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Tony Pearson is a Master Inventor, Senior IT Architect and Event Content Manager for [IBM Systems for IBM Systems Technical University] events. With over 30 years with IBM Systems, Tony is frequent traveler, speaking to clients at events throughout the world.
Tony is author of the Inside System Storage series of books, available on Lulu.com! Order your copies today!
Lloyd Dean is an IBM Senior Certified Executive IT Architect in Infrastructure Architecture. Lloyd has held numerous senior technical roles at IBM during his 19 plus years at IBM. Lloyd most recently has been leading efforts across the Communication/CSI Market as a senior Storage Solution Architect/CTS covering the Kansas City territory. In prior years Lloyd supported the industry accounts as a Storage Solution architect and prior to that as a Storage Software Solutions specialist during his time in the ATS organization.
Lloyd currently supports North America storage sales teams in his Storage Software Solution Architecture SME role in the Washington Systems Center team. His current focus is with IBM Cloud Private and he will be delivering and supporting sessions at Think2019, and Storage Technical University on the Value of IBM storage in this high value IBM solution a part of the IBM Cloud strategy. Lloyd maintains a Subject Matter Expert status across the IBM Spectrum Storage Software solutions. You can follow Lloyd on Twitter @ldean0558 and LinkedIn Lloyd Dean.
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This week, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, I am at the IBM Dynamic Infrastructure Executive Summit at the beautiful Fairmont Resort in Scottsdale, Arizona. This is a mix of indoor and outdoor meetings, one-on-ones with IBM executives, and main-tent sessions.
The Solutions Showcase will cover the following:
Smarter Systems
As the bar for performance gets higher and the need to manage, store and analyze massive amounts of information escalates, systems must scale to meet the needs of the business. The latest server and storage technology innovations including: POWER7, eX5, XIV, ProtecTIER, SONAS, and System z Solution Editions.
Smarter Data Centers
Today’s data centers are under extreme power and cooling pressures and space constraints. How can you get more out of your existing facility, while planning for future requirements? IBM energy efficiency consultants will tell you how you can reduce both CAPEX and OPEX costs and plan for future growth with consolidation and virtualization, energy efficient (energy star) equipment and modular data center solutions. Be sure to check out the IBM Portable Modular Data Center (PMDC) that fits in a standard shipping crate!
Smarter Clouds
IBM’s Cloud Computing solutions provide you with flexible, dynamic, secure and cost-efficient delivery choices from pay-per-use (by the hour, week or year) at IBM cloud centers around the world, conditioning your infrastructure to build your own private cloud or out-of-the box cloud solutions that are quick and easy to deploy. Which workloads are the best fit for cloud computing? How do you decide which cloud computing is right for your organization? Cloud experts will talk about the options, give you recommendations based on your business objectives and help you get started.
It seems everyone is talking about stacks, appliances and clouds.
On StorageBod, fellow blogger Martin Glassborow has a post titled [Pancakes!] He feels that everyone from Hitachi to Oracle is turning into the IT equivalent of the International House of Pancakes [IHOP] offering integrated stacks of software, servers and storage.
Cisco introduced its "Unified Computing System" about a year ago, [reinventing the datacenter with an all-Ethernet approach]. Cisco does not offer its own hypervisor software nor storage, so there are two choices. First, Cisco has entered a joint venture, called Acadia, with VMware and EMC, to form the Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) coalition. The resulting stack was named Vblock, which one blogger had hyphenated as Vb-lock to raise awareness to the proprietary vendor lock-in nature of this stack. Second, Cisco, VMware and NetApp had a similar set of [Barney press releases] to announce a viable storage alternative to those not married to EMC.
"Only when it makes sense. Oracle/Sun has the better argument: when you know exactly what you want from your database, we’ll sell you an integrated appliance that will do exactly that. And it’s fine if you roll your own.
But those are industry-wide issues. There are UCS/VCE specific issue as well:
Cost. All the integration work among 3 different companies costs money. They aren’t replacing existing costs – they are adding costs. Without, in theory, charging more.
