Online Storage Optimization

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.

An earthquake shook up San Jose (not mention Twitter) today. But that didn’t stop the storage industry’s movers and shakers from making all kinds of interesting news. Here’s a quick roundup from where we sit.

A game of musical chairs…

EMC lost storage tech consultant and blogger Steve Kenniston to inline dedupe player Storwize, where he will be Vice President of Technology Strategy. Steve continues to blog avidly and well at The Storage Alchemist. We may find ourselves crossing swords with him occasionally over here at Online Storage Op, but we always read his posts with interest.

And EMC has been no slouch in scooping up major talent:

Gestalt IT contributor Ed Saipetch (known to many of us edsai) started this week at EMC as Senior VCE Specialist. Prior to that, he was a systems engineer at Network Storage.

And Scott Lowe set tongues wagging when he announced last week on his blog that he’ll also be joining EMC, as a VMware-Cisco Solutions Principal. This seems a very shrewd move on their part, as Scott is well-known for his Cisco expertise and virtualization knowhow–both of which no doubt will be extremely handy as UCS takes off.

Nice going, EMC.

And in other news…acquisition fever!

Disk drive array subsystem provider Dot Hill has bagged Israeli storage virtualization company Cloverleaf for $12M in cash and stock, the Register reports. Clearly, they’re locking onto the virtualization and cloud storage trends with a vengeance. This may also give them a new edge in their battles with competitors like LSI and Xyratex.

Plenty of takeover rumors swirling around 3Par, although for now no one’s confirming anything. Whatever happens, it seems that everyone’s impressed by 3Par, the little thin provisioning engine that could. Over here at this blog, we’re consistently impressed and amused by their creative blogger Marc Farley. Financial pub Barron’s, in addition to initiating the speculation, called 3Par a “small but scrappy” possible takeover target. But who will be the suitor? Feel free to add in any and all rumors and speculation in our comments field below.

And don’t let us forget EMC, which in addition to snagging talent has picked up Archer Technologies, an IT governance software company that will be rolled into its overall security offerings for its RSA division. As Beth Pariseau reports on Storage Soup, the acqui could affect some others in the industry.

Writes Beth, “Archer brings with it a business continuity software module, which could affect those who manage disaster recovery in the storage environment. It also extends EMC’s move to inject automation into its software offerings, which we’ve seen in the storage market with last month’s first release of FAST, and is a part of EMC’s vision for archiving and e-Discovery.”

Well, that’s all for now. No doubt we’ll be seeing all manner of intrigue, rumor, speculation and other fascinating stuff now that 2010 is upon us.

It really has been a field day the last day and a half here in Silicon Valley. We’re in the final stretch of the Gestalt IT sponsored Tech Field Day, which brings together independent bloggers from around the globe for hands-on demos at Silicon Valley storage and virtualization companies.

The participants are some of the smartest and most influential in their fields (see the full list here). They haven’t spared the presenting companies–lobbing difficult questions and putting their opinions out on Twitter. For those who survived the drubbing, it’s been celebratory. We’ve all been following the conversation on the #TechFieldDay hashtag.

The morning here at Ocarina was a blast. Co-presenter and partner Nirvanix announced its upcoming CloudNAS 2.0–due out November 20. And our “bring out your data” challenge yielded two winners, and our average compression rates with these tougher than tough data sets was impressive. (A whole new post on this to come soon.) On Twitter, folks were raving about the whiteboard session on compression and dedupe by our CTO, Goutham Rao. As Devang Panchigar, known to many of us as @Storagenerve summed it up: “Rest of the presenters at #techfieldday, please be ready for deepdive sessions, ppl are loving it need tech not marketing.”

And we must apologize for the arctic conditions at the front of the room nearest the servers. Lots of tweets about using laptops as heaters and renting jackets. Guess that air conditioning works just a little too well!

Here are the posts I’ve seen so far on the event–no doubt there will be more.

First of all, Rick Vanover has been busy!

**Update** One more post from Rick: Day 2 recap of Tech Field Day

Within minutes of leaving Ocarina (or perhaps while still there) he posted this on Tech Republic: Storage-based compression and deduplication overview. Plus all these are also up:

TechRepublic - Storage in the cloud: Availability and SLAs

Rick Vanover’s Blog - Field Day Recap of Activities

Virtualization Review - Every Day Virtualization: Quick Thoughts on Virtualized I/O

Rick Vanover’s Blog - Gestalt IT Tech Field Day: Here we go!

Others:

Live blogging has been going on nonstop on John Obeto’s Absolutely Windows blog.

Musings of Rodos - Three days of posts:

Gestalt IT Field Days 2009 Day 1

And … Day 2
Featuring a video interview with Goutham Rao, CTO of Ocarina Networks, whose whiteboard presentation was a deep dive into the technology behind our compression and dedupe solution.

And now … Summary post: Gestalt IT Field Days 2009

Carlo Costanz0 - VMWare Info Tech Field Day

Rich Brambley - Gestalt IT Tech Field Day: Day 2 With a lovely picture of Mike Wilson, test architect at Ocarina running the compression of the participants’ data sets.

Marc Farley - StorageRap - Boy, the Gestalt IT Tech Field Day yesterday sure was fun This post includes a video featuring this blogger and Mr. Farley going on a mission for organizer Stephen Foskett.

Looking forward to seeing what else comes out. What a truly joyous and interesting event!

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.

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.

Summer is almost here, and despite rumors of a recession, the malls are filling up with shoppers seeking bathing suits, sunblock, iPhones, and other de rigueur gear of the season. Here in storage land, the latest industry news continues to amaze, amuse and baffle.

