Online Storage Optimization

This Saturday I’m participating in an event that aims to bridge the gender gap in computer science and engineering. It’s the first annual Dare2BDigital, a conference for young women in the 7th-10th grades that exposes them to the new and exciting career options that now exist in computer science and engineering.

Why such a young group? Studies suggest this is the time when we begin the decision-making process about our career path. These young women are beginning to make pictures in their minds about how they’ll be spending their days when they enter the workforce. They might well be gifted in math or logic. But computer science still suffers from an image problem. Most people–girls in particular–see it as the realm of geeky guys who make endless Star Trek references, drink too much soda and have questionable grooming habits.

What many don’t know is how far this field has come in the last decade. If you’re creatively inclined, now is one of the best times to enter the vast computing field and start poking around for an interest area. An example, one of the first workshops at Dare2BDigital to fill up was one taught by Pixar technical directors on “Computers, Art, and Animation — How opposing specialties come together to create feature films.” What a a treat for a middle- or high school-aged girl to be able to dip her toes into the exciting field of computer animation. Other popular choices were programming with Python, making a Facebook game (with folks from Zynga), my workshop on being a tech reporter, and others. For the full list of workshops to share with your daughter, go to the workshops page.

The event is sponsored by SAP, along with many other top names in technology, including, HP, Microsoft, Cisco, IBM, Symantec, and others. What do you think? Is this the way to bring more women into the fold? What else can be done to open up the world of computing to more potentially qualified and creative people?

Full disclosure: I personally am receiving a small stipend from the event presenters for my consulting work on this conference. This blog’s parent Ocarina Networks is in no way involved, other than to be supportive of the concept.

It’s been a tough year — a worldwide recession, a sluggish housing market, rising unemployment … and on top of all that, the tarnished image of one of sports’ most squeaky clean players. Well, actually, there have been some bright spots. As DCIG blogger and storage analyst Jerome Wendt notes while looking back at the past year, “Deduplication is the Big Success Story of 2009.”

Wendt writes: “Deduplication is arguably one of the most notable trends of 2009 as it has been widely adopted by users after bursting onto the scene just a few years ago and has grown to be included in both software and hardware products.”

Wendt focuses on dedupe for backups, where there has been much publicized activity over the past year. The big storage story of 2009 was of course the battle between storage titans EMC and NetApp over backup dedupe specialist Data Domain. He cites an industry survey from SearchDataBackup that indicates that 41% of enterprises either are or are seriously considering dedupe to control data growth and costs. He also notes that the despite the predicted demise of Quantum, that dedupe company remains strong.

Dedupe for backups is one part of the cost reduction puzzle. Another part is to reduce data at the source, in primary storage. This is of course the specialty of this blog’s parent Ocarina, which implements a unique combination of content-aware dedupe and compression to achieve startling results. It focuses on the very types of unstructured data that are driving storage growth today–emails, images, documents, and so on. The company has been partnering with almost every leading storage provider, including HP, EMC, HDS, BlueArc, and Isilon. Another  leader in this space is NetApp, which has a strong dedupe for primary offering that has also garnered a great deal of attention.

Here’s the thing, the economy might be slowing down, but data growth continues apace. This is one reason that the storage industry has been thriving this year. But rather than standing still, what is spells is a concerted effort to keep that data under control. As Wendt notes, another of the year’s big trends is cloud storage, which offers companies more flexibility for storing some percentage of their data. I would also add that virtualization has taken a huge leap forward, not only in terms of the technology itself, but also in terms of adoption over the past year. Yet another way to attack the problem.

So if 2009 was all about dedupe for backups, I’m going to guess that 2010 will be very much about data reduction at all points on the data life cycle. What do you predict?

Image: Gizmodo

This week the storage blog-o-tweet-osphere lit up like a Christmas tree with glowing reports from HP Tech Day–or #HPTechDay as it was known on Twitter. Something of a misnomer, it was in fact two tech days. Held at the company’s Colorado Springs facility, the event was proof that HP has recognized the power of blogging to get its message across.

