Inside System Storage -- by Tony Pearson

Continuing my coverage of the IBM Dynamic Infrastructure Executive Summit at the Fairmont Resort in Scottsdale, Arizona, we had a day full main-tent sessions. Here is a quick recap of the sessions presented in the afternoon.

Taming the Information Explosion

Doug Balog, IBM Vice President and Disk Storage Business Line Executive, presented on the information explosion. Storage Admins are focused on managing storage growth and the related costs and complexity, proper forecasting and capacity planning, and backup administration. IBM's strategy is to help clients in the following areas:

1. Storage Efficiency - getting the most use out of the resources you invest
2. Service Delivery - ensuring that information gets to the right people at the right time
3. Data Protection - protecting data against unethical tampering, unauthorized access, and unexpected loss and corruption

Cory Vokey, Senior Manager of IT Systems Operations at Research in Motion, Ltd., the people who bring you BlackBerry phone service, provided a client testimonial for the XIV storage system. Before the XIV, RIM suffered high storage costs and per-volume software licensing. Over the past 15 months, RIM deployed XIV as a corporate standard. With the XIV, they have had 100 percent up-time, and enjoyed 50 percent costs savings compared to their previous storage systems. They have increased capacity 300 percent, without any increase to their storage admin staff. XIV has greatly improved their procurement process, as they no longer need to "true up" their software licenses to the volume of data managed, a sore point with their previous storage vendor.

Mainframe Innovations and Integration

Tom Rosamillia, IBM General Manager of the System z mainframe platform, presented on mainframe servers. After 40 years, IBM's mainframe remains the gold standard, able to handle hundreds of workloads on a single server, facilitating immediate growth with scalability. The key values of the System z mainframe are:

• Industry leading virtualization, management and qualities of service
• A comprehensive portfolio for business intelligence and data warehousing
• The premier platform for modernizing the enterprise
• A large and growing portfolio of leading-applications ISV support

Steve Phillips, CIO of Avnet, presented the client testimonial for their use of a System z10 mainframe. Last year, Avnet was ranked Fortune's Number One "Most admired" for Technology distribution. Avnet distributes technology from 300 suppliers to over 100,000 resellers, ISVs and end users. They have modernized their system running SAP on System z with DB2 as the database management system, using Hypersockets virtual LAN inside the server to communicate between logical partitions (LPARs). The folks at Avnet especially like the ability for on-the-fly re-assignment of capacity. This is used for end-of-quarter peak processing, and to adjust between test and development workloads. They also like the various special purpose engines available:

• z Integrated Information Processor (zIIP) for DB2 workloads
• z Application Assist Processor (zAAP) for Java processing under WebSphere
• Integrated Facility for Linux (IFL) for Linux applications

Cloud Computing: Real Capabilities, Real Stories

Mike Hill, IBM Vice President of Enterprise Initiatives, presented on IBM's leadership in cloud computing. He covered three trends that are driving IT today. First, there is a consumerization and industrialization of IT interfaces. Second, a convergence of the infrastructure that is driving a new focus on standards. Third, delivering IT as a service has brought about new delivery choices. The result is cloud computing, with on-demand self-service, ubiquitous network access, location-independent resource pooling, rapid elasticity, and flexible pricing models. Government agencies and businesses in Retail, Manufacturing and Utilities are leading the charge to cloud computing.

Mike covered IBM's five cloud computing deployment models, and shared his views on which workloads might be ready for cloud, and which may not be there yet. Organizations are certainly seeing significant results: reduced labor costs, improved capital utilization, reduced provisioning cycle times, improved quality through reduced software defects, and reduced end user IT support costs.

Mitch Daniels, Director of Technology at ManTech International Corporation, presented the customer testimonial for an IBM private cloud for Development and Test. Mantech chose a private cloud as they work with US Federal agencies like Department of Defense, Homeland Security and the Intelligence community. The private cloud was built from:

• IBM Cloudburst virtualized server environment
• Tivoli Unified Process to document process and workflow
• Tivoli Service Automation Manager to request, deliver and manage IT services
• Tivoli Self-Service Portal and Service Catalog to allow developers and testers to request resources as needed

The result: Mantech saved 50 percent in labor costs, and can now provision development and test resources in minutes instead of weeks.

