Inside System Storage -- by Tony Pearson

Here are some upcoming events related to IBM Storage!

If you sell IBM and/or Oracle solutions, please join me for IBM Oracle Virtual University 2013!

A few weeks ago, I recorded a session on IBM Storage: Overview, Positioning and How to Sell that will be available on demand starting tomorrow, February 26th, at the IBM Oracle Virtual University 2013.

It's one of 65 new sessions that will help IBM to surround Oracle applications with IBM infrastructure, services and industry solutions. Oracle software, after all, runs best on IBM hardware. Other highlights of Oracle Virtual University include a live executive State of the Alliance session with Q&A, Oracle keynote, updates by Oracle product managers, sessions on PureSystems, Selling IBM into an Oracle environment, Cloud, and much more.

Visit the [Orace Virtual University 2013 Registration page] to register.

(Update: For employees of IBM, Oracle and their respective business partners, the replays for this event is available until Feb 26, 2014. Visit the [Orace Virtual University 2013 Replay page])

There will be live technical teams on hand throughout launch day to answer your questions in real time, so I hope you can carve out 30 minutes or more on February 26th to take advantage of these available resources.

After helping launch the first Pulse back in 2008, I have sadly not been back since. Last year, I was invited to attend as a last-minute replacement for another speaker, but I was busy [having emergency surgery].

This year's [Pulse 2013] conference looks amazing. It will be held in Las Vegas, Nevada. Guest Speaker Payton Manning, NFL 4-time MVP football player, and Carrie Underwood, 6-time Grammy award winner, join IBM's Software Group executives and experts on how IBM Tivoli can help optimize your IT infrastructure.

Sadly, once again, I will not be there at Pulse. This time, I will be on the East Coast visiting clients instead, but my on-premise correspondent, Tom Rauchut, has informed me that he will be there. Hopefully, he will provide me something to write about.

Later in March, I will be in Brussels, Belgium for the Storage Expo. This is held March 20-21, at the Brussels-Expo venue. I will be presenting several topics each day, as well as visit clients in the area. This event comes on behalf of IBM Belgium in association with IBM Business Partner IRIS-ICT.

If you plan to participate in any of these events, let me know!

technorati tags: IBM, Oracle, Pulse, Storage, Expo, Payton Manning, Carrie Underwood, Las Vegas, Brussels Belgium

Well, it was Tuesday again, and we had quite a lot of announcements here at IBM this week! Over 1,800 clients attended the [Live February 5 webcast]! The announcements were all part of IBM's SmartCloud Storage portfolio. Here are the highlights:

STN7800 Real-time Compression Appliance

Back in October 2010, IBM announced the acquisition of Storwize, Inc., renaming its NAS-compression units to the IBM Real-time Compression appliances. Some folks were confused, so I had a blog post [IBM Storwize Product Name Decoder Ring]. IBM initially offered two models:

• The [STN6500 model] had 16 Ethernet ports 1GbE (16x1GbE) and a pair of four-core processors.
• The [STN6800 model] had either eight 10GbE ports (8x10GbE), or four 10GbE plus eight 1GbE ports (4x10GbE+8x1GbE). It has a pair of six-core processors.

Now, IBM offers the [STN7800 model], which can replace either of the ones above, offering 16x1GbE, 8x10GbE, and 4x10GbE+8x1GBE port configurations. It has a pair of eight-core processors to handle more robust Cloud Storage environments. See [Announcement Letter 113-012] for more details.

New XIV Gen3 model 214

With its awesome support for VMware, the XIV is often chosen for Cloud storage. The new XIV model 214 now offers up to a dozen 10GbE ports, or you can stay with the 22 1GbE ports available on previous models. These can be used for iSCSI host attachment and/or IP-based replication.

IBM strives to make each new model of every storage device more energy efficient than the last. The new XIV model is no exception. The original XIV, introduced in 2008, consumed 8.4 kVA fully loaded. The XIV Gen 3 model 114 consumed 7.0 kVA. This new model 214 consumes only 5.9 kVA!

