This year marks the 10 year anniversary of IBM's introduction of LTO tape technology. IBM is a member of the Linear Tape Open consortium which consists of IBM, HP and Quantum, referred to as "Technology Provider Companies" or TPCs. In an earlier job role, I was the "portfolio manager" for both LTO and Enterprise tape product lines.

Today, we held a celebration in Tucson, with cake and refreshments. IBM Executives Doug Balog, IBM VP of Storage Platform, and Sanjay Tripathi, the new IBM Director and Business Line Executive for Tape, VTL and Archive systems, presented the successes of LTO tape over the past 10 years. To date over 3.5 million LTO tape drives, and over 150 million LTO tape media cartridges have been shipped which is a testament to the remarkable marketplace acceptance of the technology.

In honor of this event, I decided to interview Bruce Master, IBM Senior Program Manager for Data Protection Systems, about this 10 year anniversary.

10 years of LTO technology is a great milestone. How is this especially significant to IBM and its clients?

According to IDC data, IBM has held the #1 leader position in market share for total world wide branded tape revenue for over 7 years and that IBM is still #1 in branded midrange tape revenue which includes the LTO tape technologies. IBM was the first drive manufacturer to deliver LTO-1 drives, back in September 2000, the first to deliver tape drive encryption to the marketplace on LTO-4 drives, and is shipping LTO generation 5 drives and libraries. IBM is the author of the new Linear Tape File System (LTFS) specification that has been adopted by the TPCs. This file system revolutionizes how tape can be used as if it were a giant 1.5 terabyte removable USB memory stick with the capability to be accessed with directory tree structures and drag and drop functionality. With LTO's built-in real-time compression, a single tape cartridge can hold up to 3TB of data.

The Linear Tape File System has been getting a lot of attention. Where can we learn more about it?

Researchers at IBM's Almaden Research Center invented the [Linear Tape File System], released it as Open Source under the name [IBM Long Term File System], and contributed the specification to the LTO consortium. On the [Ultrium.com] website, you can read articles written about the file system, the specification [60-page PDF] document and a [video demo] of the file system in action. There is also an article out on [Wikipedia].

Why is tape still a critical part of a storage infrastructure?

Tape is low cost and provides critical off-line portable storage to help protect data from attacks that can occur with on-line data. For instance, on-line data is at risk of attack from a virus, hacker, system error, disgruntled employee, and more. Since tape is off-line, not accessible by the system, it protects against these forms of corruption. LTO technology also provides write-once read-many (WORM) tape media to help address compliance issues that specify non-erasable, non-rewriteable (NENR) storage, hardware encryption to secure data, as well as a low cost long term archive media. When data cools off, or becomes infrequently accessed, why keep it on spinning disk? Move it to tape where it is much greener and lower cost. A tape in a slot on a shelf consumes minimal energy.

So tape is not dead?

Ha! Far from it. Seems like disk-only "specialty shop" storage vendors that don’t have tape in their sales portfolio are the ones that propagate that myth. In reality, storage managers are tasked with meeting complex objectives for performance, compliance, security, data protection, archive and total cost of ownership. Optimally, a blend of disk and tape in a tiered infrastructure can best address these objectives. You can’t build a house with just a hammer. IBM has a rich tool kit of storage offerings including disk, tape, software, services and deduplication technologies to help clients address their needs.

Do you have an example of a client who was saved by tape?

Yes indeed. Estes Express, a large trucking firm, was hit by a hurricane that flooded their data center and destroyed all systems. Fortunately the company survived because the night before they had backed up all data on to IBM tape and moved the cartridges offsite! The company survived and has since implemented a best practices data protection strategy with a combination of disk-to-disk-to-tape (D2D2T) using LTO tape at the primary site, and a remote global mirrored site that is also backed up to LTO tape.

So tape saved the day. What is the outlook for tape innovation in the future?

The future is bright for tape. Earlier this year, IBM and Fujifilm were able to [demonstrate a tape density achievement] that could enable a native 35TB tape cartridge capacity! This shows a long roadmap ahead for tape and a continued good night’s sleep for storage managers knowing that their precious data will be safe.

Of course, LTO tape is just one of the many reasons IBM is a successful and profitable leader in the IT storage industry. Doug Balog talked about his experiences in London for the [October 7th launch] of IBM DS8800, Storwize V7000 and SAN Volume Controller 6.1. Sanjay Tripathi showed recent successes with IBM's ProtecTIER Data Deduplication Solution and Information Archive products.

I would like to thank Bruce Master for his time in completing this interview. To learn more about IBM tape and storage offerings, visit [ibm.com/storage].

technorati tags: IBM, Linear Tape Open, LTO, LTO-1, LTO-2, LTO-3, LTO-4, LTO-5, Doug Balog, Sanjay Tripathi, Bruce Master

Tags:  bruce+master nenr lto-4 ibm worm linear+tape+open doug+balog lto-5 lto-3 sanjay+tripathi lto-2 lto-1 lto

This week I am in New York City to meet with clients, IBM Business Partners, Independent Software Vendors (ISV) and Industry Solution Resellers (ISR). I'll be at IBM's [Wall Street Center of Excellence]. IBM has over 120 client centers worldwide.

Tags:  isv ibm isr

Last month, I mentioned that I was named [one of the faces of IBM Smarter Planet campaign]. This resulted in some interesting email, including a college student named Hamas from India who asks:

"How can I participate in IBM's Smarter Planet, specifically Smarter Cities?"

With a lot of college students graduating next month, I thought this would be a good question to answer.

Apply for a Job at IBM

The best way to participate in IBM Smarter Cities is to get a job within IBM, and then get assigned to one of the many IBM Smarter Cities projects. Visit IBM's [Employment Page] to learn why IBM is recognized as one of the top 50 most attractive employers in the world. Mention "Smarter Cities" on your Resume so it can be routed to the appropriate manager.

Join the Conversation

Another way to participate in Smarter Cities is to "join the conversation". Each of IBM's 25 different programs has folks that are focused on that area, with blogs, forums and case studies. Here is the conversations page for [Smarter Cities]. Watch the videos at []ibm.com/theSmarterCity]. Play IBM's [City One], IBM's Smarter Planet for game for Smarter Cities. Provide IBM feedback on any ideas you might have to help make cities smarter.

You can also join in one of the many upcoming [IBM Jam events]. Jams are not restricted to generating business ideas. Their methods, tools and technology can also be applied to social issues. In 2005, over three days, the Government of Canada, UN-HABITAT and IBM hosted Habitat Jam. Tens of thousands of participants - from urban specialists, to government leaders, to residents from cities around the world - discussed issues of urban sustainability. Their ideas shaped the agenda for the UN World Urban Forum, held in June 2006. People from 158 countries registered for the jam and shared their ideas for action to improve the environment, health, safety and quality of life in the world's burgeoning cities.

Buy Products and/or Services from IBM

IBM has the resources to help the planet in so many ways that NGOs and non-profit agencies only dream of. With IBM's advocacy for causes like global public education, universal healthcare, and improved infrastructures, people often forget that IBM is not itself a non-profit organization. IBM has learned early on that creating value for the world can also be good business. The more people buy from IBM, the more skills and resources IBM will have to solve the world's toughest challenges.

IBM ... Let's build a smarter planet!

technorati tags: IBM, Smarter Planet, Smarter Cities, CityOne

Tags:  smarter+cities smarter+planet ibm cityone

It's Tuesday, and you know what that means... IBM Announcements!

IBM System Storage ProtecTIER

Today, IBM refreshed its IBM System Storage ProtecTIER data deduplication family with new hardware and software. On the hardware side, The [TS7650G gateway] now has 32 cores and 64GB RAM. The [TS7650 Appliance] now has 24 cores and 64GB of RAM, and the [TS7610 Appliance Express] has 4 cores and up to 16GB of RAM.

On the software side, all of these now support Symantec's proprietary "OpenStorage" OST API. This applies across the board, from the [Enterprise Edition], [Appliance Edition], and the [Entry Edition]. For those using Symantec NetBackup as their backup software, the OST API can provide advantages over the standard VTL interface.

