This was our first Storage Decisions conference in the hilly city built on a fault line, and that meant a fresh crop of Storage Decisions attendees and happenings.

Sun held a “trends and innovation” dinner for press and analysts concurrent with the show on Monday night (it wasn’t affiliated). About two dozen Sun execs and their audience sat down to a gourmet repast at San Francisco’s trendy Absinthe restaurant. Execs and Sun reps including Chief Technology Officer and Executive Vice President of Research and Development Greg Papadopoulos, CIO Bob Worrall, Executive Vice President of Systems John Fowler, and distinguished engineer Subodh Bapat.

As always, Sun was articulating grand visions of the future. “The storage marketplace is about to undergo its most rapid set of changes possibly ever–it will change the economic fortunes of a number of companies,” Fowler predicted (Sun is hoping this will hold true in a positive direction for its storage products). Cost per capacity will be “one-tenth of what you see today.”

Like fellow large players IBM and EMC, both of whom have recently acquired storage service-provider companies, and Symantec, which is preparing a software-as-a-service (SaaS) backup offering, Sun is keen on outsourcing as well. Eventually, according to Bapat, there will only be a few “really big computers” in the world run by companies like Microsoft and Google in “mega data centers” like Google’s famed farm of PCs. Sun would also like to become a service provider itself, but their real focus is on selling equipment into those service-provider data centers. Sun was already part of a similar build-out in the telecom industry in past years, though it was also pointed out that companies like Google have already done their build-outs just fine without Sun.

Meanwhile, new “mega data centers” are beginning to spring up, including a new 500,000 square-foot, 50-megawatt behemoth being built for a national lab set to open next year, according to Bapat. “50 megawatts is bigger than a small city would consume,” Bapat said. “Utilities are going to become a real problem.”

Bapat also predicted that within the next year, a major data center failure will “cause major national effects, and bring forward the importance of data centers as national assets.”

Sun loves to look out 15 years, but ask about the next 15 months and it’s a trickier question. Sun’s recently announced partnership with Dell is part of its attempt to position itself better in the market; Sun will also be going after service provider customers such as SmugMug, according to Worrall, and developing server-farm products with its partners at research universities. How that’ll translate into specific products and sales remains largely unclear.

Sun is on to something when it comes to Fowler’s prediction about the pace of change over the next year, according to Taneja Group founder Arun Taneja. “We’re in such a vibrant market right now,” he said. “I have never seen so much change and innovation happening all at once, ever.” 

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Some visuals from the show floor (click to see larger versions, mouseover for descriptions)

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Everybody’s favorite user-blogger Tory Skyers was Mr. Storage Decisions this year, presenting on the storage issues presented by new mobile devices and participating in a user panel on storage management. Skyers warned users not to overlook the trend toward iPhones and home servers. “An executive buys a home server, plugs in his laptop at home, and the home server asks, ‘wanna back it up?’ Then his kid comes home with the Trojan du jour and suddenly your company’s data is in the Eastern bloc somewhere.”

The flow of data leakages happen both ways in the mobile world, he added, with mobile devices blurring the line between personal and corporate data repositories. “So mp3s and AVIs and maybe even that Trojan find their way to the laptop, which finds its way to your data center, which finds its way to your SAN and your network.” Tory gave some how-tos on controlling some of that flow of information on both sides of the equation, including “using social networks in your work environment to enforce policy”–specifically, a “Page of Shame” for violators of company storage policies pertaining to mp3s etc. and strategically placed rumors of “someone getting busted” for violating policies. He recommended tools like Desktop Authority and Powerfuse for content filtering and executable monitoring for contraband files, using open-source and free Microsoft tools to create document templates for data classification, and Surfcontrol Mobile Filter to restrict access to Websites and protocols even when users are off the network and VPN on company machines. Desktop Authority and Powerfuse will also restrict which mobile devices can be plugged in to a corporate machine–a USB mouse will get through but not a thumb drive or iPod.

“This is a better alternative to sealing your USB ports with epoxy,” something Tory said he’d been asked to do before (by an exec who then realized he had no way to plug a mouse in to a $2500 machine).