It has been almost three years since my now infamous post [Double Drive Failure Debunked: XIV Two Years Later]. Back then, the XIV offered only 1TB and 2TB drives, with rebuild time for 1TB drive of less than 30 minutes, and for 2TB less than 60 minutes.

The new XIV Gen3 software 11.2 release, available for both the 114 and 214 models, can now rebuild a 2TB drive in less than 26 minutes, and a 3TB drive in less than 39 minutes. There is also support specific to Windows Server 2012 including thin provisioning, MSCS, VSS, and Hyper-V. See [Announcement Letter 113-013] for more details.

SmartCloud Storage Access

IBM is the first major storage vendor to offer a product of this kind, so understanding it may be a bit difficult.

The concept is simple. Rather than having end-users having to ask IT every time they need some storage space, IBM created a self-service portal that frees up the IT department to work on more important transformational projects.

This is basically what people can do with "Public Cloud" storage service providers, so basically IBM is now giving you the capability with your "Private Cloud" storage deployment.

Here is the sequence of events. End users point their favorite web browser to the self-service portal, and login using their credentials stored in your Active Directory or LDAP server database.

Once validated, the end-user now can request new storage space, expanding their existing space, or returning the space to the IT department. For new storage requests, users can have a choice of storage classes, -- such as Gold, Silver and Bronze-- defined in the Tivoli Storage Productivity Center (TPC), either stand-alone or in the SmartCloud Virtual Storage Center.

But wait! Do you want to give every end-user a blank check to provision their own storage? Most IT staff are horrified at the thought.

Knowing this, IBM has included an option to put in an approval process, based on the end-user and the amount of capacity requested. The approver can be the cloud administrator, or someone delegated for approvals, known as an environment owner.

For some users, policies may restrict the storage classes as well. For example, Fred can only have Silver or Bronze, but not Gold.

Once the approval is obtained, TPC then issues the appropriate commands to the appropriate SONAS or Storwize V7000 Unified device. SmartCloud Storage Access can do this for thousands of storage devices across dozens of geographically dispersed locations.

Before, the Cloud Admin had to configure storage pools of managed disks, define file systems, dole out file sets to hundreds or thousands of users with hard quotas, and then configure shares based on the protocols required, like CIFS, NFS, HTTPS, etc.

With SmartCloud Storage Access, the Cloud admin still defines the pools and file systems, but then lets the self-service capability of the software to create the file sets, set the quotas and configure shares with the appropriate protocols. This greatly reduces the work on the IT staff, and greatly improves the turn-around time for end-user requests to get exactly what they want, when they need it.

The next time you withdraw money from an ATM machine, fill up your gas tank at the self-service gas station, then serve your own salad at the salad bar and fill up your own soft drink at the fast food restaurant, you will realize and appreciate that SmartCloud Storage Access is a brilliant move for the IT staff.

Cloud administrators, environment owners, and end-users can all use SmartCloud Storage Access to monitor and report on storage usage.

See [Announcement Letter 213-087] for more details.

For more information on these announcements, check out the [IBM Smarter Storage landing page].

For a different perspective on this, consider Dave Vallente's thoughts on Wikibon, in his [Message to IBM's Ambuj Goyal: A Prescription for Storage Transformation]. Ironically, Ambuj Goyal was my fifth-line manager for the past two years, but since he took this new job leading Storage and System Networking, he is no longer in my management chain.

technorati tags: IBM, SmartCloud, Storage Access, XIV, STN7800

Happy [Valentine's Day] everyone! Love is in the air! There was plenty of evidence of this everywhere I looked:

• I professed my love for Mo -- we just celebrated our four-year anniversary!
• My fellow Tucsonans [professed their love for beautiful weather with clear sunny skies].
• Server admins [professed their love for their favorite distro of the Linux operating system].
• Storage admins professed their love for IBM System Storage products on IBM's [Reviews and Ratings] portal.
• Physicians around the world professed their love for [electronic medical records and digitized medical imaging].

