Monday afternoon, I attended various break-out sessions.
- 1441A Data Resiliency: Data-Driven Analytics and Beyond
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Ramani Routray (IBM) and B.J. Klingenberg, IBM, co-presented. Aggressive and differentiated Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs) and Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) create data protection silos. Resiliency for an enterprise data center is often achieved via redundant components, periodic backup, continuous replication and/or highly available architectures. With the emergence of cloud delivery models, Backup-as-a-Service and DR-as-a-Service have gained wide acceptance. This uniquely challenges service providers to quickly analyze all the metadata from these environments to enable problem determination, fault isolation, capacity management, SLA violation, etc. Learn about a big data analytics framework that analyzes millions of resiliency metadata tuples in near real-time to generate actionable insights.
- 1267A Prudential and IBM: Integrating Application and Storage Management to Drive Cloud Service Levels
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This was a 50/50 presentation, with the first half covered by clients OJ Dua, supported by his boss, Scott Singerline, both from Prudential Financial.
Prudential explored their successful approach for optimizing storage and improving service. First, experts from Prudential Financial will describe their experiences integrating IBM Spectrum Control v5.2 (formerly IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center) inventory, availability, and performance data with Tivoli Application Dependency Discovery Manager (TADDM) and Netcool OMNIbus to improve services for core business applications.
(Over 10 years ago, I was the chief architect for IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center v1. The clients from Prudential could not emphasize enough how much better Spectrum Control v5.2 was compared to their experiences with the prior versions. It has come a long way, baby!)
The second half was covered by Brian Sherman, IBM Distinguished Engineer. He described how related IBM Spectrum Storage solutions are transforming storage. IBM Spectrum Storage solutions deliver reliable, flexible service levels at a significantly lower cost than traditional storage.
- 6523A VersaStack: Because Time and Cost are of the Essence for Cloud Service Providers
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This was more of a 25/75 presentation. Ian Shave, IBM Business Line Executive for Spectrum Virtualize and VersaStack, kicked off the session with a quick overview of VersaStack, which combines Cisco UCS x86 blade servers and Cisco network switches with IBM Spectrum Virtualize storage solutions. This is often referred to as "Integrated Infrastructure" or "Converged Systems". While the growth of Integrated Infrastructure adoption is growing 15 percent, storage within Integrated Infrastructure solutions is growing faster at 44 percent.
VersaStack can be implemented as follows:
- Cisco UCS Mini with Storwize V5000, either iSCSI or FCP
- Cisco UCS with Storwize V7000 (block-only) or V7000 Unified (file and block access)
- Cisco UCS with FlashSystem V9000, for high-speed, low-latency application requirements
John Buskermolen and Dan Simunic, both from i-Virtualize, covered their experiences with VersaStack. Founded in 2009, i-Virtualize is a Managed Services Provider (MSP), Cloud Service Provider (CSP) and value-added reseller, for clients in both USA and Canada, growing 41 percent year over year.
They reduced the time to market from weeks to days, cut new environment provisioning time from days to minutes, and simplified management when it implemented VersaStack, an integrated infrastructure solution that combines Cisco UCS Integrated Infrastructure with IBM storage solutions built with IBM Spectrum Virtualize to deliver extraordinary levels of performance and efficiency.
Why did i-Virtualize choose VersaStack?
- 79 percent reduced provisioning time
- 60 percent lower costs
- 10x performance acceleration
- Higher flexibility, with clustered systems that scale up and out
- Let's i-Virtualize administrators and management sleep at night
- 47 percent capacity savings with Real-time Compression
- IBM Spectrum Virtualize HyperSwap for high availability
- Storage-based replication across multiple datacenters
- Cisco UCS director provides single-pane-of-glass management
Their latest project is called VIXO, a Cloud Managed Services Console which stacks Cloud Foundry, Docker, OpenStack, VMware and other 3rd party services on top of their VersaStack. This is a collaboration with Oxbury Group.
VersaStack is an ideal solution for Cloud Service Providers (CSP) or for any client interested in "cloud-in-a-box."
- 3690A Meet the Experts on IBM Cloud Storage Services
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Ann Corrao and Mike Fork, both from IBM, presented IBM's various storage capabilities on SoftLayer and Cloud Managed Services (CMS). Of IBM's 43 Cloud datacenters, 28 are SoftLayer, and the other 15 are CMS.
For block-based volume storage, SoftLayer offers "Endurance" and "Performance". These are backed by multi-pathed iSCSI volumes.
- With "Endurance" option, you purchase a fixed I/O density, either 0.5 IOPS/GB, 1 IOPS/GB or 4 IOPS/GB. If you choose a 100 GB volume, you are guaranteed 400 IOPS. Typical business applications like database or email consume about 0.7 IOPS/GB.
- With the "Performance" option, you pick the IOPS for your volume, up to 6,000 IOPS, and then pick the size to match your needs, say 100 GB. This is best suited for clients who know their application well enough to specify this.
IBM Bluemix also has a block service, based on OpenStack Cinder drivers. These are backed by internal disk on storage-rich servers. IBM SoftLayer can pack 4 drives into a 1U server, 12 drives into a 2U server and 36 drives into a 3U server.
For object store, IBM SoftLayer supports OpenStack Swift. They support content expiration, versioning and metadata search.
(When asked if this was Cleversafe or something else, Mike was quick to point out that IBM SoftLayer focuses on the "Service Level Agreement (SLA), the client experience, and the APIs" so however they chose to back this storage is internally determined. The client should not have to specify product xyz in their contract.)
An extra feature for object store is "Content Delivery Network" (CDN) which uses EdgeCast to cache content at the edges of the network to improve performance delivery. You designate which object containers you want to accelerate performance, and you pay for the amount of bandwidth consumed.
For file space, IBM SoftLayer supports NFS and SFTP only. Supporting CIFS, or rather its replacement SMB, is a known requirement. In the meantime, there are a variety of 3rd party "Cloud Gateway" solutions, like NetApp AltaVault, Panzura global namespace, or CTERA.
For file sync-and-share, IBM has partnered with Box to provide Enterprise-class service.
How do clients ingest data into their IBM SoftLayer account? One option is to use Aspera, a recent IBM acquisition that is 3x faster than traditional SCP. Another option is to ship disk or tape cartridges to IBM SoftLayer facility.