IBM Technical Edge 2013 Tackles Flash – Big Data – Cloud & More

IBM Edge 2013 kicks off in just one week, 6/10 and runs through 6/14. Still time to register.  This blogger will be there through 6/13.  You can follow me on Twitter for conference updates @Writer1225.  I’ll be using hashtag #IBMEdge to post live Twitter comments from the conference. As noted here previously I’ll buy a drink for the first two people who come up to me and say they read DancingDinosaur.  How’s that for motivation!

The previous post looked at the Executive track. Now let’s take a glimpse at the technical track, which ranges considerably wider, beyond the System z to IBM’s other platforms, flash, big data, cloud, virtualization, and more

Here’s a sample of the flash sessions:

Assessing the World of Flash looks at the key competitors, chief innovators, followers, and leaders. You’ll quickly find that not all flash solutions are the same and why IBM’s flash strategy stands at the forefront of this new and strategic technology.

There are many ways to deploy flash. This session examines Where to Put Flash in the Data Center.  It will focus particularly on the new IBM FlashSystem products and other technologies from IBM’s Texas Memory Systems acquisition. However, both storage-based and server-based flash technologies will be covered with an eye toward determining what works best for client performance needs.

The session on IBM’s Flash Storage Future will take a look at how IBM is leveraging its Texas Memory Systems acquisition and other IBM technologies to deliver a flash portfolio that will play a major role across not only IBM’s storage products but its overall solution portfolio and its roadmap moving forward.

The flash sessions also will look at how Banco Azteco, Thompson Reuters, and Sprint are deploying and benefiting from flash.

In the big data track, the Future of Analytics Infrastructure looks interesting. Although most organizations understand the value of business analytics many don’t understand how the infrastructure choices they make will impact the success or failure of their analytics projects.  The session will identify the key requirements of any analytical environment: agility, scalability, multipurpose, compliance, cost-effective, and partner-ready; and how they can be met within a single, future-ready analytics infrastructure to meet the needs of current and future analytics strategies.

Big data looms large at the conference. A session titled Hadoop…It’s Not Just about Internal Storage explores how the Hadoop MapReduce approach is evolving from server internal disks to external storage. Initially, Hadoop provided massively scalable, distributed file storage and analytic capabilities. New thinking, however, has emerged that looks at a tiered approach for implementing the Hadoop framework with external storage. Understanding the workload architectural considerations is important as companies begin to integrate analytic workloads to drive higher business value. The session will review the workload considerations to show why an architectural approach makes sense and offer tips and techniques, and share information about IBM’s latest offerings in this space.

An Overview of IBM’s Big Data Strategy details the company’s industrial-strength big data platform to address the full spectrum of big data business opportunities. This session is ideal for those who are just getting started with big data.

And no conference today can skip the cloud. IBM Edge 2013 offers a rich cloud track. For instance, Building the Cloud Enabled Data Center explains how to get maximum value out of an existing virtualized environment through self-service delivery and optimization along with virtualization optimization capabilities. It also describes how to enable business and infrastructure agility with workload optimized clouds that provide orchestration across the entire data center and accelerate application updates to respond faster to stakeholder demands and competitive threats. Finally it looks at how an open and extensible cloud delivery platform can fully automate application deployment and lifecycle management by integrating compute, network, storage, and server automation.

A pair of sessions focus on IBM Cloud Storage Architectures and Understanding IBM’s Cloud Options. The first session looks at several cloud use cases, such as storage and systems management.  The other session looks at IBM SmartCloud Entry, SmartCloud Provisioning, and ServiceDelivery Manager.  The session promises to be an excellent introduction for the cloud technical expert who desires a quick overview of what IBM has to offer in cloud software and the specific value propositions for its various offerings, along with their architectural features and technical requirements.

A particularly interesting session will examine Desktop Cloud through Virtual Desktop Infrastructure and Mobile Computing. The corporate desktop has long been a costly and frustrating challenge complicated even more by mobile access. The combination of the cloud and Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) provides a way for companies to connect end users to a virtual server environment that can grow as needed while mitigating the issues that have frustrated desktop computing, such as software upgrades and patching.

There is much more in the technical track. All the main IBM platforms are featured, including PureFlex Systems, the IBM BladeCenter, IBM’s Enterprise X-Architecture, the IBM XIV storage system, and, for DancingDinosaur readers, sessions on the DS8000.

Have you registered for IBM Edge 2013 yet?  There still is time. As noted above, find me in the Social Media Lounge at the conference and in the sessions.  You can follow me on Twitter for conference updates @Writer1225.  I’ll be using hashtag #IBMEdge to post live Twitter comments from the conference. I’ll buy a drink for the first two people who come up to me and say they read DancingDinosaur.  How much more motivation do you need?

