Category Archives: Data

Truthful information under attack. The call for Data Preservation

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The slogan of The Washington Post is “Democracy Dies in Darkness“. Although not everyone agrees with the US brand of democracy, the altruism of WaPo‘s (the publication’s informal name) slogan is a powerful one. The venerable newspaper remains the beacon in the US as one of the most trustworthy sources of truthful, honest information.

4 Horsemen of Apocalypse with the 5th joining

Misinformation

Misinformation has become a clear and present danger to humanity. Fake news, misleading information, lies are fueling and propelling the propaganda and agenda of the powerful (and the deranged). Facts are blurred, obfuscated, and even removed and replaced with misinformation to push for the undesirable effects that will affect the present and future generations.

The work of SNIA®

Data preservation is part of Data Management. More than a decade ago, SNIA® has already set up a technical work group (TWG) on Long Term Retention and proposed a format for long-term storage of digital format. It was called SIRF (Self-contained Information Retention Format). In the words of SNIA®, “The SIRF format enables long-term physical storage, cloud storage and tape-based containers effective and efficient ways to preserve and secure digital information for many decades, even with the ever-changing technology landscape.”

I don’t think battling misinformation was SNIA®’s original intent, but the requirements for a vendor-neutral organization as such to present and promote long term data preservation is more needed than ever. The need to protect the truth is paramount.

SNIA® continues to work with many organizations to create and grow the ecosystem for long term information retention and data preservation.

NFTs can save data

Despite the hullabaloo of NFTs (non-fungible tokens), which is very much soiled and discredited by the present day cryptocurrency speculations, I view data (and metadata) preservation as a strong use case for NFTs. The action is to digitalize data into an NFT asset.

Here are a few arguments:

  1. NFTs are unique. Once they are verified and inserted into the blockchain, they are immutable. They cannot be modified, and each blockchain transaction is created with one never to be replicated hashed value.
  2. NFTs are decentralized. Most of the NFTs we know of today are minted via a decentralized process. This means that the powerful cannot (most of the time), effect the NFTs state according to its whims and fancies. Unless the perpetrators know how to manipulate a Sybil attack on the blockchain.
  3. NFTs are secure. I have to set the knowledge that NFTs in itself is mostly very secure. Most of the high profiled incidents related to NFTs are more of internal authentication vulnerabilities and phishing related to poor security housekeeping and hygiene of the participants.
  4. NFTs represent authenticity. The digital certification of the NFTs as a data asset also define the ownership and the originality as well. The record of provenance is present and accounted for.

Since NFTs started as a technology to prove the assets and artifacts of the creative industry, there are already a few organizations that playing the role. Orygin Art is one that I found intriguing. Museums are also beginning to explore the potential of NFTs including validating and verifying the origins of many historical artifacts, and digitizing these physical assets to preserve its value forever.

The technology behind NFTs are not without its weaknesses as well but knowing what we know today, the potential is evident and power of the technology has yet to be explored fully. It does present a strong case in preserving the integrity of truthful data, and the data as historical artifacts.

Protect data safety and data integrity

Misinformation is damaging. Regardless if we believe the Butterfly Effect or not, misinformation can cause a ripple effect that could turn into a tidal wave. We need to uphold the sanctity of Truth, and continue to protect data safety and data integrity. The world is already damaged, and it will be damaged even more if we allow misinformation to permeate into the fabric of the global societies. We may welcome to a dystopian future, unfortunately.

This blog hopes to shake up the nonchalant state that we view “information” and “misinformation” today. There is a famous quote that said “Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth“. We must lead the call to combat misinformation. What we do now will shape the generations of our present and future. Preserve Truth.

WaPo “Democracy Dies in Darkness”

[ Condolence: Japan Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe, was assassinated last week. News sources mentioned that the man who killed him had information that the slain PM has ties to a religious group that bankrupted his mother. Misinformation may played a role in the killing of the Japanese leader. ]

Is there no end to the threat of ransomware?

