Category Archives: Data Management

What happened to NDMP?

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The acronym NDMP shows up once in a while in NAS (Network Attached Storage) upgrade tenders. And for the less informed, NDMP (Network Data Management Protocol) was one of the early NAS data management (more like data mover specifications) initiatives to backup NAS devices, especially the NAS appliances that run proprietary operating systems code.

NDMP Logo

Backup software vendors often have agents developed specifically for an operating system or an operating environment. But back in the mid-1990s, 2000s, the internal file structures of these proprietary vendors were less exposed, making it harder for backup vendors to develop agents for them. Furthermore, there was a need to simplify the data movements of NAS files between backup servers and the NAS as a client, to the media servers and eventually to the tape or disk targets. The dominant network at the time ran at 100Mbits/sec.

To overcome this, Network Appliance® and PDC Solutions/Legato® developed the NDMP protocol, allowing proprietary NAS devices to run a standardized client-server architecture with the NDMP server daemon in the NAS and the backup service running as an NDMP client. Here is a simplified look at the NDMP architecture.

NDMP Client-Server Architecture

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The Starbucks model for Storage-as-a-Service

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Starbucks™ is not a coffee shop. It purveys beyond coffee and tea, and food and puts together the yuppie beverages experience. The intention is to get the customers to stay as long as they can, and keep purchasing the Starbucks’ smorgasbord of high margin provisions in volume. Wifi, ambience, status, coffee or tea with your name on it (plenty of jokes and meme there), energetic baristas and servers, fancy coffee roasts and beans et. al. All part of the Starbucks™-as-a-Service pleasurable affair that intends to lock the customer in and have them keep coming back.

The Starbucks experience

Data is heavy and they know it

Unlike compute and network infrastructures, storage infrastructures holds data persistently and permanently. Data has to land on a piece of storage medium. Coupled that with the fact that data is heavy, forever growing and data has gravity, you have a perfect recipe for lock-in. All storage purveyors, whether they are on-premises data center enterprise storage or public cloud storage, and in between, there are many, many methods to keep the data chained to a storage technology or a storage service for a long time. The storage-as-a-service is like tying the cow to the stake and keeps on milking it. This business model is very sticky. This stickiness is also a lock-in mechanism.

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Open Source Storage Technology Crafters

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The conversation often starts with a challenge. “What’s so great about open source storage technology?”

For the casual end users of storage systems, regardless of SAN (definitely not Fibre Channel) or NAS on-premises, or getting “files” from the personal cloud storage like Dropbox, OneDrive et al., there is a strong presumption that open source storage technology is cheap and flaky. This is not helped with the diet of consumer brands of NAS in the market, where the price is cheap, but the storage offering with capabilities, reliability and performance are found to be wanting. Thus this notion floats its way to the business and enterprise users, and often ended up with a negative perception of open source storage technology.

Highway Signpost with Open Source wording

Storage Assemblers

Anybody can “build” a storage system with open source storage software. Put the software together with any commodity x86 server, and it can function with the basic storage services. Most open source storage software can do the job pretty well. However, once the completed storage technology is put together, can it do the job well enough to serve a business critical end user? I have plenty of sob stories from end users I have spoken to in these many years in the industry related to so-called “enterprise” storage vendors. I wrote a few blogs in the past that related to these sad situations:

We have such storage offerings rigged with cybersecurity risks and holes too. In a recent Unit 42 report, 250,000 NAS devices are vulnerable and exposed to the public Internet. The brands in question are mentioned in the report.

I would categorize these as storage assemblers.

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Don’t go to the Clouds. Come back!

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Almost in tandem last week, Nutanix™ and HPE appeared to have made denigrated comments about Cloud First mandates of many organizations today. Nutanix™ took to the annual .NEXT conference to send the message that cloud is wasteful. HPE campaigned against a UK Public Sector “Cloud First” policy.

Cloud First or Cloud Not First

The anti-cloud first messaging sounded a bit funny and hypocritical when both companies have a foot in public clouds, advocating many of their customers in the clouds. So what gives?

That A16Z report

For a numbers of years, many fear criticizing the public cloud services openly. For me, there are the 3 C bombs in public clouds.

  • Costs
  • Complexity
  • Control (lack of it)

Yeah, we would hear of a few mini heart attacks here and there about clouds overcharging customers, and security fallouts. But vendors then who were looking up to the big 3 public clouds as deities, rarely chastise them for the errors. Until recently.

“The Cost of Cloud, a Trillion Dollar Paradox” released by revered VC firm Andreessen Horowitz in May 2021 opened up the vocals of several vendors who are now emboldened to make stronger comments about the shortcomings of public cloud services. The report has made it evident that public cloud services are not panacea of all IT woes.

The report has made it evident that public cloud services are not panacea of all IT woes. And looking at the trends, this will only get louder.

