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THE BUSINESS VALUE OF TECHNOLOGY JULY 23, 2012 Previous Next
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PLUS
Office 2013 built for sharing >>
Compliance in the cloud era >>
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VMware’s executive shuffle >>
Why IT outsourcing fails >>
Oracle vs. Salesforce in social >>
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New scale-out, solid-state, and cloud-integrated products may be
a better fit for companies than monolithic systems >>
By Kurt Marko
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CONTENTS THE BUSINESS VALUE OF TECHNOLOGY July 23, 2012 Issue 1,339
This all-digital issue of InformationWeek is part of our 10-year strategy to reduce the publication’s carbon footprint
COVER STORY
22 Compliance In The Cloud Era
Fundamental changes in the way companies use IT
services are changing the dynamics of compliance
12 Storage Innovation
New scale-out, solid-state,
and cloud-enabled products 3 Research And Connect
provide a flexible alternative InformationWeek’s in-depth reports, events, and more
to monolithic systems
4 CIO Profiles
Iron Mountain’s Tasos Tsolakis learned not to rely on big budgets
12 5 Global CIO
QUICKTAKES 10 VMware’s Exec Shuffle An IT exec takes a practical look at why IT outsourcing often fails
7 Office Gets Social EMC brings VMware closer,
Microsoft makes it easier pushes ahead with vision of
to store and share software-defined data center
documents on the Web 4
9 Buying Spree
Oracle and Salesforce.com
face off over social and
collaboration software
CONTACTS
28 Editorial Contacts 29 Business Contacts
informationweek.com 7 July 23, 2012 2

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CIOprofiles TASOS TSOLAKIS Iron Mountain
Title: Executive VP and mann, my first mentor at Bell Labs. He helped VISION
Chief Information and me focus on practical results and simplify plans One thing I’m looking to do better this
Global Services Officer and design. year: In the past year, we made significant in-
vestment in talent acquisition. This year will
Degrees: Virginia Tech, ON THE JOB stabilize the team by focusing on key deliver-
MS and Ph.D.; Wharton IT budget: $102 million ables and delivering on schedule for our key
Business School, MBA projects and initiatives.
Size of IT team: 480 employees
Leisure activity: Lesson learned from the recession: You can
Motorcycling Top initiatives: be more effective with less of a budget, still
>> Enterprise-wide implementation of Oracle, meeting your goals and delivering results.
Tech vendor CEO I using one system to streamline internal pro-
admire most: Sam CAREER TRACK cesses like travel, expenses, and employee What the federal government’s top
Palmisano of IBM How long at Iron Mountain: Almost two learning. technology priority should be: Make the
years at this provider of records management government more open—use technology to
Pet peeve: Reliance on and data backup services. >> Implementation of a human resource portal, make more information more accessible to
big budgets; it’s possi- allowing greater levels of employee self-service. more people.
ble to do more with less Career accomplishment I’m most proud of:
I was part of the team that launched AT&T Inter- >> Improving the technology aspects of cus- Kids and technology careers: Although I
If I weren’t CIO, I’d be ... net Services. During our first week of operation, tomer service. don’t have children, I would definitely steer
the CEO of a startup we got 10 times the demand that the business them toward technology. It’s pervasive in our
technology firm anticipated for the first six months of the service. How I measure IT effectiveness: Some of the society, and you need to be proficient in it to
Scaling the service while supporting customers key metrics we use are measurements of busi- be successful.
was a big challenge and a key accomplishment. ness team and customer satisfaction, expense
to revenue, and on-time delivery and defects Ranked No. 47 in the 2011
Most important career influencer: Hank Berg- in the first month of production.
informationweek.com July 23, 2012 4

5. globalCIO
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Why IT Outsourcing Often Fails JIM DITMORE
While the general trend of more IT outsourc- However, IT is critical to all three areas. And companies don’t have the scale to achieve
ing (via smaller, more focused deals) contin- because of this intrinsic linkage, IT isn’t like a cost parity with a large outsourcer, nearly all
ues, these engagements remain difficult to security guard force or a legal staff, two areas large companies and many midsize ones do.
navigate. Every large IT shop that I have companies commonly outsource successfully. Nearly every outsourcing deal that I have re-
turned around had significant problems By outsourcing intrinsic capabilities, compa- versed in the past 20 years yielded savings of
caused or made worse by the outsourcing nies put their core competency at risk. at least 30% and often much more. Cost savings
arrangement, particularly large deals. While My IT best practice: Companies must control can be accomplished by an IT outsourcer for a
those shops performed poorly for other rea- their critical intellectual property. If your com- large company for a broad set of services only
sons (ineffectual leadership, process failures, pany uses outsourcing vendors to develop if the current shop is mediocre. If your shop is
talent issues), improving performance re- and deliver key features or services that differ- well run, your all-in costs will be similar to the
quired a substantial revamp or reversal of the entiate its products and define its success, best outsourcing vendors. If you’re world class,
outsourcing arrangements. then those vendors can typically turn around you can beat the outsourcer by 20% to 40%.
