• Share
  • ?
  • Profiles ▼
  • Communities ▼
  • Apps ▼

Blogs

  • My Blogs
  • Public Blogs
  • My Updates

LATEST TRENDS:

  • Log in to participate
Tony Pearson Tony Pearson is a Master Inventor and Senior IT Architect for the IBM Storage product line at the IBM Systems Client Experience Center in Tucson Arizona, and featured contributor to IBM's developerWorks. In 2016, Tony celebrates his 30th year anniversary with IBM Storage. He is author of the Inside System Storage series of books. This blog is for the open exchange of ideas relating to storage and storage networking hardware, software and services.
(Short URL for this blog: ibm.co/Pearson )
Facebook,   Twitter,   LinkedIn,   RSS Feed 

My books are available on Lulu.com! Order your copies today!

Featured Redbooks and Redpapers:

  • IBM System Storage Solutions Handbook
  • IBM Software-Defined Storage Guide
  • IBM Private, Public, and Hybrid Cloud Storage Solutions
  • IBM Spectrum Archive Enterprise Edition V1.2: Installation and Configuration Guide
  • IBM Spectrum Scale and ECM FileNet Content Manager Are a Winning Combination
  • IBM Spectrum Scale in an OpenStack Environment


IT featured blogger BlogWithIntegrity.com HootSuite Certified Professional

Links to other blogs...

  • Accelerate with ATS
  • Alltop - Top Storage Blogs
  • Anthony Vandewerdt
  • Barry Whyte (IBM)
  • Bob Sutor (IBM)
  • Brad Johns Consulting
  • Chris M. Evans
  • Chuck Hollis (Oracle)
  • Corporate Blogs
  • Greg Schulz
  • Hu Yoshida (HDS)
  • Jim Kelly (IBM)
  • Jon Toigo - DrunkenData
  • Kirby Wadsworth (F5)
  • Martin Glasborow
  • Raj Sharma, IBM Storage and Te...
  • Richard Swain (IBM)
  • Roger Leuthy, Storage CH Blog
  • Ron Riffe, "The Line"
  • Seb's SANblog
  • Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat
  • Steve Duplessie (ESG)
  • Storagezilla
  • Technology Blogs
  • Top 10 Storage Blogs
  • VMblog by David Marshall

Archive

  • March 2018
  • February 2018
  • January 2018
  • December 2017
  • November 2017
  • October 2017
  • September 2017
  • August 2017
  • July 2017
  • May 2017
  • April 2017
  • March 2017
  • February 2017
  • January 2017
  • December 2016
  • November 2016
  • October 2016
  • September 2016
  • August 2016
  • May 2016
  • April 2016
  • February 2016
  • January 2016
  • December 2015
  • November 2015
  • October 2015
  • September 2015
  • May 2015
  • April 2015
  • March 2015
  • February 2015
  • January 2015
  • October 2014
  • September 2014
  • July 2014
  • June 2014
  • May 2014
  • April 2014
  • March 2014
  • February 2014
  • January 2014
  • December 2013
  • November 2013
  • October 2013
  • August 2013
  • July 2013
  • June 2013
  • May 2013
  • April 2013
  • March 2013
  • February 2013
  • January 2013
  • December 2012
  • November 2012
  • October 2012
  • September 2012
  • August 2012
  • July 2012
  • June 2012
  • May 2012
  • April 2012
  • March 2012
  • February 2012
  • January 2012
  • December 2011
  • November 2011
  • October 2011
  • September 2011
  • August 2011
  • July 2011
  • June 2011
  • May 2011
  • April 2011
  • March 2011
  • February 2011
  • January 2011
  • December 2010
  • November 2010
  • October 2010
  • September 2010
  • August 2010
  • July 2010
  • June 2010
  • May 2010
  • April 2010
  • March 2010
  • February 2010
  • January 2010
  • December 2009
  • November 2009
  • October 2009
  • September 2009
  • August 2009
  • July 2009
  • June 2009
  • May 2009
  • April 2009
  • March 2009
  • February 2009
  • January 2009
  • December 2008
  • November 2008
  • October 2008
  • September 2008
  • August 2008
  • July 2008
  • June 2008
  • May 2008
  • April 2008
  • March 2008
  • February 2008
  • January 2008
  • December 2007
  • November 2007
  • October 2007
  • September 2007
  • August 2007
  • July 2007
  • June 2007
  • May 2007
  • April 2007
  • March 2007
  • February 2007
  • January 2007
  • December 2006
  • November 2006
  • October 2006
  • September 2006

Disclaimer

"The postings on this site solely reflect the personal views of each author and do not necessarily represent the views, positions, strategies or opinions of IBM or IBM management."

