Permabits and Petabytes
Massively Scalable, Data Reduced Archive Solutions for the Enterprise
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- Jered Floyd, CTO
- Mike Ivanov, VP Marketing
- Tim Anderson, Storage Consultant
- Tom Cook, CEO
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- Wayne Salpietro, Director PMM
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2010 Predictions
Published by Wayne Salpietro | Filed under Wayne Salpietro, Director PMM
Every New Year brings with it hope for a more prosperous year than the one before and a clearing of the previous year’s frustrations. We all enter New Years Eve with a sense of optimism and it’s a good time to look at the horizon and predict what we think the next be 12 months will look like.
Having waited a few weeks; I have tempered my unbridled optimism while looking ahead to the end of the year 2010. From a technology perspective, I continue to be optimistic, which in sharp contrast to what my views were for 2009. Last year was an incredibly difficult and frustrating year for everyone. The economy tanked and IT spending was off so markedly that some businesses, simply stopped spending on IT altogether. In most cases the IT spend was on an as needed basis and in all cases “if it doesn’t have a quick ROI” the money was just not available. At this point we seem to be past the worst of it and there are many signs that validate that opinion.
The business dynamics of the last year enabled a “New Normal” to evolve that required optimization of existing investments, tight budget controls and a “flight to efficiency” that we haven’t seen in IT for many years! These behaviors seem to have taken hold and will be the model for 2010 and beyond. Luckily, the technology industry advances are helping with lower cost storage as density increases and the cost per GB continues down a curve. Many of these advances have been from companies that did not stop investing in R&D and did not fall to the economic cycle of 2008/9. The investments were made by smaller more agile technology companies that are driving the trend back to a more prosperous business climate.
The years 2008/2009 saw rapid expansion and adoption of some key technologies such as deduplication, virtualization and cloud. Each has been fodder for the industry analyst communities and the technology press that have called each a new frontier and the savior of the IT budget! In fact, each is helpful and each has been impactful. However, they are at the early stages of their lifecycle and broad adoption is still in the future. Albeit near future in some cases!
Deduplication has been deployed in the backup space for the last few years and has risen to become a “must have technology.” It can save space, costs of storage and improve efficiency in the backup cycle! OK good first use case! But what about the rest of the information businesses manage? Primary storage, where the most active and important business information is stored must have duplicates? Or, how about tier 2, beyond storage, and archive storage? These all have duplicates! In 2010, use of deduplication will extend to all of these. The most difficult will certainly be primary storage where deduplication must be “non impactful” in the overall ingestion and rehydration of information. Technical advances from those smaller vendors I mentioned earlier will enable this to happen and broad adoption including primary, tier2 –n and archive will begin to occur in 2010!
Virtualization has also taken hold of the IT imagination and the seamless and transparent access that it employs has improved the efficiency of information management, user deployment and information complexity. The key enabler has been the ability to rapidly deploy virtual machines. One caveat in this panacea is the virtual machine images themselves. The backup/compliance/gold master copies of the images. They consume huge amounts of storage and for the most part are 90% the same. What a great opportunity for deduplication! As deduplication use cases expand in 2010 the bloat seen from VM images will be tamed!
Cloud computing and more specifically cloud storage seemed to be rapidly rising as an alternative model. The ability to shift CAPEX to OPEX during the economic cycle of 2009 was appealing to the finance managers who held the purse strings of many IT managers. However, historical awareness of the initial attempts of “storage as a service” several years ago quickly brought down to earth the reality of data security and public storage! In recent discussions with industry analysts and CIO surveys, the fear of security issues has quickly slowed the fervor on cloud deployments in many enterprises. 2010 will see the small steps forward in cloud computing that will deploy “private clouds” that will be within the corporate firewall but provide shared deployments enabled by multi-tenancy support. This will enable a better utilization of resources and optimize information management and CAPEX. In some cases, smaller businesses may utilize public cloud deployments as a necessity continuing to be driven by the economics they provide.
