Bruce Backa's thoughts on technology and life

Another Technology Passes

Your DisplayName here! — Mon, 03 May 2010 15:47:13 GMT

Depressingly (for me, anyway),today's generation doesn't even know what floppy drives are. In another 10 years the same will be true of 'disk' drives or 'hard' drives. This year is the beginning of the end for rotating media. You can already go to Staples and, for a reasonable price, buy an 80-gig solid state drive that is 100 times faster rotating media. Once there are no more rotating drives in desktop computers, servers will follow in a couple of years. Goodbye hard drive... you've served us well.

Cloud? What cloud?

Your DisplayName here! — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 14:43:06 GMT

The bad news is that for this post I have to admit to being over 40 (maybe even over 50…).

These days I’m often fascinated to see what 30-something MBAs in high tech marketing can come up with – and how much money they get to spend once they do. The latest, of course, is Cloud Computing and Cloud Storage. What is Cloud Computing? All your data and your applications are somewhere else and you connect to them over the common carrier (read: phone company) network. We did this 40 years ago. It was called mainframe computing.

This is an ideal scenario for smaller companies that don’t need much computing infrastructure and who cannot afford a systems maintenance staff. For the SOHO (small office, home office) market, this is a great thing. Over the years I've watched small businesses try to run their own infrastructure and it's not pretty.

But Cloud Computing isn't being marketed as a small business solution. The buzz is that this is the answer for everyone and everything.

However, for companies large enough to have or need an IT staff, there is little value here. What is the CIO going to do? Go to the CEO and say, “I quit. I just outsourced everything to the cloud. My job here is done.”

Let's look at a long-standing example. I’ve always been impressed by the success of Salesforce.com com who, by the way – when they talked to us a few years ago, did not encrypt the data you gave them and put it on a system you share with others. (Anyone read those stories about lost backup tapes...) I can’t see giving the life blood of my company to someone else to manage, nor having my staff rely on the vagaries of Verizon (or, in New Hampshire’s case, the literally bankrupt Fairpoint) as to whether they can do work today. Sorry.

This doesn't mean that we don't use web-based applications. We certainly do. But not for anything critical to our business.

If it sounds too good to be true… it probably is

Your DisplayName here! — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 19:43:06 GMT

One of the hottest topics in the storage industry today is deduplication. Deduplication is this year’s fancy way to do data compression, something that has been available for decades. If you were a fan of compression in years past, then you will probably be a fan of deduplication. But it’s not all upside.

Whereas most of the older compression formats have become standards (Winzip, for example) and thereby readable and writeable by most programs, all of the deduplication formats are proprietary. This means that the only thing that can read the deduped data is the hardware or software that wrote it in the first place. This, of course, is what all the platform manufacturers want – to lock you into their platform.

Dedupe is smarter than ‘ordinary’ compression, which does allow it to compress more, on average. These results, however, come at a price – processing time. Many of the dedupe solutions that perform brilliantly in demo fail when the volume being compressed grows beyond a few terabytes. Their algorithms become unwieldy and system performance deteriorates.

The bottom line for dedupe is the same as it is for most technologies… Under the right circumstances, it offers a lot of value. But dedupe is not the silver bullet. It is not a solution to every problem, and it may or may not be an answer to the challenges confronting you today.

Structural vs. Informative Technology

Your DisplayName here! — Sat, 16 May 2009 16:39:34 GMT

An interesting thing happened this year – an aspect of our business reversed… For years, the bulk of our discussions with customers has been about NTP Software QFS®. QFS provides a structural solution for managing file data. QFS users can set policies that govern the use of their resources. These policies can be both hard (an absolute rule) and soft (warnings, but not prohibitions). But in the majority of situations, QFS users set hard policies. Part of the value proposition for QFS is that it will automatically control what is allowed to go on in your environment.

However, these days it seems that many people have been taken by surprise by the need to manage their storage. Now, all of a sudden, they view storage management as something that has to be addressed immediately – not tomorrow, but today – but they don’t know where to start.

As a result, the character of our conversations has changed. What people want to talk about is no longer about implementing structural solutions, rather we’re talking more and more about how to gather the information necessary to decide what to manage and how to manage it.

The good news is that the applications that can show you where you stand and what your issues may be are non-invasive and easy to implement. You can gather data today, make decisions tomorrow, and start taking action the day after. If you find yourself in a storage management crisis, it only needs to last a matter of days. A non-structural, non-invasive solution is easy to implement and it will provide answers and direction in just a few days.

