Well, it's Tuesday, in the United States at least, and you know what that means... IBM Announcements! I am actually down under in Sydney, Australia, and it is Wednesday already as I write this. I feel like a time traveler.

IBM announces their latest disk system, the [IBM System Storage DCS3700], designed for high-performance computing (HPC), business analytics, video broadcasting, and other sequential workloads. The "DCS" stands for Deep Computing Storage. IBM already has the DCS9900 for large enterprise deployments, so this smaller DCS3700 is targeted for midrange deployments.

In a compact 4U package, the DCS3700 packs dual active-active controllers and up to 60 disk drives. The controller drawer can support two additional expansion drawers, of 60 drives each in 4U drawers, for a maximum total of 180 drives in 12U of rack space. Packed with "green" 7200RPM energy-efficient 2TB drives, a system can have up to a 360TB raw capacity. The system supports RAID levels 0, 1, 3, 5, 6, and 10.

The system comes with the latest 6Gbps SAS connections for host attachment, but you can choose 8Gbps Fibre Channel Protocol (FCP) instead, allowing the DCS3700 to be managed by SVC or Storwize V7000.

technorati tags: IBM, DCS3700, HPC, DCS, FCP

Continuing my coverage of the [IBM Storage Innovation Executive Summit], that occurred May 9 in New York City, this is my fourth in a series of blog posts on this event.

Down the street, in Times Square, IBM made it on the big board.

Continuous Data Availability

Jeanine Cotter, IBM VP for Data Center Services, started out with a video about Sabre. IBM developed this revolutionary airline reservation system to handle the huge volume of transactions. Today, 18 percent of organizations consider downtime unacceptable for their tier-1 applications, and 53 percent would be seriously impacted by an outage lasting an hour or more.

Eventually, companies cross the "Continuous Availability" threshold, the point where they discover that the possibility of downtime is too costly to ignore. IBM has clients using 3-site Metro/Global Mirror that can fail-over an entire data center in just five mouse clicks.

Jeanine also mentioned Euronics, which is using SAN Volume Controller's Stretched Cluster capability, which allows them to easily vMotion virtual guest images from one data center to another. SVC has had this capability for a while, but now, with full VMcenter plug-in and VAAI support, the capability is fully integrated with VMware.

A final example was a mid-sized University, they are using IBM Storwize V7000 with Metro Mirror. The primary location's Storwize V7000 manages Solid-state drives with Easy Tier. The secondary location's Storwize V7000 has high-capacity SATA drives and FlashCopy.

Customer Testimonial - University of Rochester Medical Center

Rick Haverty, Director of IT infrastructure at University of Rochester Medical Center [URMC] provided the next client testimonial. The mission of the URMC is to use science, education and technology to improve health. URMC gets over $400 million USD in NIH grants, which puts them around 23rd largest University-based academic medical centers in the country. They have over 900 doctors, general practice and specialists.

URMC has an IBM BlueGene supercomputer, a Cisco network over 45,000 ports, and over 7.5 million square feet of Wi-Fi wireless internet coverage. They have three datacenters. The first is 7500 square feet, the second is 6000 square feet, and the third is just 800 square feet to hold their "off-site tapes".

URMC has digitized all of their records, including Electronic Medical Records (EMR) system, medical dosage history, imaging "priors", calibration of infusion pumps, RFID monitoring, and even provide IT support while the patient is on the operating table. RFID monitoring ensures all of the refrigerators are keeping medications at the right temperature. A single failed refrigerator can lose $20,000 dollars worth of medication.

When is a good time for downtime? At URMC, they handle 90,000 Emergency Room vists per year, so the answer is never. When is the ER busiest? Monday morning. (not what I expected!)

URMC's EMR software (Epic) runs on clustered POWER7 servers, with DS8700 disk systems using Metro Mirror to secondary location. They also keep a third "shadow" POWER7 for read-only purposes, and a separate system that provides web-based read-only access. Finally, they have 90 stand-alone Personal Computers (PCs) that contain information for all the patients that have reservations this week, just in case all the other systems fail.