IBM Systems Director Storage Control

The second announcement has an interesting twist. I could file this in my "I Told You So" folder. Offiically, it's called the [Cassandra Complex], where you accurately predict how something will turn out, but being unable to convince anyone else of what the future holds.

About ten years ago, I was asked to be lead architect of a new product to be called IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center, which was later renamed to IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center. This would combine three projects:

• Tivoli Storage Resource Manager (TSRM)
• Tivoli SAN Manager (TSANM)
• Multiple Device Manager (MDM)

The first two were based on Tivoli's internal GUI platform, and the MDM was a plug-in for IBM Systems Director. I argued that administrators would want everything on a single pane of glass, and that we should bring all the components under a common GUI platform, such as IBM Systems Director. Unfortunately, management did not agree with me on that, and preferred instead to leave each interface alone to minimize development effort. The only "unification" was to give them all similar sounding names, four components packaged as single product:

• Productivity Center for Data (formerly TSRM)
• Productivity Center for Fabric (formerly TSANM)
• Productivity Center for Disk (formerly MDM)
• Productivity Center for Replication (formerly MDM)

While this management decision certainly allowed version 1 to hit the market sooner, this was not a good "first impression" of the product for many of our clients.

In 2002, IBM acquired Trellisoft, Inc. which replaced the internally-developed TSRM with a much better interface, but again, this was different GUI than the other components. A "launcher" was created that would launch the various disparate interfaces for each component for Version 2. At this point, we have different development teams scattered in five locations, with the first two components being developed by the Tivoli software team, and the other two components being developed by the System Storage hardware team.

Often times, when a technical lead architect and management do not agree, things do not end well. The lead architect has to leave the product, and management is forced to take alternative actions to keep the product going. In my case, management considered the idea of a common GUI as an expensive "nice-to-have" luxury we could not afford, but I considered this a "must-have". I moved on to a new job within IBM, and management, unable to continue without my leadership, gave up and handed the entire project over to the Tivoli Software team.

The Tivoli Software team took a whiff at the pile of code and agreed that it stunk. Dusting off my original design documents, they pretty much discarded most of the code and re-wrote much from scratch, with a common database, common app server, and common GUI platform. Unfortunately, Productivity Center for Replication was held up waiting for some hardware prerequisites, but the other three components would be packaged together as "Productivity Center v3 - Standard Edition" and was a big improvement over the prior versions.

In Version 4, TotalStorage Productivity Center was renamed to Tivoli Storage Productivity Center, and the Replication component was brought into the mix. A scaled-down version packaged as Productivity Center "Basic Edition" was made available as a hardware appliance named "System Storage Productivity Center" or SSPC. The idea was to provide a pre-installed 1U-high hardware console that had the basic functions of Productivity Center, with the option to upgrade to the full Tivoli Storage Productivity Center with just license keys.

So, now, years later, management recognizes that a common GUI platform is more than just a "nice-to-have". IBM now support three very specific use cases:

1. Administration for a single product

For small clients who might have only a single IBM product, IBM is now focused on making the GUI browser-based, specifically to work with the Mozilla Firefox browser, but any similar browser should work as well. The new IBM Storwize V7000 GUI is a good example of this.In this case, the browser serves as the common GUI platform.

2. Administration for both servers and storage devices

For mid-sized companies that have administrators managing both servers and storage, IBM announced this month the new [IBM Systems Director Storage Control v4.2.1] plug-in, which provides Tivoli Storage Productivity Center "Basic Edition" support. This allows admins already familiar with IBM Systems Director for managing their servers to also manage basic storage functions. This is the "I Told You So" moment, connecting server and storage administration under the IBM Systems Director management platform makes a lot of sense, it did when I came up with the idea 10 years ago! Hmmmm?

3. Administration for just the storage environment

For larger companies big enough to have separate server and storage admin teams, IBM continues to offer the full Tivoli Storage Productivity Center product for the storage admins. The most recent release enhanced the support for IBM DS8000, SVC, Storwize V7000 and XIV storage systems.

Today, analysts consider IBM's [Tivoli Storage Productivity Center] one of the leading products in its category. I am glad my original vision has finally come to life, even though it took a while longer than I expected.

To learn more about IBM storage hardware, software or services, see the updated [IBM System Storage] landing page.

technorati tags: IBM, ProtecTIER, TS7650G, TS7650, TS7610, Symantec, NetBackup, OpenStorage, API, OST, TPC, TSRM, Trellisoft, TSANM, SSPC, Systems Director, Storage Control, GUI

Tags:  ts7650 trellisoft tsrm systems+director symantec deduplication ibm ost ts7610 api protectier ts7650g storage+control tsanm gui netbackup openstorage tpc sspc

To make true advances in any industry or field requires forward thinking—as well as industry insight and experience. It can't be done just by packaging a bag of piece parts and putting a new label on it. But forward thinkers are putting smarter, more powerful technology to uses that were once unimaginable -- either in scale or in progress.

I am pleased that IBM has honored me with recognition as a "forward thinker" on the corporate-wide [IBM Smarter Planet for Smarter IT systems and Infrastructure]. This is quite an honor, being one of the "faces" of IBM's Smarter Planet campaign. I am joined by my esteemed colleagues: [Brian Sanders], [Steve Will], [Willie Favero], and [Kathleen Holm].

The graphics developed for the IBM Smarter Planet vision are interesting. This one for Infrastructure includes images relating to public utilities, like gas, water and electricity, clouds representing cloud computing, green forests representing the need for energy efficiency and reducing carbon footprint to fight global warming, roads, representing the intricate transportation and traffic systems, highways and city streets that connect us all together, and a printed circuit board, representing the Information Technology that makes all of this possible.

Ironically, I didn't even know I made the final cut until I got three, yes three, separate requests for interviews about it. I already reached the "million hits" milestone.  Other people track these things for me, so it will be interesting how much additional traffic my latest [15 minutes of fame] will generate.

Infrastructure is just one of the 25 different areas that IBM's vision for a Smarter Planet is trying to address, including the need for smarter buildings, smarter cities, smarter transportation systems, smarter energy grids, smarter healthcare and public safety, and smarter governments.

To learn more, visit the [Smarter Planet overview] landing page. Together, we can build a smarter planet!

technorati tags: IBM, Brian Sanders, Steve Will, Willie Favero, Kathleen Holm, Smarter Planet, Infrastructure, forward thinker

Tags:  kathleen+holm brian+sanders smarter+planet infrastructure ibm willie+favero forward+thinker steve+will

In his blog post, [The Lure of Kit-Cars], fellow blogger Chuck Hollis (EMC) uses an excellent analogy delineating the differences between kit-cars you build from parts, versus fully-integrated systems that you can drive off the car dealership showroom lot. The analogy holds relatively well, as IT departments can also build their infrastructure from parts, or you can get fully-integrated systems from a variety of vendors.

Is this what your data center looks like?

Certainly, this debate is not new. In my now infamous 2007 post [Supermarkets and Specialty Shops], I explained that there were clients that preferred to get their infrastructure from a single IT supermarket, like IBM or HP, while others were lured into thinking that buying separate parts from butchers, bakers and candlestick makers and other specialty shops was somehow a better idea.

Chuck correctly explains that in the early years of the automobile industry, before major car manufacturers had mass-production assembly lines, putting a car together from parts was the only way cars were made. Today, only the few most avid enthusiasts build cars this way. The majority get cars from a single seller and drive away. In my post [Resolving the Identity Crisis], I postulated that EMC appeared to be trying to shed itself of the "disk-only specialty shop" image and over to be more like IBM. Not quite a full IT Supermarket, but perhaps more like a [Trader Joe's] premium-priced retailer.

(If you find that EMC's focus on integrated systems appears to be a 180-degree about-face from their historical focus on selling individual best-of-breed products, see my previous discussion of Chuck's contradictions in my blog post: [Is Storage the Next Confusopoly].)

