Continuing my coverage of the IBM Systems Technical University in Orlando, here are the sessions that I presented or attended on Days 4 (Thursday).

Technology Trends in IBM Storage

Jack Arnold, IBM Client Technical Architect, provide an entertaining session on various technology trends in the industry. For example, What is the fastest growing storage medium for 2015? Answer: [Vinyl LP] records, which have seen a resurgence recently, growing at over 40 percent!

IBM Spectrum Scale and Elastic Storage Server offerings

Tony Pearson provided an architectural overview of both Spectrum Scale software, as well as the Elastic Storage Server pre-built system appliance.

IBM Spectrum Scale for File and Object storage

Tony Pearson explained the differences between file and object-level storage, and how IBM Spectrum Scale can provide both access methods in a single infrastructure.

IBM Storage Integration with OpenStack

IBM Spectrum Virtualize IP Replication 101

Andrea Sipka, IBM Software Developer for SVC/Storwize Copy Services from the UK Hursley lab, presented the implementation details of IP-based replication using the built-in WAN Acceleration that IBM licensed from Bridgeworks SANslide.

Storage Meet the Experts

Mo McCullough hosted the last session of Thursday with a "Meet the Experts" Q&A panel. Tony Pearson, Brian Sherman, Clod Barrera, John Wilkinson, Mike Griese and Jim Blue were among the storage experts fielding questions. Tony Pearson provided a quick overview of the LTO-7 and TS4500 tape library announcements made earlier in the week.

Most IBM conferences are 4.5 days long, which means that there are typically two or three sessions on Friday morning. Unfortunately, the two sessions I was planning to attend on Friday were both cancelled, so Day 4 was the end of my week for this conference.

technorati tags: IBM, #ibmtechu, Jack Arnold, Andrea Sipka, Mo McCullough, Vinyl LP, Spectrum Scale, Elastic Storage Server, ESS, IP Replication, SVC, Storwize V7000, LTO-7, TS4500, Spectrum Virtualize, Mike Griese, Jim Blue

Continuing my coverage of the IBM Systems Technical University in Orlando, here are the sessions that I presented or attended on Day 3 (Wednesday).

What is Big Data? Architectures and Use Cases

Tony Pearson explained what Big Data analytics are, and IBM's various products to support this, incluidng BigInsights, BigSQL and Spectrum Scale with the Hadoop Connector.

Why use IBM Spectrum Virtualize for High Availability

John Wilkinson, IBM Storage Software Engineer from the UK Hursley lab, presented the latest enhancements to Spectrum Virtualize-based products, such as SVC and Storwize V7000, related to Stretch Cluster and HyperSwap functions for High Availability.

IBM Systems Hybrid Cloud Strategy, POV and Showcase

Dave Willoughby, IBM z System Hardware Architect for Systems Cloud Emerging Technologies, provided a high-level "Point-of-View" for Hybrid Cloud, and why IBM is focused on helping clients transition from traditional IT infrastructures.

Data Footprint Reduction - Understanding IBM Storage Efficiency Options

Tony Pearson presented an overview of Thin Provisioning, Space-efficient snapshots, Data deduplication and Real-time Compression features.

IBM Spectrum Virtualize - Understnding SVC, Storwize and FlashSystem V9000

Tony Pearson provide an overview of SAN Volume Controller, the Storwize family of products and FlashSystem V9000, all of which are based on Spectrum Virtualize software.

The day ended with a trip to Universal Studios. Dinner on the City Walk offered entertainment with Dueling Pianos. This was then followed by a trip to Hogsmeade, the Harry Potter themed portion of the resort.

technorati tags: IBM, #ibmtechu, big data, analytics, BigInsights, BigSQl, Spectrum Scale, Hadoop, John Wilkinson, SVC, Storwize, Stretch Cluster, HyperSwap, Dave Willoughby, Thin Provisioning, Space-Efficient Snapshot, Deduplication, Real-time Compression, Spectrum Virtualize, FlashSystem V9000

Continuing my coverage of the IBM Systems Technical University in Orlando, here are the sessions that I presented or attended on Day 2 (Tuesday).

Storage Futures

Andrew Greenfield, IBM Global XIV Storage and Networking Client Technical Specialist, presented IBM's future plans for XIV and FlashSystem products. This was a special NDA session.

Demystify OpenStack

Eric Aquaronne, IBM Systems and Cloud Business Development lead, explained what OpenStack was, and why IBM is so heavily invested in its success. OpenStack is cloud management software that can be used to manager both on-premise and off-premise environments, including computer, storage and networking resources.

Software Defined Storage - Why? What? How?

Tony Pearson presented an overview of Software Defined Environments and how storage fits into this.

Suspiciously, there was a lot of overlap with Brian Sherman's presentation on Day 1. As Charles Caleb Colton would say, "Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery."

Making Sense of IBM Cloud Offerings

Jay Kruemcke, IBM Cloud Program Executive Client Collaboration Market Management Offering Manager, gave a high-level overview of IBM's various Cloud offerings from SoftLayer to Managed Cloud Services.

The Pendulum Swings Back - Understanding Converged and Hyperconverged environments

Tony Pearson presented IBM's involvement with Converged Systems like VersaStack and Hyperconverged systems with Spectrum Accelerate and Spectrum Scale software.

Next Generation Storage Tiering: Less Management, Lower Cost and Increased Performance

Tony Pearson presented Easy Tier, Storage Analytics Engine in Spectrum Control Advanced Edition, and Spectrum Scale tiering across flash, disk and tape media.

The second day ended with a "Networking" Reception in the Solution Center, serving food and my favorite grape-flavored beverages.

technorati tags: IBM, #ibmtechu, Andrew+Greenfield, Eric+Aquaronne, Jay+Kruemcke, XIV, FlashSystem, OpenStack, SDS, Software+Defined+Storage, IBM+Cloud, SoftLayer, Cloud+Managed+Services, converged+Systems, hyperconverged, VersaStack, Spectrum+Accelerate, Spectrum+Scale, Easy+Tier, Storage+Analytics+Engine, Spectrum+Control

Continuing my coverage of the IBM Systems Technical University in Orlando, here are the sessions that I presented or attended on Day 1 (Monday).

Storage Keynote Session

This was a three-part kick-off keynote session. Mo McCullough, IBM Systems Lab Services and Training, coordinated the storage track of this event and provided some details on how to use the website portal and smartphone app.

Clod Barrera, IBM Distinguished Engineer and Chief Technical Strategist for Storage, presented the future of the storage industry, including trends in storage media technologies, data plane and control plane level enhancements, and broader system-wide considerations.

Tony Pearson, IBM Master Inventor and Senior Software Engineer, wrapped up the session with an overview of IBM's Smarter Storage strategy.

IBM Software Defined Storage Overview, Concepts and IBM SDS Family

Brian Sherman, IBM Distinguished Engineer and Client Technical Specialist for Advanced Technical Skills in the Americas, provided an overview of Software Defined Environments and how storage fits in that view, especially IBM's Spectrum Storage family.

IBM Cloud Storage Options

Tony Pearson presented on IBM's various Cloud Storage options.

IBM Cloud Storage Options from Tony Pearson

While my original focus was on-premise storage solutions for use by Data Centers and Cloud Service providers, there was a lot of interest in IBM's storage available from SoftLayer and other Cloud providers. During this week, IBM announced its acquisition of CleverSafe, which I had not incorporated into the deck.

What's New in IBM Spectrum Protect v7.1.3

Tricia Jiang, IBM Technical Enablement Specialist for IBM Spectrum Storage, presented the latest release of IBM Spectrum Protect. That's an inside joke--this is the first release, but since it was based on IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) v7.1.2, it was easier just to continue the same numbering scheme.

The main features of v7.1.3 is the new in-line dedupe capability, the new "deduplication containers" concept, and support for backing up to object storage either on-premise or in the cloud

IBM Spectrum Scale v4.1 Overview

Glen Corneau, IBM Client Technical Specialist for Power Systems, presented the latest features of IBM Spectrum Scale, formerly known as IBM General Parallel File System (GPFS). It was interesting to hear this from a Power Systems perspective, as IBM Spectrum Scale supports both AIX and Linux on POWER.

The day ended with a Welcome Reception at the IBM Solution Center that had various z System, Power System and System Storage solutions, as well as solutions from various IBM Business Partners and other third parties.

technorati tags: IBM, #ibmechu, Clod Barrera, Brian Sherman, Mo McCullough, Tricia Jiang, Glen Corneau, Smarter Storage, Cloud Storage, Spectrum Storage, Spectrum Protect, Spectrum Scale, SDS, Software Defined Storage, AIX, Linux POWER, TSM, GPFS

This week I am in beautiful Orlando, Florida for the [IBM Systems Technical University] conference.

Amy Hirst, IBM Director, z Systems, Power, & Storage Technical Training, kicked off the general session.

Dr. Seshadri "Sesha" Subbanna, IBM Corporate Innovation and Technology Evaluation, asked the audience what capability is needed to drive business growth. A recent poll indicated that the ability for businesses to innovate was the number one response.

The IT industry has had its own version of growth. Consider the Apollo 11 [Guidance Computer] used to land a man on the moon had just 4KB or RAM, and 36KB or ROM. A typical smartphone has 62,000,000 times as much.

The Appollo missions led and motivated the Integrated-Circuit technology, but soon, maybe in the next 10 years, Dr. Subbanna feels that Silicon may run its course. Today, both POWER8 and z13 servers are based on 22nm. IBM has projected possible reductions to 17nm, 13nm, 10nm, and finally 7nm. That's it, smaller than 7nm may not be possible without hitting atomic issues.

The City of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil is a good example. In 2010, heavy rains resulted in flooding and landslides that killed over 110 residents. To prevent such high death rates in the future, IBM helped the city government predictive analytics and forecasting that allows "rain simulations" to see how well the city can handle different situations.

IBM is already looking for a more holistic view of systems, and new technologies like cognitive computing. New 3D technology allows various chip technologies to be stacked as layers on a single chip. For example, you could have computer on the bottom layer, flash non-volatile storage in middle layers, and networking at top layer. Connecting the layers is merely a matter of drilling holds and filling them with metal.

