Energy Matters

Moving to a New Location in the Cloud

2010-05-07T15:26:35-04:00

Time to go.

I began writing this blog in August of 2007. At the time I was just beginning to understand the implications of energy use in IT. It wasn't long before I knew that the real issues for IT were more complex and that energy issues were a symptom.

At EMC, we've already done a great deal and we'll continue to address all of those issues in every way possible.

It's been a fascinating, frustrating, exhilarating and often fun time. I've traveled across the US, Asia and Europe - not a good thing for my personal carbon footprint - and I've met some wonderful people. Many are now friends.

Mostly I have learned what makes a difference to customers and in some small way have helped spread my learning to help them. I know that, because they often invited me back.

Now my time and interests are focused increasingly on helping customers on their Journey to the Private Cloud. Turns out that much of what we've been saying about gaining IT efficiency and reducing energy consumption fits right into the cloud journey too.

So now I'll write a different blog. It's called Cloud Matters.

Hope that you'll join me there as the journey continues.

Thanks for reading.

Dick

5.7.10

Expanding Our Thinking: Cloud Potential

2010-05-05T09:44:26-04:00

I've spent a good deal of time lately with partners. Mostly System Integrators (SIs) and Service Providers (SPs), these are EMC partners that intend to use EMC technology in offerings to their own customers. Some, not all, are focused heavily on cloud services.

Roughly, these services fall into three big categories: helping customers to create their own private cloud, providing customers a selection of cloud-delivered options such as infrastructure, platform, storage etc., or transition of some existing capability to cloud form - say migrating SAP to a cloiud implementation.

Now, because it is core to our business, EMC spends a lot of energy on the technology pieces - our storage, software, services etc.. And there are lots of bits and pieces that are essential to make up the cloud. Some are supplied by other technology partners like Cisco, VMware, SAP.

All needed to make the cloud work and none certain to make it effective.

For a long time, I have believed that a comprehensive approach - systems thinking - is essential to successfully achieve efficient and sustainable IT. That thinking surely carries forward to the cloud. But the potential impacts reach way beyond the obvious costs and predictable IT or business implications. Now I'm thinking that the scope of the "system" is much bigger than I imagined.

So, forget the technology, once you have a cloud, what can you do with it?

Virtual everything?

Using technology, workers have been working remotely for a long time. The April issue of Inc. was all about the virtual company. But that has been mostly limited to a few edgy start-ups, right? Well it's getting more mainstream when EMC expands working from home and now we are planning a virtual work week for my entire department - just to see what it's like.

How about virtual schools? Yes, I know that colleges have been doing on-line learning for years and that all sorts of education gets delivered over the web. But today's Boston Globe features a front page story of a new virtual school - Kindegarten through High School - opening this fall in Massachusetts. And come to find that the company, K12 Inc., that they have hired to help run it is already doing this in 25 states.

I had a recent conversation with a service provider that offers virtual city government from their cloud.

News to me that these businesses even exist. Guess I have to get out more.

Expanded Thinking

Awhile ago I attended a presentation by Daniel Esty, co-author of the book “Green to Gold”. It was fascinating on several levels, in particular in his emphasis on long-term systems thinking for those seeking to take advantage of green business mainstreaming.

Esty told a story from his days as an EPA administrator, helping to create the Clean Air Act. He spent thousands of hours engaged with the best and brightest from government and industry on the minutia, technology and theory of how to improve air quality. In all that time and exchange, nobody ever made the connection to what ultimately was the biggest single factor in improved air quality – the deregulation of railroads.

It seems that with all of the debated smokestack scrubbers and pollution controls installed, the biggest impact came from the economic viability of railroads delivering cleaner, low-sulfur coal from the mid-west’s Wind River basin to the coal-fired power plants in the east.

The biggest influence but totally unforeseen.

Two things struck me about this story. First, expand what you include in your “system” to achieve breakthrough thinking. Second, you are on the right track when you see positive benefits from unintended results.

None of this happens without our action and intent to improve but every "improvement" has potential to unintended negative side effects as well. Still, what we have to hope for are those best results you didn’t see coming. That's why this whole cloud thing is so very interesting.

Changed Thinking. Cloud Thinking.

2010-02-03T17:40:48-05:00

We know that IT in the cloud means change.

It’s different.

It’s deployed differently, operated differently and consumed differently. What’s implied but not always said is that it must be thought about differently too.

Like democracy, monarchy, communism or capitalism, cloud calls up a frame of reference. It sets expectations for individual behavior, organizational structures, decision making and point of view. (We could call it “cloudism” but I’ve just discovered that’s a religion. Yeah. Really.)

The cloud frame of reference isn’t confined to IT.

A recent article in the Boston Globe entitled The Leased Life prompted me to think how cloud IT relates to a broader trend. The article asserts that people own more stuff than they really want. Businesses too.

“The essential insight is that in many purchases, we don’t want the thing per se - we want what it can do for us. You don’t crave a lawn mower, you want shorter grass; the desire is not for a refrigerator but for cold, unspoiled milk.”

A construct that deals with this is called the “product service system.” While it isn’t new – rental cars, gym membership, Netflix – it is being applied in some new ways. For example, there are new websites that help you locate someone in the neighborhood with a power drill or a wheelbarrow you can rent for the day.

This also relates to sustainability. If we each own less stuff. We'll consume less resource individually. More to go around on a global basis and less impact on the environment. In theory.

At some level, it makes sense to think of the IT cloud as a response to not wanting to own things. Of course there are some very good business drivers as well. It’s a quest for better economics, higher value, greater flexibility, speed of purpose and more.

All good stuff.

But. There’s always a but.

“ But the biggest challenge may be cultural. Americans are accustomed to having many possessions - it is a sign of status and identity…”

To do this cloud thing successfully, we need to change the way we think. And, as John Kenneth Galbraith said:

“ Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everybody gets busy on the proof.”

I have no doubt that we will work our way through it. As we succeed in resolving technical issues, as we move from proof of concept to production at scale, we will get serious about the organizational changes, the new job titles, the new psychology, the transition from physical to virtual as the new frame of reference on a massive scale.

No more hugging the server before you go home.

In earlier posts I have pointed at the videos our own EMC IT team has been publishing to highlight their journey to the private cloud.

We are drinking our own champagne.

And while we haven’t resolved all the issues, we’ve identified many. And we're working hard at adapting to the changes required.

That’s why we call it a journey.

Practical Commitments & Heavenly Power

2010-01-10T05:41:00-05:00

While IT efficiency is important, it’s only a small part of the larger quest for energy efficiency. I unexpectedly found a great practical example in Rome - at the Vatican.

It was my good fortune over the holidays to spend time in Italy with my family. A long-planned trip, we hit all of the top tourist spots, among them, the Vatican in Rome. And while it may be the smallest country in the world, it still has some very big energy needs. How about heating and lighting St Peter's Basilica, the world's largest church?

During our visit, we attended a Papal Audience held in a huge solar powered auditorium. I didn't realize the solar power part 'til my son Conor spotted the lobby display board. It details how much energy the solar plant is producing as well as how much CO2 and oil equivalent is being saved.

So what else, I wondered, was the Vatican up to in the realm of conservation and energy? Turns out, quite a lot.

The rooftop solar plant was installed in 2008, thanks to equipment donated by a German Solar company. It supplies all the power needed for the huge auditorium and when that’s not in use the power is routed to the Vatican power grid.

In April of 2009, the world’s smallest state began construction of the biggest solar plant in Europe near the village of Santa Maria de Galeri just north of Rome. The 100 megawatt plant will supply all of Vatican city’s power, with excess to sell into the Italian power grid.

Seems that Pope Bendedict is acting on his convictions:

“The destruction of the environment, its improper or selfish use, and the violent hoarding of the Earth’s resources cause grievances, conflicts and wars, precisely because they are the consequences of an inhumane concept of development.”

The commitment even extends to plans for a gasification plant at his summer residence, Castel Gandolfo.

And he continues to reiterate. On January 1, POPE BENEDICT XVI issued his message celebrating the “World Day of Peace”. It’s titled “IF YOU WANT TO CULTIVATE PEACE, PROTECT CREATION”. It’s worth a full read but here is one quote:

“A sustainable comprehensive management of the environment and the resources of the planet demands that human intelligence be directed to technological and scientific research and its practical applications. “

Seems like wise advice to me. And he’s acting on it too.

EMC IT. All At Once, and Backwards.

2009-12-17T07:00:00-05:00

–

EMC has a big IT environment of its own - with all of the same issues faced by our customers and all of the same constraints: money, time, talent, energy consumption, business demands and more.

EMC is also fortunate enough to have some very smart, forward looking and thoughtful IT executives who are leading the way for our own IT evolution and leading our customers by example.

They have done a terrific job taking advantage of EMC technology and ideas to reduce energy consumption and increase IT efficiency with an eye on sustainability too.

A few of them seem quite comfortable in front of a camera too. So, they have been making and posting videos about their journey. The idea is to let our customers in on what we ourselves are experiencing as we "drink our own champagne."

I should have been doing this since they started so now I post the videos here in reverse order with the most recent first. You can go to the end if you want them in sequence or see them all posted here.

I emphasize that I am the one who is backwards and not EMC IT.

The most recent video is Chris Murphy, Director of International IT Operations. Listen for the pleasant trace of an Irish brogue as Chris describes the future of our desktop environment, our VDI strategy and all of the challenges that go with.

The next discussion is around Server Virtualization and it comes in two parts.

Part One is Paul Divittorio discussing the EMC strategy for aggressive server virtualization - which is expected to save $10M over five years.

Part two is Adam Wagner, an EMC Systems Architect discussing the his insight into implementation challenges faced in development of new best practices for a highly virtualized environment.

And finally, the intro that kicked it off from Sanjay Mirchandani, EMC's Sr. Vice President and CIO. Sanjay regularly speaks to our customers and analysts as well as CIO peers to share perspective on common challenges. In turn he launched this series to provide a unique inside view of our virtualization and Cloud journey from servers to storage to desktop to our full future in the Private Cloud.

So, as I mentioned at the start of this post, you can see more links and find future videos at this site. I'll also be more conscientious about posting the latest here as they arrive.

Enjoy.

Not too Small. Very Practical

2009-12-14T14:12:12-05:00

It's not all happening in Copenhagen.

The Boston Herald Newspaper notes EMC's focus on energy savings in an article published yesterday, December 13th.

The story highlights the fact that lots of modest individual projects can add up to some very large savings when taken together.

