03 Feb 12, 02:02:00

"Database Discontent" report, a top item on IT departments' 2012 to-do list is handling big data in a way that allows for change over time. According to Joseph P. Raiti Jr., managing director of Blue Slate Solutions and co-author of the report, there is a perfect storm of factors driving the need for data analysis. Changes in technology during the last 15 years have pushed businesses to adopt the Web and field more end user applications, which results in far more transactions and data on those transactions. The increased volume combined with rapidly dropping data storage costs has created an environment that is continuously generating and storing more and more data, he said. "Given this growing transactional data along with environments that support big data analysis, businesses have now identified an ability to gain value by analyzing the data they are generating in transactional systems and, more recently, data being generated by their own process automation tools," Raiti said. The process and productivity improvements gained through the Web and implementing new and more integrated transactional systems have created a certain level of process entitlement within enterprises, he added. As the amount of data available in an enterprise continues to grow, it's becoming a chore to track, manage and understand that data. Additionally, data is scattered in different places--on-premise storage, cloud-based storage, virtualized systems, desktop and notebook hard drives, and across a growing number of mobile devices (some owned by the enterprise and others owned by the worker). The process and productivity improvements gained through the Web and implementing new and more integrated transactional systems have created a certain level of process entitlement within enterprises, he added. "Knowing where to look in the data is becoming the new focus of analysis," said David Read, CTO of Blue Slate Solutions and co-author of the report. "For years, business subject matter experts [SMEs] have defined reports, cubes, universes and so forth. Understanding the data, where the interesting and potentially profit-driving enlightenment could be found, was defined manually." Data is no longer managed so simply, though. With the significant depth and breadth of data contained inside and outside the enterprise, in addition to the high volume of transactions that are continually generating more data, there is no reasonable way for people to know where to look when seeking out actionable knowledge, Read said. Predictive analytics will likely outpace reporting and traditional business intelligence efforts in the future, and they will be used to inform SMEs about where to invest their business intelligence efforts, he added.IT departments often use SQL-based systems for performing operations on data of a uniform type, but the analysis breaks down when it comes to unstructured data. Some enterprises have found the answer in NoSQL, but according to the report, that's not always effective because as the average size of enterprise data stores increases, the feasibility of restructuring and reloading each time the business requires a new view of its data will decrease. As the fundamental way data is structured changes, semantic technology will be the solution. Semantic technology has matured in the last few years, and Read and Raiti said they expect it to become the new gold standard for housing enterprise data. Analysis tools in general have matured in their capabilities while also dropping in price. "The analysis tools to get this done have grown in capability and have also reduced in price. So there really is a confluence of mature technology producing large amounts of data in organizations where process improvements have become harder to find and the easier place to gain value is through data analysis," Raiti said. Learn more about "State of Database Technology" by subscribing to Network Computing Pro Reports (free, registration required). ]]>

31 Jan 12, 07:01:00

The report also found that virtualized workloads are expected to nearly double by 2015, from 37% to 63%, leading to an estimated government-wide savings of $23.6 billion. Among federal agencies, 57% believe server virtualization takes priority over desktop virtualization, compared with 64% of state and local respondents. Although some form of desktop virtualization will be implemented by government agencies, less than one in 10 plans to virtualize all applications for all users, according to the report, which was underwritten by Microsoft and NetApp.

The reason for the low number is that "agencies are still getting their arms around server virtualization and private cloud, and desktop and application virtualization are yet another paradigm shift,'' noted Susie Adams, Microsoft Federal's CTO, in an email. Respondents say the top challenges associated with desktop and application virtualization include incompatible business applications, security concerns, lack of end-user training, increased complexity and uncertain ROI.

The transition of VDI from largely try to must-buy status has been slower than predicted, but prospects are improving. Technologies that enable desktop virtualization, of which VDI is only one, are finally maturing to the point where enterprises can realize ROI, says Karin Kelley, analyst, infrastructure management, at 451 Research.

Survey respondents appear to be willing to wait for the savings to be had from virtualization projects. Some 57% say they expect to wait a year or more to realize savings once a server virtualization implementation is completed and operational.

"In an era of cost-consciousness, virtualization is literally doing more with less,'' said Adams. "Not only have agencies already realized savings, they also estimate saving an additional $30 billion. Those savings mean the possibility of fewer cuts for citizen services. That is simply better government."

Adams added that virtualization is the "next step down the road to larger savings initiatives." If agencies combine server consolidation, data center consolidation and private cloud infrastructures, she maintained, they can realize even more scalability, cost saving, improved services and integrated management.

Tying a well-conceived virtualization strategy to data center consolidation can lead to many benefits, according to the federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative (FDCCI), in an August, 2011 report, Federal Data Centers: Server Virtualization, by InformationWeek Analytics. The FDCCI, part of the office of Management and Budget, requires agencies to take an inventory of data center assets, develop consolidation plans and integrate those plans into their fiscal year 2012 budget submissions.

The key benefits of server virtualization identified by the FDCCI are reduced energy consumption, lower facilities and server maintenance/operations costs, and improved automation of server management and provisioning. Other benefits include lower data center complexity, rapid provisioning and support for continuity of operations, the InformationWeek Government report states.

Virtualization "dramatically" reduces the time to provision servers, down from day or weeks with physical servers to minutes or hours with virtual servers, according to the report. Virtual servers can be moved faster and easier than physical servers, expediting the process of consolidating dispersed computing environments into a central location. Space savings is listed as another big benefit.

The MeriTalk report was based on an online survey of 302 government agency CIOs, CTOs, IT directors/supervisors, IT managers, and data center managers conducted in October 2011.

Learn more about Strategy: Delegation Delivers Virtualization Savings by subscribing to Network Computing Pro Reports (free, registration required). ]]>

31 Jan 12, 02:01:00

While it's always fun to be able to drive the conversation deep in the interactive briefings that are the core of tech days, I was already familiar with most of the HP storage lines, having worked with several of them. However HP did manage to bring out a few products that piqued my interest.

