Category Archives: Data Fabric

The future of Fibre Channel in the Cloud Era

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The world has pretty much settled that hybrid cloud is the way to go for IT infrastructure services today. Straddled between the enterprise data center and the infrastructure-as-a-service in public cloud offerings, hybrid clouds define the storage ecosystems and architecture of choice.

A recent Blocks & Files article, “Broadcom server-storage connectivity sales down but recovery coming” caught my attention. One segment mentioned that the server-storage connectivity sales was down 9% leading me to think “Is this a blip or is it a signal that Fibre Channel, the venerable SAN (storage area network) protocol is on the wane?”

Fibre Channel Sign

Thus, I am pondering the position of Fibre Channel SANs in the cloud era. Where does it stand now and in the near future? Continue reading →

Data Sovereignty – A boon or a bane?

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Data across borders – Data Sovereignty

I really did not want to write Data Sovereignty in the way I have written it now. I wanted to write it in a happy manner, but as recent circumstances appeared, the outlook began to dim. I apologize if my commentary is bleak.

Last week started very well. I was preparing for the iXsystems™ + Nextcloud webinar on Wednesday, August 25th 2021. After talking to the wonderful folks at Nextcloud (Thanks Markus, Uwe and Maxime!), the central theme of the webinar was on Data Sovereignty and Data Control. The notion of GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) has already  permeated into EU (European Union) entities, organizations and individuals alike, and other sovereign states around the world are following suit. Prominent ones on my radar in the last 2 years were the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and Vietnam Personal Data Protection Act 2020.

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Where are your files living now?

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[ This is Part One of a longer conversation ]

EMC2 (before the Dell® acquisition) in the 2000s had a tagline called “Where Information Lives™“**. This was before the time of cloud storage. The tagline was an adage of enterprise data storage, proper and contemporaneous to the persistent narrative at the time – Data Consolidation. Within the data consolidation stories, thousands of files and folders moved about the networks of the organizations, from servers to clients, clients to servers. NAS (Network Attached Storage) was, and still is the work horse of many, many organizations.

[ **Side story ] There was an internal anti-EMC joke within NetApp® called “Information has a new address”.

EMC tagline “Where Information Lives”

This was a time where there were almost no concerns about Shadow IT; ransomware were less known; and most importantly, almost everyone knew where their files and folders were, more or less (except in Oil & Gas upstream – to be told in later in this blog). That was because there were concerted attempts to consolidate data, and inadvertently files and folders, in the organization.

Even when these organizations were spread across the world, there were distributed file technologies at the time that could deliver files and folders in an acceptable manner. Definitely not as good as what we have today in a cloudy world, but acceptable. I personally worked a project setting up Andrew File Systems for Intel® in Penang in the mid-90s, almost joined Tacit Networks in the mid-2000s, dabbled on Microsoft® Distributed File System with NetApp® and Windows File Servers while fixing the mountains of issues in deploying the worldwide GUSto (Global Unified Storage) Project in Shell 2006. Somewhere in my chronological listings, Acopia Networks (acquired by F5) and of course, EMC2 Rainfinity and NetApp® NuView OEM, Virtual File Manager.

The point I am trying to make here is most IT organizations had a good grip of where the files and folders were. I do not think this is very true anymore. Do you know where your files and folders are living today? 

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Enterprise Storage is not just a Label

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I have many anecdotes around the topic of Enterprise Storage, but the conversations in the past 2 weeks made it important for me to share this.

Enterprise Storage is …

Amusing, painful, angry

I get riled up whenever people do not want to be educated about Enterprise Storage. Here are a few that happened in the last 2 weeks.

[ Story #1 ]

A guy was building his own storage for cryptocurrency. He was informed by his supplier that the RAID card was enterprise, and he could get the best performance using “Enterprise” RAID-0.

  • Well, “Enterprise” RAID-0 volume crashed, and he lost all data. Painfully, he said he lost a hefty sum financially

[ Story #2 ]

A media company complained about the reliability of previous storage vendor. The GM was shopping around and was told that there are “Enterprise” SATA drives and the reliability is as good, if not better than SAS drives.

  • The company wanted a fully reliable Enterprise Storage system with 99.999% availability, and yet the SATA interface was not meant to build a more highly reliable enterprise storage. The GM insisted to use “Enterprise” SATA drives for his “enterprise” storage system instead of SAS.  

[ Story #3 ]

An IT admin of a manufacturing company claimed that they had an “Enterprise Storage” system for a few years, and could not figure out why his hard disk drives would die every 12-15 months.

  • He figured out that the drives supplied by his vendor were consumer SATA drives, even though he was told it was an “Enterprise Storage” system when he bought the system.

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Storageless shan’t be thy name

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Storageless??? What kind of a tech jargon is that???

This latest jargon irked me. Storage vendor NetApp® (through its acquisition of Spot) and Hammerspace, a metadata-driven storage agnostic orchestration technology company, have begun touting the “storageless” tech jargon in hope that it will become an industry buzzword. Once again, the hype cycle jargon junkies are hard at work.

Clear, empty storage containers

Clear, nondescript storage containers

It is obvious that the storageless jargon wants to ride on the hype of serverless computing, an abstraction method of computing resources where the allocation and the consumption of resources are defined by pieces of programmatic code of the running application. The “calling” of the underlying resources are based on the application’s code, and thus, rendering the computing resources invisible, insignificant and not sexy.