In this case, the Environmental Defense Fund had 26 of their fellows - MBA students with some environmental background - have a look at some local companies to see what the possibilities were for some energy savings. What they identified was:

"$54 million in potential savings for 23 host companies, including Boston-area firms EMC, Genzyme and Stop & Shop. The proposed projects could reduce energy use by 160 million kilowatt hours a year (enough to power 14,000 homes) and eliminate 100,000 metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions yearly."

Not bad for short work by some smart volunteers. Makes me think that other smart people in IT should be able to do pretty much the same if they think about it.

Doesn't mean it's easy. The EMC example wasn't simple for Ian Lavery, a graduate student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management. He worked a whole summer at it. But it will have a nice payoff.

“Because EMC has been so committed to energy efficiency for the past 20 years, Ian was challenged,” said Sandra Lehane, EMC’s global facilities project manager. “All the basic projects were completed. Ian had to get into the innovative technologies that are out there.”

Lavery, 29, an Arlington native, gave EMC seven recommendations. One was to install a day lighting system in which photosensors adjust the amount of artificial light based on the amount of natural light available. Another was to use window film to provide more insulation and reduce solar glare.

But the idea EMC was most taken with, Lehane said, was Lavery’s analysis of how to more efficiently cool the company’s technology labs, which get very hot due to the electronic equipment. Lehane estimated that project could save $187,000 a year. All in all, she said, his suggestions could save the company $650,000 a year, with just a two-year period to recoup the initial implementation costs.

“It’s just so encouraging to see that the future business leaders of our country are so focused on the environment. These are the people who are going to run corporate America in the next few years,” Lehane said. To put it bluntly, she said, “It pays to be green.”

I think its the mindset that makes up much of the energy and efficiency opportunity advantage. If we are open minded about it, maybe more of us can entice a few bright and energetic MBAs to shed light on problems we have been staring at for 20 years.

Maybe save some green in the process too.

Head in the Clouds. Feet on the Ground.

2009-12-07T08:00:00-05:00

We’re seeing lots of ink (old school I know but I think of pixels as ink) about Private Cloud. Lots of opinion and some reality. You may even hear words like “tectonic shift in IT”, which makes you wonder if the hype meter isn’t turned up a bit too high.

I heard a colleague today relate info from a recent market study showing "cloud" as one of the most irritating words cited by customers.

Perhaps. But call it what you like, something very different is absolutely underway.

So, Cloud. EMC is in the thick of it and so am I. And I am especially happy that it really does relate to my interest in energy efficiency and overall sustainability.

In the simplest terms, if Cloud becomes the broad reality of IT, we’ll use less stuff. Less energy, less raw material, manufacturing, packaging, transportation and disposal of old stuff. We will also have more time. That’s the promise at least, because more low-touch / no-touch services pretty much take care of themselves.

I wouldn’t worry though. There will still be lots to do. Just different realms to do it in.

For now though I am spending time explaining our view of Private Cloud and working with our partners so they know what we are doing and how that fits with what they and our mutual customers gain from it.

Seems too much is made of precise cloud definitions. I think of it this way:

Private Cloud: Fully virtualized, efficient, flexible, easily accessible, and reliable IT

available as a service. It flexibly spans internal and external cloud infrastructure, presenting a seamless, managed cloud to the business with IT fully in control.

I recently heard an EMC executive give his simple view of the progression customers would generally follow in their “journey to the Private Cloud”. It strikes me as simple but not simplistic. In essence, there are three phases:

Phase One: Virtualize as much as possible. Gain immediate payback in capital expense reduction and improved IT flexibility.

Phase Two: Integrate applications and optimize for rapid deployment of low-touch / no-touch on-demand services. Gain immediate payback in operating expense reduction and improved ease-of-use.

Phase Three: Integrate with service providers: the federated cloud. Gain improved business agility, increased operational optimization and reduced costs.

Now there is more to it than this and there will certainly be variations on the theme but I think this is a pretty good framework.

Now the next question customers or partners typically ask is “How do we get started?”

Mostly, the answer is “Depends upon what you want to do, how fast you want to do it and how.”

It almost certainly means working with multiple vendors, each with their own view of the cloud. And that’s where the value of VCE becomes pretty clear.

VCE

The elevator pitch is: VMware, Cisco and EMC (VCE) have combined their industry leading products and expertise to simplify and accelerate implementation of private cloud infrastructures.

The idea here is that the VCE Coalition enables partners to rapidly create environments their customers want. That’s predictable Private Cloud environments to deliver on the promise of choice, flexibility and assured compliance. They want reliable cloud outcomes that include increased agility and quality of service with reduced risk and downtime.

VCE also set up Acadia, a joint venture of the coalition, to offer Vblock Infrastructure Packages through a unique model that constitutes a fast on-ramp. Acadia is there to smoothly enable the success of VCE partners in providing their customers with private cloud infrastructures based on the Vblock architecture. They’ll build a new environment, provide needed support and training to get it into production and then transfer it to a customer or partner as part of an established transfer timeline.

We expect that V-Block’s unique combination of pre-tested, pre-configured capabilities, and the combined support services from EMC, VMware and Cisco, will reduce deployment and operating costs by as much as 40% in the operation and management of data center infrastructures.

System Integrators are very important in this mix. They’ll leverage VCE to enable highly virtualized application infrastructures and to more rapidly advance cloud service offerings of every type. And they can deliver now in days rather than weeks or months.

The model delivers predictable deployment, ease-of-use, and repeatability that saves labor and avoids costly mistakes. To end-user customers that means reduced cost and improved services. To SIs and partners, it means greater opportunity and profit. To EMC, Cisco and VMware it accelerates market adoption of our vision of the cloud.

So here is a simple and high level view of what Vblock offers.

VCE and Vblock

Vblock is a validated reference architecture. That means VCE has created pre-configured and virtualized compute, network and storage building blocks. They take best-of-breed products, management and security and provide the capability for rapid deployment with a single point of contact for support services.

It’s all tested and proven, but if you have a problem, one call and all three partners are on the case.

What you get here is a platform that enables seamless extension of the virtualized environment in repeatable units of construction based on matched performance, operational characteristics and discrete power, space and cooling.

Simultaneously, it addresses the required process changes to accelerate the technology, operational and consumption models that IT needs to operate in a Private Cloud.

Any traditional application that makes sense to virtualize at scale – Exchange, Oracle, SAP etc. - is appropriate for Vblock. It’s also an ideal platform for new implementations of Virtual Desktop, self-service computing or development and test.

Now, what’s another bane of our IT existence?

How about consistent adoption and adherence to IT policies? How about having a way to track and report compliance?

What about Vblock’s policy-driven Infrastructure to solve these problems by enabling the Private Cloud through a unique templating capability? What about having a way to create a policy once and then easily save and replicate it hundreds of times?

So, now business requirements can easily translate to IT resources which are rapidly assigned according to user specification. Save time & increase application availability. Make it repeatable and compliant to IT processes. Reduce configuration error and non-compliance.

Pretty cool.

Of course security is also a central element of the Vblock architecture including built-in authentication technology and automated security templates matched to data types.

Then there is the Unified Infrastructure Manager (UIM), used with one or more Vblocks. It simplifies provisioning, configuration and compliance control. It gives fault and performance management and makes it straightforward to control compute, network and storage resources across multiple Vblocks.

Vblock also incorporates automated discovery of cross-domain data center views that populate a configuration management database (CMDB) and Provide visualization of resource relationships across application, network and storage domains. Repeatable design patterns facilitate rapid deployment, integration and scalability with straightforward resource metering, reporting and utilization.

There is plenty more information available here.

This is good, but keep in mind that this is just a start.

Now we just have to think of a name for it that doesn't irritate customers.

Government Gets Cloud

2009-09-17T16:52:53-04:00

Not many government agencies get greater respect than NASA. In particular, that’s because they know a heck of a lot about technology - satellites, men on the moon, the space shuttle, the international space station etc. and have had some very impressive successes along the way. So, it was no accident that Vivek Kundra chose NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley to announce a major Federal technology initiative. (Ames is located at Moffett Field, California, and has a technology pedigree stretching back beyond Hangar One which was built 1932 for the USS Macon, a massive blimp.)

You may recall that Kundra was appointed as the first Federal CIO back in March. (Chuck blogged about it.) It seems he has been busy thinking in new ways and acting quickly. - Not necessarily what we expect where Federal thinkers are concerned.

This announcement centered on a White House Cloud Computing Initiative and it was done like a new product rollout that any high tech company would be proud of.

First, he laid out the problems being addressed. They include cost, waste, duplication, resource consumption, and excessive energy use.

The government now spends about $76 billion dollars a year on IT. Of that, 25% / $19 billion is spent on infrastructure and they continue to go on "building datacenter after datacenter".

So the new guy doesn’t take long to conclude that it makes no sense and costs too much and isn’t very effective in getting the job done either.

Sometimes common sense is “out of the box” thinking.

He gave the example of Homeland Security having 23 datacenters and says that "We cannot continue on this trajectory" .

Safeguarding my tax money. I like that.

Wonder if he has finished counting DOD yet.

Like any good product announcement, he showcased a shiny example in GSA’s new Apps.gov site which acts as a fast, simple portal & clearing house for business, social media, and productivity applications, as well as cloud IT services like storage, virtual machines, web portals and more. The site is just getting started but one of the working elements already allows government departments to easily add free services – just like consumers use Facebook or Google – to their own resources.

I’m impressed.

This is pretty progressive stuff when you think about the Federal government doing it before many IT savvy commercial enterprises have figured it out and many sophisticated IT services companies continue to struggle with it too.

The intent here is clearly that government agencies will use the site as a simple, cost-effective, one-stop shop for the kinds of services that to date have required long involved process and expensive IT outlays.

The initiative also counts upon improvements in energy consumption and overall sustainability impacts by the government. Check out the cartoon video to the right of the top on the Apps.gov site.

Kundra was pretty clear in his presentation that more long term impacts of this will be advanced in fiscal year 2010 as the administration pushes for cloud-computing pilot projects. The expectation is that the old expensive ways can be replaced by new and lightweight, lower cost ways of delivering IT.

One example he gave was of the upgrade of GSA’s usa.gov web site that was done in a day for $800,000 instead of six months at $2.5 million.

But my personal favorite is the way they have simplified the application process for student loans by linking the IRS tax info to the Fafsa (Free Application for Federal Student Aid) form.

