Yes I saw and heard a lot about Green IT lately, especially after 2 weeks of interesting SNW conferences in Dallas and Frankfurt last month, including for the new SNIA Green Storage Initiative. But I won’t mention the G word in this note… especially since my fellow blogger Hu already covers this very eloquently.

This time I’d like to take a look at some of the challenges the world of data storage will face with the so-called metadata and its utilization for data and information management purposes. Some of the publications and related work associated with the Semantic Conference earlier this year got me to think about what it could mean for data storage and data management. In so many different IT layers including applications as well as management systems, many IT tools build a huge amount of reference data and/or contextual information about data that are created, accessed, transported, shared or protected. The ILM & DLM requirements got the storage industry to think that it would be very useful to organize the use of and access to such metadata. By doing so it becomes possible to optimize the management of IT assets and data assets according to policies that relate to business & IT operations efficiencies, including managing the changing value of data. This is a great development as storage solutions have tons of potential to optimize where, when and how data should be stored; just think about thin-provisioning, tiered-storage or data de-dup as examples.

Handling metadata is so important that the storage industry is looking at easing the access to it especially for environments where it matters a lot such as fixed-content or archiving. The SNIA XAM initiative is a typical example of a future industry standard to enable open access to both data and metadata without depending on a specific application framework. So as storage solutions get closer to information management requirements – and here I mean that storage technologies and standards will give access to actionable resources and services to help achieving information management objectives – it is very likely that the amount of metadata will increase, starting with what can be generated by the original application that created the data in the first place. Associated with the metadata growth we can also anticipate that there will be a diversification of metadata to make it richer, more relevant and more dynamic. Multi-tenancy metadata is likely to be generalized. So if we can foresee that access to metadata will become easier, will the utilization of metadata become any easier too? This is a genuine question since metadata interpretation is very much application dependent today. Of course, “basic” details such as creation date & time, last modification date & time, data type etc. can be leveraged outside the application context. However more contextual references could become more difficult to utilize. As an example take a set of CRM records that have been tagged as “critical” because the CRM application has determined that the status of those customers required such tagging: whilst the context of such decision is obvious within the CRM application, it is less evident to refer to this decision context outside the application. The significance of the tag “critical” is also a difficult notion to export outside the application context. Is “Critical” a level of dangerousness or a sales process indicator? We can see that it becomes relatively difficult to automate data management tasks based on metadata content that is hard to interpret or for which a human intervention is required. With the anticipated explosion of metadata and metadata types, it is not difficult to believe that handling contextual metadata will become increasingly complex and will require a different approach to allow storage solutions to make sense out of them.

Several years ago, the Web architects faced a similar situation. The Web is by definition a very distributed environment where data is disseminated in many ways and formats. It is therefore challenging for any web users, man or machine, to use different sets of data to (re)construct or determine a set of information matching specified objectives. However the human brain is very quick at performing these tasks, combining data from different sources even if different terminologies are used. What could be done to help the computers and applications to perform in analogous ways on the web? In addition to traditional parameters to call services, a notion of semantic could be added. The Semantic Web project started by W3C in the 90’s helped to specify how metadata should be constructed to provide “portable” metadata that could be directly interpreted by the computer: a machine processable format including a common naming (URI), a common data model for expressing metadata (RDF) and where to find such metadata on the web and a common vocabulary (Ontologies). So W3C standards RDF (and RDFS) and OWL have helped positioning the use of semantic technologies to extend the Web as a reasoning metadata-based infrastructure. The semantic fields have since been extended to address larger notions such as interoperable content, executable knowledge or semantic infrastructure. Web2.0 applications have also leveraged such semantic concepts.

Could semantic technologies enhance data management solutions? Future trends for the storage industry describe the next generation of storage solutions as more autonomous, self-healing, and capable to react or even anticipate the rapid evolution of the IT infrastructure in response to business changes. Such “intelligence” will have to include a significant amount of contextual analysis based on information managed by the different layers involved in IT operations, accessible and interpretable by management frameworks including those driving storage services. So yes, it looks like semantic technologies could be leveraged to help with metadata handling for data storage solutions as well as ILM/DLM best practices. This is not an obvious step forward as many hurdles exist including the questions around metadata formats or the need for a data model. But addressing complex metadata contexts will become necessary for achieving higher-level of management intelligence including for sophisticated storage services. Maybe to even further the greening of IT… Ooops! No G word I said.