HP has decided to focus most of its storage development on what it's calling "converged storage," which primarily means that products from Lefthand iSCSI arrays to iBRIX scale-out NAS and StoreOnce backup appliances are implemented as applications running under a common Linux kernel on x86 server hardware. This approach combined with HP's broad server portfolio lets HP offer systems with an interesting mix of packages, like the P4800 Lefthand that combines blade servers and HP's high-density MDS600 shelf that crams 70 3.5-inch drives in just five rack units by using pull-out drawers.

The storage guys even have a neat little package all their own. The X5000 G2 NAS runs a Windows Storage Server cluster in a 3U package that holds two BL460 blades. The blade's SmartArray controllers are connected to 16 internal drives on a pull-out drawer, and maintain cache coherency like a modular SAN array to provide shared storage for the Windows cluster. Since WSS can host virtual server guests with Hyper-V, the X5000 chassis could be all the compute infrastructure a branch office needs.

The bloggers in the room all agreed we'd like HP to offer this server package for additional applications, such as SQL Server clusters or VMware hosting. Personally, I think there's a market for a Proliant version of the X5000 chassis.

We also took a deep look at the StoreOnce B6200 backup appliance. Holding up to 768 Tbytes of disk and ingesting 28 Tbytes per hour, the B6200 is HP's home-grown entry into the heavyweight ranks of the deduplicating appliance market that HP's been using OEMed Sepaton VTLs to address. The B6200 combines StoreOnce's deduplication engine with the iBRIX file system and data distribution technology. Up to four redundant pairs of controllers can be managed as a single system, but backup targets, and therefore deduplication realms, are constrained to a single two-node cluster. While StoreOnce may not have the mindshare of some of the other deduping appliances, it's No. 2 in the market, in no small part because of HP customer loyalty.

For me, the best part of the event was the lab tour--not just because it's the biggest data center I've been in for a long time, at 50,000 square feet with racks of servers and storage as far as the eye could see, but because it's an HP Labs test site dedicated to exploring how to reduce data center power consumption.

As you would expect for a green data center, HP has kept the cold aisles at 72 degrees and used hot aisle containment to keep hot air from recirculating back into server inputs. While one would assume that free air cooling would be a good solution high in the Rockies, it turns out that the dry air year-round makes evaporative cooling a better bet. When we were there, the outside temperature was about 50 degrees and the chillers weren't needed at all.

HP also manages to avoid the 10% to 30% overhead of power conditioning equipment like UPSes. Since this is a lab, not a production data center, the HP folks have made the decision that the projected outage costs of downtime don't justify the additional cost of backup power. They've even built cool vented tiles for their raised floor that have remotely controlled motorized dampers. When the computer that monitors the whole place, through a 3D interface that frankly gave me a momentary CA Unicenter flashback, sees a hot spot, it can open the dampers further--a better solution than just adding more vented tiles and running the blowers faster to move air everywhere.

HP's tiles are a project of HP Labs and not commercially available. The closest I've managed to come is Tate's SmartAire.

Our host, Calvin Zito, made a video of a previous lab tour that's on YouTube.

While HP is a client of DeepStorage.net, the trip was not conditioned on my blogging, tweeting or otherwise mentioning Tech Day. HP paid all my expenses for Tech Day, including airfare, hotel and meals. ]]>

31 Jan 12, 02:01:00

The new version of Cascade comes just two months after the WAN optimization market leader released a major upgrade to the RiOS 7--the software that powers its line of Steelhead application acceleration appliances--and Steelhead Mobile client software, adding optimizations for video, disaster recovery applications, ICA over SSL and enterprise applications, as well as IPv6.

The new features include tight integration with Riverbed's Stingray traffic manager and F5's BipIP so that Cascade can perform multisegment analysis correlating individual connections to a virtual IP (VIP) address associated with connections to hosts in a server pool. With multisegment analysis, IT can correlate traffic issues like dropped packets, delay and other issues with an end user session. Without such correlation, monitoring application performance across the load balancer is difficult. Other load balancers are supported, but the configuration in Stingray is a manual process.

The need to manage the growth and increasing complexity of networks is driving demand for network performance management technology that can monitor traffic, identify possible bottlenecks and intervene to clear them up. As use of IT grows in enterprises so does demand on IT to deliver more capacity and speed over the WAN and to be able to prioritize traffic. For example, video gets priority over a simple email, but a VoIP call gets priority over video if the video in question is something frivolous on You Tube.

The data center is undergoing a radical transformation. Data centers are being consolidated as virtualization technology is more widely adopted. Network pipelines need to expand to handle more traffic, particularly high-bandwidth video. And as applications are increasingly being distributed over the Web, more attention has to be paid to how well the network delivers those apps.

Wrap all of this with a virtualization layer, and application performance management and monitoring gets difficult. Virtual Cascade Shark, which currently runs only on VMware ESX hypervisors, is a virtualized version of Cascade, offering visibility into traffic flows between virtual machines in a hypervisor. Cascade Virtual Shark pricing starts at $1,200. The Cascade Shark appliance now integrates with intelligent taps from companies like Gigamon, cTap and VSS, relying on their timestamps for latency measurements.

All of that is happening at the same time, and network administrators are pushed to understand the applications that run over the network and how well they are performing. While virtualization has greatly improved the efficiency of data centers by increasing server utilization, it has created "another blind spot for network managers," says Jim Frey, managing research director at Enterprise Management Associates (EMA).

"There could be traffic that goes on inside a hypervisor between multiple virtual machines, and unless you have a means for gaining visibility into that hypervisor, you have no way to understand what's happening in terms of the traffic between those VMs," Frey says.

Other Riverbed management appliances that interact with Cascade 9.5 include the Stingray application delivery controller--which the company said is more commonly known and a load balancer--the Whitewater cloud storage gateway and the Steelhead WAN optimization appliance.

Steelhead appliances could sit on the network at various branch offices and send WAN performance data to be aggregated by another Steelhead appliance in the data center, with the results then presented in the Cascade management console.

