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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 )
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  • IBM System Storage Solutions Handbook
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  • 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


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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.

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STORSever Enterprise Backup Appliances based on IBM hardware and Tivoli Storage Manager

| | Comments (2) | Visits (13528)

Recently, I spoke with Jarrett Potts, my long-time friend and former IBM colleague, who now works as Director of Strategic Marketing over at STORServer. If you have never heard of STORServer, it is a company that makes purpose-built backup appliances.

  • Last month, STORServer announced their [backup appliances are sold with a data recovery guarantee].
  • Two weeks ago, STORServer announced [free migration services from environments running TSM verion 5 to their backup appliances based on TSM version 6].

What is a Backup Appliance? It is an integrated solution of hardware and software that serves a single purpose: backup and recovery. STORServer Enterprise Backup Appliance (EBA) combines IBM's high-end x86 M4 server, IBM disk and tape storage, and IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) backup software.

(Fun Fact: The 2012 IBM year-end financial results were announced last month. IBM not only continues its #1 lead in servers overall, but has the #1 marketshare for high-end x86 servers, market-leading disk and tape storage hardware, and market leading backup software.)

To determine the appropriate size of your backup appliance, the folks at STORServer help you every step of the way. They figure out the number of TB you will backup every day, and even help configure all of the TSM server parameters to achieve the policies that make the most sense for your organization.

The appliance can backup every type of data, from databases and Virtual Machines (VMs) to documents, spreadsheets, and other unstructured data.

Are you then left with a solution too complicated to run yourself? No. The STORServer Console is an easy-to-use GUI for ongoing monitoring and maintenance. Plus, your friends at STORServer are only a phone call away in case you have any questions.

(FTC Disclosure: I work for IBM, and STORSever is an approved IBM Business Partner that uses IBM hardware and software to build their solution. I have no financial interest in STORServer, and was not paid by STORServer to mention their company or products on my blog. This post may be considered a celebrity endorsement of STORServer and its Enterprise Backup Appliances.)

Perhaps my readers feel that I am a bit biased in describing a TSM-based solution, and you want a second opinion. No worries, I understand. In the latest 165-page [2012 DCIG Backup Appliance Buyer's Guide], the STORServer models ranked very high. Here is an excerpt:

"Nowhere is this demand for purpose built appliances more evident than in the rise of purpose built backup appliances (PBBAs) over the last few years and their anticipated growth rate going forward. A recent market analysis performed by IDC found that worldwide PBBA revenue totaled $2.4 billion in 2011 which was a 42.4 percent increase over the prior year.

This scoring came into play in preparing this Buyer's Guide as the STORServer EBA 3100 model scored so highly overall that it fell outside of the two (2) standard deviations that DCIG generally uses as a guideline for inclusion and exclusion of products.

The reason DCIG included this model in this Buyer's Guide whereas in other situations it might not is that DCIG is unaware of any other backup appliance(s) from any other providers that come close to matching the EBA 3100's software and hardware attributes. As such, DCIG felt it would be doing STORServer specifically and the market generally a disservice by not highlighting in this Buyer's Guide that such a backup appliance existed and was generally available for purchase."

 Backup Appliance ModelsScoreRanking
1. STORServer EBA 3100 91.70 ENTERPRISE
2. Symantec NetBackup 5220 Backup Appliance 87.11 Recommended
3. STORServer EBA 2100 86.90 Recommended
4. STORServer EBA 1100 85.70 Recommended
5. STORServer EBA 800 85.60 Recommended
6. Symantec Backup Exec 3600 Appliance 78.83 Excellent
7. Unitrends Recovery-823 76.55 Excellent
8. RackTop EBR-FE 76.50 Excellent
9. Unitrends Recovery-833 76.25 Excellent
10. Unitrends Recovery-822 76.15 Excellent

The STORServer is ideal for small and medium-sized business (SMB), but can scale quite large to handle business growth. If you are currently unhappy with your current backup environment, and feel now is the time to look around for a better way of taking backups, you won't go wrong choosing a solution based on IBM's market-leading server and storage hardware with Tivoli Storage Manager software.

technorati tags: IBM, System Storage, Tivoli Storage Manager, STORServer



Tags:  tivoli+storage+manager ibm system+storage storserver

Upcoming Storage Events - Spring 2013

| | Comments (2) | Visits (12588)

Here are some upcoming events related to IBM Storage!

