This week and next, I am down under in Australia and New Zealand for a seven-city Storage Optimisation Breakfast series of presentations to clients and prospects. My first city for this seven-city tour was Sydney, Australia.

Here is the view from my room at the [Shangri-La hotel], including the famous [Sydney Opera House] and Circular Quay, from which to take a water taxi or ride the Manly Ferry. [Sydney harbour] is the deepest harbour in the Southern Hemisphere, allowing boats of all sizes to enter. This section of the city is known as "The Rocks".

Sydney is a very modern metropolis. The last time I was in Sydney was in May 2007 to teach an IBM Top Gun class. My post back then on [Dealing with Jet Lag] is as relevant now as it was back then. In addition to being 9 hours off-shifted from last week in Dallas, Texas, I also have to deal with the colder climate, about 40 degrees F cooler down here. The weather is crisp and clear, it is Winter going into Spring down here as the seasons are flipped below the equator.

Many of the buildings are recognizable from the movie ["The Matrix"] which was filmed here. We joked that this seven-city trip was also similar to [The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert], in that both journeys started in Sydney. If you haven't seen the latter, I highly recommend it to get to learn more about Australia as a country.

(Completely useless trivia: Actor Hugo Weaving appeared in both movies. While most people associate him with Australia, where he has lived since 1976, he actually was born in Nigeria, and traveled extensively because his father worked in the computer industry.)

Here I am standing next to our banner.

The line-up for each event is simple. After all the attendees sit down for breakfast, we have the following three sessions:

• First, Anna Wells, local IBM Executive for Storage Sales in Australia and New Zealand presents IBM's strategy for storage, and how IBM plans to address Storage Efficiency, Data Protection and Service Delivery. She then highlights various products that are currently available to help meet customer needs, including XIV and the SAN Volume Controller (SVC).
• Second, we have a client or two share their success story. We will have different speakers at the different locations.
• Third, I present on future trends that will impact the storage marketplace. With only 40 minutes for my section, I decided to focus on just three specific trends, with a mix of some colorful analogies to help emphasize my key points.

We had a great turn-out for our first event in Sydney, lots of clients and prospects came out for this. There is a lot of enthusiasm for IBM's vision, thought leadership, and broad portfolio of storage solutions.

technorati tags: , IBM, storage, optimisation, events, Sydney, Australia, Hugo Weaving, Anna Wells

Tags:  events australia anna+wells sydney optimisation hugo+weaving ibm storage

This week I am down under, starting my 7-city Storage Optimisation Breakfast roadshow on Tuesday in Sydney, Australia. I can't be at two places at once, and it seems whenever I am one place, lots of my coworkers are somewhere else at another conference or event. For those at [VMworld 2010] conference in San Francisco this week, IBM is a Platinum Sponsor and hosting a variety of presentations and activities. Here are some things to look forward to:

Session ID SP9638 - Getting the MAX from your Virtualization Investment

Monday 1:30pm, Moscone South Room 309
Speaker: Bob Zuber, IBM System x Program Director
Speaker: Clod Barrera Distinguished Engineer and Chief Technical Strategist

Clod and I just finished Solutions University 2010 in Dallas, and here he is going to VMworld! You already know that virtualization is beneficial. Exploit virtualization to its MAXimum and move beyond virtualization 101 where you have virtualized web, file/print, and DHCP type workloads. Now it is time to take virtualization to the next step and virtualize business infrastructure applications such as ERP, Messaging, CRM, and Database. With IBM solutions you can take the virtualization journey to build a smarter data center through; 1) Consolidation, 2) Management, 3) Automation and 4) Optimization. Attend this session and learn the key considerations for virtualizing mission-critical workloads and the best practices for a virtual data center that delivers a REAL return on your investment.

