Evolve IP – The Cloud Services Company put together a nice infographic that helps IT take into account all of the variables that impact TCO.  They call them the “7 Vaults of Cloud TCO.” What is most helpful about this infographic is that it looks at TCO holistically, and not simply through the lens of technology acquisition cost and predicted lifespan. Too many times, companies will measure storage TCO by “Only Cost per Terabyte (OCT).” If this were the case, there would only be one type of hard drive on the market – the highest possible capacity at the lowest possible price.  True, this is something we strive for, but it’s not a true indicator of TCO.

Check out the infographic below, and think about how the choices you make beyond the raw capacity that impact storage TCO.  I can already think of a few:  security, power, scale, performance, service & support…can you think of even more?

“Do the data center solutions of the present and future need faster hard drives, or is bigger and cheaper the rule of the day given the sheer amount of unstructured data being stored? Let’s face it, such unstructured data was created somewhere at sometime, and the creation of data is highly dependent upon IOPS more than anything.  SSDs have been the answer as of late, but that solution remains expensive and limiting for many customers to deploy at mass scale.”

This is the question I posed in my blog post “Is there a market for a faster enterprise hard drive?“ on Seagate’s The Storage Effect blog today. Coincidentally, on LinkedIn we were talking “fast” enterprise drives just this week on Data Storage Professionals discussion: Future of 3.5″ Enterprise Disk Drives. The discussion centers on the end of the era of the 3.5-inch 15K hard drive, and what the future holds for companies needing 450GB or 600GB capacities on a 15,000 RPM design.

One, it was great to hear that 15K drives are still in high demand, which Seagate recognizes, and two, that SSD is not the answer for everything, and that there is a market for faster enterprise hard drives.

Read more about how, potentially, we can make the fastest enterprise drives even faster.

A round of applause please for Mark Thiele at SwitchScribe and at Data Center Pulse who unknowingly summed up the reason why Seagate launched our Cloud Builder Alliance program in his post “Why monopolies and commoditization would pollute the cloud.”

“While there’s little doubt that several big players would come to dominate the market as is already the case today, we cannot afford to be without all those spunky new companies looking to carve out a market for themselves. These little players will force the larger players to stay honest, to bill correctly, to offer new services, and to continually innovate.”

Mark’s post on GigaOM articulated the risks of a monopolized commoditized cloud. It’s worth the read. Basically, monopolies stifle innovation, and though certain cloud providers – who will remain nameless – look to strip every ounce of differentiation out of hardware and replace it with intelligent software, it is a formula that just doesn’t work for everybody.  He uses a car analogy to paint this picture rather well, “…two cars have substantially different features and solve different problems, yet they are both cars. So, the simple answer is no, they are not commodity if by commodity you mean there is little or no profit or differentiation to be found.”

The same can be said for storage devices.  Each one of Seagate’s enterprise devices have substantially different features and solve different problems. From cost per Terabyte to cost per IOPS, from cost per Watt to activity per watt, to any number of combinations everywhere in between. The fact that a company building server and storage infrastructure can build almost anything imaginable for any workload supports the notion that the server and storage could never truly be commoditized.  Factor in the need to continuously innovate at the device level to help enable innovation at the system level and you have a future ripe with improvement in performance, capacity, reliability, and power consumption.

Seagate sees a world where the large OEMs, and now the largest of the large cloud providers will continue to innovate on their terms, while the smaller, more hungry upstarts will look for ways to change the game.  What better partner to have than those companies that want to change the game, that focus on driving innovation at the hardware level to unleash even more opportunities with software and applications.

That’s a Seagate Cloud Builder Alliance partner, and what we are seeing from these companies is just the beginning.

More Cloud rants.

If someone told you that their storage solution delivered predictable performance, was open architecture, and simple to procure and use, would you believe them? Well, that is what Rackspace is offering with their new Cloud Block Storage.

J.R. Arredondo wrote a great post on The Rackspace Blog that provides some background and some compelling data for why their Cloud Block Storage offering is superior. Check it out and judge for yourself.

What’s most compelling for me is the customer input that went into the development of their solution.  When it comes to developing cloud based solutions, it’s almost impossible to do so in a vacuum.  The cloud is still evolving, and separating the winners from the losers ultimately lies with who is best at taking customer input and applying it to their solutions offering.

In the case of Rackspace, the input from customers was:

• We want consistent and reliable performance.
• We want options based on our performance requirements.
• We want simple pricing based solely on capacity used.