The idea that compute is the center of the universe, with a mainframe server surrounded by input and output "peripheral" storage devices, is giving way to a more storage-centric model, where central storage repositories (or data lakes) are accessed by "peripheral" smartphones, tablets and variety of servers. For example, the IBM DB2 Accerlation Appliance acts as a storage-centric model that IBM z System mainframes can connect to, send data in, process complex database queries, and get the results 2000x faster.

In another client example, IBM helped a bank in China to determine optimal placement of bank branches, based on public information of average salary levels of each neighborhood.

CPU processors are also getting help from co-processor accelerators like GPU (Graphical Processing Unit) and FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Arrays). Comparing a single IBM POWER8 server that is CAPI-attached to an IBM FlashSystem to a stack of x86 servers with internal SSD, the POWER8 solution connsumes 12x less rackspace, consumes 12x less electricity, and reduces per-user costs from $24/user for x86 down to $7.50/user on POWER8.

While social media, mobile phones and the Internet of Things (IoT) generate a lot data. If you then factor the "context multiplier effect" of all the links, connections and cross-references, you quickly see that data is growing at incredible rates.

Another issue is the difficulty to identify application inter-dependencies. Forecasting disruptive anamolies can be quite difficult. In one example, adminstrators received warning messages 65 minutes before a major outage, but they did not respond in time because they were unable to understand the full implications.

Cognitive computing is different than the tabulating and programming paradigms of prior decades. It is focused on Natural Language Processing, citing evidence to base responsed, and the ability to learn and improve based on learning from experience. The IBM Watson group is working with Memorial Sloane Kettering to help oncology doctors with cancer patients.

In an interesting demo, IBM Watson computer analyzed thousands of "TED Talk" videos, and was able to respond to search queries by playing a 30-second video clip that most closely address the search topic.

Cognitive computing is also looking at "Neuro-Synaptic" chips that work very much like the neurons and synapses in the brain. I have seen some of this work already at the IBM Almaden Research Center in California.

The general session ended with a Q&A panel with Dr. Subbanna, Frank De Gilio, and Bill Starke.

technorati tags: IBM, #ibmtechu, Seshadri Subbanna, Frank DeGilio, Bill Starke, Apollo 11, Apollo Guidance Computer, IoT, context multiplier effect, Rio Brazil, weather prediction, GPU, FPGA, POWER8, cognitive computing, TED talk, Watson

This week I am in beautiful Orlando, Florida for the [Systems Technical University].

Here are the sessions I will be speaking at:

Day	Time	Topic
Monday	10:15am	Opening Session - Storage
	01:45am	IBM's Cloud Storage Options
	05:30pm	Solution Center Reception
Tuesday	11:30am	Software Defined Storage - Why? What? How?
	03:15pm	The Pendulum Swings Back - Understanding Converged and Hyperconverged Environments
	04:30pm	New Generation of Storage Tiering: Less Management, Lower Cost, and Increased Performance
	05:30pm	Solution Center Reception
Wednesday	09:00am	What is Big Data? Architectures and Use Cases
	01:45pm	Data Footprint Reduction - Understanding IBM Storage Efficiency Options
	03:15pm	IBM Spectrum Virtualize - SVC, Storwize and FlashSystem V9000
	06:00pm	Event Night
Thursday	10:15am	IBM Spectrum Scale and Elastic Storage Server
	01:45am	IBM Spectrum Scale for File and Object storage
	01:45am	IBM Storage Integration with OpenStack
	05:30pm	Storage! Meet the Experts
Friday	10:15am	IBM Spectrum Virtualize - SVC, Storwize and FlashSystem V9000

It looks like a busy week!

technorati tags: IBM, Systems, STU, Orlando, Conference

This post was originally written as a guest post for VMware for VMworld 2015 conference. Read the full blog post [IBM Storage and the Beauty and Benefits of VVol]. The following is an exerpt:

Back in 2012, I had mentioned that VMware was cooking up an exciting new feature called VVol, short for VMware vSphere Virtual Volume.

• June 2012: [Day 3 of IBM Edge breakout sessions"], Steve Foskett was excited over solving the "I/O Blender" problem.
   
• October 2012: [IBM Storage VMware Integration: Get ready for VM Volumes], I went into more detail of what to expect.

Officially, the VVol concept was still just a "technology preview" in 2012, to be fleshed out over the next few years through extensive collaboration between VMware and all the major players: IBM, HP, Dell, NetApp and EMC.

In 2013 and 2014, IBM attended VMworld with live demonstrations of VVol support. VMware vSphere v6 was not yet available, but when it was, we assured them, IBM would be one of the first vendors with support!

When vSphere v6 was finally made available earlier this year, [only four vendors support VVols on Day 1 of vSphere 6 GA]! Keeping true to its promises, IBM was indeed one of them.

To understand why VVol is such a game-changer, you have to understand a major problem with VMware version 4 and version 5, namely their Virtual Machine File System, or [VMFS].

Here is a picture to help illustrate:

On the left, we see that VMFS datastore is a set of LUNs from the storage admin perspective, and a set of VMDK and related files from the vCenter admin perspective.

If there was a storage-related problem, such as bandwidth performance or latency, how would the two admins communicate to perform troubleshooting? For many disk systems, it is not obvious which VMDK file sits on which LUN.

There are also a variety of hardware capabilities that work at the LUN level, such as snapshots, clones or remote distance mirroring, and this would apply to all the VMDK files in the data store across the set of LUNs, which may not be what you want.

There are two ways to address this in vSphere v4 and v5:

• The first method is to have fewer VMDK files per datastore. By defining smaller datastores with just a few VMs associated with each, you can then have a closer mapping of VMDK files to datastore LUNs. Unfortunately, VMware ESXi has a 256 limit on the number of different datastores that can be attached, so this method has its own limitations.
   
• The other method around this is "Raw Device Mapping" (RDM) which allowed Virtual Machines to be attached to specific LUNs. Some of the earlier restrictions and limitations for RDMs have since been relaxed over the releases, but your disk system still needs to expose the SCSI identifiers of each LUN to make this work, and additional setup is required if you plan to cluster two or more systems together, such as for a Microsoft Cluster Server (MSCS).

On the right side of the picture, using VMware v6, vCenter admins can now allocate VVols, which are mapped to specific "VVol Storage Containers" on specific storage systems. The storage admin knows exactly which VVol is in which container, so they can now communicate and collaborate on troubleshooting!

The vSphere ESXi host communicates to storage arrays via a new "virtual LUN id" called a "Protocol Endpoint". This is to allow FCP, iSCSI and FCoE traffic to flow correctly through SAN or LAN switches. For NFS, the Protocol Endpoint represents a "virtual mount point", so that traffic can be routed through LAN switches correctly.

Storage Policies can help determine which attributes or characteristics you want for your VVol. For example, you may want your VVol to be on a storage container that supports snapshots at the hardware level. The vCenter server can be aware of which storage arrays, and which storage containers in those arrays, through the VMware API for Storage Awareness, or VASA.

Different storage manufactures can implement their VASA provider in different ways. IBM has opted to have a single VASA provider for all of its supported devices, so as to provide consistent client experience. When you purchase any VVol-supported storage system from IBM, you are entitled to download the IBM VASA provider at no additional charge!

Initially, the IBM VASA provider will focus on IBM XIV Storage System, an ideal platform for your VVol needs. The XIV is a grid-based storage system, utilizing unique algorithms that give optimal data placement for every LUN or VVol created, and virtually guarantees there will be no hot spots. The XIV provides an impressive selection of Enterprise-class features, including snapshot, mirroring, thin provisioning, real-time compression, data-at-rest encryption, performance monitoring, multi-tenancy and data migration capabilities.

With the XIV 11.6 firmware level, you can define up to 12,000 VVols across one or more storage containers in a single XIV system. For more details, see IBM Redbook [Enabling VMware Virtual Volumes with IBM XIV Storage System].

Let me give some real world examples from Paul Braren, an IBM XIV and FlashSystem Storage Technical Advisor from Connecticut, who has been working directly with clients over the past five years:

In addition to XIV, all of IBM's Spectrum Virtualize products also support VVolLs, including SAN Volume Controller, Storwize including the Storwize in VersaStack, and FLashSystem V9000.

I am not in San Francisco this week for VMworld, but lots of my IBM colleagues are, so please, stop by the IBM booth and tell them I sent you!

Next week, I will return to Istanbul, Turkey to present at the [IBM Systems Technical Symposium], June 1-3 at the Hilton Bomonti hotel.

(Frequent readers of my blog may remember that I had been to Istanbul for a similar conference last year. I arrived a day earlier to do some sightseeing, which I documented in my April 2014 blog post [Arrived Safely to Istanbul].)

Like IBM Edge conference in Las Vegas earlier this month, this conference will not just be for Storage, but also include z Systems and POWER Systems content. Here are the sessions I will be presenting:

Date	Time	Title
Monday	11:30	Software Defined Storage: IBM Vision and Strategy
	14:45	Software Defined Storage: Technical Overview
Tuesday	11:30	IBM's Cloud Storage Options
	16:00	What is Big Data? Architectures and Practical use Cases
Wednesday	10:15	IBM Spectrum Storage Integration with OpenStack
	14:45	New Generation of Storage Tiering: Less Management, Lower Costs and Increased Performance

If you are attending next week in Istanbul, I will see you there!

technorati tags: IBM, Systems Technical Symposium, Istanbul Turkey, Software Defined Storage, Cloud Storage, Big Data, Spectrum Storage, OpenStack, Storage Tiering

The [IBM Edge2015 conference] is premiere conference covering Infrastructure Innovations for IBM System Storage, as well as sessions about z Systems and POWER Systems from our IBM Enterprise conference.

Here is my quick recap of my fifth and final day, Friday, May 15, 2015.

IBM Spectrum Storage™ Integration with OpenStack

See the [entire deck] on SlideShare!

