The Fox in IBM’s Storage Henhouse

Posted on Dec 4, 2009 in Records Management News

http://www.itjungle.com/tfh/tfh113009-story04.html

Mad Dog 21/21: The Fox in IBM’s Stor­age Henhouse

Pub­lished: Novem­ber 30, 2009

by Hesh Wiener

Moshe Yanai became suc­cess­ful by tak­ing enter­prise stor­age busi­ness away from IBM. He led the team that cre­ated the EMC Sym­metrix, which became the lead­ing stor­age prod­uct at IBM’s glass house accounts. EMC and Yanai parted ways in 2001 and after a decent inter­val Yanai founded a new stor­age ven­ture, XIV (pro­nounced Ex Eye Vee). IBM acquired XIV at the start of 2008, nam­ing Yanai an IBM Fel­low. Yanai may be able to clob­ber EMC for IBM, but to suc­ceed he will also have to kill off IBM’s flag­ship DS8000 array with his XIV boxes.

The rea­son XIV just might be rev­o­lu­tion­ary, at least by IBM stan­dards, is that it is a disk array that has some of the attrac­tive char­ac­ter­is­tics of just about every kind of array in the alpha­bet soup of today’s stor­age indus­try. Basi­cally, an XIV box has a front-end based on X64/Linux servers with soft­ware and inter­faces that let the machine talk over Fibre Chan­nel, Eth­er­net, iSCSI (which uses Eth­er­net), and if there were a need, any other fast hookup the mar­ket might want. Behind the gate­way machines sit a pile of X64 servers that talk to large SATA disk dri­ves. Today the dri­ves are 1 TB each; tomor­row they will be 2 TB and maybe in 2010 or 2011 they will go to 4 TB. The hard­ware com­po­nents are stan­dard and cheap. Each XIV box can have up to 180 dri­ves; this com­ple­ment of disks yields 79 TB of stor­age capac­ity after deduc­tions for inter­nal mir­ror­ing and spares. Total cache in each box can be up to 120 GB. (Details galore for the XIV stor­age clus­ter can be found in IBM’s XIV Red­book.) But as all the hard­ware is based on indus­try stan­dard tech­nol­ogy, it is the soft­ware that really adds value.

The XIV soft­ware dupli­cates data (mak­ing the machine RAID 1) and scat­ters it across the full set of dri­ves in the cab­i­net. This, says IBM, lets the box rebuild a failed drive quickly (20 to 30 min­utes) and accu­rately. Data scat­ter­ing makes it very unlikely that a whole file or dataset gets clipped if a drive fails, but a two-drive fail­ure, which is a very unlikely event, can cause a whole box to lose via­bil­ity. There has been a blog rant about this but peo­ple who read through the mate­r­ial will most likely end up trust­ing the disk sub­sys­tems more than the bloggers.

The actual machine is not quite this sim­ple but nei­ther is it as elab­o­rate as the DS8000 boxes IBM sells to its high-end server cus­tomers, includ­ing main­frame and Power Sys­tems shops and includ­ing AIX 6.1, Linux, and i 6.1 (the lat­ter through the Vir­tual I/O Server par­ti­tion) on the Power boxes. IBM says the XIV is a bar­gain and that it also is less power hun­gry than alter­na­tives. While IBM’s sales­force makes these claims when com­par­ing the XIV to non-IBM alter­na­tives, the very same com­par­isons can be made to the DS8000, which remains in the spot­light in part because it is the only large IBM disk array that z/OS will talk to.

There may be a per­for­mance case for the DS8000 com­pared to the XIV (and other high-end arrays), at least for cer­tain kinds of work­loads, but in prac­tice there are no inde­pen­dent bench­mark tests for big stor­age sub­sys­tems. Indus­try folk­lore sug­gests that a box like the DS8000 should shame the XIV in trans­ac­tion pro­cess­ing appli­ca­tions, while the XIV would win when data is not struc­tured. Unstruc­tured (or incon­sis­tently struc­tured) data shows up a lot in pop cul­ture sites like Face­book but also is the nature of med­ical records sys­tems (with com­puter files, doc­u­ments, pho­tos, videos, scans, etc.) and insur­ance claims data­bases, to name only two of many appli­ca­tions where large disk arrays are used.