Take this a step further.  This level of customer insight is extremely valuable to companies like Seagate who look to develop storage devices and features specifically for cloud partners like Rackspace.  Sure, it’s important to meet the needs of partners like Rackspace, but more importantly, how do our products and features enable Rackspace to solve their customer problems.

The 3 concerns above are just a small sampling of the type of customer insights collected from cloud builders, cloud providers and end customers.  How to use such insights to develop solutions will determine if we win or lose. For now, we are referring to this as “the strategic application of storage”  to gain a competitive advantage.  So far, we have announced Enterprise Value or Constellation CS.  We have PowerChoice, RAID Rebuild, Instant Secure Erase, and SED from a feature perspective, but what’s next?  Hybrid? A new SSD? In a word…

yes.

Related Posts:

What’s a Cloud Builder anyway?

New names, more game – bigger, faster, more affordable drives for enterprise and cloud data centers

Introducing 3 new Enterprise product lines that save you Time & Money

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What do you do with 300 million photos a day when their “shelf-life” in terms of viewer interest is no longer than a few weeks?  You freeze them in what is increasingly being referred to as “cold storage” in the cloud space.

That is what Facebook is exploring according to this InfoWorld article.  The article goes into Facebook’s explanation for why cold storage of photos, and from what I understand it comes down to a couple key reasons: they cannot simply delete them and they cannot afford to keep them (on their existing storage infrastructure).  Facebook, like any cloud company, or any company for that matter, amasses a huge amount of data on a daily basis.  Tiered storage and auto-tiering has taught us to keep the most important data in higher speed storage like SSD or 15,000 RPM HDDs, and move the less frequently accessed data to higher-capacity, lower-cost media like 7200RPM HDDs.

But, even higher capacity, lower cost media like 7200RPM HDDs are overkill for files that may never get looked at again, or at least it may be months, years before they are accessed.  When was the last time you looked at the first few Facebook photos or albums you uploaded?  For me, it’s been a couple years.  Hence, this idea of cold storage.  Cold storage is nothing more than high-capacity, lower-cost, and even lower-power storage designed, for the most part, to sit idle until the mother ship comes calling for one of those old photos, or files.

Facebook’s strategy is to utilize their software layer to, first, manage what gets placed in cold storage, the energy it takes to run, and the time it takes to retrieve files. I’m sure there is more to the system, but for simplicity’s sake, let’s say these are the top 3 design considerations. And this makes sense, if you consider what Frank Frankovsky, the ex-Dell man who oversees hardware design at Facebook, said about designing an open storage architecture in this Wired article on Gizmodo:

“We’re taking the same approach we took with servers: Eliminate anything that’s not directly adding value. The really valuable part of storage is the disk drive itself and the software that controls how the data gets distributed to and recovered from those drives. We want to eliminate any ancillary components around the drive – and make it more serviceable.”

The challenge in front of hard drive suppliers like Seagate is how to develop products for an increasing cold storage usage model?  No doubt, Amazon’s Glacier and Facebook’s move to cold storage are indications that a growing trend to store massive amounts of seldom-used, but always-needed data will demand a different type of storage device.  A storage device with the highest possible capacity and the lowest possible power envelope that seamlessly integrates with existing cloud or traditional IT storage architectures.

In the meantime, Seagate’s new Enterprise Value or Enterprise Capacity 3.5 with PowerChoice Technology seem like a good fit.

When’s the last time you looked at your first Facebook photos?

Related Posts:

New names, more game – bigger, faster, more affordable drives for enterprise and cloud data centers

5 Reasons why Facebook wins the cloud storage war

Is Facebook a media company or tech company?

Is Sub-Zero cold storage another Facebook first?

4 TB ENTERPRISE

If you’re looking for a 4TB (or 3, 2 or even 1TB) higher performing (37% better than last generation), lower power (5% lower than last generation), more reliable (more chassis support, Humidity Sensor, Dual Heaters, SuperParity and improved RV Tolerance) capacity-optimized HDD for your tier 2 storage in your data center, look no further than the new Seagate Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD, the 6th generation nearline HDD also known as the Constellation ES.3. It’s so reliable, we’ve increased the MTBF from 1.2M hours to 1.4M hours and doubled the load/unload specification from 300K to 600K.

Or if you’re looking to improve your performance, check out the new Seagate Performance 10K HDD, the 6th generation of our mission critical Savvio 10K-RPM product line. It’s the perfect upgrade drive to get off of 3.5-inch Cheetah drives for a couple of great reasons. This new 10K drive matches the sequential performance of a 15K Cheetah drive, provides 50% more capacity (900GB vs. 600GB) in 70% less space (2.5” vs. 3.5” form factor) while reducing your power consumption by up to 71% saving you money every day.

