IBM SONAS guest post from John Sing

Body

Continuing on the [IBM Storage Launch of February 9], John Sing has offered to write the following guest post about the [announcement] of IBM Scale Out Network Attached Storage [IBM SONAS]. John and I have known each other for a while, traveled the world to work with clients and speak at conferences. He is an Executive IT Consultant on the SONAS team.

[John Sing profile]

Guest Post written by John Sing, IBM San Jose, California

What is IBM SONAS? It’s many things, so let’s start with this list:

It’s IBM’s delivery of a productized, pre-packaged Scale Out NAS global virtual file server, delivered in a easy-to-use appliance IBM’s solution for large enterprise file-based storage requirements, where massive scale in capacity and extreme performance is required, especially for today’s modern analytics-based Competitive Advantage IT applications Scales to many petabytes of usable storage and billions of files in a single global namespace Provides integrated central management, central deployment of petabyte levels of storage Modular commercial-off-the-shelf [COTS] building blocks. I/O, storage, network capacity scale independently of each other. Up to 30 interface nodes and 60 storage nodes, in an IBM General Parallel File System [GPFS]-based cluster. Each 10Gb CEE interface node port is capable of streaming at 900 MB/sec Files are written in block-sized chunks, striped over as many multiple disk drives in parallel – aggregating throughput on a massive scale (both read and write), as well as providing auto-tuning, auto-balancing Functionality delivered via one program product, IBM SONAS Software, which provides all of above functions, along with clustered CIFS, NFS v2/v3 with session auto-failover, FTP, high availability, and more

IBM SONAS makes automated tiered storage achievable and realistic at petabyte levels:

• Integrated global policy engine file placement, physical management, replication, deletion, archival
• Integrated high performance parallel scan engine capable of identifying files at over 10 million files per minute per node
• Integrated parallel data movement engine to physically relocate the data within tiered storage

And we’re just scratching the surface. IBM has plans to deploy additional protocols, storage hardware options, and software features.

However, the real question of interest should be, “who really needs that much storage capacity and throughput horsepower?”

The answer may surprise you. IMHO, the answer is: almost any modern enterprise that intends to stay competitive. Hmmm…… Consider this: the reason that IT exists today is no longer to simply save cost (that may have been true 10 years ago). Everyone is reducing cost… but how much competitive advantage is purchased through “let’s cut our IT budget by 10% this year”?

Notice that in today’s world, there are (many) bright people out there, changing our world every day through New Intelligence Competitive Advantage analytics-based IT applications such as real time GPS traffic data, real time energy monitoring and redirection, real time video feed with analytics, text analytics, entity analytics, real time stream computing, image recognition applications, HDTV video on demand, etc. Think of how GPS industry, cell phone / Twitter / Facebook, iPhone and iPad applications, as examples, are creating whole new industries and markets almost overnight.

Then start asking yourself, “What's behind these Competitive Advantage IT applications – as they are the ones that are driving all my storage growth? Why do they need so much storage? What do those applications mean for my storage requirements?”

( Read more about Analytics, pages 14-48 of [New Intelligence for a Smarter Planet - Driving Business Innovation with IBM Analytic Solutions] )

To be “real-time”, long-held IT paradigms are being broken every day. Things like “data proximity”: we can no longer can extract terabytes of data from production databases and load them to a data warehouse – where’s the “real-time” in that? Instead, today’s modern analytics-based applications demand:

• Multiple processes and servers (sometimes numbering in the 100s) simultaneously ….
• Running against hundreds of terabytes of data of live production data, streaming in from expanding number of smarter sensors, input devices, users
• Producing digital image-intensive results that must be programatically sent to an ever increasing number of mobile devices in geographically dispersed storage
• Requiring parallel performance levels, that used to be the domain only of High Performance Computing (HPC)

This is a major paradigm shift in storage – and that is the solution and storage capabilities that IBM SONAS is designed to address. And of course, you should be able to save significant cost through the SONAS global virtual file server consolidation and virtualization as well.

Certainly, this topic warrants more discussion. If you found it interesting, contact me, your local IBM Business Partner or IBM Storage rep to discuss Competitive Advantage IT applications and SONAS further.

technorati tags: , IBM, Scale-Out, NAS, SONAS, John Sing, San+Jose, COTS, Petabytes, CEE, CIFS, NFS, FTP, HPC, New Intelligence, Analytics, Competitive Advantage IT Applications