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Softchoice/IBM Social Media and Big Data Presentation - BC MISA Fall 2011
- 1. MISA 2011 Social Media Presentation Interconnected technologies are changing the way the world works. Consumer services and Social Media are rapidly changing the expectations of our end users in the workplace. This presentation will address why infrastructure matters on the road to smarter computing, and how we can best leverage our existing infrastructure to provide next generation services to our users. Dan Sylvester Softchoice Corporation Solutions Architect Dan.sylvester@softchoice.com
- 2. Twitter Please feel free to tweet about your experiences at this event! @SCTechEvents
- 3. Agenda - “Today’s Goals” Introduction to Softchoice Our social media journey so far How that will impact our infrastructures Trends and Potential Solutions Discuss how next-generation virtualized storage is key to strategically delivering IT as a service
- 4. Softchoice at a Glance • $1.8 billion in Sales (2010) • #1 MS EA Advisor in North America • 40+ local sales offices & 5 call centers • 19,000 Customers • Fastest growing NA Solutions provider • 900 employees • Canada’s Top Solution Provider – Computer Dealer News Magazine • Canadian Headquarters • Traded on TSX Symbol: SO
- 5. Softchoice Locations Over 40 local sales offices and 5 call centres in North America
- 6. Softchoice Enterprise Architecture Group A team of locally available, highly qualified Solution Architects Storage Networks Microsoft Servers Virtualization Security Available at no charge to assist our customers in understanding the latest technology developments Help them develop their vision and strategies through a vendor agnostic, needs assessment approach
- 7. Our Social Media Strategy Scale and amplify our thought-leadership across our business and beyond it’s borders
- 8. Our Constituents: Who we want to engage with Internal Audience Sales Pre-sales Marketing External Audience Customers! Vendor partners Career candidates The world at large
- 9. Getting our folks onboard
- 10. Evolving World
- 11. Data Explosion 2009: 0.8 Zb Source: IDC Digital Universe Study, May 2010 2020: 35.2Zb Growing By A Factor Of 44!
- 12. Goals of Traditional Internal IT Broker Services Support those services through standardization Secure Corporate Data Accelerate and Enable the Business
- 13. User Expectations Users use whatever hardware they want Data should be secure and accessible from anywhere Services should never be down IT should always support them
- 14. Cloud
- 15. Changing the economics of IT Improve Service Reduce Costs Utilize Existing Infrastructure Manage Risk Maximize Internal Resources
- 16. Why IBM Simplify Management Provide Choice Converged Infrastructure Reduce Costs Servers Networking Management Storage
- 18. Easy Tier Storage Tiering Easy Tier’s Basic Capabilities The combination of Easy Tier and the Storage Tier Advisor performs the following three basic functions: Workload hotspot analysis Continuous workload monitoring Smart data Data tiering capabilities can help your organization balance the cost of storage with the value of data.
- 19. Reducing Costs 5000 SVC systems shipped since announcement making the SVC a market leader in Storage Virtualization. Improved Storage Administration with single point of control Improved Storage efficiency by allowing businesses to leverage unused disk capacity. Complements Server Virtualization 19 Storwize V7000 Released – October 2010 V7000 • Supports over 50 vendors including EMC, HP and SUN. • Protect your existing disk systems by virtualizing them. • Apply advance features like thin provisioning, EasyTier and Flashcopy to existing disk subsystems • Virtualize up to 2 PB of external storage. Released – June 2003 V7000
- 22. Thank You!
Editor's Notes
- Hey Everyone, I’m Dan Sylvester. I’m a solutions architect at Softchoice and my role is to be a vendor neutral subject matter expert on Storage and Backup. Up there is my contact information, and if you scan the QR code with your phones, you should hopefully be able to add me to your contacts *** Test the QR code, make it as big as possible if needs be
- Softchoice is pretty involved in Social Media these days, so please don’t hesitate to tweet about what you thought about this event @SCTechEvents.Maybe if you thought the QR code was lame and/or ugly (as a few people have said) – let us know not to do it again Maybe even tweet us and let us know what you thought of the prizes at the end of this session
- So, today, I’d like to introduce you to Softchoice, or if you’re already familiar with Softchoice – I’d like to discuss some of our newer initiatives.And then I’d like to talk about Social Media and how its changing the expectations of our users, we’ll further discuss how those changing expectations will impact our infrastructures.We’ll talk about some of the trends and potential solutions in the market.. And then discuss how virtualized storage can help solve some of the problems experiencing both today and tomorrow.
