• Tweek N Storage 2-27-09
• Taylor’s Take on Delicious
• The Storage Buzz:

In: “The Current Environment” | 5 Minutes Ago: “These Economic Times” | Out: “The Recession”

This Week’s Blog:

SRM Tools – an Extreme Cash Cow?
I have personally seen raised frustrations around SRM tools from end-users ever since the “Single-Pane-of-Glass” glory days – pitched by every storage vendor under the sun…

Storage News:

VMware makes world takeover bid
VMware Infrastructure 4 will now be called “vSphere.” VMware CEO Paul Maritz at VMworld related vSphere to a “giant software mainframe” with management at the service level. This is exciting, in my StorageTek days I helped open-source StorageTek’s first an only open source initiative – OpenTMS. The thought was to embed data management services in the OS-layer, similar to Mainframe’s DFSMS offerings. At Sun, I became an Open Storage advocate with the agenda of seeing DFSMS-like functionality embedded in OpenSolaris. But with Mr. Maritz’s latest keynote, I now see that VMware “gets it” and may just have the technology, resource, and momentum to actually pull it off…

Chuck’s Blog: It’s Happening Again
Chuck sees a new trend happening that looks like an old one – the Golden Age of UNIX was in the mid-1980’s. Will the new Golden Age of the 2000’s be VMware???

Will the SAN Market become a Feature?
A bright engineer at StorageTek used to say, “Never put a product where a feature should be.” He was talking about tape encryption, when we put an encryption chip right next to the compression chip on the STK T10000. This was a better approach than a separate appliance. My friend, Mr. John McArthur, asks a similar question. And it looks like StorMagic is trying to turn a SAN into a feature…

Products of the Year 2008
And the winners are….VMware Site Recovery Manager takes Gold for Backup & DR software; Data Domain DD690 wins Gold for Backup hardware; BlueArc Titan 3200 takes Gold for Disk systems; Riverbed Optimization System (RiOS) takes Gold for Networking; and VMware VMotion brings home Gold for Storage management tools.

EMC beefs up Celerra NAS
The Celerra NS-120, NS-480, and NS-960 models pull in hashing codes from Avamar for file-level dedupe, but no block-level dedupe yet. Additionally, code from the Kashya file-system crawler was pulled into Celerra to locate inactive files for dedup and compression. On the hardware side, larger disk systems were added from Clariion CX4 (NS-960 has up to 960 drives & 8 blades) – and the new NS series will support Flash drives. Also see Chuck’s blog, NAS Evolved.

HP Joins Solaris Community (Live Free or Die)
Sun just inked a deal with HP’s ProLiant server business. Now you can get Solaris on HP, IBM, and Dell servers. Good for Sun’s Solaris business (and a testament to Solaris’ strength as an OS). Good for customers. Good for HP because they can now access customers that won’t move off of Solaris. But I suspect difficult for Sun’s server business – if you want Solaris, but are happy with your HP hardware, no need to change. On the other hand, if you are not happy with your HP hardware and like Solaris, you may look at Sun’s now.

Latest Sun/NetApp clash: SPEC SFS
Yet another benchmark debate. I managed the Sun Storage benchmark team for a short stint, and in that time I learned a lot about benchmarks, SPEC, and SPC. Without a lengthy post, I can make two general observations: 1. There is a LOT of science that goes behind these benchmarks and a lot off good people that try to make them fair. 2. If a vendor’s product performs well, then there is little complaint. But if it does not, that vendor will always discredit the benchmark and/or try to change the “criteria” so that vendor’s product performs better.

Iron Mountain opens file archiving service
Iron Mountain Digital rolled out a new cloud storage offering this week with a service called Virtual File Store (VFS).

I found his latest post representative of storage user’s thoughts on the topic of Storage Resource Management (SRM). In his Extreme Cash Cow – Redux post, he writes about challenges he had with ECC, but his comments are geared towards general SRM providers.

I have personally seen raised frustrations around SRM tools from end-users ever since the “Single-Pane-of-Glass” glory days – pitched by every storage vendor under the sun.

What’s going on?

My take on SRM can be summed up on a recent client call. We were talking about developing a storage strategy and storage infrastructure optimization plan:

Client: We already deployed a Storage Optimization plan.

Me: Great! How did you do it?

Client: We bought an SRM tool from XYZ vendor (one of the big disk vendors)

Me: Great, so how did it go? Did you return wasted space to free pool? Did you locate allocated but unused space, orphaned space and files, inert or unreferenced data, etc.?

