Sprint, Back In The WiMax Saddle?

I’ve been following the voluminous press around Sprint’s WiMax partnership announcement today. I’ve been following the news mostly to see if I’m missing anything, and it seems I’m not. It looks like a good news/bad news story for end users of the service. The good news is that there is a solid consortium around Sprint’s Xohm initiative which, until now, seemed increasingly more promise than substance. With the most recent dissolution of the agreement with Clearwire and subsequent deployment delays, I was beginning to think we’d see LTE before WiMax coverage that Sprint had promised. In short, it looks like a solid team – albeit with some fluffy marketing language. Intel’s roadmap was already committed to supplying WiMax chipsets in its devices as a way to drive up sticker price with a small increase in BOM cost, regardless of the network build out.

The bad news: this does nothing to get Sprint closer to reaching it’s committed 100M PoPs with the Xohm service by year’s end as stated in mid-2007. No doubt this will raise questions on the longevity of Sprint as a whole and some doubts around how soon any of us will see Xohm service in North America. It’s also been suggested that the backhaul Sprint has in place (mostly T1) is underpowered for the throughput the Xohm service will need to backhaul once it’s up and running with a decent number of users. Microwave backhaul is an answer to this, but not something that Sprint seems to have invested heavily in.

So, for now it reads to me like a lot of good intentions which do nothing to diminish the daunting task of building out the network and it’s requisite backplane to make Xohm a reality at the level of expectations Sprint and others have built around WiMax. New company or not, what matters now is execution, and the clock is ticking before WiMax begins to lose spotlight to true 4G technologies like LTE.

By Chris Silva

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Help Set Energy Star Standards?

Everyone wants to make their data centers more efficient and gain recognition for their efforts but we’re lacking the benchmarks to shoot for. Well, here’s your chance to help change that. On March 20th the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) kicked off a data collection process to help create Energy Star™ ratings for data centers. Energy Star, the best known energy efficiency identifier, is respected as a mark of credibility for products and services that deliver superior energy efficiency. While mainly a consumer mark, the EPA recently published a draft standard for servers , its first serious foray into providing enterprise product and service guidance. While extending Energy Star to your corporate data center, consumed only by your own company, may not have customer impact, it has corporate brand value that matters to the C-level executives. It will also have differentiating value when choosing outsourced service providers.

While the US Green Building Council has now extended its LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) guidelines to data centers and awarded the first several such distinctions, the EPA is taking a more inclusive approach; one that takes the best of what you are doing today to drive efficiency and captures it into standards everyone can adopt. The EPA hopes to collect enough information from a vast number of data centers in order to develop rating models.

And this effort couldn’t come at a better time as nearly every IT solution is touting its “greenness” and choosing the wrong solutions or technologies could simply result in increased capital expense when the opex line of power is rising steadily. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, reported in 2007 that the amount of electricity used by servers in the US in 2005 was 23 billion kWh; add in cooling and auxiliary power-consuming equipment and the total jumped to 45 billion kWh. The total estimated bill: $2.7 billion. The EPA states that power costs have risen by 30% since 2005, making this total over $3.5B this year. What percent of this bill will you pay in 2008?

The value of any standard is directly related to the ease with which it can be implemented; that reason alone should be motivation to participate in this exercise. LEEDs for data centers require such significant changes to traditional data center design that it will mainly be applicable for enterprises undertaking greenfield data center builds. Energy Star for data centers must expand to work with existing facilities to achieve broad success. To participate, download the necessary forms and get more information by clicking here.

By James Staten

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Cisco To Enter Femto-Fray?

ThinkPanmure released a bulletin this week speculating that networking stalwart Cisco had plans to enter the femtocell fray via the potential acquisition of equipment vendor iP.access.

If the plans prove true, is this another Navini move for Cisco? I’d say not. An acquisition like this would symbolize a new vector in the vendor’s network equipment strategy. This move would take Cisco equipment in a place where it has not (at least officially) gone before; extending the cellular networks that are of increasing importance to businesses, especially those with a high percentage of mobile workers.

I say “not officially” since Linksys routers are, at this moment, powering Wi-Fi calling for many users of T-Mobile’s HotSpot@Home UMA Service, currently on offer in the US. The speculation of a Cisco femtocell acquisition points to the ready availability of dual-mode phones and the proven nature of UMA. While I’ve written multiple times in the past about the availability and attractiveness of a dual-mode calling solution, this is most often in the context of an organization looking to drive higher returns from its WLAN investment. The use of dual-mode handsets in organizations presumes a widely available and properly deployed WLAN solution. Based on anecdotal data, we know that this not the case in most organizations.

