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Inside System Storage

Inside System Storage -- hosted by Tony Pearson

Data Center Conference in Las VegasYesterday

Well, I'm back from my vacation from Bali and Singapore, and am glad to see that my fellow blogger BarryB [aka Storage Anarchist] also had a chance to take a break to exotic locations.

Next Thursday, in the USA, is [Thanksgiving holiday], so this will give me a chance to catch up on my email and read everyone's blog posts and product announcements.

The following week, December 2-5, I'll be attending the 27th annual [Data Center Conference] at the MGM Grand hotel and casino in Las Vegas, Nevada. IBM is a Premier and Platinum sponsor for this event. Look for me in one of the many break-out sessions, one-on-one executive meetings, or IBM's "booth 20" at the solution center. Our team will be showing off IBM's XIV, SVC and TotalStorage Productivity Center offerings, as well as explaining IBM Information Infrastructure and the rest of the New Enterprise Data Center strategy.

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IBM Tivoli Key Lifecycle ManagerNovember 4

Well it's Tuesday, and ["election day"] here in the USA, and again IBM has more announcements.

IBM announced [IBM Tivoli Key Lifecycle Manager v1.0] (TKLM) to manage encryption keys. This provides a graphical interface to manage encryption keys, including retention criteria when sharing keys with other companies.

TKLM is supported on AIX, Solaris, Windows, Red Hat and SUSE Linux. IBM plans to offer TKLM for z/OS in 2009. TKLM can be used with Firefox or Internet Explorer web browser. This will include the Encryption Key Manager (EKM) that IBM offered initially to support encryption keys for the TS1120, TS1130, and LTO-4 drives.

While this is needed today for tape, IBM positions this software to also manage the encryption keys for "Full Drive Encryption" (FDE) disk drive modules (DDM) in IBM disk systems in 2009.

Tomorrow, I'll start my long-overdue vacation!

technorati tags: IBM, Tivoli, TLKM, AIX,

Exabyte Data Center for ArchiveOctober 31

There's some good discussion in the comments section over at Robin Harris' StorageMojo blog for his post [Building a 1.8 Exabyte Data Center]. To summarize, a student is working on a research archive and asked Robin Harris for his opinion. The archive will consist of 20-40 million files averaging 90 GB in size each, for a total of 1800 PB or 1.8 EB. By comparison, an IBM DS8300 with five frames tops out at 512TB, so it would take nearly 3600 of these to hold 1.8 EB. While this might seem like a ridiculous amount of data, I think the discussion is valid as our world is certainly headed in that direction.

IBM works with a lot of research firms, and the solution is to put most of this data on tape, with just enough disk for specific analysis. Robin mentions a configurion with Sun Fire 4540 disk systems (aka Thumper). Despite Sun Microsystems' recent [$1.7 Billion dollar quarterly loss], I think even the experts at Sun would recommend a blended disk-and-tape solution for this situation.

Take for example IBM's Scale Out File Services [SoFS] which today handles 2-3 billion files in a single global file system, so 20-40 million would present no problem. SoFS supports a mix of disk and tape, with built-in movement, so

The Two Faces of EMCOctober 30

Perhaps the recent financial meltdown is making storage vendors nervous. Both IBM and EMC gained market share in 3Q08, but EMC is acting strangely at IBM's latest series of plays and announcements. Almost contradictory! Benchmarks bad, rely on your own in-house evaluations instead

Let's start with fellow blogger Barry Burke from EMC, who offers his latest post [Benchmarketing Badly] with commentary about Enterprise Strategy Group's [DS5300 Lab Validation Report]. The IBM System Storage DS5300 is one of IBM's latest midrange disk systems recently announced. Take for example this excerpt from BarryB's blog post:

"I was pleasantly surprised to learn that both IBM and ESG agree with me about the relevance and importance of the Storage Performance Council benchmarks.

That is, SPC's are a meaningless tool by which to measure or compare enterprise storage arrays."

Nowhere in the ESG report says this, nor have I found any public statements from either IBM nor ESG that makes this claim. Instead, the ESG report explains that traditional benchmarks from the Storage Performance Council [SPC] focus on a sing

Trends in Tech Spending 2008October 29

This is page 34 of Sequoia Capital's [56-slide presentation] about the current financial meltdown. In the past, IT spending tracked closely to the rest of the economy, but the latest downturn has not yet reflected in IT spend.

The rest of the deck is worth going through, with interesting stats presented in a clear manner.

technorati tags: IBM, Sequoia Capital, tech spending, financial, crisis, meltdown, downturn