Inside System Storage -- by Tony Pearson

Continuing my coverage of the [IBM Storage Innovation Executive Summit], that occurred May 9 in New York City, this is my seventh and final in a series of blog posts on this event.

Cosmic Scale of Data

Dan Galvan, IBM VP of Marketing for Storage, was the next speaker. With 300 billion emails being sent per day, 4.6 billion cell phones in the world, and 26 million MRIs per year, there is going to be a huge demand for file-based storage. In fact, a recent study found that file-based storage will grow at 60 percent per year, compared to 15 percent growth for block-based storage.

Dan positioned IBM's Scale-out Network Attached Storage (SONAS) as the big "C:" drive for a company. SONAS offers a global namespace, a single point of management, with the ability to scale capacity and performance tailored for each environment.

The benefits of SONAS are great. We can consolidate dozens of smaller NAS filers, we can virtualize files across different storage pools, and increase overall efficiency.

Powering advanced genomic research to cure cancer

The next speaker was supposed to be Bill Pappas, Senior Enterprise Network Storage Architect, Research Informatics at [St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital]. Unfortunately, St. Jude is near the flooding of the Mississippi river, and he had to stay put. An IBM team was able to capture his thoughts on video that was shown on the big screen.

Thanks to the Human Genome project, St. Jude is able to cure people. They see 5700 patients per year, and have an impressive 70 percent cure rate. The first genetic scan took 10 years, now the technology allows a genome to be mapped in about a week. Having this genomic information is making vast strides in healthcare. It is the difference of fishing in a river, versus putting a wide net to catch all the fish in the Atlantic ocean all at once.

Recently, St. Jude migrated 250 TB of files from other NAS to an IBM SONAS solution. The SONAS can handle a mixed set of workloads, and allows internal movement of data from fast disk, to slower high-capacity disk, and then to tape. SONAS is one of the few storage systems that supports a blended disk-and-tape approach, which is ideal for the type of data captured by St. Jude.

IBM's own IT transformation

Pat Toole, IBM's CIO, presented the internal transformation of IBM's IT operations. He started in 2002 in the midst of IBM's effort to restructure its process and procedures. They identified four major data sources: employee data, client data, product data, and financial data. They put a focus to understand outcomes and set priorities.

The result? A 3-to-1 payback on CIO investments. This allowed IBM to go from server sprawl to consolidated pooling of resources with the right levels of integration. In 1997, IBM had 15,000 different applications running across 155 separate datacenters. Today, they have reduced this down to 4,500 applications and 7 datacenters. Their goal is to reduce down to 2,225 applications by 2015. Of these, only 250 are mission critical.

Pat's priorities today: server and storage virtualization, IT service management, cloud computing, and data-centered consolidation. IBM runs its corporate business on the following amount of data:

• 9 PB of block-based storage, SVC and XIV
• 1 PB of file-based storage, SONAS
• 15 PB of tape for backup and archive

Pat indicated that this environment is growing 25 percent per year, and that an additional 70-85 PB relates to other parts of the business.

By taking this focused approach, IBM was able to increase storage utilization from 50 to 90 percent, and to cut storage costs by 50 percent. This was done through thin provisioning, storage virtualization and pooling.

Looking forward to the future, Pat sees the following challenges: (a) that 120,000 IBM employees have smart phones and want to connect them to IBM's internal systems; (b) the increase in social media; and (c) the use of business analytics.

After the last session, people gathered in the "Hall of the Universe" for the evening reception, featuring food, drinks and live music. It was a great day. I got to meet several bloggers in person, and their feedback was that this was a very blogger-friendly event. Bloggers were given the same level of access as corporate executives and industry analysts.

technorati tags: IBM, NYC, Summit, Dan Galvan, SONAS, Bill Pappas, St Jude, Research Hospital, CIO, Pat Toole, SVC, XIV

Continuing my coverage of the [IBM Storage Innovation Executive Summit], that occurred May 9 in New York City, this is my sixth in a series of blog posts on this event.

During the break, I talked with some of the other bloggers at this event. From left to right: Stephen Foskett [Pack Rat] blog, Devang Panchigar [StorageNerve], and yours truly, Tony Pearson. (Picture courtesy of Stephen Foskett)

Meet the Experts

This next segment was a Q&A panel, with a moderator posing questions to four experts. Originally, I was scheduled to be the moderator, but this was changed to Doug Balog. The experts on the panel were:

• Jon Toigo, Principal of Toigo Partners International LLC. I have worked with Jon for years, and most recently the two of us held a webcast on [How to Diagnose and Cure What Ails your Storage Infrastructure].
• Rich Castagna, Editorial Director for Storage Media, TechTarget. TechTarget is the group that runs the [SearchStorage] website.
• Stan Zaffos, Gartner VP of Research, who spoke earlier today. I have worked with Stan for years as well, and have attended the last four Gartner Data Center Conferences held every December in Las Vegas.
• Steve Duplessie, Founder and Senior Analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG). Steve's blog is titled [The Bigger Truth].

