I’ve been incredibly busy this year and my lack of posts really shows it, one would think I forgot my login or something. In that time, however, there has been no lack of great topics to talk about, and here are a couple that lit my candle in 2009:

Consumer computing is fast approaching levels of enterprise computing, making corporate citizens more computer savvy, and making IT management work harder to keep things humming along. Mark my words, you are going to see quite a bit of work-slash-home networking products come to the market in 2010, specifically around data protection and storage that are going to tout “office integration” or “workplace integration”.

The mobile computing and storage space and the rate at which consumer mobile devices are making inroads into the datacenter is something that I’m paying close attention to. Specifically, the Android OS and the Nexxus One and Droid hardware–these devices are significant to enterprise computing because they take the whole idea of a netbook to another level!!

If you remember the Toshiba Libretto, these new devices are what the Libretto could have been. The mobile phones are both fast and offer the ability to the savvy user to essentially replace their office with a hand-held device. And for those with super security conscious IT departments, there are companies like Good Technologies “Good for Enterprise” that allows an administrator to remotely wipe Exchange data from a Droid in a fully encrypted container so “security” can’t be used as a reason not to support the platform.

Take this a step further, I’m sure you’ve been asked at least once already to store backups of a user’s phone to tape, or better still seen a backup of a user’s phone on their shared drive. If you haven’t yet, you’d better get ready for it!

Virtualization has been rampant, and I predict it will be in my toaster within the year, allowing me to virtually toast multiple slices of bread simultaneously and store the trend info on how many times I’ve burned my Eggo’s on SSD. While I’m being flippant, we may actually see a hypervisor capable toaster or fridge or washer, and apparently I’m not the only one that thinks so–in an article on a New York times blog Sehat Sutardja has been quoted as saying: “[Virtualization] will become pervasive…It will be used in everything from TVs to IP phones to digital picture frames to washing machines.”

If Android is in a washing machine, then I have Linux and everything that is available to Linux in that washing machine … just think of the Folding at Home scores you can rack up if we linked the neighborhood washing machines up!! Think about all the data that will need to be stored when they start tracking wash cycles of a particular garment via RFID!!!

On a more serious note, the age of operating systems for small to midsized branch office network attached storage devices, as well as smarter switches and other infrastructure devices, is upon us. Microsoft is not standing still — Windows 7 is small and much faster than its predecessors (why do I feel like that is a paraphrase of the architect from the Matrix?) and is definitely a viable OS for these devices, so now we have raw Linux; Moblin is making its way onto the stage with Android, among others. And remember, all these things have one thing in common: they need somewhere to store the data they produce.

Speaking of virtualization, the march of development in the virtualization management software space is going to pick up steam in 2010, and there are going to be some casualties. The winner will be the one that allows truly heterogeneous management of my virtual data center from storage up, and after taking a look at Cisco’s offerings I’m going to be paying very close attention to what they do. I’ve been digging really deep into vSphere, and it’s jam packed with goodies. Orchestrator is a little gem – properly executed, it can add a good bit of speed and agility to any rapid provisioning initiative you may have, BUT be careful, with a poorly orchestrated (you knew that pun was coming didn’t you?) workflow that shiny new NAS with 400TB of storage will be gone in a day.

Enterprise Storage has continued to move forward at a blistering pace, with drives breaking the 2 TB mark, and some serious performance increases in the form of SSDs, Sata III and Fusion IO putting Flash directly on the bus. I look at price in this space. The price of SSDs will get lower and lower and the performance will continue to go up. We will see the proliferation of end-to-end solutions mixing the two, a la Exadata and the Sun 7000 line. Take a look at what Fusion IO is doing in the high end gaming market! It’s funny but the consumer machines of today are looking more and more like the specialized workstations and servers of yesterday.

I see some things that we really missed the ball on last year, too. Convergence really isn’t here yet. The drive to make a device the “media hub” and then backing all that stuff up is getting there, but hasn’t quite caught on yet. I think once it gets closer it could drive an entire wave of datacenter build outs to handle it. I can also see telcos getting into the act a little more aggressively, offering storage services at their major POPs to enable some of the consumer products to work properly. This has some unintended but positive side effects for the small to medium business because they will have ready access to fast, reliable online storage. Well, at least in theory. I’m still waiting for it to happen!

Cloud storage also hasn’t really shaped up to be the game changer I thought it was going to be. I like the idea of not owning infrastructure and I’m a really big fan of the rapid provisioning/de-provisioning model, but I just don’t see the bandwidth needed for that to work here in the US the way it really should. In Korea and various places who’ve deployed infrastructure recently I see cloud as a viable model, but not here.