While companies like EMC might be making this transition, there is a lot of resistance and inertia from the customer marketplace. I agree with Chuck, companies should not be building kit-cars or IT infrastructures from parts, certainly not from parts sold from different vendors. In my post [Talking about Solutions not Products], I explained how difficult it was to change behavior. CIOs, IT directors and managers need to think differently about their infrastructure. Let's take a quick look at some choices:

Oracle

Following Chuck's argument, it makes no sense to build a "kit-car" combining Oracle/Sun servers with EMC storage. Oracle would argue it makes more sense to run on integrated systems, business logic on their "Exalogic" system, and database processing on their "Exadata". Benchmark after benchmark, however, IBM is able to demonstrate that Oracle applications and databases run faster on IBM systems. Customers that want to run Oracle applications can run either on a full Oracle stack, or a full IBM stack, and both do better than a kit-car including EMC parts.

Hewlett-Packard (HP)

HP has been working hard to keep up with IBM in this area. With their their partnership with Microsoft, and acquisitions of EDS, 3Com and 3PAR, they can certainly make a case for getting a full HP stack rather than a kit-car mixing HP servers with EMC disk storage. The problem is that HP is focused on a converged infrastructure for private cloud computing, but Microsoft is focused on Azure and public cloud computing. It will be interesting when these two big companies sort this out. Definitely watch this space.

Dell

If you squint your eyes and focus on the part of the world that only has x86 machines, then Dell can be seen as an IT supermarket. In my post about [Entry-Level iSCSI Offerings], I discuss how Dell's acquisition of EqualLogic was a signal that it was trying to get away from selling EMC specialty shop products, and building up its own set of offerings internally.

Cisco

Cisco is new on the server scene, but has already made quite a splash. Here, I have to agree with Chuck's logic: the only time it makes sense to buy EMC disk storage at all is when it is part of an integrated "V-block". This is not really an IT supermarket situation, instead you park your car at the "Acadia Mini-Mall" and get what you need from Trader Joe's, Cisco UCS, and VMware stores.

But wait, if what you want is running VMware on Cisco servers, you might be better off with IBM System Storage N series or NetApp storage. In his blog post about [Enhanced Secure Multi-Tenancy], fellow Blogger Val Bercovici (NetApp) provides a convincing argument of why Cisco and VMware run better on an "N-block" rather than a "V-block". IBM N series provides A-SIS deduplication, and IBM Real-time Compression can provide additional capacity and performance improvements.  That might be true, but whether you get your storage from EMC, NetApp or IBM, to me, you are still working with three different vendors in any case.

IBM

Of course, following Chuck's logic, it makes more sense for people with IBM servers, whether they be mainframes, POWER systems or x86 machines, to integrate these with IBM storage, IBM software and IBM services. IBM is the leading reseller of VMware, but also has a lot of business with Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix Xen, Linux KVM, PowerVM, PR/SM and z/VM. While IBM has market leading servers, disk and tape systems, to compete for those RFP bids that just ask for one component or another, it prefers to sell fully-integrated systems, which IBM has been doing successfully since the 1950s.

Back in 2007, I mentioned how IBM's fully-integrated InfoSphere Balanced Warehouse [Trounced HP and Sun]. For business analytics, IBM offers the fully-integrated [IBM Smart Analytics Systems]. Today, IBM expanded its line of fully-integrated private cloud service delivery platforms with the announcement of the [IBM CloudBurst for on Power Systems], which does for POWER7 what the IBM CloudBurst for System x, Oracle Exalogic, or Acadia's V-block, do for x86. IBM estimates that private clouds built on Power systems can be up to 70 percent less expensive than stand alone x86 servers.

Before he earned his PhD in Mechanical Engineering, my father was a car mechanic. I spent much of my teenage years covered in grease, helping my father assembling cars, lifting engines, and rebuilding carburetors. Certainly this was good father-son time, and I certainly did learn something in the process. Like the automobile industry, the IT industry has matured, and it makes no financial sense to build your own IT infrastructure from parts from different vendors.

For a test drive of the industry's leading integrated IT systems, see your IBM sales rep or IBM Business Partner.

technorati tags: IBM, kit-cars, supermarkets, specialty-shops, EMC, Chuck Hollis, Oracle, HP, Sun, Dell, NetApp, InfoSphere Balanced Warehouse, Smart Analytics, CloudBurst, VMware, Cisco, Acadia

Tags:  sun chuck+hollis infosphere+balanced+wareh... cloudburst hp vmware acadia ibm supermarkets specialty-shops cisco oracle smart+analytics kit-cars emc dell netapp

IBM had its big launch yesterday of the [IBM Storwize V7000 midrange disk system], and already some have discussed IBM's choice of the name. Fellow blogger Stephen Foskett has an excellent post titled [IBM’s Storwize V7000: 100% SVC; 0% Storwize]. On The Register, Chris Mellor writes [IBM's Midrange Storage Blast - Storwize. But Without Compression]. In his latest [Friday Rant], fellow blogger Chuck Hollis (EMC) feels "the new name is cool, if a bit misleading."

In the spirit of the [HP Product Line Decoder Ring] and [Microsoft Codename Tracker], here is your quick IBM product name decoder ring:

In English	Protocols	Which company designed it	What IBM decided to call it
Intelligent block-level disk array that virtualizes both internal and external disk storage	8 Gbps FCP and 1GbE iSCSI	IBM	IBM Storwize V7000 disk system
Real-time compression appliance for files	10GbE/1GbE CIFS and NFS	Storwize, now an IBM company	IBM Real-time Compression STN-6800 appliance
	1GbE CIFS and NFS		IBM Real-time Compression STN-6500 appliance

If you think this is the first time a company like IBM has pulled shenanigans with product names like this, think again. Here are a few posts that might refresh your memory:

• In my September 2006 post, [A brand by any other name...] I explain that I started blogging specifically to promote the new "IBM System Storage" product line name, part of the "IBM Systems" brand resulting from merging the "eServer" and "TotalStorage' brands.
• In my January 2007 post, [When Names Change], I explain our naming convention for our disk products, including our DS family, SAN Volume Controller and N series.
• In my February 2008 post, [Getting Off the Island], I cover how the x/p/i/z designations came about for our various IBM server product lines.

But what about acquisitions? When [IBM acquired Lotus Development Corporation], it kept the "Lotus" brand. New products that fit the "collaboration" function were put under the Lotus brand. I think most people can accept this approach.

But have we ever seen an existing product renamed to an acquired name?

In my post January 2009 post [Congratulations to Ken on your QCC Milestone], I mentioned that my colleague Ken Hannigan worked on an internal project initially called "Workstation Data Save Facility" (WDSF) which was changed to "Data Facility Distributed Storage Manager" (DFDSM), then renamed to "ADSTAR Distributed Storage Manager" (ADSM), and finally renamed to the name it has today: IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM).

Readers reminded me that [IBM acquired Tivoli Systems, Inc.] in 1996, so TSM could not have been an internally developed product. Ha! Wrong! Let's take a quick history lesson on how this came about:

• In the late 1980s, IBM Almaden research had developed a project to backup personal computers and workstations, which they called "Workstation Data Save Facility" or WDSF.
• This was turned over to our development team, which immediately discarded the code, and wrote from scratch its replacmeent, called Data Facility Distributed Storage Manager (DFDSM), named similar to the Data Facility products on the mainframe (DFP, DFHSM, DFDSS). As a member of the Data Facility family, DFDSM didn't really fit. The rest processed mainframe data sets, but DFDSM processed Windows and UNIX files. That a version of DFDSM server was available to run on the mainframe was the only connection.
• Then, in the early 1990s, there were discussions of possibly splitting IBM into a bunch of smaller "Baby Blues", similar to how [AT&T was split into "Baby Bells"], and how Forbes and Goldman Sachs now want to split Microsoft into [Baby Bills]. IBM considered naming the storage spin-off as ADSTAR, which stood for "Advanced Storage and Retrieval." Pre-emptively, IBM renamed DFDSM to "ADSTAR Distributed Storage Manager" or ADSM.
• Fortunately, in 1993, IBM brought a new sheriff to town, Lou Gerstner, who quickly squashed any plans to split up IBM. He quickly realized that IBM's core strength was building integrated stacks, combining systems, software and services to solve business problems.
• In 1996, IBM acquired Tivoli Systems, Inc. to expand its "Systems Management" portfolio, and renamed ADSM over to IBM Tivoli Storage Manager, since "storage management" is an essential part of "systems management". Later, IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center would be renamed to "IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center."

