Image via Wikipedia

     In Recent News, and as an outstanding announcement for travelers everywhere, Harley Davison motorcycles (with some caveats) can Guarantee a 50% reduction of tires in use on the road compared to traditional cars and trucks made by the Ford Motor Company.

Using the following math:

50% less tires compared to a baseline of traditional cars and trucks. The baseline is determined from the amount of tires touching the ground on a car/truck and the amount of tires that a vehicle of transport requires. For example, suppose that you need a vehicle to get you from point A to point B. Here’s how we calculate the baseline:

• Default Harley Davidson Motorcycle has only 2 wheels/Tires, add on 100% overhead for 4 wheel ability, plus an additional spare tire.
• Total tires required to get from Point A to Point B  – 2 tires on a traditional auto this number is 4 tires plus a smaller spare tire.
• 50% less tires means a traveler will only need to purchase 2 tires to get from Point A to Point B

 

In Similar News, NetApp releases “50% Virtualization Guarantee*”

50% less storage compared to a baseline of traditional storage. The baseline is determined from the amount of data to be stored and the amount of storage overhead that a system of similar protection and performance levels typically requires. For example, suppose that you need a system to accommodate 10TB of data. Here’s how we calculate the baseline:
•  Add on 100% overhead for RAID 10 protection; 2.6% overhead for rightsizing and formatting; and two spare drives.
•  Total raw capacity required for 10TB of data on a traditional storage system is roughly 21.75TB.
•  50% less storage means that the customer will need to purchase only 10.75TB of raw space with NetApp.

Obviously, there are other significant savings with NetApp, reduction in Hot Spares, Deduplication, etc.  I just thought it was funny that the baseline for storage chosen wasn’t another RAID6 based configuration, but comparison to a RAID10 deployment.

Also, that URL isn’t a typo, guarantee was in fact spelt wrong.

Image via Wikipedia

My perspective on “Good” Vendor Blogs vs. “Bad” Vendor Blogs…

     I find a few blogs very interesting, and I tend to make them a Priority when new posts hit my Feed Demon reader.  Some of these blogs are Storage Vendor blogs, many of them what I would consider to be “Good”.  Some of them are Storage Vendor blogs that are “Bad”.  How do I qualify the two?  Can I gain insight to the IT Industry, a person’s person life, or is it a post that should really be considered an advertisement for X vendors products again?  I implore potential end-users, perspective customers, to take any vendors blog with the proverbial “grain of salt”, for that matter, any blog in general.

     Take my blog as an example.  I’ve owned the URL for a few years (since it’s inception), and have been posting to it for roughly 2 years.  In that time I’ve been employed by three different companies, two of which were up-starts/start-ups.  I openly post my Career history in my About-Steven Schwartz page, and if you search the history and ownership of this blog, you’ll notice it is privately owned, and there are pretty much no ads (except for the occasional Qumana linking when I used that off-line writer).  The one main point, that I believe shows through in most of my blog entries, is my passion for technology.  Another prime example of the openness of this blog is the open posting of opposing “comments”.  Hey, if you disagree with something I post, comment, cross blog and trackback.  However, if you chose to make personal comments about me, or my knowledge, in petty defense of “your” product, it is transparent to educated readers.

     So, when reading anything online, do your own research, read what is being linked to, and take away your own opinions.  As for my “Good” vs. “Bad” lists?  You’ll never get that out of me, everyone needs their own list.

Image by Wolfgang Staudt via Flickr

At times the whole world seems to be in conspiracy to importune you with emphatic trifles.
–Ralph Waldo Emerson

     In the past several months I’ve written a couple times about Deduplication, mainly in regards to my feeling that it is a feature and not a product, and more recently looking at NetApp’s implementation of A-SIS.  I also mentioned the announcement of a newer blog DEDUPEMATTERS.com, which is run by Data Domain, here.

     It isn’t that I’ve been ahead of the curve with Deduplication, it just continues to come up as a checkbox mark in every storage discussion.  Why?  Mainly because of the exponential growth of storage, and storage retention requirements for both public and private companies (please ignore the current economy turn down in the United States, and while this has an impact short term, I believe long term projections will still be accurate).