In a joint effort between the IRS and the Department of Education, with one click of a mouse button, IRS data populates the Fafsa form and eliminates more than 70 questions and 20 screens.

My son is applying to college this Fall.

Kundra’s expectation is that IT needs can be met with new secure, lightweight processes that are safe in the cloud. For fiscal 2011, they will issue cloud guidance to agencies throughout government.

Now EMC and every other IT company with Federal business will be competing for quite a different set of opportunities to serve our country.

That means some important re-thinking for all of us.

Technorati Tags: EMC,data storage,Symmetrix,CLARiiON,energy,IT energy,data center,DMX,CX,Energy Efficiency,Green IT,VMware,RSA,Energy Plans,IT energy strategy,useable capacity,economy,TCO,energy future,EIT,Symmetrix V-Max,Private Cloud,VCE,Federal Government,GSA.gov

Summers Over

2009-09-02T11:26:08-04:00

It wasn't my initial plan but I took the summer off - from blogging.

Of course I thought about it regularly, then had some real vacation time and then became very busy. It’s been a very full summer.

Some of us start out thinking that July and August will be slower paced and less pressured than than other seasons - you’d think by now we would have learned.

So, summer’s over.

As the cooler weather comes, there is plenty to write about & lots of interesting developments in the marketplace and at EMC.

Clouds in particular.

I’ve spent a good deal of my work time this summer looking into the Clouds.

I’m not alone.

Many others are looking at Cloud computing and rendering opinions, projections and sometimes loud disagreement. The only point where I expect no disagreement, it is that there is plenty of Cloud disagreement – confusion at least.

Since this is a blog about energy and related matters, I should emphasize that I see developments in Cloud computing as an emphatic continuation and expansion of the principles and ideas I’ve been promoting for several years and in the spring began connecting to the Cloud proposition.

« Clouds, Complexities & Simple Truths

Serendipity & Clouds »

And of course Chuck Hollis and others have been blogging about multiple dimensions of Cloud Retooling IT For Private Cloud »

New twists of course but traceable to the simple idea that we can do more with less - more effectively, more energy efficiently, and more cost consciously.

Cloud computing will help us to be more energy efficient and environmentally sustainable while creating environments where IT does its job with orders of magnitude improvement.

So, expect:

- announcements this week from VMWorld

- interesting developments in acquisitions (like this week’s FastScale)

- more on industry partnerships directed at the Cloud

- some nifty new products that help advance the cloud

- pronouncements from experts on definitions of the Cloud

- more specific service offerings that help customers plan and begin moving into the Cloud – like this one announced today:

New EMC Services and Solutions Drive Private Cloud Acceleration

I’ll spend time on all of them, because they’re interesting, relevant, and related to my energy and efficiency roots.

Summer’s over.

Enjoy Labor Day.

Serendipity & Clouds

2009-06-22T12:40:59-04:00

Every time I have the energy & efficient IT conversation with customers I learn something new. In the process I try to connect the new information with what will help customers accomplish their objectives and to better understand what drives their decisions.

That’s where serendipity - making fortunate discoveries by accident - comes into play.

For some time, my focus has been IT energy use in data centers and how to help consume less of it. As I learned more, it became clear that energy difficulties are mostly symptoms of inefficient IT – a very unfortunate and costly side effect.

Lately I’m seeing a line-up that connects several important customer concerns: the economy, sustainable business, sustainable natural environments, the expanding digital universe, and next generation IT/business imperatives.

They may not all intersect for every customer, but the themes do and more frequently there are more ah-ha moments that connect them to a course of action.

Serendipity.

Customers are realizing they have a rare opportunity for multiple related difficulties to be addressed effectively and simultaneously with one core strategy that incorporates mission critical computing, seamless virtualization and Private Cloud.

All of the elements, including timing, are falling into place.

I think of pool balls - five of them lined up perfectly in front of the pool table pocket. It isn’t an easy shot but it’s possible. With a bit of skill and experienced coaching it’s a shot with great promise.

Start with the economy. Whatever can be done to consume less energy, capital, space etc., will help save on expenses and improve business. Here you have multiple opportunities to advance the cause -through consolidation, de-duplication, Flash and SATA disk, virtualization and so on. Yes there are capital expenses, but smart strategy paybacks in direct savings and cost avoidance are rapid and well worth the investment.

There are solid IT efficiency paybacks too.

It’s not all new. For example, EMC moved to a tiered storage strategy and over about four and a half years capacity grew from under 1 petabyte to nearly 5.5 petabytes. At the same time, energy for storage decreased 45%. There were immediate savings in the storage consolidation and energy reduction as well as long term operating economies that would never have been possible without that early change in practices.

During the same period, EMC used virtualization to reduce its server pool by over 1000 machines. And there’s opportunity for much more.

Now there are even more reasons to look at this and more positive impacts that can result.

Go beyond the narrow IT focus, because we also want to sustain our business and natural environments. After all, if the natural environment fails it will certainly not be good for business.

So, when I talk to customers about IT efficiency, I use energy as a placeholder for ways that the business can increase operational efficiency, spend less for IT and help the environment suffer less.

In the right context, using less energy means accomplishing the mission with less gear on the machine room floor. That means less equipment was packaged, transported or manufactured. That in turn means we have cut fewer trees and extracted less oil and copper from the ground. Cloud computing can enable and accelerate these benefits.

All of this makes the business more efficient economically and operationally. At the same time, the environmental impacts are reduced and chances for both business and environmental sustainability are improved.

Another concern, the expanding data universe, deserves its own discussion. Then there are the collection of factors pushing next generation IT and business imperatives. Let’s just agree that the forces are rapid and strong. We need to contend with new technologies, new IT demands and new business pressures.

Challenges like these create competitive opportunity and some real dangers too. That’s why the virtualization and Cloud concepts make so much sense. (Read more about Private Cloud on Chuck’s Blog.)

They incorporate the flexibility factor.

One of the big drawbacks of more traditional IT structures is that a good deal of physical infrastructure is created for “just in case” scenarios. As a result, overall utilization suffers. In virtualized and cloud environments, the utilization rates can be much greater and much less can be installed for “just in case” needs.

This is the true for private or public cloud environments. And the resulting flexibility of just-in-time IT services means that business objectives are still met, probably at higher performance and lower cost.

Clouds, Complexities Simple Truths

2009-06-08T17:18:32-04:00

Lots of talk lately on Cloud Computing. Not unlike the earlier green IT frenzy, there is no shortage of opinions, or confusion. But once again, EMC is doing its part to lead the way .

In all the talk of cloud -public or private - I have seen little about potential benefits to IT sustainability and energy efficiency. But here’s a clear opportunity to have another of those happy coincidences. Help lower both IT costs and environmental impacts. Improve performance at the same time.

The cloud foundation concepts are pretty straightforward. (Hmm, clouds with foundations – how’s that for a strike at traditional thinking?) A private cloud extends the virtues of virtualization. Abstract the IT capabilities from the physical infrastructure, make IT a service that can be easily scaled and flexed. In the process buy fewer resources utilize them more fully and service production spikes with federated resources.

Execution can be admittedly tricky since we are now dealing with both virtual and physical environments. Paradoxically, that means more simplicity and more complexity at the same time.

Among other things, simpler means fewer devices to pay for and operate. It also means easier access. A great example is those customers who have instituted self-service offerings that enable internal users to virtually provision, use and decommission their own IT resources.

Nothing to buy. No time waiting. Log in and go.

Still, behind the scenes it must all be seamlessly knit together. New ways of thinking, new process and change.

Complexity and change can slow progress. Add multiple complexities together, lace them with discomforting challenges to long held operating assumptions, and place them into a context of economic and political crisis.

Are we having fun yet?

I have had several recent conversations with customers about the linkage of IT efficiency challenges with private cloud and our universal concerns for sustainability in both environmental and business contexts.

I’ve seen great interest in understanding our potential to blend the benefits of private cloud to promote efficiency and sustainability interests simultaneously.

That’s a worthwhile challenge all around.

A Serious Call for Help

2009-05-20T08:09:22-04:00

In the last few years the EMC blogging community has grown but today it is being asked to get the word out on a subject quite unlike any other. It has to do with a serious call for help and hope.

See below.

From: Fredrickson, Mark
Sent: Monday, May 18, 2009 12:52 PM
To: Blogs
Subject: Update: Potential donors desperately needed for Nick Glasgow

On Friday we circulated word through the global EMC community and beyond about Nick Glasgow, a 28-year-old EMC employee in California who, in the span of just weeks, has been diagnosed with Leukemia and now is in desperate need of a bone marrow transplant. Over the weekend, the compassion of the EMC family was abundant as hundreds of EMCers responded to this plea -- either by getting tested as potential donors, passing the information along to friends and family members, or just offering their prayers, personal experiences, and asking what they could do. When word reached Cisco, a company larger than EMC that has been a strong partner in the marketplace for years, Cisco people also sprang into action.

Nick's mother, Carole Wiegand, also an EMC employee, has expressed her and Nick's deepest gratitude at the outpouring of help and support. But the race to find a qualified donor is at a critical stage, so I am sending this update with more specifics on how a potential donor can expedite a possible match. Please feel free to circulate this message beyond EMC (social media vehicles were used to rapidly spread word about Nick throughout the weekend).

Here are the essential facts:

-- Any person whose ethnic background is a mix of Asian and Caucasian, and is in good health with no history of cancer or major illness, and is between the ages of 18 and 60, is a potential donor for Nick. Expanding on the initial information, one does not need to be 75% Caucasian and 25% Asian -- any potential mix could work. While the most likely match would be from a person who is 75% Caucasian and 25% Japanese, it is absolutely possible that other combinations of Caucasian-Asian background in different proportions could work. The Asian background should be Sino-Asian, rather than Indo-Asian. Finding an ideal match with all of Nick's markers is very difficult, and we do not want to exclude any potential donors.

-- Go to the "Be The Match" National Marrow Donor Program at http://www.marrow.org/. Rather than ordering a test kit (time is too critical for that), read the facts about donating and then you can register yourself and enter your zip code at http://www.marrow.org/JOIN/Join_in_Person/index.html to find drives in your area in the next few days. If there is not a local drive in your area within the next few days, please call one of the labs listed and request a time to drop in for urgent testing. (These instructions apply to people in the US. Other countries have similar programs.) People who join the registry can help any person, not just Nick.