Failed outsourcing deals involving reputable and sell those advances to your competitors. Realize as well that any cost difference an IT
vendors and customers litter various industries. Or you are putting your success in the hands outsourcer can deliver typically degrades over
Why? Much depends on what you choose to of someone with very different goals. Be wary time. The outsourcer’s goals are to increase
outsource and how you manage the vendor of those who say IT isn’t a core competency. revenue and profit margin, so it invariably will
and service. A common misconception is that With every year that passes, there’s more IT find ways to charge you more, usually for
any activity that’s not “core” to a company can content in products in nearly every industry. changes to services, while minimizing its work.
and should be outsourced. In The Discipline Of Choose instead to outsource those activities One dysfunctional, $55 million-a-year out-
Market Leaders, authors Michael Treacy and Fred where you don’t have scale or cost advantages, sourcing contract I reversed a few years back
Wiersema argued that market leaders must rec- or capacity or competence. But ensure that you was for desktop provisioning and field support
ognize their competency in one of three areas: either retain or build the key design, integra- for a major bank. During a surprise review of
product and innovation leadership, customer tion, and management capabilities in-house. the relationship, we found warehouses full of
service and intimacy, or operational excellence. Cutting costs is another frequent reason for obsolete equipment that should have been dis-
They shouldn’t try to excel at all three. outsourcing. While most small and midsize posed of and new equipment that should have
informationweek.com July 23, 2012 5

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Table of Contents
globalCIO
been deployed. Why? Because the outsourcer range of services, organizations, and locales. and in the right circumstances. An executive
was paid to maintain all equipment, whether in When I was at Bank One more than a decade leader can’t focus on all company priorities at
use in our offices or in a warehouse, and it had ago, working under CEO Jamie Dimon and once, nor would you have the staff. In some ar-
full control of the logistics function. COO Austin Adams, they supported our un- eas, such as field support, outsourcing provides
The solution? We insourced the logistics func- winding of the largest IT outsourcing deal ever natural economies of scale for many companies.
tion and established quality goals. Then we split consummated at the time. Three years into the When outsourcing, ensure that your com-
the field support geography and conducted a contract, it had become a millstone around pany retains critical IP and control. Use out-
Bank One’s neck. Costs were going up every sourcing to augment your capacity or to lever-
My then-CEO Jamie Dimon at year, and quality eroded to the point where age best-in-class specialized services.
Bank One said it best: “Who do system availability and customer complaints Since effective management of large out-
were the worst in the industry. sourcing deals is nearly impossible, do small
you want doing your key work?
In 2001, we cut the deal short; it was sched- deals. Handle the management like any signifi-
Patriots or mercenaries?” uled to run another four years. During the next cant in-house function—establish service-level
18 months, after hiring 2,200 infrastructure agreements, gather operational metrics, review
competitive bid to select two vendors for that staff and revamping the processes and infra- performance with management every three to
work. Every six months, we evaluated each ven- structure, we reduced defects (and downtime) six months, and address problems. Stipulate
dor’s quality, timeliness, and cost. We gave more to one-twentieth the levels in 2001 while re- consequences for bad performance and re-
territory to the higher-performing vendor and ducing our ongoing expenses by more than wards for good performance. Use contractors,
took away territory from the lower-performing $220 million per year. This effort aided the including cloud providers, for peak workloads.
one, which was on notice for possible replace- bank’s turnaround and allowed for the merger With these best practices and a selective hand,
ment. We kept a small team of field support ex- with JPMorgan a few years later. your IT shop and company can benefit from
perts to keep training and capabilities up to par, As for having in-house staff do critical work, outsourcing and avoid the failures.
update service routines, and resolve problems. Dimon said it best: “Who do you want doing
The result was far better quality and ser - your key work? Patriots or mercenaries?” Jim Ditmore is senior VP of technology, operations, infrastruc-
vice—at a 40% lower cost. These results are Like any tool or management approach, out- ture, architecture, and innovation at Allstate. Write to us at
typical with similar actions across a wide sourcing is quite valuable when used properly iwletters@techweb.com.
informationweek.com July 23, 2012 6

7. Quicktakes
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CLOUD FIRST
Office 2013 Built For Social Sharing
Install the preview of Microsoft Office 15, and business network, they’re easier to share.
you’ll know something radical has changed the At some point, Microsoft’s $1.2 billion acqui-
first time you click “save” on a new document.
In the upcoming version of Office aimed at
home users, the default location for saving a
document is the cloud—Microsoft’s SkyDrive
sition of Yammer collaboration software will
also factor into Office and SharePoint, but with
the deal not yet closed, Microsoft offered no
specifics.
Ballmer
wants Office
“touchable”
Meanwhile, after years of lagging in social
[
service. In the next version for business, the de- Cloud and social collaboration features are software functionality, a new version of Share-
fault will be to save to SharePoint, or maybe Sky- central themes with the new Office, which is Point is delivering what appears to be a com-
Drive Pro, a version of the cloud storage service now in an open beta test phase expected to petitive enterprise social networking experi-
featuring more enterprise controls. You can still last several months. Microsoft is also touting ence. The new SharePoint news feed handles
store files to your local machine and change the touch screen functionality and a con- threaded discussions and more of the social
the settings to make that the default, but Mi- sumerized user interface, which it hopes will features you’d expect, such as the ability to
crosoft wants to make that the last choice on align with the Metro user interface of Windows “like” a post, mention another user by typing
the list. SkyDrive, SharePoint, and other Web lo- 8 to make Microsoft relevant on tablets. Mi- the @ symbol, and type # for suggested hash
cations for storing documents come first be- crosoft CEO Steve Ballmer described this ver- mark tags. You develop feeds by following peo-
cause, when they’re stored on the Web or your sion of Office as “fast and fluid and touchable.” ple, topics, tags, documents, or groups. Share-
informationweek.com July 23, 2012 7

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Point is gaining group collaboration functionality,
which it never really had before.
