Category Archives: Data

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 →

Hammering Next Gen Hybrid Clouds

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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 paid 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]

Hammerspace came out of stealth 2 days ago. Their objective? To rule the world of data for hybrid clouds and multi-clouds, and provide “unstructured data anywhere on-demand“. That is a bold statement, for a company that is relatively unknown, except for its deep ties with the now defunct Primary Data. Primary Data’s Chairman, David Flynn, is the head honcho at Hammerspace.

The Hammerspace technology has come the right time in my opinion because the entire cloud, multi-cloud and hybrid cloud stories have become fractured, siloed. The very thing that cloud computing touted to fix has brought back the same set of problems. At the same time, not every application was developed for the cloud. Applications rely on block storage services, or NAS protocols, or the de facto S3 protocols for storage repositories. However, the integration and communication between applications break down when these on-premises applications are moving to the cloud, or when applications residing the cloud are moved back to on-premises for throughput delivery, or even applications residing at the edge.

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Huawei Dorado – All about Speed

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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]

Since Storage Field Day 15 3 weeks ago, the thoughts of the session with Huawei lingered. And one word came to describe Huawei Dorado V3, their flagship All-Flash storage platform is SPEED.

My conversation with Huawei actually started the night before our planned session at their Santa Clara facility the next day. We had a evening get-together at Bourbon Levi’s Stadium. I was with my buddy, Ammar Zolkipli, who coincidentally was in the Silicon Valley for work. Ammar is from Hitachi Vantara Japan, and has been a good friend of mine for over 17 years now.

Shortly, the Huawei team arrived to join the camaraderie. And we introduced ourselves to Chun Liu, not knowing that he is the Chief Architect at Huawei. A big part of that evening was our conversation with him. Ammar and I have immersed in the Oil & Gas EP (Exploration & Production) data management and petrotechnical applications when he was in Schlumberger and after that a reseller of NetApp. I was a Consulting Engineer with NetApp back then. So, the 2 of us started blabbering (yeah, that would be us when we get together to talk technology).

I observed that Chun was very interested to find learn about real world application use cases that would push storage performance to its limits. And I guessed that the best type of I/O characteristics would be small block, random I/O and billions of them, with near-real time latency. After that evening I did some research and could only think of a few, such as deep analytics or some applications with needs for Monte Carlo simulations. Oh, well, maybe I would share that with Chun the following day.

The moment the session started, it was already about the speed prowess of Huawei Storage. It was like the greyhounds unleashed going after the rabbit. In the lineup, the Dorado series stood out.

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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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Storage dinosaurs evolving too

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[Preamble: I am a delegate of Storage Field Day 15 from Mar 7-9, 2018. 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 have been called a dinosaur. We storage networking professionals and storage technologists have been called dinosaurs. It wasn’t offensive or anything like that and I knew it was coming because the writing was on the wall, … or is it?

The cloud and the breakneck pace of all the technologies that came along have made us, the storage networking professionals, look like relics. The storage guys have been pigeonholed into a sunset segment of the IT industry. SAN and NAS, according to the non-practitioners, were no longer relevant. And cloud has clout (pun intended) us out of the park.

I don’t see us that way. I see that the Storage Dinosaurs are evolving as well, and our storage foundational knowledge and experience are more relevant that ever. And the greatest assets that we, the storage networking professionals, have is our deep understanding of data.

A little over a year ago, I changed the term Storage in my universe to Data Services Platform, and here was the blog I wrote. I blogged again just before the year 2018 began.

 

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DellEMC SC progressing well

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[Preamble: I was a delegate of Storage Field Day 14. 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 haven’t had a preview of the Compellent technology for a long time. My buddies at Impact Business Solutions were the first to introduce the Compellent technology called Data Progression to the local Malaysian market and I was invited to a preview back then. Around the same time, I also recalled another rather similar preview invitation by PTC Singapore for the 3PAR technology called Adaptive Provisioning (it is called Adaptive Optimization now).

