Online Storage Optimization

For IT decision makers it’s imperative that you keep up with the latest news and information. Yet, the overall shakeup of the media has left many confused about where to turn. Industry pubs are getting slimmer and slimmer. Some are cutting back, others are consolidating, and a few have disappeared entirely. At the same time, the blogosphere is exploding with content. How do you sort it all out?

Here are some of the stops we at Online Storage Op make on a regular basis in order to stay up-date on IT infrastructure news without driving ourselves nuts in the process. We’d love to hear your suggestions–how do you find out what you need to know? What used to work and isn’t so much anymore? What do you wish were out there that isn’t? For now, here’s our list:

TechTarget - Still a prime source of storage news and views, particularly SearchStorage. Reporters to watch: Beth Pariseau and storage gossip watcher Simon Sharwood.

The UK Register - Chris Mellor, Timothy P. Morgan and others continue to churn out solid daily coverage of industry trends, with headlines that might make you laugh out loud.

Gestalt IT - I admit it, there are days when I don’t bother reading anything else except Gestalt to get my daily dose of storage news and views. With a solid lineup of independent writers and objective analysis on industry trends–not to mention the new addition of a humor column–it’s a one stop shop.

Network Computing - For those who used to read Byte & Switch, this is the new site that integrates it with other networking news. A necessary update in these lean times one supposes. Solid regular contributions from such writers as Howard Marks and George Crump offer simple, straightforward information and advice about products and platforms.

Wikibon -Dave Vellante and others contribute to this blog, which picks out some of the hottest trends in storage. A good way to get a quick hit on what the Wikibon analyst community is talking about.

Emulex’s Shared Items - An easy cheat sheet on what the latest industry observers and vendor bloggers are talking about. Easy to track on Twitter or through Google Reader.

Storage Monkeys - This community site has a lot going on, so I tend to just quickly check the blogs and then take a listen to the latest episode of the Infosmack podcast, which is posted each Monday morning. The blogs tend to be a little on the insiderey side, so if you’re not actively working in the data center you might find them too granular. On the other hand, the podcast is very much the 30,000-foot view of overall storage, networking and virtualization trends, served up in a highly entertaining radio format with two great hosts, Greg Knieriemen and Marc Farley.

Twitter - It sometimes seems like more trouble than it’s worth, but truth be told, the best way to find out what people in storage are talking about, worried about, and trying to fix is to sit around and listen to what they’re saying on a daily basis. Go ahead and follow a couple of Storage lists and you’re pretty much all set–here are a few I’d recommend:

We Follow Top Storage Twitter

Bas Raayman’s Storage List

So, what did I miss? Inquiring storage minds want to know.

Bleary-eyed, the storage industry has begun to wake up from its holiday stupor. VMware has decided to go into the email business. EMC continues to vacuum up talent like a Roomba on a tear through the world’s biggest living room. Meanwhile, the jokers over at Gestalt IT are picking up the “Fake Steve Jobs” meme and running with it. Their version is actually funnier than the original — at least to this blogger, perhaps because I know the players and situations.

The increasingly crowded and competitive Storage Monkeys Top Vendor Blogs contest is about to screech to its exciting conclusion. Voting ends Friday. Front runners are EMC bloggers Chuck Hollis and Storagezilla. Third place at the moment is the HP Storageworks blog, helmed by fearless blogger Calvin Zito. This puts early front runner Marc Farley, founder of the vaunted Steering Wheel Camera Society of America in fourth place. Step on it, Marc! In fifth right now is the Storage Anarchist, Barry Burke, who is just barely edging out NetApp’s Val Bercovici. Well, it ain’t over till it’s over–these things can change fast.

So before the week is out–why not VOTE?

Speaking of which, blogger extraordinaire Stephen Foskett has started a series that delves into the whole vendor blogging question. He has two posts up on the topic, “Vendor Bloggers 1: Why Does It Matter?” and “The Spectrum of Vendor Blogs.” Mr. F cites none other than Online Storage Op as an example of a hybrid “independent-seeming official” blog, but credits us for being transparent about the fact that our parent is a company. No doubt Stephen and I will hash this out further when we give a talk on social media to a group of storage industry pros at The BD Event in Palo Alto next Wednesday.

But wait… there’s yet more news, and this is actual news:

Nexsan and FalconStor are teaming up to try to defeat rival Data Domain. It can get really interesting when two vendors come up with a combination product that serves a larger purpose than they would’ve had if they acted alone. Two pieces on the topic caught my eye this week:

Beth Pariseau, SearchDataBackup - Nexsan and FalconStor gun for EMC Data Domain with Dedupe SG 2 data deduplication backup device

Writes Beth: “Analysts say a series of updates to Dedupe SG — comprised of FalconStor’s dedupe software and Nexsan enterprise data storage systems — put it into closer competition with the 800-pound gorilla Data Domain.”