At the Systems Technical University in Prague last month, I had submitted "IBM Spectrum Storage overview", while another speaker submitted "Storage Integration with OpenStack" and somehow the two topics got merged into a single title "IBM Spectrum Storage Integration with OpenStack" through perhaps some cut-and-paste error.

It turns out, it was a [chocolate-and-peanut-butter] situation! Combining the two topics worked out well.

I first had to explain the basics of OpenStack, how OpenStack manages pools of compute, storage and network resources. Then I explained specific details on Cinder, Swift and Manila interfaces. Finally, having laid the groundwork and reviewed the basics, I was able to explain how IBM's various storage offerings support these OpenStack interfaces.

The feedback from the audience was that this should have been presented earlier in the week! Attendees mentioned that other presentations earlier in the week merely assumed the audience was already familiar with OpenStack concepts and terminology, which obviously is not the case.

Storwize V7000 Unified with Spectrum Scale (formerly Elastic Storage)

Cameron McAllister, IBM Systems Architect for Spectrum Scale, presented an overview how Storwize V7000 Unified can interconnect with IBM Spectrum Scale deployments. The secret is a feature in both called Active File Management (AFM).

Shankar Balasubramanian, IBM Senior Technical Staff Member for Active File Management, went into details on how to set up Active File Management for a variety of use cases. For example, you could have Storwize V7000 Unified boxes in Remote Office/Branch Office (ROBO) locations replicating data to a centralized Spectrum Scale datacenter.

This week was a great conference! I received great feedback overall from many attendees about all the quality presentations they enjoyed this week.

Next year, Edge will be held in October 10-14, 2016. Save the date! Mark your calendars now!

technorati tags: IBM, #ibmedge, Edge2015, System Storage, IBM Expert Network, SlideShare, OpenStack, OpenStack Cinder, OpenStack Manila, OpenStack Swift, Cameron McAllister, Shankar Balasubramanian, Spectrum Scale, Elastic Storage, Storwize V7000 Unified

The [IBM Edge2015 conference] is premiere conference covering Infrastructure Innovations for IBM System Storage, as well as sessions about z Systems and POWER Systems from our IBM Enterprise conference.

Here is my quick recap of various sessions on the fourth day, Wednesday, May 14, 2015.

Object Storage and Its Use with OpenStack

Rich Swain, IBM Storage Team Lead Engineer, presented this in three sections. First, he covered the advantages of object storage versus block or file-based storage. This includes the idea that each object comes with rich metadata that can be searched.

Rich then went to explain the specifics of OpenStack Swift, an open standard for object storage. A simple three-tier hierarchy of account, container, and object.

Rich wrapped up his talk with an overview of Spectrum Scale and Elastic Storage Server offerings from IBM.

Driving Timely Business Insights on the IBM Data Engine for Analytics

Linton Ward, IBM Distinguished Engineer, POWER Systems Big Data and Analytics, presented Big Data analytics from a POWER Systems perspective. He gave an overview of Big Data analytics, and how IBM POWER Systems provide advantages to analyze data quickly.

Linton had helped me with my Big Data presentation, so I decided to participate in his presentation during his section on Spectrum Scale, but no questions came up that he couldn't handle on his own.

The Pendulum Swings Back -- Understanding Converged and Hyper-converged Environments

 

See the [entire deck] on SlideShare!

This presentation has an interesting back-story. At a client briefing, I was asked to explain the difference between "Converged" and "Hyper-converged" systems, which I did with the analogy of a pendulum. I used the whiteboard, and then later made it into a single chart.

 

At the far left, I start with mainframe systems of the early 1950s that had internal storage. As the pendulum swings to the middle, I discuss the added benefits of external storage, from RAID protection to centralized management.

To the far right, the pendulum swings over to networked storage, from NAS to SAN attached devices for flash, disk and tape. This offers excellent advantages, including greater host connectivity, and greater distances supported to help with things like disaster recovery.

Here is where the pendulum swings back. IBM introduced PureSystems that combined servers, storage and switches into a single rack configuration. Other vendors had similar offerings, such as VCE vBlock, Flexpod from NetApp and Cisco, and Oracle Exadata.

Lately, the pendulum has swung fully back to internal storage, with storage-rich servers running specialized software. There are two kinds. First there are pre-built systems like Nutanix, Simplivity or EVO:Rail which are x86 based server systems with built-in flash and disk. Second, there is software that can be deployed on your own choice of hardware, such as IBM Spectrum Scale FPO or VMware VSAN.

 

So, what I presented on a single slide before, has been fleshed out into a full blown hour-long presentation!

Common Performance Pitfalls and the Value of Latency

Erik Eyberg and Woody Hutsell from IBM FlashSystem team presented the differences between MB/sec, IOPS and latency. IBM FlashSystem is the world's fastest storage with incredibly low latency that is two to five times faster than most major competitors in the all-flash arrays category.

Accelerate with OpenStack: Flexible and Rapid Deployed Orchestration for Your Cloud

Ohad Atia, IBM Systems Development Manager for XIV Cloud Storage Solutions, presented how the OpenStack Cinder interface works, then explained the new IBM Spectrum Accelerate, based on the software from XIV.

Ronen Kat, IBM Research Manager and Cloud Storage Research Scientist, gave a live demo on how easy it is to deploy Spectrum Accelerate in a public cloud. First, you request three or more bare metal servers with specific amounts of RAM and spinning disk. Optionally, Spectrum Accelerate can support a single Solid State Driver (SSD) as read cache in each server. You can either install VMware ESXi 5.5 yourself, or have the Cloud provider do it for you. This step can be done quickly to initiate, but then the Cloud provider might take 24-72 hours depending on how busy they are.

Like cooking shows, where they take out an already prepared item from the oven or refrigerator to save time, Ronen started with four servers that were already configured above from IBM SoftLayer. The second step was to deploy the Spectrum Accelerate code, supplied as an OVF file that VMware can use to start up each virtual machine.

The third step is to connect all of the IP addresses, since Spectrum Accelerate uses TCP/IP for everything from iSCSI host attachment to inter-node communication.

Steps 2 and 3 took less than 5 minutes! I was impressed how simple and easy it was. Even when you factor in the few days it might take IBM SoftLayer to provide you access to the servers, it is still way faster than ordering your own on-premise storage.

A Powerful Virtualization Solutions Delivered by the VMware and IBM Storage Partnership

Impressed with their last presentation, I stayed in the room for this one. Ohad Atia presented IBM Spectrum Control Base edition, and how this provides VMware VVol support through its VASA 2.0 provider code.

IBM Spectrum Control Base edition is entitled to all IBM owners of XIV, Spectrum Accelerate, DS8000 and Storwize family products to provide a consistent VMware interface experience.

Storage Meet the Experts, hosted by Maurice McCullough

For those not familiar with Edge, Maurice "Mo" McCullough is the lead organizer of the storage portion of Technical Edge, as well as various Systems Technical University events held throughout the year.

On the Thursday evening of Edge every year, Mo hosts this popular session for everyone to ask their questions to the experts at the front of the room. There were similar sessions for z Systems and POWER Systems experts in the adjoining rooms.

Joining me on the storage expert panel were Clod Barrera, Shelly Howrigon, Mike Griese, Barry Whyte, Jim Blue, Sven Oehme, and several others. Generally, there isn't a question we don't have an answer to, but if you stump the panel, we will take you out to dinner. The audience was ready to take that challenge!

After Storage Meet the Experts, I had dinner and went to see [Frank: The Man, The Music] musical show at the Venetian hotel. Bob Anderson impersonates Frank Sinatra, singing a popular selection of Frank's many recordings, intermixed with highlights from his television and film career. Bob was accompanied by a 32-piece orchestra that brought the music of the era back to life.

technorati tags: IBM, #ibmedge, Edge2015, System Storage, IBM Expert Network, SlideShare, Rich Swain, OpenStack, OpenStack Swift, , OpenStack Cinder Object Store, Spectrum Scale, Elastic Storage Server, Linton Ward, POWER Systems, Big Data, Analytics, Erik Eyberg, Woody Hutsell, FlashSystem, All-Flash Array, Pendulum Swings Back, Converged Systems, Hyper-converged Systems, FPO, Nutanix, Simplivity, EVO:Rail, VMware VSAN, Ohad Atia, Ronen Kat, XIV, Spectrum Accelerate, Spectrum Control, VMware, VASA, VVol, Clod Barrera, Shelly Howrigon, Mike Griese, Barry Whyte, Jim Blue, Sven Oehme, Maurice McCullough, Frank Sinatra, Bob Anderson, Venetian Hotel

The [IBM Edge2015 conference] is premiere conference covering Infrastructure Innovations for IBM System Storage, as well as sessions about z Systems and POWER Systems from our IBM Enterprise conference.

Here is a quick recap of my sessions I presented on the third day, Wednesday, May 13, 2015.

New Generation of Storage Tiering: Less Management, Lower Costs and Increased Performance

 

See the [entire deck] on SlideShare!

I organized this into three sections. In the first section, I talked about single-system optimization by moving extents within single volumes on a single system. For IBM, I focused on Easy Tier on DS8000 as an example of this methodology, and all the enhancements IBM introduced since its introduction, including Easy Tier Server, Easy Tear Application API, and Easy Tear Heat Map Transfer utility.

 

In the second section, I covered data center optimization using Spectrum Control Storage Analytics Engine. This involves moving entire volumes/LUNs from one storage system to another. At IBM's Boulder Facility, this methodology saved $17 million dollars per year, roughly 50 percent reduction of its storage budget.

The third section covered the global optimization with Information Lifecycle Management (ILM), Hierarchical storage Management (HSM) and Active File Management (AFM) features in Spectrum Scale. This provides a seamless movement of data from flash to disk to tape media. Spectrum Scale has been around in one form or another since 1998, and over 200 of the TOP500 supercomputers are using it today.

IBM Spectrum Scale (Elastic Storage) Offerings

 

See the [entire deck] on SlideShare!