-- The test is a simple cheek swab. The actual donation can be a blood draw or a more complex procedure, which would have some side-affects from which people bounce back quickly. This link has facts about the procedural aspects of bone marrow donation:

http://www.marrow.org/JOIN/Myths_%26_Facts_about_Marrow_Don/index.html. If a qualified donor is identified and medical or travel costs are an issue, this will be taken care of.

-- Special drives for Nick are also being arranged for the next few days. We are looking at possible locations where a drive could facilitate good numbers of potential donors (San Francisco/San Jose area, the Boston/Hopkinton area, and Orlando, where EMC World is taking place this week). Carol Gillespie at the Asian American Donor Program (AADP) is providing testing if you are located in the Bay Area in California (all ethnic minorities and Caucasians wishing to join will be asked to pay a portion of their testing costs, $25). Please contact AADP directly at 1-800-593-6667 and speak to anyone on the staff if you are local, to have your testing done more quickly .

-- If you get tested, it is important that you expedite the process by sending an email to all three people in the cc line on this message:

Carole Wiegand (wiegand_carole@emc.com), Nick's mom and fellow EMC employee

Stacy Morales (morales_stacy@emc.com), a friend and EMC colleague of Nick and Carole who is helping to coordinate all this

Carol Gillespie (carol@aadp.org) at the Asian American Donor Program

In the email, include your registration ID number, the location where you were tested, and testing date. The reason for this is that the national database usually takes a few weeks to be updated with a new potential donor's test results. For Nick, time is of the essence. They will be expediting these samples for Nick so his doctors will be able to urgently retrieve possible matches.

Thank you to all who have tried to help and expressed concern. I would like to close with this message from Stacy Morales:

"Thank you does not begin to express the gratitude that Carole and Nick have for you all right now. You have given this family hope, and quite possibly, the gift of life."

EMC IT: Do it yourself efficiencies

2009-05-19T13:54:23-04:00

A new Lab Report posted yesterday on emc.com details the continuing transformation of EMC’s IT infrastructure. The report, titled EMC IT, A Blueprint for Data Center Efficiency, was authored by Brian Garrett and Mark Peters of the Enterprise Storage Group.

No surprise, EMC needs to contend with all the same IT issues encountered by our customers:

Explosive growth – applications, servers, storage & global operations challenges
Space, power and cooling at their limits
Expensive data center upgrades
Increased efficiency requirements and cost containment

This report outlines EMC’s approach to obstacles, choices and desired outcomes as well as plans for what comes next. It also shows that we are “drinking our own champagne”, seeking consulting advice and laying the technical groundwork for the coming virtual world.

EMC IT Savings

There is no big bang here. Just as many of our customers would pursue it, this was a steady, thoughtful, flexible, sometimes difficult, sometimes brilliant series of steps toward greater efficiency today and better positioning for the future.

The report covers a period from 2004 to 2008 with three key and continuing initiatives:

Storage Efficiency
- Storage tiers expanded from 2 to 5
- Software for more and better automation
Data Center Facilities Efficiencies
- Power, cooling and space improvements
Server Efficiency
- Virtualization / consolidation

Over the period covered, EMC achieved some remarkable results. A data center expansion was delayed by about five years. About $10 million dollars was saved in energy expense (and 60million pounds less of CO2) and cost avoidance for equipment is estimated at about $74 million dollars.

This was not a small effort but the demonstrated results were well worth it. And beyond the progress already achieved the stage is set for the next phase of virtualization, for EMC’s private cloud and for a leadership demonstration of how-to that our customers can look at to help guiding their own next steps.

Lots more detail of what was done and what it means in the report ….

World Views

2009-05-16T12:33:06-04:00

EMC published its third annual Sustainability Report today. Titled "Looking Inward, Outward, Ahead"

The first report was more a brochure, last year we attained report status and this year's 61 page document shows how our attention and commitments have grown. Not that there wasn't lots of activity here going back a couple of decades. Just that now the diverse bits are being assembled (special credit to Maria Gorsuch Kennedy) in a much more coherent and compelling way.

You might ask, how come?

Every parent knows that very young children have a world view centered upon themselves.

As kids grow, their world view expands (for some it may seem to take a very long time) and eventually passes through the phases of family-friends-school-church-community-state-country... and at last they have a more encompassing world view. Factor in political, cultural, economic, geographic, historic conditions and it's no wonder there are so many variations on the theme.

By understanding the relative impacts from each of these factors, experience can broadly predict the likely world view of groups, if not individuals.

I'd suggest that businesses go through similar phases - with much greater need to do it right and do it quickly. Of course there are other compelling points of influence and pressure too - economics, competitiveness and self-preservation high among them.

Like kids, companies grow and mature. They develop personalities influenced by demographics, technology, economic conditions, management values and lots more. Somewhere in there is also how a company sees itself as a leader. What energy, talent and resources are put into all the facets of leadership - and why?

Sustainability is arguably a buzzword but there are many who also see it as a shift in the way individuals, companies, societies governments, special interests are finally confronting conditions that will impact all of us. And there are plenty of reasons for the motivation.

Take the example in today's news that a Global Warming Study predicts smaller shifts in sea levels if Antarctica's ice fully disintegrated. Now they expect that sea levels would "only" rise about ten feet. That's half what they had predicted earlier.

Small consolation if you are at the lower end of Manhattan when the tide comes in.

Everyone is needing to grow up a bit more and more quickly. There is a lot to cover and a lot to learn.

EMC's Sustainability Report covers an overall commitment to sustainability. It also covers energy, the environment, citizenship, social investment, governance, integrity, supply chain and more. Most importantly it reinforces our leadership's commitment to sustainability and a mature world view. It's very appropriate timing, coming on the eve of EMC's 30th anniversary of its founding and as we are ready to conduct the EMCWorld conference next week in Orlando.

We still have lots to learn and lots to do and we're more intent about it than ever before. Have a look at this report and you'll see progress is being made.

A V-Max Moment

2009-05-05T15:46:49-04:00

I spent time last week with the IT team responsible for a major university research program. As a current EMC customer they were interested in how our plans and vision fit with their own.

They have a good size IT operation in place and want to control costs gain efficiency and control overall IT growth.

Not unusual.

The new wrinkle is a major research program being planned that will double and then triple their IT demand in the next 18-24 months.

Challenging.

They are also nearly out of energy and confined in space.

Predictable plot twist.

So, we talked about a bunch of efficiency improvements to consider. The starter list: server virtualization, storage consolidation, tiering with Flash and SATA drives, archiving.

The extended list: de-duplication, application classification, consolidation and alignment, information management, proven practices and automation.

Of course the list goes on but the point wasn’t to cover them all. More, it was to highlight that there are a good number of options - choices to be made. That’s where experienced professional consulting services were very handy to help sort it out.

They had a packed agenda but I noticed that the recently announced Symmetrix V-Max was not being covered. So I offered an overview and they agreed.

We walked through the high level vision - Mr.. Tucci’s vision for the virtual data center. We talked about our work with Cisco and VMware and how the private cloud looked less cloudy. Then we talked about the new Virtual Matrix Architecture and the flexibility to start very small and grow very large – up in capacity, out in scale.

Then came the V-Max moment.

It was as if little cartoon light bulbs lit up all around the room.

They had the IT efficiency concepts already. Then, as we linked those to the V-Max and Virtual Provisioning, and Virtual LUNs, and FAST (Fully Automated Storage Tiering) and non-disruptive capacity/performance expansion and VMware’s just announced Vsphere and Cisco’s Unified Networking …

They got it.

We had looked at the piece parts. Now we were looking at the whole IT system – soon to be virtual environment.

The conversation started with V-Max as a product. Now they saw it as an illustration of a concept. Take all that virtual stuff and start putting it together. Take it to the private cloud. And no reason not to start now.

Save some energy too.

Made my day.

You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet

2009-04-14T07:57:44-04:00

"You ain't seen nothing yet."

That's what Al Jolson said in "The Jazz Singer", the first feature length Hollywood film with sound. Jolson billed himself as "The World's Greatest Entertainer" and was already the highest paid star on Broadway when the picture was released to put him in front of a whole new phenomenon.

Everything in entertainment changed.

So, here's the tie in. Symmetrix has also been a star for a long time. EMC has not been short of hyperbole to describe it either. But IT changes today. Like adding sound to movies.

The Announcement

Today's announcement is big in multiple dimensions. It's our first virtual event launch, with thousands of customers, partners, analysts - and no doubt lots of competitors - set for a virtual experience that includes keynote presentations, technical sessions, partner and analyst chats and a whole library of technical documentation.

Its about way more than a new product. Its about a whole new way of thinking about IT. And virtual IT. And IT efficiency.

Take it in three parts.

First, the EMC Vision.

That's the overarching set of ideas that have directed our investments, research, alliances, partnerships, services and customer relationships. It's EMC leadership and what we do in response to those ideas. Virtualization in particular:

“The shift from physical to virtual computing is being driven by efficiency gains too compelling to ignore,” said Joe Tucci, EMC Chairman and CEO. “Virtualization’s ability to maximize resources and automate complex and repetitive manual tasks is overtaking the server world and is now happening in the storage world. EMC is leading the way with the most breakthrough new high-end storage design in nearly two decades, enabling storage customers to deploy a flexible, dynamic, energy-efficient information infrastructure and get the maximum value for their investment.”

I'm especially happy to quote Mr. Tucci citing energy efficiency, and we'll get to more of that in a few minutes.

Second is EMC Architecture.

It's called the Virtual Matrix Architecture - a practical way to achieve several important objectives at once. It meansmassive consolidation or scale-up - over 2 petabytes now with potential for hundreds of thousands of petabytes in the coming virtual infrastructure.

It also means a federated infrastructure that enables previously impossible levels of scale-out. Achievements in automation, flexibility, and performance will ultimately enable tens of millions of IOPS (input/output per second) supporting hundreds of thousands of virtual servers.

Third is EMC product.

The Symmetrix V-Max, announced today, employs the Virtual Matrix Architecture and was designed from scratch as a practical demonstration of how the vision will be achieved. It breaks physical boundaries of the data center. It does everything that enterprise storage must do while using less energy, taking less space, increasing automation and simplifying management.

Some examples:

Growth and Energy: Contending with data growth still means contending with energy pressures. Symmetrix V-Max addresses both.

V-Max consumes 20% less power per terabyte. And the new system bay is especially energy impressive. That's the cabinet that holds all of the engines - the nerves, brains and veins. The new design has greater performance and flexibility but fewer separate components and, depending upon configuration, uses 28 - 43% less energy.

