Category Archives: Analytics

Hammering Next Gen Hybrid Clouds

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[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.

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The Commvault 5Ps of change

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[Preamble: I have been invited by Commvault via GestaltIT as a delegate to their Commvault GO conference from Oct 9-11, 2018 in Nashville, TN, USA. My expenses, travel and accommodation are paid by Commvault, 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]

I am a delegate of Commvault GO 2018 happening now in Nashville, Tennessee. I was also a delegate of Commvault GO 2017 held at National Harbor, Washington D.C. Because of scheduling last year, I only managed to stay about a day and a half before flying off to the West Coast. This year I was given the opportunity to experience the full conference at Commvault GO 2018. And I was able to savour the energy, the mindset and the culture of Commvault this time around.

Make no mistakes folks, BIG THINGS are happening with Commvault. I can feel it with their people, with their partners and their customers at the GO conference. How so?

For one, Commvault is making big changes, from People, Process, Pricing, Products and Perception (that’s 5 Ps). Starting with Products, they have consolidated from 20+ products into 4, and simplifying the perception of how the industry sees Commvault. The diagram below shows the 4 products portfolio.

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Industry 4.0 secret gem with Dell

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[Preamble: I have been invited by Dell Technologies as a delegate to their upcoming Dell Technologies World from Apr 30-May 2, 2018 in Las Vegas, USA. My expenses, travel and accommodation will be paid by Dell Technologies, the organizer and I was not obligated to blog or promote the technologies presented at this event. The content of this blog is of my own opinions and views]

This may seem a little strange. How does Industry 4.0 relate to Dell Technologies?

Recently, I was involved in an Industry 4.0 consortium called Data Industry 4.0 (di 4.0). The objective of the consortium is to combine the foundations of 5S (seiri, seiton, seiso, seiketsu, and shitsuke), QRQC (Quick Response Quality Control) and Kaizen methodologies with the 9 pillars of Industry 4.0 with a strong data insight focus.

Industry 4.0 has been the latest trend in new technologies in the manufacturing world. It is sweeping the manufacturing industry segment by storm, leading with the nine pillars of Industry 4.0:

  • Horizontal and Vertical System Integration
  • Industrial Internet of Things
  • Simulation
  • Additive Manufacturing
  • Cloud Computing
  • Augmented Reality
  • Big Data and Analytics
  • Cybersecurity
  • Autonomous Robots

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Huawei Dorado – All about Speed

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[Preamble: I was a delegate of Storage Field Day 15 from Mar 7-9, 2018. My expenses, travel and accommodation were paid for by GestaltIT, the organizer and I was not obligated to blog or promote the technologies presented at this event. The content of this blog is of my own opinions and views]

Since Storage Field Day 15 3 weeks ago, the thoughts of the session with Huawei lingered. And one word came to describe Huawei Dorado V3, their flagship All-Flash storage platform is SPEED.

My conversation with Huawei actually started the night before our planned session at their Santa Clara facility the next day. We had a evening get-together at Bourbon Levi’s Stadium. I was with my buddy, Ammar Zolkipli, who coincidentally was in the Silicon Valley for work. Ammar is from Hitachi Vantara Japan, and has been a good friend of mine for over 17 years now.

Shortly, the Huawei team arrived to join the camaraderie. And we introduced ourselves to Chun Liu, not knowing that he is the Chief Architect at Huawei. A big part of that evening was our conversation with him. Ammar and I have immersed in the Oil & Gas EP (Exploration & Production) data management and petrotechnical applications when he was in Schlumberger and after that a reseller of NetApp. I was a Consulting Engineer with NetApp back then. So, the 2 of us started blabbering (yeah, that would be us when we get together to talk technology).

I observed that Chun was very interested to find learn about real world application use cases that would push storage performance to its limits. And I guessed that the best type of I/O characteristics would be small block, random I/O and billions of them, with near-real time latency. After that evening I did some research and could only think of a few, such as deep analytics or some applications with needs for Monte Carlo simulations. Oh, well, maybe I would share that with Chun the following day.

The moment the session started, it was already about the speed prowess of Huawei Storage. It was like the greyhounds unleashed going after the rabbit. In the lineup, the Dorado series stood out.

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Own the Data Pipeline

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[Preamble: I was a delegate of Storage Field Day 15 from Mar 7-9, 2018. My expenses, travel and accommodation were paid for by GestaltIT, the organizer and I was not obligated to blog or promote the technologies presented at this event. The content of this blog is of my own opinions and views]

I am a big proponent of Go-to-Market (GTM) solutions. Technology does not stand alone. It must be in an ecosystem, and in each industry, in each segment of each respective industry, every ecosystem is unique. And when we amalgamate data, the storage infrastructure technologies and the data management into the ecosystem, we reap the benefits in that ecosystem.

Data moves in the ecosystem, from system to system, north to south, east to west and vice versa, random, sequential, ad-hoc. Data acquires different statuses, different roles, different relevances in its lifecycle through the ecosystem. From it, we derive the flow, a workflow of data creating a data pipeline. The Data Pipeline concept has been around since the inception of data.

To illustrate my point, I created one for the Oil & Gas – Exploration & Production (EP) upstream some years ago.