One necessary technology that I believe will quickly evolve is new data protection solutions for larger capacity drives. RAID is “running out of gas”! As we continue to see larger and larger data stores many in the 100’s of TB and even reaching petabytes. These data stores are utilizing the latest and largest drives available, 1 TB and 2 TB. As the scale grows, it is increasingly risky to depend on RAID technology that was initially developed in the 1980s! Back then a petabyte may have been mathematically possible but was not included in the design of RAID. Today petabyte data stores are reality and increasingly more probable as we continue to store and retain more information daily. The key issue is at the petabyte scale, using 1 and 2 TB drive technology; RAID cannot recover effectively and efficiently and without data loss or corruption if there is a failure. Newer more scaleable technologies using erasure coding techniques can scale and provide the recovery and data protection necessary in the petabyte scale data stores we will see more frequently in 2010 and beyond.
2010 will be an interesting year and I am optimistic that we will see the advances mentioned above take hold and deliver increased value and cost/efficiency to IT and a more robust economy. Let’s not forget what we have endured and let’s apply what we have learned to optimize our business and our information!
The Ghosts of Storage Past, Present and Future
Published by Mike Ivanov | Filed under Mike Ivanov, VP Marketing
“For it is always the person not in the predicament who knows what ought to have been done in it, and would unquestionably have done it too . . .” ~ Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol
The Ghosts of Storage Past, Present and Future
While the ghosts of Christmas continue to haunt Ebenezer Scrooge in the various versions of Dickens’ Christmas Carol this time of year, we thought it would be fun to visit with the ghosts of data storage as we prepare to put a wrap on the first decade of the new millennium. As in Dickens’ story, the ghosts of storage past are much more pleasant to think of for most data center managers than the harsh reality of what they face today and their rather chilly future prospects.
Unreal Archiving Strategies II
Published by Tim Anderson | Filed under Tim Anderson, Storage Consultant
Greetings again from the field! This is the second installment of real-world horror stories of disturbing Archival “best practices.” The second scenario (Tape as an Archive) is one I have seen many times, from companies of all sizes, and in a number of cases, is still the de facto standard for a long-term archival repository.
Company #2 Scenario- This organization’s archival strategy is to backup their data to tape and retain it for an infinite period of time. Then, the backup admin grabs those tapes on a monthly basis, puts them in the trunk of his car, and then takes them home to his basement. Honestly, I couldn’t make this stuff up. This completely caught me off guard, as I thought at least they would use an onsite fire safe or an offsite vaulting facility. When I was asking the customer what his thoughts were on the situation, he seemed fine with it, which made me shake my head even more. I’ll bet his business owners wouldn’t be fine with it if they new the serious risks they were taking in using this method as a way to preserve their most critical data-sets.
Default Storage Tier
Published by Tim Anderson | Filed under Tim Anderson, Storage Consultant, Uncategorized
Greetings again from the field! In my travels to our customers and prospect base, I have noticed some very interesting ways that our product is being deployed. As a primary storage platform! Our customers have taken the time to understand the complete use case of a given application and / or data set. Meaning not just how much capacity they need, but business related objectives such as SLA’s tied to performance, uptime, reliability, and operational efficiencies. They begin not only to understand more of what their internal business groups are trying to accomplish out of the storage infrastructure, but also capture vital metrics that details what the real requirements are for their applications.
In doing so, this allows them to right-size the application and/or data-set to the appropriate storage platform. This, versus the standard mantra, which is jam everything either to a completely oversized and/or undersized storage platform, where they will have customers over-paying for storage and underutilizing the platform they paid for. Or by using an undersized storage platform where performance and reliability may be sacrificed for cost and customer needs. When a storage person actually takes the time to really service and understand their customer’s needs, they can deploy applications and / or data-sets to the appropriate platform.
The “New Normal” and Storage Company Leadership
Published by Tom Cook | Filed under Tom Cook, CEO
In my last two posts I spoke about the “New Normal” in storage - my view on the future sustained period of slow growth in storage spending. In this post I discuss how I view the impact of the “New Normal” on storage companies.
