Technically Speaking

The last few days were insanely busy, with sessions and discussion and emerging new standards, but all in all Tech Field Day Seattle was an amazing experience.  I took a pile of notes, though there could have been more and met a group of great people who I would likely not have been able to meet otherwise.  We heard from several companies and got great information about using new ideas and products and spent a lunch hour discussing the effectiveness of a new standard in networking communication #FCoTR (Fibre Channel over Token Ring).

This post is an overall view of what I got out of #Techfieldday, which was quite a lot.

What’s this all about?

As in a previous post, Tech Field Day is a summit of technical thinkers and organizations who can benefit from the feedback each has to give.  I realize that the sponsor companies were looking for product feedback and constructive discussion which they got, but I think the delegates were able to learn a great deal as well, both about the hot new products coming from the sponsor companies and about technology in general.

I know I got a lot out of the networking opportunity with everyone and that was very valuable for me.

Getting into the discussion

We heard from 5 companies at Tech Field Day Seattle this week and the theme was definitely storage.  The companies that came out were:

Virtualization of both systems and storage were hot topics this week and rightfully so.  Since big storage allows a huge amount of virtualization possibilities the two go hand in hand.

Working to provide feedback to these organizations as well as have some open discussion about our opinions of the product was the overall goal of the sessions.  To be honest and open and not solely “for the press” by giving the presenters honest feedback and not worrying about media image, but of technical relevancy was a nice change.

A bit about the companies we saw

First up was Veeam.  Its always good to go first, sets the tone for the rest of the day.



The Veeam crew provided information about their Virtualization solutions providing backup and replication of virtual machines.  The seemingly easy to use process of being able to get your VM Snapshots replicated to a DR environment.  Being new to the Virtualization space (and wishing spell check would be OK with the word Virtualization) I can see the usefulness of a tool that takes the guesswork out of ensuring your VM environment is both backed up and safe somewhere else in the environment.

But some would say…

Snapshots are not backup.  Which they arent, technically.  However if there are enough snapshots taken regularly, there is no reason that this could not be almost a complete replacement for actual backup.  Depending on the size of the environment and resources available.

My organization is just now looking into Virtualization and this solution could be a great supplement to existing backup methods once we get there.  Perhaps to keep the VMs in a mount-ready state at another site and back them up with our current solution.

Next up was Nimble Storage.  They built an array that uses both flash based storage and more affordable storage to provide a high-speed read/write solution and manage it all from one interface and in one box.

This was a highlight for me.  Not only because I am interested in and learning about storage arrays but because the company launched at Tech Field Day.  They have been working on development of the product and with customers, but chose this event to go live.

Bringing to market a storage solution is one thing, but to deliver a product that can accomodate what appear to me to be the pitfals of typical storage, fast reads and lower cost long term storage could be huge.

Most companies like cheap storage… cheap is relative of course, but being able to put data on SATA disks can save quite a bit of money in overall solution costs.  They are cheap and they work great for read operations.  So with SATA disk you get great storage and read access, but the writes can be a bit slow.  Depending on the environment and the number of drives in the solution (and number of hits by users) the reads may also be slow, but many times not deal-breaking.

Along with the afford-ability of backend storage, Nimble Storage combines high performance writes to the array in the form of a flash cache.  On the front of the storage system there is a flash based cache that allows nearly instantaneous access to storage (both for read and write).  Data goes into the cache and is written to storage or disk at intervals.  So if there is a file that gets written into the cache and is highly used it may not get written until much later in the day making it instantly available within the flash disk for your users.

I think of it as a tiered approach (although it is not quite the same as other tiered solutions we saw, more there in a bit) where information goes into the flash based portion of the solution on write and stays there until the cache gets to a certain percent full, then is written to the disk.  Once the cache is written to disk portions of it can be cleared to make room for other data.

Tiered storage isn’t new

I know there are other organizations that use tiering to keep heavily accessed stuff highly available to the users, which is a great concept, but the heavy incorporation of a set of SSD media to improve overall performance (especially writes to the array) is great.

After lunch on day one, we took a break from the Storage/Backup stuff for a while and went over to F5 networks for a session.

F5 was new to me.  I had seen their building before on other visits to Seattle, but wasn’t really sure what they were all about.  What I learned was networks were the business they were in but it wasnt necessarily pointing users or companies at the Internet (or network), it was more about providing an experience on the network for the users that was optimized in many ways.