(c) Copyright Tony Pearson and IBM Corporation. All postings are written by Tony Pearson unless noted otherwise.

Tony Pearson is employed by IBM. Mentions of IBM Products, solutions or services might be deemed as "paid endorsements" or "celebrity endorsements" by the US Federal Trade Commission.

This blog complies with the IBM Business Conduct Guidelines, IBM Social Computing Guidelines, and IBM Social Brand Governance. This blog is admistered by Tony Pearson and Sarochin Tollette.

Safe Harbor Statement: The information on IBM products is intended to outline IBM's general product direction and it should not be relied on in making a purchasing decision. The information on the new products is for informational purposes only and may not be incorporated into any contract. The information on IBM products is not a commitment, promise, or legal obligation to deliver any material, code, or functionality. The development, release, and timing of any features or functionality described for IBM products remains at IBM's sole discretion.

Tony Pearson is a an active participant in local, regional, and industry-specific interests, and does not receive any special payments to mention them on this blog.

Tony Pearson receives part of the revenue proceeds from sales of books he has authored listed in the side panel.

Tony Pearson is not a medical doctor, and this blog does not reference any IBM product or service that is intended for use in the diagnosis, treatment, cure, prevention or monitoring of a disease or medical condition, unless otherwise specified on individual posts.

Posts by date
  • Sort by:
  • Date ▼
  • Title
  • Likes
  • Comments
  • Views

Day4 IBM Edge Free-for-All

| | Visits (10031)


IBMedge2012

This week I am in Orlando, Florida for the IBM Edge conference. Thursday evening after all the other sessions, we had a Free-for-All, a Q&A panel across all storage topics, moderated by Scott Drummond. The conference officially ends at noon tomorrow, but for many, this is the last session, as people fly out Friday morning. Here are the questions and the panel responses during the session.

When will IBM unify their storage management between Mainframe z/OS and the distributed systems platforms?

IBM offers a Change and Configuration Management Data Base (CCMDB) for this purpose with appropriate collectors from z/OS and distributed systems, but hasn't sold well.

 

When will IBM devices have RESTful interfaces?

Both IBM Systems Director and IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center (TPC) offer RESTful APIs. IBM Systems Director can manage z/VM and Linux on System z, as well as Power Systems and x86 based distributed systems. Since October 2008, IBM's Project Zero introduced RESTful interfaces to PHP and Groovy software running on WebSphere sMash environments. We have not heard much about this since 2008.

 

Will IBM TPC support NPIV on Power Systems?

TPC 5.1 has toleration support for this, showing the first port connection discovered, but not all connections, and we expect to retrofit this toleration to TPC 4.2.2 Fixpack 2. Hopefully, we will have full support in a future release.

 

We would like TPC for Replication to run on Linux for System z. We do not run z/OS at the disaster recovery site location.

Submit an IBM Request for Enhancement [RFE] for this. We have TPC for Replication on z/OS, as well as the distributed systems version that runs on Windows, Linux and AIX.

 

We have enhancements we would like to see for XIV and SONAS also, can we use the RFE process for this also?

Yes, submit the requirements for our review.

 

We heard the Statement of Direction that there would be storage integrated into the PureSystems. What exactly does that mean?

The PureSystems family of expert-integrated systems is based on a new chassis that has a front part, a midplane, and a back-part. All IBM System Storage products that support x86 and Power Systems can work with PureSystems. However, IBM does not yet offer storage that fits in the front part of the PureFlex chassis, but the Statement of Direction indicates that we intend to offer that option. Until then, the IBM Storwize V7000 is the storage of choice that can be put into the PureSystems rack, but outside the individual chasses.