The event seems to have electrified the bloggers, who were particularly impressed by the evolution of HP’s EVA line. Even the normally critical Nigel Poulton wrote on his Ruptured Monkey blog that the event convinced him that HP does “get” storage–a complete 180 from his previous opinion. Wow.

For a nice roundup, HP’s Calvin Zito has assembled all the links to blog posts thus far recounting the two-day event thus far. And the latest breaking post is from Storage Nerve, Devang Panchigar, who has included video in his coverage.

Here’s the list of the smart guys (and one gal!) that attended from the blogging camp. (Thanks to Rich Brambley, from whom I have stolen this information.) If you’re interested in learning more about storage, these are some of the best folks to follow on Twitter and regularly read:

• Nina Buik (@NinaBuik)  Connect Community
• Stephen Foskett (@sfoskett)  http://blog.fosketts.net
• Robin Harris  (@StorageMojo) http://storagemojo.com
• Greg Knieriemen (@Knieriemen)  http://www.storagemonkeys.com
• Ray Lucchesi (@RayLucchesi) http://silvertonconsulting.com/blog/
• John Obeto (@JohnObeto) http://absolutevista.com
• Frank Owen (@fowen)  http://techvirtuoso.com
• Devang Panchigar  (@StorageNerve)  http://storagenerve.com
• Nigel Poulton (@nigelpoulton)  http://blogs.rupturedmonkey.com
• Simon Seagrave (@kiwi_Si) http://www.techhead.co.uk
• Rich Brambley (@rbrambley) http://vmetc.com/
• Calvin Zito (@HPStorageGuy) http://www.communities.hp.com/online/blogs/datastorage/default.aspx

VMWorld is in full swing in San Francisco this week, and attendance has gone far beyond all predictions. I’ve heard a number of estimates, ranging from 12,000-15,000. In any case, the attendance has blown away their original prediction of 8,000-10,000. Seems there were a lot of last-minute registrees.

The downside of this is that the events–particularly the labs–are now so overbooked that there are reports of two hour waits for demos. Sessions are hard to get into as well. Even the expo floor has been snarled with pedestrian traffic.

Here are some of the reasons that could account for the unexpected upsurge in attendance at this year’s VMWorld:

Virtualization is a technology that promises to actually reduce costs, particularly around power and space. As Stephen Herrod, CTO of VMWare told attendees in his keynote this morning, the machines that are being used to run VMWorld itself would take up the equivalent of three football fields if it weren’t for virtualization. Instead, they all fit into one end zone. So even in a recession, companies are willing to invest in this technology.

Virtualization has given, but it has also taken away–that is, there is a storage bottleneck as a result of the complexity it has created. End users are forced to educate themselves about potential storage solutions (and other simplifying technology) to reduce the pain they’re experiencing as a result of this new level of complexity.

As an example, I was at a dinner event last night for a new company that just has come out of stealth, EvoStor. VMWare CEO Paul Maritz spoke at the event, a sign that the company is taking this seriously. In a nutshell, the company claims to be storage designed specifically for VMWare vSphere. It was built from the ground up, they say, to manage the challenges and complexity of virtualization. It’s too early to tell of course whether this will be a better solution than the ones out there now, but its very existence supports this argument.

Possibility number three: the economy is recovering! This is the sunniest view, but given my moniker I should be allowed this one. I do think that many companies are loosening the purse strings for corporate travel, particularly in areas where the expense could be so easily justified.

The mood at this year’s VMWorld is certainly very upbeat. I’ve seen vendor presos–particularly in storage–truly mobbed by attendees. I’ve spent time at the EMC, NetApp, Isilon, and HP booths and there’s a ton of activity. Even some of the smaller concerns, such as Asigra, have a steady stream of traffic. Now, this could all be due to the raffle announcements, attractive “booth babes” in nurse uniforms, magicians and jugglers, but I’d also like to believe that there’s real interest here from potential customers.

All in all, an exciting show. I feel lucky to be there to see and experience the bleeding edge of tech.

We’re just one week away from VMWorld, to be held here in San Francisco Aug. 31-Sept. 3 and the storage blogo-tweet-osphere is lighting up like a Christmas tree. This blogger will be there with her trusty iPhone, ready to send out tweets on every imaginable topic, rumor, random thought, and food item she encounters.