Since some of the main things people share on
SharePoint are Office documents, the news feed lets
you preview documents by paging through a pres-
entation without the need to open it in PowerPoint,
for example.
Office 15 will eventually come to market as Office
2013, for those who install it as traditional software,
or as an update to the Office 365 subscription service.
Microsoft isn’t saying when the software will be avail-
able or at what price.
Microsoft Office is being challenged in business and
consumer markets by Google Apps, which includes a
suite of Web-based office productivity apps, so Mi-
crosoft is working to show the value of combining
cloud services with its traditional desktop software.
Office 365 includes Web-based document viewers
and editors that work much like the document edi-
tors in Google Apps, but they’re positioned as alter-
natives for quick access rather than the primary mode
of interaction.
Office is taking another cue from the online world
by creating an apps market for each of its products.
These apps are based on Web standards—HTML5,
JavaScript, OAuth, and REST—together with Office-
specific APIs, so they’ll work in Web and desktop
modes. —David F. Carr, TheBrainYard.com (dcarr@techweb.com)
informationweek.com

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SOCIAL MARKUP LANGUAGE
Oracle To Acquire Involver As Next Step In Broader Plan
The duel between Oracle and Salesforce.com that provide a consistent experience across applications, which its customers can modify,
to acquire social and collaboration software multiple touch points,” Involver CEO Don Beck and a Visual SML tool for developers.
continues, with Oracle’s planned purchase of said in a blog post on the Oracle acquisition. Oracle and Salesforce have fallen into a pat-
Involver and Salesforce’s pending acquisition While there may be some overlap between tern of making news in this area, one after the
of GoInstant. Vitrue and Involver, Oracle is particularly inter- other. They compete in customer relationship
Oracle announced an agreement to pur- ested in the latter’s Social Markup Language management, with the emphasis shifting to
chase Involver on July 10, and the deal is ex- development platform, which gives Web de- online and social sales and customer service.
pected to close this summer. Oracle declined signers and developers greater freedom over GoInstant disclosed July 9 that it has agreed to
to discuss its plans for the company beyond the content they create to be embedded in so- be acquired by Salesforce. Details on the deal
what was published on its website. cial sites. Involver provides a library of social haven’t been announced, but some reports
Oracle bought Vitrue, another social market- put the purchase price at more than $70 mil-
ing tools purveyor, in May for a reported $300 lion. GoInstant’s co-browsing software makes
million. Oracle also recently purchased Collec- What Oracle Gets it possible for a customer service representa-
tive Intellect, a maker of social media monitor- >> INVOLVER’S Social Markup Language tive to browse a website with a customer—not
ing software geared to tracking customer com- integrates APIs and services through screen sharing, but as a shared session
ments and complaints, as part of a broader >> VISUAL SML can be used to quickly create where the representative can help.
“customer experience” strategy. social media pages This pattern has been intensifying in the last
Like Buddy Media, which Salesforce agreed to >> CONVERSATION SUITE makes it possible two years, as Salesforce stepped up its focus on
to listen and reply to comments at scale
buy in June for $689 million, and Vitrue, Involver social business with the introduction of Chat-
helps marketers create landing pages and ap- >> CUSTOMERS include Facebook, Mogo ter and the acquisition of Radian6. Oracle
Finance, and the White House
plications that can be embedded on Facebook countered with the acquisition of RightNow, in
and other social media websites. “Social-savvy >> TECHNOLOGY supports multiple part for its ability to connect and service cus-
languages, mobile devices
customers expect brands to build social cam- tomers through social media interaction.
paigns that are engaging, easy to navigate, and —David F. Carr, TheBrainYard.com (dcarr@techweb.com)
informationweek.com July 23, 2012 9

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VIRTUALIZATION
Exec Shake-Up Hints At Data Center’s Future
When I interviewed EMC president Pat Gel- increasingly focused on selling software used
singer in May, he laughed when I pointed out to manage virtualized data centers.
that the way he described automated data The shuffle occurs as VMware’s growth, while
center management sounded a lot like what still impressive, may be cooling. VMware’s pre-
VMware CTO Steve Herrod was calling the liminary results for its second quarter show rev-
“software-defined data center.” enue of $1.12 billion for the first quarter of 2012,
“You’re right,” Gelsinger said. “Maybe I should
sit down with Steve and talk about aligning
up 22% over the same quarter last year. Its an-
nual revenue growth last year was 32%, while
[ Gelsinger:
Studied at Intel
our strategies.” the first quarter of 2012 showed growth of 25%. coined to describe a data center that can be
Guess it’s time to have that chat. EMC CEO and chairman Joe Tucci, who will organized more flexibly, with resources com-
Gelsinger has been named CEO of VMware, continue in his roles, said he is changing missioned, reconfigured, or decommissioned
replacing Paul Maritz, who will move into a VMware’s leadership from “a position of through a software management layer. Admin-
chief strategist position at EMC after four years strength.” Changes are needed as “we see a istrators are able to make such changes con-
leading VMware. EMC owns 79% of VMware. transformation in the IT industry unlike any- tinuously without disrupting users. But many
My exchange with Gelsinger spotlights the thing we’ve seen before,” Tucci said during an challenges remain before a data center can be
blurring line between the missions of EMC and analyst conference call. “Organizations are run from the management console of just one
VMware. EMC is a data storage company trying moving to adopt cloud computing that can in- software layer. Data on hundreds or thousands
to play a bigger role in today’s more automated voke the efficiency and agility that comes from of devices will need to be plugged into analyt-
data centers. Companies increasingly want to running IT as a service.” ics software that can draw a picture of how the
manage their data center hardware—storage, Maritz and team positioned VMware as a facility is running as a whole and help make
networking, and servers—as one resource, and leader of that transformation. Now EMC and decisions on how to keep it in trim.
