Category Archives: Data Archiving

Catch up (fast) – IBM Spectrum Protect Plus

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[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]

The IBM Spectrum Protect Plus (SPP) team returned again for Storage Field Day 18, almost exactly 50 weeks when they introduced SPP to the Storage Field Day 15 delegates in 2018. My comments in my blog about IBM SPP were not flattering but the product was fairly new back then. I joined the other delegates to listen to IBM again this time around, and being open minded to listen and see their software upgrade.

Spectrum Protect Plus is NOT Spectrum Protect

First of all, it is important to call that IBM Spectrum Protect (SP)and IBM Spectrum Protect Plus (SPP) are 2 distinct products. The SP is the old Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) while SPP is a more “modern” product, answering to virtualized environments and several public cloud service providers target platforms. To date, SP is version 8.1.x while SPP is introduced as version 10.1.4. There are “some” integration between SP and SPP, where SPP data can be “offloaded” to the SP platform for long term retention.

For one, I certainly am confused about IBM’s marketing and naming of both products, and I am sure many face the same predicament too. Continue reading →

Minio – the minimalist object storage technology

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The Marie Kondo Konmari fever is sweeping the world. Her decluttering and organizing the home methods are leading to a new way of life – Minimalism.

Complicated Storage Experience

Storage technology and its architecture are complex. We layer upon layer of abstraction and virtualization into storage design until at some stage, choke points lead to performance degradation, and management becomes difficult.

I recalled a particular training I attended back in 2006. I just joined Hitachi Data Systems for the Shell GUSto project. I was in Baltimore for the Hitachi NAS course. This was not their HNAS (their BlueArc acquisition) but their home grown NAS based on Linux. In the training, we were setting up NFS service. There were 36 steps required to setup and provision NFS and if there was a misstep, you start from the first command again. Coming from NetApp at the time, it was horrendous. NetApp ONTAP NFS setup and provisioning probably took 3 commands, and this Hitachi NAS setup and configuration was so much more complex. In the end, the experience was just unworldly for me.

Introducing Minio to my world, to Malaysia

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Quantum Corp should spin off Stornext

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What’s happening at Quantum Corporation?

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.)

Stornext – The Swiss Army knife of Data Management

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.

Jack of all trades, master of none

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 →

From the past to the future

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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.

The evolution of the Data Services Platform

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.

Some good ones …

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“.

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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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Let there be light with Commvault Activate

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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]

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.

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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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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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Commvault UDI – a new CPUU

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[Preamble: I am 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 at this event. The content of this blog is of my own opinions and views]

I am here at the Commvault GO 2017. Bob Hammer, Commvault’s CEO is on stage right now. He shares his wisdom and the message is clear. IT to DT. IT to DT? Yes, Information Technology to Data Technology. It is all about the DATA.

The data landscape has changed. The cloud has changed everything. And data is everywhere. This omnipresence of data presents new complexity and new challenges. It is great to get Commvault acknowledging and accepting this change and the challenges that come along with it, and introducing their HyperScale technology and their secret sauce – Universal Dynamic Index.

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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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