As I alluded to in a previous post, maintaining existing service levels, adding new resources and services, and troubleshooting performance and availability issues in the increasingly complex IT environment are difficult enough challenges on their own. Combine that with budget constraints and your average IT manager faces a quandary: How do you roll out new services, continue to maintain existing service level commitments, and stay within your budget? Put another way, which will you get called to the mat for first: an application performance issue, or cost overruns? More importantly, how does an IT manager keep from getting called out on either of these issues?

Now you may say that cost really isn’t an issue anymore, what with storage becoming so inexpensive. StorageMojo had a great post back in October disspelling this myth: yes, the cost of storage capacity has gone down dramatically, but in that same amount of time, the cost of storage processing has doubled according to Robin:

In storage, the capacity illusion reigns supreme. We measure storage utilization by looking at capacity in gigabytes, which, as Hu points out, is the cheapest part of storage. The expensive storage component is I/O. And the expensive management component is people.

Five years ago, the average disk drive cost about $4/GB while the average cost of OLTP tpmc was about $20. Today, 3.5″ disks are about $0.30/GB and OLTP tpmc is about $4. So capacity is less than 1/10th the cost of five years ago, while I/O is about 1/5th the cost. The relative cost of I/O has doubled in the last five years.

This tells me two things. First, we’re all probably underestimating the true cost of storage. But secondly, and much more importantly, it highlights the need for storage management systems to track more than just capacity and application-specific utilization. To be successful, an IT manager needs to supplement SRM reporting and management tools with other systems that can, for instance, understand and predict how the complex relationships between applications, servers, networks, and storage will affect business performance and availability. These new products must predict issues before they impact business operations and help properly budget for future capacity growth given projected application demands.

This kind of insight requires a cross-domain approach–it requires close cooperation across storage, application and infrastructure management systems. It’s another reason why I feel that the time is right for Akorri.

Mario Apicella asked a very interesting question on Friday: “Is storage management already past its prime?”

He wrote:

It may sound hasty to dismiss a technology that many companies have yet to deploy or even evaluate, but some of the vibes I am getting lately from vendors suggest that storage management applications may become obsolete before becoming mainstream.

It’s hard to give a short answer to the question of what’s wrong with storage management, but perhaps the beginning of the end for the technology is the limited scope revealed by its name.

Does it make sense to devolve so much effort to rein in just a single piece of the infrastructure puzzle? Shouldn’t storage be orchestrated in harmony with other important — perhaps even more important — pillars such as servers, networks, and above all, applications?

I think he’s right because the IT Data Center has evolved to a shared, virtualized world. It is no longer sufficient to look at and understand just one piece of the puzzle. A holistic view of the problem must be taken.

Recently I was on a sales call at a very large enterprise. Its data center contains thousands of servers and petabytes of storage. The person with whom I was talking had a mission. His mission was to optimize his server utilization. He realized that the pitifully low utilization he was currently experiencing was costing him greatly. When I asked him what his approach was going to be it became obvious to me that he couldnt succeed. His approach was to combine applications onto servers that had sufficient CPU horsepower. But I asked him a couple of simple questions. What about the applications storage requirements? How can you make changes to your applications and servers without understanding the impact on your shared storage pool. A light bulb went off for the customer. He realized I was right. He couldnt accomplish his mission without taking that holistic view. Everything is interconnected. Changing servers has a great impact on the underlying storage system and vice versa. This was now a great time to talk with him about Akorris BalancePoint product. I quickly told him that BalancePoint creates the Cross-Domain view he’d need and provide the analysis and modeling required to do the job efficiently.

What was it that Lincoln said? “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” While there’s certainly a place for storage management systems, they are not the panacea as they have often been portrayed. Without a comprehensive view of the infrastructure and a good understanding of the increasingly complex relationship between storage, applications, operating systems and servers, troubleshooting problems will continue to be an exercise in finger pointing.

There are a lot of people out there talking about the importance of applications in todays data center. There’s a lot of smart things being said, but to use a phrase inspired from my ham radio days, the signal to noise ratio is pretty poor.

Applications are, of course, the key component in todays enterprise: they are the portal for business delivery. Furthermore, as infrastructure hardware continues to commoditize, its just not a sexy topic to talk about anymore. But the fact of the matter is you cant have one without the other. Applications need hardware to run on and businesses need application to run. Looking at one without understanding the other is short sighted.

Understanding the complex relationships that exist between applications and the shared hardware infrastructure that supports them has become an important issue for IT organizations. One trend that is making these relationships even more difficult to grasp is virtualization. Virtualization is hot, but it vastly complicates the process of getting a complete picture of these relationships.

So let’s explore virtualization in more detail for a moment. Everybody seems to be talking about server, network or storage virtualization, but in reality, virtualization does two things. First it turns physical resources into services. With virtualization, CPUs, networks, and data storage all become fungible. This allows these physical resources to be delivered as services. Over the long term, those services should be able to be delivered on-demand, changing in real time as business requirements change.