SmartCloud Storage Access Simplifies Private Cloud Storage

IBM has long been offering storage as part of its SmartCloud family of products.  In early February it introduced SmartCloud Storage Access, a storage software appliance that looks to be a game changer, at least for IBM storage shops. It offers easy private cloud storage-as-a-service through a self-service portal for storage provisioning, monitoring and reporting. DancingDinosaur, however, also finds the software appliance concept intriguing, especially as it can be applied to simplifythe zEnterprise.

Two issues are driving interest in SmartCloud Storage Access. The first is a report that labor costs will consume 70% of IT spending this year. The second: 90% of organizations expect to adopt or deploy a cloud model in the next three years.  It’s no surprise that IBM thinks the time is right to introduce SmartCloud Storage Access as a way to facilitate storage in the cloud while lowering the IT labor costs associated with storage.

IBM SmartCloud Storage Access enables organizations to implement a private cloud storage service through which users can create an account, provision storage, and upload files over the Internet—with only a few clicks and without involving IT labor if done through the automated self-service GUI portal. Not only will SmartCloud Storage Access reduce IT labor involvement but it should speed the delivery of storage resources, which in turn boosts user productivity.  No longer do they have to wait for a storage admin to provision storage for them.

Unlike several IBM appliances, SmartCloud Storage Access is a software-only appliance; no hardware ships with it. Of course, if you are using it with a private cloud, you still need to populate your private cloud with physical storage. For that you can use most of the IBM storage products. The SmartCloud Storage Access appliance itself installs on an Intel server running VMware. Basically, it is a VMware image loaded on a VMware virtual machine.

As an appliance, all the technical complexity of the storage provisioning process is hidden; this abstraction to the storage-as-a-service level relieves the user of dealing with conventional storage provisioning. It simplifies and standardizes monitoring, reporting, and control to reduce operational complexity. It also does away with the typical collection of point tools required to address various storage functions.

It allows admins to quickly and easily set up a private cloud storage service complete with elastic capacity, automatic or routed approval flows, multiple service classes with different QoS. Admins can simply define the service without concern about the underlying technical details. The SmartCloud Storage Access appliance hides all the complexity. It also simplifies monitoring and reporting.

The bottom line: it delivers storage provisioning on demand in seconds and with minimal involvement of IT. The result is increased productivity for both storage users and IT; fast, consistent high quality service; and high operational efficiency. Reduced IT involvement translates into better TCO while automated self-service leads to faster deployment and higher end user satisfaction.

And it can play with most of IBM’s storage lineup; XIV, Storwize V7000 and V7000 Unified, and SONAS.  The DS8000 and other block storage systems are not expected to play much of a role in SmartCloud Storage Access; clouds today primarily focus on file storage.

In recent years the idea of a private storage cloud has emerged as the Holy Grail of storage; something that would finally put an end to the difficulty of responding to rapidly escalating storage demands for different types of storage. But it proved difficult to implement.

As a software appliance, however, SmartCloud Storage Access already is proving effective, as early adopters like ETH Zurich University and the Tallink Group attest.  If the software appliance concept can simplify private storage clouds what other aspects of enterprise computing can it help?  One IBM researcher already thinks that because it can hide complicated platform specifics, the concept is a particularly good fit for System z.  More on this to follow.

EMC Introduces New Mainframe VTL

EMC introduced the high end DLm8000, the latest in its family of VTL products. This one is aimed for large enterprise mainframe environments and promises to ensure consistency of data at both production and recovery sites and provide the shortest possible RPO and RTO for critical recovery operations.

It is built around EMC VMAX enterprise storage and its SRDF replication and relies on synchronous replication to ensure immediate data consistency between the primary and target storage by writing the data simultaneously at each. Synchronous replication addresses the potential problem latency mismatch that occurs with the usual asynchronous replication, where a lag between writes to the primary and to the backup target storage can result in inconsistent data.

Usually this mismatch exists for a brief period. EMC suggests the issue, especially for large banks and financial firms—its key set of mainframe target customers—is much more serious. Large financial organizations with high transaction volume, EMC notes, have historically faced recovery challenges because their mainframe tape and DASD data at production and secondary sites were never fully in synch.  As such, recovery procedures often slowed until the differences between the two data sets were resolved, which slowed the resulting failover.  This indeed may be a real issue but for only a small number of companies, specifically those that need an RTO and RPO of just about zero.

EMC used the introduction of the DLm8000 to beat up tape backup in general. Physical tape transportation by third party records management companies, EMC notes, hinders recovery efforts by reducing what it refers to as the granularity of RPOs while dramatically increasing the RTO.  In addition, periodic lack of tape drive availability for batch processing and for archive and backup applications can impair SLAs, further increasing the risks and business impact associated with unplanned service interruptions. That has been long recognized, but, remember EMC is a company that sells disk, not tape storage, and ran a Tape Sucks campaign after its purchase of Data Domain. What would you expect them to say? 

