Category Archives: Big Data

The Return of SAN and NAS with AWS?

By | | , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
1 Comment

AWS what?

Amazon Web Services announced Outposts at re:Invent last week. It was not much of a surprise for me because when AWS had their partnership with VMware in 2016, the undercurrents were there to have AWS services come right at the doorsteps of any datacenter. In my mind, AWS has built so far out in the cloud that eventually, the only way to grow is to come back to core of IT services – The Enterprise.

Their intentions were indeed stealthy, but I have been a believer of the IT pendulum. What has swung out to the left or right would eventually come back to the centre again. History has proven that, time and time again.

SAN and NAS coming back?

A friend of mine casually spoke about AWS Outposts announcements. “Does that mean SAN and NAS are coming back?” I couldn’t hide my excitement hearing the return but … be still, my beating heart!

I am a storage dinosaur now. My era started in the early 90s. SAN and NAS were a big part of my career, but cloud computing has changed and shaped the landscape of on-premises shared storage. SAN and NAS are probably closeted by the younger generation of storage engineers and storage architects, who are more adept to S3 APIs and Infrastructure-as-Code. The nuts and bolts of Fibre Channel, SMB (or CIFS if one still prefers it), and NFS are of lesser prominence, and concepts such as FLOGI, PLOGI, SMB mandatory locking, NFS advisory locking and even iSCSI IQN are probably alien to many of them.

What is Amazon Outposts?

In a nutshell, AWS will be selling servers and infrastructure gear. The AWS-branded hardware, starting from a single server to large racks, will be shipped to a customer’s datacenter or any hosting location, packaged with AWS popular computing and storage services, and optionally, with VMware technology for virtualized computing resources.

Taken from https://aws.amazon.com/outposts/

In a move ala-Azure Stack, Outposts completes the round trip of the IT Pendulum. It has swung to the left; it has swung to the right; it is now back at the centre. AWS is no longer public cloud computing company. They have just become a hybrid cloud computing company. Continue reading →

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to prove skeptics wrong

By | | , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
1 Comment

[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 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]

The much maligned Oracle Cloud is getting a fresh reboot, starting with their Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), and significant enhancements and technology updates were announced at the Oracle Open World this week. I had the privilege to hear about Oracle Cloud’s new attack plan when they presented at Tech Field Day 17 last week.

Oracle Cloud has not have the best of days in recent months. Thomas Kurian’s resignation as their President of Product Development was highly publicized in a disagreement with CTO and founder, Larry Ellison over cloud software strategy. Then there was an on-going lawsuit about how Oracle was misrepresenting their cloud revenue growth, which puts Oracle in a bad light.

On the local front here in Malaysia, I have heard from the grapevine of the aggressive nature of Oracle personnel pushing partners and customers to adopt their cloud services using legal scare tactics on their database licensing. A buddy of mine, who was previously the cloud business development manager at CTC Global, also shared Oracle’s cloud shortcomings compared to Amazon Web Service and Microsoft Azure a year ago.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure team aimed to turnover the bad perceptions, starting with the delegates of Tech Field Day 17, including yours truly.Their strategy was clear. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure runs the highest performance and the highest enterprise grade Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), bar none. Unlike the IBM Cloud, which in my opinion is a wishy-washy cloud service platform, Oracle Cloud’s ambition is solid.

They did a demo on JDEdwards EnterpriseOne application, and they continue to demonstrate their prowess running the highest performance computing experience ever, for all enterprise-grade workload. And that enterprise pedigree is clear.

Just this week, Amazon Prime Day had an outage. Amazon is in the process of weaning Oracle database from their entire ecosystem by 2020, and this outage clearly showed that the Oracle database and the enterprise applications would only run best on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

Continue reading →

The Network is Still the Computer

By | | , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
3 Comments

[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 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]

Sun Microsystems coined the phrase “The Network is the Computer“. It became one of the most powerful ideologies in the computing world, but over the years, many technology companies have tried to emulate and practise the mantra, but fell short.

I have never heard of Drivescale. It wasn’t in my radar until the legendary NFS guru, Brian Pawlowski joined them in April this year. Beepy, as he is known, was CTO of NetApp and later at Pure Storage, and held many technology leadership roles, including leading the development of NFSv3 and v4.

Prior to Tech Field Day 17, I was given some “homework”. Stephen Foskett, Chief Cat Herder (as he is known) of Tech Field Days and Storage Field Days, highly recommended Drivescale and asked the delegates to pick up some notes on their technology. Going through a couple of the videos, Drivescale’s message and philosophy resonated well with me. Perhaps it was their Sun Microsystems DNA? Many of the Drivescale team members were from Sun, and I was previously from Sun as well. I was drinking Sun’s Kool Aid by the bucket loads even before I graduated in 1991, and so what Drivescale preached made a lot of sense to me.Drivescale is all about Scale-Out Architecture at the webscale level, to address the massive scale of data processing. To understand deeper, we must think about “Data Locality” and “Data Mobility“. I frequently use these 2 “points of discussion” in my consulting practice in architecting and designing data center infrastructure. The gist of data locality is simple – the closer the data is to the processing, the cheaper/lightweight/efficient it gets. Moving data – the data mobility part – is expensive.

