‘Just do it.’ – Nike

‘To be is to do.’ – Socrates

‘To do is to be.’ – Sartre

‘Do be do be do.’ – Sinatra

I’ve talked before about my desire to lose weight and the ‘eureka’ moment when I realised that the answer was in front of me the whole while, but I must admit …even with the best of intentions I haven’t lost as much weight as I would like.  Yeah, okay …a few pounds here and there …which always prompt Mrs. PL to offer to sew up the hole in my trousers from whence I’ve lost three pounds …har de har har.  The brutal truth is that I need to increase my outgoings and reduce my incomings to lose weight, and that requires me to take control of my diary and make time for taking exercise.

I suppose you could say my challenge is execution over intent …in other words, to just get on with it and do.

You could describe me as a ‘doer’ in many other aspects of my life, but I’ve always had a problem with ‘doing’ when it comes to things that don’t interest me terribly.  And let’s face it, exercise isn’t overly exciting.  But I’ve always had a deep respect for anyone who is a ‘doer’ no matter the circumstances, and one such doer whom I’ve come to respect deeply is one of our account managers …Rob MacAlister.

For reasons that entirely escape me, Mr. MacAlister has decided he would like to visit the North Pole.  Now, that in and of itself would normally be interesting …but Rob has decided to race to the North Pole.

Yes, you read that right.

And he’s spending the next year in training …you know, dragging a 75kg tire around Richmond Park, eating freeze dried Pot Noodles, spending hours on end in walk in freezers to acclimate his body to extreme cold, that sort of thing.  I know, I can think of about a million other hobbies I would prefer to have, but hey …it makes him happy and I applaud anyone with this level of dedication.

Rob is a doer, and rather than talk the talk (how many of us have made pint sozzled plans to rule the universe with mates in a pub?!) he is going to walk the walk.  Applied for and received sabbatical.  Train for a year.  Diet for a year …no boozin‘ or ciggies (prolly for the best in any case)!  Six weeks away from his wife and young family racing 350+ nautical miles in -40C.

Rob, I take my ten gallon yarmulke off to you my friend and Godspeed.

If you want to follow Rob, his blog can be found here http://robmacalister.blogspot.com/

What does this have to do with Data Storage and Protection?

One of the storage customer blogs I read regularly is Grumpy Storage written by the inimitable ianhf.  Ian always writes things as he sees them and rarely sugar coats anything.  He wrote a post …actually, it’s damn near a manifesto …towards the end of 2009 called ‘Show Me the Money! (Information)’ and what Ian wrote in this post has been swirling round in my head since the first time I read it.  If you’re in technology, this is essential reading on how to engage and actively work with your customers in a positive fashion …actually, thinking on that, Ian’s commentary is applicable for just about any business you might be in!

I wanted to pick up on point 13, however where Ian writes …”I need electronic copies of any & all materials discussed or presented - no exceptions, without this I can’t use it as reference material in my internal strategy planning. If you hide behind “it’s beyond NDA”, or “NDA prohibits” then I’ll interpret that as “you don’t trust me personally or respect me professionally” and the relationship will be difficult from then on.”

I personally struggled with this one a bit when I first read it as I meet with all of our vendor partners frequently under NDA, and I wouldn’t ever wish to betray their confidence …but I could empathise with where Ian was coming from.

Then it occurred to me …what is an NDA really but protecting intent over execution.

Time was, not so long ago, that within data storage specifically and technology generally that if you came upon an idea such as thin provisioning, data deduplication, automated storage tiering, or data compression you could pretty well rest assured that you had a good 18 months before anyone could bring anything similar to market.

So you used an NDA to protect yourself from competition long enough so you could launch your product, as well as protection from someone launching something that seemed similar when you did but in actuality wasn’t as good.  Customers hate esoteric FUD based arguments …see Ian’s point 12 if you don’t believe me …so you prolly don’t want to be having a ‘but mine goes to eleven’ type argument with customers.

What’s the answer?  For me I think the answer lies in reversing the intent over execution equation with customers.

1. Show me, don’t tell me. I hate slides and slideware presentations generally, but I recognise their use as a medium for delivering information.  But that shouldn’t be the whole presentation, in fact I would reserve slides for ‘handouts’ post meeting.  Why not show someone what you’re talking about with a videoed demo?  I could give you slides to articulate automated storage provisioning, or I could just show you.  Watch this space as we’ll make similar videos for containerisation, container mobility, and secure multitenancy for virtualised datacentres.  Just don’t expect me to schlep a 75kg bit of vulcanised rubber around the Solution Centre like Rob will be in Richmond Park.
2. Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker. ROI/TCO calculators are great and very useful, but in the end they are nothing more than numbers which have most likely started in a lab and may or may not have field referenceability.  Firstly, I think we as an industry should stand by cost reductions by underwriting them and, if we’re wrong …we’ll write you a cheque.  Secondly, the TCO data should be field referenceable …and the iPod/iPhone app we’re developing for virtualised datacentres will have the ability to reference the most up to date field TCO data every time you use it.
3. Let customers consume information when they wish, how they wish. Part of the reason we’re developing an iPod/iPhone app is to allow customers to interact with TCO modelling, virtualised datacentre demonstrations, virtualised datacentre components, application containers moving between our virtualised datacentre and another in the USA ..all without me hovering over you!  Seriously, though …I believe customers want to consume information in ways that are useful to them, and this requires us to present information and data in ways that allow this.

Execution drives true value, intention tells me you might (or might not) get there one day.

I hope you’ll join me in execution and perhaps someday NDAs will become a thing of the past.

Have a great weekend,

-Matthew

Click here to contact me.

To be sure, I’ve been a geek for as long as I can remember.  My first video game was Star Trek on an IBM mainframe whilst my father did the reel to reel backups.  Seriously.  Try as I might, I never did beat Khan nor the Klingons.  Khaaaan!  My father tells me that he was once called in to a parent/teacher conference to enquire where I had got the copy of Newsweek which I was boring the kids to death within the playground.  Laugh if you must, but the Soviets shooting down KAL007 was a hugely important incident and led to Ronald Reagan ordering the military to allow the use of the US GPS systems by civilians.  And I still believe to this day that’s waaay more important than kickball.

So, nothing much has changed although now I bore people at dinner parties as opposed to the playground, my video games tend to be of the PS3 variety, and instead of reading about planes I’d much rather be flying them.

But, as big a geek as I may be, I’ve never really been a petrol head.  Indeed, I hate driving and view it as a colossal waste of time …time which could be spent doing far more productive things.  As such, I don’t really care too much about cars.  This isn’t to say I don’t love Top Gear or would turn away a Maserati Quattroporte, but in the absence of someone giving me one I can’t really justify £100k on a hunk of metal …okay, a terribly fast hunk of metal with lovely leathery bits …and so plan to drive my humble BMW 320D until the wheels fall off.

