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

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], this is my second in a series of blog posts on this event.

Optimizing Storage Infrastructure for Growth and Innovation

This session started off with my former boss, Brian Truskowski, IBM General Manager of System Storage and Networking.

We've come a long way in storage. In 1973, the "Winchester Drive" was named after the famous Winchester 3030 rifle. The disk drive was planning to have two 30MB platters, hence the name. When it finally launched, it would have two 35MB platters, for a total raw capacity of 70MB.

Today, IBM announced the verison 6.2 of SAN Volume Controller with support for 10GbE iSCSI. Since 2003, IBM has sold over 30,000 SAN Volume Controllers. An SVC cluster can now manage up to 32PB of disk storage.

IBM also announced new 4TB tape drive (TS1140), LTFS Library Edition, the TS3500 Library Connector, improved TS7600 and TS7700 virtual tape libraries, enhanced Information Archive for email, files and eDiscovery, new Storwize V7000 hardware, new Storwize Rapid Application bundles, new firmware for SONAS and DS8000 disk systems, and Real-Time Compression support for EMC disk systems. I plan to cover each of these in follow-on posts, but if you can't wait, here are [links to all the announcements].

Customer Testimonial - CenterPoint Energy

"CenterPoint is transforming its business from being an energy distribution company that uses technology, to a technology company that distributes energy."
-- Dr. Steve Pratt, CTO of CenterPoint Energy

The next speaker was Dr. Steve Pratt is CTO of [CenterPoint Energy]. CenterPoint is 110 years old (older than IBM!) energy company that is involved in electricity, gasoline distribution, and natural gas pipeline. CenterPoint serves Houston, Texas (the fourth largest city in the USA) and surrounding area.

CenterPoint are transforming to a Smart Grid involving smart meters, and this requires the best IT infrastructure you can buy, including IBM DS8000, XIV and SAN Volume Controller disk systems, IBM Smart Analytics System, Stream Analytics, IBM Virtual Tape Library, IBM Tivoli Storage Manager, and IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center.

Dr. Pratt has seen the transition of information over the years:

1. Data Structure, deciding how to code data to record it in a structured manner
2. Information Reporting, reporting to upper management what happened
3. Intelligence Aggregation, finding patterns and insight from the data
4. Predictive Analytics, monitoring real-time data to take pro-active steps
5. Autonomics, where automation and predictive analysis allows the system to manage itself

What does the transition to a Smart Grid mean for their storage environment? They will go from 80,000 meter reads, to 230,400,000 reads per day. Ingestion of this will go from MB/day to GB/sec. Reporting will transition to real-time analytics.

Dr. Pratt prefers to avoid trade-offs. Don't lose something to get something else. He also feels that language of the IT department can help. For example, he uses "Factor" like 25x rather than percent reduction (96 percent reduced). He feels this communicates the actual results more effectively.

Today's smarter consumers are driving the need for smarter technologies. Individual consumers and small businesses can make use of intelligent meters to help reduce their energy costs. Everything from smart cars to smart grids will need real-time analytics to deal with the millions of events that occur every day.

IBM's Data Protection and Retention Story

Brian Truskowski came back to provide the latest IBM messaging for Data Protection and Retention (DP&R). The key themes were:

1. Stop storing so much
2. Store more with what's on the floor
3. Move data to the right place

IBM announced today that the IBM Real-Time Compression Appliances now support EMC gear, such as EMC Celerra. While some of the EMC equipment have built-in compression features, these often come at a cost of performance degradation. Instead, the IBM Real-Time compression can offer improved performance as well as 3x to 5x reduction in storage capacity.

OVer 70 percent of data on disk has not be accessed in the last 90 days. IBM Easy Tier on the DS8700 and DS8800 now support FC-to-SATA automated tiering.

IBM is projecting that backup and archive storage will grow at over 50 percent per year. To help address this, IBM is launching a new "Storage Infrastructure Optimization" assessment. All attendees at today's summit are eligible for a free assessment.

Analytics are increasing the value of information, and making it more accessible to the average knowledge worker. The cost of losing data, as well as the effort spent searching for information, has skyrocketed. Users have grown to expect 100 percent uptime availability.

An analysis of IT environments found that only 55 percent was spent on revenue-producing workloads. The remaining 45 percent was spent on Data Protection and Retenion. That means that for every IT dollar spent on projects to generate revenue, you are spending another 90 cents to protect it. Imagine spending 90 percent of your house payments for homeowners' insurance, or 90 percent of your car's purchase price for car insurance.

IBM has organized its solutions into three categories:

1. Hyper-Efficient Backup and Recovery
2. Continuous Data Availability
3. Smart Archiving

What would it mean to your business if you could shift some of the money spent on DP&R over to revenue-producing projects instead? That was the teaser question posed at the end of these morning sessions for us to discuss during lunch.