- We’ve got a lot of locations across North America, 40 offices and 5 call centers.
- I’m a member of what we call the Enterprise Architecture group.I mentioned earlier that my area of focus is Storage and Backup, but we have 134 people across North America on the EAG team. Essentially we’re non-billable customer facing resources, and our mandate is to help our customers develop their vision and strategy.It’s a bit of a unique approach because everywhere else I’ve ever worked, we’ve charged for these types of services. We have subject matter experts on a wide variety of topics that are available to Softchoice customers - we help with the planning, architecture or design of infrastructures involving: Storage Networks Microsoft Software Servers Virtualization SecurityI think that this approach is one of our largest differentiators in the market
- I’d actually like to spend a little bit of time talking about are the social media initiatives that we’ve been implementing at Softchoice.And really we started our journey a year and a half ago When we decided to start down this path, we didn’t really know where to begin - we did a lot research - what we we discovered that blogs and other forms of social media are very helpful for our customers in terms of them making their infrastructure decisionsThe first thing we did was heavily invest in the concept of content marketing - we try to understand the needs of our customers, develop our own content on the solutions to those needs. Then we try to share that content in a way someone would expect to receive it - Content marketing is how we expand and amplify our thought leadership and expertise across our business and to our customers. - It’s one thing to develop the content, its another thing altogether in to get people interested in reading it.Many organizations and lots of our competitors spend a great of money advertising - we’ve never done that, unfortunately there’s no Softchoice NASCAR. - instead we have always invested internally, in resources which provide value to our customers - social media has levelled the playing field for us… it allows us to connect with more customers in new and novel way while still allowing us to invest in ourselves
- As our social media strategy started to develop, what come to light extremely quickly is that we had just as many, if not more, internal uses for Social media, than we did externally.- we realised it’s not just for customers - how are we collaborating internally? - we’re a company of 900 people, there’s nearly 140 people on the EAG team. Finding out who the subject matter experts are internally can be challenging at timesSo when we look at who we want to connect with, there’ really two distinct schools of thought.Internal Audience –connect with the people who support you and who you supportExternal Audience– Customers, vendors, and really the world at large
- One of the biggest challenges we had was getting people involved internallySo now that we know what we want to do, and how we want to organize, how do we inspire/encourage/drag people to join the party? We’ve started to create an onboarding program tailored to softchoice.
- So, enough about what we’re doing at Softchoice – what’s going on in the rest of the world.Through mobile devices and consumer services we’re becoming more and more connected. - people are interacting with each other in many different ways than they used to - twitter, facebook, blogs, instant messages, VOIP, video conferences, skype, podcasts, flickr, the list goes on and on - 3.5 million pieces of content added to facebook per week - 10 billion tweets a year - 3 million new blog posts per dayI have to be honest here, I’m not a real proponent of social media in all its forms. I’ve barely used my twitter account.In fact, when I was doing research for this presentation and I had to interview our marketing department to get a better understanding of our journey towards social media – Our marketing people were pretty quick to point out that I’m perhaps not as involved internally as I could be But where this topic does get more interesting to me is when we start talking about sheer volume of data we’re generating as we communicate and collaborate in these ways.Not only is it a lot of data - These technologies are becoming more interconnected each and every day - We can view Flickr from Facebook, bring your LinkedIn contacts into your phone.. Or just this week, our Hockey Pool was running off a Yahoo service, which I logged into with my google account. Crazy. If you think about the number of integration points and the complexity that exists between these services today, it makes you wonder about tomorrow.When we look a the progression of how people used to communicate - used to write letters, then emails, texts, tweets and instant messages are becoming a faster, more preferred way to communicate.The actual content data isn’t the only data we need to concern ourselves with. When we look at the concept of metadata, the easiest analogy to metadata is really if we look at an “analogue” letter. The envelope would be the metadata, it really has nothing to do with the content inside the letter, but on it we have the sender, the receiver, the addresses for each and a postmark (or a timestamp). - In the case of twitter – where the content can never exceed 140 characters, the metadata is often larger than the entire message. - we need to store all thisWorst yet – that’s just the user of today.. The user of tomorrow is going to be far more connected.
