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.

To sign up for this webcast, visit the [Registration page].

Does Your Virtualization Platform Matter?

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.

To sign up for this webcast, go to the [Registration page]

technorati tags: IBM, South Africa, ECTY, Johannesburg, Cape Town, Chris Saul, SAN Volume Controller, SVC, PowerVM, VMware, vSphere, Microsoft, Hyper-V, Oracle, SPARC, OVM

Tags:  powervm vsphere san+volume+controller microsoft svc south+africa chris+saul johannesburg hyper-v sparc ecty ibm oracle cape+town vmware ovm

Every year, I teach hundreds of sellers how to sell IBM storage products. I have been doing this since the late 1990s, and it is one task that has carried forward from one job to another as I transitioned through various roles from development, to marketing, to consulting.

This week, I am in the city of Taipei [Taipei] to teach Top Gun sales class, part of IBM's [Sales Training] curriculum. This is only my second time here on the island of Taiwan.

As you can see from this photo, Taipei is a large city with just row after row of buildings. The metropolitan area has about seven million people, and I saw lots of construction for more on my ride in from the airport.

The student body consists of IBM Business Partners and field sales reps eager to learn how to become better sellers. Typically, some of the students might have just been hired on, just finished IBM Sales School, a few might have transferred from selling other product lines, while others are established storage sellers looking for a refresher on the latest solutions and technologies.

I am part of the teach team comprised of seven instructors from different countries. Here is what the week entails for me:

• Monday - I will present "Selling Scale-Out NAS Solutions" that covers the IBM SONAS appliance and gateway configurations, and be part of a panel discussion on Disk with several other experts.
  
  
• Tuesday - I have two topics, "Selling Disk Virtualization Solutions" and "Selling Unified Storage Solutions", which cover the IBM SAN Volume Controller (SVC), Storwize V7000 and Storwize V7000 Unified products.
  
  
• Wednesday - I will explain how to position and sell IBM products against the competition.
  
  
• Thursday - I will present "Selling Infrastructure Management Solutions" and "Selling Unified Recovery Management Solutions", which focus on the IBM Tivoli Storage portfolio, including Tivoli Storage Productivity Center, Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM), and Tivoli Storage FlashCopy Manager (FCM). The day ends with the dreaded "Final Exam".
  
  
• Friday - The students will present their "Team Value Workshop" presentations, and the class concludes with a formal graduation ceremony for the subset of students who pass. A few outstanding students will be honored with "Top Gun" status.

These are the solution areas I present most often as a consultant at the IBM Executive Briefing Center in Tucson, so I can provide real-life stories of different client situations to help illustrate my examples.

To learn more about a Top Gun class in your area, see the [Top Gun class schedule].

The weather here in Taipei calls for rain every day! I was able to take this photo on Sunday morning while it was still nice and clear, but later in the afternoon, we had quite the downpour. I am glad I brought my raincoat!

technorati tags: IBM, Sales Training, Top Gun, Taipei, Taiwan, NAS, SONAS, disk, virtualization, unified+storage, SAN Volume Controller, SVC, Storwize V7000, Storwize V7000 Unified, Infrastructure Management, Tivoli Storage, Productivity Center, TPC, Unified Recovery Management, TSM, FlashCopy, FCM

Tags:  tsm productivity+center virtualization taipei unified+recovery+manageme... storwize+v7000+unified ibm san+volume+controller top+gun tivoli+storage nas disk unified+storage svc taiwan storwize+v7000 tpc sonas sales+training infrastructure+management flashc

With all the announcements we had in June, it is easy for some of the more subtle enhancements to get overlooked. While I was at Orlando for the IBM Edge conference, I was able to blog about some of the key featured announcements. Then, later, when I got back from Orlando to Tucson, I was able to then blog about [More IBM Storage Announcements]. For IBM's Scale-Out Network Attach Storage (SONAS), I had simply:

"SONAS v1.3.2 adds support for management by the newly announced IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center v5.1 release. Also, IBM now officially supports Gateway configurations that have the storage nodes connected to XIV or Storwize V7000 disk systems. These gateway configurations offer new flexible choices and options for our ever-expanding set of clients."

In my defense, IBM numbers its software releasees with version.release.modification, so 1.3.2 is Version 1, Release 3, Modification 2. Generally, modification announcements don't get much attention. The big announcement for v1.3.0 of SONAS happened last October, see my blog post [October 2011 Announcements - Part I] or the nice summary post [IBM Scale-out Network Attached Storage 1.3.0] from fellow blogger Roger Luethy.

Here is a diagram showing the three configurations of SONAS.

I have covered the SONAS Appliance model in depth in previous blogs, with options for fast and slow disk speeds, choice of RAID protection levels, a collection of enterprise-class software features provided at no additional charge, and interfaces to support a variety of third party backup and anti-virus checking software.

The basics haven't changed. The SONAS appliance consists of 2 to 32 interface nodes, 2 to 60 storage nodes, and up to 7,200 disk drives. The maximum configuration takes up 17 frames and holds 21.6PB of raw disk capacity, which is about 17PB usable space when RAID6 is configured. An interface nodes has one or two hex-core processors with up to 144GB of RAM to offer up to 3.5GB/sec performance each. This makes IBM SONAS the fastest performing and most scalable disk system in IBM's System Storage product line.