     So where am I going with this train of thought?  I honestly believe, as I’ve stated before, that Deduplication is a feature, and primarily a feature of backup storage/suites and server applications.  This is a personal belief for the following reasons:

• The act of Deduplication on a data set, in both online and post-processing activities, is a compute and storage intensive process.
• The act of data re-hydration, or re-duplication, is also an intensive process, but mostly can have a storage capacity ballooning effect.
• A data set which has been through Deduplication forces data into a consolidated format, which, in certain instances can cause disk hot spots and data access performance to be lowered.
• Current methodologies for Deduplication are based only on capacity savings, and not the important of data access, nor application performance.

     What does this all mean regarding features vs. products?  How does this apply to your implementation of Deduplication?  What does this mean for Deduplication of primary storage volumes?  Let’s explore this:

Product vs. Feature

     I would like to make a parallel here to Storage Virtualization.  Some time ago, there were a plethora  of “Heterogeneous” Storage Virtualization products/appliances.  The biggest issues with these products/appliances was a very common IT dilemma; what I call the IT Triangle!  There is no way to get ALL three without on of the corners suffering.  If you want the highest performing, and highest resiliency, you end up with the HIHGEST COST.  So in order for Virtualization products/appliances to stay cost effective and provide “heterogenous” storage support, they sacrificed performance and/or reliability.  So the market dictated, that this level of functionality should be based within storage devices, and that "the flexibility” of true heterogeneous support would become less of a priority.

     Deduplication products/appliances typically have the same problem, however, what the target is that they are deduplicating will have much different requirements.  I will touch upon this shortly.  So, the real question is, what are the sacrifices you are willing to make with a deduplication product/appliance in your environment?  Are you willing to par extra for an additional product in the IT infrastructure for deduplication of the backup stream?  Do you want to run your NAS environment on a 3rd party solution in order to take advantage of block based deduplication, when file level deduplication might be built into your current file serving solution?  Would you be willing to place an in-data-path appliance between your application servers and your primary storage in order to leverage block based deduplication, knowing that it may have significant storage savings, however, at a cost to application performance?

How Deduplication is used in Environments Today!

     YOU ARE ALREADY USING DEDUPLICATION TECHNOLOGIES!!!!!  You might not even know it!  There are several technologies that ARE Deduplication technologies present is MOST datacenters today.

1. Are you running Exchange 2000, 2003 or 2007?
   • Guess what, Exchange has Single Instance Storage built-in for email messages and attachments already.
2. Are you utilizing Windows Storage Servers?
   • Well starting with Windows Storage Server 2003 RC2, there is file level Deduplication within volumes and set per volume.
3. Are you utilizing any pointer based snapshot technology within your storage system, or VSS within Windows?
   • Once again, this is a form of data Deduplication, specifically around data protection.  Storage arrays that utilize a pointer based snapshot technology allow virtual backup copies of a volume set, this is the case when utilizing VSS within windows as well, just handled at the OS level rather then the disk storage level.  (some storage providers can utilize VSS functionality to use disk based snapshot technology to take OS and Application consistent snapshots at the hardware layer, rather then the default software layer.
4. Do you utilize COTS applications running on a Database?
   • Many database applications utilize record linking in order to minimize multiple copies of the same data rows/columns/table spaces.

     So what do the above examples show?  Application/OS based deduplication which is a feature of a larger application set, not a product unto itself.  Primary storage features that over several years have become relatively mainstream features. (note:  NOT ALL Snapshots are created equal!).

     There are also deduplication features available for most backup packages for helping reduce the footprint of the backup environment.

Deduplication of Primary Storage Volumes

     So Primary Storage Volumes seem to be the next logical discussion point.  Catching up on my questions earlier, virtualization appliances gave heterogeneous storage support, and cross platform data services, however, at a performance degradation, as well as with additional cost.  Most customers I’ve come across in recent years are so concerned with performance, that detailed application assessments, and deep technical dives into storage performance was required in order to drive purchase decisions.  The number of saved perfmon exports, and IOSTAT redirects that I’ve looked at an analyzed through tools sets continues to grow.  So, as Stephen Foskett recently put, ”deduplication is not yet ready for prime time in primary storage applications”, it is however, readily present and ready for production use in other areas.