Regard­less of widely held pre­con­cep­tions, how­ever, the XIV may be bet­ter than DS8000 advo­cates (such as users who have a big invest­ment in the machines and some IBMers with careers tied to the prod­uct) seem to believe. Bank Leumi uses XIVs for every­thing, includ­ing trans­ac­tion pro­cess­ing, and says it is get­ting great results. Recently, IBM has been hold­ing dog-and-pony shows for users and ana­lysts that fea­ture a grow­ing num­ber of user orga­ni­za­tions that have bet their strate­gic stor­age on XIV equip­ment. \r\nFor now, IBM is pro­tect­ing its DS8000 base by not sup­port­ing XIV under z/OS. If you want to use a XIV on a main­frame, you have to hook it up using zLinux. (On Power-based servers, AIX and Linux can talk directly to the XIV arrays, but i 6.1 has to work through VIOS to reach the machine.) Clearly, direct links between Power Sys­tems or main­frame machines and XIV clus­ters could hap­pen just as soon as IBM is will­ing to let XIVs can­ni­bal­ize the DS8000 base. Actu­ally, the deci­sion would not so much be IBM’s but that of high-end server shops, who will flee the DS8000 the minute they fig­ure out that XIV is going to be the future of IBM enter­prise stor­age, a process that is begin­ning to get underway.

Out­side the main­frame base, there’s plenty of sup­port for XIV. But for IBM, which is not the prime ven­dor to the Web 2.0 world of Google, Ama­zon, eBay, and their ilk, the strate­gic bat­tle is the fight to store glass house data. And in that world, IBM has to grow by 50 per­cent to catch up to EMC.

In the sec­ond quar­ter of this year, which is the most recent quar­ter for which IDC has issued a pub­lic report, EMC had 21.5 per­cent of the mar­ket IDC calls exter­nal disk sys­tems. IBM had 14.9 per­cent of this $4.1 bil­lion (in the quar­ter) seg­ment. Hewlett-Packard fol­lowed with 11.4 per­cent, Dell had 9.89 per­cent and NetApp had 8.9 per­cent. Gart­ner says more or less the same thing about the mar­ket, peg­ging EMC’s share of what it calls con­troller based disk stor­age at 21.8 per­cent in this year’s first quar­ter, IBM at 15.7 per­cent, HP at 10.3 per­cent, Dell at 9.2 per­cent, Hitachi (which also sells sub­sys­tems through HP and Sun) at 8.7 per­cent, and NetApp at 8.5 percent.

The 2009 mar­ket data describes a seg­ment that’s headed for a year-on-year decline of 15 to 20 per­cent com­pared to 2008, which itself was not glo­ri­ous. IBM’s main­frame sales data con­firm times are tough in glass house coun­try, and with banks dying like mayflies, the out­come for the indus­try, for each ven­dor and for var­i­ous prod­ucts is quite hard to pre­dict. Nev­er­the­less, it’s prob­a­bly safe to say a story about cheaper stor­age will get users’ ears.

It’s very hard to tell just how cheap a XIV is com­pared to alter­na­tives, in part because IBM report­edly pumped out so many eval­u­a­tion machines, mean­ing free­bies, to seed the mar­ket. Now EMC blog­gers are not about to praise the XIV but they also are not going to put com­plete balder­dash on their Webs because it’s hard enough for them to get eye­balls under the best of con­di­tions. But IBM fans (and peo­ple who like to gripe about EMC) might want to dis­count Big Blue blog­gers at least as much as those on the EMC pro­pa­ganda squad. One of IBM’s (until recently, any­way) vis­i­ble and often enter­tain­ing blog­sters, Tony Pear­son, seems to have just dis­ap­peared … or what­ever you call it when a whole lot of Google point­ers that for­merly worked now take you to 404 country.

