Category Archives: Data Management

Storage and Data Management Planning crucial for Malaysian SMBs

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Hybrid IT for 2019 and beyond

2019 is here.

I am especially buoyed by the strong network storage industry footing in 2018, reported by The Register last week. 2018 was certainly a blowout year for storage infrastructure and storage software, both for on-premises and the cloud computing platforms. The AWS Outposts announcement over a month ago also just affirmed that the new world is Hybrid IT. And there is plenty to look forward to in 2019.

Malaysian Economic Doldrums

Things are not as rosy for the Malaysia economy in 2019. It will be a challenging 2019 as reported by the Edge, a local business publication. The GDP (gross domestic product) of the first half of 2018 shrunk, from 5.9% in 2017, to 4.65%, and it is estimated to be 4.9% in 2019. With an inexperienced new government, a weak currency, and more competitive economies emerging in ASEAN, Malaysia small and medium businesses (SMBs) could be challenged.

The knee jerk reaction would be to cut the IT spending and revert to buying on price. This has happened too often, because there are always other operating costs that may be more pressing. Furthermore, many of the SMBs are still aimless when it comes to transforming their businesses into the digital data era, groping in the dark and sputtering to get its worth with their IT investments. Often, many are misinformed and stumbled, resulting in much higher wastage and costs.

There is a local saying here:

“Good thing No Cheap; Cheap thing No Good“

And the saying is very apt to describe that there is value in investing well, and the price factor should not always be the main determinant criteria of buying IT infrastructure, software and services.

Many of these SMBs also lack experienced IT staff to manage their IT environment. There is also a hurried urgency to modernize IT, because a well-planned and executed IT strategy and operations would definitely increase their Competitive Advantage. Continue reading →

Microsoft desires Mellanox

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My lazy Thursday morning was spurred by a posting by Stephen Foskett, Chief Organizer of Tech Field Days. “Microsoft mulls the acquisition of Mellanox”

The AWS factor

A quick reaction leans towards a strange one. Microsoft of all people, buying a chip company? Does it make sense? However, leaning deeper, it starts to make some sense. And I believe the desire is spurred by Amazon Web Services announcement of their Graviton processor at AWS re:Invent last month.

AWS acquired Annapurna Labs in early 2015. From the sources, Annapurna was working on low powered, high performance networking chips for the mid-range market. The key words – lower powered, high performance, mid-range – are certainly the musical notes to the AWS opus. And that would mean the ability for AWS to control their destiny, even at the edge. 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 Return of SAN and NAS with AWS?

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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 →

Sexy HPC storage is all the rage

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HPC is sexy

There is no denying it. HPC is sexy. HPC Storage is just as sexy.

Looking at the latest buzz from Super Computing Conference 2018 which happened in Dallas 2 weeks ago, the number of storage related vendors participating was staggering. Panasas, Weka.io, Excelero, BeeGFS, are the ones that I know because I got friends posting their highlights. Then there are the perennial vendors like IBM, Dell, HPE, NetApp, Huawei, Supermicro, and so many more. A quick check on the SC18 website showed that there were 391 exhibitors on the floor.

And this is driven by the unrelentless demand for higher and higher performance of computing, and along with it, the demands for faster and faster storage performance. Commercialization of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Deep Learning (DL) and newer applications and workloads together with the traditional HPC workloads are driving these ever increasing requirements. However, most enterprise storage platforms were not designed to meet the demands of these new generation of applications and workloads, as many have been led to believe. Why so?

I had a couple of conversations with a few well known vendors around the topic of HPC Storage. And several responses thrown back were to put Flash and NVMe to solve the high demands of HPC storage performance. In my mind, these responses were too trivial, too irresponsible. So I wanted to write this blog to share my views on HPC storage, and not just about its performance.

The HPC lines are blurring

I picked up this video (below) a few days ago. It was insideHPC Rich Brueckner interview with Dr. Goh Eng Lim, HPE CTO and renowned HPC expert about the convergence of both traditional and commercial HPC applications and workloads.

I liked the conversation in the video because it addressed the 2 different approaches. And I welcomed Dr. Goh’s invitation to the Commercial HPC community to work with the Traditional HPC vendors to help push the envelope towards Exascale SuperComputing.

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Is Pure Play Storage good?

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I post storage and cloud related articles to my unofficial SNIA Malaysia Facebook community (you are welcomed to join) every day. It is a community I started over 9 years ago, and there are active live banters of the posts of the day. Casual, personal were the original reasons why I started the community on Facebook rather than on LinkedIn, and I have been curating it religiously for the longest time.

The Big 5 of Storage (it was Big 6 before this)

Looking back 8-9 years ago, the storage vendor landscape of today has not changed much. The Big 5 hegemony is still there, still dominating the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise and Mid-end Arrays, and is still there in the All-Flash quadrant as well, albeit the presence of Pure Storage in that market.

The Big 5 of today – Dell EMC, NetApp, HPE, IBM and Hitachi Vantara – were the Big 6 of 2009-2010, consisting of EMC, NetApp, Dell, HP, IBM and Hitachi Data Systems. The All-Flash, or Gartner calls it Solid State Arrays (SSA) market was still an afterthought, and Pure Storage was just founded. Pure Storage did not appear in my radar until 2 years later when I blogged about Pure Storage’s presence in the market.

Here’s a look at the Gartner Magic Quadrant for 2010:

We see Pure Play Storage vendors in the likes of EMC, NetApp, Hitachi Data Systems (before they adopted the UCP into their foray), 3PAR, Compellent, Pillar Data Systems, BlueArc, Xiotech, Nexsan, DDN and Infortrend. And when we compare that to the 2017 Magic Quadrant (I have not seen the 2018 one yet) below:

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The Big Elephant in IoT Storage

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It has been on my mind for a long time and I have been avoiding it too. But it is time to face the inevitable and just talk about it. After all, the more open the discussions, the more answers (and questions) will arise, and that is a good thing.

Yes, it is the big elephant in the room called Data Security. And the concern is going to get much worse as the proliferation of edge devices and fog computing, and IoT technobabble goes nuclear.

I have been involved in numerous discussions on IoT (Internet of Things) and Industrial Revolution 4.0. I have been in a consortium for the past 10 months, discussing with several experts of their field to face future with IR4.0. Malaysia just announced its National Policy for Industry 4.0 last week, known as Industry4WRD. Whilst the policy is a policy, there are many thoughts for implementation of IoT devices, edge and fog computing. And the thing that has been bugging me is related to of course, storage, most notably storage and data security.

Storage on the edge devices are likely to be ephemeral, and the data in these storage, transient. We can discuss about persistence in storage at the edge another day, because what I would like to address in the data security in these storage components. That’s the Big Elephant in the room I was relating to.

The more I work with IoT devices and the different frameworks (there are so many of them), I became further enlightened by the need to address data security. The proliferation and exponential multiplication of IoT devices at present and in the coming future have increased the attack vectors many folds. Many of the IoT devices are simplified components lacking the guards of data security and are easily exposed. These components are designed for simplicity and efficiency in mind. Things such as I/O performance, storage management and data security are probably the least important factors, because every single manufacturer and every single vendor are slogging to make their mark and presence in this wild, wild west world.

Picture from https://fcw.com/articles/2018/08/07/comment-iot-physical-risk.aspx

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Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to prove skeptics wrong

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[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.

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The Network is Still the Computer

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[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.

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The Dell EMC Data Bunker

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[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

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