The IBM Transformation Story

Leslie Gordon, IBM Vice President of Application and Infrastructure Services Management, presented IBM's own transformation story, becoming the premier "Globally Integrated Enterprise". Based on IBM's 2009 CIO study, CIOs must balance three roles with seemingly contradictory demands:

1. Make innovations real, be both an insightful visionary but also an able pragmatist
2. Raise the Return on Investment (ROI) of IT, determine savvy ways to create value but also be ruthless at cutting costs
3. Expanding the business impact of IT, be a collaborative business leader with the other C-level executives, but also be an inspiring manager for the IT staff.

In this case, IBM drinks its own champagne, using its own solutions to help run its internal operations. In 1997, IBM used over 15,000 applications, but this has been simplified down to 4500 applications today. Thousands of servers were consolidated to Linux on System z mainframes. The applications workloads were categorized as Blue, Bronze, Silver, and Gold to help prioritize the consolidation. IBM's key lessons from all this were:

• Gather data at the business unit level, but build the business case from an enterprise view.
• Start small and monitor progress continually, run operations concurrently with transformational projects
• Address cultural and organizational changes by deploying transformation in waves

I found the client testimonials insightful. It is always good to hear that IBM's solutions work "as advertised" right out of the box.

technorati tags: IBM, dyninfra, summit, Scottsdale, RIM, XIV, zIIP, zAAP, IFL, Avnet, LPAR, ManTech, ROI, CIO

Continuing my coverage of the IBM Dynamic Infrastructure Executive Summit at the Fairmont Resort in Scottsdale, Arizona, we had a day full main-tent sessions. Here is a quick recap of the sessions presented in the morning.

Leadership and Innovation on a Smarter Planet

Todd Kirtley, IBM General Manager of the western United States, kicked off the day. He explained that we are now entering the Decade of Smart: smarter healthcare, smarter energy, smarter traffic systems, and smarter cities, to name a few. One of those smarter cities is Dubuque, Iowa, nicknamed the Masterpiece of the Mississippi river. Mayor Roy Boul of Dubuque spoke next on his testimonial on working with IBM. I have never been to Dubuque, but it looks and sounds like a fun place to visit. Here is the [press release] and a two-minute [video].

Smarter Systems for a Smarter Planet

Tom Rosamillia, IBM General Manager of the System z mainframe platform, presented on smarter systems. IBM is intentionally designing integrated systems to redefine performance and deliver the highest possible value for the least amount of resource. The five key focus areas were:

1. Enabling massive scale
2. Organizing vast amounts of data
3. Turning information into insight
4. Increasing business agility
5. Managing risk, security and compliance

The Future of Systems

Ambuj Goyal, IBM General Manager of Development and Manufacturing, presented the future of systems. For example, reading 10 million electricity meters monthly is only 120 million transactions per year, but reading them daily is 3.65 billion, and reading them every 15 minutes will result in over 350 billion transactions per year. What would it take to handle this? Beyond just faster speeds and feeds, beyond consolidation through virtualization and multi-core systems, beyond pre-configured fit-for-purpose appliances, there will be a new level for integrated systems. Imagine a highly dense integration with over 3000 processors per frame, over 400 Petabytes (PB) of storage, and 1.3 PB/sec bandwidth. Integrating software, servers and storage will make this big jump in value possible.

POWERing your Planet

Ross Mauri, IBM General Manager of Power Systems, presented the latest POWER7 processor server product line. The IBM POWER-based servers can run any mix of AIX, Linux and IBM i (formerly i5/OS) operating system images. Compared to the previous POWER6 generation, POWER7 are four times more energy efficient, twice the performance, at about the same price. For example, an 8-socket p780 with 64 cores (eight per socket) and 256 threads (4 threads per core) had a record-breaking 37,000 SAP users in a standard SD 2-tier benchmark, beating out 32-socket and 64-socket M9000 SPARC systems from Oracle/Sun and 8-socket Nehalem-EX Fujitsu 1800E systems. See the [SAP benchmark results] for full details. With more TPC-C performance per core, the POWER7 is 4.6 times faster than HP Itanium and 7.5 times faster than Oracle Sun T5440.

