on external, persistent solid-state storage(SSD). This paper outlines successful methods for performance analysis and tuning, illustrated with real-world examples. (huh.. too much… I think I am good! I am just fed up of managing my four different USB hard-disks… hahaha)
Explore more at http://www.storagesearch.com/3dram.html

EMC tackles growing SMB storage needs too

Do you know that IBM now targets SMB market in developing countries like India, China, Brazil, East Europe etc. The most important criteria here is cost effectiveness. IBM released Blade center entry chassis in Nov 2007 with 6 server blades and 12 SAS/SATA disks enclosed within a chassis with 2 SAS Switches for external connectivity and expandability.
Have a look for details at ”BladeCenter S: Big benefits for the small office”



Now on this background I was looking for the news to know where IBM’s competitors are. And found this article. Here is the summary and link of the article:

EMC tackles growing SMB storage needs
IDG News Service 1/8/08
Stephen Lawson, IDG News Service, San Francisco Bureau

As small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) save more data and rely on it more, they are turning to networked storage even under the burden of limited budgets and IT expertise.
EMC is aiming at this growing market with its Clariion AX4, a platform that can scale from a few terabytes of storage to 60T bytes and take advantage of many advanced EMC storage management applications designed for large enterprises. The company was set to announce and ship it Tuesday. The AX4 comes with at least 3T bytes of storage and can be expanded by stringing together as many as five systems with 12 drives each. Each AX4 can be ordered with either a Fibre Channel or a iSCSI (Internet Small Computer System Interface) connection, meeting demand for IP (Internet Protocol) connectivity among SMBs, according to Barry Ader, senior director of Clariion marketing at EMC. By mixing SAS and SATA drives, users can set up a tiered storage system in which the more critical data is on better-performing, more expensive SAS drives and less critical on lower-performance SATA disks, said Charles King, an analyst at Pund-IT.

Have a look at details at http://smallbusiness.itworld.com/4392/emc-tackles-smb-storage-080108/page_1.html

Top Five Predictions in Storage Market for 2008

On the background of the predicted recession in the IT market, I was looking for what people are saying about Storage Market. I found this really good piece of predictions. Of course noone knows what is going to happen. But the article discusses trends in storage market and Hitachi's stake among them.
Here are some para's from the article:

Top five storage predictions for 2008
Computerworld Australia 11/28/07
Sandra Rossi, Computerworld Australia

>> Hitachi Data Systems released its top five storage predictions for 2008, with data de-duplication rated the hottest and most innovative technology to hit the market since virtualization.

>> Hitachi predicts the death of network-based virtualization and the rise of controller-based virtualization as it becomes a dominant approach to storage virtualization in 2008.

>> Off-shoring of storage administration activities will increase as a result of the skills shortage, but offshore organizations will face similar challenges.”

>> Hitachi predicts that this data center dilemma will worsen in 2008, forcing CIOs and IT managers to turn toward leaner, greener practices such as dynamic provisioning, data de-duplication, power-down and storage virtualization to rectify the problem.

>> The cost per megabyte of magnetic disk storage continues to fall, resulting in a perception that disk storage is closing the price gap with tape storage

You can read the details at http://storage.itworld.com/4619/071128storagepredict/page_1.html

Animation and Mythological movies create new opportunities and pressures in Indian Storage Market

“India is producing a lot of mythological cartoons / animations and these developments are putting pressure on traditional IT systems used by movie makers. There is traction in the server and storage industry and while it is at a nascent stage it looks promising.” - Viswanath Ramaswamy, Project Lead, STG, IBM India/South Asia

Ramaswamy said, “For a 30-minute episode, there could be 90 odd blade servers (off course sizing would be required) and most of these machines run Linux.”

“The digital content creation (DCC) industry in has seen some of the biggest blade and networked storage deployments.” – Subram Natarajan, Technical Solutions Architect, STG, IBM Asia Pacific

With filmmakers going for HD resolution, storage requirements have ballooned,..

Talking about how studios have started investing in storage and high computing servers and it has become an interesting market to follow, Subram Natarajan, Technical Solutions Architect, STG, IBM Asia Pacific said, “Often, storage in the studios for applications including animation, special effects, or editing, is simply a JBOD (Just a Bunch of Disks), directly attached to workstations striped together to get acceptable performance, measured by raw throughput. Projects that have grown in size and scope, along with a growing thirst for more sophisticated visual effects, have both caused a significant increase in the complexity of the creation process, and demand a rethinking of storage infrastructure for the studio.” Gone are the days when a trip to the movies involved marveling only at the cinematography. Today’s blockbusters are as likely to rely on computer-generated graphics.

When the storage infrastructure is incapable of meeting requirements for a large project, some studios have been forced to compromise on the creative side. This is done by reducing the complexity of the shots, often limiting the number of elements in a frame, which reduces the strain on the server and storage infrastructure. Other studios break the artists into shifts to try to spread the load across a greater part of the day. This, along with generally longer workdays due to infrastructure slowdowns, puts an undue strain on the creative and IT staff. Natarajan added, “The digital content creation (DCC) industry in has seen some of the biggest blade and networked storage deployments. There are compute-intensive applications that are used by digital content creators, which are driving the investments in high performance servers and storage. It requires a lot of computational power and storage and hence we are seeing a lot of blade servers are moving into digital content creation.”

DQ Entertainment limited, Toonz Animation India, Crest Communications (a customer of both IBM and HP), Prana Studios, UTV, My Entertainment are some companies that have invested in high end servers/blades and networked storage for their requirement. There are another half a dozen of studio houses/production houses investing in servers and storage that are currently not referenceable.

