The CEO's Corner

Customer Spotlight

Wipe Away Those Tiers

Application Mapping at its Finest

Protecting Your Strategic Assets

The CEO's Corner

IBM's POWER 7 (P7) continues to impress and the feedback we are getting is extremely positive. Datatrend is hosting future briefings (under NDA/Confidentiality Agreements) for those aspects of P7 not yet released. While IBM plans are subject to change without notice, projections IBM published earlier in the year seem to be on target. As clients begin to adopt the advanced functions of AIX 6, IBM is working diligently to unveil AIX 7. The pace of POWER and AIX development is at a high level and improvements in price performance and advanced functions seem to be expected to continue for an extended period of time.

IBM's XIV™ continues to gain acceptance and the product set is evolving in a material way. While this enterprise class storage solution has been out for about 2 years, IBM has improved levels of performance materially since the initial release. You can be updated via a Datatrend managed briefing tailored for your organization, and/or through events that will soon be published at www.datatrend.com.

In this issue of TrendSetter, we have included an update on BMC's Atrium Discovery and Dependency Mapping (ADDM) product, formerly known as Tideway Foundation. IT organizations need to be able to identify assets and how they are configured. Today the number of IT components, their configurations, relationships among them, and the constant changes introduced by business and technology needs make manual tracking difficult. It is impractical and costly to conduct manual audits and maintain IT service relationship and application dependency mapping information. Discovery automates the process of populating and maintaining a CMDB. This is done by discovering IT hardware and software and creating instances of configuration items and relationships from the discovered data. A configuration item can be physical (such as a computer system), logical (such as an installed instance of a software program), or conceptual (such as a business service). BMC ADDM discovers network devices, enterprise applications, and business processes and then automatically generates impact relationships. Datatrend would be happy to help your organization secure a no cost, non obligatory evaluation of ADDM.

For those of you looking for something different to do in the summer, consider Minnesota. The summer weather is about as comfortable as it gets anywhere, there is the new home of the Minnesota Twins at Target Field, Mall of America, over 12,000 lakes, hiking trails, and of course headquarters of Datatrend Technologies! Please let us know if you will ever be in the area of our headquarters; we would like to host a lunch or dinner for you! Hope your summer is excellent in all respects!

Respectfully,

Mark Waldrep
CEO Datatrend Technologies
mark.waldrep@datatrend.com

Customer Spotlight

In this edition of TrendSetter, we are beginning a Customer Spotlight segment. This new feature provides one way to facilitate networking by and between appropriate Datatrend clients and partners, and a way for them to illuminate their offerings to the marketplace. Networking is a great way to develop new relationships, clients, and friends, and we hope this new segment will be of value to our readership. In this issue, our customer spotlight features one of Datatrend’s newest partners, RioRey™, Inc.

RioRey, Inc. designs and manufactures a family of products that provide automatic and comprehensive protection against Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. RioRey and Datatrend are partnering to provide integrated software/hardware solutions combining RioRey's DDoS mitigation software and the IBM BladeCenter platform to launch the new RG series protection platform for major Carriers, large Hosting Centers, Fortune 500 Enterprise customers and government organizations. RioRey's top end, RG20 product leads the market in throughput capability by filtering DDoS attack traffic at 29 million packets per second.

Learn more at www.riorey.com

Any Datatrend client can drop us a line (trendsetter@datatrend.com) and include an authorized communication that overviews your business, target market, and related information, plus your company logo. We will happily put all such qualified submissions into a review queue with the plan of publishing one each quarter.

Wipe Away Those Tiers

The XIV™ Storage System is shaking traditional tiered storage solutions with its revolutionary architecture.

With the combination of humble commodity hardware components, LINUX operating systems, and a stealth storage visionary technologist (Moshe Yanai), the XIV™ Storage System is going  “where no SATA has gone before”.

Ok, that’s the hype, but all joking aside … the truth is XIV™ has broken through barriers and boundaries which even the most skeptical of critics (storage administrators to CIOs), have brought forth.

In the early beginnings, IBM purchased the XIV™, then branded Nextra, storage appliance for a mere $300 million and positioned it as the solution for WEB 2.0 storage; or those applications which experience exponential growth rates from Megabytes to Petabytes in a short time span and utilize unstructured or semi-structured data, such as WebPages, presentations, documents, medical images, videos, and the like.

Both IBM and the market place have been pleasantly surprised

XIV™ has delivered well beyond the early “pigeon holed” typical ‘SATA’ drive Tiered Storage stereotype.

