Online Storage Optimization

An earthquake shook up San Jose (not mention Twitter) today. But that didn’t stop the storage industry’s movers and shakers from making all kinds of interesting news. Here’s a quick roundup from where we sit.

A game of musical chairs…

EMC lost storage tech consultant and blogger Steve Kenniston to inline dedupe player Storwize, where he will be Vice President of Technology Strategy. Steve continues to blog avidly and well at The Storage Alchemist. We may find ourselves crossing swords with him occasionally over here at Online Storage Op, but we always read his posts with interest.

And EMC has been no slouch in scooping up major talent:

Gestalt IT contributor Ed Saipetch (known to many of us edsai) started this week at EMC as Senior VCE Specialist. Prior to that, he was a systems engineer at Network Storage.

And Scott Lowe set tongues wagging when he announced last week on his blog that he’ll also be joining EMC, as a VMware-Cisco Solutions Principal. This seems a very shrewd move on their part, as Scott is well-known for his Cisco expertise and virtualization knowhow–both of which no doubt will be extremely handy as UCS takes off.

Nice going, EMC.

And in other news…acquisition fever!

Disk drive array subsystem provider Dot Hill has bagged Israeli storage virtualization company Cloverleaf for $12M in cash and stock, the Register reports. Clearly, they’re locking onto the virtualization and cloud storage trends with a vengeance. This may also give them a new edge in their battles with competitors like LSI and Xyratex.

Plenty of takeover rumors swirling around 3Par, although for now no one’s confirming anything. Whatever happens, it seems that everyone’s impressed by 3Par, the little thin provisioning engine that could. Over here at this blog, we’re consistently impressed and amused by their creative blogger Marc Farley. Financial pub Barron’s, in addition to initiating the speculation, called 3Par a “small but scrappy” possible takeover target. But who will be the suitor? Feel free to add in any and all rumors and speculation in our comments field below.

And don’t let us forget EMC, which in addition to snagging talent has picked up Archer Technologies, an IT governance software company that will be rolled into its overall security offerings for its RSA division. As Beth Pariseau reports on Storage Soup, the acqui could affect some others in the industry.

Writes Beth, “Archer brings with it a business continuity software module, which could affect those who manage disaster recovery in the storage environment. It also extends EMC’s move to inject automation into its software offerings, which we’ve seen in the storage market with last month’s first release of FAST, and is a part of EMC’s vision for archiving and e-Discovery.”

Well, that’s all for now. No doubt we’ll be seeing all manner of intrigue, rumor, speculation and other fascinating stuff now that 2010 is upon us.

Excitement is building here at Ocarina as tomorrow is the big kickoff for Tech Field Day, and we’re a presenting sponsor of the event. As we speak, cables are being laid, demos are being run through, and a certain amount of nervous excitement is in the air.

In just two short days, a horde of smart, savvy bloggers will descend on the Ocarina offices on Airport Parkway in San Jose, bearing thumb drives packed with their toughest data sets–part of a challenge we laid down in order to show them how well we can compress and dedupe that data.

Sponsored by online IT pub Gestalt IT, the next two days are sure to be worth watching even if you’re not directly involved. Tech Field Day seems to me to represent a new kind of experimentation with social media in both its on- and offline form. The event brings together influential bloggers and others from around the world for two days of hands-on demos at storage and virtualization companies around Silicon Valley. As I mentioned on the VMWare Communities Roundtable today, this group of presenting sponsors represent Silicon Valley at its innovative best. And the fact that they were quickly able to recognize the value of such an event is a further testament to their forward thinking.

The chatter on blogs and Twitter in the weeks leading up to this event has been intense, which makes it even more exciting to be a part of. So, what the heck is this Tech Field Day that everyone’s talking about? It’s a fairly simple concept. Gather a group of the leading independent bloggers in IT, storage, virtualization and related fields and take them to companies around Silicon Valley for a deep dive on some cutting edge technology they may not yet know a whole lot about. No slick marketing presentations, no PR. Just plain, straightforward geeking out. Gestalt IT’s founder/publisher Stephen Foskett has said he plans future events as well, and they will encompass other areas of high tech.

Social media made this thing possible, and it’s making it easy to follow as well. Here are some of the ways to get in on the fun:

Twitter: Hashtag #TechFieldDay

FriendFeed

Or, The Official Tech Field Day Scoreboard, which aggregates all of the posts *and* tweets about the event in real time.

See you there!

Summer is almost here, and despite rumors of a recession, the malls are filling up with shoppers seeking bathing suits, sunblock, iPhones, and other de rigueur gear of the season. Here in storage land, the latest industry news continues to amaze, amuse and baffle.

Here are a few headlines that caught our eyes:

Data Domain Board Rejects EMC Takeover Offer - Computerword, Lucas Mearian

HDS Expands Thin Provisioning - Search Storage, Beth Pariseau

VCs and IT Execs Discuss IT’s Brave New World in Boston - Storage Soup, Beth Pariseau

VMWare and HP Announce Co-developed Plan - Byte and Switch, Mike Fratto

And, for a little summertime diversion, one 3Par storage rapper’s response to the strange and wondrous EMC-NetApp-Data Domain tale:

3P’s Open Rap to Data Domain Employees - Storagerap, Marc Farley

Many of us have become extremely dependent on certain online sources–Google and Twitter, to name the most prominent–for our daily work and personal lives. And so when not one, but both of these services are on the blink at the same time, it becomes news.