Here are a few headlines that caught our eyes:

Data Domain Board Rejects EMC Takeover Offer - Computerword, Lucas Mearian

HDS Expands Thin Provisioning - Search Storage, Beth Pariseau

VCs and IT Execs Discuss IT’s Brave New World in Boston - Storage Soup, Beth Pariseau

VMWare and HP Announce Co-developed Plan - Byte and Switch, Mike Fratto

And, for a little summertime diversion, one 3Par storage rapper’s response to the strange and wondrous EMC-NetApp-Data Domain tale:

3P’s Open Rap to Data Domain Employees - Storagerap, Marc Farley

Exciting news broke this morning in the storage world - EMC has made a $1.87 billion counterbid for Data Domain, against NetApp’s original $1.5 billion offer in late May. We will have some commentary on this soon, but meanwhile, it seems worthwhile to at least aggregate the opinions that are starting to churn out of the real-time blogosphere on the subject.

One very quick piece of analysis: If nothing else, we hope that people take from this news the immense importance that deduplication is starting to take on in the storage industry. It is slowly dawning on everyone that this is the best way to save on storage costs, both in the near-term and over the long haul. It serves to reign in both CapEx for storage and OpEx for power, cooling, people and other costs. In short, dedupe is hot!

As our lead blogger Carter George pointed out when the news of the NetApp bid went public, the acquisition would mean that, “…one vendor, NetApp, has the market leadership position in both dedupe for online with NetApp Dedupe and dedupe for backup with Data Domain.” He also raised the question how EMC and others would respond. Well, now we know!

First out of the gate with the instant analysis was Steve Duplessie.

Steve’s IT Rants - EMC Trying to Outbid Netapp on Data Domain. In this post, Mr. D. argues that EMC doesn’t need what Data Domain has, and that in essence it’s just a way to mess with its prime competitor. Later, Steve spelled out his perspective even more overtly with the following tweet: “new conspiracy theory - EMC trying to make Netapp spend more cash - evil but excellent if true.”

Chuck Hollis of EMC gives his perspective as an insider:

Chuck’s Blog - EMC Makes Surprise Play for Data Domain - In this, Chuck explains that this supports the EMC vision of deduplication everywhere. Beyond that, he doesn’t get into any detail as to where it will integrate or the fate of EMC’s similar products, such as Avamar. EMC’s Joe Tucci, in a conference call today, also declined to give specifics on the fate of that product line.

Stephen Foskett, Gestalt IT - EMC Takes on NetApp for Data Domain. Stephen argues quite compellingly that Data Domain might actually be a better fit for EMC than NetApp, because in the long-run it has a better technology than Quantum, which could still be cut loose.

As he puts it: “Their Quantum-based VTLs are expensive and enterprise-focused, while a new Data Domain-powered line might have broader appeal.”

Marc Farley, StorageRap - EMC versus Netapp for Data Domain - call notes

More than notes, this also includes his perspectives.

More to come. Meanwhile, the question remains - who will prevail in this bidding war?

Many of us have become extremely dependent on certain online sources–Google and Twitter, to name the most prominent–for our daily work and personal lives. And so when not one, but both of these services are on the blink at the same time, it becomes news.

First, there was the slowness of Gmail and related Google applications, a problem that seemed to be worse in the early morning hours. A Google blogger issued an explanation for the slowness of Google apps. All due to a “traffic jam” in which data was routed through Asia, apparently.

Marc Farley over at StorageRap had this to say about this outage:

“Anytime this sort of thing happens, questions come up about whether or not cloud computing is ready for prime time. The answer is - of course it is, but maybe not at Google.”

Meanwhile, Twitter appears to have been down at times both today and yesterday, expanding beyond its pre-stated outage at noon PT. A quick Twitter post explained it, though it implies that the service was only down for seven minutes–not what several were reporting. In light of yesterday’s debacle regarding the “replies” feature, Twitter seems to be getting into hot water more often than not these days.

In response, someone tweeted about this: it’s called “Down or is it Just Me” and seems a useful tool. My suggestion is that you bookmark it, just to be sure it’s handy. Nothing like old-style web technology when things are feeling shaky.

In the big picture, we still don’t know what this means. It could just be a strange and/or cosmic coincidence. Or, it could obviously be a sign that, as some have suggested, the pace of growth of these highly successful services is proving too hard on the infrastructure they’ve built.

Twitter, for example, has been far more virally successful than anyone envisaged. The news today was that Oprah has surpassed 1 million followers. To accommodate this amount of activity–and who wants to bet that at least three-quarters of them were new to Twitter?–can’t be within its normal scope of operations. Oprah, as we know, has been the source of many a server crash over the years. Then there’s storage. At this point, Twitter must surely have multi-petabytes on disk, not to mention a skyrocketing growth rate.

Time will tell how these mega-popular services will manage their growth. One possibility is that with just a few more outages, the fickle user base will migrate to something else before the problem becomes too severe. FriendFeed seems to be the new geek platform of choice–though for now at least, it’s being used in coordination with Twitter by most of the users I follow. Or perhaps something even newer and shinier will strike our fancy.

Happy Tuesday. It’s been one doozy of a week. A heatwave hit Silicon Valley, both in reality and in the more metaphorical sense–in other words, the Sun seemed to be shining all over the place. And it’s also been an exciting week right here at Ocarina, as mentioned in an earlier post.

Here are a few posts that caught my eye today:

VMware’s Cloud Strategy - Ed Saipetch

The Real Impact of vSphere - Chuck’s Blog

Storage Changes in the VMware vSphere 4 Family - Stephen Foskett, Packrat

And, on another topic…

Data Storage Can Become Green - Greg Schulz

And on yet another topic that has been mentioned here and there:

Oracle and Sun - Expanded Thoughts - Steve’s IT Rants

Crazy Larry Strikes Again - StorageRap, Marc Farley

What will tomorrow bring, I wonder?