Inside System Storage -- by Tony Pearson

#ibmtechu Day 2 IBM Storage University - Cloud Storage

2011-07-22T08:07:39-04:00

There were several break-out sessions on the second day of the [IBM System Storage Technical University 2011] related to Cloud Storage.

Storage for Cloud Computing

Clod Barrera is an IBM Distinguished Engineer and Chief Technical Strategist for IBM System Storage. He predicts that by 2015, 10 percent of the servers and storage purchases, as well as 25 percent of the network gear purchases, will be related to Cloud deployments. Cloud Storage is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 32 percent through 2015, compared to only 3.8 percent growth for non-Cloud storage.

Cloud Computing is allowing companies to rethink their IT infrastructure, and reinvent their business. Clod presented an interesting chart on the "Taxonomy" of storage in Cloud environments. On the left he had examples of Storage that was part of a Cloud Compute application. On the right he had storage that was accessed directly through protocols or APIs. Under each he had several examples for transactional data, stream data, backups and archives.

Clod feels the only difference between Private and Public clouds is a matter of ownership. In private clouds, these are owned by the company that uses them via their private Intranet network. Public clouds are owned by Cloud Service providers and are accessed over the public Internet. Clod presented IBM's strategy to deliver Cloud at five levels:

Private Cloud: on-site equipment, behind company firewall, managed by IT staff
Managed Private Cloud: on-site equipment, behind company firewall, managed by IBM or other Cloud Service provider
Hosted Private Cloud: dedicated, off-premises equipment, located and managed by IBM or other Cloud Service Provider, and access through VPN
Shared Cloud Services: shared, off-premises equipment, located at IBM or other Cloud Service Provider, managed by IBM or Cloud Service provider, and access through VPN. The facility is intended for enterprises only, on a contractual basis, and will be auditable for compliance to government regulations, etc.
Public Cloud: shared, off-premises equipment, located and managed by IBM or other Cloud Service provider, targeted to offer cloud compute and storage resources, with standardized platforms of operating systems and middleware, for individuals, small and medium sized businesses.

As with storage in traditional data center deployments, storage in clouds will be tiered, with Tier 0 being the fastest tier, to Tier 4 for "deep and cheap" archive storage. IBM SONAS is an example of Cloud-ready storage that can help make these tiers accessible through standard Ethernet protocols. Cloud Service providers will use metering and Service Level Agreements (SLAs) to offer different rates for different tiers of storage in the cloud.

Clod wrapped up his session explaining IBM's Cloud Computing Reference Architecture (CCRA). This is an all-encompassing diagram that shows how all of IBM's hardware, software and services fit into Cloud deployments.

SONAS and the Smart Business Storage Cloud

This is a presentation I often give at the [IBM Executive Briefing Center] in Tucson, Arizona. I cover the following points:

IBM positioning between its two strategic NAS products: N series and SONAS
The history of SONAS, from Storage Tank and SAN File System to the Scale-out File Services offering
How SONAS is designed differently than N series GX Cluster mode and other mount-point aggregators
Independent Scaling of performance and capacity, allowing companies to design a solution that fits their particular workload characteristics
World Record Performance results for a moderately-sized SONAS deployment, for a single file system entirely on spinning disk, based on SPECsfs2008 benchmark
IBM's Smart Business Storage Cloud, which combines the base SONAS product with IBM services to offer unique solutions optimized for specific industries, clients and workloads

These sessions served as a preview for later presentations in the week that got into more detail on SONAS specifically.

technorati tags: IBM, Clod Barrera, Cloud Computing, Cloud Storage, SONAS, Smart Business Storage Cloud, SBSC, Storage University

#ibmtechu Day 1 IBM Storage University - My Afternoon Break-out Sessions

2011-07-21T14:29:01-04:00

I finished of the first day of the [IBM System Storage Technical University 2011] by presenting two topics. These were repeated on day 3 for those who missed it today.

IBM Information Archive for email, files and eDiscovery

Not too many people have heard of IBM's Smart Archive strategy and the storage products IBM offers to meet compliance regulations. This session covered the following:

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 optical media, Write-Once Read-Many (WORM) media, and Non-Erasable, Non-Rewriteable (NENR) storage options.
Why putting a [space heater] on your data center floor is a bad idea, driving up power and cooling costs for little business value to the enterprise once the unit is full of rarely accessed read-only data.
An overview of the [IBM Information Archive], an integrated stack of servers, storage and software that replaces previous offerings such as the IBM System Storage DR550 and the IBM Grid Medical Archive Solution (GMAS).
The marketing bundle known as the [Information Archive for Email, Files and eDiscovery] that combines the Information Archive storage appliance with Content Collectors for email and file systems, as well as eDiscovery tools, and implementation services for a solution that can support a small or medium size business, up to 1400 employees.

IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center v4.2 Overview and Update

Many of the concerns raised when I [presented v4.1 at this conference last year] were addressed this year in v4.2, including full performance statistics for IBM XIV storage system, storage resource agent support for HP-UX and Solaris, and a variety of other issues.

I presented this overview in stages:

"Productivity Center Basic Edition" that comes pre-installed on the IBM System Storage Productivity Center hardware console, that provides discover of devices, basic configuration, and a clever topology viewer of what is connected to what.
"Productivity Center for Disk" and "Productivity Center for Disk Midrange Edition (MRE)" that provides real-time and historical performance monitoring, asset and capacity reporting.
"Productivity Center for Replication" which supports monitoring, failover and failback for FlashCopy, Metro Mirror and Global Mirror on the SVC, Storwize V7000, DS8000, DS6000 and ESS 800.
"Productivity Center for Data" which supports reporting on files, file systems and databases on DAS, SAN and NAS attached storage from a Operating System viewpoint.
"Productivity Center Standard Edition" which includes all of the above except "Replication", and adds performance monitoring of SAN Fabric gear, and some very clever analytics to improver performance and problem determination.

One of the questions that came up was "How big does my company have to be to consider using Productivity Center?" which I answered as follows:

"If you are a small company, and the "IT Person" has responsibilities outside the IT, and managing the few pieces of kit is just part of his job, then consider just using the web-based GUI through a Firefox or similar browser. If you are a medium sized company with dedicated IT personnel, but mostly run by system admins or database admins that manage storage and networks on the side, you might want to consider the "Storage Control" plug-in for IBM Systems Director. But if you are larger shop, and there are employees with the title "Storage Administrator" and/or "SAN Administrator", then Tivoli Storage Productivity Center is for you."

Tivoli Storage Productivity Center has matured into a fine piece of software that truly can help medium and large sized data centers manage their storage and storage networking infrastructure.

I like speaking the first day of these events. Often people come in just to hear the keynote speakers, and stay the afternoon to hear a few break-out sessions before they leave Tuesday or Wednesday for other meetings.

technorati tags: IBM, IA, DR550, Information Archive, email, files, eDiscovery, WORM, NENR, compliance, CAS, EMC Centera, TPC, Tivoli Storage, Productivity Center, Storage Administrator, Management Tools

#ibmtechu Day 1 IBM Storage University - More Keynotes

2011-07-19T16:35:38-04:00

First day of the [IBM System Storage Technical University 2011] continued with more keynote sessions.

Jim Rymarczyk

Jim is an IBM Fellow for IBM Systems and Technology Group. There are only 73 IBM Fellows currently working for IBM, and this is the highest honor IBM can bestow on an employee. He has been working with IBM since 1968.

He is tasked with predicting the future of IT, and help drive strategic direction for IBM. Cost pressures, requirements for growth, accelerating innovation and changing business needs help influence this direction.

IBM's approach is to integrate four different "IT building blocks":

Scale-up Systems, like the IBM System Storage DS8000 and TS3500 Tape Library
Resource Pools, such as IBM Storage Pools formed from managed disks by IBM SAN Volume Controller (SVC)
Integrated stacks and appliances, integrated software and hardware stacks, from Storwize V7000 to full rack systems like IBM Smart Analytics Server or CloudBurst.
Clouds, such as IBM's [Smart Cloud Enterprise]

Mobility of workloads and resources requires unified end-to-end service management. Fortunately, IBM is the #1 leader in IT Service Management solutions.

Jim addressed three myths:

Myth 1: IT Infrastructures will be homogenous.
Jim feels that innovations are happening too rapidly for this to ever happen, and is not a desirable end-goal. Instead, a focus to find the right balance of the IT building blocks might be a better approach.
Myth 2: All of your problems can be solved by replacing everything with product X.
Jim feels that the days of "rip-and-replace" are fading away. As IBM Executive Steve Mills said, "It isn't about the next new thing, but how well new things integrate with established applications and processes."
Myth 3: All IT will move to the Cloud model.
Jim feels a substantial portion of IT will move to the Cloud, but not all of it. There will always be exceptions where the old traditional ways of doing things might be appropriate. Clouds are just one of the many building blocks to choose from.

Jim's focus lately has been finding new ways to take advantage of virtualization concepts. Server, storage and network virtualization are helping address these challenges through four key methods:

Sharing - virtualization that allows a single resource to be used by multiple users. For example, hypervisors allow several guest VM operating systems share common hardware on a single physical server.
Aggregation - virtualization that allows multiple resources to be managed as a single pool. For example, SAN Volume Controller can virtualize the storage of multiple disk arrays and create a single storage pool.
Emulation - virtualization that allows one set of resources to look and feel like a different set of resources. Some hypervisors can emulate different kinds of CPU processors, for example.
Insulation - virtualization that hides the complexity from the end-user application or other higher levels of infrastructure, making it easier to make changes of the underlying managed resources. For example, both SONAS and SAN Volume Controller allow disk capacity to be removed and replaced without disruption to the application.