My stand

Among the 3 main infrastructure technology – compute, network, storage, storage technology is a bit of a science and a bit of dark magic. It is complex and that is what makes storage technology so beautiful. The constant innovation and technology advancement continue to make storage as a data services platform relentlessly interesting.

Cloud, Kubernetes and many data-as-a-service platforms require strong persistent storage. As defined by NIST Definition of Cloud Computing, the 4 of the 5 tenets – on-demand self-service, resource pooling, rapid elasticity, measured service – demand storage to be abstracted. Therefore, I am all for abstraction of storage resources from the data services platform.

But the storageless jargon is doing a great disservice. It is not helping. It does not lend its weight glorifying the innovations of storage. In fact, IMHO, it felt like a weighted anchor sinking storage into the deepest depth, invisible, insignificant and not sexy. I am here dutifully to promote and evangelize storage innovations, and I am duly unimpressed with such a jargon.

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Storage in a shiny multi-cloud space

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The multi-cloud for infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) era is not here (yet). That is what the technology marketers want you to think. The hype, the vapourware, the frenzy. It is what they do. The same goes to technology analysts where they describe vision and futures, and the high level constructs and strategies to get there. The hype of multi-cloud is often thought of running applications and infrastructure services seamlessly in several public clouds such as Amazon AWS, Microsoft® Azure and Google Cloud Platform, and linking it to on-premises data centers and private clouds. Hybrid is the new black.

Multicloud connectivity to public cloud providers and on-premises private cloud

Multi-Cloud, on-premises, public and hybrid clouds

And the aspiration of multi-cloud is the right one, when it is truly ready. Gartner® wrote a high level article titled “Why Organizations Choose a Multicloud Strategy“. To take advantage of each individual cloud’s strengths and resiliency in respective geographies make good business sense, but there are many other considerations that cannot be an afterthought. In this blog, we look at a few of them from a data storage perspective.

In the beginning there was … 

For this storage dinosaur, data storage and compute have always coupled as one. In the mainframe DASD days. these 2 were together. Even with the rise of networking architectures and protocols, from IBM SNA, DECnet, Ethernet & TCP/IP, and Token Ring FC-SAN (sorry, this is just a joke), the SANs, the filers to the servers were close together, albeit with a network buffered layer.

A decade ago, when the public clouds started appearing, data storage and compute were mostly inseparable. There was demarcation of public clouds and private clouds. The notion of hybrid clouds meant public clouds and private clouds can intermix with on-premise computing and data storage but in almost all cases, this was confined to a single public cloud provider. Until these public cloud providers realized they were not able to entice the larger enterprises to move their IT out of their on-premises data centers to the cloud convincingly. So, these public cloud providers decided to reverse their strategy and peddled their cloud services back to on-prem. Today, Amazon AWS has Outposts; Microsoft® Azure has Arc; and Google Cloud Platform launched Anthos.

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Falconstor Software Defined Data Preservation for the Next Generation

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Falconstor® Software is gaining momentum. Given its arduous climb back to the fore, it is beginning to soar again.

Tape technology and Digital Data Preservation

I mentioned that long term digital data preservation is a segment within the data lifecycle which has merits and prominence. SNIA® has proved that this is a strong growing market segment through its 2007 and 2017 “100 Year Archive” surveys, respectively. 3 critical challenges of this long, long-term digital data preservation is to keep the archives

  • Accessible
  • Undamaged
  • Usable

For the longest time, tape technology has been the king of the hill for digital data preservation. The technology is cheap, mature, and many enterprises has built their long term strategy around it. And the pulse in the tape technology market is still very healthy.

The challenges of tape remain. Every 5 years or so, companies have to consider moving the data on the existing tape technology to the next generation. It is widely known that LTO can read tapes of the previous 2 generations, and write to it a generation before. The tape transcription process of migrating digital data for the sake of data preservation is bad because it affects the structural integrity and quality of the content of the data.

In my times covering the Oil & Gas subsurface data management, I have seen NOCs (national oil companies) with 500,000 tapes of all generations, from 1/2″ to DDS, DAT to SDLT, 3590 to LTO 1-7. And millions are spent to transcribe these tapes every few years and we have folks like Katalyst DM, Troika and more hovering this landscape for their fill.

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NetApp double stitching Data Fabric

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Is NetApp® Data Fabric breaking at the seams that it chose to acquire Talon Storage a few weeks ago?

It was a surprise move and the first thing that came to my mind was “Who is Talon Storage?” I have seen that name appeared in Tech Target and CRN last year but never took the time to go in depth about their technology. I took a quick check of their FAST™ software technology with the video below:

It had the reminiscence of Andrew File System, something I worked on briefly in the 90s and WAFS (Wide Area File System), a technology buzz word in the early to mid-2000s led by Tacit Networks, a company I almost joined with a fellow NetApp-ian back then. WAFS DNA appeared ingrained in Talon Storage, after finding out that Talon’s CEO and Founder, Shirish Phatak, was the architect of Tacit Networks 20 years ago.

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StorageGRID gets gritty

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[ 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 ]

NetApp® presented StorageGRID® Webscale (SGWS) at Storage Field Day 19 last month. It was timely when the general purpose object storage market, in my humble opinion, was getting disillusioned and almost about to deprive itself of the value of what it was supposed to be.

“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?”

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Open Source and Open Standards open the Future

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[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:

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