Our CTO Wai Lam, (who is one of the brightest guys I have ever met) was recently featured in an executive viewpoint in Virtual Strategy magazine, and I thought his views were quite interesting, and could provide some insight to the readers of this blog.
Please review it and let me know your thoughts.
With the economy being what it is, and all the consolidation going on in very large US business, the ability to provide complete data mobility is becoming a very interesting topic for many a CIO these days. I ran across an interesting article on searchstorage.com as an example of how virtualization can actually make data migrations as easy as “flipping a switch”!
Lots of folks have recently been asking me about how the cost benefits of introducing the ODS model in their datacenters. I guess the current economic climate is finally pushing the CIO’s to take an even closer look at what they are doing to reduce costs to help the business.
It boggles my mind how much money companies are throwing at their technology vendors to help them solve some simple business problems. Backup and Data Replication for DR are the two big ones. Innovation in the datacenter is at a standstill in many cases simply because the incumbent technology “partners” the company has chosen has only a few ways of doing things. The “traditional” companies have been repackaging the same old methodologies and forcing it down the throat of their customers, and taking advantage of the fact that the technical decision makers in these companies are simply too busy fighting fires to do the proper research to find out what else is available in the market. Sure the old approaches work and feel comfortable, since it is what everyone is “used to” doing. But times are changing, and those companies who make the effort to review the new innovations in the technology market today may be pleasantly surprised to find out they can most likely reduce their current IT expenditures by 50% or more.
In the next few blogs, I am going to dive a little deeper, and give specific examples of how companies can leverage the ODS model to dramatically reduce costs. As an example, what if I can show you how to get all the benefits of data deduplication without actually dedulicating your data? How about saving 80% on your WAN to consolidate data protection for remote offices, without having to buy all those VERY EXPENSIVE network tuning appliances. How about increasing operational efficiency by 70% or more? You need to take your current vendors to task, and I will be more than happy to show you how.
Finally, imagine if the ODS utility model could be implemented while leveraging the same server and storage infrastructure currently in place! That would make rolling out the solution a bit more cost effective and easier to deploy than a complete rip and replace scenario. There would be no need to purchase proprietary disks or servers, the accumulated knowledge of the existing environment would not be wasted, and the existing service contracts could stay in place, which could reduce costs further while also lowering the learning curve. In order to accommodate such a scenario, the ODS solution would have to provide intelligence in an abstraction layer which integrated with and virtualized the existing storage infrastructure. (more…)
Last time I suggested a new model for data management, the Optimized Data Services model – an integrated suite of capabilities that would operate in a virtual environment, intelligently managing data use, protection and archiving, which in essence creates a services oriented utility model for critical data services. Today I’d like to continue on this topic, covering the need for integrated risk management, deduplication, and general interoperability. (more…)
This is going to be a three part series, due to it’s length. I will try and post one part each week for the next three weeks. This topic covers a new paradigm in storage virtualization, which I am calling the ODS model. The ODS (Optimized Data Services) model is a holistic way to do exactly what it says, leverage innovation in technology to reduce IT costs and optimize data services. (more…)
A while back, I was one of the SAN experts on SearchStorage.com, and I guess my work there was noticed by one of the folks working at Wikipedia.com. Anyway, I was asked to provide a definition for something or other, (I can’t even remember what it was at this point), but knowing that they do good work there, and the fact that I am currently doing researchfor the second edition of SAN for dummies, I wanted to get the best definition of “Storage Virtualization” that I could, so I searched for the “Wiki” of it. What I found was one of the most comprehensive definitions of storage virtualization around, but alas, one that could use either some more updating or better research. (more…)
It’s official. Virtualization has hit the mainstream. The reason I know this is even PC magazine is now featuring stories and mentioning the aspects of how cloud computing is going to change everything. I have been reading PC mag for years, and i find it exciting that even the PC guys are talking virtualization now, and not just as it pertains to running applications on a PC, but from the perspective of the network and storage (http://www.pcmag.com/current_issue in the frontside section “Living in the cloud”) Excerpt:” Cloud computing is set to tale over the world”.
Now you need to ask yourself: “Why are we looking at Virtualization in the first place”?
The answer is virtualization provides the plumbing for a “Services Oriented Architecture” By services, I mean all the things that a COMPLETE virtualization solution needs to bring to the table to make it useful to the organization. The whole point of Virtualizing is to simplify the environment while gaining efficiencies of process and procedures to reduce overall costs. In other words, putting real meaning to the often used terms of “better ROI”, and “ Lower TCO”.
Although many datacenter and storage managers are looking for solutions such as storage virtualization to simplify operations and streamline the infrastructure, I am finding that most are having a difficult time in figuring out how to qualify the upfront expenditures of buying a virtualization solution vs. the return on investment that is needed to sell the solution up through the management chain. Many upper level managers may be strictly focused on the bottom line, and may perceive solutions that make life easier for IT operations as unimportant. What they are missing, and what operations managers are failing to communicate up the chain, is how virtualization solutions can have a significant impact on cost savings for the company. (more…)