EMC doesn’t want to be stuck providing just VMware need “to become the leader in building When Tucci says “running IT as a service,” he
the storage hardware. VMware is the dominant out the complete, software-defined data center.” is referring primarily to a private, on-premises
server virtualization software provider, but it’s The software-defined data center is a phrase cloud—an environment that lets companies
informationweek.com July 23, 2012 10

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mimic some of the advantages of speed and data center as virtual appliances, providing stor- ership of 21% to give VMware some inde-
flexibility that public cloud computing ven- age management wherever it’s needed instead pendence—to give VMware room to lead in
dors such as Amazon Web Services offer. Pri- of centralized on EMC-only equipment. EMC is the emerging field of server virtualization.
vate clouds let CIOs get some advantages of still working on executing on the idea. Wells Fargo equity analyst Jason Maynard
cloud computing without the risk of relying Another innovation is to have more auto- thinks the exec shuffle is a step toward unify-
on an outside provider. mated security and network management ing EMC and VMware, a move he calls “in-
built into the management layer, allowing evitable” in a note to investors. One reason:
Conservative Approach greater ease of administration of virtual ma- EMC’s software-defined data center strategy
The EMC-VMware vision for a software-de- chines, Gelsinger said. centers on VMware’s virtualization.
fined data center, in comparison, is a safer, more But for the software-defined data center to Enterprise customers may one day want inte-
conservative approach. Think of it as pulling come about, VMware is going to have to work grated units of hardware and software shipped
legacy systems into a single management con- with other software vendors, including other vir- to them, something like Oracle’s Exadata and
sole without worrying about the organizational tualization software vendors. Elevating Maritz to Exalogic machines, ready to be plugged in.
changes a cloud environment demands, like the parent company may reflect a desire to get Gelsinger’s Intel experience—he led x86 archi-
letting employees self-provision their comput- VMware one step removed from his known spirit tecture development—might give him the right
ing capacity or imposing a strict environment of relentless competitiveness. By putting VMware perspective to take VMware beyond virtualizing
limited to x86 servers. The software-defined under the tutelage of the cool-headed Gelsinger, existing data center hardware and into a new
data center message lets EMC-VMware cater to Tucci may be encouraging VMware staffers to field of integrated virtualization appliances. ”The
both legacy and newly built, cloud-oriented ap- reach out to other vendors. After all, before join- next generation of software-defined data cen-
plications without VMware or EMC needing to ing EMC in 2009, Gelsinger spent 30 years at Intel, ters will be built by combining software with
tell customers which camp they should be in. the ultimate industry partner. He’ll need those standardized hardware building blocks,”
So how might EMC and VMware work more skills to diminish other tech vendors’ fears that a Gelsinger said. ”VMware is uniquely positioned
More On Private Clouds closely together to establish such a data center? software-defined data center is something de- to be the leader in this endeavor.”
Our digital issue explores what’s Look at EMC’s storage applications. Earlier this signed to entrap them. Tucci referred to Maritz will continue on EMC’s board of direc-
needed to implement private
clouds: expertise, automation,
year, EMC said it plans to make its storage man- Gelsinger’s ability to successfully build out an tors, Gelsinger will join the board, and Tucci will
and a willingness to bust silos. agement software “virtualize-able,” meaning ecosystem around a proprietary vendor’s set of keep his roles at least through 2013. ”As long
able to run functions in virtual machines. That technologies as “something he did at Intel.” as I’m in good health, and I am, I’ll be around,”
Download
would let IT move storage functions around the After EMC bought VMware, it yielded own- Tucci said. —Charles Babcock (cbabcock@techweb.com)
informationweek.com July 23, 2012 11

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[COVER STORY]
Table of Contents
Storage
Innovation
New scale-out, solid-state,
and cloud-integrated products
may be a better fit for companies
than monolithic systems
By Kurt Marko
F or years, the trend in storage architectures has
been consolidation—bigger, more complex, and
more expensive systems. But the maturation of
flash memory into a cost-competitive storage technology
along with creative approaches that have turned banks of
cheap, commodity disk drives into parallelized, consoli-
dated pools of centrally managed storage are reshaping
the landscape.
Designing enterprise storage architectures is no longer a
matter of choosing the biggest, baddest storage system
informationweek.com July 23, 2012 12

13. Previous Next STORAGE INNOVATION [COVER STORY]
Table of Contents
and bulking up as needed to create complex, Which Applications Are Driving Big Data Needs At Your Company?
monolithic, and hence expensive disk arrays Financial transactions
that try to meet every requirement. Today 58%
storage architects are designing more special- Email
ized systems that make it easier to strike the 58%
right balance between price and performance Imaging data
38%
based on a company’s needs.