The F5 core product is a device called Big IP which proxies connections to resources and can optimize the availability or access to these resources for the user needing them.  This was very cool.

An example would be a website that lives on servers spread across multiple locations.  The Big IP can optimize the use of these resources by doing things like figuring out which web server is closest to the requester and routing the request to that server to display the content.  Doing this creates better resource distribution for the servers and a much faster/smoother experience for the user.

Another concept that was introduced to me while at F5 (aside from the awesome cupcakes) was their technologies of iRules and iControl and the community they have put together to help provide and support these technologies.

iRules are the items that move things around.  They allow you to apply scripts to traffic that hits the Big IP device and take action on it.  Like the delivery of content from a server near you as discussed in the above example or working around an error found on a web page.  Suppose my website was sitting behind a Big IP device and I discovered that a string entered in browser when looking for certain content allowed pages to be manipulated by users.  iRules could be created to inspect the traffic as it was coming through the Big IP and based on the rule send the visitor to a predetermined place instead of the area where the manipulation might happen.  This effectively works around the issue.

iControl allows applications on a network to work together even on dissimilar environments.  Traffic monitoring and business process management come to mind for me here.  Suppose you wanted to monitor traffic coming into your network across all locations. iControl would be able to provide a simple interface across all of these devices to allow for monitoring rather than having to capture all the data at each location and work with it separately.

Tech Field Day – Day 2

On day two we were able to board the bus a bit later, which was great.  First on day 2 was Compellent for a session about their storage technology.

Compellent produces storage arrays that support automatic tiering of data across multiple types of disks.  This is really pretty sweet.  The automatic tiering idea is one that takes a look at the data being stored and scrubs it for statistics every day.  With the information it discovers during scrubbing the algorithm used within the array can determine how much use their is on a file (or group of files) and move limited use data to a higher tier of storage, or one that isnt as frequently used.

Perhaps your production database is kept in tier 1 to allow for fastest access, but some of your company’s marketing material is not accessed all that much and can be kept on tier 3 storage costing less money long term.

Why do I care about where items live?

If an item is used infrequently it can live on inexpensive (and slower) storage media.  Perhaps things that are not used often will live on SATA drives within the array and things used every day will live on faster SAS drives.  This could be done by administrators, moving things around to optimize their use, but Compellent takes care of this and does it all within the same array.

Another area where I found Compellent to be particularly impressive was in replication. With Compellent arrays on both ends of a DR solution, replication between these arrays can be done at a much faster rate because the information can be compressed and only the changes replicated rather than the entire file during certain time periods.  This can speed up performance and optimize bandwidth when needed by users.

During the intermission…

During the intermission of lunch and blogging at TFD day 2 a great deal of discussion was had covering a new networking standard Fibre Channel over Token Ring.  You can read more about that here.  We also made a trip to building 92 at Microsoft to check out the company store and more of their campus.

Back to Storage

Our last presentation was at NEC North America and covered their HYDRAStor product.

When I got to NEC I had no idea they were in the storage business.  I have used NEC projectors and things but this was completely surprising to me.  Not only was the product new to me (and most apparently) but our host Gideon Senderov was a wealth of knowledge on the product.  It was by far the presentation that captured my attention the most.

The HYDRAStore product is built on NEC gear (Servers… who knew NEC made servers).  And each device making up the solution, the Accellerator Nodes and the Storage Nodes are running on servers with memory to facilitate access and improve performance.

Midway through the presentation we toured the test lab at NEC which seemed to get its cooling right out of a wind tunnel.  No the HYDRAStor arrays do not need a wind tunnel for cooling, but it was kinda cool to see it in place.  The lab had four racks full of storage running and was able to hit throughput rates at 10 GB per second.  The speed offered here was definitely amazing.

The NEC Solution was very high end and seemed to me to be greatly suited for archival.  Something used to keep long term copies of your data on with a suplimental storage solution used for every day read/write.

Overall thoughts on Tech Field Day

I had a blast networking with the other delegates and sponsor companies at Tech Field Day Seattle and learned quite alot about these companies and their products.  Coming from an end user role this helped me to see why Storage is so paramount and that there are many ways to skin the storage cat.

I hope the sponsors got the feedback they were looking for and will continue to support Tech Field Day in the future.  As for the solutions, they are all extremely good and accomplish big things.  I think combining some of them, perhaps in a very forward thinking environment or a large environment could be a great all around storage and or backup solution.

I am working further with information learned at Tech Field Day and will be communicating with the sponsor companies to further develop my notes for future blog posts.

