Online Storage Optimization

More cloud storage news today, as ParaScale is offering software that allows companies to turn a network of commodity Linux servers into a cloud storage platform. Sony Pictures Imageworks and Stanford Genome Technology Center are testing it with an eye towards using it to manage their massive image rich storage needs.

Good coverage of the announcement by Lucas Mearian at Computerworld and Dave Raffo at SearchStorage.

In the press release, Noemi Greyzdorf, storage analyst at IDC is quoted saying “‘ParaScale’s flexible, object-oriented file system allowing scale and ease of management across different pools of storage and will enable content and general tier2 storage deployments to achieve new levels of economy and flexibility.’”

On a related note, Chris Evans has written a thoughtful post on cloud storage and availability questions on his Storage Architect blog.

Looking forward to hearing the speculation across the blogosphere about what if anything this vendor is offering that’s new.

There’s a lot of chit chat going on about storage these days - some on the mud-slinging level, some civilized, most somewhere in between. One positive trend is that the blogosphere is becoming less about personalities and more about collaboration and discussion — thanks to Twitter and other networking tools. Storage bloggers, being the smart and tech savvy  folk they are, have started creating their own online communities.

Here are some of the newest and most innovative sites that are aggregating content about storage:

Storage Monkeys - This site is serving as a social network and discussion forum for those involved in the storage industry. There are also pages for job listings and blogs.

Gestalt IT - This is a group magazine that aggregates blog entries on storage and IT, and features some of the most informed and interesting bloggers in the storage realm, such as Stephen Foskett (Packrat), Martin Glassborow (Storagebod) and Chris Evans (Storage Architect), to name a few.

BlueArc Shared Items - A quick way to get a tour around the storage blogosphere and find out what topics are getting the most online ink.

If I have missed any here, please feel free to comment.

Interesting story in today’s San Jose Merc about the new home for the “wayback machine” run by the nonprofit Internet Archive. For those who haven’t explored it, this site is a great way to take a trip down memory lane, a la Proust’s madeleine, at Web pages gone by. For example, I was able to track down this article I wrote in 2000 for a dot com called Pro2Net. (Note to younger self on that one: brevity is the soul of wit.) There are plenty of other uses.

The problem is that there is a massive and growing amount of data in this archive. Their novel solution? The system was moved from a data center running standard Linux servers to a specially equipped shipping container on the campus of Sun Microsystems in Santa Clara.

On the Sun site there’s a video tour of the shipping container/data center. It has all kinds of green elements, including a recirculating chilled water cooling system. Plus, the efficient size is impressive. The storage itself is very high density disk inside a small form factor — up to 48 disks in each — something they say requires far less power. In all, there are eight racks filled with 63 Sun Fire x4500 servers running Solaris 10 with ZFS.

In any case, this is an instructive example of what is happening with online data growth. The archive, which takes occasional snapshots of pages across the entire WWW, now must grapple with increase in video, audio and graphics. In fact, the rate of growth on this already multi-petabyte system is now 100TB/month, reports Lucas Mearian at Computerworld. One wonders how long this solution will hold before the Internet Archive will have to go searching for yet another home for its nostalgia machine.

You may have noticed some changes to our blog over the last few months. We’ve changed the name and URL to onlinestorageoptimization.com. We are posting far more frequently. Content is getting more diverse, and contributors are increasing. Here are some of the posts that you guys are saying are really knocking your socks off:

Where is Atlas? - Why we think Riverbed needs to jump into the optimization game sooner rather than later.

Dedupe for Primary - Another Shade of Blue - Our response to NetApp’s Alex McDonald on dedupe for primary.

A Q&A with Shmuel Shottan, CTO of BlueArc - Insights from one of the best in the business.

Entrepreneurship Meets American Idol - Ocarina CEO Murli Thirumale on his business philosophy - a must read for entrepreneurs who think one idea is all they need.

