[ Disclosure: I was invited by GestaltIT as a delegate to their Storage Field Day 19 event from Jan 22-24, 2020 in the Silicon Valley USA. My expenses, travel, accommodation and conference fees were covered by GestaltIT, the organizer and I was not obligated to blog or promote the vendors’ technologies presented at the event. The content of this blog is of my own opinions and views ]
“Cheap and deep“, “Race to Zero” were some of the less storied calls I have come across when discussing about object storage, and it was really de-valuing the merits of object storage as vendors touted their superficial glory of being in the IDC Marketscape for Object-based Storage 2019.
Almost every single conversation I had in the past 3 years was either explaining what object storage is or “That is cheap storage right?”
[ Disclosure: I was invited by GestaltIT as a delegate to their Storage Field Day 19 event from Jan 22-24, 2020 in the Silicon Valley USA. My expenses, travel, accommodation and conference fees were covered by GestaltIT, the organizer and I was not obligated to blog or promote the vendors’ technologies presented at this event. The content of this blog is of my own opinions and views ]
Cloud computing will have challenges processing data at the outer reach of its tentacles. Edge Computing, as it melds with the Internet of Things (IoT), needs a different approach to data processing and data storage. Data generated at source has to be processed at source, to respond to the event or events which have happened. Cloud Computing, even with 5G networks, has latency that is not sufficient to how an autonomous vehicle react to pedestrians on the road at speed or how a sprinkler system is activated in a fire, or even a fraud detection system to signal money laundering activities as they occur.
Furthermore, not all sensors, devices, and IoT end-points are connected to the cloud at all times. To understand this new way of data processing and data storage, have a look at this video by Jay Kreps, CEO of Confluent for Kafka® to view this new perspective.
Data is continuously and infinitely generated at source, and this data has to be compiled, controlled and consolidated with nanosecond precision. At Storage Field Day 19, an interesting open source project, Pravega, was introduced to the delegates by DellEMC. Pravega is an open source storage framework for streaming data and is part of Project Nautilus.
The data generated at source (end-points, sensors, devices) is serialized, timestamped (as event occurs), continuous and infinite. These are the properties of a time series data stream, and to make sense of the streaming data, new data formats such as Avro, Parquet, Orc pepper the landscape along with the more mature JSON and XML, each with its own strengths and weaknesses.
You can learn more about these data formats in the 2 links below:
Many time series projects started as DIY projects in many organizations. And many of them are still DIY projects in production systems as well. They depend on tribal knowledge, and these databases are tied to an unmanaged storage which is not congruent to the properties of streaming data.
At the storage end, the technologies today still rely on the SAN and NAS protocols, and in recent years, S3, with object storage. Block, file and object storage introduce layers of abstraction which may not be a good fit for streaming data.
[Disclosure: I was invited by GestaltIT as a delegate to their Storage Field Day 19 event from Jan 22-24, 2020 in the Silicon Valley USA. My expenses, travel, accommodation and conference fees were covered by GestaltIT, the organizer and I was not obligated to blog or promote the vendors’ technologies to be presented at this event. The content of this blog is of my own opinions and views]
I, for one perhaps have seen far too many “file lifecycle and data management” software solutions that involved tiering, hierarchical storage management, ILM or whatever you call them these days. If I do a count, I would have managed or implemented at least 5 to 6 products, including a home grown one.
The whole thing is a very crowded market and I have seen many which have come and gone, and so when the opportunity to have a session with Komprise came at Storage Field Day 19, I did not carry a lot of enthusiasm.
[Disclosure: I was invited by GestaltIT as a delegate to their Storage Field Day 19 event from Jan 22-24, 2020 in the Silicon Valley USA. My expenses, travel, accommodation and conference fees were covered by GestaltIT, the organizer and I was not obligated to blog or promote the vendors’ technologies to be presented at this event. The content of this blog is of my own opinions and views]
Western Digital dived into Storage Field Day 19 in full force as they did in Storage Field Day 18. A series of high impact presentations, each curated for the diverse requirements of the audience. Several open source initiatives were shared, all open standards to address present inefficiencies and designed and developed for a greater future.
Zoned Storage
One of the initiatives is to increase the efficiencies around SMR and SSD zoning capabilities and removing the complexities and overlaps of both mediums. This is the Zoned Storage initiatives a technical working proposal to the existing NVMe standards. The resulting outcome will give applications in the user space more control on the placement of data blocks on zone aware devices and zoned SSDs, collectively as Zoned Block Device (ZBD). The implementation in the Linux user and kernel space is shown below:
[Disclosure: I was invited by GestaltIT as a delegate to their Storage Field Day 19 event from Jan 22-24, 2020 in the Silicon Valley USA. My expenses, travel, accommodation and conference fees were covered by GestaltIT, the organizer and I was not obligated to blog or promote the vendors’ technologies to be presented at this event. The content of this blog is of my own opinions and views]
This blog was not intended because it was not in my plans to write it. But a string of events happened in the Storage Field Day 19 week and I have the fodder to share my thoughts. Hadoop is indeed dead.