The network performance management solutions market is "pretty healthy and growing," says EMA's Frey, with startups seeing revenue growth of 20% to 40% or more annually and even more mature firms--publicly traded companies like Riverbed and NetScout Systems--reporting low double-digit revenue increases.

Learn more about Strategy: OpenFlow vs. Traditional Networks by subscribing to Network Computing Pro Reports (free, registration required).

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27 Jan 12, 08:01:00

Scale provides enterprise-class storage based on IBM's General Purpose File System (GPFS) at SMB prices for smaller IT organizations made up of IT generalists and not specialists. These organizations can be either SMBs or departments, such as a developer group or research team, in a larger organization.

Scale's architecture builds on the concept of self-contained yet unified storage nodes, where each includes four disk drives and the associated processing power required to integrate into the larger storage architecture. The nodes can be clustered, allowing them to act together as if they are one. This means that capacity and performance can scale as more nodes are added. It's a unified approach because iSCSI, CIFS and NFS protocols can be accommodated in one storage pool. Scale supports valuable storage management capabilities, including thin provisioning, snapshots and replication.

IBM's GPFS gives Scale built-in features such as high-availability/reliability, which translates into the elimination of production outages and enables non-disruptive maintenance and capacity upgrades, improved performance and added functionality such as seamless capacity expansion and an extensive management and monitoring infrastructure to simplify file system administration.

One problem that mid-market customers might encounter with a powerful clustered file system is having far more capabilities available than they would ever need. After all, most users of storage software use only a fraction of the available functions, although some may use a particular function or feature that few others use. Although ease of use is welcome by all, IBM GPFS clients typically have specialized knowledge, whereas Scale's users are typically generalists. Scale's value-add is in making GPFS easy to use for mid-market generalists.

Putting a Data Center in a Storage Array Box
Each of the company's storage nodes is powered by an Intel general-purpose CPU running Redhat Linux-based software. The storage system demands on the CPU use only a fraction of its overall capacity, so Scale lets you run a KVM server hypervisor with guest operating systems and associated business applications. As such, Scale's storage node CPUs can be used for both storage processing and general-purpose computing.

Downscaling GPFS is a useful way of providing key enterprise capabilities for the SMB market while also providing computing resources. Scale Computing takes innovative advantage of the unused CPU capacity in each storage node to provide general-purpose computing (including server virtualization) in the storage box. All in all, Scale Computing is giving mid-market storage customers and enterprise vendors like IBM a lot to think about.

At the time of publication, Scale Computing was not a client of David Hill and the Mesabi Group. ]]>

27 Jan 12, 05:01:00

By 2016, sales of 40-Gbit Ethernet and 100-Gbit Ethernet products will amount to $3 billion, Dell'Oro said in its five-year forecast for the Ethernet switch market. The company, which is focused exclusively on networking and telecommunications equipment market research, expects the strongest growth in 10-Gbit Ethernet in 2013 and 2014 as enterprise data centers invest in the technology for server access through a mix of connectivity options for blade and rack-mounted servers.

Growth in 10-Gbit Ethernet deployments will be driven by continued adoption of virtualization, meaning servers will be running at higher utilization rates than will non-virtualized servers, said Alan Weckel, senior director at Dell'Oro Group. Another driver is expected to be the expected server refresh cycle prompted by the release of Intel's new Romley microprocessor platform, which will provide the faster server throughput that is needed for virtualization.

"Romley comes out in the first half of 2012, so 2012 is going to be the time that enterprises go through qualification tests of the new servers and new switches. The hockey stick up is [in] 2013," Weckel said.

Vendors in this burgeoning market include Alcatel-Lucent, Avaya, Brocade, Cisco Systems, Extreme Networks, Dell, HP, IBM, and Juniper Networks, but Weckel declined to say which specific vendors Dell'Oro thinks will benefit more from 10-Gbit Ethernet sales than others.

Vendors are seeing the same pick-up that Dell'Oro sees.

"This is the year of 10 gig," said Arpit Joshipura, chief marketing officer for Force 10 Networks, which was acquired by Dell in August 2011. "All of a sudden, this year we will see a lot more 10-Gbit deployments, and it's already starting to happen in our customer base."

Joshipura, who came to Dell from Force 10, said Force 10 developed the first 10-Gbit Ethernet switches about 10 years ago and would have hoped the technology would have caught on sooner, but is nonetheless happy that sales are picking up. However, while the rate of growth of 10-Gbit Ethernet switch sales is strong, Dell still sells far more 1-Gbit Ethernet switches than 10-Gbit Ethernet ones. Based on unit sales, he estimated 90% of sales are of the previous-generation 1-Gbit Ethernet products.

Likewise, Cisco Systems sees strong growth in the 10-Gbit Ethernet market and crossed the 10 million unit sales mark in December 2011, said Shashi Kiran, senior director of data center and enterprise networking at Cisco.

Kiran said Cisco currently enjoys a 76% share of the 10-Gbit Ethernet market and that, although the majority of its sales are also still of 1-Gbit Ethernet products, the growth rate for 10-Gbit Ethernet is higher. He also said that as more 10-Gbit Ethernet switches are deployed, Cisco is acting proactively to see what other points on a network may appear as "choke points" for the faster 10-Gbit Ethernet traffic.

Kiran also said unit sales of 10-Gbit Ethernet products are driven by declining prices, which makes it easier for customers to justify purchasing 10 Gbit Ethernet to replace 1 Gbit Ethernet on their networks.

Dell'Oro's Weckel provided some specifics: Across all vendors, the average selling price of a 10-Gbit Ethernet product was $388 per port in 2011, down from $818 per port in 2008.

Learn more about IT PRO Report: Data Center Networking by subscribing to Network Computing Pro Reports (free, registration required). ]]>

27 Jan 12, 03:01:00

October, adding the VMware vFabric Application Management and VMware IT Business Management tools. The new enhancements focus on embedding and integrating management tools into the platform, streamlining processes and applying analytics so customers can achieve better economics with their cloud computing deployments.