So, why not subscribe to Online Storage Optimization via the handy dandy RSS feed on your navigation bar? We’d love to have you join us for news, views, and controversial stands on issues of importance to the storage industry. Thanks in advance. We look forward to hearing your comments.

Some very interesting posts and stories out there this week. Here are some that caught our attention.

Small businesses find big value in Twitter - Financial Times

Storage Resource Analysis - Gestalt IT/Storagenerve Devang Panchigar

Cloud Storage Options Multiply - Byte & Switch

Woz Staves off Elimination - Computerworld on “Dancing with the Stars” (admit it, you’re following the blow by blow of this story)

Quick Calculations Show that Enterprises Can Save Over a Million Dollars Using Archival Storage - Jerome Wendt, DCIG

We hope you enjoy your reading today!

The recession is and the recession isn’t. It’s an odd beast that way. As I noted in an earlier post, the recessionary economy hasn’t yet translated to massive IT job losses — at least not yet.  There are winners and losers, something that’s true in just about any economic climate. And right now, technologies that save on overall IT costs are very much in demand.

James Koopmann’s post on the DCIG blog today argues this case eloquently. He points out that Gartner has recently estimated that storage as an industry is growing by 11.3% a year, and quotes analyst Jon Collins of Freeform Dynamics who says there is “no recession in storage” due to the fact that data continues to pile up. While some large companies are announcing layoffs, there is a great deal of potential for growth in certain key areas of storage.

Writes James:

“When the economy goes south, there tends to be a greater necessity and, as a result, a greater push for companies to find innovative technologies that will help them reduce their TCO.”

He is discussing thin provisioning (a technology that is not only good for a company’s bottom line, but has also yielded a really nice rap song). However, this could apply to many of the forward looking technologies that are out there, including, I’d like to mention, the type of next generation optimization solutions offered by Ocarina Networks and others that free up disk capacity.

As James notes, one thing companies need to watch is whether both CapEx and OpEx costs are being lowered. For example, a new offering may claim to save you on costs, but if it requires that you replace your existing storage, it’s a CapEx headache at the very least.

With all this in mind, innovation is taking the storage world by storm these days, which is translating into a healthier industry overall.

Isn’t it great to hear some positive news for a change?

This past weekend, I had the privilege of being a speaker at Entrepreneur Trek ‘09, a conference held at Stanford Graduate School of Business featuring many of the leading lights in Silicon Valley. Participants were a diverse group of mainly MBA students and recent graduates from around the country. I met folks from Stanford, Duke, Wharton, Chicago, Northwestern, and other schools, all of whom had gathered to learn from VCs, entrepreneurs, and other movers and shakers in the high tech industry.

What struck me the most about the weekend was the enthusiasm among these students, who refuse to be daunted by the down economic news that is filling the airwaves. The discussions were almost all in a forward looking mode, with plenty of excitement about potential new business models that are emerging from social networking and other Web 2.0 advances.

In my workshop, I gave the inside story on what led me to found my company Ocarina Networks, which is the leader in content aware compression and deduplication for online storage. I described my philosophy as a serial entrepreneur, a concept I have dubbed “SDBS” or “Sell, Design, Build, Sell.” This is a disciplined and structured way of selecting ideas that are worth pursuing that first identifies a real need and then builds a business around that, rather than the other way around. I suggested they contrast this with the far more common “DBS” or “Design, Build, Sell” approach — otherwise known as “I have only one idea and so I’m going to start a company around it.”

As I told the students, an idea is a dangerous thing if it is the only one you have! Much more important is to strongly validate a customer need and market for your idea, evaluating it while simultaneously championing it. In this way you are approaching your business in a much more curious and open minded way, with the result being that you can be of far more service to your customers and are more likely to build a winning business.

When first developing what would become Ocarina Networks, my co-founders and I ran a competition, or what you might call a kind of “American Idol” of entrepreneurial ideas. After gathering input from trusted sources, we came up with three ideas that we considered the “finalists,” and then competed them against each other by surveying customers and thought leaders in the industry. What we discovered was that of the three, the idea of shrinking down storage was far and away the winner. You might even call it the “Kelly Clarkson” of technology ideas.