Lock-in. UCS/Vblock is, effectively, a mainframe with a network backplane.
Barriers to entry. Are there any? Cisco flagged hypervisor bypass and large memory support as unique value-add – and neither seems any more than a medium-term advantage.
BOT? Build, Operate, Transfer. In theory Vblocks are easier and faster to install and manage. But customers are asking that Acadia BOT their new Vblocks. The customer benefit over current integrator practice? Lower BOT costs? Or?
Price. The 3 most expensive IT vendors banding together?
Longevity. Industry “partnerships” don’t have a good record of long-term success. Each of these companies has its own competitive stresses and financial imperatives, and while the stars may be aligned today, where will they be in 3 years? Unless Cisco is piloting an eventual takeover."
Fellow blogger Bob Sutor (IBM) has an excellent post titled
[Appliances and Linux]. Here is an excerpt:
"In your kitchen you have special appliances that, presumably, do individual things well. Your refrigerator keeps things cold, your oven makes them hot, and your blender purees and liquifies them. There is room in a kitchen for each of these. They work individually but when you are making a meal they each have a role to play in creating the whole.
You could go out and buy the metal, glass, wires, electrical gadgets, and so on that you would need to make each appliance but it is is faster, cheaper, and undoubtably safer to buy them already manufactured. For each device you have a choice of providers and you can pay more for additional features and quality.
In the IT world it is far more common to buy the bits and pieces that make up a final solution. That is, you might separately order the hardware components, the operating system, and the applications, and then have someone put them all together for you. If you have an existing configuration you might add more blades or more storage devices.
You don’t have to do this, however, in every situation. Just from a hardware perspective, you can buy a ready-made machine just waiting for the on switch to be flicked and the software installed. Conversely, you might get a pre-made software image with operating system and applications in place, ready to be provisioned to your choice of hardware. We can get even fancier in that the software image might be deployable onto a virtual machine and so be a ready made solution runnable on a cloud.
Thus in the IT world we can talk about hardware-only appliances, software-only appliances (often called virtual software appliances), and complete hardware and software combinations. The last is most comparable to that refrigerator or oven in your kitchen."
If your company was a restaurant, how many employees would you have on hand to produce your own electricity from gas generators, pump your own water from a well, and assemble your own toasters and blenders from wires and motors? I think this is why companies are re-thinking the way they do their own IT.
Rather than business-as-usual, perhaps a mix of pre-configured appliances, consisting of software, server and storage stacked to meet a specific workload, connected to public cloud utility companies, might be the better approach. By 2013, some analysts feel that as many as 20 percent of companies might not even have a traditional IT datacenter anymore.
“By employing techniques like virtualization, automated management, and utility-billing models, IT managers can evolve the internal datacenter into a ‘private cloud’ that offers many of the performance, scalability, and cost-saving benefits associated with public clouds. Microsoft provides the foundation for private clouds with infrastructure solutions to match a range of customer sizes, needs and geographies.
The public cloud:
“Cloud computing is expanding the traditional web-hosting model to a point where enterprises are able to off-load commodity applications to third-party service providers (hosters) and, in the near future, the Microsoft Azure Services Platform. Using Microsoft infrastructure software and Web-based applications, the public cloud allows companies to move applications between private and public clouds.”
Finally, I saw this from fellow blogger, Barry Burke(EMC), aka the Storage Anarchist, titled [a walk through the clouds] which is really a two-part post.
The first part describes a possible future for EMC customers written by EMC employee David Meiri, envisioning a wonderful world with "No more Metas, Hypers, BIN Files...."
The vision is a pleasant one, and not far from reality. While EMC prefers to use the term "private cloud" to refer to both on-premises and off-premises-but-only-your-employees-can-VPN-to-it-and-your-IT-staff-still-manages-it flavors, the overall vision is available today from a variety of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers.