With that, folks, I’m back and rarin’ to post!!!

Storage-related updates include:

• New application-integrated snapshot option for LeftHand iSCSI SANs. LeftHand already had application-integrated snapshots that supported VSS for snapping the LeftHand SAN, but not with the ability to run inside and quiesce an application. This update fills that gap; competitors like Dell EqualLogic and NetApp already offer this capability.
• New NAS interface for D2D data deduplication products. SMBs no longer need to license virtual tape drives to use HP’s low-end data deduplication product.
• New DAT 320 tape drive. SMBs still using tape, on the other hand, have the option of doubling the capacity on DAT tape drives to 320GB. HP claims the new drives also offer up to a 75% performance increase with a 50% lower power draw. Tape, especially for SMBs, is frequently declared dead, but there are still pockets of tape use in this market, particularly in remote and branch offices.
• Six new HP Virtualization Smart Bundles for Microsoft Hyper-V. Full specs on the bundles, which range from an entry-level tower server form factor to rackmount servers with networked storage, are available at HP’s website. These bundles are similar to the ones HP previously rolled out this year for VMware environments.

LeftHand product marketing manager Chris McCall says the Hyper-V bundles are not a counter strike against the new joint venture between VMware, Cisco and EMC. He says HP is supporting both hypervisors, even though VMware is deeply aligned wiht HP HP competitors Cisco and EMC. ”We’ve done bundles for VMware already because we’ve targeted market size — we did VMware first because they’re the market leader,” he said. “If Microsoft was, we would’ve done Hyper-V first. There’s nothing to read into there.”

The survey began by asking SMBs (which represented 70 percent of the respondents, with “small” companies defined as 10 to 99 employees and midsize as 100 to 499 employees) how confident they were in their ability to respond to a disaster. According to the survey results, around 82% are somewhat or very satisfied with their DR plan, 84% believe they are “very” or “somewhat” protected, and one in three responded that they believe customers would evaluate other vendors should they experience an outage.

But when the survey questions drilled down into the details of SMB DR plans, Symantec representatives noticed discrepancies in the responses. While the vast majority began by expressing confidence in their ability to survive a disaster, 47% also said they have no formal DR plan An estimated 60% of company data is backed up in this market, with only one in five respondents backing up daily, and more than half expect they would lose more than 40% of their data in a disaster. More puzzling, while only a third of respondents said they expected their own customers to evaluate competitors in the event of a disaster or outage, 42% said they personally had switched vendors due to “unreliable computing systems” and 63% said it damaged their perception of an SMB vendor.

Pat Hanavan, Symantec’s VP for Backup Exec product management, admitted the answers to the questions about confidence may have been different if asked at the end of the survey rather than at the beginning. “My guess is the survey itself may have been an educational process for some,” he said.

It’s also important to remember how long it has taken enterprises to focus on formalized disaster recovery planning and technology with the benefit of internal expertise dedicated to data protection in most cases. Many SMBs rely on a partner or non-technical employees to keep IT operations running and also operate without the budget of the big guys.

The good news for SMBs starting to consider disaster recovery is that more and more vendors are focused on storage and data protection in their market these days, including a plethora of cloud services designed to host data and/ or standby infrastructure for companies which can’t afford a full secondary data center.

If you’re an SMB working your way through disaster recovery planning, please feel free to share your experiences in the comments.

One analyst who follows the consumer space closely says these products may be hitting the market at just the right time, but vendors still may need to tweak their approach to get the attention of shoppers at Best Buy.

“Digitization is reaching critical mass” in the home and small-office market, said ABI Research digital home group senior analyst Jason Blackwell in an interview with Storage Soup this week. Blackwell recently authored a market research report declaring that consumers are growing comfortable with home networks and network-attached devices. Products have been refined to offer easier installation and more features, and digital multimedia has become mainstream for users who want to keep music and photos on home networked storage products.

Still, storage vendors and customer may need help finding each other. Retailers don’t always provide that yet.

“There needs to be continued education in this market, of retailers as well as consumers,” Blackwell said. “Usually [home storage systems] end up at Best Buy in the networking section. They really need to be located closer to the TVs” so consumers associate the storage boxes with what they’re good for – streaming multimedia. In the networking section, they’ll be mixed in with routers and other devices.

“Typically stores have really good salespeople for televisions, but the same cannot always be said about the networking section,” he said. “Customers are kind of left on their own.”

