Originally posted by: TonyPearson

This week, I was in beautiful Melbourne, Australia for IBM Systems Technical University. On Wednesday evening, we had a poster session. This was the first time I presented a poster session, so I was understandably very excited.

(I have so many photos that I will split this post up into topics. This post will focus on storage posters. See my other posts for IBM Power and Z systems.)

The venue was Eureka Skydeck 89, the top floor of the Eureka Tower. This tower is 297 meters tall (974 feet), and the views it afforded of the city of Melbourne were stunning.

Mo and I arrived early as I was one of the 11 finalists that got selected to present a poster. While it is a hot summer back in Arizona, it is cold here in Australia. I am glad we brought our heavy coats for the brisk 8-minute walk from our hotel, the Crown Promenade, to the Eureka Tower.

Posters are designed to present specific topics in a concise and interactive way to appeal to peers and colleagues at conferences and/or public displays. Everyone would be given an "A0" poster size foam board on which to tape on their poster, 841mm wide, and 1189 mm tall (roughly three feet by four feet).

Understanding Converged and Hyperconverged Systems

My design was simple. I took my summary chart from one of my presentations, and enlarged it to fit the "A0" poster size. I chose my "Pendulum Swings" presentation that explains the history of storage infrastructure, and the rise in interest in Converged and Hyperconverged Infrastructure.

In the early days of IT, storage was internal to its server, over time, storage outgrew its container, and we started having externally attached storage, and benefits like RAID and clustered servers for high availability. Then, SANs, LANs and WANs took the main stage, allowing for greater connectivity and distance.

But now, it seems the pendulum is swinging back with converged and hyperconverged systems. Converged Systems like IBM PureSystems, or VersaStack from IBM and Cisco, provide best-of-breed hardware for servers, storage and networks in a pre-cabled, pre-configured rack. With everything in a single rack, port count and cable distance limits are no longer a major concern.

Hyperconverged Systems, such as IBM Spectrum Scale, IBM Spectrum Accelerate, Nutanix or Simplivity, focus instead on offering commodity servers with internal flash and disk storage. Software-Defined Storage software is then used to glue together multiple units over a LAN infrastruture. With the huge increase in Flash and Disk capacities, a server with internal storage can hold many TB of data.

My poster included a "QR Code" that pointed to a link on BOX so that people could use their smartphones to access all of my presentations.

IBM Spectrum Scale with focus on Active File Management

A poster presents not all the details but the most important information.

Trishali Nayar, IBM AFM/Spectrum Scale Development from Pune India, had a poster on IBM Spectrum Scale with focus on Active File Management (AFM). She had a clean, simple design, basically two presentation slides enlarged to fill the poster size.

Active File Management (AFM) enables sharing of data across clusters, even if the networks are unreliable or have high latency. AFM allows you to create associations between IBM Spectrum Scale™ clusters or between IBM Spectrum Scale clusters and NFS data source. With AFM, you can implement a single name space view across sites around the world making your global name space truly global. You can also duplicate data for disaster recovery purposes without suffering from WAN latencies.

IBM Ubiquity Storage Service for Container Ecosystems

Your audience isn't trying to replicate your solution or case -- they are simply after the basics. Take for example, this poster on IBM's Ubiquity Storage Services.

Ashutosh Mate, IBM WW Senior Solutions Architect, created this poster on storage for Containers. Not to be confused with the Containers used in Spectrum Protect container pools, or the Containers supported by IBM Cloud Object Storage!

The poster had six enlarged presentation slides. Two at the top under "Abstract" covered business need and technology overview. The two in the middle under "Ubiquity Architecture" had a connection diagram and a list of supported environments. The last two under "IBM Vision" covered customer value, use cases, and additional resources.

As people transition from monolithic applications to microservices, IT is shifting from heavy Virtual Machines to lightweight Docker containers.

The Ubiquity project enables persistent storage for the Kubernetes and Docker container frameworks. It is a pluggable framework available for different storage systems. The framework interfaces with the storage systems, using their plugins. Different container frameworks can use Ubiquity concurrently, allowing access to different storage systems.

IBM has support for Spectrum Scale, all of the Spectrum Accelerate offerings (including XIV, FlashSystem A9000/R) and all of the Spectrum Virtualize offerings (including SVC, Storwize and FlashSystem V9000).

Single page handouts as "take-aways" was a nice extra touch.

technorati tags: IBM, #IBMtechU, #IBMstu2017, Melbourne Australia, Poster Session, Ashutosh Mate, Eureka Tower, Eureka Skydeck, Eureka 89, Crown Promenade, Pendulum Swings, Converged Infrastructure, Hyperconverged Infrastructure, HCI, QR Code, Trishali Nayar, Spectrum Scale, Active File Management, AFM, WAN, Ubiquity Storage Services, Docker, Kubernetes, Spectrum Accelerate, Spectrum Virtualize, FlashSystem, XIV, SVC, Storwize