She quotes ESG’s Lauren Whitehouse, who says that the high-availability config on this combo is a poke in Data Domain’s eye. And Dave Vellante of Wikibon calls the bundle the “best of both worlds” due to the fact that it’s compatible with existing home office systems and reduces data over the WAN–though he questions how it will do in real world deployments.

Joseph Kovar, ChannelWeb - Nexsan, FalconStor Join Forces On Newest Backup Appliance

Joe, for his part talked to Greg Knieriemen at Chi Corp., which partners with both Nexsan and FalconStor who is impressed with among other things the potential inherent in its 10-GB-ethernet option. Hmm, where have I heard that name Greg Knieriemen before?

Well, that’s all for now folks. Maybe next time I talk to you I’ll be checking my zMail.

Tis the week for the “out of office” email messages. But the storage blogo-tweet-osphere waits for no man. Here are a few posts that caught my eye this week.

Bas Raayman sees CPU power hitting the wall: The RAM per CPU wall

Rick Vanover says 2010 could be the year for 10GigE - Will 2010 see 10 Gigabit Ethernet go mainstream?

It being the end of a year–and a decade–predictions abounded. We’re pleased to note that when it came to summarizing the top storage stories of 2009, deduplication for primary storage, the specialty of this blog’s parent Ocarina, made the big lists:

Infostor: The top 5 storage technologies of 2009 (and 2010?)

“Storage optimization (or data reduction) technologies such as data deduplication and compression can significantly reduce capacity requirements and costs … Consider data reduction for primary storage.”

SearchStorage - Beth Pariseau: Top 10 enterprise data storage news stories of 2009

“10. Data deduplication branches out. As deduplication settled into a comfortable role in backup, data-reduction technology started working its way into other parts of the data storage infrastructure, including primary as well as nearline and archived data … Ocarina and Isilon Clustered NAS help visual effects studio archive images, cut costs.”

For sheer inventiveness, blogger Stephen Foskett wins the prize with his 2009 predictions post, in which he turns the clock back and takes advantage of 20-20 hindsight: My 2009 IT Industry Predictions.

Meanwhile, social media and tech watcher Louis Gray takes himself to task and looks at all of his 2009 predictions to see how well he fared: My 2009 Tech Predictions: Mixed, But Nailed Real-Time.

OK that’s all for now. Here’s wishing all of you a happy, healthy, green and techy new decade.

‘Tis the season for holly hocks, eggnog, and pundits predicting industry trends for the coming year. Apparently, in the storage blogo-tweet-osphere, getting in the holiday spirit means poking fun at one another.

One of the most notable entries is a series of “Letters to Father Christmas” penned by none other than one of our favorite bloggers, Storagebod (Martin Glassborow). They are broken into seven — count ‘em! — installments (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, The Last One). Storagebod really kept Santa busy this year.

The letters contain such gems as this jab at storage giant EMC, which he has dubbed “Elven Magic Company”: “there was that V-MAX announcement; boy did that go down well with all of the other Father Christmases. Still, it was great to see you get down with the Intel Gnomes; still a pity that the FAST magic wasn’t ready to go quite yet…”

And this for another company he calls Hippie Pixies (try to guess…) “I think you need a tete-a-tete with your Hitachi partners; they’ve been sleeping on the job! They either come up with a refreshed array or you’re going to have to go acquisitive to get yourself a top of the line Tier 1 array.”

And lest you think that the Elven Magic folk are balking, he got props from the big elf himself, Chuck Hollis. He writes: “He tells all of us vendors what we need to hear, and does it in a gentle and funny manner.  I think Martin has emerged as one of the most insightful and reasonable voices in the storage blogging world, and we all follow him closely here at EMC.”

Martin G. also sends us and our fellows a little gifty: “A special shout out to the smaller vendor bloggers; what you do is very important, more so than the bloggers of the big guys…Most of you do it very well and with a keen sense of humour! Keep it up and keep me smiling.” We’re working on it, Martin, we really are.

But wait, Mr. Bod isn’t the only one getting nipped by Jack frost. Over at his StorageIO blog, Greg Schulz has penned a post for the season: Behind the Scenes, SANta Claus Global Cloud Story. In it, we learn that “The heart or brains of the SANta operation is his global system operations center (SOC) or network operation center (NOC) that rivals those seen at NASA among others with multiple data feeds. The SOC is a 24×365 operations function that covers all aspects from transportation, logistics, distribution, assembly or packaging, financials back office, CRM, IT and communications among other functions…” Wow. For those of us who thought it was just elves turning wooden cranks to pop out Tonkas, this gives us a whole new view of the ops at the North Pole.

