Continuing this week's coverage of the 27th annual [Data Center Conference] I attended some break-out sessions on the "storage" track.

Effectively Deploying Disruptive Storage Architectures and Technologies

Two analysts co-presented this session. In this case, the speakers are using the term "disruptive" in the [positive sense] of the word, as originally used by Clayton Christensen in hisbook[The Innovator's Dilemma], andnot in the negative sense of IT system outages. By a show of hands,they asked if anyone had more storage than they needed. No hands went up.

The session focused on the benefits versus risks of new storage architectures, and which vendors they felt would succeed in this new marketplace around the years 2012-2013.

By electronic survey, here were the number of storage vendors deployed by members of the audience:

• 14 percent - one vendor
• 33 percent - two vendors, often called a "dual vendor" strategy
• 24 percent - three vendors
• 29 percent - four or more storage vendors

For those who have deployed a storage area network (SAN), 84 percent also have NAS, 61 percent also have some form or archive storage such as IBM System Storage DR550, and 18 percent also have a virtual tape library (VTL).

The speaker credited IBM's leadership in the now popular "storage server" movement to the IBM Versatile Storage Server [VSS] from the 1990s, the predecessor to IBM's popular Enterprise Storage Server (ESS). A "storage server" is merely a disk or tape system built using off-the-shelf server technology, rather than customized [ASIC] chips, lowering thebarriers of entry to a slew of small start-up firms entering the IT storage market, and leading to newinnovation.

How can a system designed for now single point of failure (SPOF) actually then fail? The speaker convenientlyignored the two most obvious answers (multiple failures, microcode error) and focused instead on mis-configuration. She felt part of the blame falls on IT staff not having adequate skills to deal with the complexities of today's storage devices, and the other part of the blame falls on storage vendors for making such complicated devices in the first place.

Scale-out architectures, such as IBM XIV and EMC Atmos, represent a departure from traditional "Scale-up" monolithic equipment. Whereas scale-up machines are traditionally limited in scalability from their packaging, scale-out are limited only by the software architecture and back-end interconnect.

To go with cloud computing, the analyst categorized storage into four groups: Outsourced, Hosted, Cloud, and Sky Drive. The difference depended on where servers, storage and support personnel were located.

How long are you willing to wait for your preferred storage vendor to provide a new feature before switching to another vendor? A shocking 51 percent said at most 12 months! 34 percent would be willing to wait up to 24 months, and only 7 percent were unwilling to change vendors. The results indicate more confidence in being able to change vendors, rather than pressures from upper management to meet budget or functional requirements.

Beyond the seven major storage vendors, there are now dozens of smaller emerging or privately-held start-ups now offering new storage devices. How willing were the members of the audience to do business with these? 21 percent already have devices installed from them, 16 percent plan to in the next 12-24 months, and 63 percent have no plans at all.

The key value proposition from the new storage architectures were ease-of-use and lower total cost of ownership.The speaker recommended developing a strategy or "road map" for deploying new storage architectures, with focus on quantifying the benefits and savings. Ask the new vendor for references, local support, and an acceptance test or "proof-of-concept" to try out the new system. Also, consider the impact to existing Disaster Recovery or other IT processes that this new storage architecture may impact.

Tame the Information Explosion with IBM Information Infrastructure

Susan Blocher, IBM VP of marketing for System Storage, presented this vendor-sponsored session, covering theIBM Information Infrastructure part of IBM's New Enterprise Data Center vision. This was followed by BradHeaton, Senior Systems Admin from ProQuest, who gave his "User Experience" of the IBM TS7650G ProtecTIER virtual tape library and its state-of-the-art inline data deduplication capability.

Best Practices for Managing Data Growth and Reducing Storage Costs

The analyst explained why everyone should be looking at deploying a formal "data archiving" scheme. Not just for "mandatory preservation" resulting from government or industry regulations, but also the benefits of "optional preservation" to help corporations and individual employees be more productive and effective.

Before there were only two tiers of storage, expensive disk and inexpensive tape. Now, with the advent of slower less-expensive SATA disks, including storage systems that emulate virtual tape libraries, and others that offer Non-Erasable, Non-Rewriteable (NENR) protection, IT administrators now have a middle ground to keep their archive data.

New software innovation supports better data management. The speaker recalled when "storage management" was equated to "backup" only, and now includes all aspects of management, including HSM migration, compliance archive, and long term data preservation. I had a smile on my face--IBM has used "storage management" to refer to these other aspects of storage since the 1980s!

The analyst felt the best tool to control growth is the "Delete" the data no longer needed, but felt that nobody uses Storage Resource Management (SRM) tools needed to make this viable. Until then, people willchose instead to archive emails and user files to less expensive media.The speaker also recommended looking into highly-scalable NAS offerings--such as IBM's Scale-Out File Services (SoFS), Exanet, Permabit, IBRIX, Isilon, and others--when fast access to files is worth the premium price over tape media.The speaker also made the distinction between "stub-based" archiving--such as IBM TSM Space Manager, Sun's SAM-FS, and EMC DiskXtender--from "stub-less" archive accomplished through file virtualization that employes a global namespace--such as IBM Virtual File Manager (VFM), EMC RAINfinity or F5's ARX.

She made the distinction between archives and backups. If you are keeping backups longer than four weeks, they are not really backups, are they? These are really archives, but not as effective. Recent legal precedent no longer considers long-term backup tapes as valid archive tapes.

To deploy a new archive strategy, create a formal position of "e-archivist", chose the applications that will be archived and focus on requirements first, rather than going out and buying compliance storage devices. Try to get users to pool their project data into one location, to make archiving easier. Try to have the storage admins offer a "menu" of options to Line-of-Business/Legal/Compliance teams that may not be familiar with subtle differences in storage technologies.

While I am familiar with many of these best practices already, I found it useful to see which competitiveproducts line up with those we have already within IBM, and which new storage architectures others find mostpromising.

technorati tags: Clayton Christensen, SAN, NAS, DR550, VTL, SPOF, Scale-Up, Scale-Out, IBM, XIV, EMC, Atmos, Susan Blocher, Brad Heaton, ProQuest, TS7650G, ProtecTIER, deduplication, archive, SATA, NENR, HSM, SRM, VFM

Tags:  infrastructure