Continuing my coverage of the 30th annual [Data Center Conference]. Here is a recap of the Monday afternoon sessions:

IBM Watson and your Data Center

Steve Sams, IBM VP of Site and Facilities Services, cleverly used IBM Watson as a way to explain how analytics can be used to help manage your data center. Sadly, most of the people at my table missed the connection between IBM Watson and Analytics. How does answering a single trivia question in under three seconds relate to the ongoing operations of a data center? If you were similarly confused, take a peak at my series of IBM Watson blog posts:

• [IBM Watson: What's in that one Terabyte?]
• [IBM Watson: Tucson Watch Event]
• [IBM Watson: Business Intelligence, Data Retrieval and Text Mining]
• [IBM Watson: How to build your own Watson Jr. in your Basement]

Devising a Cloud Computing Strategy

The analyst who presented this topic was probably the fastest-speaking Texan I have met. He covered various aspects of Cloud Computing that people need to consider. Why hasn't Cloud taken off sooner? The analyst feels that Cloud Computing wasn't ready for us, and we weren't ready for Cloud Computing. The fundamentals of Cloud Computing have not changed, but we as a society have. Now that many end users are comfortable consuming public cloud resources, from Facebook to Twitter to Gmail, they are beginning to ask for similar from their corporate IT.

• Legal issues - see this hour-long video, [Cloud Law & Order], which discusses legal issues related to Cloud Computing.
• Employee staffing - need to re-tool and re-train IT employees to start thinking of their IT as a service provider internally.
• Hybrid Cloud - rather than struggle choosing between private and public cloud methodologies, consider a combination of both.

University of Rochester Medical Center (URMC) Cracks Code on Data Growth

Often times, the hour is split, 30 minutes of the sponsor talking about various products, followed by 30 minutes of the client giving a user experience. Instead, I decided to let the client speak for 45 minutes, and then I moderated the Q&A for the remaining 15 minutes. This revised format seemed to be well-received!

University of Rochester is in New York, about 60 miles east of Buffalo, and 90 miles from Toronto across Lake Ontario. Six years ago, Rick Haverty joined URMC as the Director of Infrastructure services, managing 130 of the 300 IT personnel at the Medical Center. I met Rick back in May, when he presented at the IBM [Storage Innovation Executive Summit] in New York City.

URMC has DS8000, DS5000, XIV, SONAS, Storwize V7000 and is in the process of deploying Storwize V7000 Unified. He presented how he has used these for continuous operations and high availability, while controlling storage growth and costs.

The Q&A was lively, focusing on how his team manages 1PB of disk storage with just four storage administrators, his choice of a "Vendor Neutral Archive" (VNA), and his experiences with integration.

This was a great afternoon, and I was glad to get all my speaking gigs done early in the week. I would like to thank Rick Haverty of URMC for doing a great job presenting this afternoon!

technorati tags: IBM, Steve Sams, Watson, Analytics, Cloud Computing, Hybrid Cloud, University of Rochester, Medical Center, URMC, Rick Haverty, SONAS, Storwize V7000, XIV, DS8000, DS5000

Tags:  urmc rick+haverty ds8000 cloud+computing sonas storwize+v7000 steve+sams university+of+rochester medical+center ibm xiv watson analytics hybrid+cloud ds5000

The first day had various breakout sessions in the afternoon.

Understanding Your Options for Storing Archive Data to Meet Compliance Challenges

Storing Archive Data to meet Compliance Challenges

View more presentations from Tony Pearson on the IBM Expert Network.

I presented IBM's Smart Archive strategy and the storage products IBM offers to archive data and meet compliance regulations:

• The differences between backup and archive, including a few of my own personal horror stories helping companies who had foolishly thought that keeping backup copies for years would adequately serve as their archive strategy
• The differences between Write-Once Read-Many (WORM) media, and Non-Erasable, Non-Rewriteable (NENR) storage options.
• How disk-only archive solutions become "space heaters" for your data center.
• An overview of the various storage hardware options from IBM.
• How LTFS can be incorporated into an archive solution, such as [Crossroads Systems' StrongBox® solution].
• An explanation of the different IBM software offerings to help complement the storage hardware choices.