Yes I know: I should have never stopped blogging (some might say that it was goodness I did). To paraphrase my blogging colleague Claus, it was a blogcation. “In reality”, Santa snatched the keys of my blog last Xmas, and it took me several months to get them back… but I could not wait for Xmas this year especially as I have received encouragements (right or wrong) on a regular basis from colleagues & fellow bloggers to start again my postings. I am thinking in particular about a very nice note from Anil Gupta from SNW-San Diego that I re-read recently and which has really motivated me to blog once more. Thanks Anil.

Several topics have caught my attention lately -

First of all, the OVF proposal going to DMTF. Just think about how complex it is to instantiate reliably a Virtual Machine on various platforms, taking care of all the installation parameters for the various environments including software licensing. Well, that what is being worked at with the Open Virtual machine Format (OVF) standard proposal going to DMTF.
The OVF specification describes an extensible format for the packaging and distribution of virtual machines or groups of virtual machines, whilst still allowing some localization based on the platform and run-time environments to optimize the deployment and performance of the applications contained in the package. So this is a portable metadata model for virtual machines that can be exchanged between platforms. In dynamic resource environments such as SOA when tasks and services are (re-)distributed on a regular basis, the portability of a standard like OVF could become very helpful. Many questions spring to mind with regards to the resource definition and allocation for each virtual machine image, let’s say for storage and data… Could the creation of VM images be automated? Yes probably. The application field for such standard is broad and could go beyond the traditional business application packages to more specialized ones such as specialized service providers. Like any standards it only provides value to IT users if it becomes truly utilized in real products and if all adopting vendors don’t attempt to twist it to include their own “added value”… With virtualization being a well-monitored IT industry topic, I have no doubt we will hear fairly soon if OVF isn’t on the right track.

FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet) is also an interesting industry project right now. The Ethernet convergence is a recurring theme in our industry and whilst there are concrete proof-points to demonstrate the reality of such convergence (e.g. VoIP, iSCSI…), the timeline and the market conditions for such convergence are often different than what is originally announced – rarely shorter though! But FCoE appears to be on a fast(er) track. The adoption of the project in T11 has not affected the momentum behind the proposed technology - of course nothing against T11 here but official standards work generally has a higher coordination cost than if it is privately developed.
The FCoE proposal is attractive: being able to leverage Ethernet networks, without the weight of TCP/IP, to transport FCP constructs whilst relying on the use of optional congestion management features in Ethernet (Pause mechanism in 802.3-A31B) is an interesting convergence approach.
From an FC standpoint it also capitalizes on previous FC-BB development efforts. Of course time will tell if the specific network conditions required for FCoE will allow the storage community to embrace the Ethernet foundations that exist in most if not all Enterprises today. With FCoE in the pipeline, FC-BaseT futures could become a little more uncertain. The idea to leverage the Ethernet connectivity standard for FC communications was a good one – however going away from the Ethernet communication standard over Cat5 or Cat6 infrastructure would prove to be a tough choice, even for FC. FCoE appears to be a safer bet to help bridging Fibre Channel and Ethernet Fabrics.

Oh by the way - SNW is only a few weeks away and for the first time it is in Dallas, Texas. I expect topics like Green, Security, Virtualization, FCoE, ILM, Data Classification, Next Generation Data Center and Resource Management to be hot topics… See you there!

With Grid only just entering the Enterprise space and still plenty of developments required including for industry standards, the forward-looking experts of the IT industry are attempting to define the logical next step beyond Grid and use models such as Utility Computing. With the holidays’ period approaching, I could not resist the idea to give you a new acronym to play with in 2007: SOKU – Service Oriented Knowledge Utility. OK, fair enough: I already hear the comments saying that’s not brand new; that’s true. The idea of SOKU emerged around 2003 / 2004 as part of a work activity driven by a group of experts named the Next Generation Grid (NGG) in collaboration with the 6th Framework Program of the European Commission.