In fact, XIV™ is being rapidly adopted as a leading Tier-One (and Tier-all) solution. 
IBM reports more than 450 different customers and more than 1,000 units sold since their initial XIV™ roll-out in early 2008.

The market pipeline is filling fast with case studies, white papers, and customer testimonials of users who have replaced existing tier-one storage with XIV™.   A common theme among these users is the positive early experience where XIV™ was brought in for a specific purpose, such as archive or as an inexpensive test pool of storage, often at a tier-two level.  As the storage teams and internal user groups began to utilize the XIV™ architecture, additional workloads were tested.  Production databases and high I/O intensive workloads were added to the mix, (or more precisely, the XIV™ frame). A common occurrence was seen;  not only did XIV™ deliver as promised for the original workload, including the exceptionally easy management and administration and the simplistic virtualization, but most significant was the surprising consistent performance capability and scalability. And as dawn broke, the revelation became clear, ’Tier-one performance at lower tier pricing’. 

Perhaps this wasn’t the silver lining intended for an ‘enterprise’ storage sales organization, but what a ‘Cloud’ burst for the storage consumer. 

At last a storage architecture and solution which can eliminate the burden of manual placement and tuning, disk hot spots, unutilized capacity due to difficulty in reuse, reclamation or ineffectual allocations.  A storage architecture, which  can eliminate building pricing models for multiple “tiers” and added  storage services, such as copy services,  and replication .  A storage architecture with a consistently proven TCO story.  A storage architecture which can …” provide business benefits, making life simpler … “ **1

XIV™ Highlights 
The IBM XIV™ Storage System, architected in its entirety to provide high reliability and performance at strikingly low total cost of ownership brings a host of benefits to storage customers, including,

1. A single architecture providing a cost-effective and powerful solution for all storage needs
2. A fully virtualized, self-managed, self-healing system that balances loads perfectly at all times, optimizing capacity use and minimizing human intervention and error
3. No software licensing fees. Simple pricing includes all features, making purchasing simple and eliminating software licensing fees. There are no software licensing fees, neither upon initial purchase, nor over time when capacity is added
4. Simplified management through a simple graphical user interface (GUI) that minimizes storage management overhead
5. Built entirely of standard components, including low-cost, very high density slower rotation disks (VHDSR)
6. Enables non-disruptive changes to hardware and firmware, without affecting performance and without need for downtime
7. Full hardware redundancy lowers risk of failure to negligible levels
8. A single-tier platform based on a grid architecture, for easy scaling
9. Revolutionary snapshot technology improves and simplifies backup, software testing, and more

The IBM XIV™ Storage System is truly TCO Reinvented

Its ability to offer low TCO is the outcome of several inherent characteristics:

1. The system yields outstanding power, cooling, and space efficiencies per TB, due to its use of enterprise-class, very high density slower rotation (VHDSR) drives and optimization of disk capacity
2. Thin provisioning, powerful snapshot features, and easy management – all of which streamline system overhead – furthering to help reduce overall costs
3. XIV™ technology is scalable in all key aspects, including storage, interfaces, cache, CPU power, and internal bandwidth
4. Most enterprise systems on the market today scale in capacity only; the ability to increase performance with capacity is an XIV™ differentiator

Client Workload Highlights

1. Highly I/O intensive SAS Grid application performance testing, comparing XIV™ and NetApp storage architectures yielded a three-fold increase over the NetApp Storage solution.  The testing was conducted at a large financial institution, using client supplied data and a small host grid comprised of fourteen IBM HS22 blades. A sustained throughput rate of 5+ gigabytes was maintained. **2
2. A large public sector client migrated all workloads live without any service disruption, including GIS, Email, and Fire / Police Emergency support systems. Following migrations, the DBA and GIS support teams asked why they were experiencing a 30 to 40 percent throughput improvement in their respective applications.
3. Large SAP / Oracle user reduced:
1. CAPEX, acquiring 2 times more storage at 60 percent less the overall cost
2. Reduced backup time by 50 percent
3. Reduced key SAP / Oracle refresh processes from 8 hours on previous legacy storage to less than 15 minutes using XIV™

Datatrend is very excited to offer our customers one of the most successful storage products launched in recent memory.  With its many groundbreaking attributes, IBM XIV™ is creating a lot of buzz in corporate boardrooms and in the trade media.  XIV™ Storage System makes enterprise storage easier to manage, faster, and more secure….at the lowest possible overall cost. 

To learn more, contact a Datatrend representative today at 800-367-7472.