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I find it blasphemous that with all the rhetoric of data protection and cybersecurity technologies and solutions in the market today, the ransomware threats and damages have grown proportionately larger each year. In a recent report by Kaspersky on Anti-Ransomware Day May 12th, 9 out of 10 of organizations previously attacked by ransomware are willing to pay again if attacked again. A day before my scheduled talk in Surabaya East Java 2 weeks’ back, the chatter through the grapevine was one bank in Indonesia was attacked by ransomware on that day. These news proved how virulent and dangerous the ransomware scourge is and has become.

And the question that everyone wants an answer to is … why are ransomware threats getting bigger and more harmful and there are no solutions to it? 

Digital transformation and its data are very attractive targets

Today, all we hear from the data protection and storage vendors are recovery, restore that data blah, blah, blah and more blah, blah, blahs. The end point EDR (endpoint detection and response) solutions say they can stop it; the cybersecurity experts preach depth in defense; and the network security guys say use perimeter fencing. And the anti-phishing chaps say more awareness and education required. One or all have not worked effectively these few years. Ransomware’s threats and damages are getting worse. Why?

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Ridding consumer storage mindset for Enterprise operations

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I cut my teeth in Enterprise Storage for 3 decades. On and off, I get the opportunity to work on Cloud Storage as well, mostly more structured storage infrastructure services such as blocks and files, in cloud offerings on AWS, Azure and Alibaba Cloud. I am familiar with S3 operations (mostly the CRUD operations and HTTP headers stuff) too, although I have yet to go deep with S3 with Restful API. And I really wanted to work on stuff with the S3 Select when the opportunity arises. (Note: Homelab project to-do list)

Along with the experience is the enterprise mindset of designing and crafting storage infrastructure and data management practices that evolve around data. Understanding the characteristics of data and the behaviours data in motion is part of my skills repertoire, and I continue to have conversations with organizations, small and large alike every day of the week.

This week’s blog was triggered by an article by Tech Republic® Jack Wallen‘s interview with Fedora project leader Matthew Miller. I have been craning my neck waiting for the full release of Fedora 36 (which now has been pushed to May 10th 2022), and the Tech Republic®’s article, “The future of Linux: Fedora project leader weighs in” touched me. Let me set the context of my expanded commentaries here.

History of my open source experience- bringing Enterprise to the individual

I have been working with open source software for a long time. My first Linux experience was Soft Landing Linux in the early 90s. It was a bunch of diskettes I purchased online while dabbling with FreeBSD® on the sides. Even though my day job was on the SunOS, and later Solaris®, having the opportunity to build stuff and learn the enterprise ways with Sun Microsystems® hardware and software were difficult at my homelab. I did bring home a SPARCstation® 2 once but the CRT monitor almost broke my computer table at that time.

Having open source software on 386i (before x86) architecture was great (no matter how buggy they were) because I got to learn hardcore enterprise technology at home. I am a command line person, so the desktop experience does not bother me much because my OS foundation is there. Open source gave me a world I could master my skills as an individual. For an individual like me, my mindset is always on the Enterprise.

The Tech Republic interview and my reflections

I know the journey open source OSes has taken at the server (aka Enterprise) level. They are great, and are getting better and better. But at the desktop (aka consumer) level, the Linux desktop experience has been an arduous one even though the open source Linux desktop experience is so much better now. This interview reflected on that.

There were a few significant points that were brought up. Those poignant moments explained about the free software in open source projects, how consumers glazed over (if I get what Matt Miller meant) the cosmetics of the open source software without the deeper meaningful objectives of the software had me feeling empty. Many assumed that just because the software is open source, it should be free or of low costs and continue to apply a consumer mindset to the delivery and the capability of the software.

Case in point is the way I have been seeing many TrueNAS®/FreeNAS™ individuals who downloaded the free software and using them in consumer ways. That is perfectly fine but when they want to migrate their consumer experience with the TrueNAS® software to their critical business operations, things suddenly do not look so rosy anymore. From my experience, having built enterprise-grade storage solutions with open source software like ZFS on OpenSolaris/OpenIndiana, FreeNAS™ and TrueNAS® for over a decade plus gaining plenty of experience on many proprietary and software-defined storage platforms along this 30 year career, the consumer mindsets do not work well in enterprise missions.

