Compellent has a valuable ILM capability that provides metadata for each block -- this enables them to move unused blocks to lower tiers of storage and back to high tiers when needed. This level of granularity should provide greater economic value to IT professionals.

We are entering the era of PB storage systems. But what is reality and what is fiction? There are performance, relability, footprint and cost issues that must be considered.

The Drobo is an intelligent and easy to use personal storage system from Data Robotics and there are a ton of reviews out there. This is not a review but a discussion on what I find compelling about this product and its core technology. To me it represents a leap in fundamental storage technology -- virtualizing disk drives for greater simplicity and efficiency.

It has been a long time since I wrote for Computerworld but, like it or not, I am back. The title of this blog series is Technology Matters -- a double entendre -- "the substance of thought" and "to be of importance."

Gear6 is a startup vendor that technically isn't a well kept secret because their product is just being released. But I have a confession to make: I'm a huge fan of caching. Okay. There it is. I admit it. Whew. That felt good - to finally get that off my chest. Seriously, I think that caching is extremely valuable and I do actually get annoyed with people that disagree. And I don't agree that application caching solves the problem - since most application vendors don't know how to spell I/O, The problem has to be solved at all levels. It is like a rely race with fast runners handing off to other fast runners. That is how you win.

I know that the name of the company is a bit odd but you certainly won't forget it. StoreWiz is an Israeli based company that has developed a data compression solution for heterogeneous storage. Right now they support NAS but they have FC and iSCSI SAN support on their road map. You put the StoreWiz appliance onto the network and it will compress data in real time. You can use it to provide data compression to a bunch of NAS storage systems reducing their capacity requirements by 2:1, 3:1 or more. If you have 10 TB of primary data you can compress it so that it only consumes between 3.3 TB to 5 TB of disk capacity. Since primary storage is the most expensive tier this can yield huge cost savings. You can save on capacity costs and there is an impact on power, cooling and floor space. Additionally, once your data is compressed you get to take advantage of sending fewer bits over the WAN for disaster recovery as well.

I am going to try to post one of these a week. If you recall I was going to use this blog as a way to share with you storage products that you probably haven't heard about. How many of you knew that Fujitsu is in the primary Enterprise storage business? That they are the number two storage vendor in Japan? That is fairly interesting but the real shocker is that they have a number of capabilities that are quite impressive. First, they support a clustered storage architecture. They are one of the few FC-based storage system vendors that support an N-way true cluster. A true N-way cluster is the ability to add more storage controllers into the cluster and have it be a single logical system that aggregates all of its hardware resources.

Another well kept secret is actually from one of the leading storage vendors. According to IBM they have over 2,000 customers that have implemented the SVC. The IBM SVC is an appliance that can scale up to eight controller nodes that provides intelligent storage level virtualization in front of heterogeneous storage systems. It is used to create volumes, data migration and has snapshot and remote mirroring capability. IBM customers are using SVC as a way to migrate data between different storage systems creating an intelligent tiered storage environment. These end users are among the relatively few companies that actually do this. Most people still keep data stored on their tier one storage systems even though no one is accessing it. I did a 10 city tour talking about tiered storage and not one company has implemented any kind of ongoing movement of data between tiers. And most of the end users had 80% or more of their data that was never accessed 90 days after its creation. That means that in a 100 TB storage system over 80 TB was never used. Move that stuff off of Tier One storage onto another tier.

If you haven't seen Hitachi Data System's Mr. T video go check it out. Other than the first Rocky, the one with Mr. T was my favorite. When asked for a prediction about the fight Mr. T looked menancingly into the camera and said "I predict Paaaaiiiin". He didn't use that line in the video but it would be perfect. The interviewer can ask: "Mr T what do you predict by not using virtualization...".

I am a proponent of storage virtualization and I think HDS has an excellent solution for Enterprise-class customers. It is good to see HDS out there trying to get the word out. They haven't done this nearly enough. I think it is important to raise awareness about storage virtualization. I believe that storage virtualization will be core in how we implement storage networking going forward. Today, most storage networks provide networking from host to storage system but not between storage systems. Each storage system is a stove pipe and resources are not easily shared. As a result we don't leverage our expensive physical storage assets to the degree that we need to. Storage virtualization essentially networks networked storage. That is the real value of creating a logical layer to utilize physical assets beyond their own bounded limitations. We need to create greater awareness and education. The Mr. T video creates awareness -- thousands of people have already viewed it. And it prompted me to write about it -- hopefully adding some small amount of education. And more is coming from me on this topic.