First, there was the slowness of Gmail and related Google applications, a problem that seemed to be worse in the early morning hours. A Google blogger issued an explanation for the slowness of Google apps. All due to a “traffic jam” in which data was routed through Asia, apparently.

Marc Farley over at StorageRap had this to say about this outage:

“Anytime this sort of thing happens, questions come up about whether or not cloud computing is ready for prime time. The answer is - of course it is, but maybe not at Google.”

Meanwhile, Twitter appears to have been down at times both today and yesterday, expanding beyond its pre-stated outage at noon PT. A quick Twitter post explained it, though it implies that the service was only down for seven minutes–not what several were reporting. In light of yesterday’s debacle regarding the “replies” feature, Twitter seems to be getting into hot water more often than not these days.

In response, someone tweeted about this: it’s called “Down or is it Just Me” and seems a useful tool. My suggestion is that you bookmark it, just to be sure it’s handy. Nothing like old-style web technology when things are feeling shaky.

In the big picture, we still don’t know what this means. It could just be a strange and/or cosmic coincidence. Or, it could obviously be a sign that, as some have suggested, the pace of growth of these highly successful services is proving too hard on the infrastructure they’ve built.

Twitter, for example, has been far more virally successful than anyone envisaged. The news today was that Oprah has surpassed 1 million followers. To accommodate this amount of activity–and who wants to bet that at least three-quarters of them were new to Twitter?–can’t be within its normal scope of operations. Oprah, as we know, has been the source of many a server crash over the years. Then there’s storage. At this point, Twitter must surely have multi-petabytes on disk, not to mention a skyrocketing growth rate.

Time will tell how these mega-popular services will manage their growth. One possibility is that with just a few more outages, the fickle user base will migrate to something else before the problem becomes too severe. FriendFeed seems to be the new geek platform of choice–though for now at least, it’s being used in coordination with Twitter by most of the users I follow. Or perhaps something even newer and shinier will strike our fancy.

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 week has been a bonanza in the storage and tech blog world. A number of interesting stories, plus … the smackdowns continue.

I never thought I’d see myself writing this, but the dueling rap videos among storage players has once again began to heat up. Marc Farley over at 3Par has posted a video that slams NetApp’s more, shall we say, professionally produced 8 Mile parody while rhyming about 3Par’s thin provisioning tech. His rap persona 3P is comic book serious as he throws out lines like:

“Come back later when you’ve got some game/with the 3P undisputed storage rap/we don’t take no crap from posers who can’t tell a disk drive from a lamp…”

Ouch. Looks like the war of the rap videos is back on. I’m still working on getting that deal with MC Hammer (lyrics in progress: “we shrink your files like one else’s business/JPEGs, docs, we even cover PDFs…” OK, maybe needs work) but meanwhile looking forward to more entrants.

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On a more serious note, a post on Pete Steege’s Storage Effect caught my eye–it is simply a listing of the cost per MB for disk drives over the the past three decades–thus raising the question, how much lower can it go?:

1980: $233
1985: $71
1990: $9
1995: $0.75
2000: $0.0118
2005: $0.0006

As we know, the cost has plummeted further since ‘05. At some point will we see companies paying customers to take the drives off their hands? Just a thought.

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Meanwhile, storage execs are spilling their plans left and right these days. As Beth Pariseau reported on SearchStorage, EMC’s Joe Tucci hinted around about plans for a second phase of SSD development at a forum in Boston this week. She seems to have been busy getting scoops this week, as she also spoke to Riverbed SVP of marketing and biz dev Eric Wolford while he was bibbing it up for a lobster dinner. Wolford said he thought SSDs aren’t going to replace spinning disks any time soon, and also spilled some news on what’s happening with the much-awaited Atlas dedupe for primary product. More on THAT in another post.

Big day today for the storage industry. Top story for us, Ocarina announced $20 million in Series B financing, led by Palo Alto-based Jafco Ventures, with participation from existing investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Highland Capital Partners. Here the latest round up of news articles:

• San Jose Mercury News (print and online eds) - Ocarina plays to the cacophony of clutter
• VentureBeat - Ocarina Networks lands $20M for content compression
• San Jose/Silicon Valley Business Journal - Ocarina Networks closes 2nd round with $20M

Plenty of other chatter in the news and blogosphere of interest to the storage industry today as well:

Iron Mountain announced a new service, Virtual File Store (VFS), reports Beth Pariseau at SearchStorage.

On Storage Soup, Beth also dished on a recent clash between EMC & NetApp, this time around VMWare. The post includes a link to a video spoof of 8 Mile that has to be seen to be believed. (I can see an updated version in which MC Hammer leaps in at the last minute and starts talking about content-aware compression, but I digress…)

And speaking of videos, here’s one that Marc Farley over at 3Par put together on his Storage Rap blog that takes some swipes at Hitachi’s dynamic provisioning in what has to be said is a truly creative way. The “Mangatars” used in it are a phenom that’s currently sweeping through Twitterville. (Yes, I’ve got one.)

And speaking of HDS, David Merrill’s blog post today is an explainer on dynamic tiering that many will find useful and enlightening reading (I know I did).