Going a step further, Cisco’s partnerships with vendors such as Nokia to empower handsets to make use of the WLAN for cheaper, single device calling inside the enterprise do not offer WLAN to Cellular handoff at the moment, so it is reasonable to believe that Cisco is focused on solutions that will drive a greater portion; femtocells would accomplish this, UMA would not. In the end, Cisco buying a femtocell concern would:

• Ensure that more voice traffic from carriers is made IP-ready, if not pushed entirely to an IP-network, which could spur IP-based networking investment from carriers – good for Cisco,
• Create a force behind IP-backhauled femtocells making them a more attractive choice over UMA for carriers already reluctant to support Dual-Mode devices, and,
• Allow Cisco to have another point of entry to the consumer’s home, adding to its Linksys router and switch offerings and its Scientific-Atlanta set-top-boxes.

For IT this could add up to a groundswell of support for IP-based femtocells offering solutions for organizations seeking deeper penetration of cellular coverage. The solution would eschew the potential choice-limiting move to dual-mode handsets, avoid the potential support headaches of familiarizing users with WLAN-based calling and handover and avoid carrier changeover to find a voice providers that can reliably offer service in all campus areas where it is needed. Lastly, the consumer-lead on femtocells, which seems the likely route, indicates a low-cost network augmentation product that boosts cellular coverage; after all a handful of IP-based femtocells have to be cheaper than investing in a distributed antenna system.

By Chris Silva

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Chip Wars Renewed?

In recent years, AMD has struggled to remain relevant in the commercial PC as it has competed against Intel, the market share leader and gold-standard in processor performance. Today, companies often only choose AMD for its lower initial acquisition costs — which run approximately $50 to $75 cheaper than Intel’s, although you’re sacrificing performance to get there. This approach of narrowly undercutting Intel has not worked well for AMD, as it has now seen six straight quarters of net loss.

On Monday, however, AMD announced a major new initiative it calls AMD Business Class — a renewed effort to better compete in the commercial segment across both desktops and laptops. Targeting SMBs, the public sector, and large enterprises, AMD Business Class is its renewed focus on a historically weaker area than the consumer market. Initially, AMD is touting the availability of three new AMD-powered desktops: HP’s dc5850 and dx2450, Fujitsu Siemens Computers’ Esprimo E/P5625, and a refresh of Dell’s OptiPlex 740. The new processors are available in Athlon X2 dual-, Phenom X3 triple-, and Phenom X4 quad-cores and will try to keep pace with Intel’s Green IT initiatives with Energy Star 4.0 compliance.

AMD claims that the new processors will help minimize IT disruption through longer PC lifecycles, greater cross-generation compatibility, and a guarantee that this hardware will be available for the next 24 months as part of AMD's CSIP stable image program.  What is the net-net for IT Ops professionals? AMD now has a lower-cost alternative to Intel’s Stable Image Platform Program (SIPP), but with more processor options (Intel’s SIPP processor options are limited to Core2 Duo processors and Core2 Quad processors). So when IT Ops is told to cut spending, AMD Business Class is worth investigating.

This announcement is just a forerunner to the real excitement around AMD’s upcoming mobile chipset, codenamed Puma, which is scheduled to ship at the close of this quarter. Puma, which is built on the Griffin processor, will be the first big challenger to the Intel Centrino mobile processor. Stay tuned as things will likely get more interesting between Intel and AMD, which will benefit businesses that clearly demand more competition and innovation from their component manufacturers.

By Benjamin Gray

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IBM Buys Diligent As Its Deduplication Anchor

On April 18^th, IBM announced its intent to acquire virtual tape library (VTL) and deduplication vendor Diligent Technologies. For IBM, Diligent is a good fit. The company offers both mainframe and open systems virtual tape libraries and they are a pioneer of deduplication. However, IBM already offers a market leading mainframe VTL based on its own intellectual property and an open systems VTL based on FalconStor technology — although the open systems VTL has very limited adoption — so there is also a lot of overlap. Because Diligent is a software solution, IBM can quickly integrate Diligent with any of its storage systems and bring new VTLs to market relatively quickly. It’s very likely that IBM will in fact pursue this route so it can bring an inline deduplicating VTL to market as quickly as possible.

The result of this acquisition? Good news for customers, who will have a choice between two open system VTLs, the FalconStor-based VTL that has much broader ecosystem interoperability and better integration with physical tape and the Diligent VTL that is focused on tape elimination. In the short-term, this will create some confusion for customers, so it’s important to know which camp you fall into — tape integration or tape elimination. You also have to fully embrace deduplication with Diligent; the technology is inline, you can’t selectively decide which backups to dedupe, and all your backups will be deduplicated. Inline deduplication isn’t right for everyone or for all backups. Also, before investing in a non-Diligent VTL, customers should ask IBM for a roadmap that shows at least one year of planned product updates.