We’re also hoping to make it to the VMWorld Tweetup on the first night of the conference, Monday, August 31. As with most such events, a major reason to attend is to sit around and gossip with industry folks. For me, this will also mean a chance to meet some people in person that I have so far only encountered virtually.

It’s obviously a big year for EMC, the majority owner of VMware and we expect to see many of its bloggers there, offering up plenty of blow-by-blows on what’s going on in each of the labs at the conference. We’ve already got word that Dave Graham will be in attendance at one of the EMC booths. We’ll see who else is on the ground.

We’ve also been told by HP’s Calvin Zito that he will be at VMWorld, and will be easily identifiable in his highly informative polo shirt. Let’s hope he has two or three of them or an in-room washer/dryer at his hotel.

On another topic, StorageRap’s Marc Farley has managed to turn the storage blogosphere into one big singing contest with his newest and goofiest video creation. See below for a screen grab–to watch the video you must visit his site:

Among other bloggers, yours truly makes an appearance (in avatar form), representing one of the few female storage bloggers. Still trying to understand the connection with former U.S. Presidents, but perhaps this is just my Monday brain. Thanks to Marc for starting the week out with a laugh. OK everyone, back to work.

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!

Steve Duplessie has a very interesting post up on his blog today. It is part of a series he’s doing on scarcity. He seeks to understand what made deduplication vendor Data Domain so attractive to both EMC and NetApp. What he comes to is that scarcity is now focused around power, cooling and rackspace. At one time, these were hardly considerations. Nowadays you can’t always get the amount of power you need at any cost, he says.

Writes Duplessie: “Today, things like power/cooling and floor space are the new scarcity factors of record.  If CPU or capacity or bandwidth are essentially free, then the other considerations take precedence.  Now in many major metropolitan areas, you can’t buy any more power - no matter how rich you are.  That is a scarcity issue that drives value.”

I have heard this kind of thing firsthand from Ocarina customers. When I spoke with Graham Hobson, CTO of Photobox, Europe’s most popular photo sharing service, he told me power costs have quadrupled in the past few years in Europe. Meanwhile, many data centers aren’t really equipped to handle their 32 amps/rack storage systems. Rather, they were designed for telecom, where 8 or 16 amps are the norm. Ocarina’s data compression was an absolute lifesaver for his company, he said.

From Steve’s point of view, there won’t be a need for technologies such as dedupe once this is fixed at the source. Perhaps, but I doubt it. The more likely scenario is that there will be need to be a number of different approaches that all converge on the problem at once, and data reduction will continue to play a key role for the foreseeable future.

As it happens, there’s a piece in Forbes today by HP’s Chief Strategy and Technology Officer Shane Robison that takes up the data center power issue in greater depth. HP is certainly investing in dedupe–in fact, it recently announced a partnership with Ocarina in order to introduce data reduction into its NAS offerings.

Robison, in his article, describes HP’s newest energy saving data center, which seems likely to serve as a model for many others to come. Located in Wynard, a village on the Northeast coast of England, the new data center makes use of just about every power-saving approach out there. In addition to techniques such as virtualization and intelligent software, the building itself is equipped with an entire system of environmental designs inside and out. This includes using cool air from the North Sea to lower equipment temperatures–a trend we’ve been following with great interest on this blog.

So to me the answer isn’t to home in on one solution, but to make use of the multiplicity of options that are out there — lowering costs and benefiting the environment at the same time.

The storage press has sniffed out a good story recently. Today, Beth Pariseau has a piece up on her Storage Soup blog that hones in on the drama surrounding the technology du jour–deduplication.

The post, “HP to EMC/Data Domain: Bring it On” has a headline that’s reminiscent of the sort of fighting words we heard from our former president.

Pariseau writes: “Admittedly late to the data deduplication game, Hewlett-Packard Co. is brewing new dedupe offerings to compete with the market’s new 800-pound gorilla — EMC/Data Domain. … HP partners with Sepaton for high-end VTLs and Ocarina for primary storage data reduction, but also develops deduplication software for its entry-level disk backup devices.”

