Earlier this week, Jon Erickson from Forrester Reserch, and Chris Saul from IBM, co-presented a webcast on the economic impact of using SAN Volume Controller for storage virtualization. The event was co-sponsored by IBM, InformationWeek, and UBM TechWeb, The Global Leader in Business Technology Media, a Division of UBM LLC. Jon spoke first, covering the cost savings and financial benefits of using SAN Volume Controller in your environment. His analysis shows a payback period of only 18 months!

Chris Saul (IBM) then covered the latest features introduced last June for SAN Volume Controller v6.4 release. Many of these features are available on older hardware models of SAN Volume Controller. One of the most exciting features is Real-time Compression.

If you missed the webcast, you can listen to the [Replay]. There is also a [whitepaper] if you prefer that format.

The Real-time Compression benefits can vary by the type of data compressed. Some data compresses only 20% savings. Other data compresses 80% or more. The best way to find out how much Compression would benefit your environment is to run the [IBM Comprestimator Tool] that runs against your own data!

If you are constantly battling out-of-space conditions, and would like to make extra room on your existing storage devices, your dreams have come true!

technorati tags: IBM, Forrester, ROI, SAN Volume Controller, SVC, Real-time Compression, RTC, Comprestimator

Tags:  san+volume+controller roi compresstimator rtc real-time+compression svc forrester ibm

This week, I am in Taipei, teaching Top Gun class. There was concern that another typhoon would hit the island of Taiwan later this week, but it looks like it is now headed for Hong Kong instead.

Elsewhere in the world, there are several events going on next week, so I thought I would bring them to your attention.

ECTY - South Africa

Next week, Jerry Kluck, IBM Global Sales Executive for Storage Optimization and Integration Services, will be the keynote speaker at "Edge Comes to You" (ECTY) conference in South Africa. This is a one-day event, similar to the [ECTY event in Moscow, Russia] that I spoke at last June.

Here is the schedule for South Africa next week:

• Monday, August 20, 2012 - Johannesburg
• Wednesday, August 22, 2012 - Cape Town

(I have been to both Jo'burg and Cape Town back in 1994. A month after Apartheid had just ended, I was part of a small group of IBMers sent to re-establish IBM's business operations there. I would have liked to have attended the events next week, not just to hear Jerry speak, but also to see how much the country has changed over the past 18 years, but I could not get a work permit in time.)

If you are interested in attending either of these next week, contact your local IBM Business Partner or sales rep to attend.

Forrester's Total Economic Impact Study of Virtualized Storage

Virtualized storage can help organizations stretch their storage investment dollar and storage administration and management resources. Jon Erickson from Forrester Research will review the latest findings from IBM SAN Volume Control (SVC) users studied as part of the recently completed Forrester Total Economic Impact Study of IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller.

• Date: Tuesday, August 21, 2012
• Time: 10:00 AM PDT / 1:00 PM EDT
• Duration: 60 minutes

Among the findings, users were able to:

• Avoid the capital cost of additional storage
• Increase IT productivity
• Provide greater end user data availability

The second presenter is Chris Saul, IBM Storage Virtualization Manager, who will explain how SVC can manage heterogeneous disk from a single point of control, autonomously manage tiered disk storage and can store up to five times as much data on your existing disk using IBM Real-time Compression.

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

Does Your Virtualization Platform Matter?

Not all virtualization solutions are created equal! That's true for storage virtualization, like the SAN Volume Controller mentioned above, and it's true for server virtualization as well.

This webcast discusses the real-world impact on businesses that deploy IBM's PowerVM® virtualization technology as compared to those using Oracle® VM for SPARC (OVM SPARC), Microsoft® Hyper-V, VMware® vSphere or other competing products.

• Date: Wednesday, August 22, 2012
• Time: 10:00 AM PDT / 1:00 PM EDT
• Duration: 60 minutes

This webcast will include findings from a [Solitaire Interglobal] study of over 61,000 customer sites on the value of virtualization from a business perspective and how IBM's PowerVM provides real business value.

Other key discussion points that will be covered during this webcast include:

• Behavioral characteristics of server virtualization technologies that were examined and analyzed from survey participant's environments
• How IT colleagues were able to obtain a faster time-to-market for business initiatives when using IBM PowerVM
• Why the learning curve time for PowerVM is as much as 2.58 times faster than for other offerings
• Why VM reboot comparisons for PowerVM vs competitive platforms resulted in downtime of 5.5 times less than with other options
• A TCO reduction of up to 71.4% for PowerVM compared to alternative options

This webcast will also feature an in-depth discussion on the IBM PowerVM solution from an IBM product expert who will share the unique virtualization features available when PowerVM is utilized within the IBM Power Systems™ environment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This week I am in Orlando, Florida for the IBM Edge conference. This is the last day, so it ends early for people who want to get home to their datacenters (er.. families) for the weekend.