In the long-term, IBM will try to find additional opportunities for taking advantage of Diligent’s deduplication technology, either as embedded technology or as a deduplicating gateway to any of its storage systems. This is ultimately a good thing for customers; storage capacities are growing at 50% per year, sometimes 100% per year, and most of this data is redundant and it doesn’t need to be stored on expensive, high performance storage. It would be nice to store this avalanche of data more cost effectively in the future. Customers can expect about 10-15X reduction in data using deduplication, sometimes more depending on the data set.

By Stephanie Balaouras

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Xiotech Zigs When Other Storage Vendors Zag

Bucking the ‘hardware is a commodity’ trend seen widely in the storage industry these days, emerging vendor Xiotech recently announced their Emprise line of storage arrays based on a modular component called Intelligent Storage Element (ISE), housing drives in sealed DataPacs designed to dampen vibration, prolong lifespan, and reduce the incidence of “no fault errors.”

The ISE relies on a custom enclosure architecture that mounts drives in an opposing fashion to cancel vibration and uses advanced materials and design to improve cooling and IOPS performance. While the drives inside are standard Seagate HDDs, they use specialized firmware to allow for advanced error management and give ISEs the ability to manage around errors, bypassing bad sectors without having to swap out individual failed drives. This has the effect of increasing the size of the base unit of storage, from the individual drive to the ISE, allowing storage admins to spend their time on higher level data management while base level functions like striping, drive, and spindle management are automated.

Technology features aside, the Xiotech solution drives business impact for users. Because of the improved reliability of the new architecture, the vendor offers a five year warranty standard with Emprise arrays, contrasted with typical warranties of three years in the storage industry. This relieves customers from the burden of costly and complex migrations after only three years of service, or the prospect of paying around 15% of total array purchase price for annual maintenance — either of which can add up very quickly in terms of overall IT expenditures. Combine this cost avoidance with the claims for easier management for an ISE based system and the result is a significant reduction of overall operating expense related to storage. Xiotech, a relatively small fish in the ocean of sharks that is the storage industry, gains a serious product differentiator with this announcement — one that can directly translate into reduced deployment and management costs for storage; a timely attribute in this time of shrinking budgets and ever growing data.

By Andrew Reichman

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IBM Expands Replication Capabilities With Acquisition Of FilesX

On April 10, 2008, IBM announced its intent to acquire FilesX, a small startup that offers server-based replication and continuous data protection technology. The acquisition will become part of the Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) family of products.

This acquisition will help IBM Tivoli fill a gap in their current portfolio of offerings for data protection. The vendor currently offers Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM), which is one of the leading enterprise-class backup software applications, and Tivoli Continuous Data Protection for Files, a product mostly used to protect PCs. In addition to traditional backup to tape or disk, TSM can also manage Microsoft Virtual Snapshots (VSS) and its own IBM storage-based snapshot technology in support of instant restore or snapshot assisted backup. But the company didn’t really have an offering for customers who wanted something that was better than backup but not as expensive as storage-based replication, this is where FilesX comes in. With FilesX, IBM can now address the recovery requirements of small enterprises that can’t afford storage-based replication. They can also meet the recovery requirements of large enterprises that want to protect more servers within their company with a more affordable replication offering as well as servers at the remote office.

To be really successful, IBM will need to integrate the management of FilesX into TSM. Customers are no longer interested in having multiple point products for the continuum of data protection options; they want to manage backups, snapshots, replication, and continuous data protection (CDP) from a single console. If achieved, IBM will compete head-on with offerings from CommVault and may surpass the current capabilities of Symantec NetBackup and EMC NetWorker. It’s unfortunate that IBM’s storage-based replication technologies are managed from within IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center; integrating the management of this functionality would make TSM the one stop for any IBM protection technology.

By Stephanie Balaouras

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EMC Bolsters Data Protection Reporting Capabilities With Acquisition Of Partner WysDM

News emerged Friday regarding EMC’s acquisition of data protection reporting software maker WysDM . The move is not entirely surprising due to several years of partnering arrangements between the two companies. WysDM, the New York City based independent software vendor, brings significant enterprise credibility gleaned from a Wall Street pedigree, with several founders coming not from Silicon Valley, but from the technology organizations of major investment banks. WysDM offers a strong portfolio of backup and primary data reporting tools — an area that is sorely lacking in most data centers today. With all storage environments growing at a significant pace, companies need to know how much data resides in what store, what the backup and replication scheme is for each piece of data, and must have the ability to measure the performance of all of the elements of a complex data storage environment. In most environments, backup job success rates are abysmal, policies are nearly impossible to audit, the ability to meet backup windows are under severe pressure, and decision-makers generally don’t have the tools to identify what the bottleneck truly is.