OVU2013

If you sell IBM and/or Oracle solutions, please join me for IBM Oracle Virtual University 2013!

A few weeks ago, I recorded a session on IBM Storage: Overview, Positioning and How to Sell that will be available on demand starting tomorrow, February 26th, at the IBM Oracle Virtual University 2013.

It's one of 65 new sessions that will help IBM to surround Oracle applications with IBM infrastructure, services and industry solutions. Oracle software, after all, runs best on IBM hardware. Other highlights of Oracle Virtual University include a live executive State of the Alliance session with Q&A, Oracle keynote, updates by Oracle product managers, sessions on PureSystems, Selling IBM into an Oracle environment, Cloud, and much more.

Visit the [Orace Virtual University 2013 Registration page] to register.

(Update: For employees of IBM, Oracle and their respective business partners, the replays for this event is available until Feb 26, 2014. Visit the [Orace Virtual University 2013 Replay page])

There will be live technical teams on hand throughout launch day to answer your questions in real time, so I hope you can carve out 30 minutes or more on February 26th to take advantage of these available resources.

Pulse2013

After helping launch the first Pulse back in 2008, I have sadly not been back since. Last year, I was invited to attend as a last-minute replacement for another speaker, but I was busy [having emergency surgery].

This year's [Pulse 2013] conference looks amazing. It will be held in Las Vegas, Nevada. Guest Speaker Payton Manning, NFL 4-time MVP football player, and Carrie Underwood, 6-time Grammy award winner, join IBM's Software Group executives and experts on how IBM Tivoli can help optimize your IT infrastructure.

Sadly, once again, I will not be there at Pulse. This time, I will be on the East Coast visiting clients instead, but my on-premise correspondent, Tom Rauchut, has informed me that he will be there. Hopefully, he will provide me something to write about.

Storage-Expo2013

Later in March, I will be in Brussels, Belgium for the Storage Expo. This is held March 20-21, at the Brussels-Expo venue. I will be presenting several topics each day, as well as visit clients in the area. This event comes on behalf of IBM Belgium in association with IBM Business Partner IRIS-ICT.

If you plan to participate in any of these events, let me know!

technorati tags: IBM, Oracle, Pulse, Storage, Expo, Payton Manning, Carrie Underwood, Las Vegas, Brussels Belgium



Tags:  las+vegas oracle ibm expo carrie+underwood payton+manning brussels+belgium storage pulse

IBM announces SmartCloud Storage

| | Visits (8380)

Well, it was Tuesday again, and we had quite a lot of announcements here at IBM this week! Over 1,800 clients attended the [Live February 5 webcast]! The announcements were all part of IBM's SmartCloud Storage portfolio. Here are the highlights:

STN7800 Real-time Compression Appliance

Back in October 2010, IBM announced the acquisition of Storwize, Inc., renaming its NAS-compression units to the IBM Real-time Compression appliances. Some folks were confused, so I had a blog post [IBM Storwize Product Name Decoder Ring]. IBM initially offered two models:

  • The [STN6500 model] had 16 Ethernet ports 1GbE (16x1GbE) and a pair of four-core processors.
  • The [STN6800 model] had either eight 10GbE ports (8x10GbE), or four 10GbE plus eight 1GbE ports (4x10GbE+8x1GbE). It has a pair of six-core processors.

Now, IBM offers the [STN7800 model], which can replace either of the ones above, offering 16x1GbE, 8x10GbE, and 4x10GbE+8x1GBE port configurations. It has a pair of eight-core processors to handle more robust Cloud Storage environments. See [Announcement Letter 113-012] for more details.

New XIV Gen3 model 214

With its awesome support for VMware, the XIV is often chosen for Cloud storage. The new XIV model 214 now offers up to a dozen 10GbE ports, or you can stay with the 22 1GbE ports available on previous models. These can be used for iSCSI host attachment and/or IP-based replication.

IBM strives to make each new model of every storage device more energy efficient than the last. The new XIV model is no exception. The original XIV, introduced in 2008, consumed 8.4 kVA fully loaded. The XIV Gen 3 model 114 consumed 7.0 kVA. This new model 214 consumes only 5.9 kVA!