Jon clarified a statement Doug Balog said earlier in the day attributed to his study. Doug had said that 40 percent of all data should be archived. The study that Jon Toigo had done found that, on average, for the data on disk systems, about 30 percent is useful data, 40 percent is not active and could be eligible for archive, and the remaining 30 percent was crap.

The other experts introduced themselves. Rich felt that "Cloud" was still the biggest buzzword in the IT industry. Stan felt that CIOs should ask their storage administrators "What are you doing to improve my agility and efficiency". Steve felt that it was better to focus on improving process and procedures, rather than trying to deploy the best technology.

How can you best reduce backup costs per TB?

Jon- use tape.
Rich- Clean up your environment.
Stan- Don't rehydrate your deduplicated data, adopt archive approach, and revisit your backup schedules.
Steve- Deduplication covers up stupidity. No band-aids! Companies need to address the cause.

Does Backup as a Public Service for large enterprises makes sense?

Rich- Yes, especially for those with Remote Office/Branch Office (ROBO).
Stan- It depends. You should implement client-side dedupe. Get the Cloud Provider to waive telecom bandwidth charges.
Steve- Consider recovery scenarios, and try to maintain control.
Jon- "Clouds" are bulls@#$ marketing. WAN latency will pile up.

What are the top issues IT leaders should be discussing with the Storage Managers?

Stan- To ensure SLAs meet but not exceed design, to automate, and to evaluate SAN/NAS ratios.
Steve- Server virtualization is putting the spotlight on storage. Failure to implement storage virtualization is becoming the gate that slows down sever virtualization adoption.
Jon- Insist on management features from all storage vendors, try to separate feature/function from the underlying hardware layer. See IBM's [Project Zero].
Rich- Efficiency, Archiving, Thin Provisioning, Compression, Data Protection & Retention, Backup Redesign to protect endpoints like laptops and cell phones.

When does Archive eliminate Backup?

The need for protection never goes away. There are two kinds of data: "originals" and "derivatives", and two kinds of disk: "failed" and "not yet failed".

Given SATA and SAS drives, what is the future of 10K/15K RPM drives?

There is no future for these faster drives, they are going away.

What is the biggest challenge for adopting archive?

It is easy to move data out of production systems, but difficult to make these archives accessible for eDiscovery and Search. There is also concern about changing data formats. Adobe has changed the format of PDF a whopping 33 times.

This was by far the most entertaining section of the day! Hand-held devices allowed the audience to vote which answers they liked best.

technorati tags: IBM, NYC, Summit, Expert, Panel, Stephen Foskett, PackRat, Devang Panchigar, StorageNerve, Doug Balog, Jon Toigo, Rich Castagna, Stan Zaffos, Steve Duplessie, Adobe, PDF

Continuing my coverage of the [IBM Storage Innovation Executive Summit], that occurred May 9 in New York City, this is my fifth in a series of blog posts on this event.

Smart Archiving

Doug Balog, IBM VP and Business Level Executive for Storage, presented Smart Archiving. Citing research by Jon Toigo, Doug indicated that 40 percent of data on disk should be archived. Sadly, a vast majority of companies continue to use their backups as archives. There is a better way to do archives, to address the needs of four use cases:

1. Analytics
2. Compliance
3. Consolidation
4. Preservation

The IBM Information Archive for email, files and eDiscovery offers full text indexing. A well-deployed archive strategy can save up to 60 percent in backup costs, and reduce backup times by 80 percent. IBM offers advanced analytics and visualization for archive data.

An analysis of a global insurance company found that they kept, on average, 120 copies of every email sent. This was the combination of an average of 12 copies of the email, multipled by 10 backups of the email repository.

Banjercito, a bank in Mexico, has a 10-year retention requirement from government regulations.

The new LTFS Library Edition allows Library-based access to files stored on tape cartridges. The new TS3500 Library Connector means that a single system of connected tape libraries can hold up to 2.7 Exabytes (EB) of data.

Archive Industry Perspectives

Steve Duplessie from Enterprise Strategy Group [ESG] gave his views on the challenges of volume, access and cost. His definition for archive: the long term retention of information on a separate environment for compliance, eDiscovery and business reference purposes. Steve advocates a purpose-built solutiion for archive. There are three major challenges for implementing an archive solution:

1. Getting Participation -- Steve feels that key stakeholders have inappropriate expectations of what archive is, or can be.
2. Define Tasks -- Steve argues that archive is very much a process-oriented approach, and tasks must fit business process and procedures
3. Prepare for Future Content Types -- the frequent change of standard and proprietary data types poses a real challenge for long term retention of data

For example, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority [FINRA] oversee 4,000 brokerage firms, and 600,000 broker/dealers. They have mandated the storing of digital data related to stock trades, and this can include text messages, voice messages, and emails. They continue to expand this definition, so soon this could include tweets on Twitter, for example.

