Online Storage Optimization

Today is a bit of a sad day for me, as this will be my last post on Online Storage Optimization. For those who are just joining us, I’ve been the regular “newsy” blogger on this site. It’s never been a traditional setup. I’m not an employee of this blog’s parent, Ocarina Networks. Rather, I’m an independent social media consultant who started out as a PR rep for the company. I moved into this role when we relaunched the blog as more of a publication in early 2009. It’s been a wonderfully fruitful arrangement that allowed me all the freedom and breadth to think, talk and learn to my heart’s content.

As much as I’ve loved working on this project, the reality of my life as a consultant has meant that I am being pulled in many directions. I’m now in the process of launching a new business, currently in stealth but soon to be revealed. (And I hope I can count on your support when it does.) This new set of responsibilities makes it impossible for me to continue to follow the daily ups and downs, trials and tribulations and fascinating personalities of the storage industry as an active blogger. I will of course be watching from afar. More than that, I’ll never forget the warm welcome I received in the storage blog-o-tweet-osphere.

With that said, I feel compelled to thank certain specific people who have made the experience of being part of the storage industry particularly enjoyable and enlightening. First, Carter George, VP Products at Ocarina and the lead blogger on this site. Carter took me under his wing from the get-go, sharing his vast wealth of knowledge as a leader in the industry. He took every single one of my questions seriously, no matter how stupid, and answered them in ways that expanded my understanding of this complex and technical subject area. For those who don’t know him personally, Carter is also one of the nicest and most approachable people you could meet. He encouraged me to stretch myself, and the result is that, lo and behold, I became a reasonably well-known and recognized “storage blogger.” Not something I would’ve dreamed of in million years.

Second, Stephen Foskett, publisher of Gestalt IT. A couple months after I started working on this blog, I got a DM on Twitter from him that read, “I hope Ocarina appreciates what you’re doing for them.” It couldn’t have been better timed. I was buried in working on a white paper about Ocarina’s newest release that I honestly didn’t believe I would ever have the technical know how to finish. At the same time, I was struggling to come up with topics for the blog. I also worried, continually, that I had pissed someone or other off by what I said on this blog or on Twitter. To get this message from someone as well-respected as Stephen gave me a much needed sense that somehow or other, I was doing okay.

Third, Murli Thirumale, CEO of Ocarina. Murli doesn’t have the personality you associate with your typical Silicon Valley CEO–he’s about as far from the image we all know of the crazed egomaniac as you can get. He is a thoughtful, respectful, and yet endlessly upbeat person who has built a successful company based on a real need. We had a relaxed working relationship, and I always appreciated his occasional contributions to this blog, which offered a “big picture” understanding of what he intended when he started the company. It was an honor to work for someone like him.

Fourth Marc Farley, storage rapper and 3Par’s social media whiz. Marc was one of the first people to respond to a Twitter tweet of mine and chat with me. We talked about whether it’s possible to remove the light bulb in your fridge, I seem to recall. Marc and I ended up creating a video together that became something of a viral hit within storage circles. He is one funny, cool guy and a true storage industry veteran who nevertheless has stayed ahead of the curve.

Fifth, Storagebod, also known as Martin Glassborow. Aside from being a great source of interesting blog posts that always kept me on my toes and wanting more, Martin is a fantastic Twitter conversationalist. He seems to have read every book on the planet. He also knows a great deal about a whole lot of other subjects, from music to health to wine. A true renaissance man and therefore someone I could always count on for a laugh or a chat–often when I most needed it.

Sixth, Greg Knieriemen. Greg has been a great guy to know, and has given me lots to think about through the exciting and active storage community he created, StorageMonkeys. Last fall, he had me on as a guest on his podcast, Infosmack, where we talked booth babes and other hot topics. He’s also a very funny guy–and a sense of humor is everything in this intense business.

Seventh, George Crump. George, of Storage Switzerland, was kind enough to give me all kinds of advice about how to run a successful blog when we first relaunched. I give myself credit for listening to him, and the results were notable. We have had a great run here, and one that I am sure will continue as I pass the baton to Mike Davis and any others who jump on the bandwagon known as Online Storage Optimization. I hope you’ll keep reading. I know I will.

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.

