Dell

Data deduplication is a topic being asked about by our customers, and being discussed in the media, more and more. Would you like to know Dell’s take on it?

In the video below, Darren Thomas, vice president and general manager of Dell's storage business, discusses Dell’s view on the future of this technology and what we are doing to help deliver solutions to meet your data management needs. (If you'd like to download the slides in this video, they are available on Dell's Slideshare account here.)

We are announcing enhancements to our deduplication portfolio, both in services to help you understand holistically how you might benefit from de-duplication, as well as in products that help address your storage challenges. That's the conversation should be about -- how you can best solve your problems related to data growth, protection and access.

Dell views deduplication as a feature of storage, one that may help you optimize your investments in data management. However, it's not the only one to accomplish this goal. Our view is that deduplication it is not, by itself, a solution.

Deduplication can be implemented in different ways, whether through dedicated appliances or through integration into existing areas, such as in backup software.

Dell's view is that an integrated approach -- a feature of your software -- provides the greatest benefits to you. In this way, deduplication becomes ubiquitous across many aspects of the data path, from applications through operating systems and backup, where it is focused today. We are helping to drive this evolution.

Before you can decide which approach to take to optimize your storage, though, you need to understand your unique needs and environment. Dell deduplication services can help. Our services teams can assess your needs, provide recommendations and implement solutions, whatever they may be – instead of just figuring out how to make a single approach work.

For more information on deduplication, I'd encourage you to take a look at www.dell.com/deduplication.

And if you have a more technical focus or appetite, I invite you to join us next week at Dell TechCenter for a live chat on this topic.

I spent a few minutes yesterday talking to Theodore Gray, who along with Dr. Stephen Wolfram, founded Wolfram Research in 1988. The company has made quite a few headlines recently with the launch of their newest project, Wolfram Alpha, a computational knowledge engine.

Before I get into Wolfram's latest news, let me tell you a little about Theo. In addition to co-founding Wolfram Research, he is responsible for the graphical user interface of Mathematica, Wolfram Research's other widely successful software program that is used in universities and companies around the world. In 2002, he was awarded an Ig Nobel prize in Chemistry for his Wooden Periodic Table Table. He also has written a column for Popular Science since 2003 about chemistry and blowing things up, and just last month launched a book called Mad Science - Experiments You Can Do at Home -- But Probably Shouldn't, a collection of his columns.

Theo was very clear that while journalists and users are quick to compare Wolfram Alpha to traditional search engines like Google, Ask Jeeves and Microsoft Live Search, and others suggest is more similar to Wikipedia, in reality it is a completely different type of online tool. As Theo tells me in this interview, "It is not a search engine...it is really quite different."

I did a little "research" myself that probably didn't cause the PowerEdge server powering the Wolfram Alpha supercomputer too much strain.

I entered a simple term that represents something many of you may have pondered: what is the weight of a gallon of milk? Having been raised on a dairy farm in Northern Illinois, I always knew that the weight of a gallon of milk was approximately eight-and-a-half pounds. I entered "weight of gallon of milk" into Wolfram Alpha and it generated a data table that showed it weighed nine pounds (must be rounded up), but also unit conversions, serving density and volume.

On Google I found this result, Ask Jeeves gave me this and Microsoft Live Search gave me this -- all search results that were generated when the search engines went out to the World Wide Web, looked for meta-data and keywords that would suggest a page had something to do with the weight of a gallon of milk. So you'll see links to all sorts of websites that propose to answer that question or discuss it in some way.

Wolfram Alpha, on the other hand, actually taps into a number of data pools and produces data that are related to the words entered into the text box. So, the server infrastructure required to power the Wolfram Alpha computational knowledge engine is significant as it is actually crunching numbers, data, to deliver to the user an answer to their query.