I participated in five months of painful meetings to figure out what to name our new internally-developed midrange disk system. Since it ran SAN Volume Controller software, I pushed for keeping the SVC designation somehow. We considered DS naming convention, but the new midrange product would not fit between our existing DS5000 and DS6000 numbering scheme. A marketing agency we hired came up with nonsensical names, in the spirit of product names like Celerra, Centera and CLARiiON, using name generators like [Wordoid]. Luckily, in the nick of time, IBM acquired Storwize for its compression technology, and decided that Storwize as a name was way better fit than any of the names we came up with already.

However, the new IBM Storwize V7000 midrange product had nothing in common with the appliances acquired from Storwize, the company, so to avoid confusion, the latter products were renamed to [IBM Real-time Compression]. Fellow blogger Steven Kenniston, the Storage Alchemist from Storwize fame now part of IBM from the acquisition, gives his perspective on this in his post [Storwize – What is in a Name, Really?]. While I am often critical of the names and terms IBM uses, I have to say this last set of naming decisions makes a lot of sense to me and I support it wholeheartedly.

To learn more about the IBM Storwize V7000 midrange disk system, watch the latest videos on the IBM Virtual Briefing Center (VBC). We have a [short summary version for CFO executives] as well as a [longer version for IT technical professionals].

technorati tags: IBM, Storwize, Storwize V7000, Stephen Foskett, decoder+ring, real-time+compression, microsoft, codename, Lou Gerstner, ADSM, TSM, SVC

Tags:  storwize storwize+v7000 svc adsm ibm microsoft tsm decoder+ring lou+gerstner stephen+foskett real-time+compression codename

This week, Hitachi Ltd. announced their next generation disk storage virtualization array, the Virtual Storage Platform, following on the success of its USP V line. It didn't take long for fellow blogger Chuck Hollis (EMC) to comment on this in his blog post [Hitachi's New VSP: Separating The Wheat From The Chaff]. Here are some excerpts:

"Well, we all knew that Hitachi (through HDS and HP) would be announcing some sort of refresh to their high-end storage platform sooner or later.

As EMC is Hitachi's only viable competitor in this part of the market, I think people are expecting me to say something.

If you're a high-end storage kind of person, your universe is basically a binary star: EMC and Hitachi orbiting each other, with the interesting occasional sideshow from other vendors trying to claim relevance in this space."

Chuck implies that neither Hewlett-Packard (HP) nor Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) as vendors provide any value-add from the box manufactured by Hitachi Ltd. so combines them into a single category. I suspect the HP and HDS folks might disagree with that opinion.

When I reminded Chuck that IBM was also a major player in the high-end disk space, his response included the following gem:

"Many of us in the storage industry believe that IBM currently does not field a competitive high-end storage platform. IDC market share numbers bear out this assertion, as you probably know."

While Chuck is certainly entitled to his own beliefs and opinions, believing the world is flat does not make it so. Certainly, I doubt IDC or any other market research firm has put out a survey asking "Do you think IBM offers a competitive high-end disk storage platform?" Of course, if Chuck is basing his opinion on anecdotal conversations with existing EMC customers, I can certainly see how he might have formed this misperception. However, IDC market share numbers don't support Chuck's assertion at all.

There is no industry-standard definition of what is a "high-end" or "enterprise-class" disk system. Some define high-end as having the option for mainframe attachment via ESCON and/or FICON protocol. Others might focus on features, functionality, scalability and high 99.999+ percent availability. Others insist high-end requires block-oriented protocols like FC and iSCSI, rather than file-based protocols like NAS and CIFS.

For the most demanding mission-critical mix of random and sequential workloads, IBM offers the [IBM System Storage DS8000 series] high-end disk system which connects to mainframes and distributed servers, via FCP and FICON attachment, and supports a variety of drive types and RAID levels. The features that HP and HDS are touting today for the VSP are already available on the IBM DS8000, including sub-LUN automatic tiering between Solid-State drives and spinning disk, called [Easy Tier], thin provisioning, wide striping, point-in-time copies, and long distance synchronous and asynchronous replication.

There are lots of analysts that track market share for the IT storage industry, but since Chuck mentions [IDC] specifically, I reviewed the most recent IDC data, published a few weeks ago in their "IDC Worldwide Quarter Disk Storage Tracker" for 2Q 2010, representing April 1 to June 30, 2010 sales. Just in case any of the rankings have changed over time, I also looked at the previous four quarters: 2Q 2009, 3Q 2009, 4Q 2009 and 1Q 2010.

(Note: IDC considers its analysis proprietary, out of respect for their business model I will not publish any of the actual facts and figures they have collected. If you would like to get any of the IDC data to form your own opinion, contact them directly.)

In the case of IDC, they divide the disk systems into three storage classes: entry-level, midrange and high-end. Their definition of "high-end" is external RAID-protected disk storage that sells for $250,000 USD or more, representing roughly 25 to 30 percent of the external disk storage market overall. Here are IDC's rankings of the four major players for high-end disk systems:

1. EMC
2. IBM
3. HDS
4. HP

By either measure of market share, units (disk systems) or revenue (US dollars), IDC reports that IBM high-end disk outsold both HDS and HP combined. This has been true for the past five quarters. If a smaller start-up vendor has single digit percent market share, I could accept it being counted as part of Chuck's "occasional sideshow from other vendors trying to claim relevance", but IBM high-end disk has consistently had 20 to 30 percent market share over the past five quarters!

Not all of these high-end disk systems are connected to mainframes. According to IDC data, only about 15 to 25 percent of these boxes are counted under their "Mainframe" topology.

Chuck further writes:

"It's reasonable to expect IBM to sell a respectable amount of storage with their mainframes using a protocol of their own design -- although IBM's two competitors in this rather proprietary space (notably EMC and Hitachi) sell more together than does IBM."

The IDC data doesn't support that claim either, Chuck. By either measure of market share, units (disk systems) or revenue (US dollars), IDC reports that IBM disk for mainframes outsold all other vendors (including EMC, HDS, and HP) combined. And again, this has been true for the past five quarters. Here is the IDC ranking for mainframe disk storage:

1. IBM
2. EMC
3. HDS
4. HP

IBM has over 50 percent market share in this case, primarily because IBM System Storage DS8000 is the industry leader in mainframe-related features and functions, and offers synergy with the rest of the z/Architecture stack.

So Chuck, I am not picking a fight with you or asking you to retract or correct your blog post. Your main theme, that the new VSP presents serious competition to EMC's VMAX high-end disk arrays, is certainly something I can agree with. Congratulations to HDS and HP for putting forth what looks like a viable alternative to EMC's VMAX.

To learn more about IBM's upcoming products, register for next week's webcast "Taming the Information Explosion with IBM Storage" featuring Dan Galvan, IBM Vice President, and Steve Duplessie, Senior Analyst and Founder of Enterprise Storage Group (ESG).

technorati tags: IBM, DS8000, EMC, Chuck Hollis, Hitachi, HDS, Virtual Storage Platform, VSP, USP-V, HP, P9500, Easy Tier, high-end, enterprise-class, IDC, marketshare

Tags:  ds8000 idc p9500 high-end enterprise-class ibm easy+tier usp-v vsp emc hds marketshare hp chuck+hollis virtual+storage+platform hitachi

Last week, in Computer Technology Review's article [Tiering: Scale Up? Scale Out? Do Both], Mark Ferelli interviews fellow blogger Hu Yoshida, CTO of Hitachi Data Systems (HDS). Here's an excerpt:

"MF/CTR: A global cache should be required to implement that common pool that you’re talking about going across all tiers.

Hu/HDS: Right. So that is needed to get to all the resources. Now with our system, we can also attach external storage behind it for capacity so that as the storage ages out or becomes less active we can move it to the external storage. They would certainly have less performance capability, but you don’t need it for the stale data that we’re aging down. Right now we’re the only vendor that can provide this type of tiering.

If you look at other people who do virtualization like IBM’s SVC, the SVC has no storage within it because it’s sitting so if you attach any storage behind it, there is some performance degradation because you have this appliance sitting in front. That appliance is also very limited in cache and very limited in the number of storage boards on it. It cannot really provide you additional performance than what is attached behind it. And in fact, it will always degrade what is attached behind it because it’s not storage, where as our USP is storage and it has a global cache and it has thousands of port connections, load balancing and all that. So our front end can enhance existing storage that sits behind it."