In the course of his presentation, Tory also referenced the following tidbit from CNN: customs and border guards can confiscate anyone’s laptop without any grounds for suspicion and copy all the information held within it. Terrifying.

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Some more visuals from around the conference:

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On Wednesday users gathered for a peer discussion on virtualization that turned up some interesting things, including–be still our hearts–an actual, living, breathing, Invista user (we wanted to take his picture). Very few of those present have actually deployed storage virtualization and those considering storage virtualization tools were also in the minority among this group. “I’m wondering what the benefits are that other people have seen to virtualization, what the return is,” said one user.

The majority of users saying they’d begun virtualizing are using HDS. Almost all users with storage virtualization in place said they used it to front other arrays from the same vendor, with the exception of migrating data from decommissioned storage. “You just don’t want to get into finger-pointing with the different vendors,” according to one attendee.

Last week, I met with more vendors and was briefed on more new technologies than I thought possible in a 3-day period at Storage Networking World (SNW) in Dallas, TX. However, now that I am back in the comforts of Omaha, NE, (if one can ever call Omaha comfortable), here are some of the briefings and interviews that I found to be the most interesting. And some that I thought were totally unremarkable.

Sun’s director of storage marketing, Dave Kenyon, and I met under the pretense of doing an interview for an upcoming article for Storage magazine on VTLs that manage disk and tape. But, whatever Dave was on during our interview, I need to get me some of that. I’m guessing Dave was up all night with the SNW crowd and his coffee was just kicking in when we sat down for our 9:00 am interview on Wednesday morning, because he let it rip. From blasting how backup software manages disk to wondering aloud why open systems vendors and users fail to learn the same lessons that the mainframe folks learned years ago, Dave solved backup’s problems (and most of the world’s) in the 30 minutes we met.

I also met with Isilon Systems’ director of marketing, Brett Goodwin. In the last year, Isilon Systems has gone from Wall Street darling and supposed NetApp-killer to a stock price collapse and whispers on the street that their product was having problems.

Brett explained that Isilon Systems had initially set earning expectations too high and then when Isilon System failed to meet lowered earnings expectations, they were promptly punished by Wall Street. As far as the rumors about their IQ product not working well, it was more a matter of Isilon’s VARs selling into accounts that they had little or no business selling into. Isilon Systems IQ series operates best when it is used in conjunction with video streaming applications, not in most business environments where random file access is the norm.

On the other end of the spectrum, I had a most unremarkable briefing with SeaNodes. SeaNodes provide clustered software that shares unused capacity on internal hard drives on Linux servers between Linux servers. Now, I thought this idea was dumb five years ago when a company named Monosphere attempted to do something similar for Windows servers. Monosphere has since seen the light and moved on to more intelligent pursuits, so I was dumbfounded that another company would try the same thing.

In SeaNode’s defense, at least they are just shooting for the clustered, high performance Linux server market that uses 500 and 750 GB internal drives where their aggregate of excess storage capacity on internal drives probably reaches the hundreds of TBs. However, users should only look at this technology if they are as geeky as the people who run clustered server computing farms and would rather be saving a few terabytes of storage than trying to figure out how they can squeeze time in their schedule to hit the golf course before the first snow of the season flies.

Notes from last week’s Fall Storage Networking World. . . .

LSI’s Engenio was the first systems vendor to make the jump from 2 Gbit to 4 Gbit Fibre Channel in late 2005. But LSI won’t have 8-gig systems when HBAs become available from the likes of Brocade, Emulex and QLogic around the middle of next year.

“We believe in 8-gig Fibre, but we’ll be there with the market, not ahead of it,” said Phil Bullinger, general manager of LSI’s Engenio storage group. “I think it will be a slower roll [than 4-gig] in the market.” . . . .

Encryption is usually the first thing that comes to mind when people think of storage security. But TD Ameritrade security architect Alan Lustiger warns that encryption doesn’t do much good to protect sensitive information in databases from hackers. Lustiger said hackers gain access to storage by getting in through security holes in the network.