Now, I like car maintenance almost as much as I like being called ‘Matt’ or ‘reseller’ but BMW have done something very clever.  They’ve put what amounts to a countdown timer in the car so that as the miles increase, the car tells you how many more you can travel before the next service.  Genius.  And what happens if you go over the service threshold?  It starts counting the miles in negative digits and ‘bongs’ every time you get in or out to remind you that you really must get a service organised.

Gentle nagging works, but the simplistic countdown is what drives me (no pun intended) to organise services regularly.  And at £180 or more a go, I reckon BMW continues to make a tidy profit from me.

What’s this got to do with data storage and protection?

I wrote in my year end post that, along with the march to the virtualised datacentre, subscription models would change the way we consume just about everything.

One of the questions I inevitably get asked by customers when discussing optimised storage and virtualised datacentres is so what?  What business benefit do I get by deploying the elements of optimised storage such as thin provisioning, storage virtualisation, storage compression and so on.

It is a fair question and customers are right to ask it.  Let’s be clear, whilst I am a geek, deploying technology for technology’s sake is not something I would ever advocate.  Nor would I advocate just buying more ‘stuff’ in the absence of a proper strategy.  Frankly, this is partially the cause that we ended up with unsolved Rubik’s cubes for infrastructures.

Now, whilst we will publish TCO metrics and projected cost savings for optimised infrastructures and/or virtualised datacentres …and in some cases underwrite these costs …one of the unintended consequences of optimising/virtualising a datacentre is it gives the IT guys room to breathe.

Why room to breathe?  By automating certain datacentre tasks and removing the need to deploy more data storage for even a few weeks …although it often ends up to be months …the IT folks get time to manage data.  The elephant in most datacentres is not whether we should virtualise or optimise but, rather, how we manage data.  This is one of the biggest questions I get from customers …‘How do we manage our data?  How do we keep our internal customers from creating more?’ and I generally give them the exact same answer.

Shoot the users.

Not trying to be flippant, but seriously …no users, no more data.  Job done, crack tubes.

‘But we can’t shoot the users!’

Indeed.  So how do we manage the data if users are going to keep creating it?  Yes, there are technical solutions available in archiving and data deduplication, but why throw technology at a people problem?  Why create the data in the first place?

What if we gave the users a yearly and monthly subscription for data storage?

Try phoning your mobile phone company when you’ve used up your minutes and demanding more now and for free because hey …your moby is fundamental to your job!

The challenge is not in having adequate tools for data management …three of the best are , in my opinion…

1. Storage Fusion for enterprise data infrastructure.  SF is brilliant at showing you exactly what the storage devices are doing; how much raw storage is deployed/consumed, how much power they’re consuming, how the storage is tiered, and so on.
2. Symantec CommandCentral Storage.  Symantec CommandCentral is fantastic for managing infrastructures comprised of more than one storage vendor, and lets you manage storage down to the file level.
3. Northern Storage Suite.  I really love Northern because it has robust LDAP hooks, which is geekspeak for ‘it analyses the data and tells me who, specifically, created it’.  Imagine being able to run reports to tell you which users and departments are creating the most duplicate data, data which isn’t accessed often if ever …and what they are likely to create in future …and you can see why I love these guys.

But the tools are only half the solution.  The other half is what we do with the information.  In the past we’d try to nicely ask the user to delete duplicate or old data.  We’ve even tried ‘quotas’ which rarely, if ever, work.

In 2010 I think we should be asking ‘How much space does a user need and how can I build a subscription model to monitor …and report to them …their usage.’

Shoot the users?  A bit harsh.  But perhaps charge them after they use up their subscription is the answer to user managed data.

Have a great weekend, and please contact me if I can be of any assistance in helping you manage data.

I promise I won’t shoot your users.

-Matthew

Click here to contact me.

Sorry I haven’t blogged since, well …2009!  A belated Happy New Year to you all and, needless to say, with the holidays, designing virtual datacentre cubes …plus my day job …things have been very hectic and I’ve got a bunch of posts swirling round in this little brain of mine.

I was going to discuss the snowcalypse we had and how mobile technology has changed the IT landscape forever, but was reminded of a favourite phrase of my grandmother’s …‘Snow is like family.  You’re delighted to see them when it has been a while, but they both stink after three days.’  Then again, she also says ‘If you’re right 98% of the time, why worry about the other 3%?’ so I wouldn’t believe everything that my grandmother says.

Over the recent winter holidays …okay, they were almost two months ago now but they feel recent … I gave two gifts, one physical and one not, which got me thinking about technology.

My grandmother lives quite some distance away …about 3,803 miles to be exact, but who’s counting …so visiting her frequently is a bit challenging, as is her spending time with her great-grandson, PL Junior.  I’ve taken to using the great and vaunted cloud computing technologies Facebook and Skype to enable my grandmother to see videos we’ve taken of PL Junior and also interact with him now that, at three and a half, he is fully interactive!  In fact, he doesn’t shut up from the moment he wakes until he goes to sleep.  Honestly, I just don’t know where he gets that from!  My grandmother has taken to co-opting my sisters, neighbours, aunt …pretty much anyone with any technological ability …into teaching her how to use a computer so she can access Facebook and interact with her great-grandson.  At the tender age of 84, that’s not bad going!

My mother-in-law, by stark contrast, lives remarkably close to us and is also a lover of all things java.  Coffee, mind, not the software developed by Sun …ooops, I meant Oracle.  Sorry Uncle Larry!  But I digress.  In any case, I thought I would be a good son-in-law and buy her an automated coffee maker like the one we have and have fallen in love with over the past six years.  She and my father-in-law were delighted by the gift, asked me to show them how to use it, and made Mrs. PL and I coffee the next time we were around for Sunday brunch.  Imagine my surprise when, recently when we had to stay with my in-laws whilst our boiler was repaired, I heard not the sounds of the Nespresso machine being engaged in the morning but …the kettle and the distinctive sound of Nestle instant coffee being spooned into mugs.

What does this have to do with Data Storage and Protection?

People, whether they be consumers or the CXOs of large businesses, tend not to change anything unless they can see cost benefit and an improvement in the way that they were previously doing things which we sometimes call agility.

I would love to be able to visit my grandmother more often, but with the a young family and career this isn’t always possible.  My grandmother can see the benefit in using technologies such as Facebook and so has learned how to use them to allow her to enjoy PL Junior as much as possible.

My mother-in-law, on the other hand, loved the gift of the Nespresso machine but has remarked to Mrs. PL that she doesn’t use it very often as, frankly, boiling the kettle is much quicker and she can live with the difference in quality.

And so it is with customers and cloud computing, virtualisation, et al.

Why haven’t more adopted cloud computing?  Sure, there are the standard arguments regarding data security and the like, but I think one of the biggest reasons is that very few …if any …cloud providers have shown trust cost benefit analysis for customers choosing to adopt cloud solutions.