Steve feels there are four key requirements for archive:

1. Support for email, such as an email application plug-in
2. Off-line access to archived data
3. Support for mobile devices, such as smartphones
4. Basic search capabilities

Companies are starting to take archive seriously. About 35 percent of firms surveyed have adopted archive, and another 36 percent plan to in the next 12-24 months. Enterprise archive has grown over 200 percent from 2007 to 2009. Steve agrees that not everything needs to be stored on disk. Retention periods greater than six years dictates the need for tape.

Current systems may not meet today's requirements. Data loss and downtime costs have skyrocketed. Data Protection and Retention projects can represent a gold mine of savings, new capabilities can greatly lower costs, allowing companies to shift resources over to revenue generation.

Big Data, New Physics and Geospatial Super-Food

I would vote this the best session of the day! For all those confused on what the heck "Big Data" means, Jeff has the best explanation. Jeff Jonas is an IBM Distinguished Engineer and the Chief Scientist of Entity Analytics. He had just finished his 17th marathon on Saturday, and his fingers were bandaged.

Jeff had founded the Systems Research and Design (SR&D) company, known for creating NORA (non-obvious relationship awareness) used by Las Vegas casinos to identify fraud. SR&D was acquired by IBM back in 2005. Jeff is focused on sensemaking of streams. He feels many companies are suffering from "Enterprise Amnesia".

"The data must find the data .. and the relevance must find the user."
-- Jeff Jonas

Jeff's metaphor to Big Data is a jigsaw puzzle without the picture on the outside of the box. To demonstrate his point, he presented a pile of jigsaw puzzle pieces and asked four teenagers to put the puzzle together without the advantage of the picture on the box. What he had not told them was that he mixed four different puzzles together, removing out 10 to 20 percent of the pieces from each puzzle. He also added some duplicate pieces from a second identical puzzle, and just to make things fun, included a dozen pieces from a sixth puzzle just to mess with their heads. Within a few hours, the kids had managed to figure out that there were four puzzles, that there were duplicate pieces, and that there were some pieces that did not fit any of the four puzzles.

"You can't squeeze knowledge from a pixel."
-- Jeff Jonas

This approach favors false negatives. New observations reverse out old conceptions. As the picture emerges, this provides added focus on new information. More data can provide better predictions. "Bad" data, including misspelled words and mis-coded categories, was often discarded or corrected on the basis of "Garbage-In, Garbage Out", but can now be useful in a Big Data perspective.

Take for example the 600 billion recordings of the "location data" captured on cell phones every day. With regular triangulation of cell phone towers, the information can pinpoint you within 60 meters, add GPS and this improved to within 20 meters, and add Wi-Fi is further improved to 10 meters. While this data is "de-identified" so as not to identify individual users, the process of re-identification is relatively trivial. Jeff's system is able to predict a person will be next Thursday at 5:35pm with 87 percent accuracy.

Thus, Big Data represents an asset, accumulation of context. Real-time analytics can be a competitive advantage. These streams of data will need persistent storage and massive I/O capabilities. In one example, Jeff processed 4,200 separate sources of information and was able to identify "dead votes". These are votes cast by people that died in years prior, indicating voter fraud.

Jeff's latest project, codenamed G2, will tackle not just people, but everything from proteins to asteroids.

Normally, the worst time slot is the hour after lunch, but these presentations kept people's attention.

technorati tags: IBM, Summit, NYC, Doug Balog, Smart Archive, Information Archive, Banjercito, Steve Duplessie, ESG, , FINRA, Big Data, Jeff Jonas, NORA, SRD, Enterprise Amnesia, cell phone, location data

Continuing my coverage of the [IBM Storage Innovation Executive Summit], that occurred May 9 in New York City, this is my fourth in a series of blog posts on this event.

Down the street, in Times Square, IBM made it on the big board.

Continuous Data Availability

Jeanine Cotter, IBM VP for Data Center Services, started out with a video about Sabre. IBM developed this revolutionary airline reservation system to handle the huge volume of transactions. Today, 18 percent of organizations consider downtime unacceptable for their tier-1 applications, and 53 percent would be seriously impacted by an outage lasting an hour or more.

Eventually, companies cross the "Continuous Availability" threshold, the point where they discover that the possibility of downtime is too costly to ignore. IBM has clients using 3-site Metro/Global Mirror that can fail-over an entire data center in just five mouse clicks.

Jeanine also mentioned Euronics, which is using SAN Volume Controller's Stretched Cluster capability, which allows them to easily vMotion virtual guest images from one data center to another. SVC has had this capability for a while, but now, with full VMcenter plug-in and VAAI support, the capability is fully integrated with VMware.