“If the bad guys are going in the same way as the good guys, then encryption hasn’t bought you anything,” he says. Lustiger says that securing the operating system and Web servers is more important than encryption. “If you do nothing else, lock the front door,” he said, referring to Web servers. . . .

Two of the founders of Cisco-backed Nuova Systems made an appearance at SNW, but left without shedding any light on the company’s product line. Nuova’s marketing vice president Soni Jiandani and senior fellow Silvano Gai joined QLogic and Network Appliance at a Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) news conference but limited their discussion to the technology itself.

“We’re not launching products or the company,” Jiandani said when asked what Nuova’s role in FCoE would be. “We just wanted to speak about Fibre Channel over Ethernet and 10-gig.” . . . .

H3C, a subsidiary of 3Com based in China and the leading IP SAN vendor there, came to SNW to launch new products but does not intend to sell them in the U.S. “We are here to look for U.S. partners but not to sell systems here,” said H3C’s president Arthur Lee.

H3C’s upcoming products include a high-end IX3000 series that supports SAS and SATA, and will eventually include a Fibre Channel interface – although no Fibre Channel-only systems are on H3C’s roadmap. H3C’s U.S. partners include FalconStor and Intel. . . .

Venture capitalists need to find the next hot technology long before it becomes the next hot technology. So what are the VCs looking at now? Storage services, says Charles Curran, general partner at Valhalla Partners.

“We like storage services,” he said. “There’s a rapid growth of Internet storage, video, and those types of applications and people are looking for services to manage them.”

Services are hardly new, though. Curran said he’s still looking for the type of emerging technology Valhalla identified when it funded companies like LeftHand Networks to take advantage of Ethernet storage and Sepaton for its early position in disk backup.

“I’m trying to find the next tornado,” Curran said. “We don’t have one now.” . . . .

Comings and going: Former BlueArc CEO Gianluca Rattazzi has a new software startup called MaxiScale. The company is in stealth mode, but raised $12 million in funding last March. Other MaxiScale execs included former Attune Networks CTO Francesco Lacapra and former Attune Systems vp of marketing Dan Liddle. . . . Storage veteran Larry Cormier, recently with defunct data classification startup Scentric, now heads marketing at iSCSI vendor LeftHand Networks.

My name is Tory Skyers. Through circumstances not entirely beyond my control (!!) I have been deeply involved throughout my career in various types of centralized and distributed storage. Now, at the end of a long chain of events beginning in Long Beach, CA with Curtis Preston and some blinky magnets (I’ll let you use your imagination), I’ve been offered an opportunity to share some of my experiences and insight with you. 

I’ve been agonizing for a week on what to say for my first Blog. I think it has to be earth-shatteringly profound, so of all the catchphrases and tag lines I came up with, this seemed to sum it all up best:

Hello and thanks for reading my Blog.

What do you think? Just imagine a guy smiling ear to ear and waving at you from behind his keyboard :).

An admission: I’m absolutely fascinated by storage. The technology that goes into connecting computers and people to storage today was the stuff of science fiction 20 years ago. Pause for a second and take a look at where we are in storage: 1 TB hard drives, 55GB optical discs, 10Gb Ethernet, 4Gbps Fibre Channel, 3 millisecond seek times, 300MBps throughput… all these numbers add up to wow, at least to me. When I think about all the technology out there, I feel like that kid at the toy store window with my eyes the size of saucers, staring at the GI Joe with the Kung-Fu grip, and the Spiderman Hotwheels set.

Here in my little corner of cyberspace I’ll be blogging about some of those stare-inducing storage technologies from my perspective, which is that of a network administrator (and according to friends is sometimes “warped and twisted” by my own particular brand of logic. I’ll also be touching on the ennui (SAT word I’ve been dying to use in a sentence) that I see creeping into the market. Check back from time to time and let me know if you agree with me. (And dig out that old SAT prep book while you’re at it–send me a word or two I’ll see if I can roll it in.)