This performance can be combined with incredible scalability. IBM's PowerVM outperforms VMware by 65 percent and provides features like "Live Partition Mobility" that is similar to VMware's VMotion capability. IBM's PureScale allows DB2 to scale out across 128 POWER servers, beating out Oracle RAC clusters.

IBM AIX on POWER sytsems is also the most reliable UNIX operating system, which is 2.3 times more reliable than Oracle Sun Solaris on SPARC, HP-UX or Apple MacOS, and 10 times more reliable than Windows 2008 Server on x86 platforms. See the [ITIC 2009 Global Server Hardware and Server OS Reliability Survey].

Analytics and Information

The final speaker in the morning was Greg Lotko, IBM Vice President of Information Management Warehouse solutions. Analytics are required to gain greater insight from information, and this can result in better business outcomes. The [IBM Global CFO Study 2010] shows that companies that invest in business insight consistently outperform all other enterprises, with 33 percent more revenue growth, 32 percent more return on invested (ROI) capital, and 12 times more earnings (EBITDA). Business Analytics is more than just traditional business intelligence (BI). It tries to answer three critical questions for decision makers:

1. What is happening?
2. Why is it happening?
3. What is likely to happen in the future?

The IBM Smart Analytics System is a pre-configured integrated system appliance that combines text analytics, data mining and OLAP cubing software on a powerful data warehouse platform. It comes in three flavors: Model 5600 is based on System x servers, Model 7600 based on POWER7 servers, and Model 9600 on System z mainframe servers.

IBM has over 6000 business analytics and optimization consultants to help clients with their deployments.

While this might appear as "Death by Powerpoint", I think the panel of presenters did a good job providing real examples to emphasize their key points.

technorati tags: IBM, dyninfra, summit, Scottsdale, Dubuque, Iowa, Smarter City, Smarter Energy, POWER7, AIX, PowerVM, PureScale, DB2, Oracle, Sun, Solaris, SPARC, HP-UX, Apple, MacOS, Windows, ROI, EBITDA, OLAP, Nehalem-EX

Wrapping up my coverage of the IBM Dynamic Infrastructure Executive Summit at the Fairmont Resort in Scottsdale, Arizona, we had a final morning of main-tent sessions. Here is a quick recap of the sessions presented Thursday morning. This left the afternoon for people to catch their flights or hit the links.

Data Center Actions your CFO will Love

Steve Sams, IBM Vice President of Global Site and Facilities, presented simple actions that can yield significant operational and capital cost savings. The first focus area was to extend the life of your existing data center. Some 70 percent of data centers are 10-15 years old or worse, and therefore not designed for today's computational densities. IBM did this for its Lexington data center, making changes that resulted in 8x capability without increasing footprint.

The second focus area was to rationalize the infrastructure across the organization. The process of "rationalizing" involves determining the business value of specific IT components and deciding whether the business value justifies the existing cost and complexity. It allows you to prioritize which consolidations should be done first to reduce costs and optimize value. IBM's own transformation reduced 128 CIOs down to a single CIO, and from 155 host data centers scattered were consolidated down to seven, and 80 web hosting data centers down to five. This also included consolidating 31 intranets down to a single global intranet.

The third focus area was to design your new infrastructure to be more responsive to change. IBM offers four solutions to help those looking to build or upgrade their data center:

• Scalable Modular Data Center - save up to 20 percent than traditional deployments with turn-key configurations from 500 to 2500 square feet that can be deployed in as little as 8-12 weeks to an existing floorspace.
• Enterprise Modular Data Center - save 40 to 50 percent with 5000 square foot standardized design for larger data centers. This modular approach provides a "pay as you grow" approach that can be more responsive to future unforeseen needs.
• Portable Modular Data Center - this is the PMDC shipping container that was sitting outside in the parking lot. This can be deployed anywhere in 12-14 weeks and is ideal for dealing with disaster recoveries or situations where traditional data center floor plans cannot be built fast enough.
• High Density Zone - this can help increase capacity in an existing data center without a full site retrofit.