The exploding volume of data comes from medical imaging. For radiology (X-rays), each image is called a "study" takes 20-30 MB each, and they have 650,000 studies per year. This represents about 16TB storage per year, with 3 second response time access. These must be kept for 7 years since last view, or until the patient reaches the age of 18 years old, which ever is later.

But radiology is just one discipline. Healthcare has a whole bunch of "ologies". Another is "Pathology" which looks at cells between glass slides in a microscope. Each study consumes 10-20GB, and URMC does about 100,000 pathology studies per year, representing 150TB per year.

URMC has identified that they have 42 mission-critical applications. The data for these are stored on DS8000, XIV, Storwize V7000 and DS5000, all managed behind SAN Volume Controller.

Next up, Doug Balog covers Smart Archiving.

technorati tags: IBM, NYC, Summit, Continuous Availability, Jeanine Cotter, SVC, Stretched Cluster, Euronics, URMC, Rick Haverty, BlueGene, EMR, Epic, RFID, NIH

Continuing my coverage of the [IBM Storage Innovation Executive Summit], that occurred May 9 in New York City, this is my third in a series of blog posts on this event.

During lunch, people were able to take a look at our solutions. Here are Dan Thompson and Brett Cooper striking a pose.

Hyper-Efficient Backup and Recovery

The afternoon was kicked off by Dr. Daniel Sabbah, IBM General Manager of Tivoli software. He started with some shocking statistics: 42 percent of small companies have experienced data loss, 32 percent have lost data forever. IBM has a solution that offers "Unified Recovery Management". This involves a combination of periodic backups, frequent snapshots, and remote mirroring.

IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) was introduced in 1993, and was the first backup software solution to support backup to disk storage pools. Today, TSM is now also part of Cloud Computing services, including IBM Information Protection Services. IBM announced today a new bundle called IBM Storwize Rapid Application Backup, which combines IBM Storwize V7000 midrange disk system, Tivoli FlashCopy Manager, implementation services, with a full three-year hardware and software warranty. This could be used, for example, to protect a Microsoft Exchange email system with 9000 mailboxes.

IBM also announced that its TS7600 ProtecTIER data deduplication solutions have been enhanced to support many-to-many bi-direction remote mirroring. Last year, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) reported that they were average 24x data deduplication factor in their environment using IBM ProtecTIER.

"You are out of your mind if you think you can live without tape!"
-- Dick Crosby, Director of System Administration, Estes

The new IBM TS1140 enterprise class tape drive process 2.3 TB per hour, and provides a density of 1.2 PB per square foot. The new 3599 tape media can hold 4TB of data uncompressed, which could hold up to 10TB at a 2.5x compression ratio.

The United States Golfers Association [USGA] uses IBM's backup cloud, which manages over 100PB of data from 750 locations across five continents.

Customer Testimonial - Graybar

Randy Miller, Manager of Technical System Administration at Graybar, provided the next client testimonial. Graybar is an employee-owned company focused on supply-chain management, serving as a distributor for electical, lighting, security, power and cooling equipment.

Their problem was that they had 240 different locations, and expecting local staff to handle tape backups was not working out well. They centralized their backups to their main data center. In the event that a system fails in one of their many remote locations, they can rebuild a new machine at their main data center across high-speed LAN, and then ship overnight to the remote location. The result, the remote location has a system up and running by 10:30am, faster than they would have had from local staff trying to figure out how to recover from tape. In effect, Graybar had implemented a "private cloud" for backup in the 1990s, long before the concept was "cool" or "popular".

In 2001, they had an 18TB SAP ERP application data repository. To back this up, they took it down for 1 minute per day, six days a week, and 15 minutes down on Sundays. The result was less than 99.8 percent availability. To fix this, they switched to XIV, and use Snapshots that are non-disruptive and do not impact application performance.

Over 85 percent of the servers at Graybar are virtualized.

Their next challenge is Disaster Recovery. Currently, they have two datacenters, one in St. Louis and the other in Kansas City. However, in the aftermath of Japan's earthquakes, they realize there is a nuclear power plan between their two locations, so a single incident could impact both data centers. They are working with IBM, their trusted advisors, to investigate a three-site solution.