 

IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center (TPC): New Features and Functions

Mike Griese, IBM program manager for TPC, presented the latest in TPC 5.1 version announced this week. His session was organized into four key sections:

• Insights - TPC 5.1 integrates COGNOS reporting, which allows custonmization of reports and ad-hoc exploration and analysis. Since the reports are not binary-compiled into the product, IBM can ship new COGNOS reports as templates outside the normal TPC release schedule. Also, TPC 5.1 got smarter on reporting on server virtualization hypervisor environments to avoid double-counting.
  
  
• Recommendations - TPC 5.1 can analyze your usage patterns across the entire data center and make recommendations to move data from one storage tier to another. You can then act on these recommendations by moving data from one tier to another, either "up-tier" to faster storage, or "down-tier" to less expensive storage, using a storage hypervisor like IBM SAN Volume Controller. This is complementary to features like Easy Tier which optimize within a single disk system.
  
  
• Performance - TPC 5.1 uses a new web-based GUI, based on AJAX, HTML5 and Dojo widgets, inspired by the IBM XIV GUI, and similar to the web-based GUI of SAN Volume Controller, Storwize V7000 and SONAS.
  
  
• Optimization - TPC 5.1 allows you to optimize for Cloud by introducing a new RESTful API for storage provisioning and support for SONAS environments. This will allow upward-integration to products like [IBM Service Delivery Manager] and [Tivoli Storage Automation Manager].

Mike also explained the new TPC 5.1 packaging. Instead of having a variety of components like "TPC for Disk", "TPC for Data", and "TPC for Replication", the new packaging simplifies this down to two levels of functionality. The basic level supports block-level devices, including disk performance, replication and SAN fabric management. The advanced level adds support for files and databases, including support for Cloud management such as SONAS environments.

Dan Zehnpfennig, Solution Architect, talked about his experiences installing TPC 5.1 and how this was much improved over previous TPC versions.

IBM Watson: How it Works and What it Means for Society Beyond Winning Jeopardy!

IBM Watson: How it Works, and What it means for Society beyond winning Jeopardy!

View more presentations from Tony Pearson on the IBM Expert Network.

I presented how IBM Watson works, how it played the Jeopardy! game show last year, and how IBM has helped clients use the technology to solve real-world problems.

• Understanding the IBM Grand Challenge, how it compares to the IBM Deep Blue chess playing computer
• How IBM Watson works, the hardware, the software, and the algorithms involved
• How to build your own "Watson Jr." in your own basement, based on my [popular instructions I published last year].
• Examples of how the technology is being used in Healthcare and Financial Services

If you missed it, I will be repeating this session on IBM Watson on Thursday.

Tonight we have the grand opening reception of the Solution Center and a concert featuring Grace Potter & the Nocturnals!

technorati tags: IBM, Archive, Compliance, WORM, NENR, Mike Griese, , Dan Zehnpfennig, Tivoli Storage, Productivity Center, TPC, Watson, Healthcare, Financial Services, Wellpoint, Seton, CitiGroup

Tags:  healthcare productivity+center watson mike+griese nenr archive compliance worm wellpoint seton tpc ibm citigroup tivoli+storage financial+services

Last night, I presented an E-Talk to the Engineering Student Council (ESC) of the University of Arizona (UofA).

The ESC is the student governing body of The University of Arizona’s College of Engineering. The organization works with scholastic honorary societies, professional organizations, and project clubs to aid and encourage the professional and social development of students. This year, ESC launched a new program, Engineering Talks (E-Talks), consisting of workshops and lectures, which will focus on teaching students what it takes to work within a company, before they enter the workforce. To make this program successful, career advice from professionals working at established companies is essential.

