Online Storage Optimization

Across the storage blog-o-tweet-osphere today folks are donning green scarves, putting four leaf clovers in their lapels, and generally proclaiming the luck of the Irish. Yes, it’s a good life in storageland. And there’s plenty of news to amuse and bemuse.

EMC made a big splash this week with a presentation to analysts by President and COO Pat Gelsinger that outlined a new vision for virtual storage. You can listen to the whole thing here. Chris Mellor at the Register called the plan a sign that EMC has “lost their marbles,” but others think it represents the future of storage.

Here is some of the commentary from both within and outside EMC:

EMC:

Chuck’s Blog - This changes everything

Blog Stu - Virtual Storage, not just another V-word

Commentary:

**New addition thanks to @sfoskett** Burton Group: EMC’s Global Storage Vision

Gregs’ StorageIO blog - Virtual Storage and Social Media: What did EMC not Announce?

Chris Mellor, The Register - Gelsinger stuns analysts and colleagues with storage pool plan

Stacey Higginbotham , GigaOM (yes, GigaOm! Welcome to sto-land, Stacey) - EMC’s Crazy Plan to Create a Worldwide Data Cloud

In other news… there’s a really sweet video on the Hitachi Data Systems site that talks about its partnership with this blog’s parent Ocarina Networks, and how this will benefit customers, reducing their data at rest by 10:1. Ocarina CEO Murli Thirumale makes a pixelated, jazz music backed appearance.

Here’s the video in its entirety, or go to the HDS blog site and watch a higher quality version:

Meanwhile, it’s not all sword crossing in the land of the storers.

As we already know, our kind can rally for a good cause. This past week, arch rivals NetApp and EMC raised money for kids with cancer by shaving their locks for St. Baldrick’s. NetApp led the charge, and EMC responded in kind.

Virtual Geek Chad Sakac sums it up here: A little EMC/NetApp Fun - to help cure cancer…

A heartwarming effort.

That’s all for now. Remember, it’s not what you store, it’s how you store it.

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.

Drobo maker Data Robotics has a major announcement out today that has the storage blog-o-tweet-osphere all atwitter. It has introed two new products, Drobo S and DroboElite. These new models add new functionality to the popular desktop, SOHO and single server SMB storage, making them faster, easier and more failproof. With the new Elite, they’re extending into the hot SMB storage market. We at Tech Field Day got a sneak peek on November 13. The new Drobos were literally unveiled–a black cloth pulled off to reveal the sleek black boxes beneath. To all of the attendees’ credit, no one broke the embargo. (This bodes well for future Tech Field Days–and I’m told a new one is already in the works.)

Today, the pressure was released and everyone has a chance to talk about the announcement. First out of the gate of the Gestalt IT/Tech Field Day crew, Devang Panchigar on his StorageNerve blog with a post that offers a comprehensive summary of the tech, plus a great video with a killer soundtrack. Next up was Stephen Foskett with a Willie Wonka comparison t0 make. He points out that one of the best new features of the Drobo S is its dual-drive protection. As we discovered at Drobo’s offices, both the Drobo S and DroboElite have built-in “self-healing” functionality. In fact, we were encouraged to fail a drive so that we could see it in action. That was fun!

Data Robotics’ BeyondRAID has birthed a new era. At a time when everyone–even personal home users–are facing an onslaught of rich media  such as video and photos, more and more people are seeking a simple, yet reliable way to safely store their data. Prosumers such as professional photographers are already fans of the Drobo–I have no doubt they’ll be interested in the Drobo S with its eSATA connectivity and better performance. The DroboElite is an SMB level offering, with iSCSI SAN support and the potential to expand into virtualized architectures. This is a major departure for the more prosumer-focused company.

I see the Elite catapulting Data Robotics to a new category–something its shareholders should be applauding. It is reaching well beyond the corner it seemed painted into in the past. And Data Robotics should also be congratulated for coming up with such a memorable product name. I don’t know about you, but when I hear “Drobo” I keep thinking it must be some less-famous member of the Muppets. Scooter the assistant’s assistant, perhaps? (And you know he’d need someone to store all the great jokes and songs.)

