Are you going to Edge 2013 in Las Vegas, June 10-14?

In my talks with clients about storage, I find similar hesitation on turning on various storage efficiency features that IBM (and other vendors) have to offer. Let's examine a few of them.

• Less than half of businesses have activated "thin provisioning" on storage devices that support this feature. Why? IBM introduced thin provisioning on its RAMAC Virtual Array back in 1997! The technology is well proven in the field. Don't know how to report this for charge-back activity? Charge your end-users for the maximum capacity upper limit. Simple enough!
   
• What about Data Deduplication? IBM has had this feature on its N series since 2007, but it wasn't until IBM came out with the IBM ProtecTIER gateway and appliance models that people started to take notice of this technology. Yes, I agree Hash Collisions can be quite scary on competitive gear, but on IBM ProtecTIER we do not use hash codes, and all data is compared byte-for-byte. For those considering hash-based deduplication, hash collisions in general are quite rare. Jeff Preshing does the math for you in his blog post: [Hash Collision Probabilities]. Of course, if you want to leave no doubt in the minds of a jury of your peers, stick with byte-for-byte comparison methods in the IBM ProtecTIER.
   
• Lastly, I have heard concerns of using real-time compression? Really? Real-time compression has been used in wide-area network (WAN) transmissions ever since IBM developed the Houston Aerospace Spooling Protocol (HASP) for NASA back in 1973. IBM has offered real-time compression on tape cartridges since 1986, the year I started with IBM, some 27 years ago. And now, real-time compression is available for file-based and block-based disk systems. All of these solutions are based on the Lempel-Ziv lossless compression algorithms introduced in 1977. One customer I spoke with was unwilling to try compression, because it requires thin provisioning as a pre-requisite. How is that for having one fear based on another one!

IBM places a high value on data integrity. For each data footprint reduction method, IBM has designed a solution that returns back the exact ones and zeros, in the correct quantity and order, as was originally stored.

For more on this topic, come see me present "Data Footprint Reduction -- Understanding IBM Storage Efficiency Options" at [IBM Edge 2013 conference] in Las Vegas, June 10-14.

technorati tags: IBM, Storage Efficiency, Data Footrpint Reduction, Thin Provisioning, Data, Deduplication, Real-time, Compression

It seems I have been on the road non-stop for the past nine weeks! On my flights, I often find myself sitting next to a young adult who is flying for the first time. Many of these young adults formed their fear of flying a decade ago, in their teenage years, during the terror attacks of September 11, 2001. Some are just now trying to face those fears.

(What does any of this have to do with storage? Actually, there are similar fears for enabling various storage efficiency functions like data deduplication, thin provisioning and compression, so work with me here!)

• Flying from Seattle down to Los Angeles, I sat next to Michele (shown in the picture on the left). She was facing her fear of flying overseas by taking seven months off to visit Japan, China, Thailand, Laos, Ireland, England and various countries in continental Europe. Wow! She was joining up with her friend Brittney in Los Angeles, and the two will be travelling together. Since I had been to nearly every country she was planning to visit, I gave her a list of survival phrases and cultural guidance.
   
• Flying from Los Angeles to Tucson, I sat next to Alex on his first day of flying adventures. He flew from Jacksonville, to Dallas, to Los Angeles, to finally Tucson to pick up his fiancée. He met her in Florida, but her father was re-assigned to Fort Huachuca Army Base near Tucson, Arizona. He kept in touch with his bride-to-be, and now faced his fear of flying to go pick her up and bring her back for the wedding. This was the first time he had been west of the Mississippi river.
   
• On a short 18-minute flight from Tucson to Phoenix, I sat next to Rachel, a college student at the University of Arizona, on her way to visit her folks in Santa Ana, California. She immediately apologized to me for not wearing pants. What I mistook for bikini bottoms were actually stretchy exercise shorts she wears to play [Lacrosse]. She had sprained her ankle, then went [AMA] to wear high-heeled shoes on a girl's weekend to Las Vegas, only to trip and break her ankle completely. Her foot was in a cast, thus preventing her from driving her car, or, as it turned out, wear any pants.
   
• Returning from a briefing in Poughkeepsie, on the short flight from Stewart Airport to Philadelphia, I sat next to Krista (shown in the picture on the right), who formerly was a [Bacardi Girl], but now decided she wants to do something more meaningful in her life than handing out prizes and free samples of spiced rum. She decided to go visit her friend in Charlotte, North Carolina, but did not want to drive 15 hours to get there. She faced her fears of flying to avoid driving by herself all that distance. She didn't know what she wanted to do with her life, so I suggested she get a Myers-Briggs profile analysis, and perhaps determine her strengths using Gallup's [Strengths Finder 2.0]. This might help her find a career choice that best fits her interests.

As is often the case, many fears are unfounded. Statistically, flying is safer than being on the road in car. As a result of facing their fears, they all got to meet me, and be one step closer to accomplishing their life goals.

What do all of these have in common? They all faced their fear of flying, either because their situation forced them to, something more important drove them to, or they felt it was just time to do it. Good for them!

If you have recently faced your fears and came out ahead, let me know in the comments below!

I am back safely from my travels to New Zealand and Australia, and would like to wish everyone today a Happy [Earth Day]!

