ICT role in 21st century education and its challenges
Spectrum archive solution
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IBM EchoLeaf Training
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Where Echoleaf fits
2
LTFS Single Drive – Free To Download
LTFS LE (Library Edition)
All tapes become folders
EchoLeaf Stretch Storage
Virtualizes ALL LTFS-LE Folders
as a Single Drive
LTFS EE (Enterprise Edition)
Now Spectrum Scale
Adds a Tape Tier to GPFS
T:
GPFS DISK +
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How EchoLeaf Works
3
IBM or Equivalent Server Runs Linux,
LTFS-LE, EchoLeaf, with Cache.
SAS Adapters,
One Per Drive
Alternate
Connection: Fiber
Channel Adapters
and Switch
IBM
TS3100,
3200,
3310, 3500
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How EchoLeaf Works
4
IBM or Equivalent Server Runs Linux,
LTFS-LE, EchoLeaf, with Cache.
SAS Adapters,
One Per Drive
Alternate
Connection: Fiber
Channel Adapters
and Switch
IBM
TS3100,
3200,
3310, 3500
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Virtualization & Cloud
Computing
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EchoLeaf Software
5
USER
EchoLeaf
(Virtual Drive)
LTFS-LE
FUSE
Tape
System
DataBase
User accesses EchoLeaf Virtual Drive.
EchoLeaf maintains database of what files are on what tapes
EchoLeaf accesses all LTFS-LE Functions
EchoLeaf intercepts FUSE calls (File System In User Space – Part of LTFS-LE
LTFS-LE Interacts with Tape System
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Virtualization & Cloud
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Q&A
7. IT Services to Grow Your Business
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Consulting Services
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Q&A
8. IT Services to Grow Your Business
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Q&A
Editor's Notes
{DESCRIPTION}
This is a title page. The module presented in this page is called - IBM EchoLeaf Training.
{TRANSCRIPT}
Mark:
Alright gang, thanks for joining. We’ve got a couple of guest speakers with us today that I will introduce in sequence. The topics are really part of our Spectrum Storage story and different things that we can do that hopefully will help us both broaden our skill set but also broaden our toolkit in terms of what we can sell in the marketplace for selling Spectrum Archive and of course all of the stuff that gets dragged along with that.
Our first speaker is Mike Piltoff and Mike is the Champion Solutions Group. Champion is one of our premier business partners based out of Florida. Champion does have a previous amount of storage business with us and they have integrated a nice tidy little front end in LTFS or Spectrum Archive that I want Mike to share with you guys because I think it gives us another avenue into predominantly non-GPFS accounts that have the same kind of business requirement that we see with Spectrum Archive. So big data type of challenges, rich data kind of challenges that they need to keep for long periods of time. So Mike, without further ado I’m going to turn it over to you guys. I did send Mike’s chart deck out, I think it’s a fairly short chart deck and you should have that in your in basket.
Mike:
Thank you Mark. I am on the IBM EhcoLeaf training slide. It’s a very short amount of slides because the beauty of this solution is in the simplicity of it, it really is. It’s a very simple solution to position. I’ve been out selling it and by the way I got a commitment from Flushing Bank yesterday, they want to do a POC and we are going to give them a fantastic price and they have agreed to be a published reference, a local and published reference for us if of course we go through the POC process which we anticipate no issues with. So we are out moving and shaking. I was on Long Island and also met with a company called Leviton, I met with the CFO and I positioned the simple end drive that utilizes this great IBM technology that has really low cost of ownership model and I went over with him and he is very interested. He said we have some of the files that he said we just wanted a repository that we could push it to. We really don’t want to go into cloud, we feel that there could be a lot of our information at risk there in a public cloud environment. So we just comply and gave them a great on premise alternative.
{DESCRIPTION}
LTFS Single Drive – Free To Download
LTFS LE (Library Edition)
All tapes become folders
EchoLeaf Stretch Storage
Virtualizes ALL LTFS-LE Folders as a Single Drive
LTFS EE (Enterprise Edition)
Now Spectrum Scale
Adds a Tape Tier to GPFS
{TRANSCRIPT}
Let’s go to the second slide – Where EchoLeaf fits. It’s all self-explanatory here, I don’t have to bore you guys with any of the details. It’s basically a very simple solution that capitalizes on IBM’s LTO tape, LTFS and also rotating disk.