Sadly, only 70 percent of doctors in the United States use Electronic Medical Record [EMR] systems. My own Primary Care Physician has made the switch, and told me he how much he loves having ready access to the information he needs. EMR systems reduce costs, help manage risk, and improve healthcare outcomes. It is no surprise that the U.S. government has taken a [stick-and-carrot approach] to encourage doctors to use them.

Two years ago this week, [IBM Watson won the Grand Challenge] on the popular Jeopardy! game show. I wrote [a series of blog posts on IBM Watson]. To-date, there have been over 90,000 downloads for my now infamous step-by-step instructions on [How to build your own "Watson Jr." in your basement]!

A frequent topic at the Tucson Executive Briefing Center where I work is how to make the most use of IT for healthcare and life sciences. For much of 2011 and 2012, I was also one of the technical advocates assigned to Wellpoint Insurance, in support of their adoption of IBM Watson technology for healthcare.

Consider [Oncology], the branch of medicine focused on cancer. IBM has just released a new 8-minute YouTube video [IBM Watson Demo: Oncology Diagnosis and Treatment] that shows how IBM Watson is being put to use at [Memorial Sloan-Kettering], a world-class cancer treatment facility.

This is just one of the many [IBM Smarter Healthcare solutions] that is helping to build a smarter planet!

technorati tags: IBM, Watson, Wellpoint Insurance, Memorial Sloan-Kettering, EMR, Oncology, Reviews and Ratings, Valentine's Day

We're moving! We often joke that I.B.M. stands for "I've Been Moved", and the Tucson Executive Briefing Center is no exception.

Today is the last day for us in Building 9070. Starting tomorrow, the Tucson EBC will operate out of Building 9032 instead. While moving is always painful, there are some distinct advantages to the new facility:

• The Building 9070 facility has been in operation since 2003, and some IBM executives felt it was starting to show its age. The new facility reflects IBM's commitment and investment to IBM System Storage portfolio, including a new Green Data Center reflecting the latest "best practices" in facility design similar to the one we have in the Raleigh EBC.
  
  
• Several companies rent space in Building 9070. Clients visiting Building 9070 had to walk past the offices of our competitors. Building 9032 is exclusively IBM, with the new facility just off the main lobby.
  
  
• The previous facility was on the top floor of Building 9070, and the floors often shook because of an air handler on the roof. Clients complained that it felt like a minor earthquake every time it kicked in. The new facility is on the ground floor, on solid concrete.
  
  
• As the tallest building on campus, our clients in Building 9070 were often distracted by the views of our mountains and desert landscapes. We would take a 5 or 10 minute break, and getting everyone back in the briefing rooms was [like herding cats]. The new facility has no views to distract anyone, allowing our briefing managers to keep our meetings on schedule.
  
  
• The Building 9070 facility was so large with five meeting rooms and three dining areas, arranged facing out in a circle. If you get lost, just do a few laps on the outer track and eventually you will get back to the room you were looking for. No client will get lost in the new facility, with just two rooms and common dining area all facing each other in a triangle configuration.
  
  
• With the success of the Storwize family developed in Hursley UK, IBM management felt the Building 9070 facility no longer reflected the "center of gravity" of IBM's storage development. Moving the Tucson EBC a quarter mile northward therefore brings us closer.
  
  
• Since the primary purpose of an Executive Briefing Center is to bring clients in direct contact with IBM Research and Development, we often had developers walk over from the other buildings to the Building 9070 facility. They often complained that this took 5 minutes or longer each way. Since most or our disk and tape developers reside in Building 9032, we have greatly shortened the time it takes for them to come over.

For myself, as the lead Subject Matter Expert on the Tucson EBC staff, I get a much larger office with brand new furniture!

Now is the time to book a briefing in Tucson to check out the new facility. Go to the [Tucson EBC landing page] for contact information.