 

We see some features like Real-Time Compression being put into the SAN Volume Controller (SVC), and other features put into the back-end devices. How are we supposed to make sense of this?

IBM's new pilot program, the SmartCloud Virtual Storage Center, to bring these all together. In general, we have design teams of system architects that determine which features go in which products, and prioritize accordingly.

 

We heard the IBM Executives during the opening session indicate that IBM's strategy involves supporting Big Data, but I haven't seen any storage that supports native Hadoop interfaces. Did I miss something?

First, I want to emphasize that Big Data is more than just MapReduce workloads. IBM offers Streams and BigInsights software to handle text, as well as Business Intelligence and Data Warehouse solutions for structured data. IBM's General Parallel File System (GPFS) has a Shared-Nothing-Cluster (SNC) mode with Hadoop interfaces that runs twice as fast as Hadoop's native HDFS file system. The storage products we recommend for Big Data are the SONAS and the DCS3700 disk systems, as both are optimized for the sequential workloads Big Data represents.

 

Everytime we upgrade our SVC, we review the list for SDDPCM multi-pathing and see that we need to upgrade our back-end DS8000 microcode up to recommended levels. Can we get a list of combinations that work from other customers?

The advantage of storage hypervisors like SVC is that we can separate the multi-pathing driver from the back-end managed disk systems. You only need the SDDPCM to support the SVC, not the back-end devices. For the most part, SVC has not dropped support for any level of previously supported OS or multi-pathing software.

 

On SVC, when we migrate volumes (vDisks) from one storage pool to another, we would like to throttle this process during FlashCopy.

Yes, we had several requests like this, which is why we now recommend using Volume Mirorring to perform migrations. In fact the GUI wizard uses Volume Mirroring by default when migrations are performed. As for throttling, IBM has implemented "I/O Priority Manager" that offers Quality of Service classes for DS8000 and XIV Gen3, and might consider porting this to other products in our portfolio.

 

Sizing systems is an art. I just need to know if the DS8000 is running hot. Can we have the equivalent of "red lines" for our disk systems similar to automobile engines?

Storage Optimizer was added to TPC 4.2 to help in this area, identifying heat-maps for IBM DS8000, DS6000, DS5000, DS4000, SVC and Storwize V7000. We recommend you look at the performance violation reports.

 

How can we evaluate the characteristics of our workloads?

Yes, TPC can do this.

 

When we are replacing non-IBM storage with IBM, we don't have good tools to evaluate the non-IBM equipment. What is IBM doing for this?

IBM's Disk Magic modeling tool can take inputs from a variety of sources, including iostat from the servers themselves. You can also install a 90-day trial of TPC to help with this.

 

We really like EMC's "Grab" program, does IBM have one also?

Yes, IBM has one also. See the [SSIC Discovery Utility].

 

Updating the Host Attachment Kit (HAK) for AIX is quite painful for the SVC. We prefer the method employed for the XIV.

Thanks for the feedback.

 

For SVC, we need to correlate disk with VMware and VIOS. Can we get vSCSI information on VIOS?

TPC 5.1 has this support, and we believe it has been retrofitted to TPC 4.2.2 Fixpack 2, coming out this month.

 

Currently, with SVC, when volumes are part of a Global Mirror (GM) session, we need to cancel GM, expand the source volume, expand the target volume, then restart GM. We would like this to be fully automated and non-disruptive.

Sounds like a great requirement to submit for the RFE process.

 

Can we get an RSS Feed for the RFE community.

Yes, you can subscribe to it. You can also set up "Watch Lists".

 

Thanks to all of the IBM experts on the panel for their participation at this event!

technorati tags: IBM, Edge2012, Free-for-All, CCMDB, Project Zero, RESTful, TPC, SVC, RFE, Storwize V7000, PureSystems, PureFlex, SmartCloud, Virtual Storage Center, Big+Data, SONAS, XIV, DS8000, Global Mirror



Tags:  global+mirror rfe big+data project+zero pureflex edge2012 tpc virtual+storage+center ibm free-for-all ccmdb restful ds8000 svc storwize+v7000 smartcloud puresystems sonas xiv

Day4 IBM Edge Cloud Computing

| | Visits (8018)

IBMedge2012

This week I am in Orlando, Florida for the IBM Edge conference. Here is a recap of Day 4 afternoon sessions which related to Cloud computing.

