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.

It’s back… That’s right, on Gestalt IT you can now find details on the upcoming Tech Field Day, to be held in Boston April 8 and 9. This event brings together bloggers from around the world for two days of deep dives at tech companies. The result is expected to be a multitude of tweets, blog posts, videos and photos. The concept is a clever one, and as participants in the first Tech Field Day, we’re thrilled to see it continue. The upcoming Boston event has an impressive list of presenting sponsors: EMC, Cisco, Data Robotics, HP, and something called VKernel, a VM optimization company.

Today I spoke to organizer and Gestalt IT Publisher Stephen Foskett about his plans. I couldn’t help but wonder, when looking at the list of companies that will be presenting, whether the profusion of big names represents a new chapter for Tech Field Day.

“I was trying to find interesting companies in Boston and they just happened to be more of the big IT companies,” said Stephen. “As always, I’m inviting great companies. That’s the real story.”

There is plenty of new blood among the invited bloggers. About half of the delegates weren’t at the last Tech Field Day. The list for Boston includes some well-known virtualization bloggers: Jason Boche, David Davis, Edward Haletky, and Gabrie Van Zanten. Another new face is Matt Simmons, a system administrator with a popular blog called Standalone SysAdmin. Meanwhile, the previous delegates developed some documents designed to help both sponsors and bloggers. These are now posted on Gestalt IT as well, at this link.

I also got the scoop on the upcoming Seattle Tech Field Day, slated for mid-July. While he declined to name the companies, Stephen did say it’s already half booked with presenting sponsors.

“Redmond is home to a huge number of tech companies. I underestimated the number,” he said. “Some of the companies have lots of different product lines and want to do repeats.”

For the many of us who aren’t going to be able to attend, the Twitter hash tag #techfieldday is the way to get a sense of the proceedings in real time. There’s also a handy Twitter list of the Boston delegates. We’ll be watching!

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 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!

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)

Tech Field Day may be over, but it lives on in digital form–scattered like so many tiny shreds of confetti across the interwebs. One of the delegates at the event, Rod Haywood, put together this video on his Musings of Rodos blog about Day 2 of the event, featuring interviews with Ocarina’s own Goutham Rao, plus Peter Pistek of Nirvanix, W. Curtis Preston of Truth in IT, and Jim Sherhart of Data Robotics.  Rod was kind enough to allow me to repost it, and so here it is for your viewing pleasure:

Gestalt IT Field Day 2 from Rodney Haywood on Vimeo.

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!

Lots of speculation this past week in the storage tweet-o-blog-0sphere around our “Bring Out Your Data” Challenge for Tech Field Day. We can’t wait to see what these smart and savvy participants bring us, and we’re confident about the results. There will be prizes awarded for those who stymie us and those who get the greatest reduction. This morning, we sent out a brief email giving a few more details about it. In the spirit of transparency, here is what we sent to the attendees:

Dear Tech Field Day attendee,

Ocarina Networks has issued a challenge to you for Tech Field Day: bring out your data. In brief, we’re asking you to arrive on November 13 at our offices with a thumb drive containing your toughest data set. We will compress and dedupe that data for you right in front of your eyes. This will be a chance for you to see the Ocarina ECOsystem in action so that you can assess data reduction and performance for yourself in real time.

Here are a few guidelines.

1. Try to keep it under 2 GB. This is to ensure that as many participants as possible have an opportunity to shrink their data during the four-hour time period you will be at the Ocarina offices.

2. If you would like to see both deduplication and compression, we recommend that you bring data that includes duplicates. In other words, one 2GB file is not going to be deduplicatable, but several different files that have shared objects will show much more interesting results. If you’re only interested in seeing our compression capabilities, then this isn’t necessary, but please keep in mind that the results you get in that case won’t reflect the deduplication feature.

3. Give us a mix of files from your local hard drive.

4. Label your stick. Put your name somewhere on the physical thumb drive. Also, give the directory your own first and last name.

A final note: we will return your flash drive to you at the end of the day, but please don’t bring us a sole copy of an important piece of data, as we may return it to you with the data in a compressed format.

Thanks for you participation in Tech Field Day, and we look forward to meeting you next week!

Best wishes,

The Ocarina Social Media Team

Carter George, Mike Davis, Sunshine Mugrabi, and Helen Miller-Montana

For the upcoming Gestalt IT Tech Field Day November 12-13 we’re expecting a contingent of bloggers and other thought leaders to converge on Silicon Valley. When they arrive at the Ocarina Networks offices in San Jose, we won’t just be giving them a demonstration. In fact, we’ll be taking something away from them.

In anticipation of this event, we’re challenging the attendees to bring us their toughest data set on a thumb drive. It can involve whatever files they want Ocarina to try to shrink–JPEGs, video, audio, PDFs, homeshares, email databases and so on. They will probably want to include several similar but not duplicate files, such as a series of PowerPoint files that contain some of the same slides but also different ones, or similar slides that have been edited.

On November 13 when the participants arrive, we’ll collect all the thumb drives. Then we’ll pick a few at random from a hat, and do a real time demonstration of the Ocarina ECOsystem compressing and deduping the files.

This is a first as far as we know, and it should provide for a very lively session. Here are some of the questions they’ll probably be asking.

1. What kind of data reduction will I get with this test data set?

2. Which files are being compressed, and by how much?

3. What kind of deduplication results will I see?

4. How does Ocarina do on image files? Video? Already compressed files such as Zip or PDF?

We hereby issue this challenge to the participants, and look forward to showing them what Ocarina can do.