Web logs
Storage innovation isn’t just happening in the 35%
usual, predictable areas. Sure, engineers con- Internet text and documents
tinue to find ways to pack more bits on a square 28%
inch of magnetic film. But the real innovation is Call detail records
coming from the long-predicted migration 28%
from magnetic to solid-state electronic storage, Science or research data
accompanied by scale-out architectures. These 26%
new architectures have self-contained arrays, E-commerce
25%
with their own I/O controllers and network in-
Video
terfaces that can be aggregated, adding I/O 24%
processing power and network bandwidth as
Data: InformationWeek 2012 Big Data Survey of 231 business technology professionals, December 2011
you add capacity. They’re often paired with dis-
What’s New In Storage tributed file systems and cloud storage services. performance is the need to manage and pro- shops should develop a strategy for replacing
Our full report on storage In the latest sign of storage innovation, Dell tect big data such as Web clickstreams and cus- high-performance hard disk drives with solid-
innovation is free with
registration. It includes: just last week announced a $60 million fund tomer interactions. But those aren’t the only state storage, and for adding scale-out prod-
> A look at how distributed, to invest in five to 10 early-stage storage start- drivers. Storage needs continue to increase ucts to their storage technology arsenal, par-
parallel, fault-tolerant file ups. The fund is part of the company’s Dell across the board, driven by expanding email ticularly for applications with rapidly growing
systems are moving into
the enterprise
Ventures venture capital arm. and collaboration systems as well as the in- or extreme capacity requirements.
> More storage-related data
The surge in storage innovation is driven by creased use of rich content, particularly video.
from InformationWeek surveys demand as companies struggle to store and Don’t let our use of “innovative” mislead Storage Vendors Answer The Call
manage increasing quantities of data. One de- you: This isn’t bleeding-edge stuff that you To meet this demand, storage vendors are
Download mand driver for more storage space and better should take a wait-and-see attitude toward. IT improving both storage performance and ca-
informationweek.com July 23, 2012 13

14. Previous Next STORAGE INNOVATION [COVER STORY]
Table of Contents
IS SOMETHING STALLING
pacity—the traditional yin and yang of the technol-
ogy. They’re finding new, and not always mutually ex-
clusive, ways to improve I/O throughput and provide
cost-efficient capacity. Companies across industries
YOUR FEDERATION?
need to store more data, so they’re hungry for
cheaper and more efficient ways to add capacity.
Speed is a powerful driver as well, as companies try
to move data in and out of applications as fast as pos-
sible, like when analyzing real-time customer interac-
tions. Speed has never been the strong suit of spin-
ning mechanical disks. But Moore’s Law has finally
driven the price and capacity of solid-state storage to
the point where it’s not just viable, but often is a
preferable alternative to disk for performance-sensi-
tive applications.
While today’s flurry of VC-backed storage startups
and innovative new products is impressive, we’re on the
Get This And cusp of even bigger changes in storage given the in-
All Our Reports tense interest in big data applications that mine every-
ACCELERATE WEB AND CLOUD SSO
Our State of Storage 2012 report thing from financial transactions to Web logs for mean-
BY FEDERATING YOUR IDENTITY LAYER
is free with registration. This Sometimes it feels like your federation is stuck in first gear. You’ve invested in great tools to federate your SAML security, but
report includes 44 pages of
ingful information. Working with data sets that can
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action-oriented analysis, packed exceed a petabyte, using algorithms that voraciously the slow-down? If you think federation is just about federating your security layer, you haven’t taken a look under the hood at
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15. Previous Next STORAGE INNOVATION [COVER STORY]
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move toward distributed, scale-out designs for How Are You Using Or Planning To Use Solid-State Drives?
bulk data storage front-ended by solid-state General databases
arrays for an application’s working data set. 61%
Big vendors like EMC, Hewlett-Packard, and Improve overall server performance
Dell have responded to the demand for more 57%
and better storage by buying innovative start- Automated tiered storage
ups: EMC snagged scale-out specialist Isilon, HP 34%
acquired IBRIX and LeftHand, and Dell grabbed Technical applications (financial, scientific)
29%
EqualLogic (another scale-out firm) and Com-
Reduce power consumption
pellent. They’ve also integrated solid-state 27%
technology, largely for caching and auto-tier-
Video or multimedia editing
ing, into their established scale-up products. 21%
Other transaction-heavy software (e-commerce, CRM, ERP)
Performance Vs. Capacity 26%
The classic trade-off when designing stor- Data: InformationWeek 2012 State of Storage Survey of 166 business technology professionals using or evaluating SSDs, January 2012
age systems is performance and speed versus
cost and capacity. Traditional scale-up arrays of products do blend high-capacity architec- All-silicon designs are the leading edge of
like the big iron that EMC has perfected try to tures with high-performance devices in an at- solid-state storage innovation, but the overall
Big Data’s Challenge
accommodate performance and speed as tempt to get the best of both. market has stratified into several performance
Our full report on big data
management is free with well as cost and capacity needs in the same >> Architectures for performance: When tiers. There are the blazingly fast, pure solid-state
registration. It’s packed with box. This approach has led to layering feature it comes to storage performance, it’s all about systems from GridIron, Kaminario, Texas Mem-
useful information, including:
upon feature in systems that are costly and solid-state memory. But the days of just shoe- ory, and Violin. These systems have been built
> The first steps you should take
complex. They’ve become the storage version horning flash memory into legacy disk sub- from scratch without mechanical disks and disk
to manage big data
of sporks, good at both speed and capacity systems are over. Storage innovators have de- controllers. They look nothing like a typical disk
> A rundown of the major players
in the field but not perfect for either. veloped memory systems with controllers, array. Instead, they resemble a server stuffed to
> A look at the economics of big New storage architectures generally try to packaging, and firmware optimized around the gills with flash memory, controlled by soft-
data and the cloud meet one goal or the other, not both. There’s the integrated circuit’s speed, size, and power ware, and married to network interfaces that ex-
still a strong impulse toward the Swiss army efficiency. These systems work around non- pose standard storage protocols to the outside.