At the IBM Edge conference last year,IBM announced "Codename: Elastic Storage." IBM had to rename its General Parallel File System (GPFS) because it is not just a file system for two very good reasons:

 

• Spectrum Scale can support volumes, files and objects.
• Spectrum Scale provides active data management, including Information Lifecycle Management (ILM), Hierarchical storage Management (HSM) and Active File Management (AFM) features.

This year, IBM now has several offerings: Spectrum Scale software, Elastic Storage Server pre-built system, Storwize V7000 Unified pre-built system, and Elastic Storage on IBM Managed Cloud services.

IBM Winning Edge - CASE Training

IBM Winning Edge is focused on Business Partner and IBM seller training. Part of this is CASE (Cloud and Analytics Sales Enablement). I co-presented "Systems Infrastructure Offerings for Cloud" with Elan Freedberg.

For Wednesday evening, I had dinner with Dr. Steve Hetzler, IBM Almaden Research, to discuss his paper on "touch rate" that Clod Barrera mentioned at the Monday kickoff.

Later that evening, I was invited to enjoy some champagne and cigars with Eric Herzog, Jamie Thomas and other IBM Executives. I brought along fellow blogger Elisabeth Stahl, who recently was promoted to Distinguished Engineer!

technorati tags: IBM, #ibmedge, Edge2015, System Storage, IBM Expert Network, SlideShare, Easy Tier, SVC, Storwize, FlashSystem V9000, Spectrum Control, Spectrum Virtualize, SmartCloud VSC, Spectrum Scale, ILM, HSM, AFM, CASE Training, Steve Hetzler, Eric Herzog, Jamie Thomas, Elisabeth Stahl

The [IBM Edge2015 conference] is premiere conference covering Infrastructure Innovations for IBM System Storage, as well as sessions about z Systems and POWER Systems from our IBM Enterprise conference. Check out this short two-minute [YouTube video on IBM Edge2015].

Here is my quick recap of the sessions that I either presented myself, or presented by others that I found interesting, on Tuesday, May 12, 2015.

What Is Big Data? Architectures and Practical Use Cases

See the [entire deck] on SlideShare!

Not everyone understands the storage implications of Big Data analytics. I started this session explaining the basics of Big Data, and how it changes the entire information pipeline, from storage administrators to data scientists to empowered employees making decisions and taking actions.

I then gave some real-life use cases, from Vestas using Big Data to shorted a 3-week decision process down to 15 minutes, to University of Ontario using Big Data to save the lives of new-born babies.

I then provided a broad overview of IBM's Analytics platform, including IBM InfoSphere BigInsights, BigSQL and Platform Symphony. IBM is a major backer of the Open Data Platform to help provide standards-based choices in the analytics marketplace.

I wrapped up the session with IBM Spectrum Scale™ which has a Hadoop Connector which allows Map/Reduce programs to run unchanged against Spectrum Scale data. This eliminates the waste of ingesting data from other sources into an HDFS file system, then discarding the data after the analytics processing completes.

IBM Smarter Storage Strategy

See the [entire deck] on SlideShare!

At past events, I normally present this on the first day, to provide context for all other presentations later in the week. However, this time, Ken Keverian presented IBM's Corporate strategy on the Tuesday keynote general session, so the event coordinators scheduled my session afterward. I was able to explain how IBM's Smarter Storage strategy fits hand-in-glove IBM's larger Corporate strategy.

As with all IBM strategies, there were three parts. First, IBM is helping clients deal with data growth, resulting from everything from the Internet of Things to Big Data analytics. IBM offers the market leading Real-time Compression capability, for example, to help reduce the amount of capacity consumed.

Second, IBM cannot forget its support of traditional "Systems of Record" applications, like ERP, SCM and CRM transactional workloads. IBM is helping clients deal with business pressures to balance performance versus cost across a variety of storage media, from the world's fastest non-volatile flash storage, IBM FlashSystem, to the least expensive options with tape.

Third, IBM strongly feels the IT industry is shifting to Cloud deployments, including private, public and hybrid clouds. IBM is helping clients with this transition, with support for Software Defined Environments from OpenStack, VMware and Microsoft. IBM ranks #1 in Software Defined Storage with over 40 percent marketshare.

Royal Caribbean Cruise Line's Success with IBM FlashSystem

This was a part IBM, part client testimonial session. Joe Rendace, IBM Technical Flash Channel Manager, and Barry Whyte, fellow IBM Master Inventor and IBM ATS for Storage Virtualization, provided IBM's point of view on Flash technology. Last year, IBM shipped more Flash capacity than the next two closest competitors combined!

Jorge L. González, Enterprise SAN & Storage Architect for Royal Caribbean Cruise Line (RCCL) presented his company's success using IBM's FlashSystem products.

Archive Strategies in the Software-Defined Data Center

Jon Toigo, fellow author and blogger, Managing Principal Toigo Partners International and long-time friend presented this lively topic. Here is a great quote from his presentation:

"Moving data intelligently across different storage tiers (and into archives) is a lot like using a claw machine to get your crying kid a toy at the Chuck E. Cheese!

I can always rely on Jon to provide a unique viewpoint on the latest strategies and technologies. He never disappoints.

IBM Edge Special Events

For Tuesday evening, I went to see the world-famous [Penn & Teller] perform their unique form of magic and comedy show.

For the past 40 years, Penn & Teller have performed magic together, and watching them, up close and personal from just a few dozen feet away on stage, was truly amazing!

technorati tags: IBM, #ibmedge, Edge2015, System Storage, IBM Expert Network, SlideShare, Big Data, IBM Analytics, IBM BigInsights, IBM BigSQL, Open Data Platform, Hadoop, HDFS, Platform Symphony, Spectrum Scale, Smarter Storage Strategy, FlashSystem, RCCL, Royal Caribbean, Jorge Gonzales, Joseph Rendace, Barry Whyte, Penn Teller

The [IBM Edge2015 conference] is premiere conference covering Infrastructure Innovations for IBM System Storage, as well as sessions about z Systems and POWER Systems from our IBM Enterprise conference. Check out this short two-minute [YouTube video on IBM Edge2015].

Doug Brown, IBM Vice President of Marketing, kicked off the second general session. Here is my quick recap of the general session on the second day, Tuesday, May 12, 2015.

IBM Corporate Strategy

 

Ken Keverian is IBM Senior Vice President Corporate Strategy. He feels that when they write the history of IT industry of the past 100 years, the key innovations were the transistor, the Internet, and analytics. (IBM was involved in all three!)

IBM organizes all of its strategies in three segments. Ken presented the three pillars of IBM's corporate strategy. The first pillar is the set of IBM strategic imperatives: Data, Cloud and Engagement. Engagement includes Mobile, Social and Security concerns.

The second pillar is the effort and expertise needed to connect these new strategic imperatives together with existing traditional workloads. Hybrid Cloud is a good example of this, linking together traditional IT or on-premise private Clouds with off-premise offerings. IBM is committed to open standards to make this happen.

The third pillar is moving up the value chain. Some 30 years ago, IBM relied heavily on its hardware business that represented as much as 85 percent of its total revenues. Today, IBM continues with Software, Services and Systems as its core foundation. However, a new portion of IBM will focus on delivering deep industry offerings and expertise, automation of services, and insights-as-a-service.

Client Testimonial from Walmart

Rich Jackson, Senior Technical Expert at Walmart, presented his client testimonial. He started with the following quote:

"There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everyone from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else."
-- Sam Walton

Walmart is one of one of the largest retailers in the world, with over 11,000 stores across 27 countries, generating over $480 Billion US dollars in revenue last year. But Walmart is not just large from putting big stores in small towns, but by shifting from inventory to information.

As with many retailers, the last two months of the year, November 1 to December 31, represent a huge spike in holiday sales for Walmart. Cyber Monday in 2014 resulted in 1.5 billion page views online. About 70 percent of the online sales are from mobile devices. Walmart has trusted its business to the robust scalability and reliability of IBM z System mainframe servers and storage.

Analytics in Healthcare

Inhi Suh is IBM Vice President of Strategy for IBM Analytics. She presented the use of IBM Streams computing in hospitals to help deal with all the alerts and beeping sounds that nurses and technicians just can't act upon.

Thanks to IBM technology, the data of an incoming patient can be retrieved to the hospital before the patient does. Doctors can also access the data, to let the nurses and technicians start on things before the doctor arrives to the hospital.

Dr. Gustavo Stolovitzky is IBM Program Director for Translational Systems Biology and Nanobiotechnology. He explained the challenges of breaking down the silos by using the "wisdom of crowds". IBM launched "Dream Challenges" to see if crowd-sourcing can help with medical challenges. The result, two very accurate algorithms to predict the progression for ALS. These two algorithms were more accurate than 12 ALS medical experts!

Scott McGill is President and CEO of Coriell Life Sciences. He explained that deaths from drug interactions now causes more deaths than automobile accidents. Their product is called GeneDose Live, which uses genomics and DNA science to help doctors determine if this pill is right for that patient, and whether a cocktail of medicines will work together, or against each other. This tool can help doctors swap out different medicines to reduce risk and increase effectiveness for individual patients.

IBM Research projects

Arvind Krishna is IBM Senior Vice President and Director of Research. When it comes to medical data about a patient, only 10 percent is in the medical records. Another 30 percent is your genetics and family history. The last 60 percent is your lifestyle, what countries you have visited, and what foods you have eaten.

Analytics can also be used in the food supply chain to increase food safety. This can help reduce forborne illnesses which affects 1 out of 6 people every year, resulting in over $80 billion dollars in lost productivity. Analytics can also help food growers to reduce water usage and increase crop yields.

By the end of this decade, IBM plans to have "Exascale" systems that can have ExaFLOP of compute capability connected to an Exabyte of data. Your brain can do amazing things with just 50 Watts of energy, but supercomputers consume 50 Megawatts!

IBM has developed "Cognitive Computing" chips that emulate thousands of neurons and millions of synapses. It can be "trained" to perform certain functions with just 200 miliwatts of power. By combining these chips into boards and racks, IBM can amass a large cognitive computing environment to give Watson the ability to reason.