When it comes to storage management, there is no need to suffer. You can start making progress as soon as the day after tomorrow…

The Fastest Way to Save Money on Storage

Your DisplayName here! — Wed, 06 May 2009 17:19:34 GMT

The speed and depth of the economy’s decline has taken a lot of people by surprise, me included. Today it’s clear that the Storage Industry is no longer immune to reductions in IT spending. While we all still have to keep our businesses running, we also need to cut expenses and cut them now.

Storage, however, remains one of the most expensive aspects of most people’s networks and the end-users’ requirements continue to increase. We need our users to be doing new business every day. This means we’re telling them to create and save new business objects every day. So how do we control this expense? And how do we do it now!

While Harry Potter can just waive his magic wand, the rest of us cannot. Nevertheless, here are some easy to implement techniques that will do the job – and get it done now!

Block all non-business content. There are numerous ways to create file blocking policies depending on your storage infrastructure. The first and easiest step in reducing costs is to stop treating storage as though it were infinite and free.

Set reasonable limits on personal space. There are very few jobs that require the creation of mountains of content. Normally when someone has a large home directory it’s because they never take the time to clean up, or they’re filling it with non-business content. Again, depending on your storage platform, there are a variety straight-forward ways to set limits.

Analyze what’s out there. Unfortunately, there are no easy ways to do this. You will ultimately need find the right application and probably buy a license for it. But a terabyte of storage at today’s prices costs $47,000 a year to own and maintain. Compared to this price, the cost of analysis software is quite modest. For the customers that we work with, their one-year ROI is normally 3 to 5 times the license cost. (Providing, of course, they act on the information the application gives them.)

Everything here can be done on any storage platform. And all of it should have a positive one-year return whether your investment is in staff costs or applications. There is no reason why you cannot make a meaningful reduction in your storage costs this year. None. To quote Nike, “Just do it!”

A Job Offer You Should Refuse

Your DisplayName here! — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 15:07:28 GMT

Over the years a fair number of people have asked my opinion about the job offers they have received. I am happy to say that most of these offers were quite good. In fact, a couple of times I was jealous…

But if I were offered the job of most of the storage managers and CSOs (Chief Storage Officers) I meet, I would refuse. Not because being an infrastructure manager is a thankless job – which it is. Most jobs are characterized by more criticism than praise. The issue for me is that I won’t take a job where I am held responsible for delivering non-stop, high-quality service while, at the same time, I have no control over the consumption of the resources, and little or no insight about how they are being used.

What am I talking about?

Only a few of the storage mangers I meet have any policies describing the appropriate consumption of corporate storage resources. In fact, their users are free to do pretty much anything they please. The majority of these storage managers also lack a system management application that they can use to control the consumption of their storage, nor do they have anything that tells them how the existing resources are being consumed.

Even worse, a surprising number of these people are reluctant to set firm policies governing resource consumption. They live in fear of their end-users.

As an entrepreneur, I’m used to taking risks. But in a successful company, these are controlled risks. I never write blank checks. Why would I want to be responsible in a situation where any one of my users could create a service outage…? And where it’s even somewhat likely that a naïve user will do so by accident one day.

Doing a great job – in storage management or anything else – requires having the right tools for the job. A carpenter without a hammer and a saw is very limited in what he can do. Don’t put yourself in a situation where you don’t have the tools to succeed. Infrastructure management is hard enough even when you have what you need.

The Easiest Way to Save Money on Storage

Your DisplayName here! — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 19:18:23 GMT

In the world at large, there is a saying that goes: “Often, the old ways are the best ways.” When it comes to managing storage, this can be equally true.

While I don’t often admit it, I am old enough to have worked on and managed mainframes – in a world before networked storage existed. In those days users had limits on the amount of resources they could tie up, and most companies allocated the cost of the users’ consumption back to the department they worked for.

With the advent of PC networks and networked storage, most companies stopped charging users for resource consumption. What happens when you make a valuable resource free to the consumer..? Usage soars. Analysts such as Gartner Group tell us that 20 to 40 percent of what’s stored on most networks is junk – it has no value to the business at all. Why is it there? Because the resource has no limits and consumption is free.

NTP Software has one of the very few storage billing applications available today. Our informal statistics on the net result of going from free to a fair-cost model is that consumption is reduced 10 to 20 percent almost over night and that growth rates are cut in half. When consumers understand that there is a cost associated with their actions, they moderate their behavior.

And... you don’t even need to bill people. Simply publishing the list of the top 25 or top 100 users has a similar effect. For many people, how others perceive them – in this case as resource hogs – is as valuable as cash.

Some times the old ways really are the best ways – even in high-tech.

