This week, I am in Orlando, Florida presenting, blogging and tweeting at the IBM Edge conference. The first day began with opening main tent sessions. Deon Newman, IBM VP of Marketing, was the emcee. The four-person [Bella Electric Strings] rocked the house with some electric violins.

Game Change on a Smarter Planet: A New Era in IT

Rod Adkins, IBM Senior VP for the Systems and Technology Group, presented IBM's Smarter Computing strategy. For those not familiar with this, a little context might help.

Back in 2008, IBM launched its corporate-wide strategy called "Smarter Planet", which focused on solving the world's biggest problems through the effective use of Information Technology. To get there, everything needs to be instrumented to monitor and gather information, interconnected with centralized processing, and analyzed through intelligent algorithms.

Over the past few years, this general approach has been made more specific to tackle problems in particular industries. Detailed approaches like Smarter Cities, Smarter Energy, Smarter Education, Smarter Retail, Smarter Water and Smarter Food, are a few examples of this.

As IBM pursued solutions in each of these areas, clients realized they needed some guidance on the underlying IT infrastructure needed to deploy these solutions. Last year, IBM launched the Smarter Computing, which I [explained in great detail in my blog post last March].

• Designed for the Data - to be fair, IBM systems have always been designed for the data. When the System/360 first came out, the bulk of data was stored in structured databases, so systems were designed for this. Today, over 80 percent of data is unstructured, not in a database, so the design and approach for systems today must reflect that new reality. For example, Big Data analytics is often used against spreadsheets, documents, social media feeds, and other unstructured sources.
  
  
• Workload-Optimized Systems - There are two ways to have a workload-optimized system. The first is to start with general purpose components and tune them, and the second is to integrate expertise into the design.
  
  
• Managed with Cloud technologies - Cloud computing has introduced new levels of standardization, automation and virtualization.

Rod wrapped up his session discussing the IBM PureSystems family of expert-integrated systems that IBM announced in April. This includes the PureFlex infrastructure system and the PureApplication platform system.

A New Approach to Storage

Brian Truskowski, IBM General Manager for System Storage and Networking, presented IBM's new approach to storage to support Smarter Computing environments.

• Efficient by Design - Storage needs to be designed for the data, to store it efficiently, and be able to scale in the expected growth, driven by trends such as Big Data analytics.
  
  
• Self-Optimizing - Storage needs to be self-optimizing for their particular application workloads, to avoid manual performance tuning efforts. Policies to handle Qualities of Service help optimize performance and costs based on business requirements.
  
  
• Cloud Agile - Storage needs to be part of a virtualized environment, managed by Cloud technologies. This includes working seemlessly in environments with server hypervisors, storage hypervisors, virtual LANs, SANs and tape libraries.

With this new approach, clients will be able to increase competitiveness, while reducing both capital and operational expenses.

Snowball Studios

Yoni Cohen is the founder and CEO of Snowball Studios. They started with five artists, and grew to 60 people in a few years to take on bigger projects. They produce digital animation for television shows and commercials.

Despite their small size, they have a dedicated "IT" department. In addition to developing in-house tools for the artists to produce animation, they also were tasked to find the best storage solutions. Files storing 3D video can be quite large. After exhausting research into all the storage options, they chose IBM, and complemented this with the Real-Time Compression appliance for their NAS environments.

The results were stunning. A project that took 417GB before took only 148GB. a 64 percent data footprint reduction! He found he got this 3x reduction across his environment.

University of Rochester Medical Center (URMC)

University of Rochester is in New York state, about 60 miles east of Buffalo, and 90 miles from Toronto across Lake Ontario. Six years ago, Rick Haverty joined URMC as the Director of Infrastructure services, managing 130 of the 300 IT personnel at the Medical Center. I met Rick last year, when he presented at the [IBM Storage Innovation Executive Summit] in New York City. Last December, I co-presented with Rick on a session for SONAS at the [Data Center Conference].

URMC has DS8000, DS5000, XIV, SONAS, Storwize V7000 and is in the process of deploying Storwize V7000 Unified. He presented how he has used these for his Vendor Neutral Archive (VNA). For Rick, the IT Infrastructure has become the new "dial tone", everyone expects it to work 100 percent of the time.

For those not familiar with VNA, Rick has 36 different departments, and each was storing archives of their medical images in separate silos of storage. Using software from [Acuo Technologies], he was able to have all 36 different PACS systems store data onto a single storage repository. The side benefit is that all medical images are now readily available to the Electronic Medical Records (EMR) system.

