HPE is acquiring Cray Inc. Almost 3 years ago, HPE acquired SGI. Back in 2017, HPE partnered WekaIO, and invested big in the latest Series C funding of WekaIO just weeks ago.
Cray, SGI and WekaIO are all strong HPC technology companies. Given the strong uptick in the HPC market, especially commercial HPC, we cannot deny HPE’s ambition to become the top SuperComputing and HPC vendor in the industry. Continue reading
I like LTFS (Linear Tape File System). I was hoping it would take off but it has not. And looking at its future, its significance is becoming less and less relevant. I look if Cloud has been a factor in the possible demise of LTFS in the next few years.
In a nutshell, Linear Tape File System makes LTO tapes look like a disk with a file system. It takes a tape and divides it into 2 partitions:
Diagram from https://www.snia.org/sites/default/orig/SDC2011/presentations/tuesday/DavidPease_LinearTape_File_System.pdf
It has a File System module which is implemented in supported OS of Unix/Linux, MacOS and Windows. And the mounted file system “tape partition” shows up as a drive or device.
There were many attempts to kill off tapes and so far, none has been successful.
Among the “tape-killer” technologies, I think the most prominent one is the VTL (Virtual Tape Library). There were many VTLs I encountered during my days in mid-2000s. NetApp had Alacritus and EMC had Clariion Disk Libraries. There were also IBM ProtecTIER, FalconStor VTL (which is still selling today) among others and Sepaton (read in reverse is “No Tapes’). Sepaton was acquired by Hitachi Data Systems several years back. Continue reading
[Disclaimer: I have been invited by Dell Technologies as a delegate to their Dell Technologies World 2019 Conference from Apr 29-May 1, 2019 in the Las Vegas USA. My expenses, travel and accommodation are covered by Dell Technologies, the organizer and I am not obligated to blog or promote their technologies presented at this event. The content of this blog is of my own opinions and views]
Talk about big. Dell Technologies just went big with the Cloud.
Day 1 of Dell Technologies World 2019 (DTW19) started with a big surprise to many, including yours truly when Michael Dell, together with Pat Gelsinger invited Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella on stage.
There was nothing new about Microsoft working with Dell Technologies. Both have been great partners since the PC days, but when they announced Azure VMware Solutions to the 15,000+ attendees of the conference, there was a second of disbelief, followed by an ovation of euphoria.
VMware solutions will run native on Microsoft Azure Cloud. The spread of vSphere, VSAN, vCenter, NSX-T and VMware tools and environment will run on Azure Bare Metal Infrastructure at multiple Azure locations. How big is that. Continue reading
[Preamble: I have been invited by GestaltIT as a delegate to their Tech Field Day for Storage Field Day 18 from Feb 27-Mar 1, 2019 in the Silicon Valley USA. My expenses, travel and accommodation were covered by GestaltIT, the organizer and I was not obligated to blog or promote their technologies presented at this event. The content of this blog is of my own opinions and views]
3 weeks after Storage Field Day 18, I was still trying to wrap my head around the 3-hour session we had with Western Digital. I was like a kid in a candy store for a while, because there were too much to chew and I couldn’t munch them all.
Not many storage companies in the world can claim that mantra – “From Silicon to Systems“. Western Digital is probably one of 3 companies (the other 2 being Intel and nVidia) I know of at present, which develops vertical innovation and integration, end to end, from components, to platforms and to systems.
For a long time, we have always known Western Digital to be a hard disk company. It owns HGST, SanDisk, providing the drives, the Flash and the Compact Flash for both the consumer and the enterprise markets. However, in recent years, through 2 eyebrow raising acquisitions, Western Digital was moving itself up the infrastructure stack. In 2015, it acquired Amplidata. 2 years later, it acquired Tegile Systems. At that time, I was wondering why a hard disk manufacturer was buying storage technology companies that were not its usual bread and butter business.
