Continuing my post-week coverage of the [Data Center 2010 conference], Wednesday morning started with another keynote session, followed by some break-out sessions.

Realities of IT Investment

Tighter budgets mean more business decisions. Future investments will come from cost savings. The analysts report that 77 percent of IT decisions are made by CFOs. Most organizations are spending less now than back in 2008 before the recession.

How we innovate through IT is changing. In bad times, risk trumps return, but only 21 percent of the audience have a formal "risk calculation" as part of their purchase plans.

Divestment matters as much as investment. Reductions in complexity have the greatest long-term cost savings. Try to retire at least 20 percent of your applications next year. With the advent of Cloud Computing, companies might just retire it and go entirely with public cloud offerings. Note that this graph the years are different than the ones above, in groups of half-decade increments.

It is important to identify functional dependencies and link your IT risks to business outcomes. Focus on making costs visible, and re-think how you communicate IT performance measurements and their impact to business. Try to change the culture and mind-set so that projects are not referred to as "IT projects" focused on technology, but rather they are "business projects" focused on business results.

Moving to the Cloud

Richard Whitehead from Novell presented challenges in moving to Cloud Computing. There are risks and challenges managing multiple OS environments. Users should have full access to all IT resources they need to do their jobs. Computing should be secure, compliant, and portable. Here is the shift he sees from physical servers to virtual and cloud deployments, years 2010 to 2015:

Richard considers a "workload" as being the combination of the operating system, middleware, and application. He then defines "Business Service" as an appropriate combination of these workloads. For example, a business service that provides a particular report might involve a front-end application, talking through business logic workload server, talking to a back-end database workload server.

To address this challenge, Novell introduces "Intelligent Workload Management", called WorkloadIQ. This manages the lifecycle to build, secure, deploy, manage and measure each workload. Their motto was to take the mix of physical, virtual and cloud workloads all "make it work as one". IBM is a business partner with Novell, and I am a big fan of Novell's open-source solutions including SUSE Linux.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Cloud....

Bud Albers, CTO of Disney, shared their success in deploying their hybrid cloud infrastructure. Everyone recognizes the Disney brand for movies and theme parks, but may not aware that they also own ABC News and ESPN television, Travel cruises, virtual worlds, mobile sites, and deploy applications like Fantasy Football and Fantasy Fishing.

Two years ago, each Line of Business (LOB) owned their own servers, they were continually out of space, power and HVAC issues forced tactical build-outs of their datacenters. But in 2008, the answer to all questions was Cloud Computing, it slices and dices like something invented by [Ron Popeill], with no investment or IT staff required. However, continuing to ask the CFO for CAPEX to purchase assets that were only 1/7th used was not working out either. That's right, over 75 percent of their servers were running less than 15 percent CPU utilization.

The compromise was named "D*Cloud". Internal IT infrastructure would be positioned for Cloud Computing, by adopting server virtualization, implementing REST/SOAP interfaces, and replicating the success across their various Content Distribution Networks (CDN). Disney is no stranger to Open Source software, using Linux and PHP. Their [Open Source] web page shows tools available from Disney Animation studios.

At the half-way point, they had half their applications running virtualized on just 4 percent of their servers. Today, they run over 20 VMs per host and have 65 percent of their apps virtualized. Their target is 80 percent of their apps virtualized by 2014.

Bud used the analogy that public clouds will be the "gas stations" of the IT industry. People will choose the cheapest gas among nearby gas stations. By focusing on "Application management" rather than "VM instance management", Disney is able to seamlessly move applications as needed from private to public cloud platforms.

Their results? Disney is now averaging 40 percent CPU utilization across all servers. Bud feels they have achieved better scalability, better quality of service, and increased speed, all while saving money. Disney is spending less on IT now than in 2008,

UPMC Maximizes Storage Efficiency with IBM

Kevin Muha, UPMC Enterprise Architect & Technology Manager for Storage and Data Protection Services, was unable to present this in person, so Norm Protsman (IBM) presented Kevin's charts on the success at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center [UPMC]. UPMC is Western Pennsylvania's largest employer, with roughly 50,000 employees across 20 hospitals, 400 doctors' offices and outpatient sites. They have frequently been rated one of the best hospitals in the US.

Their challenge was storage growth. Their storage environment had grown 328 percent over the past three years, to 1.6PB of disk and nearly 7 PB of physical tape. To address this, UPMC deployed four IBM TS7650G ProtecTIER gateways (2 clusters) and three XIV storage systems for their existing IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) environment. Since they were already using TSM over a Fibre Channel SAN, the implementation took only three days.

