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.

Note: this is the first in a series of posts on the blogs that make up the Online Storage Optimization blogroll. Please look out for future reviews of other storage bloggers.

Every once in awhile I find myself enjoying a blog so much that I end up reading several posts in one sitting. Such was the case today with Storagebod’s Blog. Who else, I thought, could integrate references to Winnie-the-Pooh with cloud storage while making subtle points about storage infrastructure costs? This must be a sign I’m becoming a fan.

Storagebod, whose real name is Martin Glassborow, is an independent storage blogger whose topics cover a wide swath of storage and tech-related topics. His bio states that he’s responsible for storage infrastructure for a large UK Media company, which he doesn’t name. He also says in posts that he utilizes both EMC and NetApp storage, which puts him in an interesting position vis a vis the two competitors.

I’ve gotten chatting with Martin on Twitter on several occasions (as have some other contributors to this blog), and one thing that stands out about him is that while he has strong opinions about storage products, they always seem to come from a customer perspective — that is, he’s not interested in slamming a vendor for its own sake. Rather, he takes a pragmatic approach that speaks to a larger mission of helping other storage and IT professionals who are also struggling to control costs, keep data safe, and so on.

So, even while mocking IBM’s latest cloud offerings with his Milne-inspired ditty, he gives it the benefit of the doubt, saying, “…I’ve been a bit unfair, it’s not just tin, it comes with a raft of management software as well…”

Another recent post about a recent Amazon AWS outage doesn’t slam the company for losing a data center, but instead argues for better planning for such an eventuality.

“When Amazon lose a data-centre in their cloud, this should not be news! It will happen, it may be a whole data centre, it may be a partial loss. This not a failure of the Cloud as a concept; it is not even a failure of the public Cloud…”

In short, this is a blogger I recommend for anyone who would like to read spirited, opinionated yet fair coverage of storage from the point of view of someone who knows your pain. And while he never seems to quite find the best way to alleviate it, the process he goes through should be enlightening to many, both within and outside the industry.

This has been quite a week so far in the storage blog-o-tweet-osphere. I hope you’ve all been wearing your seatbelts as it’s been a bumpy ride!

First, Beth Pariseau at TechTarget has a fascinating post on what a recent SEC filing tells us about the unfolding drama of the Sun-Oracle merger. For example, who was that mysterious third bidder? And just how close was IBM before it blew making a deal?

It’s also been a week of discussion about discussing things. A seemingly small change to Twitter has had reverberations across the Tweet-o-sphere. Stephen Foskett’s take on this is that Twitter has lost control of its own service, which has become very much about conversation rather than one-way blasts of information. And Stu Miniman has a worthwhile post on how to make use of various social media tools that also highlights the interactive, conversation element. As I’ve often said, just about everything in life seems to come down to communication.

Finally, this blog’s parent, Ocarina Networks is getting some more buzz. This week, Storage Switzerland released the results of a test that Ocarina commissioned to see how well it stacks up against NetApp dedupe. We have posted it on the Ocarina site as well. More on this coming up, so remember to come by and visit us soon. Or, why not get an Online Storage Optimization RSS feed so you’re sure to get the latest, greatest storage and dedupe news and views every day?

Okay that’s all for now. Happy Wednesday–only two more days to the weekend.

Great line-up of speakers at Storage Networking World next week in Orlando. Among other highlights, Carter George, VP Products at Ocarina Networks and the lead author here on Online Storage Optimization will give a talk entitled “Building Castles in the Cloud:  Leveraging Cloud Storage Architecture to Lower Costs” on Wednesday, April 8 at 3:05 p.m. Anyone who is interested in seeing how cloud storage can solve multiple business problems should attend. Because of Ocarina’s role in the storage marketplace, Carter has a unique perspective on how cloud storage architectures have evolved, and how they are in a position to influence the direction of the entire storage industry.

Here’s the talk in a nutshell:

Cloud storage is one of the fastest-growing segments in the storage industry due to its potential for lowering costs and moving the burden of managing and protecting data to the cloud provider. It has given rise to new innovative storage architectures, and could well be a harbinger of future corporate storage architecture. In this talk, we’ll look at cloud storage architecture across multiple cloud providers, offering a detailed look at the technology trends and innovations in cloud storage platforms, including the use of grid architectures of commodity storage nodes and the use of global namespaces. We will also discuss how cloud grid architectures enable value-add storage software breakthroughs, such as integrated content-aware compression, dedupe, replication instead of backup, replication by file type policies, and the move of value in storage to the software layer, rather than in legacy vendor hardware. Vendor offerings to be discussed include: Amazon, IBM, Nirvanix, and others.

We hope to see you at SNW.

The recession is and the recession isn’t. It’s an odd beast that way. As I noted in an earlier post, the recessionary economy hasn’t yet translated to massive IT job losses — at least not yet.  There are winners and losers, something that’s true in just about any economic climate. And right now, technologies that save on overall IT costs are very much in demand.