A good analogy for "private cloud" might be a corporate "intranet" that is accessible only within the company's firewall. This allowed internal websites where information to be disseminated to employees could be posted, using standard HTML and standard web browsers that are already deployed on most PCs and workstations. Web pages running on an intranet can easily be moved to an external-facing website without too much rework or trouble.
The second part has Barry claiming that EMC has made progress towards a "Virtual Storage Server" that might be announced at next month's EMC World conference.
Seriously?
When people hear "Storage Virtualization" most immediately think of the two market leaders, IBM SAN Volume Controller and Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) Universal Storage Platform (USP) products. Those with a tape bent might throw in IBM's TS7000 virtual tape libraries or Oracle/Sun's Virtual Storage Manager (VSM). And those focused on software-only solutions might recall Symantec's Veritas Volume Manager (VxVM), DataCore's SANsymphony, or FalconStor's IPStor products.
But what about EMC's failed attempt at storage virtualization, the Invista? After five years of failing to deliver value, EMC has so far only publicised ONE customer reference account, and I estimate that perhaps only a few dozen actual customers are still running on this platform. Compare that to IBM selling tens of thousands of SAN Volume Controllers, and HDS selling thousands of their various USP-V and USP-VM products, and you quickly realize that EMC has a lot of catching up to do. EMC's first delivered Invista about 18 months after IBM SAN Volume Controller, similar to their introduction of Atmos being 18 months after our Scale-Out File Services (SoFS) and their latest CLARiiON-based V-Max coming out 18 months after IBM's XIV storage system.
So what will EMC's Invista follow-on "Virtual Storage Server" product look like? No idea. It might be another five years before you actually hear about a customer using it. But why wait for EMC to get their act together?
IBM offers solutions TODAY that can make life as easy as envisioned here. IBM offers integrated systems sold as ready-to-use appliances, customized "stacks" that can be built to handle particular workloads, residing on-premises or hosted at an IBM facility, and public cloud "as-a-service" offerings on the IBM Cloud.
My colleagues, Harley Puckett (left) and Jack Arnold (right) were highlighted in today's Arizona Daily Star, our local newspaper, as part of an article on IBM's success and leadership in the IT storage industry. At 1400 employees here in Tucson, IBM is Southern Arizona's 36th largest employer.
Highlighted in the article:
DS8700 with the new Easy Tier feature
TS7650 ProtecTIER virtual tape library with data deduplication capability
LTO-5 tape and the new Long Term File System (LTFS)
XIV with the new 2TB drive, for a maximum per-rack usable capacity of 161 TB.
Perhaps E.A.R.T.H. could stand for IBM's "Energy-efficient Archive, Retention, Tape and Hybrid" storage offerings, which combined, had double-digit percent growth in Petabytes shipped (1Q10 versus 1Q09). This helped IBM gain market share. Last week's LTO-5 announcement was made at [NAB Show 2010] by the National Association of Broadcasters. Why? Because many digital media and entertainment people at this conference are interested in getting off "analog video". LTO-5 is 20 times cheaper than professional versions of the BetaMax or VHS tape currently used. So while many are trying to go "tape-less" by switching to disk, like the IBM DCS9900, they are finding that perhaps LTO-5 tape might be the better alternative. A key advantage of LTO-5 is that the cartridges can now be used like DVD-RW or USB thumb drives, with drag-and-drop file capability using the new Long Term File System (LTFS) on the LTO-5 cartridges. This earned a "Pick Hit" at the conference.
Overall, IBM storage revenues grew double digits, which leads me to believe that the worst of the financial melt-down is over, at least from an IT industry perspective. To learn more, see [IBM 1Q10 Financial Results].
Greg and 3PAR's Marc Farley did an "ambush" interview with the folks at the IBM booth at SNW, including Paula Koziol about Twitter, and [Rich Swain] about IBM's latest SONAS product. Here is their post [Storage Monkey business with IBM]:
You can learn more about SONAS from my post [More Details about IBM Clustered NAS]. SONAS is based on software that has been available since 1996, on commodity off-the-shelf server and storage systems, but building a complete system was left as an exercise to the end-user, which many of the top 500 Supercomputers have done.