In today's economy, IT transformation costs must be low enough to yield near-term benefits. The long-term benefits are real, but near-term benefits are needed for projects to get started.

What set's IBM ahead of the pack? Here was Jim's list:

100 Years of Innovation, including being the U.S. Patent leader for the last 18 years in a row
IBM's huge investment in IBM Research, with labs all over the globe
Leadership products in a broad portfolio
Workload-optimized designs with integration from middleware all the way down to underlying hardware
Comprehensive management software for IBM and non-IBM equipment

Clod Barrera

Clod is an IBM Distinguished Engineer and Chief Technical Strategist for IBM System Storage. His presentation focused on trends and directions in the IT storage industry. Clod started with five workload categories:

Transaction/Database
Data Analytics
Business Logic/Apps
Web/Collaboration
Archive/Retention

To address these unique workload categories, IBM will offer workload-optimized systems. The four drivers on the design for these are performance, efficiency, scalability, and integration. For example, to address performance, companies can adopt Solid-State Drives (SSD). Unfortunately, these are 20 times more expensive dollar-per-GB than spinning disk, and the complexity involved in deciding what data to place on SSD was daunting. IBM solved this with an elegant solution called IBM System Storage Easy Tier, which provides automated data tiering for IBM DS8000, SAN Volume Controller (SVC) and Storwize V7000.

For scalability, IBM has adopted Scale-Out architectures, as seen in the XIV, SVC, and SONAS. SONAS is based on the highly scalable IBM General Parallel File System (GPFS). File systems are like wine, they get better with age. GPFS was introduced 15 years ago, and is more mature than many of the other "scalable file systems" from our competition.

Areal Density advancements on Hard Disk Drives (HDD) are slowing down. During the 1990s, the IT industry enjoyed 60 to 100 percent annual improvement in areal density (bits per square inch). In the 2000s, this dropped to 25 to 40 percent, as engineers are starting to hit various physical limitations.

Storage Efficiency features like compression have been around for a while, but are being deployed in new ways. For example, IBM invented WAN compression needed for Mainframe HASP. WAN compression became industry standard. Then IBM introduced compression on tape, and now compression on tape is an industry standard. ProtecTIER and Information Archive are able to combine compression with data deduplication to store backups and archive copies. Lastly, IBM now offers compression on primary data, through the IBM Real-Time Compression appliance.

For the rest of this decade, IBM predicts that tape will continue to enjoy (at least) 10 times lower dollar-per-GB than the least expensive spinning disk. Disk and Tape share common technologies, so all of the R&D investment for these products apply to both types of storage media.

For integration, IBM is leading the effort to help companies converge their SAN and LAN networks. By 2015, Clod predicts that there will be more FCoE purchased than FCP. IBM is also driving integration between hypervisors and storage virtualization. For example, IBM already supports VMware API for Array Integration (VAAI) in various storage products, including XIV, SVC and Storwize V7000.

Lastly, Clod could not finish a presentation without mentioning Cloud Computing. Cloud storage is expected to grow 32 percent CAGR from year 2010 to 2015. Roughly 10 percent of all servers and storage will be in some type of cloud by 2015.

As is often the case, I am torn between getting short posts out in a timely manner versus spending some more time to improve the length and quality of information, but posted much later. I will spread out the blog posts in consumable amounts throughout the next week or two, to achieve this balance.

technorati tags: IBM, Jim Rymarczyk, Clod Barrera, Storage University, Scale-Up, DS8000, TS3500, Cloud, Middleware, Scale-Out, XIV, SVC, SONAS, GPFS, HDD, SSD, VAAI, VMware, SAN, LAN, convergence, FCoE

#ibmtechu Day 1 IBM Storage University - Keynote Sessions

2011-07-18T15:39:04-04:00

First day of the [IBM System Storage Technical University 2011] started with some keynote sessions.

Maria Boonie

Maria Boonie is the IBM Director for IBM Worldwide Training and Technical Conferences. She indicated that there were 1500 attendees this week crossing both the System Storage and System x conferences at this hotel. There are 35 vendors that have sponsored this event, and they will be at the "Solutions Center" being held Monday through Wednesday this week.

She took this opportunity to plug IBM's latest education offerings, including Guaranteed-to-Run implementation classes, and Instructor-Led Online (ILO) technical classes.

Brian Truskowski

Brian Truskowski is IBM General Manager for System Storage and Networking. I used to directly report to him in a previous role, and a few years ago he used to be the IBM CIO that helped with IBM's internal IT transformation.

Brian indicates that the previous approach to growth was to "Just Buy More", but this has some unintended consequences. He argued that companies need to adopt one or more of the following approaches to growth:

Stop storing so much - reduce data footprint using storage efficiency capabilities like data deduplication and compression
Store more with what is already on the floor - improve storage utilization with technologies like storage virtualization and thin provisioning
Move data to the right place - implement automated tiering, such as "Flash & Stash" between Solid-state drives and spinning disk, and/or Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) between disk and tape. Studies at some clients have found over 70 percent of data has not beed touched in the last 90 days

This time of dramatic change is the result of a "perfect storm" of influences, including the rising costs and risks associated with losing data, the increased need to index and search data, the desire for "Business Analytics", and the expectation for 100 percent up-time. This is driving IBM to offer hyper-efficient backup, Continuous Data Availability, and Smart Archive solutions.

The case study of SPRINT is a good example. SPRINT is a Telecommunications provider for cell phone users. They were challenged with 35 percent utilization, 165 storage arrays from six different vendors, and an expected 100 percent increase in their IT maintenance costs. After implementing IBM SAN Volume Controller (SVC) and Tivoli Storage Productivity Center (TPC) to manager 2.9 PB of data, SPRINT increased their utilization to 82 percent, reduced down to 70 storage arrays from only three vendors, and reduced their maintenance costs by 57 percent. Today, SPRINT now manages over 5 PB of data with SVC and TPC, have reduced their power and cooling by 3.5 million KWh, representing $320,000 USD in savings.

He covered the latest XIV Gen3 announcement, including the amazing boost in performance that I covered in detail in last week's post [IBM Announcements for July 2011 - XIV Gen 3, and more].

Roland Hagan

Roland Hagan is the IBM Vice President for the System x server platform. He talked about the "IT Conundrum" that represents a vicious cycle of "IT Sprawl", "Untrusted Data" and "Inflexible IT" that seem to feed each other. IBM is trying to change behavior, from thinking and dealing with physical boxes representing servers, storage and network gear, to a more holistic view focused on workloads, shared resource pools, independent scaling, and automated management.

IBM is leading the server marketplace, in part because of clever things IBM is doing, especially in developing the eX5 chipset that surrounds x86 commondity processors, and in part because of actions or decisions the competition have taken:

It doesn't break IBM's heart that Oracle decided to drop software support of their database on Itanium, which focued entirley against HP. Oracle runs on IBM servers better than Oracle/Sun or HP servers today, so it does not impact us, other than IBM has had a lot of people leaving HP to switch over to IBM.
HP has taken on a new CEO and reduced their R&D budget, causing them to be late-to-market on some of their offerings.
Dell continues to focus on the small and medium sized customer, and have not really broken into the "Enterprise".
Newcomer Cisco has some great technology that only seems to be adoptable in "Green Field" situations, as it does not integrate well with existing data center infrastructures.

The combination of ex5 chip-set architecture, Max5 memory expansion capabilities and Virtual Network Interface Cards (NICs), provide for a very VM-aware platform. For those who are not ready to fully adopt an integrated stack like IBM CloudBurst, IBM offers the Tivoli Service Automation software on its own, and a new [IBM BladeCenter Foundation for Cloud] as stepping stones to get there.

There are certainly more attendees here than last year, which reflects either the change in location (Orlando, Florida rather than Washington DC) as well as the economic recovery. I'm looking forward to an excellent week!

technorati tags: IBM, Storage University, Brian Truskowski, Roland Hagan, keynote sessions, SPRINT, SVC, TPC, conundrum, vicious cycle, XIV Gen3, ex5, Max5, CloudBurst, BladeCenter

#ibmtechu Day 0 IBM Storage Technical University - Last Year Review

2011-07-18T00:12:12-04:00

It's that time again. Every year, IBM hosts the "System Storage Technical University". I have been going to these since they first started in the 1990s. This time we are at the lovely [Hilton Orlando] in Orlando, Florida.

For those who want to relive past events, here are my blog posts from this event in 2010:

[Day 1 - Intro] with recap for events 2007 through 2009
[Day 1 - Keynote sessions]
[Day 2 - More Keynote sessions]
[Day 2 - Green Data Center]
[Day 3 - My other two sessions], Tivoli Storage Productivity Center, and Information Lifecycle Management (ILM)
[Day 3 - XIV Sessions]
[Day 4 - Storage Free-for-All]
[Day 5 - Grid, SOA, and Cloud Computing]
[Day 5 - The New zEnterprise]

The list of sessions that I will be presenting this week were detailed last month in my post [Don't Miss IBM Storage Technical University 2011].

As was the case last year, IBM once again will run this conference alongside the [IBM System x Technical University] the same week, in the same hotel. This allows attendees to cross over to the other side to see a few sessions of the other conference. I took advantage of this last year, and plan to do so again this year as well!

For those on Twitter, you can follow my tweets at [@az990tony] or search on the hash tag #ibmtechu.

technorati tags: IBM, TPC, ILM, Green, DataCenter, Grid, SOA, Cloud Computing, zEnterprise

Did IBM XIV force EMC's hand to announce VMAXe?

2011-07-15T16:18:06-04:00

Did IBM XIV force EMC's hand to announce VMAXe? Let's take a stroll down memory lane.