Lastly, Arvind covered IBM's advancements in Quantum Computing. They were able to successfully combine 4 Quantum Bit circuits (QuBits) together. IBM estimates that just 50 QuBits would outperform any combination of supercomputers from the TOP500 list.

IBM's innovations can be applied not just to Retail and Healthcare, but a variety of other industries as well!

technorati tags: IBM, #ibmedge, Edge2015, System Storage, Doug Brown, Ken Keverian, Rich Jackson, Walmart, Inhi Suh, Gustavo Stolovitzky, Scott McGill, Coriell Life Sciences, GeneDose, Arvind Krishna, cognitive computing, Exabyte, ExaFLOP, Exascale

The [IBM Edge2015 conference] is premiere conference covering Infrastructure Innovations for IBM System Storage, as well as sessions about z Systems and POWER Systems from our IBM Enterprise conference. Check out this short two-minute [YouTube video on IBM Edge2015].

Here is my quick recap of my sessions on the first day, Monday, May 11, 2015.

Solution Center Setup and Training

IBM hires [George P. Johnson Experience Marketing], or GPJ for short, to help with its events. I was asked to be on-hand for the Monday morning training in case I was needed to fill in for anyone else during the lunch hours and evening receptions.

There were quite a lot of demos. We had SAN Volume Controller, Spectrum Accelerate and Spectrum Scale at various booths. There were also plenty for POWER and z Systems as well. I cover a wide variety of these topics, so am often used as the "universal substitute" in case some needs to take a break, or just gets caught up in a one-on-one discussion with an attendee.

It didn't help that while we are trying to listen to the GPJ ladies on how to scan barcodes on attendee badges and use the interactive kiosks, large machinery is placing the demo hardware in place.

Here a forklift operator is putting a VersaStack converged system that has a mix of Cisco UCS, NEXUS and MDS hardware with IBM Storwize V7000 Unified storage.

Software Defined Storage -- Why? What? How?

See the [entire deck] on SlideShare!

I presented as session explaining why our clients are excited about Software Defined Environments, including an overview of IBM's Software Defined Storage offers in the IBM Spectrum Storage™ family of products, and how to get started.

According to IDC, an independent IT analyst firm, IBM has over 40 percent marketshare in Software Defined Storage, ranking IBM #1 in this market.

Not surprisingly, this was by far my most attended session for the week, and I presented twice to fully packed rooms.

IBM's Cloud Storage Options

See the [entire deck] on SlideShare!

IBM is ranked #2 in Cloud Storage. This session covered the different types of Cloud storage, including persistent, ephemeral, hosted and reference storage categories. I covered the advantages of block, file and object level access.

Lastly, I covered the various IBM products for each type. For block-level transactional storage, I covered IBM XIV Storage, XIV Cloud Storage for Service Providers, Spectrum Accelerate software and the Storage Hypervisors built with Spectrum Virtualize such as SAN Volume Controller (SVC) and the rest of the Storwize family, and FlashSystem family products.

For file and object level storage, I covered Spectrum Scale software, including Elastic Storage Server and Storwize V7000 Unified pre-built systems. I also included how these fit into a file sync-and-share deployment using IBM partnership with OwnCloud or Funambol.

Finally, I mentioned the Cloud storage offerings from IBM SoftLayer and IBM Cloud Managed Services.

Data Footprint Reduction - Understanding IBM Storage Efficiency Options

See the [entire deck] on SlideShare!

I have presented this topic now for several years, but never fails to draw an audience.

I start with the basics of Thin Provisioning, explaining the difference between coarse-grained and fine-grained designs, and how these are employed in IBM DS8000 disk system, XIV Storage system, SVC and Storwize family products, DCS3700 and DCS3860 disk systems.

I then covered Space-efficient Snapshots, including IBM FlashCopy. These can be used with either fully-allocated or thin-provisioned source volumes, and can substantially reduce the amount of storage needed to keep immediate copies.

Next I covered Data Deduplication, including IBM ProtecTIER family of products, Spectrum Protect software, and IBM's partnership with Atlantis ILIO for IBM FlashSystem for Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) deployments.

Lastly, I covered Compression, explaining the unique advantages of IBM's Real-time Compression compared to the performance-degrading methods used by our competitors. IBM Real-time Compression provides better capacity savings than Data Deduplication for 95 percent of your active data workloads, and is available on FlashSystem V9000, SAN Volume Controller, Storwize V7000 and this week IBM announced it available on the XIV Storage systems as well!

As you can imagine, I get invited to a lot of client dinners during the week. For Monday evening, I managed to combine two clients into a single dinner! The two clients were from completely different industries, but from the same part of the country. Everyone all got along, so it worked out very well.

technorati tags: IBM, #ibmedge, Edge2015, System Storage, IBM Expert Network, George P Johnson, GPJ, SlideShare, XIV Storage, XIV Cloud Storage, Spectrum Storage, Spectrum Accelerate, Spectrum Virtualize, SAN Volume Controller, SVC, DS8000, Storwize, Spectrum Scale, SoftLayer, FlashSystem, FlashSystem V9000, Storwize V7000 Unified, DCS3700, DCS3860, Thin provisioning, Space-efficient FlashCopy, Deduplication, Real-time Compression, Hybrid Cloud

The [IBM Edge2015 conference] is premiere conference covering Infrastructure Innovations for IBM System Storage, as well as sessions about z Systems and POWER Systems from our IBM Enterprise conference. Check out this short two-minute [YouTube video on IBM Edge2015].

Here is my quick recap of the kickoffs and keynote sessions on the first day, Monday, May 11, 2015.

Storage Systems Technical Kickoff

 

At the dreadful hour of 8:30am on Monday morning, Clod Barrera and Axel Koester kicked off the Storage portion of Technical Edge.

 

Clod is IBM Distinguished Engineer and Chief Technical Strategist for IBM's System Storage product line. He discussed IBM's investments in Software Defined Storage, FlashSystem products, and Storage Virtualization.

Axel Koester is IBM Executive IT Specialist and Storage Chief Technologist for the European Storage Center of Competency. Axel discussed IBM's invention of Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) in 1966, and how this led to the development of Programmable Read-Only Memory (PROM), Electronically Erasable PROM (EE-PROM), and NAND Flash systems. Running out of two-dimensional surface for NAND Flash has led to the development of 3D Flash.

General Session

Stephen Leonard, Tom Rosamilia and Jen Crozier presented the opening keynote. It is available as a 90-minute YouTube video [IBM Edge 2015 - General Session] compliments of SiliconAngle.

Tom Rosamilia is my fifth-line manager and IBM Senior Vice President of the recently formed "IBM Systems" business unit, comprised of System Storage, z Systems, POWER Systems and Middleware.

By 2016, there will be 26 billion things on the Internet. Connected cars, for example, can serve as Wi-Fi "hot spots" to connect multiple mobile devices in the vehicle. Each mobile transaction triggers up to 100 back-end system transactions. Security is non-negotiable at every stage of these transactions. As an example, client testimonial from TravelPort and Priceline.com indicated that it takes over 90 billion back-end transactions to handle 120 million travel reservations.

Analytics converts raw data into actionable insights. Unfortunately, as much as 90 percent of data never gets analyzed. By combining Systems of Record, Systems of Engagement and Systems of Insight, your IT infrastructure empowers you to engage your customers in the manner they expect. A Hybrid Cloud can help bring these systems together.

Jen Crozier is IBM Vice President, Global Citizenship Initiatives. She asked mayors of cities across the world a simple question, if you had access to six IBM executives and technical experts, what problem would you want them to solve? In partnership with Twitter, IBM donated over $100 million dollars in expertise as "Smarter Cities" grants to address the most challenging problems. The following 16 cities won the grant for 2015 (I have been to eight of them!):

• Allahabad, India - Prime Minister Modi of India is interested in having over 100 "Smarter Cities" across the country. IBM will help Allahabad to improve waste management.
• Amsterdam, Netherlands - to help the city support new business startups
• Athens, Greece - to reduce traffic congestion and offer car-free transportation alternatives
• Denver, United States - to coordinate services for the homeless
• Detroit, United States - to help with urban recycling, debris and blight to rebuild the city infrastructure
• Huizhou, China - to help with tourism management
• Melbourne, Australia - to help with disaster preparedness
• Memphis, United States - to help coordinate emergency calls across fire, police and medical departments
• Rochester, New York, United States - to help with assistance to families with children living in poverty
• San Isidro, Peru - to help with traffic congestion and related pollution
• Santiago, Chile - to help with disaster preparedness, especially important given the recent earthquakes, landslides, floods and fires
• Sekondi-Takoradi, Ghana - to help expand its tax base to reduce corruption
• Surat, India - to help integrate urban planning across agencies
• Taichung, Taiwan - to help with road safety and traffic congestion
• Vizag, India - to help with disaster preparedness in flood and cyclone prone areas
• Xuzhou, China - to help optimize transportation as a regional hub

The mayor of Memphis TN, A C Wharton, gave a quick acceptance speech, introducing his chiefs of fire department and police departments, and explaining his focus to better serve his citizens.

Deon Newman is IBM Vice President for IBM z Systems marketing explained IBM's [Intelligent Operations Center], or IOC for short.

Stephen Leonard highlighted some of the key products announced this year, including the z13 System mainframe, the new 4-socket E840 POWER System, and the FlashSystem V9000 storage system. Nobody supports more open standard than IBM, including Linux, OpenStack, Apache, Eclipse, Cloud Foundry, SPARK and Hadoop.

The kickoff sessions and keynote presentations are always a great way to set the context for the rest of the week.

technorati tags: IBM, #ibmedge, Edge2015, System Storage, Clod Barrera, Axel Koester, Software Defined, SDE, SDS, Stephen Leonard, Tom Rosamilia, Jen Crozier, AC Wharton, , Smarter Cities, Allahabad, Amsterdam, Athens, Denver, Detroit, Huizhou, Melbourne, Memphis, Rochester, San Isidro, Santiago, Sekondi-Takoradi, Surat, Taichung, Vizag, Xuzhou, Deon Newman, Intelligent Operations Center, IOC, VodaFone, Boeing, Hybrid Cloud

Are you going to the [IBM Edge 2015 conference]? This is IBM's premiere conference covering IBM System Storage, z Systems and POWER Systems.