One last thing: I gave a presentation on mobile storage at the recent Storage Decisions show in New York, and at the end of the presentation I mentioned a few scripts I wanted to share with the attendees. Below is a copy-and-paste of a simple script using ADfind from Joeware.net to archive users’ home directories that no longer have Active Directory accounts. This script can certainly be more elegant so feel free to expand, expound and extend.  There are a few things on the “to-do” list for it: first, make it self-contained and not need an input file (i.e., do the AD query using ADODB or something similar). Second, provide logic to validate permutations of a username or directory. Third, be a pretty HTA (HTML Application). I’m working on migrating this script to Powershell.

The code is below the jump. Copy it out using notepad (not wordpad) or some script editor and save it as a .vbs. Run it from the command line with an input text file with one username per line. You’ll need to insert specifics for your environment like domain names, etc. 

Again, thanks for the read! Read more »

It is not often that a non-storage conference distracts from the normal round of storage conferences such as Storage Decisions and Storage Networking World, but that may be the case when VMworld kicks off on September 11. What makes this event unique is that multiple storage vendors are planning to use VMworld as their venue for new product announcements or, in the case of startups, as their coming out party.

Selecting VMworld as a product or company launching point does not so much diminish the value of  other storage conferences, as it reflects the growing importance that VMware is taking on in corporate boardrooms. Storage vendors know that companies are going to need more virtualization technologies, not less, if they adopt VMware, so these vendors see VMworld as a perfect opportunity to share in VMware’s spotlight.

There are only a couple of small problems with storage vendors piggybacking on the VMware express. VMware as a company is already nine years old, founded in 1998. Also, VMware has had a functioning product since 1999 with VMware’s recent ESX server operating system product release, now in its 3rd generation.

IT managers should exercise some caution because, while VMware offers for savings in server consolidation, IT managers can not automatically extend VMware’s savings and benefits to complimentary storage technologies. VMware has spent years developing its technology and building a user and knowledge base. Products from these storage companies may not have reached the same level of maturity.

The good news is that storage virtualization went through a similar round of hype about five to six years ago. Some of the companies that survived that round, such as DataCore Software and FalconStor Software, now have much more mature products that are still around and in use in mission-critical environments.

VMworld is acting as a demarcation point in the future of storage management. Virtualization is no longer something that companies can ignore or minimize – it is critical to the future of enterprise storage management and storage vendors recognize that sharing in VMware’s spotlight will likely pay huge dividends for them in the coming years. However, IT Managers still need to verify, before they spend big money on complimentary storage virtualization technologies, that these products can technically and financially deliver on their promised benefits.

HP’s impressive keynote hall…actually a boxing arena.

Welcome back to Las Vegas, where water (a precious commodity in the desert) will cost you $4 a bottle. This week, storage users moved from the Venetian to the Mandalay Bay hotel, drinking in its tropical theme and all the news they could handle on HP. A few miscellaneous items from the show: 

HP CEO: “no confusion” about need to improve business

During his keynote speech Monday night to officially open the show, HP’s CEO Mark Hurd said he’s proud of the progress the company has made “over the last two and a half years” (i.e. since the “Carly Era” ended and the “Mark Era” began), but said “there isn’t any confusion about how much work we have in front of us.”

Hurd told the gathered audience of thousands in Mandalay Bay’s Event Center (where Pay-Per-View boxing matches are also held) that “we’ve invested millions in R&D, only to underdistribute our products in the market.” He estimated the market for HP’s products at $1.1 trillion, compared to HP’s revenues of $100 billion. The company has added 1000 salespeople and is working with its 140,000 channel partners “to get them deeper into the markets they cover,” Hurd said, particularly in midmarket accounts.

“The biggest complaint I get is how hard it is to do business with HP,” Hurd said. “We have to take the complexity that comes with being a big company and turn it into a capability that works for you.”

HP backup tapes climb Everest

Among the presentations at this year’s conference for media was the video-illustrated story of the brothers Clowes, who climbed Everest in 2006 carrying an HP DAT 160 tape drives and LTO-2 tape cartridges to backup photos and video they took on their ascent to the summit. HP “helped out” with the climbing trip and loaned the brothers a laptop as well as the drives, according to Thomas, the excursion’s photographer and the owner of a small residential building company in the UK. He said his two-man climbing team (consisting also of brother Benedict, a UK financial analyst) bailed out a professional video team from the BBC filming a documentary when their laptop choked on the dust flying around the air at base camp. HP also had the brothers do temperature testing on the tapes, which it is reported survived the wintry ordeal intact.