Equally, whilst virtualised datacentres are the way of the future it won’t really matter whether it be VCE vBlock, VCN NetApp Virtualise Anything, IBM Dynamic Infrastructure, HP Converged Infrastructure or indeed some other ‘flavour’ …or an open VDC …if you can’t show a customer demonstrable cost benefit and how a customer will be able to increase business agility it becomes nothing more than an interesting idea and a big ‘so what’ that folks won’t adopt for some time.

My predictions?

1.  VDCs will reduce datacentre costs.

Deploying fully virtualised datacentres will see us reduce CAPEX and OPEX costs by as much as 50% or more …forever.  We’re currently building VDCs in the Hatfield Solution Centre to test, test, and test some more …and you can bet that total cost of ownership validation will be high on the list of testing.

2.  Customers who deploy VDCs will be able to innovate and become more agile by looking after their structured data and ‘out-tasking / outsourcing’ their unstructured data.

If we accept the industry standard metric that an average customer environment is comprised of 20% structured data [ERP, customer billing systems, customer databases, etc.] and 80% unstructured [PPTs, email, MP3s] …not to mention all of the deuplicate and dormant data in the unstructured data …we can assume that customers don’t really make any money on unstructured data.  I’m betting that in five years time …or less …we will see structured data catered for by GUI / virtualised mainframes [e.g. Oracle Exadata, IBM zSeries] with corporate IT departments focussed on the structured data and how to use it to be more agile and competitive in their respective market.  But what to do with all of that unstructured data?

3.  Unstructured data will be catered for by virtualised datacentres; VDCs will allow users to containerise applications and shrink datacentre space by an order of magnitude.  Think ‘buckyballs’.

VDCs will enable customers to containerise whole applications where a container will be comprised of a virtualised application [e.g. email] plus the virtualised grid storage [e.g. IBM XiV, NetApp, or EMC vMax] virtualised compute [e.g. Cisco UCS], plus the hypervisor [e.g. VMware] and virtual network to operate it.  If you have a container, you can move that container …real time …to a service provider like Computacenter thus freeing up critical datacentre space.  Just like a buckyball customers will be able to shrink their datacentres without losing the structural integrity of their businesses.

4.  There’s too much religion in technology.

As I’ve said many times in the past, I’ve got a religion …and it ain’t storage.  Steve Jobs made a mistake by being too messianic about the iPad.  Will it change the world?  Not likely, but it is a very sexy bit of technology that will allow Apple to potentially control yet another media distribution model with newspapers, magazines, and books delivered automatically to your iPad much in the same way that iPods have made listening to digital music ridiculously easy and ultra-convenient.  Equally, the iTunes app store is now worth $1.4b per annum …and Gartner are predicting the mobile application market to overtake desktop apps by 2013.  Underestimate Jobs and mobile apps at your peril, but I would also argue that so vendors made a mistake about being too messianic regarding cloud.  But this is not to say that this isn’t the future, and we need to show how you reduce costs and increase agility with such technology.

5.  Subscription models have …and will continue …to change the way we consume.

There was a time, not so long ago, when we would stop in a high street shop such as Carphone Warehouse to buy a mobile phone.  Why?  Because it was a new technology and we didn’t really understand how the minutes and related fine print of a contract work.  When’s the last time you visited a high street shop to buy a mobile phone?  As consumers became au fait with the contract model, suppliers met them half way by giving them a ‘free’  phone based upon how many minutes the user contracted to.  I don’t think it is so very far away to believe that a customer purchasing a managed service contract for three or five years will be given a ‘free’ virtualised datacentre.  Don’t believe me?  Think it won’t work for ‘big ticket’ items?  We see this model already changing the way electric cars are sold …Shai Agassi bets he can get you to drive an electric car if he gives you one for free, and the experience is no worse than that you currently have with your motor.  If he’s right, we may be on the way to cracking global warming.

In any case, have a great weekend and here’s to a virtual virtual virtual world!

-Matthew

Click here to contact me.

‘Daddy, when will it be dark?’

‘Not until this evening, I’m afraid.  Why do you ask?’

‘Is tonight Hanukkah?’

‘Yes, it is …as soon as the sun goes down.’

‘When it gets dark we light the candles?’

‘Yes, are you excited?’

‘Um hmmm!  After the candles the Hanukkah Armadillo will come and sing me a lullaby.  And bring me presents!’

I start to laugh.  PL Junior isn’t.  He’s deadly serious.

‘Erm, sure. I suppose.‘  Not good to hurt a three year old’s feelings.  Best play along.

‘What else does the Hanukkah Armadillo do?’

‘He has flying powers, just like rocket!  And big jet!  And he comes down with presents each night of Hanukkah!  But he doesn’t like biscuits.  Only water and cucumbers.’

I dropped off PL Junior at school and then phoned Mrs. PL where, after we got done laughing, she tells me that she was channel hopping recently when she happened upon the Friends episode with the Holiday Armadillo.  It being one of her [and my] favourites, she watched and laughed.

PL Junior didn’t.  My father lives in Texas.  PL Junior thought it was real.  So, being a great mum, Mrs. PL decided to just go with it.  And thus was born the legend of the Hanukkah Armadillo in Casa PL.

My father just sent me an email offering to send a stuffed armadillo to place next to our menorah.

Thanks dad.

What’s this got to do with Data Storage & Protection?

One of the many things that I love about living in the UK generally and London specifically is the amazing diversity and breadth of opinion.

I don’t know if there is such as thing as a Universal Truth other than to say that everyone I know and work with would describe family as being paramount.  It doesn’t really matter much if you celebrate Christmas, Hanukkah, Diwali, Eid, Kwanzaa, Christmaskah, or Festivus …or none of these …you tend to do what you do because it makes you and your family happy.  And, frankly, how you observe or celebrate will often vary from family to family …who’s to say if there’s a ‘right’ way or ‘wrong’ way to do it?

Although I must say, there is a lot of merit in the Airing of Grievances around the Festivus pole.  But I digress.

As I’ve said before, I have a religion and it ain’t storage.  I’m not aware of any ‘one size fits all’ solution, but we have developed an equation and methodology which gives us as fair and equitable a way as I know for selecting and recommending solutions.  Just as families celebrate holidays in different ways so too do customers select and implement technologies.

That said, my predictions for 2010:

1.  The emergence of the virtualised datacentre.

What do you get if you add optimised storage, deduplication, storage compression, converged networks, virtualised servers, virtualised applications, integrated backup to disk/replication/tape storage, automation for the whole lot …I’m probably missing a few bits, but you get my point.  Whether you call it VCE Vblock, IBM Dynamic Infrastructure, NetApp Virtualise Everything, HP Converged Infrastructure, they’re all articulations of a virtualised datacentre.  We’re headed towards integrated and virtualised datacentres and one of the fascinating things about IT is stick around long enough and you’ll see the same ideas come back round.  We deconstructed the mainframe in pursuit of open systems, but now open systems are creaking under the load of data proliferation and low utilisation.  What to do?  Well, reconstruct the mainframe conceptually using integrated open systems.  And that’s what customers want …not necessarily flashy marketing schtick, but, rather a self healing/self tuning, policy based datacentre which allows customers to flex up/down depending upon market conditions with predictable and best costs and then sits invisibly in the corner and behaves!