Here are some secrets for winning prizes while you attend!

Sit in the first FIVE rows of the Techincal Kickoffs - Monday 8:30am

Funding has been approved to give out a few nice prizes. To be eligible, you need to show up on time, and sit in the first five rows of any of the following three Kickoffs. I will be in the one for Storage!

Attend sessions by Edge Event Sponsor companies

Brocade, Cisco and others often present lectures at Technical Edge, and they often give out prizes at those sessions, as part of their sponsorship to the event.

Take a "Selfie" with IBM z13 System mainframe

Yes, we will actually have a z13 System on display at the Solution Center for you to take pictures with. Post it on Instragram, Twitter, Facebook or your other favorite social media websites and be eligible to win prizes.

Get your handwriting analyzed with an IBM POWER8 system

Get your handwriting analyzed at the Solution Center and be eligible to win prizes.

Get your badge scanned at as many booths as you can at the Solution Center

Yes, this means you might get an email from the companies involved, but it will also add you to the list of people eligible for some raffles and drawings for prizes.

Participate in the #IBMEdgeHunt scavenger hunt!

Follow the Twitter hashtag #IBMEdgeHunt to see what else the "Hunt Organizers" have in store during the week!

I arrive Sunday afternoon! Below are some of the hashtags I will be using during the event. You can follow me on @az990tony Twitter handle.

technorati tags: IBM, #ibmedge, #storage, #IBMstorage, #SoftwareDefined, #FlashSystem, #DS8870, #XIV, #Storwize, #VersaStack, #Tape, #LTO, #FICON, #IBMEdgeHunt, #IBMz, #IBMPower, #IBMPartner, #Cloud

Next week, May 11-15, I will be in Las Vegas, Nevada for the [IBM Edge 2015 conference], covering IBM System Storage, z Systems and POWER Systems.

There are really three conferences in one:

• Executive Edge, for business executives, CIO and IT directors
• Technical Edge, for storage, system and cloud administrators
• Winning Edge, for IBM Business Partners

I am giving presentations this year at both Technical Edge and Winning Edge.

Here is my Technical Edge schedule of what I will be presenting next week:

Day	Time	Technical Edge
Monday	10:30am	Software Defined Storage Technical Overview -- Why? What? How?
	03:00pm	IBM's Cloud Storage Options
	04:30pm	Data Footprint Reduction -- Understanding IBM Storage Efficiency Options
Tuesday	10:30am	Software Defined Storage Technical Overview -- Why? What? How?
	12:30pm	What is big data? Architectures and Practical use cases
	01:45pm	IBM's Smarter Storage Strategy
Wednesday	09:00am	New Generation of Storage Tiering: Less management, lower costs and increased performance
	10:30am	IBM's Smarter Storage Strategy
	12:30pm	IBM's Cloud Storage Options
	01:45pm	IBM Spectrum Scale (Elastic Storage) Offerings
Thursday	12:30pm	The Pendulum Swings Back -- Understanding Converged and Hyper-converged environments
Friday	09:00am	IBM Spectrum Storage Integration with OpenStack

I am also part of the Winning Edge track for Cloud and Analytics Sales Enablement (CASE) training. Here is my Winning Edge schedule of what I will be presenting next week:

Day	Time	Winning Edge
Wednesday	04:15pm	IBM Offerings for Cloud Infrastructure - Storage (co-presenting with Elan Freedberg)

We will have some exciting storage demos at the Solutions Center:

• Object and Cloud storage
• Big data and pervasive Flash
• Virtualization 2.0
• Next generation Tier 1 storage
• Data Protection, Archive and Nearline storage
• Storage Efficiency with Data Footprint Reduction

The Solution Center demos will be shown at the following times. I will try to hang out here during these times to help answer questions:

Day	Time	Demos at the Solution Center
Monday	11:30am - 12:45pm	Solution Center Hours
	05:30pm - 07:30pm	Opening Reception
Tuesday	11:30am - 01:00pm	Solution Center Hours
	05:30pm - 07:30pm	Reception
Wednesday	11:30am - 12:30pm	Solution Center Hours

In between presentations and demos, I will be having conversations with clients at breakfast, lunch and dinner, blogging, tweeting, and attending some of the 600 other storage sessions that will be presented at Edge this year!

I am looking forward to a great week!

technorati tags: IBM, Edge2015, Las Vegas, Executive Edge, Winning Edge, Technical Edge, Software Defined Storage, SDS, IBM Cloud, Cloud Storage, Data Footprint Reduction, Real-time Compression, data deduplication, big data, IBM analytics, Spectrum Storage, Spectrum Scale, Spectrum Accelerate, FlashSystem, Converged Systems, VersaStack, IBM Hyper-Converged, Pendulum Swings, Solution Center, Object Storage, Elan Freedberg, CASE training, storage efficiency

I got some exciting news today that i would like to share with my readers!

Several years ago, I mentored a young 19-year Tarun Pondicherry from India to work on one of Google's Summer-of-Code project. We worked on a simple blogging system to help teach grade school children in Uruguay how to write their own blogs.

I summarized that effort in my 2008 blog post [Sending my baby off to school], and the results in my 2009 blog post [Helping Young Students - Part 1].

Well, that was six years ago, but I have kept in touch, and today learned that Tarun has been working on an exciting project to teach young kids to write computer programming code.

It's called "LightUp" and the idea is quite simple. Using a simple programming interface, you can program the machine to light up based on what the programming code specifies. It is immediate feedback for the child to explore the world or software logic. Already they have helped kids around the world build over 100,000 circuits!

They are about to launch their latest kit, so check out their [LightUp pre-launch page]

And speaking of learning new innovations, I will be at the [IBM Edge 2015 conference] next week in Las Vegas. There will be traditional lectures about IBM's latest innovations, mixed with hands-on labs and plenty of exciting demos, because Adults need to learn too!

I hope to see you all there!

technorati tags: IBM, Edge2015, #LearnByMaking, #Edge2015, TarunPondicherry, LightUp

This week I am in beautiful Prague, Czech Republic, for the Systems Technical University, April 21-24.

Here are the topics that I will be presenting this week:

Date	Time	Title
Tuesday	15:00	IBM's Smarter Storage Strategy
	16:15	Software Defined Storage -- Why? What? How?
Wednesday	09:00	IBM's Cloud Storage Options
Thursday	09:00	What is big data? Architectures and Practical use cases
	13:45	New Generation of Storage Tiering: Less management, Lower Costs and Increased Performance
	17:30	Meet the Storage Experts - Q&A Panel
Friday	11:20	The Pendulum Swings Back -- Understanding Converged and Hyperconverged environments
	14:10	Data Footprint Reduction -- Understanding IBM Storage Efficiency Options

technorati tags: IBM, storage, strategy, Software Defined Storage, Cloud Storage, Big Data, Analytics, Storage Tiering, Converged Systems, Hyperconverged, Data Footprint Reduction, Prague

Every year, March 31 marks "World Backup Day". Sadly, many people forget the importance of backing up their critical information. This is not just true for businesses, non-profit organizations and government agencies, but also for all of your personal information that you keep on computer devices.

My friends over at Cloudwards had developed an awesome infographic related to World Backup Day. Here it is.

(FTC Disclosure: I work for IBM, which has no business relationship with Cloudwards. Cloudwards does not itself provide backup services, but rather reviews services provided by others. This post should not be considered an endorsement of Cloudwards or their reviews.)

Courtesy of: Cloudwards.net

I hope you find this information helpful and informative!

Well it's Tuesday again, and you know what that means? IBM Announcements!

Today, IBM announced an exciting new addition to the IBM System Storage™ product line, [IBM Spectrum Storage™], a family of software defined storage offerings.

To understand its significance, I need to explain a few things first. Software defined storage is part of a larger concept of software defined environment.

How is software defined environment different than what you have now? In every data center, you need to map business requirements of an application workload with an appropriate set of IT infrastructure, including server, network and storage resources.

The traditional approach involves an application owner or database administrator reviewing the business requirements documented for the application, calling the server, network and storage administrators, who match those requirements to appropriate IT hardware and notify the folks in facilities to rack and stack the gear accordingly.

In a software defined environment, Application Programming Interfaces (API), Service Level Agreements (SLA) and Orchestration workflows can automate the request for the appropriate resources. This is referred as the "Control Plane".

Responding to these requests, the software can provision the appropriate server, network and storage resources required. Server, network and storage virtualization, standard interfaces and deployment technologies exist to make this practical. This is referred to as the "Data Plane".

Any time new a way of doing things is introduced into the world, there could be some resistance. Let's tackle the three most frequently stated objections:

1. "IT infrastructure resources are rare and expensive! Administrators need to control or approve how resources are doled out!" An objection to self-service automation is the fear that employees would take too much.
   
   If you have a bank account, Automated Teller Machines (ATM) can restrict the amount of cash you can take out, based on what is appropriate per request, or per day, with an upper limit of what you have in your personal checking or savings account. You enter your debit card and PIN into the "Control Plane" keypad and out comes a stack of 20-dollar bills from the "Data Plane" slot. In a software defined environment, you can limit requests through quotas and resource pools.
    
2. "Some application workloads are more important than others! Another objection is that every workload will be treated in the same standard way, mission critical workloads and dev/test would be treated alike.
   
   At the gas station, you can select different levels of octane gasoline. You enter your credit card and zip code into the "Control Plane" keypad and selected octane comes out of the "Data Plane" hose. In a software defined environment, resources can be provisioned with different Quality of Service (QoS) levels.
    
3. "Different applications require different combinations of resources!" Another objection is the fear that fixed combinations of server, storage and network resources will be stifling to innovation and productivity.
   
   At the vending machine, you can choose which candy bar and which chips to have with whatever soft drink you choose for lunch. You enter your bills and coins into the "Control Plane" slot, select the row letter and column number for your snack of choice, and then fetch your purchases from the "Data Plane" flap. In a software defined environment, a Service Catalog can offer a virtual menu of different server, network and storage resources to be combined together as needed.

