2008 Storage Symposium Mexico
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The "Storage Symposium Mexico - 2008" conference was a great success this week!
Day 1 - The plan was for me to arrive for the Wednesday night reception. Each attendee was given a copy of my latest book[Inside System Storage: Volume I] and I was planning to sign them. I thought perhaps we should have a "book signing" table like all of the other published authors have. Things didn't go according to plan. Thunderstorms at the Mexico City airport forced our pilot to find an alternate airport. Nearby Acapulco airport was the logical choice, but was full from all the other flights, so the plane ended up in a tiny town called McAllen, Texas. I did not arrive until the morning of Day 2,so ended up signing the books throughout Thursday and Friday, during breaks and meals, wherever they could find me! Special thanks to fellow IBMer Ian Henderson who picked me up from the airport at such an awkward hour and drive me all the way to Cuernavaca! Day 2 - The event venue is the beautiful Japa I was original scheduled to be first to speak, but with my flight delays, was moved to a time slot after lunch.After a big Mexican lunch, the conference coordinators were afraid the attendees might fall asleep,a Mexican tradition called [siesta], so I was instructed to WAKE THEM UP! Fortunately, my topic was Information Lifecycle Management, a topicI am very passionate about, since my days working on DFSMS on the mainframe. With 30percent reduction in hardware capital expenditures, 30 percent reduction in operational costs, and typical payback periods between 15 to 24 months, the presentation got everyone's attention.
Day 3 - Wrapping up the week, I presented two more times. First, I covered IBM Disk Virtualization with IBM SAN Volume Controller. One interesting question was if the SAN Volume Controller could be made to look like a Virtual Tape Library. I explained that this was never part of the original design, but that if you want to combine SVC with a VTL into a combined disk-and-tape blended solution, consider using theIBM product called Scale-Out File Services[SoFS] which I covered in my post[Moredetails about IBM clustered scalable NAS]. Later, I covered Archive and Compliance Solutions to highlight our complete end-to-end set of solutions.When asked to compare and contrast the architectures of the IBM System Storage DR550 with EMC Centera, I explained that the DR550 optimizes the use of online disk access for the most recent data. For example, if you are going to keep data for 10 years, maybe you keep the most recent 12 months on disk, and the rest is moved,using policy-based automation, to a tape library for the remaining nine years. This means that the disk inside the DR550 is always being used to read and write the most recent data, the data you are most likely to retrieve from an archive system. Data older than a year is still accessible, but might take a minute or two for the tape library robot to fetch.The EMC Centera, on the other hand, is a disk-only solution. It offers no option to move older data to tape,nor the option to spin-down the drives to conserve power. It fills up after the same 12 months or so, and then you get to watch it the remaining nine years, consuming electricity and heating your data center. I don't know about you, butI have never seen anyone purposely put in "space heaters" into their data center, but certainly a full EMC Centera does little else. Both devices use SATA drives and support disk mirroring between locations, but IBM DR550 offers dual-parity RAID-6, and supports encryption of the data on both the disk and the tape in the DR550. EMC Centera still uses only RAID-5, and has not yet, as far as I know, offered any level of encryption. IBM System StorageDR550 was clocked at about three times faster than Centera at ingesting new archive objects over a 1GbE Ethernet connection.
The conference wrapped up with a Mexican lunch with a traditional Mariachi band. I took pictures, but figured you all already know what [Mariachi players] look like, and I didn't want to detract from the otherwise serious tone of this blog post! This was the first System Storage Symposium in Mexico, but based on its success, we might continue these annually.
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