Last week’s BD Event was more than just a deal making event. It was a chance to learn about new product releases and trend in the storage industry. The big picture: gone are the days when end users had to accept whatever the storage industry handed down to them. Today’s small-to-medium-sized storage operations are all about designing systems in response to customer needs. Whether that’s developing end-to-end dedupe, refining and improving processes for data recovery management, delivering automated marketing tools, improving data migration, or creating storage that is more energy efficient, the push is towards designing systems with real world customer needs in mind.

The BD Event organizers’ deep connections within the storage arena meant that the two-day conference in Palo Alto drew a who’s who of industry folks. I was particularly pleased to see the number of analysts and consultants on site, including Jerome Wendt, George Crump, Deni Connor, Dave Vellante, Stephen Foskett and Tony Asaro (who unveiled his new project, Voices of IT). I also spoke at length with storage writer Howard Marks, who has a new project called DeepStorage.net that looks very promising for companies seeking solid research that they can use as outbound marketing.

Pleasingly enough, this blog’s parent Ocarina was very much the talk of the conference after kicking off the first day’s emerging vendor showcase. Carter George, VP Products gave away the fact that end-to-end dedupe is becoming a part of the overall strategy for the company. This information set tongues wagging. As DCIG’s Jerome Wendt later blogged: “Ocarina Networks is another company that is adapting to new demands from its customers. Originally it started out doing post-process deduplication of large image files (JPGs, MPEGs, etc.) that had been dormant for 30 days or more - great stuff! But now its customers and even OEMs (Ocarina did not say who) are coming to it and asking for it to do end-to-end data deduplication from primary disk to backup disk without ever reconstructing it. After all, once the data it deduplicated on primary storage, why reconstruct it to then deduplicate it again when it is backed up?”

A good question, and one that was hotly debated and discussed among those in attendance. As Jerome notes, this is a perfect example of the customer responsiveness trend. It’s also an acknowledgment of something that’s been obvious to end users for some time–data reduction shouldn’t have to be isolated within each storage sector. In this day and age you really shouldn’t have to buy separate products to dedupe within primary, nearline, and backup. It’s like having to buy a separate dishwasher for your pre-rinse, wash, and dry cycles.

Other standouts at the event included Bocada, which has updated its DR management software by introducing a new product, Prism. I plan to have the CEO Nancy Hurley on my podcast, and so will learn more about how this update is serving its existing and new customers. I confess that I went to her presentation mainly because I wanted her on my show, but I quickly realized that there was something here of note. That is, the company is addressing a real gap in how well these processes are managed and improved, a key consideration with a crucial component like data protection. She gave a brief overview of the user interface, and on its face it seemed intuitive and flexible.

TechValidate also served as a great example of a company that has evolved based on customer needs. As CEO and founder Brad O’Neill explained during his emerging vendor presentation, originally the company was formed to serve companies that were having trouble getting customer references. These all-important testimonials are sometimes difficult to get–as many industries are gun shy about trumpeting their connections with too many IT and storage vendors. However, O’Neill soon recognized a larger need among its customers for usable marketing materials that could be generated from the information they were gathering. Now, the company has a wide range of customers across numerous industries that are using it as a way to serve up marketing publications.

One final highlight of the event–I got to speak with the NetApp blogger known as “Dr. Dedupe,” Larry Freeman. Larry is best known for running around in a lab coat and stethoscope asking people if they know anything about dedupe. The videos of these shenanigans are posted on his blog and on NetApp TV on YouTube. I suppose in a sense he and I are competitors. Turns out, he’s been writing a book, “Evolution of the Storage Brain” and posting it as he writes it, chapter by chapter, on his blog. This means that readers have a chance to comment on it and shape it as it goes along. Check it out!

George Crump of Storage Switzerland has a post up today on Network Computing that really should be made required reading for every single mid-level executive in the storage industry and beyond. He offers the following simple, straightforward advice:

“…every vendor’s opening slide should have three bullets: The exact problem the solve, why they are different, and how much the product costs. Optionally, the slide could end with a ‘Should we continue? Yes or No?’”

Leaving aside the wisdom of putting a price up on the very first slide, the main point–what problem do you solve?–is the crucial piece here. When you step back and look at it, this is one of those more than obvious pieces of advice. Why else are you giving the presentation? Yet, I dare you to take a look at your slides–the ones you present to analysts, prospects, and others. What does the first one say? I thought so.

If you’re not fixing something that’s broken, why are you in business? Or, if you don’t like the negativity, you can use a phrase that my friend Tony Asaro at Contemplating IT prefers, you’re addressing “pent up demand.” That’s fine too–in fact it might be a more accurate way of expressing the situation.