{DESCRIPTION}
This slide contains a graphic that is covered by the narration written in the transcription of this slide.
{TRANSCRIPT}
Let’s go to the next slide which is how EchoLeaf works. Basically what EchoLeaf is, is it’s a solution that consists of software and a database which creates a meta-table layer so we can identify where the files are. It makes a Linux-based server, we do have a Microsoft version but I’m not down the road testing and we are finding that most customers don’t really care, so we prefer our Linux solution right now because it has come through extensive testing. By the way the solution I might add actually began development at IBM and there was a couple of technicians from IBM that took it for a low program, they were working for a business partner and the business partner had financial issues and they mothballed the program. So the guys left, we developed a relationship with them and we helped them fund the finished solution, so we have exclusivity to it.
It has been completely validated by the IBM Testing Center in Dallas and the intent there was to validate it as an NFS depository, simple end drive. So we created a simple MON point and it looks like a single file that you can just dump your file data into it has what I would like to refer to it as an NFS target. The IBM folks in Dallas validated it working flawlessly and we were in the queue to actually do testing as a potential for Netezza backup and Netezza is a Linux based OS solution. There is two simple commands on Netezza, one is LZ Backup and another is LZ Restore. So we believe we make a really nice target for Netezza backup solution and that is yet to be validated through IBM. So I want to hold off on that for the sake of our go to market strategy, right now we are just focusing on the sample NFS target.
Mark:
Let us know when that is approved, because that would be a great answer. I would love to have that…that would be just awesome. We need an answer for that right now.
Mike:
And I think that getting in the queue to have IBM testing is essential. I may be able to find a customer that we could validate on. I would rather go through IBM. There is absolutely no reason why it won’t work. We are Red Hat, Lenox, and Netezza Red Hat Linux, NZ Backup, NZ Restore and we set off an IP pipe as a target. Why won’t we work, IP makes it happened. So I think it’s a validation issue.
So we have this software that makes us look like a target and it splits the writes and it also has intelligence because it has a database. So let’s say you get really busy, so where is an example where we are a perfect candidate? Digital video surveillance, you have 300 cameras, it is possible that all 300 cameras are picking up changed information simultaneously and there you could get flooded with a lot of requests to place files on the EchoLeaf storage. What would happen there is the disk would then work as a buffer, so we would record all the information that comes in on the disk which are simple, FIFO (first in first out).
{DESCRIPTION}
This slide contains a graphic that is covered by the narration written in the transcription of this slide.
{TRANSCRIPT}
We size it according to what we think the maximum needs would be. You can use any storage here, if they want to carve out storage from their SAN and allocate it, we can do that. If they want to buy a standalone array and have this as an appliance concept, of course we could supply that do. We could use the low will cost Lenovo if we think the FIFO only needs to be a certain size and if it gets any bigger then of course we will take a look at the integrating IBM array type of storage to it. So it’s real simple.
Then that cache would hold the writes and the meta-table would record the fact that they weren’t yet updated into the LTFS system and then it would do a simple copy over to the LTFS systems when I/O really relinquished and went down in performance dates. But under normal circumstances we will be doing simultaneous writes to both disks and to tape. So how does this play there? Well, we are looking at data that you probably are not going to be interacted with otherwise we are not the appropriate solution, but if you do drop a file into an end drive the chances of you needing that file would be greater right after or some shorter time period after you’ve placed the file into that end drive.
So therefore, if an FIFO is sized properly, there is a pretty good chance it will still be on disk and you will get faster access rate. But if we do the ball back, I don’t have to doing education with you guys, what is the worst-case effort, 35 to 40 seconds and you’re accessing a file. So there is really no downside to the device, it just gets a little faster if you happen to have the files still in the disk buffer.
So this is what we are seeing. What drives is it compatible with, I don’t have to answer that for you guys, every LTO drive system works here, LTFS skills against all of them. We can size the library appropriately and keep the costs more aligned with customer’s density needs. Of course we have the WORM capability and any type of encryption or anything that IBM offers, all that is preserved, it’s 100% compatible. So we are not doing anything besides building an interface that presents us a simple MON point, I like to say NFS target and then we did the simultaneous write to both rotating disk as a cache and the tape.