A Breakthrough Technology

Sat, 21 Mar 2009 19:31:15 GMT

Every once in a while there is a breakthrough in technology that changes the character of an established paradigm. One such breakthrough has just occurred in the area of file archiving – On-demand Archiving™. On-demand Archiving dramatically increases the ROI on file system archiving by completely eliminating the need for repetitive file systems scans.

In lieu of system-wide scans, On-demand Archiving uses events to trigger the archiving process, for example, the crossing of a threshold on user home directories. As the end-user reaches certain levels of consumption, the archiving engine is automatically engaged and moves targeted files to secondary storage. This limits the consumption of primary storage and provides for continuous, high-quality service while reducing cost.

In addition, On-demand Archiving can engage the end-user directly and allow them to choose the files that are archived based on their business value and on-going relevance. Preliminary research has shown that when users are engaged in the process of choosing the disposition of their data they are more prone to delete unnecessary files. This further reduces demand and cost.

To learn more see: http://www.ntpsoftware.com/products/ODA

Microsoft Sneaks Out A Winner

Tue, 11 Mar 2008 17:52:10 GMT

If Microsoft made a big announcement for the release of Windows Home Server, I certainly missed it. But it looks like Microsoft has created a winner. Windows Home Server will hold all of your files, automatically backup your home workstations, stream your audio and video, and act as a remote gateway into your home network – allowing you to access both the server and your workstations from outside the house. What more could anyone want?

Today you can buy a fast terabyte hard drive for $1,000 or less and gigabyte drives for a few hundred dollars. Using Windows Home Server you can create a home network whose capacity and features rival many corporate networks.

I don’t know what it says about me that I have a 5 terabyte network at my house or that I expect to need more storage in a couple of years, but I definitely enjoy having continuous online access to everything that I have from pretty much everywhere in the world.

The mystery of the missing bits in Europe

Thu, 15 Nov 2007 13:15:19 GMT

A couple of years ago i became sensitive to the fact that European companies seem to have dramatically less storage on their networks - in general, and per employee or per revenue dollar - than North American companies. Where are the missing bits? How can a multi-national, headquartered in Europe, run its business with a small fraction of the information its North American competitors need to run their business? If anyone has an answer, I would love to hear it. The difference (from my unscientific survey) is enormous – generally a factor of 10. If a North American bank has a petabyte, its European equal has only 100 terabytes, often less. Surely 90% of the bits in North America are not junk… So far the only material difference I can find in business practices is that while companies on both sides of the pond are treating compliance (other than PCI) quite lightly, many of the European companies I speak with are doing almost nothing. Since a lot of the compliance legislation ultimately translates to ‘you can’t delete anything’, this may account for some of the difference, but certainly not all of it. Stay tuned, the investigation continues…

Keep your eye on the money

Thu, 07 Jun 2007 13:48:51 GMT

Most of today's talk about storage is 'techie talk'. Rarely do we hear about (human, customer) management issues. In a world of a thousand details, it's easy to lose track of the forest. Sometimes we have to remember to step back and look at the big picture.

In the world of storage, along with death and taxes, there are some givens: hardware prices go down, salaries go up. Only a few years ago the TCO for storage was 4 to 5 times its acquisiton cost. Today it is 6 to 7 times. Why? Hardware costs go down (acquisition) and salaries go up (TCO is really the cost of keeping what you've bought). How many people are talking about reducing the human costs of providing a first-class storage utility for your customers? Not many.

Today in North America there is a well established paradigm for managing the human costs of providing first class service to your customers - self-service. Give your customers what they want, when they want it, 24x7x365 by letting them serve themselves, getting what they need when they need it. Storage resources can be self-service too. The technology exists to let your users provision themselves (with the guidelines you have established), use work flow to get authorization for the expense and ask for appropriate exceptions to policy. Self-service storage is self-managing storage. Self-managing storage lets you and your team move on to deal with more important matters.

Who wouldn't want to provide their users with better service while lowering their operating costs? I sure would.

The value of allocating costs

Thu, 24 May 2007 14:14:04 GMT

Most IT departments supply resources – including their most costly resource, storage – at no charge to everyone. We all need to realize that under these circumstances the optimum strategy for each user is to consume as much storage as possible. Any time using or abusing storage can save the user even a minute’s time or help in any way, why wouldn’t they take advantage of a resource that comes at no cost to them whatsoever?

However, once storage has a fair price, then it becomes to the users’ advantage to treat it with the respect it deserves. The average result of moving from ‘free’ to fairly priced is clear: consumption drops about 20% in an instant, and the growth in demand is cut in half. How can this be? Gartner Group told us long ago that, on average, 20% to 40% of the stuff on most company’s networks is junk. Once there is cost for keeping junk around, most people get rid of it. Once you make the decision not to put junk on the network, your demand for additional storage decreases.