In 2008, IBM XIV showed the world that it could ship a Tier-1, high-end, enterprise-class system using commodity parts. Technically, prior to its acquisition by IBM, the XIV team had boxes out in production since 2005. EMC incorrectly argued this announcement meant the death of the IBM DS8000. Just because EMC was unable to figure out how to have more than one high-end disk product, doesn't mean IBM or other storage vendors were equally challenged. Both IBM XIV and DS8000 are Tier-1, high-end, enterprise-class storage systems, as are the IBM N series N7900 and the IBM Scale-Out Network Attached Storage (SONAS).

In April 2009, EMC followed IBM's lead with their own V-Max system, based on Symmetrix Engenuity code, but on commodity x86 processors. Nobody at EMC suggested that the V-Max meant the death of their other Symmetrix box, the DMX-4, which means that EMC proved to themselves that a storage vendor could offer multiple high-end disk systems. Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) would later offer the VSP, which also includes some commodity hardware as well.

In July 2009, analysts at International Technology Group published their TCO findings that IBM XIV was 63 percent less expensive than EMC V-Max, in a whitepaper titled [COST/BENEFIT CASE FOR IBM XIV STORAGE SYSTEM Comparing Costs for IBM XIV and EMC V-Max Systems]. Not surprisingly, EMC cried foul, feeling that EMC V-Max had not yet been successful in the field, it was too soon to compare newly minted EMC gear with a mature product like XIV that had been in production accounts for several years. Big companies like to wait for "Generation 1" of any new product to mature a bit before they purchase.

To compete against IBM XIV's very low TCO, EMC was forced to either deeply discount their Symmetrix, or counter-offer with lower-cost CLARiiON, their midrange disk offering. An ex-EMCer that now works for IBM on the XIV sales team put it in EMC terms -- "the IBM XIV provides a Symmetrix-like product at CLARiiON-like prices."

(Note: Somewhere in 2010, EMC dropped the hyphen, changing the name from V-Max to VMAX. I didn't see this formally announced anywhere, but it seems that the new spelling is the officially correct usage. A common marketing rule is that you should only rename failed products, so perhaps dropping the hyphen was EMC's way of preventing people from searching older reviews of the V-Max product.)

This month, IBM introduced the IBM XIV Gen3 model 114. The analysts at ITG updated their analysis, as there are now more customers that have either or both products, to provide a more thorough comparison. Their latest whitepaper, titled [Cost/Benefit Case for IBM XIV Systems: Comparing Cost Structures for IBM XIV and EMC VMAX Systems], shows that IBM maintains its substantial cost savings advantage, representing 69 percent less Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) than EMC, on average, over the course of three years.

In response, EMC announced its new VMAXe, following the naming convention EMC established for VNX and VNXe. Customers cannot upgrade VNXe to VNX, nor VMAXe to VMAX, so at least EMC was consistent in that regard. Like the IBM XIV and XIV Gen3, the new EMC VMAXe eliminated "unnecessary distractions" like CKD volumes and FICON attachment needed for the IBM z/OS operating system on IBM System z mainframes. Fellow blogger Barry Burke from EMC explains everything about the VMAXe in his blog post [a big thing in a small package].

So, you have to wonder, did IBM XIV force EMC's hand into offering this new VMAXe storage unit? Surely, EMC sales reps will continue to lead with the more profitable DMX-4 or VMAX, and then only offer the VMAXe when the prospective customer mentions that the IBM XIV Gen3 is 69 percent less expensive. I haven't seen any list or street prices for the VMAXe yet, but I suspect it is less expensive than VMAX, on a dollar-per-GB basis, so that EMC will not have to discount it as much to compete against IBM.

technorati tags: IBM, XIV, Gen3, EMC, DMX-4, VMAX, V-Max, HDS, N7900, SONAS, DS8000, CKD, FICON, TCO

IBM Announcements for July 2011 - XIV Gen 3, and more

2011-07-13T21:57:54-04:00

Well it's Tuesday again, and you know what that means... IBM Announcements! While most of the attention is going to [IBM's new servers, the zEnterprise 114 and the POWER 775], there were a few [announcements related specifically to storage] that I wanted to discuss.

New 3592 Model C07 Tape Controller

The new [IBM System Storage Tape Controller 3592 Model C07] is an upgrade to the previous C06 controller. Like the C06, the new 3592-C07 can have up to four FICON (4Gbps) ports, four FC ports, and connect up to 16 drives. The difference is that the C07 supports 8Gbps speed FC ports, and can support the [new TS1140 tape drives that were announced on May 9]. A cool feature of the C07 is that it has a built-in library manager function for the mainframe. On the previous models, you had to have a separate library manager server.

Crossroads ReadVerify Appliance (3222-RV1)

IBM has entered an agreement to resell [Crossroads ReadVerify Appliance], or "RV1" for short. The RV1 is a 1U-high server with software that gathers information on the utilization, performance and health for a physical tape environment, such as an IBM TS3500 Tape Library. The RV1 also offers a feature called "ArchiveVerify" which validates long-term retention archive tapes, providing an audit trail on the readability of tape media. This can be useful for tape libraries attached behind IBM Information Archive compliance storage solution, or the IBM Scale-Out Network Attached Storage (SONAS).

As an added bonus, Crossroads has great videos! Here's one, titled [Tape Sticks]

Linear Tape File System (LTFS) Library Edition Version 2.1

You might be scratching your head on this one. Wasn't the LTFS v2.1 announced May 9? Actually, it was for the TS3500, TS3200 and TS3100. On this announcement, the [ IBM System Storage Linear Tape File System Library Edition Version 2.1] was extended to support the rest of our tape library portfolio, specifically the TS3310 and TS2900.

XIV Storage System - Generation 3

Saving the biggest announcement for last, IBM announces new [XIV Generation 3 hardware] and corresponding [XIV Software Version 11.0.0]. The new hardware is officially the model 114, but since today's new zEnterprise announced today is also "model 114", I will refer unofficially to the current XIV hardware that [IBM launched initially in September 2008] as "Gen2", and the new XIV Gen3 hardware as "Gen3" to avoid confusion.

While the hardware is all refreshed, the overall "scale-out" architecture is unchanged. Kudos to the XIV development team for designing a system that is based entirely on commodity hardware, allowing new hardware generations to be introduced with minimal changes to the vast number of field-proven software features like thin provisioning, space-efficient read-only and writeable snapshots, synchronous and asynchronous mirroring, and Quality of Service (QoS) performance classes.

The new XIV Gen3 features an Infiniband interconnect, faster 8Gbps FC ports, more iSCSI ports, faster motherboard and processors, SAS-NL 2TB drives, 24GB cache memory per XIV module, all in a single frame IBM rack that supports the IBM Rear Door Heat Exchanger. The results are a 2x to 4x boost in performance for various workloads. Here are some example performance comparisons:

Disclaimer: Performance is based on measurements and projections using standard IBM benchmarks in a controlled environment. The actual throughput that any user will experience will vary depending upon considerations such as the amount of multiprogramming in the user's job stream, the I/O configuration, the storage configuration, and the workload processed. Therefore, no assurance can be given that an individual user will achieve throughput improvements equivalent to the performance ratios stated here. Your mileage may vary.

In a Statement of Direction, IBM also has designed the Gen3 modules to be "SSD-ready" which means that you can insert up to 500GB of Solid-State drive capacity per XIV module, up to 7.5TB in a fully-configured 15 module frame. This SSD would act as an extension of DRAM cache, similar to how Performance Accelerator Modules (PAM) on IBM N series.

IBM will continue to sell XIV Gen2 systems for the next 12-18 months, as some clients like the smaller 1TB disk drives. The new Gen3 only comes with 2TB drives. There are some clients that love the XIV so much, that they also use it for less stringent Tier 2 workloads. If you don't need the blazing speed of the new Gen3, perhaps the lower cost XIV Gen2 might be a great fit!

As if I haven't said this enough times already, the IBM XIV is a Tier-1, high-end, enterprise-class disk storage system, optimized for use with mission critical workloads on Linux, UNIX and Windows operating systems, and is the ideal cost-effective replacement for EMC Symmetrix VMAX, HDS USP-V and VSP, and HP P9000 series disk systems, . Like the XIV Gen2, the XIV Gen3 can be used with IBM System i using VIOS, and with IBM System z mainframes running Linux, z/VM or z/VSE. If you run z/OS or z/TPF with Count-Key-Data (CKD) volumes and FICON attachment, go with the IBM System Storage DS8000 instead, IBM's other high-end disk system.

To learn more, read Jim Kelly's [XIV Gen 3: Both Hands Clapping], and Anthony Vandewerdt's [Brief History of XIV], and Elisabeth Stahl's [Big Day, Big Data, Big Announcements] blog posts, or see the resources on the [XIV resources page].

technorati tags: xiv, rv1, Information Archive, Tape Sticks, 3592, emc, symmetrix, hds, c07, usp-v, crossroads, readverify, hewlett-packard, ltfs, sonas, p9500, vmax, ts3310, ts2900, vsp, archiveverify, ibm, ts3500

Knocking Off Eight Items from the Bucket List

2011-07-09T12:05:33-04:00

Last year, Mo and I traveled down alongside the Mississippi river, attempting to cover [Eight States in Eight Days], but ended up covering [Seven States in Nine Days]. This time, we decided to go overseas, to knock off a few items from her [bucket list].

1. Eat a Croissant in a Parisian Cafe

Friday - We landed in Paris, France. I have been to Paris many times, but this was a first for Mo. A croissant cost only 2 Euro, but the young woman behind the counter gave me a look of disgust when I asked for a knife and butter to put on the croissant. If you ever get the chance to have a real French croissant, you will realize you don't need any more butter. If you do attempt to put anything on the croissant, it will disintegrate into a million tiny pieces!

