tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-90041797387340913752010-07-26T04:31:55.217-06:00BillMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15959941385680394450bill@veridictusassociates.comBlogger119125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9004179738734091375.post-27315152090564560372010-07-13T16:57:00.002-06:002010-07-13T17:00:38.704-06:00

Most storage folks refer to the growth of data as being the today’s primary storage challenge. However, other than CapEx and Opex, it is the byproducts of this growth, management and accessibility, which are the defined, operational, data center pain points. When optimizing storage resources the objective has to be the continual matching of the value and requirements of the data with the value

BillMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15959941385680394450bill@veridictusassociates.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9004179738734091375.post-88469264800015945022010-07-07T11:21:00.008-06:002010-07-07T12:12:35.391-06:00

In a couple of my earlier posts I have referred to performance starved applications. To give some insight into what I am talking about I thought a brief post on the subject was warranted.Performance starved applications are those applications where performance is negatively impacted because it is not receiving sufficient IO to deliver optimal performance. Examples would be transactional heavy

BillMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15959941385680394450bill@veridictusassociates.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9004179738734091375.post-11452410142872798972010-07-05T19:24:00.005-06:002010-07-05T19:32:07.530-06:00

Will adding SSD’s help administrators eliminate storage IO bottlenecks? The answer is probably yes if a true hybrid solution, with intelligent tiered management, is implemented but unlikely if the tiering management is a simple retread of traditional tiered management thinking.So, it depends. First consider the data landscape the company has, which is highly dependent upon the applications in

BillMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15959941385680394450bill@veridictusassociates.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9004179738734091375.post-75711039634913489442010-06-19T10:55:00.005-06:002010-06-19T11:04:19.152-06:00

Tiered storage is a technology that enables the storage administrator to match the value and requirements of the data with the performance and cost of the storage. However not all tiering solutions deliver the same value proposition, despite the marketing buzz. Storage tiering has evolved over the past 12 to 18 months into what can be called performance tiering and archival tiering.Performance

BillMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15959941385680394450bill@veridictusassociates.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9004179738734091375.post-83805682346705690562010-04-06T17:43:00.006-06:002010-04-06T17:48:47.796-06:00

Using mixed media to match the value of data to the cost of storage is not a new concept. Storage tiering is a constantly evolving architecture that has undergone drastic changes since its beginnings. Think HSM of the 80’s. However tiered storage management has bifurcated into two major, but dissimilar and complementary classes of tiered storage management. 1. Tiering for Archive: Increases

BillMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15959941385680394450bill@veridictusassociates.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9004179738734091375.post-32298171693162263172010-03-30T17:49:00.006-06:002010-04-06T08:13:35.945-06:00

Autonomic is a word that is increasing being used to describe the ultimate in ease of use of data storage equipment with “autonomic tiering” having recently come into vogue. However, despite there being a plethora of tiering solutions available not all of them are as autonomic as they claim. My first recollection of the use of the word in an IT context was IBM’s Self-Managing Autonomic Technology

BillMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15959941385680394450bill@veridictusassociates.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9004179738734091375.post-38931455083495813402010-03-28T16:33:00.004-06:002010-03-28T16:53:04.861-06:00

My favorite phrase these days is that “server virtualization breaks traditional storage” and the more I talk with folks who are at the sharp end of a virtualization implementation the more I am convinced of its truth.There are several reasons we can point to that are responsible for this dilemma. Robin Harris of StorageMojo coined a very descriptive phrase, the “IO Blender” to describe one of the

BillMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15959941385680394450bill@veridictusassociates.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9004179738734091375.post-13490428997056884142010-03-24T18:36:00.006-06:002010-03-24T18:48:03.841-06:00

In an announcement today Atrato, Inc introduced its next-generation high performance storage solution. While performance details are embargoed until Atrato next announcement, their second major win in about four weeks, it is fair to say that when they issue the release the details will be raising the eyebrows of a number of competitors that use the term extreme to describe the performance of

BillMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15959941385680394450bill@veridictusassociates.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9004179738734091375.post-34788097490221162032010-03-19T15:10:00.004-06:002010-03-19T15:40:51.724-06:00