Now’s your chance to get on board with providing data security where the data lives…on the hard drive. These new Enterprise drives now offer the Self-Encrypted Drives (SED) option at NO ADDITIONAL CHARGE.That means you can rest easy knowing your data is safe and you’ve got the convenience of 1 second erasure when you’re ready to retire the drive or repurpose it.

Watch for more info on other new Enterprise features that will knock your socks off in my next post.

Okay, maybe the term “cloud” is a bit overused and abused, but it by no means is a fad. It’s the next evolution of compute, storage, and networking, and according to this infographic from The Everest Group and Cloud Connect, the argument that the cloud lacks enterprise adoption lacks all of the facts.

But, the stats and charts are only half of the story here.

The one thing I pulled out of this infographic more than anything is the disconnect between how the cloud is “marketed and sold” and why enterprises adopt it in the first place. Near the bottom of the graphic, there is a small table that compares buyers and sellers in the cloud space, and the perceptions as to the reasoning for cloud adoption.

Sellers and/or marketers tout the lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) as the number 1 reason, while that ranks towards the bottom for buyers. The real reason enterprise are adopting the cloud: speed.  Not speed in terms of compute, storage, or network performance, but speed in terms of their own personal abilities to get compute, storage, and network resources up and running and scalable for the customers they serve:  fellow employees.

This screams emotional buying behavior – if you are a fan of the benefit ladder where you “list your products’ functional attributes on one side, and your customers’ reported emotional benefits on the other”, this would sit squarely in the emotional benefits tier of the ladder.  ”You can do your job faster, and be a hero to your fellow employees.”

Perhaps too much of the marketing and sales speak around the cloud is focused on the functional benefits, and not enough on the emotional ones. Then again, maybe not, given this infographic says the cloud is growing in adoption just fine.

But, could adoption be growing even faster?

Related Posts:

Cloud hype to last for another 2 to 10 years

Cliff Notes: Seagate whitepaper on cloud computing

Why the cloud is “rent vs buy” for many businesses

Flash Memory Summit 2012

Last week, I attended the 7^th annual Flash Memory Summit held in Santa Clara, CA.  In addition to a 30% increase in the number of exhibitors and attendees, there were several hot topics discussed throughout the event in speaking sessions, hallways, and on the exhibit floor.  I have selected five of the hottest areas of interest here:

1. The shrinking size of NAND lithography – To reduce NAND power consumption and footprint, NAND providers continue to push for smaller NAND flash (we are now approaching 1X nm).  As this occurs, Floating Gate geometry also shrinks causing cell endurance & data retention degradation as the potential for unintended bit flips and data corruption will increase. Currently, NAND flash uses floating gate technology to store data. (A floating gate is a CMOS- (complementary metal-oxide semiconductor) based transistor that is capable of holding an electrical charge.) As NAND sizes continue to get smaller, current technologies such as floating gates are approaching end of life (2013 estimated timeframe) and new methodologies such as 3D NAND cells (2014-2015 estimated transition timeframe) must be matured to expand the market for solid state storage.
2. The increasing importance of and focus on data integrity and device endurance – As NAND lithography gets smaller and enterprise datacenters incorporate more SSDs into mission critical production environments (that store a company’s most valuable data), the need for advancements in power loss data protection, error detection and correction code, Low Density Parity-Checks (LDPC), signal and processing techniques are increasing.
3. SSD Speed is great, but the consistency of the performance is also important – SSDs must provide consistent performance over their designated life span to meet datacenter goals.  This means that all SSD background activities such as wear leveling, garbage collection, free space reclamation, and error correction code must be improved such as to not have an impact on performance.  It also means that mixed and changing read and write workloads do not dip below IOPs level that 100% reads or 100% writes can achieve.
4. NAND cost per bit (measured in $/GB) is trending downward – NAND Flash is the single most expensive item in an SSD’s bill of materials and drives SSD pricing to OEMs and end users.  As NAND cost per bit is reduced, SSDs prices are expected to follow suite – enabling more companies to purchase and implement SSDs.
5. The Enterprise SSD market is segmenting into three sub-markets – One size does not fit all.  A single SSD does not meet the diverse needs of different applications with significantly different workload characteristics.  The storage industry is beginning to see the emergence of three sub-markets within enterprise SSDs:

• Entry Level SSDs designed for read intensive workloads
• Mainstream SSDs designed for complex, mixed read/write workloads
• High Endurance SSDs designed for write intensive workloads

Seagate had a strong presence at the FMS with 13 speaking sessions – including a Keynote session by Dr. Jeff Burke, VP Market Intelligence at Seagate – a large booth, technology demos of the Seagate hybrid drive for ultra-thin laptops and a technology demo of 12Gb/s SAS working with both Seagate SSDs and HDDs.  Click Here to see more information on all of the presentations from the various Flash Memory Summit speaking sessions.