So what’s in SOKU? Let’s take a look at the context first. Grid, SOI (Service-Oriented Infrastructure), SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture) will gradually allow the provision of computing, data and information capabilities through specific managed services. Hopefully access to these services will be standardized across all components. Experts have identified the need in the future to close the gap between end-users (i.e. users of IT services) and Grid technologies with knowledge capabilities using semantic technologies. If Grid could be thought in multiple shapes and scales (e.g. computing and/or data, Enterprise and/or Collaborative), you should think big with SOKU, some kind of ubiquitous Grid approach with an evolutionary system made of very large numbers of interconnected nodes of any type across multiple business or society boundaries. From a software perspective SOKU is meant to provide a totally customizable environment, leveraging virtualization capabilities across the IT stack combined knowledge-assisted services to provide the automation and advanced functionality required. In a true service-orientation, SOKU architectures comprise dynamically assembled services where behaviour and location of software as well as data are adjusted on the fly. The utility aspects of SOKU refer to a predictable model where services can be called with specific functionality, performance and cost expectations.
The convergence of Grid, Web Services and Semantic Web is perceived as a fundamental step towards the development of commonly available SOI to create and provide access to intelligent services anywhere, anytime and in a secure, cost effective and trustworthy way. As Grid exceeds the computing & HPC solution requirements to move into composing intelligent services allowing ad-hoc dynamic creation of IT organizations for businesses or else, future Grid and SOKU developments have clear and important implications for security, scheduling, data movement, applications/executables movements, messaging, transactions, right managements, licensing… This new Grid operating environment would require some new levels of intelligence, notably based on semantically-rich based services, in order to provide the security, trust, performance and self-* properties required. As new applications are breaking away from monolithic executables running on large centralised platforms, they tend to become dynamic groups of computed entities. Such applications are modular and leverage heterogeneous sources of data, computing, network and software services. SOA’s have conceptualised this approach. The next generation of application will also rely on a set of infrastructure services to avoid having to re-develop the whole complex network of services required each time a new application needs to be deployed. This services combination model is similar to what we can find on the Web. So if the first generation of Grid was very much purpose focused (Compute, Data…) the next generation(s) of Grid will tend to become multi-disciplinary, collaborative and even more dynamic and distributed. This leads to an organizational model for IT in the Enterprise where business entities could be supported by a group of virtual organizations that will be dynamically populated by components, services and data (information).

So what’s the difference between SOKU and a next generation Grid? In addition to looking at the next generation Grids as the accomplishment of many of the original targets specified for Grid, next generation Grid are intended to allow a more seamless integration and interaction of multiple Grids, very much like in a Web approach. SOKU’s may be part of next generation grids and may also represent a collection of SOKU’s. The big difference comes from the representation of services. SOKU services are semantically described; i.e. the services metadata are built in a machine-readable format to ease their automated use. This allows the dynamic composition and configuration of services providing the autonomic behaviour required to achieve self-management. Furthermore, semantic tools can be used to describe the content of services; .i.e. services can process information based on reference representations of the appropriate type (schema, vocabulary, ontology). A SOKU approach does not impose that all services need to be semantically rich, but it requires that SOKU services are implemented in the SOI to handle information and/or knowledge processing. This can be particularly important when considering ILM requirements in terms of persistence, distribution, privacy and security in such dynamic environment.

The impact on data storage? It really hard to say for now as the industry is trying to tackle the existing challenges such as location transparency, security, data movement…to better manage distributed data repositories across and between Enterprise infrastructures. Addressing such elements would help defining the role of Enterprise Storage in the Enterprise Grid. But to achieve the level of abstraction and contextualization described for the next generation Grid and SOKU, the industry will need to think about how to store data in the future so that many of the management operations can be automated along with the mechanisation of services composition. Without the ability to automate many of the operations and therefore the ability to scale – a typical example is the discovery of resources and services– visions like the next generation Grid and SOKU won’t become reality. Peer-to-peer technologies may be of help here, in support of the self-* orientation of IT. No need to say that such vision would not exist if the management and communication entry points of such concepts are not standardised.

Is it or is it not a new IT era? The SOKU concept seem seems to point at the convergence and integration of multi-disciplinary IT domains such as Grid, Web Services, Semantic Web, Data Storage, Peer-to-peer, Lifecycle Management, Trust and Security…which have been studied for many years. The answer will certainly come from the research programs addressing these domains – in the meantime we can only admire the ambition of these concepts to lay stronger and stronger IT foundations to help driving business and societal projects.

The month of October has had a weird recurring pattern of events at least in the last few years. It usually starts relatively slowly; well for sure it’s slower than the mad September month full of interesting but schedule intensive conferences and business meetings. Then, towards the middle of the month suddenly the workload increases exponentially to only break after the Fall Storage Networking World conference. So I am sorry I have been away from the wires for so long – many thanks to those of you that have kindly asked me through emails and discussions to continue blogging – will do!