Main Tent for Technical Edge

After the opening session, the folks in Technical Edge moved to a different room for the main tent session. Mike Kuhn, IBM VP of Systems Lab Services, was the emcee. There were three guest speakers:

• Clod Barrera, IBM Distinguished Engineer and Chief Technical Strategist for IBM System Storage, presented on storage trends and directions, and how this will influence workload-optimized systems, Cloud computing, Easy Tier, and Active Cloud Engine.
• Jeff Jonas, IBM Fellow and Chief Scientist for IBM Entity Analytics, presented "Fantasy Analytics" which explained his work in the Business Analytics. He used "jigsaw puzzles" as an analogy to help explain for the type of work he is researching.
• Dan McMillan, Chief Comedy Officer of his own company, was formerly an engineer, but now stand-up comedian. He poked fun at the IT industry, how things have changed since he was an engineer, and his ideal "Universal Business Translator".

This was a great way to kick off the week!

technorati tags: IBM, Deon Newman, Bella Electric Strings, Rod Adkins, Smarter Planet, Smarter Computing, Brian Truskowski, Smarter Storage, Yoni Cohen, Snowball Studios, Rick Haverty, URMC, SONAS, Storwize V7000, VNA, Acuo Technologies

Tags:  vna rod+adkins deon+newman smarter+computing yoni+cohen smarter+planet snowball+studios storwize+v7000 bella+electric+strings ibm acuo+technologies rick+haverty brian+truskowski urmc smarter+storage sonas

The first day had various breakout sessions in the afternoon.

Understanding Your Options for Storing Archive Data to Meet Compliance Challenges

Storing Archive Data to meet Compliance Challenges

View more presentations from Tony Pearson on the IBM Expert Network.

I presented IBM's Smart Archive strategy and the storage products IBM offers to archive data and meet compliance regulations:

• The differences between backup and archive, including a few of my own personal horror stories helping companies who had foolishly thought that keeping backup copies for years would adequately serve as their archive strategy
• The differences between Write-Once Read-Many (WORM) media, and Non-Erasable, Non-Rewriteable (NENR) storage options.
• How disk-only archive solutions become "space heaters" for your data center.
• An overview of the various storage hardware options from IBM.
• How LTFS can be incorporated into an archive solution, such as [Crossroads Systems' StrongBox® solution].
• An explanation of the different IBM software offerings to help complement the storage hardware choices.

 

IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center (TPC): New Features and Functions

Mike Griese, IBM program manager for TPC, presented the latest in TPC 5.1 version announced this week. His session was organized into four key sections:

• Insights - TPC 5.1 integrates COGNOS reporting, which allows custonmization of reports and ad-hoc exploration and analysis. Since the reports are not binary-compiled into the product, IBM can ship new COGNOS reports as templates outside the normal TPC release schedule. Also, TPC 5.1 got smarter on reporting on server virtualization hypervisor environments to avoid double-counting.
  
  
• Recommendations - TPC 5.1 can analyze your usage patterns across the entire data center and make recommendations to move data from one storage tier to another. You can then act on these recommendations by moving data from one tier to another, either "up-tier" to faster storage, or "down-tier" to less expensive storage, using a storage hypervisor like IBM SAN Volume Controller. This is complementary to features like Easy Tier which optimize within a single disk system.
  
  
• Performance - TPC 5.1 uses a new web-based GUI, based on AJAX, HTML5 and Dojo widgets, inspired by the IBM XIV GUI, and similar to the web-based GUI of SAN Volume Controller, Storwize V7000 and SONAS.
  
  
• Optimization - TPC 5.1 allows you to optimize for Cloud by introducing a new RESTful API for storage provisioning and support for SONAS environments. This will allow upward-integration to products like [IBM Service Delivery Manager] and [Tivoli Storage Automation Manager].

Mike also explained the new TPC 5.1 packaging. Instead of having a variety of components like "TPC for Disk", "TPC for Data", and "TPC for Replication", the new packaging simplifies this down to two levels of functionality. The basic level supports block-level devices, including disk performance, replication and SAN fabric management. The advanced level adds support for files and databases, including support for Cloud management such as SONAS environments.

Dan Zehnpfennig, Solution Architect, talked about his experiences installing TPC 5.1 and how this was much improved over previous TPC versions.

IBM Watson: How it Works and What it Means for Society Beyond Winning Jeopardy!

IBM Watson: How it Works, and What it means for Society beyond winning Jeopardy!

View more presentations from Tony Pearson on the IBM Expert Network.

I presented how IBM Watson works, how it played the Jeopardy! game show last year, and how IBM has helped clients use the technology to solve real-world problems.

• Understanding the IBM Grand Challenge, how it compares to the IBM Deep Blue chess playing computer
• How IBM Watson works, the hardware, the software, and the algorithms involved
• How to build your own "Watson Jr." in your own basement, based on my [popular instructions I published last year].
• Examples of how the technology is being used in Healthcare and Financial Services

If you missed it, I will be repeating this session on IBM Watson on Thursday.