2. Innovative products continue the march to becomes universal features.

There was a time when thin provisioning, data deduplication, disk spindown for underutilised disks, and automated storage tiering were products in their own right.  But if a product is so great that it demonstrably reduces costs and increases utilisation, shouldn’t it be a feature?  Exactly.  Which is why 2009 saw EMC, IBM, NetApp, HP, and HDS introduce or extend these technologies as features in their product sets.  And I don’t think that the list will stop there as I expect to see data compression enter as a feature in primary storage in 2010 as well.  Why should we care?  As features within an infrastructure we can use these technologies holistically, whether in a ‘branded’ virtualised datacentre or one composed of open products which work together seamlessly, to deliver storage at the most appropriate cost from creation to cremation with zero disruption to production business.

3. Server and desktop virtualisation are no longer incorrectly viewed as workloads.

VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V are good examples of server virtualisation, whilst VMware View and Citrix XenDesktop are good examples of desktop virtualisation.  Virtualisation of physical resources undoubtedly delivers higher utilisation and cost benefit, however virtualisation is a technology not a workload.  What’s the difference?  A workload is what you do with the technology, and everyone will do something slightly different with their workload based upon their business needs.  If you forget that and leave out the storage design and tuning, you may fail to achieve cost benefit at best or have to abandon the project at worst.  Don’t believe me though, have a read of this blog post by Chad Sakac, worldwide VP of VMware and all round virtualisation guru who is intimately involved with such deployments worldwide.

4. Grid storage / scale out storage take hold and never look back.

IBM XiV, EMC Vmax, NetApp ONTAP v8 …don’t look now, but everybody’s going grid.  Will it solve global warming, introduce world peace, and cuddle baby seals?  Not exactly.  But it will introduce self healing/tuning highly efficient and utilised storage at attractive price points using commoditised components …and become the bedrock of the virtualised datacentre.

5. Automation, automation, automation.

What use are virtualised servers, virtualised desktops, virtualised applications, self healing/tuning storage systems if you have to provision and manage them manually?  Precisely.  If you can’t automate it, chances are it will be left behind in the march towards the virtualised datacentre.  But don’t stop there as pure automation should give rise to …

6. Automation gives birth to policy based storage.

Remember aligning data to business value?  Of course you did!  Automation will remove the manual nature of managing IT and related resources, but customers don’t just want a conveyer belt of chocolates with Lucy and Ethel.  Automation which allows us to align a customer SLA and/or business value is what we truly want to deliver …policy based movement of data with zero disruption.

7. Customers continue to interact openly and publicly.  Are we listening?

Customers are speaking with us and our vendor partners publicly and openly in ways that we never could have anticipated through the use of technologies such as Twitter and blogs.  If you think that Twitter is just a platform for people to tell you what they’ve had for breakfast, you’ve missed the point entirely.  These platforms are a way for end users/customers to interact with one another as well as business partners efficiently. Storagebod, an end user at a major media company, took the time to write six individual letters to Father Christmas regarding what he would like to see from vendors.  Ianhf, an influential end user at a major telecoms company, took the time to write about what he expects from business partners.  Think you’re Elite?  See if you can get through all 17 of Ianhf’s points saying ‘yes, we/I do that’.  I’m not sure that I can, and that’s the point …by actively reading and engaging with what our customers are saying we and vendors have two choices …ignore it and continue making products / delivering services which customers find shoddy, or listen and strive to evolve and provide the products / services / solutions which make a difference to them in a positive way.  I know which one I’ll be choosing in 2010, otherwise we’re left just talking to ourselves and what fun or use is that?  Ignore customer public sentiment at your peril, as it would seem AT&T did in the USA with iPhone users.

8. England win the World Cup, Watford FC are promoted to the Premiership, and Mrs. PL stops yelling at me for snoring.

Okay, I kinda made that last one up but a PL can dream can’t he?  And who knows what 2010 will bring but what I do know is this …England, Watford FC, indeed all of us are in control of our destiny for the year ahead.

Have a great Christmas / Hanukkah / Diwali / Eid / Kwanzaa / Christmaskah / Festivus …none of the above …enjoy your holiday with your family and see you in 2010.

I’m off to light the last Hanukkah candle with Mrs. PL, PL Junior …and anxiously await the arrival of the Hanukkah Armadillo.

-Matthew

Click here to contact me.

It was time for me to meet her parents.

As diaries would have it, it was suggested that I meet my possibly future in-laws at Royal Ascot as they had an extra place for me in the Royal Enclosure.  Brilliant, I thought …I’m sure dressing up in a morning suit and wearing a top hat whilst quaffing champagne and Pimms all day will steady my nerves nicely.  And what the heck, if I get into trouble I could surely ask the Queen for help?  I make that Pimms o’clock!  Or so my thinking went when I accepted the invitation.

The arrangements were made and we arrived at the appointed hour for a champagne reception hosted by one of my future in-law’s friends.  I had a glass of very nice champers, and then politely declined a further glass.  I conversed lightly about the events of the day and declined any further glasses of champagne.  I was beginning to get a few ‘looks’ …well, more so than usual anyway …and we made our way to the grounds for the racing.

I was offered another drink almost as soon as we entered the enclosure, which I again politely declined.  Now, as anyone who knows me or reads this blog frequently will know …I rarely shy away from a nice glass of champagne.  Or claret.  Or New Zealand sauvignon blanc.  Or single batch Hendrick’s gin.  Yes, I enjoy the odd tipple and my future mother-in-law was beginning to get worried.

‘Aren’t you having a nice time?’, asked she.

‘Not at all, I’m having a lovely day!’, I replied.

‘Are you teetotal?  Or are the drinks not to your liking?’, she said in a low tone.

‘No, they’re fine and no …I am most certainly not teetotal.  But I was raised to not have more than three drinks in front of your future in-laws.’

Silence.

‘Well, I guess perhaps it as serious as I have been led to believe.  Tell me, what do you do exactly.’

‘Erm, well …I’m in technology, I guess.’

‘Oh!  Great, we’ve had this problem with our PC lately and …’

*slight chuckle*

‘No, I’m sorry I don’t work on that side of technology.  I design and integrate data storage for corporations.’

My future father-in-law had joined my future mother-in-law’s side just as she turned a whiter shade of pale, leaned in to him, and whispered something in his ear.

‘No, no …our daughter will be just fine, I think I understand what he means!’, said my future father-in-law to my future mother-in-law.

The conversation shifted swiftly, and the remainder of the day was enjoyed by all.

It was only years later …at a dinner celebrating the birth of our son, actually …when my mother-in-law finally told me that she turned pale because she thought I bought and sold filing cabinets and self storage for City firms.

What does this have to do with Data Storage & Protection?