- Anyone know how large a zettabyte is?So a zettabyte is a billion trillion … that’s 1 with 21 zeros after it. Literally a billion terabytes.So, what IDC is saying here is that between 2009 and 2020, we’re going to have the amount of data on earth grow by a factor of 44.It’s only 45% of growth to get to these numbers, pretty conservative in terms of a lot of the customers I’m talking to these daysSo for every 1TB of data you manage today, in a decade it’s 40TB.What’s more is the number of IT professionals is only going to grow by 1.4xSo, let’s think about how we’re going to manage all of that data. If data is growing at an alarming rate – we really can’t afford to store all of this data on expensive fast disk, but we can’t afford to waste manpower on moving data around. We need to get smarter about how we’re managing our data today so we can handle the growth of tomorrow.How do we protect that data? How do you backup hundreds of terabytes? How do you recover hundreds of terabytes in a timely manner?
- In my opinion, if I were to sum up what infrastructure people do, we broker IT services to end users. I say broker, because we rarely develop the service itself, we implement and support it.Typically the easiest way to support those services is to standardize on technologies - because The more technologies we need to support, the more difficult it becomes to develop skillsets specialized on those technologiesIn addition to providing that service -We need to own the data that is corporate intellectual property. So by “owning” it – I mean securing it from internal and external people who shouldn’t have access to it, and also by ensuring that if a user leaves the organization, that data doesn’t leave with them.We also need to be seen as an innovative force in the business, not just a cost. – accelerate / enable the underlying business, not just support it.
- An interesting development is that the expectations of our users are changing. The generations coming up behind us have a different definition of software than I have.When I think software, I still think Microsoft Office.. Obtain the CD and insert it in the drive, enter the CD key, next, next, next, wait, reboot and there we go, software has been installed.Today, software is becoming synonymous with with the word “app” .. Which is typically a small program which front ends a massive service on the internet to the “app”. So when we think about installing an “app” this is typically something that is installed, available and ready to use within minutes of even hearing about it – much less making the decision to install it.It used to be that most people used computers primarily in the workplace and perhaps recreationally at home – but that paradigm is beginning to change. There is a large and growing number of the people we support that: - Are not IT people - And use technology more personally than they do professioanlly.The types of services that a user experiences in their life outside of work, is changing what their expectation of services in the workplace. We talk about SLAs, but a SLA is usually something between the IT department and the business, or the business and a hosted provider. SLAs aren’t very relevant when we talk about things from the perspective of an end user - We can’t measure wether we meet user expectations in terms of 99.9% uptime.And while there isn’t really a buzz word for meeting user expectations – I’m fully convinced we’re going to have one coming.So, what are some of the things users are beginning to expect of the services we provide to them? - People are beginning to feel they should be able to use whatever hardware they want. We’ve all been hearing about the “bring your own device” concept, where, in some organizations - users are just given a budget and told to buy a laptop, or a mobile device - Users are beginning to think that they should be able to access their data securely from anywhere, just like a lot of these “apps”. The widely accepted reasoning is that if we can download it off the app store, it must be secure, right? - Services should never be down, they should never be slow, if the power is on, everything should be running! - And last, but certainly not least – IT should always support them. I mean, we’re computer people, we know everything right?
- Everyone ready for another “what is the cloud?” speech? So, we all know what the cloud is and how it’s going to magically solve our problems, right?The cloud is supposed to lighten our load by allowing us to effectively outsource services that we can’t afford to maintain ourselves or are too labor intensive to maintain ourselves. - Double edged sword, some services we’ll want to outsource.But for the services we want to keep internally, we’ll be competing against other providers for our users mindshare.For data / services we want to own, we need to be able to meet or exceed the sameavailability and performance of the cloudservices we’re competing against.If you think about deploying your own instant messaging service, if its slow, or if it’s down occasionally – how long before people just start using something else?
- How do we meet these expectations while still managing cost? We need a dynamic infrastructure.Improve Service - faster, more reliable systems - Making sure the right data is in the right place at the right time at the right costReduce Costs - decrease ourcosts on our upcoming purchases - we can’t afford to rip/replace everything today in order to accomplish that - we can’t afford to rip/replace everything in 3 years either - making sure we can size for the future based on capacityor performance individuallyUtilize existing infrastructure - we need to make the most of out the investments we’ve already madeManage Risk - Data protection is extremely complex today. We discussed how data is growing at an alarming rate - We need to Improve our RTO and RPOMaximize internal resources - This means focusing on technologies which require less administrative effort.