These concerns are addressed well enough in software defined environments, in general, and with IBM Spectrum Storage family of products, in particular.

(Nostalgia: I remember the days before self-service automation. At the bank, I had to stand in line at the bank until I could to talk to a human bank teller to get cash from my savings account. At the gas station, human gas attendants would come out and pump the gas for me, check my oil and wash my windshield. And at a restaurant, I felt like I waited an eternity from the time I ordered my meal to the time the human short-order cook had it ready and human wait staff delivered it to my table. These all seem silly today, doesn't it?)

technorati tags: BM, Spectrum Storage, Software Defined Environment, SDE, Software Defined Storage, SDS, Control Plane, Data Plane

Today in the USA, we honor [Martin Luther King, Jr.] This year marks the 50th anniversary of the largest political demonstration to date in American history. Over 250,000 people went to Washington DC to hear Dr. King give his now famous "I have a dream" speech.

Well, it's the end of the year, so I thought a recap of year 2014 would be in order.

The year started out with some January announcements, including the IBM FlashSystem 840. IBM is proud to be ranked #1 in All-Flash Arrays, and the IBM acquisition of Texas Memory System has caused all of the other competitors to scramble their own wanna-be offerings. IBM also announced it was going to sell off its System x division to Lenovo.

In February, I wrapped up a project to build a Linux-based PC for a kindergarten class. IBM announced some exciting new things at Pulse 2014 conference, including IBM Bluemix Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), new IBM SmartCloud Virtual Storage Center offerings, and acquisition of Cloudant Database. Also, on Valentine's day, IBM announced the FlashSystem V840, which combines the software-defined storage features of SAN Volume Controller, with the Microlatency of the FlashSystem 840. IBM sold its 10,000th PureSystems converged expert-integrated system.

In March, I completed a six-month film project ["A Tucson Executive Briefing Center: A Quick Visual Tour"]. I was writer/director/actor for this quick 3-minute film posted on YouTube. I wrote the script and had it reviewed by a professional script reviewer, hired a professional cinemetographer, paid royalties for background music, located a voice-over expert for narration, and trained the actors (all IBM employees) how to read their lines and stand on their mark for the camera. It was a big success!

Also in March, I worked with the Netezza, Tivoli and Storwize V7000 team to work out [complete backup options for IBM clients who use PureData System for Analytics, powered by Netezza].

In April, I presented at the Systems Technical University in Istanbul, Turkey. I had been to Turkey before, but this was my first time to the city of Istanbul itself. The owner of my local [Savaya Coffee] is from Istanbul, and was able to introduce me to someone who was able to arrange for a full tour my first day! Meanwhile, on the other side of the pond, IBMers in New York were celebrating the 50th anniversary of the IBM mainframe, including a cameo appearance on the TV show "Mad Men".

In May, I was busy presenting at the IBM Edge conference in Las Vegas. IBM celebrated the sixth anniversary of IBM ProtecTIER data deduplication device, announced "Codename: Elastic Storage" and new features on the DS8870 disk system, and presented analyst findings that IBM Software Defined Storage was substantially less expensive than competitive offerings.

In June, I was recognized as one of the most influential bloggers in the IBM company, earning the prestigious [IBM Corporate Technology Social Business Imact Award for 2013].

In July, I took a nice summer vacation, [a road trip across the state of Tennessee]. IBM made a strategic partnership with Apple to offer mobile apps for the data center enterprise for the iOS operating system on iPhones and iPad tablets.

In August, I completed a summer partnership with University of Toronto and IBM Softlayer to build "Concept IBM Watson", a scaled down version of IBM Watson based on my infamous 2011 blog post [How to replicate Watson hardware and systems design for your own use in your basement]. Rather than using three physical servers, however, we had virtual x86 machines running on IBM Softlayer cloud. The system was only asked the simplest "How many...?" questions against a single text document, but proved to the University that teaching analytics by replicating IBM's historic achievement was effective and possible.

In September, I celebrated my eight year "Blogoversary". That's right, I have been blogging for the past eight years! With over 800 posts, and five published books, I countinue to be ranked #1 most-read blog on IBM developerWorks. IBM was ranked #1 for Software Defined Storage!

In October, I presented at the Systems Technical University in Dublin, Ireland. This was my first time in Ireland, and I found Dublin to be quite a beautiful city, with friendly people and delicious food.

The rest of October, and much of November and December, I spent on the road, visiting clients to help close deals! (Sorry folks... Due to SEC black-out rules, I am prohibited from telling you how well I did) Since I am not allowed to talk about on-going discussions that I have with clients, my blog has been noticeably silent during these months. I apologize for any stress or anxiety this might have caused any of my readers!

Despite too-much-candy, too-much-turkey and too-many-cookies that the year-end often brings, I managed to lose twenty pounds on a low-carb, gluten-free, Paleo diet and exercise.

2015 is shaping up to be a good year!

This week, I am in Dublin, Ireland for the [IBM System x, IBM PureSystems and System Storage Technical University] conference.

(Note: While Lenovo has officially taken over the System x on October 1st back in the United States, China, and several other countries in Asia and the Americas, it has not yet happened in Europe. This is expected to happen this December. This results in some awkwardness during this period of transition.)

Day 1 started off with some keynote sessions. Amy Purdy, IBM Director of Training Services, was the emcee.

Gareth Tucker, Director of EMEA for Intel

Gareth focused on the strong partnership between IBM, Lenovo and Intel. For example, a client query that took 4 hours with traditional DB2 database on Intel Xeon, but only 90 seconds on DB2 BLU with the new Xeon V2 chip.

10 years ago, some storage vendors warned clients not to use any Intel-based storage devices. Today, over 85 percent of storage is Intel-based, including most of the IBM System Storage portfolio. IBM SoftLayer also uses Intel to offer both bare metal and virtual x86 servers, and was the first cloud provider to use Intel's "Trusted Execution" mode.

Next year, Microsoft will drop support for Windows 2003 server on July 15, 2015. This represents an excellent selling opportunity to get clients to upgrade their x86 server hardware. Intel estimates there are 24 million instances of Windows 2003 worldwide. On average, it takes 150 days to migrate to Windows 2012, so get clients to start now!

Jeff Howard, Vice President of Lenovo Flex and BladeCenter

Jeff was a last-minute stand-in for Adalio Sanchez who is busy getting thousands of employees and hundreds of trailer trucks full of IT equipment from IBM's Raleigh location to Lenovo's new building in Morrisville.

Lenovo's goal is simple: to be the #1 vendor of x86 enterprise servers. Lenovo sees a $44 Billion USD opportunity in x86 servers, with an additional $14B opportunity selling IBM System Storage attached to these servers. Lenovo is already #1 for Personal Computers in the consumer space, and is #1 for customer satisfaction. IBM System x #1 in reliability and up-time for x86 servers. In a client survey of how many clients had an outage lasting four hours or more, less than 1 percent from IBM System x compared to 13 percent for HP servers. That's a big difference!

There is a 40 percent growth in "Converged Systems" such as the Flex System and PureFlex systems. Lenovo will take over the x86-only versions of these, while IBM will retain the POWER-based and Power-and-x86 hybrid models. IBM will also retain the PureApplication and PureData models of the PureSystems line.

Lenovo is also focused on security. Their "Trusted Platform" includes Self-encrypting Drives (SED) managed by IBM Security Key Lifecycle Manager software, and Crypto-assist co-processors.

Jeff also mentioned new reference architectures for VMware's VSAN, Microsoft's Fast-track Data warehouse for SQL Server, SmartCloud Desktop Infrastructure VDI with Atlantis ILIO, and Flex Systems for Hyper-V.

Greg Lotko, VP of IBM Storage Systems Development

Greg is the new VP of Storage Systems Development, about 11 months on the job, but I am glad to hear that he recognizes that IBM System Storage has a huge portfolio of products.

He focused on those areas where IBM is ranked #1:

• IBM is #1 for All-Flash arrays.
• IBM is #1 for Software Defined Storage (SDS).
• IBM is #1 for Tape, including tape drives, tape libraries and virtual tape systems

 

The weather here in Dublin is great, although I have had not had much time to enjoy the outdoors with all the awesome and interesting sessions inside!

technorati tags: IBM, #ibmtechu, Lenovo, Intel, SoftLayer, VMware, VSAN, Microsoft, Gareth Tucker, x86, converged systems, expert-Integrated systems, Flex Systems, PureFlex, BladeCenter, , Jeff Howard, Self-encrypting drives, Security Key Lifecycle Manager, SED, SKLM, , Greg Lotko, Software-Defined Storage, SDS, All-Flash, Tape, x86, Dublin Ireland

This week, I am in Dublin, Ireland for the [IBM System x, IBM PureSystems and System Storage Technical University] conference.

Here are the sessions that I will be speaking at:

Day	Time	Session
Monday	14:30	IBM Smarter Storage Strategy
Tuesday	16:15	Cloud Storage Options
Wednesday	09:00	What is Big Data? Architectures and Practical use cases
	10:30	New Generation of Storage Tiering: Less management, lower investment and increased performance
	16:15	IBM Archive Storage Solutions - Data Retention for Government Compliance and Industry Regulations
	17:45	Meet the Storage Experts
Thursday	14:30	Data Footprint Reduction - Understanding IBM Storage Efficiency Options
Friday	10:30	IBM Smarter Storage Strategy (repeat of Monday)

If you are at the conference, stop by and see me! You can also follow me on Twitter @az990tony and the hashtag #ibmtechu.

technorati tags: #ibmtechu, Smarter Storage, Cloud storage, Big data, Storage tiering, Archive storage, Data footrpint reduction, storage efficiency

Hello everyone! I am back, fully well-rested from a wonderful 3-week vacation touring the lovely state of Tennessee. Here's a quick recap:

(FCC Disclosure: I mention various companies and products in this blog post. I have no financial interested in any of them, nor have I received any compensation to mention or endorse them here.)