Viswanath Ramaswamy, Project Lead, STG, IBM India/South Asia said, “The digital content creation industry has picked up pace in India in recent months and it has created a rage in the market place. You can see a lot of animations or cartoons with special effects being made in India.” Today toddlers are spending most of their after-school hours watching Power Rangers, Crayon Shin-Chan, Looney Tunes, Perman and more. These days, however, one of their favorite superheroes is a cool cartoon version of Hanuman, the monkey-headed Hindu god. In The Return of Hanuman, the adored deity is reborn as a boy who goes to school in khaki shorts, uses a computer, combats pollution and, most importantly, smashes the bad guys to pulp. Soon ‘Sultan the Warrior’ will also see Tamil superstar-actor Rajanikanth fighting villains in his trademark style, except that this time around he will be animated. A complete work of fiction, the film is being made in an animation studio in Chennai, on a budget of $ 10 million, with a crew of 80 members working on it. For The Return of Hanuman, Toonz Animation India used IBM servers and TotalStorage. The company is creating Tenali Raman next. It has also begun production on its next TV series titled, “The Adventures of Hanuman” (not to be mistaken with Hanuman 2 the movie). This action/adventure series will make use of a blend of 2D and 3D technology for its 13 half hour episodes.

Read the rest at http://www.ibm.com/news/in/en/2008/02/2008_02_14B.html.

Confidence

A hypothetical situation where 20 CEOs board an airplane and are told that the flight that they are about to take is the first-ever to feature pilot less technology: It is an un-crewed aircraft. Each one of the CEOs is then told, privately, that their company’s software is running the aircraft’s automatic pilot system. Nineteen of the CEOs promptly leave the aircraft, each offering a different type of excuse.

One CEO alone remains on board the jet, seeming very calm indeed. Asked why he is so confident in this first un-crewed flight, he replies : “If it is the software designed by my company, this plane won’t even take off.” !!!

That is called Confidence!!! (No conclusion should be derived from this joke! )

SCM released on Nov 16, 2007

IBM’s ‘Storage Configuration Manager’ Product released on Nov 16, 2007. The product is a device management console providing single interface to manage multiple system devices like Raid Controller and SAS switches in Blade center chassis and high volume servers.

The product can be downloaded from IBM website at http://www-304.ibm.com/jct01004c/systems/support/supportsite.wss/docdisplay?lndocid=MIGR-5502070&brandind=5000008

Details about this product will follow in the upcoming Blog entries. So keep your fingers crossed.

IBM Storage Configuration Manager

The Storage Configuration Manager is a Tier 1, Point to Point management application used for the configuration, health and state monitoring, problem determination and inventory management of Storage systems (ranging from onboard RAID Controllers to midrange storage arrays) as well as other related storage fabric elements such as switches in the IBM BladeCenter ecosystem.

The SCM uses the industry adopted, Common Information Model (CIM) and the Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S) open standards to manage these elements. It is designed to integrate seamlessly into higher level enterprise management applications thereby providing the customer with a single console to manage their Server and Storage products.

HP Hits Back On IBM Server Claims

HP Hits Back On IBM Server Claims
By Edward F. Moltzen, CMP Channel
6:04 PM EDT Wed. Oct. 10, 2007

For the full article have a look at http://www.crn.com/hardware/202401135

Here are some glimpses of it.

Alex Yost, vice president of IBM‘s BladeCenter product line, offered a demonstration of an IBM BladeCenter S configured against an HP c3000 during an appearance Tuesday at the CMP Channel XChange Tech Innovator conference in Miami. The BladeCenter S is scheduled to ship to market in mid-December.

Yost presented an IBM server that ran quietly, without any rats nests of wires, and at what he said was a full configuration against an HP c3000, which he also said was fully configured but which was depicted with several rats nests of wires, hummed loudly, and which Yost said was more expensive than IBM‘s future server. Sinclair provided his own comparison, based on information published publicly by both IBM and HP, which told a much different story.

According to HP, similar configurations of the competing servers provide a cost of $22,496 for the HP c3000 and $33,070 for the BladeCenter S. IBM‘s configuration looks at a version of each server with a much higher-end configuration. According to IBM, a fully spec‘d HP c3000 comes to $106,262, while an IBM Blade Center S, fully spec‘d, comes to $51,610.

IBM BladeCenter

Existing BladeCenter Chassis

IBM BladeCenter® offers a broad range of storage and networking options integrated into the chassis to simplify infrastructure complexity and manageability while lowering total cost of ownership.

IBM BladeCenter® HT, a new telecommunications optimized version of IBM BladeCenter H, delivers outstanding core telecom network performance and high-speed connectivity (more than 1.2 Tbps of aggregate throughput on the backplane) to the BladeCenter family. It is uniquely designed to support end-to-end, next- generation-network (NGN) applications, spanning the Control, Transport and Services planes, for Telecommunications Equipment Manufacturers and Service Providers.

IBM BladeCenter® delivers high performance and manageability thanks to an effectively managed infrastructure that helps maximize resource productivity and minimize IT and network administration costs. BladeCenter gives control back to the IT or network manager.

IBM BladeCenter® H delivers increased performance and many new capabilities to the BladeCenter family while maintaining compatibility with the BladeCenter family of products. Simply smarter management can empower IT professionals to take control of the entire solution. BladeCenter H — new function, new performance and fully compatible.

BladeCenter® T is NEBS-3-/ETSI-compliant and is optimally designed with rich functionality to satisfy the most stringent telecommunications industry standards and testing. Ideal applications include: Telecommunications service and control plane applications including VoIP, IPTV and IMS.