A final example was a mid-sized University, they are using IBM Storwize V7000 with Metro Mirror. The primary location's Storwize V7000 manages Solid-state drives with Easy Tier. The secondary location's Storwize V7000 has high-capacity SATA drives and FlashCopy.

Customer Testimonial - University of Rochester Medical Center

Rick Haverty, Director of IT infrastructure at University of Rochester Medical Center [URMC] provided the next client testimonial. The mission of the URMC is to use science, education and technology to improve health. URMC gets over $400 million USD in NIH grants, which puts them around 23rd largest University-based academic medical centers in the country. They have over 900 doctors, general practice and specialists.

URMC has an IBM BlueGene supercomputer, a Cisco network over 45,000 ports, and over 7.5 million square feet of Wi-Fi wireless internet coverage. They have three datacenters. The first is 7500 square feet, the second is 6000 square feet, and the third is just 800 square feet to hold their "off-site tapes".

URMC has digitized all of their records, including Electronic Medical Records (EMR) system, medical dosage history, imaging "priors", calibration of infusion pumps, RFID monitoring, and even provide IT support while the patient is on the operating table. RFID monitoring ensures all of the refrigerators are keeping medications at the right temperature. A single failed refrigerator can lose $20,000 dollars worth of medication.

When is a good time for downtime? At URMC, they handle 90,000 Emergency Room vists per year, so the answer is never. When is the ER busiest? Monday morning. (not what I expected!)

URMC's EMR software (Epic) runs on clustered POWER7 servers, with DS8700 disk systems using Metro Mirror to secondary location. They also keep a third "shadow" POWER7 for read-only purposes, and a separate system that provides web-based read-only access. Finally, they have 90 stand-alone Personal Computers (PCs) that contain information for all the patients that have reservations this week, just in case all the other systems fail.

The exploding volume of data comes from medical imaging. For radiology (X-rays), each image is called a "study" takes 20-30 MB each, and they have 650,000 studies per year. This represents about 16TB storage per year, with 3 second response time access. These must be kept for 7 years since last view, or until the patient reaches the age of 18 years old, which ever is later.

But radiology is just one discipline. Healthcare has a whole bunch of "ologies". Another is "Pathology" which looks at cells between glass slides in a microscope. Each study consumes 10-20GB, and URMC does about 100,000 pathology studies per year, representing 150TB per year.

URMC has identified that they have 42 mission-critical applications. The data for these are stored on DS8000, XIV, Storwize V7000 and DS5000, all managed behind SAN Volume Controller.

Next up, Doug Balog covers Smart Archiving.

technorati tags: IBM, NYC, Summit, Continuous Availability, Jeanine Cotter, SVC, Stretched Cluster, Euronics, URMC, Rick Haverty, BlueGene, EMR, Epic, RFID, NIH

Continuing my coverage of the [IBM Storage Innovation Executive Summit], that occurred May 9 in New York City, this is my third in a series of blog posts on this event.

During lunch, people were able to take a look at our solutions. Here are Dan Thompson and Brett Cooper striking a pose.

Hyper-Efficient Backup and Recovery

The afternoon was kicked off by Dr. Daniel Sabbah, IBM General Manager of Tivoli software. He started with some shocking statistics: 42 percent of small companies have experienced data loss, 32 percent have lost data forever. IBM has a solution that offers "Unified Recovery Management". This involves a combination of periodic backups, frequent snapshots, and remote mirroring.

IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) was introduced in 1993, and was the first backup software solution to support backup to disk storage pools. Today, TSM is now also part of Cloud Computing services, including IBM Information Protection Services. IBM announced today a new bundle called IBM Storwize Rapid Application Backup, which combines IBM Storwize V7000 midrange disk system, Tivoli FlashCopy Manager, implementation services, with a full three-year hardware and software warranty. This could be used, for example, to protect a Microsoft Exchange email system with 9000 mailboxes.

IBM also announced that its TS7600 ProtecTIER data deduplication solutions have been enhanced to support many-to-many bi-direction remote mirroring. Last year, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) reported that they were average 24x data deduplication factor in their environment using IBM ProtecTIER.

"You are out of your mind if you think you can live without tape!"
-- Dick Crosby, Director of System Administration, Estes

The new IBM TS1140 enterprise class tape drive process 2.3 TB per hour, and provides a density of 1.2 PB per square foot. The new 3599 tape media can hold 4TB of data uncompressed, which could hold up to 10TB at a 2.5x compression ratio.

The United States Golfers Association [USGA] uses IBM's backup cloud, which manages over 100PB of data from 750 locations across five continents.

Customer Testimonial - Graybar

Randy Miller, Manager of Technical System Administration at Graybar, provided the next client testimonial. Graybar is an employee-owned company focused on supply-chain management, serving as a distributor for electical, lighting, security, power and cooling equipment.