Lynchburg

Our first stop was Lynchburg, TN, home of [Jack Daniel's], America's oldest whiskey distillery. Our tour guide, Ron (who both looked and sounded like [John Goodman]) took us first to see how they burn wood to make charcoal, then the natural water spring which supplies the iron-free water used for the whiskey. We then got a whiff of the mash at various stages of fermentation. Lastly, we had samples of Original No. 7, Gentleman's Jack, and Single Barrel.

(A word of caution: Domestic airlines only allow FIVE LITERS of Bourbon, Whiskey or Rum in your checked luggage. That is only six bottles at the 750ml size, of beverages that are between 24 to 70 percent alcohol by volume [ABV]. Anything above 70 percent is considered too flammable to take on the plane. Excess bottles can be custom packed and shipped, but can be quite expensive. Nearly everyone we met drove all the way to Tennessee instead of flying, and now I understand why.)

While in the area, we had a nice lunch at [Miss Mary Bobo's], a boarding house turned into a restaurant. They only serve one meal a day at 1pm, by reservation only. And we were paired up with eight others and served food "family style" a large round table with a [Lazy Susan].

Jack Daniel's is not the only attraction in the area. We also visited [Falls Mill], a grist mill that grinds corn, wheat and rye for the other distilleries. Mo and I visited [Prichard's Distillery], where they make Whiskey, Rye and Rum. We highly recommend their molasses-flavored "Sweet Lucy"!

Chattanooga

We stopped at the famous historic landmark, the [Chattanooga Choo Choo], which was formerly a train station, and now renovated into a hotel. We asked to see the inside of one of the train cars converted into a hotel room.

 

Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge

We stayed in a cabin in the [Smokey Mountains] near Gatlinburg. In addition to pleasant rides through the National park, we also walked around the small town, looking at all the shops and amusements.

The next town over is Pigeon Forge, and driving down the main parkway is like Las Vegas in a slightly alternate universe. One person called it the Redneck Riviera!

We spent two days at Dollywood theme park, named after its founder, famous country singer Dolly Parton. We arrived after 3pm the first day, so they gave us the second day free!

In addition to roller coaster rides, artisan shops and restaurants, we found zip lines! Mo and I put on harness, attached to a pulley, and zipped over roller coasters, trees and rivers throughout Dollywood park. It was a lot of fun!

We also went to Dolly Parton's other attraction: Stampede. This was a dinner show with horses. It was similar to the Excalibur show we saw in Las Vegas last year during the week of Edge 2013 Conference.

 

Knoxville

On our way from Gatlinburg, we stopped into Knoxville to have lunch with clients. We had a choice to make, we could either drive up into Kentucky and visit the distilleries in the Bourbon trail, or drive straight to Nashville and spend more time there. We opted for Nashville, saving the Bourbon trail for a future trip.

Nashville

Our final stop was Nashville, known as Music City. Our hotel was on Broadway, walking distance between Vanderbilt University and the [honky-tonks] downtown.

We had purchased advanced tickets for the [Grand Ole Opry]. This is not your typical concert. Instead, you have no idea who will play until just a few days before. The three hour show had about a dozen different musical acts, some famous, some new to the country music scene.

We went to the Johnny Cash Museum. People with ticket stubs from the Grand Ole Opry get in for a discount!

After the museum, we had lunch at [Demos' restaurant] and then listened to live music at a honky-tonk called [Second Fiddle]. Mo got a picture with the country singer [John Riggins]!

Searching [TripAdvisor] for things to do in Nashville, I found [The Escape Game]. You pay them money to lock you up in a room with a bunch of strangers, and then collectively as a team you need to figure out how to escape by solving puzzles and clues.

Each room has different themes. First, we tried the "Underground Playground". You know that TV show [Are you Smarter than a Fifth Grader?] Well, the majority of our so-called team were not in this case, and after 60 minutes the referee told us we had failed and unlocked the door.

We had so much fun that we came back two days later to try a different room. This time we tried "The Heist" which is all about art theft. The strangers we were teamed up with were very motivated to get out of the room in time, and we succeeded, getting out in just 54 minutes!

Mo and I had a great time, but are glad to be back home!

Well, it's Tuesday again, and you know what that means? IBM Announcements!

Back in 2007, my blog post [Double Happy Wedding] compared IBM's acquisition for a company that produced data migration software to the practice in Japan of waiting until the bride is five to seven months pregnant to have a wedding. In USA, these are called "shotgun" weddings.

I was in Japan when I wrote that, and the company IBM acquired was Japanese, so the comparison stuck.

Today, IBM announces the latest versions Transparent Data Migration Facility z/OS v5 [TDMF] and z/OS Dataset Migration Facility v3 [zDMF] software products.

(Where better to commemorate this event than in Pigeon Forge, Tenessee, the capital of shotgun wedding venues! Including, and I am not making this up, a replica of the [grand staircase of the Titanic]. Yes, you can book this for a shotgun wedding, while your guests re-arrange the deck chairs. I stopped at a local McDonald's to submit this blog post.)

TDMF software allows you to migrate CKD volumes that are attached to your System z mainframe, including those that are actively being used by applications. zDMF allows you to migrate z/OS data sets, including those currently open by applications.

The migration is hardware-agnostic, supporting CKD volumes on IBM, EMC and HDS disk systems. As many clients are migrating from EMC and HDS disk systems to IBM DS8870, this is a good time to look at TDMF and zDMF to help make the process as transparent as possible.

Of course, if you are not interested in acquiring the software to do this yourself, you can hire IBM Data Mobility Services, which uses TDMF and zDMF to do it for you!

technorati tags: IBM, TDMF, zDMF, shotgun wedding

This week, I was one of the 24 recipients of the IBM Corporate Technology Social Business Impact awards!

The list of recipients spans 14 countries (in alphabetical order):

Country	Award recipient
Australia	Darryl Miles
Brazil	Sergio Varga
Egypt	Ahmed Abbass
France	Jean Francois Puget
Germany	Turgut Aslan
	Detlef Helmbrecht
	Sebastian Thaele
India	Prashanta Chandramohan
	Vinod A Valecha1
Italy	Massimo Chiriatti
	Bruno Portaluri
Korea	JungWoon Lee
	HyungKeun Park
Netherlands	Edwin Schouten
Poland	Renata Anna Bilecka
Spain	Maria Borbones
Switzerland	Alessandro Sorniotti1
United Kingdom	Richard G Brown
	Jon McNamara
	Rick Robinson
United States	Paul DiMarzio
	Tony Pearson
	Christopher Pepin
	Elisabeth Stahl

The award was based on engagements and conversations resulting from blogs, tweets, Facebook and Linkedin posts, Slideshare, Flickr, and other social venues, over the 2013 calendar year.

I would like to congratulate the other 23 winners! I am glad to recognize several of the people that I had helped get their blog started, and mentored along the way, have made it to the list!

technorati tags: IBM, Social Business, Darryl Miles, Sergio Varga, Ahmed Abbass, Jean Francois Puget, Turgut Aslan, Detlef Helmbrecht, Sebastian Thaele, Prashanta Chandramohan, Vinod A Valecha1, Massimo Chiriatti, Bruno Portaluri, JungWoon Lee, HyungKeun Park, Edwin Schouten, Renata Anna Bilecka, Maria Borbones, Alessandro Sorniotti1, Richard G Brown, Jon McNamara, Rick Robinson, Paul DiMarzio, Tony Pearson, Christopher Pepin, Elisabeth Stahl

Years ago, I wrote a series of blog posts related to IBM Watson computer that played Jeopardy! game show. My most popular post to-date has been [IBM Watson -- How to replicate Watson hardware and systems design for your own use in your basement], which I had previously used "Watson Jr." an an unofficial name for your own personal implementation.

Over time, I have gotten many emails, comments and tweets related to this post. The instructions have been downloaded over 130,000 times!

The letter below was so inspiring that I felt I need to share it. (Published here with permission from the author, who goes by the screen name DaveAlex)

Thought you would like to know that I am working toward an AI Agent hopefully more advanced than "Watson Jr." although I will probably include the software behind it.

The hardware I have on hand is a System X3650M2 which I bought for $250 on eBay. It has four 2.66 GHz Xeons with 6 cores each, and 16 GB RAM. I have another 16 to install when I need it. I will shortly have 4 TB of HDD space on line, plus an addition 3 TB USB3 drive.

Ultimately, I hope to have some of the available knowledge bases on line, Freebase, CYC, etc which will handle specific information perhaps better than the Watson software by itself.

What the target (goal) that I am aiming for is a stationary version of Commander Data of Star Trek, Next generation.

I envision if having some form of self knowledge, being capable of processing graphical data, i.e., facial recognition, gesture interpretation, voice input/output, mathematical processing, with graphical output (display & hardcopy) and several additional features.

As I have studied this project, I am amazed at how much of the required software is already available. The biggest stumbling block is integrating the separate parts.

Back to Hardware. I just bought 2 Dell 2850 servers, each with dual Intel Xeons which can handle some of the tasks. If I need more processing power, I just happen to have about 10 other towers with Pentium IV or dual core processors sitting around, which can be pressed into service as needed. So far, my total cost is less than $1000 US Dollars, and my wife has not thrown me out yet. I continue to watch eBay for additional older used equipment for fractions of the original cost. My friends who follow my project keep telling me that I need to get on with the software, and add hardware as needed; they are absolutely correct, but I can't resist a bargain.

The power consumption is a potential problem, but I have a 4500 Watt solar array to use. The cooling could be a problem too, but my house sits into the side of hill, and can readily duct the air supply pass the sub-surface wall, perhaps with old Processor cooling fins glued to the wall.

I hope to get some hobby programmers involved in the project, it is a bit beyond my programming capabilities. I hope that I can live long enough to see it come to fruition; I am 78 now, and mentally in very good condition.

-- DaveAlex

Wow! He is 78 years old! While others his age are playing shuffleboard at the nursing home, he is out there learning new things about the latest technology. I wish him the best of luck on this! If you would like to reach out to DaveAlex, send me a note or comment below, and I will forward them on to him.