So what have I seen so far from objections? All the same objections that you guys would expect, we don’t like tape. We are trying to get away from tape. Flushing Bank yesterday had the CIO and we have the technical engineer and he didn’t like tape, he wanted to get away from it. He kept referring to it as plastic media. Of course I politely corrected him, and let him know the density ratios on this. I told him that I believe that disk had reached its half-life in 04 and I went through the same presentation and pitch that you guys do all the time. I told him this was the only way he could lower its cost, the CIO said give me some examples of what the cost could be and went over it and he said listen, we need something like this in here. He said I just want to put this in somewhere, I want to put WORM cartridges in it and I want to just keep them there for 20 years. I said well the us. So once I got over that hump that you guys address all the time became a dollar and cents game and as you now, we have really good ratios there.
{DESCRIPTION}
User accesses EchoLeaf Virtual Drive.
EchoLeaf maintains database of what files are on what tapes
EchoLeaf accesses all LTFS-LE Functions
EchoLeaf intercepts FUSE calls (File System In User Space – Part of LTFS-LE
LTFS-LE Interacts with Tape System
{TRANSCRIPT}
The next slide is the EchoLeaf software. Here you could see the database, which I already described and EchoLeaf creating that the virtual drive which is nothing more than an NFS target. Then in the background you guys know you have LTFS LE edition and the standard LTO tape.
That’s it, that’s all this is. I think keeping it simple and focusing on the business case aspect of the fact that you got the IBM company behind you, you’ve got all the IBM R&D and we are just creating a simple NFS target to place files that for mid to long-term archive we can do WORM is as well and this thing is going to keep scaling in density to just… We already have a huge price performance advantage, how much greater is it going to be over time, that is the positioning strategy.
That’s it Mark.
Mark:
So Mark thanks. I got a couple questions for you and I’m sure some of the team will as well. Let me through a couple out there and then we will open the mike up. The first one is kind of engagement model. I’m assuming you guys can kind of do I will say end to end sales support, so starting with requirements definition, sizing, putting together a proposal, and even to the point of integrating the solution and setting it up. You’ve got professional services to implement it and deploy on a customer’s site to make that a turnkey kind of a solution. Is that fair?
Mike:
Absolutely! We have been selling IBM tape for 20 years and we do the perform services work. So we have that capability to help you guys on the presales side, on the post sale side, whenever you need it. We are also putting monitoring on it, everything is going to be economical here. We are putting dynamic monitoring on it so that if there is an issue we can stay involved to make sure the customer…there isn’t any confusion on who to call, IBM Global Services or Champion for the software support.
Mark:
I was just going to kind of go there next with…I will call a multi-element solution. You’ve got all the IBM content but you’ve also got the EchoLeaf content. How do you guys handle support in that kind of environment?
Mike:
Well, we’re going to be capturing all the errors, so we will get notification on it, and then we will be able to proactively notify the customer that we are getting involved. We are going to call IGS for they can call IGS and get the ball rolling and we will shepherd along with them. Of course all software companies say this is really software defined storage and that we don’t anticipate any problems. Here I think we can be bold and saying that Mark because I/O isn’t really very high and nothing changes. We have complete control of this environment with the exception of the array that provides LUN’s to us. So we got all the change management on this and honestly this is a set it and forget it, we don’t see any upgrades coming that we would be forced to patch for any reason because the performance is the performance.
We will be offering some upgrades in the form of GUIs. So what we plan on doing and here is where really you guys can help us as well, help us help you. We are going to be building a GUI for this that allows us to build some buttons, some simple buttons that will have information that will be displayed that are more colloquial to the customer vertical. So medical, we will have a GUI for our end drive for the medical. Financial will have that GUI associated with the financial community. So we are going to have some customization there, but understand that from a complexity standpoint it’s a very rudimentary type of product and we are pricing saying from a rudimentary standpoint to maintain competitiveness.
{DESCRIPTION}
This is a Q&A slide.
{TRANSCRIPT}
Mark:
So are there any other any other questions for Mike on this?