Their problem was that they had 240 different locations, and expecting local staff to handle tape backups was not working out well. They centralized their backups to their main data center. In the event that a system fails in one of their many remote locations, they can rebuild a new machine at their main data center across high-speed LAN, and then ship overnight to the remote location. The result, the remote location has a system up and running by 10:30am, faster than they would have had from local staff trying to figure out how to recover from tape. In effect, Graybar had implemented a "private cloud" for backup in the 1990s, long before the concept was "cool" or "popular".

In 2001, they had an 18TB SAP ERP application data repository. To back this up, they took it down for 1 minute per day, six days a week, and 15 minutes down on Sundays. The result was less than 99.8 percent availability. To fix this, they switched to XIV, and use Snapshots that are non-disruptive and do not impact application performance.

Over 85 percent of the servers at Graybar are virtualized.

Their next challenge is Disaster Recovery. Currently, they have two datacenters, one in St. Louis and the other in Kansas City. However, in the aftermath of Japan's earthquakes, they realize there is a nuclear power plan between their two locations, so a single incident could impact both data centers. They are working with IBM, their trusted advisors, to investigate a three-site solution.

This week, May 15-22, I am in Auckland, New Zealand teaching IBM Storage Top Gun sales class. Next week, I will be in Sydney, Australia.

technorati tags: IBM, summit, NYC, Daniel Sabbah, TSM, Storwize, , TS7600, ProtecTIER, TS1140, tape, USGA, Graybar, Randy Miller, SAP, ERP, Disaster Recovery, New Zealand, Australia, Top Gun

Continuing my coverage of the [IBM Storage Innovation Executive Summit], this is my second in a series of blog posts on this event.

Optimizing Storage Infrastructure for Growth and Innovation

This session started off with my former boss, Brian Truskowski, IBM General Manager of System Storage and Networking.

We've come a long way in storage. In 1973, the "Winchester Drive" was named after the famous Winchester 3030 rifle. The disk drive was planning to have two 30MB platters, hence the name. When it finally launched, it would have two 35MB platters, for a total raw capacity of 70MB.

Today, IBM announced the verison 6.2 of SAN Volume Controller with support for 10GbE iSCSI. Since 2003, IBM has sold over 30,000 SAN Volume Controllers. An SVC cluster can now manage up to 32PB of disk storage.

IBM also announced new 4TB tape drive (TS1140), LTFS Library Edition, the TS3500 Library Connector, improved TS7600 and TS7700 virtual tape libraries, enhanced Information Archive for email, files and eDiscovery, new Storwize V7000 hardware, new Storwize Rapid Application bundles, new firmware for SONAS and DS8000 disk systems, and Real-Time Compression support for EMC disk systems. I plan to cover each of these in follow-on posts, but if you can't wait, here are [links to all the announcements].

Customer Testimonial - CenterPoint Energy

"CenterPoint is transforming its business from being an energy distribution company that uses technology, to a technology company that distributes energy."
-- Dr. Steve Pratt, CTO of CenterPoint Energy

The next speaker was Dr. Steve Pratt is CTO of [CenterPoint Energy]. CenterPoint is 110 years old (older than IBM!) energy company that is involved in electricity, gasoline distribution, and natural gas pipeline. CenterPoint serves Houston, Texas (the fourth largest city in the USA) and surrounding area.

CenterPoint are transforming to a Smart Grid involving smart meters, and this requires the best IT infrastructure you can buy, including IBM DS8000, XIV and SAN Volume Controller disk systems, IBM Smart Analytics System, Stream Analytics, IBM Virtual Tape Library, IBM Tivoli Storage Manager, and IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center.

Dr. Pratt has seen the transition of information over the years:

1. Data Structure, deciding how to code data to record it in a structured manner
2. Information Reporting, reporting to upper management what happened
3. Intelligence Aggregation, finding patterns and insight from the data
4. Predictive Analytics, monitoring real-time data to take pro-active steps
5. Autonomics, where automation and predictive analysis allows the system to manage itself

What does the transition to a Smart Grid mean for their storage environment? They will go from 80,000 meter reads, to 230,400,000 reads per day. Ingestion of this will go from MB/day to GB/sec. Reporting will transition to real-time analytics.

Dr. Pratt prefers to avoid trade-offs. Don't lose something to get something else. He also feels that language of the IT department can help. For example, he uses "Factor" like 25x rather than percent reduction (96 percent reduced). He feels this communicates the actual results more effectively.

Today's smarter consumers are driving the need for smarter technologies. Individual consumers and small businesses can make use of intelligent meters to help reduce their energy costs. Everything from smart cars to smart grids will need real-time analytics to deal with the millions of events that occur every day.