IBM SmartCloud Enterprise -- Object Storage

George Contino, IBM GTS Consultant for Cloud Storage Service Enablement, presented IBM's latest Object Storage offering, based on an alliance IBM formed with Nirvanix last October 2011, launched January 31, 2012. It is part of the IBM SmartCloud Enterprise system.

IBM currently has two datacenters for this now, Secaucus NJ and Frankfurt Germany, but will have five by end of 2012, and hopefully seven datacenters by nid-year 2013.

The storage is then divided in several layers:

  • Customer master account, assigned a 128-bit encryption key
  • Name spaces by department or LOB
  • User sub-accounts
  • User folders
  • User file objects

The objects are given random names, with the real customer-assigned file names stored elsewhere, to provide additional privacy through obfuscation. For added security, it uses Two-Factor Authentication, requiring the users to provide both the 128-bit encryption key and the password.

There are three ways to access data:

  • Proprietary API - An API is available on Windows and Linux. Symantec NetBackup, BackupExec and Commvault Simpana have already coded to the Nirvanix API to allow backups to be stored in the Nirvanix storage cloud. IBM InfoSphere Optim can archive data to the Nirvanix storage cloud.
  • CloudNAS - Nirvanix provides software that provides CIFS and NFS interfaces, that converts to the Nivranix API. IBM Tivoli Storage Manager can send backups and archives to the Nirvanix storage cloud using this approach.
  • Cloud Storage Gateway - Third parties have developed hardware that runs the CloudNAS software, or directly codes to the API, to provide standard interfaces to the local clients, and provides access to the Nirvanix storage cloud. Two examples were Panzura File System Controller and Twinstrata Cloud Array Gateway.

One of Nirvanix's partners is OxygenCloud, which allows mobile/laptop access to work files. This includes security checks on Active Directory or LDAP, AES-256 bit encryption and HTTPS protocol support. For example, if you had to give a bunch of PDF files to your clients outside your company, you could create a folder, and send out a URL link to the clients, and this link would be valid for the next 14 days for them to download the files.

How University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM) moved SAP to the Cloud

Maik Gasterstaedt, IBM Technical Enablement for SAP, Storage and Cloud solutions, presented this session on the deployment of an SAP cloud at UWM. Worldwide, SAP has established five University Competency Centers (UCC) to provide SAP cloud services to other universities, and UWM is one of these five UCC.

Basically, the UWM manages SAP instances that are then "rented out" to 107 other universities. An SAP instance represents a "sample company" that could be used in a course curriculum, for example, "Global Bikes, Inc.", "Fitter Snacker", or IDES. An SAP Client represents a fresh copy of the data for this sample company.

UWM charges each University per "SAP client" per semester. Suppose a professor will teach three classes on SAP. He can arrange the SAP clients depending on how much he is willing to spend.

  • Get one SAP Client to be shared across all three classes. All three classes would be using the same sample company.
  • Get an SAP Client for each class. Each class could be based on the same or different sample companies.
  • Get one or more SAP Clients for each class. In this case, for example, a class could get two or more sample companies.

The problem was that they were running on Sun servers approaching end-of-life. They decided to switch to IBM, running 43 SAP Instances on AIX with two Power750 servers, 7 SAP instances on Windows guests of VMware across two BladeCenter chassis using HS22 blades, XIV storage, backed up by Tivoli Storage Manager and Tivoli Storage FlashCopy Manager. They can run 50 SAP clients on each SAP instance. Each client could be rented out to different professors at different universities.

They started installation April 1, and the entire system was running in production by August 15, less than five months end-to-end.

The results were stunning. SAP instance provisioning used to take 5 days, now takes 12 hours. Backups that used to take an hour complets in about 30 seconds.