Finally I would like to thank Stephen Foskett and others at Gestalt IT for allowing me to be a part of Tech Field Day and the other delegates for helping me learn so much while attending.

Tech Field Day Seattle is just about here.  There has been some interesting discussion about the things to do in Seattle around the conference that make me wish the plane from Appleton left at a more reasonable time, but the tickets are booked and I am jazzed to be headed out to the event.

I have not decided on  if I will be blogging from the event, but I will be taking lots of notes, and hopefully some awesome content will jump off the page.  Surely the event will see the blog… this blog and a few others, but I do not want to jump the shark with any ideas.

I am interested in the event sponsors and to see what they will bring to the table for sharing, but Im also interested in meeting some new people.  I have a feeling I am going to gain a huge appreciation for all things storage… it has begun already, but I do not get to do it everyday…

See you in Seattle

Storage gets cheaper all the time.  Spindles get cheaper and capacities climb making large storage accessible for companies of all sizes.  For IT and users alike, this can mean less limitations and quotas and better virtualization and backup possibilities.

This leads me to wonder about…

Even though this is great news for organizations, what would you keep if your storage was limited to 4Gb?  How would you limit and manage use data to ensure that these things were stored properly?

I am curious to know what might become the data that you cannot live without, both organizational for business and personal.  Family photos, e-mail, writing and other documents?

But storage is cheap and getting cheaper why do I care?

I guess the curiosity comes from my coming move and huge need to get rid of things.  Even though my home data storage has a small physical footprint and fits on my desk, it is far more interesting to think about what might get rid of in terms of data.  Maybe that’s the geek in me.  Seeing the amount of physical stuff we are getting rid of and the amount we will be moving made me wonder about data.

Maybe if  we all thought about the the actual items and data we are keeping (and the number of copies of these items) and what we can, and cannot live without, the efficiency of our storage solutions and optimization of what we have to work with might improve as storage gets cheaper and more efficient in the future.

What would be your most important data?  Please take a few minutes and let me know in the comments.

One of the coolest things going on in business is mobility of data; from the user perspective at least.  As an administrator, this stuff makes me cringe.  Allowing users to access their data from anywhere is a key requirement, but letting the data travel on a flash drive or portable device is somewhat sketchy because the media can be lost, broken, stolen, etc.  This would allow in many cases, the data to get into the wrong hands.

The IEEE standards board is working on IEEE1667 which is an encryption/authentication method for USB devices to allow them to support enhanced storage capabilities.  Microsoft supports this standard in all SKUs of Windows 7.  Hopefully soon, the devices that make use of the standard will hit the shelves.

The idea is that the device supports a certificate (and many types of certificates) to allow authentication by the host system and the device to protect data.

An example of how this might be helpful

Suppose that Joe User is working in a company and carries his most used data on a 1667 supported flash drive.  This way he has it everywhere just in case he needs it.

The device has a certificate to ensure that it works with computers within the organization, but not on computers outside the organization because the certificate authentication cannot happen.

It works great for moving between the company computers.  Allowing Joe to be in the Washington office where he works every day, using the flash drive and data, but also to travel to the New York office and plug right in and continue working.

When Joe goes home and plugs into his desktop PC, the drive will not work because there is no certificate there for authentication with the device.

New, not perfect

This provides a bit of peace of mind to business for the majority of their users travelling with and possibly losing flash drives, however it is likely far from perfect at this point.  Going forward other applications and “smart” enhancements for USB drives will make this technology a great standard, keeping employees happy because they can use portable media without stepping on the toes of the IT department and risking data loss.

Windows 7 does recognize these devices and can make use of them when they arrive, which is definitely something I am looking forward to.  I hope the idea takes off simply to encourage companies to properly handle the portability of Information by employees.

There are other uses for this technology I am sure, but the data portability portion is something I have been working to correct for quite some time, maybe this is just the technology needed to do that job.

All people who use a computer have some contact with storage.  From the disk inside your PC to the flash drive that stores all of the photos of your kids, we all get to interact with storage.  Over the past two years I have been a Microsoft MVP in the File System Storage area and it has provided a great opportunity to see that there is more to storage than the disk(s) that hold the data.

Working with enterprise class storage, using SANs or direct attached storage in file servers, is an interesting role.  My organization uses a network attached storage box running Windows Storage Server 2003 with a very small amount of disk space.  Certainly not the piles of disks used by large companies, but still a good amount of storage to manage.