Isilon is an emerging vendor that has developed a clustered storage system focused on digital content. They are about to go public and I hope that Wall Street will understand what they bring to the table. It is easy for people to conclude that Isilon is directly competing with NetApp and EMC. Certainly Isilon will bump into these guys. But Isilon has built a solution that is differentiated and has applied their advantages to a market where neither EMC nor NetApp are dominant. That is the beauty of their strategy. Isilon is a leader in their market and the other guys are at a disadvantage. Isilon's market includes digital storage from media and entertainment, oil and gas research, life sciences, advanced engineering, and online services.

Back in August I wrote a blog at Computerworld that Avamar was a well kept secret, but that is about to change.

EMC is acquiring Avamar and I believe this a really smart move. Avamar focuses on backing up to disk and adds its magic to make it easy and extremely economical to do so using its advanced data reduction technology.  In fact, Avamar makes backing up to disk less expensive than tape and far less cumbersome from a management and operational perspective.  ESG Lab has tested Avamar software and interviewed a number of customers and the product basically rocks the house (sorry - showing my age).  You can backup 20 TB of data and only take up 1 TB of capacity.  The challenge that Avamar has (or rather "had") is that they are an emerging vendor and just don't have the resources and brand to conquer the world.  However, EMC is a different animal altogether.  In their hands, if they truly understand what they have here, EMC should be able to change the backup landscape.  A landscape, mind you, that is in dire need of changing.   

I did a presentation for Nexsan's channel partners a few weeks ago and have been meaning to write about it. I've known for some time that Nexsan had a strong channel focus and that it is part of the reason for their success. But after spending time with these folks you can tell that there is something powerful here.

A good reseller has loyal end-user customers who depend on them as an extension of their IT staff. They expect the reseller to do their homework and qualify anything they bring onto the end user's doorstep. The reseller typically has some really smart people who work for them who are gurus of the different products they support. They help to plan, design, implement and then manage the solutions going forward. Again, the reseller is an extension of the end-user customer's IT staff. This is important. One of the biggest problems that end users are faced with is being resource limited. They have a number of projects in the queue but they don't have the cycles to do the research, evaluation, testing, planning and implementation for new products. Having a good reseller streamlines this process. Additionally, the end user knows they can call the reseller's resident expert if anything should arise. When this works, everyone wins.

I am going to write a series of blogs focusing on what I consider well kept secrets in the storage industry that you should know about. The first in the series focuses on a vendor called Avamar. You are probably familiar with the name but not what they really do (and do well). Avamar is a backup and recovery software company. I think its stupid for vendors to shy away from that classification. Backup and recovery are fundamental to every end user customer in the great big world. And for the most part the leading backup and recovery vendors are not the most loved by the IT folks. This space is ripe for innovation. Avamar is a major innovator.

I've had a number of conversations with Bill Andrews, the CEO of an emerging vendor called ExaGrid. Bill is a high energy guy with a passion for what he does. Steve Duplessie just wrote an article for Computerworld.com on who the best CEO's in the storage business are, and while Bill was not mentioned I think that over time he will be added to that list. Bill has a gripe with people who write about disk-to-disk (D2D) backup solutions with data reduction technologies and leave ExaGrid out. I am guilty of this myself (you can see where this is going). And Bill actually is right. ExaGrid has a very compelling D2D backup solution that does not provide data de-duplication, a topic I often discuss. ExaGrid is a NAS-based storage appliance that uses a technology that I refer to as Delta Differencing.

These two vendors have been at the storage game for years. Their contemporary startups have come and gone. Do you remember Cereva? Yotta Yotta? Zambeel? These others are gone but, 3Par and BlueArc continue to fight the good fight. Both vendors keep pushing the boulder up the hill making more progress every day. 3Par and BlueArc are not competitiors. The 3Par InServ is an Enterprise-class SAN storage system competiting with the EMC DMX, HDS USP and IBM DS8000. Talk about a David versus Goliath scenario. Yet 3Par has been winning deal after deal. They are making great progress and are becoming that fourth vendor for Enterprise-class SAN storage- just like what Fox did to ABC, CBS and NBC. 3Par is the Fox of the storage industry. 3Par can build a billion dollar business just going after the Enterprise market. And in many ways its a smarter strategy then going after the mid-market. The average selling price is higher. They know exactly who the customers are. There are less customers to go after so they can have a direct model that is effective. 3Par has outlasted the upstarts and has graduated from a startup to an emerging vendor.