The main thing is that you’re addressing some THING, not doing a creative but ultimately useless science research project. And most likely you are. But many companies are so enamored with their cool tech they forget all about the purpose of their existence. Their slides (and web sites, and press releases and other promotional platforms) are all focused inward on themselves, rather than on their raison d’etre–their customers.

Here’s an example of a problem that needs solving. Data growth is raging out of control. As it happens, it is unstructured data that is posing the biggest threat to data centers worldwide–email, documents, photos, videos, sound files–in short, the detritus of our wired age. The problem isn’t getting better–in fact, it’s worsening with each passing day. Despite the fact that the cost of disk is going down, the environmental and monetary price to be paid for cooling, power and rack space could cripple a number of otherwise healthy concerns.

Here’s how Graham Hobson, CTO of Photobox, Europe’s largest photo sharing site, explained his problem to me when I interviewed him last spring: “Our data was growing by leaps and bounds–on busy days, millions of photos are uploaded to our servers. If we were to fill a typical data center rack with storage systems, we needed 32 amps of power. But a lot of these data centers in Europe are really only geared up to provide 8 or 16 amps per rack. They were designed for telecom. So there are very few suppliers we can go to that have rack space and that power quota. And of the people that remain they’re not really inclined to give discounts, because their costs are rising.” In short, the company was literally running out of space to store their customers’ data.

That constitutes a serious and pressing issue in my book. What problem does your company solve? Is it spelled out on the first slide of all of your presentations? If not, why not?

Two identical photos placed side by side. Both are are blown up to large size on the wall. The difference? One has been compressed by 70% using a specialized compression technique called NFO, while the other is the original. Can you tell the difference?

This was the challenge we offered participants at the recent Gestalt IT Tech Field Day. Calling it the “NFO Challenge,” we at Ocarina asked the attendees to pick the optimized photo from a series of image pairs. The participants in the event were some of the sharpest folks around–a group of independent tech blogggers from around the world–but we stumped them. In fact, the winner of the contest only guessed 50% correctly. It was that difficult.

NFO stands for “Native Format Optimization.” It’s a workflow option that Ocarina provides for image and video customers to shrink their data while retaining the native file format after optimization. Today, George Crump has a thoughtful piece, sponsored by Ocarina, that gets into detail about the technology on his Storage Switzerland blog.

Here are the basics: a JPEG comes in, a smaller JPEG goes out. Right now we’re supporting JPG and GIF, and we have beta support for PNG and h.264 video. Although our GUI offers a “volume knob” (which goes to 11 by the way), the standard settings shrink media files by 30%-50% with no perceivable quality loss.

To be clear, this is lossy compression in the technical sense. There’s no substitute for looking at the real thing. We’ve had plenty imaging experts at our customers tell us that the changes made by our algorithms really don’t impact quality. But if you need bit-for-bit lossless compression, we provide that through our standard compression offering.

NFO optimization introduces image changes that render an image that is visually identical. The most common method for validating this is to print some really big before and after images and go through them in excruciating detail to look for artifacts. You can calculate PSNR and other quantitative measures, but there’s no substitute for looking at the real thing.

The customers that have really taken off with this technology include folks not so much concerned with storage, but companies trying to save money on bandwidth. Internet photo sites are an obvious sweet-spot, but some less obvious users are large Internet retailers, whose bandwidth bills are dominated by product imagery. These guys are really excited to start building out with Ocarina. And that’s just the economic benefit of NFO. The ultimate benefit is improved end-user experience and loyalty when an image-laden web site loads faster. Now we’re adding some serious value to Internet brands.

Here’s the secret sauce: Ocarina’s software looks for ways re-encode the media in ways that align image encoding with the sensitivities of the human visual system. We’ll generally analyze the image in the pixel domain, making adjustments in de-noising, Luma/Chroma quantization, Huffman optimizations, better motion compensation, and more.  To read about these optimizations, and hear more about what our team of Ph.D.s has accomplished with these algorithms, read our new white paper at OcarinaNetworks.com (http://www.ocarinanetworks.com/images/resources/nfo.pdf)

In what seems to be a theme this week in Online Storage Optimization–we’re all about what’s next, and what’s “out there” in the stratosphere. We’re also not beneath making as many pop cultural sci fi references as we can. That’s just the way we roll.