This is not the first time I have had to correct Hu and others of misperceptions of IBM's SAN Volume Controller (SVC). This month marks my four year "blogoversary", and I seem to spend a large portion of my blogging time setting the record straight. Here are just a few of my favorite posts setting the record straight on SVC back in 2007:

• [Hu Yoshida should know better]
• [We Copied What From Whom?]
• [Yes, Chris, SVC is non-disruptive]
• [Welcome to the Super High-End Club]
• [Innovation that Matters: SVC and the Bendy Straw]

Since day 1, SAN Volume Controllers has focused primarily on external storage. Initially, the early models had just battery-protected DRAM cache memory, but the most recent model of the SVC, the 2145-CF8, adds support for internal SLC NAND flash solid state drives. To fully appreciate how SVC can help improve the performance of the disks that are managed, I need to use some visual aids.

In this first chart, we look at a 70/30/50 workload. This indicates that 70 percent of the IOPS are reads, 30 percent writes, and 50 percent can be satisfied as cache hits directly from the SVC. For the reads, this means that 50 percent are read-hits satisfied from SVC DRAM cache, and 50 percent are read-miss that have to get the data from the managed disk, either from the managed disk's own cache, or from the actual spinning drives inside that managed disk array. For writes, all writes are cache-hits, but some of them will be destaged to the managed disk. Typically, we find that a third of writes are over-written before this happens, so only two-thirds are written down to managed disk.

In this example, the SVC reduced the burden of the managed disk from 100,000 IOPS down to 55,000, which is 35,000 reads and 20,000 writes. Some have argued against putting one level of cache (SVC) in front of another level of cache (managed disk arrays). However, CPU processor designers have long recognized the value of hierarchical cache with L1, L2, L3 and sometimes even L4 caches. The cache-hits on SVC are faster than most disk system's cache-hits.

This is a Ponder curve, mapping millisecond response (MSR) times for different levels of I/O per second, named after the IBM scientist John Ponder that created them. Most disk array vendors will publish similar curves for each of their products. In this case, we see that 100,000 IOPS would cause a 25 millisecond response (MSR) time, but when the load is reduced to 55,000 IOPS, the average response time drops to only 7 msec. To be fair, the SVC does introduce 0.06 msec of additional latency on read-misses, so let's call this 7.06 msec. This tiny amount of latency could be what Hu Yoshida was referring to when he said there was "some performance degradation". There are other storage virtualization products in the market that do not provide caching to boost performance, but rather just map incoming requests to outgoing requests, and these can indeed slow down every I/O they process. Perhaps Hu was thinking of those instead of IBM's SVC when he made his comments.

Of course, not all workloads are 70/30/50, and not every disk array is driven to its maximum capability, so your mileage may vary. As we slide down the left of the curve where things are flatter, the improvement in performance lowers.

IOPS before SVC	IOPS after SVC	MSR before SVC	MSR after SVC	Percentage Improvement
100,000 IOPS	55,000	25 msec	7.06 msec	72%
80,000 IOPS	44,000	12 msec	6.06 msec	50%
60,000 IOPS	33,000	7 msec	4.86 msec	31%
40,000 IOPS	22,000	5.4 msec	4.16 msec	23%
20,000 IOPS	11,000	4 msec	3.86 msec	4%

Hitachi's offerings, including the HDS USP-V, USP-VM and their recently announced Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) sold also by HP under the name P9500, have similar architecture to the SVC and can offer similar benefits, but oddly the Hitachi engineers have decided to treat externally attached storage as second-class citizens instead. Hu mentions data that "ages out or becomes less active we can move it to the external storage."  IBM has chosen not to impose this "caste" system onto its design of the SAN Volume Controller.

The SVC has been around since 2003, before the USP-V came to market, and has sold over 20,000 SVC nodes over the past seven years. The SVC can indeed improve performance of managed disk systems, in some cases by a substantial amount.  The 0.06 msec latency on read-miss requests represents less than 1 percent of total performance in production workloads.  SVC nearly always improves performance, and in the worst case, provides same performance but with added functionality and flexibility. For the most part, the performance boost comes as a delightful surprise to most people who start using the SVC.

To learn more about IBM's upcoming products and how IBM will lead in storage this decade, register for next week's webcast "Taming the Information Explosion with IBM Storage" featuring Dan Galvan, IBM Vice President, and Steve Duplessie, Senior Analyst and Founder of Enterprise Storage Group (ESG).

technorati tags: IBM, SVC, HDS, USP, USP-V, USP-VM, VSP, CTO, Hu Yoshida, Ponder

Tags:  svc usp-vm ponder vsp cto hds ibm usp usp-v hu+yoshida

In my presentations in Australia and New Zealand, I mentioned that people were re-discovering the benefits of removable media. While floppy diskettes were convenient way of passing information from one person to another, they unfortunately did not have enough capacity. In today's world, you may need Gigabytes or Terabytes of re-writeable storage with a file system interface that can easily be passed from one person to another. In this post, I explore three options.

Cirago CDD2000 Docking Station

The good folks over at [Cirago International Ltd.] sent me a cute little [CDD2000 docking station] for evalution.

(FCC Disclaimer: I work for IBM, and IBM has no business relationship with Cirago at the time of this writing. Cirago has not paid me to mention their product, but instead provided me a free loaner that I promised to return to them after my evaluation is completed. This post should not be considered an endorsement for Cirago's products. List prices for Cirago and IBM products were determined from publicly available sources for the United States, and may vary in different countries. The views expressed herein may not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of either IBM or Cirago.)

I took a few photos so you can see what exactly this device looks like. Basically, it is a plastic box that holds a single naked disk drive. It has four little rubber feet so that it does not slip on your desk surface.

The inside is quite simple. The power and SATA connections match those of either a standard 3.5 inch drive, or the smaller form factor (SFF) 2.5 inch drive. However, to my dismay, it does not handle EIDE drives which I have a ton of. After taking apart six different computer systems, I found only one had SATA drives for me to try this unit out with.

The unit comes with a USB cable and AC/DC power adapter. In my case, I found the USB 3.0 cable too short for my liking. My tower systems are under my desk, but I like keeping docking stations like this on the top of the desk, within easy reach, but that wasn't going to happen because the USB cable was not long enough.

Instead, I ended up putting it half-way in between, behind my desk, sitting on another spare system. Not ideal, but in theory there are USB-extension cables that probably could fix this. Here it is with the drive inside. I had a 3.5 inch Western Digital [1600AAJS drive] 160 GB, SATA 3 Gbps, 8 MB Cache, 7200 RPM.

To compare the performance, I used a dual-core AMD [Athlon X2] system that I had built for my 2008 [One Laptop Per Child] project. To compare the performance, I ran with the drive externally in the Cirago docking station, then ran the same tests with the same drive internally on the native SATA controller. Although the Cirago documentation indicated that Windows was required, I used Ubuntu Linux 10.04 LTS just fine, using the flexible I/O [fio] benchmarking tool against an ext3 file system.

• Sequential Write - a common use for external disk drive is backup.
• Random read - randomly read files ranging from 5KB to 10MB in size.
• Random mixed - randomly read/write files (50/50 mix) ranging from 5KB to 10MB in size.

Workload	Metric	Internal	External
Sequential Write	Throughput IOPS	1119	1044
	Latency (msec)	0.866 ms	0.948 ms
	Bandwidth (KB/s)	16900	14400
Random Read	Throughput (IOPS)	164	119
	Latency (msec)	6.06 ms	8.36 ms
	Bandwidth (KB/s)	658	477
Random Mixed (50/50)	Throughput (IOPS)	112	81
	Latency (msec) read	8.78 ms	12.1 ms
	Latency (msec) write	0.0983 ms	0.120 ms
	Bandwidth (KB/s) read	557	328
	Bandwidth (KB/s) write	556	337

For sequential write, the Cirago performed well, only about 15 percent slower than native SATA. For random workloads, however, it was 30-40 percent slower. If you are wondering why I did not get USB 3.0 speeds, there are several factors involved here. First, with overheads, 5 Gbps USB 3.0 is expected to get only about 400 MB/sec. My SATA 2.0 controller maxes out at 375 MB/sec, and my USB 2.0 ports on my system are rated for 57 MB/sec, but with overheads will only get 20-25 MB/sec. Most spinning drives only get 75 to 110 MB/sec. Even solid-state drives top out at 250 MB/sec for sustained activity. Despite all that, my internal SATA drive only got 16 MB/sec, and externally with the Cirago 14 MB/sec in sustained write activity.