I picked up the latest development news about Quantum Corporation. Last month, in December 2018, they secured a USD210 million financial lifeline to support their deflating business and their debts. And if you follow their development, they are with their 3rd CEO in the past 12 months, which is quite extraordinary. What is happening at Quantum Corp?
Quantum Logo (PRNewsFoto/Quantum Corp.)
I have known Quantum since 2000, very focused on the DLT tape library business. At that time, prior to the coming of LTO, DLT and its successor, SuperDLT dominated the tape market together with IBM. In 2006, they acquired ADIC, another tape vendor and became one of the largest tape library vendors in the world. From the ADIC acquisition, Quantum also got their rights on Stornext, a high performance scale out file system. I was deeply impressed with Stornext, and I once called it the Swiss Army knife of Data Management. The versatility of Stornext addressed many of the required functions within the data management lifecycle and workflows, and thus it has made its name in the Media and Entertainment space.
However, Quantum has never reached great heights in my opinion. They are everything to everybody, like a Jack of all trades, master of none. They are backup with their tape libraries and DXi series, archive and tiering with the Lattus, hybrid storage with QXS, and file system and scale-out with Stornext. If they have good business run rates and a healthy pipeline, having a broad product line is fine and dandy. But Quantum has been having CEO changes like turning a turnstile, and amid “a few” accounting missteps and a 2018 CEO who only lasted 5 months, they better steady their rocking boat quickly. Continue reading
My lazy Thursday morning was spurred by a posting by Stephen Foskett, Chief Organizer of Tech Field Days. “Microsoft mulls the acquisition of Mellanox”
The AWS factor
A quick reaction leans towards a strange one. Microsoft of all people, buying a chip company? Does it make sense? However, leaning deeper, it starts to make some sense. And I believe the desire is spurred by Amazon Web Services announcement of their Graviton processor at AWS re:Invent last month.
AWS acquired Annapurna Labs in early 2015. From the sources, Annapurna was working on low powered, high performance networking chips for the mid-range market. The key words – lower powered, high performance, mid-range – are certainly the musical notes to the AWS opus. And that would mean the ability for AWS to control their destiny, even at the edge. Continue reading
2019 beckons. The year 2018 is coming to a close and I look upon what I blogged in the past years to reflect what is the future.
Late 2017, I blogged about the Data Services Platform. Storage is no longer the storage infrastructure we know but has evolved to a platform where a plethora of data services are served. The changing face of storage is continually evolving as the IT industry changes. I take this opportunity to reflect what I wrote since I started blogging years ago, and look at the articles that are shaping up the landscape today and also some duds.
One of the most memorable ones is about memory cloud. I wrote the article when Dell acquired a small company by the name of RNA Networks. I vividly recalled what was going through my mind when I wrote the blog. With the SAN, NAS and DAS, and even FAN (File Area Network) happening during that period, the first thing was the System Area Network, the original objective Infiniband and RDMA. I believed the final pool of where storage will be is the memory, hence I called it the “The Last Bastion – Memory“. RNA’s technology became part of Dell Fluid Architecture.
True enough, the present technology of Storage Class Memory and SNIA’s NVDIMM are along the memory cloud I espoused years ago.
What about Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE)? It wasn’t a compelling enough technology for me when it came into the game. Reduced port and cable counts, and reduced power consumption were what the FCoE folks were pitching, but the cost of putting in the FC switches, the HBAs were just too great as an investment. In the end, we could see the cracks of the FCoE story, and I wrote the pre-mature eulogy of FCoE in my 2012 blog. I got some unsavoury comments writing that blog back then, but fast forward to the present, FCoE isn’t a force anymore.
Weeks ago, Amazon Web Services (AWS) just became a hybrid cloud service provider/vendor with the Outposts announcement. It didn’t surprise me but it may have shook the traditional systems integrators. I took the stance 2 years ago when AWS partnered with VMware and juxtaposed it to the philosophical quote in the 1993 Jurassic Park movie – “Life will not be contained, … Life finds a way“.