James Koopmann’s post on the DCIG blog today argues this case eloquently. He points out that Gartner has recently estimated that storage as an industry is growing by 11.3% a year, and quotes analyst Jon Collins of Freeform Dynamics who says there is “no recession in storage” due to the fact that data continues to pile up. While some large companies are announcing layoffs, there is a great deal of potential for growth in certain key areas of storage.

Writes James:

“When the economy goes south, there tends to be a greater necessity and, as a result, a greater push for companies to find innovative technologies that will help them reduce their TCO.”

He is discussing thin provisioning (a technology that is not only good for a company’s bottom line, but has also yielded a really nice rap song). However, this could apply to many of the forward looking technologies that are out there, including, I’d like to mention, the type of next generation optimization solutions offered by Ocarina Networks and others that free up disk capacity.

As James notes, one thing companies need to watch is whether both CapEx and OpEx costs are being lowered. For example, a new offering may claim to save you on costs, but if it requires that you replace your existing storage, it’s a CapEx headache at the very least.

With all this in mind, innovation is taking the storage world by storm these days, which is translating into a healthier industry overall.

Isn’t it great to hear some positive news for a change?

Chris Preimesberger over at eWeek is reporting that the IBM acquisition of Sun for the bargain basement price of $6.5 billion is almost definitely a go and could be announced today or Monday. Writes Chris:

“All the indicators point one way: The acquisition of one of the most innovative, risk-taking and open-source-minded IT companies in the world, Sun Microsystems, by the world’s oldest and arguably largest IT corporation, IBM, is a done deal. All that remains is for the ink on the legalese to dry. That’s what several eWEEK sources are telling us.”

Meanwhile, the commentary on what this will mean continues to pour out in the blogosphere. Beth Pariseau’s recent post on StorageSoup raises questions about the shakeout sure to result from the OEM deals IBM has made with vendors, particularly NetApp with the IBM N-Series. Considering the lawsuits between NetApp and Sun over ZFS, a merger seems tricky at best. After laying out some possiblilities, Beth asks:

“Are any of those scenarios particularly palatable, especially for customers who are invested in IBM’s N-series precisely because it has the IBM brand associated with it, and therefore ostensibly an assurance that IBM would stand behind that product?”

Meanwhile, Matthew Sarrel in another eWeek column is parting ways with much of the crowd by arguing that the acquisition is “all about storage.” Oh, really? Yes, argues Sarrel–between the StorageTek asset and Sun’s homegrown Storage 7000 Unified Storage System, OpenSolaris and Open Portfolio, IBM could win back its piece of the migration puzzle.

Two of the best bloggers in the biz, Storagezilla and Storagebod weighed in with posts this week that run counter to some of this. For example, Storagezilla argues the Solaris is actually a liability of the merger, because:

“IBM’s cash rich pSeries division is an AIX stronghold with IBM’s numerous attempts to kill AIX and replace it with Linux having all failed. With Linux being pushed hard on xSeries hardware, on the Mainframe and even on pSeries where does Solaris settle? The answer is that it doesn’t.”

Storagebod has a slightly different take on this with his assertion that most likely Solaris will survive the merger. Update: reread this and realized he is agreeing with Storagezilla on Solaris. He writes:

“Yes IBM will have to kill products and at least one sacred cow will have to go; AIX or Solaris. That’s a hard one to call. Solaris on pSeries would be an interesting proposition but I suspect AIX will survive; it’ll pick up some technologies from Solaris, ZFS for example. And if Solaris goes; where does that leave Sparc?”

Phew. Seems like the whole thing is raising more questions than it’s answering–and it could be months or even longer before we see what happens to the IBM-Sun (or, as Beth Pariseau has dubbed it “SunBM”) product line. Many geeks are obviously rooting for a continuation of the open source path that Sun has been heading down, but really it is early days yet. The ink, in fact, is not dry–and as we saw with some recent bank mergers, you just never do know.

Of course, many have been wondering about the cultural fit between the ponytails and the suit wearers. Though if you look at this recent video on his blog, you can see that Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz has both a ponytail and a suit. So, perhaps all will be fine–the IBMers can grow their hair (or perhaps cut it if they’re women?) and the Sun folks can start putting ties over their t-shirt/bermuda shorts ensembles.

By the way, I think I might get booed by one or more of my fellow storage tweeters for the headline on this post, but I couldn’t resist–I grew up in a household of punsters, and then (mis)spent many years in the news biz. May the groans commence.

With all the talk about Cisco, the possible IBM-Sun merger, and other hot news of the day, this has also been a remarkable week for posts on other topics of interest to the storage community.