Jeff:
Hi, this is Jeff and I have a handful of questions. Mike how much does this product cost?
Mike:
Well we are finalizing the pricing on it but the uplift is probably going to be about 10% over the IBM pricing on the hardware. So we are looking at…and here’s something else to. We are still putting this together. We are looking at multi-tiered distribution. Let’s take the federal community with IBM, a big opportunity for this in video surveillance there. Of course you have GPFS based storage, but you need the complexity, and if you don’t we have the right solution. But we don’t sell into the feds, so we are not going to try to leverage hardware sales and IBM might have a reseller that focuses in that environment. So we will sell the software through them and work through them. So we covered the eastern United States and I think we do a pretty good job in most of that region, but west of the Mississippi we don’t have coverage, so let’s be realistic. If there is partners there that have opportunity in accounts or if you guys uncover an opportunity in the geo and you have a strong partner we will sell through them. We are not going to come back and step on them and try to take over the account.
Jeff:
That’s good.
Mike:
In our accounts and in the eastern United States, we are attacking the whitespace. I was with Levitron there and they are an EMC shop, so I didn’t talk to them about interactive rotating disk storage, not yet. But he is really interested in archive solutions, so at some point when they are really interested and it looks like they are going to cut in order we might take a stab at a complete IBM solution, why not, we want to uplift. This is an interesting product.
Jeff:
I think you answered the question, we are good here. In the interest of time let me ask a couple of others. Do we have any customers using this in production yet?
Mike:
We have no customers using in production, we have two customers and I’m not at liberty to disclose right now doing test on it.
Jeff:
That’s fine, we are good. If the customer wants to add tapes to the system after the fact, they started with 100 tapes and they use it up and now I need another 20 tapes, how dynamic is adding additional cartridges to the system?
Mike:
How would you answer that question if it was just a basic LTFS?
Jeff:
If it was LE it would be additional folders that show up in LE but I don’t know how that transfers to the EchoLeaf level.
Mike:
We can still convert those folders into a single MON point. So we don’t see any scalability issues and I didn’t mean to be facetious with you, but we scale and I don’t want to say unlimited because there is always a limit, but we should have no limitations on our scaling ability.
Jeff:
We are good there. You mentioned NFS support, and CIFS support?
Mike:
We have run this product on Microsoft and…
Jeff:
I’m sorry, not CIFS, SOMBA, can you export from the Linux server to a Windows application node?
Mike:
We should be able to do that, there should be no limitation there because then that would be a basic SOMBA kernel to kernel type of export program. Remember we are sitting underneath that OS.
Jeff:
Okay, good. Two more questions real quick. What database do you use?
Mike:
We are using on this one a SQL database.
Jeff:
Okay, great. I think you said you did some testing with IBM in Dallas, who is contact for that testing?
Mike:
I don’t have that contact, this was actually about eight months ago, but I will get that for you. I will distribute that out to Mark and then he can push it out to you guys.
Mark:
You’ve got my e-mail address, you can just shoot me a note.
Mike:
By the way, I don’t know if you guys know Forest Wilson…
{DESCRIPTION}
This is a Q&A slide.
{TRANSCRIPT}
He is with IBM down here in Miami. He is really a top-notch engineer. He is working very closely with us he is going to push this thing into some solution spaces that we didn’t think of and you guys could be the architects as well. So if you come up with needs that you think if we added SOMBA and revalidated, reach out to us and see if we can get to it. We want to expand our capabilities and you guys are the vehicle to do that.
Jeff:
I think the Forest is off of Roy Deke’s team, so we know Forest.
Mike:
He was here on Thursday, he was here yesterday working on the solution.
Mark:
Thanks, do you have anything else?
Jeff:
Nothing here could.
Mark:
Does anyone else?
Rob:
This is Rob. We talked briefly at Edge a couple of weeks ago. How does the solution scale? What drives do you support on the backend, in particular you mentioned LTO during the presentation, we support the 3592 and which (inaudible) are supported. I am interested in how big this can scale on the backend.
Mike:
Yes, we don’t see any limitations to the library because as long as LTFS is compatible we should be able to scale. That is kind of irrelevant to where we sit in the stack to be honest with you.