The audience was a mix of undergraduate and graduate engineering students from a variety of disciplines, such as Petroleum, Hydrology, Mining, Biomedical, Electrical and Computer Engineering. Only a few were graduating this May. There were roughly an equal number of boys and girls, which was encouraging. When I was an engineering student at the UofA, women engineers were very rare.

I divided my talk into three sections.

1. A little about myself, my academic and professional career over the past 30 years, and some background of IBM as a company, how it is organized, and its 100 year Centennial celebration.
2. An overview of IBM's corporate strategy for Smarter Computing, explaining how IBM is solving the world's toughest challenges for analyzing Big Data, developing Optimized Systems for particular workloads, and new delivery and deployment models for Cloud Computing.
3. Some career advice, based on my decades of work experience at IBM and elsewhere

After the Q&A, several students stayed around afterwards to ask questions. This seems to happen every time I give a presentation to a mixed audience. I handed out plenty of business cards, and offered to make the charts available to all the students via the IBM Expert Network on Slideshare.net website.

technorati tags: IBM, Watson, Smarter Computing, E-Talk, ESC, UofA, Career Advice

Tags:  watson e-talk smarter+computing esc career+advice uofa ibm

Homework Assignment: My Results

We are only days away from the big IBM Challenge of Watson computer against two human contestants on the show Jeopardy!

I watched two episodes of Jeopardy! on my Tivo, pausing it to follow the [homework assignment] I suggested in my last post. Here are my own results and observations.

Game 1

Episode [6082] involved a web programmer, a customer service representative, and a bank teller.

Round 1

Of the first six categories in Round 1, I guessed four of the six themes for each category. For the category "Diamonds are Forever", I wrote down "All answers are some kind of gem or mineral", but the reality was that all the answers were some physical characteristic of diamonds specifically. For the category "...Fame is not", I wrote down "All answers are TV or Movie celebrities". I was close, but actually it was famous celebrities, rock bands and pop culture of the 1980s. (The movie "Fame" came out in 1980).

In the round, there were 27 of the 30 answers given before they ran out of time. Of these, I was able to get 24 of 27 correct by searching the Internet. That is 88 percent correct. Here were the ones that eluded me:

• Answer related to a "multi-chambered mollusk". I could not find anything on the Internet definitively on this, so abstained from wager. The correct question was "What is Nautilus?".
• Answer was the Irish variant of "Kathryne". I found Kathleen as a variant, but did not investigate if it had Irish origins. The correct question was "What is Caitlin?"
• Answer was this Norse name for "ruler" whether you had red hair or not. I found "Roy" and "Rory" so guessed "What is Rory?" The correct question was "What is Eric?"

Round 2

The second round, I guesed three of the six themese for the categories. For category "Musical Titles Letter Drop" I wrote down "All the answers are titles of musical songs" but it was actually "Musicals" as in the Broadway shows. For category "Place called Carson", I wrote down "All the answers are places" and was way off on that one, with answers that were people, places and names of corporations. And for "State University Alums", I wrote down "All the answers are college graduates", but instead they were all "State Universities" such as the University of Arizona.

In this second round, only 26 answers were posed. I got 80 percent correct with Internet searching. I missed three on the "Musical Titles", one in "Pope-pourri" and one State University (sorry SMU). The "Musical Titles Letter Drop category" was especially difficult, as for each title of a Musical, you had to remove a single letter out of it to form the correct response.

• For the answer "Good luck when you ask the singers "What I Did For Love"; they never tell the truth", you would need to take "Chorus Line" the musical, where the song "What I did for Love" appears, and ask "What is Chorus Lie?" Note that "line" changed to "lie" and the letter "n" was dropped out.
• For the answer "Embrace the atoms as Simba and company lose and gain electrons en masse in this production", you would need to recognize that Simba was the main character of "The Lion King" and change it to "What is The Ion King".