Many companies are reluctant to charge for storage. Sometimes it’s a matter of management will, other times their financial systems are not set up for cost allocation, or their finance department doesn’t have the resources to do the work. One thing most people don’t realize is that there is both hard billing and soft billing.

Hard billing is what you would assume it to be. The charges are real and someone has to pay, either with internal funds or in cash. As explained above, implementing hard billing is well worth the price.

However, soft billing – generating the bills, circulating them appropriately, but not requiring payment – can be equally effective. How? Human psychology. Humans are acutely sensitive to being watched. The mere fact that they know someone cares or someone is watching changes their behavior. Knowing that someone is watching the costs you generate is no different than knowing you will be watched in any other aspect of your life. You alter your behavior to ensure that people see you only when you are acting appropriately. Since there is no way to ‘hide’ from a billing system, storage users start acting appropriately all the time.

The bottom line: implementing a system that can generate bills for storage that are distributed to your users even thought payment is not required has nearly the same effect as actually collecting the money. Namely, consumption drops immediately, and the growth rate is cut substantially. Well worth the effort, wouldn’t you say?>>

Beware of Vista

Tue, 01 May 2007 14:02:34 GMT

Often the lesson is: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

Many of us were not looking for a new Microsoft Operating system – I certainly wasn’t. But Vista is here. However, Microsoft has changed its implementation of the CIFS protocol. Vista is incompatible with all of the third-party NASes that we have tested against, from NetGear home systems to NetApp Filers.

I can’t imagine why Microsoft would do such a thing, but a lot of people who were open to Vista have since rolled back rather than change all their NASes. As of this writing, (April 2007), I have no information from Microsoft or any of the NAS vendors concerning a solution to this problem or a timeframe for releasing one.

Amazing! I suggest we all boycott Microsoft.

This year's themes

Thu, 12 Apr 2007 15:40:04 GMT

Industries and technologies move in synchronous waves. We all experience the same macro-economic cycles, and each of us can only buy what is currently offered for sale. This means that at any given time most companies are in the same place relative to issues in technology. As a result, various periods in time have 'themes' that focus everyone's attention.

This year would seem to have two themes: data security and controlling spending - tough themes to have at the same time since security costs money and generally has no direct benefits to the end users. Even worse, a recent Gartner Group study reported that most IT shops are already under funded this year in the area of storage. This year we have to do a whole lot more with less. The only way to do this is to move quickly and use a two-phase solution. You have to generate an immediate savings that can be used to establish an infrastructure that gives you an on-going reduction in cost.

There are several ways you can take control of your environment and quickly achieve a one-time savings that can be applied to establish the infrastructure that allows for perpetual cost reductions. For example, automatic policy-based removal or migration of data is easy to implement and will give you an immediate break in spending. Follow this with the creation of a self-service environment and permanently reduce your on-going operating costs.

The challenge is to be able to move fast enough in building your infrastructure that you don't get caught by being under-funded. Those who can get it done in time will be the heroes of the next two years.

Beware of Microsoft Vista

Tue, 03 Apr 2007 20:01:02 GMT

Often the lesson is: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

Many of us were not looking for a new Microsoft Operating system – I certainly wasn’t. But Vista is here. However, Vista is incompatible with all of the third-party NASes that we have tested against, from NetGear home systems to NetApp Filers.

Amazing!

Compliance? What compliance?

Wed, 01 Nov 2006 15:52:50 GMT

Last year Compliance was everyone's hot topic. It's a year later, the noise has died down, does this mean the problem is solved? Not hardly.

We spend most of our days talking to large companies about their storage issues and strategies. Over the course of time, the subject of Compliance generally comes up. What's been done over the last year? Not much. Want to know why? There are at least two reasons for what appears to be a lack of interest in addressing compliance issues - other than in the Banking community, of course.

The first and most important issue is the lack of organization in most people's data. The mere task of figuring out where all the stuff that's supposed to subject to compliance actually is becomes a daunting task in and of itself.

The second issue is what you might expect - cost. Once you find the data you need, you have to rearchitect your systems to bring your handling of the data into compliance. And this expense gives no value to the user community. It is pure cost. If you were in charge, where would you spend your time and money? Not here.

As time goes on and systems get rebuilt, companies will come closer and closer to being in compliance. But today the average company isn't even close.