Download knife design, though, and a growing number flash memory’s major flaw—poor durability. Then there are the evolutionary, but still fast,
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solid-state drive-based arrays from GreenBytes, Do You Use Cloud Storage Services?
Pure Storage, and SolidFire where the SSDs are
2012 2011
coupled to conventional array controllers.
Yes, for email
These systems stick with disk controllers and 13%
hard disk drive form factors but replace spin- 8%
ning disks with much faster flash-based SSDs. Yes, for archiving
>> Architectures for capacity: Storage sys- 11%
8%
tems designed to provide the most cost-effec-
Yes, for backup and recovery
tive capacity typically use commodity SATA 8%
drives. Storage innovators don’t scale capacity 6%
by adding shelves to a big, monolithic disk No, but we’re considering it
controller like HP’s quintessential MSA arrays. 34%
34%
Instead, new scale-out designs are built
No
around self-contained storage blocks or 43%
nodes, each with its own controller, that can 51%
be deployed independently and incremen- Data: InformationWeek State of Storage Survey of 313 business technology professionals in January 2012 and 377 in November 2010
tally. Capacity is increased by adding more
nodes to a networked cluster. Beyond Solid-State Drives cache from a big, consolidated storage array
The secret sauce for scale-out storage is the The most innovative solid-state designs to the application server. Two other product
use of storage clustering or virtualization have ditched the disk drive entirely, and archi- segments are all-SSD arrays, and hybrid sys-
software. Such software can spread data tecturally look much more like very large tems that use a mix of SSDs, flash modules or
among storage nodes yet still treat a group computer memory systems than a bank of mSATA cards, and conventional hard drives.
of nodes as a unified storage pool through a disks. The solid-state market has evolved into SolidFire offers a scale-out system built com-
common set of metadata. Conceptually, it’s several subcategories. pletely from SSDs. Each storage node is a 1U
similar to RAID, but the atomic storage units The most familiar is the PCIe adapters pop- device sporting 10 SSDs for up to 6 TB of raw
are complete storage nodes. These are what ularized by Fusion-io that serve as embedded capacity. Nodes can be clustered in groups of
Coraid CEO Kevin Brown calls RAIN, redun- flash storage devices. These are often used as five to 100, which when coupled with the sys-
dant array of independent nodes, each of caching devices for conventional storage—a tem’s real-time data compression, deduplica-
which uses RAID on the inside. form of tiered storage that moves the flash tion, and thin provisioning software, yields up
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to 2.4 PB of effective capacity in a single storage pool.
SSDs are showing up in primarily disk-based sys-
tems, too. Nexsan has augmented its scale-out arrays
with a hybrid product that uses DRAM and SSDs to
transparently cache reads and writes, promising per-
formance up to 10 times better than its hard disk
drive-based products. On the low end, Drobo’s re-
cently announced 5D product uses a single mSATA
SSD card as a fast cache while keeping all five drive
bays open for high-capacity drives.
SSDs will continue to have their place, as they build
upon established SATA and SAS storage interface
standards, and are easily integrated into existing
standalone servers and storage arrays. SSD-based sys-
tems, which often use multilevel cell devices and less
sophisticated controllers, also are cheaper per byte
than pure solid-state arrays.
Which brings us to the most basic point of solid-
state storage product differentiation: the type of
memory device employed. Flash memory comes in
two flavors: single-level cell that stores 1 bit per cell,
and multilevel cell that (despite the ambiguous
name) only stores 2 bits per cell, doubling the mem-
ory density of single-level cell chips.
The trade-off here is that multilevel cell has lower
performance, particularly for writes, and is less durable
and reliable. Since each multilevel cell has four elec-
tronic states (corresponding to “0” and “1” for each of
the 2 bits), its bit error rates are higher than the single-
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level design. A subclass of multilevel cell prod- Are You Utilizing Public Cloud Infrastructure Or Storage For Big Data?
ucts, known as eMLC, includes features such as
more memory cell redundancy and better er-
No plans to use or consider for use
ror correction circuitry to reduce error rates.