And speaking of cranking out wondrous things, Beth Pariseau over at SearchStorage has put together two seasonal posts that provide for highly entertaining reading. What’s great about this is that those of us in the tweetsphere saw her doing at least some of the research in real-time by asking for feedback through Twitter. Here they are:

First, on SearchStorage - What to buy a geek for the holidays

The best quote in this has to be the following from Taneja Group analyst Jeff Boles, “I’ve rejected the Kindle concept. Have you seen the book prices? It’s an entirely disadvantaged arrangement for what is ultimately a compromised experience in the first place. Wait until NEC makes a levitating robot dog that follows you around and holds the Kindle up for you while you do other things…” Quips Pariseau, “We’ll be sure to include this on our “What to Buy a Geek in 2050″ list.” Well, fine but I’m still putting that robot dog on my wish list…

Then this, on Storage Soup: The storage industry’s holiday wish list

In it, is the “wish list” of Wikibon’s Dave Vellante:

• secure cloud
• A dumpster to haul all my backup tapes that I’ve converted to disk-based backup.
• A primary storage device that optimizes capacity without sacrificing performance. (Dave, we may just have a surprise for you under the tree over here at Ocarina….)
• A virtualization performance guru … make it 5 gurus …

Finally, here’s a video showing John Troyer, Community Manager at VMware (and my costar in the Gestalt IT Tech Field Day overview video). In it, we see him open a veritable bonanza of presents from the VMware community. The normally unflappable Troyer cannot help but be blown away by the outpouring of love and truly enviable gifts he received. Those who know John are aware that this is all entirely appropriate to the level of positive energy he brings to that circle of techies. All the way over here at Online Storage Optimization we can feel the glow.

And with that, we wish you all a Merry Merry Christmas, and to all a good night!

This year’s VMWorld ended with a bang–as rock legend Foreigner played for a crowd of 10,000 virtualization fanatics at the Yerba Buena Center in S.F. This really was one heck of a jampacked and exciting event. It is clear that this is becoming one of the key shows for the virtualization and storage markets. There were two–count ‘em!–EMC acquisitions. The big buzzword was “cloud.” There were more than a few product launches, and even a few new companies on the scene.

On a more personal note, this was a great way to connect with a whole lot of storage bloggers that I’d met online but not in person. The storage “tweetup” on Tuesday evening drew a crowd that could be called a veritable who’s who of the storage blogging community, including Marc Farley, Stephen Foskett, “HPStorageGuy” Calvin Zito, NetApp’s Alex McDonald, Dave Vellante of Wikibon, Ed Saipetch, “Storagenerve” Devang Panchigar, and others. I also met EMC bloggers Dave Graham and Chad Sakac, and NetApp blogger Vaughn Stewart. What a talented community!

One thing that made VMWorld stand out was the diversity of companies represented there–from huge heavyweights such as EMC to newish tech cos. like Veeam to startups just coming out of stealth. Perhaps the hottest of these new entrants was EvoStor–which I mentioned in yesterday’s post. As Storage Switzerland’s George Crump says in a recent VMWorld dispatch on Byte and Switch:

“EvoStor, a VMware only, first that I have seen, storage solution. This is more than focus, this is exclusive support of a single environment … The system is basically a storage grid similar to other scale-out models like LeftHand or Isilon but again, focused on VMware.”

Also this week, EMC went on a shopping spree. Tuesday, we learned it had picked up e-discovery specialist Kazeon. As Stephen Foskett notes in Gestalt IT, “EMC will likely integrate the Kazeon technology with their SourceOne archiving and discovery platform.” He also says that while EMC probably paid a fair price for the technology–just $75 million–it’s not without its challenges.

A day earlier, on the first day of VMWorld, EMC announced it had acquired “application image management” company FastScale. On his blog, Chuck Hollis describes this as the final piece in a puzzle that it has been assembling for some time with Ionix. He calls their method of prepping images for virtualization “predupe,” reducing footprint in memory.

As Beth Pariseau writes in Storage Soup, the FastScale acqui is a sign that EMC and VMWare are acting more like two interrelated companies. The more logical acquirer would be VMWare, since this is a server virtualization company. This could signal a shift in focus away from their purely hands-off approach that meant that it sometimes even signed agreements with EMC arch-competitor NetApp. Time will tell where this is leading.

There’s much more to say about the show, but this will have to do for now.

As many people know, Ocarina Networks has been living up to its name lately. It really is becoming a “network”-oriented company, inking partnerships with just about all of the top storage vendors–HP, BlueArc, Isilon, and so on and so forth. This is great news for storage customers, who can now depend on the very best in data reduction, slashing storage costs.