I think these play-on-words are the questions that would stump the IBM Watson computer.

Round 3

In the final round, the category was "Ancient Quotes". I thought the answer would be a famous adage or quotation, but it was instead famous people who uttered those phrases. The answer was "He said, to leave this stream uncrossed will breed manifold distress for me; to cross it, for all mankind".  I was able to determine the correct response readily from searching the Internet:  The river was the Rubicon, the border of the Gaul region governed by an ambitious general.  The correct response "Who was Julius Caesar?"

Total time for the entire exercise: 87 minutes.

Game 2

The following night, episode [6083] brought back Paul Wampler, the returning champion web programmer, against two new contestants: an actor, and high school principal.

Round 1

Of the first six categories in Round 1, I guessed five of the six themes for each category. For the category "Nonce Words", I wrote all the answers would be nonsense words. I was close, the clues had words invented for a particular occasion, but the correct responses did not.

I was able to get 29 of 30 correct by searching the Internet. That is 96 percent correct. The one I missed was in the category "Nonce Words" and the answer was "In an arithmocracy, this portion of the population rules, not trigonometry teachers.." My response was "What is Math?" but the correct answer was "What are the majority?" It did not occur for me to even look up [Arithmocracy] as a legitimate word, but it is real.

Round 2

The second round, I guesed five of the six themese for the categories. For category "Hawk" eyes, the "Hawk" was in quotation marks, so I wrote "All answers would start with the word Hawk or end with the word "eyes". I was close, the correct theme was that the word "hawk" would appear in the front, middle or end of the correct response.

In this second round, I got 28 of 30 correct. I got 93 percent correct with Internet searching. Ironically, it was the category "German Foods" that caught me off guard.

• For, the answer was "Pichelsteiner Fleisch, a favorite of Otto von Bismarck, is this one-pot concoction, made with beef & pork". I know that "fleisch" is a German word for meat, so I guessed "What is sausage?" but the correct response was "What is stew?" I should have paid more attention to the "one-pot concoction" part of the answer.
• For the answer was "Mimi Sheraton says German stuffed hard-boiled eggs are always made with a great deal of this creamy product". I didn't realize that "stuffed eggs" was German for "deviled eggs". Instead, I found Mimi Sheraton's "The German Cookbook" on Google Books, and jumped to the page for "Stuffed Eggs" The ingredients I read included whippedc cream, cognac, and worcestershire sauce. Taking the "creamiest" ingredient of these, I wrote down "What is whipped cream?" However, it turned out I was actually reading the ingredients for "Crabmeat Cocktail" that was coninuing from the previous page. I thought it was gross to put whipped cream with eggs, and should have known better. The correct response was "What is mayonnaise?"

Round 3

In the final round, the category was "Political Parties". This could either be political organizations like Republicans and Democrats, or festivities like the Whitehouse Correspondents Dinner. The answer was "Only one U.S. president represented this party, and he said, I dread...a division of the republic into two great parties." So, we can figure out the answer refers to political organizations, but both Democrat and Republican are ruled out because each has had multiple presidents. So, looking at a [List of Political Parties of each US President], I found that there were four presidents in the Whig party, four in the Democrat-Republic party, but only one president in the Federalist party (John Adams), and one in the War Union party (Andrew Johnson). Looking at [famous quotes from John Adams] first, I found the quote, it matched, and so I wrote down "What is the Federalist party?". I got it right, as did two of the three contestants. Ironically, the one contestant who got it wrong, the returning champion web programmer, wagered a small amount, so he still had more money after the round and won the game overall.

Total time for the entire exercise: 75 minutes. I was able to do this faster as I skipped searching the internet for the responses I was confident on.

To find out when Jeopardy is playing in your town, consult the [Interactive Map].

technorati tags: IBM, Challenge, Watson, Jeopardy, homework

Tags:  watson homework challenge ibm jeopardy