Analyst George Crump had a nice piece in Networking Computing (the new umbrella publication that has eaten Byte and Switch for breakfast). His article, “Deduplication Moves Beyond Deduplication” gives a good overview of the state of dedupe and where it might be headed. For those of you who have been reading this blog regularly, we’re predicting a major leap in innovation around dedupe.

We see an end-to-end or “global dedupe” as the obvious next step for this groundbreaking technology. As Carter George, our lead writer noted a recent post: we see a future in which dedupe will have post process architecture, and will find duplicates across multiple nodes and multiple storage pools. It will also integrate a combination of technologies–most likely the best will be those that have both dedupe and content aware compression. This has been the direction that this blog’s parent Ocarina has taken, and it has proven a very wise strategy.

As Crump notes, Ocarina differs from other solutions in that it “adds deduplication to the process as well as content specific optimizers that provide a greater understanding of the file formats being processed.” The next wave of dedupe, he predicts, will still involve two or three different solutions within an environment. No doubt there will be a path that takes us from here to the ideal of simplification we envision. Meanwhile, they will continue to add features that ensure that the investment in dedupe is amply leveraged.

I’d say that one great example of that is the ability to easily facilitate migration among multiple tiers of storage–in other words, migrating data and tracking its location as part of the optimization process. A solution that can do that in addition to reducing file sizes offers notable savings and simplification on both ends. Oh, did I mention Ocarina already does that?

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.

Data deduplication has become a very hot topic these days, especially in light of EMC’s recent and very high profile acquisition of Data Domain. This week, analyst George Crump of Storage Switzerland made some predictions as to where this technology is heading. His post, The Foundation of DeDupe’s Next Era, asserts that it will require many different approaches–likely from a number of vendors–in order to best reduce the multiple types of data found in primary storage. I agree with much of what he says, but here are some further thoughts on the topic.

First, a general observation. In every new major market, there is always an early winner, and then that early winner is typically leap-frogged by a 2.0 approach that solves the problems of the first wave. There are a number of examples of this. Browsers, for starters. Netscape made the market, only to be wiped out by Internet Explorer. In the file serving market, Auspex created the market, but NetApp blew them away. The list goes on.

With that in mind, there are four elements that I believe will define the winning architecture in Dedupe 2.0:

1. Global dedupe: Deduplication will find duplicates across multiple nodes and multiple storage pools. No matter where a data stream comes in to the solution, if it has a dupe, it will be found.

2. Post-Process: The second wave of dedupe will be a post-process architecture. Data Domain tells us as much when they focus so much of their marketing on their latest product (the 800 series) on why in-band is the right answer. They’re the market leader, they have a smoking fast new product – why are they so worried about post-processing that they make it the focus of their release messaging? Who are they worried about? Not the vendors they’ve already beaten. No, they’re worried because they know the 2.0 generation will be done this way. They are already positioning now for the new competitors they know they’ll see in the future; they’re being defensive, because they understand their own limitations better than anyone else.

There are several reasons dedupe will move to a post-process architecture, but the main one is better results in data reduction. Dedupe 2.0 won’t be just dedupe – it will  be dedupe plus content-aware compression. This means two- and three-dimensional compressors need to see the context of data, not just the small window of data passing through memory in an in-band appliance. Done right, there’s no reason why post-processing can’t be just as fast as in-band, and data reduction will be dramatically better.

3. Scale-out Processing: In Dedupe 2.0 you will be able to scale out throughput by adding more nodes to your dedupe cluster to process in-coming streams. The Dedupe 2.0 cluster will look like one single target to backup (or other) sources. It will have a load-balanced global namespace, but behind that you could have one cheap server or 32 big fast ones. You’ll be able to start small and grow big, without changing anything on the backup software or writer side. Data streams can get load-balanced to any node, and because of global dedupe, any node can dedupe in real time with data coming to any other node. Instead of having to pick which model has the right throughput for you, start with one node, and if you grow from needing half a Terabyte an hour to 5 Terabytes an hour throughput, you add a few more nodes.

4. Scale-out Capacity: As the between backups (with short retention windows) and archives (potentially long retention periods) continue to blur, the dedupe 2.0 store wants to scale out to massive amounts of storage. That should be independent of processing capacity. For example, the shop that does not backup that much every day should not have to buy some top of the line model just so that they can get enough storage to keep their backups online for 7 years.

