Originally posted by: TonyPearson

Today, I attended the IBM Fast Data Forum. This was a special announcement event for press, analysts and IBM employees.

My fifth-line manager, [Tom Rosamilia], IBM Senior Vice President of Systems Technology Group, kicked off the ceremonies.

The world is changing fast, and technology has changed the way we live, and the way we work. For example, nearly [80 percent of people use their smart phone 22 hours a day]. Tom then introduced our first speaker, Jamie Thomas.

Jamie Thomas, IBM General Manager of Storage and Software Defined Environments

Jamie announced [IBM Elastic Storage], a new offering that is available as a software defined storage solution, based on IBM's General Parallel File System (GPFS) technology already deployed at 45,000 installations.

IBM Elastic Storage provides a global name view across data center locations. It can manage up to a Yotabyte of information, combining Flash, disk and tape resources. It supports OpenStack interfaces, Hadoop and standard POSIX file system conventions.

IBM Elastic Storage provides automated tiering to move data from different storage media types. Infrequently accessed files can be migrated to tape and automatically recalled back to disk when required. Unlike traditional storage, it allows you to smoothly grow or shrink your storage infrastructure without application disruption or outages.

IBM Elastic Storage software can run on a cluster of x86 and/or POWER-based servers, and can be used with internal disk, commodity storage, or advanced storage systems from IBM or other vendors.

IBM partnered with various clients in different industries in a special beta program. Jamie led a client panel to discuss their experiences with IBM Elastic Storage:

• Alan Malek, Director of IT, Cypress Semiconductor.

  "Total cycle time is key". Over the past 31 years, they bought whatever file storage was available. Now, with IBM Elastic Storage, the performance was very consistent for their engineering workloads with full load balancing.

• Russell Schneider, Principal Storage Consultant, Jeskell.

  Russell's company works with a lot of federal agencies, "Big Data has become Bigger Data". For example, research on Global Warming and Climate Change requires a large amount of storage across agencies.

  In another example, when the tsunami hit Japan a few years ago, an agency here in the USA realized they had 14PB of data stored as a single copy in a data center at sea level less than a mile from the coast. They realized they needed to have a secondary copy, and an option to cache to a third location depending on regional disasters.

• Matthew Richards, Products, OwnCloud.

  For those not familiar with OwnCloud, it provides a Dropbox-like file sharing service, but in the Enterprise, with on-premise storage. It has been fully tested and certified with IBM Elastic Storage to provide a secure file sharing platform.

  With IBM Elastic Storage, they were able to scale linearly up to 20,000 users, and are now testing 100,000 users. The need to have intelligent access to files at scale is what Matthew likes about IBM Elastic Storage.

 

Dr. Michael Factor, IBM Distinguished Engineer at IBM Research

Michael started out explaining there are three areas for storage: block, file and object. The fastest growing type of data is unstructured fixed content with associated metadata. This is ideal for object storage. Michael has been working with OpenStack Swift, an open source interface defined for object storage. He defined "storlets" as follows:

Storlets extend an object store by moving computation to the data -- filtering, transforming, analyzing -- instead of bringing data to the computation.

Storlets have been deployed on a variety of European Union research projects. For example, in partnership with Phillips, a pathology storlet can count the number of cancer cells in an image. By bringing the computation to the data, it eliminates having to transfer large amounts of data over the network.

Storlets can run on-premise and on IBM's SoftLayer IaaS cloud offering.

Bruce Hillsberg, IBM Director of Storage Systems at IBM Research

Bruce led another panel discussion, this time of IBM storage experts:

• Vincent Hsu, IBM Fellow and CTO of Storage.

  The problem is the isolation of data into "storage silos". Isolation causes problems in managing large amounts of data at scale, and costs more as storage is not fully utilized. IBM Elastic Storage brings everything together, eliminating storage silos.

  IBM Elastic Storage can scan [10 billion files on a system in 43 minutes].

• Dr. Michael Factor, IBM Research.

  Michael explained how IBM works with clients all over the world to ensure that storage solutions meet client requirements. For example, storlets can be used to use rich metadata to manage photographs, and display them based on GPS satellite location, or other content that makes it easier to manage these images.

  IBM Elastic Storage will support OpenStack Cinder and Swift interfaces. IBM is a platinum sponsor of OpenStack foundation, and is now its second most prolific contributor, with hundreds of full-time employees working on this.

• Tom Clark, IBM Distinguished Engineer, Chief Architect, Storage Software, Cloud & Smarter Infrastructure.

  Storage Management is a critical piece of Software Defined Storage. This is done in three ways:

  1. The use of analytics to optimize the deployment of storage, based on workload requirements. Storage admins set policies, and then IBM Elastic Storage analytics gather metrics and then optimize data placement and movement based on these policies. IBM Elastic Storage has 70 percent lower TCO that competitive offerings.
      
  2. The focus on backup services. Backups are not just for data protection, but rather can be used to duplicate or replicate data for testing, for training, and for other purposes. IBM Elastic Storage is fully supported by IBM Tivoli Storage Manager.
      
  3. Being able to support Hybrid Cloud environments, where some data can be on-premise, and other data off-premise. Storage Management challenges will need to deal with this possibility. IBM Elastic Storage is well positioned for this.
      
• Carl Kraenzel, IBM Distinguished Engineer, Director of Watson Cloud Technology and Support.

  Watson is ground-breaking technology, and IBM Elastic Storage technology was at the heart of the Watson that was first introduced in 2011.

  To consider IBM Elastic Storage based on lower-cost and higher-scalability is not the full picture. Rather, this is an important platform for Cognitive Computing, which we are just at the tip of the iceberg in exploring. IT systems need to be aware of the context of what we are doing.

  While the Grand Challenge demonstration on Jeopardy! was exciting, it is time we stop playing games and apply IBM Elastic Storage to business, to help with health care and medical research, and other problems in society. IBM has already deployed this at Anderson Cancer Center and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, for example.

Tom Rosamilia provided closing remarks. IBM Elastic Storage is not just for new workloads in Cloud, Analytics, Mobile and Social (CAMS) but also traditional workloads as well. IBM Elastic Storage provides "data democracy" and allows for "better rested storage administrators" that make fewer mistakes.

Tom opened the floor for questions from the audience:

Tom Rosamilia assured the audience that IBM is fully committed to its storage portfolio. IBM Elastic Storage is not just about the profoundness of what IBM announced today, but also where IBM is investing in the future of storage.

technorati tags: IBM, Fast Data Forum, #fastdata, Tom Rosamilia, STG, Jamie Thomas, Software Defined Storage, Software Defined Environment, Elastic Storage, Alan Malek, Cypress Semiconductor, Russell Schneider, Jeskell, Matthew Richards, OwnCloud, Michael Factor, storlets, Bruce Hillsberg, IBM Research, Anderson Cancer Center, Memorial Sloan Kettering, Tom Clark, Carl Kraenzel, Novocaine, data democracy