So what happened this last October? Well like many fellow SNIA volunteers, Storage Networking World represents a unique opportunity for SNIA and its members to demonstrate, explain and educate about the fast evolving Storage industry and its subtle intricacies. So tons of dedicated efforts went into the planning phase of this event from volunteers and sponsors (and Computerworld of course). Kudos to my HDS colleagues that have once again done a fantastic job at ensuring that our solutions and expertise were well represented and visible, and in particular Christophe Bertrand, Rudy Castillo, John Cook, Don Fautt, Derek Gascon, Jeff Harris, Steve Quinn, Francisco Salinas and Kevin Sampson.

For this Fall event I wanted to continue the effort started at SNW-Fall’05 about Grid and Storage. With the help of the SNIA Grid Taskforce Team, we proposed to have a discussion panel with real Grid users and representatives of the relevant industry groups to discuss the position of Enterprise Storage in Grid environments. I was pleased to be joined on this panel by very eminent participants including, Paul Strong (Distinguished Research Scientist, eBay – Open Grid Forum At-Large Board Member), John S. Hurley (Sr Manager Distributed Systems and Software Integration, Group Head – Grid Evaluation and Implementation, The Boeing Company), Chris Lionetti (SAN Specialists, Microsoft Labs) and Alan Yoder (Senior Technical Staff, NetApp – Vice-Chair SNIA Technical Council – Co-Chair OGF Storage Networking Community Group). This was an interactive panel where several important points were made about the relevance of Grid for the Enterprise. Once passed the not-yet-fully-answered questions about definitions, the panel described some of the misconceptions around Grid. Paul Strong insisted on the fact that there are many forms of Grid, not only focused on performance computing. Different organizations will see their Grid’d infrastructure differently: as one big Grid, as a collection of isolated Grids or as the conjunction of multiple (virtual) organizations possibly spanning across several business boundaries. The latter form is what John Hurley told us Boeing is looking at since this company deals with data exchange and movement requirements that go beyond the Boeing firewalls. Grid was described as complicated and hard to deploy and manage. Still all panel participants agreed that Grid helps with adapting services to demand in a common context to manage most IT resources, including data and storage, in a service-oriented fashion. Simplification and standardization were both requested by all Grid users, with a warning that some businesses won’t be able to wait for standards. Take a look at the almost live report from Byte&Switch.

SNW once again took us by storm with the breadth and depth of its agenda. This Fall SNW had up to 8 parallel tracks covering diverse topics such as Data Management, ILM, Regulatory Compliance, Virtualization & Tiered Storage, Grid, Data Protection and Security, End-Users Case Studies, SMB, Industry Analysts perspectives plus the numerous and unique SNIA rich tutorials and the Hands-On-Lab. Two interesting piece of news were gathered whilst I was on the main stage of SNW for quick audience surveys: 21% of surveyed attendees declared that the integration of their storage management tools with other management platforms is their greatest storage management need. This is an interesting feedback for SNIA at it embarks into a new development direction with the launch of the Management Framework Technical Workgroup. This other interesting point was regarding the rating of the security of the storage networking infrastructure by the SNW audience. The answers were very similar to the last conference’s results: two thirds of the surveyed attendees confirmed that their SN infrastructure is somehow at risk from both hacking and/or physical threats. This is yet another acknowledgement that further efforts (e.g. education, standards deployments) have yet to be made to allow IT users to tackle the storage security challenges.

So what happened this October that did not happen before? You might have already seen it in the announcement by SNIA or in Hu Yoshida’s blog, not only I have been kindly re-elected by the SNIA members as Director of the SNIA Board of Directors for another 2-year term, following my 2 previous terms between 2001 and 2005, but I have also been privileged to be elected as Chairman of the Board for this year. This is a great honor for me to lead this prestigious industry association where many industry talents have already contributed to the advancement of the storage industry. Storage has moved up the stack and the SNIA has to proactively develop the necessary programs to continue progressing for further integration and leveraging of standardized data storage management tools inside the data centre, in support of information management requirements.

This blog won’t be an official SNIA blog, but I will continue the dialog as an active participant of this industry!

I could not resist attending the GridWorld event in Washington earlier this month. Not only this was an opportunity to meet with the passionate members of the Open Grid Forum (OGF was formed after the merger of the Global Grid Forum and the Enterprise Grid Alliance) but GridWorld was also a venue to meet with Grid users and Grid solutions implementers.

