Monday morning of the [Oracle OpenWorld 2011] conference had Joe Tucci, CEO of EMC, present the keynote. Joe indicated that I.T. stands for "Industry in Transition". He had a chart that showed the history of IT, from the mainframe and mini-computer, to the PC and client/server era, and now to the Cloud era. He called these "waves of disruption". The catalysts for change are a "Budge Dilemma", "Information Deluge" and "Cyber Security". The keynote was very similar to what EMC presented at [VMworld] conference earlier this summer.

"We have failed our customers. Over the past 10 years, they spend 73% to maintain their existing systems, and only 27% for new."
--- Joe Tucci, EMC

While many people equate "EMC" and "Failure", I believe Joe was referring not just to his own company, but most of the other IT vendors as well. Analysts predict that from January 1, 2010 to December 31, 2019, the world of stored data will grow from 0.9 ZB to 35.2 ZB, which represents a 44x increase. During that same time, IT staff is only expected to grow 50 percent. A staggering 90 percent of this data will be unstructured (non-database) content. Meanwhile, the average company gets cyber-attacked 300 times per week.

The answer is Cloud Computing. A few years ago, EMC was trying to get people to go "private cloud" route instead of "public cloud", they now have a more realistic "hybrid cloud" approach similar to IBM. Of the clients that EMC works with, 35 percent are implementing some form of cloud, and another 30 percent are planning to. The tenents of Hybrid Cloud are "Efficiency", "Control" and "Choice" which equals "Agility".

Joe also mentioned that there is now a new "layering" for IT. Instead of storage, switches and servers, we have a cloud platform of shared resources, mobile devices like smartphones and tablets, and management.

Joe feels there is a massive opportunity where Cloud meets Big Data. A cute video showed a driver wearing a motorcycle helmet so you can't see his face get into an under-powered car with "VNXe" on the license plate. He punches in "Cloud and Big Data" into the GPS navigation system, and starts out on city streets. Then the car transforms to an under-utilized family sedan "VNX" on a highway in the middle of the desert, then transforms to an over-priced sports car labeled "VMAX" as it climbs into the mountains surrounded by fog. The video borrowed the "CARS" theme from the videos IBM developed for its 2008 launch of "Information Infrastructure" initiative.

EMC's Pat Gelsinger (CTO) and fellow blogger Chad Sakac did some demos of VMware vCenter. They called the VMware vSphere "the Datacenter-wide OS" indicating that EMC storage has 75 points of integration with their "partner" (VMware is majority-owned by EMC, so I am not sure if partner is the right term). If you don't count Itanium, SPARC, POWER and IBM Syste z architectures, VMware enjoys over 80 percent marketshare for server virtualization.

(Full disclosure: IBM is the leading reseller of VMware.)

Pat claims that 40 percent of Oracle Apps at EMC run VMware. For the longest time, Oracle refused support its apps on VMware, but they relaxed this restrictive policy back in 2009. Today, nearly 25 percent of Oracle Apps run virtualized. EMC claims that they can support 5 million VMs on a single VMAX, and can generate 1 million IOPS from a single VMware ESX host.

Chad did a demo of vFabric which allows a vCenter plug-in to kick up Database instances of OracleDB, MySQL, Hadoop, PostgreSQL, and GreenPlum (GreenPlum is EMC's version of open-source PostgreSQL).

Chad showed that VMware vMition could move workloads from servers without solid-state, to servers that are flash-enabled. Lightweight workloads can be moved from DAS-enabled servers to compute-enabled storage devices like their EMC Isilon. (EMC acquired Isilon to offer their me-too version of IBM's Scale-Out NAS [SONAS] product.) EMC announced their first "Solid-State on a PCIe card" from their Project Lightning initiative. These are 320 GB capacity, so they sounded like a me-too versino of IBM's [Fusion-io IOdrive] cards that IBM has had available for quite some time now.

Next, Pat and Chad talked about Big Data. The world is transforming from a manual scale-up model to an automated scale-out architecture. Moving from "islands" to "pools". They used a cute example of Car Insurance. Business Analytics were able to review a safe drivers record, including the driver's Facebook and Twitter activity, and give him a discount, and then review the bad driving habits of another driver, and raise the bad driver's rates.

