Commvault calling again

[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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Pure Electric!

I didn’t get a chance to attend Pure Accelerate event last month. From the blogs and tweets of my friends, Pure Accelerate was an awesome event. When I got the email invitation for the localized Pure Live! event in Kuala Lumpur, I told myself that I have to attend the event.

The event was yesterday, and I was not disappointed. Coming off a strong fiscal Q1 2018, it has appeared that Pure Storage has gotten many things together, chugging full steam at all fronts.

When Pure Storage first come out, I was one of the early bloggers who took a fancy of them. My 2011 blog mentioned the storage luminaries in their team. Since then, they have come a long way. And it was apt that on the same morning yesterday, the latest Gartner Magic Quadrant for Solid State Arrays 2017 was released.

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Can NetApp do it a bit better?

[Preamble: I was a delegate of Storage Field Day 12. My expenses, travel and accommodation were paid for by GestaltIT, the organizer and I was not obligated to blog or promote the technologies presented in this event]

In Day 2 of Storage Field Day 12, I and the other delegates were hustled to NetApp’s Sunnyvale campus headquarters. That was a homecoming for me, and it was a bit ironic too.

Just 8 months ago, I was NetApp Malaysia Country Manager. That country sales lead role was my second stint with NetApp. I lasted almost 1 year.

17 years ago, my first stint with NetApp was the employee #2 in Malaysia as an SE. That SE stint went by quickly for 5 1/2 years, and I loved that time. Those Fall Classics NetApp used to have at the Batcave and the Fortress of Solitude left a mark with me, and the experiences still are as vivid as ever.

Despite what has happened in both stints and even outside the circle, I am still one of NetApp’s active cheerleaders in the Asia Pacific region. I even got accused by being biased as a community leader in the SNIA Malaysia Facebook page (unofficial but recognized by SNIA), because I was supposed to be neutral. I have put in 10 years to promote the storage technology community with SNIA Malaysia. [To the guy named Stanley, my response was be “Too bad, pick a religion“.]

The highlight of the SFD12 NetApp visit was of course, having lunch with Dave Hitz, one of the co-founders and the one still remaining. But throughout the presentations, I was unimpressed.

For me, the only one which stood out was CloudSync. I have read about CloudSync since NetApp Insight 2016 and yes, it’s a nice little piece of data shipping service between on-premise and AWS cloud.

Here’s how CloudSync looks like:

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FlashForward to Beyond

The flash frenzy has reached its zenith in 2016. We now no longer are interested in listening to storage technology vendors touting the power of solid state storage (NAND Flash included) over spinning drives.

The capacity of 3D NAND Flash SSDs has reached a whopping 15.3TB (that is even bigger than the 12TB 7200RPM HDDs of today), and with deduplication and compression, the storage efficiency has reached a conservative 4:1 or 5:1. Effective capacity of most mid-end storage arrays can easily reach 1-2 Petabytes.

And flash and hybrid platforms have reached maturity in these few short years. So what is next?

The landscape has obviously changed. The performance landscape, the capacity landscape and all related to the storage data points have changed. And the speed of SSDs together with the up-and-coming NVMe and NVDIMM technology in new storage array controllers are also shifting the data bottlenecks to another part of the architecture. The development of I/O communications and interfaces has to change as well, to take advantage of the asynchronous I/Os in storage tiering and caching using NAND Flash.

With this mature and well understood landscape, it is time to take Flash to the next level. This next level comes in the form of an exciting end-user conference in Singapore on 25th April 2017. It is called FlashForward.

The 2016 FlashForward event in Europe has already garnered great support from the cream of the storage technologists around the world, and had fantastic feedbacks from the end-user attendees. That FlashForward event has also seen the birth of an international business and technology exchange in its inaugural introduction.  Yes, it is time to learn from the field experts, and it is time to build on the Flash Platform for new Data Services.

From the sponsorship package brochure I have received, it is definitely an event not to be missed.

The FlashForward Conference in Singapore is exquisitely procured by Evito Ltd, under the stewardship of Mr. Paul Talbut. Paul is a very seasoned veteran in the global circuit as an SNIA director of several initiatives. He has been immensely involved in the development of several SNIA chapters around the world, including South Asia, Malaysia, India, China, and even Brazil. He also leads by example with the SNIA Global Steering Committee (GSC); he is the SNIA Global Education Director and at one time, SNIA DPCO (Data Protection & Capacity Optimization) global proctor.

I have had the honour working with Paul for almost 8 years now, and I am sure he will lead the FlashForward Conference with valuable insights and experiences.

This is probably the greatest period for the industry and end users to get involved in the FlashForward Conference. For one, it is endorsed by SNIA, the vendor-neutral association which has been the growth beacon of the storage networking industry.

Secondly, it is the perfect opportunity for technology vendors to build their mindshare with end users and customers. And with the endorsement of the independent field experts and technology practitioners, end users would have a field day garnering approvals for their decisions, as well as learning the best practices to build upon the Flash technology they have implemented in their data center space.

The sponsorship packages are listed below, and I do encourage technology vendors, especially the All-Flash vendors to use the FlashForward conference as a platform to build their mindshare, and most of all, their branding. Continue reading

Can CDMI emancipate an interoperable medical records cloud ecosystem?

PREFACE: This is just a thought, an idea. I am by no means an expert in this area. I have researched this to inspire a thought process of how we can bring together 2 disparate worlds of medical records and imaging with the emerging cloud services for healthcare.

Healthcare has been moving out of its archaic shell in the past few years, and digital healthcare technology and services are booming. And this movement is part of the digital transformation which could eventually lead to a secure and compliant distribution and collaboration of health data, medical imaging and electronic medical records (EMR).