There are still many debates about what Grid stands for. You might like the background information given by Wikipedia. I quite like what the EGA (now OGF) came up with for Enterprise Grid in their reference model document: “An enterprise grid is a collection of interconnected (networked) grid components under the control of a grid management entity”; it’s a simple definition with in mind the development of managed architectures that aggregate the IT resources of data centres aligned with a business into dynamically assignable pools.

But quite often when I discuss Grid technology and products, I get the odd look and comment: “Grid is a dream… it’s only for research and guys in academia“. Whilst I would agree that Grid has been much over-hyped about its potential and maturity for data centres, this conference in Washington clearly confirmed that Grid has already a foot in the Enterprise. The testimonial from Paul Strong at eBay during the conference was particularly eloquent. With a very large (and growing) IT environment where many resource tiers are always improved or upgraded, managing access to ever-scaling web-transaction repositories from multiple distributed applications for millions of users worldwide is not an easy task. In such dynamic IT configuration, a Grid architecture will help coordinating and managing the overall job executions and resource utilisation across application domains. And eBay is convinced that they can develop their own platform in order to do this. EBay’s example is just another way of highlighting the impact of grid infrastructures on IT in general as noted by Dr Carolino/Venturini/Warner when they wrote that “as the data processing demands of grid computing grow, it is important that the grid community understand the impact of grids on the enterprise network and other components“.

The other good sign at GridWorld was sent by IT vendors themselves. This is always encouraging for the not-yet-converted IT users to see large IT vendors embracing specific technologies and architectures for their own business. This is exactly what Intel, AMD and Oracle portrayed in Washington. Another encouraging sign is the multiplication of companies directly involved in the development and distribution of Grid middleware and related software. However this is also raising an important point mentioned by almost all communities represented at GridWorld: the need for Grid standards is higher than never. As Grid solutions get rolled in data centres, the lack of standardised interfaces in Grid means that it will take some efforts by IT vendors and users to put them in place later on whether this is for managing or supplying services. The danger here is to recreate a different type of silo.

There’s obviously hope that the newly formed OGF will help addressing these issues for the Enterprise whilst continuing its collaboration with the research community. On the data storage front in OGF, a new community group called “StorageNetworking” (SN-CG) was launched during the OGF symposium to start addressing the need for Enterprise
data storage management systems and Grid to interoperate and leverage each other’s capabilities.      

So much to do in Grid and so little time! So maybe Grid is a dream… let’s make sure it does not become a nightmare for IT users.

SNW-Europe took place earlier this month in Frankfurt and I am pleased to say that it was another very successful storage industry event, well attended by European IT professionals. Its success was mostly due to a conference agenda that allowed the many data storage industry constituencies, from vendors to users, to get an update on the usual hot industry topics but also to open attendees’ mind on broader and longer term industry issues such as the future of information management.

Amongst the main industry challenges, here are some of the most popular discussed topics in Frankfurt:

• Data Protection / Disaster Recovery: European storage users have repeatedly said it loud and clear that they cannot afford to miss business cycles because of data inaccessibility and/or inconsistencies. The DP/DR challenges are only increased by data growth, data type multiplication and regulatory compliance trends and as a consequence IT users are asking for more flexible and granular open DP/DR tools to place and protect information repositories at the right time, in the right location and on the right media.
• Security:
  In the world of data storage security issues are too often summarised as being a matter of data encryption (at rest). Whilst this is undoubtedly an important technology component for ensuring information security, it becomes clearer in IT users’ mind that the information security challenges entail a more comprehensive approach across management processes & IT layers. Security experts are helping the Storage community to understand the overall security management requirements and vice-versa. No doubt that further industry education is required in this arena.
• ILM: Bizarrely enough – or may be not -, ILM was not a topic as hot as it used to be in previous data storage related event. Don’t get me wrong: elements usually connected with ILM (Data classification, Data Retention/Archiving, Tiered Storage Resource…) are still being discussed by IT experts and challenged by IT users regarding their application in real business environments. But the “ultimate” ILM vision for information management magically aligned with business priorities is not so much advertised upfront anymore. IT users have confirmed they need a stepped approach here with relevant (business) proof-points. Good.
• IP-Networking for Storage: No surprise here… NAS & File systems technologies are
  gradually been considered as key infrastructure elements. iSCSI is increasingly gaining momentum with SMB/SME’s but also with the Enterprise, even if market projections through to 2008/9 are still conservative.
• Data Storage Management, Virtualization and Tiered Storage: Still sizzling hot… IT & storage users in Frankfurt have said it again and again: Data Storage Management is still perceived as too complex, not always flexible and not standardised enough. Virtualization and Tiered Storage management systems are steps in the right direction for simplifying and helping with targeted storage resource utilization.
• SMB/SME: This business segment starts to have Enterprise-like data management requirements without the equivalent financial and personnel resources. So what do SMB/SME need? Cheaper products with feature/functions similar to high-end gears? Easier access to data storage services? Less complex and easily deployable management tools? All of it? Besides any cost considerations, complexity seems to be the killing factor for many SMB/E’s when dealing with data storage.