Back in November 2007, IBM announced Scale-Out File Services (SoFS) which was a set of IBM Global Technical Services to build a customized solution from the software and a set of servers, disk and tape storage. Customized configurations were done for a variety of workloads from Digital Media to Scientific Research High Performance Computing (HPC). Last year, SoFS was renamed to IBM Smart Business Storage Cloud (SBSC).
This year, IBM was able to package all of the software and hardware into an easy to order machine-type model that has everything cabled and ready to use. This is what SONAS is today.
Continuing my discussion of this week's announcements of IBM storage products, I will cover the announcements that double storage capacity per footprint.
Linear Tape Open - Generation 5
IBM announced [LTO-5 drives], the TS2250 half-height and the TS2350 full-height drives, as well as support for LTO-5 drives in its various tape libraries: TS3100, TS3200, and TS3500. The native 1.5TB capacity of the LTO-5 cartridge is nearly double the 800GB capacity of the LTO-4 predecessor. With 2:1 compression, that's 3TB of data per cartridge! Performance-wise, the data transfer rate is 140 MB/sec, about 17 percent improvement over the 120MB/sec of the LTO-4 technology. The TS2250, TS2350, TS3100 and TS3200 now all offer dual-SAS ports for higher availability.
LTO-5 carries forward many of the advancements of past generations. For example, LTO-5 continues the G-2/G-1 "backward compatibility" architecture, which means that the LTO-5 drive can read LTO-3 and LTO-4 cartridges, and can write LTO-4 cartridges. Like the LTO-3 and LTO-4, the same LTO-5 drive can read and write WORM or regular rewriteable cartridges. Like the LTO-4, the LTO-5 offers drive-level data-at-rest encryption. These use a symmetric 256-bit AES key, managed by IBM Tivoli Key Lifecycle Manager (TKLM).
One thing that is new in LTO-5 is the Long Term File System [LTFS] available on the TS2250 and TS2350, which allows you to treat the tape as a hierarchical file system, with files and folders, that you can drag and drop like any other file system.
XIV storage system
IBM [doubles the capacity of the XIV storage system] by supporting 2TB SATA drives. A full 15-module frame can hold up to 161TB of usable capacity. The smallest 6-module system with 2TB can hold up to 55TB of usable capacity. At this time, all of the drives in an XIV must be the same type, so we do not yet allow intermix of 1TB and 2TB in the same frame. The 2TB are more energy efficient, with a full 15-module frame consuming on average 6.7 kVA, compared to 7.8 kVA for the 1TB drives. The performance is roughly the same, so if, for example, your application workload got 3700 IOPS per module with 1TB drives, it will get about the same 3700 IOPS per module with 2TB drives.
TS7650 ProtecTIER Data Deduplication
IBM now supports [many-to-one virtual tape volume mirroring] on the ProtecTIER. In other words, you can have two or more locations sending data to a single ProtecTIER disaster recovery site.
N series disk system
The EXN1000 and EXN3000 can now double in capacity with 2TB SATA drives. These can be attached to the N3000 entry-level models, such as the N3400.
DS3000 disk system
The DS3200, DS3300 and DS3400, as well as their related expansion drawers, now supports 2TB SATA drives. This means that a single control unit with three expansion drawers can hold up to 96TB of raw capacity (48 drives).
DS8700 disk system
The DS8700 also now supports 2TB SATA drives, for a maximum raw capacity over 2PB, as well as new 600GB Fibre Channel drives. Now that IBM offers [Easy Tier] functionality, pairing Solid State Drives with slower, energy-efficient SATA disk makes a lot of financial sense.
That's a lot of announcements! As always, feel free to dig into each of the links to learn more about each product.
Well, it's Tuesday, and that means IBM announcements!
