Apr 26

IBM’s Long Term File System: Tape Lives On

Engineering No Comments »

The newest technology in tape, LTO5, is making news lately for both its performance and its impressive capacity per piece of media. IBM recently announced a Long Term File System specifically designed for LTO5. The idea is that the file system enables tape to become a better medium for data archiving and not just backup.

Of course, adoption of LTFS is going to be driven by both ISVs and the makers of the operating systems. After all, if the intention is to use tape as a “drag and drop” drive, then an O/S is going to have to mount that tape and present it as a file system just as it would any old disk.

But what folks like us are more interested in is the new partitioning feature. Since tape is linear (Linear Tape Open), it must be written sequentially, and ideally, at the maximum rate the drive and tape supports. This makes it ideal for fast streaming backup targets, but makes search and discovery, a key component of archiving, a bit difficult.

We agree that tape is a great archive medium, even given the challenges of the linear format. Seven10 has been archiving file system data to tape for 5 years, albeit with a proprietary file system and through our tiered storage product, StorFirst EAS. Even older technologies without partitions can be used with intelligent tiering and caching.

Today, our customers can tier SAN disk and tape for a mirrored WORM archive file system. Or, they can simply use a locally attached disk to cache data written by users and set policies for how large the cache should be before flushing it out to tape.

Our CIFS/NFS presentation and highly scalable virtual file system takes care of the bits and bytes of media support for them. Want to mirror that tape and bring to another site for use? That’s absolutely possible by simply inventorying the mirror at another site and then reading the data from the share. Our read caching even enhances 1 + n access read times.

The advent of the partitioning on tape has been thought of internally for years now. There is even preliminary support in the product today; we were just waiting for the appropriate physical technology to work with. We’re really excited about the possibility of making search and discovery even quicker than it is now.

Repeat after me: Tape is not dead.

- Adam Marcionek, Principal Engineer for Seven10

Apr 23

Some Musings from Little Old Me

Seven10 No Comments »

The social media talking heads (who seem to be just about everybody these days) strongly recommend that blogs be updated frequently, at a minimum of two-three times per week. If that’s the suggested goal, well, I’ve been failing miserably. I mentioned in an earlier blog post that we had begun looking into a Web site redesign. We’re on our way towards a new site, and I think that’s why I haven’t been blogging as much – I want to save all our good content for a our new, pretty site.

Seven10 observations, thoughts, and forecasts (in no particular order):

1) We’re pumped for EMC World from May 10-13. Stop by our booth, #912. We’re scheduled to deliver two presentations during the conference.

2) Announcement preview: Seven10’s StorFirst EAS technology will be joining our StorFirst Altus product in EMC’s Select program.

3) Seven10 will be hitting the road this summer on a tour with our technology. We’ll be visiting over 10 cities across the country and will reveal the schedule in the next month or so. If we’re in your area, schedule a meeting with us. We’d love to talk to you.

4) Seven10 will be announcing the release of StorFirst EAS v. 3.7, rich with new features.

5) LOTS of cloud start-up companies? Wow. We’re looking forward to seeing how this plays out. We’re working with EMC on a lot of cloud initiatives. Lots of buzz, but organizations are slow to adopt so far.

6) Check out our product videos: www.youtube.com/user/Seven10Storage. We’re adding more every few weeks.

I’ll end this by saying what a great time it is to be a Boston sports fan. Bruins have had a [surprisingly] good playoff run so far, up 3-1 in the series against Buffalo. People predicted the Celtics to fall to the Heat, but they have a comfortable 2-0 lead in that series.

Red Sox progress and Belicheck’s drafting strategy – we’ll, uh, ahem, see what happens.

– Tim Pitta, Marketing Boy

Mar 24

What Happened to XAM?

Engineering No Comments »

A few years ago, the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) set out to create an open standard for archiving fixed content data. The initiative was led by major software and hardware vendors that focused on archiving. XAM, short for eXtensible Access Method, included goals that were quite noble, if not lofty. The idea was to create an interface, or API, that most major hardware vendors would support as a means to get data in and out of archiving platforms.

Today, there is no denying that EMC’s Centera platform is the market leader in this segment and it’s no surprise that EMC provided the biggest push for adoption. EMC wants to grow the market for these devices and providing an open standard API would be just the right trick. Even if this decreased EMC’s percentage of market share in the segment, the market would still grow with regards to the total amount of data under management. Lots of data = lots of dollars, so EMC would still win.