How Real-Time Compression Can Maximize Storage Efficiency for Production Applications

This was a split session with two speakers. First, Ian Rimmer, Senior IT Engineer and Architect at iBurst, presented their experience with the IBM Real-Time Compression Appliance in front of NetApp NAS storage arrays. Second, Jerry Haigh, IBM offering manager for IBM System Storage, presented the new Real-Time compression feature announced this week on IBM SAN Volume Controller (SVC) and Storwize V7000.

iBurst is the #1 Wireless Telecom for South Africa. The also offer cable broadband and VOIP. They have 200 employees servicing 120,000 subscriber/households. They need to keep five years' worth of text files, and have chosen real-time compression of their NAS storage. This was before IBM acquired the Storwize company, as they have been using it for the past six years.

The monetary savings from compression was used to purchase Performance Accelerator Modules (PAM) cards for their NetApp NAS gear, which benefit from the compression (more data stored in SSD to improve performance).

For backup, they use NDMP with Symantec NetBackup that keeps data in its compressed form as it is written to tape. They have an IBM TS3100 library with LTO tape as the backup repository.

Jerry Haigh presented Real-Time compression for primary disk data. Unlike the competition, this is designed to be used with primary data, including databases, and does this real-time, not post-process. In some performance tests, DB2 compressed on 48 drives out-performed the same data uncompressed on 96 drives. In another test focused on VMware Vmark benchmark, the compressed data was able to be same or better performance as uncompressed. In a third test with SVC virtualizing XIV running Oracle ORION test, the Oracle databases compressed 50 to 64 percent, and had better performance.

For those who already have SVC or Storwize V7000, consider a 45-day trial to check out compression for yourself.

NAS File Systems: Access and Authentication

Mark Taylor, IBM Technical Specialist for SONAS, N series and Storwize V7000 Unified, presented the nuances of authentication and authorization for NAS file systems. The differences between these two are:

• Authentication - Yes, you are who you are.
• Authorization - Yes, you are permitted to do what you are trying to do

(Prior to working with SONAS, my only experience with access and authentication in NAS was setting up my LAN at home, which I have connecting my Mac, Linux and Windows machines. I have both N series and SONAS at the IBM Executive Briefing Center in Tucson, Arizona, so I know first-hand how complicated NAS access and authentication systems can be. A few months ago, I taught "Intro to NAS" as one of my topics at the Top Gun class in Argentina and Brazil. Several of the students had mentioned they thought they knew NAS solutions but had not realized all the technical issues with access and authentication that I discussed in my presentation.)

Mark explained the differences between Windows NTFS-style System identifiers (SID), versus UNIX-style user and group identifiers (UID, GID). For NAS solutions that support both CIFS and NFS, there are four options:

1. Microsoft Active Director (AD) extended with Identity Management for UNIX, formerly known as Services for UNIX (SFU). AD servers normally store SID information, but the extensions add extra columns to hold UID/GID mappings.
2. AD with Network Information Service (NIS) server. The problem with this approach is that AD and NIS are separate databases, and you need to coordinate updates to them, and their backups.
3. Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) with SAMBA extensions. LDAP holds UID/GID information, and the SAMBA extensions adds extra columns to hold SID mapping.
4. Local mapping. The dangerous part of local mapping is that the storage admin is also the security admin, and you may want different people doing these roles.

Of these four methods, Mark recommends the first and third as best practices for multi-protocol authentication.

Device	CIFS	Mixed	NFS
N series	NTFS-style	SID-to-UID mapping, UID-to-SID mapping	UNIX-style
SONAS and Storwize V7000	SID-to-UID/GID mapping, NFS v4 ACLs		NFS v4 ACLs

Mark then explained how NFS v4 ACLs work, basically an ordered collection of "Access Control Elements" or ACEs. Each ACE on the ACL may "allow" or "deny" the request. You want to avoid "Inheritance" as that can cause problems and unxpected results.

That's it folks. Next week, I am spending time with my research buddies at the Almaden Research Center near San Jose, California, and then it is off to Moscow, Russia to kick off a series of IBM events called "Edge Comes to You" (ECTY).

The ECTY conferences will be a smaller subset of the Edge conference here in Orlando, but offered in other countries for those who were unable to travel to the United States.

technorati tags: IBM, Edge2012, Real-Time Compression, NetApp, SVC, Storwize V7000, iBurst, PAM, NDMP, SONAS, Active Directory, NIS, LDAP, SAMBA, Acess Control Lists, NFS, CIFS, ECTY

Tags:  cifs iburst pam netapp active+directory real-time+compression storwize+v7000 acess+control+lists samba nfs ibm sonas nis ldap ndmp edge2012 ecty svc