The products themselves can get closer to other devices as well, Blackwell said, in more ways than one – through integration and automation of media adapter cards to more easily network with those devices, and through attention to industrial design to look more like them. “Products need to look good, and provide a good overall experience for consumers,” Blackwell said.

The Iomega StorCenter Pro ix4-100 is an upmarket successor to the two-drive ix2 consumer product. It also has a predecessor within Iomega’s product lines, the Iomega 150d NAS, launched prior to EMC’s acquisition of Iomega last year. The ix4 adds more enterprise-level software features such as security and built-in data backup with the addition of EMC’s LifeLine consumer storage software to the 150d’s hardware. EMC’s Mozy online backup service and Retrospect local backup software are also included, along with automatically updated backup folders within the device.

Marc Tanguay, GM of the StorCenter product line, said the four-bay ix4 is aimed at small businesses of around 25 employees rather than the home NAS market. It will come in 2 TB and 4 TB capacities, the latter double the capacity for the ix2. As with the ix2, the LifeLine software will offer features like Windows Active Directory support, email and SNMP system status notifications, print server capabilities and Bluetooth compatibility. The ix4 will support four printers (the ix2 supports two), and the ability to plug in an Axis security camera and stream directly to the box without a PC as an operator.

Tanguay said customers who purchase the ix4 now will get a free upgrade at the end of the first quarter to the next version of LifeLine. That version will include remote administrative access, which will be free for the first year and then cost around $9.95 per year, according to Tanguay. Remote access will let customers upload and download files to the box from a remote location, and an admin can manage it from a Web browser. Also coming in the next version of Lifeline is native Apple File Protocol support. StorCenter currently supports Mac and Apple computers, but “it’s easier to share files and networks with native AFP support,” Tanguay said.

The next version will also offer folder quotas and automated torrent support. Consumers are the most frequent users of torrents to share media files, but Tanguay said small businesses are increasingly using them to exchange data as well. The new version of LifeLine will offer the ability to run the torrent downloader on the shared storage box without requiring a separate computer or process. “Today if a worker is moving from office to home, they lose the continuity of the download, and they have to use their PC’s CPU power for large files,” Tanguay said. Finally, the next version of LifeLine will also make the StorCenter a full media server, including native support for iTunes.

The StorCenter hardware will also be upgraded in the second quarter when EMC will support 2 TB SATA drives from Seagate and Western Digital, and release a new 8 TB StorCenter model.

The 2TB StorCenter Pro ix4-100 NAS Server is now available for $799.95. The 4TB StorCenter Pro ix4-100 NAS Server will be available later this month for $1,299.95.

I’ve passed through all the phases of grief with this motherboard. At first, I was in denial for a good 24 hours, thinking ‘there’s no way this could be happening, something just tripped and all I have to do is reset a switch or jumper.” Well, I moved around the three jumpers on the board, and the myriad of switches at least 10 times each, and it was still dead.  I took out the CPU, the memory, all the cards, and tried a new power supply. No go.

By now I’d been down for about 48 hours and panic was setting in. So I set out to try and at least recover my data. I have most (funny thing, I thought I had all) of my important data on my file server in the basement, my email via IMAP (replicated from a protected server on the Internet to a server in my home virtual server farm) and the applications I’d need to carry out my work functions available via ISOs on another file server. I figured these steps would be good enough to get me up and running in case I lost my desktop. But I was wrong, ooooh so wrong. As it turned out, neither repairing the motherboard nor restoring data from other devices even came close to solving the whole problem.

The first tenet of data recovery planning is “Know the value of thy data” (Jon Toigo). The second tenet is “Know where it is, dummy” (Curtis Preston). I thought I knew the value of all my data, and I was absolutely certain I knew where it was. I had scripts built to move that data around from where I created it (my now-dead desktop) to a “safer” place (my super-redundant file server), while some of the smaller file size and text-based items were created directly on the file server.

I routinely categorize my documents, images, invoices and other data I create as well. As far as data classification is concerned, I really do eat my own dog food.

But apparently. this wasn’t enough (or I need something new) because I still wasn’t able to work after my desktop went down. I was literally dead in the water–production in my office came to a screeching halt with terabytes of storage, servers and such still happily whirring away.