It’s pos­si­ble that these devel­op­ments in the murky world of stor­age mar­ket­ing and per­sua­sion stem from the heated dis­cus­sions about the actual cost and real green­ness of XIV. The dis­pute, which we found close to impen­e­tra­ble, stems from the fact that a XIV box is at its most cost-effective and power friendly when it is fully con­fig­ured. In fact, it may be the case that IBM builds every XIV fully loaded, the way it builds large servers with a full load of engines, and then turns on pieces of the machine based on how much a user pays.

It turns out that a seri­ous prospect for the XIV or an alter­na­tive from IBM or one of its rivals can get good answers to hard ques­tions quite directly. First, get IBM and any other ven­dor in the run­ning to quote a five-year total cost includ­ing main­te­nance, soft­ware to pro­vide all the required disk array func­tion­al­ity, etc., includ­ing mir­ror sys­tems and what­ever it takes to do mir­ror­ing if the mir­ror is going to be remote. At the same time ask the sales rep for power and heat data for the machin­ery as it will actu­ally be con­fig­ured. Any­thing less is just ask­ing for ugly surprises.

Even when you have done that, you may not have all the answers unless you give ven­dors’ financ­ing arms (and the hand­ful of inde­pen­dents whose names come up if you search for “used IBM main­frame stor­age”) a chance to offer sec­ond­hand equip­ment. Just as you should in the case of new gear, you have to press the ven­dors of used disk arrays to quote total costs includ­ing main­te­nance and func­tion­al­ity soft­ware as well as power and heat.

Also, if you think you might be mov­ing some or all of your work from one plat­form to another dur­ing the next few years, you need to get prices that include all the rel­e­vant inter­fac­ing hard­ware and soft­ware. While it ought to be suf­fi­cient to spec­ify a stan­dard such as Fibre Chan­nel or iSCSI (over Eth­er­net), be spe­cific. In this game, you can’t count on good surprises.

The result might cause a bit of a stir. On just about any mea­sure where a XIV looks good com­pared to, say, a Sym­metrix or Sun Microsys­tems Stor­ageTek array, it is going to look great com­pared to a DS8000, if IBM’s flag­ship disk sub­sys­tem is in the running.

It’s not that IBM fel­low Yanai wants the DS8000 to tank. It’s that he prob­a­bly doesn’t have any choice if he wants his XIV device to emerge a winner.

Read more here          http://www.itjungle.com/tfh/tfh113009-story04.html

Com­pli­ments of File­Man Research

Cary

_____________________________________________________

Cary F. McGov­ern, CRM

File­Man

Keep records longer, Pennsylvania auditor general says … “A Sign of our times”

Posted on Dec 4, 2009 in Records Management News

Keep records longer, Penn­syl­va­nia audi­tor gen­eral says

By Brad Bum­sted
STATE CAPITOL REPORTER
Wednes­day, Decem­ber 2, 2009

HARRISBURG — Forty per­cent of state com­puter doc­u­ments Audi­tor Gen­eral Jack Wag­ner requested for an audit were destroyed before the exam­i­na­tion of $592 mil­lion worth of con­tracts began, a top offi­cial told a Sen­ate panel Tuesday.

Anne Rung, a deputy sec­re­tary of the Depart­ment of Gen­eral Ser­vices, said the doc­u­ments were destroyed “right­fully and law­fully” because some records con­cern­ing con­tracts with Deloitte Con­sult­ing were older than three years and the state’s records reten­tion pol­icy doesn’t require keep­ing records longer.

The agency noti­fied audi­tors about the lack of records in July, said Ed Myslewicz, press sec­re­tary for Gen­eral Services.

“We were never told up front, at the begin­ning of the process” in mid-2008, said Wagner’s spokesman Steve Halvonik.

The Sen­ate Com­mu­ni­ca­tions and Tech­nol­ogy Com­mit­tee held a hear­ing about Wagner’s audit, issued in Octo­ber, which found lax over­sight of Deloitte Con­sult­ing com­puter con­tracts. Gen­eral Ser­vices, which over­sees state con­tracts, “fell down on the job,” Wag­ner said when he released the audit.

The audit found that $382 mil­lion worth of con­tracts with Deloitte shot up to $592 mil­lion from 2004 to 2007, as a result of change orders, emer­gency con­tracts and no-bid contracts.