Just like processing and throughput capability, capacity should scale independently. You also should be able to add as much storage as you want – inside a dedupe 2.0 cluster node, on a SAN, or network-attached – independently of whether you bought the small cheap dedupe node or the big fast one or a cluster of many of them.

Some vendor will deliver a dedupe 2.0 cluster solution that meets these four must-have requirements. Who knows? That might be Data Domain, the winner of the first wave. But it might be someone else, too.

The question of what to do with already-deduped input streams is a separate but interesting topic. For the most part, customers voted with their wallets against doing source dedupe for backups. After all, EMC bought Data Domain even though it already had source-based dedupe technology Avamar.

More and more, file servers and even database servers are going to be doing dedupe of the primary and nearline file systems, not for backup, but for storage efficiency in primary storage. That means that data streams going to the backup solution with dedupe are going to be already deduped in some way.

All of which raises even more questions–which will have to wait for a later post. What’s the right way to deal with that? Is the answer something that needs to be done on the source side or the backup side? Meanwhile, I invite your comments.

George Crump has a piece in Byte and Switch today that poses an important question: “Can we get to a single point of deduplication?” This is a question that we have taken up in one form or another in some of our recent posts, such as this one and this one.

In the article, Crump asks the question in another way: “… can you have all your data tiers; primary, archive and backup deduplicated by a single engine?”

In light of the recent focus on deduplication, this in my view is a question that really does need to be raised. For how long will the industry to silo out these different tiers for its deduplication solutions? And how much sense does it make to rehydrate data every time you move it, in order to once again deduplicate it? Not a lot.

Crump writes: “The current deduplication vendors could work on building out their solutions to either scale up into primary storage performance (see Data Domain’s DD880) or they could move their existing data duplication technology into other markets; see the increased speed of Ocarina Networks and Permabit as well as their move into cloud storage.”

At the same time, as we’ve pointed out here, online storage is quite a bit different than backups and so far at least, none of the successful backup dedupe vendors - Data Domain, Diligent, Quantum, etc. have been able to break into it. Rather, it is NetApp and Ocarina who have been the trailblazers.

Crump makes another key point:

“NetApp and Ocarina could continue to enhance and improve the re-hydration speed of their technologies to make read performance a non-issue, making primary storage a viable platform. Ocarina can already maintain the deduplicated format as they move through tiers, so landing on backup or archive disk would simply be another move for them.”

This is an interesting observation, and one that is often missed in reporting on both of these solutions. We look forward to seeing more debate and discussion on this issue, which was well kicked off with this piece.

Even in these recessionary times. Green IT continues to gain momentum. This, according to a recent survey from Symantec, which states: “Virtually all the companies surveyed are discussing their Green strategy. They are not just talking, either. Green budgets are on the rise and IT is more than willing to pay a premium on energy efficient products…”

Citing this survey, analyst and consultant George Crump argues in an article in Byte and Switch today that energy savings are possible in many areas of IT, including storage.

Update: also found this article on TechTarget that’s a little incomplete, but worth a read nevertheless — Green storage best practices control costs, increase energy efficiency.

Writes Crump:

“I admit it, I was wrong. I assumed that green IT initiatives would be put on the back burner as we slogged our way through the current recession but according to a recent survey by Symantec apparently just the opposite is happening. Will green storage be a key part of the green IT effort?”

The answer could well be “yes.” In fact, there is a green side to data reduction, which as many are aware has been a very hot topic lately–especially in light of the recent battle between storage giants NetApp and EMC over archive deduplication leader Data Domain.

Crump argues that one of the greenest forms of storage is tape, which doesn’t require any power or cooling.

He also notes: “While disk archives that leverage clustered storage will have some difficulty in powering down drives since data is distributed across nodes in the cluster, they could power manage the nodes in the cluster itself. Of course, they gain power efficiency through greater density per node - bigger drives, compression and deduplication.”

Crump is discussing archive storage here, and cites Permabit as a solution for that realm. There is no doubt that data reduction for primary storage is a particularly key way to reduce one’s storage footprint. Primary storage, by its very nature doesn’t lend itself to tape, because the data is being kept online. Dedupe is therefore becoming a must-have, with all the leading vendor offering some type of it for their primary storage. For those who would like notably better results, a next-generation solution such as Ocarina is a way to further shrink files. The results–lower power, cooling and space usage. Green indeed.