EMC announced their "GreenPlum Analytics Platform" (GAP?). I often tell people that if you want to predict what EMC will announce next, just look at what IBM announced 18 months ago. This new platform sounds like their me-too version of IBM's [Smart Analytics System].

After EMC, Judith Sim from Oracle introduced the Ed Lee, the Mayor of San Francisco which was just named the "Greenest city in North America". He thanked the audience for contributing an estimated $100 million USD to his local economy. Also, he was happy that by eliminating paper-based handouts and conference materials, the audience saved 1,636 trees.

Mark Hurd, formerly CEO of HP, and now president of Oracle, gave some highlights of 2011, and what Oracle's strategy is going forward. He said that Oracle plans to provide complete stacks, complete choice, and have each component of the stack be best-of-breed. In 2011, Oracle introduced the new MySQL 5.5 database, Java 7 programming language, and the Solaris 11 operating system with ZFS file system. Oracle spent $4 Billion in R&D, and gained 20 percent growth in software licenses, which gave them 33 percent growth fiscally for 2011 year. Oracle acquired Larry Ellison's [Pillar Data] storage company. Oracle also launched a [Database Appliance].

Thomas Kurian, another Oracle executive, finished the keynote session. He started with yet another chart showing the historical transition from Mainframe to Tablet. He indicated that leading-edge OracleDB and their Fusion middleware combined with industry standard hardware provides 5-30x faster queries, 4-10x less disk space, and simplifies the data center footprint. Their Exadata provides what he likes to call "Hierarchical Storage Management" between DRAM, Flash Solid-State, and spinning disk.

(Note: I started my career at IBM in 1986 working on a product called DFHSM, the Data Facility Hierarchical Storage Manager! It is now a vibrant component of DFSMS, part of IBM's z/OS mainframe operating system.)

ps this new announcement is to address that deficiency.

Finally, Oracle announced their "Exadata Storage Expansion Rack". Many people realized that the Exadata was under-provisioned for storage, which explains why they have only sold a few thousand of them, so perha

If you are attending Oracle OpenWorld, here are sessions for Tuesday that IBM is featuring. Note the first two are Solution Spotlight sessions at the IBM Booth #1111 where I will be most of the time.

Securing Heterogeneous Database Infrastructures: A Comprehensive Approach

10/04/11, 9:45 a.m. -- 10:15 a.m., Solution Spotlight, Booth #1111 Moscone South
Presenter: Al Cooley, Director, IBM InfoSphere Guardium

IBM Business Analystics for Oracle Solutions

10/04/11, 2:15 p.m. -- 2:45 p.m., Solution Spotlight, Booth #1111 Moscone South
Presenter: John Strazdins, ERP Strategy Executive

Consolidated Global View of Your Customer with One Global Billing System

10/04/11, 3:30 p.m. -- 4:30 p.m., OpenWorld session #23650
Presenter: John Waterman, IBM
Enterprise billing system technologies are emerging to assist with global customer views and other challenges banks struggle with today. In this session, Citi discusses its challenges and successes in implementing a global billing system.

Upgrading Your Siebel CRM with Reduced Risk and Lowered Cost: Customer Successes

10/04/11, 3:30 p.m. -- 4:30 p.m., OpenWorld session #18222
Presenters: Arnaud Wingelaar, IBM; Geetha Sundaram; Agnes Zhang, Oracle
Hear customer success stories about upgrading Siebel CRM. Learn best practices on upgrading with lowered cost, or achieving a high-availability upgrade with zero downtime and reduced risk.

technorati tags: IBM, Oracle, Larry Ellison, Mark Hurd, EMC, Joe+Tucci, Pat Gelsinger, Chad Sakac, Isilon, GreenPlum, OpenWorld, SONAS, Fusion-io, Project+Lightning, VMware, vCenter, vMotion, Exadata, Solaris, MySQL, Java7

Tags:  oracle mark+hurd vcenter mysql chad+sakac pat+gelsinger vmware emc ibm solaris project+lightning fusion-io isilon larry+ellison sonas joe+tucci greenplum java7 openworld exadata vmotion

This week, I am in Melbourne, Australia for the [IBM System x and System Storage Technical Symposium]. Here is a recap of Day 1:

IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center v4.2.2 Overview and Update

This was an updated version of the presentation I gave last July in Orlando, Florida (see my post [IBM Storage University - Day 1]). Since it might have been awhile since the Australian audience had heard about the latest and greatest for Tivoli Storage Productivity Center, I decided to cover the enhancements of 4.2.0, 4.2.1 and 4.2.1 combined.

IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center is an important part of IBM's "Storage Hypervisor" solution, combining a single pane of glass for management with non-disruptive storage virtualization with SVC and Storwize V7000.

IBM Storwize V7000 and SVC integration with VMware

Alexi Giral from IBM Sydney presented this session on how Storwize V7000 and SVC serve as the "Storage Hypervisor" for VMware server virtualization environments. The focus was on the FCP and iSCSI block-only access modes of these devices, although one could use IBM Storwize V7000 Unified to provide NFS file-level access to VMware. Alexi covered both VMware Vsphere v4 and v5, as there are a few differences.

IBM Storwize V7000 and SVC supports thin provisioning, VMware's VAAI interface, VMware's Site Recovery Manager, and provides a storage management plug-in to Vmware's vCenter. The SVC has extended the distance for split-cluster configurations that support VMware's vMotion live partition mobility and High Availiability (HA) up to 300km using active DWDM.

Want best practices for configuring SVC or Storwize V7000 with VMware? IBM has published the [VMware Proof of Practice and Performance Guidelines on the SAN Volume Controller] redbook, and the [VMware Multipathing with the SAN Volume Controller] redpaper.

Tape Storage Reinvented: What's New and Exciting in the Tape World?

Special thanks to Jim Fisher and Jim Karp for providing me this presentation, videos and supporting materials for me to present this session. I gave this as the first break-out session on Tuesday, and then repeated as the last break-out session on Thursday. Several of the attendees in the audience mocked my title, with taunts like "What could be NEW or EXCITING about tape?" I covered four key areas:

• The new TS1140 tape drive, including the corresponding model-JC tape that holds 4TB native (12 TB compressed!).
• The enhanced TS3500 with the Tape Library Connector Shuttle. I had a video that shows how tapes can be sent from one TS3500 tape library string to another.
• The new Linear Tape File System (LTFS), both the single drive edition and the library edition
• The new 3592-C07 FICON controller for our mainframe clients

By the end of the session, the folks that taunted me were honestly impressed that they learned a few things, and had not realized so much has been developed recently in the world of tape.

This week is also hosting [The Presidents Cup] golf tournament at the [Royal Melbourne Golf Club] featuring 24 of the top golfers, including Tiger Woods, as well as [celebrities like Michael Jordan].

technorati tags: IBM, Storage, Symposium, Melbourne, Australia, TPC, Storage Hypervisor, Storwize V7000, SVC, VAAI, vMotion, DWDM, TS1140, 3592-E07, TS3500, LTFS, Emmy, 3592-C07, FICON, The Presidents Cup, Royal Melbourne Golf Club, Tiger Woods, Michael Jordan

Tags:  vmotion 3592-e07 melbourne michael+jordan storwize+v7000 australia storage+hypervisor ltfs vaai tpc tiger+woods ficon storage symposium ibm emmy ts1140 3592-c07 royal+melbourne ts3500 dwdm presidents+cup svc

Have you ever noticed that sometimes two movies come out that seem eerily similar to each other, released by different studios within months or weeks of each other? My sister used to review film scripts for a living, she would read ten of them and have to pick her top three favorites, and tells me that scripts for nearly identical concepts came all the time. Here are a few of my favorite examples:

• 1994: [Wyatt Earp] and [Tombstone] were Westerns recounting the famed gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Tombstone, Arizona is near Tucson, and the gunfight is recreated fairly often for tourists.
• 1998: [Armageddon] and [Deep Impact] were a pair of disaster movies dealing with a large rock heading to destroy all life on earth. I was in Mazatlan, Mexico to see the latter, dubbed in Spanish as "Impacto Profundo".
• 1998: [A Bug's Life] and [Antz] were computer-animated tales of the struggle of one individual ant in an ant colony.
• 2000: [Mission to Mars] and [Red Planet] were sci-fi pics exploring what a manned mission to our neighboring planet might entail.
• 2009: [Paul Blart: Mall Cop] and [Observe and Report] were comedies dealing with challenges of security at a shopping mall.