Secondly, virtualization adds lots of complexity to the IT infrastructure. It has, in fact, become too complex for humans to understand how multiple applications interact with a shared, virtualized infrastructure. Just imagine how difficult it is today to understand how one application sitting on a virtual server–connected to a virtual network, talking with virtualized storage–interacts with another applications being serviced by the same infrastructure. Now ask yourself, which application is accessing which drive at what time? This is a fact of life for today’s IT organizations, and if you’re not able to answer that question when trouble hits, when you’re planning your capacity growth or when your committing to service levels, you’ll be in trouble.

This is one of the many challenges that I set out to solve when I founded Akorri. We’ve developed an application that you’ll be reading about shortly that helps IT organizations understand the complex relationships that exist between the cross-domain technology silos in todays data center–helping them balance performance, availability and utilization/cost for instance.

Using complex analytic and modeling algorithms, Akorri can help you identify and troubleshoot performance and availability related issues, provide optimization recommendations and allow effective, accurate planning.

In future posts Ill discuss how this technology works, the importance of analytics and modeling, and how customers are already using our technology to solve some important challenges.

In 1999 I founded Pirus Networks. A technology shift was occurring back then that I felt I could bring some value to. As enterprises shifted from direct attached storage to storage area networks (SAN) I felt it was also a good time to re-examine how data services where being offered in the data center.

At that time all of the data services–like data migration, data replication, file services, and virtualization–were being done at the end points: either the server or the storage system. With SAN technology firmly in place I felt it was a good time to bring those services into the network. Offering SAN based services made a lot of sense, it was a single point of management, scalability was a lot better, and it provided an easier way of bringing data services to heterogeneous systems.

In 2002 Pirus was acquired by Sun Microsystems. It was a great acquisition and Sun was able to deliver the StoreEdge 6920 system powered by the Pirus product. At Sun I ran the Storage Platform Group. In this role I heard first hand the issues customers were facing. The biggest issue I heard was one of complexity. Sure, it’s great having all of these services available–after all, having flexible services with virtualized physical resources is what will make the On-Demand data center a reality. But, as most IT administrators admitted, managing those services and resources can quickly become a nightmare.

Questions such as, How should I virtualize my server or storage to optimize my applications performance? or When and where should I migrate my data? or Is my infrastructure configured properly to support my application portfolio? were all questions that IT folks felt need answering.

After leaving Sun in 2004 I continued to think about this problem. It occurred to me that the only way to truly solve this complexity issue was to fully understand the cross-domain (i.e., server, network, and storage) technologies that 1) make up the data center, 2) characterize the applications requirements for the infrastructure, and 3) use advance analytical techniques to pull it all together.

I realized that if I could characterize, or fingerprint an application and use that fingerprint information against a mathematical representation of the infrastructure then I could bring the knowledge needed to effectively control the data services and virtual resources. My challenge was to bring together infrastructure and application engineers along with mathematicians to work on this complex problem. I felt it was a perfect problem for a startup to attack. Being able to get a small, focused, diverse set of people together in order to solve a complex issue is what startups are best at.

So with that understanding I founded Akorri. With many man years of development already behind us, we’ve produced our first product, BalancePoint. BalancePoint will give IT administrators the visibility and knowledge they need in order to troubleshoot, optimize and plan around their complex environments.

I hope this gives you a good understanding of the thought process behind our company and product. In my next few posts, I’ll explore many of the different balance points that managers and administrators must find as they walk the modern IT tightrope.

Well, Akorri information has been slowly leaking into the business, technology and local press–from the news of our first two funding rounds while we were in our “stealth mode” to some articles that hit last week in Storage Magazine, Network World and Byte and Switch, to name a few.

With today’s product and official company launch, it’s finally official–you can find the press release and other coverage in our online Press Room.

I’m very pleased about the progress we’ve made since our inception, and I hope to share with you on this blog my vision for the future of Akorri, BalancePoint and the IT management world. Stay tuned for more…

Welcome to Akorriblog. My name is Rich Corley and I am the founder and CEO of Akorri. I’ve been described by many people as a serial entrepreneur. Like most entrepreneurs, I have a passion for creating and building. That passion for creating started as a teenager building ham radio’s from scratch. Nothing is more satisfying then seeing something you’ve designed and built from the ground up work.

I’ve found that building successful companies that solve real customer problems delivers similar satisfaction. The serial part of “serial entrepreneur” comes from the fact I’ve done this six times! I guess that qualifies this as an addiction for me.

Another passion for me these days is the evolution of the enterprise data center. It’s amazing to see the transformation in twenty years from mainframes to distributed systems and now to the emerging on-demand, service-orientated data center. The focus of this blog will be to explore the directions I believe the enterprise data center is heading, and to share with you some of the thinking behind Akorri’s business–which was built to help companies make it through this transformation.

I’ll look at some of the current challenges that exist in today’s data center and how Akorri can solve those problems, while keeping an eye towards the technology and business initiatives that will transform the data center over the coming years.

I’ve brought together a seasoned team of system and software engineers, world-class mathematicians and business people in order to create solutions for the issues that data centers face today and become leaders in helping in the evolution of the data center. I’m looking forward to sharing some of the insights that this great team has as we tackle some very challenging issues for our customers.

I can’t promise to be brief in every post, but I will be focused. If you’re interested in the changing world of the datacenter, or your ears perk up when you hear words like storage, virtualization, application performance, SLAs, troubleshooting and capacity planning, you’ve come to the right place. I hope you’ll come back. Thanks!