Tony Pearson is a Master Inventor and Senior IT Architect for the IBM Storage product line at the
IBM Executive Briefing 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.
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This week, I am in Taipei, teaching Top Gun class. There was concern that another typhoon would hit the island of Taiwan later this week, but it looks like it is now headed for Hong Kong instead.
Elsewhere in the world, there are several events going on next week, so I thought I would bring them to your attention.
ECTY - South Africa
Next week, Jerry Kluck, IBM Global Sales Executive for Storage Optimization and Integration Services, will be the keynote speaker at "Edge Comes to You" (ECTY) conference in South Africa. This is a one-day event, similar to the [ECTY event in Moscow, Russia] that I spoke at last June.
Here is the schedule for South Africa next week:
Monday, August 20, 2012 - Johannesburg
Wednesday, August 22, 2012 - Cape Town
(I have been to both Jo'burg and Cape Town back in 1994. A month after Apartheid had just ended, I was part of a small group of IBMers sent to re-establish IBM's business operations there. I would have liked to have attended the events next week, not just to hear Jerry speak, but also to see how much the country has changed over the past 18 years, but I could not get a work permit in time.)
If you are interested in attending either of these next week, contact your local IBM Business Partner or sales rep to attend.
Forrester's Total Economic Impact Study of Virtualized Storage
Virtualized storage can help organizations stretch their storage investment dollar and storage administration and management resources. Jon Erickson from Forrester Research will review the latest findings from IBM SAN Volume Control (SVC) users studied as part of the recently completed Forrester Total Economic Impact Study of IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller.
Date: Tuesday, August 21, 2012
Time: 10:00 AM PDT / 1:00 PM EDT
Duration: 60 minutes
Among the findings, users were able to:
Avoid the capital cost of additional storage
Increase IT productivity
Provide greater end user data availability
The second presenter is Chris Saul, IBM Storage Virtualization Manager, who will explain how SVC can manage heterogeneous disk from a single point of control, autonomously manage tiered disk storage and can store up to five times as much data on your existing disk using IBM Real-time Compression.
Not all virtualization solutions are created equal! That's true for storage virtualization, like the SAN Volume Controller mentioned above, and it's true for server virtualization as well.
This webcast discusses the real-world impact on businesses that deploy IBM's PowerVM®
virtualization technology as compared to those using Oracle® VM for SPARC (OVM SPARC), Microsoft® Hyper-V, VMware® vSphere or other competing products.
Date: Wednesday, August 22, 2012
Time: 10:00 AM PDT / 1:00 PM EDT
Duration: 60 minutes
This webcast will include findings from a [Solitaire Interglobal] study of over 61,000 customer sites on the value of virtualization from a business perspective and how IBM's PowerVM provides real business value.
Other key discussion points that will be covered during this webcast include:
Behavioral characteristics of server virtualization technologies that were examined and analyzed from survey participant's environments
How IT colleagues were able to obtain a faster time-to-market for business initiatives when using IBM PowerVM
Why the learning curve time for PowerVM is as much as 2.58 times faster than for other offerings
Why VM reboot comparisons for PowerVM vs competitive platforms resulted in downtime of 5.5 times less than with other options
A TCO reduction of up to 71.4% for PowerVM compared to alternative options
This webcast will also feature an in-depth discussion on the IBM PowerVM solution from an IBM product expert who will share the unique virtualization features available when PowerVM is utilized within the IBM Power Systems™ environment.
Tuesday morning at the [Oracle OpenWorld 2011] conference started with another keynote session. This time, Michael Dell, founder, chairman and CEO of Dell, Inc., presented. Over the past nine years, he feels "the line between business and IT is going away." Michael claims that "Dell is no longer a PC company", and instead is focusing on data center solutions and services to be more like IBM.
John Fowler, Executive VP for Oracle Hardware, claims that Oracle has a single team for hardware development. The SPARC-T4 is their newest chip, with 8 cores and 64 dynamic threads, running at 3.0 GHz. It has on-chip 10GbE ethernet, PCIe, DDR3 Memory controllers and Crypto features. For storage, Oracle now offers four different offerings:
Exadata (as Database storage)
ZFS Storage Array (NAS)
Pillar Axiom (block-level I/O)
StorageTek tape
Edward Screven, Chief Corporate Architect at Oracle, indicated that the new Oracle Linux kernel allows for zero downtime patches, meaning that you can update the OS while applications are running without a reboot. The OracleVM (based on open-source XEN) supports both x86 and SPARC-based server hosts. On x86, it can run Linux, Solaris and Windows guests. On SPARC, it can run Linux and Solaris guests.
John Loaiza, Oracle Senior VP, explained the Exadata. It has 168 disk drives and 56 PCIe Flash Cards, connected via 40Gbps Infiniband. The Exadata keeps all data on spinning disk, with "warm data" cached on Flash, and "hot data" cached on DRAM. This is similar to IBM's Easy Tier feature on the DS8000, SVC and Storwize V7000.