UPMC was backing up nearly 60TB per day, in a 15-hour back window. Their primary data is roughly 60 percent Oracle, with the rest being a mix of Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server, and unstructured data such as files and images.

Their results? TSM reclamation is 30 percent faster. Hardware footprint reduced from 9 tiles to 5. Over 50 percent reduction in recovery time for Oracle DB, and 20 percent reduction in recovery of SQL Server, Microsoft Exchange, and Epic Cache. They average 24:1 deduplication overall, which can be broken down by data category as follows:

• 29:1 Cerner Oracle
• 18:1 EPIC Cache
• 10:1 Microsoft SQL Server
• 8:1 Unstructured files
• 6:1 Microsoft Exchange

UPMC still has lots of LTO-4 tapes onsite and offsite from before the change-over, so the next phase planned is to implement "IP-based remote replication" between ProtecTIER gateways to a third data center at extended distance. The plan is to only replicate the backups of production data, and not replicate the backups of test/dev data.

The presentation and supporting case study details on this is available on the [IBM Literature Fullfilment] website.

The show floor closed after Wednesday's lunch, so many people made their last attempts to meet the folks at the booth.

technorati tags: IBM, CFO, Novell, WorkloadIQ, Disney, UPMC, ProtecTIER, TS7650G, deduplication, XIV, Kevin Muha, Norm Protsman, Bud Albers

Tags:  kevin+muha ibm upmc xiv protectier novell cfo deduplication disney workloadiq ts7650g bud+albers norm+protsman

Wrapping up my seven-city romp through Australia and New Zealand, the final city was Canberra, which is the capital of Australia. As with Wellington, this meant many of the clients in the audience work in government agencies.

I had not taken any photos of Anna Wells, IBM Storage Sales Leader for ANZ, but I was able to find this caricature of her on a poster from an award she won within IBM. I also did not have a picture of Robert, my videographer for this trip, who was always behind the camera himself.

The event went smoothly, just like the rest of them. Anna presented IBM's storage strategy and highlighted specific IBM storage solutions.

I had several emails asking if this event was called "Storage Optimisation Breakfast" because it was held in the mornings, or did we actually serve food at these events. The answer is we actually served food, a variation of the [Full English Breakfast], and most of the attendees gobbled it down while Anna spoke. The fare was quite similar across all seven locations: scrambled or poached eggs, on toast or english muffin, ham/bacon/sausages, potatoes or mushrooms, and half of a baked tomato with bits of something toasted on top. One morning, for a change, I decided instead to have a bowl of Weet-Bix cereal. Tasted like cardboard. I learned my lesson.

Next, we had Will Quodling, Manager of Infrastructure Operations, at Australia's Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research. The Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research consists of 3200 staff that strive to encourage the sustainable growth of Australian industries. The Department is committed to developing policies and delivering programs to provide lasting economic benefits ensuring Australia's competitive future, undertakes analysis, and provides services and advice to the business, science and research community.  American President, Barack Obama, visited Australia and was interested in adopting a similar concept for the United States.

The department was looking to replace their existing IBM System Storage DS4800 disk systems with something more energy efficient. They selected IBM XIV storage system, with an expected savings of 10kW per year. They are able to run 800 VMware images and 150 VDI workstations using storage on one XIV, replicate the data to a second XIV at a remote location, and have a third XIV for their Web serving environment. They tested out both single drive and full module failures, and experienced better-than-expected rebuild times, with no impact to users, and no impact to performance.

After 17 days without a functioning government, Australia finally selected a prime minister. Her name is Julia Gillard, shown here. She won in part by promising to build a National Broadband Network (NBN) for the entire country, including the rural areas.

[Canberra] is an interesting town, a fully planned community designed in 1913 by Chicago's husband-and-wife architect team of Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin. The location was selected as being half-way compromise between Australia's two largest cities, Sydney and Melbourne.

I would like to thank all the wonderful people in both Australia and New Zealand for making this a successful trip!

technorati tags: IBM, Canberra, Australia, Innovation, Government, XIV, DS4800, VMware, VDI

Tags:  government ibm vmware innovation ds4800 canberra xiv australia vdi

Continuing my romp through Australia and New Zealand, the last Storage Optimisation Breakfast of the week was Brisbane, which the locals here refer to as [Brisvegas], probably for all of the nightlife and casinos here.

The IBM office building is conveniently across the street from my hotel, the [Sofitel Brisbane]. The hotel also sits above central station, which allows quick transportation to the airport.

This time, we had a tag team of two people from James Cook University (JCU) to present their success story. First up was Kent Adams, the Director or Information Technology and Resources. JCU is recognized as one of the top 5 percent of Universities worldwide, and as a result, their data storage requirements are growing at 400 percent per year! Their latest purchase put out for RFP was for at least 40TB that could handle at least 20,000 IOPS. The winning solutions was an IBM XIV disk system.

