Storage Effect

Thanks to Ruptured Monkey for this campy but cool IBM video from the Fifities on how their RAMAC (and the disk drive) was created.

(photo courtesy of IBM.com)

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. 

Potential risk for IBM competitors currently using Diligent’s product

Byte and Switch  is referencing Israeli media reports that IBM has acquired Diligent for $200M.  The deal’s been talked about in the blogosphere, including here, for a few weeks now. 

Deduplication is an important enabling technology for the data center. Diligent, EMC’s former Israeli lab, is a dedupe leader.  It’s not clear what this will mean for IBM competitors HDS, Sun and Overland that are licensing Diligent’s technology today.

There may be a bit of scrambling as the music stops on the dedupe round of techno musical chairs.

Destroying data can be as important as creating it

How much time do you spend talking with your customers about what to do with their solutions when they are done with them?  Maybe you should rethink your priorities. 

According to Seagate, 50,000 enterprise drives are retired every year. In this age of highly proprietary business data and hyper-sensitive customer records, destroying information can be as important as creating it.  How do businesses guarantee that data is completely removed from retired servers and storage - and PCs ?

Seagate, IBM and LSI have taken a step towards making this incredibly simple and inexpensive.  With Seagate’s Cheetah 15K.6 FDE drive, available this summer, data can be made to disappear forever from retired server and storage drives with a single command.  

This technology already exists for notebook PCs.  In all cases, make sure proper password management procedures are in place before implementing these drives.  Once the key is lost or erased, the data is gone forever.

More from Seagate on secure storage here.

Anyone out there using FDE in notebooks today? How is it working for you?

Moshe Yanai and connection makes this intriguing

Byte and Switch says IBM is looking at acquiring Diligent, which includes what was EMC’s Israeli lab.  The interesting connection is Moshe Yanai, who engineered the recent purchase of Israeli-based XIV a few months ago.

An added incentive for IBM is that they have been relatively quiet about deduplication, which is Diligent’s forte.

Update:  Storagezilla adds some color on Diligent, EMC and IBM.

Server virtualization is helping storage shrug off a weak economy

Byte and Switch observe that disk storage demand continues to expand, even as a recession threatens in the US economy.  They see server virtualization and specifically the SCSI storage systems supporting it as the reason.

No surprise to me.  Storage demand is limited primarily by the ability to manage it effectively.  Virtualization makes server deployment easy, and iSCSI arrays make it easy to feeding their appetite for terabytes.  Case in point: Dell’s Equallogic. 

VMWare has helped open the door wide for real-world server virtualization, with Microsoft eager to walk in with Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V.

A future big spark for business storage demand will be the “top-down” mainstream technology shift driven by XIV at IBM and Hulk/Maui at EMC. 

Two petabyte storage consolidation and virtualization up and running

Byte and Switch covered Ford’s revamp of their corporate data storage strategy, including 2 petabytes of virtualized storage.  They used IBM’s SAN Volume Controller and DS4000 & DS8000 systems. 

Ford’s Vijay Santoran says that they’ve tested EMC gear as well, and are not relying on a single solution.

Consolidation is paying off already, but it’s not a silver bullet 

From the sounds of it, Ford has been able to deliver on the promises of virtualized storage, including fewer chasses, less power, delayed storage growth.  Despite this, I believe Ford will ultimately be able to support more, not less data with this enabling architecture.

I’m a firm believer that storage as a business enabler trumps storage as a cost savings tool every time.

What do you think? I’d love to hear from you.

But no one’s yet sure exactly what

Byte and Switch talks about the storage impact of social networking on pure play Web 2.0 social networking sites as well as businesses in general. 

The infrastructure seems to be emulating the network it supports, demanding what they call “cloud computing”.  The needs are less about performance or even capacity, but managing the content cloud as it grows and changes.

EMC and IBM are on it.  So are a slew of newer storage technology companies. 

One thing’s for sure about storage for social networking: there’s going to be a lot of it.

A perfect storm for IBM in the enterprise storage space? 

There are a lot of startups in the storage world with mostly excellent technology, all struggling to break out.  IBM may have scored a coup with its acquisition of XIV by providing the business scale and market reach to propel Nextra into mainstream adoption. 

IBM’s marketing plus XIV’s technology, coupled with the fact that IBM doesn’t have EMC’s Symmetrix business to cannibalize, creates a market-changing Pivotal Moment in the enterprise storage space.  If IBM can move fast, they can achieve the market success in this segment that all of those startups mostly just gret to dream about.

Read what Robin Harris has to say on this.

IBM acquires XIV: storage technology for a Web 2.0 world 

Moshe Yanai, the man who invented the Symmetrix (and therefore EMC) decades ago, has created a game-changing storage solution at XIV, his 5 year-old  startup.  IBM thinks so too, it seems. They announced today that they had acquired the company.

Enterprise Strategy Group was big on XIV even before IBM announced they would acquire them.  Who couldn’t like rebuilding a 1 TB drive in less than 30 minutes?  An innovative massively parallel storage architecture creates all kinds of rule-busting capabilities (near-infinite scalability, high performance with SATA drives) that are only available today in massive, custom-built internet data centers.