Here is the mess that is inside my system. The slot for drive 2 was blocked by cables, memory chips and the heat sink for my processor. It is possible to damage a system just trying to squeeze between these obstacles.

However, the point of this post is "removable media". Having to open up the case and insert the second drive and wire it up to the correct SATA port was a pain, and certainly a more difficult challenge than the average PC user wishes to tackle.

Price-wise, the Cirago lists for $49 USD, and the 160GB drive I used lists for $69, so the combination $118 is about what you would pay for a fully integrated external USB drive. However, if you had lots of loose drives, then this could be more convenient and start to save you some money.

IBM RDX disk backup system

Another problem with the Cirago approach is that the disk drives are naked, with printed circuit board (PCB) exposed. When not in the docking station, where do you put your drive? Did you keep the [anti-static ESD bag] that it came in when you bought it? And once inside the bag, now what? Do you want to just stack it up in a pile with your other pieces of equipment?

To solve this, IBM offers the RDX backup system. These are fully compatible with other RDX sytems from Dell, HP, Imation, NEC, Quantum, and Tandberg Data. The concept is to have a docking station that takes removable, rugged plastic-coated disk-enclosed cartridges. The docking station can be part of the PC itself, similar to how CD/DVD drives are installed, or as a stand-alone USB 2.0 system, capable of processing data up to 25 MB/sec.

The idea is not new, about 10 years ago we had [Iomega "zip" drives] that offered disk-enclosed cartridges with capacities of 100, 250 and 750MB in size. Iomega had its fair share of problems with the zip drive, which were ranked in 2006 as the 15th worst technology product of all time, and were eventually were bought out by EMC two years later (as if EMC has not had enough failures on its own!)

The problem with zip drives was that they did not hold as much as CD or DVD media, and were more expensive. By comparison, IBM RDX cartridges come in 160GB to 750GB in size, at list prices starting at $127 USD.

IBM LTO tape with Long-Term File System

Removable media is not just for backup. Disk cartridges, like the IBM RDX above, had the advantage of being random access, but most tape are accessed sequentially. IBM has solved this also, with the new IBM Long Term File System [LTFS], available for LTO-5 tape cartridges.

With LFTS, the LTO-5 tape cartridge now can act as a super-large USB memory stick for passing information from one person to the next. The LTO-5 cartridge can handle up to 3TB of compressed data at up to SAS speeds of 140 MB/sec. An LTO-5 tape cartridge lists for only $87 USD.

The LTO-5 drives, such as the IBM [TS2250 drive] can read LTO-3, LTO-4 and LTO-5cartridges, and can write LTO-4 and LTO-5 cartridges, in a manner that is fully compatible with LTO drives from HP or Quantum. LTO-3, LTO-4 and LTO-5 cartridges are available in WORM or rewriteable formats. LTO-4 and LTO-5 cartridges can be encrypted with 256-bit AES built-in encryption. With three drive manufacturers, and seven cartridge manufacturers, there is no threat of vendor lock-in with this approach.

These three options offer various trade-offs in price, performance, security and convenience. Not surprisingly, tape continues to be the cheapest option.

technorati tags: IBM, Cirago, CDD2000, RDX, Ubuntu, Linux, LTO, LTO-5, LTFS, SATA, USB, fio

Tags:  rdx usb cdd2000 iomega lto-5 linux zip fio ltfs cirago ibm sata ubuntu lto

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tags:  innovation vdi xiv canberra australia ds4800 government vmware ibm

Continuing my romp through Australia and New Zealand, this is city 6 - Wellington, which is the capital of New Zealand. This meant many of the clients in the audience work in government agencies.

Here is my view of Wellington from my hotel room at the Duxton Hotel. I have been to Wellington before, it has that "small town" feel.

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

Replacing Natalie from GPJ Australia is Megan, who coordinated our events in both Auckland and Wellington, NZ.

Next, we had Glen Mitchell again from Telecom NZ, presenting his success story going from an EMC-only environment to a dual IBM-and-EMC mixed environment managed by IBM SAN Volume Controller.

Someone mentioned that my job as public speaker in different cities was akin to "busking". I had no idea what "busking" was, until I was shown two "in the act" in front of a bank. Americans call these "street performers", which shows we appreciate this art form perhaps more than the Kiwis.

Lastly, I covered future trends in storage. This is particularly interesting to government agencies that are particularly interested in reducing costs, managing risks, and improving service delivery.

Lastly, this is Aisel Giumali, IBM storage marketing manager for Australia and New Zealand. She managed my calendar, all of my events and one-on-one client briefings. I could not have handled these past two weeks without her.

Since the first big earthquake on Saturday, there were several smaller aftershocks, including one in Wellington itself. It is a good thing I head back for Australia for the rest of the trip.

technorati tags: IBM, Wellington, busking, Aisel Giumali

Tags:  aisel+giumali wellington busking ibm

While I was in Auckland, New Zealand, for the IBM Storage Optimisation Breakfast series of events, I agreed to also talk at the [Ingram Micro Showcase 2010] held there the same week. David Bird, who was scheduled to speak, was down in Christchurch taking care of his family after the big 7.1 magnitude earthquake.

The marketing team did a great job putting up a "Smarter Planet" ball up near the ceiling. It had to be "enhanced" with some extra black ink to include the outline of the islands of New Zealand.

Basically, I had 25 minutes to present "Future Storage Trends" to a packed room with standing room only. This was a shortened version of my 40-minute talk that I had been already giving at the Storage Optimisation Breakfast events. This presentation was based on three key trends:

1. There is a shift in the role each storage media type is going to be used for. Rising energy costs, performance and economics are causing the IT industry to re-evaluate their use of solid-state drives, spinning disk, tape cartridge, paper and analog film. IBM Easy Tier and blended disk-and-tape solutions are paving the way for these future trends.
2. Advancements in commuications technology and bandwidth are driving a convergence of SANs and LANs to a single Data Center Network (DCN) based on Convergence Enhanced Ethernet (CEE). IBM's top-of-rack switches and converged network adapaters (CNA) are the first step in this process.
3. Cloud Computing is driving new levels of standardization, automation and management that will impact the way internal IT departments will manage their own IT equipment as well. IBM's five different levels of cloud computing offerings, from private cloud to public cloud, provides every individual or company a level of service that is just right.

Here is the IBM booth. As is often the case, we get a prestigious corner booth that maximizes foot traffic to see our solutions.

While walking around, the folks at the Samsung booth notices my Samsung Galaxy S smartphone. These are not yet available in the New Zealand market, so they thought I was a Samsung employee. I explained that I am an American, and that these have been available for weeks now in the states.

The Samsung team then showed me their latest 3D television. Basically, you wear special 3D glasses that sync-up electronically with the TV screen itself to give the appearance of 3D image on anything you play. I believe the TV comes with two pairs of glasses, and additional pairs can be purchased for substantial extra. It works with any movie or TV show, there is no requirement that it be filmed in 3D mode. The 3D-TV automatically analyzes that is moving on the screen, and then makes that item clearer and sharper, and things that are considered background are automatically made fuzzier, out of focus. The effect is really incredible.

One of the storage solutions on display was the entry-level IBM System Storage DS3524 disk system, which is a small 2U high cabinet that holds 24 drives. These are the small form factor 2.5 inch drives. It's amazing we can pack so many drives in such a compact rack-optimized enclosure!