Behind the scenes at all the events this week here in Australia were, from left to right, Natalie from GPJ Australia, the local subsidiary of the George P. Johnson events management we use in the states; Sonia Phillips, IBM Advisory Marketing Lead for Dynamic Infrastructure Optimisation and Cloud Computing, Demand Programs, for Australia and New Zealand; and Monika Lovgren, IBM Marketing and Execution Lead for Workload Optimised Systems for Australia.

The second speaker was Lee Askew, one of the Storage Administrators. Overall, the JCU team have been amazed at how well this box works. When they started it up, they expected to spend the next 24-36 hours formatting RAID ranks, but not with the XIV. It was ready in 2 minutes and they started provisioning storage right away. Their own tests to fail a drive found they can do a full rebuild to redundancy in 9 minutes. It took 8-36 hours on their previous disk array. Failing a full data module took only 75 minutes to bring back to redundancy.

After a long and tiring week, I was able to relax by walking through this beautiful King Edward park near the IBM building. This had a nice variety of plants and flowers, and with the surprise visit of a lizard about the length of my arm that crossed my path.

JCU also uses Asynchronous Mirror to replicate data to another XIV at distance. Again, as with all aspects of IBM XIV, the solution works as advertised. They are well positioned to grow from the 18,000 students they have today, to their target goal of 25,000 students they want to have by 2015.

Worldwide, IBM has done well with colleges and universities, and this was a great example of how partnering with IBM for your IT infrastructure can make a huge difference!

technorati tags: IBM, James Cook University, XIV, Brisbane, King Edward Park

Tags:  brisbane ibm king+edward+park james+cook+university xiv

Continuing my coverage of the annual [2010 System Storage Technical University], I participated in the storage free-for-all, which is a long-time tradition, started at SHARE User Group conference, and carried forward to other IT conferences. The free-for-all is a Q&A Panel of experts to allow anyone to ask any question. These are sometimes called "Birds of a Feather" (BOF). Last year, they were called "Meet the Experts", one for mainframe storage, and the other for storage attached to distributed systems. This year, we had two: one focused on Tivoli Storage software, and the second to cover storage hardware. This post provides a recap of the Storage Hardware free-for-all.

The emcee for the event was Scott Drummond. The other experts on the panel included Dan Thompson, Carlos Pratt, Jack Arnold, Jim Blue, Scott Schroder, Ed Baker, Mike Wood, Steve Branch, Randy Arseneau, Tony Abete, Jim Fisher, Scott Wein, Rob Wilson, Jason Auvenshine, Dave Canan, Al Watson, and myself, yours truly, Tony Pearson.

What can I do to improve performance on my DS8100 disk system? It is running a mix of sequential batch processing and my medical application (EPIC). I have 16GB of cache and everything is formatted as RAID-5.

We are familiar with EPIC. It does not "play well with others", so IBM recommends you consider dedicating resources for just the EPIC data. Also consider RAID-10 instead for the EPIC data.

How do I evaluate IBM storage solutions in regards to [PCI-DSS] requirements.

Well, we are not lawyers, and some aspects of the PCI-DSS requirements are outside the storage realm. In March 2010, IBM was named ["Best Security Company"] by SC Magazine, and we have secure storage solutions for both disk and tape systems.  IBM DS8000 and DS5000 series offer Full Disk Encryption (FDE) disk drives.  IBM LTO-4/LTO-5 and TS1120/TS1130 tape drives meet FIPS requirements for encryption.  We will provide you contact information on an encryption expert to address the other parts of your PCI-DSS specific concerns.

My telco will only offer FCIP routing for long-distance disk replication, but my CIO wants to use Fibre Channel routing over CWDM, what do I do?

IBM XIV, DS8000 and DS5000 all support FC-based long distance replication across CWDM. However, if you don't have dark fiber, and your telco won't provide this option, you may need to re-negotiate your options.

My DS4800 sometimes reboots repeatedly, what should I do.

This was a known problem with microcode level 760.28, it was detecting a failed drive. You need to replace the drive, and upgrade to the latest microcode.

Should I use VMware snapshots or DS5000 FlashCopy?

VMware snapshots are not free, you need to upgrade to the appropriate level of VMware to get this function, and it would be limited to your VMware data only. The advantage of DS5000 FlashCopy is that it applies to all of your operating systems and hypervisors in use, and eliminates the consumption of VMware overhead. It provides crash-consistent copies of your data. If your DS5000 disk system is dedicated to VMware, then you may want to compare costs versus trade-offs.