Client: Well, no. It didn’t work.

Me: Why? What happened?

Client: Well…we bought the tool, and had some issues with deployment. And we couldn’t get the tool to accurately identify inert space. And we needed some information from our application admins, but they wouldn’t cooperate.

Me: So what did you do?

Client: We told management we needed another headcount. To manage the SRM tool and extract and interpret the data from it. It turned out to be a full-time job.

Me: What did management say?

Client: No. They said they freed resource to buy the tool, but can’t justify more headcount to manage it.

In essence, this optimization/SRM tool turned into Shelfware. Storagebod sums up part of the problem on his blog – this stuff isn’t easy. It’s pretty complex and each environment is different, so building one tool to management everything is extremely hard to do.

So what’s the solution?

The solution is this: You need an expert with your expert SRM tool. It may not be what you want to hear (we all want a magic bullet solution) – but it is reality. Consider these tasks:

• First you need to install it and deploy it correctly (not always easy).
• Next you need to configure it based on your needs and priorities.
• Then you need to collect data and usage patterns for a set period, so you monitor all the peak and valley times.
• Then you need to write a clear and digestible PLAN based on the data that leads to ACTIONS that will lead to RESULTS.
• Then you need to align your organization around this plan.
• Then you need to deploy the plan, track metrics, and report on its success.

A single tool can’t do this. A person with a tool has to. So, we have two choices here

1. Justify headcount to go with the tool
2. Buy the tool and storage expert together as a service

Storagebod cautions in his blog post that the service cost should be more than just fixing the tool and getting it to work properly. What clients need is a fact-based Storage Optimization Plan and Roadmap based on tool findings.

If you are not buying that (the reason why you want an SRM tool in the first place) then you are buying Shelfware.

What SRM tool do I use?

Again, it’s not about the tool alone, but the interpretation of the tool’s data. But, if you are interested, the best tool I have seen is from pure-play SRM vendor Tek-Tools. They cover primary, backup, and virtualized environments. The folks there are great and the tool continues to improve. But again, make sure you have a storage expert or service to go with that tool to accomplish what you are really looking for.

Economic Downturn Hits Storage Spending
Ok – so I think we all know that our IT budgets will be flat or cut next year. We also know that data will continue to grow (and grow fast) regardless of what we do with our budgets. So what to do? Optimize, optimize, optimize. If you haven’t run a formal efficiency and optimization program in your storage infrastructure environment, then you are overlooking a huge chuck of wasted capacity and space. The storage utilization and allocation rates are far worse than most vendors are telling us (I know b/c I came from one!) It’s not in their best interested to sell less storage, but it is in yours to buy less…

The state of data backup in 2009, Part 3
Good reading in Beth’s Data Backup series – this issue covers disaster recovery and the emergence of Cloud backup. Amazon was first to market with S3, EMC came out with Mozy, and Beth writes about Symantec’s offering…

Symantec adds change management to SRM
Symamtec mentions making agentless options available too. When I work with IT admins this is top of their list – they don’t like agents crawling all over their environment. I understand – but agents will still be around, maybe minimized. ESG says that SRM tools aren’t viewed as a must-have – this is unfortunate. There is HUGE value in them – but you need to know (or have a partner that knows) how to deploy them, interpret them, and ACT upon the data. If you don’t take this step, you just bought shelf-ware. You do this, and you can free between 30% – 70% of your capacity – I’ve seen this done with multiple infrastructures and count THAT as a must have.

Brocade Buys Foundry Networks for $3B
Brocade drops $3B to pick up Foundry – a good move on the surface. This will make them more competitive with Cisco – offering LAN and WAN equip. 10GbE still looks to be a great bet, and networking companies are investing in it. See Stephen Foskett’s blog.

HDS embraces SSDs
HDS is a little late to the party (EMC led the charge, followed by Sun and others). But USP is a great disk system, and SSD will make it better. STEC is making out as the SSD partner to have. Again – if you have any apps that live or die by latency times, you need to be researching SSD options.

“Despereaux” uses clustered storage
For you HPC junkies, the movie “Despereaux” had to chunk through 1,700 shots and 90 million images. They did it the way most do, Linux clusters running an HPC filesystem – this one Lustre. They stored 200TB of generated data on Infortrend’s EonStor RAID system (comment if you know anything about EonStor – I don’t). I’ll probably take my boy to the movie and bore him on the details on how it was made…