Brad Cameron, Senior Director, explained Exalogic, which pre-dates Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems. The idea was to build an x86 machine for running Java applications on Oracle WebLogic. The Exalogic can connect via Infiniband to an Exadata to access database information, and to 10GbE ethernet for the rest of the servers and clients. Whether you get the quarter, half or full-rack system, you get 40TB of NAS storage.
Ganesh Ramamurthy, Oracle VP of Hardware Engineering, presented the SPARC Supercluster. This combines the storage cells from Exadata, the compute nodes from Exalogic, shared NAS storage using ZFS file system, and Solaris 11 with OracleVM. Taking a cue from IBM's zEnterprise Unified Resource Manager, Oracle is offering centralized management for all the layers in their SPARC Supercluster stack. The SPARC Supercluster is intended as general purpose machine, and can be used to run non-Oracle applications like SAP. From a storage perspective, he claims that the storage in the SPARC Supercluster is 2.5x better than EMC VMAX, which basically puts it comparable to IBM XIV pricing.
For my readers in San Francisco attending Oracle OpenWorld, here are some sessions that IBM is featuring on Wednesday. Note the first two are Solution Spotlight sessions at the IBM Booth #1111 where I will be most of the time.
Data Management Best Practices for Oracle Applications
Oracle RAC and Cloud: Tips from IBM Global Business Services
10/05/11, 10:00 a.m. -- 11:00 a.m., OpenWorld session #15733
Presenters: David Simpson, IBM; Nalin Sahoo, Oracle
In this session, gain valuable insight into high-availability systems leveraging Oracle Database 11g Release 2 and Oracle Real Application Clusters (Oracle RAC). Hear best practices and lessons learned with these Oracle technologies as well as how IBM utilizes cloud infrastructure with Oracle Clusterware and server pools.
In the Heat of the Oracle Fusion Decision-Making Process: What's Your Next Move?
10/05/11, 10:00 a.m. -- 11:00 a.m., OpenWorld session #9423
Presenter: Esther Parker, IBM
This session discusses how companies can embrace Oracle Fusion so they can meet their business objectives today and in the future.
Continuing my coverage of the IBM Dynamic Infrastructure Executive Summit at the Fairmont Resort in Scottsdale, Arizona, we had a day full main-tent sessions. Here is a quick recap of the sessions presented in the morning.
Leadership and Innovation on a Smarter Planet
Todd Kirtley, IBM General Manager of the western United States, kicked off the day. He explained that we are now entering the Decade of Smart: smarter healthcare, smarter energy, smarter traffic systems, and smarter cities, to name a few. One of those smarter cities is Dubuque, Iowa, nicknamed the Masterpiece of the Mississippi river. Mayor Roy Boul of Dubuque spoke next on his testimonial on working with IBM. I have never been to Dubuque, but it looks and sounds like a fun place to visit. Here is the [press release] and a two-minute [video].
Smarter Systems for a Smarter Planet
Tom Rosamillia, IBM General Manager of the System z mainframe platform, presented on smarter systems. IBM is intentionally designing integrated systems to redefine performance and deliver the highest possible value for the least amount of resource. The five key focus areas were:
Enabling massive scale
Organizing vast amounts of data
Turning information into insight
Increasing business agility
Managing risk, security and compliance
The Future of Systems
Ambuj Goyal, IBM General Manager of Development and Manufacturing, presented the future of systems. For example, reading 10 million electricity meters monthly is only 120 million transactions per year, but reading them daily is 3.65 billion, and reading them every 15 minutes will result in over 350 billion transactions per year. What would it take to handle this? Beyond just faster speeds and feeds, beyond consolidation through virtualization and multi-core systems, beyond pre-configured fit-for-purpose appliances, there will be a new level for integrated systems. Imagine a highly dense integration with over 3000 processors per frame, over 400 Petabytes (PB) of storage, and 1.3 PB/sec bandwidth. Integrating software, servers and storage will make this big jump in value possible.
POWERing your Planet
Ross Mauri, IBM General Manager of Power Systems, presented the latest POWER7 processor server product line. The IBM POWER-based servers can run any mix of AIX, Linux and IBM i (formerly i5/OS) operating system images. Compared to the previous POWER6 generation, POWER7 are four times more energy efficient, twice the performance, at about the same price. For example, an 8-socket p780 with 64 cores (eight per socket) and 256 threads (4 threads per core) had a record-breaking 37,000 SAP users in a standard SD 2-tier benchmark, beating out 32-socket and 64-socket M9000 SPARC systems from Oracle/Sun and 8-socket Nehalem-EX Fujitsu 1800E systems. See the [SAP benchmark results] for full details. With more TPC-C performance per core, the POWER7 is 4.6 times faster than HP Itanium and 7.5 times faster than Oracle Sun T5440.
This performance can be combined with incredible scalability. IBM's PowerVM outperforms VMware by 65 percent and provides features like "Live Partition Mobility" that is similar to VMware's VMotion capability. IBM's PureScale allows DB2 to scale out across 128 POWER servers, beating out Oracle RAC clusters.
IBM AIX on POWER sytsems is also the most reliable UNIX operating system, which is 2.3 times more reliable than Oracle Sun Solaris on SPARC, HP-UX or Apple MacOS, and 10 times more reliable than Windows 2008 Server on x86 platforms. See the [ITIC 2009 Global Server Hardware and Server OS Reliability Survey].