The audit did not accuse Deloitte of any­thing improper. Gen­eral Ser­vices offi­cials sharply dis­puted the findings.

Wag­ner said he obtained 25 of 59 state con­tracts with Deloitte, and 33 con­tracts were purged or unavail­able. He told the com­mit­tee records should be retained for seven years.

State records typ­i­cally are main­tained three years, but los­ing bid­ders’ pro­pos­als are purged after six months. Gen­eral Ser­vices Sec­re­tary James Cree­don told the com­mit­tee the agency plans to extend its reten­tion of all records to four years. But he cited space as an issue, say­ing “one can’t keep everything.”

Repub­li­can Sen. Bob Men­sch of Mont­gomery County, who worked in the com­puter and tele­phone indus­try, said later that stor­age space should not be an issue in an era of advanced com­puter tech­nol­ogy. “There’s no space con­sid­er­a­tions once it is in giga­bytes,” he said.

Gen­eral Ser­vices makes avail­able most records on the agency’s Web site, Cree­don said.

Cree­don said the agency imple­mented two-thirds of Wagner’s rec­om­men­da­tions when it began reform­ing pro­ce­dures in 2003. Gen­eral Ser­vices denied 21 of 46 no-bid con­tract pro­pos­als and rejected 357 sole-source pro­cure­ments since 2004, he said.

Com­pli­ments of File­Man Research

Cary

_____________________________________________________

Cary F. McGov­ern, CRM

File­Man

Store (nice work Dennis) … Keep in front of your Clients

Posted on Dec 4, 2009 in Records Management News

http://undergroundvaults.wordpress.com/2009/12/02/year-end-vital-records-storage-reminder/

Under­ground Vaults and Stor­age, Inc.

Decem­ber 2, 2009

Year End Vital Records Storage Reminder

As we approach the end of the year, Under­ground Vaults & Stor­age, Inc would like to remind busi­nesses of the impor­tance of vital records stor­age and asset pro­tec­tion.  Under­ground Vaults & Stor­age, has been a val­ued provider of these ser­vices for over fifty years.  Busi­nesses from around the world rely on the exper­tise and knowl­edge of our expe­ri­ence.  We pro­vide secure, acces­si­ble, and cost effi­cient stor­age for your information.

Our stor­age options are eco­nom­i­cal and pro­vide your busi­ness with the ulti­mate in off site stor­age.  With no monthly min­i­mums, UV&S offers a more cost effec­tive solu­tion than most other stor­age alter­na­tives, includ­ing mini stor­age units.  We can accom­mo­date your records stor­age and infor­ma­tion man­age­ment needs with our highly trained staff and mul­ti­tude of ser­vices and stor­age options available.

Under­ground Vaults & Stor­age, Inc (UV&S) is a privately-held infor­ma­tion and records man­age­ment com­pany estab­lished in 1959, oper­at­ing three under­ground and three above ground secure stor­age facil­i­ties.  It is per­haps known best for stor­ing mil­lions of items includ­ing movie film, data tapes, and paper records, within a 650-foot deep salt mine in Kansas.

Feel free to con­tact any of our sales rep­re­sen­ta­tives for a free con­sul­ta­tion and eval­u­a­tion of your infor­ma­tion man­age­ment and stor­age needs.

Com­pli­ments of File­Man Research

Cary

_____________________________________________________

Cary F. McGov­ern, CRM

File­Man

Nice reminder from Underground Valuts … perhaps you may want to do something similar for your clients

Posted on Dec 4, 2009 in Records Management News

http://undergroundvaults.wordpress.com/2009/12/02/year-end-vital-records-storage-reminder/

Under­ground Vaults and Stor­age, Inc.

Decem­ber 2, 2009

Year End Vital Records Storage Reminder

As we approach the end of the year, Under­ground Vaults & Stor­age, Inc would like to remind busi­nesses of the impor­tance of vital records stor­age and asset pro­tec­tion.  Under­ground Vaults & Stor­age, has been a val­ued provider of these ser­vices for over fifty years.  Busi­nesses from around the world rely on the exper­tise and knowl­edge of our expe­ri­ence.  We pro­vide secure, acces­si­ble, and cost effi­cient stor­age for your information.