Santayana's Rule

Wed, 25 Oct 2006 13:29:47 GMT

What was it he said? Ah, yes... “Those who refuse to learn from the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them.” Let's look at some history. IBM created a PC with a proprietary architecture. Others created an IBM-compatible PC that was an open platform. Which one is around today? Apple created a brilliant PC device with a closed architecture and a proprietary operating system. Microsoft created an open OS platform and actively recruited developers. Which one owns the market today?

It has been clear for years (going back to the heyday of IBM) that an open platform and the courting of third-party developers wins the market. In the end, the third parties taken together have more money, get to market quicker and have more ideas than any one company could possibly have, regardless of how rich they happen to be.

Network Appliance and EMC are battling tooth and nail to dominate the storage market. Why then do they both have closed platforms and shun third-party developers? (The one exception being the Centera folks, who seem to have the right perspective.) It certainly seems to me that neither EMC nor NetApp live in a world where Santayana's Rule fails to apply. My bet is that the first of these guys who figures out that if their hardware and infrastructure underly every third-party storage application, and they actually support ISVs, they will rule the Industry. What are they waiting for... someone else to create an open platform and take the market away from them? NIH (not invented here) never wins. It has been tested for years with the same result every time.

Paradigm Shift #1

Fri, 13 Oct 2006 22:18:50 GMT

As the demand for storage grows and technology progresses, the economics of owning storage change. Not all that long ago we wanted to write as much as we could to tape, because tape was cheap and on-line storage was expensive. Now many people think that on-line storage is infinite (almost) and free (not at all, but we'll talk more about this later). In today's economics, storing your data on tape is one of the most expensive things you can do. As a result, many of the people I talk to have abandoned tape altogether for on-line archives. Not only are the on-line archives cheaper, but they are more flexible and much easier to search. But this doesn't mean you can manage them like tape...

With tape the deal was write it and forget it. Tapes in a mountain somewhere generally receive no maintenance (not that this is the right thing to do). On-line storage, on the other hand, needs maintenance. As you write more, you need to provision more. And if you don't organize it well, as you write more, specific things become harder and harder to find.

The bottom line is that this is a real paradigm shift. It is not as simple as substituting a disc for a tape. You have to manage differently as well. It's time to change your thinking as well as your media...

DIstinguishing between health and risk

Tue, 10 Oct 2006 13:52:14 GMT

Storage is just bits on a disk, right? What's complicated about this? A lot. Storage is a surprisingly complex thing to manage.

I tell you that a volume is 95% full. What does this mean? I tell you that another volume is 70% full. What does this mean? Maybe not what you think...

A volume that is 95% full is unhealthy. There is no getting around this. The algorithms that allocate space on volumes start breaking down after 85% of the space is taken. Fragmentation begins to increase dramatically, and there is not enough free space to reorg the data in place. In other words, the volume is unhealthy. The reaction of most people to this situation is to say that this volume demands immediate attention. Seeing only 5% free space, many a wise storage manager would declare an emergency.

But suppose I also tell you that the volume's size has been stable over time. It neither grows nor shrinks by more than 1%. Now there is no immediate emergency. The volume in question is unhealthy, but not very risky. Should you apply your efforts here, or do something else?

Our other volume is 70% full. At 70%, we know this volume is healthy. But now suppose I tell you that the space used is growing by 10% to 15% a month... This volume is certain to run to be completely out of space in less than 3 months. Sounds pretty risky to me. I might put my attention here and let the other volume slide for a while.

The point of the story is that things - storage management in particular - are rarely one-dimensional. If your model for storage management is over simplified, you might make serious mistakes, or you might be constantly chasing your tail never knowing what is truly important. As you plan to manage your storage cost-effectively, you need more information than just performance and free space. If all you know is performance and free space, your only solution to any issue is add more hardware. Hardware vendors love this solution, but your senior management doesn't. Nor should you.

What happens on the last day?

Tue, 03 Oct 2006 14:21:03 GMT

Many companies have dropped tape in favor of on-line archiving. This is certainly a good economic strategy and a requirement in some cases. But what's the end-game? You can storage an infinity of data on tapes and throw them in a mountain somewhere (data waste to go along with nuclear waste) at a low cost. (It's writing the tape that is expensive.) But the bits that go to the on-line archive simply require more and more storage... Who is doing the math? This is an exponential curve. Remember, for most organizations, the need for storage is doubling every 12 to 18 months (Gartner Group). This year you added 500 terabytes... Next year you don't add 500 terabytes, you add a petabyte.

How many doublings does it take before the cost of storage exceeds the company's annual revenue? I've yet to have anyone give me their plan for 5 years out. What's yours?