Here are some other recommended pieces of reading about the new Drobos:

Louis Gray - By Thinking Small, Data Robotics’ Success Looking Big

The Register - Chris Mellor: Drobo restrings boxes to double-up product range
ZDNet - Andrew Nusca: Data Robotics debuts enterprise-ready DroboElite, five-bay Drobo S

Slashgear - Data Robotics unveil new Drobo S and DroboElite backup systems

Network Computing - Howard Marks Drobo Elite - Ready for the Server Room if not for the Data Center

We’ll be watching this company and space!

In today’s UK Register, Chris Mellor talked with Brian Biles of Data Domain about its plans for global dedupe. In it, Brian says that Ocarina is not “synergistic” with Data Domain. Writes Chris: “Data Domain set out to solve a data protection problem whereas Ocarina set out to solve a media management problem.” He then quotes Brian, “‘I think it [Ocarina] is in a different market that’s not that synergistic. It’s a different choice from how to optimise data protection.’”

Chris’s final comment? Even if Ocarina offered an OEM deal, Data Domain wouldn’t be “enthusiastic.” Well, that remains to be seen, and actually, it isn’t the important question. Ocarina agrees that, for now, the right place for its functionality is not in the backup tier where Data Domain lives. There is no reason to believe that Data Domain’s acquisition by EMC in any way diminishes the strength of the technology partnership that already exists between Ocarina and EMC.

Ocarina is the Rolls Royce solution for online data reduction, and in that sense, we compete with NetApp Dedupe, not Data Domain. The reality is that right now, as a member of the EMC Celerra Velocity program, Ocarina has been a point of synergy for them, and we don’t see that ending any time soon. The synergy is that if you do online dedupe right on your NAS platform, including EMC’s Celerra, then it plays right in to the strengths of Data Domain when it comes time to back up.

In the Data Domain product, you have a product that’s optimized for the backup world – fast sequential throughput in support of backup windows driven by standard backup applications. In the NetApp case, you have an OK implementation of simple block dedupe, designed to give some data reduction results without sacrificing too much performance in support of random I/O by end users.

There is no right or wrong answer here – both products take the correct approach for the problem that they solve. What’s misleading is the positioning of Ocarina as a solution for media accounts. While Ocarina does have many successful installs in rich media accounts, our core dedupe engine is intended to give multiple storage vendors the same kind of fast, embedded dedupe solution that NetApp has for all online file types. Just to clear any misconceptions, Ocarina has a diverse - and fast growing - customer base, with existing customers in publishing, semiconductor, bio-informatics, energy, film-making, eDiscovery, and Web 2.0.

Because Ocarina’s solution combines dedupe with content-aware compression, Ocarina can address a much broader set of data types and customers than any dedupe-only product, including NetApp. With Ocarina, you can use policies to configure Ocarina for simple dedupe only, giving Ocarina storage partners like BlueArc, EMC, HDS, HP and Isilon equivalent data reduction and primary storage performance as NetApp dedupe.

Alternatively, you can set the policies to be more aggressive, to use all the content-aware compressors, and get much much better data reduction than NetApp while still supporting reasonably fast random I/O for end-users. Since dedupe in general does not get good results on already-compressed files – especially images, video,  Zip and other compressed data – having content-aware compressors allows Ocarina to address all those files in addition to providing great dedupe performance for corporate and enterprise file types. Finally, Ocarina works across multiple types of storage, so a customer can have a single dedupe “language” across all their NAS and primary storage vendors.