It has been almost three years since my now infamous post [Double Drive Failure Debunked: XIV Two Years Later]. Back then, the XIV offered only 1TB and 2TB drives, with rebuild time for 1TB drive of less than 30 minutes, and for 2TB less than 60 minutes.

The new XIV Gen3 software 11.2 release, available for both the 114 and 214 models, can now rebuild a 2TB drive in less than 26 minutes, and a 3TB drive in less than 39 minutes. There is also support specific to Windows Server 2012 including thin provisioning, MSCS, VSS, and Hyper-V. See [Announcement Letter 113-013] for more details.

SmartCloud Storage Access
SmartCloud Storage Access Login Screen

IBM is the first major storage vendor to offer a product of this kind, so understanding it may be a bit difficult.

The concept is simple. Rather than having end-users having to ask IT every time they need some storage space, IBM created a self-service portal that frees up the IT department to work on more important transformational projects.

This is basically what people can do with "Public Cloud" storage service providers, so basically IBM is now giving you the capability with your "Private Cloud" storage deployment.

SmartCloud Storage Access Architecture

Here is the sequence of events. End users point their favorite web browser to the self-service portal, and login using their credentials stored in your Active Directory or LDAP server database.

Once validated, the end-user now can request new storage space, expanding their existing space, or returning the space to the IT department. For new storage requests, users can have a choice of storage classes, -- such as Gold, Silver and Bronze-- defined in the Tivoli Storage Productivity Center (TPC), either stand-alone or in the SmartCloud Virtual Storage Center.

But wait! Do you want to give every end-user a blank check to provision their own storage? Most IT staff are horrified at the thought.

Knowing this, IBM has included an option to put in an approval process, based on the end-user and the amount of capacity requested. The approver can be the cloud administrator, or someone delegated for approvals, known as an environment owner.

SmartCloud Storage Access Administration

For some users, policies may restrict the storage classes as well. For example, Fred can only have Silver or Bronze, but not Gold.

Once the approval is obtained, TPC then issues the appropriate commands to the appropriate SONAS or Storwize V7000 Unified device. SmartCloud Storage Access can do this for thousands of storage devices across dozens of geographically dispersed locations.

Before, the Cloud Admin had to configure storage pools of managed disks, define file systems, dole out file sets to hundreds or thousands of users with hard quotas, and then configure shares based on the protocols required, like CIFS, NFS, HTTPS, etc.

With SmartCloud Storage Access, the Cloud admin still defines the pools and file systems, but then lets the self-service capability of the software to create the file sets, set the quotas and configure shares with the appropriate protocols. This greatly reduces the work on the IT staff, and greatly improves the turn-around time for end-user requests to get exactly what they want, when they need it.

The next time you withdraw money from an ATM machine, fill up your gas tank at the self-service gas station, then serve your own salad at the salad bar and fill up your own soft drink at the fast food restaurant, you will realize and appreciate that SmartCloud Storage Access is a brilliant move for the IT staff.

Cloud administrators, environment owners, and end-users can all use SmartCloud Storage Access to monitor and report on storage usage.

See [Announcement Letter 213-087] for more details.

For more information on these announcements, check out the [IBM Smarter Storage landing page].

For a different perspective on this, consider Dave Vallente's thoughts on Wikibon, in his [Message to IBM's Ambuj Goyal: A Prescription for Storage Transformation]. Ironically, Ambuj Goyal was my fifth-line manager for the past two years, but since he took this new job leading Storage and System Networking, he is no longer in my management chain.

technorati tags: IBM, SmartCloud, Storage Access, XIV, STN7800



Tags:  ibm stn7800 xiv storage+access smartcloud

Pardon our Dust -- Tucson EBC is Moving

| | Comments (2) | Visits (8024)

We're moving! We often joke that I.B.M. stands for "I've Been Moved", and the Tucson Executive Briefing Center is no exception.

IMG_2642

Today is the last day for us in Building 9070. Starting tomorrow, the Tucson EBC will operate out of Building 9032 instead. While moving is always painful, there are some distinct advantages to the new facility:

  • The Building 9070 facility has been in operation since 2003, and some IBM executives felt it was starting to show its age. The new facility reflects IBM's commitment and investment to IBM System Storage portfolio, including a new Green Data Center reflecting the latest "best practices" in facility design similar to the one we have in the Raleigh EBC.