The argument for adoption of this sort of API is that fixed content rarely, if ever, changes. Therefore, the API should provide software vendors with ways to: 1) ensure indelibility and 2) avoid the pains of secondary indexing. The first point makes a lot of sense for compliance reasons. The second point can be accomplished by providing flexibility (in terms of metadata) in describing objects sent to the storage. This is currently a big ticket item in the cloud storage arena since most vendors support custom metadata for objects, a place where normal file system interfaces like CIFS or NFS don’t hold up well.

Seven10 integrated XAM into our StorFirst EAS product, and found the process to be very easy and straightforward, likely because it resembles the older Centera API. We are wondering, however, when and if widespread adoption will come. We have partnerships with many of the vendors listed as part of the XAM Initiative, but as far as we know, less than a handful actually have plans to integrate XAM as a connector, never mind actually begin shipping with one.

How long does it take for a standard to become widespread? Is XAM the right tool for archiving, compared to other methods available? Does fixed content archiving necessarily have to be CAS? Lots of questions and few answers at this point. If you have any questions or comments, specifically about XAM or more broadly about fixed content archiving, please post them in our comments section.

- Adam Marcionek, Principal Engineer at Seven10

UPDATE: Today Dell announced they are developing an object-based storage device that will support XAM as an interface. There is mention of communication over HTTP, but no specifics as to whether that will be a RESTFUL API interface. Announcements like this bode well for XAM’s future.

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Mar 01

Why NetApp is Wrong

Management No Comments »

NetApp CEO Tom Georgens recently told the world that he believed the entire concept of tiering was dying. The comment received quite a bit of tweets and blog responses from the talking mouths. (Is tweeting fingers more appropriate?) Perhaps we need to take his comments in full context, and giving him the benefit of the doubt, assume he was just referring to primary storage and tiering. If that’s the case, Tom isn’t taking into account the immense benefits that tiering offers to secondary storage.

We all agree that there are two forms of data: active and inactive. Active data is a work in progress, so performance and availability are important. Active data is housed within primary storage, where information is born. However, in the second part of the data’s lifecycle, the time comes for it to relocate to secondary storage. You can’t freeload in your parent’s mansion forever. Once data leaves the comfy confines of primary storage, it will now live in a secondary storage system. The information is still important, but the data is now reference information and only accessed periodically.

In the secondary storage layer, critical storage decisions must be made. It’s the last stop for data, where information either finds a permanent resting place on the lowest tier or faces death by deletion. Compliance mandates often require that information be saved for a length of time or purged after a period of time, making the secondary archive mission-critical. (These highly sensitive environments should be tiered, but more on this later.) Name the industry and legal requirements exist for keeping inactive data accessible. Sarbanes-Oxley, SEC 17-4a, 21 CFR Part 11, and DoD 5015.2 are only a handful of existing regulations.

Responsible data archiving is easily accessible, efficiently stored, and reliably secured from loss or tampering. The easiest path to accessibility, efficiency, and security is via tiering to the most appropriate storage media. As mentioned above, compliance-driven industries like health, government, and banking need to have processes in place that assure information can be accessed quickly, but also that it’s safeguarded against sabotage or accidental deletion. Tiering, commonly defined as the assignment of different categories of data to different types of storage media, ensures compliancy because data lies on accessible tiers and often includes built-in redundancy to protect against deletions or disasters.

Smart folks are always engineering the latest and greatest storage technology. The concept of tiering allows customers to use the best solutions on the market to house their data. Why wouldn’t customers string together top-rate storage platforms that can talk to each other within the tier?

What would the world look like without tiering? IT administrators would buy much more storage, lots more expensive disk arrays, and then use the older, even more expensive disk arrays for archive storage. And as for compliance, they’d cross their fingers and hope to discover and find information when called upon to do so.

Here’s the bottom line: tiering is easy, stub-less, transparent, extremely scalable, and highly secure. Show me an industry that doesn’t utilize tiering. It’s everywhere: hospitals, banks, and brokerage firms, schools, universities, and research labs. Tiering is not dying, nor is it on the way out; it’s just heading into its prime.

- Jim Moulton, CEO of Seven10 Storage Software

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Feb 18

Seven10 in the Media: Part II

Seven10 No Comments »

Seven10 has decided to implement a major redesign of our current Web site. We’re very excited about the upcoming site, so expect to see a change in the coming months.   To that end, this blog has been acting as our “Press Room” until we launch the new site.  We’ve also recently built a new Facebook Fan Page where we’ve been posting company news. We’d love for you to become a fan. Check it out here.