Image by Wired

If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.

According to Wired’s coverage of Facebook over the years, they have definitely elevated themselves from a technology perspective as a leader in data center design and economics.  First, they shared their Open Compute, then came talk about an Open Storage concept, and now plans for a Cold Storage system that, according to the Wired article and Tom Furlong, vice president of site operations at Facebook, it’s “a hard-disk storage server that powers off when it’s not in use.”

“It’s going to sit in a dedicated building that is optimized to support this device that we don’t need to access very often.”

Called Sub-Zero, this 62,000-square-foot building is right next to its 330,000-square-foot Prineville, Oregon data center. Its sole purpose: “do the kind of large-scale deep archiving that some companies still achieve with tape backup.” It’s in the early stages of development, but when complete, the main data center will be able to backup / archive to the Sub-Zero data center with a much smaller power footprint (around 1.5 kW / rack).

I wonder what tweaks Facebook is doing to accomplish this. Of course, we may never know, unless they intend to make this “Open” much like their other data center innovations. We will see.

Before diving into the Wired article, I had a conversation with our friends over at Elliptical Media – whom I blogged about here. We were discussing mobile data centers, and it dawned on me.  What’s stopping smaller cloud providers — much less medium to large enterprise customers — from doing the same thing Facebook is doing?  The technology is there to do it, with some custom software tweaks here and there.

Go with me on this one…take an Elliptical Media R.A.S.E.R HD, R.A.S.E.R DX or C3-S.P.E.A.R outfit it with some storage systems running Seagate drives with PowerChoice Technology, and add some software script customization, and voila, emergency cold storage that just so happens to be mobile as well. Seagate has been shipping drives with PowerChoice since 2007. A feature that enables users to tell the drives to spin down to one of four Idle modes, or standby mode based upon their specific window of usage. Once in standby mode it takes the drive 8 seconds to get back to ready, so as long as the script tells the system to kick in 8 minutes before the backup process begins, you’re golden.

Of course, I am minimizing the complexity a bit, but the technology exists, and has for 5 years now. Maybe it takes a Facebook idea to give it some extra legs. Just another Facebook first…maybe, but maybe not.

Related Posts:

5 takeaways from Facebook’s Open Compute Project

Is Facebook a media company or tech company?

[Video] Tour of Facebook data center

Gartner Research released their updated Hype Cycle for Cloud Computing, 2012 and is has some interesting prognostications.

Gartner’s Hype Cycle attempts to measure and predict the amount of time before a particular technology, innovation, or application will reach a “plateau of productivity.”  In other words, the way I see it, at what point will it become mainstream achieving adoption by >50% of the market. Here is the quite elaborate graph reduced down to bullets, so even I can understand it.

What will be mainstream in less than 2 years:

• Virtualization
• Salesforce Automation (SaaS)

This makes sense considering that Gartner also cited penetration and saturation as two key trends for virtualization in 2012 in this blog post. “Penetration and Saturation: Virtualization hitting 50% penetration. Competition and new, small customers driving down prices. The market is growing, but not like it used to, and vendor behavior will change significantly because of it. And don’t forget the impact on server vendors – the next few years will prove to be a challenge until virtualization slows down.”

And, who doesn’t deploy some level of CRM applications today. Based on Gartner’s Hype Cycle for CRM via Forbes, “Gartner estimates 35% of all CRM implementations today use SaaS, growing to over 50% by 2020 according to their projections.”

What will be mainstream in 2 to 5 years
The further down this list, the closer it is to mainstream, or plateau-ing.

• Cloud Security & Risk Standards
• Community Cloud
• Cloud-Optimized Application Design
• Private Platform as a Service
• Personal Cloud
• Cloudbursting
• IaaS and Middleware
• Big Data
• Cloud Management Platforms
• Cloud BPM
• Cloud Email
• Platform as a Service (PaaS)
• Private Cloud Computing
• Application PaaS
• Database Platform as a Service (dbPaaS)
• Elastic Multi-tenancy
• Cloud Computing
• Public Cloud Storage
• Cloud Web Platforms
• Infrastructure as a Service
• Enhanced Network Delivery
• Software as a Service (SaaS)
• Cloud Archiving
• Dedicated Email Services