(I think I made my point with just a few examples. A more complete list can be found on [Sam Greenspan's 11 Points website].)

This is different than copy-cat movies that are re-made or re-imagined many years later based on the previous successes of an original. Ever since my blog post [VPLEX: EMC's Latest Wheel is Round] in 2010 comparing EMC's copy-cat product that came our seven years after IBM's SAN Volume Controller (SVC), I've noticed EMC doesn't talk about VPLEX that much anymore.

This week, IBM announced [XIV Gen3 Solid-State Drive support] and our friends over at EMC announced [VFCache SSD-based PCIe cards]. Neither of these should be a surprise to anyone who follows the IT industry, as IBM had announced its XIV Gen3 as "SSD-Ready" last year specifically for this purpose, and EMC has been touting its "Project Lightning" since last May.

Fellow blogger Chris Mellor from The Register has a series of articles to cover this, including [EMC crashes the server flash party], [NetApp slaps down Lightning with multi-card Flash flush], [HP may be going the server flash route], and [Now HDS joins the server flash party].

Fellow blogger Chuck Hollis from EMC has a blog post [VFCache means Very Fast Cache indeed] that provides additional detail. Chuck claims the VFCache is faster than popular [Fusion-IO PCIe cards] available for IBM servers. I haven't seen the performance spec sheets, but typically SSD is four to five times slower than the DRAM cache used in the XIV Gen3. The VFCache's SSD is probably similar in performance to the SSD supported in the IBM XIV Gen3, DS8000, DS5000, SVC, N series, and Storwize V7000 disk systems.

Nonetheless, I've been asked my opinions on the comparison between these two announcements, as they both deal with improving application performance through the use of Solid-State Drives as an added layer of read cache.

(FTC Disclosure: I am both a full-time employee and stockholder of the IBM Corporation. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission may consider this blog post as a paid celebrity endorsement of IBM servers and storage systems. This blog post is based on my interpretation and opinions of publicly-available information, as I have no hands-on access to any of these third-party PCIe cards. I have no financial interest in EMC, Fusion-IO, Texas Memory Systems, or any other third party vendor of PCIe cards designed to fit inside IBM servers, and I have not been paid by anyone to mention their name, brands or products on this blog post.)

The solutions are different in that IBM XIV Gen3 the SSD is "storage-side" in the external storage device, and EMC VFCache is "server-side" as a PCI Express [PCIe] card. Aside from that, both implement SSD as an additional read cache layer in front of spinning disk to boost performance. Neither is an industry first, as IBM has offered server-side SSD since 2007, and IBM and EMC have offered storage-side SSD in many of their other external storage devices. The use of SSD as read cache has already been available in IBM N series using [Performance Accelerator Module (PAM)] cards.

IBM has offered cooperative caching synergy between its servers and its storage arrays for some time now. The predecessor to today's POWER7-based were the iSeries i5 servers that used PCI-X IOP cards with cache to connect i5/OS applications to IBM's external disk and tape systems. To compete in this space, EMC created their own PCI-X cards to attach their own disk systems. In 2006, IBM did the right thing for our clients and fostered competition by entering in a [Landmark agreement] with EMC to [license the i5 interfaces]. Today, VIOS on IBM POWER systems allows a much broader choice of disk options for IBM i clients, including the IBM SVC, Storwize V7000 and XIV storage systems.

EMC is not the first to manufacture an SSD-based PCIe card. Last summer, my friends at Texas Memory Systems [TMS] gave away a [RAMsan-70 PCIe card] at an after-party on [Day 2 of the IBM System Storage University].