You might ask why a guy who is negative about storage spending in general is leading an expansion stage storage company. Well, I’ll skip to the punch line and tell you I am optimistic about value creation via storage optimization technologies.
When the economy took a turn in 2008, I believe everything changed in storage. Budget constraints shined the light on storage efficiency in a way the industry had never experienced. That meant the focus in storage innovation changed from speed (frankly, we can store and access information plenty quickly these days) to cost optimization. Simultaneously, the largest storage vendors got conservative and slashed R&D budgets to build cash balances (and they weren’t alone, the US tech sector has unprecedented cash balances today). And, they focused on maintaining account control by slashing prices on less efficient technologies.
Mike’s Rant
Published by Mike Ivanov | Filed under Mike Ivanov, VP Marketing
OK, so I’m “borrowing” Steve Duplessie’s (old?) title (which I just noticed looks like it’s changed) for this blog post, but I felt it fit perfectly with my thoughts. So, thanks Steve!
I’m a techie type that knows enough to get most things working but, sometimes I change one too many configurations and everything gets screwed up. In this case however, it’s not me…it’s them! I’m talking about my last two week battle trying to get my VoIP phone in working order. I changed nothing in my network (really, nothing!) and my voice quality started to fall apart. Unfortunately, my VoIP provider is not the same provider as my cable internet provider. One simple feature is keeping me from getting everything through my cable provider. But, until then, I have to live with two throats to choke.
My last two weeks went like this:
“New Normal” Storage Buyer’s Guide
Published by Tom Cook | Filed under Tom Cook, CEO
Last week I wrote about the “New Normal” in Storage and how I think we are looking at a future of much greater value (lower effective cost) and slow revenue/investment growth in storage. Today I wanted to outline what this means to the enterprise - how a storage buyer or administrator should adapt their organization’s storage selection and consumption patterns to take advantage of market changes.
The New “Normal” in Storage
Published by Tom Cook | Filed under Tom Cook, CEO
The downturn in the economy and slow recovery has impacted IT spending. I’ve been thinking a lot about how this impacts storage companies and buyers and I conclude the market has undergone a permanent change where the most important buying lever is cost efficiency.
Below, I illustrate four scenarios for storage revenue/expenditure growth in the future. Line A is the one we saw prior to 2008, where storage revenue followed an upward sloping function of capacity and price that equates to revenue increases. That was the storage world over that last 10 year period (ex-some variability). However, beginning in 2008, storage revenue began to fall (B) and diverge from the upward sloping line. Respectively, lines (C), (D) and (E) represent future scenarios of (C) full recovery to pre-September 2008 pricing and demand, (D) recovery after reset and (E) a permanent decline and slower future growth.
I think we are entering a long-term period of slower revenue/expenditure growth for storage represented by (E).
The regulations are coming….
Published by Wayne Salpietro | Filed under Wayne Salpietro, Director PMM
I am joining my Permabit colleagues to offer additional perspective to the discussions from a product marketing venue. My first post addresses two markets that I have been involved with for much of my business career, Healthcare and Finance.
The two most active topics in the news today are Healthcare and Wall Street. The impending regulatory changes in both of these industry segments will impact IT in very significant ways.
Email hygiene is no excuse!
Published by Mike Ivanov | Filed under Mike Ivanov, VP Marketing
For the first time in probably a dozen years, I’m not at SNW this week. Part of me is ecstatic to be home for once and part of me feels like I’m missing the reunion with the gang! My wife’s business travel plans collided with mine for this week giving me the opportunity to stay at home with the kids. I can see some gourmet meals happening this week!
While everyone else is in meetings this week, I thought I’d get caught up with some blogging. I ran across a story last month that I meant to comment on, but never got to it, so now’s my chance. It’s about the email antics associated with Mayor Thomas M. Menino’s administration. It turns out that even though they were told last year by a judge to stop deleting emails, the practice still continued.