Looking into longer term challenges, several SNW-Europe keynote talks - including those by Jon Toigo and Steve Duplessie - pointed at two critical issues:

• Is data/information natively stored in any meaningful ways to allow any management and business applications to leverage it directly? In most cases it is not and many extra software layers are required to add contextual data to data. So clearly that’s a complex area to review.
• Can Information be shared, distributed and utilised within and/or between enterprises whilst preserving its integrity and its consistency across application and business domains? Well many researchers are scratching their heads about this, and this goes beyond any data storage considerations into services management and business models. It is in fact a major discussion with the Service-Oriented Infrastructure community.

In my previous blog I had introduced the topics I intended to discuss at SNW-Europe about the potential alignment of SOA, Grid and storage management for future SNIA activities. The feedback from most conference attendees was positive and highlighted that the storage industry at large should better link its efforts with other IT layers to further integrate and coordinate information & infrastructure management tools. A direction that needs to be explored by SNIA and allies.
I would also like to highlight that SNW-Europe was the opportunity for the Storage Networking Industry Association Europe to thank a great industry leader and contributor when its Chairman (now ex-) Paul Talbut decided to step down from his leadership role.

I told you:
it was a thrilling event! I can’t wait for SNW-Europe 2007!

Here is a set of buzz-words and acronym that have been over-hyped and often used out-of-context by IT industry “wonderfullists”. So using them together may look like an odd move. However, there seem to be some emerging and interesting convergence points (say synergy if you want) between these domains or at least some complementariness. Here’s a quick overview of how they could play together:

SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) is a popular methodology that uses standards such as Web Services, which allows organisation to build more flexible IT infrastructures that respond more adequately to changing business needs.

SOA’s are considered by many industry experts and by an increasing number of IT users that it allows a better tie between business processes and IT whilst introducing greater flexibility and agility as to how Enterprises applications can respond to changing requirements at a business domain level. This is enabled by SOA re-designed applications based on re-usable modules matching business process components. On the technical side, more flexibility is gained by a looser coupling of resources required to run autonomous services. More transparency is also enabled as services and required resources get identified and accessed with less location restrictions.   

Grid, first adopted for performance-demanding scientific applications in its compute oriented form, is increasingly thought as a generic architecture model to provision, on-demand, virtualized IT resources (application, compute power, data, network, storage…) inside and across Business/IT domains in order to execute an IT function. New Grids are also leveraging Web-Services.

Several IT experts and IT users have started to highlight the convergence points between SOA and Grid. Alan Goldstein
– Managing Director, Head of Technology for the Bank of New-York – was stressing earlier on this year in a BankTech article that “In the area of SOAs, the grid is the ideal platform on which to execute services because of its ability to virtualize the actual execution of the service away from the physical host on which the service is to be executed.”. Other industry Grid experts also explain that both SOA and Grid are architectural styles that support service-orientation, one for business processes and applications and the other one for the infrastructure (e.g. GridToday article with Matt Haynos). Many SOA and Grid articles point at the Web-Services layers has been the crucial tactical stack to get IT clients connected to Grid Middleware and SOA applications modules. No doubts that the security layers of Web-Services will play an important role in the success of Grids and SOA. The Oracle Grid Index also shows common adoption trends between SOA and Grid by early adopters across geographies and business verticals.