Here is a quick [video] that provides more insight.

Neil Jarvis, CIO of American Automobile Association (AAA) for Northern California, Nevada and Utah (NCNU), provided the customer testimonial. Last September, the [AAA NCNU selected IBM] to build them an energy-efficient green data center. Neil provided us an update now six months later, managing the needs of 4 million drivers.

Virtualization - Managing the World's Infrastructure

Helene Armitage, IBM General Manager of the newly formed IBM System Software product line, presented on virtualization and management. Virtualization is becoming much more than a way of meeting the demand for performance, capability, and flexibility in the data center. It helps create a smarter, more agile data center. Her presentation focused on four areas: consolidate resources, manage workloads, automate processes, and optimize the delivery of IT services.

Charlie Weston, Group Vice President of Information Technology at Winn Dixie, one of the largest food retailers in the United States, with over 500 stores and supermarkets. The grocery business is highly competitive with tight profit margins. Winn Dixie wanted to deploy business continuity/disaster recovery (BC/DR) while managing IT equipment scattered across these 500 locations. They were able to consolidate 600 stand-alone servers into a single corporate data center. Using IBM AIX with PowerVM virtualization on BladeCenter, each JS22 blade server could manage 16 stores. These were mirrored to a nearby facility, as well as a remote disaster recovery center. They were also able to add new Linux application workloads to their existing System z9 EC mainframe. The result was to free up $5 million US dollars in capital that could be used to remodel their stores, and improve application performance 5-10 times. They were able to deploy a new customer portal on Linux for System z in days instead of months, and have reduced their disaster recovery time objective (RTO) against hurricanes from days to hours. Their next steps involves looking at desktop virtualization.

Redefining x86 Computing

Roland Hagan, IBM Vice President for IBM System x server platform, presented on how IBM is redefining the x86 computing experience. More than 50 percent of all servers are x86 based. These x86 servers are easy to acquire, enjoy a large application base, and can take advantage of readily available skilled workforce for administration. The problem is that 85 percent of x86 processing power remains idlea, energy costs are 8 times what they were 12 years ago, and management costs are now 70 percent of the IT budget.

IBM has the number one market share for scalable x86 servers. Roland covered the newly announced eX5 architecture that has been deployed in both rack-optimized models as well as IBM BladeCenter blade servers. These can offer 2x the memory capacity as competitive offerings, which is important for today's server virtualization, database and analytics workloads. This includes 40 and 80 DIMM models of blades, and 64 to 96 DIMM models of rack-optimized systems. IBM also announced eXFlash, internal Solid State Drives accessible at bus speeds.

The results can be significant. For example, just two IBM System x3850 4-socket, 8-core systems can replace 50 (yes, FIFTY) HP DL585 4-socket, 4-core Opteron rack servers, reducing costs 80 percent with a 3-month ROI payback period. Compared to IBM's previous X4 architecture, the eX5 provides 3.5 times better SAP performance, 3.8 times faster server virtualization performance, and 2.8 times faster database performance.

The CIO of Acxiom provided the customer testimonial. They were able to get a 35-to-1 consolidation switching over to IBM x86 servers, resulting in huge savings.

Top ROI projects to Get Started

Mark Shearer, IBM Vice President of Growth Solutions, and formerly my fourth-line manager as the Vice President of Marketing and Communications, presented a list of projects to help clients get started. There are over 500 client references that have successfully implement Smarter Planet projects. Mark's list were grouped into five categories:

• Enabling Massive Scale
• Increase Business Agility
• Manage Risk, Compliance and Security
• Organize Vast Amounts of Information
• Turn Information into Insight

The attendees were all offered a free "Infrastructure Study" to evaluate their current data center environments. A team of IBM experts will come on-site, gather data, interview key personnel and make recommendations. Alternatively, these can be done at one of IBM's many briefing centers, such as the IBM Executive Briefing Center in Tucson Arizona that I work at.