With VMware virtualization becoming increasingly pervasive within enterprise data centers, vCenter Operations Management Suite provides customers with detailed views into their infrastructures while also providing standardized methodologies for more effectively managing virtualized systems, says Charles King, principal analyst Pund-IT. He notes there are two main elements to the product's value proposition.

"First, having a single, unified management solution offers enterprises the chance of gaining significant cost and labor efficiencies in data center operations," King says. "In addition, as companies shift IT operations more and more toward cloud computing methodologies, having a single, virtualization/cloud centric management platform for all their x86 systems will become even more attractive."

VMware is also driving intelligence into the virtualization environment and driving further efficiency with vCenter Operations Management Suite, says Mark Bowker, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. Although VMware's value proposition to customers has primarily been focused on reduction of capex, vCenter Operations Management Suite is focused on improving operational efficiency and streamlined opex, he adds.

"Enterprises that have mature server virtualization deployments that include workloads beyond basic IT services require more management functionality to reliably deliver applications and efficiently utilize the underlying IT infrastructure," Bowker says. "At small scale, low consolidation and less critical workloads, the standard vCenter management console offers most of the features and functionality an administrator requires. As IT rapidly scales virtualized environments, drastically increases consolidation ratios and focuses its efforts on the next tier of applications, they need improved visibility, reporting and analytics that ultimately are geared toward driving automation into IT processes. vCenter Ops is focused on exactly this."

According to VMware, the integration between the different products will aid customers in identifying emerging problems, right-sizing infrastructure resources, and identifying and remediating performance issues that are caused by changes in configuration. VMware is not alone in adding performance management features into its management platforms. Microsoft's new System Center 2012 includes a rich set of tools for monitoring application performance and troubleshooting performance issues.

Additionally, VMware's management suite is equipped with a dashboard that's new to the management products portfolio. The dashboard provides greater depth into the health, risk and efficiency of cloud infrastructure. Smart alerts were included so IT administrators will receive notifications of emerging health, performance and capacity issues so they can be more proactive in the remediation of problems. Also included is automated root cause analysis for the identification of offending metrics across all layers of the infrastructure.

For applications management, VMware has included application awareness features that automatically discover and map the relationships and dependencies between applications and infrastructure components. These features are intended to help customers optimize infrastructure operations based on the individual application's requirements.

The updated VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite is available in four editions to address SMB to large enterprise requirements, with list prices starting at $50 per VM. Updates are also available as a free upgrade for current VMware vCenter Operations customers.

Check out your peers' view of IT Automation by downloading Research: IT Automation by subscribing to Network Computing Reports (free, registration required). ]]>

25 Jan 12, 03:01:00

The InfiniBand specification defines a low-latency, high-bandwidth input/output architecture used to interconnect servers, communications infrastructure equipment, storage and embedded systems. It is a true fabric architecture that leverages switched, point-to-point channels with data transfers today at up to 120 Gbits per second, both in chassis backplane applications as well as through external copper and optical fiber connections.

Last year the InfiniBand Trade Association reported the technology is seeing continued growth on the TOP500 list of supercomputing sites. InfiniBand connects the majority of the top 100 with 61%, the top 200 with 58% and the top 300 with 51%. The total number of InfiniBand-connected CPU cores on the TOP500 list has grown 65%, from 1.4 million in November 2009 to 2.3 million in November 2010.

IDC says the HPC market was worth $19 billion in 2010, up 10%, and expected to see 7% growth through 2015. While Ethernet remains the leader, the research company predicts InfiniBand will continue to take market share from proprietary interconnects.

Supercomputing is the key to the deal, says Intel. While the percentage of HPC CPU shipments will drop from 15% to 12% between 2010 and 2015, it still represents a sizable chunk of the total market. However, next year the top 100 supercomputing CPU (total addressable market) will reach 1 million units, double in 2015, and reach 8 million units by 2019.

Intel says InfiniBand was seen as the missing piece to developing a scalable fabric by 2018. The acquisition also rounds out the company's Ethernet portfolio, it says. HPC is one of the two key pillars of growth within Intel's data center business, along with cloud.

The other company remaining in the IB market is Mellanox Technologies), which, along with Qlogic, has been an Intel partner. Oracle uses InfiniBand technology in its database appliances and bought a 10.2% share of Mellanox in late 2010.

The Qlogic deal, which is is expected to close this quarter, involves the product lines of and certain assets related to its InfiniBand business. A significant number of the employees associated with this business are expected to join Intel's network and communications unit.

Learn more about OpenFlow vs Traditional Networks by subscribing to Network Computing Pro Reports (free, registration required).

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25 Jan 12, 03:01:00

Of course, the whole thing brought back the early days of the LAN industry when we installed ARCnet and Cheapernet LANs so users could share expensive peripherals like hard disks and laser printers. The I/O virtualization vendors from Apruis to Xsigo all promised to give us access to peripherals from Ethernet and Fibre Channel ports to RAID controllers, and of course their storage and GPUs, while sharing the cost across multiple servers.

These vendors were trying to bring the promise of the PCI SIG's I/O virtualization standards to market. The PCI SIG developed standards for how multiple processes, or even multiple servers, could share resources on I/O cards. SR-IOV, the standard for sharing resources between multiple processes on a single server, has gotten lukewarm reception in the industry, with important players like VMware still not fully supporting it. MR-IOV, which allows multiple servers to share I/O cards, never took off because the I/O card vendors realized supporting MR-IOV could mean selling fewer cards.

Virtensys, Aprius and NextIO all worked on building a solution that would let users put any PCIe I/O card into their I/O concentrators. Virtensys and NextIO used low-cost ($200) PCI extension cards to connect to their concentrators, where Apruis moved to 10-Gbps Ethernet for the server-concentrator connection, which was neat but raised the cost of each connection.

