Storage Effect

Compellent’s success is about more than their technology

My first clue that Compellent is different came in the lobby bathroom.  In their LEED-certified corporate HQ (the first in Minnesota), the urinals use no water.

Compellent is getting rave reviews from their fast-growing customer base, not just for their storage solution, but also for their “thin provisioning” approach to delivering and supporting their solutions.  I had an eye-opening visit to Compellent and talked with Larry Aszmann, their CTO. 

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Storage is rising in importance for solutions, according to attendees

I’m at the Intel Channel Conference today in Minneapolis.  Looks like 100+ solution providers here.  I’ve been having lots of real-world, thought-provoking conversations. 

Takeaways

• I’m not overstating the sea change in storage requirements for homes and businesses.  For these guys, storage is now on par with processors, networking and software in enabling solutions.
• Data recovery is a growing need.  Solution providers prefer a local option to avoid the “send away and pray” effect.
• SSD is a popular topic, but lots of head nodding when I suggest that the first real killer app will be enterprise, not laptops.
• Notebook augmentation is a growing business for solution providers: buy off the shelf, customize with storage, software, services. 

High performance laptops are in

By the way, 7200 rpm drives look to rapidly ramp in notebooks this year as users look for desktop performance.  Consider getting in ahead of the crowd.  The drives are readily available.

Who’s using 7200 rpm today?  Are your customers asking for it?

A lesson from light beer

Calling a disk drive “green” is like calling a light beer “healthy”.  In both cases, the means to achieve a goal are being confused with the goal itself.

Just as switching from regular to light beer might help someone (a little) improve their health, lower power disk drives can reduce the power consumption (and carbon footprint) of a datacenter, DVR or PC. 

Seagate gets this.  They don’t slap a big “Green” label on their drives.  Yet in general, Seagate’s products are the most power efficient at any specific performance/capacity point.  That means that using Seagate drives can result in the lowest overall power consumption for your system, whatever it may be.

Look beyond the label of your storage components when trying to configure the most power efficient solution. 

Agree or disagree?  Let’s discuss this further.

More room to save all those movies - and your cable company is happy too

Seagate just announced Showcase, add-on storage for DVRs.  This is great news for movie hoarders like you and me, but also a big plus for the service providers.

Think about it: your cable company gives you a set-top DVR free or at a discount with their service.  They’re not motivated to fill it up with lots of capacity that adds cost for them.  Yet HD movies take a lot of room, and more and more consumers want to keep it all.

Showcase will let service providers give their packrat customers what they want - a way to add space to save all those HD TV shows and movies - without adding terabytes of storage as a fixed cost for every customer.

FDE will mean less crushing and more re-using of disk drives 

The Minneapolis Star Tribune profiled two local companies that have thriving businesses destroying retired disk drives.  The process is startling similar to the metal crushers used in junk yards. 

If you had any doubt that erasing data from a drive doesn’t really erase it, read this article. 

Video of a drive shredder in action

Seagate will ship about one billion disk drives in the next five years.  Imagine if they all had to be crushed and recycled when they are retired? Or worse yet, thrown in a junk pile somewhere?

An exciting feature of the industry’s new Full Disk Encryption technology is that drives can be erased with absolute certainty by simply deleting a password.  That means that still-functional retired drives can be resold as “gently used” drives. 

Make room next to that used car lot!

FDE is currently available on notebook drives like the Seagate Momentus FDE, and it will be coming soon to servers and storage systems near you.

When you get rid of a drive, do you erase it, crush it, or cross your fingers?  Let me know!

Seagate’s drive is first to Dell’s shelves

In the world of press announcements, Seagate can be a tortoise at times.  And while flashy “first” press releases can garner attention for other disk drive vendors, it’s when the drives are in the hands of customers that really matters.

According to Engadget, Seagate has crossed the finish line first with 320GB 7200 rpm notebook drives from Dell.  The Momentus 7200.3 is a rockin’ drive, too - check it out.

Here’s a slow-motion video of the Momentus 7200 zero-G sensor in action.

Who’s using 7200 rpm in their notebook?  Is it worth the extra $46?

Whatever the media, storage marches on

Here’s a fun read from Maximum PC: David Murphy’s interview of Seagate’s Bill Watkins.   He tells it like it is - which is a refreshing change from your average CEO.  Bill covers a lot of ground - worth the time if you’ve got it.

Takeaways for solution providers

• 1 TB sounds like a lot of storage, but it’s no larger than 5 MB was in 1979.  Like then, people will surprise themselves with how easily they fill it up.
• Your biggest storage opportunity is helping your customers use all of their data - not just what’s on their PC. 
• Your customers don’t care if it’s flash or disk or optical or green goo from Mars - they want storage that works for them.  Don’t get distracted. 
• DVDs and CDs are dinosaurs.  Electronic distribution is the new species, and demands lots of storage to enable it.

Answer the question “How much storage do you need?”

Seagate has a simple tool on seagate.com (under Useful Links on this page) that helps you figure out how much storage you or your customers need for desktop PCs, notebooks and home servers.  Plug in your content usage, and out pops some recommendations. 

Give it a try and report back on how much storage YOU need.  Also, any feedback on the tool?  What could make it more useful?

Hardware-based encryption is an important weapon in the defense of data at rest

If the National Security Agency says Seagate’s Momentus FDE self-encrypting hard drive is secure, I don’t need any more convincing. 

It really is a cool drive, with full AES encryption of all data within the drive, all without any slow-down in performance. 

And it can’t be hacked the way software-based PC data encryption schemes can. Just don’t lose your password!  That’s why key management is such an essential part of notebooks using of these drives.

Bonus benefit: you can instantly and thoroughly erase a drive for retiring or repurposing by simply deleting the password.  One-click instant erase!  Nice.

Forbes’ thoughts on the NSA action 

EDS differentiates HP more than you might think

Could Om Malik be on to something?  Unlike other analysts looking at HP’s pending acquisition of EDS as a me-too consultancy move - similar to IBM acquiring Price Waterhouse Cooper a few years back - he sees HP shooting for the clouds. 

His rationale: EDS’ clear strengths in outsourcing, plus other recent HP acquisitions all pointing to building out a global data center infrastructure. 

This would be a great play for them to put their comprehensive server and storage system portfolio to work in-house. 

Servers supporting Web 2.0 are very real - and very costly

Business Week reports that Facebook’s new pile of cash will be used to buy servers.  They currently have 10,000;  they’ll get 50,000 more.  Yet they’re way behind Google and MSN in the computing arms race.

Om Malik draws some conclusions on this as well.

In Web 2.0 terms, servers mean storing as much as processing.  Traditionally servers were all about crunching the numbers.  Even today, high-end servers doing the transactional heavy lifting in businesses of all types rely on the fastest disk drives - even enterprise SSDs - but require little capacity.

Changing IT as we know it

Facebook’s investment is a stark example of how hardware in general and storage in particular are a very necessary part of our growing cyber communities.  

These are early days.  Expect continued acceleration in these kinds of investments, and watch for the consequences of such a large techno-economic shift.