Here are a few that caught my attention:

HDS - Hu’s Blog - Your Assets, Sweat it or Enhance It
Hu Yoshida spoke with a hospital CIO from Hong Kong, where medical records are already digitized, gaining some insight on what kind of storage demand will be created when this same process begins under the new stimulus plan. Hu points out how useful virtualization and dynamic provisioning are for efficiency. As I’ve mentioned in the past, Ocarina has developed compression algorithms specific to several life sciences file types, another way to increase capacity.

Channel Marker - George Crump - Disk Archiving: How do you know it’s not the next ILM?
Why disk archiving to secondary tier storage is actually useful to customers–rather than a misguided attempt to fix a problem that wasn’t broken, which was the case with ILM. As Crump mentions in passing, Ocarina’s content aware compression can help maximize secondary tier storage capacity–helping save even more in storage costs.

Seagate - Pete Steege - I thawed out my disk drive. Did it work?
Amazing footage of Pete Steege taking a chainsaw and cutting a disk drive that he had frozen into an ice rink for 100 days. I won’t spoil it by telling you what happens in this experiment, except to say it’s the kind of thing that reminds me of why I like the storage crowd so much. There truly is a spirit of adventure and willingness to try out the novel–even at times the bizarre–to put hardware to the test.

It’s been an exciting week. Monday, all the talk was on Cisco’s Unified Computing System (UCS), which the Ruptured Monkey blog went so far as to compare to the borg. Still reeling from this major piece of news, today we learned that IBM is in talks to acquire Sun Microsystems.

The great thing about acquisitions–especially rumored, unsigned ones–is that they get everyone talking. We all know that neither IBM nor Sun will listen to our punditry and will instead get out their abacuses and determine behind closed doors whether this is a worthwhile scheme. Yet, who among us has the discipline to keep our yaps shut about what they should do? Not I. As an IBM baby myself, I have long wished to see Big Blue rise again and become the great company it once was, and so my take is that this acquisition has the potential to restore much of its lost luster.

Chuck Hollis at EMC has a thoughtful post in which he questions whether there really is one hidden gem that makes the deal worthwhile. And other than the fact that this could spell a monopoly on tape, he sees little effect on the storage industry.

Though I wonder, what about Chris Mellor’s assertion that this would eliminate Sun’s FalconStor? Seems likely that, as he said, Diligent would be the dedupe line they’d retain. Could this change the game for DataDomain?

In his usual tongue in cheek style, Marc Farley at 3Par wins the prize for the best headline on the merger, with “IBM & Sun: Probably better than two garbage trucks colliding.” He has helpfully provided a link to an earlier usage of the term, by Sun Chairman Scott McNealy regarding the HP/Compaq merger. Well, we all know how that merger went.

Lots of chit chat on Twitter about this. Any other posts catch your eye? And most of all, what is your view on this news and how it will or will not impact storage industry vendors? We’d like to hear.

He may be dancing with the stars, but Steve Wozniak’s storage company is in the news again today. Fusion-io, of which Woz is now chief scientist, has announced an OEM deal with HP. This follows the recent disclosure that Michael Dell was an early investor in the solid state vendor, whose ioDrive Gizmodo has called the “fastest storage product in the world.”

Update as of 4/4–Fusion-io has a new CEO: David Bradford replaces Don Basile.

Beth Pariseau at TechTarget had two articles about it on SearchStorage today–one, coverage of the news and an interview with David Flynn, CTO of Fusion-io, and two, some “bonus footage” of the interview, posted on the StorageSoup blog.

Later in the day Pariseau took it a step further, soliciting input from storage folks on Twitter to get their responses to Storage-io’s  ioSAN product, which Flynn claimed will replace SANs as they now exist. As I’ve mentioned before, Pariseau truly “gets” the power of social media and is one of the few journalists who is fearlessly utilizing it as a way of conversing with industry insiders.

The discussion on Twitter yielded a surprising amount of agreement among disparate sources who might otherwise trade barbs among themselves, coming from such competitors as IBM and EMC. There was no resolution, but many seemed to be taking a wait and see attitude to this new kid on the block, to find out whether these offerings are trading speed for other storage value additions that make SANs a reliable and popular choice.

Blogger Storagezilla’s view was supported by many–he questioned whether what you’ll end up with, once all the necessary components are in place, is a storage array: “How do you handle failures? You’re probably going to cluster them and fail over nodes. Oh look it’s now an array…. Just like DAS with RAID controllers. It’s the same argument the speed is just different.”

In all, a very interesting discussion. Here’s hoping Beth engages storage Twitters/bloggers on future hot topics.

InformationWeek had some smart pieces this week that are worth checking out. In both of these articles, there is food for thought for the storage industry.

First, this piece by Charles Babcock on Russ Daniels, CTO of HP and his view of the future of cloud computing:

HP On the Cloud: “The World is Cleaving in Two”

Second, this article by Paul McDougall on IBM’s hopes for getting a piece of Obama’s stimulus package:

IBM Eyes $122 in Stimulus-Backed Tech Spending