Why? Here’s the kicker. I was so used to my dual monitor setup with that fast storage subsystem that most of the things I  was creating I couldn’t easily (or in some cases at all) shift to working on a laptop. Not only that, but I missed small things that I thought were unimportant, like Outlook email filters I created to organize my email (I get about 100 or so real messages out of the 500+ total messages on a weekday). I found it almost impossible to sift through all the email to get at the bits I needed. I kept running into situations where documents I was creating depended on some bit of data that was easily accessible when I was working on my desktop but took me close to two hours to find when I was on my laptop (I have a desktop search engine setup that indexes my document stores). 

I’d also gotten so used to the notepad gadget on Vista’s sidebar that I stored all kinds of little notes to myself,  URLs and such. All now inaccessible. While I could technically “work,” it was taking me eight hours to do what normally took 30 minutes.

Being caught completely offguard by this made all the steps I took to prepare for this situation seem all the more pointless. I had most of my data. I could access most of my data. But I was having serious problems with productivity because key pieces were missing.

This cost me. . .and not just in terms of productivity. I actually ended up paying $100 more for goods for my hobby e-shop because I couldn’t locate the original quote the company sent me and it had been a relatively long period of time between quoting and purchasing. Aargh!

Trying to find a motherboard (the same brand and model) locally was an exercise in futility. The board was out of production and stock had dried up everywhere but on the Internet, where the price was astronomical. I ended up having to RMA a second board and had to switch manufacturers and reinstall Vista three times.

What’s more, there are always complicating factors at work in any recovery situation. Right before my motherboard shorted, my wife and I — given the economy — had revisited our budget looking to cut costs, and, seeing how much we were paying for communications and television, decided to switch to Comcast VoIP from a Verizon land line. 

In doing so, we discovered that the cable line coming into our house had a crack in it, and when the wind blew or a bird sat on the cable the cable swayed, and the signal strength would fluctuate too much for the VoIP Terminal Adapter.  So the cable had to be replaced. This meant that when the motherboard died, not only was my main computer down, but I also had no reliable communications besides my cell phone. The only way for me to get on the Internet reliably was to tether with my cell phone–all this only a week after I got my computer back to a semi-productive state!

Comcast would replace our modem four times, and send five different technicians out to diagnose the issue. After two weeks of no (or nearly no) Internet, they replaced the cable all the way out to multiples poles along the street.

And those were just the infrastructure disasters. The work stoppages caused by them were disasters in and of themselves. I have a home office, and my wife works exclusively from her home office. Without the Internet she is, for all intents and purposes, out of business, and I’m not too far behind her. Over the five weeks it took for these events to unfurl we’ve calculated the lost man (and woman) hours at about 350. . .give or take a few working Saturdays.

Lessons learned for me:

• Have a spare board. Sure, it’s costly, but after almost two weeks of lost productivity just waiting for a board, I realized it’s cheaper to have a board on a shelf.
• As an infrastructure engineer I do my best to plan for disasters by building in replication facilities and sourcing storage subsystems that lend themselves to replication and can operate in hot/warm and hot/hot configurations. This, however, is not disaster recovery planning, as much as I’d like to pat myself on the back and say it is. That part of the process is simply being prudent about hardware choices.  While it helps with DR, it cannot be relied on as your main plan no matter what hardware vendors tell you.
• Really planning for DR involves things that I’ve always felt should be left to folks with proven expertise. My recent experiences have firmly cemented that belief. A storage professional is not a DR professional by default, no matter how many storage professionals happen to be extremely proficient at DR. Having a great protection plan for data with SRDF, snapshots and gigawatts of backup power does not mean that you or your business will actually be able to function in the event of a disaster.
• Make efforts to truly understand the value of metadata, indexes and other things required to conduct business in the event of a disaster, not just the Word file and a copy of Microsoft Office.
• Internet access has become a requirement. It is no longer a luxury plan for a backup line (DSL, cellular etc).
• If your computers not working means you will lose money at your business, pay someone to help you with a REAL DR plan. If you are a home-based business, do research on what you should be planning for and talk with a professional about DR.
• Have spares. . .wait, did I say that already?

Hopefully all this will scare spare some folks this nightmare by pushing them to take a real look at how they work and how they can continue working in the event of a disaster. Whether it’s on a small or large scale.

CA will sell the service through resellers and other channel partners. A participating reseller will establish a VPN connection between the customer and CA, and use that to automatically fail over a server that goes down. The service supports Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server and IIS, as well as Oracle applications.

Instant Recovery on Demand  costs around $900 per server for a one-year subscription.