It is never difficult, in my opinion, to be misunderstood when attempting to explain things which you may be completely au fait with but others mightn’t have even heard of.  Indeed, I have a friend who is a fellow data storage practitioner who often tells people that he ‘sells insurance’ at cocktail parties rather than try to explain the weird and wacky world of storage thus avoiding the situation I found myself in with my future in-laws.  To be honest, I’ve considered this approach a few times but wouldn’t wish to be intentionally misleading nor fallacious.

And yet, the more I think about it …I do ‘sell insurance’ to a degree.

EMC made an announcement that I have been waiting for quite a while, the GA launch of Fully Automated Storage Tiering or ‘FAST’ for short.  FAST introduces automated storage tiering for the EMC Symmetrix Vmax, CLARiiON CX4, and Celerra NS unified storage NAS product.  Great, I hear you say.  What the heck does that mean?

Well, put simply FAST automates the movement of data at the block level between tiers of storage.  For example, a tier of solid state drives, a tier of fibre channel drives, and a tier of SATA drives.  Now, In a normal storage array, we tend to lose a lot of efficiency due to the fact that we need to ‘place’ the data by telling it where it should live through the management interface on which tier and such things as RAID groups, disk groups, and LUNs. What if you want to move the data between tiers after you’ve placed it?  It isn’t exactly an easy process and often requires downtime.  And If you don’t know what those terms above mean, don’t worry …I doubt they’ll be around for very much longer anyway.

What FAST does is essentially automate the placement of data at the block level on the most appropriate tier thus eliminating the inefficiencies noted above with the largely manual placement of data.  Where it will begin to get even more interesting is with the introduction of FAST v2 in 2010 when we can then monitor data workloads and promote/demote data seamlessly between tiers based upon business SLAs.

Before I go any further, it is worth noting that EMC aren’t alone in automating data tiering at the data block level as Compellent and 3PAR have been offering similar solutions in their products for a while.  Equally, there are many opinions about what FAST truly is, and one of the more balanced views I’ve read is Chris Evans’ a.k.a. The Storage Architect blog post on the subject here.

So is EMC’s announcement important?  Yes …and no.  There are two things that I find important about the announcement.

The first is that, just as with thin provisioning and data deduplication before, what was once a product is now …rightfully, in my opinion …becoming a feature.  I recognise that EMC will wish to market FAST as a product …sorry, guys, but I will have to respectfully disagree …but the emergence of automated storage tiering as a feature in storage products is a huge step forward as it allows us to link other automation technologies to storage to create a highly efficient datacentre which is adaptable with predictable costs.

Second, automated storage tiering is but a waypoint on a journey which I believe leads to policy based engines.  This means that, in the future, a Computacenter customer can select a workload package based upon their specific business needs and all of the components of the workload [server, storage, application, network] will be automatically provisioned and then …here’s the clever bit …actively monitored by the policy engine.  If the workload exceeds the capabilities of where it was originally provisioned, not a problem …we’ll move it seamlessly to a higher ‘tier’.  And what if the workload actually under-utilises where it was originally provisioned?  We’ll move it seamlessly to a lower cost ‘tier’.

And that’s where selling insurance comes in.

This is the journey to the virtualised datacentre and, frankly, every customer will be at a different stage of the journey and possibly be expecting different benefits out of their own virtualised datacentre.

Equally, I believe that there will be several different vendor ‘flavours’ of virtualised datacentre each with their own technological and cost benefits.

What makes us unique from our competition is our ability to understand the components of the virtualised datacentre, how to solve each customer’s own individual Rubik’s cube, how to calculate the return on investment as well as the cost benefit analysis to migrate to a fully virtualised datacentre …all whilst identifying and mitigating risk, perhaps even underwriting / gainsharing the calculated benefits

If that isn’t the beginnings of an attractive insurance policy in a challenging economy, I’m not sure what is.

-Matthew

Click here to contact me.

Whilst we have been married for six years and together for almost ten, I still naively cling to the belief that if I just keep talking and present a coherent and factually based argument that Mrs. PL will come round to my way of thinking.

Me: ‘But we can’t really afford a new house, and I’ve been upgrading our house recently …what about our new supercharged home office?’

Mrs. PL: ‘Nice try, but weren’t you …by your own admission …indulging your own inner geek?  How does you being able to Twitter or tweet or whatever the heck it’s called build a new baby room?’

Me: ‘Yeah, okay …but what about the new shower stall, or the new washing machine?  It spins at 1400 rpm!  And has a 20 minute steam cycle to freshen up shirts when they’re wrinkled!’

Silence.  I’m pretty sure Mrs. PL is melting my inner organs with her glare.

Me: ‘And what about the new refrigerator?  It’s like a magic superfridge made by wizards and Hobbits …nothing ever goes bad in there!  We’ve eaten things that are like three weeks over the use by date!’

Mrs. PL: ‘Tell me something, my dearest chucklehead.  How do these upgrades fit into this equation you keep banging on about?  Wouldn’t a new house as opposed to siloed upgrades have a better five year cost benefit?’

Silence.  I hate it when she’s right.

What has this got to do with data storage and protection?

Mrs. PL has got me thinking about Howard Moskowitz, horizontal segmentation and a great talk I heard from Malcolm Gladwell.  I don’t want to steal any of Malcolm’s thunder or take too long explaining horizontal segmentation so click here if you have about fifteen minutes, well worth your while.

Put simply, the thought is that there is no such thing as a ‘perfect’ product nor, by extension a ‘perfect’ solution.  Rather, each product or solution should be developed and subsequently recommended based upon the good it can do for a particular customer situation.

I was reading a blog post from an analyst recently which questioned Is IBM XiV Still Relevant?  Whilst the blog post makes some interesting points, I kept coming back to the same thought …yes, I suppose you could ask this question but only really if you are viewing IBM XiV next to other storage array products in a ‘bikini contest’ fashion.

But judging arrays in a Miss World style lineup isn’t the real value of grid storage …and not at all the way I would advocate our articulating a solution in any case.

No, I think that grid storage …in this case IBM XiV, but you could also make the same argument with EMC Vmax or NetApp ONTAP v8 …is a basic building block of the virtualised datacentre.

If we wanted to view IBM XiV as a building block, one of the more interesting announcements around IBM XiV was actually buried in an announcement IBM made on 10 November which was talking about asynchronous mirroring …but the very next paragraph of the announcement talks about new support for instant space reclamation.

Why is this important?  Well, if you think back to this post about thin provisioning, what this means is that IBM XiV is making the software APIs which make thin provisioning possible available to third party products such as Symantec Storage Foundation such that Symantec software can now ‘recognise’ unused space and return it to the storage pool quickly.  We could easily add an IBM N Series gateway to provide NFS/CIFS NAS in addition to the block level storage from IBM XiV, as well as Storewize to give us data compression from 45% or higher for stale data.

What would this give us?  What we want …and need …to see, with vendors working together to ensure their products ‘glue’ together such that we can build a horizontally capable virtualised datacentre which is efficient, optimised, and fully flexible for customer needs both now and in the future.