The DLm8000 delivers throughput of up to 2.7 GB/s, which it claims is 2.5x the performance of its nearest competitor. DancingDinosaur can’t validate that claim, but EMC does have a novel approach to generating the throughput. The DLm8000 is packed with eight Bus-Tech engines (acquired in its acquisition of Bus-Tech in Nov. 2010) and it assigns two FICON connections to each engine for a total of 16 FICON ports cranking up the throughput. No surprise they can aggregate that level of throughput.

EMC has not announced pricing for the DLm8000. The device, however, is the top of its VTL lineup and VMAX enterprise storage tops its storage line. With high throughput and synchronous replication, this product isn’t going to be cheap. However, if you need near zero RPO and RTO then you have only a few choices.

Foremost among those choices should be the IBM TS7700 family, particularly the 7740 and the 7720. Both of these systems provide VTL connectivity. The TS7700 avoids the latency mismatch issue by using a buffer to get the most optimal write performance and then periodically synch primary and target data. “Synchronous as EMC does it for VTL is overkill,” says an IBM tape manager. The EMC approach essentially ignores the way mainframe tape has been optimized.

Among the other choices are the Oracle Virtual Storage Manager and Virtual Library Extension. Oracle uses StorageTek tape systems. The Oracle approach promises to improve tape drive operating efficiencies and lower TCO by optimizing tape drive and library resources through a disk-based virtual tape architecture. HDS also has a mainframe tape backup and VTL product that uses Luminex technology.

EMC is a disk storage company and its DLm8000 demonstrates that. When it comes to backup, however, mainframe shops are not completely averse to tape. Disk-oriented VTL has some advantages but don’t expect mainframe shops to completely abandon tape.

In breaking storage news, IBM today announced acquiring Texas Memory Systems (TMS), a long established (1978) Texas company that provides solid state memory to deliver significantly faster storage throughput and data access while consuming less power. TMS offers its memory as solid state disk (SSD) through its RamSan family of shared rackmount systems and Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe) cards. SSD may be expensive on a cost per gigabyte basis but it blows away spinning hard disk on a cost per IOPS. Expect to see IBM to use TMS’s SSD across its storage products as one of its key future storage initiatives, as described by Jai Menon, CTO and VP, Technical Strategy for IBM Systems and Technology Group (STG), at last June’s Storage Edge 2012 conference. BottomlineIT, DancingDinosaur’s sister blog, covered it here back in June. BTW, Edge 2013 already is scheduled for June 10-14 in Las Vegas.

Deep Mainframe Storage Dive at Edge Conference

The spring SNW conference held in early April offered 19 program tracks covering everything from cloud backup to VDI.  A new storage conference, IBM Edge 2012  (Orlando, FL, June 4-8), covers a similar breadth of storage topics but includes about 15 sessions focused specifically on various aspects of mainframe storage. You won’t find this depth of mainframe storage coverage anywhere else except possibly at SHARE, which is a larger conference.

With the advent of zEnterprise-zBX hybrid computing it is important to have mainframe-specific information on the exploding amount of detail around every aspect of storage.  Today, a mainframe shop can find itself trying to deploy distributed systems storage alongside System z and zEnterprise storage. With many more choices, including cloud storage, it is not always clear what is the best option and how to make the various pieces work together in an optimal way.

The upcoming IBM Edge conference promises to address this need.  At the same time IBM promises to use the event to make major market-shaking announcements, introduce new storage offerings, and showcase the real business outcomes its customers are achieving.

The conference will have two main tracks, both mainframe-oriented. Executive Edge,  for business and IT executives and leaders, will focus on how leading companies are transforming their storage infrastructures to address such challenges as big data or achieving superior business outcomes. Technical Edge for IT professionals and practitioners, will feature cutting-edge education, hands on labs and on-site certification geared for all levels and taught by IBM distinguished engineers, leading product experts,  and clients and partners. A link to the conference sessions is here.

Here is a sample of what you will find:

Delivering High Availability and Disaster Recovery Using IBM GDPS—DancingDinosaur recently addressed this here, but not in nearly the depth. GDPS is IBM’s premier high availability and recovery solution. This session will go over the different GDPS solutions and explore the underlying technology that is exploited to deliver the different solutions.

z FICON and zHPF Operation and Usage—a more technical discussion, this session examines Fibre Connection (FICON) and high performance FICON (zHPF) usage on System z servers. It will describe FICON I/O operation and usage by the System z channel architecture for a FICON channel command word (CCW) channel program, the newer zHPF channel program, and more.

Using Unified Resource Manager to Provision Storage Resources—a hands-on lab demonstrating how a zEnterprise System ensemble running the Unified Resource Manager can provision resources to the ensemble, hypervisor, and virtual servers. Ensembles and ensemble resources such as virtual networking, storage and virtual servers are created and defined using various HMC tasks to identify and define storage resources to the blade hypervisor and virtual servers.