Warning: There are Lord of the Rings references in this blog. You might want to do some research. 😉
Storage metrics never happened
The fellowship of Arjan Timmerman, Keiran Shelden, Brian Gold (Pure Storage) and myself started at the office of Pure Storage in downtown Mountain View, much like Frodo Baggins, Samwise Gamgee, Peregrine Took and Meriadoc Brandybuck forging their journey vows at Rivendell. The podcast was supposed to be on the topic of storage metrics but was unanimously swung to talk about Hadoop under the stewardship of Mr. Stephen Foskett, our host of Tech Field Day. I saw Stephen as Elrond Half-elven, the Lord of Rivendell, moderating the podcast as he would have in the plans of decimating the One Ring in Mount Doom.
So there we were talking about Hadoop, or maybe Sauron, or both.
The photo of the Oliphaunt below seemed apt to describe the industry attacks on Hadoop.
In 2020, the intensity on the topic of Artificial Intelligence will further escalate.
One news which came out last week terrified me. The Sarawak courts want to apply Artificial Intelligence to mete judgment and punishment, perhaps on a small scale.
Digital Transformation is again a big word for 2020. As more and more organizations becoming digitalized, the opportunity to communicate, interact and collaborate has become easier, faster, more convenient than ever.
File Sharing forever
Working in projects, file sharing is a fundamental activity that underpins communication and collaboration. Network drives via NAS (network attached storage) for file sharing are common within the confines of the company network. The perimeter of the company’s network is further extended via VPN (virtual private network) access, allowing branch offices and remote individuals to access the files from the central NAS server. It is a workable solution albeit poor network performance in delivery, challenges of siloed data management and difficult scalability.
The phenomenon of Dropbox
When Dropbox arrived circa 2008-2009, it took the industry by storm. They practically invented the term BYOD (bring your own device) and capture the imagination of the file sharing market. Gartner recognized this and coined EFSS (enterprise file sync and share) to consolidate the burgeoning file sharing market. Pretenders and challengers flooded the market, and after the shakedown, Box.net, Microsoft OneDrive, Google Drive and of course, Dropbox, are some of the market leaders today.
[Disclosure: I am invited by GestaltIT as a delegate to their Storage Field Day 19 event from Jan 22-24, 2020 in the Silicon Valley USA. My expenses, travel, accommodation and conference fees will be covered by GestaltIT, the organizer and I am not obligated to blog or promote the vendors’ technologies to be presented at this event. The content of this blog is of my own opinions and views]
This is NOT an advertisement for coloured balls.
This is the license to brag for the vendors in the next 2 weeks or so, as we approach the 2020 new year. This, of course, is the latest 2019 IDC Marketscape for Object-based Storage, released last week.
My object storage mentions
I have written extensively about Object Storage since 2011. With different angles and perspectives, here are some of them:
Something triggered my thoughts a few days ago. A few of us got together talking about climate change and a friend asked how green was the datacenter in IT. With cloud computing booming, I would say that green computing isn’t really the hottest thing at present. That in turn, leads us to one of the most voracious energy beasts in the datacenter, storage. Where is green storage in the equation?
What is green?
Over the past decade, several storage related technologies were touted as more energy efficient. These include
Tape – when tapes are offline, they do not consume power and do not require cooling
Virtualization – Virtualization reduces the number of servers and desktops, and of course storage too
MAID (Massive Array of Independent Disks) – the arrays spin down the HDDs if idle for a period of time
SSD (Solid State Drives) – Compared to HDDs, SSDs consume much less power, and overall reduce the cooling needs
Data Footprint Reduction – Deduplication, compression and other technologies to reduce copies of data
SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) Drives – Higher areal density means less drives but limited by physics.
The largest gorilla in storage technology
HDDs still dominate the market and they are the biggest producers of heat and vibration in a storage array, along with the redundant power supplies and fans. Until and unless SSDs dominate, we have to live with the fact that storage disk drives are not green. The statistics from Statistica below forecasts that in 2021, the shipment of SSDs will surpass HDDs.
Today the areal density of HDDs have increased. With SMR (shingled magnetic recording), the areal density jumped about 25% more than the 1Tb/inch (Terabit per inch) in the CMR (conventional magnetic recording) drives. The largest SMR in the market today is 16TB from Seagate with 18TB SMR in the horizon. That capacity is going to grow significantly when EAMR (energy assisted magnetic recording) – which counts heat assisted and microwave assisted – drives enter the market next year. The areal density will grow to 1.6Tb/inch with a roadmap to 4.0Tb/inch. Continue reading →
The thought of it has been on my mind since Commvault GO 2019. It was sparked when Don Foster, VP of Storage Solutions of Commvault answered a question posted by one of the analysts. What he said made a connection, as I was searching for the better insights to how Commvault and Hedvig would end up to be together.
Data Deluge is a swamp thing now
Several years ago, I heard Stephen Brobst, CTO of Teradata brought up the term “Data Swamp“. It was the anti- part of the Data Lakes, and this was back when Data Lakes and Hadoop were all the rage. His comments were raw, honest and it was leading to the truth out there.
Almost every single conversation I had in the past 3 years was either explaining what object storage is or “That is cheap storage right?”