V-Max configurations can scale from pretty small - 96 drives - to extremely large - 2400 drives - and pack more than 3x the usable capacity and 2x the performance into less space than previously possible with anybody's storage. And it uses less energy.

Automation: Any massive infrastructure requires simple but sophisticated automation and management. It's in there.

For virtual server environments, a new capability called Auto-provisioning smoothly automates what used to be a tedious manual process that required hundreds of individual mouse clicks to leverage mobility features such as VMotion. Now its only a few.

There are also Virtual Provisioning and Virtual LUN technologies to improve storage utilization. Storage pools can grow as applications need it or shrink to reclaim unused capacity. Data can be migrated between any drive or RAID type without disruption. And it uses less energy.

Data Protection: One more example. This is called EDP or Extended Data Protection. A picture will help:

The idea here is to increase data protection over extended distances and assure no data loss. You get that by adding a pass-through system containing only cache and a few disks for vaulting. So, greater protection, faster recovery times, fewer spindles, less energy consumed.

Are you seeing a pattern here?

Our constant objective is improved efficiency. We also need to help our customers contend with ever increasing needs for capacity and performance. Then there are the ilities. Reliability. Manageability. Usability. Flexibility....

Let's go back to the vision of virtual IT. It isn't virtual reality. It has to be real.

So the architecture is a solid framework to construct that virtual world.

Symmetrix V-Max is a solid example of what it looks like.

Easier management, lower capital costs, higher utilization, along with improved business continuity, blazing performance, less energy and space. Put enough Flash disks in there and you can even make it lighter.

What's better than that?

Its even more exciting in the coming attractions.

You ain't seen nothing yet.

The EMC bloggers are out in full force on this one. Have a look:

Symmetrix V-Max: Storage Architecture Redefined

« 1.054: overtake the future - with symmetrix v-max!

Symmetrix V-Max

EMC Announces V-Max

Overtake the Future...

2009-04-08T15:17:14-04:00

My blog posts have been thin in Q1. Not because I have lost interest. It's a time thing. I've been working on the future. Yours and mine.

EMC plans a major announcement on April 14th.

This will be a virtual announcement - a first for EMC. But it will feel a lot like a live and in-person event. And it should be both interesting and fun.

Go ahead and speculate. Start an office pool. Then go to the url above and register to reserve your virtual seat.

Save the Planet. Save IT.

2009-04-07T18:07:03-04:00

A recent op-ed piece in the Boston Globe offered a different view of how we should deal with global warming.

Don’t.

Titled “Save the planet? Let's try saving ourselves.”the author, John Hagen, argues that global warming is a symptom, a sub-set of the higher order need for Sustainability.

“We need a game-changing relationship with the planet. Our current relationship is not working, either for us or for the planet. We are on track to heat up the earth 10 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of this century as a result of burning fossil fuels. Drought will prevail in many regions. The rising sea level will displace tens of millions of people around the world. Wars will be fought over water, not oil, because there won't be any oil. Our current economic crisis will pale in comparison with what we are queuing up for our children.”

Scary.

But it is not necessarily the only outcome according to Hagen. Not if we change our ways. Not if we think differently.

And it struck me that there are a lot of parallels to his argument in the one we have been advocating for IT. Efficient IT as we envision it addresses multiple pressing needs and also requires a different way of thinking.

IT energy consumption, for example, is in part a symptom, one outcome of frenetic growth and wasteful practices. Practices that we know how to improve and perfect.

Just like harmful environmental practices, IT practices have gotten out of hand. But we can fix them. Systematically.

But one-at-a-time feels too slow to me.

We need simultaneous multiple strands.

We need systems and Systems Thinking

Systems Thinking

The formal study of Systems Thinking has been underway for a number of years. Don’t know to what extent it has been applied to IT but it certainly seems a good fit.

A system is an entity which maintains its existence
through the mutual interaction of its parts.

The key emphasis here is one of "mutual interaction," in that something is occurring between the parts, over time, which maintains the system. A system is different than a heap or a collection, mostly.

Think about green as a system. Not just the ecological or environmental system but the whole social, economic, environmental, political and aspirational system.

A typical large system life-cycle is roughly fifty or sixty years. Toward the end of that period, significant events and changes are to be expected.

IBM introduced the System/360 Mainframe in 1965. Rachel Carson published Silent Spring in 1962 and the first Earth Day was April 22, 1970. So, if the modern computing and the awakening of a global green system both started in the early 60s, then we are on schedule for some breakout events – turning points.

There is a confluence here. Even the president is getting in on the act with cabinet level positions and senior advisors on his “Green Team” and promise for a cabinet level position of Chief Technology Officer.

And it’s more than symbolism. Yesterday, in a speech delivered in Istanbul Turkey, President Obama was emphatic about US participation in the international efforts to address global warming.

Accomplishments await but intent is clear and a refreshing departure.

The greenest our previous administration ever got was serving pistachio ice cream at state dinners. California pistachios.

Technorati Tags: EMC,data storage,Symmetrix,CLARiiON,energy,IT energy,data center,DMX,CX,Energy Efficiency,Green IT,VMware,RSA,Energy Plans,IT energy strategy,useable capacity,economy,TCO,energy future,EIT,global warming,system/360,Silent Spring,Stystems Thinking

Flash Energy Economics

2009-03-18T15:32:50-04:00

Flash disk for enterprise storage.

HP has finally come ‘round. (See the Storage Anarchist) IBM struggles. EMC Customers love 'em.

An EMC press release today announced new 200GB and 400GB Flash drives. Flash is one of those rare technologies that delivers multiple simultaneous positive – even extraordinary benefits.

EMC was first to introduce Flash – Tier 0 - in enterprise storage about a year ago. Started with 73GB and later added 150GB capacity.

Taking others in the storage industry by surprise – they didn’t have it so it couldn’t be worthwhile - it took awhile for the general idea to sink in that his was a tectonic shift.

Some still don’t get it. (Storage Anarchist again.)

Big objection early on was about price - about 40x a spinning disk at introduction but now only about 8x. I say “only” because the way to think of it isn’t as a 1-1 replacement. Since one Flash disk provides the performance of as many as 30 spinners, customers have come to realize they are both cost effective and very good for business.

Database performance, for example, has long been constrained by hard disk I/O capability. It’s mechanical, so latency is built in.

Not with Flash drives. No moving parts. Practically no latency delay. That dramatically improves performance to about 30X the IOPS of spinning disks.

SIA-SSB, an EMEA based financial services company, provides one example from the EMC press release:

“SIA-SSB processes 6.4 billion transactions annually related to credit cards, collections and payments,” said Fabio Grignani, Chief Information Officer and Deputy General Manager at SIA-SSB. “We meet extremely demanding levels of service for our customers throughout Europe and are constantly trying to improve the efficiency of our systems and processes in order to be more competitive. Flash drive technology, as part of an overall EMC Payments Solution, was able to help improve application performance from 6,000 to 16,000 I/Os per second and reduce average response times by more than 60 percent, while monthly batch processing times improved significantly from 22 to 17 hours.”

So, great performance and business benefits. Well worth the price.

But there’s more. They help save energy too.

One Flash disk uses about 38% less energy than a spinning drive. Take out 20 or 30 spinning drives, otherwise needed to equal the performance, and do it dozens, soon hundreds of times.

You get the idea.

So, it may take a bit longer to catch on with some vendors. But EMC customers are getting it and fast.

And the Storage Anarchist again…

Technorati Tags: Tags EMC,data storage,Symmetrix,CLARiiON,energy,IT energy,data center,DMX,CX,Energy Efficiency,Green IT,VMware,RSA,Energy Plans,IT energy strategy,useable capacity,economy,TCO,energy future,EIT,Flash Disk,SSD,IT cost cutting,Storage Performance

IT Star Gazing, 2009

2009-02-27T11:14:31-05:00

Few cosmic vistas excite the imagination like the Orion Nebula. Also known as M42, the nebula's glowing gas surrounds hot young stars at the edge of an immense interstellar molecular cloud only 1,500 light-years away.

Yes, I’m late.

Any look into the IT / energy future of 2009 should have been done two months ago. But when compared to measurement’s like “only 1,500 light years” my lateness doesn’t seem like much.

So, right on time with my first 2009 prediction - it’s going to be really busy.

A safe bet ‘cause it’s already true.

Something about a challenged economy that gets us all working harder, longer and a bit more anxiously.

And it makes time out for blogging harder to come by.

I’ve pulled some industry predictions in the links that follow. To me, it’s interesting that there is little predicted that wasn’t, well, predictable.

Not that you should believe it all. And not that there aren’t plenty of opposing views. But the essential ideas seem to flow in the same general direction.

Of course the fun thing about crystal gazing is that you can say almost anything and nobody can prove you wrong – not yet at least.

Coming Attractions
So, what IT energy trends should we be looking for in 2009?

Cloud computing.

- Cloud computing is a computing paradigm in which tasks are assigned to a combination of connections, software and services accessed over a network.

Cloud is somewhat of of a twist on earlier ideas of grid computing, or “the network is the computer” or any number of other distributed computing scenarios that went before. What is really different is that we now have more practical means to do it.

How will it save energy? Well, if efficiency is a primary objective to enable energy savings, then cloud offers lots of efficiency / energy savings potential.

Several EMC blogs have written on the topic. Enterprise Cloud Wars , Video -- Private Clouds, Replication and The Private Cloud, Shipping Files to the Private Cloud?

Expect more.

Storage Stuff
There are three prominent predictions I’ve heard for storage in 2009.

One is that storage will fare better than other tech areas because the need to store data increases regardless of the economy.

Let’s hope.

Another is that solid state disk will take off. A predictable prediction since it’s already well underway.

A third is that the swirl of virtualization will encompass everything in an accelerated blur – and that the virtualized data center will flourish because of advances in virtualized storage in new and useful forms. This will be the most interesting to watch (see cloud).

Solid State disks and virtualization are both big contributors to IT and energy efficiency. So is another fast rising technology, data deduplication.

Here’s hoping the seers are correct.

Beyond Storage: ICT
Information and Communications Technology – ICT - is increasingly a descriptor of the whole collection of elements required to deal with the critical core driving us. After all, the reason we need all this technology is information. Let’s put all the critical information technologies together in a more accessible way.

IT becoming ICT will encompass telco and tele. too. We see customers linking telephone & teleconferencing to more traditional IT organizationally to increase efficient and economic information delivery.

High-end videoconferencing, for example is held up as a way to save on travel, and it can. But the greatest benefit may be its ability to increase productivity - exchange information more effectively.