But we wouldn’t stop with just the first building block if we wanted to derive true ROI and cost benefit.  We would need to consider virtualising the servers, converging the network, optimising the physical servers with blades, and automating the whole lot.

And here’s where it could get tricky if we start trying to articulate such a solution with stories of Prego, Howard Moskowitz, or Malcolm Gladwell and horizontal segmentation.

I think one of the easiest ways to visualise this concept is to picture a virtualised datacentre as a solved Rubik’s cube with each of the six sides a different solid colour made up of nine blocks.  Each solved side represents one of the discipline areas required for a virtualised datacentre …Data Storage & Protection, Networks, Platforms, Virtualisation, Automation, and Workspace / Collaboration.

Our customers …all of them …have unsolved Rubik’s cubes with the coloured blocks in any of a number of different iterations.

Our job, in my humble opinion, is not to articulate a storage product …or products …in the context of the proverbial bikini contest but, rather, in the context of exactly how our recommended solution will help our customers solve one, then two, then three sides until they reach all six for a fully virtaulised datacentre which delivers true ROI, cost benefit, and little or no disruption to their production business.

Please contact me if you would like assistance in taking this journey.

-Matthew

Click here to contact me.

But I’ll tell you a secret …I don’t actually have a favourite bottle of wine, nor do I have any silly rules like ‘no bottle under £20’ or some such.  I admit that I do subscribe to Decanter, read Jancis Robinson online, and subscribe to more wine blogs and Twitter feeds than I care to mention.  Whilst data can be very useful, you always run the risk of ‘analysis paralysis’ and, at the end of the day …much of what is written about wine is frankly someone’s subjective opinion.

No, I firmly believe that wine should be had for enjoyment …and I’ve tasted exceptional wine at £5 as well as wine costing much more which I wouldn’t clean Mrs. PL’s motor engine with.  Equally, as each one of us has an idea of the tastes we like and don’t like …who am I to tell someone else whether a bottle is good or not?  All I can do is tell you if I like it, although this does introduce the small problem of what to serve at dinner parties or when Mrs. PL and I are sharing a bottle.

So, what to do?  I do have a little formula in my head that I use which takes things into account when I choose a bottle …why are we drinking this, is it a celebration or a weekday? …how much does it cost, and is that a fair price? …what kind of food are we eating, or are we not eating until later? …and so on.  I want to get on to the crux of this post, but at the bottom of this post there are a few wines which make the PL Wine List.

What has this got to do with data storage and protection?

I’ll tell you another secret …contrary to what some might believe …including a few of our vendors …I don’t have a ‘favourite’ vendor or product any more than I have a favourite bottle of wine.  Without getting too Eddie Haskell about this, what is truly important to me …and I know I am far from alone in this within Computacenter …are our customers and how our solutions can help them remain competitive in their respective markets in the midst of a difficult economy.

Great, fantastic, huzzah.  But so what.  Isn’t that, you know …your job?  Indeed it is, but just as it can be difficult to select a wine for an occasion where it will be shared with others …how do we select a solution for a customer in a selective and demonstrably valuable way?

Some customers work directly with vendors and often use Gartner Magic Quadrants as a way to select their preferred solution.  Nothing wrong with that, but just as some winemakers and wineries are now openly criticising scoring systems they see as subjective scoring techniques such as the Robert Parker 100 Point Scale …so too are some vendors criticising the Gartner Magic Quadrants claiming the research methodologies are something less than scientific.  Indeed, a vendor recently brought a suit against Gartner claiming exactly this, with the suit having been initially thrown out but likely to be appealed.

Now, this post isn’t about criticising or having a go at Gartner or their Magic Quadrants …indeed, I applaud Gartner for being very open and transparent regarding their research techniques leaving folks to make up their minds for themselves.

That said, I believe research provided by companies such as Gartner to be but one part of the solution equation.

In an effort to inject more science into a solution decision, rather, I would argue that the solution equation should be expressed as [ROI] + [CBA] + [DPB] = CSS.

ROI, or Return on Investment.  How does our proposed solution return ROI within our customer’s stated period?  How can we leverage the existing infrastructure and investment to improve upon the ROI period?

CBA, or Cost Benefit Analysis.  Once the solution has been implemented, how much cost can be removed from our customer’s infrastructure and related budgets?  Exactly how will this be achieved (e.g. thin provisioning, data deduplication and/or data compression, storage virtualisation)?  What is the CBA not just for one to three years, but for five years from implementation?

DPB, or Disruption to Production Business.  What disruption is the recommended solution likely to have on the customer’s production business?

We give each of the above blocks …[ROI], [CBA], and [DPB] each a possible score of 100 such that a perfect solution would give us 300 expressed as CSS, or the Composite Solution Score.

How do we score each of the blocks such that we aren’t scoring subjectively?  Well, firstly we ensure that our data consultants retain the highest credentials in the industry …but we then couple their knowledge with a point system derived from IDC Storage v3.0 criteria as well as the Carnegie Mellon Capability Maturity Model.

The findings, CSS, are then presented to the customer in either a ‘leader table’ format or as an executive review comparative matrix based upon the vendor solutions the customer informed us they were most interested in.  In addition, the findings often form the basis on which we can offer to underwrite / gainshare the proposed cost savings for up to and including five years from implementation.

How do we do that, exactly?  Well, I can certainly provide you some samples but it does very much remain Computacenter intellectual property …and it probably doesn’t hurt to have a Practice Leader for Data Storage & Protection who studied neuroscience and Technology Leader for Data Consultants in Bill McGloin who studied applied mathematics.

Does it always work?  Yes …and no.  Just as people have reasons for liking or disliking different wines, so too customers will have reasons for agreeing or disagreeing with our findings.

But I believe this is just about the fairest way I know to present a proposed solution in an agnostic way …and, at the very least, absolutely articulates our value to a customer as a true service and solution provider.

As always, if you would like further assistance in taking this journey please don’t hesitate to contact me.

Have a great weekend,

-Matthew

Click here to contact me.

PL Winter 2009/10 Wine List

If you like champagne as a pre-dinner drink or to celebrate, you won’t go far wrong with Heidseck Monopole Gold Top vintage 2004.  Always a quality drop, but at £19.99 from the normal £40 …or even £18.99 if you are near a Budgens …this is a steal!

If you are looking for something more ‘unique’ in the champers department, why not try Nyetimber?  Produced in Sussex, which has geographical features identical to the champagne region, this the the tipple good enough for Her Majesty to serve at the Royal Garden Parties.

I’m a huge fan of pinot noir from New Zealand, and you won’t go wrong with the bottle which won the International Wine Challenge for Best Red Wine, Wild Earth.  At £18 a bottle …and if you hunt around I’ve seen it as low as £13 …how affordable is the world’s best red wine?!