2. Visit Ronda

Saturday - We rented a car and drove to the mountain village of [Ronda, Spain], which is in the heart of the region of Spain called Andalucia. Why Ronda? This was where Mo's uncle was stationed during the war. The town is built on two mountains, connected by a set of bridges. The tallest is "Puente Nuevo", built in the 1700s, which is nearly 400 feet tall. Ronda is also home of Spain's oldest Bull Fighting ring. Bars and restaurants built along the cliff offer some spectacular views. Mo and I shared a "Paella Mixta" for lunch, consisting of yellow rice with bits of chicken and seafood.

3. Soak in European Mineral Waters

Sunday - Most things in Europe are closed on Sunday, so we decided to have a "Spa Day" at the [Gran Hotel Benahavis], in Benahavis, Spain. This lovely hotel is built over a natural mineral waters hot spring, and an underground spa allowed us to relax in the warmth. The spa also had a dry sauna, steam sauna, and ice cold water bath to complete the experience.

4. Climb to the Top of the Rock of Gibraltar

Monday - Technically, Gibraltar is a separate country, but they use British money (Pound Sterling). To get to the top of the rock, we drove across their airport runway, saw the mosque at Point Europa, parked in large parking lot and took the cable car to the top. From there, we climbed a few more steps to see the grand views of Spain and North Africa, while keeping our distance from the infamous monkeys. These [Barbary Macaque] are cute, but can bite or scratch you if you get too close. Afterwards, we had lunch in a pub called the Angry Friar.

5. See Snake Charmers in Morocco

Tuesday - We took a guided tour over to the Kingdom of Morocco. This included a ferry boat ride from Tarifa, Spain to Tangier, Morocco. A bus then took us to the "Kasbah" (the fort), where we got to see snake charmers perform their act. We had an interesting lunch, followed by obligatory "shopping opportunities" for rugs and spices. Back on the bus, we went to a place to go ride camels, see the King's palace, and visit the the Grotto of Hercules. The last stop was to sit back and relax for a nice cup of hot Menthol Tea at Cap Spartel, the northernmost point of Morocco.

6. Hang Out at a Mediterranean Beach

Wednesday - Our last full day in Spain, we decided to have lunch on the beach. This region is referred to as Costa Del Sol. We opted for "Playa de la Rada" in Estepona, Spain. The beach was a bit rocky, the sand was hot and uncomfortable to walk on, and the heat and humidity was just slightly less than the steam sauna at the Gran Hotel Benahavis. We stayed in the shade of our beach-side restaurant and had a lunch of grilled sardines and the local Cruzcampo beer.

7. Visit the World of Coca-Cola

Thursday - we drove to Malaga, Spain, and flew back to the United States. Malaga is famous for celebrities like Ernest Hemingway and Pablo Picaso. We could not get all the way back to Tucson, so we stayed overnight in Atlanta.

Friday - This gave us an opportunity to visit the [World of Coca-Cola], where Mo's cousin had done some recent marketing work in celebration of their 125 year anniversary. This is a museum with a live bottling operation on display, a 4D movie, viewing areas to see commercials from around the world, and free tasting, sampling some of the 105 different soft drink flavors manufactured. I recommend the Tawney Ginger from Tanzania, and the Simba Guarana from Brazil. I did not care for the Apple-and-Carrot soda from Japan.

8. See a Manta Ray Up Close

Our discount combo tickets included a visit to the [Georgia Aquarium] next door. Mo can't scuba-dive, but she got stung by a ray when she was a kid, and wanted to show me a big Manta Ray up close. The aquarium was quite good, divided up into separate exhibits, including interactive touch-the-fish areas for the kids, Beluga whales, Jellyfish, Seahorses, and a moving sidewalk that takes you underneath the sea life.

I would like to thank Delta Air Lines for letting Mo and I take this trip using frequent flyer miles, Hertz Rental Cars for offering a sweet deal on a tiny Hyundai i20 car, the Gran Hotel Benahavis for their hospitality, and the incredibly warm and helpful people of Atlanta. I am glad that my language skills in French, Spanish and Arabic came in quite handy!

How to make the EncryptStick even better

2011-06-28T15:30:00-04:00

Last March, in my blog post [RSA Breach, World Backup Day and the use of Encryption], I mentioned the use of [EncryptStick], a product by ENC Security Systems. Since then, I have thought of some ways that could make it even better.

(FTC Disclosure: I do not work or have any financial investments in ENC Security Systems. ENC Security Systems did not paid me to mention them on this blog. Their mention in this blog is not an endorsement of either their company or any of their products. Information about EncryptStick was based solely on publicly available information and my own personal experiences. My friends at ENC Security Systems provided me a full-version pre-loaded stick for this review.)

The EncryptStick software comes in two flavors, a free/trial version, and the full/paid version. The free trial version has [limits on capacity and time] but provides enough glimpse of the product to decide before you buy the full version. You can download the software yourself and put in on your own USB device, or purchase the pre-loaded stick that comes with the full-version license.

Whichever you choose, the EncryptStick offers three nice protection features:

Encryption for data organized in "storage vaults", which can be either on the stick itself, or on any other machine the stick is connected to. That is a nice feature, because you are not limited to the capacity of the USB stick.
Encrypted password list for all your websites and programs.
A secure browser, that prevents any key-logging or malware that might be on the host Windows machine.

I have tried out all three functions and everything works as advertised. However, there is always room for improvement, so here are my suggestions.

Plausible Deniability

The first problem is that the pre-loaded stick looks like it is worth a million dollars. It is in a shiny bronze color with "EncryptStick" emblazoned on it. This is NOT subtle advertising! This 8GB capacity stick looks like it would be worth stealing solely on being a nice piece of jewelry, and then the added bonus that there might be "valuable secrets" just makes that possibility even more likely.

If you want to keep your information secure, it would help to have "plausible deniability" that there is nothing of value on a stick. Either have some corporate logo on it, of have the stick look like a cute animal, like these pig or chicken USB sticks.

It reminds me how the first Apple iPod's were in bright [Mug-me White]. I use black headphones with my black iPod to avoid this problem.

Of course, you can always install the downloadable version of EncryptStick software onto a less conspicuous stick if you are concerned about theft. The full/paid version of EncryptStick offers an option for "lost key recovery" which would allow you to backup the contents of the stick and be able to retrieve them on a newly purchased stick in the event your first one is lost or stolen.

The Cap

Imagine how "unlucky" I felt when I notice that I had lost my "rabbits feet" on this cute animal-themed USB stick.

I sense trouble for losing the cap on my EncryptStick as well. This might seem trivial, but is a pet-peeve of mine that USB sticks should plan for this. Not only is there nothing to keep the cap on (it slides on and off quite smoothly), but there is no loop to attach the cap to anything if you wanted to.

Since then, I got smart and try to look for ways to keep the cap connected. Some designs, like this IBM-logoed stick shown above, just rotate around an axle, giving you access when you need it, and protection when it is folded closed.

Alternatively, get a little chain that allows you to attach the cap to the main stick. In the case of the pig and chicken, the memory section had a hole pre-drilled and a chain to put through it. I drilled an extra hole in the cap section of each USB stick, and connected the chain through both pieces.

(Warning: Kids, be sure to ask for assistance from your parents before using any power tools on small plastic objects.)

Multi-OS Support

The EncryptStick can run on either Microsoft Windows or Mac OS. The instructions indicate that you can install both versions of download software onto a single stick, so why not do that for the pre-loaded full version? The stick I have had only the Windows version pre-loaded. I don't know if the Windows and Mac OS versions can unlock the same "storage vaults" on the stick.

Certainly, I have been to many companies where either everyone runs Windows or everyone runs Mac OS. If the primary target audience is to use this stick at work in one of those places, then no changes are required. However, at IBM, we have employees using Windows, Mac OS and Linux. In my case, I have all three! Ideally, I would like a version of EncryptStick that I could take on trips with me that would allow me to use it regardless of the Operating System I encountered.

Since there isn't a Linux-version of EncryptStick software, I decided to modify my stick to support booting Linux. I am finding more and more Linux kiosks when I travel, especially at airports and high-traffic locations, so having a stick that works both in Windows or Linux would be useful. Here are some suggestions if you want to try this at home:

Use fdisk to change the FAT32 partition type from "b" to "c". Apparently, Grub2 requires type "c", but the pre-loaded EncryptStick was set to "b". The Windows version of EncryptStick> seems to work fine in either mode, so this is a harmless change.
Install Grub2 with "grub-install" from a working Linux system.
Once Grub2 is installed, you can boot ISO images of various Linux Rescue CDs, like [PartedMagic] which includes the open-source [TrueCrypt] encryption software that you could use for Linux purposes.
This USB stick could also be used to help repair a damaged or compromised Windows system. Consider installing [Ophcrack] or [Avira].
Certainly, 8GB is big enough to run a full Linux distribution. The latest 32-bit version of [Ubuntu] could run on any 32-bit or 64-bit Intel or AMD x86 machine, and have enough room to store an [encrypted home directory].
If you plan to use Firefox's [Private Browsing Mode], I highly recommend using the [NoScript] Firefox plug-in.

Since the stick is formatted FAT32, you should be able to run your original Windows or Mac OS version of EncryptStick with these changes.

Depending on where you are, you may not have the luxury to reboot a system from the USB memory stick. Certainly, this may require changes to the boot sequence in the BIOS and/or hitting the right keys at the right time during the boot sequence. I have been to some "Internet Cafes" that frown on this, or have blocked this altogether, forcing you to boot only from the hard drive.

