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Data Center Transformation Part 3: Storage Transformation

admin — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 23:56:51 +0000

This is the third part in my series on data center transformations. My last post was on server transformation and the impact of virtual servers on the data center. In this post I will address the impact of storage transformation on the data center. Data is at the core of the Data center Data is at the core of the data center, and any effort to transform the data center must involve the movement, provisioning, access, and protection of data which is provided by storage systems

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Data Center Transformation Part 3: Storage Transformation

Cisco sneaks into the corporate laptop/desktop market with CIUS

admin — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 16:10:48 +0000

I've been going slightly nuts since yesterday after Cisco announced the CIUS. It looks like the perfect tablet for the sorts of things I really want a personal screen device for – communicating with other people. This review by Erik Parker of InfoWorld is a pretty good read and it summarizes key advantages and disadvantages of CIUS. If it can make the technology of video conferencing transparent to end users, it will be a big deal. But the hidden story to this is that Cisco is also making a play to get into the corporate desktop/laptop business with the CIUS. The idea that companies could deploy these with VDI is definitely part of Cisco's grand plan for world domination . Whether or not the CIUS could replace laptop or desktop computers remains to be seen, but there are reasons to think they could eventually if the stars align. The arguments for VDI are strong, but there are still a lot of hurdles to overcome, such as back end storage performance to support boot storms . By the way, people looking at large VDI implementations might want to look at 3PAR's wide striping storage systems to get the sort of affordable IOPS needed to support large VDI environments. My previous post illustrates our design for massive throughput, which supports a huge number of IOPS without needing SSDs or requiring storage administrators to create special disk pools to isolate the VDI workload from other applications running in the same storage array.

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Cisco sneaks into the corporate laptop/desktop market with CIUS

Visualizing real storage virtualization

admin — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 12:54:14 +0000

Steve Taylor, one of our SEs, created an animation that shows the multiple layers of virtualization that create the natively wide-striped data layout on a 3PAR storage server. I think it's the coolest thing I'd seen since joining the company that quickly summarizes the multiple layers of virtualization in a 3PAR array. All the functions shown are automatically done for the customer with minimal administrative effort.

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Visualizing real storage virtualization

What Storage Virtualization can not sacrifice

admin — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 19:04:54 +0000

There is an increasing interest in storage virtualization as seen an the increasing number of articles and blog posts on storage virtualization. In the last few days Rick Vanover posted a very balanced overview of storage virtualization for Datamation where he reviewed some of the many options. Carol Sliwa posted a Storage Pro Guide to block-based storage virtualization for SearchStorage which cited some use cases. One of the use cases was the City of Coquitlan (Canada) who is a 2010 Computerworld Honors Laureate award winners in IDG’s Computerworld Honors Program and a customer of Hitachi.

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What Storage Virtualization can not sacrifice

“Do More with Less”- is there any end in sight?

admin — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 04:51:16 +0000

A new survey by Intercall shows that 48 percent of americans who use technology in their everyday jobs say that they are now required to do more work with fewer resources due to the current economic climate.

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“Do More with Less”- is there any end in sight?

Customer Priceline talks about 3PAR storage

admin — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 17:37:45 +0000

Here's a video that TechTarget produced for us with one of our customers, Priceline.com . Here are a few highlights from the video: Priceline.com was one of the first e-commerce players to adopt virtualization. That may account for why the company's IT organization is known for for it's high availability and ability to adapt quickly to changes in the market. Given the fact that their business has a broad value-based appeal, their IT organization works very hard to get the best rate of return for their capital expenditures. 3PAR storage allowed them to increase their storage capacity over 400% over the last four years while reducing the administrative load required to manage it all. Ron Rose, ex-CIO at Priceline (now on the Sr

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Customer Priceline talks about 3PAR storage

Computerworld Honors Laureate Award Winners

admin — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 12:02:23 +0000

Since 1988, the Computerworld Honors Program has been recognizing and documenting the achievements of men, women, organizations and instututions around the world whose visionary use of information technology promotes positive social, economic and educational change. We are pleased to announce that five Hitachi Data Systems customers have been selected as the 2010 Computerworld Honors Laureate award winners by IDG’s Computerworld Honors Program. These Hitachi Data Systems customers will be recognized during the 22nd Annual Laureates Medal Ceremony & Gala Awards Evening on June 7, 2010 at the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium in Washington, D.C.

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Computerworld Honors Laureate Award Winners

The Mythical FTE per TB

admin — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 05:36:47 +0000

Full Time Employee (FTE) per TB used to be a measure of productivity for storage managers. Some people still use that metric today. I submit that FTE per TB is no longer relevant today. For the last 10 years the mantra for IT has been “do more with less”

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The Mythical FTE per TB

Content Aware Search

admin — Fri, 28 May 2010 21:04:08 +0000

A Computerworld article by Bernard Golden highlights an IDC report that says that the “digital Universe” will grow by 1.2 zeta bytes or 1.2 million peta bytes in 2010. One of the biggest issues with this increasing data growth is the ability to search for that particular piece of data that you need.

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Content Aware Search

How would you build an iBlock?

admin — Thu, 27 May 2010 23:49:48 +0000

I just read an article about how the concept of infrastructure blocks is playing out on the SearchDataCenter site. The article presents several perspectives, but it's a bit confused. The concept is referred to as three different terms (pods, blocks and cells) and the comparison between a making your own and buying one are not clearly juxtaposed. Regardless, its a thought provoking article. But is does raise the point what should we call these things? I think a better generic word for them is iBlock, short for infrastructure block. I've been speaking to customers about this sort of thing lately and a number of them have expressed the opinion that rolling out their own iBlock would be a lot cheaper, more flexible and more scalable than anything they could buy from a vendor. I'm a big believer in the power of integration, but it's possible to get too far ahead of the curve. 3PAR customers have already been implementing iBlocks for several years using the 3CV design discussed in this ESG Labs report.

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How would you build an iBlock?