Any truth to the rumor that Fibre Channel protocol will be replaced by SAS?

SAS has some definite cost advantages, but is limited to 8 meters in length. Therefore, you will see more and more usage of SAS within storage devices, but outside the box, there will continue to be Fibre Channel, including FCP, FICON and FCoE. The Fibre Channel Industry Alliance [FCIA] has a healthy roadmap for 16 Gbps support and 20 Gbps interswitch link (ISL) connections.

What about Fibre Channel drives, are these going away?

We need to differentiate the connector from the drive itself. Manufacturers are able to produce 10K and 15K RPM drives with SAS instead of FC connectors. While many have suggested that a "Flash-and-Stash" approach of SSD+SATA would eliminate the need for high-speed drives, IBM predicts that there just won't be enough SSD produced to meet the performance needs of our clients over the next five years, so 15K RPM drives, more likely with SAS instead of FC connectors, will continue to be deployed for the next five years.  

We'd like more advanced hands-on labs, and to have the certification exams be more product-specific rather than exams for midrange disk or enterprise disk that are too wide-ranging.

Ok, we will take that feedback to the conference organizers.

IBM Tivoli Storage Manager is focused on disaster recovery from tape, how do I incorporate remote disk replication.

This is IBM's Unified Recovery Management, based on the seven tiers of disaster recovery established in 1983 at GUIDE conference.  You can combine local recovery with FastBack, data center server recovery with TSM and FlashCopy manager, and combine that with IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center for Replication (TPC-R), GDOC and GDPS to manage disk replication across business continuity/disaster recovery (BC/DR) locations.

IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center for Replication only manages the LUNs, what about server failover and mapping the new servers to the replicated LUNs?

There are seven tiers of disaster recovery. The sixth tier is to manage the storage replication only, as TPC-R does. The seventh tier adds full server and network failover. For that you need something like IBM GDPS or GDOC that adds this capability.

All of my other vendor kit has bold advertising, prominent lettering, neon lights, bright colors, but our IBM kit is just black, often not even identifying the specific make or model, just "IBM" or "IBM System Storage".

IBM has opted for simplified packaging and our sleek, signature "raven black" color, and pass these savings on to you.

Bring back the SHARK fins!

We will bring that feedback to our development team. ("Shark" was the codename for IBM's ESS 800 disk model.  Fiberglass "fins" were made as promotional items and placed on top of ESS 800 disk systems to help "identify them" on the data center floor.  Unfortunately, professional golfer [<a href="http://www.shark.com/">Greg Norman</a>] complained, so IBM discontinued the use of the codename back in 2005.)

Where is Infiniband?

Like SAS, Infiniband had limited distance, about 10 to 15 meters, which proved unusable for server-to-storage network connections across data center floorspace. However, there are now 150 meter optical cables available, and you will find Infiniband used in server-to-server communications and inside storage systems.  IBM SONAS uses Infiniband today internally.  IBM DCS9900 offers Infiniband host-attachment for HPC customers.

We need midrange storage for our mainframe please?

In addition to the IBM System Storage DS8000 series, the IBM SAN Volume Controller and IBM XIV are able to connect to Linux on System z mainframes.

We need "Do's and Don'ts" on which software to run with which hardware.

IBM [Redbooks] are a good source for that, and we prioritize our efforts based on all those cards and letters you send the IBM Redbooks team.

The new TPC v4 reporting tool requires a bit of a learning curve.

The new reporting tool, based on Eclipse's Business Intelligence Reporting Tool [BIRT], is now standardized across the most of the Tivoli portfolio. Check out the [Tivoli Common Reporting] community page for assistance.

An unfortunate side-effect of using server virtualization like VMware is that it worsens management and backup issues. We now have many guests on each blade server.

IBM is the leading reseller of VMware, and understands that VMware adds an added layer of complexity. Thankfully, IBM Tivoli Storage Manager backups uses a lightweight agent. IBM [System Director VMcontrol] can help you manage a variety of hypervisor environments.

This was a great interactive session. I am glad everyone stayed late Thursday evening to participate in this discussion.

technorati tags: IBM, Technical University, DS8100, EPIC, PCI-DSS, FDE, Encryption, XIV, CWDM, DS5000, SAS, InfiniBand, FCIA, FCoE, FICON, GUIDE, Tivoli, Productivity Center, TPC-R, GDPS, SONAS, SVC, BIRT, Systems Director, VMcontrol

Tags:  svc sas infiniband pci-dss birt ds8100 tpc-r ficon fcoe sonas vmcontrol gdps ibm fde ds5000 productivity+center #ibmtechu tivoli systems+director encryption epic xiv fcia guide #ibmstorage cwdm #storage technical+university