Session ID TA8065 - Storage Best Practices, Performance Tuning and Troubleshooting

Speaker: Duane Fafard, Senior XIV Storage Architect, IBM
Monday 10:30 AM Moscone South Room 301
Wednesday 03:00 PM Moscone West Room 2005

The industry has solved many of the challenges of virtualization applications by delivering innovative server solutions that automatically migrate load to available resources, but the complete environment requires both the network and the storage to be part of the equation. Designing, managing, and troubleshooting intricate storage environments in today’s age have become more and more complex. This session will discuss storage best practices, performance challenges, and resolving issues in the storage area network using native tools within the environment. With the techniques learned in this session, the storage administrator will be able to use these best practices to design proper storage solutions and pinpoint troubled areas quickly and accurately.

Session ID SS1012 - Expert Panel: How Smarter Systems can Address your Business Challenges

Wednesday, 12-1pm, Room 135

This is IBM's "Super Session". At IBM, we know that all business challenges such as sprawling IT infrastructure, poor performance and rising management costs are solvable on a smarter planet. With Smarter Systems, IBM can help you increase utilization and flexibility, reduce complexity and cost, respond to business changes swiftly and effectively, and enable end-to-end resiliency and security. Alex Yost, Vice President and Business Line Executive for IBM System x and BladeCenter hosts a panel of Virtualization experts:

• James Northington, Vice President and Business Line Executive, IBM System x
• Donn Bullock, Vice President of Sales, Mainline Information Systems, Inc.
• Dylan Larson, Director of Advanced Software and Server Technologies, Intel Data Center Group
• Richard, McAniff, Chief Development Officer and Member of the Office of the President, VMware
• Siddhartha (Sid) Chatterjee, Ph.D, Vice President, Strategy & Partnerships, IBM Systems Software
• David Guzman, Chief Information Officer and Senior Vice President, Global Technology Solution, Acxiom

Sounds like a lot of fun!

technorati tags: IBM, VMworld, Bob Zuber, Duane Fafard, Clod Barrera, David Guzman, Acxiom

Tags:  ibm acxiom duane+fafard bob+zuber david+guzman vmworld clod+barrera

Next week is [VMworld 2010], so I thought today would be a good day to write a blog post about reporting and managing virtual guest images.

As the original lead architect for IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center, I am no stranger to reporting and management tools. Needless to say, if you have lots of virtual guest images, it makes sense to deploy reporting and management software. I had never heard of Veeam before, but I decided to check out Veeam Reporter 4.0, an enterprise-level reporting solution specifically designed for large Virtual Infrastructure (VI3) and vSphere virtual environments that allows you to automatically discover and collect information about your VMware virtual environment. Their 90-page User Guide offered these helpful "First Steps" on page 9 which I used as the master plan for my evaluation.

Install Veeam Reporter 4.0

The instructions appeared fairly straightforward: Download [the latest version] of the application. Unpack the downloaded archive and run the VeeamReporter.exe file. Then follow the installation wizard steps. What could go wrong?

I should have known better. Like IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center, Veeam Reporter is designed to be installed on its own server-class machine with its own application web server and database. I wasn't going to stand up a new server in our lab just for this contest, so I decided to just install it on my Windows XP SP3, which Veeam had listed as a supported operating system level. I ran into a series of installation issues, including installing IIS, installing SQL server, and installing the SRSS component. I am more familiar with IBM's WebSphere Application Server and DB2 combination used in IBM's own products, and have experience with Apache and MySQL on a standard LAMP stack, so my lack of experience with IIS and SQL server made the installation more difficult. Many thanks to all the support personnel at Veeam, Microsoft, and my internal IT department to finally get all of this working.

It appears you can set this up as a client/server environment, where the Veeam Reporter server runs IIS and SQL Server, and then you have a browser on your client machine point to that server. In my cases, I have client browser and server all on one machine.

Create and run a collection job

This step also seemed fairly standard for reporting tools. Once you launch Veeam Reporter 4.0 for the first time, you need to retrieve data from your virtual infrastructure to be able to generate reports. To start the created collection job, select it and click the Start button on the toolbar. If you have a vCenter server in your VI environment, we recommend that you create a job for it to immediately collect data for all objects in its hierarchy. After that, you will be able to select VI objects that were engaged in the performed job using the Workspace, and generate reports for it.

