Inside System Storage -- by Tony Pearson

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

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

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

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.

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