Economic N Series

1. Economic N Series Getting to Yes V0.1 W Saltzman

2. What is Economic Nseries • A solution to: • Return capacity to free pool to save money • Reduces amount of data for back ups thereby reducing network bandwidth to save more money • Reduces amount of data for back ups thereby shortening backup windows to allow applications more processing time so client can make more money • What is it made from? • IBM Compression Appliance with one or more IBM N Series storage devices

3. How to determine its benefits? • Do a file crawl on the storage devices • For many shops, this is really hard and extremely difficult to perform. • Fortunately, at IBM this is easy! • Use the SIO program to get access to Arxview. • It takes less than a day to install and get operational. Depending upon the size of the shop and the location / network available to perform the scan, within a couple of days* you can get an EXTREMELY detailed report • File Report: Age, Mix, Number, Location of files • Compressibility Report: A macro level estimation of exactly the savings and why * Scan rates vary from 500 files a second (lousy network on cruddy nas system) to 50,000 file a second (dedicated DC network on N Series )

4. Example File Report (A Real Case!) 366M Total files Consuming 57TB usable capacity Organized listing of file types

5. Screen Shots related to Compression Analysis • The Arxview tool can be used to generate PPT files or printer friendly reports that can be imbedded in a proposal or status report • The Arxview tool can be used interactively by an administrator to make updates and changes to the analysis either periodically or ad hoc to respond to management requests about the environment • Some examples are attached…

6. Compression Analysis (Part I) 57.2TB of total file data was scanned in the environment 30.1TB of file data was recognized as compressible* 24.1TB is the estimated size of those newly compressed files 6.0TB is the estimated free space 20.0% is the estimated overall compression ratio 10.5% is the overall savings 1 2 3 4 5 6 * The unknown file types may still becompressible and can be manually input

7. Ad Hoc Analysis (Part II) Filter to interrogate specific file types Sortable columns Scroll through 1443 Total file types

8. Additional Considerations • There are ~380 defined file types with an estimated compression percentage • Files are not touched during crawl. Just analyzes the file type from metadata. • You can fool the tool and render the analysis worthless by changing the file types to something misleading (eg. “rename *.mp3 *.txt”) • Estimations work well on the macro level. • Certain file type compression ratios are very predictable (eg. TXT files) • Other file types compression rations are very unpredictable due to content specific dependencies (eg. TIFF files) • Use the winzip tool to get the actual compression improvement for any file. • For unknown or application specific file types, the tool allows the user to manually specify a compression percentage. The reports will be automatically updated. • Defaults can be overwritten by the user.

9. Adding New File Types for Unique Analysis Administrator simply adds a new file type extension (“sh”) along with its expected compression ratio (“70”) and reports get updated to reflect the change