Theo is quick to point out that they are learning new information every time someone enters a term and over time the site will get better and better. But the cool thing now is that if you're a Firefox user, they have just added a plug-in that allows you to see Wolfram Alpha results pasted JavaScript-style into the right-hand side of your Google results page. So now it's easy for you to get your Google and Wolfram Alpha information all in one search.

Have a listen.

In most cases, electronics and liquids do not mix. We’ve all had incidents that prove this. I’ve knocked over a glass of wine on my keyboard. It died, but I like to think it died happy with a belly full of Bordeaux. When my toddler ran into a pool I dove after him with my smart phone in my pocket. I wasn’t able to call home to complain about that one. I’ve clung to my digital camera with a death grip for fear that one unexpected toss of the boat would cast thousands of memories in the form of digital images from the palm of my hand to the bottom of the ocean floor.

But, sometimes putting electronics out to sea is the best thing you can do for your business. Geotrace, a leading seismic processing and imaging company based in Houston, packed the power of a data center into the hull of a ship to speed oil and gas exploration. The Geowave Endeavor, the ship that Geotrace deploys for 3D Seismic production, has a Dell PowerEdge M-series blade server high performance computing cluster on board. They have sixteen a fully-loaded Dell M1000e blade chassis that house a total of 256 Dell M600 blade servers networked with Dell PowerConnect M6220 Ethernet switches. Now that’s a boat load of servers.

I had a chance to catch up with Matt Gaskamp, Geotrace’s data center operations manager, briefly last week. He explained that having the ability to analyze and process information while off shore has given his company a significant edge over the competition. Previously, data collected while at sea could not be processed until the ship returned to shore. Now, Dell blade servers and workstations, software, and services allow Geotrace engineers to analyze the data as soon as it is gathered offshore, which has eliminated at minimum two months of wait time for its customers.

Energy efficiency is a concern with any data center, but it is especially important when it’s all housed on a ship. Geotrace uses Dell Remote Access Controllers and Dell OpenManage software to manage the blades remotely. It has power management tools that let their administrators easily configure maximum power thresholds by server or server group. To increase the energy efficiency of the servers while at sea Geotrace administrators can reset peak observed watts/amps and cumulative power, regulate and manage the fixed power supply aboard the ship.

The folks at Geotrace were kind enough to supply us with images of the Geowave Endeavor and the HPC cluster aboard the Endeavor, which is currently off the coast of Libya. You can view other images of the installation at Dell's Flickr pool. We also have a full case study on the Geotrace HPCC implementation if you'd like to read more.

Have you seen the latest?  Storage Magazine ranked Dell the #1 midrange array provider in service and reliability.  With our acquisition of EqualLogic, we turned last-year’s 9^th place ranking into a #1 ranking in product reliability and initial product quality.  Hopefully, you didn’t miss Dell’s other recent achievement where Gartner recognized Dell as a leader in Midrange Disk Arrays for their Magic Quadrant 2008.

Dell has made a tradition out of listening to you, our customers.  In turn, you’ve rewarded us with your support.  We’re excited to be plugged in, so we can keep building storage solutions you want.

Thanks for all of your feedback.

 Dell has made aggressive strides with the "greenness" of our enterprise products and solutions in an effort to help our customers meet their environmental and cost goals. Our hard work is paying off...

 According to a recent GreenFactor study released by Strategic Oxygen and Cohn & Wolfe, Dell is the number one green technology brand among IT buyers. Strategic Oxygen surveyed more than 3,500 enterprise IT decision makers, including CXOs, CIOs and IT Managers, in 11 different countries. Take a look at Lionel’s Direct2Dell post for a bit more context on the topic.

 While we're happy to see the industry taking notice of our efforts, our work isn’t finished yet. We're still helping customers find their hidden data centers by focusing on IT productivity; we just released new infrastructure products that help reduce IT complexity and cost while improving power and cooling in the data center; and finally, we're working on our next generation of enterprise products and technologies that will continue to set new standards for energy efficiency. Time to get back to work!