The conference is almost over folks! Just a few sessions tomorrow and then it is all done.

technorati tags: IBM, SmartCloud Enterprise, object storage, George Contino, Nirvanix, CloudNAS, SAP, UWM



Tags:  smartcloud+enterprise object+storage uwm cloudnas ibm nirvanix george+contino sap

Day4 IBM Edge Tivoli Sessions

| | Visits (8826)

IBMedge2012

This week I am in Orlando, Florida for the IBM Edge conference. Here is a recap of Day 4 morning sessions that focused on Tivoli products.

IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center Overview and Update
IBM Tivoli Storage Productivit Center overview and update
View more presentations from Tony Pearson on the IBM Expert Network.

With my colleague, Mike Griese, presenting TPC 5.1 and the IBM SmartCloud Virtual Storage Center earlier this week, you might wonder what is left to say. Mike's session was intended more for clients who already have TPC deployed, but my session is more of an introductory session.

I was the original architect of the product back in 2000-2003, so have some insight into the history, motivations and design principles applied to each version of the product. It has evolved nicely over the years, and while I am no longer working full-time on the product, I am still very much involved, and am consulted by the current architects and product managers for direction and opinion going forward.

I presented an overview of the overall product as it stands today in its current v4.2.2 version, and gave a few highlights of what to expect in the upcoming TPC 5.1 announced this week.

Encryption and Key Management in the Cloud: The Top 6 Concerns to Ensure a Secure and Reliable Solution
This was a split session with two speakers. The first speaker was Richard Moulds, VP of Strategy and Marketing from Thales, and the second speaker was Gordon Arnold, IBM Senior Technical Staff Member (STSM) and Software Architect for Tivoli Security Management.

Richard presented security issues in the cloud. He is an author of several books, including "Key Management for Dummies" and "Data Protection and PCI Compliance for Dummies". Thales is a large French companay of 70,000 people nobody in the USA has heard of, but is a major company in the area of IT Security. He presented survey results about people's perceptions and attitudes towards encryption and security issues in the cloud.

The security threats in the Cloud were presented as the "Seven Deadly Sins":

  • Data loss and leakage, including data that is not deleted with resources are re-used for other purposes
  • Shared technologies, especially in Cloud environments that do not have robust multi-tenancy
  • Malicious insiders, such as administrators being bribed to provide access to sensitive data
  • Account or service hijacking, including those that pretend to be someone else, asking for password resets
  • Insecure APIs for applications and services, many of these APIs were developed quickly, recently, and perhaps without the robust review from a security perspective
  • Abuse of the Cloud, such as using the Cloud itself to crack passwords or break decryption passwords through parallel processing
  • Unknown risk profile, as few Cloud providers have certified security capabilities
(Yesterday, [6.5 million LinkedIn passwords were compromised] by hackers. Hackers also got to eHarmony compromising 1.5 million user passwords.)

Gordon Arnold (IBM) presented IBM's Encryption and Key management. IBM has two products: IBM Tiovli Key Lifecycle Manager (TKLM) and IBM Security Key Lifecycle Manager (SKLM). These are KMIP v1.0 compliant today. The OASIS group is currently reviewing KMIP v1.1 enhancements that includes some suggestions from IBM.

IBM's use of Key Encrypting Keys on disk and tape has proven to be quite useful. The only copy of the encryption key is on the media, and is then encrypted by an authorization key. If you need to defensibly delete the data for compliance reasons, you can simply destroy the encrption key.

At lunch, I spoke with Scott Laningham who was doing video interviews. For years, Scott was the #1 blogger on IBM developerWorks until I took over the title last year. We discussed working on a video in the future on this.

technorati tags: IBM, Tivoli Storage, Productivity Center, SmartCloud, Virtual Storage Center, Richard Moulds, Thales, Gordon Arnold, Encryption, Scott Lanignham



Tags:  ibm scott+lanignham virtual+storage+center gordon+arnold productivity+center thales encryption smartcloud tivoli+storage richard+moulds

Day3 IBM Edge Breakout sessions

| | Visits (10175)

IBMedge2012

This week I am in Orlando, Florida for the IBM Edge conference. Here is a recap of Day 3.

Data Footprint Reduction: Understanding IBM Storage Efficiency Options
Data Footprint Reduction: Understanding IBM Storage Options
View more presentations from Tony Pearson on the IBM Expert Network..