IBM kicks EMC in the teeth with the announcement of System Storage Easy Tier, a new feature available at no additional charge on the DS8700 with the R5.1 level microcode. Barry Whyte introduces the concept in his [post this morning]. I will use SLAM (sub-LUN automatic movement) to refer generically to IBM Easy Tier and EMC FAST v2. EMC has yet to deliver FAST v2, and given that they just recently got full-LUN FAST v1 working a few months ago, it might be next year before you see EMC sub-LUN FAST v2.
Here are the key features of Easy Tier on the DS8700:
Sub-LUN Automatic Movement
IBM made it really easy to implement this on the DS8700. Today, you have "extent pools" that can be either SSD-only or HDD-only. With this new announcement, we introduce "mixed" SSD+HDD extent pools. The hottest extents are moved to SSD, and cooler extents are moved down to HDD. The support applies to both Fixed block architecture (FBA) LUNs as well as Count-Key-Data (CKD) volumes. In other words, an individual LUN or CKD volume can have some of its 1GB extents on SSD and other extents on FC or SATA disk.
Entire-LUN Manual Relocation
Entire-LUN Manual Relocation (ELMR, pronounced "Elmer"?) is similar to what EMC offers now with FAST v1. With this feature, you can now relocate an entire LUN non-disruptively from any extent pool to any other extent pool. You can relocate LUNs from an SSD-only or HDD-only pool over to a new Easy Tier-managed "mixed" pool, or take a LUN out of Easy Tier management by moving it to an SSD-only or HDD-only pool. Of course, this support also applies to both Fixed block architecture (FBA) LUNs as well as Count-Key-Data (CKD) volumes.
This feature also can be used to relocate LUNs and CKD volumes from FC to SATA pools, from RAID-10 to RAID-5 pools, and so on.
Pool Mergers
What if you already have SSD-only and HDD-only pools and want to use Easy Tier? You can now merge pools to create a "mixed" pool.
SSD Mini-Packs
Before this announcement, you had to buy 16 solid-state drives at a time, called Mega-packs. Now, you can choose to buy just 8 SSD at a time, called Mini-packs. It turns out that just moving as little as 10 percent of your data from Fibre Channel disk over to Solid-State with Easy Tier can result in up to 300 to 400 percent performance improvement. IBM plans to publish formal SPC-1 benchmark results using Easy Tier-managed mixed extent pool in a few weeks.
Storage Tier Advisor Tool (STAT)
Don't have SSD yet, or not sure how awesome Easy Tier will be for your data center? The IBM Storage Tier Advisor Tool will analyze your extents and estimate how much benefit you will derive if you implement Easy Tier with various amounts of SSD. Those clients with R5.1 microcode on their DS8700 can download from the [DS8700 FTP site].
To learn more, see the [Easy Tier landing page] and the 10-page Easy Tier chapter in [DS8000 Introduction and Planning Guide]. IBM also had announcements regarding LTO-5 tape, N series and XIV storage systems, which I will get to in later posts.
They say "Great Minds think alike" and that imitation is "the sincerest form of flattery." Both of these quotes came to mind when I read fellow blogger Chuck Hollis' (EMC) excellent April 7th blog post [The 10 Big Ideas That Are Shaping IT Infrastructure Today]. Not surprisingly, some of his thoughts are similar to those I had presented two weeks ago in my March 22nd post [Cloud Computing for Accountants]. Here are two charts that caught my eye:
Telephone Operators
On page 13 of my deck, I had an old black and white photo of telephone operators, as part of a section on the history of selecting "cloud" as the iconic graphic to represent all networks. Chuck has this same graphic on his chart titled "#1 The Industrialization of IT Infrastructure".
Looks like Chuck and I use the same "stock photo" search facility!
Arms Dealers
On page 45 on my deck, I had a list of major "arms dealers" that deliver the hardware and software components needed to build Cloud Computing. Chuck has a similar chart, titled "#2 The Consolidation of the IT Industry", but with some interesting differences.