Rob:
The comment about LTO was just a comment, there is no restriction to LTO?
Mark:
You mean on the tape drive side?
Rob:
Yes.
Mike:
The only tape drives should we support are the IBM drives. If a customer has any of the SUN LTOs or any other version of LTO, any other OEM LTO, we have no support capability for that.
Mark:
I think the question Mike is would you support an IBM enterprise drive with the DS3800.
Mike:
Yes, it is the answer to that would be yes and also we are not trying to just leverage that new hardware. If a customer has a library and they want to carve out a portion of it and layer LTFS on it we will support that environment as well. Is or any thing else? Okay guys, thanks. You guys have a good weekend.
Mark:
Mike, just for clarity because I will be broadcasting this recording out, to contact you, your email address is mp@championsg.com and I guess that is the best way for folks get a hold of you if they think they’ve got an opportunity.
Mike:
Yes, it is, and what I would like to do is just in closing I would like to get kind of a map of your guys Mark in the Geos and as I travel into the Geos we make sure we do an introduction. We matched up and Amod has matched us up with a couple of the IBM storage sellers and they immediately came up with three or four opportunities that we can scale into.
Mark:
Let me just throw something out in particular for guys, Amod, Andy, Scott, Joe, Joanna, the folks that are really kind of what I will call the LTFS spec archive (inaudible) here. I want you to be using this by broadcasting this out to your peer storage sellers and storage sales managers You’re going to get it for me but I want to hear from you as well. Also the Enterprise Business Unit client team managers, especially for public sector accounts where you got municipalities, you have Police Department that are going to have chest cameras in hand dash cams and stuff like that, those are places that have a need for this that frankly don’t have…
{DESCRIPTION}
This is a Q&A slide.
{TRANSCRIPT}
…the skills to set up this kind of environment and I think the nice thing that Champion has is they can come in and provide a turnkey solution for something like that. Municipal hospitals, rural hospitals is another great environment where we are not going to be able to get in with our big heavy lifting full-spectrum scale kind of solution. I wouldn’t use this necessarily at UPMC and certainly Mike I’m going to get this out to the fed because there's a lot of federal departments that this would work at. Guys, casinos, Indian reservations, any place, every place that there is a camera which is almost anyplace. Mike mentioned that bank that they are working with. Banks have cameras on every single ATM and they have been in the hallways and in the parking lots, the people that own those cameras don’t often talk to the IT department and they will probably have not got the skills to store all that data. Those are great niches for something like this and I think all this can do is give us more arms and legs out there delivering the solution, a lot of segments of the market that we are not going to get to and just give us a lot more lift.
Thank you Mark for your time.
Jeff:
I thought of one additional question. Champion is an IBM business partner, what happens if you go to an account and it’s interesting but there is already a business partner involved?
Mike:
I think that we could sell through that business partner but we want to kind of cauterize the types of partners that we signed up with. We don’t want partners that are reactive to our selling. When I say our “our” I mean as a collective group, you and I. So if we are out selling and we are out penetrating into an account, then we don’t want to just flip deals over, these guys have to start learning how to hunt to. So we like to find partners that are aggressive going out to the white space and sign them up. So it would really be at your discretion, to be honest with you.
Mark:
I think what Jeff is talking about is if we got a partner that’s already working on an opportunity, but we think you got something to bring to the table as well. So what Mike and I talked about in situations like that it’s kind of a teeming where Champion might provide the EchoLeaf integration, a lot of the ongoing services and what not and somebody else maybe has already provided the hardware. So there is a lot of different ways to skin that cat. We can talk about those as we need to and I see that is a good problem solved.
Mike:
Also guys, just as an FYI, there are still 60,000 optical disk units, laser type disk units and a lot of them are in regional banks and this is one hell of WORM appliance. It sits in the corner, it’s a target, you just dump everything down to it, you’re probably never going to accept that stuff, but if compliance randomly picks a couple of files, you can retrieve it and see it. This blows away EMC Centera and those bloody laser disks because those laser disks, they can’t ever upgrade them, they have to build a whole complete new unit to get more density, so we have the advantages of the media just being upgraded. I just want to throw that out there okay?
Mark:
Okay Mike, thanks. I am going to end the recording. Thanks Mike!