Earlier this year, I wrote a Web article titled [Data Footprint Reduction] which covered data deduplication and compression, and was asked to present this at IBM Edge. I have expanded it to include:

  • Thin Provisioning
  • Space-Efficient Point-in-Time copies
  • Data Deduplication
  • Compression

After I presented the basic concepts, Sanjay Bhikot, a Unix and Storage admin at RICOH, presented his real-world experiences with data deduplication using the IBM ProtecTIER and real-time compression Beta experience using the SAN Volume Controller (SVC).

IBM Active Cloud Engine Implementation on IBM SONAS 1.3 and IBM Storwize V7000 Unified

John Sing (IBM) presented the latest enhancements in the v1.3.2 release of SONAS and Storwize V7000 Unified.

Introducing VMware vSphere Storage Features

Fellow blogger Stephen Foskett presented this session on VMware's storage features. This included VMware APIs for Array Integration (VAAI), VMware Array Storage Awareness (VASA), vCenter plug-ins, and a new concept he called "vVol" which de-multiplexes the "I/O Blender" that server hypervisors do by tagging individual requests to individual OS guests to provide added benefit. IBM is a leading reseller of VMware, so it makes sense that most of our storage meets all of Steve's requirements for recommendation.

IBM's Storage Strategy in the Smarter Computing Era
IBM Storage Strategy in the Era of Smarter Computing
View more presentations from Tony Pearson on the IBM Expert Network.

Last year, I presented this on the fourth day of the conference, and feedback we received from attendees was that this should have been presented sooner in the week, as it provides great context for the more detailed product presentations.

To address this concern, the IBM executives presented IBM strategy on Monday's keynote session, but allowed me to present this on Wednesday for several reasons:

  • You may have missed the keynote session. For example, you may not have arrived in time to hear the executives speak due to weather or mechanical problems causing travel delays.
  • You may have attended the keynote session, but want to hear it again. Maybe you were a bit hung-over, or just may have been overwhelmed with the size and scope of this event. I have read for strategic topics, audiences may have to hear the message five to seven times before they truly appreciate and understand it.
  • You may want to ask questions, and explore the implications in more detail. While keynote sessions can reach a broader audience, the communication is very much uni-directional. With break-out sessions with a few hundred people, the venue is more intimate and can afford opportunties for information exchange.

This was well attended, so the plan worked!

IBM SONAS and the Cloud Storage Taxonomy
IBM SONAS and the Cloud Storage Taxonomy
View more presentations from Tony Pearson on the IBM Expert Network.

The title of this session rolls off the tongue nicely, much like "James and the Giant Peach", "Harold and the Purple Crayon", or "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory".

When people say they are interested in "Cloud Storage", what exactly do they mean. After discussions with hundreds of clients, IBM has worked out a "taxonomy" that identifies four distinct types of storage:

  • Persistent storage
  • Ephemeral storage
  • Hosted storage
  • Reference storage

In this session, I presented how IBM SONAS addresses all four of these categories, as well as other IBM storage products that can address specific categories in the taxonomy.

In the evening, the attendees at IBM Edge joined the attendees from Innovate2012 (focused on IBM Rational products) at SeaWorld, with BBQ dinner, rides, Shamu the whale show, and a concert featuring Foreigner!

technorati tags: IBM, Stephen Foskett, Sanjay Bhikot, Data Footprint Reduction, Compression, Deduplication, Space-Efficient, Point-in-time, RICOH, SVC, Storwize V7000, SONAS, Active Cloud Engine, Smarter Computing, Smarter Storage, Foreigner, SeaWorld, Innovate2012



Tags:  foreigner smarter+storage svc stephen+foskett data+footprint+reduction innovate2012 ricoh deduplication storwize+v7000 smarter+computing space-efficient point-in-time sonas seaworld compression ibm sanjay+bhikot active+cloud+engine

Day2 IBM Edge Social Media BOF

| | Visits (8516)

IBMedge2012

This week I am in Orlando, Florida for the IBM Edge conference. Tuesday afternoon we had a Birds-of-a-Feather (BOF) session to discuss social media. I was the moderator. We had two independent bloggers on the panel: [Jon Toigo] and [Steve Foskett]. We had several IBM social media experts, including Jack Arnold, Scott Drummond, Mary Hall, Nick Harris, and Rich Swain. Also joining us was Alex Hollingworth, social media expert from Emulex.

