Features - Enterprise Data Insights:

IBM STORAGE: BLUE-SKY PROJECTS BECOME BIG BLUE PRODUCTS
By William Fellows, the451.com

IBM has lifted the lid on three of the more important storage technologies that it's currently working on. IBM fellow and Storage Systems Institute director Jai Menon describes them as autonomic storage (which has specific software and hardware objectives), grid-enabling StorageTank for use in data or storage grids, and extending IBM Global Services' block virtualization managed storage service.

IMPACT ASSESSMENT

The message

IBM is serious about the commercial implementation of virtualization and storage management, and is working on future technologies at all market points –software (SAP), hardware (Ice Cube), solution (StorageTank), services (extending IGS managed storage) and research and development (grid-enabling StorageTank).

Competitive landscape

There are plenty of companies working on virtualization mechanisms like StorageTank, including HP and Sun. EMC's approach is focused on automating storage, with virtualization as one component. Hitachi, Fujitsu Softek, CA, Veritas and a clutch of ISVs are all working toward the same broad goal. But none has described in so much detail any plan to develop application- and device-specific storage automation such as the SAP and Ice Cube projects.

The assessment

By lifting the lid on a clutch of new storage projects, IBM achieves a number of things. It continues to be seen as pushing the envelope. Talking about SAP and products that can be seen and tried out (Ice Cube) lends more commercial credibility to real-world implementations of storage management and virtualization. It delivers further momentum to the overall autonomic computing strategy. And it maintains a sense of thought leadership to which rivals will be reacting and responding.

Autonomic storage: SAP Autonomic storage dovetails with IBM's other autonomic computing developments, such as its eLiza self-managing and self-healing software. Autonomic computing is analogous with the autonomic nervous system, which is at the heart of all organisms, the purpose of which is to keep us alive. Autonomic storage means reducing the number of people required to run storage systems by developing automated, policy-based storage operations and reducing the total cost of ownership.

There are three components to IBM's autonomic storage activities. First is what Menon calls "hands-free SAP installation." Under way for nine months, the aim of the project is to remove from database administrators (DBAs) the timeconsuming task of configuring the storage an SAP installation requires.

Menon explains that when SAP tables are created, a DBA has to manually specify which disks they are written to, whether it is striped and a string of other parameters. The DBAs are effectively managing storage, not administering databases. SAP has 5,000 table spaces.

IBM wants the storage system itself to configure the table space required, by using predefined policies. It wants the storage system to be able to extend table spaces automatically so that when they run out of space the system doesn't have to be brought down so more can be allocated. It is also working on a dynamic query optimizer. Typically, search and query patterns are established at the initial implementation of an application. Only when users complain about search performance time does anyone typically look at reconfiguring search patterns, and yet the software and hardware configuration of the application will often be quite different from when the application went live.

Autonomic storage: bricks The hardware element of IBM's autonomic storage strategy is the so-called Ice Cube, a brick containing 12 2.5-inch hard drives offering a total of 1.2TB RAID storage, 1GB RAM, an Intel processor and an 8- port switch. The bricks can be stacked in a 3x3x3 formation, 27 in a block, offering 32TB total storage. The bricks are connected by iSCSI. A 'cold rail' water pipe cools the densest configuration, but this is the "most aggressive" design, says Menon.

IBM is also working on air-cooled versions, but Menon believes that, given the heat generated by newer-generation CPUs and the dissipation required, that water cooling may well come back into fashion. The alternative will be "gale force winds," to cool systems sufficiently, he says.

IBM is already touting the brick form factor as the successor to blade architectures, but that's a long way from being the case. However, bricks will offer 10 times the density of blades, Menon believes. He says IBM is already working on a storage blade and is thinking about developing prototype server bricks and StorageTank metadata controller bricks.

Autonomic storage: StorageTank The third element of autonomic storage is the out-of-band StorageTank technology itself. Already described in other reports, StorageTank is IBM's much-delayed virtualization technology, which uses a metadata controller as a directory of data location and can accommodate SAN blocks or NAS files.

Menon admits StorageTank didn't have an easy rite of passage, and its progress will now be scrutinized closely. But at one time Menon had only eight developers working on the technology and no product team assigned to it. After Tivoli picked up the ball and then dropped it, IBM gave StorageTank to a new storage software group under Mike Zisman. Menon says it almost never happens that a research team is impressed with the product team assigned to commercialize a project, but this time it is.

Grids and StorageTank A second storage project under way is to grid-enable StorageTank. The idea is to implement a layer on top of StorageTank (including integrating the Globus toolkit) so that it looks like a Globus utility. Then any Globus application can use StorageTank to find files regardless of location. StorageTank allows an instance of a file to be copied to satisfy a user request; it doesn't cache lots of instances all over the network. Using a standard, such as OGSA and GridFTP, to achieve this would also enable thirdparty virtualization engines to be used (seamlessly) in conjunction with each other to find and deliver files.

IBM says it's already prototyped a configuration with StorageTank running in Intel facilities in CA, New York and Haifa, which is being used to pull files in grid-type arrangements.

A third project is to extend IBM Global Services' block virtualization managed storage service, so that it can find and allocate storage that meets the performance and size requirements of an application automatically.

Competition A chief constraint IBM has faced for many years was its inability to turn the great inventions in its research labs into technologies and products it could sell. Louis Gerstner changed all of that, and Menon estimates that between 60% and 70% of technology under development in IBM labs now makes it to market. Any more would mean it wasn't being aggressive enough in its goals.

There are plenty of companies working on virtualization mechanisms like StorageTank, including HP and Sun. EMC's approach is focused on automating storage, with virtualization as one component. Hitachi, Fujitsu Softek, CA, Veritas and a clutch of ISVs are all working toward the same broad goal.

But none has described in so much detail any plan to develop application - and device-specific storage automation such as the SAP and Ice Cube projects. Whether IBM can establish its brick technology as a blade successor will depend on how successful its forthcoming BladeCenter systems prove to be – and how widely adopted blade configurations are by the industry at large.

Courtesy of the451.com