Let's look at some of the key differences:
The left-to-right order is slightly different. I chose a 1-2-4-2-1 symmetrical pattern purely on aesthetic reasons. My presentation was to a bunch of accountants, and so I was trying not to make it sound like an "Infomercial" for IBM products and offerings. My sequence is roughly chronological, in that Oracle announced its intention to acquire Sun, then Cisco, VMware and EMC announced their VCE coalition, followed closely by Cisco, VMware and NetApp announcing they work together well also, followed by [HP extended alliance with Microsoft] on Jan 13, 2010. As the IT marketplace is maturing, more and more customers are looking for an IBM-like one-stop shopping experience, and certainly various "mini-mall" alliances have formed to try to compete in this space.
I had HP and Microsoft in the same column, referring only to the above-mentioned January announcement. HP is all about private cloud hardware infrastructures, but Microsoft is all about "three screens and the public cloud", so not sure how well this alliance will work out from a Cloud Computing perspective. This was not to imply that the other stacks don't work well with Microsoft software. They all do. Perhaps to avoid that controversy, Chuck chose to highlight HP's acquisition of EDS services instead.
I used the vendor logos in their actual colors. Notice that the colors black, blue and red occur most often. These happen to be the three most popular ballpoint pen ink colors found on the very same paper documents these computer companies are trying to eliminate. Paper-less office, anyone? Chuck chose instead to colorize each stack with his own color scheme. While blue for IBM and orange for Sun Microsystems make some sense, it is not clear if he chose green for Cisco/VMware/EMC for any particular reason. Perhaps he was trying to subtly imply that the VCE stack is more energy efficient? Or maybe the green refers to money to indicate that the VCE stack is the most expensive? Either way, I would pit IBM's server/storage/software stack up against anything of comparable price from these other stacks in any energy efficiency bake-off.
What about the Cisco/VMware/NetApp combination? All three got together to assure customers this was a viable combination. IBM is the number one reseller of VMware, and VMware runs great with IBM's N series NAS storage, so I do not dispute Cisco's motivation here. It makes sense for Cisco to two-time EMC in this manner. Why should Cisco limit itself to a single storage supplier? Et tu VMware? Having VMware chose NetApp over its parent company EMC was a bit of a shock. No surprise that Chuck left NetApp out of his chart.
No love for Dell? I give Dell credit for their work with Virtual Desktop Images (VDI), and for embracing Ubuntu Linux for their servers. Dell's acquisitions of EqualLogic iSCSI-based disk systems and Perot Systems for services are also worth noting. Dell used to resell some of EMC's gear, but perhaps that relationship continues to fade away, as I [predicted back in 2007]. Chuck's decision to leave Dell off his chart speaks volumes to where this relationship stands, and where it is going.
Perhaps we are all in just one big ["echo chamber"], as we are all coming up with similar observations, talking to similar customers, and reviewing similar market analyst reports. I am glad, at least this time, that Chuck and I for the most part agree where the marketplace is going. We live in interesting times!
Last week, I presented "An Introduction to Cloud Computing" for two hours to the local Institute of Management Accountants [IMA] for their Continuing Professional Education [CPE]. Since I present IBM's leadership in Cloud Storage offerings, I have had to become an expert in Cloud Computing overall. The audience was a mix of bookkeepers, accountants, auditors, comptrollers, CPAs, and accounting teachers.
Here is a sample of the questions I took during and after my presentation:
If I need to shut down host machine, I lose all my virtual machines as well?
No, it is possible to seemlessly move virtual machines from one host to another. If you need to shut down a host machine, move all the VMs to other hosts, then you can shut down the empty host without impacting business.
Does the SaaS provider have to build their own app, can they not buy an app and then rent it out?
Yes, but they won't have competitive differentiation, and the software development they buy from will want a big cut of the action. SaaS developers that build their own applications can keep more of the profits for themselves.
How do backups work in cloud computing? Do I have to contact someone at the cloud computing company to find the backup tape?
Large datacenters often keep the most recent backups on disk, and older versions on tape in automated tape libraries that can fetch your backup in less than 2 minutes. Because of this, there is no need to talk to anyone, you can schedule or invoke your own backups, and often perform the recovery yourself using self-service tools.