38%
Turning flash memory chips into a storage sys- Utilizing in production
tem involves several layers of additional circuitry 13%
and software. Every solid-state storage prod-
uct—whether a flash PCIe card, pure solid-state
array, or SSD—uses a controller to manage read- 17%
ing and writing data to the memory chips. Con- Testing some applications
trollers perform a number of important func- 32%
tions, including: error correction; wear leveling Planning to use, but not currently in use
that spreads data out so that all cells are used
equally; memory scrubbing and bad block map- Data: InformationWeek 2012 Big Data Survey of 231 business technology professionals, December 2011
ping to proactively look for bad memory cells
or blocks and eliminate them from the available age can be used either independently by formance, scale-out designs are the way to go.
memory pool; and read and write caching. manually setting up separate LUNs consisting These products can turn a batch of commod-
Some controllers also perform inline data com- of only solid-state devices, or in tandem with ity SATA drives and standard chassis into
pression to reduce the amount of data actually hard disk drives in which the solid-state de- large, redundant, easily expanded and cen-
written to flash and automatically encrypt data. vices act as caches for “hot” data. EMC’s Fast trally managed pools of shared storage.
Solid-state systems sport the features found Cache and Nexsan’s FASTier do this using an Coraid's scale-out products combine a pure
in any storage array. These include RAID for array controller. Other vendors integrate a file Ethernet-based storage protocol and Lego-
SSD or memory module redundancy and sup- system that incorporates automatic caching; like storage blocks and epitomize the new
port of common block and file storage proto- Coraid does this with ZFS in its new ZX series. generation of scale-out design. This approach
cols, and standard Ethernet and Fibre Channel Alternatively, arrays can incorporate a caching is ideal for the big data needs of Coraid’s cus-
network interfaces. software add-on like VeloBit’s HyperCache. tomers, many of which operate multipetabyte
Increasingly, systems allow mixing and systems for everything from video hosting to
matching of solid-state and conventional Scale-Out Is In genome sequencing, Coraid CEO Brown says.
hard drives in the same array. Solid-state stor- When capacity is more important than per- While scale-out systems are often less ex-
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pensive per byte than legacy SAN arrays, their big ad-
vantage is incrementalism: You can start small and
grow big by adding storage blocks. Unlike big iron
scale-up systems, increasing capacity doesn’t require
adding controller cards, network interfaces, and ex-
pansion chassis to existing storage frames. The new
capacity you get by adding storage blocks automati-
cally shows up in the available storage pool on a cen-
tral management console and can be seamlessly
added to existing LUNs and file shares.
A valuable byproduct of scale-out designs is that
their innate I/O performance scales with added capac-
ity. With a consolidated, scale-up approach, you add
capacity by adding drive shelves to an existing con-
troller module, which is responsible for all drive and
network interfaces. But added capacity usually means
added workload and greater network I/O. You can’t
just add expansion units; you need to add processing
capacity (CPU) and throughput (network interfaces).
This means adding modules to the controller itself.
With scale-out designs, there’s no central controller,
and each storage block includes its own CPU and net-
work interface. Adding capacity means automatically
adding I/O throughput since larger scale-out designs
spread I/O across more controller horsepower and
network capacity.
Such scalability across all critical storage perform-
ance parameters—capacity, controller performance,
and I/O throughput—is a big reason scale-out de-
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signs are especially popular in IT organiza- consider public cloud infrastructure or storage port data deduplication to reduce the amount
tions dealing with rapidly growing data sets. for big data applications (see chart, p. 18). of information stored in the cloud and data
Most of Coraid’s customers, which range from Backup services usually provide client soft- encryption to protect data in transit and
cloud service providers to government agen- ware for controlling backup jobs and copying stored on public cloud systems, Marks says.
cies, are doubling their data every year. files to their servers. But for general-purpose
Although initially focused on providing the storage, a big hurdle to use of online services What To Do
best capacity bang for the buck, scale-out prod- is the difficulty of moving data between inter- With new storage products being released
ucts are also being used in hybrid configura- nal systems and the cloud. Cloud storage serv- every month, what’s an IT pro—particularly
tions. For example, Brown says a virtual desktop ices don’t typically support SAN protocols like one in a large company saddled with a sizable
infrastructure implementation might use all iSCSI, and certainly not FCoE. The big infra- investment in big storage systems—to do?
SSD LUNs for boot drives and SATA for home di- structure-as-a-service providers, namely Ama- While that gold-plated storage system seemed
rectories. “You can reserve the high capacity zon Web Services and Rackspace, don’t even like the only reasonable option just a few years
spindles for the long tail of data,” he says. support NAS protocols like NFS or CIFS, al- ago, consider these four steps before you cut a
though many cloud backup services do. purchase order on yet another expansion rack:
Cloud Storage Gateways Cloud storage gateways, which come as ei- 1. Inventory your storage requirements.
Cloud services are rapidly gaining acceptance ther hardware or software appliances, tackle Take stock of your critical applications and
as an alternative to on-site storage for every- this problem, serving as bridges between identify those with high I/O requirements
thing from backup and disaster recovery to SANs and the cloud. They act as storage prox- (typically transaction-based databases) and
email archiving and application development ies sitting inside your data center that look like rapidly growing capacity needs. This informa-
repositories. More than half of respondents to a conventional iSCSI target or NAS device but tion is critical to making best use of your pre-
our 2012 State of Storage Survey are using or can redirect read and write requests to a cloud cious storage dollars and figuring out where
considering cloud storage services (see chart, p. service. Storage gateways like Panzura’s Quick- you might use new storage technologies.