IBM's Data Protection and Retention Story

Brian Truskowski came back to provide the latest IBM messaging for Data Protection and Retention (DP&R). The key themes were:

1. Stop storing so much
2. Store more with what's on the floor
3. Move data to the right place

IBM announced today that the IBM Real-Time Compression Appliances now support EMC gear, such as EMC Celerra. While some of the EMC equipment have built-in compression features, these often come at a cost of performance degradation. Instead, the IBM Real-Time compression can offer improved performance as well as 3x to 5x reduction in storage capacity.

OVer 70 percent of data on disk has not be accessed in the last 90 days. IBM Easy Tier on the DS8700 and DS8800 now support FC-to-SATA automated tiering.

IBM is projecting that backup and archive storage will grow at over 50 percent per year. To help address this, IBM is launching a new "Storage Infrastructure Optimization" assessment. All attendees at today's summit are eligible for a free assessment.

Analytics are increasing the value of information, and making it more accessible to the average knowledge worker. The cost of losing data, as well as the effort spent searching for information, has skyrocketed. Users have grown to expect 100 percent uptime availability.

An analysis of IT environments found that only 55 percent was spent on revenue-producing workloads. The remaining 45 percent was spent on Data Protection and Retenion. That means that for every IT dollar spent on projects to generate revenue, you are spending another 90 cents to protect it. Imagine spending 90 percent of your house payments for homeowners' insurance, or 90 percent of your car's purchase price for car insurance.

IBM has organized its solutions into three categories:

1. Hyper-Efficient Backup and Recovery
2. Continuous Data Availability
3. Smart Archiving

What would it mean to your business if you could shift some of the money spent on DP&R over to revenue-producing projects instead? That was the teaser question posed at the end of these morning sessions for us to discuss during lunch.

Normally, IBM has its announcements on Tuesdays, but this week it was on Monday!

I am here in New York City, at the Kaufmann Theater of the American Museum of Natural History, for the [IBM Storage Innovation Executive Summit]. We have about 250 clients here, as well as many bloggers and storage analysts.

My day started out being interviewed by Lynda from Stratecast, a division of [Frost & Sullivan]. This interview will be part of a video series that Stratecast is doing about the storage industry.

(About the venue: American Museum of Natural History was built in 1869. It was featured in the film "Night at the Museum". In keeping with IBM's focus on scalability and preservation, the museum here boasts skeletons of the largest dinosaurs. The five-story building takes up several city blocks, and the Kaufmann theater is buried deep in the bottom level, well shielded from cell phone or Wi-Fi signals allowing me to focus on taking notes the traditional way, with pen and paper.)

Deon Newman, IBM VP of Marketing for Northa America, was our Master of Ceremonies. Today would be filled with market insight, best practices, thought leadership, and testimonials of powerful results.

This is my first in a series of blog posts on this event.

Information Explosion on a Smarter Planet

Bridget van Kralingen, IBM General Manager for North America, indicated that storage is finally having its day in the sun, moving from the "back office" to the "front office". According to Google's Eric Schmidt, we now create, capture and replicate more date in two days than all of the information recorded from the dawn of time to the year 2003.

• 1928: IBM's innovative 80-column punch card stored nearly twice as much as its 50-column predecessor.
• 1947: Bing Crosby decided to do his radio show by recording it at his convenience on magnetic tape, rather than doing it live. This was the motivation for IBM researches to investigate tape media, delivering the first commercial tape drive in 1952. One tape reel could hold the equivalent of 30,000 punch cards.
• 1956: the IBM RAMAC mainframe was the first computer to access data randomly with an externally-attached disk system, the "350 Disk Unit", which stored 5 million 7-bit characters (about 5MB) and weighed over 500 pounds. Compare that today's cell phone that can store several GB of data in a handheld device.
• 1978: IBM invented Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID) through a collaboration with University of Berkeley.
• 1993: IBM introduces the [IBM 9337 Disk Storage Array], the first external disk storage system for distributed operating systems. This was based on the Serial Storage Architecture [SSA] protocol.
• 1995: IBM launches products that support Storage Area Networks (SAN), based on the Fibre Channel Protocol. IBM's internal codenames for disk products were all names of sharks, and so our internal mantra was that a healthy storage diet was comprised of "Plenty of Fish and Fibre".
• 2010: IBM ships Easy Tier, the world's easiest-to-use sub-LUN automated tiering capability, for the IBM System Storage DS8700 disk system.

Storage is growing (in capacity) at 40 percent per year, but IT budgets are only growing (in dollars) by a measly 1 to 5 percent. She cited the success at [Sprint], presented at the October 2010 launch. By combining IBM SAN Volume Controller with a three-tier storage architecture, Sprint lowered their raw capacity from 10PB to 8.4PB, increasing utilization from 35 to 78 percent. This involved shrinking from six storage vendors to three, and reducing total number of disk arrays from 166 down to 96. The resulting system has only 38 percent of their data on their most expensive Tier-1 storage, the rest is now living on less expensive Tier-2 and Tier-3 storage.

