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
- Uncategorized
- Wayne Salpietro, Director PMM
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Dedupe Comes of Age
Published by Mike Ivanov | Filed under Mike Ivanov, VP Marketing
As Wayne highlighted in his recent blog post, dedupe is going way beyond backup. 2010 will be the year, we predict, when dedupe comes of age. As this technology has now become broadly accepted, users are starting to ask the question of whether it will ever be viable for anything other than backup. In the recently published 2010 Storage Trends by Rich Castagna at SearchStorage.com, which was conducted in December 2009, some interesting things were highlighted:
Deduplication - Moving Beyond Backup
Published by Wayne Salpietro | Filed under Wayne Salpietro, Director PMM
It was just a matter of time! The Dedupe 1.0 era comes to an end! For readers that may not know the phrase Dedupe 1.0 is what we refer to as the initial phase of dedupe which employed the use case of dedupe in backup. Simple enough backups by their nature contain an excessively high duplicate rate. Since the daily backup is 90% duplicate from the previous day it stands to reason that the initial use case for dedupe would be backup.
VMware “The Storage Monster”
Published by Tim Anderson | Filed under Tim Anderson, Storage Consultant
Greetings again from the field! As I travel around meeting customers, prospects, and partners, talking about our technology, it’s become really clear lately that shops that have fully embraced VMware are trying to find new and unique ways to reduce their consumption of primary storage. A few interesting use cases have popped up in recent months that have really helped curb the appetite VMware has for storage.
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 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.