Finding out more

Last week I was in Redmond learning about storage and the ways it works within Windows Server (and client) as well as storage (or file system) related features in Windows Server 2008 and 2008 R2.  The opportunity to interact with other MVPs and the product groups based around storage was amazing and I am hoping to really begin digging into storage more.  My first goal is to rebuild my Windows Server 2008 R2 box to look more at iSCSI and Storage Server.

My goal isn’t to build Peta-bytes of storage, but to look at smaller storage possibilities for mid-sized businesses.  Companies similar in size to my employer who might not have the resources for huge amounts of storage, but might want to create a very efficient storage platform perhaps using Windows based iSCSI and a reasonable amount of physical disks.

Storage is all about disk isn’t it?

For a good portion of my career I thought that disk was the only component of storage, after all to store the data, there has to be some where to put it.  However, another factor is the method by which the data gets to the disk and its availability.  Other things that influence storage (or certainly could in the future) are items like Virtualization.  Being able to captialize on the mobility of virtualized servers and the reduced hardware overhead they provide seems to bring a better storage utilization.

Many opportunities but just getting going

With the MVP Summit 2010 behind me, I am very interested in what I learned and the relationships I have formed.  Getting the opportunity to work with those at Microsoft, like Suzanne Morgan, who works with the storage initiatives in and around Windows Server is amazing. In the next few months I am sure I will have a few questions, both of Microsoft and of other Storage MVPs as my learning about enterprise storage is just getting started.

So this week the G Drive became available from Google, allowing users of Google Docs to store up to 1Gb worth of data in the Google cloud.  The files can be any variety of files and are not limited to the Google Docs suite of applications.  This is a good thing because it allows users or even organizations to store files in the cloud realatively easily.

Microsoft allows up to 25Gb of storage in its Sky Drive cloud application which to me seems the better deal.  Sure there are reasons to use both, depending on how the service is used and what applications it will be used with.  If you are a Docs user, the Google solution makes sense as long as you can keep within the 1Gb limit.

So where does this stack up for organizations?

I have accounts with both Google and Microsoft and have looked at both services briefly, each one coming in quite handy on days when for whatever reason, I forget my flash drive(s) at home.  But I am a bit curious as to the concept of organizational cloud storage and how this might start to change the game for companies.

Sure many companies still use on premise storage, either on a SAN or NAS with disk or tape backup to keep things recoverable, but would it make sense for an organization to push backups and even file storage into the cloud?  In coming years I think the answer will be a very loud yes.  Google and Microsoft can get server and disk space very cheaply per Gigabyte because they buy so much disk space all at once.  My organization can get the disk space to meet its needs in an on premise solution fairly cheap because we aren’t talking tons of storage, but for a larger organization, the need for storage space is likely to become much greater than today.  Allowing someone else to purchase, maintain, and handle the disks in your storage solutions might make the most sense.  This requires companies to have less IT staff and less server room overhead.

Pushing the stores to the cloud could cut into the overall energy utilization of a company quite quickly given the reduction in back office servers and tape drives that must be run to ensure business continuance.

What about today?

I am not sure the cloud is ready to take over entirely for on premise storage and backup but it is growing a bit more everyday.  In the future I have a feeling that storage other than an external hard disk for ITunes or other entertainment and a few files will be done in the cloud.  Maybe the disks in workstations will be large enough to foot the bill and a synchronization of the data to the organizations slice of the cloud will ensure backup all the way to the desktop.  Sure the bandwidth to the Internet would need to increase, but with fiber coming along and broadband being a mainstay already, this seems like the natural progression of things to me.

Lately the goofed up tape backups happening at my office have been quite the challenge.  Working with drive support and testing various theories about the order of the backup jobs and the likelihood that once the library puts the tape away there is some crazy leprechaun messing with my setup… which by the way turned out to be false. 

It turns out to simply be a matter of hardware support.  The card I got to operate the library and drive was not on the list recommended, tested, certified, blessed, etc. by the manufacturer.  Rather than try to get it working and hoping for the best, I replaced the card and rebooted the server.

The next attempt at backups (and two since) have gone off without a hitch, even with multiple mounts of the tape. 

Following the recommendations of the manufacturer is a good idea.  While I knew this, I had a perfectly good card here and thought it surely should work.  Should and will… definitely not the same.

Thanks to the folks at Quantum support and to a few readers of my blog who emailed me with suggestions.  The effort put forth by others to lend a hand has been outstanding.

Here’s to many successful and undisturbed backups to come.