So where’s storage in this newly defined IT space? Networked Storage solutions, made of small or big iron, network gears and management software, are designed to improve the overall management of storage resources. As a result storage networking solutions are now at the heart of most data centres, allowing optimised storage resource utilisation and data
protection policies, commonly taking care of mission critical applications data repositories. So what? Well talking to IT experts and IT users that have experienced the deployment of Grid, I hear that their common headache is about data and storage resource management in Grid. If even if several vendors have optimised the use of storage resources for their own Grid applications, there is a lack of coordination and specification to allow Grid management standards (e.g. GGF OGSA [pdf]) and data storage management standards to leverage each other. This is very much amplified in a heterogeneous environment. As mentioned in a previous blog, SNIA has started an initiative to start exploring the gaps between data storage and Grid management standards to address these issues. As part of a response to SNIA’s interests in Grid, the Open Grid Forum (OGF) has launched a new Storage Networking Community Group to help addressing common Grid and Storage industry priorities. SOA adopters are also asking for Enterprise data management solutions and best practises adapted to their services environments. If application and service executions are distributed dynamically, information & data access will need to “follow” the execution & distribution model in order to reach the management efficiency level required for each application. Combined and/or coordinated grid and data storage management can possibly start addressing SOA adopters’ data management challenges if they become well enough integrated to avoid any on-going
compatibility or lack of content issues.

So whilst SOA and Grid adoption rates are still relatively lower than many be of you would expect (from 0 to approximately 20%) with significant differences between verticals and geographies (e.g. in the Oracle Grid Index), these complementary architectures will very likely penetrate data centres as more flexibility and business alignment get imposed on IT by business & finances managers. So data storage solutions and standards need to evolve to address such data centre transformations. But we need more detailed requirements to understand the technology development directions precisely… this is why I will be talking about this exciting subject on behalf of SNIA at SNW Europe and SNW Australia in September! I hope to see you there!

After a short break, I was privileged last week to support a worldwide delegation of SNIA leaders in Singapore and Bangalore. I had not been to these cities for a long time, too long I guess. This SNIA tour was a great opportunity to meet with CIO’s, Officials, Storage Professionals and representatives of the local press.

In Singapore I was impressed by the overall efforts of IT professionals to use IT technologies and IT skills to not only empower businesses but also to improve Singaporeans’ everyday life and professional developments. In a discussion with
Dr Tan Geok Leng of IDA, we were given an introduction to the ambitious IT plan of Singapore for 2015 (PDF), guaranteeing homes and businesses access to amazing personal services and generating more IT jobs opportunities. For example, IDA’s experts are trying to figure out how they could improve access to Internet information for Singaporeans (and probably for a good portion of south-east Asia) by hosting locally mirrors of internet data repositories…No doubts that the Storage experts of SNIA liked that story! Another example is the financial incentives for IT professionals of
Singapore to follow trainings that are officially recognised by IDA’s education programs. The SNIA South-Asia  team has started discussions with Singapore’s IDA to possibly include the SNIA SNCP in those programs; this would be just another great support for this base-level training for storage engineers that is also included in Hitachi Data Systems’ education services.

CIO’s and IT professionals of Singapore as well the local press confirmed the significant economic growth of the ASEAN area and the significant investment of SMB/SME in storage networking solutions, as previously noticed in a recent report from AMI Partners (PDF). I had a chance to discuss this market trend in a TV interview with Channel News Asia as well as the strong impact of regulations such as SoX or more locally the Limitation Act, Records Retention Act or the Evidence Act on data management practises.

The Singapore journalists we met were pleased to have access to a vendor-neutral forum with the re-positioning of the SNIA South-Asia chapter to discuss storage market topics outside any vendor’s or analyst’s context.
      

The next hop got me in Bangalore: what a change, what a transformation! This south Indian city is truly enjoying a major growth in many areas, with significant investments from major IT firms, and with giant traffic jams! The local daily reported that 5 majors IT companies had already invested over $1B in India with a strong portion for the Bangalore area. The storage Indian market is very much aligned with south-Asian trends, but the last IDC numbers tell us that India is out growing all other ASEAN countries traditionally included in APAC market reports. At the CxO conference organised by SNIA-India, now an independent regional affiliate of SNIA, we heard that many Indian industry segments are investing in storage: Telcos, Government, Healthcare, Oil&Gas, Art & Entertainment (Bollywood & digital movie studios) as well as SMB/SME. Multi-PBs storage projects are not rare anymore in India. 

Technical education seems also to remain a high priority in a region where many businesses around R&D outsourcing are being developed. The SNIA India press conference highlighted a strong interest in the convergence and commonalities between the Enterprise storage market and the emerging Home storage market. A possible intersection of these 2 markets is already defined by Telco or Internet providers proposing services to store and/or protect data. There seemed to be consensus within the CxO conference audience that privacy management and regulations will fuel many debates related to home information storage in the future.