It is a blessing that today’s medical imaging industry has been consolidated with the DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine) standard. DICOM dictates the how medical imaging information and pictures are used, stored, printed, transmitted and exchanged. It is also a communication protocol which runs over TCP/IP, and links up different service class providers (SCPs) and service class users (SCUs), and the backend systems such as PACS (Picture Archiving & Communications Systems) and RIS (Radiology Information Systems).

Another well accepted standard is HL7 (Health Level 7), a similar Layer 7, application-level communication protocol for transferring and exchanging clinical and administrative data.

The diagram below shows a self-contained ecosystem involving the front-end HIS (Hospital Information Systems), and the integration of healthcare, medical systems and other DICOM modalities.

Hospital Enterprise

(Picture courtesy of Meddiff Technologies)

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Solid in the Fire

December 22 2015: I kept this blog in draft for 6 months. Now I am releasing it as NetApp acquires Solidfire.

真金不怕紅爐火

The above is an old Chinese adage which means “True Gold fears no Fire“. That is how I would describe my revisited view and assessment of SolidFire, a high performance All-Flash array vendor which is starting to make its presence felt in South Asia.

I first blogged about SolidFire 3 years ago, and I have been following the company closely as more and more All-Flash array players entered the market over the 3 years. Many rode on the hype and momentum of flash storage, and as a result, muddied and convoluted the storage infrastructure market understanding. It seems to me spin marketing ruled the day and users could not make a difference between vendor A and vendor B, and C and D, and so on….

I have been often asked, which is the best All-Flash array today. I have always hesitated to say which is the best because there aren’t much to say, except for 2-3 well entrenched vendors. Pure Storage and EMC XtremIO come to mind but the one that had stayed under the enterprise storage radar was SolidFire, until now.

SolidFire Logo

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Discovery of the 8th element – Element R

I am so blind. After more than 20 years in the industry, I have chosen to be blind to one of the most important elements of data protection and availability. Yet, I have been talking about it over and over, and over again but never really incorporated it into mantra.

Some readers will know that I frequently use these 7 points (or elements) in my approach to storage infrastructure and information management. These are:

  • Availability
  • Performance
  • Protection
  • Accessibility
  • Management
  • Security
  • Compliance

A few days ago, I had an epiphany. I woke up in the morning, feeling so enlightened and yet conflicted with the dumbfounded dumb feeling. It was so weird, and that moment continued to play in my mind like a broken record. I had to let it out and hence I am writing this down now.

Element RRecovery, Resiliency, Restorability, Resumption. That’s the element which I “discovered“. I was positively stunned that I never incorporated such an important element in my mantra, until now. Continue reading

Don’t get too drunk on Hyper Converged

I hate the fact that I am bursting the big bubble brewing about Hyper Convergence (HC). I urge all to look past the hot air and hype frenzy that are going on, because in the end, the HC platforms have to be aligned and congruent to the organization’s data architecture and business plans.

The announcement of Gartner’s latest Magic Quadrant on Integrated Systems (read hyper convergence) has put Nutanix as the leader of the pack as of August 2015. Clearly, many of us get caught up because it is the “greatest feeling in the world”. However, this faux feeling is not reality because there are many factors that made the pack leaders in the Magic Quadrant (MQ).

Gartner MQ Integrated Systems Aug 2015

First of all, the MQ is about market perception. There is no doubt that the pack leaders in the Leaders Quadrant have earned their right to be there. Each company’s revenue, market share, gross margin, company’s profitability have helped put each as leaders in the pack. However, it is also measured by branding, marketing, market perception and acceptance and other intangible factors.

Secondly, VMware EVO: Rail has split the market when EMC has 3 HC solutions in VCE, ScaleIO and EVO: Rail. Cisco wanted to do their own HC piece in Whiptail (between the 2014 MQ and 2015 MQ reports), and closed down Whiptail when their new CEO came on board. NetApp chose EVO: Rail and also has the ever popular FlexPod. That is why you see that in this latest MQ report, NetApp and Cisco are interpreted independently whereas in last year’s report, it was Cisco/NetApp. Market forces changed, and perception changed.  Continue reading

Really? Disk is Dead? From Violin?

A catchy email from one of the forums I subscribed to, caught my attention. It goes something like “…Grateful … Disk is Dead“. Here the blog from Kevin Doherty, a Senior Account Manager at Violin Memory.

Coming from Violin Memory, this is pretty obvious because they have an agenda against HDDs. They don’t use any disks at all …. in any form factor. They use VIMMs (Violin Inline Memory Modules), something no vendor in the industry use today.

violin-memory4

I recalled my blog in 2012, titled “Violin pulling the strings“. It came up here in South Asia with much fan fare, lots of razzmatazz and there was plenty of excitement. I was even invited to their product training at Ingram Micro in Singapore and met their early SE, Mike Thompson. Mike is still there I believe, but the EMC veteran in Singapore whom I mentioned in my previous blog, left almost a year later after joining. So was the ex-Sun, General Manager of Violin Memory in Singapore.

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Oops, excuse me but your silo is showing

It is the morning that the SNIA Global Steering Committee reporting session is starting soon. I am in the office extremely early waiting for my turn to share the happenings in SNIA Malaysia.

And of late, I have been getting a lot of calls to catch up on hot technologies, notably All Flash Storage arrays and hyper-converged infrastructure. Even though I am now working for Interica, a company that focuses on Oil & Gas exploration and production software, my free coffee sessions with folks from the IT side have not diminished. And I recalled a week back in mid-March where I had coffee overdose!

Flash storage and hyperconvergence are HOT! Despite the hypes and frenzies of both flash storage and hyperconvergence, I still believe that integrating either or, or both, still have an effect that many IT managers overlook. The effect is a data silo.

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