WysDM offers tools to assist with all of these problems, and EMC is likely to put them in the hands of more customers. Symantec has offered the Backup Reporter module for their NetBackup product for more than a year, and CommVault has come to challenge the big players in this market due in no small part to advanced data reporting capabilities. EMC’s Legato and IBM Tivoli have lagged in this area, and it therefore makes sense for EMC to take on the WysDM product, tried and tested as it is in EMC environments. This move will likely prompt IBM to take a good hard look at acquiring WysDM competitor Bocada who they have partnered with. EMC needs to proceed carefully with integration to avoid diluting the strong WysDM interoperability with data protection suites offered by Symantec and IBM.

What is the upside for IT professionals? This is likely to be good for both EMC and consumers as data protection reporting is a key function, directors of enterprise storage environments would be remiss not to have this high on their priority list. If EMC manages this acquisition well, the vendor will use the WysDM technology to give a shot in the arm to the reporting capabilities of their overall storage resource management portfolio, which continues to lag behind that of competitors.

By Andrew Reichman

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Windows Mobile 6.1 Announced At CTIA

CTIA, one of the wireless industry’s biggest conferences of the year, is happening this week in Las Vegas and Microsoft is garnering the most headlines. Why? It officially announced Windows Mobile 6.1, which is expected to hit the market "within the next couple of months." Forrester received a hands-on preview of it a couple of weeks ago and we couldn’t help but leave the meeting feeling like Microsoft’s playing catch-up to superior handheld device user experience providers like Apple and RIM. Still, it’s a good sign that Microsoft is focused on simplifying the user experience moving forward.

Microsoft has been heads down for years keeping IT happy and it’s been pretty successful given that 54% of the 531 North American businesses we recently surveyed support Windows Mobile-powered smartphones. However, Microsoft is now facing pressure to improve the user experience so that it’s pleasant for workers’ personal lives as well as their professional lives. The biggest changes that Windows Mobile 6.1 will bring include a more PC-like browsing experience, threaded SMS conversations, improved search, and simpler navigation (e.g., an improved home page and one-tap connection to a wireless network).

These experience improvements are clearly evolutionary rather than revolutionary. But Windows Mobile 6.1 proves two things:

1. Microsoft can deliver a new mobile operating system on schedule approximately once per year.
2. Bringing a better browsing experience to handhelds is going to be a big step for Microsoft and one that its users will embrace. Unfortunately, existing users will have to wait until Q3 to upgrade their browser and those looking to replace their devices altogether will have to wait for the end of the year before they come standard with the new IE Mobile browser.

By Benjamin Gray

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Startup Ocarina Networks Proposes Ground-Breaking Data Footprint Reductions

I met with Ocarina Networks founder Carter George for the first time this week and was genuinely excited about the dramatic data reduction that their cutting edge technology promises. Ocarina aims to reduce the number of bytes that go into file storage through a combination of data deconstruction, deduplication, and compression. Deconstruction breaks complex file types into basic components, deduplication spots block level similarities and replaces them with hashes, and compression squeezes the de-duplicated components beyond what traditional compression techniques can with more complex whole files.

The heavy lifting is done by an out-of-band appliance that applies post processing techniques to create size reduced shadow copies of data with “bit for bit consistency checks” to prevent corruption or loss of data. The key to the approach is a “file type aware approach,” using specialized algorithms and techniques for files like images or text. George claims that the process can reduce the size of most data types by 10X and can even yield a 3X reduction on JPEGs that typically see little benefit from deduplication techniques. For web 2.0 firms that are looking at growing their storage by multiple TB a day, a capability like this would be game changing by reducing their growth costs by leaps and bounds.

There is considerable market resistance to deduplication of primary data, where the industry has long relied on creation of multiple copies to guarantee the protection and availability of critical data. If you are an IT operations professional in the banking or financial services sector, don’t expect your peers to adopt Ocarina’s cutting edge approach any time soon. But, if your firm has less stringent SLAs around data loss and availability and faces staggering growth from day-to-day operations, this could be the missing link that allows you to stay ahead of competitors and offers more rich services to customers without breaking the bank on storage capacity. I can’t speak to the viability of technology approach yet, but suffice it to say that if they can deliver what they promise, this could dramatically shake up the enterprise data storage world and move the industry along the path to keeping up with the astonishing but widely accepted forecasts for growth of file data.

By Andrew Reichman

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