One of the most complex and interesting reds I’ve recently is Lillian Shiraz Mataro 2005.  At £11.75 a bottle, I challenge you to blind taste it and tell me it doesn’t taste about three times more expensive.  I’m stocking up on this one!

Finally, to round out the reds I give you Château Méaume ‘Château Matured’ 2003 Bordeaux Supérieur.  A bit of a mouthful for a wine costing a very affordable £8.99, yet if you open it 45 minutes before dinner I guarantee your guests will think you spent a whole lot more than that!

What has this got to do with data storage and protection?

There have been many exciting developments in technology generally and storage specifically over the past few weeks.  VMware, Cisco, and EMC …the VCE consortium or coalition, if you will …announced a reference architecture which is essentially a virtualised datacentre in a box called vBlock as a infrastructure package / product in its own right, with Acadia as a private cloud ‘solution provider’ to help enterprise customers migrate their existing infrastructures to said virtualised datacentre and possibly even the much vaunted cloud.  Not to be outdone or left behind, HP also made a similar announcement regarding their converged infrastructure, and then made things very interesting by acquiring 3Com for $2.7 billion.  We also had IBM with their development and test cloud launch and the IBM Cloud Academy, and we mustn’t forget BT having selected NetApp as their provider of choice for BT cloud offerings labelled the Virtual Datacentre.

Now, announcements are all well and good but there remains plenty left for us to more fully understand about just what these solutions will look like …and cost …so I don’t want to get too far ahead of myself nor overstep my bounds prior to more senior Computacenter executive views on what this all means for both us and our customers. 

That said, I am hugely excited about what, at first glance, would appear to be the conversion of hype to reality.  We’ve heard so much about ‘cloud’ computing over the past few years that customers were becoming palpably sceptical …in many cases, cynical …about the ‘cloud’, and I can’t say that I blame them.  Indeed, if you want to have fun ask two industry analysts or vendors to defined cloud and watch the three or more definitions come back.  I say fun, but I’m a geek remember so I tend to find analysts and vendors arguing about these things humorous …but customers don’t and, frankly, don’t really care about the new whizz bang features of a cloud solution.  No, what they care about is how technology can improve their business …or Sharpen it, if you will …to reduce their costs in the pursuit of their being competitive in their respective market.

So are these announcements the signalling of the end of history for technology …will the cloud be the final end point for customer computing infrastructures and datacentres?  I personally don’t think so, and tend to view the announcements as a watershed waypoint rather than an endpoint.  Just as I don’t believe that Spotify will be the death of iPods or iTunes, nor do I believe that customers will take an ‘all or nothing’ approach to cloud computing.

If you look more closely at the recent vendor announcements, what is perhaps most interesting is that the productisation of a virtualised datacentre through the use of a reference architecture is essentially made possible by aligning core products such as VMware, a scale out storage offering, blade servers, a unified network to bring it all together, and software to automate the provisioning and management of the lot. 

And here is where I fundamentally believe we can add real and demonstrable value. 

We are well versed with capabilities which far outweigh our competition in the components which make a virtualised datacentre possible.  Don’t believe me?

We have been involved with VMware since 2002 and won a Supplier Innovation Award in 2007 from BT. 

I’ve been developing collateral, running customer education events, and providing internal training around grid storage solutions such as IBM XiV, EMC Vmax, and NetApp ONTAP 8 internally for well over a year. 

We have more BMC, BladeLogic, and Tideway datacenter automation experience than anyone in the UK. 

We’ve automated the provisioning of data storage. 

We have skills in Cisco networking, virtualised I/O solutions such as Xsigo, and unified network architectures such as FCoE.

Put simply, we have demonstrable skills and expertise to advise and assist customers every step of the way from their existing traditional datacentre …and the low utilisation and high costs it undoubtedly entails …to a virtualised and automated datacentre with the high efficiency, increased utilisation, and lowered and predictable costs it promises.  What’s more, we have an equation in [ROI] + [CBA] + [DPB] = CSS which we use to quantifiably measure what our customers will reap by moving to the next step …and, in certain circumstances, we will agree with a customer to underwrite and gainshare the difference between their existing costs and the lowered costs our proposed solution has identified.

The end of history?  No, I think this is just the beginning …and Computacenter are ideally placed to help customers write the next exciting chapters.

As always, please don’t hesitate to contact me if you would like help in taking this journey.

Have a great weekend,

-Matthew

Click here to contact me.

Okay, so I didn’t fly a ‘real’ Boeing 737-300 …it was a full motion flight simulator operated by BMI at London Heathrow …but as simulators go this was about as realistic as you can get short of hearing the passengers behind you scream when you bank at 45 degrees over Canary Wharf.  From the time I walked in until the time they had to practically peel me from the captains chair I thought I had died and gone to geek heaven.  Those of you that know me know that I’m not just any run of the mill geek …nope, I’m an aeroplane technoweenie.  Perhaps not to the extent that you would mistake me for Colin Hunt, but Mrs. PL has sometimes come down at 02:00 to tell me that I’m not really flying to Japan its Microsoft Flight Simulator dammit now come to bed!  I know some men who feel they have to hide some magazines of a delicate nature from their wives …in our house, I hide my landing charts and cockpit video DVDs.

What does this have to do with data storage and protection?

I have known for quite some time just how difficult it is to fly a commercial airliner, although the experience of flying a Boeing 737-300 full motion simulator brought into even sharper focus the number of processes which must be mastered and continually monitored to ensure a safe flight.  Indeed, with the advent of low cost airlines many of us fly so frequently that we can easily forget to remember just how remarkable a thing it is that we can get on board a metal tube, have a seat, and fly through the air at several hundreds of miles per hour as I was reminded in this humorous clip.

However, it is rare these days that a pilot will fly a plane entirely ‘by hand’ as systems have been designed which can take off a plane, fly to a destination, and land again all on autopilot.  Why?  Well, the reasons are somewhat complicated …and most commercial pilots actually use a mixture of automation and flying ‘by hand’ …but, put simply, computers are far better at automating the speed and direction of an aircraft such that the human pilots can concentrate on more important matters such as not crashing, monitoring airspace to avoid collisions, monitoring the weather to move the plane to smooth altitudes and so on.

One of the more interesting storage products to have been recently announced is the Emulex OneConnect Universal CNAs.  Try as I might, I won’t ever be able to make host bus adapters [HBAs] nor network interface cards [NICs] ‘sexy’ …sorry Emulex! …but what the OneConnect CNA product is capable of is fascinating and deserves attention.

Firstly, the converged nature of the Emulex product is certainly interesting as it means that we can use the same card for both network and storage traffic.  This in and of itself would equate to demonstrable cost savings for our customers …you can essentially use one product where you would have previously used two …however Emulex doesn’t stop there.

The OneConnect products allow me to not only operate and leverage multiple network / storage mediums and protocols [Fibre Channel Over Ethernet a.k.a. FCOE, iSCSI, fibre channel], I can also offload these from the server to the chipset on the Emulex card.