Continue reading →

The Dell EMC Data Bunker

By | | , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
1 Comment

[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 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]

Another new announcement graced the Tech Field Day 17 delegates this week. Dell EMC Data Protection group announced their Cyber Recovery solution. The Cyber Recovery Vault solution and services is touted as the “The Last Line of Data Protection Defense against Cyber-Attacks” for the enterprise.

Security breaches and ransomware attacks have been rampant, and they are reeking havoc to organizations everywhere. These breaches and attacks cost businesses tens of millions, or even hundreds, and are capable of bring these businesses to their knees. One of the known practices is to corrupt backup metadata or catalogs, rendering operational recovery helpless before these perpetrators attack the primary data source. And there are times where the malicious and harmful agent could be dwelling in the organization’s network or servers for long period of times, launching and infecting primary images or gold copies of corporate data at the opportune time.

The Cyber Recovery (CR) solution from Dell EM focuses on Recovery of an Isolated Copy of the Data. The solution isolates strategic and mission critical secondary data and preserves the integrity and sanctity of the secondary data copy. Think of the CR solution as the data bunker, after doomsday has descended.

The CR solution is based on the Data Domain platforms. Describing from the diagram below, data backup occurs in the corporate network to a Data Domain appliance platform as the backup repository. This is just the usual daily backup, and is for operational recovery.

Diagram from Storage Review. URL Link: https://www.storagereview.com/dell_emc_releases_cyber_recovery_software

Continue reading →

The Commvault 5Ps of change

By | | , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
1 Comment

[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.

Continue reading →

Let there be light with Commvault Activate

By | | , , , , , , , ,
1 Comment

[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]

Nobody sees well in the dark.

I am piqued and I want to know more about Commvault Activate. The conversation started after lunch yesterday as the delegates were walking back to the Gaylord Opryland Convention Center. I was walking next to Patrick McGrath, one of Commvault marketing folks, and we struck up a conversation in the warm breeze. Patrick started sharing a bit of Commvault Activate and what it could do and the possibilities of many relevant business cases for the solution.

There was a dejà vu moment, bringing my thoughts back to mid-2009. I was just invited by a friend to join him to restructure his company, Real Data Matrix (RDM). They were a NetApp distributor, then Platinum reseller in the early and mid-2000s and they had fell into hard times. Most of their technical team had left them, putting them in a spot to retain one of the largest NetApp support contract in Malaysia at the time.

I wanted to expand on their NetApp DNA and I started to seek out complementary solutions to build on that DNA. Coming out of my gig at EMC, there was an interesting solution which tickled my fancy – VisualSRM. So, I went about seeking the most comprehensive SRM (storage resource management) solution for RDM, one which has the widest storage platforms support. I found Tek-Tools Software and I moved that RDM sign up as their reseller. We got their SE/Developer, Aravind Kurapati, from India to train the RDM engineers. We were ready to hit the market late-2009/early-2010 but a few weeks later, Tek-Tools was acquired by Solarwinds.

Long story short, my mindset about SRM was “If you can’t see your storage resource, you can’t manage your storage“.  Resource visibility is so important in SRM, and the same philosophy applies to Data as well. That’s where Commvault Activate comes in. More than ever, Data Insights is already the biggest differentiator in the Data-Driven transformation in any modern business today. Commvault Activate is the Data Insights that shines the light to all the data in every organization.

After that casual chat with Patrick, more details came up in the early access to Commvault embargoed announcements later that afternoon. Commvault Activate announcement came up in my Twitter feed.

Commvault Activate has a powerful dynamic Index Engine called the Commvault 4D Index and it is responsible to search, discover and learn about different types of data, data context and relationships within the organization. I picked up more information as the conference progressed and found out that the technology behind the Commvault Activate is based on the Apache Lucene Solr enterprise search and indexing platform, courtesy of Lucidworks‘ technology. Suddenly I had a recall moment. I had posted the Commvault and Lucidworks partnership a few months back in my SNIA Malaysia Facebook community. The pictures connected. You can read about the news of the partnership here at Forbes.

Continue reading →

Industry 4.0 secret gem with Dell

By | | , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Leave a comment

[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

Continue reading →

Huawei Dorado – All about Speed

By | | , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
3 Comments

[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.

Continue reading →

Own the Data Pipeline

By | | , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
2 Comments

[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.

 

Continue reading →

NetApp and IBM gotta take risks

By | | , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
3 Comments

[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]

Storage Field Day 15 was full of technology. There were a few avant garde companies in the line-up which I liked but unfortunately NetApp and IBM were the 2 companies that came in at the least interesting end of the spectrum.

IBM presented their SpectrumProtect Plus. The data protection space, especially backup isn’t exactly my forte when it comes to solution architecture but I know enough to get by. However, as IBM presented, there were some many questions racing through my mind. I was interrupting myself so much because almost everything presented wasn’t new to me. “Wait a minute … didn’t Company X already had this?” or “Company Y had this years ago” or “Isn’t this…??”

I was questioning myself to validate my understanding of the backup tech shared by the IBM SpectrumProtect Plus team. And they presented with such passion and gusto which made me wonder if I was wrong in the first place. Maybe my experience and knowledge in the backup software space weren’t good enough. But then the chatter in the SFD15 Slack channel started pouring in. Comments, unfortunately were mostly negative, and jibes became jokes. One comment, in particular, nailed it. “This is Veeam 0.2“, and then someone else downgraded to version 0.1.

Continue reading →