I post storage and cloud related articles to my unofficial SNIA Malaysia Facebook community (you are welcomed to join) every day. It is a community I started over 9 years ago, and there are active live banters of the posts of the day. Casual, personal were the original reasons why I started the community on Facebook rather than on LinkedIn, and I have been curating it religiously for the longest time.
Looking back 8-9 years ago, the storage vendor landscape of today has not changed much. The Big 5 hegemony is still there, still dominating the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise and Mid-end Arrays, and is still there in the All-Flash quadrant as well, albeit the presence of Pure Storage in that market.
The Big 5 of today – Dell EMC, NetApp, HPE, IBM and Hitachi Vantara – were the Big 6 of 2009-2010, consisting of EMC, NetApp, Dell, HP, IBM and Hitachi Data Systems. The All-Flash, or Gartner calls it Solid State Arrays (SSA) market was still an afterthought, and Pure Storage was just founded. Pure Storage did not appear in my radar until 2 years later when I blogged about Pure Storage’s presence in the market.
Here’s a look at the Gartner Magic Quadrant for 2010:
We see Pure Play Storage vendors in the likes of EMC, NetApp, Hitachi Data Systems (before they adopted the UCP into their foray), 3PAR, Compellent, Pillar Data Systems, BlueArc, Xiotech, Nexsan, DDN and Infortrend. And when we compare that to the 2017 Magic Quadrant (I have not seen the 2018 one yet) below:
I woke up yesterday morning with a shocker of a news. IBM announced that they were buying Redhat for USD34 billion. Never in my mind that Redhat would sell but I guess that USD190.00 per share was too tempting. Redhat (RHT) was trading at USD116.68 on the previous Friday’s close.
Redhat is one of my favourite technology companies. I love their Linux development and progress, and I use a lot of Fedora and CentOS in my hobbies. I started with Redhat back in 2000, when I became obsessed to get my RHCE (Redhat Certified Engineer). I recalled on almost every weekend (Saturday and Sunday) back in 2002 when I was in the office, learning Redhat, and hacking scripts to be really good at it. I got certified with RHCE 4 with a 96% passing mark, and I was very proud of my certification.
One of my regrets was not joining Redhat in 2006. I was offered the job as an SE by Josep Garcia, and the very first position in Malaysia. Instead, I took up the Hitachi Data Systems job to helm the project implementation and delivery for the Shell GUSto project. It might have turned out differently if I did.
The IBM acquisition of Redhat left a poignant feeling in me. In many ways, Redhat has been the shining star of Linux. They are the only significant one left leading the charge of open source. They are the largest contributors to the Openstack projects and continue to support the project strongly whilst early protagonists like HPE, Cisco and Intel have reduced their support. They are of course, the perennial top 3 contributors to the Linux kernel since the very early days. And Redhat continues to contribute to projects such as containers and Kubernetes and made that commitment deeper with their recent acquisition of CoreOS a few months back.
[Preamble: I have been invited by GestaltIT as a delegate to their TechFieldDay from Oct 17-19, 2018 in the Silicon Valley USA. My expenses, travel and accommodation are paid by GestaltIT, the organizer and I was not obligated to blog or promote their technologies presented at this event. The content of this blog is of my own opinions and views]
Hammerspace came out of stealth 2 days ago. Their objective? To rule the world of data for hybrid clouds and multi-clouds, and provide “unstructured data anywhere on-demand“. That is a bold statement, for a company that is relatively unknown, except for its deep ties with the now defunct Primary Data. Primary Data’s Chairman, David Flynn, is the head honcho at Hammerspace.
The Hammerspace technology has come the right time in my opinion because the entire cloud, multi-cloud and hybrid cloud stories have become fractured, siloed. The very thing that cloud computing touted to fix has brought back the same set of problems. At the same time, not every application was developed for the cloud. Applications rely on block storage services, or NAS protocols, or the de facto S3 protocols for storage repositories. However, the integration and communication between applications break down when these on-premises applications are moving to the cloud, or when applications residing the cloud are moved back to on-premises for throughput delivery, or even applications residing at the edge.