Companies are entering the era of Big Data with an insatiable appetite for collecting and analyzing data for marketplace insights. IBM [InfoSphere BigInsights], based on the Apache Hadoop, has helped customers make sense of it all. Innovative technology, expertise and marketplace insight will provide the competitive path forward in the coming decade.

Storage Challenges and Opportunities in 2011 and Beyond

I always enjoy hearing Stan Zaffos, Gartner Research VP, present at the annual [Data Center Conference] in Las Vegas every December. His analysis and research focuses on storage systems and emerging storage technologies.

Stan provided his perspective on the storage industry. He suggested a top-down approach, based on the market trends that Gartner is closely monitoring. He suggests focusing heavily on managing data growth, using SLAs to improve efficiency, and to follow Gartner's recommended actions. His statement, "If something is not sustainable, then it is unsustainable." resonated well with the audience. His key three points:

1. Design to meet but not exceed Service Level Agreements (SLAs)
2. Re-evaluate your ratio of SAN versus NAS based on growth of unstructured data content,
3. Explore the variety of Cloud options available.

Those of us who have been in this business a long time recognize that the problems haven't changed, just the dimensions. When in the past three decades were IT budgets generous and plentiful? When was there more than enough IT staff to handle all the requests in a timely manner? When hasn't there been a period of information growth? Gartner's analysis external control block (RAID protected disk systems) is growing revenue at 8.7 percent. Raw TBs of disk capacity is growing at 55 percent, and expected to be 100 Exabytes by 2015.

SAN has four times more revenue than NAS today, but NAS is growing faster. NAS was only 9 percent marketshare in 2010, but is projected to grow to 32 percent by 2015. SAN can offer higher price/performance for traditional OLTP and database workloads, but NAS is better suited for unstructured data, backups and archives, assisted by storage efficiency features like real-time compression and data deduplication. Which industries create the most unstructured data? The ones involved in filling out forms! This includes government, insurance agencies, manufacturing, mining and pharmaceuticals.

The phrase "good enough" should no longer be considered an insult. Too often IT departments design solutions that far exceed negotiated Service Level Agreements (SLAs), and they should instead focus on just meeting them instead. Modular storage systems are often sufficient for most workloads. Slower 7200RPM SATA disks can be one third the price of faster 15K RPM Fibre Channel drives, and often sufficient performance for the tasks required. Unified storage, such as IBM N series, can help simplify capacity planning, as storage can be re-purposed if different workloads grow at different rates. The key is to focus on meeting SLAs based on the price-vs-risk factor. Take a minimalist approach with fewer SLAs, fewer management classes, and fewer storage vendors.

Stan suggests a two-pronged approach: Capacity management through content analytics and classification, and Efficient Utilization through Thin Provisioning, storage virtualization, Quality of Service (QoS), compression and deduplication capabilities. This features will be ubiquitous by 2013. If you are worried that these technologies mean more information packed onto fewer devices, Stan's response was "If it's not there, it can't break." Storing data on fewer disks or tape cartridges means less chance something will fail.

Stan feels IT shops using Thin Provisioning should continue to charge their end-users on what they ask for (the full allocation request) rather than what the thin-provisioned amount actually is on the storage devices themselves. For example, if someone asks for 100GB LUN to be allocated to their system, but this only takes up 30GB of actual data space, chargeback the full 100GB!

It can take five years for new technology to get 50 percent adopted. The Romans took eight years to build the [Colosseum]. His research on "network convergence" found that 42 percent planned to use iSCSI, 32 percent Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) or other Top-of-Rack(TOR) converged switches, and 16 percent looking for full convergence of servers, switches and storage. Features like IBM Easy Tier automatic sub-LUN tiering were introduced later, and so have not been adopted as widely as other features like Thin Provisioning that have been around since the 1990's IBM RAMAC Virtual Array.

Stan felt that Public and Private clouds were two different approaches. Public clouds offer reservation-less provisioning. Private clouds offer improved agility, but can be more complex to set up, and has the risk of idle capacity similar to traditional IT datacenter deployments. Storage and File virtualization should be considered a pre-req for adopting Cloud technologies.

Storage IT teams need to adopt more than just technical skills. They need to learn about legal and government regulatory compliance issues, financial considerations, and would even benefit doing some "marketing". Why marketing? Because often IT departments need end-users to change their attitudes and behaviours, and this can be accomplished through internal marketing campaigns.

This certainly was a great way to start the day!

technorati tags: IBM, NYC, Stratecast, Deon Newman, Bridget van Kralingen, Eric Schmidt, RAMAC, Bing Crosby, Easy Tier, Sprint, Stan Zaffos, Gartner

Last month, the National Association of Broadcasters [NAB] had their big [2011 NAB Show]. Broadcast Engineering [announced the 2011 NAB Show Pick Hit winners]. The big news was that IBM's Linear Tape File System (LTFS) was a "Pick Hits" winner at this conference!