Ocarina is, therefore a better technology than NetApp dedupe that also has the advantage of being vendor agnostic. At the same time, it’s complementary to Data Domain. That synergy comes from a fundamental difference in how a customer backs up data that has been deduplicated by Ocarina versus data that has been deduplicated by NetApp. With NetApp, when you go to backup a deduped volume, NetApp will rehydate that volume, expanding the data back to its original full size. With Ocarina, we have a dedupe-aware implementation of NDMP – the backup protocol standard – that allows us to keep data in its deduplicated and compressed state as it is backed up, while still allowing single file restores.

This actually raises an interesting question: Do you still need Data Domain in that case? After all, you’re backing up already deduped data?

Well, yes, actually. Backups are repetitive. So even if you perfectly dedupe the live online volume, if you back it up every day, that process is going to create more dupes in the backup target. Data Domain will find those and eliminate them. The data reduction is additive. The combination of Ocarina for live volumes and Data Domain as a backup target has a big advantage for backups, because it shrinks the backup window. Because the first pass of dedupe has already been done on the filer, there is less data that has to move from storage to backup. If you have 100TB on a set of NAS filers, and Ocarina shrinks that to 40TB, then you’ve reduced the amount of data that needs to be sent across a network to the Data Domain by 60%, making your backup window smaller and faster. Data Domain, in turn, will shrink that data further with every subsequent backup.

As I mentioned in a blog post yesterday, the media is beginning to swoop down and take note of yesterday’s announcement that HP is now an official reseller of Ocarina. It’s pretty darn big news.

Here are some of the better articles that have appeared. I’ll add more as they come in, so keep rechecking this post. In fact, if you’re worried about missing something, I suggest you subscribe to the Online Storage Optimization news feed by clicking the RSS symbol above.

New addition: Paul Shread, Enterprise Storage Forum - HP Sees Opportunity in Data Deduplication

Chris Mellor, The Register (UK)  — HP Makes Ocarina Music

As Chris puts it: “Ocarina has similar partnerships with BlueArc, EMC and Isilon. It looks almost inevitable that every other filer supplier must be looking at the Ocarina product and thinking a reseller deal might be a good idea. Otherwise, it could lose sales to the competition when a lot of image-type data is being stored.”

Raju Shanbhag, TMCnet - Ocarina Networks’ Ocarina ECOsystem to be Resold by HP

Says Raju: “According to the company, this solution has the intelligence to extract and analyze the component parts of virtually any file … As the amount of information companies produce on a daily basis are increasing phenomenally, companies are looking for highly scalable storage solutions that efficiently and cost-effectively manage these volumes.“

Sometimes someone at Online Storage Optimization writes a post that is so controversial, so intense and thought-provoking, that it seems the entire world is lining up to read it. Later, we find out that while most of the world had a chance to peruse it, there was some small part of the global community–a system administrator here, a CIO there–who, tragically, did not get a chance.

The moment was gone. The post consigned to the archives, where it has been left to molder and sink into obscurity. Such is the pace of the news business. But today we decided that we could defy the laws of physics, and actually turn back the clock. Force time to stop, make a U-turn and come barreling back at us like some kind of souped up toy PowerWheels car on snow.

So here you have it–your guide to some of our most thought-provoking and interesting posts since this blog’s humble beginnings in April 2008. A trip down memory lane for some, and a whole new road to travel for others.

Introducing Storage Optimization Blog - This was the very first post that ever appeared on this blog. While hardly likely to win the prize for the cleverest headline, it actually said a lot more than just “hello world.” It talks about the growth of unstructured data, and even mentions a pioneering company that would later be fodder for mispronounciations on CNBC, Data Domain.

Less is More - Part 2 - Again, this is from the very early days of this blog, before we discovered that it might help to write a headline that made sense. But putting that aside, this is another example of a post that is as relevant now as it was way, way back in the olden days of Spring 2008. It even addresses an aspect of the massive scalability question that Chris Mellor just raised in an  opinion piece in The Register. In short, this post is worth a read now more than ever before.