Bangalore has lots of IT talents: probably one of the highest PhD densities per square meter! My meeting with SNIA India members was really re-energizing as they demonstrated such enthusiasm and determination to support the growth of the storage business in India through new SNIA programs in India, including IT professional trainings, support for storage standard developments, technical demonstrations at the IIIT of Bangalore and storage-user programs.       

Before I forget, one more word on one of my favourite topics: Grid! Both Singapore and Bangalore IT professionals have expressed strong interests in Grid Computing and the challenges to manage data & storage in such environments. Singapore is also hosting a separate National Grid project.

A big thank to my colleagues Ricky Fun as well as Atul Sood and his team for helping me to better understand the business trends of their respective areas. It was a great week!

I have heard and read some “interesting” comments regarding the recent announcement by 5 SNIA members companies (EMC, HP, Sun, Symantec and Hitachi Data Systems) about the SMI-S Advanced Services. Many of these comments were highly speculative and not often reflecting the approach the 5 vendors decided to take. This announcement got nick-named “Anti-Aperi” or even “Anti-IBM”…but again that’s not the case and missing the point of this announcement.

So what is this all about? Fairly simple: Managing storage resources remains a challenging exercise for many IT departments, especially for those working in heterogeneous environments; i.e. most of them. Standards like SNIA SMI-S do help to provide management tools with multi-vendors management capabilities; however its development & adoption cycles by vendors and users are longer than initially anticipated, creating somehow a need to accelerate the next development steps for SMI-S, leveraging the significant efforts from SNIA and the Storage Management Forum.

SNIA has provided a good framework for SMI-S to become a device-level interface with the right abstraction layer for modelling, discovering and controlling multi-vendor storage network equipment. However storage users have also told the storage vendors that management functions need to be more homogeneous across the board, possibly beyond storage, with more common management features/functions. I.e. SMI-S need to provide reference building blocks for advanced management features, transitioning SMI-S in to a system level interface. Benefits for vendors, ISV and users will include the quicker delivery of management services for heterogeneous resources, closer to business application requirements. Clearly this announcement is here to boost the discussion around the future of SMI-S.

So what about coding or code contribution(s)? Well before any coding you need strong specifications, especially if you seriously think about providing reference elements. SNIA can look in to the distribution model for a reference code at a later stage. Right now, besides organizational talks, the focus of this effort will be on the specification objectives and content. No rush to coding…

So if this announcement shares some goals with what Aperi had announced, the intended path and framework (SNIA) for this effort is indeed different. All SNIA members are invited to join us!

Anybody visiting Beijing these days
would realize that major restructuring efforts are underway in PRC. Last week at SNW-China conference in the Kerry Centre of Beijing, I had the opportunity to witness and discuss the interest of Chinese IT professionals in Data Storage solutions.

With a fast growing economy in public and private sectors (e.g. Telecoms, Energy…) that benefits Chinese and foreign businesses, PRC is facing a rapid evolution of its IT infrastructure including data storage in order to scale, secure and protect all tools to access and manage business information. The 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing are also perceived locally as great business and technical motivations to demonstrate the ineluctable changes of IT infrastructures in China. InformationWeek has recently reported that IT spending in China will rise to US$142.3 billion this year, a 21 percent increase compared with last year and three and a half times greater than the rest of the world. As such China is expected to become the third largest IT and communications spender by 2009.

SNW-Beijing highlighted that in many ways the storage market trends in China echo what happened and is still happening in more mature storage market places such as US or Europe: tough TCO/ROI objectives, IT consolidation, Virtualization, Security are amongst top concerns of IT managers in PRC – no surprise here. The difference with other regions is that such IT infrastructure transformations have to happen in a much shorter timescale. Not only the very (very) centralized IT legacy systems have to grow and comply with new business expansion requirements (scalability, data protection plans…), but the IT Chinese market has to empower local SMB/SME to benefit from such IT changes, throughout the country. So strong product foundations to scale out and protect data as well as a reliable channels network will be key to succeed in PRC. 

I was also pleased to see the SNIA China continuing their efforts to educate Chinese IT professionals about the benefits of storage networks through a series of great tutorials and live demonstrations. Congratulations to my colleague Will Hsu in
Beijing for joining SNIA-China’s leadership team.