IBM introduced the Linear Tape File System last year, which I explained in my post [IBM Celebrates 10 Year Anniversary for LTO tape], and released it as open source to the rest of the Linear Tape Open [LTO] Consortium so that the entire planet can benefit from IBM's innovation. IBM presented a technology demonstration of its Linear Tape File System - Library Edition at the NAB conference, showing how this new IBM library offering of the file system can put mass archives of rich media video content at the users fingertips with the ease of library automation.

From left to right, here is Atsushi Nagaishi (Toshiba) and Shinobu Fujihara (IBM). Fujihara-san is from IBM's Yamato lab in Japan where some of the LTFS development was done. The Yamato Lab was not damaged by the [Earthquakes in Japan].

With the capabilities of LTFS, IBM has introduced an entirely new role for tape, as an attractive high capacity, easy to use, low cost and shareable storage media. LTFS can make tape usable in a fashion like removable external disk, a giant alternative to floppy diskettes, DVD-RW and USB memory sticks with directory tree access and file-level drag-and-drop capability. LTFS can allow the for passing of information around from one system or employee to another. And as for high video storage capacity, a 1.5TB LTO-5 cartridge can hold about 50 hours of XDCAM HD video!

A group photo of the global IBM LTFS team, from left to right, David Pease from IBM Almaden Research Center, Ed Childers from IBM Tucson, Shinobu Fujihara and Hironobu Nagura from IBM Japan.

IBM was once again #1 leader in Tape worldwide for the year 2010. With this exciting new win, tape is not just for backup and archive anymore!

Next week, I will be in New York City for the [IBM Storage Innovation Executive Summit].

technorati tags: IBM, LTFS, NAB, Atsushi Nagaishi, Toshiba, Shinobu Fujihara, David Pease, Ed Childers, Hironobu Nagura

"All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy!"
--- proverb

Often I get feedback from my readers that I focus too much on storage products in this blog, and have been asked to break out of the work world for a change. Fair enough! The first Sunday of May is designated "World Laughter Day". I am proud to be one of the founding members of the [Tucson Laughter Club] back in 2004, and we held our first World Laughter Day event on May 1, 2005 at Udall Park.

Over the past seven years, we have had four other clubs "spin off" from the main group to form their own club. However, for World Laughter Day, the five sister clubs (or five warring tribes, as some call them) put down our differences and got together for a day of fun. In keeping with the tradition of having these events outside, we were granted permission to hold our event at the University of Airzona mall.

While the Tucson Laughter Club is recognized as one of the oldest laughter clubs in the United States, there are actually over 6000 clubs worldwide in over 60 countries. Laughter clubs started in India, when Dr. Madan Kataria (a medical doctor) and his wife Madhuri (a yoga instructor) gathered people in a park to try laughter as a form of healing and exercise. Today, [Laughter Yoga] is practiced outside in parks or indoors.

Up until now, all of the World Laughter Day events in Tucson have been organized by the original Tucson Laughter Club, but this time we decided to pass the baton over to Gita Fendelman of [Curve's Laughter YogHA club] to take the lead. Here she is standing next to a large yellow sign with facts and figures about the history of World Laughter Day.

We had about 45 people join us in a large circle, and proceed with a series of breathing, stretching and laughter exercises. Many of the laughter exercises involve moving around to look at each of the other participants eye-to-eye, and with 45 people, this can be quite challenging.

The weather could not have been nicer. Clear blue skies, a slight breeze, and an unusually cool 75 degrees F. Last week we were in the nineties approach summer, so we were delighted the weather cooled down for this event.

As a certified Laughter Yoga instructor myself, I offered to help lead the events for World Laughter Day. We had plenty of other certified laughter leaders on hand, and so both Gita and Emily (from Laughter Yoga with Emily) served as co-chairs.

I brought my [CRATE battery-powered amp] and microphones so that we could project our voices loud enough to the entire group. There was no electricity anywhere near our location, so battery-powered amps are the way to go for these situations.

After two hours of laughing, we all lie down for some relaxing meditation. Some people use this time to pray for World Peace. In a delightful coincidence, later that day, US President Barack Obama announced that the [world was a better place] having eliminated one of the world's most dangerous terrorists.

I would like to thank Jeff from our local NBC News Channel 4 affiliate [KVOA] who came to interview Gita and video us while we did our laughter exercises.

For more photos from this World Laughter Day event, see my [World Laughter Day 2011 Photo Set on Flickr].

technorati tags: World Laughter Day, Tucson, Laughter Club, Laughter Yoga, University of Arizona, Barack Obama, Osama bin Laden, World Peace