EMC is already making heavy use of telepresence and plans to expand. More commercial centers are starting up to be shared resource video conferencing hubs and its clear that the economy and travel restrictions will keep the interest high for some time to come.

Of course, the economy and driving costs down will influence many decisions. And that’s predictable too.

Still, EMC’s most recent marketing campaign has “Thrive” as its theme. The idea is that now’s a good time for IT to evaluate, plan, build efficiencies and prepare for the future. Get an advantage jump on competitors.

A little scary maybe but it makes sense.

Sort of like my financial advisor saying that stocks are cheap now, on sale.

Buy low. Sell high.

Lots of other opinions linked below:

InformationWeek: “10 Cloud Computing Predictions For 2009”

January 24, 2009

By John Foley

http://www.informationweek.com/news/services/saas/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=212901104&subSection=Business+Intelligence

In some respects, the cloud computing market arrived in a big way in 2008. Amazon, EMC/VMware, IBM, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, and a dozen other vendors introduced products and services for on-demand, pay-as-you-go computing. Despite the economic recession, new players will emerge as cloud service providers and, because of the recession, IT departments will plug into cloud services as a way of "doing more with less." Some of the issues associated with cloud computing will fade into the background, while others will be pushed to the forefront. InformationWeek offers predictions for what's ahead in 2009.

SearchStorage.com: “Storage Outlook '09: Looking Toward the Clouds”

January 5, 2009

By Beth Pariseau

http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid5_gci1344074,00.html

Michael Passe is the storage architect at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, a teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School. The hospital eliminated tape this year with a deployment of Data Domain Inc.'s data deduplication hardware, and is turning its sights to archive and ultra-dense, commodity-based storage designed by EMC Corp. for the cloud in 2009. Passe will evaluate EMC Atmos cloud storage for long-term archive in 2009. They have a target of under $1 per GB storage.

BusinessWeek: “The Big Promise of Cloud Computing”

December 16, 2008

By Steve Hamm

http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/dec2008/tc20081215_014901.htm?chan=top+news_top+news+index+-+temp_technology

The story of a recovered laptop demonstrates the power of Mozy to do more for subscribers than its designers ever imagined, yet it doesn't even begin to show the potential that the people running the service now believe they can accomplish. Mozy comes from Decho, an independent subsidiary of storage giant EMC that was formed last month. Decho, which stands for digital echo, aims to help consumers and businesspeople store and coordinate all of the digital information, photos, and videos in the computing cloud that they now keep on their computers, handhelds, and smartphones. Decho is on the leading edge of an emerging market for information management services—which is expected to attract giants like Microsoft and Google as well as other upstarts.

Associated Press: “Cloud Computing Looms Larger on Corporate Horizon”

December 21, 2008

By Michael Liedke

http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D957AARO0.htm

Cloud computing has already swelled into an estimated $36 billion market this year, representing roughly 13 percent of global software sales. The big question now is whether it can turn into a technology tsunami that sweeps Microsoft and other software industry staples into obsolescence. Yet for all the potential and hype surrounding cloud computing, breaking old habits won't be easy -- particularly with business-software powerhouses Microsoft, IBM Corp., Oracle Corp. and SAP AG all maneuvering to protect their existing, lucrative software franchises while also setting up their own online services to compete with the industry upstarts.

InformationWeek: “Cloud Storage Is About Dispersion”

December 23, 2008

By George Crump

http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2008/12/cloud_storage_i.html

Cloud storage is destined to be one of the hottest markets next year. It is one of those technologies that is actually aided by a down economy. As IT budgets remain flat or decline, the need for storage capacity will accelerate. The ability to buy storage as you need it instead of all at once will be interesting. Additionally, Web 2.0 and other Internet-enabled services are supposed to continue to thrive, and all these will need storage as well. Companies like EMC with its Atmos product, ParaScale’s cloud storage software, and Cleversafe’s dsNets are starting to address real customer needs in cloud storage, making it more than just cheap, connected storage.

Associated Press: “EMC Shares Surge on 4Q Outlook, Job Cuts”

January 8, 2009

http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D95J8IH00.htm

EMC Corp. shares surged Thursday, a day after the data storage company projected fourth-quarter results in line with analyst expectations and announced it would cut 2,400 jobs, or 7 percent of its work force. Shares of EMC, the No. 1 maker of data storage devices, climbed 71 cents, or 6.4 percent, to close at $11.89.

InfoStor: “Enterprise Storage: 2009 Outlook”

January 8, 2009

By Dave Simpson

http://www.infostor.com/article_display/enterprise-storage/6374066751/s-articles/s-infostor/s-top-news/s-1.html

Throughout 2008, the enterprise storage market proved surprisingly resilient compared to the overall IT sector (although spending started a steep slide in the fourth quarter). The outlook for enterprise storage in 2009 is not quite certain. A recent Needham & Company report sheds some light on what to expect this year, both in terms of spending and which technologies could (re-)fuel the storage industry. Not surprisingly, Needham analysts note that "there is significant uncertainty and lack of visibility in IT budgets, which ultimately underpin enterprise storage-related spending."

Byte and Switch: “Accelerating Enterprise Adoption of Solid-State Storage”

January 8, 2009

By Mary Shacklett

http://www.byteandswitch.com/document.asp?doc_id=170073&WT.svl=news1_1

Solid-state disks are starting to make their way into the data centers of enterprises that need high performance, but broader deployment will take time and be driven by a number of factors. The main inhibitor is the high price of solid-state technology, which currently runs several times the price of a conventional hard disk drive. Businesses also are considering other issues when looking at SSDs, including data center space restrictions and the drive to cut energy and cooling costs.

SearchStorage.com: “Storage Outlook '09: SSDs, Networking and the Economy”

January 5, 2009

By Beth Pariseau

http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid5_gci1343493,00.html

Brandon Jackson is the chief information officer (CIO) for Gaston County, N.C. He says he'll focus on networking and solid-state drive (SSD) technologies in 2009, and be looking over his shoulder at how the wider economy is faring because it's directly tied to government revenue and storage product prices.

eWeek: VIDEO: “The Future is SSD”

December 18, 2008

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Data-Storage/The-Future-is-SSD/

Right now, solid-state drives are a specialty item, available for laptops as a premium and fairly expensive option. But that’s going to change as the technology gains popularity over the next three years. Researchers forecast dramatic growth for SSD shipments, and as they approach capacities of 512GB, they’re shaping up to be viable alternatives to hard drives in mobile devices and even server equipment.

Byte and Switch: “The Argument for SSDs: Saving Storage Dollars”

December 19, 2008

By George Crump

http://www.byteandswitch.com/document.asp?doc_id=169582&WT.svl=news1_1

In the midst of a Category Five economic hurricane, IT budgets are being cast asunder while IT managers are still expected to shrink the data center footprint, consume less power, reduce management overhead, cut capital budgets, and shave operating expenditures. Fortunately there are still some creative ways for IT planners to gather some low-hanging, cost-cutting fruit while actually gaining significant performance enhancements that present no risk to the business. One answer is solid-state disks (SSDs), once a cost-prohibitive way to store data that now can help IT organizations drive big performance gains while actually lowering costs.

CNET News.com: “Looking ahead at security trends for 2009”

December 23, 2008

By Jon Oltsik

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-10128133-83.html

In spite of the global economic recession, information security will continue to be a dominant IT priority in 2009. Why? There are simply too many threats and vulnerabilities creating a perpetual increase in IT risk. CNET News.com presents a top-10 list of technologies and trends to watch for in the New Year including RSA in info-centric security and entitlement management categories.

CIOL (India): “Top Storage Trends for 2009: EMC”

December 17, 2008

By Rajesh Itagi

http://www.ciol.com/Technology/Storage/News-Reports/Top-Storage-Trends-for-2009-EMC/171208113838/0/

Rajesh Itagi, Director of Client Services for EMC presents the outlook for storage trends in 2009. His roundup includes predictions for Green IT, Data Center Consolidation, Information Lifecycle Management, Virtualization, De-duplication, NAS, Disks over Tapes, A move from hard drives to solid-state drives (SSDs), Cloud Computing and the advent of 8 Gbps Fibre Channel and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE).

Network World: “HP on a Roll, but Challenges Await in 2009”

December 16, 2008

By Jon Brodkin

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/121608-crystal-ball-hp.html?hpg1=bn

HP has been remarkably successful in a difficult financial time, but keeping up the pace in 2009 will be tough. HP last month reported fourth quarter net revenue of $33.6 billion, a 19% year-over-year increase, or 16% after adjusting for currency fluctuations. Forrester Research analyst Andrew Bartels credits HP with expanding and deepening its market presence in both services and software. HP itself predicts great financial challenges in 2009. The company says unfavorable currency exchange rates will likely drag down its fiscal 2009 revenue by five percentage points in its first quarter and six to seven percentage points over the year.

Byte and Switch: “The State of Data Backup in 2009, Part 1”

December 16, 2008

By Beth Pariseau

http://searchdatabackup.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid187_gci1342719,00.html

Data backup has changed a lot over the past few years. In the old days, backups consisted of a backup server, backup software and tapes. That was simple but often slow and unreliable. Today's backups have improved the process by introducing more choices, but in the process more complexity has been added as well. The biggest change in backup over the past few years was the introduction of disk as a medium that rivals -- and in many cases surpasses – tape. This four-part piece will explore the latest advances in backup technology. The first three parts cover new developments in hardware, software and the cloud. The fourth part looks at process improvements and the newest data management techniques administrators and experts say will be required for the next generation of data backup.

Investor’s Business Daily: “High-Tech Meetings Gain Fans”

December 29, 2008

By Jennie L. Phipps

http://www.investors.com/editorial/IBDArticles.asp?artsec=17&artnum=1&issue=20081229

High-end videoconferencing has some warts, including high costs, but as business travel gets more challenging and expensive, staying in the office and doing business via TV screen is getting popular with some users. Boston-based computer networking and storage company EMC (EMC) has conducted more than 300 telepresence sales and training sessions through October this year between its executive briefing centers in Hopkinton, Mass., and Santa Clara, Calif. That has saved the company 3,000 employee hours and $300,000 in travel expenses, estimates Bob Basiliere, vice president for customer programs at EMC.

eWeek: “Why IT Co-location Centers Will See a Boom in 2009 Despite the Macroeconomy”

December 29, 2008

By Chris Preimesberger

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Data-Storage/Why-IT-Colocation-Centers-Will-See-Boom-in-2009-Despite-the-Macroeconomy/

In the midst of a painful recession, i/o Data Centers, which houses about 150 SMB IT systems, secures $56 million in venture capital and becomes a poster child for a burgeoning market. Analysts expect co-location to be a hot sector in 2009.