     So, high IO, and low latency requirements for storage need to be seriously looked at as applications that aren’t “storage hardware feature” ready for deduplication.  Applications can be more intelligent typically about deduplication, minimizing performance impact for a very specific data set, which just hasn’t been seen yet in the storage industry’s feature set.

Final Thoughts

     So I am going to contradict myself.  Several years ago I was actually a very big fan of Virtualization appliances, they were a non-perfect stop-gap for the storage industry.  My customers wanted strong storage services, like Snapshots, site-to-site replication/mirroring/archiving, and heterogeneous storage pooling.  They were willing to make an investment in products like SANSynphony, IPStor, and SVC, in order to gain an agnostic storage approach, re-deploy older storage, and leverage cheaper featureless storage arrays.  The storage vendors caught up however, and began offering better performance with the same feature sets, and, in general, the virtualization appliance went away.  I believe the same is occurring with deduplication appliances.  This is a good stop-gap until the application providers and storage vendors come up with better native deduplication technologies and support.  So yes, while I STRONGLY feel that Deduplication is a feature of either applications or storage hardware, for the time being deduplication appliances will continue to be prevalent, just a stop-gap though!

Posted on the Wright County Republican blog was a very interesting thought:

Wednesday, September 24, 2008

The Birk Plan

I’m against the $85,000,000,000.00 bailout of AIG.
Instead, I’m in favor of giving $85,000,000,000 to America in
a We Deserve It Dividend.
To make the math simple, let’s assume there are 200,000,000
bonafide U.S. Citizens 18+.
Our population is about 301,000,000 +/- counting every man, woman
and child. So 200,000,000 might be a fair stab at adults 18 and up..
So divide 200 million adults 18+ into $85 billon that equals
$425,000.00.
My plan is to give $425,000 to every person 18+ as a
We Deserve It Dividend.
Of course, it would NOT be tax free.
So let’s assume a tax rate of 30%.
Every individual 18+ has to pay $127,500.00 in taxes.
That sends $25,500,000,000 right back to Uncle Sam.
But it means that every adult 18+ has $297,500.00 in their pocket.
A husband and wife has $595,000 .00.
What would you do with $297,500.00 to $595,000.00 in your family?
Pay off your mortgage housing crisis solved.
Repay college loans what a great boost to new grads
Put away money for college it’ll be there
Save in a bank create money to loan to entrepreneurs.
Buy a new car create jobs
Invest in the market capital drives growth
Pay for your parent’s medical insurance health care improves
Enable Deadbeat Dads to come clean or else
Remember this is for every adult U S Citizen 18+ including the folks
who lost their jobs at Lehman Brothers and every other company
that is cutting back. And of course, for those serving in our Armed
Forces.
If we’re going to re-distribute wealth let’s really do it…instead of
trickling out a puny $1000.00 ( vote buy ) economic incentive that is being proposed
by one of our candidates for President.
If we’re going to do an $85 billion bailout, let’s bail out every
adult U S Citizen 18+!
As for AIG liquidate it.
Sell off its parts.
Let American General go back to being American General.
Sell off the real estate.
Let the private sector bargain hunters cut it up and clean it up.
Here’s my rationale. We deserve it and AIG doesn’t.
Sure it’s a crazy idea that can never work.
But can you imagine the Coast-To-Coast Block Party!
How do you spell Economic Boom?
I trust my fellow adult Americans to know how to use the $85 Billion
We Deserve It Dividend more than I do the geniuses at AIG or in
Washington DC .
And remember, The Birk plan only really costs $59.5 Billion because
$25.5 Billion is returned instantly in taxes to Uncle Sam.
Ahhh…I feel so much better getting that off my chest.
Kindest personal regards,
Birk
T. J. Birkenmeier, A Creative Guy & Citizen of the Republic

Good in theory, not sound in reality.  I think people clearly don’t understand the AIG “bailout”.  It is really more of a highly leveraged LOAN.  So the fundamental problem is loan, not gift, and high interest terms, and in the event of a default, roughly 90% of AIG would become owned by the government.

Regardless, it is a good read, and i got a good laugh about it, it would be a nice gift from the US Government, however, I’m not willing to accept the same terms.

Of course, I didn’t even bother to do the math, as it was pointed out to me.  If his math was sound, the plan was still shitty, but considering that his math is off by roughly 424,500 dollars per person, it is ludicrous.