  • Several companies rent space in Building 9070. Clients visiting Building 9070 had to walk past the offices of our competitors. Building 9032 is exclusively IBM, with the new facility just off the main lobby.

  • The previous facility was on the top floor of Building 9070, and the floors often shook because of an air handler on the roof. Clients complained that it felt like a minor earthquake every time it kicked in. The new facility is on the ground floor, on solid concrete.

  • As the tallest building on campus, our clients in Building 9070 were often distracted by the views of our mountains and desert landscapes. We would take a 5 or 10 minute break, and getting everyone back in the briefing rooms was [like herding cats]. The new facility has no views to distract anyone, allowing our briefing managers to keep our meetings on schedule.

  • The Building 9070 facility was so large with five meeting rooms and three dining areas, arranged facing out in a circle. If you get lost, just do a few laps on the outer track and eventually you will get back to the room you were looking for. No client will get lost in the new facility, with just two rooms and common dining area all facing each other in a triangle configuration.

  • With the success of the Storwize family developed in Hursley UK, IBM management felt the Building 9070 facility no longer reflected the "center of gravity" of IBM's storage development. Moving the Tucson EBC a quarter mile northward therefore brings us closer.

  • Since the primary purpose of an Executive Briefing Center is to bring clients in direct contact with IBM Research and Development, we often had developers walk over from the other buildings to the Building 9070 facility. They often complained that this took 5 minutes or longer each way. Since most or our disk and tape developers reside in Building 9032, we have greatly shortened the time it takes for them to come over.

For myself, as the lead Subject Matter Expert on the Tucson EBC staff, I get a much larger office with brand new furniture!

Now is the time to book a briefing in Tucson to check out the new facility. Go to the [Tucson EBC landing page] for contact information.

IBM Watson - Helping Doctors Reduce Costs, Manage Risk and Improve Healthcare Outcomes

| | Visits (7165)
Valentines Day

Happy [Valentine's Day] everyone! Love is in the air! There was plenty of evidence of this everywhere I looked:

  • I professed my love for Mo -- we just celebrated our four-year anniversary!
  • My fellow Tucsonans [professed their love for beautiful weather with clear sunny skies].
  • Server admins [professed their love for their favorite distro of the Linux operating system].
  • Storage admins professed their love for IBM System Storage products on IBM's [Reviews and Ratings] portal.
  • Physicians around the world professed their love for [electronic medical records and digitized medical imaging].

Sadly, only 70 percent of doctors in the United States use Electronic Medical Record [EMR] systems. My own Primary Care Physician has made the switch, and told me he how much he loves having ready access to the information he needs. EMR systems reduce costs, help manage risk, and improve healthcare outcomes. It is no surprise that the U.S. government has taken a [stick-and-carrot approach] to encourage doctors to use them.

Two years ago this week, [IBM Watson won the Grand Challenge] on the popular Jeopardy! game show. I wrote [a series of blog posts on IBM Watson]. To-date, there have been over 90,000 downloads for my now infamous step-by-step instructions on [How to build your own "Watson Jr." in your basement]!

A frequent topic at the Tucson Executive Briefing Center where I work is how to make the most use of IT for healthcare and life sciences. For much of 2011 and 2012, I was also one of the technical advocates assigned to Wellpoint Insurance, in support of their adoption of IBM Watson technology for healthcare.

Consider [Oncology], the branch of medicine focused on cancer. IBM has just released a new 8-minute YouTube video [IBM Watson Demo: Oncology Diagnosis and Treatment] that shows how IBM Watson is being put to use at [Memorial Sloan-Kettering], a world-class cancer treatment facility.

This is just one of the many [IBM Smarter Healthcare solutions] that is helping to build a smarter planet!

technorati tags: IBM, Watson, Wellpoint Insurance, Memorial Sloan-Kettering, EMR, Oncology, Reviews and Ratings, Valentine's Day



Tags:  oncology valentines+day wellpoint+insurance ibm watson emr reviews+ratings memorial+sloan-kettering
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