At the beginning of January 2010, we posted several pieces of media coverage. It’s been a busy several weeks since that point, and we wanted to update you guys on some recent articles with which we’ve been involved.

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February 17, 2010

Managing Editor Amy Newman interviews Seven10 regarding storage virtualization and Seven10’s work with the cloud storage.  To read the full article, click here.

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February 10, 2010

In this piece, Reporter Mike Vizard discusses how IT centers have locked themselves into storage decisions by tying applications directly to a hardware platform’s API. Vizard interviews Seven10 about the company’s StorFirst EAS product and how it prevents vendor lock-in. Check it out here.

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February 8, 2010

Editor Arthur Cole conducts a Q&A session with Seven10 about archiving to the cloud. The company discusses the stark differences between backing-up to the cloud and intelligently archiving. To read the full interview, please click here.

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February 3, 2010

Seven10 President Bobby Moulton authors a contributed piece, offering advice for start-ups who want to develop and grow a successful business without the use of venture capital funds. Seven10, in its eight years of existence, has never accepted a dime of venture capital money. To read Bobby’s five suggestions, click here.

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January 30, 2010

Seven10 was quoted in a “2010 State of Enterprise Storage Survey” authored by Behzad Behtash. In this comprehensive storage industry round-up, Seven10 discusses deduplication and how active archiving is a much better alternative. To read this story and see Seven10’s perspective, click here.

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January 29, 2010

Senior Writer Chris Preimesberger included Seven10 in a piece about CommVault’s cloud gateway. While CommVault offers some cloud support, they cannot yet connect to Iron Mountain and EMC Atmos. Seven10 connects to these two clouds today. To check out the article, click here.

Feb 08

Data Deduplication: An Aspirin, Not an Antidote

Engineering No Comments »

Let’s travel back in time about fifteen years, when IT shops were making the move from analog to digital and it’s a net new environment for everybody. Corporate execs are telling IT managers to save everything for now, and that they can delete unnecessary data later. So, IT managers turn to back-up. It’s safe, it makes them feel nice and cozy inside. Back-up ensured that multiple copies of data were created. No better way to CYA.

But here was the problem: they weren’t able to know which data would be static and which would be transactional. So they made multiple copies of all data. Little did they know, unstructured data was accounting for the vast majority of the data being backed-up – nearly 80%. The obvious question is: why make multiple copies of something that’s never changing?

Years go by before people realized that something was wrong. See, since then, the characteristics of the data have changed. We are now able to delineate out-of-the-gate whether data is unstructured or transactional. Before, IT organizations had no idea what types of files would be modified over time and which would be unstructured.

The core problem is that the practices of storing data have not changed. IT managers continue to store information as if all environments are net new. They’re backing up everything, instead of just the transactional data.

As time wore on, back-ups were causing data growth to exponentially explode. Industry vendors circled the wounded IT centers, smelling blood and revenue opportunity. After buying lots of hardware and lots of software to manage that hardware, what solution did the industry sharks (vendors) come up with? Data deduplication.

Since everyone was having so many problems with multiple copies of back-ups, they decided to install software that can sort out and extract the duplicates. Hooray! IT managers think the problem is solved, data dedupe companies sprout up like wild weeds, and the storage industry licks their chops in anticipation of a newfound revenue stream.

Now it’s 2010. And what we’ve discovered is that data deduplication is growing. What started as a technology to fix a growing problem has morphed into an entire industry. Back-up companies see data dedupe as a gold mine.

If IT managers continue to “migrate their bad habits” (back-up static data), there will always be room at the table for dedupe. So far this year, six companies – Acronis Inc., Barracuda Networks Inc., CA, CommVault Systems Inc., IBM Corp. and Symantec Corp. – have added dedupe to their back-up software.

Seven10 asks: Why not just fix the problem? Why feed a problem aspirin when what data center managers need is an antidote so that this problem ceases to occur?  Seven10 proposes implementing a smart archive today and stop using back-up as an archive.  Each method is entirely different. Deduplication offers the same promises as archiving – reduced infrastructure purchases, optimization of current hardware, lower storage costs – but wouldn’t even be necessary if the industry would nip the bad back-up habit in the bud.

Active archiving eliminates duplicate copies and stores information intelligently from Day 1. No headaches, and certainly, no aspirin needed.

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Feb 03

The Early Years: Three Salesmen and a CTO

Management No Comments »

In an earlier Seven10 post, the story of the birth of Seven10 was told anonymously. I prefer the firsthand experience.  This time Renee Zellweger is not involved.