If your eyes are glazing over just like they were when I was geeking out with the flight references above, here’s what that means in English …and why we should care.

The offload of protocols to the humble converged network adapter allows the server to do what it does best without having to carry the overhead of worrying about the network and storage protocols.  Just like we want pilots to worry about the important stuff and we’ll leave the highly repeatable tasks to computers and automation, this offload will allow the server to worry about the more important elements of the technology infrastructure.

How much more?  Well, Emulex claim that by using a OneConnect Universal CNA we can operate 20% more virtual machines on a server than we would otherwise.  Imagine our being able to ‘shrink’ a customer datacentre by upwards of 20% …and all of the management operating costs, power, cooling, etc. that go with it …by simply using another card which costs the same as competitive products and you can see why I’m excited about this product release.  Talk about Sharpen Your Business!

I know that we are all incredibly busy during this time of year and can often overlook which card we select when recommending a server and/or storage solution, but I would urge you to bear Emulex in mind.

As always, please don’t hesitate to contact me if you require any assistance in taking this journey.

Have a great weekend,

-Matthew

Click here to contact me.

If there is one thing in the world that absolutely makes my teeth itch and I would pay just about anything not to have to do, it is packing and unpacking for extended trips.  It would seem that I am not the only one as, prior to the recession, there were companies popping up which would come to your house, pack for you, and then ship your bags to your holiday destination …where one of their representatives would unpack for you!  Probably not a sustainable business model as they’ve since disappeared, but it was an intriguing idea …and, whilst pricey, still cheaper to the live in butler I’ve always secretly wished for.

Extravagant you say?  Perhaps, but it would could help avoid the inevitable rows in Case PL as, whenever Mrs. PL and I go on hols with PL Junior, we end up having a very full and frank discussion regarding how much we need to take.

I would be more than happy to go on holiday with nothing more than a carry on.  Now that I have my geek lair at home setup such that I can access my personal data from anywhere with a WiFi connection, all I really need for a fortnight’s holiday is my wash bag, MacBook Air, iPod iTouch, Sony eBook Reader …and possibly a couple of pairs of knickers, tshirts, and shorts.  I’d of course wash them well prior to them standing up and walking on their own.  Mrs. PL rolls her eyes, notes my objections to wanting to take anything more than this …and proceeds to tell me not to be ‘ridiculous’ and get on with packing what seems to be every stitch of clothing I’ve ever owned.  And don’t get me started on what Mrs. PL ends up packing for herself and PL Junior.  Do you really need to pack clothing which you ‘might feel like wearing’?  Nor do I think it the remotest possibility that Her Highness will have selected the same resort in Malta and invite us round for high tea, thus necessitating us to pack our finest …’just in case’.  But, as with all disagreements in Casa PL, Mrs. PL humours me just long enough for me to realise that she is right, state ‘yes dear’ …and just get on with it.

In fairness, there has been a bit of a truce called on this front and a reasonable  compromise struck.  We now use vacuum bags to compress our packing and thus fit 25%-40% more than we could have otherwise.  Et voilà, Mrs. PL gets to take virtually our whole wardrobe …just in case …although the toothpaste made rather a mess when it got compressed this year.

What has this got to do with Data Storage and Protection?

Data deduplication has been a very prevalent buzz word in the storage industry for the past few years with the major vendors scrambling to introduce deduplication into their solutions through either invention or acquisition.  The IBM acquisition of Diligent in April 2008 for $200 million and the very public tussle in July 2009 between EMC and NetApp over the acquisition of Data Domain …with EMC eventually winning but at a costly $2.4 billion …are among the more interesting.

Why the rush and what would cause a $2.4 billion struggle?  Well, just as I’m not over the moon about taking everything we own on holiday and would prefer to leave the unneeded bits and bobs at home, our customers have a similar challenge as data storage requirements has continued to grow and, by extension, so to has the need to backup that data.  Problem is, not only are we storing lots of duplicate and dormant data …when we try to back it up we can see both the time to backup and the, perhaps more importantly the cost to backup …rise exponentially.  Data deduplication allows us to quickly investigate the data to be backed up at the block level …the zeroes and ones of data, essentially, as opposed to the file level, i.e. a ‘PPT’ or ‘Word’ document …and when we see a non-unique series of zeroes and ones, we can ‘drop’ them but leave a reference to where a future user can find the series of unique zeroes and ones.  With industry standard deduplication ratios of 40% …with many customers achieve much higher ratios of 60% or even 80% …data deupe can have a hugely positive impact on a customer’s backup infrastructure by significantly reducing the amount of data storage and time required to backup data.  As a technology, data dedupe has one of the quickest ROIs and demonstrable cost benefits …great for us as we use our equation of ROI + CBA + DPB = CSS to show customers how we can save them dosh not just now, but for years to come.

But.  There’s always a but, isn’t there?  Some have openly questioned what the performance impacts would be if we then had to restore the data we have deduped.  Sometimes known as ‘rehydration’, I do think that it is indeed possible …nay, probable …that it will take a bit longer to restore deduped data as opposed to bog standard backups.  To my mind the cost benefits far outweigh any potential performance impact on restoration, so I believe that this risk can be mitigated by ensuring that our customers reset their service level agreements internally such that any added restoration time is expected and catered for.

But.  There’s that word again!  But if data deduplication is so great for backup, why wouldn’t we just go ahead and introduce dedupe into primary storage?  In other words, why stop there …why not have dedupe in our SANs and NAS?

Perhaps, although I’m not convinced this is the most appropriate way forward.  If we anticipate performance degradation when we rehydrate deduped data during data restores from backups, should we not also expect some performance impact if we introduce data dedupe into primary storage?  Yes, I think we should.  Indeed, data dedupe is effectively changing the data in that non-unique zeroes and ones are dropped and replaced by a much smaller ‘reference’ to the unique zeroes and ones so it would stand to reason that there would be some performance impact during future host access to data.

But let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater …we could still get the ROI and CBA benefits of deduplication without changing the data.  Enter data compression for primary storage.

Just as Mrs. PL gets more packing space when we go on hols by using vacuum bags …and you get more space by using ZIP files and compression on your PC hard drive …so too can we conserve data space in primary data through compression.  Put simply, whilst data deduplication uses an algorithm to ‘drop’ non-unique zeroes and ones data compression also uses an algorithm to compress non-unique data blocks.  I think it less likely for there to be a performance degradation in using compression as we’re not ‘changing’ the data, but merely compressing it.

One of the companies I’m watching in this space is Storwize.  Storwize have data compression products which can compress data with NAS devices, and often see ratios which aren’t dissimilar to data dedupe …40% or more of duplicate data compressed, in other words.  I am expecting them to be bringing out products in the near future which will allow for compression with SAN products …imagine reducing a corporate datacentre by ⅓ or more in a non-disruptive manner and you can see why I’m so excited by the prospect of saving our customers money through data compression within primary storage and data deduplication in backup.

Have a great weekend.

-Matthew

Click here to contact me.