Analytics and Information
The final speaker in the morning was Greg Lotko, IBM Vice President of Information Management Warehouse solutions. Analytics are required to gain greater insight from information, and this can result in better business outcomes. The [IBM Global CFO Study 2010] shows that companies that invest in business insight consistently outperform all other enterprises, with 33 percent more revenue growth, 32 percent more return on invested (ROI) capital, and 12 times more earnings (EBITDA). Business Analytics is more than just traditional business intelligence (BI). It tries to answer three critical questions for decision makers:
What is happening?
Why is it happening?
What is likely to happen in the future?
The IBM Smart Analytics System is a pre-configured integrated system appliance that combines text analytics, data mining and OLAP cubing software on a powerful data warehouse platform. It comes in three flavors: Model 5600 is based on System x servers, Model 7600 based on POWER7 servers, and Model 9600 on System z mainframe servers.
IBM has over 6000 business analytics and optimization consultants to help clients with their deployments.
While this might appear as "Death by Powerpoint", I think the panel of presenters did a good job providing real examples to emphasize their key points.
The marketshare data for external disk systems has been released by IDC for 4Q09. Overall, the market dropped 0.7 percent, comparing 4Q09 versus 4Q08. While EMC was quick to remind everyone that they were able to [maintain their #1 position] in the storage subset of "external disk systems", with the same 23.7 percent marketshare they had back in 4Q08 and revenues that were essentially flat, the real story concerns the shifts in the marketplace for the other major players. IBM grew revenue 9 percent, putting it nearly 5 points of marketshare ahead of HP. HP revenues dropped 7 percent, moving it further behind. Not mentioned in the [IBM Press Release] were NetApp and Dell, neck and neck for fourth place, with NetApp gaining 16.8 percent in revenues, while Dell dropped 13.5 percent. Both NetApp and Dell now have about 8 percent marketshare each. These top five storage vendors represent nearly 70 percent of the marketshare.
Given that HP is IBM's number one competitor, not just in storage but all things IT, this was a major win. Bob Evans from InformationWeek interviews my fifth-line manager, IBM executive Rod Adkins [IBM Claims Hardware Supremacy] where he shares his views and opinions about HP, Oracle-Sun, Cisco and Dell.
I'll add my two cents on what's going on:
Shift in Servers causes Shift in Storage
Hundreds of customers are moving away from HP and Sun over to IBM servers, and with it, are chosing IBM's storage offerings as well. IBM's rock-solid strategy (which I outlined in my post [Foundations and Flavorings]) has helped explain the different products and how they are positioned. HP's use of Itanium processors, and Sun's aging SPARC line, are both reasons enough to switch to IBM's lastest POWER7 processors, running AIX, IBM i (formerly i5/OS) and Linux operating systems.
Thunder in the Clouds
Some analysts predict that by 2013, one out of five companies won't even have their own IT assets. IBM supports all flavors of private, public and hybrid cloud computing models. IBM has its own strong set of offerings, is also the number one reseller of VMware, and has cloud partnerships with both Google and Amazon. HP and Microsoft have recently formed an alliance, but they have different takes on cloud computing. HP wants to be the "infrastructure" company, but Microsoft wants to focus on its ["three screens and a public cloud"] strategy. Microsoft has decided not to make its Azure Cloud operating system available for private cloud deployments. By contrast, IBM can start you with a private cloud, then help you transition to a hybrid cloud, and finally to a public cloud.
In the latest eX5 announcement, IBM's x86-based servers can run 78 percent more virtual machines per VMware license dollar. This will give IBM an advantage as HP shifts from Itanium to an all x86-based server line.
Network Attached Storage
There seems to be a shift away from FC and iSCSI towards NAS and FCoE storage networking protocols. This bodes bad for HP's acquisition of LeftHand, and Dell's acquisition of EqualLogic. IBM's SONAS for large deployments, and N series for smaller deployments, will compete nicely against HP's StorageWorks X9000 system.
Storage on Paper no longer Eco-friendly
HP beats IBM when you include consumer products like printers, which some might consider "Storage on Paper". At IBM, we often joke that 96 percent of HP's profits come from over-priced ink cartridges. With the latest focus on the environment, people are printing less. I have been printing less myself, setting my default printer to generate a PDF file instead. There are several tools available for this, including [CutePDF] and [BullZip]. As IBM employees switch from Microsoft Office to IBM's [Lotus Symphony], it has built-in "export-to-PDF" capability as well. People are also going to their local OfficeMax or CartridgeWorld to get their cartridges refilled, rather than purchase new ones. That has to be hurting HP's bottom line.
Don't Forget About Storage Management
The leading storage management suites today are IBM's Tivoli Storage Productivity Center and EMC's Control Center. HP's Storage Essentials doesn't quite beat either of these, and management software is growing in importance to more and more customers.
To learn more about IBM results 4Q09 and full-year 2009, see [Quarterly Earnings].
Tony Pearson is a Master Inventor and Senior IT Architect for the IBM Storage product line at the
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