Continuing my coverage of the [IBM Storage Innovation Executive Summit], that occurred May 9 in New York City, this is my sixth in a series of blog posts on this event.

During the break, I talked with some of the other bloggers at this event. From left to right: Stephen Foskett [Pack Rat] blog, Devang Panchigar [StorageNerve], and yours truly, Tony Pearson. (Picture courtesy of Stephen Foskett)

Meet the Experts

This next segment was a Q&A panel, with a moderator posing questions to four experts. Originally, I was scheduled to be the moderator, but this was changed to Doug Balog. The experts on the panel were:

• Jon Toigo, Principal of Toigo Partners International LLC. I have worked with Jon for years, and most recently the two of us held a webcast on [How to Diagnose and Cure What Ails your Storage Infrastructure].
• Rich Castagna, Editorial Director for Storage Media, TechTarget. TechTarget is the group that runs the [SearchStorage] website.
• Stan Zaffos, Gartner VP of Research, who spoke earlier today. I have worked with Stan for years as well, and have attended the last four Gartner Data Center Conferences held every December in Las Vegas.
• Steve Duplessie, Founder and Senior Analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG). Steve's blog is titled [The Bigger Truth].

Jon clarified a statement Doug Balog said earlier in the day attributed to his study. Doug had said that 40 percent of all data should be archived. The study that Jon Toigo had done found that, on average, for the data on disk systems, about 30 percent is useful data, 40 percent is not active and could be eligible for archive, and the remaining 30 percent was crap.

The other experts introduced themselves. Rich felt that "Cloud" was still the biggest buzzword in the IT industry. Stan felt that CIOs should ask their storage administrators "What are you doing to improve my agility and efficiency". Steve felt that it was better to focus on improving process and procedures, rather than trying to deploy the best technology.

How can you best reduce backup costs per TB?

Jon- use tape.
Rich- Clean up your environment.
Stan- Don't rehydrate your deduplicated data, adopt archive approach, and revisit your backup schedules.
Steve- Deduplication covers up stupidity. No band-aids! Companies need to address the cause.

Does Backup as a Public Service for large enterprises makes sense?

Rich- Yes, especially for those with Remote Office/Branch Office (ROBO).
Stan- It depends. You should implement client-side dedupe. Get the Cloud Provider to waive telecom bandwidth charges.
Steve- Consider recovery scenarios, and try to maintain control.
Jon- "Clouds" are bulls@#$ marketing. WAN latency will pile up.

What are the top issues IT leaders should be discussing with the Storage Managers?

Stan- To ensure SLAs meet but not exceed design, to automate, and to evaluate SAN/NAS ratios.
Steve- Server virtualization is putting the spotlight on storage. Failure to implement storage virtualization is becoming the gate that slows down sever virtualization adoption.
Jon- Insist on management features from all storage vendors, try to separate feature/function from the underlying hardware layer. See IBM's [Project Zero].
Rich- Efficiency, Archiving, Thin Provisioning, Compression, Data Protection & Retention, Backup Redesign to protect endpoints like laptops and cell phones.

When does Archive eliminate Backup?

The need for protection never goes away. There are two kinds of data: "originals" and "derivatives", and two kinds of disk: "failed" and "not yet failed".

Given SATA and SAS drives, what is the future of 10K/15K RPM drives?

There is no future for these faster drives, they are going away.

What is the biggest challenge for adopting archive?

It is easy to move data out of production systems, but difficult to make these archives accessible for eDiscovery and Search. There is also concern about changing data formats. Adobe has changed the format of PDF a whopping 33 times.

This was by far the most entertaining section of the day! Hand-held devices allowed the audience to vote which answers they liked best.

technorati tags: IBM, NYC, Summit, Expert, Panel, Stephen Foskett, PackRat, Devang Panchigar, StorageNerve, Doug Balog, Jon Toigo, Rich Castagna, Stan Zaffos, Steve Duplessie, Adobe, PDF

Tags:  jon+toigo ibm steve+duplessie stan+zaffos pdf summit devang+panchigar nyc panel expert stephen+foskett adobe rich+castagna storagenerve packrat doug+balog