I signed up for this contest August 7, but step 1 above took me two weeks to resolve all the installation iissues. I wanted to get my blog post entry for the contest BEFORE the start of VMworld. Since I am in Dallas, Texas this week for the IBM Storage Solutions University, I had to go through several firewalls for my laptop to tunnel through and get to my VMware Center back in Tucson.

Click on the graphic above to see larger view.

I was able to create and run a collection job. I have a WMware ESX 3.5 host running five guest images and 14 datastores. This seemed to be enough to evaluate the basic features of this reporting tool. Veeam Reporter let's you run the collection process manually, or set a "periodic" schedule to collect data every hour.

Generate reports manually or create a reporting job

Finally, I get to the fun part: To generate report manually, click the Workspace tab, select a necessary VI object from the tree view, date and collection job session, choose reports and click the Create Report button.

At this point, I am reminded of a famous poem:

To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.
- William Blake

When evaluating products, try to imagine what the reports would look like with hundreds of virtual guest images. Certainly, I can see some potential, even though I had rather limited data to work with. In theory, the tool can create Visio output files, but you need to have Microsoft Visio installed. I have only "Visio Viewer" so I was unable to create any visio files with this product.

The reports can be exported to PDF, Word or Excel formats. Here is an example of an Excel spreadsheet export. While it has 14 bars for the 14 datastores, there are no labels, and the misleading details link in the lower right corner is non-functional. The only way for me to figure out what each referred to was to go back to my vCenter client, which kind of defeats the purpose of having a separate reporting tool.

This same report exported to PDF spanned across four pages, leaving the re-assembly to be done with a pair of scissors and celophane tape.

When you create reports, you can use SRSS or Veeam's internal proprietary format. Only SRSS reports can be put on the dashboard, so I recommend that.

Customize your dashboard

The fourth and final step is to configure your own dashboard: To add reports to the Dashboard, you should first create and save them using Workspace of Veeam Reporter 4.0. Keep in mind that you can add to the Dashboard only saved SSRS-based reports. To customize the Dashboard, click the Dashboard tab and then click the Edit Dashboard button. Customize the layout by dragging blue borders from the right and the bottom of the screen. Then, drag reports from the Reports list and drop them onto the created cells.

The "Free Edition" only allows you to put a single report on the dashboard, so as in step 3, you have to use your imagination of what the potential of the full license would looke like with multiple reports are on a single pane of glass.

(FTC Disclosure: I work for IBM, the leader in server virtualization worldwide, and the number #1 reseller of VMware. In this post, I review [Veeam Reporter 4.0] as my official entry for their blogging contest. IBM and Veeam do not have any business relationshiop that I know of, other than both being VMware business partners, so I am treating them here as an Independent Software Vendor (ISV). Veeam has not compensated me in any manner for this review, this review is not to be taken as an endorsement of Veeam or its products, and I was not provided any full or evaluator license keys. The review is based entirely on my experience using the "Free Edition" available to all for download. None of this blog post was pre-reviewed by anyone from Veeam. IBM, of course, also offers similar software, which I mention below for comparison purposes.)

At this point, you might be thinking, "Doesn't IBM offer something like this?" Of course it does! IBM is the leader in infrastructure reporting, monitoring and management software. Last October, [IBM unveiled IBM Systems Director VMcontrol] software. Not only does IBM Systems Director VMcontrol provide similar support for your VMware environment, it also manages Microsoft Hyper-V and Xen deployments, PowerVM on POWER-based serves, and even z/VM guest images on the System z mainframes. Combined with the rest of the IBM Systems Director, you can manage all of your physical and virtual servers with a single tool from a single pane of glass. How cool is that?