Well, those are my suggestions. Whether you go on a trip with or without your laptop, it can't hurt to take this EncryptStick along. If you get a virus on your laptop, or have your laptop stolen, then it could be handy to have around. If you don't bring your laptop, you can use this at Internet cafes, hotel business centers, libraries, or other places where public computers are available.

technorati tags: IBM, ENC Security Systems, EncryptStick, encryption, USB, WIndows, MacOS, Linux

Don't Miss IBM Storage Technical University 2011

2011-06-23T07:30:37-04:00

In less than a month, I will be presenting at the annual IBM Storage Technical University, July 18-22, at the Hilton in Orlando, Florida. This is one of my favorite conferences! You can sign up for this at their [Online Registration Page].

I will be covering a variety of topics:

IBM Storage Strategy in the Era of Smarter Computing - After IBM has led the IT industry through the "Centralized Computing" era, and then later the "Distributed Computing" era, we are now entering the third era, that of Smarter Computing. Come learn IBM's strategy for Storage to address today's big challenges, including Big Data, Integrated Workload-optimized systems, and Cloud service delivery models.
IBM Information Archive for Email, Files and eDiscovery - This session will cover the latest announcement for our non-erasable, non-rewriteable compliance storage, the Information Archive (IA), how this can be used to protect your emails and files, and provide indexed search to assist with eDiscovery.
IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center Overview and Update - I was one of the original lead architects for Productivity Center. Come learn what this software is all about, and how the latest features and functions can help you manager your IT environment.
IBM SONAS and the Smart Business Storage Cloud - Confused about Cloud Computing and Cloud Storage? I will explain everything you need to know, including how the integrated SONAS appliance operates, IBM's customized solutions for private cloud deployments, and IBM's public cloud offerings.
BOF on Social Media - BOF stands for "Birds of a Feather", and his normally an after-hours discussion on a single theme. This BOF will be a four-expert Q&A panel, including myself, John Sing, Rich Swain and Ian Wright. We will discuss how we got started in Social Media, and how it has boosted our careers and our ability to get work done.

I'll be in Orlando, Florida all week for this conference. I hope you can make it! To learn more, see the [Technical University Event Page].

technorati tags: IBM, storage, Technical University, Information Archive, Tivoli Storage, Productivity Center, Smarter Computing, SONAS, Smart Business, Storage Cloud, BOF, Social Media, Orlando, Florida

Photos from Tucson IBM Centennial Celebration

2011-06-20T18:50:11-04:00

Last Thursday, on IBM's 100-year anniversary, we had a huge turn-out for the celebration here at the IBM Development Lab site in Tucson, AZ. Employees brought in memorabilia that reminded them of the past 100 years.

Everyone got a black tee-shirt with the original IBM logo. There was plenty of music, food and drink, as well as a few speeches by former and current IBM executives.

Now, the fun begins on the next century of IBM. What will be in store for the world in the 21st century? We live in interesting times!

IBM is Making the World Work Better

2011-06-16T15:22:24-04:00

Today, IBM celebrates its 100 year anniversary. Today, is also my 25th anniversary with IBM, which I [celebrated last week].

Yesterday, I received a copy of the book [Making the World Work Better -- The Ideas that Shaped a Century and a Company] that was sent to every IBMer. IBM commissioned three journalists to write their perspective on the company and its history. IBM Chairman and CEO Sam Palmisano wrote the foreword.

Kevin Maney

Kevin Maney was a reporter, editor and columnist for [USA Today], contributing editor for Conde Nast Portfolio, and contributor to [Fortune], [Wired], [the Atlantic], [NPR], and [ABC News]. He has also written several books, including [Megamedia Shakeout: The Inside Story of the Leaders and the Losers in the Exploding Communications Industry], [Trade-Off: Why Some Things Catch On, and Others Don't], and [Maverick and His Machine: Thomas Watson, Sr. and the Making of IBM].

Kevin's perspective focused on the evolution over the past 100 years of "information science", in six chapters: sensing, memory, processing, logic, connecting, and architecture. He covers the technology from IBM Punched Cards and core memory, to the latest optical chips and the DeepQA technology in IBM Watson.

Steve Hamm

Steve Hamm has been a journalist for the past 30 years, including two decades covering the computer industry for [BusinessWeek]. He has written several books, including [Bangalore Tiger] about rewriting the rules of global competition, and [Race for Perfect: Inside the Quest to Design the Ultimate Portable Computer ].

Steve's perspective was on IBM as a corporation, and how IBM and other corporations have evolved over the past century. In the late 19th century and early 20th century, "Internationals" had their headquarters in the United States, and regional sales and distribution offices elsewhere. The mid-20th century gave rise to "Multinationals" that invested more heavily in regional headquarters scattered across the globe. Today, in the 21st century, IBM and its clients are [Globally Integrated Entrprises] that move work to the lowest costs, best skills, and most attractive business climates.

Jeffrey M. O'Brien

Jeffrey M. O'Brien has been a senior editor [Fortune] and [Wired] magazines, and his work has appeared in The Best of Technology Writing, The Best American Science and Nature Writing, and The Best American Science Writing.

Jeffrey's perspective is on the impact technology has on humanity, organized into five steps towards progress: Seeing, Mapping, Understanding, Believing, and Acting. These steps have been around long before IBM, and Jeffrey is able to draw parallels to such efforts as Lewis & Clark mapping out the Louisiana Purchase, advancements in genetically modified foods, and the thousands of IBMers required to land a man on the moon.

This afternoon, everyone at the IBM Tucson site will be getting together to celebrate IBM's Centernnial!

technorati tags: books, Sam Palmisano, #ibm100, ibm, Kevin Maney, Steve Hamm, Jeffrey O'brien

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Tucson EBC

2011-06-15T14:21:34-04:00

This week, IBM celebrates its Centennial, 100 years since its incorporation on June 16, 1911.

A few months ago, the Tucson Executive Briefing Center ordered its latest IBM System Storage [DS8800] to be on display for demos. This was manufactured in Vác, Hungary (about an hour north of Budapest), and was going to be shipped over to the United States.

However, Sam Palmisano, IBM Chairman and CEO, was in Hannover, Germany for the [CeBIT conference] and wanted this DS8800 to be re-directed to Germany first for this event. He was kind enough to sign it for us. Brian Truskowski, IBM General Manager for Storage, and Rod Adkins, IBM Senior Vice President for IBM Systems Technolgoy Group (and my fifth-line manager), also signed this as well!

I am pleased to say this "signed" DS8000 has arrived to Tucson. This is the latest model in a family of market-leading high-end enterprise-class disk systems designed to attach to all computers, including System z mainframes, POWER systems running AIX and IBM i, as well as servers running HP-UX, Solaris, Linux or Windows.

For more on IBM's other innovations over the past 100 years, check out the [Icons of Progress], which includes these storage innovations:

If you are planning a visit to Tucson, please ask for a tour to see this DS8800, a historic monument to disk innovation!

technorati tags: IBM, Tucson, EBC, DS8800, CEO, Chairman, Sam Palmisano, Brian Trukowski, Rod Adkins, mainframe, AIX, Linux, Windows

Tony Pearson Joins the Quarter Century Club

2011-06-13T19:28:24-04:00

This Thursday, June 16, 2011, marks IBM's Centennial 100 year anniversary. It happens to also be my 25th anniversary with IBM Storage. To avoid conflicts in celebrations, we decided to celebrate my induction into the "Quarter Century Club" (QCC) last Friday instead.

My colleague Harley Puckett was master of ceremonies. Here he is presenting me with a memorial plaque and keychain. Harley mentioned a few facts about 1986, the year I started working for IBM. Ronald Reagan was the US President, gasoline cost only 93 cents per gallon, and the US National Debt was only 2 trillion US dollars!

Here are my colleagues from DFSMShsm. From left to right: Ninh Le, Henry Valenzuela, Shannon Gallaher, and Stan Kissinger. I started in 1986 as aa software developer on DFHSM, and slowly worked my way up to be a lead architect of DFSMS.

Here are my colleagues from Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM). From left to right: Matt Anglin, Ken Hannigan and Mark Haye. I first met them when they worked in DFDSS, having moved from San Jose, CA down to Tucson. While I never worked on the TSM code itself, I did co-author some of the patents used in the product and other products like the 3494 Virtual Tape Server that makes use of TSM internally. I also traveled extensively to promote TSM, often with a TSM developer tagging along so they can learn the ropes about how to travel and make presentaitons.

Here are my colleagues from the disk team. From left to right: Joe Bacco, Carlos Pratt, Gary Albert, and Siebo Friesenborg. I worked on the SMI-S interface for the ESS 800 and DS8000 disk systems needed for the Tivoli Storage Productivity Center. Joe leads the "Disk Magic" tools team. Carlos and I worked on qualifying the various disk products to run with Linux on System z host attachment. Gary Albert is the Business Line Executive (BLE) of Enterprise Disk. Siebo Friesenborg was a disk expert on performance and disaster recovery, but is now enjoying his retirement.

Here are my colleagues from the support team. From left to right: Max Smith, Dave Reed, and Greg McBride. I used to work in Level 2 Support for DFSMS with Max and Dave, carrying a pager and managing the queue on RETAIN. We had enough people so that each Level 2 only had to carry the pager two weeks per year. On Monday afternoons, the person with the pager would give it to the next person on the rotation. On Monday, September 10, 2001, I got the pager, and the following morning, it went off to help all the many clients affected by the September 11 tragedy.

I worked with Greg McBride when he was in DFSMS System Data Mover (SDM), and then again in Tivoli Storage Productivity Center for Replication (TPC-R), and now he is supporting IBM Scale-Out Network Attached Storage (SONAS).