Tonight we have the grand opening reception of the Solution Center and a concert featuring Grace Potter & the Nocturnals!

technorati tags: IBM, Archive, Compliance, WORM, NENR, Mike Griese, , Dan Zehnpfennig, Tivoli Storage, Productivity Center, TPC, Watson, Healthcare, Financial Services, Wellpoint, Seton, CitiGroup

Tags:  healthcare productivity+center watson mike+griese nenr archive compliance worm wellpoint seton tpc ibm citigroup tivoli+storage financial+services

Well it's Tuesday again, and you know what that means... IBM announcements! Yesterday, at the IBM Edge conference here in Orlando, Florida, IBM announced its new apporach to storage, and a whole bunch of storage products, enhancements, and services. I will focus on some key ones here, and save the rest for next week.

IBM SAN Volume Controller (SVC) v6.4

The SVC is IBM's enterprise-class storage hypervisor. The latest software release, v6.4, can be installed on any SVC hardware, from the 2145-8F2 introduced back in 2005, to newer models like the 2145-CG8. Here are the key features:

• Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) -- This is complete end-to-end support. For SVC units with 10GbE ports, these ports can be now be used for FCoE. This allows hosts to attach to SVC via FCoE, allows SVC node-to-node communication for clustering, and allows SVC to communicate to back-end devices via FCoE.
  
  
• Real-Time Compression -- IBM ported over the patent Random Access Compression Engine (RACE) from the Real-Time Compression Appliances to SVC v6.4. This allows primary data, accessed via block-based protocols, to be compressed up to 80 percent. This feature is an extra priced feature by TB.
  
  
• Non-Disruptive Volume move between I/O Groups -- If you don't already have SVC, you don't need to worry about this. For existing SVC customers, this allows volumes to be associated with two or more I/O groups, and that you can add or remove I/O groups non-disruptively. For example, if you want to move a volume from IOG1 to IOG2, then you add IOG2 to the list of I/O groups for the volume, let the multi-pathing software discover the additional paths, the remove IOG1, which then marks the previous IOG1 paths inactive. All this can be done while applications read and write data.
  
  
• Dedicate FCP ports for Replication -- If you activate the two 10GbE Ethernet ports for FCoE, you can free up two FCP ports that you can dedicate for long-distance Metro Mirror or Global Mirror.

If you have SVC today, but are running an old release like v4.3 or v5.1, I recommennd you upgrade up to at least v6.2.05 release now. This release has been out for a year and is very stable, and serves as a great platform for a later upgrade to SVC v6.4.

IBM Storwize V7000 v6.4

The Storwize V7000 is IBM's midrange storage hypervisor. The latest software release, v6.4, can be installed on existing block-only Storwize V7000 units in the field. The Storwize V7000 v6.4 gets all the features listed above, as well as the following:

• Four-way clustering -- Previously, you could cluster two Storwize V7000 controller enclosures together (4 canisters total). To cluster three or four controllers required an RPQ. Now, IBM supports up to four Storwize V7000 controller enclosures (8 canisters) without an RPQ.
  
  
• Direct Fibre Channel attach -- A lot of people are using Storwize V7000 inside single-rack configurations, so it makes sense not to require a SAN switch for just a few Windows, Linux or VMware servers. An RPQ is now available to allow this to happen.

 

IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center (TPC) v5.1

TPC is already ranked one of the best Storage Infrastructure Management software in the market, and this release will just solidify its lead. Key features include:

• Upward integration to higher level management systems
• A new, intuitive, easy-to-use web-based GUI inspired by the XIV GUI
• Integration of COGNOS to be able to generate and customize reports
• Support for SONAS systems

There are several presentations on TPC this week that will go into more detail. Check out the [TPC Facebook page].

My latest book Inside System Storage: Volume IV is now available!

Yes, can you believe it? I have published my fourth volume in my "Inside System Storage" series! It is available in three formats:

• Hardcover with dust jacket
• Paperback
• eBook (Adobe Acrobat PDF)

You can order this, and all my other books, in all formats, directly from my [Author Spotlight] page. The paperback will also be available soon from other online booksellers, search for ISBN 978-1-105-72213-4.

IBM DS3500 Express

The DS3500 is our entry-level block-based device, designed specifically for random I/O workloads. This includes databases, email repositories, traditional business applications, and on-line transactional workloads. Here are the new features:

• Dynamic Disk Pooling, similar to what XIV does to reduce disk rebuild times, but using a RAID-6 like approach per chunk of data.
• Thin Provisioning using Dynamic Disk Pooling
• Asynchronous Logical Unit Access (ALUA) failover
• Enhanced FlashCopy, improved scalability, consistency groups and rollback support
• VMware API for Array Integration (VAAI) support. This includes Write Same, Extended Copy, and Atomic Test & Set.

