

Webcast: How to Diagnose and Cure What Ails Your Storage Infrastructure
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Visits (14963)
![]() Webcast: How to Diagnose and Cure What Ails Your Storage Infrastructure Wednesday, March 23, 2011 at 11:00 AM PDT / 11:00 AM Arizona MST / 2:00 PM EDT Storage is the most poorly utilized infrastructure element -- and the most costly part of hardware budgets -- in most IT shops today. And it’s getting worse. Storage management typically involves nightmarish mash-up of tools for capacity management, performance management and data protection management unique to each array deployed in heterogeneous fabrics. Server and desktop virtualization seem to have made management issues worse, and coming on the heels of changing workloads and data proliferation is the requirement to add data management to the set of responsibilities shouldered by fewer and fewer storage professionals. Forecast for Storage in 2012: more pain as long delayed storage infrastructure refresh becomes mandatory. In this webcast, fellow blogger Jon Toigo, CEO of Toigo Partners International, of [DrunkenData] fame, and I will take turns assessing the challenges and suggesting real-world solutions to the many issues that confound storage efficiency in contemporary IT. Integrating real world case studies and technology insights, our storage experts will deliver a must see webcast that sets down a strategy for fixing storage...before it fixes you. Don't miss this event, unless you like the stress of knowing that your next disaster may be a data disaster. Register for this webcast to come hear me and Jon Toigo talk!
Tags:  storage+efficiency big+data optimized+systems smarter+computing retention data+protection jon+toigo webcast cloud+computing archive ibm |
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Storage Efficiency versus Data Reduction
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Visits (22050)
Wrapping up my week's theme of storage optimization, I thought I would help clarify the confusion between data reduction and storage efficiency. I have seen many articles and blog posts that either use these two terms interchangeably, as if they were synonyms for each other, or as if one is merely a subset of the other.
So why am I making a distinction on terminology here? Data reduction is already a well-known concept among specific industries, like High-Performance Computing (HPC) and Business Analytics. IBM has the largest marketshare in supercomputers that do data reduction for all kinds of use cases, for scientific research, weather prediction, financial projections, and decision support systems. IBM has also recently acquired a lot of companies related to Business Analytics, such as Cognos, SPSS, CoreMetrics and Unica Corp. These use data reduction on large amounts of business and marketing data to help drive new sources of revenues, provide insight for new products and services, create more focused advertising campaigns, and help understand the marketplace better.
There are certainly enough methods of reducing the quantity of storage capacity consumed, like thin provisioning, data deduplication and compression, to warrant an "umbrella term" that refers to all of them generically. I would prefer we do not "overload" the existing phrase "data reduction" but rather come up with a new phrase, such as "storage efficiency" or "capacity optimization" to refer to this category of features. IBM is certainly quite involved in both data reduction as well as storage efficiency. If any of my readers can suggest a better phrase, please comment below.
Tags:  data+deduplication storage+efficiency thin+provisioning lossy data+reduction supercomputers analytics deduplication ibm centera hash+collisions emc hpc compression histogram linear+regression aldc lossless storwize sldc information+archive lto lto-dc |