Our stor­age options are eco­nom­i­cal and pro­vide your busi­ness with the ulti­mate in off site stor­age.  With no monthly min­i­mums, UV&S offers a more cost effec­tive solu­tion than most other stor­age alter­na­tives, includ­ing mini stor­age units.  We can accom­mo­date your records stor­age and infor­ma­tion man­age­ment needs with our highly trained staff and mul­ti­tude of ser­vices and stor­age options available.

Under­ground Vaults & Stor­age, Inc (UV&S) is a privately-held infor­ma­tion and records man­age­ment com­pany estab­lished in 1959, oper­at­ing three under­ground and three above ground secure stor­age facil­i­ties.  It is per­haps known best for stor­ing mil­lions of items includ­ing movie film, data tapes, and paper records, within a 650-foot deep salt mine in Kansas.

Feel free to con­tact any of our sales rep­re­sen­ta­tives for a free con­sul­ta­tion and eval­u­a­tion of your infor­ma­tion man­age­ment and stor­age needs.

Com­pli­ments of File­Man Research

Cary

_____________________________________________________

Cary F. McGov­ern, CRM

File­Man

BARE METAL Reflections from Storage Guardian Blog

Posted on Dec 4, 2009 in Records Management News

Expert tips: busi­ness doc­u­ment reten­tion guidelines

Posted By Dave Minns

Small and medium-sized busi­nesses are cur­rently fac­ing a ‘data tsunami’ forced on them by reg­u­la­tory preser­va­tion and com­pli­ance rules that dic­tate how they must man­age elec­tron­i­cally stored infor­ma­tion. What’s the best strat­egy for man­ag­ing this com­plex problem?

The paper­less office will prob­a­bly never hap­pen. But while paper still clut­ters our desks, it’s the elec­tronic paper trail that is prov­ing harder for most busi­nesses to man­age. What should you do with the paper and elec­tronic busi­ness records your busi­ness accu­mu­lates each year? What has to be kept year after year, what can be destroyed or dis­posed of as soon as possible?

The IRS needs this, state law says that, fed­eral laws say some­thing else. And, depend­ing on the indus­try in which you work, the lat­est com­pli­ance reg­u­la­tions demand that you pre­serve cer­tain information.

Once you fig­ure out WHAT to keep, you need to decide HOW to keep it. Should you scan the paper doc­u­ments into the com­puter? Or should you print out all the elec­tronic cor­re­spon­dence and doc­u­ments? As you weigh these deci­sions you need to fac­tor in the cost of off-site paper stor­age, and the amount of hard­copy ver­sus soft­copy you will need to retain.

Once you have estab­lished the best pol­icy for doc­u­ments, you’ll need to next think about email, IM, voice mes­sages, and even SMS mes­sages. What to keep? And for how long? What can be purged imme­di­ately? These new forms of cor­re­spon­dence can gen­er­ate far more vol­ume than ‘reg­u­lar’ correspondence.

Acces­si­bil­ity is another dimen­sion to the prob­lem — what you will have to pro­duce for audi­tors or researchers if you have an IRS audit, lit­i­ga­tion dis­cov­ery or human resource issue. This may require you to go through paper files for prior years and elec­tronic files from this time for­ward. The cost of such a dis­cov­ery process of audit needs to be man­aged, both finan­cially and in terms of its impact on your busi­ness’ productivity.

Stor­age Guardian has been man­ag­ing the preser­va­tion and reten­tion of business-critical elec­tronic records of com­pa­nies for the past 10 years. As a result, we’ve devel­oped some guide­lines that apply to most busi­nesses – but make sure to check with a legal expert famil­iar with the spe­cific fed­eral /state leg­is­la­tion for your industry.

Read more here:               http://www.storageguardian.com/blog/expert-tips-business-document-retention-guidelines-2

Com­pli­ments of File­Man Research

Cary

_____________________________________________________

Cary F. McGov­ern, CRM

File­Man