The last I/O virtualization vendor, Xsigo, kept its focus on what most customers actually needed--scalable, manageable 10-Gbps Ethernet and Fibre Channel connectivity at the right price. While it may be cool to share a RAID controller and allocate its logical drives to a group of servers, SAN technology does that and allows multiple servers to access the same volume at the same time to support clustering and VMotion.

By using 40-Gbps InfiniBand and/or 10-Gbps Ethernet for the connections to its I/O Director, Xsigo can put IB or Ethernet switches between the I/O Director and the servers. One I/O Director can support 250 servers, and a cluster four IO Directors can support 1,000 servers. That's a significant number of servers over the 16 servers Virtensys could support with a single system. NextIO similarly concentrated on just making IOV work at rack scale.

Virtensys was founded in 2006 as a spinoff from Xyratex and burned through about $40 million in venture funds over its short life. In October, Virtensys and Micron announced plans to share Micron SSDs over the Virtensys systems. Last week Micron picked up the assets, primarily intellectual property, and staff of Virtensys. While details of the deal are being kept secret, word on the street is that the purchase price was more on the order of a sack of magic beans than the $160 million the VCs would have considered a win.

Rumors also indicate that Aprius has been absorbed by Fusion-IO for a song. I tried contacting the folks I've worked with at Virtensys and Aprius, but have gotten no response.

While losing two or four players isn't good for the remaining players, there is a market for their gear at telcos, hosting providers and other organizations that run large, highly virtualized environments with a high rate of change. Hopefully Micron will come up with a PCIe SSD sharing system. Till then, it's 10-Gbps Ethernet and iSCSI for me.

Disclosure: I've followed all the companies mentioned here for a few years. I'm sure drinks, meals and promotional tchotchkes were involved, but that is the extent of business I have done with them. ]]>

24 Jan 12, 02:01:00

Research: Windows 8, finds that the migration strategy appears to be predicated on people migrating from Windows 7 to Windows 8, when it is clear that a significant number of existing users are still running Windows XP. This demonstrates the sort of problem that Microsoft is facing. The new operating system is scheduled to come out in beta in February and for final shipment in the second half of the year.

According to the survey of 973 business technology professionals, 90% still have Windows XP and 81% have Windows 7. Just over half, 52%, plan to upgrade, while 48% will not. Of those planning to upgrade, 82% will be upgrading from Windows 7 and 54% will be upgrading from Windows XP. Half plan to stay with Windows XP, while 30% plan to stick with Windows XP. And even those who do plan to upgrade, 28%, the largest percentage, have not yet established a timetable for when they will be upgrading. Moreover, 21% said they do not plan to deploy Windows 8 on mobile devices.

Issues cited by the survey respondents included having to redesign applications to support the new Metro tile-based touch user interface, the requirement for touch devices and monitors to take advantage of the new interface, Windows 8 compatibility among different browsers, and the requirement to develop back-end systems that can service a variety of devices.

Barriers to upgrades cited by respondents include other IT projects with higher priorities, compatibility issues, testing requirements, a lack of business drivers or ROI, training requirements, lack of staff, lack of money, and the fact that they're still in the process of migrating to Windows 7.

Another survey, InformationWeek's 2012 forecast, found the prospects are good for Windows 8 Server and not so bright for Win Mobile. At the end of 2011, 63% of respondents said they'll run Windows 8 on at least 50% of their servers. Only 30% of respondents say they'll run the phone/tablet version on that fraction of these devices, which was considered surprisingly high.

Migrating from Windows 7 to Windows 8 is supposed to be seamless, but migrating from Windows XP to Windows 8 will be another issue, since, like the migration to Windows 7, it will require a clean install. "Essentially, you have to save your data, do the install and migrate your data in," says analyst Roger Kay, owner of Endpoint Technologies Associates. Moreover, Windows XP users may find they need more memory or processing power to support Windows 8.

"If a system is more than two or three years old, it might not have the processing power to make Windows 8 work correctly," says Charles King, principal analyst for Pund-IT.

However, users who migrate from Windows 7 may see improvements, says Rob Enderle, principal analyst for the Enderle Group. While Windows 8 has the same memory requirements as Windows 7, it is less resource-intensive. "The cheapest systems that run Windows 7 or Vista should be as fast or faster with Windows 8," he says. Systems should have at least 2 Gbytes of memory, though Kay suggests that 4 Gbytes would be better.

Learn more about Research: Windows 8 by subscribing to Network Computing Pro Reports (free, registration required). ]]>

23 Jan 12, 02:01:00

Let's work through this together; it may be a tough one. Many of us have been trained to make all IT-related decisions based on ROI. Some of this is self-induced, some may come from vendors with ROI spreadsheets utilizing amazing formulas, industry data and handfuls of pixie dust to show how much money you'll save over the next three years with widget X.15. For whatever reason, ROI is a big part of most IT-related decisions.

IT decisions weren't originally made this way. Instead, they were made based on the business value that would be gained from an IT system. IT was purchased based on how it would enable the business to increase profits, build better products or better service its customers. That's really what the technology should be about.

The decision to move to private cloud should be based on the competitive advantage it can provide. If we can justify that private cloud can give us the ability to do something better, faster or at lower cost than the competition, we're halfway there. Let's take a look at gaining competitive advantage with private cloud.

Let's start with some example numbers for the time it takes to bring a new service online:

1 week - Design and validate a BOM (bill of materials)

1 week - Receive approvals and submit PO

2 weeks - Wait on required gear

1 week - Rack, stack, cable and configure

3 weeks - Build service, test and validate

2 months - Total time

This is just an example; some of these times may be laughably short or long depending on your organization. Using these example numbers you have a two-month period between identifying a new service that will enable your business and having that service online. This doesn't take into account rollout of and training on the service once online. If you could cut that time in half, would that provide competitive advantage?

By using a private cloud model for delivery of IT services, this process can be trimmed to three weeks (using the same example numbers.) The infrastructure would be in place, carved into flexible pools and the tools to automate deployment of the required subset would be available to IT staff, developers or both. Through a self-service portal the first four steps above can take place in minutes.