The storage reduction idea won for a simple reason: customers voted overwhelmingly for it. They let us know loud and clear that their most pressing problem was how to manage their ever-increasing storage needs.

At the Stanford event, I spoke with a number of people who instinctively got how important it is to keep storage costs and data footprints under control, and why a new approach was needed. A fellow panelist at the event, Peter Pham, CEO of BillShrink, told me that he immediately recognized Ocarina’s benefit while at Photobucket, which he helped grow from infancy to the 61 million users it had when he left.

For me, the greatest pleasure of attending such an event is that I have the opportunity to meet tomorrow’s businesspeople today. I have no doubt that groundbreaking ideas will be coming from the many bright thinkers I met this past weekend, and I wish them all well on the entrepreneurial road.

Murli Thirumale is the CEO of Ocarina Networks.

Today, Online Storage Optimization is taking a break from storage related topics and instead brings you some of the strangest, most amusing, and generally oddball stories we’ve seen of late. Here they are for your enjoyment.

Fact, not fiction, rules the brain (except for gamers). A new study shows that in general, the human brain places more importance on real people than on fictional ones, according to PhysOrg.com. Thus, we know that Cinderella isn’t as real as George Bush, who in turn is not as real to us as our mother. (Their example.) However, the article states that: “personal relevance is not unequivocally related to what is real, since some individuals may experience personal relevance in certain fictional realms, such as in religion or chronic computer gaming. For instance, for a chronic gamer, a World of Warcraft character could yield greater activation in the amPFC and PCC [reality-oriented regions of the brain] than a real person of low personal relevance would.” (Emphasis added–and gamers, please do take heed.)

Totally tubular. From Boing Boing–Audiophiles, and folks who want to risk electrocuting themselves can follow the steps laid out at Instructables.com on how to build their very own stereo tube amp from spare parts. The post starts out with this tantalizing line: “Ever wanted to build a highly dangerous, inefficient, and essentially obsolete piece of electronics?” Oh, well, in that case, what are we waiting for?

Terminator beware. And speaking of tubes, contributor Brandon Keim reports in Wired on the development of carbon nanotubes–structures that are  incredibly strong, lightweight and flexible. These tubes can be used for everything from artificial limbs with “smart” muscles to solar cells. Perhaps the Governator can make use of them to save future generations of the world from the high cost of electricity.

Robofish to the rescue. As long as we’re on the subject of ’80s sci fi movie references, there’s a new robocop on the block, and this one is sniffing out pollution. According to Britain’s Daily Mail, schools of robotic fish may be released into the Thames to pick up signs of pollution. Reports the Mail: “Each fish … will be packed with pollution sensors that can electronically ’sniff’ harmful chemicals in the water.” The robofish will travel in schools and alert each other via wifi when pollution is detected. (Thanks @bcaulfield for that tip.) Let’s just hope no one decides to tempt them with a PCB-packed fly and cook them up for dinner.

Snow men behaving badly. Finally, two separate snow-bites-man-related stories caught our attention this past week. First, take a look at this series of videos depicting grown men riding around in the snow on retooled on children’s toy cars–and clearly having the time of their lives. (Thanks @davegraham for tweeting that tip.) And in a second, related story, a Canadian man was ordered to tear down his backyard snow fort because it posed a fire hazard. (From NPR’s “Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me quiz.) Talk about having WAY too much fun.

And speaking of which, shouldn’t you be getting back to work?

Chris Preimesberger over at eWeek is reporting that the IBM acquisition of Sun for the bargain basement price of $6.5 billion is almost definitely a go and could be announced today or Monday. Writes Chris:

“All the indicators point one way: The acquisition of one of the most innovative, risk-taking and open-source-minded IT companies in the world, Sun Microsystems, by the world’s oldest and arguably largest IT corporation, IBM, is a done deal. All that remains is for the ink on the legalese to dry. That’s what several eWEEK sources are telling us.”