Standing in the light blue striped shirt is Greg Van Hise, my first office-mate and mentor when I first joined IBM. He went on to be part of the elite "DFHSM 2.4.0" prima donna team, then move on to be an architect for Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM).

I wasn't limited to inviting just coworkers, I was also able to invite friends and family. Here are Monica, Richard, and my mother. Normally, my parents head south for the summer, but they postponed their flights so that they could participate in my QCC celebration.

From left to right: my father, Greg Tevis, and myself. It was pure coincidence that my father would wear a loud darkly patterned shirt like mine. Honestly, we did not plan this in advance. Greg Tevis and I were lead architects for the Tivoli Storage Productivity Center, and Greg is now the Technology Strategist for the Tivoli Storage product line.

Here is Jack Arnold, fellow subject matter expert who works with me here at the Tucson Executive Briefing Center, sampling the food. We had quite the spread, including egg rolls, meatballs, luncheon meats, chicken strips, and fresh vegetables.

More colleagues from the Tucson Executive Briefing Center, from left to right, Joe Hayward, Lee Olguin, and Shelly Jost. Joe was a subject matter expert on Tape when I first joioned the EBC in 2007, but he has moved back to the Tape development/test team. Lee is our master "Gunny" sargeant to manage all of our briefing schedules. Shelly is our Client Support Manager, and was the one who organized all the food and preparations for this event!

Lastly, here are Brad Johns, myself, and Harley Puckett. Brad was my mentor for my years in Marketing, and has since retired from IBM and now works on his golf game. I would like to thank all of the Tucson EBC staff for pulling off such a great event, and all my coworkers, friends and family for coming out to celebrate this milestone in my career!

In addition to the plaque and keychain, Harley presented me with a book of congratulatory letters. If you would like to send a letter, it's not too late, contact Mysti Wood (mysti@us.ibm.com).

technorati tags: IBM, IBM100, QCC, Tucson, EBC, DFSMS, DFSMShsm, DFHSM, TSM, TPC

IBM Introduces the DCS3700

2011-05-24T20:25:14-04:00

Well, it's Tuesday, in the United States at least, and you know what that means... IBM Announcements! I am actually down under in Sydney, Australia, and it is Wednesday already as I write this. I feel like a time traveler.

IBM announces their latest disk system, the [IBM System Storage DCS3700], designed for high-performance computing (HPC), business analytics, video broadcasting, and other sequential workloads. The "DCS" stands for Deep Computing Storage. IBM already has the DCS9900 for large enterprise deployments, so this smaller DCS3700 is targeted for midrange deployments.

In a compact 4U package, the DCS3700 packs dual active-active controllers and up to 60 disk drives. The controller drawer can support two additional expansion drawers, of 60 drives each in 4U drawers, for a maximum total of 180 drives in 12U of rack space. Packed with "green" 7200RPM energy-efficient 2TB drives, a system can have up to a 360TB raw capacity. The system supports RAID levels 0, 1, 3, 5, 6, and 10.

The system comes with the latest 6Gbps SAS connections for host attachment, but you can choose 8Gbps Fibre Channel Protocol (FCP) instead, allowing the DCS3700 to be managed by SVC or Storwize V7000.

technorati tags: IBM, DCS3700, HPC, DCS, FCP

Storage Innovation Executive Summit - Part 7

2011-05-18T00:33:45-04:00

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

Storage Innovation Executive Summit - Part 6

2011-05-17T23:43:12-04:00

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

Storage Innovation Executive Summit - Part 5

2011-05-17T19:47:19-04:00

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:

Analytics
Compliance
Consolidation
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:

Getting Participation -- Steve feels that key stakeholders have inappropriate expectations of what archive is, or can be.
Define Tasks -- Steve argues that archive is very much a process-oriented approach, and tasks must fit business process and procedures
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:

Support for email, such as an email application plug-in
Off-line access to archived data
Support for mobile devices, such as smartphones
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

Storage Innovation Executive Summit - Part 4

2011-05-15T22:46:10-04:00

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

Storage Innovation Executive Summit - Part 3

2011-05-15T16:37:06-04:00

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

Storage Innovation Executive Summit - Part 2

2011-05-13T13:15:34-04:00

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:

Data Structure, deciding how to code data to record it in a structured manner
Information Reporting, reporting to upper management what happened
Intelligence Aggregation, finding patterns and insight from the data
Predictive Analytics, monitoring real-time data to take pro-active steps
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:

Stop storing so much
Store more with what's on the floor
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:

Hyper-Efficient Backup and Recovery
Continuous Data Availability
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.

Storage Innovation Executive Summit - Part 1

2011-05-12T11:34:59-04:00

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:

Design to meet but not exceed Service Level Agreements (SLAs)
Re-evaluate your ratio of SAN versus NAS based on growth of unstructured data content,
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

IBM Linear Tape File System wins 2011 NAB Show Pick Hits Award

2011-05-07T16:30:20-04:00

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

World Laughter Day 2011

2011-05-02T14:56:17-04:00

"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

Accessing OS/2 Stacker Compressed Diskettes

2011-04-25T16:04:06-04:00

Back in Februray, my blog post [A Box Full of Floppies] mentioned that I uncovered some diskettes compressed with OS/2 Stacker. Jokingly, I suggested that I may have to stand up an OS/2 machine just to check out what is actually on those floppies. Each floppy contains only three files: README.STC, STACKER.EXE and a hidden STACKVOL.DSK file. The README.STC explains that the disk is compressed by Stacker, a program developed by [Stac Electronics, Inc.]. The STACKER.EXE would not run on Windows XP, Vista or Windows 7. The STACKVOL.DSK is just a huge binary file, like a ZIP file, compressed with [Lempel-Ziv-Stac] algorithm that combines Lempel-Ziv with Huffman coding.

In my follow-up post [Like Sands in an Hourglass], I explained how there are many ways I could have tackled this project. I could either use the Emulation approach and try to build an OS/2 guest image under a hypervisor like VMware, KVM or VirtualBox, or just take the Museum approach and try taking one of my half dozen old machines, wipe it clean and stand up OS/2 on it bare metal. This turned out to be more challenging than I expected. The systems I have that are modern and powerful enough to run hypervisors don't have floppy drives, so I opted for the Museum approach.

(A quick [history of OS/2] might be helpful. IBM and Microsoft jointly developed OS/2 back in 1985. By 1990, Microsoft decided it's own Windows operating system was more popular with the ladies, and decided to break off with IBM. In 1992, IBM release OS/2 version 2.0, touted as "a better DOS than DOS and a better Windows than Windows!" Both parties maintained ownership rights, Microsoft renamed OS/2 to Windows NT. The "NT" stood for New Technology, the basis for all of the enterprise-class Windows servers used today. IBM named its version of OS/2 version 3 and 4 "WARP", with the last version 4.52 released in 2001. In its heyday, OS/2 ran the majority of Automated Teller Machines (ATMs), was used for hardware management consoles (HMC), and was used worldwide to run various Railway systems. After 2001, IBM encouraged people to transition from Windows or OS/2 over to Java and Linux. For those that can't or won't leave OS/2, IBM partnered with Serenity Systems to continue OS/2 under the brand [eComStation].)

Working with an IBM [ThinkCentre 8195-E2U Pentium 4 machine] with 640MB RAM and 80GB hard disk, a CD-rom and one 3.5-inch floppy drive, I first discovered that OS/2 is limited to very small amounts of hard disk. There are limits on [file systems and partition sizes] as well as the infamous [1024-cylinder limit] for bootable operating systems. Having a completely empty drive didn't work, as the size of the disk was too big. Carving out a big partition out of this also failed, as it exceeded the various limits. Each time, it felt the partition table was corrupted because the values were so huge. Even modern Disk Partitioning tools ([SysRescueCD] or [PartedMagic]) didn't work, as these create partitions not recognizable to OS/2.

The next obstacle I knew I would encounter would be device drivers. OS/2 comes as a set of three floppy diskettes and a CD-rom. The bootable installation disk was referred to affectionately as "Disk 0", then Disk 1, then Disk 2. Once all drivers have been loaded into memory, then it can start looking at the CDrom, and continue with the installation. In searching for updated drivers, I came across [Updated OS/2 Warp 4 Installation Diskettes] to address problems with newer display monitors. It also addresses the 8.4GB volume limit.

The updates were in the form of EXE files that only execute in a running DOS or OS/2 environment, expanded onto a floppy diskette. It seemed like [Catch-22], I need a working DOS or OS/2 system to run the update programs to create the diskettes, but need the diskettes to build a working system.

To get around this, I decided to take a "scaffolding" approach. Using DOS 6 bootable floppy, I was able to re-partition the drive with FDISK into two small 1.9GB partitions. I have the full five-floppy IBM DOS 6 set, I hid the first partition for OS/2, and install the DOS 6 GUI on the second partition. I went ahead and added a few new subdirectories: BOOT to hold Grub2, PERSONAL to hold the data I decompress from the floppies, and UTILS to hold additional utilities. This little DOS system worked, and I now have new OS/2 "Disk 1" and "Disk 2" for the installation process.

(If you don't have a full set of DOS installation diskettes, you can make due with "FORMAT C: /S" from a [DOS boot disk], and then just copy over all the files from the boot disk to your C: drive. You won't have a nice DOS GUI, but the command line prompt will be enough to proceed.)

Like DOS, OS/2 expects to be installed on the C: drive. I hid the second partition (DOS), and marked the first partition installable and bootable. The OS/2 installation involves a lot of reboots, and the hard drive is not natively bootable in the intermediate stages. This means having to boot from Disk 0, then putting in Disk 1, then disk 2, before continuing the next phase of the installation. I tried to keep the installation as "Plain Vanilla" as possible.