The Tucson area has been continuously-inhabited by people for the past 3,500 years. One of the great challenges for this arid desert region is water. Recently, Tucson was selected for a [2013 IBM Smarter Cities Challenge] grant. Here is an excerpt from a blog post by Tucson Mayor Jonathan Rothschild titled [Ensuring Tucson's Water Future]:

"One critical area for cost-effective investment is technology. We are converting all of our customer water meters to digital in order to reduce the amount of labor required to manually read all the 225,000 customer meters each month. And we are replacing our Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system in order to improve our ability to control and manage our water distribution system.

I was pleased that Tucson was selected for a 2013 IBM Smarter Cities Challenge grant. As a result, a team of senior IBM executives came to Tucson for three weeks to listen to our story, learn about our water system and lend their expertise. They came from North Carolina, Texas, New York, California and Virginia to learn about how one of the most arid American cities is setting the standard for wise water use. The IBM team lived in our community and worked with the Tucson Water Department. They learned a great deal and helped us even more.

The Smarter Cities team's final report delivered exactly what we were looking for. It contained a roadmap with both shorter and longer term recommendations. The report did not recommend additional investments beyond our means, but it did make an effective case for the timing and scheduling of our planned investments – recommendations which will help us achieve better near-term results while we develop sustainable practices for this ongoing project. The four areas of improvement detailed in the roadmap were:

• Improve customer service with automated metering
• Modernize our meter management systems
• Implement advanced operations management systems
• Build additional capacities for our existing information technology systems

It's clear that IBM has made a strategic decision to focus on the opportunities and challenges facing cities around the world through its Smarter Cities program. They understand that a city is a 'system of systems,' and that comprehensive analyses of the ways these systems interact with one another and with the populations they serve are critical to improving the quality of life of citizens everywhere. IBM's selection of Tucson as a global smarter city has given us the chance to demonstrate that we have some of the highest standards for resource management, conservation, financial planning and community engagement for municipal water departments anywhere in the United States."

While this is certainly good for the environment, IBM's focus on helping the Earth become a smarter planet has been good for its bottom line as well. According to the latest 1Q 2013 financial results, IBM revenues related to Smarter Planet initiatives, including the Smarter Cities campaign, have increased 25 percent year-to-year.

technorati tags: IBM, Smarter Planet, Smarter Cities, Earth Day, Tucson, Jonathan Rothschild

Wrapping up my week teaching Top Gun class in Sydney, Australia, I could not resist taking a photo of the cityscape.

Sydney is a beautiful city, and the view from the 13th floor of the IBM Centre at St. Leonards in North Sydney is always worth a picture!

Vic, Scott and I all have engineering backgrounds, so it is easy for us to drop down into the technical weeds in discussing each product and solution. However, the student feedback from both Auckland and Sydney was that some of our material was just too technical.

"Shoe salesman should know how to tie a pair of shoe laces, but do not need to know [how the little aglets at the tip of each lace are made] just to sell a pair of shoes!"

Rather than presenting my standard 137-slide "Death-by-Powerpoint" deck on selling midrange solutions, I came up with this simple 5-point approach.

1. Are they digitizing their information? In my blog post, [IBM Watson - Helping Doctors Reduce Costs, Manage Risk and Improve Healthcare Outcomes], I mentioned that 70 percent of doctors do not use Electronic Medical Record (EMR) systems. They are still doing everything on paper! On a Dollar-per-GB basis, paper is more expensive than magnetic tape media.
    
2. Do they plan to store and process their data in house? IBM's [focus on Cloud is paying off], and IBM SmartCloud offerings might make a lot of sense for many clients.
    
3. Do they plan to centralize their IT? Some companies centralize all of their IT, and others distribute the decision-making to departments, remote office and branch office locations. For the latter, use the ROBO approach to selling.
    
4. Do they prefer one-stop shopping? In my now infamous post [Supermarkets and Specialty Shops], I mentioned research that found our clients fall into two camps. Those that favor one-stop shopping from IBM, HP, Cisco, Dell or Oracle, versus those that prefer to buy from the many IT equivalent of butchers, bakers and candlestick makers like EMC, HDS, or NetApp. For those clients that fall in the latter camp, focus on IBM's best-of-breed products.
    
5. IT Supermarket competition? The final group are clients that prefer one-stop shopping, but have not yet made up their mind between IBM versus the [IBM wannabees]. Focus on IBM's synergy between storage, servers, software, switches and services.

Last week, we celebrated Joe's birthday in Auckland. This week, it was Vic's turn, so we went to the Garfish restaurant at Manly beach. Here we are with bacon-enhanced oysters.

The four-day class finished Thursday afternoon, and I went out with some of the students to celebrate their graduation. I started with beers at the Cabana, then wine at [the Ivy Room], and finally dinner at Uccello on the rooftop [Pool Club]. Dinner was awesome: pork sausage-stuffed olives to start, roasted chicken with polenta, and finally a capuccino to finish the meal.

I would have never found these places on my own, and the students provided me some interesting feedback about the class and how to improve it.

technorati tags: IBM, Supermarkets, Specialty Shops, ROBO, SmartCloud, Garfish, Ivy Room, PoolClub, Uccello