Use ours first. We are better

It is pretty obvious that both Nutanix™ and HPE have bigger stakes outside the public cloud IaaS (infrastructure-as-a-service) offerings. It is also pretty obvious that both are not the biggest players in this cloud-first economy. Given their weights in the respective markets, they are leveraging their positions to swing the mindsets to their turf where they can win.

“Use our technology and services. We are better, even though we are also in the public clouds.”

Not a zero sum game

But IT services and IT technologies are not a zero sum game. Both on-premises IT services and complementary public cloud services can co-exist. Both can leverage on each other’s strengths and support each other’s weaknesses, if you know how to blend and assimilate the best of both worlds. Hybrid cloud is the new black.

Gartner Hype Cycle

The IT pendulum swings. Technology hype goes fever pitch. Everyone thinks there is a cure for cancer. Reality sets in. They realize that they were wrong (not completely) or right (not completely). Life goes on. The Gartner® Hype Cycle explains this very well.

The cloud is OK

There are many merits having IT services provisioned in the cloud. Agility, pay-per-use, OPEX, burst traffic, seemingly unlimited resources and so. You can read more about it at Benefits of Cloud Computing: The pros and cons. Even AWS agrees to Three things every business needs from hybrid cloud, perhaps to the chagrin of these naysayers.

I opined that there is no single solution for everything. There is no Best Storage Technology Ever (a snarky post). And so, I believe there is nothing wrong of Nutanix™ and HPE, and maybe others, being hypocritical of their cloud and non-cloud technology offerings. These companies are adjusting and adapting to the changing landscapes of the IT environments, but it is best not to confuse the customers what tactics, strategy and vision are. Inconsistencies in messaging diminishes trust.

 

 

What the heck is Storage Modernization?

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We often hear the word “modernization” thrown around these days. The push is to get the end user to refresh their infrastructure, and the storage infrastructure market is rife with modernization word. Is your storage ripe for “modernization“?

Many possibilities to modernize storage

To modernize, it has to be relative to legacy storage hardware, and the operating environment that came with it. But if the so-called “legacy” still does the job, should you modernize?

Big Data is right

When the word “Big Data” came into prominence a while back, it stirred the IT industry into a frenzy. At one point, Apache Hadoop became the poster elephant (pun intended) for this exciting new segment. So many Vs came out, but I settled with 4 Vs as the framework of my IT conversations. The 4Vs we often hear are:

  • Volume
  • Velocity
  • Variety
  • Veracity

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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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What If – The other side of Storage FUDs

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Streaming on Disney+ now is Marvel Studios’ What If…? animated TV series. In the first episode, Peggy Carter, instead of Steve Rogers, took the super soldier serum and became the first Avenger. The TV series explores alternatives and possibilities of what we may have considered as precept and the order of things.

As storage practitioners, we are often faced with certain “dogmatic” arguments which were often a mix of measured actuality and marketing magic – aka FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt). Time and again, we are thrown a curve ball, like “Oh, your competitor can do this. Can you?” Suddenly you are feeling pinned to a corner, and the pressure to defend your turf rises. You fumbled; You have no answer; Game over!

I experienced these hearty objections many times over. The best experience was one particular meeting I had during my early days with NetApp® in 2000. I was only 1-2 months with the company, still wet between the ears with the technology. I was pitching the SnapMirror® to Ericsson Malaysia when the Scandinavian manager said, “I think you are lying!“. I was lost without a response. I fumbled spectacularly although I couldn’t remember if we won or lost that opportunity.

Here are a few I often encountered. Let’s play the game of What If …?

What If …?

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SSOT of Files

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[ This is part two of “Where are your files living now?”. You can read Part One here ]

“Data locality, Data mobility“. It was a term I like to use a lot when describing about data consolidation, leading to my mention about files and folders, and where they live in my previous blog. The thinking of where the files and folders are now as in everywhere as they can be in a plethora of premises stretches the premise of SSOT (Single Source of Truth). And this expatriation of files with minimal checks and balances disturbs me.

A year ago, just before I joined iXsystems, I was given Google® embargoed news, probably a week before they announced BigQuery Omni. Then I was interviewed by Enterprise IT News, a local Malaysian technology news portal to provide an opinion quote. This was what I quoted:

“’The data warehouse in the cloud’ managed services of Big Query is underpinned by Google® Anthos, its hybrid cloud infra and service management platform based on GKE (Google® Kubernetes Engine). The containerised applications, both on-prem and in the multi-clouds, would allow Anthos to secure and orchestrate infra, services and policy management under one roof.”

I further quoted ” The data repositories remain in each cloud is good to address data sovereignty, data security concerns but it did not mention how it addresses “single source of truth” across multi-clouds.”

Single Source of Truth – regardless of repositories

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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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