Originally posted by: TonyPearson
Last week, I was in São Paulo, Brazil for IBM Systems Technical University.
Instead of separate physical rooms for each breakout session, this event had "virtual rooms". One speaker called it the "Software Defined Stage". Basically, there were five "rooms" in the main ballroom, and another eight rooms in a second ballroom.
Rather than blasting out each speaker's voice over loudspeakers, each speaker spoke softly into a headset microphone. All attendees wore headsets. Rooms 1 through 4 offered real-time translation, so attendees could chose to hear in English or Brazilian Portuguese.
In the other 13 "rooms", local speakers spoke in Brazilian Portuguese, but you still had to wear headsets to avoid speaking louder than the speaker next to you. For many of these, the charts were written in English.
My translators, Luciana and Marilia, explained to me the advantage of this approach. When speakers use English language, those who prefer must hear the real-time translation wore the "headphone of shame" which advertised to all others that an attendee's English proficiency was poor.
Sometimes, those who did not understand English well would not wear their headsets, nod or laugh with other attendees, but fail to understand the message. By forcing everyone to wear headsets, there is no stigma associated, and everyone can discreetly select the language they prefer to listen in.
Here is my recap for the breakout sessions on Day 2:
- IBM Hybrid Cloud Storage solutions
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In this presentation, I gave an overview of interest in Cloud technologies, including OpenStack and RESTful APIs to manage server and storage resources. I then covered IBM Hybrid Cloud Storage configurations in five categories:
- Cold storage for data infrequently accessed
- Backup and Snapshot storage
- Disaster Recovery storage
- Daily Operations and Reporting
- Production Applications
Special thanks to Chris Vollmar and Brian Sherman for their help in preparing this presentation.
- Data Optimization: How to verify your data is being used efficiently
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It is hard to believe that it was over 15 years ago that I was the chief architect for the software we now call IBM Spectrum Control. There are a variety of editions and bundles for this product, but my focus on this talk was on the advanced storage analytics found in IBM Virtual Storage Center and IBM Spectrum Control Advanced Edition.
I covered three use cases:
- What storage tier to put your workload in, and how to move existing data into a faster or slower tier to meet business requirements and IT budgets.
- For steady state environments, how to re-balance storage pools within a single tier to keep things even for optimal performance.
- When it is time to decommission storage, how to transform volumes from one storage pool to another without downtime or outages.
Special thanks to Bryan Odom for his help in preparing this presentation.
- IBM Hyperconverged Systems powered by Nutanix: Technical Overview
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Ricardo Matinata, IBM Senior Technical Staff Member for Linux, KVM and Cloud on POWER, presented the latest IBM CS models for POWER systems that are pre-installed with Nutanix software running their Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV) to run Linux on POWER application virtual machines.
- Managing Risks with Thin Provisioning, Compression, and Data Deduplication
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This session had four parts. First, an overview of "Data Footprint Reduction" technologies, like compression, data deduplication, space-efficient snapshots and thin provisioning.
Second, a look at how these technologies can get storage administrators in trouble. Much like airlines selling more tickets than seats on the airplane, storage administrators may over-provision based on data reduction estimates, and then suddenly run out of storage capacity.
Third, an overview of IBM FlashSystem A9000 and A9000R products, often referred to as "A9000/R" to cover both as a family. These models offer data footprint reduction for all data.
Finally, I explain how the Hyper-Scale Manager GUI can help with reporting and analytics to avoid these risks. This GUI is available for the FlashSystem A9000/R, as well as XIV Gen3 and Spectrum Accelerate software clusters.
Special thanks to Rivka Matosevich for her help in preparing this presentation.
- The Right Flash for the Right Workload
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Fabiano Gomes, IBM Client Technical Specialist, presented IBM's portfolio of All-Flash Arrays, from FlashSystem and DS8000F to Elastic Storage Server and Storwize V7000F and V5000F models. Each of these have their own characteristics, which might favor one over the others for particular workloads and use cases.
The day was capped off with a nice evening reception at the pool bar. Bartenders were serving Caiparinhas, a Brazilian cocktail traditionally made sugar cane liquor, sugar and lime, but in this case offered in other flavors, such as pineapple or passion fruit.
technorati tags: IBM, #ibmtechu, #ibmstu2017, Sao Paulo, Brazil, Hybrid Cloud Storage, OpenStack, Data Optimization, Virtual Storage Center, Spectrum Control, storage analytics, Hyperconverged, IBM Power, Nutanix, Acropolis Hypervisor, Data Footprint Reduction, Data Reduction, Compression, Deduplication, Pattern Removal, Space-Efficent Snapshot, Thin Provisioning, Chris Vollmar, Brian Sherman, Ricardo Matinata, FlashSystem, FlashSystem A9000, FlashSystem A9000R, Rivka Matosevich, Fabiano Gomes, Caiparinha, DS8000, DS8880F, Elastic Storage Server, Storwize V7000F, Storwize V5000F, XIV Gen3, Spectrum Accelerate