Earlier this week, Chris Mellor at The Register covered the HP-Ocarina partnership news, also talking about it in terms of the rising competition for a complete dedupe solution. His article “HP Makes Ocarina Music” has a subhead that speaks volumes: “Ocarina close to clean sweep of file vendors.”

Mellor writes: “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.”

It will be interesting to see how this story unfolds. We vendor bloggers are already chattering about the recent partnership announcement, such as this post on the HP Storageworks “Around The Storage Block” blog. The post, by Pete Brey, WW Extreme Storage Business Development Manager, homes in on two recent HP announcements. First, its recent acquisition of IBRIX, and second its partnership with Ocarina.

Brey writes: “Now multi-petabyte systems are great when you have zillions of files that need to be stored but so is a multi-petabyte system that is optimized so that in the same space tens of zillions can be contained. This is where Ocarina’s ECOsystem software adds its value to our NAS products. The ECOsystem software transforms your storage with its content-aware storage optimization that compresses data up to 10:1 with added features such as deduplication, ECOsnap snapshots, and its own global name space capability. The unique thing about our reseller partnership is that HP can run the ECOsystem software right on our NAS nodes, further optimizing your infrastructure. Now there aren’t too many storage vendors out there who can talk about that now, are there?”

Bragging rights, indeed.

Clearly, it’s too soon to say exactly how each player in this space will benefit and/or lose out. As Mellor’s piece obliquely refers to, this isn’t about Ocarina setting itself in opposition to any vendors–in fact, it has a partnership with EMC. Rather, it shows how each provides a piece of the puzzle. In the big picture, there needs to be a shift in thinking towards something more along the lines of end-to-end dedupe–something that our lead blogger Carter George talked about at length in his popular post, “The Dedupe (R)evolution.” But in the short-run it’s certainly good to see how each vendor is distinguishing itself, and working hard to provide the most efficient, cost-effective storage options to its customers.

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.“

One question that we hear repeatedly about storage is why isn’t efficient enough? In today’s economy, reducing storage costs is a top priority. Yet, it can be confusing to navigate through every vendor’s pitch and figure out what will truly save you on storage now and in the long term.

In thinking this through, I realized the connection between such important questions and a pair of funny videos have been making their way around the blog-o-tweet-osphere lately. The first was what appears to be real footage of a wedding between a couple named Jill and Kevin, in which guests were surprised by a completely oddball, goofy wedding procession:

The second, a parody of the first, is the same situation, only now in divorce court.

In both of these, what we find is that the participants are taking a completely unusual and creative tack in circumstances that most people think should have an air of solemnity around it. The first, the wedding procession takes place during a happy occasion, but one in which the traditional state of affairs requires formality at that juncture, followed by frivolity later in the day (and on into the night, and in some cases, on to the next day after that, and in Scotland, I am told, for another week afterward). In the second video, we see a situation in which people would normally be in a state of distress instead doing acrobatics.

Storage optimization is like this. It requires flexibility–sometimes to the point of acrobatics–and an ability to think outside the usual parameters of how things should be done. As they walk down the aisle, the bride and groom (and later the divorcing couple) must work out ways to do more with less–turning a narrow corridor into something that allows for a dramatic amount of play.

Oh, and speaking of new unions (and one I’m sure will last), today Ocarina announced a reseller agreement with none other than HP. This is one of just a slew of partnerships that the company has announced over the past two quarters. It is noteworthy in a number of ways–first, it is integrated into HP ExDS9100 in such a way that it provides a seamless experience of data reduction for the customer. Second, this is a strong validation of Ocarina’s business proposition, which is to quite simply reduce storage costs for those who are struggling to manage an upsurge in the types of files (PDFs, Zips, graphics, etc.) that stymie most other data reduction technologies. And finally it shows that customers are asking for–you guessed it–flexibility so that they can determine what types of files they would like reduced, and on what schedule. The combined HP- Ocarina offering has the ability to set policies based on common attributes such as file type, date, owner, or location. Now that’s something to dance and sing about.

We look forward to seeing how this partnership is portrayed in the storage and tech media–and I’ll be adding links as they come in. Meanwhile, I hope you dance your way through the week.