Last month, my sister tried to rent a car during the week the Tucson Gem Show, but they were out of cars she wanted to drive. Could this happen with Cloud Computing?
Not likely. With rental cars, the cars have to be physically in Tucson to rent them. Rental companies could have brought cars down from Phoenix to satisfy demand. With Cloud Computing, it is all accessible over the global network, you are not limited to the cloud providers nearest you.
Is there a reason why Amazon Web Services (AWS) charges more for a Windows image than a Linux image?
Yes, Amazon and Microsoft have a patent cross-licensing agreement where Amazon pays Microsoft for the priveledge of offering Windows-based images on their EC2 cloud infrastructure. It just makes business sense to pass those costs onto the consumer. Linux is a free open source operating system, and is often the better choice.
So if we rent a machine from Amazon, they send it to my accounting office? What exactly am I getting for 12 cents per hour?
No. The computer remains in their datacenter. You get a virtual machine that runs 1.2Ghz Intel processor, with 1700MB of RAM, and 160GB of hard disk space, with Windows operating system running on it, comparable to a machine you can get at the local BestBuy, but instead of it running in the next room, it is running in a datacenter somewhere else in the United States with electricity and air conditioning.
You access it remotely from your desktop or laptop PC.
Why would I ever rent more than one computer?
It depends on your workload. For example, Derek Gottfrid at the New York Times needed to convert 11 million articles from TIFF format to PDF format so that he could put them up on the web. This would have taken him months using a single computer, so he rented 100 computers and got the entire stack converted in 24 hours, for a cost of about $240. See the articles [Self-Service, Prorated, Super Computing] and [TimesMachine] for details.
What about throughput? Won't I need to run cables from my accounting office to this cloud computing data center?
You will need connectivity, most likely from connections provided by your local telephone or cable company, or through the Internet. Certainly, there can be cases where direct privately-owned fiber optic cables, known as "dark fiber", can directly connect consumers to local Cloud service providers, for added security.
What about medical records? Will Cloud Computing help the Healthcare industry?
Yes, hospitals are finding that digitizing their records greatly reduces costs. IBM offers the Grid Medical Archive Solution [GMAS] as a private cloud storage solution to store X-ray images and other electronic medical records on disk and tape, and these records can be accessed from multiple hospitals and clinics, wherever the doctor or patient happens to be.
The advantage of personal computers was individualization, I could put on my own choices of software, and customize my own settings, won't we lose this with Cloud Computing?
Yes, customized software and settings cost companies millions of dollars with help desk calls. Cloud Computing attempts to provide some standardization, reducing the amount of effort to support IT operations.
Won't putting all the computers into a big datacenter make them more vulnerable to hackers?
Security is a well-known concern, but this is being addressed with encryption, access control lists, multi-tenancy isolation, and VPN connections.
My daughter has a BlackBerry or iPod or something, and when we mentioned that someone in Phoenix wore a monkey suit to avoid photo-radar speed cameras, she was able to pull up a picture on her little hand-held thing, is this the future?
Yes, mobile phones and other hand-held devices now have internet access to take advantage of Cloud Computing services. People will be able to access the information they need from wherever they happen to be. (You can see the picture here: [Man Dons Mask for Speed-Camera Photos])
IBM offers a variety of Cloud Computing services, as well as customized solutions and integrated systems that can be deployed on-premises behind your corporate firewall. To learn more, go to [ibm.com/cloud].
The second speaker was local celebrity Dan Ryan presenting the financials for the upcoming [Rosemont Copper] mining operations. Copper is needed for emerging markets, such as hybrid vehicles and wind turbines. Copper is a major industry in Arizona.