Adam Famularo, CA’s general manager for recovery management and data modeling, expects the service to appeal mostly to SMBs because larger organizations are more likely to use the XOsoft packaged software for high availability and replication. “If an enterprise customer says ‘We love this model, too,’ they can buy it,” he says. “But most enterprises want to buy it as a product.”

Famularo says he sees the service more for common server problems than for large disasters. “It’s not just for hurricane season, but for everyday problems,” he says.

A year ago, the company removed the command line interface, which CEO Duncan MacPherson described as “a late ’90s level GUI that looked old and slow.” At that time, Unitrends gave backup and configuration management interfaces a facelift. The current release pulls in offsite vaulting and data recovery. Other new features include the ability to create customized reports based on the GUI, test DR plans, recover single files from a secondary site, and support for new operating systems including Novell Netware. MacPherson said Windows 2008 will be supported by the end of the year.

Unitrends’ goal is to package all data protection processes and hardware into one product. Combining operational backup and disaster recovery practices also seems to be an emerging trend. This is also being done through backup service providers whose backups by definition are offsite, and who are beginning to offer more affordable system state recovery of hosts using virtual servers. Stay tuned to the SearchDataBackup.com and SearchDisasterRecovery.com sites for more on this.

In addition to office supplies and EVault, Staples also offers reactive online services for small business IT customers for breakfix and network support through a subsidiary called EZMobileTech. However, this is Staples’ first fully managed IT service , and it will use EMC’s Level 4 data center in New England (originally launched as Fortress) to store the data.

Staples was mum on exactly what customizations they’ve made to the Mozy platform. Mozy COO Mozy Vance Checketts also offered no specifics, but said customization options for data security and interface features are built in to the software for service provider partners like Staples so that modifications to the core product aren’t needed.

In the meantime, Checketts said, EMC is dropping the Fortress name and will refer to the whole infrastructure as Mozy for now. “We’re very carefully looking at what to call the next generation of technologies we’re pulling together – stay tuned for a new name,” he said.

My guess? VMware.

Okay, maybe not the audit part, but for most of us, getting the type of disk we need in the quantity we need it is an uphill battle. Add SSD, deduplication, and longer-term retention to the mix, and things are getting a bit hairy with my budgetary requests. I’m at such a point now with a few of my smaller clients, and when they get that “you’re crazy” look, I bring up the chargeback model.

I think I just heard a collective sigh from the interwebs.

I understand both sides of the chargeback dilemma: the accounting side, that has to somehow keep track of all this without keeping track of all this; and the IT side, that is constantly being painted as the cost center only because no one is taking ownership of their parts of the “plumbing.” People (read departments) will request outrageous resources when they don’t have to directly foot the bill. That part I get, but are they so vehemently against accounting for their infrastructure usage?

In my opinion, chargeback would actually lead to better data management habits — at least in the long term — because if you have to pay for everything out of your own budget, then you’ll be more careful about separating what you need from what you want. How many of our managers and accounting folks have processes in place to account for each department’s use of the “utilities” that make up IT and understand that IT isn’t the root of all expenses?

I had an energetic debate with a co-worker about this very issue. I took the stance that chargeback is the way to go. He offered a more community-oriented accounting method. We went back and forth, point and counterpoint, until concluding that it just depends on what your business environment will support and the level of organization that business has in place.

For instance, if you have a well-organized, project-oriented IT environment, and have a project portfolio ready for sizing, you can plan a community budget very well and effectively fund addition to your infrastructure through a single IT budget. The reality from <i>my</I> experience (read, SMB clients) is that most companies are not so well-organized, don’t have a project portfolio for the next 12 months, and will not be able to identify budgetary requirements for infrastructure improvements.

In these cases, chargeback (or, at the very least, departmental accounting) is key to being able to answer my opening question with confidence.

Traditional SAN storage may be easy to bill for, but what of virtualized storage? Take it a step further, how about Softricity/Microsoft’s Softgrid? (Softricity is the company Microsoft acquired not too long ago that allows for application-level virtualization as opposed to host virtualization.) How do you quantify and itemize a streamed, virtualized application?

Then there’s the question floating just below the surface of the chargeback debate: How do I, as a department, know you are giving me what I’m being “billed” for? That question opens a giant can of worms in my mind (and there are already creepy crawlies up there, no need to add worms to the mix).

The crux of what I’m getting at is: Are we as technologists — and storage pros specifically — asking for too much or too little when it comes to chargeback? Are there still companies out there that don’t see the light when it comes to chargeback and departmental accounting. Should we as storage pros be leading the way for other areas of IT to follow our example?