Ingram Micro is one of IBM's technology distributors, and it was good to see it was a well-attended event.

technorati tags: IBM, Ingram Micro, Auckland, DS3500, DS3524, Samsung, Galaxy, smartphone, future, storage trends

Tags:  galaxy storage+trends ds3500 future ibm ingram+micro samsung ds3524 auckland smartphone

I am now fully a week behind in my coverage of my romp through Australia and New Zealand. Last week was "week 2" of the "Tony and Anna" show! This time we were in Auckland, New Zealand. Anna Wells is from New Zealand originally, so it was good for her to be back in her home country.

Sunday I was able to take the Ferry boat to Devonport, and climb to the top of Mt Victoria, which is only 283 feet above sea level, but still affords spectacular views of Auckland from across the harbour. My hotel, the Auckland Heritage, as well as the IBM building, is about a block or two away from the Sky Tower.

New Zealand shares a lot of traits with Australia, including low unemployment and a healthy economy. Employees feel secure enough in their jobs to invest in real estate, get married and start families. School teachers are well-regarded in society, earning six-figure incomes. Retail stores were filled with shoppers spending [disposable and discretionary income]. What a refreshing difference from the United States! The level of optimism made my skin tingle. I had to file a lot of paperwork for all the work permits and visas for this trip, so I hate to think what it would take to emigrate to either country.

(Of course, the grass always appears greener on the other side. Not everything is perfect in New Zealand. I saw warning signs for toxic sea slugs in their beaches, sales advertising for [Brolly Sheets], and the south island of New Zealand suffered a magnitute 7.1 earthquake near Christchurch on the day I arrived to Auckland on the north island. Over 100,000 homes were damaged, but nobody died, and the entire country rallied support to help out those affected.)

I took this photo of a seagull walking along Cheltenham Beach. I thought it might make for a nice wallpaper for my phone or laptop.

The Storage Optimisation Breakfast at this, the fifth of seven cities, went smoothly. The New Zealand client case study she had planned to show was in the middle of an [RFP], so instead she covered [Edith Cowan University] and [Bunnings Warehouse] from Australia as examples of success stories.

Our next speaker was Glen Mitchell, an IT architect in the Operational Integration, Technology & Shared Services of Telecom NZ. The Telecom NZ is New Zealand's phone company, recently split up into separate business units, similar to what the US government did to AT&T during the 1974 [Bell System Divestiture].

The change forced Telecom NZ to be more financially responsible. Before, they were using an all-EMC disk environment, managed by HP Enterprise Services (formerly known as EDS). The EMC gear worked as expected and Telecom NZ is happy with EMC as a vendor, but they were uncomfortable with vendor lock-in. Some firmware upgrades on their EMC boxes often forced them to take outages on hundreds of connected servers to install Powerpath updates. After an EMC disk array went off its four-year prepaid warranty, it took another FOUR YEARS to get all 180 servers migrated to another disk array. Keeping a disk array after warranty expires can cost as much as $450K NZD per year, per disk array, in maintenance fees! Ouch!  This served as a strong motivator to find a way to migrate data from one disk array to another in a more smooth and timely manner.

The new direction was a dual-vendor environment, keeping some of the midrange EMC gear, and getting new IBM high-end DS8700 gear, resulting in a drastically lower TCO. To make the transition as smooth as possible, Telecom NZ employed IBM SAN Volume Controller (SVC) to virtualize their entire environment, both EMC and IBM happily being part of shared disk pools. They had originally planned to migrate their entire server environment over in 12 months, but in the first six weeks, they are already at 20 percent, ahead of schedule!

The SAN Volume Controllers will also allow Telecom NZ have Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery protection in a consistent manner across both EMC and IBM equipment between their two main data centers in Auckland and Hamilton.

Remember those trees shown in the movie trilogy "Lord of the Rings"? The trees here in New Zealand are amazing! I'm not an arborist, but I was told this one shown here is a [Morton Bay Fig Tree]. Some of the oldest trees in the world live in New Zealand.

By deploying IBM DS8700 and SAN Volume Controller, Telecom NZ was able to reduce costs, manage risk, and improve service delivery!

technorati tags: IBM, Auckland, Devonport, Telecom NZ, HPES, Hewlett-Packard, EDS, EMC, vendor lock-in, price-gouging

Tags:  telecom+nz devonport auckland hpes hewlett-packard eds emc price-gouging vendor+lock-in ibm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Continuing my romp through Australia and New Zealand, today I presented in Melbourne. We had a huge turn-out, close to a hundred attendees sitting at a dozen different tables.

Here is the view of the St. Patrick's Cathedral from my hotel room at the [Park Hyatt Melbourne].

In the first two cities, Adam Beames, system administrator for Tennis Australia, presented. Tennis Australia is most known for running the [Australian Open], the first Grand Slam tennis tourney of the year, but they also run some smaller events, such as the Brisbane International, the Sydney International, the Hobart International, the Davis Cup, the Fed Cup and the Pro Tour. They have 150 full time staff, and another 180 staff contributed from their eight member associations they support.

Of these events, the Australian Open is by far the biggest, with over 9 million unique visitors to the website for the few weeks in January every year. For this, Tennis Australia leverages IBM cloud computing services. The rest of the year, they have deployed their own "private cloud" for running the other events. During the month of January, Tennis Australia grows their staff from 300 to 4500 people.

Adam had been there since 2005, and told how back then they were using beige-colored IBM PC 330 tower servers, on a plastic shelf that was sagging from the weight. This server had six hot-swappable drives, 4.5GB each. There was also a mysterious "blue box" that served as their serial distribution panel, operated by a laptop running Windows 95, with a spare laptop just in case for high-availability.

(Last month, August 24, marked Microsoft's 15 year anniversary for the introduction of Windows 95! Read Mary Jo Foley's article [Were you in line to buy Windows 95 fifteen years ago?])

The situation started to improve in 2008, Tennis Australia brought in BladeCenter H with HS20, HS21 and HS22 blade servers, and x3850 M2 machines for VMware virtual machines, and boot over SAN to an IBM XIV disk system. This allows them to run all of the other tennis events throughout the year. It provided N+1 redundancy, and made the process of provisioning servers and storage simple and efficient.

This is the view of Melbourne from the IBM office. The tall 975 foot building on the left with the golden bumblebees at the base is the famous [Eureka Tower], Melbourne's tallest residential building.

As Paul Harvey would say, at Melbourne we got to hear [the rest of the story] from Chris Yates, the CIO of Tennis Australia. He came on board in November 2007, just six weeks prior to the big Australian Open of January 2008. Witnessing how bad the IT was for the infrastructure, he partnered with IBM to deploy all the solutions that Adam mentioned in the first two cities. The transformation over the past two years has been a phenomenal success, with some of the best recognized international tennis organizations crediting Tennis Australia for some of the best run events.

IBM is also using its [cloud computing services to help the US Open] as well. In both the Australian Open and the US Open, IBM provides a cloud computing capability that allows the operation to scale up dramatically for the tournament. IBM rapidly creates and provisions services on a common infrastructure -- services that are mission-critical to the tennis tournament.

And now you know the rest of the story.

technorati tags: IBM, Tennis Australia, Austrian Open, US Open, Chris Yates, Adam Beames

Tags:  ibm us+open adam+beames tennis+australia austrian+open chris+yates

I'm down here in Australia, where the government is a bit stalled for the past two weeks at the moment, known formally as being managed by the [Caretaker government]. Apparently, there is a gap between the outgoing administration and the incoming administration, and the caretaker government is doing as little as possible until the new regime takes over. They are still counting votes, including in some cases dummy ballots known as "donkey votes", the Australian version of the hanging chad.  Three independent parties are also trying to decide which major party they will support to finalize the process.

While we are on the topic of a government stalled, I feel bad for the state of Virginia in the United States. Apparently, one of their supposedly high-end enterprise class EMC Symmetrix DMX storage systems, supporting 26 different state agencies in Virginia, crashed on August 25th and now more than a week later, many of those agencies are still down, including the Department of Motor Vehicles and the Department of Taxation and Revenue.

Many of the articles in the press on this event have focused on what this means for the reputation of EMC. Not surprisingly, EMC says that this failure is unprecedented, but really this is just one in a long series of failures from EMC. It reminds me of the last time EMC had a public failure with a dual-controller CLARiiON a few months ago that stopped another company from their operations. There is nothing unique in the physical equipment itself, all IT gear can break or be taken down by some outside force, such as a natural disaster. The real question, though, is why haven’t EMC and the State Government been able to restore operations many days after the hardware was fixed?