HP consolidates data centers

What would a conference be without more keynotes? On Tuesday morning, Randy Mott, EVP and CIO of HP, took attendees inside HP’s data center consolidation, in which it was estimated the company invested approximately 2% of its gross revenue (gross revenue, according to Mott’s presentation: $97.18 billion) in a three-year project to consolidate 85 data centers into three “zones”, each with two data center locations, in Houston, Austin and Atlanta. Construction is expected to finish on the data centers by this November, and the majority will have been completed in the next 60 days. The consolidated data centers now boast 21.6 football fields’ worth of raised floor space, 40,000 servers, 16,000 racks and 4 PB of storage. Mott said HP has halved the cost of its storage for double the capacity, though the consolidation won’t stave off storage growth for long–the company expects to be at 10 PB by the end of its three-year project.

That’s all the news that’s fit to print from where I sit–if you’re attending the HP Executive Forum, StorageWorks Americas or Technology Forum conferences this week, feel free to add your thoughts below.

Coming to you from sunny Las Vegas, in the “Blogger’s Lounge” inside Symantec’s Vision City (their name for the show floor). Seemed apropos.

In addition to the Blogger’s Lounge, which consists of picnic tables set up on a large field of Astroturf in the middle of the floor that has been dubbed “Central Park”, Vision City has a Financial District, consisting of business partners’ exhibits, and Tech Row (no relation to Skid Row, presumably), where product demos are being held. Central Park also has Wii video games, robotics competitions, and obstacle courses for remote-control cars.

Click each picture to see a larger version.

In each of this year’s seven keynotes, Symantec has shown similarly slick production values, beginning with an address given by data center group president Kris Hagerman on Tuesday.

Quite often when they roll video at a conference general session, attendees can be seen checking their watches, email, or taking advantage of dimmed lights to catch some shuteye. But the video during Hagerman’s address, called “The Complexity Master”, was a hit with the crowd, who responded with genuine belly laughs to the Office-Space stylings of the short film, which documented a day in the life of a backup administrator trying to sell his company on standardizing on the NetBackup platform (the vid was, of course, not completely without marketing).

The biggest laughs came when the Complexity Master, a Southern California comedian hired for the role, and his supporting cast (presumably of other comedic actors), were given the dialogue most backup admins either imagine or wish would happen during meetings with business units–witness the one higher-up who chews his donut thoughtfully before saying, every time he’s called upon, “that sounds…complicated.”

We can only hope it gets leaked to YouTube.

Video hijinks weren’t the end of the three-ring circus at Hagerman’s keynote, either. Senior director of product marketing Matt Fairbanks bounded onto the stage sporting one of the “Storage United” soccer jerseys (after Manchester United, DC United, et al), and was later joined by a girls’ under-10 soccer team from Silicon Valley, who handed out soccer balls and jerseys to the crowd. The talk of the conference following the session was the tiny pigtailed soccer player who flawlessly rattled off a spiel about replacing her TSM and Legato environments and achieving huge ROI when asked what she thought of the new NetBackup.  Somebody get that girl an agent.

More nuggets from the show for your reading pleasure are below the fold.

Read more »

Things have gotten kicked off in earnest out here in the Windy City at this year’s Storage Decisions conference in Chicago. Today was the first full day of sessions at this year’s edition of the conference, and attendees heard discussions of hot topics from blue-chip companies including United Airlines, Federal Reserve Bank, and Bank of America.

Gary Pilafas, managing director of enterprise architecture for United Airlines (UAL), gave a presentation this morning about his company’s DR plans, much of which centered around classifying data according to criticality, and setting disaster recovery levels appropriately, a common trend in DR of late. Pilafas said he steered application admins away from insisting on Tier 1 DR (after all, no application admin wants to say his data isn’t of top importance) by emphasizing cost.