The DS3500 replaces the previous models of DS3200, DS3300 and DS3400 models.

IBM DCS3700

The DCS3700 is our entry-level/midrange block-based device, replacing the DCS9900 model, designed specifically for sequential I/O workloads. This includes Big Data analytics, Hadoop, High Performance Computing (HPC), video surveillance, and television broadcasting. It holds 60 drives in a 4U controller enclosure.

For more on any of these announcements, see the [June 4th Announcement Page], or follow the Twitter tag #transformITnow.

technorati tags: IBM, SVC, Storwize V7000, Tivoli Storage, Productivity Center, TPC, DS3500, DCS37000

Tags:  ibm tivoli+storage ds3500 dcs37000 storwize+v7000 svc productivity+center tpc

This week I am in Orlando, Florida for the IBM Edge conference. Tuesday afternoon we had a Birds-of-a-Feather (BOF) session to discuss social media. I was the moderator. We had two independent bloggers on the panel: [Jon Toigo] and [Steve Foskett]. We had several IBM social media experts, including Jack Arnold, Scott Drummond, Mary Hall, Nick Harris, and Rich Swain. Also joining us was Alex Hollingworth, social media expert from Emulex.

At the opening session, Deon Newman suggest we re-tweet him, isn't that plagiarism? What is your take on this?

The important thing is to give credit where it is due. Avoid screen scraping others and passing it off as your own. When you re-tweet someone, you give them credit for their original tweet. You are basically saying, "I could not have said it better myself!" With blogs, you can do the same by linking to other blog posts.

I am active in social media, but am having trouble getting the older colleagues in the IT department to participate. I want them to write down all the knowledge in their heads.

The best way to get employees to do anything new or different is to show them how it benefits them. For example, if the elders are tired of answering the same questions over and over, have them start an internal wiki, blog or knowledgebase to capture the answers to frequent questions. This will save them time, so they can see value for themselves. I suggest looking at IBM Lotus Connections which provides collaboration tools inside your firewall, accessible only to internal employees of the company.

How do we differentiate facts from opinions in our social media writings?

You can always be explicit, for example IMHO stands for "In my humble opinion". I find that blogs are 99 percent opinion, and 1 percent fact, so it is easier to point out the facts linking or citing sources, and let the rest of your writing be considered opinion.

I would like to find people on Linkedin to establish business relationships with the storage administrators, decision makers and influencers within the companies I want to sell to, how do I best do that?

Nobody likes cold calls. If you upgrade to a "Pro" account on LinkedIn, you can send 15 to 25 "Inmail" emails through their system to introduce yourself. Otherwise, consider finding someone in your network that knows them, and arrange for them to provide the mutual introduction for you.

How do I find people to follow related to the topics I am interested in, like storage?

There are tools like [Tweetadder] to help you find people to follow. Or, just search on certain hashtags, and add people you find that use them.

I am concerned about privacy? What can I do to protect my privacy?

Decide up front which topics are off-limits in your blog or other social media. For services like Facebook, check your privacy settings every 30 days. Several people have opted to create a special "Facebook Page" that represents their professional brand, so that the rest of Facebook can be used for friends and family.

I want to start a new blog, which service should I use?

Services like Blogger, Blogspt and TypePad are generally easy to set up. Wordpress is more advanced, but can be more complicated to set up.

I don't care for writing a blog, how can I set up a video blog, or vlog?

Consider creating a channel on YouTube. Another popular site is Vimeo. A "Pro" account of Vimeo provides added features.

I am new to Twitter, what tools should I look into?

I suggest you look at HootSuite. This lets you post to Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin. You can schedule when a tweet will be posted, so you can right them in advance and schedule them for a certain date and time. Also, if you have a blog, you can have Hootsuite send out tweets automatically with the titles and link to each blog post.

How much effort should we put in to Social Media?

As much or as little as you want. Don't force yourself to spend more time than you want. Typically, people spend 1-2 hours per day. Cut down how much you spend watching television to make up the difference. Set up "Google Alerts" that can send you emails when certain phrases appear anywhere. There are also social bookmarking tools like Instapaper, Delicious or Diigo that can save bookmarks in the cloud for things that you want to read, but don't have time to read now.

Which social media would be the best to get chicks.

Writing a technical blog with good quality content. Girls want to be with you. Guys want to be you.

How can I use social media to provide feedback about specific products?

IBM now has a [Reviews and Ratings] for its IBM System Storage products. Consider writing a review today!

Thanks to all of the panel for their help with this!

technorati tags: IBM, IBMedge, BOF, Social Media, Twitter, Linked, Facebook

Tags:  facebook social+media bof linked ibmedge twitter ibm