Can a little SSD really help performance? Yes! An IBM client running a [DB2 Universal Database] cluster across eight System x servers was able to replace an 800-drive EMC Symmetrix by putting eight SSD Fusion-IO cards in each server, for a total of 64 Solid-State drives, saving money and improving performance. DB2 has the Data Partitioning Feature that has multi-system DB2 configurations using a Grid-like architecture similar to how XIV is designed. Most IBM System x and BladeCenter servers support internal SSD storage options, and many offer PCIe slots for third-party SSD cards. Sadly, you can't do this with a VFCache card, since you can have only one VFCache card in each server, the data is unprotected, and only for ephemeral data like transaction logs or other temporary data. With multiple Fusion-IO cards in an IBM server, you can configure a RAID rank across the SSD, and use it for persistent storage like DB2 databases.

Here then is my side-by-side comparison:

Category	EMC VFCache	IBM XIV Gen3 SSD Caching
Servers supported	Selected x86-based models of Cisco UCS, Dell PowerEdge, HP ProLiant DL, and IBM xSeries and System x servers	All of these, plus any other blade or rack-optimized server currently supported by XIV Gen3, including Oracle SPARC, HP Titanium, IBM POWER systems, and even IBM System z mainframes running Linux
Operating System support	Linux RHEL 5.6 and 5.7, VMware vSphere 4.1 and 5.0, and Windows 2008 x64 and R2.	All of these, plus all the other operating systems supported by XIV Gen3, including AIX, IBM i, Solaris, HP-UX, and Mac OS X
Protocol support	FCP	FCP and iSCSI
Vendor-supplied driver required on the server	Yes, the VFCache driver must be installed to use this feature.	No, IBM XIV Gen3 uses native OS-based multi-pathing drivers.
External disk storage systems required	None, it appears the VFCache has no direct interaction with the back-end disk array, so in theory the benefits are the same whether you use this VFCache card in front of EMC storage or IBM storage	XIV Gen3 is required, as the SSD slots are not available on older models of IBM XIV.
Shared disk support	No, VFCache has to be disabled and removed for vMotion to take place.	Yes! XIV Gen3 SSD caching shared disk supports VMware vMotion and Live Partition Mobility.
Support for multiple servers	No	An advantage of the XIV Gen3 SSD caching approach is that the cache can be dynamically allocated to the busiest data from any server or servers.
Support for active/active server clusters	No	Yes!
Aware of changes made to back-end disk	No, it appears the VFCache has no direct interaction with the back-end disk array, so any changes to the data on the box itself are not communicated back to the VFCache card itself to invalidate the cache contents.	Yes!
Sequential-access detection	None identified. However, VFCache only caches blocks 64KB or smaller, so any sequential processing with larger blocks will bypass the VFCache.	Yes! XIV algorithms detect sequential access and avoid polluting the SSD with these blocks of data.
Number of SSD supported	One, which seems odd as IBM supports multiple Fusion-IO cards for its servers. However, this is not really a single point of failure (SPOF) as an application experiencing a VFCache failure merely drops down to external disk array speed, no data is lost since it is only read cache.	6 to 15 (one per XIV module) for high availability.
Pin data in SSD cache	Yes, using split-card mode, you can designate a portion of the 300GB to serve as Direct-attached storage (DAS). All data written to the DAS portion will be kept in SSD. However, since only one card is supported per server and the data is unprotected, this should only be used for ephemeral data like logs and temp files.	No, there is no option to designate an XIV Gen3 volume to be SSD-only. Consider using Fusion-IO PCIe card as a DAS alternative, or another IBM storage system for that requirement.
Hot-pluggable/Hot-swappable	Not identified	Yes!
Pre-sales Estimating tools	None identified	Yes! CDF and Disk Magic tools are available to help cost-justify the purchase of SSD based on workload performance analysis.

IBM has the advantage that it designs and manufactures both servers and storage, and can design optimal solutions for our clients in that regard.

technorati tags: IBM, XIV, Gen3, SSD, cache, EMC, VFCache, Project Lightning, SVC, Solid State Drives, Fusion-IO, Texas Memory Systems, RAMSan, System+x, POWER systems, VIOS, DRAM, VMware, Vmotion, Live Partition Mobility, AIX, IBM i, PCIe, PCI-X

Tags:  aix vfcache ramsan +systems system+x svc emc project+lightning pcie ibm+i fusion-io gen3 vmware xiv ssd pci-x texas+memory+systems power solid+state+drives ibm cache vmotion dram live+partition+mobility