And over the years, I have been seeing this newer generation of infrastructure people taking less and less interest in learning the enterprise ways or going deep dive into the workings of the open source platforms I have mentioned. Yet, they have lofty enterprise expectations while carrying a consumer mindset. More and more, I am seeing a greying crew of storage practitioners with enterprise experiences dealing with a new generation of organizations and end users with consumer practices and mindsets.

Open Source Word Cloud

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All the Sources and Sinks going to Object Storage

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The vocabulary of sources and sinks are beginning to appear in the world of data storage as we witness the new addition of data processing frameworks and the applications in this space. I wrote about this in my blog “Rethinking data. processing frameworks systems in real time” a few months ago, introducing my take on this budding new set of I/O characteristics and data ecosystem. I also started learning about the Kappa Architecture (and Lambda as well), a framework designed to craft and develop a set of amalgamated technologies to handle stream processing of a series of data in relation to time.

In Computer Science, sources and sinks are considered external entities that often serve as connectors of input and output of disparate systems. They are often not in the purview of data storage architects. Also often, these sources and sinks are viewed as black boxes, and their inner workings are hidden from the views of the data storage architects.

Diagram from https://developer.here.com/documentation/get-started/dev_guide/shared_content/topics/olp/concepts/pipelines.html

The changing facade of data stream processing presents the constant motion of data, the continuous data being altered as it passes through the many integrated sources and sinks. We are also see much of the data processed in-memory as much as possible. Thus, the data services from a traditional storage model of SAN and NAS may straggle with the requirements demanded by this new generation of data stream processing.

As the world of traditional data storage processing is expanding into data streams processing and vice versa, and the chatter of sources and sinks can no longer be ignored.

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The young report card on Decentralized Storage

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I kept this blog in my queue for over 4 months. I was reluctant to publish it because I thought the outrageous frenzies of NFTs (non-fungible tokens), metaverses and web3 were convoluting the discussions on the decentralized storage topic. 3 weeks back, a Google Trends search for these 3 opaque terms over 90 days showed that the worldwide fads were waning. Here was the Google Trends output on April 2, 2022:

Google Trends on NFT, metaverse and web3

Decentralized storage intrigues me. I like to believe in its potential and I often try to talk to people to strengthen the narratives, and support its adoption where it fits. But often, the real objectives of decentralized storage are obfuscated by the polarized conversations about cryptocurrencies that are pegged to their offerings, NFTs (non-fungible tokens), DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations) and plenty of hyperboles with bewildering facts as well.

But I continue to seek sustainable conversations about decentralized storage without the sway of the NFTs or the cryptos. After dipping in my toes and experiencing with HODLers, and looking at the return to sanity, I believe we can discuss decentralized storage with better clarity now. The context is to position decentralized storage to the mainstream, specifically to business organizations already immersed in centralized storage. Here is my fledgling report card on decentralized storage.

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IT Data practices and policies still wanting

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There is an apt and honest editorial cartoon about Change.

From https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Who-Wants-Change-Crowd-Change-Management-Yellow.png

I was a guest of Channel Asia Executive Roundtable last week. I joined several luminaries in South East Asia to discuss about the topic of “How Partners can bring value to the businesses to manage their remote workforce“.

Covid-19 decimated what we knew as work in general. The world had to pivot and now, 2+ years later, a hybrid workforce has emerged. The mixture of remote work, work-from-home (WFH), physical office and everywhere else has brought up a new mindset and new attitudes with both the employers and their staff alike. Without a doubt, the remote way of working is here to stay.

People won but did the process lose?

The knee jerk reactions when the lockdowns of Covid hit were to switch work to remote access to applications on premises or in the clouds. Many companies have already moved to the software-as-a-service (SaaS) way of working but not all have made the jump, just like not all the companies’ applications were SaaS based. Of course, the first thing these stranded companies do was to look for the technologies to solve this unforeseen disorder.

People Process Technology.
Picture from https://iconstruct.com/blog/people-process-technology/

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The Currency to grow Decentralized Storage

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Unless you have been living under a rock in the past months, the fervent and loud, but vague debates of web3.0 have been causing quite a scene on the Internet. Those tiny murmurs a few months ago have turned into an avalanche of blares and booms, with both believers and detractors crying out their facts and hyperboles.