Storage tiering was on the rise in the 2009-2010 years. Both Compellent and 3PAR were neck and neck leading the conversation and mind share of storage tiering, and IBM easyTIER and EMC FAST (Fully Automated Storage Tiering) were nowhere to be seen or heard. Vividly, the Compellent Data Progression technology was much more elegant compared to the 3PAR technology. While both intelligent storage tiering technologies were equally good, I took that the 3PAR founders were ex-Sun Microsystems folks, and Unix folks sucked at UX. In this case, Compellent’s Data Progression was a definitely a leg up better than 3PAR.

History aside, this week I have the chance to get a new preview of the Compellent technology again. Compellent was now rebranded as the SC series and was positioned as the mid-range storage arrays of DellEMC. And together with the other Storage Field Day 14 delegates, I have the pleasure to experience the latest SC Data Progression technology update, as well their latest SC All-Flash.

In Data Progression, one interesting feature which caught my attention was the RAID Tiering. This was a dynamic auto expand and auto contract set of RAID tiers – RAID 10 and RAID 5/6 in the Fast Tier and RAID 5/6 in the Lower Tier. RAID 10, RAID 5 and RAID 6 on the same set of drives (including SSDs), and depending on the “hotness” of the data, the location of the data blocks switched between the several RAID tiers in the Fast Tier. Over a longer period, the data blocks would relocate transparently to the Capacity Tier from the Fast Tier.

The Data Progression technology is extremely efficient. The movement of the data between the RAID Tiers and between the Performance/Capacity Tiers are in pages instead of blocks, making the write penalty and bandwidth to a negligible minimum.

The Storage Field Day 14 delegates were also privileged to be the first to get into the deep dive of the new All-Flash SC, just days of the announcement of the All-Flash SC. The All Flash SC redefines and refines the Data Progression to the next level. Among the new optimization, NAND Flash in the SC (both SLCs and MLCs, read-intensive and write-intensive) set the Data Progression default page size from 2MB to 512KB. These smaller 512KB pages enabled reduced bandwidth for tiering between the write-intensive and the read-intensive tier.

I didn’t get the latest SC family photos yet, but I managed to grab a screenshot of the announcement from The Register of the new DellEMC SC Series.

I was very encouraged with the DellEMC Midrange Storage presentation. Besides giving us a fantastic deep dive about the DellEMC SC All-Flash Storage, I was also very impressed by the candid and straightforward attitude of the team, led by their VP of Product Management, Pierluca Chiodelli. An EMC veteran, he was taking up the hard questions onslaught by the SFD14 delegate like a pro. His team’s demeanour was critical in instilling confidence and trust in how the bloggers and the analysts viewed Dell EMC merger, and how the SC and the Unity series would pan out in the technology roadmap.

Unlike the fiasco I went through with the DellEMC Forum 2017 in Malaysia, where I was disturbed with 3 calls in 3 consecutive days by DellEMC Malaysia, I was left with a profound respect for this DellEMC Storage team. They strongly supported their position within the DellEMC storage universe, and imparted their confidence in their technology solution in the marketplace.

Without a doubt, in my point of view, this DellEMC Mid-Range Storage team was the best I have enjoyed in Storage Field Day 14. Thank you.

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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The rise of RDMA

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I have known of RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access) for quite some time, but never in depth. But since my contract work ended last week, and I have some time off to do some personal development, I decided to look deeper into RDMA. Why RDMA?

In the past 1 year or so, RDMA has been appearing in my radar very frequently, and rightly so. The speedy development and adoption of NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory Express) have pushed All Flash Arrays into the next level. This pushes the I/O and the throughput performance bottlenecks away from the NVMe storage medium into the legacy world of SCSI.

Most network storage interfaces and protocols like SAS, SATA, iSCSI, Fibre Channel today still carry SCSI loads and would have to translate between NVMe and SCSI. NVMe-to-SCSI bridges have to be present to facilitate the translation.

In the slide below, shared at the Flash Memory Summit, there were numerous red boxes which laid out the SCSI connections and interfaces where SCSI-to-NVMe translation (and vice versa) would be required.

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