On this he was challenged by Michael Thomas, storage architect for the Federal Reserve, who said he’d seen that kind of planning go awry in some cases after 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina. “Some business units had [scaled back] DR plans based on cost, but then their SLAs didn’t match their true business requirements,” Thomas said. “They still expected IT to respond, and we did, but not in as timely a manner as they would have liked in some cases.”

Pilafas acknowledged that getting a true sense of business requirements and managing application interdependencies made tiering for DR a tricky project. However, he said UAL is currently testing service-bus software products including IBM’s Websphere MQ and BEA’s Aqualogic, layered over Hitachi Data Systems’ Universal Storage Platform for a services-oriented architecture. That plan, he said, will decouple data services from individual business units, specific applications or devices, eliminating the issue of application interdependencies. He said it will also go a long way toward addressing the confusion about business units and their priorities. “This way we can discuss each business unit’s priorities, map it back to services, and the higher-priority services float to the top,” he said. “It’s like taking the opposite of the lowest common denominator.”

Thomas himself had a different approach to making DR plans more effective, which is to go back to the drawing board with testing. “One of the big problems in this industry is that a lot of people don’t really test their DR plans,” he said. “They send people out a week in advance and prepare, and then test.” Thomas advocated more spontaneous tests and recounted one test in an earlier position where employees were “toe-tagged” at random to more realistically simulate a disaster scenario. 

Meanwhile, if there’s anything that requires as much careful planning and precise procedure as DR, it’s e-discovery, and on hand with a keynote speech on that subject was Daniel Blair, e-discovery, investigation and incident support within the information security and business continuity division of Bank of America (say that five times fast).

Among the nuggets offered by Blair was the estimation that for every 1 GB of data produced for e-discovery, 6.25 GB of storage space is needed for multiple working copies, indexing and conversion to TIFF formats as well as the production of copies for opposing counsel. BOA’s approach to cut down on storage costs is to put the original “golden” copy of data onto lower-performing, high-capacity SATA disk (backed up vigorously, of course) and use higher-performing FC storage for the processing.

Blair wasn’t able to discuss specifics because of the sensitive nature of corporate litigation, but he did say that so far, he has yet to find a single comprehensive product for e-discovery. He also said that BOA uses a combination of in-house work and outsourcing, specifically with TIFF conversion, to lighten the workload and save financially.

Ultimately, though Blair said the new federal rules of civil procedure could make e-discovery a more bearable undertaking (since they recognize a “good faith” effort to preserve data), further attention on e-discovery means that more savvy practitioners will find new ways to key on process vulnerabilities during a lawsuit.  

As the pressure grows, Blair said there’s plenty of room for improvement in the technology space. “Real-time indexing, content categorization, records management for the lifecycle, true policy-based management, and better scalability,” he listed off immediately when asked for ideas.

One other item of note: Compellent was the name on everybody’s lips during the expo on the show floor tonight. Users said they had always liked Compellent’s automated tiered storage feature, but it had taken some time to see more customer traction in the market and product maturity for the emerging company.

So, what are you hearing at the show? Give us your thoughts in the comments section.

1)       HSM, ILM, ITIL still lack the appropriate policy management software to truly allow storage to move between tiers.  Sad, really – processing power is at an all-time high price/performance ratio, yet we don’t have software that can effectively leverage this power to even “brute force” analyze data and provide automated, policy-driven data migration.

2)       The midrange storage space is about to explode with new products.  All of the SAS products coming to market are going to put increased pressure on FC margins and revenue.  Who knows?  In three years, we say some really nifty products in attractive, inexpensive packages.  I’m waiting for storage vendors to start offering enclosures with hundreds of 2.5” drives.  The thought of a thousand 2.5” drives per rack solves lots of problems for me.

3)       Things are tough all over.  No, really – every facet of IT spending seems to be falling under scrutiny.  Many of my peers, who once bought IBM, EMC and HP are talking with – and buying from – Hitachi, NEC, Pillar and a host of others, just because these players are offering more (more professional services, migrations, price breaks, etc).