Within the web3.0, decentralized storage technologies have been rising to a crescendo. So many new names have come forth into the decentralized storage space, most backed by blockchain and incentivized by cryptocurrencies and is putting the 19th century California Gold Rush to shame.

At present, the decentralized storage market segment is fluid, very vibrant and very volatile. Being the perennial storage guy that I am, I would very much like the decentralized storage to be sustainably successful but first, it has to make sense. Logic must prevail before confidence follows.

Classic “Crossing the Chasm”

To understand this decentralization storage chaos, we must understand where it is now, and where it is going. History never forgets to teach us of the past to be intelligible in the fast approaching future.

I look to this situation as a classic crossing the chasm case. This Crossing the Chasm concept was depicted in Geoffrey Moore’s 1991 book of the same name. In his book, he spoke well about the Technology Adoption Cycle that classifies and demonstrates the different demographics and psychological progression (and regression) of how a technology is taken to mainstream.

Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm Technology (Disruption) Adoption Cycle

As a new technology enters the market, the adoption is often fueled by the innovators, the testers, the crazy ones. It progresses and the early adopters set in. Here we get the believers, the fanatics, the cults that push the envelope a bit further, going against the institutions and the conventions. This, which is obvious, describes the early adopter stage of the decentralized storage today.

Like all technologies, it has to go mainstream to be profitable and to get there, its value to the masses must be well defined to be accepted. This is the market segment that decentralized storage must move to, to the early majority stage. But there is a gap, rightly pointed out and well defined by Geoffrey Moore. The “Chasm“. [ Note: To read about why the chasm, read this article ].

So how will decentralized storage cross the chasm to the majority of the market?

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Rethinking data processing frameworks systems in real time

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“Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream…”

Except the stream isn’t gentle at all in the data processing’s new context.

For many of us in the storage infrastructure and data management world, the well known framework is storing and retrieve data from a storage media. That media could be a disk-based storage array, a tape, or some cloud storage where the storage media is abstracted from the users and the applications. The model of post processing the data after the data has safely and persistently stored on that media is a well understood and a mature one. Users, applications and workloads (A&W) process this data in its resting phase, retrieve it, work on it, and write it back to the resting phase again.

There is another model of data processing that has been bubbling over the years and now reaching a boiling point. Still it has not reached its apex yet. This is processing the data in flight, while it is still flowing as it passes through processing engine. The nature of this kind of data is described in one 2018 conference I chanced upon a year ago.

letgo marketplace processing numbers in 2018

  • * NRT = near real time

From a storage technology infrastructure perspective, this kind of data processing piqued my curiosity immensely. And I have been studying this burgeoning new data processing model in my spare time, and where it fits, bringing the understanding back into the storage infrastructure and data management side.

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Storage Elephant Compute Birds

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Data movement is expensive. Not just costs, but also latency and resources as well. Thus there were many narratives to move compute closer to where the data is stored because moving compute is definitely more economical than moving data. I borrowed the analogy of the 2 animals from some old NetApp® slides which depicted storage as the elephant, and compute as birds. It was the perfect analogy, because the storage is heavy and compute is light.

“Close up of a white Great Egret perching on top of an African Elephant aa Amboseli national park, Kenya”

Before the animals representation came about I used to use the term “Data locality, Data Mobility“, because of past work on storage technology in the Oil & Gas subsurface data management pipeline.

Take stock of your data movement

I had recent conversations with an end user who has been paying a lot of dollars keeping their “backup” and “archive” in AWS Glacier. The S3 storage is cheap enough to hold several petabytes of data for years, because the IT folks said that the data in AWS Glacier are for “backup” and “archive”. I put both words in quotes because they were termed as “backup” and “archive” because of their enterprise practice. However, the face of their business is changing. They are in manufacturing, oil and gas downstream, and the definitions of “backup” and “archive” data has changed.

For one, there is a strong demand for reusing the past data for various reasons and these datasets have to be recalled from their cloud storage. Secondly, their data movement activities still mimicked what they did in the past during their enterprise storage days. It was a classic lift-and-shift when they moved to the cloud, and not taking stock of  their data movements and the operations they ran on these datasets. Still ongoing, their monthly AWS cost a bomb.

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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.