For those who want to get a quick and entertaining hit on how one of these partnerships works–this one with BlueArc, might we suggest this new animated demo on the Ocarina site? This demo offers a case study in how a world-class CGI animation studio, Rainmaker Entertainment, deployed BlueArc storage with Ocarina to achieve astounding compression results. (For more on this, you might also want to take a look at our Q&A with Shmuel Shottan, CTO of BlueArc from last February.)

And for more on how Ocarina is joining forces with the top storage vendors to help media and entertainment companies maximize storage capacity, check out these recent news stories:

Beth Pariseau, SearchStorage - Ocarina deduplication and Isilon clustered NAS help visual effects studio archive images, cut costs

Debra Kaufman, Studio Daily - VFX Companies Lower Storage Costs with Ocarina

Bryant Frazer, Studio Daily - Q&A: Carter George, VP of Products, Ocarina Networks
Downsizing Storage Requirements for Post-Production

Happy Friday everyone!

It’s almost July 4, and I hope all of you are starting to stock up on hot dogs, buns, American flags and sparklers. And for all you Florida folks, enjoy setting your own fireworks. When I was a kid, we had an uncle who lived in Miami who brought them up to us every year–completely terrifying me with a far too close up and personal fireworks display. But I digress. Here are some of the storage and IT industry headlines that caught my eye this week.

Chris Mellor, The Register (UK) - Adaptec Adds NAND Cache to Raid Cards

Blog Stu - The Summer of FCoE

Beth Pariseau, Storage Soup - New DR SaaS startup buddies up with Data Domain, offers SLA

Tony’s Blog Bytes - Intelligent Tiering - Recent Discussions

Happy Tuesday everyone.

Beth Pariseau at TechTarget has an interesting article this week about how a combination of storage tiering and dedupe are just right in these recessionary times. It talks in some depth about Ocarina’s deployment at Rainmaker Entertainment on BlueArc and Isilon.

The article is worth a read all the way through, as it gives some real-life examples of two very different ways that tiered storage and data deduplication together added up to storage savings. For example, Clackamas County in Oregon was able to reduce storage costs by utilizing a combination of F5 for migration to lower tiers and Data Domain to dedupe archives.

Christopher Fricke, senior IT administrator for the county is quoted in the article saying: “…It helps us not have to chase capacity while we go through a budget crunch — we can focus on performance rather than capacity…”

The article also delves into how a combination of migration and dedupe/compression can greatly reduce storage costs and simplify life at entertainment studios. Rainmaker, a digital animation studio, deployed Ocarina in order to ensure that they could keep all their files online, rather than having to back up to tape while in the midst of a project.

The article quotes Ron Stinson, Rainmaker’s director of IT and operations, who said: “We’re looking at compressing 6 terabytes down to two, and possibly storing 300 terabytes on the Isilon system in the future.”

A very interesting set of use cases that help highlight the value of dedupe in very practical ways.

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

Earlier this week on Twitter, we experienced what it’s like to have real time, public discussions with bloggers, analysts, and journalists about our product. It was a great example of why Twitter is such a powerful tool for talking about technology–not to mention one that can be a little hair-raising.

It started when Martin Glassborow, known to us all as Storagebod, tweeted about his results with the Ocarina Networks Simulator, OcaSim. We were of course aware that Martin was running these tests, but somehow none of us realized he would be releasing his results as they came in — all on this highly public forum. In short, this was one of those real rubber hitting the road type moments for a young company. Either Ocarina’s compression solution was going to knock his socks off, or it wasn’t.

As it turned out, his results were impressive. While he was less than amazed by our results on video files (which we make no claims to compress), he saw a 22% reduction on a fileset that was completely made up of JPEGs. As many people know, JPEGs are notoriously difficult to compress, as they are already compressed files. He noted this in his tweet.

Then things got a little crazy.

SearchStorage reporter Beth Pariseau retweeted his original tweet, while Stephen Foskett reported that he had seen 20% savings using the OcaSim on a set of family photos. At this point, a few analysts jumped in. Steve Duplessie from ESG said he’d be interested in running the OcaSim, while Greg Schulz of Storage IO suggested a challenge. He wrote:

“@pariseauTT @storagebod how about run against some PPT/PDF briefing/sales slide decks c which 1s compresses most, blind results of course ;)”

This raised an issue that we are getting more and more familiar with. One of the biggest challenges we face at Ocarina is getting past the disbelief factor. For so long, there have been rules about what can be compressed or deduped.

Customers will often say, “but everyone knows you can’t compress an already compressed file. It’s impossible.” Or, “I’ve tried dedupe for primary storage, and it hardly makes any difference.”

Much of what we are doing is helping people open their minds to the fact that the impossible is now not only possible, but fully operational and installed with major storage vendors such as BlueArc–which also tweeted during this exchange–and Isilon.

Oh, and Steve and Greg, we’re more than happy to send you the OcaSim. This is getting to be fun!