Storage

I’d like to introduce myself. My name is Eric Kuzmack and I recently joined Dell as an Architect in the Data Center Solutions group. I came to Dell after 15 years at Gannett, the USA’s largest newspaper company and the publisher of USA TODAY along with more than 1000 other publications, television stations, and other ventures. I spent much of my time at Gannett working on large scale Identity Management, Server, and Storage architectures.

I just returned from Storage Network World in Dallas hoping to hear about what’s going on with storage infrastructure in the cloud. I’m not talking about what services are being offered by companies such as Amazon, Mozy, or Nirvanix, but what’s new on the infrastructure side to allow companies such as these to offer new and unique storage services to customers. With all the talk about cloud storage opportunities, what surprised me was how little there actually was at the show aimed at that space.

An interesting tidbit: I attended an IDC presentation where they mentioned that they expect cloud computing spend to grow from $16B in 2008 to $42B in 2012. In 2008, storage is 5% of the spend, but in 2012, it’s 18%.

Combining that potential along with the financial meltdown that many expect will hasten the adoption of cloud based services, I would have expected the show to be packed full of cloud storage goodness.

Are we going to see a radical change from what’s worked for years or are we just going to see incremental changes along the way?

I suspect that many of the traditional players in the storage space aren’t quite sure how to deal with the cloud within their existing product portfolio. Monolithic storage solutions become too expensive to deploy in the hyper-scale environment. A new way of thinking needs to come from the vendors. For example, at DCS, we have what I think is an interesting storage chassis. We call it the J23 – JBOD with 23 drives. What makes it cool is that it holds 23 3.5” SAS/SATA hot plug drives in just 2U of rack space. We mount drives in both the front (12) and rear (11) of the chassis but still use front-to-back cooling.

Much of the cloud architecture that my colleague Jimmy talks about here focuses (rightly so) on the services end of the cloud. But there seems to be a lack of discussion in the blogosphere about the underlying infrastructure.

Stay Tuned…

Hi there readers, it’s day two of GiTEX technology week. Yesterday’s activities at GiTEX were branded as Microsoft Day and sessions covered key technology trends and best practices.

I had quite a few interviews yesterday, as well as attending a two of the Microsoft presentation sessions. One interview from Emirates Computers stood out because they took us on a tour of their green data centre room, which was pretty interesting. We also interviewed other Dell partners (that were available at the time), including Mindware, Key Information Technology and Aptec.

Below is a vlog with some highlights from the day.

Dell also trusted me to take pictures for the CX4 launch. It made me feel good because Dell trusted me to do so – like part of the team.

I’ve got to get myself ready for Gitex shopper next. That’s going to be a ball! It’s loud and fast paced - a lot of stuff going on. After shopper we’re going to dash back to the Dell Lounge for an interview with one of MTV’s nominated bands from the UAE called ABRI. I think this will be a blast!

Tune in for day three tomorrow.

Today at GiTEX, Dell announced that it would be introducing the fourth-generation of Dell|EMC CX family of storage systems to the Middle East region. We caught-up with James Quarles and Robin Kuepers to ask a few questions about this announcement.

The Dell/EMC CX4 family offers four models that form the foundation of an enterprise storage architecture that is easy to deploy, manage and upgrade.

The Dell/EMC CX4 family will be sold through our channel partners in the Middle East.

(Riad Ouarzazi Corporate (left) Chief Information Officer, Orion Holdings and Michael Collins (right), General Manager - Dell Middle East.)

This week marks the first Cloud Summit, a new tradeshow from Techweb, so thoughts turn to the cloud ecosystem. As private cloud technologies begin to proliferate, an important thing to consider is the notion that developing applications to live within proprietary clouds may dilute or eliminate the very economic promise of the model. As we approach Halloween, vertically integrated cloud application stacks raise the terrifying specter of mainframe lock-in (or as recently suggested by this article from the Cloud Summit, iPods…)

In this video, Forrest Norrod, Vice President and General Manager of Dell’s Data Center Solutions Division, shares his latest views on cloud computing and choices for customers.

To hear more about Dell’s cloud computing strategy and DCS division read Timothy Prickett Morgan’s interview with Forrest over at the Reg.

The PowerVault DL2000 is the industry’s first integrated disk-to-disk (D2D) based solution that automates, simplifies, and speeds up backup and recovery. These are tasks that customers in the SMB space need to do but either do inefficiently, can’t afford, don’t have time to do, or worse, can’t do at all.

In plain English – this is the system that will help our customers automate and simplify their data protection processes while slashing data backup by 55% and restore times 77% compared to tape.

First, let me talk about the meaning of “integrated” and why this is different from anything out there. We worked on an engineer-to-engineer basis to combine our disk storage with software from leaders in the backup and recovery industry – Symantec and CommVault. We worked together to develop special code to work exclusively with our systems – and it comes straight from the factory and ready to go. That’s why the DL2000 sets up 5 times faster than any other commercially available D2D system.

Otherwise, customers are stuck with trying to combine a bunch of point solutions – needing specialized expertise, more time and more money. In short, we’ve put the pieces together so our customers don’t have to.

We also take the solution a step further for customers – with services. We don’t saddle them with armies of consultants, but instead offer Dell storage consulting services to help customers better understand their existing storage environments and provide a clear, actionable path to more efficient storage deployments and operations. And for product and technical support we have Dell ProSupport, giving them flexible, reliable and easier support solutions.