Capacity Optimized Storage - The Emergence of the O Tier - This is one of those posts that I still look back and marvel at. In it, Carter George (our chief author) coins a phrase that has since made it into many discussions of storage tiers and tiering. That’s right, if you hear about the “O” tier, and you’re talking about a capacity optimized tier of storage, then you have Carter to thank for this handy term. And by the way, if you’re thinking you’d like to get some advice about how to create cost-efficient storage tiering, it’s not too late to sign up for webinar that will be taking place this Wednesday, August 5 at 9 a.m. PDT (Noon EDT).

Storing Bush’s Brain - This post shows that one day, we did learn about writing headlines.

Entrepreneurship Meets American Idol - This guest post by Ocarina Networks CEO Murli Thirumale offers insights on what makes for a great start-up concept. And, what doesn’t. (Hint: falling in love with your technology may not be the smartest route.)

Well, that’s it for now. Hope you were able to sit back, relax, and enjoy the ride down this winding road known as Online Storage Optimization.

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.

As anyone who has tried to lose weight knows, it’s no easy feat to get and stay slim. No doubt you’ve seen the barrage of ads that promise you a quick fix (hydroxycut anyone?), but most of us know these fad programs don’t work in the long run. Rather, the key is a combination of eating less (and making healthy choices about what we do eat) and exercising.

Well, something similar could be said of your storage budget. If you are like the vast majority of enterprises today, you’re dealing with what can be described as data obesity. Whatever type of array you’re running, it’s likely gaining files every day. Many are no doubt those pesky rich media and compound Office documents like PowerPoint and PDF that add more and more weight–stressing your resources to the breaking point.

To keep up, you have to cut the flab out of your storage. This, too, calls for a two-pronged approach. First, there’s the “diet” element. This means doing a better job of tiering, and keeping files only as long as you really need them. Of course, there are many examples of near-active and inactive data that nevertheless must be kept online for compliance and other similar reasons. But the plain fact is that many of the files that are clogging up storage systems at small- to medium-sized enterprises have nothing to do with their core business at all. They can be everything from family photos to funny videos to old documents that no one will EVER look at again.

The second part is the “exercise” element of keeping your storage slim and trim. That is, run a storage efficiency tool –may we suggest Ocarina as one example — that will efficiently trim the fat out of your data. That kind of combination means that you really can tighten your belt on your storage budget. With our solution, for example, a typical enterprise will reclaim half again as much storage space. We can shrink down your files to a slim and trim size — even on the types that stymie most conventional dedupe solutions.

To find out more about how Ocarina stacks up against the leading dedupe solution, give this recent article by Chris Mellor in the UK Register a read: Ocarina Dedupes Better than NetApp.

The storage blog-o-tweet-o-sphere has been pretty quiet so far this week. Perhaps everyone is nursing jet lag and hangovers following their week at SNW. Though there was a minor dust-up or two between our favorite pair of battling giants last week to keep us all entertained.

So far, a few pieces of news that we’re noting:

The buzz is EMC’s plan for a major product announcement on the virtual data center this week. This will be big, says blogger and EMC-er Storagezilla. Chris Mellor at The Register is predicting it could be the “much-anticipated EMC Symmetrix refresh … with the expected DMX-5 product code-named Tigon.” The company is planning what looks to be an all-day conference call about it “Overtake the Future.” It’s not too late to sign-up on this page.

Deduplication Joins the Primary Storage Fray - InformationWeek has a piece by Howard Marks that covers Ocarina and other solutions that shrink primary storage files. He sums up Ocarina’s technology as follows: “Where the other dedupe schemes look at files as sets of bits, Ocarina’s Online Storage Optimization Solution takes another approach, recognizing common file types and uses different techniques to space-optimize each.”

Nice blog post by Christopher Kusik, known to tweeters everywhere as CXI, on how he uses Twitter. Some of the tips in here were news to this blogger–for example, he keeps a column open for his frequently searched topics on Twitter (in his case, all are related to his company NetApp.) Not something I’ve ever thought to do.

Happy Monday everyone.