Additionally, scale is simplified through standardized infrastructure components. Rather than deciding on which server, storage or switch is required per project, pre-defined components are purchased and plugged into the resource pools as capacity is required. Is your network at capacity? Add a switch to the mesh. The hardware itself becomes nothing more than CPU, RAM, storage and I/O capacity for the delivery model you've built.

The flip side of the above model is removing old or under-performing services. When an application or service is removed from the cloud, the resources are returned to the pools. In a legacy data center build, it is difficult to repurpose hardware when a service is no longer needed, and as such often doesn't happen. Scaling down occurs, and services are eventually retired. This model allows for seamless return of the underlying hardware resources to the cloud.

The last piece of competitive advantage is of course cost. Any reduction in cost without a reduction in revenue will inherently increase profits. This is why the ROI model persists so strongly. Private cloud can, and does in many cases, reduce costs, but this depends on how mature your IT organization is at the onset. Much of private cloud's cost reduction comes from the virtualization of the underlying hardware; automation and orchestration are not required for that, but help provide the business value shown here.

While cost is always quite important, it should not be the first or most important criteria. Cost is more easily modeled and budgeted for once the end goal has been defined. If you begin with an attempt to show ROI, you end up with models of very subjective soft costs showing savings over time. These are not solid foundations for such a large change. Define the advantages private cloud can provide your organization, decide whether they provide enough value to embark on the journey, and then model the costs into your budget. ]]>

20 Jan 12, 05:01:00

But some adapt to not only survive, but thrive. One of the latter is Dell, which seems to be successfully navigating numerous transformational challenges. An example: Dell's evolving storage efforts include a recent forum in London where the company articulated the new Fluid Data architecture, which Dell believes will help it become an increasingly important presence in the storage market.

Dell's Fluid Data architecture, which is designed to enable customers to effectively manage growing volumes of information, finds the company appearing to heed the advice of the classic Fleetwood Mac song "Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow." But at the same time, at least so far as storage goes, Dell appears to be following another of the band's hits: "Go Your Own Way."

Dell has long had its own PowerVault line of entry-level disk storage systems, and while those solutions meet the basic needs of business customers, the company long ago recognized that the line was not functionally rich enough to attract the enterprise customers it was pursuing. As a result, Dell turned to EMC as a primary storage partner, OEMing or reselling the company's CLARiiON, Celerra and Symmetrix platforms. While the relationship has been beneficial for both, it seemed unlikely to last forever, especially considering Dell's strategic focus on developing a broader set of end-to-end systems solutions.

Now, for years Dell's business model eschewed a large investment in R&D in contrast to competitors such as EMC, HP, and IBM. That made economic sense given the company's focus on commodity components and systems, but the approach made it more difficult to differentiate Dell solutions from competitors' offerings. That issue is even more pronounced in complex areas like storage which are particularly sensitive to rapidly evolving features and functionalities.

However, Michael Dell's return to the company in 2007 resulted in a marked change in attitude toward corporate acquisitions that, along with a plethora of innovative start-ups, has allowed Dell to successfully buy its way into storage success. The company's first major storage splash was the acquisition of EqualLogic in November 2007, which resulted in it becoming a leading player in the burgeoning iSCSI SAN, an increasingly important technology for many of Dell's target customers. Then in July 2010 came an under-the-radar (for the most part) move with Dell acquiring Ocarina Networks which provided some sexy new technologies, including compression and deduplication.

The company's biggest storage deal was the acquisition of Compellent Technologies in December 2010 for $820 million. A few months earlier, Dell was outbid by HP in a highly public pursuit of 3PAR (which HP eventually won for $2.35 billion), leading some to suggest that Compellent was a second choice. Dell would argue that point, as well it should, because Compellent brought a lot to the table, both in its portfolio of highly scalable enterprise solutions and as an early pioneer in thin provisioning and volume management, both keys to enhanced storage efficiency (and efficiency has always been a must-have value at Dell).

Overall, the EqualLogic, Ocarina and Compellent deals all demonstrate how a vendor with a clear vision of where it wants to go and a willingness to spend its cash carefully can acquire the assets required to compete effectively against players with larger R&D investments.One criticism that could be leveled at most if not all large IT vendors with strong storage portfolios is that they have multiple, overlapping product lines that can result in customer confusion, as well as inefficiencies. However, this criticism is misplaced. Large vendors typically work with a broad range of customers with often radically different requirements for storage performance, capacity, software and management functionalities. For these businesses, one-size-fits-all storage architectures are neither economically nor operationally feasible. What they need, however, is for vendors to articulate how all the disparate product lines play as a whole and fit into the vendor's vision of a storage future.

Dell's storage vision is clearly illustrated in its Fluid Data architecture, a schema that emphasizes efficiency and agility through intelligent data management. Let's make that abstract statement real with a pair of concrete examples from the company's recent announcement that illustrate the point:

Dell's new Compellent Storage Center 6.0, its next-generation architecture for the Compellent storage array systems, is built on a 64-bit operating system instead of a 32-bit operating system. What does that mean? Recall that storage controllers have CPUs built-in that manage the array. Obviously they have an operating system. In the case of Dell Compellent, that is a Linux-based operating system that can be non-disruptively updated, allowing customers to more easily gain the advantages of future improvements. The use of a 64-bit OS also gives significant performance and ability to scale capacity advantages. That coupled with storage management software as in copy and thin provisioning unmapping capabilities supports storage efficiency that Dell feels gives them a good story vis a vis competitors. Dell is also pushing server consolidation, so improvements in VMware integration with Storage Center 6.0 is another example of the new Compellent architecture's agility.

The Dell DR4000 disk backup appliance emphasizes built-in deduplication, compression, and replication using technology acquired in the Ocarina deal. According to Dell, the DR4000's ability to eliminate redundant files can reduce disk capacity requirements by up to 15 times, and deliver similar reductions in bandwidth requirements. Along with lowering backup storage costs to as low as $0.25/GB (list pricing) the DR4000 can also significantly reduce the footprint of backup in the data center, thus delivering significant power and cooling savings. The DR4000 gets Dell into a major competitive area of the storage market while leveraging its Fluid Data architecture strategy and emphasizing storage efficiency (TCO improvements over the existing architecture) and agility (both local and remote replication).