This wraps up the week for me. I have to pack the XIV back into the crate, and drive back to Tucson. IBM plans to host another Executive Summit in the September/October time frame on the East coast.

technorati tags: IBM, dyninfra, summit, Scottsdale, CFO, rationalization, PMDC, AAA, NCNU, CSAA, PowerVM, AIX, RTO, HP

Here I am, day 11 of a 17-day business trip, on my last leg of the trip this week, in Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia. I have been flooded with requests to give my take on EMC's latest re-interpretation of storage virtualization, VPLEX.

I'll leave it to my fellow IBM master inventor Barry Whyte to cover the detailed technical side-by-side comparison. Instead, I will focus on the business side of things, using Simon Sinek's Why-How-What sequence. Here is a [TED video] from Garr Reynold's post [The importance of starting from Why].

Let's start with the problem we are trying to solve.

Problem: migration from old gear to new gear, old technology to new technology, from one vendor to another vendor, is disruptive, time-consuming and painful.

Given that IT storage is typically replaced every 3-5 years, then pretty much every company with an internal IT department has this problem, the exception being those companies that don't last that long, and those that use public cloud solutions. IT storage can be expensive, so companies would like their new purchases to be fully utilized on day 1, and be completely empty on day 1500 when the lease expires. I have spoken to clients who have spent 6-9 months planning for the replacement or removal of a storage array.

A solution to make the data migration non-disruptive would benefit the clients (make it easier for their IT staff to keep their data center modern and current) as well as the vendors (reduce the obstacle of selling and deploying new features and functions). Storage virtualization can be employed to help solve this problem. I define virtualization as "technology that makes one set of resources look and feel like a different set of resources, preferably with more desirable characteristics.". By making different storage resources, old and new, look and feel like a single type of resource, migration can be performed without disrupting applications.

Before VPLEX, here is a breakdown of each solution:

For IBM, the motivation was clear: Protect customers existing investment in older storage arrays and introduce new IBM storage with a solution that allows both to be managed with a single set of interfaces and provide a common set of functionality, improving capacity utilization and availability. IBM SAN Volume Controller eliminated vendor lock-in, providing clients choice in multi-pathing driver, and allowing any-to-any migration and copy services. For example, IBM SVC can be used to help migrate data from an old HDS USP-V to a new HDS USP-V.

With EMC, however, the motivation appeared to protect software revenues from their PowerPath multi-pathing driver, TimeFinder and SRDF copy services. Back in 2005, when EMC Invista was first announced, these three software represented 60 percent of EMC's bottom-line profit. (Ok, I made that last part up, but you get my point! EMC charges a lot for these.)

Back in 2006, fellow blogger Chuck Hollis (EMC) suggested that SVC was just a [bump in the wire] which could not possibly improve performance of existing disk arrays. IBM showed clients that putting cache(SVC) in front of other cache(back end devices) does indeed improve performance, in the same way that multi-core processors successfully use L1/L2/L3 cache. Now, EMC is claiming their cache-based VPLEX improves performance of back-end disk. My how EMC's story has changed!

So now, EMC announces VPLEX, which sports a blend of SVC-like and Invista-like characteristics. Based on blogs, tweets and publicly available materials I found on EMC's website, I have been able to determine the following comparison table. (Of course, VPLEX is not yet generally available, so what is eventually delivered may differ.)

In-band virtualization solutions from IBM and HDS dominate the market. Being able to migrate data from old devices to new ones non-disruptively turned out to be only the [tip of the iceberg] of benefits from storage virtualization. In today's highly virtualized server environment, being able to non-disruptively migrate data comes in handy all the time. SVC is one of the best storage solutions for VMware, Hyper-V, XEN and PowerVM environments. EMC watched and learned in the shadows, taking notes of what people like about the SVC, and decided to follow IBM's time-tested leadership to provide a similar offering.

EMC re-invented the wheel, and it is round. On a scale from Invista (zero) to SVC (ten), I give EMC's new VPLEX a six.

technorati tags: IBM, SVC, 2145-CF8, SSD, FlashCopy, Metro+Mirror, Global+Mirror, EMC, VPLEX, CLARiiON, Symmetrix, VMAX, storage, virtualization, non-disruptive, HDS, USP-V, USP-VM, HP, SVSP,