This week, May 15-22, I am in Auckland, New Zealand teaching IBM Storage Top Gun sales class. Next week, I will be in Sydney, Australia.

technorati tags: IBM, summit, NYC, Daniel Sabbah, TSM, Storwize, , TS7600, ProtecTIER, TS1140, tape, USGA, Graybar, Randy Miller, SAP, ERP, Disaster Recovery, New Zealand, Australia, Top Gun

Continuing my coverage of the [IBM Storage Innovation Executive Summit], that occurred May 9 in New York City, this is my seventh and final in a series of blog posts on this event.

Cosmic Scale of Data

Dan Galvan, IBM VP of Marketing for Storage, was the next speaker. With 300 billion emails being sent per day, 4.6 billion cell phones in the world, and 26 million MRIs per year, there is going to be a huge demand for file-based storage. In fact, a recent study found that file-based storage will grow at 60 percent per year, compared to 15 percent growth for block-based storage.

Dan positioned IBM's Scale-out Network Attached Storage (SONAS) as the big "C:" drive for a company. SONAS offers a global namespace, a single point of management, with the ability to scale capacity and performance tailored for each environment.

The benefits of SONAS are great. We can consolidate dozens of smaller NAS filers, we can virtualize files across different storage pools, and increase overall efficiency.

Powering advanced genomic research to cure cancer

The next speaker was supposed to be Bill Pappas, Senior Enterprise Network Storage Architect, Research Informatics at [St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital]. Unfortunately, St. Jude is near the flooding of the Mississippi river, and he had to stay put. An IBM team was able to capture his thoughts on video that was shown on the big screen.

Thanks to the Human Genome project, St. Jude is able to cure people. They see 5700 patients per year, and have an impressive 70 percent cure rate. The first genetic scan took 10 years, now the technology allows a genome to be mapped in about a week. Having this genomic information is making vast strides in healthcare. It is the difference of fishing in a river, versus putting a wide net to catch all the fish in the Atlantic ocean all at once.

Recently, St. Jude migrated 250 TB of files from other NAS to an IBM SONAS solution. The SONAS can handle a mixed set of workloads, and allows internal movement of data from fast disk, to slower high-capacity disk, and then to tape. SONAS is one of the few storage systems that supports a blended disk-and-tape approach, which is ideal for the type of data captured by St. Jude.

IBM's own IT transformation

Pat Toole, IBM's CIO, presented the internal transformation of IBM's IT operations. He started in 2002 in the midst of IBM's effort to restructure its process and procedures. They identified four major data sources: employee data, client data, product data, and financial data. They put a focus to understand outcomes and set priorities.

The result? A 3-to-1 payback on CIO investments. This allowed IBM to go from server sprawl to consolidated pooling of resources with the right levels of integration. In 1997, IBM had 15,000 different applications running across 155 separate datacenters. Today, they have reduced this down to 4,500 applications and 7 datacenters. Their goal is to reduce down to 2,225 applications by 2015. Of these, only 250 are mission critical.

Pat's priorities today: server and storage virtualization, IT service management, cloud computing, and data-centered consolidation. IBM runs its corporate business on the following amount of data:

• 9 PB of block-based storage, SVC and XIV
• 1 PB of file-based storage, SONAS
• 15 PB of tape for backup and archive

Pat indicated that this environment is growing 25 percent per year, and that an additional 70-85 PB relates to other parts of the business.

By taking this focused approach, IBM was able to increase storage utilization from 50 to 90 percent, and to cut storage costs by 50 percent. This was done through thin provisioning, storage virtualization and pooling.

Looking forward to the future, Pat sees the following challenges: (a) that 120,000 IBM employees have smart phones and want to connect them to IBM's internal systems; (b) the increase in social media; and (c) the use of business analytics.

After the last session, people gathered in the "Hall of the Universe" for the evening reception, featuring food, drinks and live music. It was a great day. I got to meet several bloggers in person, and their feedback was that this was a very blogger-friendly event. Bloggers were given the same level of access as corporate executives and industry analysts.

technorati tags: IBM, NYC, Summit, Dan Galvan, SONAS, Bill Pappas, St Jude, Research Hospital, CIO, Pat Toole, SVC, XIV