So how does Dell's Fluid Data Architecture and its related announcements position the company during what is, to put it mildly, a highly evolutionary time in the enterprise storage market? Pretty well, overall. The company has put together a solid line-up of proven and cutting-edge solutions that should appeal to existing customers and allow Dell to compete effectively in still-growing and emerging markets.

To be honest, though, Dell's offerings don't fill absolutely every customer need. In EqualLogic and Compellent, the company made big bets on cost-effective alternatives to the traditional SAN platforms, including EMC's CLARiiON and Symmetrix. However, while we expect Dell to be a strong contender, especially in green field opportunities, displacing existing enterprise SAN systems seems less likely.

That said, Dell today has done something that many have tried and few have accomplished. Its creative approach to acquisitions has, in relatively short order, allowed Dell to assemble end-to-end storage solutions that will be attractive to many if not most businesses. At the same time, Dell's exceptional eye for innovative value means that the time required for those investments to start paying off for company shareholders should be considerably shorter than it is for many traditional storage and system vendor competitors.

Overall, we find much to like about Dell's Fluid Data architecture strategy and solutions. Over time, we expect that storage customers will find much to like in Dell's offerings, as well.

David Hill of the Mesabi Group wrote this piece in conjunction with Charles King, Pund-IT, Inc.

At the time of this publication, Dell is not a client of David Hill and the Mesabi Group.

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20 Jan 12, 02:01:00

"So far it's really interesting, really good," says Steven Bell, infrastructure systems architect for PAETEC Communications, now a part of Windstream Communications, a telecommunications company based in Fairport, N.Y. "It's definitely a paradigm shift compared to traditional storage. We have yet to deploy it on a larger scale, but we're hoping it'll be able to fulfill those needs."

The company was looking for alternatives to big-box vendor storage arrays because it wanted to treat its storage in the same, non-persistent way it treats its virtual desktop--that is, information is destroyed once a user logs off. "We didn't want to buy a huge expensive frame for something that's here one second and gone the next," he says. It expects to save both operational and capital expenses, but does not yet know the amount.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based Atlantis has been selling the ILIO product for some time; what is new is the ability for it to run only on server-based memory, says Seth Knox, director of marketing.

The Atlantis implementation reviewed both with the company and the user is the highest-performing real-world VDI installation seen to date, says James Bagley, senior analyst and business development consultant for Storage Strategies NOW. In particular, the combination of Atlantis' input-out reduction with the Cisco blades creates phenomenal performance, especially since the end user already used Cisco for switching fabric across its network.

While other VDI implementations have used flash memory appliances, Atlantis is the first to demonstrate such an implementation on blade servers without using a storage appliance or disk array, he says. This is unique and is responsible for the high performance, which is 10 to 20 times the speed of other implementations in terms of input/output operations per second (IOPS), he says.

However, the "diskless" aspect is a bit misleading, says Henry Baltazar, senior analyst of storage and systems for 451 Research. While the technology is good for storing the operating system and applications, it does not account for user-generated data, such as spreadsheets, presentations, videos, pictures, PDFs and so on, which ultimately need to be stored on some sort of disk storage system, he says.

VDI has been very popular with vendors and industry pundits, but the market traction has not met expectations. Gartner estimated that there will be as many as 20 million virtual desktops in place by 2014, and last year CDW found that 90% of businesses were considering or implementing client virtualization projects. CDW also found that companies were having a number of problems with VDI, from greater-than-expected complexity to hard-to-calculate ROI and the challenge of training end users. According to IDC, U.S. thin-client sales will amount to less than 2 million units by 2013.

The product is shipping now. It is priced per named user, in the same way as Citrix and VMware systems, at $100 per desktop for the first user and at varying prices per user after that, depending on how many users there are, says Bernard Harguindeguy, president and CEO. It is delivered through Atlantis' 60 resellers and partners.

For a VDI alternative, see The Win 8 Transition by subscribing to Network Computing Pro Reports (free, registration required).

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17 Jan 12, 04:01:00

Brad Anderson, corporate VP with Microsoft's management and security division, sees enterprises' first step into cloud computing coming through private clouds that are scalable, automated, dynamic platforms combining servers, storage, networking and applications. Our June 2011 research report Research: IT Automation agrees. We found the second most common step IT was taking to focus on providing new services was building a private cloud (35%).

Microsoft is taking the lessons it is learning from running its own cloud services and applying them to its private cloud offering. There are three pillars to Microsoft's initiative: productive infrastructure, which includes the servers and software that support cloud services, is where Microsoft has made the biggest gains with System Center 2012 automating and managing their environment, as well as integrating with VMware's vCenter and Citrix Xen; predictable apps, which automate application deployment life cycle and decouple the application from the underlying OS, make application and server management easier; and, finally, unified management, which uses a set of common tools via Systems Center 2010. It's a pretty heady lineup, and today's announcement is a solid first step.

Perhaps one of the biggest news items is the change in licensing to System Center 2012. The short story is that Systems Center now comes in two versions that include all of the modules that used to be licensed individually, like Virtual Machine Manager and Configuration Manager, as well as dependencies like SQL Server. The licensing is loosely tied to the number of CPU sockets (regardless of the number of cores per socket) in the server. Standard edition is a two-socket license that includes what Microsoft calls an operating system environment (OSE)--Windows Server 2008 R2 and one guest VM. Windows Server occupies one socket, and the VM occupies the other. The list price is $1,300. Data Center edition includes one OSE and an unlimited number of guest VMs for $3,600. In either case, if you have a four-socket server, you need two licenses. You can stack standard licenses if you want, but you hit the crossover point where it makes more sense to buy Data Center edition at two licenses.