Wall Street Journal: “Tech Chiefs See Bright Spots”

December 23, 2008

By Ben Worthen

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122999749610829153.html?mod=rss_whats_news_technology

The technology industry was dominated this year by the question of whether businesses and consumers would scale back their tech spending. Now that it's clear they are cutting back, the question for 2009 is how that fallout will affect tech companies.

Byte and Switch: “Sifting Through Online Backup Service Options”

December 17, 2008

By Paul Korzeniowski

http://www.byteandswitch.com/document.asp?doc_id=169427&WT.svl=news1_1

The future for online backup services seems bright. While the market right now is relatively small at only a few hundred million dollars annually in the U.S., it is experiencing double-digit growth and analysts predict such services will become more widely adopted -- especially in the small business and remote office market. EMC Corp. has created a business unit called Decho Corp. to offer business and consumer backup services under the Mozy brand name.

eWeek: “Why Storage Automation Will Be a Hot Topic in 2009”

December 17, 2008

By Chris Preimesberger

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Data-Storage/Why-Storage-Automation-Will-Be-a-Hot-Topic-in-2009/

If there's one word that spells out a major data storage trend for 2009, it's "automation." In its simplest form, we're talking about the creative intersection of business intelligence, botlike software and data storage arrays. Storage companies are finding ways to automate processes that used to be painstaking, tedious and expensive to handle. For example, storage tiering and change management priorities can now be dialed up from anywhere in the world on central, Web-based consoles supplied by a rapidly growing number of vendors.

Wall Street Journal: “IBM Chief: IT Investment Will Create Jobs”

January 5, 2009

By William M. Bulkeley

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123120010817055565.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

International Business Machines Corp.'s chief executive, Samuel Palmisano, advised the Obama transition team last month that $30 billion in government investments in expanding broadband access, computerizing health-care records and improving the electrical grid could create more than 900,000 U.S. jobs. The IBM presentation came in response to a November request from the Obama advisers for an analysis of the job-creation impact of information-technology investments.

Additional coverage, IBM advises an investment in IT will create U.S. jobs:

Forbes.com: “The Tech Solution To The Recession”

January 6, 2009

By Andy Greenberg

http://www.forbes.com/technology/2009/01/06/ibm-obama-infrastructure-tech-enter-cx-ag_0106ibm.html

IBM, IT industry argue that spending on smarter infrastructure will offer more job creation bang per stimulus buck.

Enterprise Storage Forum: “Apple Could Learn A Lot From EMC”

December 22, 2008

By Rob Enderle

http://www.enterprisestorageforum.com/article.php/3792511

After attending EMC's annual analyst event a couple of weeks ago, Rob Enderle came back to find that much of the breaking news appeared to be on speculation surrounding Apple pulling out of MacWorld. The problem for Apple is the increasing belief that Steve Jobs will soon be departing the company. At Apple, quality appears to be driven largely from Steve Jobs's desk, and EMC's CEO, Joe Tucci, appears to have a similar view, but he has tied the result to a quality process that could pass to his successor. Quality not only defines these two companies, which are vastly different, it likely will play a major role in 2009, as individuals and companies eliminate redundant vendors to contain cost.

Reuters: “U.S., European 2009 IT spend seen down 2 pct – UBS”

December 22, 2008

By Georgina Prodhan

http://www.reuters.com/article/marketsNews/idUSLM31083620081222

Companies in the United States and Europe expect to spend 2 percent less on IT in 2009 after a flat 2008, with SAP AG seen as most likely to benefit from any increase in spending, according to a UBS survey. Three-quarters of 100 chief information officers surveyed said they did not wish to cancel maintenance contracts -- important sources of recurring revenue for software providers -- but 70 percent said they hoped to negotiate better terms. Three percent said they would increase their spending on with virtualization market leader and pioneer VMware Inc., which is majority-owned by EMC Corp.

eWeek: “How IBM Intends to Kill IT Chaos in 2009”

December 19, 2008

By Chris Preimesberger

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/IT-Infrastructure/How-IBM-Intends-to-Kill-IT-Chaos-in-2009/

In an exclusive interview, IBM CIO Mark Hennessy explains that IBM's Global Services division has as its top priority for 2009 the integration of enterprises' legacy software and hardware with new, virtualized equipment. We also can expect to see more automation of IT processes in hardware, software and networking.

Channel Line: “EMC -- Industry Leadership and Proactive Evolution”

January 4, 2009

By Charles King

http://www.echannelline.com/usa/story.cfm?item=24074

EMC's recent North America Industry Analyst Summit highlighted numerous company products, strategies and initiatives, but the sum of these separate presentations expressed the remarkable degree to which EMC has proactively evolved. While many in the industry (particularly the company's competitors) prefer to define EMC as an enterprise storage specialist, an honest appraisal of the company reveals a far broader practical and strategic vision firmly rooted in the critical importance and value of information.

eChannel Line: “EMC Continues to Move Forward”

January 1, 2009

By David Hill

http://www.echannelline.com/usa/story.cfm?item=24069

Many consider EMC to be mostly a storage company, even though Documentum, RSA, and VMware have been key contributors to EMC's revenue stream for some time. During EMC's recent North American Industry Analyst Summit 2008 at the company's Hopkinton, Massachusetts headquarters, EMC shed light on a wide range of activities that illustrate where it is going and why it is a broad-based IT supplier. eChannel Line examines a small sample of four areas where EMC is tangibly demonstrating this breadth of offerings including RSA; cloud computing; eDiscovery and File Governance; and Investing.

eWeek: “Five Tech Trends to Watch in 2009”

January 2, 2009

By Nathan Eddy

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Midmarket/Five-Tech-Trends-to-Watch-in-2009/

With IT budgets expected to be tight this year, small business owners must make wise investments in order to stay competitive. While most analysts believe some cutting-edge trends, like mobile advertising, are still half a decade away from offering immediate ROI to small and medium-size businesses (SMBs), technologies such as virtualization and the burgeoning proliferation of portable, Internet-connected devices can be well suited for midmarket companies. eWeek outlines five trends to watch in 2009 including cloud computing, virtualization, notebook/netbook adoption, open source software and online social networking.

eWeek: “IT Infrastructure Slideshow: Products to Watch: January 5, 2009”

January 5, 2009

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/IT-Infrastructure/Products-to-Watch-January-5-2009/

eWEEK editors name the new hardware, software and services enterprise IT managers should have on their radars, including EMC’s Captiva 6.0. EMC’s new Captiva products are designed to increase capture performance and scalability while simplifying ease of use, development and deployment. EMC Captiva InputAccel 6 and EMC Captiva Dispatcher 6—which offer a new SOA (service-oriented architecture) to leverage capture as a service—are priced based on document volume and client seats.

InternetNews.com: “Obama, Dems Could Mean New Compliance Regs”

January 6, 2009

By Drew Robb

http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news/article.php/3794456/Obama+Dems+Could+Mean+New+Compliance+Regs.htm

Just as accounting scandals earlier this decade led to new regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley, last year's global financial meltdown coupled with Democratic control of the White House and Congress seems like a recipe for a host of new compliance regulations — and thus more business for storage vendors and more work for storage administrators.

IDG News Service: “Credit Crunch Takes Toll on Data Center Spending”

December 23, 2008

By James Niccolai

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/122308-credit-crunch-takes-toll-on.html?hpg1=bn

The deepening financial crisis is causing more businesses to lower their data center budgets for 2009, with spending on training and new hardware likely to feel the brunt of the cutbacks, according to a survey from Afcom, an association for data center workers. Of employees at 133 large data centers that responded to the survey, 38 percent, or more than a third, said they had been asked to cut their budgets since Afcom conducted a similar survey in May. In the earlier survey, 19 percent expected their budget to be cut for next year. The new survey was conducted last month, and the change reflects new cutbacks planned since the depth of the financial crisis became apparent in the autumn.

SearchStorage.com: “Storage Outlook 2009: Seeking Bigger, Slower Disk Drives”

December 23, 2008

By Beth Pariseau

http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid5_gci1343464,00.html

SearchStorage.com interviews Reinoud Reynders, the IT manager for the University Hospitals Leuven in Belgium. This year, he used NetApp products to design a new VMware storage infrastructure. For the near future, he's looking forward to the next release of NetApp's Ontap and for slower—yes, slower—disk drives.

eChannel Line: “Data De-Dupe Growing in SMB”

December 23, 2008

By Paul Weinberg

http://www.echannelline.com/usa/story.cfm?item=24057

More than 90 per cent of enterprises surveyed by Sepaton in November are either currently using data de-duplication or want to use a technology that eliminates excessively copied data. Of those who lack de-duplication, 55 per cent have budgeted to invest in this technology in 2009. So reported the data protection company, which online interviewed 650 enterprises with at least 50 terabytes of storage data requiring protection. The research was endorsed by the independent firm, the Enterprise Strategy Group.

Technorati Tags: EMC,data storage,Symmetrix,CLARiiON,energy,IT energy,data center,DMX,CX,Energy Efficiency,Green IT,VMware,RSA,Energy Plans,IT energy strategy,useable capacity,economy,TCO,energy future,EIT,ICT,2009 predicitons,baseball,spring training,Red Sox

IT, Storage, Energy and a look at the stars of 2008

2009-02-02T14:12:19-05:00

Now that it’s Groundhog Day, I decided to look back at 2008 before it’s too late.

The picture above is from a collection of the best astronomy pictures of 2008. It is the star nebula W5, alias the St. Valentine nebula. What perspective does it give us about the importance of our opinions on events of 2008 and how they fit in shaping the heavens?

Won't stop us from having them though.

Also, for perspective, 2008 was designated as:

International Year of Planet Earth.^[1]
International Year of Languages.^[2]
International Year of the Potato.^[3]
International Year of Sanitation.^[4]
International Year of the Frog.^[5]
European Year of Intercultural Dialogue.^[6]

Lots of trade articles appeared in December and early January to assess significant 2008 IT highlights. Of course everyone is entitled to their opinion. Here are a few of my own, followed by those of several others.

Too many Kermit references.

Too many things / ideas / programs that use the word green in their attempt at legitimacy.