In late August of 2001, the Moulton Brothers and I were being treated to a “going away” party by our previous employer (OTG) as we had decided the time to move on was now. At that party, David Maxey (Smart Storage CTO), handed us his cell phone number and said, “If you guys are doing something interesting, give me a call.”  Bobby, Jimmy and I were just recently married and starting a new life. No better time to leave your “paying” job and start a new company, right?

Everybody remembers where they were and what they were doing on 9/11/01. Two weeks after that going away party Bobby, Jimmy and I were all at our respective home offices when I got the call from Bobby at 9:00 a.m. “Holy Shit! Are you watching TV?” Starting a software company took a backseat that day. After we realized what had happened and thought about the indefinite uncertainty of the economy, did we ever question if maybe this wasn’t the right time? Never.  Seven10 was incorporated on 9/13/01.

People ask us all the time, “What does Seven10 mean?”  I would like to be able to say that it’s a very well-thought-out name, with meanings relative to the Greek gods, business fortune, storage software code,  an avid bowler (the 7-10 split),  or even the convenience store off by one number- but I can’t.  Seven10 is simply two lucky numbers. We couldn’t do 3 lucky numbers and since mine is 21, it seemed more appropriate to go with Seven (Jim) and Ten (Bobby).  Can you imagine a name with all three numbers? 71021. SevenTenTwenty-One. Doesn’t necessarily roll off the tongue.

CTO-level engineers don’t work at entry-level salaries, so we started reselling storage products to earn money; we needed to hire Dave and move into office space. We received our first order from Abbot Laboratories on 12/1/01. We used this sale, along with money out of our own pockets, to hire our first employee (Dave Maxey) that December.

Prior to having an office, we would meet with Dave once a week at the Andover Inn Bar. He would update us on his work developing our flagship product. During those meetings, we would strategize how and where we would sell it.  It feels like yesterday, the memories are vivid.  I can still see us sitting there in an empty bar at 2:00 p.m. in the afternoon with a cold beer (a scotch for Dave), sharing a bowl of peanuts, and determining our future.   The manager at the bar got to know us well. When you are making important decisions, there tend to be disagreements, times would get a little tense, and we’d draw some attention in the bar. But we knew we were all striving for the same goal.

It is hard to explain the feeling of starting a company: what you are about to embark upon is truly 100% yours, and you are no longer following the plan given to you by your President, CEO or VP.  You are not selling a product developed by somebody you have never met. This was our chance to make our product, design a plan, and execute it.

With revenue coming in and Dave getting the only paycheck, we moved into our offices in May 2002.  These are the times you remember for your entire life. This was nothing like the previous 10 years in the industry, going to work every day knowing what to expect and going through the same routine (those are the times I do forget).  We now had limitless potential and everything invested – win or lose.

The summer of 2002 was filled with positive energy as the three sales guys feverishly worked to bring in revenue to pay our one employee and also allow him to hire engineers to speed up the development process. In previous years, with a quota of $2M, a $15,000 order was nice, but also routine and expected.  In the infancy of Seven10, a $15,000 order meant a lot more.

Fortunately Bobby, Jimmy, and I had built strong relationships with the hardware partners from our Smart Storage days. That summer, in an effort to increase our revenue potential in the short term, we started reselling hardware (JVC, Pioneer, Plasmon). If somebody wanted a kitchen sink, I am sure we would have found a way to resell that too!  By August, we had brought in enough revenue to hire additional engineers for Dave.

With Dave and his team working around the clock (more to come on that), we started to shift our focus to application providers (healthcare, banking, records management) as we now had a product to talk about. The product would not be ready until 2003, but we started pitching the application providers that needed a storage backend. The market was getting a little stagnant, creating plenty of revenue so the time to emerge was now…

- Gary Lafreniere, Vice President of Operations

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Jan 28

George Crump: Seven10’s (Indirect) Evangelist

Marketing No Comments »

Here’s something I don’t understand and perhaps someone can clarify it for me. George Crump, analyst for Storage Switzerland and prolific blogger for Network Computing and InformationWeek, recently authored an article on the Storage Switzerland Web site entitled, “Backups: Band-Aids or Solutions.” He remains fairly neutral throughout the piece only mentioning Iron Mountain, the sponsor of the article, a few times.