Meanwhile, the commentary on what this will mean continues to pour out in the blogosphere. Beth Pariseau’s recent post on StorageSoup raises questions about the shakeout sure to result from the OEM deals IBM has made with vendors, particularly NetApp with the IBM N-Series. Considering the lawsuits between NetApp and Sun over ZFS, a merger seems tricky at best. After laying out some possiblilities, Beth asks:

“Are any of those scenarios particularly palatable, especially for customers who are invested in IBM’s N-series precisely because it has the IBM brand associated with it, and therefore ostensibly an assurance that IBM would stand behind that product?”

Meanwhile, Matthew Sarrel in another eWeek column is parting ways with much of the crowd by arguing that the acquisition is “all about storage.” Oh, really? Yes, argues Sarrel–between the StorageTek asset and Sun’s homegrown Storage 7000 Unified Storage System, OpenSolaris and Open Portfolio, IBM could win back its piece of the migration puzzle.

Two of the best bloggers in the biz, Storagezilla and Storagebod weighed in with posts this week that run counter to some of this. For example, Storagezilla argues the Solaris is actually a liability of the merger, because:

“IBM’s cash rich pSeries division is an AIX stronghold with IBM’s numerous attempts to kill AIX and replace it with Linux having all failed. With Linux being pushed hard on xSeries hardware, on the Mainframe and even on pSeries where does Solaris settle? The answer is that it doesn’t.”

Storagebod has a slightly different take on this with his assertion that most likely Solaris will survive the merger. Update: reread this and realized he is agreeing with Storagezilla on Solaris. He writes:

“Yes IBM will have to kill products and at least one sacred cow will have to go; AIX or Solaris. That’s a hard one to call. Solaris on pSeries would be an interesting proposition but I suspect AIX will survive; it’ll pick up some technologies from Solaris, ZFS for example. And if Solaris goes; where does that leave Sparc?”

Phew. Seems like the whole thing is raising more questions than it’s answering–and it could be months or even longer before we see what happens to the IBM-Sun (or, as Beth Pariseau has dubbed it “SunBM”) product line. Many geeks are obviously rooting for a continuation of the open source path that Sun has been heading down, but really it is early days yet. The ink, in fact, is not dry–and as we saw with some recent bank mergers, you just never do know.

Of course, many have been wondering about the cultural fit between the ponytails and the suit wearers. Though if you look at this recent video on his blog, you can see that Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz has both a ponytail and a suit. So, perhaps all will be fine–the IBMers can grow their hair (or perhaps cut it if they’re women?) and the Sun folks can start putting ties over their t-shirt/bermuda shorts ensembles.

By the way, I think I might get booed by one or more of my fellow storage tweeters for the headline on this post, but I couldn’t resist–I grew up in a household of punsters, and then (mis)spent many years in the news biz. May the groans commence.

Questions about names have pursued me throughout my life. As someone with the first name Sunshine, I am constantly asked about it. As if defying the laws of probability, they are always same two or three questions:

1. Is that your real name?

2. Were your parents hippies?

3. That must be a lot of pressure. Do you ever wish you were named cloudy day? (Variation: should I call you overcast?)

Now that I’m doing work for a company called Ocarina Networks, I often get a series of questions about that name, which stands out as a not-so-techy sounding alternative to the Zloobs and Creacraws of the Web three dot oh era. These questions, too, tend to be the same:

1. Where did you get the name Ocarina?

2. Does the name in any way relate to the company’s optimization technology? (Variation: Do musical ocarinas shrink anything?)

3. What exactly is an ocarina?

The last question has been somewhat less frequent since the introduction of the ocarina iPhone app.

So, what are the answers to all these questions? To just answer would be giving it all away. However, I do encourage you to contact your high school music teacher to see if you can learn about the history of the ocarina. It’s an amazing little musical device. And, if saving millions on storage isn’t enough incentive, Ocarina’s customers get a free ocarina as a gift.