The Top 10 System z Storage Management Problems and How to Address Them—the session looks at the 10 biggest System z Storage Management issues found in most z shops. It will help you understand what can be done in z Storage Management to address these problems, manage your environment for cost savings and increased productivity, and maximize efficiency and effectiveness of both your z resources and personnel.

IBM hasn’t specified its top 10 mainframe storage management challenges, but since this is a Tivoli session you can bet the problems will include storage optimization, data integrity, disaster recovery and reporting capabilities, as well as management of disk and tape storage devices; the stuff Tivoli does well. As for me, I’d like to see it address public/private cloud storage, mixed platform (hybrid) storage management, storing Big Data for real-time analytics, and the perennial challenges the mainframe data center faces: data protection, archiving, cost containment, and the need for skilled mainframe storage staff.

DancingDinosaur will attend the conference. For a chance to win free admission to the conference, watch for upcoming posts here. And now for the legal stuff:  this post is sponsored, meaning I am being compensated, by the Storage Community for covering IBM’s Edge Conference.  However, the opinions and writing here are my own.

 Hope to see you in Orlando.

IBM STG Cashes in on HP-Oracle Woes

The System z and the entire IBM Systems and Technology Group (STG) under Rod Adkins is sweeping the field while HP and Oracle bicker over the fate of Itanium (doomed now, no matter what HP and Intel say officially) and HP flounders in search of a meaningful business direction. The latest financials and IDC market sizing trends don’t tell a pretty picture for either company.

Meanwhile IBM continues to ride the zEnterprise 196 and now the z114 to some of the best numbers it has seen in years. And when IBM finally gets its act together around the zBX it could soar to even greater heights. (For that it has to position and market the zBX for more than the 50-100 very largest z shops.)

Still, nobody can quibble if Adkins did some boasting around the latest numbers: z revenue grew 61% in 2Q11 while MIPS grew 86%, which amounted to a 7 point share gain. System z gained 14 new customers in that time, 68 since the z196 launch a year earlier.

The Power Systems numbers also looked good as revenue grew 12% and the group gained 3 points of market share. It had run up over 250 competitive displacements, 2/3 at the expense of Oracle and 1/3 at the expense of HP.

IDC added to Adkins triumph by noting that IBM had finally pulled into a virtual tie with HP for the worldwide server market lead, with 30.5% (IBM) and 29.8% (HP) of factory revenue share respectively for 2Q11. IDC declared it a statistical tie. IBM experienced 24.5% year-over-year growth in factory revenue gaining 1.6 points of share in the quarter on the performance of System x, Power Systems, and System z, a hat trick for Adkins with all three of STG’s server groups contributing.

Behind IBM and HP was Dell, which maintained third place with 13.8% factory revenue market share in 2Q11. Dell’s factory revenue increased 5.1% compared to 2Q10, driven in part by strong demand from SMB customers. Oracle, which talked brashly of taking on the System z following its Sun acquisition, ended up with the number 4 position jointly with Fujitsu. Oracle’s 2Q11 factory revenue increased 4.2% compared to 2Q10, driven in part by improved demand for x86-based Exadata systems, according to IDC.

While some questioned whether STG’s successes would tail off now that the big new products have been successfully introduced and each product group has been refreshed, Adkins clearly doesn’t agree. Just last month the System z group rolled out the z114, giving the hybrid zEnterprise line a fully capable entry-level machine. When packaged as a Solution Edition deal for enterprise Linux or SAP combining hardware, software, middleware, and maintenance for three years at a deeply discounted price it should be very effective in new competitive wins, especially Linux consolidation wins against HP and SAP wins against Oracle.

STG also handles storage and there too it has racked up wins and introduced a flurry of products. Revenue is 2Q11 grew 10%. Maybe more importantly it handled 4,500 XIV installations with 1,100 new customers. And just last month STG announced XIV Gen 3 scalable storage that includes a host of advanced features at no additional costs. In fact, IBM reports it has reduced the total cost of ownership by 60% when compared to its biggest storage competitor, EMC. As important, IBM made it fully autonomic, meaning it can pretty much run itself, allowing for even more cost savings.

In the latest IDC study of worldwide storage disk systems EMC maintained its lead in the external disk market with 26.0% revenue share in the fourth quarter, followed by IBM in second and HP in third with 16.3% and 11.6% market share respectively. Oracle, which acquired a storage business when it acquired Sun, didn’t even register.

While IBM and STG are on a roll, it is increasingly clear that Oracle and HP are sputtering for now. Oracle can’t seem to gain any leverage from its Sun acquisition. HP just recently realized that PCs, tablets, and smartphones aren’t going to bail it out. Printers anyone?