I thought I would go a bit deeper on the gateway models. These models support up to ten storage nodes, organized in pairs. The key difference is that instead of internal disk controllers, the storage nodes connect to external disk systems. There is enough space in the base SONAS rack to hold up to six interface nodes, or you can add a second rack if you need more interface nodes for increased performance.

SONAS with XIV gateway

XIV offers a clever approach to storage that allows for incredibly fast access to data on relatively slow 7200 RPM drives. By scattering data across all drives and taking advantage of parallel processing, rebuild times for a failed 3TB drive are less than 75 minutes. Compare that to typical rebuild times for 3TB drives that could take as much as 9-10 hours under active I/O loads!

In the configuration, each pair of storage nodes can connect to external SAN Fabric switches that then connect to one or two XIV storage systems. How simple is that? These can be the original XIV systems that support 1TB and 2TB drives, or the new XIV Gen3 systems that support 400GB Solid-state drives (SSD) and 3TB spinning disk drives. In both cases, you can acquire additional storage capacity as little as 12 drives at a time (one XIV module holds 12 drives).

The maximum configuration of ten XIV boxes could hold 1,800 drives. At 3TB drive per drive, that would be 2.4PB usable capacity.

The SONAS with XIV gateway does not require the XIV devices to be dedicated for SONAS purposes. Rather, you can assign some XIV storage space for the SONAS, and the rest is available for other servers. In this manner, SONAS just looks like another set of Linux-based servers to the XIV storage system. This in effect gives you "Unified Storage", with a full complement of NAS protocols from the SONAS side (NFS, CIFS, FTP, HTTPS, SCP) as well as block-based protocols directly from the XIV (FCP, iSCSI).

SONAS with Storwize V7000 gateway

The other gateway offering is the SONAS with Storwize V7000. Like the SONAS with XIV gateway model, you connect a pair of SONAS storage nodes to 1 or 2 Storwize V7000 disk systems. However, you do not need a SAN Fabric switch in between. You can instead connect the SONAS storage nodes directly to the Storwize V7000 control enclosures.

To acquire additional storage capacity, you can purchase a single drive at a time. That's right. Not 12 drives, or 60 drives, at a time, but one at a time. The Storwize V7000 supports a wide range of SSD, SAS and NL-SAS drives at different sizes, speeds and capacities. The drives can be configured into various RAID protection levels: RAID 0, 1, 3, 5, 6 and 10.

Each Storwize V7000 control enclosure can have up to nine expansion drawers. If you choose the 2.5-inch 24-bay models, you can have up to 480 drives per storage node pair, for a total of 2,400 drives. If you choose the 3.5-inch 12-bay models, you can have up to 240 drives per node pair, 1,200 drives total. At 3TB per drive, this could be 3.6PB of raw capacity. The usable PB would depend on which RAID level you selected. Of course, you don't have to limit yourself all to one size or the other. Feel free to mix 2.5-inch and 3.5-inch drawers to provide different storage pool capabilities.

All three SONAS configurations support Active Cloud Engine. This is a collection of features that differentiate SONAS from the other scale-out NAS wannabees in the marketplace:

• Policy-driven Data Placement -- Different files can be directed to different storage pools. You no longer have to associate certain file systems to certain storage technologies.
  
  
• High-speed Scan Engine -- SONAS can scan 10 million files per minute, per node. These scans can be used to drive data migration, backups, expirations, or replications, for example. It is over 100 times faster than traditional walk-the-directory-tree approaches employed by other NAS solutions.
  
  
• Policy-driven Migration -- You can migrate files from one storage pool to another, based on age, days since last reference, size, and other criteria. The files can be moved from disk to disk, or move out of SONAS and stored on external media, such as tape or a virtual tape library. A lot of data stored on NAS systems is dormant, with little or no likelihood of being looked at again. Why waste money keeping that kind of data on expensive disk? With SONAS, you can move those files to tape can save lots of money. The files are stubbed in the SONAS file system, so that an access request to a file will automatically trigger a recall to fetch the data from tape back to the SONAS system.
  
  
• Policy-driven Expiration -- SONAS can help you keep your system clean, by helping you decide what files should be deleted. This is especially useful for things like logs and traces that tend to just hang around until some deletes them manually.
  
  
• WAN Caching -- This allows one SONAS to act as a "Cloud Storage Gateway" for another SONAS at a remote location connected by Wide Area Network (WAN). Let's say your main data center has a large SONAS repository of files, and a small branch office has a smaller SONAS. This allows all locations to have a "Global" view of the all the interconnected SONAS systems, with a high-speed user experience for local LAN-based access to the most recent and frequently used files.

If you want to learn more, see the [IBM SONAS landing page]. Next week, I will be across the Pacific Ocean in [Taipei], to teach IBM Top Gun class to sales reps and IBM Business Partners. "Selling SONAS" will be one of the topics I will be covering!

technorati tags: IBM, SONAS, gateway, disk, tape, scale-out, NAS, RAID, rebuild

Tags:  tape disk rebuild scale-out raid nas sonas ibm gateway

Sorry folks. Due to scheduling conflict, today's Webcast "Solving the Storage Capacity Crisis -- Tools and Practices for Effective Management" has been postponed to September.

The new date is set for September 25.  Here is the new [Registration Page]. Even if you were registered for the original one, you will need to register for this one.

technorati tags: IBM, On24, storage, crisis, webcast

Tags:  on24 storage ibm crisis webcast