- Today I’d actually like to discuss the IBM approach to solving these problems. I think that IBM has a very interesting offering today, and I think it’s particularly relevant in the journey towards meeting the new expectations of our users.Converged infrastructure comes up quite often in meetings for me these days.Essentially - Converged infrastructure packages multiple IT components into a single, optimized computing solution. Components of a converged infrastructure solution include servers, data storage devices, networking equipment and software for IT infrastructure management, automation and orchestration.So why is this important? It’s important, because converged infrastructures are really going to be the dynamic computing environments that we run our private clouds from. IBM is the only manufacturer with all 7 layers covered. They have: The server The network The storage And the database and application layer as well as the mangement software all within the same supported stack, all from one vendor.As the expectations from our users rise in terms of uptime and performance, and our infrastructures start becoming larger and more complicated – having fewer points of contact for support and services will be become more important as our infrastructures become more integrated.While IBM is unique in that they can do all the layers from one vendor, probably the most important part of their offering is that we can grow towards that type of a converged infrastructure stack over time as an evolutionary process. I’ve said a few times now that we can’t afford to just rip and replace everything, so it’s important that we start investing in products that are part a roadmap towards a converged infrastructure.
- Storage Virtualization is one of the best ways to begin towards a converged infrastructure stack, while making the most of the infrastructure you’ve already invested in.You can see that there is a decent definition and list of what Storage Virtualizion is. That is very useful to know, but basically what you need to know - is that a storage virtualization controller sits between your servers and the older disks subsystems you already own. If you have SAN’s from any supported vendor we can virtualize those arrays and extend the life of those products that you’ve already paid for by adding next generation features to your older disk arrays.One of the issues I mentioned back when we were talking about the explosion of data - was that we need to be able to manage our data more efficiently. We can’t just afford to put all of our rapidly growing data on the fastest and most expensive disk we own. What we need is a way of categorizing if a particular piece of data should be stored on high performance disk, or on slower, high capacity drives. We need to be able to make this determination without user interaction because the volume of data we’re going to be managing is going to grow much faster than manpower we’ll have to manage it – we need to be looking at implementing technology which requires less manpower to manage – not more.We also need to address how efficient our storage, having “whitespace” that takes up costly space on our expensive SAN disks but actually stores no data reduces the ROI on our investment. Features like thin provisioning and zero detection – where we don’t write data that’s not there, these help us improve the efficiency and the life of the SAN disks we’ve already purchased.
- Easy tier is a feature within IBM’s storage virtualization technology.Easy Tier is IBM’s way of optimizing use of Solid State Drives (or SSDs). Basically SSDs are a relatively new disk technology, and what they offer is extremely good performance per $, but extremely poor capacity for $. So they’re very low capacity, very high performance, expensive disks.We often can’t afford to put our entire high performance workloads on SSD due to the costs involved. What Easy Tier allows us to do is just put the parts of those workloads that require high performance on the SSDs.If we look at the diagram on the top right, really what we see is a logical volume and suppose it was attached to a database server. What Easy Tier would do is distribute the active PARTS of the database to the solid state drives, and it would distribute less active parts to conventional hard disks.The interesting part is that all of this happens automatically. So what it provides is a self-tuning environment which respond very quickly to the dynamic needs of our users. It allows us to mix disk types, so we can buy disks which achieve the best $ per TB when we need capacity, and buy disks which provide the best $/IOP when we need performance. Often we can get a 300% performance increase with as little as 10% of the data in SSD.
- Really what I want to talk about here is that IBM has been doing Storage Virtualization since 2003 with their SVC product – so this is very established technology. One of the things about SVC in the past was the cost of it didn’t fit all organizations, typically we only saw it in medium to large enterprises.What IBM did late last year was introduce a new Storage Array called the V7000 for the mid-market and small enterprise– and the V7000 has SVC built right in. So, basically it’s a full-blown storage array that you can add disks to, but it has the capability to virtualize other storage behind it as well. So if you have an old EMC, or IBM or Hitachi array that you’re looking at replacing because it doesn’t have any of the newer features you’re looking for, you can virtualize it behind a V7000 and add those new features to your old disk.What’s best about the V7000 is that even with the SVC functionality, is that it’s very competitively priced and is at the same pricepoint as any of the major mid-market or small enterprise SAN vendors.It’s definitely worth a consideration.
- So, how do we find out what the impact of these types of technologies would be?We’re providing a funded Visual Storage Assessment where we can analyse your storage environment in a very short amount of time, and assess costs associated with: - Data Protection - Maintenance - Power and Cooling - PerformanceRod Morreau included the details of this assessment in the surveys you’ve been given.
- So if anything we’ve spoken about today resonates with you, please reach out to us @Softchoice on Twitter, or you can visit www.softchoice.com/social and see what we have to offer in the way of social media.