The marketshare data for external disk systems has been released by IDC for 4Q09. Overall, the market dropped 0.7 percent, comparing 4Q09 versus 4Q08. While EMC was quick to remind everyone that they were able to [maintain their #1 position] in the storage subset of "external disk systems", with the same 23.7 percent marketshare they had back in 4Q08 and revenues that were essentially flat, the real story concerns the shifts in the marketplace for the other major players. IBM grew revenue 9 percent, putting it nearly 5 points of marketshare ahead of HP. HP revenues dropped 7 percent, moving it further behind. Not mentioned in the [IBM Press Release] were NetApp and Dell, neck and neck for fourth place, with NetApp gaining 16.8 percent in revenues, while Dell dropped 13.5 percent. Both NetApp and Dell now have about 8 percent marketshare each. These top five storage vendors represent nearly 70 percent of the marketshare.
Given that HP is IBM's number one competitor, not just in storage but all things IT, this was a major win. Bob Evans from InformationWeek interviews my fifth-line manager, IBM executive Rod Adkins [IBM Claims Hardware Supremacy] where he shares his views and opinions about HP, Oracle-Sun, Cisco and Dell.
I'll add my two cents on what's going on:
Shift in Servers causes Shift in Storage
Hundreds of customers are moving away from HP and Sun over to IBM servers, and with it, are chosing IBM's storage offerings as well. IBM's rock-solid strategy (which I outlined in my post [Foundations and Flavorings]) has helped explain the different products and how they are positioned. HP's use of Itanium processors, and Sun's aging SPARC line, are both reasons enough to switch to IBM's lastest POWER7 processors, running AIX, IBM i (formerly i5/OS) and Linux operating systems.
Thunder in the Clouds
Some analysts predict that by 2013, one out of five companies won't even have their own IT assets. IBM supports all flavors of private, public and hybrid cloud computing models. IBM has its own strong set of offerings, is also the number one reseller of VMware, and has cloud partnerships with both Google and Amazon. HP and Microsoft have recently formed an alliance, but they have different takes on cloud computing. HP wants to be the "infrastructure" company, but Microsoft wants to focus on its ["three screens and a public cloud"] strategy. Microsoft has decided not to make its Azure Cloud operating system available for private cloud deployments. By contrast, IBM can start you with a private cloud, then help you transition to a hybrid cloud, and finally to a public cloud.
In the latest eX5 announcement, IBM's x86-based servers can run 78 percent more virtual machines per VMware license dollar. This will give IBM an advantage as HP shifts from Itanium to an all x86-based server line.
Network Attached Storage
There seems to be a shift away from FC and iSCSI towards NAS and FCoE storage networking protocols. This bodes bad for HP's acquisition of LeftHand, and Dell's acquisition of EqualLogic. IBM's SONAS for large deployments, and N series for smaller deployments, will compete nicely against HP's StorageWorks X9000 system.
Storage on Paper no longer Eco-friendly
HP beats IBM when you include consumer products like printers, which some might consider "Storage on Paper". At IBM, we often joke that 96 percent of HP's profits come from over-priced ink cartridges. With the latest focus on the environment, people are printing less. I have been printing less myself, setting my default printer to generate a PDF file instead. There are several tools available for this, including [CutePDF] and [BullZip]. As IBM employees switch from Microsoft Office to IBM's [Lotus Symphony], it has built-in "export-to-PDF" capability as well. People are also going to their local OfficeMax or CartridgeWorld to get their cartridges refilled, rather than purchase new ones. That has to be hurting HP's bottom line.
Don't Forget About Storage Management
The leading storage management suites today are IBM's Tivoli Storage Productivity Center and EMC's Control Center. HP's Storage Essentials doesn't quite beat either of these, and management software is growing in importance to more and more customers.
To learn more about IBM results 4Q09 and full-year 2009, see [Quarterly Earnings].
Tony Pearson is a Master Inventor, Senior IT Architect and Event Content Manager for [
Christopher Vollmar is a Storage Architect supporting customers in Canada and the Caribbean. He is a Certified Consulting IT Specialist and a Design Thinking practitioner. He has also been a contributing author to the the 
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If I need to shut down host machine, I lose all my virtual machines as well?
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No, it is possible to seemlessly move virtual machines from one host to another. If you need to shut down a host machine, move all the VMs to other hosts, then you can shut down the empty host without impacting business.