Originally posted by: TonyPearson
This week, I am in Las Vegas for [Edge 2016], IBM's Premiere IT Infrastructure conference of the year. Here is my recap of breakout sessions for Monday, Sep 19, 2016:
- How do you storage a Zettabyte? IBM and Microsoft Know...
- A [Zettabyte] is a million Petabytes, or a billion Terabytes, of data. Most clients I deal with have less than 10 PB of centralized storage in their data center, but there are a few that have much larger data repositories.
Ed Childers, IBM STSM and manager for Tape and LTFS development, and Aaron Ogus, Microsoft Architect, discussed different solutions developed by IBM and Microsoft. IBM's solution has been productized, and is available as IBM Spectrum Scale and IBM Spectrum Archive. Microsoft's solution is not productized, but is being "operationalized" to be used within Microsoft's Azure Cloud.
Not surprisingly, to be able to store a Zettabyte of data, you have to be creative and cost-effective with storage media. The current winner is magnetic tape, which continues to be 20 times less expensive than disk. IBM developed the Linear Tape File System (LTFS) and then shared it with other leading IT vendors. Ed also covered some future storage media developments, from using Macro-molecular strands of DNA, to Phase Change Memory (PCM).
- All Flash is not Created Equal - Contrasting IBM FlashSystem with Solid State Drives (SSD)
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Many IBM FlashSystem presentations focus on the product, but don't explain the underlying technology, specifically what differentiates IBM FlashSystem from substantially slower competitive alternatives like EMC XtremIO and PureStorage that are based instead on fallible commodity Solid State Drives (SSD).
By working closely with our chip vendor, Micron, IBM was able to improve the write endurance of these Multi-level cell (MLC) chips by 9.4x, and reduce write amplification by 45 percent.
I explained IBM's clever asymmetrical wear-level balancing, heat segregation, read disturb mitigation, voltage level shifting, and health binning, all of which contribute to the performance and reliability of this solution. IBM's innovative Error Correcting Code provides LDPC-like correction strength but at much faster BCH-like latency speed.
This was a popular session. Despite being moved to a much larger room, they still had to turn people away, so I will be repeating this session on Wednesday, 11:00am.
- Real-time Compression: Bendingo and Adelaide Bank's Perspective
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James Harris, Senior Storage Systems Specialist for [Bendingo and Adelaide Bank], presented his success story with the use of Real-time Compression. Oracle RAC databases got 60-70 percent savings. SQL databases got 70-80 percent savings. VMware VMFS datastores average 50 percent savings. For IBM i, he is getting 60-70 percent savings for SYSBAS, and over 70 percent savings of the rest of his IBM i production data.
As a result, the bank has not had to make any Capital Expenditures (CAPEX) for disk for 2-3 years since they started compressing in 2014.
- Storage Options for Big Data and Analytics: IBM FlashSystem or Traditional Disk Systems?
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Eric Sperley, IBM Software Defined Storage Architect, presented the basics of Hadoop and the Hadoop File System (HDFS), then explained how IBM Spectrum Scale, when combined with the right tiers of flash and disk technology, could be used to optimize an environment for big data analytics.
- Solutions EXPO
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The Solutions EXPO is open all day, for people to visit the booths in between sessions. I stopped in for the evening reception. This is a great way to catch up on the latest products, re-connect with some clients or colleagues that I haven't seen in person for awhile, and meet new friends.
Shown here is Angie Welchert, who just started working for IBM a few years ago! I took her around to introduce her to some IBM executives at the Solutions EXPO.
It was a long and productive day.
technorati tags: IBM, #IBMedge, #IBMstorage, Ed Childers, IBM tape, LTFS, Aaron Ogus, Microsoft, Flash, FlashSystem, FlashSystem 900, FlashSystem V9000, FlashSystem A9000, FlashSystem A9000R, Solid State Drive, SSD, Micron, MLC, LDPC, BCH, James Harris, Real-time Compression, Eric Sperley, Hadoop, HDFS, Solutions EXPO, Angie Welchert