Hype for green peaked last January. By Q4 all the interest in green was of the cash-money type.

No crystal ball needed to expect that financial issues will continue to be out front through 2009.

My view is that it will be manifest in a quest for efficiency.

A few EMC ‘08 highlights included January’s Symmetrix introduction of the first Flash disk on Enterprise systems. At a 30x improvement in instructions per second (IOPS), that’s a big performance and efficiency improvement.

Later in the year Flash was included on the new advanced Clarion system that combined Flash, spin-down, virtual provisioning, adaptive cooling, SATA drives.

EMC also introduced new efficiency assessment services.

EMC Atmos was launched to operate as a separate entity. It features multi-petabyte offering for information storage and distribution that enables companies to build cloud storage. Providing massive scalability with automated data placement it is a whole new look at efficiency for content and information services delivery.

Not to neglect the needs of individuals, EMC also created Decho(for Your Digital Echo), from the assets of two acquisitions: Mozy and PI Corporation. Efficiency here comes in the form of care, protection and flexible access to your individual digital archives

Altogether, in step with our customers, EMC devoted much more resource in 2008 to sustainable IT and we have seen it paying off for our customers.

More to come in 2009

eWeek: SLIDESHOW: “Green IT and Green Computing Slideshow: Top 8 Green IT Highlights of 2008”

December 16, 2008

Looking back over some of the news highlights in the green IT sector, companies such as Hewlett-Packard, Cisco Systems, Sun Microsystems and a number of others really took the lead in efforts to update data centers and save electrical resources. Many analysts and industry observers expect this green IT momentum to increase throughout 2009. Here are the top eight green IT highlights of the year, as reported by eWEEK.

InfoWorld: “Green-tech Trends From 2008”

December 22, 2008

By Ted Samson

Like 2007, 2008 proved an eventful year for the world of green technology. The reasons green tech has had such staying power are pretty clear: energy prices continue to soar, organizations continue to struggle with insufficient power and space in their datacenters, and concern over the state of the environment continues to grow. With 2008 nearly at an end, InfoWorld looks back at some of the trends in green tech, ones that will most certainly spill over in 2009.

GreenerComputing.com: “Fifteen Simple Ways to Green Your Data Center on the Cheap”

December 23, 2008

By John Pappas and Ron Wilson

There's been a lot of talk lately about green data centers, and with good reason. As businesses move away from paper records and in-person transactions and more towards computer-based transactions and digital information storage, the amount of energy that data centers use is growing -- and fast. According to the EPA, data center energy use doubled between 2000 and 2006, and many are worried this figure may double again in just a few years. With energy prices on the rise, smart IT and facility managers and even top executives are taking a look at ways to build and maintain not only effective, but efficient data centers.

CRN: “The 10 Biggest Storage Stories Of 2008”

December 29, 2008

EMC acquired SMB/SOHO storage hardware manufacturer Iomega in April, put it together with the Mozy online storage technology it acquired in late 2007 and its Retrospect SMB backup software and unveiled itself as a complete channel-friendly small business storage vendor. EMC has completed its transformation into one of the most channel-friendly vendors of storage, or of pretty much any technology. Solution providers voted EMC the most channel-friendly vendor in both the storage hardware and the storage software categories in the VARBusiness Annual Report Card survey in 2008. And they did so by a wider margin over its competitors than for any other vendor in any other category.

InfoWorld: “A Year in the Clouds”

December 23, 2008

By Eric Knorr

If there was one big trend in 2008 it was cloud computing. As with all new IT trends, levels of adoption were low. The most interesting thing about cloud computing is the argument over its definition continuing to rage, even as customers are paying for it and adopting it.

ZDNet: “2008’s Best Storage Products”

December 23, 2008

By Robin Harris

The world of data storage is changing faster than it has since the mid-90’s saw the rise of storage arrays and storage networks. ZDNet offers its take on the top storage products, both consumer and enterprise, of 2008, including EMC’s Atmos cloud storage.

Enterprise Storage Forum: “Top Storage Stories of 2008”

December 31, 2008

2008 will go down in history as a year of extraordinary financial upheaval, but for storage users, it was also a year of major technological change, as technologies such as solid state drives (SSDs), data de-duplication and pNFS entered the mainstream, while the economic backdrop had users clamoring for any technology that could help them make better use of their storage environments. EMC is featured in three of the top 10 stories, including: Should EMC Buy Sun?, EMC Kicks NetApp's NAS: EMC is giving NetApp fits in its own market andApple Could Learn A Lot From EMC.

IDG News Service: “Three Deals Symbolized Storage Trends in 2008”

December 20, 2008

By Stephen Lawson

The storage story of 2008 was growth: An accelerating explosion of information, much of it in the form of video, led IT administrators to try to make better use of their capacity and staff. Overall demand for storage capacity is growing by about 60 percent per year, according to IDC. Another research company, Enterprise Strategy Group, pegs the annual growth rate of data between 30 percent and 60 percent. In addition to the trend toward disconnecting logical from physical resources, there were a handful of acquisitions this year that signaled other trends in storage world. In late February, enterprise storage giant EMC bought Pi, a provider of software and online services for consumers to keep track of personal information stored locally or online. The deal, which followed the company's 2007 buyout of online backup provider Mozy, was one sign of growing interest in cloud storage.

Wired: “Top Technology Breakthroughs of 2008”

December 26, 2008

By Priya Ganapati

The economy may be tanking, but innovation is alive and well. The world's corporate and academic R&D labs were busy laying the foundations of some amazing future technologies in 2008. Wired offers a countdown of what rocked our world in 2008 — and what will change yours in 2009 and beyond, including flash memory – where EMC is among players championing flash drives for larger business users.

SearchStorage.com: “Top storage acquisitions of 2008”

December 23, 2008

By Dave Raffo

SearchStorage.com outlines the 10 biggest storage deals of the year. IBM Corp. and NetApp set the tone for a busy first half of 2008 for storage acquisitions when IBM acquired XIV and NetApp bought Onaro Inc. in the first three days of the year. By the end of April 2008, EMC Corp. checked in with acquisitions of Iomega Corp. and Pi Corp., IBM added Diligent Technologies Corp. and FilesX Inc., Cisco Systems Inc. bought Nuova Systems Inc., and Blue Coat Systems Inc. picked up WAN optimization rival Packeteer Inc.

Technorati Tags: EMC,data storage,Symmetrix,CLARiiON,energy,IT energy,data center,DMX,CX,Energy Efficiency,Green IT,VMware,RSA,Energy Plans,IT energy strategy,useable capacity,economy,TCO,energy future,EIT,cloud computing,ATMOS,DECO

The 2009 EMC Information Calendar

2009-01-30T14:29:56-05:00
Dick Sullivan

Energy Matters

Moving to a New Location in the Cloud

Expanding Our Thinking: Cloud Potential

Virtual everything?

Expanded Thinking

Changed Thinking. Cloud Thinking.

Practical Commitments & Heavenly Power

EMC IT. All At Once, and Backwards.

Not too Small. Very Practical

Head in the Clouds. Feet on the Ground.

Government Gets Cloud

Summers Over

Serendipity & Clouds

Clouds, Complexities Simple Truths

A Serious Call for Help

EMC IT: Do it yourself efficiencies

World Views

A V-Max Moment

I spent time last week with the IT team responsible for a major university research program. As a current EMC customer they were interested in how our plans and vision fit with their own.

They have a good size IT operation in place and want to control costs gain efficiency and control overall IT growth.

Not unusual.

The new wrinkle is a major research program being planned that will double and then triple their IT demand in the next 18-24 months.

Challenging.

They are also nearly out of energy and confined in space.

Predictable plot twist.

So, we talked about a bunch of efficiency improvements to consider. The starter list: server virtualization, storage consolidation, tiering with Flash and SATA drives, archiving.

The extended list: de-duplication, application classification, consolidation and alignment, information management, proven practices and automation.

Of course the list goes on but the point wasn’t to cover them all. More, it was to highlight that there are a good number of options - choices to be made. That’s where experienced professional consulting services were very handy to help sort it out.

They had a packed agenda but I noticed that the recently announced Symmetrix V-Max was not being covered. So I offered an overview and they agreed.

Then came the V-Max moment.

It was as if little cartoon light bulbs lit up all around the room.

They had the IT efficiency concepts already. Then, as we linked those to the V-Max and Virtual Provisioning, and Virtual LUNs, and FAST (Fully Automated Storage Tiering) and non-disruptive capacity/performance expansion and VMware’s just announced Vsphere and Cisco’s Unified Networking …

They got it.

We had looked at the piece parts. Now we were looking at the whole IT system – soon to be virtual environment.

The conversation started with V-Max as a product. Now they saw it as an illustration of a concept. Take all that virtual stuff and start putting it together. Take it to the private cloud. And no reason not to start now.

Save some energy too. Made my day.

You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet

Overtake the Future...

Save the Planet. Save IT.

Flash Energy Economics

IT Star Gazing, 2009

SearchStorage.com: “Storage Outlook '09: Looking Toward the Clouds”

January 5, 2009

By Beth Pariseau

BusinessWeek: “The Big Promise of Cloud Computing”

December 16, 2008

By Steve Hamm

InformationWeek: “Cloud Storage Is About Dispersion”

December 23, 2008

By George Crump

Associated Press: “EMC Shares Surge on 4Q Outlook, Job Cuts”

January 8, 2009

CNET News.com: “Looking ahead at security trends for 2009”

December 23, 2008

By Jon Oltsik

CIOL (India): “Top Storage Trends for 2009: EMC”

December 17, 2008

By Rajesh Itagi

Investor’s Business Daily: “High-Tech Meetings Gain Fans”

December 29, 2008

By Jennie L. Phipps

Byte and Switch: “Sifting Through Online Backup Service Options”

December 17, 2008

By Paul Korzeniowski

Enterprise Storage Forum: “Apple Could Learn A Lot From EMC”

December 22, 2008

By Rob Enderle

Channel Line: “EMC -- Industry Leadership and Proactive Evolution”

January 4, 2009

By Charles King

eChannel Line: “EMC Continues to Move Forward”

January 1, 2009

By David Hill

eWeek: “IT Infrastructure Slideshow: Products to Watch: January 5, 2009”

January 5, 2009

IT, Storage, Energy and a look at the stars of 2008

CRN: “The 10 Biggest Storage Stories Of 2008”

December 29, 2008

ZDNet: “2008’s Best Storage Products”

December 23, 2008

Save some energy too.

Made my day.