 

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The leapfrog game in Asia with HPC

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Brunei, a country rich in oil and gas, is facing a crisis. Their oil & gas reserves are rapidly running dry and expected to be depleted within 2 decades. Their deep dependency on oil and gas, once the boon of their economy, is now the bane of their future.

Since 2000, I have been in and out of Brunei and got involved in several engagements there. It is a wonderful and peaceful country with friendly people, always welcoming visitors with open hearts. The country has prospered for decades, with its vast oil riches but in the past few years, the oil prices have been curbed. The profits of oil and gas no longer justify the costs of exploration and production.

2 years ago, I started pitching a new economy generator for the IT partners in Brunei. One that I believe will give a country like Brunei the ability to leapfrog their neighbours in South East Asia, which is to start build a High Performance Computing (HPC)-as-a-Service (HPC-as-a-Service) type of business.

Why HPC? Why do I think HPC will give a developing country like Brunei super powers in the digital economy?

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Cohesity SpanFS – a foundational shift

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[Preamble: I was a delegate of Storage Field Day 15 from Mar 7-9, 2018. My expenses, travel and accommodation were paid for by GestaltIT, the organizer and I was not obligated to blog or promote the technologies presented at this event. The content of this blog is of my own opinions and views]

Cohesity SpanFS impressed me. Their filesystem was designed from ground up to meet the demands of the voluminous cloud-scale data, and yes, the sheer magnitude of data everywhere needs to be managed.

We all know that primary data is always the more important piece of data landscape but there is a growing need to address the secondary data segment as well.

Like a floating iceberg, the piece that is sticking out is the more important primary data but the larger piece beneath the surface of the water, which is the secondary data, is becoming more valuable. Applications such as file shares, archiving, backup, test and development, and analytics and insights are maturing as the foundational data management frameworks and fast becoming the bedrock of businesses.

The ability of businesses to bounce back after a disaster; the relentless testing of large data sets to develop new competitive advantage for businesses; the affirmations and the insights of analyzing data to reduce risks in decision making; all these are the powerful back engine applicability that thrust businesses forward. Even the ability to search for the right information in a sea of data for regulatory and compliance reasons is part of the organization’s data management application.

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Storage dinosaurs evolving too

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[Preamble: I am a delegate of Storage Field Day 15 from Mar 7-9, 2018. My expenses, travel and accommodation are paid for by GestaltIT, the organizer and I am not obligated to blog or promote the technologies presented at this event. The content of this blog is of my own opinions and views]

I have been called a dinosaur. We storage networking professionals and storage technologists have been called dinosaurs. It wasn’t offensive or anything like that and I knew it was coming because the writing was on the wall, … or is it?

The cloud and the breakneck pace of all the technologies that came along have made us, the storage networking professionals, look like relics. The storage guys have been pigeonholed into a sunset segment of the IT industry. SAN and NAS, according to the non-practitioners, were no longer relevant. And cloud has clout (pun intended) us out of the park.

I don’t see us that way. I see that the Storage Dinosaurs are evolving as well, and our storage foundational knowledge and experience are more relevant that ever. And the greatest assets that we, the storage networking professionals, have is our deep understanding of data.

A little over a year ago, I changed the term Storage in my universe to Data Services Platform, and here was the blog I wrote. I blogged again just before the year 2018 began.

 

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The power of E8

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[Preamble: I was a delegate of Storage Field Day 14 from Nov 8-10, 2017. My expenses, travel and accommodation were paid for by GestaltIT, the organizer and I was not obligated to blog or promote the technologies presented at this event. The content of this blog is of my own opinions and views]

E8 Storage technology update at Storage Field Day 14 was impressive. Out of the several next generation NVMe storage technologies I have explored so far, E8 came out as the most complete. It was no surprise that they won the “Best of Show” in the Flash Memory Summits for the “Most Innovative Flash Memory Technology” in 2016 and “Most Innovative Flash Memory Enterprise Business Application” for 2017.

Who is E8 Storage?

They came out of stealth in August 2016 and have been making waves with very impressive stats. When E8 was announced, their numbers were more than 10 million IOPS, with 100µsecs for reads and 40µsecs for writes. And in the SFD14 demo, they reached and past the 10 million IOPS numbers.

The design philosophy of E8 Storage is different than the traditional dual controller scale-up storage architecture design or the multi-node scale-out cluster design. In fact, from a 30,000 feet view, it is quite similar to a “SAN-client” design advocated by Lustre, leveraging a very high throughput, low latency network.

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Commvault calling again

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[Preamble: I will be a delegate of Storage Field Day 14. My expenses, travel and accommodation are paid for by GestaltIT, the organizer and I am not obligated to blog or promote the technologies presented in this event]

I am off to the US again next Monday. I am attending Storage Field Day 14 and it will be a 20+ hour long haul flight. But this SFD has a special twist, because I will be Washington DC first for Commvault GO 2017 conference. And I can’t wait.

My first encounter with Commvault goes way back in early 2001. I recalled they had their Galaxy version but in terms of market share, they were relatively small compared to Veritas and IBM at the time. I was with NetApp back then, and customers in Malaysia hardly heard of them, except for the people in Shell IT International (SITI). For those of us in the industry, we all knew that SITI worldwide had an exclusive Commvault fork just for them.

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