Storage Nation

I don't know if you're familiar with the term "lighthouse project".  I've used it for years to describe projects that are more about changing perceptions than the actual project itself. And, as we accelerate towards an IT world of fully virtualized environments, private clouds and service providers, I'm finding I'm talking more and more about these types of projects. What's The Goal Of A Lighthouse Project? So many projects we undertake are to solve a well defined problem and move on.  But what if the problem turns out to be changing widely held and deeply rooted perceptions

IOPS Per RAID Group, ordered by most to least I took part in a podcast last night that discussed the XIV platform.  One of the “key features” of XIV is the wide striping of data across all spindles.  It’s a concept we’re seeing more and more in contemporary storage hardware architectures and one that’s being shoe-horned into older storage arrays too.  Have you ever wondered what the point is?  Take a look at the following graphic.  It shows the number of write operations per RAID group, ordered by the busiest RAID group to the least active.  It’s real data from a real system.  What you see is the Long Tail effect, where a small number of RAID groups are doing most of the I/O.  In this example, 80% of the workload is performed by 50% of the RAID groups; only 3 RAID groups account for 20% of the workload.

It's easy to get caught up in the excitement of new concepts in this business and it's one of the things us marketing people like the most.  We also like love competition, (oh really!), which means there is  pressure to be omniscient – or at least to appear to be. Whether it's bluster or public brainstorming, we've all listened to somebody who appeared to be very confident in what they were saying, only to find out later that they were pretty much clueless. Sometimes the industry plays a giant game of telephone, where there is a massive exchange of misspoken, misinterpreted and misaligned thought experiments.  One of the symptoms of mass-confusion is an abundance of definitions as people struggle to understand new terminology.  Defining a legitimate new concept makes it easier to think about and puts it in a frame of reference where it can be scrubbed for financial and technical viability.  Rarely, things like Twitter defy financial gravity, but most other half-baked technology concepts acquire a fish-belly patina under the harsh  light of a CFO's or CEO's scrutiny. "Tell me again why you think we need this new capital black hole and when you figure it's going to recoup half the ROI – and why we are paying you to waste your time on it?" Larry Ellison has proven himself over many years to have an excellent perspective on technology trends and he wonders what cloud computing is.

SNW Spring | April 12-15, 2010 | Rosen Shingle Creek | Orlando, FL Qualified IT end-user members of Storage Monkey may attend SNW Spring for free!  To apply for this special registration offer (a $1690 value), you must have IT responsibilities in an end-user organization and be a member of the Storage Monkey community ( http://www.storagemonkeys.com/ ).  Register now at:  http://www.snwusa.com/monkey  SNW is the world’s largest event on stoRead More…

Latency-sensitive applications are the best candidates for storage tiering to SSDs with 3PAR's AO (Adaptive Optimization .Typically, these are: High performance transaction processing, like securities trading, or Single threaded applications that are idle while storage I/Os complete People ask about Microsoft Exchange and I tell them it benefits a great deal from big, wide striping, but not much from tiering because Exchange performance is mostly a matter of providing adequate throughput. An app that people run daily but is seldom associated with transaction processing is backup.  This SWCSA video discusses backup as well as the prevailing shift to dashcams and the implications for SWCSA branding.  

Was a fun week last week – we’re onboarding so many fantastic people so fast, we’ve needed to develop a custom onboarding process.  Not enough time to do blog posts   Keith Coughlin, the vSpecialist leader for the Americas call is it the “Emersion” program.  The use of “Emersion” as opposed to “Immersion” is intentional As people are coming from all sorts of backgrounds, we are trying to cram them full of stuff and build a sense of camraderie.

Folks – we spend so much time fighting, so much seriousness in things that in the end, while important aren’t as important of the lives of people, in particular the lives of children. A friend and colleague at NetApp let me know they were doing a drive for St. Baldricks – a campaign where people shave their heads to help raise funds for fighting cancer in children.   So, in the spirit of competition driving positive things and staying above the fray, we made a little wager

I finally managed to attend a London CloudCamp last Thursday, which conveniently co-incided with a #storagebeers evening.  For two hours of listening to the collective wisdom of the presenters and the “unpanel” we were offered free beer and food

Okay, I knuckled under to pressure.  First, Leigh Grace tried to sell me on Twittering (which led me to use it as a way to notify everyone about new posts here), then I got a call from Rose Ross over in the UK who relayed to me that folks were sending me messages — tweets

It's funny how memes circulate within a larger corporation, especially one as socially connected (internally and externally) as EMC.  If you work in these sorts of environments, they're an interesting reflection of the organizational psyche.