In the Boston Globe, Zeus Kerravala, a data storage analyst at Yankee Group in Boston, is quoted as saying that such a high-profile breakdown could undermine EMC’s credibility with large businesses and government agencies. “I think it’s extremely important for them,’’ said Kerravala. “When you see a failure of this magnitude, and their inability to get a customer like the state of Virginia up and running almost immediately, all companies ought to look at that and raise their eyebrows.’’

Was the backup and disaster recovery solution capable of the scale and service level requirements needed by vital state agencies? Had they tested their backups to ensure they were running correctly, and had they tested their recovery plans? Were they monitoring the success of recent backup operations?

Eventually, the systems will be back up and running, fines and penalties will be paid, and perhaps the guy who chose to go with EMC might feel bad enough to give back that new set of golf clubs, or whatever ridiculously expensive gift EMC reps might offer to government officials these days to influence the purchase decision making process.

(Note: I am not accusing any government employee in particular working at the state of Virginia of any wrongdoing, and mention this only as a possibility of what might have happened. I am sure the media will dig into that possibility soon enough during their investigations, so no sense in me discussing that process any further.)

So what lessons can we learn from this?

Lesson 1: You don't just buy technology, you also are choosing to work with a particular vendor

IBM stands behind its products. Choosing a product strictly on its speeds and feeds misses the point. A study IBM and Mercer Consulting Group conducted back in 2007 found that only 20 percent of the purchase decision for storage was from the technical capabilities. The other 80 percent were called "wrapper attributes", such as who the vendor was, their reputation, the service, support and warranty options.

Lesson 2: Losing a single disk system is a disaster, so disaster recovery plans should apply

IBM has a strong Business Continuity and Recovery Services (BCRS) services group to help companies and government agencies develop their BC/DR plans. In the planning process, various possible incidents are identified, recovery point objectives (RPO) and recovery time objectives (RTO) and then appropriate action plans are documentede on how to deal with them. For example, if the state of Virginia had an RPO of 48 hours, and an RTO of 5 days, then when the failure occurred on August 25, they could have recovered up to August 23 level data(48 hours prior to the incident) and be up and running by August 30 (five days after the incident). I don't personally know what RPO and RTO they planned for, but certainly it seems like they missed it by now already.

Lesson 3: BC/DR Plans only work if you practice them often enough

Sadly, many companies and government agencies make plans, but never practice them, so they have no idea if the plans will work as expected, or if they are fundamentally flawed. Just as we often have fire drills that force everyone to stop what they are doing and vacate the office building, anyone with an IT department needs to practice BC/DR plans often enough so that you can ensure the plan itself is solid, but also so that the people involved know what to do and their respective roles in the recovery process.

Lesson 4: This can serve as a wake-up call to consider Cloud Computing as an alternative option

Are you still doing IT in your own organization? Do you feel all of the IT staff have been adequately trained for the job? If your biggest disk system completely failed, not just a minor single or double drive failure, but a huge EMC-like failure, would your IT department know how to recover in less than five days? Perhaps this will serve as a wake-up call to consider alternative IT delivery options. The advantage of big Cloud Service Providers (Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Amazon, SalesForce.com and of course, IBM) is that they are big enough to have worked out all the BC/DR procedures, and have enough resources to switch over to in case any individual disk system fails.

To learn more on this event, see the following articles: Washington Post, ZDnet.com, and Government Computer News.

technorati tags: EMC, Symmetrix, DMX, Failure, Virginia, State Government, DMV, IBM, Business Continuity, Disaster Recovery

Tags:  ibm dmx state+government disaster+recovery dmv symmetrix virginia failure emc business+continuity

Continuing my romp through Australia and New Zealand, today I presented in Hobart, the second city on my seven-city tour. Hobart is on a separate island called Tasmania, just south of the main Australian continent. The island is heart-shaped, and Hobart is in the lower right ventricle.

Hobart boasts the second deepest harbour in the Southern Hemisphere (yesterday's Sydney Harbour being the first). It is quite cold here, but at least the skies are clear.

I stayed in the [Henry Jones Art Hotel], named after the famous owner of the IXL Jam Company. When I arrived, they presented me with a list of 18 known convicts that shared my last name: PEARSON. I checked and made sure I was not on the list. Then it was explained to me that here in Australia, everyone values their criminal ancestors, as this is how the country was formed. The names were from registry archives from the 19th century.

In keeping with the concept of an art hotel, each of the rooms were unique, which is a nice way of saying that they fit whatever they could into the spaces available. It's been a while since I stayed at a hotel with the phone at one end of the room, but the electrical outlet at the other. The thermostat was hidden in the bathroom, and I had to master some 16 different ropes to put down the shades, as the bright light from the [Cenotaph] was keeping me awake. I was able to take pictures of some of the art sculptures from the balcony.

This was a smaller event than Sydney, with only about two dozen attendees. This makes sense, as Hobart population is only about 250,000 people. Tasmania island hold about 1 million people overall, concentrated mostly along the center line of the island.

As we had done in Sydney, Anna Wells presented IBM strategy and products, Adam Beames, system administrator for Tennis Australia (shown here in the picture at left) presented his experiences transforming their datacenter, and I presented the future trends in storage.

In appreciation for Adam's presentations in Sydney and Hobart, I presented him with a copy of my book, [Inside System Storage: Volume I], available from my publisher, Lulu.com, in paperback, hard cover, and now also in eBook format for those with Kindle, Nook or other digital book readers. See panel at right on this blog for ordering information.

technorati tags: IBM, Hobart, Events, Adam Beames, Henry James, IXL Jam

Tags:  ixl+jam ibm events henry+james adam+beames hobart

This week and next, I am down under in Australia and New Zealand for a seven-city Storage Optimisation Breakfast series of presentations to clients and prospects. My first city for this seven-city tour was Sydney, Australia.

Here is the view from my room at the [Shangri-La hotel], including the famous [Sydney Opera House] and Circular Quay, from which to take a water taxi or ride the Manly Ferry. [Sydney harbour] is the deepest harbour in the Southern Hemisphere, allowing boats of all sizes to enter. This section of the city is known as "The Rocks".

Sydney is a very modern metropolis. The last time I was in Sydney was in May 2007 to teach an IBM Top Gun class. My post back then on [Dealing with Jet Lag] is as relevant now as it was back then. In addition to being 9 hours off-shifted from last week in Dallas, Texas, I also have to deal with the colder climate, about 40 degrees F cooler down here. The weather is crisp and clear, it is Winter going into Spring down here as the seasons are flipped below the equator.

Many of the buildings are recognizable from the movie ["The Matrix"] which was filmed here. We joked that this seven-city trip was also similar to [The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert], in that both journeys started in Sydney. If you haven't seen the latter, I highly recommend it to get to learn more about Australia as a country.

(Completely useless trivia: Actor Hugo Weaving appeared in both movies. While most people associate him with Australia, where he has lived since 1976, he actually was born in Nigeria, and traveled extensively because his father worked in the computer industry.)

Here I am standing next to our banner.

The line-up for each event is simple. After all the attendees sit down for breakfast, we have the following three sessions:

• First, Anna Wells, local IBM Executive for Storage Sales in Australia and New Zealand presents IBM's strategy for storage, and how IBM plans to address Storage Efficiency, Data Protection and Service Delivery. She then highlights various products that are currently available to help meet customer needs, including XIV and the SAN Volume Controller (SVC).
• Second, we have a client or two share their success story. We will have different speakers at the different locations.
• Third, I present on future trends that will impact the storage marketplace. With only 40 minutes for my section, I decided to focus on just three specific trends, with a mix of some colorful analogies to help emphasize my key points.

We had a great turn-out for our first event in Sydney, lots of clients and prospects came out for this. There is a lot of enthusiasm for IBM's vision, thought leadership, and broad portfolio of storage solutions.

technorati tags: , IBM, storage, optimisation, events, Sydney, Australia, Hugo Weaving, Anna Wells

Tags:  hugo+weaving sydney australia anna+wells optimisation ibm events storage