Kyle Ohme — In the life of a dot com

Top tips from your peers

* Be the person that no one likes if that’s what it takes.  Someone has to play that storage role - this is key to keeping costs down and know the date it IT teams must protect.   Knowing what’s structured and non-structured data helps IT understand what is critical storage.   IT cant always know what is critical storage - this should be reviewed often.

* Charge back models work!  This can be used to help put a value on data.  Pull in a key person from each department to allow for the charge back and continue to classify the data.  This puts ownership not only in cost but also defining backup SLAs along with strategic goals and expectations.  Get your users involved.  IT can only useful if its aligned with the business.

* Rsync may be used more then some of us may think in data replication.  Sometimes a no thrills approach is all you need.  Don’t overlook the free / cheap tools that can do a very good job at a single task.

Tools

* If you can build reporting in house - you may know your data better.  A mix of tools can often be your best friend.  For example Yahoo used a mix of home grown and also NetApp DFM to assist in the overall goals utilizing  MySQL + Perl + PHP pulling SNMP and other queries.

* Creating a problem and walking through the problem with your vendors may test their critical thinking skills in a time of need.  Tossing in screwballs to really see how well vendors deal with the same issues Admins are faced with helps to understand how fast they can respond.  This if used the right way may assist in determining your vendor selection.

Overall

* Storage toolset’s seem to be a missing piece to the overall storage world.  Bits and pieces here and there seems to be available however the overall picture is something that’s lacking.  (I realize this is not an easy task - however - here lies true value in software for storage)  Its nice to see that we are not in the same boat!

Today is Day one of Storage Decisions 2007 San Francisco. 

This I think is my 4th or 5th time at a storage Decisions but first time with Storage Decisions in San Fran.   I have done New York and Chicago in the past few year.

I always enjoy this show, I think that its a great way to keep up to date in the storage industry and also check out all of the new hardware in one place.  Just think about how much time it would take to meet all of the vendors outside of a show like this and how many days of conversations and conference calls.

Stay tuned …

Here is a snip from the TechTarget Site.

Storage Decisions 2007 - happening December 4-6 in San Francisco - will address these issues head-on with in-depth, educational sessions on how to:

• Architect a classification strategy
• Improve utilization of existing assets
• Expand SANs
• Tier storage
• Solidify your data protection and recovery strategy
• And many more sessions addressing today’s challenges

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]