Kyle Ohme — In the life of a dot com

This is an awesome mix of how technology can be used to help solve technology road blocks. IBM does a great job with using Second Life to help demonstrate IT issues within the data center.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrBgF-BS-qo

IBM also announced Project Big Green putting its large foot even further into the green movement and showing its concern for power and carbon issues associated within the data center.
http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/presskit/21440.wss

[tags] IBM, Project Big Green, Second Life, Green Power [/tags]

One of the things I really enjoy about shows like Storage Decisions is how many cool and new technologies are highlighted and the ability to see the products in action on the floor.

One booth that struck my attention is offering a product called RamSan and has some really impressive numbers.

- 400,000 IOPS per appliance
- 3,000 MB/sec bandwidth
- Up to 128GB storage
- 2-8 4Gb FC Links

For those of you that dont know what solid state disk is used for its very high performance disk that can be used for your most demanding applications. This could be databases, HPC or other in-house apps that require other demanding IO requirements.

Virtualization environments also play a potential role in this as well allowing you to utilize not only your standard 4Gb disk storage but allows you to move some volumes to solid state without the reconfiguration of your backend volumes.

I was also amazed to hear the pricing reductions over the past few years this is now looking as a very appealing solution for added performance to your san environment.

Go and check them out www.texmemsys.com

Day one of Storage Decisions 2007 Chicago is almost over and the show is going well.

The weather in Chicago is rainy but the information is flowing at Storage Decisions this year. The presentations this year seem to be focused around backups/DR and compliancy issues.

The show has gotten bigger and venders have come and gone, however I am a little amazed not to see anyone here representing de-dupe other than FalconStor. It also seems that we are missing players such as BlueArc and Quantum from the mixjust to name a few.
I had several conversations on the floor tonight with some great vendors releasing new precuts and up and coming solutions. We tended to do our introductions today and will follow up with the vendors that we want more face time with on Wednesdayas we are expecting the floor to be a little quieter.

This event offers a great balance of vendor time and industry knowledge. We often comment that its well worth the event to meet and talk to all of the vendors in one place.

BlueArc did get back to me and explained that they would have loved to be at the show but something prevented them from making this particular show.  Thanks for the response and we hope to see you @ the next show!

[tags] Storage Decisions, Storage, Data centers, Chicago, IBM, FalconStor [/tags]

Lots of hype surrounding the topic of 10G taking over FC as the emerging technology of choice. I was interviewed some time ago questioning what I thought of the roll out of 10G in the datacenter. I mentioned that I really thought that storage was going to be the driving factor of a successful replacement. For the most part, this seems to remain true with the exception of Virtualization and some of the new requirements over the past few years. After all, if you are deploying 3 bandwidth intensive VMs on one host its only logical to think that you will run into a potential bottleneck.

So far very little conversation at Storage Decisions 2007 on this topic but expect to hear more when we speak to more on the vendor side of the table.

Even if the industry can overcome the technology requirements and release 10G for storage we still have the question of who owns the technology. Does this now fall into your storage engineers or will you pass this onto your network engineers. What will the cross training requirements be for your network team to understand the intricacies of your storage infrastructure?

[tags] storage, fiber channel, nas, san, storage decisions, iscsi [/tags]

Storage Decisions Starts May 15 2007 — only one day away.

We are waiting in the MPS airport for our flight to Chicago. We are continuing our data center tours followed up by attending the Storage Decisions show in Chicago.

This year we will be blogging on backup options, DR and policy issues throughout the event.

Stay tuned ….
(If you are attending the event and want to chat - track us down)