Now – how exactly did that work? If Iron Mountain paid for the article, did they draft it with their messaging and hand it to George to publish? Does George truly believe what’s written in the article, or is the Storage Switzerland Web site a forum for Iron Mountain to publish their messaging with an analyst’s name attached?

PLEASE NOTE: This post is not a criticism, but a curiosity. I’m a fan of both Iron Mountain and George Crump. Iron Mountain is a well-run company, and we have awesome relationships with a bunch of guys over there. George Crump is a good guy, very down-to-earth. Seven10 briefed George a couple months ago and we had a great conversation.

As for the actual article itself, it’s as if it were ripped straight out of a Seven10 brochure. I don’t mean that George plagiarized us; I mean that we agree 100% with the article’s messaging.

I would bullet out some key takeaways that we agree with, but what I should really do is simply copy and paste the whole article. Don’t worry George; we won’t do that.

If you want to know Seven10’s opinion on back-up, dedupe, and archiving, all you need to do is click here. How easy is that?

For all Seven10-related questions, please see:          crump_george70x70

(Only because it’s scary how humor can be lost on people, please don’t badger George with Seven10 questions. You can ask us directly.)

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Jan 25

Storage Hardware: Less is More

Management No Comments »

The debate between the merits of hardware and software in the storage industry is always on-going. Here’s Seven10’s two cents.

Intelligent software will dramatically redefine the current way of doing business in IT over the next 2-3 years. The transition will happen quickly once industry pros realize that the accelerating rate of hardware purchases isn’t sustainable.

Today’s data center is built from stacks and stacks of hardware, since disk proliferation leads to massive investments in back-up infrastructure. This “pack-rat” mentality of buying and holding onto hardware has been 15 years in the making. Big Iron is doing nothing to curb the current thinking of “throw more disk at it.”

How long has it been since Big Iron has promised to be more software-centric, yet most of their software management platforms remain the “brown-headed step child” (I am a red head) of the company. At the end of the day, the reality is this: Too much hardware has caused billions of dollars in mismanaged data.

In the next decade, the Global IT department needs to think radically in their approach to data management and focus on software solutions that will help reduce mismanagement, minimize storage obsolescence, and increase accessibility.

This approach will undoubtedly reduce the amount of hardware purchased, impacting revenue growth and forcing Big Iron into build vs. buy decisions that will eventually change the landscape of the storage industry forever.

- Bobby Moulton, President of Seven10

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Jan 22

Cloud Buyers and Sellers: ISVs Can Lend a Hand

Engineering No Comments »

There is no denying that in the data storage and services industry, “The Cloud” is one of the hottest tickets on the market right now. However, simply signing up for an account with Amazon S3 is only the first step. Unless you have a extensive engineering team lying around with nothing to do, you have to buy something else to access the cloud.

The consumer cloud space is becoming noticeably crowded as of late, with both providers and application vendors trying to make their mark. Until the dust settles, which is likely years from now, there will be no common interface which will spring up out of the weeds.  It will be awhile before most major operating systems adopt one uniform interface for out of the box support.

Enter Independent Software Vendors (ISVs.) The Cloud provides ISVs the opportunity to add value to cloud providers’ products. Take, for example, AT&T’s Synaptic Storage. AT&T allows customers to sign up for an account and then gives them documentation on how to build an application using EMC’s Atmos API. For an IT Administrator, there may not be the time, resources or even the technical ability to do so. Therefore, the Admin may go looking for software which can help the company access that cloud with minimal investment in time, resources and above all, money.

This is where ISVs add the most value. The ISV takes the time to integrate with the provider’s API, keeps it updated with the latest features and functionality that the cloud provider presents, and even has the ability to add additional value along the way (see next section). These are tasks not easily accomplished by a customer.

In the case of adding additional value, look at the example with AT&T. Synaptic allows customers to provide them with a special metadata flag indicating how they want this particular file (or object) to be stored. In the less expensive case, the file is stored with two copies on one site. For more availability, where the guarantee of AT&T’s SLA increases, the file can be optionally stored with one additional copy, on a second physical site. The customer may have different business requirements for his data and doesn’t necessarily want to overpay for the extra availability on all of the data.

Therefore, a cloud gateway product from an ISV can give the customer the flexibility to specify which data should be classified as more important. The ISV could implement various interfaces, the simplest of which could be using  different folders for the customer to put the data.

Given the variety of cloud providers out there, cloud consumers have their work cut out for them. Fortunately, there are software vendors looking out for their interests, and hopefully making a few bucks along the way!

- Adam Marcionek, Principal Engineer for Seven10

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