IBM Social Media Birds of a Feather v5
View more presentations from Tony Pearson on IBM Expert Network.

At the opening session, Deon Newman suggest we re-tweet him, isn't that plagiarism? What is your take on this?

The important thing is to give credit where it is due. Avoid screen scraping others and passing it off as your own. When you re-tweet someone, you give them credit for their original tweet. You are basically saying, "I could not have said it better myself!" With blogs, you can do the same by linking to other blog posts.

I am active in social media, but am having trouble getting the older colleagues in the IT department to participate. I want them to write down all the knowledge in their heads.

The best way to get employees to do anything new or different is to show them how it benefits them. For example, if the elders are tired of answering the same questions over and over, have them start an internal wiki, blog or knowledgebase to capture the answers to frequent questions. This will save them time, so they can see value for themselves. I suggest looking at IBM Lotus Connections which provides collaboration tools inside your firewall, accessible only to internal employees of the company.

How do we differentiate facts from opinions in our social media writings?

You can always be explicit, for example IMHO stands for "In my humble opinion". I find that blogs are 99 percent opinion, and 1 percent fact, so it is easier to point out the facts linking or citing sources, and let the rest of your writing be considered opinion.

I would like to find people on Linkedin to establish business relationships with the storage administrators, decision makers and influencers within the companies I want to sell to, how do I best do that?

Nobody likes cold calls. If you upgrade to a "Pro" account on LinkedIn, you can send 15 to 25 "Inmail" emails through their system to introduce yourself. Otherwise, consider finding someone in your network that knows them, and arrange for them to provide the mutual introduction for you.

How do I find people to follow related to the topics I am interested in, like storage?

There are tools like [Tweetadder] to help you find people to follow. Or, just search on certain hashtags, and add people you find that use them.

I am concerned about privacy? What can I do to protect my privacy?

Decide up front which topics are off-limits in your blog or other social media. For services like Facebook, check your privacy settings every 30 days. Several people have opted to create a special "Facebook Page" that represents their professional brand, so that the rest of Facebook can be used for friends and family.

I want to start a new blog, which service should I use?

Services like Blogger, Blogspt and TypePad are generally easy to set up. Wordpress is more advanced, but can be more complicated to set up.

I don't care for writing a blog, how can I set up a video blog, or vlog?

Consider creating a channel on YouTube. Another popular site is Vimeo. A "Pro" account of Vimeo provides added features.

I am new to Twitter, what tools should I look into?

I suggest you look at HootSuite. This lets you post to Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin. You can schedule when a tweet will be posted, so you can right them in advance and schedule them for a certain date and time. Also, if you have a blog, you can have Hootsuite send out tweets automatically with the titles and link to each blog post.

How much effort should we put in to Social Media?

As much or as little as you want. Don't force yourself to spend more time than you want. Typically, people spend 1-2 hours per day. Cut down how much you spend watching television to make up the difference. Set up "Google Alerts" that can send you emails when certain phrases appear anywhere. There are also social bookmarking tools like Instapaper, Delicious or Diigo that can save bookmarks in the cloud for things that you want to read, but don't have time to read now.

Which social media would be the best to get chicks.

Writing a technical blog with good quality content. Girls want to be with you. Guys want to be you.

How can I use social media to provide feedback about specific products?

IBM now has a [Reviews and Ratings] for its IBM System Storage products. Consider writing a review today!

Thanks to all of the panel for their help with this!

technorati tags: IBM, IBMedge, BOF, Social Media, Twitter, Linked, Facebook



Tags:  facebook social+media bof linked twitter ibmedge ibm
  • Show:
  • 10
  • 20
  • 30
  • Previous
  • Next
1 2 3
Inside System Storage -- by Tony Pearson
  • Share
  • ?
  • Profiles ▼
  • Communities ▼
  • Apps ▼