16), with 25% having online storage in their silver give users access to all data, whether 2. Introduce solid-state storage for appli-
project plans for the next year, as reported in cached on the appliance or in the cloud, cations with high I/O requirements. Exactly
the InformationWeek Buyer’s Guide to Cloud through a single name space, says Information- what product you use depends on your
Storage, Backup, and Synchronization. And big Week contributor Howard Marks in naming throughput requirements, size of your data
data could propel another wave of cloud stor- Quicksilver winner of a Best of Interop 2012 set, and your budget. Pure solid-state systems,
age adoption. Our Big Data Survey finds only award. Gateways can incorporate flash or disk such as those from GridIron, Kaminario, Texas
38% of respondents have no plans to use or storage for local caching. They can also sup- Memory, and Violin, offer the best perform-
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ance but are also the most expensive. For many, an
SSD or hybrid HDD/SSD system, such as SolidFire and
Nexsan, is a reasonable option.
3. Consider introducing SSD adapters as fast caches
into servers hosting I/O-sensitive applications if a new
solid-state system seems like too much. These aren’t ex-
actly plug-and-play products since they require soft-
ware or file system support, but several of them, like
Fusion-io’s ioTurbine, SanDisk’s FlashSoft, STEC’s En-
hanceIO, and VeloBit’s HyperCache, can transparently
cache the most active or I/O-intensive data without
modifying applications and existing disk configurations.
4. Consider moving applications with rapacious
capacity needs off of existing (and expensive) SAN ar-
rays onto scale-out storage nodes. Start small and
grow; that is, after all, a key benefit of the scale-out
philosophy. For example, a 10-TB stack of Gridstore
boxes goes for less than $4,000. Alternatively, Coraid
nodes average about $575 per terabyte, meaning a
nice 100+ TB starter set of three 36-TB storage blocks
sets you back around $60,000. Also consider using
cloud services for data archive, disaster recovery, or
new (but not necessarily long-term) applications.
These steps will get you well on your way to trying
out the new innovative storage products on the mar-
ket and rethinking your long-term approach to storage.
Kurt Marko is an IT pro with broad experience, from chip design to IT
systems. Write to us at iwletters@techweb.com.
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22. Previous Next
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Compliance
In The Cloud Era
The 422 respondents to our 2012 Regulatory Compliance Survey
see storm clouds gathering. Here’s how to cope.
By Diana Kelley and Ed Moyle
I
T pros charged with keeping their companies in compliance face challenges that weren’t
even on our radar a few years ago. That’s because fundamental changes in the way companies
consume IT services—led by public cloud computing and expanded outsourcing
relationships—mean we’re on the hook for the security and compliance of more external entities
in the information supply chain. And that brings a whole new set of problems.
To find out how we’re coping, we surveyed 422 business technology professionals, all of whom
qualified for our InformationWeek 2012 Regulatory Compliance Survey by being on the hook for
at least one regulation. We asked about the scope and nature of their compliance strategies, with
informationweek.com July 23, 2012 22

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a focus on how the new reality impacts over- What Are Your Top Drivers For Compliance Initiatives?
sight and governance of vendors, partners, Fear of legal repercussions or fines
customers, outsourcers, and service providers. 58%
The good news is that the regulatory bur- Strong internal desire to manage risk
den isn’t growing. Thirty-five percent of com- 41%
panies must comply with four or more man- Fear of negative publicity
41%
dates—which is a lot, but the median number
Proactive push to satisfy customer needs or expectations
of regulations IT must address in 2012 is down 33%
slightly from our June 2009 survey. IT teams
Fear of negative audit results from a third-party reviewer
tend to feel less resource-constrained, with al- 31%
most eight in 10 fairly comfortable with their Proactive push to satisfy business partner needs or expectations
resources for compliance. More companies 18%
have successfully aligned their security and We need to fix findings from a previous audit
compliance programs, to the benefit of both. 7%
The bad news is that we can’t get too com- Data: InformationWeek 2012 Regulatory Compliance Survey of 422 business technology professionals, May 2012
fortable. The dynamics of compliance are question is whether we’re doing the challeng- tory requirement under PCI, HIPAA, and mul-
changing as we grant third parties more ac- ing work of actually implementing support- tiple other mandates) scored highest, fol-
Get This And
All Our Reports cess to sensitive and critical data, and IT must ing controls. lowed by application firewalling (a PCI re-
Our full report on regulatory
consider the damage if there is a major secu- And, in fact, the data shows that respon- quirement), identity management (supports
compliance is free with registration. rity breach at one of your key external part- dents are. We listed 13 security technologies numerous access-control requirements across
This report includes 34 pages of ners. Fortunately, there are steps you can take and asked: If you could choose to fund only a broad swath of regulations), and patch man-
action-oriented analysis, packed
with 25 charts. to find and address potential problems. three security controls, which would you se- agement (supports system maintenance
What you’ll find: lect? The majority favor controls that are man- requirements).
> Regulations demanding the
Requirements, Barriers, And Drivers dated by widely adopted regulatory require- In terms of drivers for compliance, fear
most resources and attention We found that policies supporting compli- ments—at the expense of technologies, like looms large—predominantly of legal or reg-
> Desirability ratings for 13 ance are well adopted among respondents— data loss prevention and mobile device man- ulatory action (58%) and negative publicity
security tools think acceptable use and password guide- agement, that are probably on the radar for (41%). This is understandable. From a publicity
lines and pre-employment screening. the larger security team. standpoint, no one wants to make headlines
Download But it’s easy to write a policy. The bigger For example, endpoint protection (a regula- for losing data, and the recent successful
informationweek.com July 23, 2012 23