Hyper-V is still free, but the licensing changes slightly from number of sockets to number of OSEs (or VM images). Standard edition gets you two OSEs per Hyper-V server, while Data Center edition gets you unlimited OSEs. Microsoft also has a transition plan for existing Systems Center customers that maps the old licensing to the new. The net effect, Microsoft believes, is that in most cases, the cost per license will be close to even. The benefit is that you get all of the System Center modules plus two years of software assurance for one price. Microsoft has a separate plan for Core Infrastructure licensing. The licensing for virtual desktop applications are not affected.

Microsoft has two new System Center modules. The first, App Controller from the 2010 acquisition of Avicode, abstracts applications from the underlying OS and eases application deployment. One of the biggest benefits of App Controller is the ability to abstract an application from the OS, making it simpler to move an application from one host to another, between data centers, or even to Microsoft's Azure. App Controller provides rights management so that users can be limited to a subset of resources, such as 10 VMs, which helps to control VM sprawl.The second module, Orchestrator, from the 2009 acquisition of Opalis, ties together the various System Center modules as well as integrates with external IT systems. This is what links System Center and the data center into a private cloud. The tightest integration is currently with Microsoft's own products, but Orchestrator can be extended by IT as well as by vendors. Orchestrator discovers existing virtual machine templates, service catalogs, hypervisors and other integrated components, and lets IT build run books of automated tasks.

Other modules have been improved, as well. Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) has multihypervisor support for VMware's vCenter 4.1 and Citrix Xen. Anderson said, "Four years ago we talked to customers about VMware and walked away impressed. We beat VMware on price, but our features were not comparable. We are addressing that gap with this release." He went on to say that both vCenter and Xen are first-class citizens within Systems Center with support for automation and management. Both Operations Manager and Configuration Manager have been improved and support delegated rights management, which is a benefit for organizations that want to delegate management to departments.

All of these improvements and new additions come together in Service Managers Service Catalog and self-service request portal. Here, IT can create simple-to-use self-service request forms that allow business users to request IT services. IT defines a workflow and all of the templates needed to deploy, configure, manage and monitor the service. For repeatable IT service requests like a new SharePoint server, the automated workflow will save time per project and empowers the business to better manage projects.

In all, these changes and improvements bring Microsoft's System Center 2012 and private cloud initiative close in feature parity with the likes of BMC, CA, HP and IBM. Microsoft now needs to focus efforts on enticing server, storage and networking vendors to integrate with System Center. For example, there is no direct integration for the configuration and management with network equipment today. IT or vendors could add the integration themselves via Orchestrator, but, today, it is missing. Even in terms of integrating load balancing, System Center can't discover templates from load balancers like F5's BigIP or Citrix NetScaler. These are shortcomings Microsoft acknowledges, and the company is addressing them with partnerships.

If you are a Microsoft shop and use System Center, which Microsoft claims 50% of Windows Server customers already do, then System Center 2012 is going to be a big improvement for you in both features and licensing. If you are new to automation and orchestration, System Center 2012 may be a viable product set to get you started--especially if you use Hyper-V and Windows Server 2008.

See IT Pro Ranking: Data Center Networking to see what your peers are doing with new networking technologies. Free, registration required. ]]>

17 Jan 12, 04:01:00

The first question I get from users about the drive shortage is how did monsoon season flooding in a country that gets monsoons every year cause the price of a 2-Tbyte disk at Amazon.com to triple? Well, while we users continued to enjoy disk drives whose capacity doubled every 18 months or so while the price remained basically the same, Seagate and Western Digital have engulfed and devoured their competitors, leaving the power pair with more than 80% market share.

At the same time they, and their suppliers, moved much of their production facilities to Thailand to take advantage of low-cost labor. While Seagate and WD managed to save some money when they moved production from Singapore and Malaysia to Thailand, we're now paying the price.

The first place many of us saw the impact was a shortage of drives in the retail channel and on the spot market. The 2-Tbyte drives I bought for $70 in August spiked to $165 around Christmas and are now down to $140, which is still twice the earlier price. Many retail outlets also imposed one- or two-per-customer limits around the holidays.

As all this was going on some of my compatriots in the chattering class wrote that large OEMs had long-term prices built into their contracts, so EMC and NetApp users shouldn't worry about price hikes. Well, they were wrong, as EMC, NetApp and HP have all announced 5% to 25% price hikes for disk drives during the next few months.

Long disk drive warranties have been another victim of the changing hard disk market. Both Seagate and Western Digital have announced that they will no longer offer three- to five-year warranties on their retail products. Some have suggested that this is an indication of a reduction of quality control standards, and that the vendors are offering only one-year warranties as they expect their drives to last only that long.

The truth is, as Hyundai has proven in the auto market, warranties are at least as much about marketing as they are about actually repairing or replacing failed products. With a worldwide shortage of drives, and an essential duopoly in the market, Seagate and WD have realized they can sell every drive they make without the additional cost of repairs for 2- to 5-year-old drives. The warranties drive vendors provide to OEMs are very different than the retail warranties and are spelled out in their OEM agreements.

I expect that smaller vendors like Overland Storage and Nexsan will be squeezed by higher disk prices. Vendors that make bring-your-own-disk arrays like Infortrend, Promise and Drobo should also take a hit as the 100% price hike in the spot market where BYOD array buyers would buy their drives is bigger than the 20% hike the big boys are charging. The guys at Drobo tell me their sales are good as users can start by loading their Drobo with older, smaller drives and upgrade later when prices should come down.

On the other hand, a 100% price boost for spinning drives means that SSDs are now only about 10 times the cost of a spinning disk; they were 20 times the price a few months ago. I'm seeing more folks put SSDs in their laptops. Similarly, I expect an SSD for cache and high-capacity disks will continue to put a hurt on the 10K and 15K RPM drive markets.

I don't expect 2-Tbyte drives to be available for less than $75 again until late this year. Until then, we'll just have to suffer.

Disclaimer: Overland Storage and NetApp have been clients of DeepStorage; Seagate, Western Digital and Drobo have provided hardware for DeepStorage Labs over the years. ]]>