** 1 For more information, visit http://www.datatrend.com/tis-xiv-storage.html
** 2 Itzik Malach, Executive Vice President, Bank Leumi

Application Mapping at its Finest

Why Is Application Mapping Valuable?

Ten years ago, process and respect for application lifecycle were deeply ingrained into the corporate culture, and nobody would dare to make even the slightest change without filling out the proper forms, running the appropriate tests, and updating the associated documentation. Today legacy systems are a way of life. “Applications” often consist of Excel spreadsheets talking to Access97 databases, running on single-disk, single-power-supply workstations. Who is using them? What do they do? How much of our business is dependent upon them? And what happens if we disturb them?

Then there are the abandoned or forgotten servers scattered around the data center. Industry estimates show that up to 30 percent of an enterprise’s servers are obsolete, decommissioned or no longer in use but are still plugged in to something. Most customers would love to have the confidence to unplug these systems. And they could, provided the IT department could a) find them and b) figure out what they do.

Add to this scenario the fact that businesses in recent years have attempted to embrace new ways to look at systems displayed on IT platforms and relate those systems directly to the business functions they support. The business leader’s most pressing question has become, “how do I reduce the cost I am paying for my systems without sacrificing performance or agility?”

What businesses need is a complete map of their data center resources and application dependencies, and a way to quickly update that information. Today no data center stands still; change happens continuously. Even if you have fully documented the answers to your questions at the start of a project, by the time you move an application or system, something has very likely changed.

What Is Application Mapping?

The basic information for application dependency mapping exists in all configuration files, routing tables, and port allocation tables, as well as all the information that the different infrastructure components use to function effectively at runtime. Application dependency mapping (ADM) technology makes use of a kind of online reverse engineering that explores, analyzes and queries all the components supporting an application.

ADM gives you complete end-to-end visibility of all the system’s functions, including who is using it, how it is being used, and how often it is being used. This intelligence gives IT managers and business leaders new confidence in their ability to deal with systems that were previously thought to be hopelessly obscure. With a new understanding of the systems, new assessments regarding their criticality and upgradeability can be made with greater accuracy and little investment in time or money.

Some IT departments attempt to create relationship mapping manually, but this method has some inherent flaws. Like all things manual, it is subject to individual interpretation of how systems are related, and it is usually difficult and time consuming to achieve the depth and precision of information that an ADM program can provide.

An example of an ADM tool in the industry is BMC Software’s Atrium Discovery and Dependency Mapping (ADDM), formerly known as Tideway Foundation. A leading tool such as ADDM can provide the level of end-to-end visibility you need, however a tool alone is insufficient. Tools cannot identify your corporate standards, preferences, constraints or application ownership (and who has the knowledge and skill to test validate to the optimized target environment). The best approach is to supplement an ADM tool’s discovery data with the business perspective and best practices.

With the right expertise and Application Dependency Mapping technology you can optimize your infrastructure and realize many benefits, including:

• A better understanding of how applications are deployed in production. This directly affects release management. IT organizations can use this to validate application architectures and development with production before deployment.
  
  
• A better control of infrastructure and application changes. Companies that better understand their operational deployment can better evaluate and plan changes to it. They in turn can better control the impact application changes have on the infrastructure.
  
  
• A better way to consolidate infrastructure. Application mapping allows firms to understand which applications run on servers and how these servers depend on each other, enabling a more efficient and error-free server consolidation.
  
  
• A better planning of backup sites. Understanding the dependencies of critical applications leads directly to more efficient and error-free planning of disaster recovery sites for enterprises.
  
  
• A better understanding of vulnerabilities. Understanding where and how applications are deployed provides a better view of security risks due to infrastructure configurations.
  
  
• A more efficient set of management tools. For IT operation processes, such as provisioning and dynamic resource allocation, and incident and problem management processes, understanding the infrastructure components involved leads to a more efficient process.

In today’s business dynamic, IT organizations need to be able to quickly and easily identify assets and how they are configured in order to provide the information critical to today’s business decisions. The sheer number of IT components used today, their configurations, relationships, and the constant changes introduced by business and technology needs make manual tracking difficult, impractical and costly. Automated application mapping provides the accurate data businesses need today to make successful decisions for their future.

For more information about ADM tools and approaches to application mapping which meet the business objectives, consider speaking with an expert solution provider like Datatrend. We have years of experience in employing tools, analyzing data, consulting with clients, and optimizing many thousands of servers. We are especially adept at the BMC ADDM technology and can conduct a free demo any time. Plus, we tailor each assessment and project to the specific, unique enterprise.

Learn more about our approaches and technologies at http://www.datatrend.com/is-it-assessments.html.