This is the second installment of our Experts Corner Q&A series with industry thought leaders to glean insight into the world of storage and the future of the industry.  This past week we caught up with Greg Schulz at StorageIO to ask a few questions on where he sees the industry heading especially regarding the cloud, green IT and the future of storage. Leveraging almost 30 years in IT, Greg is the founder of the independent IT advisory and consultancy firm Server and StorageIO, and has worked for IT organizations involved with applications, server, and storage networking. His practice leverages his experience including public and private clouds, green it, infrastructure optimization and efficiency, infrastructure resource management including performance capacity planning, BC/DR, security and backup along with virtualization among others. Greg is also author of the books “The Green and Virtual Data Center” and “Resilient Storage Networks – Designing Flexible Scalable Data Infrastructures”.

i365: You frequently discuss your middle-of-the-road stance when it comes to “the cloud” on your blog.  Aside from the current hype surrounding cloud computing, is there any other reason you believe that organizations shouldn’t take advantage of some of the boons cloud storage has to offer?

GS: I tend to take a practical or applied approach having been both customer and vendor, thus with clouds, I see the hype, however as a user of cloud and other managed services for some things, I see how they can compliment, perhaps even for some, serve as a replacement. However, with all that being said, look before you leap, that is, cloud based data protection is not a replacement for on-site data protection, rather a compliment.

Also, a good dose of common-sense data protection (CDP) should also be applied. What I mean by this is that any information that is important should be protected, if it needs to be protected, there should be a copy both on and off-site. For example if you are doing local backups today, get a copy off site using a combination of removable media and/or electronic copies to a cloud or backup managed service provider. What this means is that I do not rely completely on clouds, or, on traditional on-site with removable media backups, rather a combination. Call it belt and suspenders or what you like; however it works as I have had to recover data using both approaches!

i365: Does that mean you practice what you preach than when it comes to backup and clouds?

GS: Absolutely! Perhaps it’s the vestige of having been a customer working in various IT organizations responsible for backup, data protection, BC/DR or having been the vendor, however I do local backups to a combination of disk to disk as well as disk to removable media that goes off-site along with regular copies of more frequently changing data to a cloud managed service provider. I have even experimented with doing backups while on an airplane using services such as gogo wifi to a managed service provider; I guess that has to be a cloud backup story or what … FTC disclosure: I’m paying for, and using another service provider’s cloud or managed solution, however I do use Seagate disk drives that I have purchased for different functions including local backups.

i365: As you’ve mentioned in your blog, cloud computing is an excellent way to complement existing IT structures; while it has been adopted by both large and small businesses, many companies still have fears of accepting it as the main way they conduct business.  Do you see any time in the near future where organizations will rely on SaaS or other cloud storage services to conduct the majority of their work? What are the benefits for adopting a SaaS or cloud storage strategy?

GS: There is a lot of cloud confusion out in the market place, thus customers are not quite sure what to make of it all. Likewise there has been some well publicized cloud related incidents, or, situations where there is some perhaps un-due guilt by association for clouds involving service disruptions or loss of data accessibility, perhaps even actual data loss.

Given all of the hype around clouds, it should be no surprise that not if, rather when something goes wrong, there will be a lightning rod effect. As the storm clouds clear and organizations understand where, what, when and why to use cloud, SaaS, XaaS, backup as a service, managed as a service or whatever you wish to call it in a complimentary fashion, they will see the value.

Don’t be scared of clouds, however look before you leap! Likewise take hype with a grain of salt, perhaps skepticism vs. cynicism, however too often those get confused as being one and the same.

So the big benefit and value proposition and opportunity for cloud or backup service providers is to articulate on one hand if you are not doing anything, start doing backups along with what are some best practices. On the other hand, for those already doing backups, show how cloud or managed service backups are complimentary. Backup providers also need to articulate more of their value adds including service level agreements, data integrity, availability and accessibility along with security stories as opposed to simply offering a free or low cost service.

i365: Recently you presented at Storage Decisions in New York on the subject of “The Other Green” to a large group of IT Professionals in New York.  The presentation involved different ways in which organizations can slim/consolidate their data profiles while still maintaining fast data response. Amongst the variety of tiered storage options (SSD, SAS, tape, cloud storage) and data management strategies (archive, compress, dedupe) discussed, did you find that people showed the most interest in a certain one?  What were the different reactions to the options and strategies discussed?

GS: There continues to be a lot of confusion in the industry about Green IT, storage efficiency and optimization. The Green Gap continues which is the perception that Green is only about recycling or reducing your carbon footprint, something that many organizations would like to do, however given economic realities today and lack of real regulations, focus is elsewhere. Yet when I ask IT pros if they have to address power, cooling or floor-space footprint constraints, budgets, storing and processing more information in a shorter amount of time while boosting productivity, the majorities chime in as that is what they need to do.

Customers don’t realize that by boosting performance using less energy that the result is energy efficiency with a benefit of enhancing business economics as well as helping the environment. That is an example of the green gap, green IT is and should be focused more on boosting productivity, doing more work, processing more information, storingmore data in a smaller footprint for longer periods of time at a lower cost without negatively impacting customer or service experience.

Likewise storage optimization is thought to be about spinning disk drives down to avoid power, compressing and deduping or thin provisioning, all of which are valid for addressing space or capacity concerns. However there is also the focus of addressing time or performance to get more work done in an efficient manner.

What’s fun to see is when I talk with IT pros, the customers that is, the messages and themes resonate around boosting performance in addition to capacity optimization, however it’s a different play or scenario that many vendors are not yet familiar with or ready to tell the story, so what gets told is what they know or have read about.

With time, watch for more focus around performance and productivity as forms of efficiency, optimization, Green IT as part of the next wave which includes life beyond consolation!

i365: Are there any developments you see on the tech horizon that could become the next major IT hype machine?  If so, how might these affect current/emerging technologies?

GS: There will be several, some of which will be more hype including technologies that seem to get re-hyped every year as the next big thing such as T10 Object Storage Device (OSD), holographic storage to name a few. Then there will be more technologies added to the zombie list, you know, those that are declared dead yet continue to be bought and used by customers, not to mention enhanced and sold by vendors as they are productive and profitable. Examples include tape, fibre channel, disk drives, mainframes, printers, windows, RAID and even block storage among others.

Some technologies that I think have legs that are still very early in their maturity cycle however that have very bright futures include among others PCI I/O virtualization (IOV), Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), 6Gb SAS for attaching clusters of servers to shared external storage systems, SAS disk drivers, flash and ram based hybrid SSD, cloud based technologies, virtualization expanding focus from just consolidation to enabling scale up, scale out along with agility and ease of management.

Dedupe enabled storage continues to gain traction and I think we have only scratched the surface in terms of actual market opportunity, same with virtual tape libraries for bridging the old with the new. What I mean by that is virtual tape libraries, regardless of presenting block tape or NFS file system interfaces are great for bridging to existing backup process and procedures (the old) with the new including on-site disk as well as off-site storage at a cloud or managed service provider.

Another area to keep an eye is overall end-to-end (E2E) cross technology domain (e.g. servers, storage, networking, hardware, software, local and remote services) infrastructure resource management (IRM) techniques including server/storage resource analysis (SRA) tools. Where resource management and reporting tools are convenient for showing you what you have, as environments continue to scale in terms of size or complexity, tools that can provide insight and awareness across different technology domains become more important, not just for reporting, but also for connecting the dots and finding where the real issues and opportunities are.