IBM VMcontrol comes in [three levels]:

• [Express Edition] offers the easiest way to manage virtual machines
• [Standard Edition] adds the ability to manage complete libraries of virtual images
• [Enterprise Edition] creates and enables the management of system pools – dynamic collections of computing resources used to support multiple virtual images running concurrently

To learn more, see the [VMcontrol Implementation Guide], take it for a test drive, with a [trial download], or talk to one of the many IBMers at [VMworld 2010] in San Francisco, August 30-September 2.

I would like to think Doug Hazelman, Senior Director of Product Strategy at Veeam, for organizing this awesome blogging contest. If you liked this blog post, click here to [vote for me] to get counted for this contest.

technorati tags: IBM, VMcontrol, Veeam, Reporter, VMware, Hyper-V, Xen, PowerVM, zVM, VMworld

Tags:  ibm vmware powervm xen veeam reporter hyper-v vmworld vmcontrol zvm

Well, it's Tuesday again, and you know what that means! IBM Announcements!

Today, IBM announced its latest IBM Tivoli Key Lifecycle Manager (TKLM) 2.0 version. Here's a quick recap:

Centralized Key Management

Centralized and simplified encryption key management through Tivoli Key Lifecycle Manager's lifecycle of creation, storage, rotation, and protection of encryption keys and key serving through industry standards. TKLM is available to manage the encryption keys for LTO-4, LTO-5, TS1120 and TS1130 tape drives enabled for encryption, as well as DS8000 and DS5000 disk systems using Full Disk Encryption (FDE) disk drives.

Partitioning of Access Control for Multitenancy

Access control and partitioning of the key serving functions, including end-to-end authentication of encryption clients and security of exchange of encryption keys, such that groups of devices have different sets of encryption keys with different administrators. This enables [multitenancy] or multilayer security of a shared infrastructure using encryption as an enforcement mechanism for access control. As Information Technology shifts from on-premises to the cloud, multitenancy will become growingly more important.

Support for KMIP 1.0 Standard

Support for the new key management standard, Key Management Interoperability Protocol (KMIP), released through the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards [OASIS]. This new standard enables encryption key management for a wide variety of devices and endpoints. See the [22-page KMIP whitepaper] for more information.

As much as I like to poke fun at Oracle, with hundreds of their Sun/StorageTek clients switching over to IBM tape solutions every quarter, I have to give them kudos for working cooperatively with IBM to come up with this KMIP standard that we can both support.

Support for non-IBM devices from Emulex, Brocade and LSI

Support for IBM self-encrypting storage offerings as well as suppliers of IT components which support KMIP, including a number of supported non-IBM devices announced by business partners such as Emulex, Brocade, and LSI. KMIP support permits you to deploy Tivoli Key Lifecycle Manager without having to worry about being locked into a proprietary key management solution. If you are a client with multiple "Encryption Key Management" software packages, now is a good time to consolidate onto IBM TKLM.

Role-based Authorization

Role-based access control for administrators that allows multiple administrators with different roles and permissions to be defined, helping increase the security of sensitive key management operations and better separation of duties. For example, that new-hire college kid might get a read-only authorization level, so that he can generate reports, and pack the right tapes into cardboard boxes. Meanwhile, for that storage admin who has been running the tape operations for the past ten years, she might get full access. The advantage of role-based authorization is that for large organizations, you can assign people to their appropriate roles, and you can designate primary and secondary roles in case one has to provide backup while the other is out of town, for example.

For more details, see the IBM [Announcement Letter].

This week, I'll be in Dallas, Texas. If you are an avid reader located in or near the Dallas area, and want to connect, you know how to reach me.

technorati tags: IBM, TKLM, KMIP, OASIS, encryption, FDE, Multitenancy, EKM, LTO, LTO-4, LTO-5, TS1120, TS1130, DS8000, DS5000, role-based, authorization, Emulex, Brocade, LSI

Tags:  ts1120 ekm kmip tklm ds8000 multitenance ds5000 encryption oasis emulex lto brocade authorization ibm lsi lto-4 lto-5 fde ts1130 role-based