I had to figure out what to include, and what to exclude, and this involved a lot of trial and error. For example, one of the choices was for "external diskette support". Since I had an "internal diskette drive", I didn't think I needed it. But after a full install, I discovered that it would not read or write floppy diskettes, so it appears that I do indeed need this support.

OS/2 supports two different file systems, FAT16 and the High Performance File System (HPFS). Since my partition was only 1.9GB in size, I chose just to use FAT16. HPFS supported larger disk partitions, longer file names, and faster performance, none of which I need for these purposes.

I thought it would be nice to get TCP/IP networking to work with my Ethernet card. However, after many attempts, I decided against this. I needed to focus on my mission, which was to decompress floppy diskettes. It was amusing to see that OS/2 supported all kinds of networking, including Token Ring, System Management, Remote Access, Mobile Access Services, File and Print.

Once all the options are chosen, OS/2 installation then proceeds to unpack and copy all the programs to the C: drive. During this process, IBM had informational splash screens. Here's one that caught my eye, titled "IBM Means Three Things" that listed three reasons to partner with IBM:

Providing global solutions for a small planet
Creating and Applying advanced technologies to improve with which customers run their businesses
Constantly improving customer service with the products and services we provide

You might wonder how these OS/2 splash screens, written over 10 years ago, can appear almost identical to IBM's current [Smarter Planet] campaign. Actually, it is not that odd. IBM has been keeping to these same core principles since 1911, only the words to describe and promote these core values have changed.

To access both OS/2 and DOS partitions, I installed Grand Unified Bootloader [Grub2] on the DOS partition under C:/BOOT/GRUB directory. However, when I boot OS/2, I cannot see the DOS partition. And when I boot DOS, I cannot see the OS/2 partition. Each operating system thinks its C: drive is the only partition on the system.

Now that I had OS/2 running, I was then able to install Stacker from two floppy diskettes. With this installed, I can compress and decompress data on either the hard disk, or on floppy diskettes. Most of the files were flat text documents and digital photos. After copying the data off the compressed disks onto my hard drive, I now can copy them off to a safe place.

To finish this project, I installed Ubuntu Linux on the remaining 76GB of disk space, which can access both the OS/2 and DOS drives FAT16 file systems natively. This allows me to copy files from OS/2 to DOS or vice versa.

Now that I know what data types are on the diskettes, I determined that I could have decompressed the data in just a few steps:

Set up a DOS partition on C: drive
Insert one of the compressed diskettes into the floppy drive
Copy the STACKER.EXE program from the floppy to the C: drive
Run "STACKER A:" to decompress the floppy diskette

However, now that I have a working DOS and OS/2 system, I can possibly review the rest of my floppy diskettes, some of which may require running programs natively on OS/2 or DOS. This brings me to an important lesson. If you are going to keep archive data for long-term retention, you need to choose file formats that can be read by current operating systems and programs. Installing older operating systems and programs to access proprietary formats can be quite time-consuming, and may not always be possible or desirable.

technorati tags: IBM, Stac, Stacker, OS/2, DOS, Microsoft, Windows, ThinkCentre, Compression, Liv-Zempel

Running Windows on IBM Mainframes, New 15K Drives, and RVU Licensing

2011-04-12T13:58:26-04:00

Yes, it's Tuesday, and that means more IBM Announcements! A lot was announced today, so I have selected an eclectic mix for your enjoyment.

Microsoft Windows support on IBM Mainframes: Last year's announcement of the new IBM zEnterprise included the zEnterprise BladeCenter Extention (zBX) which could run POWER7 and x86 operating systems, but managed by the mainframe's overall Unified Resource Manager. Initially, this was intended for AIX and Linux-x86, but today, IBM [announced a statement of general direction to support Microsoft Windows] on the zBX extension by end of this year. Of course, the standard disclaimer applies: All statements regarding IBM's plans, directions, and intent are subject to change or withdrawal without notice. Any reliance on these statements of general direction is at the relying party's sole risk and will not create liability or obligation for IBM.
New 15K RPM drives for IBM Storwize V7000: Last October, when IBM introduced the Storwize V7000, it offered both large (3.5 inch) and small form factor (2.5 inch) drives. Unfortunately, a few people were upset that there were no 15K RPM drives for the small form factor models. There were SSD and 10K RPM drives, but nothing in between. Today, IBM [announced new 15K RPM drives of 146GB capacity] have been qualified for both the controller and expansion drawers.
New RVU licensing for IBM Tivoli products: IBM [announced it is changing over to this new RVU licensing model], from the previous PVU license, based on processor value units. What is an RVU? An RVU is a unit of measure by which the program can be licensed. RVU Proofs of Entitlement (PoE) are based on the number of units of a specific resource used or managed by the program. This makes sense, resource management software should be charged by the amount of resources you manage, not the size of the server the software runs on. This change also enables running on server virtualization and live movement of VM guest images from one type of host machine to another.

If you are contemplating a visit to an IBM [Executive Briefing Center], then April and May is a great time to come to Tucson. The weather is ideal here. The cold snap appears to be over, and spring is in the air!

technorati tags: IBM, zEnterprise, zBX, Microsoft, Windows, Storwize V7000, RVU, Tivoli

IBM Storwize V7000 - Two New Reviews

2011-04-06T16:19:14-04:00

The IBM Storwize V7000 was introduced last October, and has proven to be wildly successful. I saw two awesome reviews recently of the IBM Storwize V7000 disk system that I thought I would bring to your attention.

The first review is [IBM Storwize V7000] from Roger Howorth of ZDNet UK. Here are some quotes:

"Under the hood, the Storwize V7000 is built from technologies originally developed for IBM's enterprise-class storage systems, so the V7000 benefits from a comprehensive set of high-end features that have been scaled down for mid-range buyers."
"Initial configuration couldn't be simpler."
"We really liked the layout and functionality of the GUI."

The second review is [IBM Storwize V7000 Disk System: Enterprise-class Function in a Midrange Storage Package] from Tony Palmer of Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG). Here are some quotes:

"Storwize V7000 is virtual storage that offers efficiency and flexibility through built-in SSD optimization and "thin provisioning" technologies while enabling users to virtualize and re-use existing disk systems..."
"Storwize V7000 advanced functionality also enables non-disruptive migration of data from existing storage, simplifying implementation and minimizing disruption to users."
"The Storwize V7000 graphical user interface is a browser-based, easy to navigate intuitive GUI."
"ESG Lab found that getting started with the Storwize V7000 disk system was intuitive and straightforward."
"Easy Tier increases the efficiency and simplicity of deploying SSD drives."

This is a great review, following the February ESG Report on [IBM Storwize V7000: Real-world Mixed Workload Performance in VMware Environments].

If you are looking for midrange storage with a nice set of enterprise-class features, consider the Storwize V7000!

technorati tags: IBM, Storwize V7000, Roger Howorth, ZDNet, Tony Palmer, ESG, GUI

IBM System Storage Video Recognized at International Film Festival

2011-04-01T09:52:20-04:00

I started attending the Arizona International Film Festival eight years ago. I took a week off work to see the films, and came back to tell people how enjoyable it was to just sit and watch thirty movies. "Dirty movies?" they would ask. "No, not dirty, thirty!" To avoid further confusion, I quickly switched to saying "I spent the week watching 25 to 35 independent films."

A few weeks ago, the Arizona International Film Festival notified me that my 2007 System Storage video has been recognized for a technical award under the category of "Innovative use of Technology for Animated Short Film." I will receive the award in person this evening, April 1, at the opening ceremony, which starts at 6:00pm, at the [Fox Theater] in downtown Tucson, Arizona.

As is the case with the Oscars and Grammies, technical awards are handed out in smaller ceremonies in advance of the primary award ceremony that recognizes the best actors, directors and films, which will be held April 9.

The backstory of my entry is pretty amusing. Back in 2007, I was asked to run a [Product Launch in Second Life], a virtual world environment. If you are not familiar with [Second Life ], think [World of Warcraft] for business executives.

In this virtual world, avatars representing IBM executives and marketing managers would present our latest products to avatars of the IBM Business Partners, Industry Analysts and the Press. A short "highlights" video that stitched together bits and pieces of the 90-minute event was used by executives at conferences and road shows. I submitted this shortened version to the Airzona International Film Festival back in 2008, so I am glad the judges had finally gotten around to review it. Here it is on the [IBM YouTube Channel]:

During the event, I captured the real-time video from my laptop screen using a tool called [FRAPS]. I also had some of my colleagues capture video from different angles in case we needed these in post-production. The technique of capturing computer-generated 3D video from a computer screen is known as "Machinima".

I was in Bogota Columbia that week teaching a Top Gun class. I got to the IBM building only to discover the firewall would not let me get through to the Second Life website, so I took a taxi back to the hotel and ran the event from their business center. Then the unthinkable happened, and I got to experience [Columbia's worst power outage in 22 years], in which 98 percent of the country lost power. Luckily, I had enough battery charge on my laptop and was still connected to the internet to continue with the rest of the event.

Can you believe IBM allocated $10,000 budget for me to run this event? I actually only spent $331, of which $240 was for the toll-free conference call bridge line. Second Life now offers "Voice over IP", but it did not have that feature back then. The other $91 was for virtual items in Second Life. I learned how to make virtual objects and use the GNU Image Manipulation Program [GIMP] to create avatar clothing, giveaway items, and demo equipment.

Instead of hiring voice actors, I had IBMers Andy Monshaw, Eric Buckley, Funda Eceral, David Tareen, and Kristie Bell all provide their voice talents directly.

