Storage Nation

There are three new white papers available on the site that may be of interest.  They are: Create a Smarter Storage Strategy http://thestoragearchitect.tradepub.com/free/w_fnet24 Availability and the Cloud http://thestoragearchitect.tradepub.com/free/w_fnet22/ The Economic Impact of File Virtualization: Reducing Costs and Improving Efficiency for File-Based Storage http://thestoragearchitect.tradepub.com/free/w_fnet09/ As usual I welcome any feedback as to whether this part of the site is useful. Disclaimer:  For each subscription I receive a payment which goes to fund the running of this site and www.thevirtualisationarchitect.com.  This includes covering the costs of trial subscriptions to cloud services.

The ongoing battle for 3Par by HP & Dell tells us much more about the state of the IT Industry than just the desires of two companies to acquire some interesting storage tech.  It signals an acceptance that storage is a key feature in the future direction of the IT industry – more important than networking and almost as important as the virtualisation platform itself. This may seem like a bold statement to make, however we need to look forward to where the industry is headed.  First of all, vendors want us to buy their unified hardware stacks; it represents that move back to a consolidated architecture that kept one vendor dominant in the mainframe days – IBM.  “No-one gets fired for buying IBM” the saying goes (or used to go), demonstrating how IBM was seen as the data centre supplier for all things computing in the 70’s and 80’s.  Of course we know that politics within organisations and the cost of IBM hardware eventually broke the monopoly, but the status quo worked well for many companies for many years.

I've been invited down to the xChange gathering next Monday to speak on a panel with some of my industry compatriots on the above topic. Although I can improvise as well as the next guy (and sound pretty good in the process!), I really enjoy open-ended topics like this that make me step back and reflect a bit.  As a result, I came up with way more material than I could ever fit into a 90 second panel soundbite.

I’ve added a new section to the site, which you can find at the top of the navigation bar – “ Storage White Papers “.  The selections are free, specifically storage orientated and here are a few examples to get you started: Create a Smarter Storage Strategy Availability and the Cloud The Economic Impact of File Virtualisation: Reducing Costs and Improving Efficiency for File-Based Storage These are vendor sponsored and you’ll need to register (which is the tradeoff for them being free).  Please let me know what you think if you download any of these white papers. Disclaimer: I receive a small fee for whitepaper subscriptions as part of this service.  This will go towards running the site, which, due to traffic is now increasing in expense.

Here is a list of links to posts that I thought were interesting regarding the announcement today of Dell's intentions to acquire 3PAR. Chuck Hollis, blogger from EMC Stephen Foskett, Leader of independent storage bloggers consortium Steve Duplessie, Founder of Enterprise Strategy Group Greg Schulz, Storage author and independent analyst David Floyer analyst from Wikibon Gary Orenstein, blogger for GigaOm Joseph Kovar, writer for CRN Dave Raffo, writer for SearchStorage.com Lucas Mearian, writer for Computerworld Robin Wauters, writer for TechCruchIT W David Gardner, writer for InformationWeek Rex Crum writer for MarketWatch Taylor Buley, blogger for Forbes Susan J

Well, it appears from comments on recent blog entries that I’m all of the above!  The post(s) in question are as follows; http://www.thestoragearchitect.com/2010/08/02/netapp-the-inflexibility-of-flexvols/ http://storagebod.typepad.com/storagebods_blog/2010/08/and-bod-makes-three.html http://www.grumpystorage.com/2010/08/notapp-random-thoughts.html http://blog.nigelpoulton.com/netapp-some-good-and-some-errrrr/ I thank those who have made positive comments on my behalf, it is most appreciated.  I find it even more amusing that my style of writing has been described as tabloid.  Perhaps I need a few more appropriate blog titles.  How about the following: Netapp ate my Hamster or Gotcha! (when EMC outbid Netapp for Data Domain). The things I write about are coloured by the work I do – which is for and on behalf of customers.  It’s my job to cut through the marketing hype and understand the real issues in deploying and managing technology in the most efficient and cost effective way.  No vendors are without faults and I can point to many posts that place each vendor in a negative light.  However in my defence where I see something I like, I also talk about it.  If you don’t like what I write, I urge you to unsubscribe now.  If you do like what I write about, I’d appreciate your views on what else you’d like to see me discuss.  If you have something to say, then leave a comment that can be treated as courteous.  I always post comments – apart from the SPAM ones.  I’m happy to discuss things in a reasoned manner and to admit when I’m wrong.  You never know, if we continue in that manner we all may just enjoy the blogosphere more.

Recovering a single system after a disaster can be difficult.  Recovering hundreds is a mess.  Recovering them in a consistent fashion, so that their data dependencies are all correct, is a huge task

I'm on vacation this week — no blogging, no twitter, etc. — but I did manage to get around to checking my blog for any interesting comments.

London Cycle Locations Transport for London today unveiled their new bicycle hire scheme, hopefully making it easier and cheaper to get around London on short journeys.  You can find details of the scheme here .  The concept is pretty simple; at various locations around central London you can hire a bicycle, collecting and dropping it off at one of a number of dedicated stations, placed at strategic locations such as railway stations.  Have a look at the image; it shows where the stations are located across London.

I read with interest yesterday’s announcement from IBM that they are to acquire Storwize, a vendor of NAS compression technology.  Maybe I don’t understand enough about the technology, however I don’t see much benefit in installing an application in front of my NAS environment to only achieve between 50-90% reduction in storage.  What’s more surprising is that IBM would want to acquire this technology. Firstly, let’s summarise the benefits of the Storwize offering: Better Storage Utilisation Lowers Capital and Operational Costs Better Energy Efficiency These bullet points are taken directly from the Storwize website and are then expanded into more detail.  Whilst implementing compression may save some storage space in the short term, it doesn’t address the overall reasons for growth within an organisation and at some stage capacity will reach previous levels, regardless of the ability to compress that data.  I’d also agree that compression reduces some capital costs – but these will be via cost avoidance rather than the ability to remove existing hardware.  This implies that the savings can only be made if significant growth exists in the environment in the first place.