Founded in 1998 and spun out of Bell Labs in 2000 InPhase raised about $94 million over nine years to develop and advance holographic storage technology. However, last February they laid off its staff and closed its doors. New life however has been injected into the remnants of this organization by the east coast investment firm Signal Lake Management LLC who has announced in a press release

BillMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15959941385680394450bill@veridictusassociates.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9004179738734091375.post-74126100129698233942010-03-16T18:06:00.006-06:002010-03-16T18:38:30.264-06:00

Doing some research for a recent presentation I discovered an interesting whitepaper from Gomez, the web performance division of Compuware. My talk was on eliminating performance starved applications, at least from a storage perspective with examples of how high performance storage such as the Atrato Velocity Series (Delivers 5333 IOPS/RU) can eliminate storage IO bottlenecks. While the main

BillMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15959941385680394450bill@veridictusassociates.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9004179738734091375.post-34672995661182528062010-02-24T09:34:00.002-07:002010-02-24T09:38:10.044-07:00

A recent survey of 1200 technology and business managers by Ziff Davis Enterprise Research (Dec, 2009) for the Baseline Magazine suggests that green initiatives, energy efficiency or reduction in hazardous/toxic materials are far from being on the back burner. Their findings suggest that of those interviewed:1. 37.6% have a greatly increased commitment.2. 54.5% have an increased commitment3.

BillMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15959941385680394450bill@veridictusassociates.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9004179738734091375.post-18559527508486683142010-02-22T16:18:00.004-07:002010-02-22T16:43:41.058-07:00

Atrato Inc has just introduced a unique, “autonomic” suite of software modules that is designed to eliminate the complexity normally associated with storage tiering. While storage triering itself is not necessarily complex, data classification, the key enabler of a successful tiered storage implementation can add considerable cost and complexity. The claim made by Atrato is that their intelligent

BillMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15959941385680394450bill@veridictusassociates.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9004179738734091375.post-45303090519418306512010-02-18T13:41:00.003-07:002010-02-18T13:51:35.154-07:00

Green is undoubtedly a pertinent issue in today’s business environment. However, business decisions are always based on priority. Although the impending energy crisis is compelling, next to performance and capacity requirements, green status is a nice to have, not a must have. Companies cannot afford to compromise fundamental performance competencies in the name of going green. However, the

BillMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15959941385680394450bill@veridictusassociates.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9004179738734091375.post-60422517564766733452010-02-15T14:53:00.009-07:002010-02-15T16:18:03.378-07:00

Recently Atrato Inc introduced their latest storage management software, called ApplicationSmart™ , a tiered management software which has introduced some innovative and unique approaches to managing the integration of SSD and spinning disk. While many vendors are now incorporating SSD into their storage portfolio few have integrated management tools that effectively mitigate the increased

BillMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15959941385680394450bill@veridictusassociates.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9004179738734091375.post-42418818503165925262009-12-08T14:45:00.002-07:002009-12-08T15:03:01.983-07:00

The storage industry is very cognizant of the number of conflicting challenges that they are facing. Not the least is the ever increasing gap between CPU performance and disk based storage performance. Using the approximation of 50% annual growth in CPU performance and a 10%, annual performance growth of storage there is an increasing widening in the performance gap between the CPU demand for I/O

BillMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15959941385680394450bill@veridictusassociates.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9004179738734091375.post-43989352702167397992009-12-05T21:50:00.002-07:002009-12-05T22:02:55.114-07:00

Sad news this week as another storage company closes its doors. It had been rumored for a number of weeks (months) that IBM would be acquiring the skeletal remnants of what once was a vibrant, innovative storage company and relegating them to a development unit under the umbrella of the IBM archive activities. Apparently that was not to be, but it remains to be seen how the COPAN BoD will conduct

BillMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15959941385680394450bill@veridictusassociates.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9004179738734091375.post-42748058203752522942009-10-08T10:31:00.004-06:002009-10-08T10:37:16.339-06:00

Clustered storage has its roots in the high performance computing (HPC) world where researchers needed to solve the cost/performance dilemma associated with their mainframe resources. With the dramatic evolution of commodity servers in price, performance and size, innovative thinkers realized that by aggregating the compute power of these individual resources their problem was solved.Clustered

BillMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15959941385680394450bill@veridictusassociates.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9004179738734091375.post-28609000503899937442009-09-22T23:04:00.011-06:002009-09-23T09:12:52.953-06:00

In a recent white paper “Flash and HDD – Symbiosis or Survival of the Fittest” Tom Coughlin presented an interesting case that Flash Storage and HDD technologies are complementary and not competitive, at least from a consumer electronics perspective. The argument he presented suggests that the growth of both Flash and HDD’s are interdependent with each supporting and promoting the growth of the

BillMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15959941385680394450bill@veridictusassociates.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9004179738734091375.post-50517268926113233122009-09-17T09:20:00.007-06:002009-09-17T09:38:21.754-06:00

Many thanks to Fred Moore of Horison Information Strategies who compiled these facts from a wide variety of IT industry sources.Average annual digital storage demand rate (primary occurrence of data, all platforms)i. 35-40% for all data (2010-2011)ii. 20-25 for production dataiii. >60% for fixed content, compliance and archiveAmount of digital data stored on Unix, Windows and Linux systems WW>90%

BillMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15959941385680394450bill@veridictusassociates.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9004179738734091375.post-7994774388242348722009-09-15T07:48:00.002-06:002009-09-15T07:52:59.016-06:00

In an earlier post I talked about the seven key attributes of SMB storage but what I did not talk about was the storage options available to the SMB.There are three traditional architectures; DAS, SAN, and NAS. Direct Attached Storage (DAS) with its purchasing simplicity still dominates but as the volume of data and the number of users grow, Network Attached storage (NAS) and Storage area

BillMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15959941385680394450bill@veridictusassociates.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9004179738734091375.post-14445421095249038202009-09-14T08:12:00.004-06:002009-09-14T08:18:47.856-06:00

The storage challenges faced by small and medium sized companies are no different than those experienced by larger enterprises. While IT consumers in SMBs and larger enterprises have similar service levels expectations the SMB rarely has the specialized storage resources that larger businesses enjoy. SMB IT staff tend to be generalists with a broad portfolio of IT issues to manage and are

BillMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15959941385680394450bill@veridictusassociates.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9004179738734091375.post-23345180452403843732009-09-08T20:25:00.003-06:002009-09-08T20:58:44.720-06:00

Three fully functional virtualized data centers were assembled to support all the booth, keynote and lab activities at VMWorld with EMC, NetApp, HP, IBM, Cisco, Chip PC, MDS, and XSIGO contributing equipment and support.To highlight the significance of virtualization as a primary component of a green data center strategy the VMware team presenting an interesting comparative analysis that looked

BillMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15959941385680394450bill@veridictusassociates.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9004179738734091375.post-91492742661042058502009-09-01T17:09:00.007-06:002009-09-01T17:38:02.492-06:00

In a recent press release Dell described their success in attacking the problem of e-waste. For those not conscious of the issue of e-waste, hazardous substances from discarded electronics that are populating landfills has become a significant issue with the EPA estimating that in 2005 there was 2.6M tons of e-waste made up in part from 133,000 personal computers being discarded each day in the

BillMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15959941385680394450bill@veridictusassociates.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9004179738734091375.post-23903622908688895442009-08-30T21:28:00.004-06:002009-08-30T21:39:48.088-06:00

In a recent briefing EMC articulated the performance advances they have made with Centera and the interesting use case evolution they have witnessed. Apparently data access patterns for Centera have moved from one predominantly weighted towards the write once read occasionally of large files to one that is increasingly write, with infrequent changes and read often, increase in data requests,

BillMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15959941385680394450bill@veridictusassociates.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9004179738734091375.post-32088447348470780542009-08-27T19:47:00.005-06:002009-08-27T20:04:37.776-06:00

Fossilized processes are created by doing the same thing over and over again without asking the question why! Fossilized ideas are like trying to solve today’s problems with last year’s process or solutions; it just does not make sense.Few of us have the discipline to meaningfully challenge the status quo, we justify our indolence by a focus on the immediate task of just getting things done.

BillMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15959941385680394450bill@veridictusassociates.com0