I asked the coordinator of the film festival if there was going to be a "practice session" for the technical award ceremony. She laughed, and said basically that I would just be walking across the stage, receive the award in my left hand as I shook hands with my right, and then turn slightly clockwise to pose while my picture is taken. If I had ever gotten a diploma from high school or college, she said, then I already knew what to expect. "Don't worry," she assured me, "you won't have to give a speech!"

(In lieu of a speech, I would like to thank Christine Heinisch, my video editor, and Katrina Smith, my cinemetographer. I could not have won this technical award without their assistance.)

After the ceremony tonight, the film festival (celebrating its 20th anniversary this year) will kick off with the first of 110 films called "Journey from Zanskar", a 90-minute documentary directed by Frederick Marx and narrated by Richard Gere, starting at 8:00pm. The Arizona International Film Festival will continue through April 20, with films being shown on the evenings and weekends so that I won't have to take time off from work.

If you are in the Tucson area, come out and join me tonight at the Fox Theater.

technorati tags: IBM, System Storage, Second Life, Arizona International Film Festival, Andy Monshaw, Kristie Bell, Funda Eceral, Eric Buckley, David Tareen, April 1, Christine Heinisch, Katrina Smith, Fox Theater, Frederick Marx, Richard Gere, Journey from Zanskar

RSA Breach, World Backup Day and the use of Encryption

2011-03-31T18:37:51-04:00

Normally, when EMC fails, it is worth a giggle. Companies are run by humans, and nobody is perfect. However, their latest one, failing to defend their RSA SecurID two-factor website, is no laughing matter. Breaches like this undermine the trust needed for business and commerce to be done with Information Technology, so it affects the entire IT industry.

(FTC Disclosure: I do not work or have any financial investments in either EMC nor ENC Security Systems. Neither EMC nor ENC Security Systems paid me to mention them on this blog. Their mention in this blog is not an endorsement of either company or their products. Information about EMC was based solely on publicly available information made available by EMC and others. My friends at ENC Security Systems provided me an evaluation license for their latest software release so that I could confirm the use cases posed in this post.)

Of course, EMC did the right thing by making this breach public in an [Open Letter to RSA Customers]. While this may affect their revenues, as clients question whether they should do business with EMC, or affect their stock price, as investors question whether they should invest in EMC, they were very clear and public that the breach occurred. As far as I know, none of the executives of the RSA security division have stepped down. The disclosure of the breach was the right thing to do, and required by law from the [US Securities Exchange Commission]. This law was created to prevent companies from trying to hide breaches that expose external client information.

The breach does not affect RSA public/private key pairs used by IBM and most every other large company. Rather, this breach was targeted to RSA SecurID two-factor authentication. I explained two-factor authentication in my blog post [Day 5 Grid, SOA and Cloud Computing - System x KVM solutions], but basically it is an added level of security, requiring something you know (your password) with something you have (such as a magnetic card or key fob). Both are required to gain access to the system.

Breaches happen. Recently, [Hackers found vulnerabilities in the McAfee.com website]. Last month, fellow blogger Chuck Hollis from EMC had a blog post on [Understanding Advanced Persistent Threats (APT)] in the week leading up to their RSA Conference. It was precisely an APT that hit RSA, so the irony of this breach was not lost on the blogosphere. Perhaps Chuck's blog post gave hackers the idea to do this, like saying "I hope terrorists don't bomb this building that hold all of our chemical weapons..." or "I hope bank robbers don't rob this repository where we keep all the cash..."

(The sinister counter-theory, that EMC staged this breach as a marketing stunt to undermine trust in hybrid or public cloud offerings, such as those offered by IBM, Amazon or Salesforce.com, offers an interesting twist. While computer breaches in general are fodder for [Luddites] to argue we should not use computers at all, this particular breach could be used by EMC salesmen to encourage their customers to choose private cloud over hybrid cloud or public cloud deployments. Given all the extra work that RSA SecurID customers have to now do to harden their environments, that would be in bad taste.)

Over on Mashable, Simon Crosby argues [Why the Cloud Is Actually the Safest Place for Your Data]. I am sure we have not heard the last of the implications of this RSA breach. For now, I have two recommendations for you.

Validate Backup Methodology

Today, March 31, is World Backup Day. This is because many viruses are triggered to operate on April 1. Just like checking the batteries in your smoke alarms every year, you should ensure that your backup methodology remains valid.

Back in 2008, I was a volunteer for the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative, and built an XS server to be used for Uruguay. I shipped [this baby off to school] to be the central server that all the student and teacher laptops connected to. It was the gateway to the Internet, as well as the [repository for the blogs of each student]. The blogs were accessible to the public, so that parents could read what their students were writing.

Unfortunately, this public access resulted in my little XS server being attacked by hackers, with IP addresses in Russia and China. Why anyone from either of those two countries wanted to ruin the hopes and dreams of small school children in Uruguay was beyond me. Fortunately, I had planned for remote administration. Backups were taken by me weekly to a second drive that was only mounted when I was dialed in to take the backup. The rest of the time, it was offline, so as not to be written to by hackers.

I also shipped along with the server a bootable DVD that contained a modified version of [System Rescue CD], scripts to start up SSHD daemon, and pre-populated for use with public/private RSA keys for me and eight other administrators located in various countries. To effect repairs, the local operator would reboot to the DVD, and then I could login via "ssh" and restore the operating system, programs and data. Sadly, this meant that the students might have lost some of their most recent blog posts since the last backup.

Please consider reviewing your own backup strategies. If your security were compromised, data was corrupted or lost, would you be able to recover from your backups?

Use Encryption where Appropriate

If you plan to travel this Summer, you may want to consider encryption to protect yourself. ENC Security Systems has just released their latest [Encrypt Stick] which is a USB memory stick pre-loaded with software that provides three features:

Encryption for your files
A secure web browser for accessing sensitive websites
Secure password manager

Hotel Lobby: Many hotels now offer computers for use by the guests. These are typically running some flavor of Windows operating system. Encrypt Stick comes with an EXE file that you can run to browse the web securely, and have access to your encrypted files and passwords, leaving no trace on the hotel lobby computer.
Friends and Family: What if you are visiting friends and family, and they have a Mac instead? No problem, as Encrypt Stick has a DMG file to use on Mac OS X operating system. While you may not be worried about your siblings hacking into your bank account, you may not want them necessarily seeing what sites you visited.
Airport Lounge: I have been to several airport lounges now that use Linux for their public computers. Makes sense to me, as there are fewer viruses for Linux, and updating Linux is relatively straightforward. However, Encrypt Stick does not support Linux. For my Linux-knowledgeable readers, you can build your own with [Unetbootin] bootable USB memory stick to launch your favorite Linux browser in memory on whatever system you are using. The [Gparted Magic] utility rescue tool includes [TrueCrypt] to encrypt your files. Lastly, you can use [MyPasswordSafe] to hold all of your passwords securely.

Several clients have asked if any of the IBM data-at-rest encrypted disks or tapes are affected by this breach. IBM uses AES encryption for the actual disk and tape media, but we do use RSA keys to encrypt the generated keys used on the TS1120 and TS1130 drives. However, these were not affected by the RSA SecurID breach, and your tapes are safely protected.

Advanced Persistent Threats, viruses and other malware are no laughing matter. If you are concerned about security, contact IBM to help you assess your current environment and help you plan a robust protection strategy.

technorati tags: IBM, EMC, ENC Security Systems, EncryptStick, RSA, SecurID, breach, APT, Chuck Hollis, OLPC, SysRescCD, UnetBootin, TrueCrypt, Gparted, TS1120, TS1130, AES

Next Week - Smarter Computing Virtual Event

2011-03-30T13:56:44-04:00

Did you miss IBM Pulse 2011 in Las Vegas?

Next week, April 6, IBM will host the [Smarter Computing Virtual Event] to cover IBM's Smarter Computing initiative, with key themes of Smarter Computing - Big Data, Optimized Systems, and Cloud. Smarter Computing is a new and innovative approach to computing based on the evolving role of IT in your business and an intrinsic understanding of the economics of IT.

(I found it amusing that EMC has chosen two of IBM's themes, "Big Data" and "Cloud", for their upcoming EMC World 2011 conference. I was tempted to include their graphic, but people might have accused me of using Photoshop or GIMP to make EMC look bad. Instead, you can look at the graphic on this blog post titled [When Cloud Meets Big Data: Information Logistics Revisited] by fellow blogger Chuck Hollis from EMC. IBM has been a leader in IT for decades, so we are used to having other companies follow in our footsteps. As an [IBM wannabee], EMC is no different.)

For many on tight travel budgets, this event REQUIRES NO TRAVEL! This is a virtual event, You can participate from your desk. You will hear from key IBM executives, all of which I have heard speak myself, so I can vouch that this should be a good event.

Steve Mills - IBM Senior Vice President and Group Executive, Software and Systems (my seventh-line manager)
Tom Rosamilia - IBM General Manager, Power and Mainframe Systems, IBM Systems and Technology Group.
Robert LaBlanc - IBM Senior Vice President, Middleware Software
Helene Armitage - IBM General Manager, Systems Software, Systems and Technology Group.

This event is targeted to CIOs, IT Directors and Managers, Business Analysts, Systems and Storage Administrators, and DBAs. However, we don't check what your actual title is, so feel free to attend even if you have different job responsibilities.

I am giving you one week's notice for this event. If this is the first time you have heard of this event, then I hope that is enough time to plan for this event in your busy schedule. If you had heard of it already, perhaps this serves as a useful reminder to [Register Now!] Is a week ahead the right amount of time? For virtual events, do we need more or less advance notice? What about for events that involve travel? Feel free to enter your thoughts on this in the comments section below.

technorati tags: IBM, Smarter Computing, Virtual Event, Steve Mills, Tom Rosamilia, Robert LeBlanc, Helene Armitage